Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume by Kit Brennan

been the point? He might have hated me for deserting my child, he who did everything for his own. Peering at the letter, he read aloud, “‘Beneath the French veneer you have managed to don, one still finds in you the Hungarian peasant.’ Mm. Her barbs sting more unerringly each time. I blame myself. I tour, I work, I leave her on her own; she has borne me three children in a very short period of time. What else can I expect?” He put the letter down, removed his glasses, and gave me a sad, lingering kiss. “What has happened between us, Lola… I ask you to keep it to yourself, always. Can you do that, I wonder?”
    “I can. I will.”
    “Sleep well, my dear. Life goes on.” He turned onto his side, and in a few minutes was asleep.
    I lay awake, staring into the darkness for quite a long time. Does it? Mostly, while with Franz, I had managed to forget the throbbing heartache of my lost love—except in the depths of night, in the dark. General Diego de Léon… Lithe and compact, a small, cat-like man with brown, hot skin, and a magical mustache… During my year in Spain, I’d begun so well… I’d danced and played Cupid in a musical play, in Madrid. But, with Diego, I’d become entangled in a kidnapping attempt for the moderados cause, trying to return the two little Spanish princesses to their waiting mamá , the ex-regent María Cristina, in Paris. It had gone badly wrong. Diego and his fellow general, Manuel de la Concha, had been captured and shockingly executed—by firing squad, at dawn!—with unseemly haste and without a trial, by order of the prime minister, Baldomero Espartero, a vengeful former commander during the Carlist War.
    Curled up grimly, muffling all sounds with both hands, I began juddering again with grief—shaking the mattress with it. Useless grief. It would never bring Diego back. He’d been silenced forever with six bullets to the heart. His strong and courageous heart. I’d been so young… At twenty-two, I’d no idea that love could be so swiftly extinguished, that fate could go so badly awry. That joy is given in the moment and promised for the future, but the world never stops moving, and before you know it, everything shifts.
    My nights with Franz had helped salve the ache, but not entirely, oh, not at all. And soon I was to be cast adrift again, back into a loveless world where evil lurked, ready to tear fierce bites out of you. I lay there, awake for hours, trying not to move, curled into the small of Franz’s back, breathing in the warm scent of his long, sleeping body.
    *
    And then, two things occurred that turned everything upside down.
    The following evening, I went with Franz to a new opera by a cash-strapped young acquaintance of his named Richard Wagner, an ugly, earnest man with a thick, gobbling sort of accent. Franz had kissed me and told me that we would have fun; he didn’t think to warn me that the event, titled Rienzi , was five hours in length. Dios mío ! I was going insane by the second hour, and it was without intermission until almost the third. No one’s writing or composing warrants that interminableness! After the interval, I swear, Franz had to use his sweetest, mildest words to convince me to re-enter the plushy chamber of tedium. During the fourth and fifth hour, I stood in our box and did leg exercises, not caring a fart what anyone thought. Conceited, overblown twit of a composer—I wanted to strangle him. I remember thinking that George would probably love the piece of shite, since it was about a populist figure who defeats the nobles and champions the people, but I chafed and jerked, flinging myself about with boredom, and then I fell asleep. When I woke, I cheered—loudly—when I realized that the populace had turned against Rienzi and was burning the Capitol, because at least it meant the bloody thing would be over.
    Backstage, I guessed that Wagner’s eyes had been glued to Liszt’s every reaction from wherever he’d been sitting (like