Opera of the Loyal Heart — The Canine Opera House (Complete Audiobook)

The floorboards hold their breath in the hall.

Shadows stretched thin against the lime-washed wall.

A pool of gold spills from the shaded land.

Act 1.

The Grand Arrival.

The Grand Foyer.

Where everyone arrives fashionably late, except the people who arrived first to judge everyone else.

On the evening of the season's opening night, the Grand Foyer of the Canine Opera House became, as it always did, a theater within a theater.

The performance had not yet begun on the stage, but it had been underway in the foyer for the better part of two hours, and by most measures, it was the more technically accomplished of the two productions.

The house remembers every entrance, every slight, every diamond.

The poodles arrived first, the sharp click of their heels on marble echoing through the grand space, as they always did.

not because they were eager, but because arriving first, when one is of sufficient standing, is a form of condescension so refined that it passes for graciousness.

Madame Celeste de Pamplemousse, the undisputed queen of the aristocratic tier, swept through the gilded doors in a gown of midnight blue silk that had been constructed by three seamstresses over the course of four months.

The gown was not particularly beautiful, though it was extremely expensive, and in the world of the canine opera house, these two qualities were so frequently confused that the distinction had become largely academic.

She wore around her neck a collar of diamonds that had belonged to her grandmother and her grandmother's grandmother before that.

a lineage of adornment that she considered more significant than any lineage of achievement.

She paused at the threshold of the foyer, as she always paused, for precisely three seconds, which was the exact duration required for everyone in the room to notice her without appearing to have been waiting for her.

The harpsichord in the corner played a baroque prelude, its crisp, precise notes cutting through the murmur of the gathering crowd like a well-sharpened letter opener.

The music was chosen by the French bulldog Director of Ambiance, a position that had been created 40 years ago as a ceremonial sinecure for a retiring administrator and had since become, through the mysterious alchemy of institutional inertia, one of the most powerful roles in the opera house.

The Director of Ambiance decided what music played in the foyer, what flowers adorned the tables, what temperature the champagne was served at, and in doing so, controlled the emotional weather of every social interaction that occurred before the curtain.

He was, in the truest sense, the invisible conductor of the evening's first performance.

The Chihuahua soprano, Violetta Picante, arrived 20 minutes after Madame de Pampelmousse, which was either a calculated insult or a genuine oversight, depending on whom you asked.

She was dressed in a gown of deep gold that caught the chandelier light in a way that made her appear to be perpetually on the verge of bursting into flame, which was, her dresser had assured her, the intended effect.

Violetta was the opera house's reigning star, a fact that she was aware of in the way that one is aware of a chronic pain, constantly, uncomfortably, and with the persistent fear that it might, at any moment, stop.

Her voice was a phenomenon of nature, a coloratura instrument of such precision and emotional range that critics had run out of adjectives for it and had begun inventing new ones.