Dear Erik,
Dear Mamma Valérius is very ill. I am worried about her. She has not been well since shortly after our wedding. I hate to see her suffering; she has been so good to me through the years, staying in Paris with me even though she longed to see her homeland again. Like my father. I wish he could have lived to return here with us; to think of him just wasting away in Paris, pining for his native land, just breaks my heart.
Truth to tell, it also makes me a little angry that Sweden meant more to him than I did. He could have become accustomed to Paris if he'd wanted to, and continued to teach me my music, but instead he just stayed locked up in his room playing his old country folk songs all the time. I miss him greatly, and I've never stopped loving him, but I am old enough now to realize that he was not infallible as I used to think. I wish he had chosen to engage himself with the world around him, instead of always looking backward to what might have been!
I can ruefully acknowledge that there is a certain irony to my writing those words to a dead man.
Am I growing up, Erik? Or am I just becoming discontent?
Your loving
Christine
Dear Erik,
This morning I sang in the church for the first time. It was beautiful, with the sun coming in the windows and the lovely acoustics in the church. It reminded me of that time you made me sing in the rotunda, so I could hear my voice bouncing off all those rounded stone walls! Father Fisk thanked me, and several others complimented me and said I must have had a very great teacher! I told them I had, but that he'd died recently, and I was still mourning him. They offered their condolences, but Raoul hurried me out of there soon after that. It was strange. I hadn't thought it possible for him to be jealous of a dead man, but so he seems.
I asked him about it in the carriage: I wanted to know what the harm was in even referring to you, and he made some half-hearted excuse about not wanting the outside world to know who we were.
Who were we, I asked, a little bit angry—these are my own people, after all! —and he said we were now the Count and Countess de Chagny. Since Philippe died without legitimate issue, Raoul inherited the title of Count de Chagny. It's so strange, Erik—I don't feel much like a countess, even though we got married a week ago. I just feel like little Stina, finally come home.
It still seems odd to think that little Stina got married a week ago. The wedding was lovely, with many of my parents' old friends in attendance. It was not comfortable; the dress that Raoul insisted I be married in was really a bit much for such a small community. Our neighbors seemed ill at ease, as if they didn't know what to do or how to talk to me. I tried to put them at ease as much as I could, but Raoul's not being able to speak any Swedish made it difficult to introduce him and interact with all of my family's old friends.
It's all so strange, to live with a man, to be married to him. I thought married people always shared a bed, but Raoul tells me this is not the case; only the lower classes share a bed once they're married. Men and women of his rank keep their own separate bedrooms. This seems odd to me, for the husband to merely visit his wife for their—ah, but there I cannot talk of something so private, even in a letter—and then return to his own room afterwards.
If I had married you as you had wished, dear Erik, would you have still made me sleep alone? But there, I'm being ungrateful again. Raoul has given up a great deal to marry me, and I am sure I'll become accustomed to the customs of the nobility soon enough. And I mustn't think of you in that way in any case, as I'm now married to someone else, whom I love. Deeply.
All the same, my dear, you never left me when I asked you to stay.
Your Christine
Christine locked up the letter and stood up, shivering. She reached up and turned off the gaslight, and then hurried over to her bed by the moonlight that came in the window. She took off her dressing gown and laid it carefully over the bed—she could use the extra warmth—and crawled in between the covers. The last lingering bit of heat from the young comte's body had dissipated, and Christine steeled herself to shove her already-chilly bare feet down to the bottom of the bed where the sheets were still icy.
Swedish winters were something she hadn't missed much, in Paris.
She lay still, shivering, knowing it would be a long time before she warmed up enough to fall asleep. She wished Raoul had stayed—to provide some extra warmth, if nothing else!