The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Read Free Book Online Page A

sip the burgundy that was the same color as the room’s flocked wallpaper.
    “It must be hard on you,” friends sometimes observed, “that Peter travels so much.”
    The fact that she was often alone meant that she had to fill the hours and her heart with something apart from him. Especially during his absences, her voice had bloomed. Music invaded her with wildness, overtaking everything. It consumed more hours of her life than a husband or a child could ever have done.
    The servants were accustomed to holding her dinner late while Peter was gone. Sometimes Erika did not eat before ten o’clock at night because she had been sitting at the piano, not wanting to stop until she had sung through an entire opera. The notes under her fingers led her onward. She conversed with the music, with imaginary characters who sang in reply.
    In just a few weeks Peter would be back. Usually when his homecoming neared, she felt a small dread, knowing that soon she must sink back into the limits of wifely routine. Dinner at seven, bed by the early hour of ten. No more running off by herself to attend evening concerts. No lingering by the gramophone, listening to Nellie Melba past midnight. When Peter was home, she felt she ought to awake with him at six, and take breakfast with him before a carriage bore him off to the office.
    Peter had noticed (how could he fail to notice?) that her voice was gathering acclaim. More offers for recitals and concerts had come, including engagements with the Handel and Haydn Society. A man from London had urged Erika to let him manage her career.
    “Promise that you won’t leave me?” he once murmured as they lay in bed. “Not even when they try to lure you away to Covent Garden or La Scala?” He meant it as a little joke, but to her, the vision of having a larger career felt real.
    Peter did not want a wife who lived apart from him in Europe. Whenever she had broached the possibility, he had become dismissive. He was tall, with princely good looks that made ladies pause in the street to stare at him. A man of bullish enthusiasm, he had a knack for bending others to his way of thinking. He often won her over with his body.
    Within minutes of his homecoming after a trip abroad, he would bound up the staircase with her, locking the door against overly attentive servants, drawing the shades. She’d hardly missed him at all, she thought, until he’d appeared in the foyer and she’d seen him again—the glint of many colors in his hair, strands of russet, bronze, and gold. As he removed his jacket, she saw the taut muscles in his slim hips; she knew their shape even before she placed her hands against them. In the bedroom she quickly kissed his face, and found his cheek perspiring. Her lips came away with the taste of salt. She could never pack trunks and get away to Italy with Peter present in the house. The pull of him was as hard as an undertow; she could drown in it.
    Like a pair of athletes, they were often collapsing, spent, with pumping hearts and glistening skin against the bed. But if it were not for the physical, without that, what did they have in common? She with her scales and cadenzas, he with his ledgers that recorded clever bargains he’d made for shipments of cotton from the Minet-el-Bassal?
    What did they have, really, to talk about? He barely cared about music. If not for lust, would they even be friends?
    While he was absent for long stretches, she almost forgot that he was part of her life. During the weeks he’d been away, as her throat vibrated with song and her fingers trembled over the ivory keys, she, too, had gone to another place.
    And she loathed the thought that when he returned, he’d resume his zealous quest to conceive a child. Why did he need a child so much? It used to depress her, too—their lack of children—but no longer. She had sung her way past it.

    That night Erika was too elated and too full of plans to sleep. She enjoyed having the bed to herself. When