Crimes and Punishments
Sadie Montgomery
"SH. THEY'LL HEAR us," snapped Sofi in a husky whisper. The older ballet pupil's pale skin, coal darkened eyes, and thickly painted scarlet lips loomed like a full moon inches from Meg's face.
Meg caught herself before she tripped backwards on the dark cobbled street. "I…"
Ignoring Meg's attempt to respond, Sofi walked off briskly, putting distance between her and the opera house. The other girls scuttled past Meg and fell in line behind Sofi.
The air was cold, and the streets were dark. Meg hurried to keep up. How she wished that Christine had come with them.
#
THE DANCEHALL WAS not far from the opera house. The older girls had snuck out several times before and returned in the wee hours of the morning, giddy and wakeful from their forbidden adventure.
Pretending to sleep, Meg had listened, head tucked into her pillow, as Sofi and her small entourage of fellow students whispered of their illicit forays beyond the opera house's walls.
"Can you imagine," said Sofi, "what it would be like? Dancing like that, without a thought to form or discipline!"
Meg squinted open one eye to watch Sofi wave her arms and kick her leg high in the air. Instead of the precision moves her Maman demanded of the ballet corps, Sofi bounced and let her lower leg dangle from the knee like a rag doll.
"I swear," whispered Renée, a winsome girl with mousey brown hair and muddy eyes, Sofi's second-in-command. "Some of those dancers can kick as high as Mme Giry."
"And the music!" Sofi always interrupted anyone else who dared speak. "So loud it drowns out even your thoughts. But it makes you want to jump and squirm in your seat."
Then the girls would inevitably go on to describe those who frequented the dancehall. The patrons, mostly men in dark, smoky jackets that smelled of musk and cigars, loud garish women on their arms. The din of laughter and raucous voices, the clashing notes of wine bottles and flasks. Glasses thrust into the air, held in thick-fingered grips. Faces slick with sweat, grease, and make-up. Volleys of cheers and stomping boots rumbling, like fake thunder, throughout the dancehall.
But it was the dancers that sparked Meg's curiosity and desire. They were the ones she wanted to see. To see how they danced with manic abandon—large, fleshy women who laughed out loud and wore bodices too low to cover the swell of their breasts. The daring, the scandal of it all. To let your body dance without a care to propriety or discipline. Lifting their skirts high, fluttering brightly colored ruffles and flutes, revealing bare legs, even to the fleshy slope of their thighs when the music grew to a riotous pitch.
The older ballet students, the ones who risked stealing out at night once or twice a week, returned each time with richer details.
"Then this one that always dances center front, who has legs longer even than Mme Giry's, dressed in dark red with black piping, flies down the steps to the floor and swirls from table to table. Men grab at her as she goes past, but she bumps one away with her hip, kisses another on the top of his bald head, and lands for a moment in a third's lap, twisting her bottom like a cat caught in a sack. Can you imagine dancing like that?"
Meg would drift off to sleep, imagining dancing on a stage to such a crowd, not the proper lords and ladies who came to sit stiffly in the auditorium of the opera, but men and women who yelled and stomped their approval, who shouted out the lyrics of songs everyone knew, who reached out to…
So when Sofi announced this most recent escape from the opera dormitories to the dancehall, Meg had sat up in bed and dared to say, "Take me, too. I want to go this time."
Perhaps because Meg was the Ballet Mistress's own daughter, the girls had turned serious and grim. No one replied right away.
"If you take me with you, then I won't tell Maman." Meg's skin burned at the empty threat.
"You're too young, Meg. It's not for you."
Meg had gathered her features into a severe scowl, one that she had learned from her mother, and in a clipped tone told Sofi that she would not be left behind. "I'm nearly fourteen."
From across the narrow gap between their two beds, Christine nudged Meg in the ribs. "What are you doing?" Meg's friend said. "It's dangerous to go out in the streets without protection."
Meg batted Christine's hand away. "You stay here if you're afraid, but I'm going to see the dancers. That's all."
#
MEG'S EYES WATERED and her throat constricted. The air was unbreathable. Rank and humid, dense with swirling currents of smells. The noise the clientele were making nearly overwhelmed the tinny efforts of the musicians huddled near the stage in a far corner of the cramped dancehall.
Why do they call it a dancehall? No one but the eight women on the raised stage were dancing. Tables, mostly occupied by men, peppered the floor. Sofi and the others had ordered a hard cider that they sipped, like hummingbirds, to make it last. They had only enough money for one drink each.
On the small stage, the dancers, no one in the same brightly colored dress, wiggled and bounced. At first, Meg could see no pattern in their gyrations, but then she perceived there was a modest design to the figures' placement and shifts. No one got in anyone's way, and each repeated a variety of broad movements more or less in tandem. Meg's mother would say they were undisciplined, no more dancers than a gaggle of geese careening along the bank of a pond. Even so, this was not the opera, and the performance was not a ballet. It was something else altogether and not without its pleasures or beauty. Meg felt buoyed by the sheer energy and spirit of the dancers' movements. She smiled, lips parted, her breath rapid and high in her chest, while her foot tapped the wooden floor with a mind of its own.
#
A LARGE BELLIED man with a mustache so thick and long that it seemed alive when he smiled down at Meg stepped directly in front of her, blocking her view of the stage. She had not noticed his approach until she smelled his tobacco-garlic breath. He swayed over her, a sapling on a windy day, rooted only by his tiny feet.
"My but you are a beauty," he said. His words were lopsided like his lips, which didn't quite work right.
Meg pressed her back against the wooden chair, looked over to the other girls who stopped their incessant chit-chat and stared back wide-eyed at Meg and her admirer.
"Thank you," squeaked Meg, to be polite. Heat fanned across her face and a film of sweat burst along her hairline. "But I should go now." She began to slide sideways out of her seat, to escape the shadow of the man's bulk. She darted a glance at her companions.
"Don't be silly, Meg. All he wants to do is get to know you." Sofi's friend, Céline, a sinewy blue-eyed brunette, who often got into trouble with Meg's mother for flirting with the backstage workers, winked at Sofi and the other girls.
Meg's heart dropped several inches in her chest. Her companions would be of no help. She would have to get by on her own.
"Monsieur, please excuse me." She smiled as she slipped past him and started toward the entrance. She prepared herself to run the seven blocks back to the opera house, if need be.
A warm fleshy clamp encircled her wrist and jerked her back. She landed against the man's plaid waistcoat. It smelled of musk and wool and tobacco. "Hold on there, filly. No cause to be discourteous and rush away."
"Please. Sir." She bit off each words. "Let. Me. Go."
When the man laughed in her face, a blade of pure rage sliced through her fear and went directly to her foot. She raised her knee to her waist and stomped down with all her meager weight on the top of the man's soft-leathered boot. The vise on her wrist fell away and she ran, skirting the tables, until she burst out into the dark Parisian night.
#
WOULD THE MAN follow her?
A few steps from the dancehall, she heard the door open. She willed herself not to turn around to look. Garbled voices and music spilled out to the street. Then, a jarring slam cut them off. A jumble of noises at her heels ratcheted her fear to panic. She bolted ahead, her heartbeat so loud in her ears that she heard little else. Clinging to walls, she ran until she came upon a narrow, unlit causeway between buildings. She darted into the darkness, nearly tripping over broken and raised cobblestones. A light at the far end was her only goal.
"Calm down."
Where was the voice coming from?
An arm lashed out and coiled around her waist. The sudden force pushed the air from her lungs. She gasped and stilled.
"Don't struggle. You're safe now."
That voice. She knew it! But she had never heard it this close to her. The Opera Ghost. She fought to breathe. The pressure around her waist eased, but the arm remained in place. She became aware that she leaned against a solid, warm mass.
"Your mother would be upset to find you out at this time of night." His voice, so close to her ear, dripped like chocolate. She imagined his lips no more than an inch from her neck. Small pebbles rose on her skin, and she shivered even though she was not cold.
"I was…I was…visiting a sick friend." Lies. All lies. Would he know?
He whipped her around to face him, held her out at arm's length. As if this were a dance and he her partner, Meg spiraled on the ball of one foot and froze in position. Tall, he was taller than he had appeared at a distance. For she had only ever glimpsed him from a distance. In the flies. Disappearing around a dark corner at the end of a corridor. In the shadows of Box Five. His shoulders were angular and broad. Dressed in black from his brimmed hat to his boots. A hint of white, the shirt beneath the dark waistcoat and vest, peeked out at his throat and along the edges of his coat sleeves. His long cape lay on either side of him, folded like a raven's wings, barely inches from the ground. An aura of power and strength pulsed around him like the heartbeat of the night.
"You dare add lying to your list of crimes, ma petite?"
"Crimes?" she blurted. She reared back, but there was no give in his restraints.
"And what if I had not been here?" His voice rumbled low, such a rich baritone.
"What do you mean? I was on my way home when you grabbed me. If anything, you're the danger!"
He stepped back. His grip on her was gone. She teetered off-balanced, caught herself at the last minute.
"Perhaps you wanted the man from the dancehall to follow you?" He tilted his masked face to one side. His lips glided into a half smile. But there was something sinister to them.
Meg recalled the noises she had heard at her back when she had left the dancehall.
"Did he? Did he come after me?"
"Men such as he are not accustomed to rejection. He was quite vexed when he came out of the dancehall. In search of you, ma petite."
"What happened?"
"I persuaded him to change his mind."
Meg did not resist when the Opera Ghost turned her about and propelled her, his broad, gloved hand splayed against her lower back, forward toward the opposite end of the causeway.
Would he tell Maman? She would be so angry with her. The consequences of her behavior played out in her mind as they neared the opera house. She would be punished. Severely. What form it would take, she couldn't think. Her vision blurred through a scrim of tears. Her nose began to run.
They were at the door to the stable. This was where she and the ballet students had sneaked out. She swallowed her muffled sobs, but her shoulders shook with the effort. She turned to face him and clutched the fabric of his waistcoat. His cape fluttered around her, engulfing her. An angel's or a raptor's wings? She did not care.
"Please, please, don't tell her!" She stepped closer to him, fists clenched on the dark fabric of his coat, her forearms pressed into his chest. Chin tilted, she stared up into his mask. Smooth ivory glowed in the half-light of the street. Only his lips and chin were bare. And of course his eyes. There, a hint of color, a trace of light.
He stared down at her. Was he angry? No, she didn't think so. Something else… But what?
"And is there to be no punishment, little Meg?"
She watched his lips make the sounds, almost lost the sense of their meaning. She shook her head, trying to dispel the strange hypnotic effects of being so close to this… Ghost? No. Surely not a ghost.
"I was so scared." Her voice, a whisper in the dark between them. "Is that not punishment enough?"
He turned his head away. His lips were set in a grim line. She was distracted. Too aware of his solidity. How tall he was. How strong the muscles of his chest and arms. And yet she was not afraid of him.
He pulled her hands away from his waistcoat. His grip on her wrists was tight, almost painful. "I watch you, Meg Giry." His eyes were fierce now. Dark, dark, dark. "If you do anything so foolish again, I will punish you myself. You are warned."
With that, he opened the stable door and pushed Meg inside. Behind her, the door slammed, and she was alone. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light within the stable. Shivering, she made her way to the dormitories.
#
SOFI'S SCREAM WAS followed by two other screams in the dark dormitory. Meg jerked awake and sat up on her cot. Christine was already lighting a candle.
"What is it?" Meg asked her, but Christine nodded across the large room toward the beds of the older pupils.
Sofi, Renée, and Céline were standing, jumping up and down on bare feet, arms raised to either side of their heads, eyes riveted to something on their beds.
"Oh, my God. Is that a…?" Christine clapped her hand over her mouth.
Céline had bent and picked it up. Pinched between her fingers, the tail of a dead rat that swayed by its weight from the girl's hand.
"Get it off," screamed Sofi, over and over again, until the door at the far end crashed open and Meg's mother came marching inside.
"That's quite enough! Silence!" Mme. Giry demanded in a tone that would not admit argument.
Céline turned and the dead rat swung dangerously close to her forearm. "This, this…was…"
"I see." Mme Giry sighed loudly.
Meg could now recognize the piece of stationery in her mother's hand. A pale lavender, the red wax seal, a skull and crossbones, the mark of the Opera Ghost. She reached across to grab Christine's hand. Between them, the silent message was clear.
"I will name you. When you hear your names, step forward." Mme Giry lowered the note for a moment and barked at Céline. "Drop that disgusting thing."
Céline dropped the rat to the floor at the foot of her bed.
Meg waited. Each name was a pinprick in her chest. She could barely breathe until her mother read out the last of the names. Even then, Meg waited to be sure hers was not among them.
Only the older girls had been called. They stood in the middle of the dormitory room in queue, almost as straight as in the rehearsal hall during practice. None of the younger ones, who had also gone, was among them.
"Follow me." Mme. Giry pivoted and headed toward the door. The guilty flitted on tiptoe behind her as if on an invisible string. At the door, Mme. Giry called back to the room. "Meg, remove the rodents from the beds and be sure to wash the sheets. Twice."
Meg's heart sank then rose again. Her mother knew, and this task would be her punishment.
Christine squeezed Meg's hand, and they both sighed with relief.
The older girls would meet a far worse punishment. Perhaps expulsion. Perhaps not. They certainly would not be sneaking out again.
Nor would Meg. She would not dare disobey the Opera Ghost.
At least not for a few more years.
THE END
7/7/17
© Sadie Montgomery