Like Sins
A/N: Thanks, Jennie, for some Scandinavian "touches," and to GlovedHand for some interesting discussion on Erik and the Persian.
Martine and I have gone to Grobbendonk to help Anki pack. The trip to England comes very soon, and twice already in the course of our visit Anki has burst into tears over all that must be done. Martine's slender arms can do the work of three women but she complains and criticizes. Anki is sensitive about her housekeeping, too. She has a Flemish girl who does the scrubbing, but if the servant plays with the children or lets them help, Anki does not chastise her, and the floor does not shine. In Martine's house, every floor sparkles whether it wants to or not, and no child dares leave so much as a toe print on it.
Jannecke drove Martine with Lilli and Mathilde to Grobbendenk by motor-car. Tired and grey, he smiled weakly at Anki and me as he prepared to leave, deaf to Anki's pleas to stay for supper. "Give her something to do," he joked. "She has too much energy."
"That's the trouble with these new carriages," Anki grumbled as we made our way into the kitchen, where Martine scrubbed her girls' faces and griped about the dirt, dodging a cabbage leaf that threatened to stick to her skirt. Anki hastily retrieved it and threw it into the scrap-can, and went on, "People had to rest their horses, feed them, water them. They just couldn't turn around and leave. Now it's rush here, rush there, as if there's no room for rest."
"He wants to get back," Martine inserted, still scrubbing. "He has a lot of work to do for the Ministry. Important work that can't wait."
"Of course," Anki replied, but her glance said, He probably wants a little peace and quiet for a change.
"I'm surprised to hear you complain about motor-cars," I said. "Usually it's the people older than me who don't like them."
"They change everything with their noise and bustle," Anki said. She handed the children each a stick of barley sugar, but Martine intercepted them.
"They can't have those," Martine announced. "It will spoil their supper."
Eight pairs of eyes appealed to her, but Martine believed in justice, not mercy, and so the children were sent right back outside to play with their cousins in the hayloft, where they proceeded to cover themselves from head to toe in sweet-smelling dust and straw. "Are you sure it's safe out there?" Martine asked, but Anki just waved at her and went on preparing tea.
She served her tea without cakes, and when Martine remarked that it would be nice to have a slice of toast to dip in it, Anki with uncharacteristic snappishness said, "Are you sure it won't spoil your appetite?" Because Anki had a trace of smile on her plump face, Martine only smiled back, but the two women's backs were up now. It would be a long visit, I feared.
While Anki and the cook worked on supper, I elbowed Martine into the parlor and whispered, "Can you two please get along, for the little ones' sake if no one else's?"
"Not if it means having my children interfered with. Just because your daughter-in-law runs a sloppy household, children running all over getting dirty and traipsing it all inside, servants that don't know their place, living like peasant farmers instead of a respected physician and his wife … I won't raise my own that way, even if you, Mother, encourage it at every step. And now, this going off to England, as if they should be pulled out of school, dragged to another country to live among people with foreign ways…"
"Why did you come then?" I said, my back going up as well. "If you find nothing here to your liking."
"To help you, Mother," she said in an arch tone. "Because it was my Christian duty."
"Not even so the children could play together?" I asked, interested now. Martine had never spoken of Johannes's and Lilli's strange pre-adolescent love. Perhaps she didn't know about it, and far be it from me to tell her.
"Play," she huffed. "My children came here to work, not to fritter their time away in the barn."
I sighed, but before I could think of anything to say, a great noise erupted in the pantry room off the kitchen, whoops and calls, laughter and delighted squeals. Baby Roland toddled in first, covered with dust and calling out, "Kitties! Kitties!" "We wouldn't let him have one, Mama, don't worry!" "No, we didn't bring them in the house, Aunt Martine." "Genna squirted a little milk out of the cow, for the cat, so she would let us see her babies…"
"Good heavens," said Anki. "That cow can kick. Was Karl there, to do the milking?"
"Karl let me, Mama," Genna said. "The cow didn't kick me. She knows me now that you showed me how to milk her. I let Karl help, so he could finish his other chores faster."
"I'm sure you did," Anki laughed. "And it's good you didn't bring the kitties in."
"Papa told us not to," Johannes said seriously above all the clamor. "He said that if the mother gets too angry because they're gone, she won't take care of them properly. But she did let us look at them. And she caught a rabbit, too. It was still twitching."
Martine grimaced. "Is that suitable talk, Johannes?"
"Oh, Aunt Martine, you're right. I shouldn't call it 'twitching.' Papa told me what it was called. He says it's very important to use the right words when you describe something … what are they? Galvan… Galvana … Galvanic response! That's it! When they twitch like that after they're dead, it's called a 'galvanic response.'"
"Very good!" Anki beamed, ignoring Martine's glare. Then Philippe came in, wiping his hands and face on one of the children's wet towels, as six little forms attached themselves to his legs and back. He picked up Lilli and Mathilde, one in each arm, and gave them each a wet kiss. When Larissa complained, he smiled at her and said, "Guests first, always," and then she and Genna went aloft into his embrace. Johannes then stuck out his hand, frowning a little. He was too big to be picked up and hugged, and so the two shook hands, and I saw Philippe's shoulders shake from suppressed laughter.
Then the late-afternoon sun broke in through the kitchen window, and a rose-red haze surrounded Philippe as he hoisted Baby Roland up in his arms. The little boy's skirt rose to show his fat legs and the clumsy hem stitches, sewn by six-year old Genna. She'd shortened his shift so that he wouldn't trip on it. Roland stopped squealing and the two of them, father and child, hung there quietly in the evening air for just a second, looking into each other's faces. The stillness that surrounded Philippe reminded me in an instant of Erik when he would turn his attention towards something, focusing on it with utter intentness. I wish you could see them, I told him in my heart. But perhaps he already did.
Ten fit easily around the big oak-plank table in the dining room, which was set for eleven. The empty place was for Raoul, for the remainder of their mourning. Larissa had laid a flower on his plate, a poppy that glowed like a gem. Red cabbages must have been plentiful in the garden, because they were well-represented at the table, cooked up with potatoes and strips of pork. Poor Martine, I thought, watching her fix her eagle eye on the children all through supper. In her house, the children got bread and milk in the kitchen, and then it was off to bed with them.
"And Mrs. Vermoen must have had her baby quickly, eh?" Anki said as Philippe ladled out cabbage and pork. "I didn't expect to see you until late tonight."
"A fine boy," he answered. "Mostly I read the newspapers on the back porch with her husband. He needed me more than she did." Then he looked hard at Martine, waiting for her to say something about unfitting subjects at the supper table. She sat very straight and looked stiffly ahead, ignoring him. But the children ate quickly and asked no questions, and were soon excused to the nursery.
When Anki suggested coffee in the parlor, Martine's contorting mouth could no longer stay silent. "But when are we going to start the packing?" she said, and Philippe and Anki simply stared at her.
"Sister," Philippe said gently, "we haven't seen you for months. We like a little coffee, maybe some brandy and a bit of music to settle our stomachs. When the sun's up, there's more than enough time to work. I wasn't even expecting to spend this evening here at home, but here we are, and I wish to savor it."
My eyes grew wet as he said it. The way he held his head, the way his long face white against its black hair pulled downwards to earth, how his hands drummed unconsciously against the table, the timbre of his voice itself all called to mind Erik, yet when he spoke, the tones he used were Raoul's, calming, tender, concerned.
Philippe poured himself a snifter and played his cello, one Mozart selection after another, some I could recall and some I couldn't. Wrapped in his playing, he seemed oblivious to us. Anki and I darned socks in the lamplight, for no wires ran close enough to the farmhouse to supply it with electricity. Martine embroidered white silk thread on the spotless linen of an altar cloth and said nothing.
"I pray no one comes to call for him this evening," Anki said. "It's so hard for him to write his papers and go to sick people in the middle of the night as well. He says he needs to sleep only a few hours each night, but I still worry that he'll spread himself too thin."
"In England he won't see patients, will he?"
"No, Mother de Chagny, he won't. He says he will miss it, that no doctor in research should lose sight of the men and women behind the numbers on the paper. I said, 'I'll be glad to have you home at nights, then,' and he laughed, saying that the laboratory sometimes demanded more from a physician in the bleak hours than the sick. I'm glad you will come to London for a few weeks while we settle in."
"I'm not going to Perros until early October," I said.
"I don't understand why you're going to that cold, boring place anyway, Mother," Martine inserted.
"It's where your grandfather was buried, for one thing."
Philippe stopped playing. "I remember when you and Father took us all there for a holiday. Louvel was about eight, and I recall he kept asking Father, 'Tell us about the cave. Let's find the cave that you and Mother used to explore. Maybe there's pirate treasure in it.'"
"You must have been about fourteen," I said. "All we heard from Louvel that summer was, 'Philippe won't play with me, Philippe keeps leaving me behind.'"
"You wouldn't play with me, either," Martine said. "I think you spent the entire summer alone. As did I, and Louvel."
"It's true," Philippe answered. "It was an odd holiday, for we all were alone in our own little preoccupations. We climbed on the same rocks, went on the same jetties, but all at different times, as if we hated each other that summer."
"It was just your ages," I remarked. "A boy caught between being a child and a man is neither, and needs time to discover who he is."
"You could have made him play with us," Martine said.
Philippe and I laughed, of one mind. "I don't think so," I remarked. "Philippe can be very stubborn."
"Yes, he can," Anki quipped. "I can tell you stories."
"Not necessary," Philippe said, and held out his hand to her. "I'm ready to retire."
"In a moment," Anki said, smiling. "Did Louvel ever find the cave?"
"No," Philippe sighed. "They'd built a resort hotel on that strip of beach, and everything was gone. He came to my bed in the room we shared that night and told me about it, sobbing. He was disconsolate for days, even though I told him that they probably didn't find any treasure. 'There will be no more treasure for me when I grow up and can go search for it,' he cried."
"Poor Louvel," I said. "I never knew."
"Mothers often don't," Philippe remarked, still holding Anki's hand, and her eyes shone bright in the lamplight. "Has he written you recently?"
"He has, but I didn't bring it. He's happy, Philippe. He thinks in a few years he will captain his own boat. He hasn't gone searching for treasure, instead he ferries other people's in the form of wheat and corn down to the port of New Orleans, but he's happy. Marta spoke only German when he first met her, and now they chatter in German, French, and English, as the mood takes them. He loves the river, he says it's far wider and deeper than anything in Europe, even the Rhine, and I can testify to that, when your father and I rode over the great iron bridge that linked it from east to west."
Then I told Philippe the other part of Louvel's letter, when he begged me once more to sell the house, to leave Brussels and come to St. Louis, and Philippe's face grew even longer. " 'There is going to be a war, Mother,' he wrote. "The Prussians and the French have hated each other since the 1870s, and Belgium is like a nut within the jaws of the nutcracker.' " I remembered Erik's long speech about a tide of blood washing up under L'Arc de Triomphe, and I wondered.
"A friend is coming to Brussels shortly for some kind of diplomatic meeting to talk about Belgium's neutrality," and as I mentioned Monsieur Peillard's upcoming trip, my heart quickened. In my bag was a letter from him, unread, waiting for a moment alone when it could be savored. At home on the bureau was a small stack, slowly growing.
"A friend?" Philippe asked.
"Someone I've had a few letters with, back and forth. An attorney, who writes magazine articles in his spare time."
"An attorney?" Philippe asked.
"Umm," Anki said, pulling on Philippe's hand. "Of course Mother de Chagny has friends, even gentleman ones," and she gave me a little wink.
"Since he writes on political matters, I would like to ask him his opinion when I write again," I said. "I'll tell him what Louvel says, see what he thinks. The more opinions the better with something that serious, I should say."
"Philippe" Anki said, "We should say good-night now." She kissed me on both cheeks, and I tried not to show too much pleasure, for fear of making Martine jealous. I can't help how I feel, if I'm more partial to Anki than Martine, who is my own flesh and blood. I looked at my thin, pale daughter, her hair already faded more than mine as she stabbed her embroidery with resolute stitches that never drew a drop of blood to mar the pure white cloth, and sighed.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Sometimes birds would get into the auditorium of the Opera Garnier and fly up into the rafters. You could hear them flapping, twittering, and either they died, or got out somehow. That was how Raoul and I finished up our explorations of the vast wooden fly-tower above the main stage, like birds lost in the wooden forest of the flies.
Until we came to the final fateful day.
It was Thursday, and the next night I was to sing Marguerite in Faust. I was to meet Raoul at tea, and I lay in bed a few moments longer to savor the sweetness that still lingered from some already-forgotten dream. A grating, sliding noise startled me, and in my nightgown I ran into the parlor. The rug had been rolled to one side, and there was Margot, dragging a trunk over the bare wooden floor, and Adèle huffing behind her, weighed down with boxes.
"What on earth are you doing?" I demanded of Margot.
"Didn't he tell you, Madame? We're packing."
I rubbed sleep from my eyes. "And going where?"
"He didn't say, just told me that I was to pack us all up and be ready to clear out of here in a few days. Sounded to me like you and he was going abroad for a time."
A stone-faced Adèle handed me a note, sprawling round handwriting on thick cream paper. "A boy brought it round this morning, Mam'selle," she said to me, glaring at Margot.
Stunned, I read it quickly. I was to come to Erik this afternoon after lunch. "And Mama?" I asked.
"Monday I'm to move with her to a room on, where is it? Don't have the slip it's written on. This one's been sulking about it all morning," and she shook her head at the scowling Adèle.
"I deserve more notice, Mam'selle," Adèle said stubbornly.
"She's Madame to you," said Margot.
Adèle threw her boxes to the floor with a thud. "I won't take orders from you no more! You keep insulting her like that, I don't know why she don't smack you. She's not married, and she's a good girl, stop calling her 'Madame' like she runs some red-light house or something. I won't stand for it!" and the weeping girl ran out of the apartment with the slam of a door.
The apartment walls seemed to close in on me, and it was almost with relief that I finally left. In a beaded reticule tied to my waistband I carried the iron satyr-headed key. In my heart I bore a lump of ice.
When I arrived, he was packing note books, sheet music, and folios into boxes, and he scarcely looked up when I entered through the wide open stone door. His workroom door also stood wide open. I stood in the entrance, expectantly. Finally he came over to take my coat, not forgetting to make that little ritualistic gesture of brushing his face through the fur. Drawn in morbid fascination I looked into his work room, now empty save for tools and a few remaining rolls of silver wire, and the long strips of rubber he cut into the shapes of human faces, so eerie with their dead eyes and smooth features. On a wig stand rested a mask, and I gave a cry, for it looked like a blank and brainless male human face, with a black moustache and long thick side whiskers.
"Where are they? Where's everything gone?" I stammered.
"Don't you remember? I made a shipment. They took it all, and paid me well for it, too. There's no point in starting all over again here."
"You told Margot to pack," I said. "Where am I going?"
"Can you not simply trust me?" he rounded on me. "Marguerite will ascend to her heavens, and so will you ascend to yours shortly afterwards."
There seemed to be nothing to say to this, so I wandered over to his shelves of books, where some had already been emptied. Then I spotted it on the mantelpiece, large, ebony, with inlaid carvings of lighter wood. A box, strong and square. I tried to lift the lid but it wouldn't budge. Apparently it was locked. Trying to pick it up to rattle it did no good either, because it was firmly fixed to the mantel with some kind of bolt or screw.
"Ah, you've noticed," he said, watching me intently. "The box of life and death. The box of secrets." He took a little key from his vest pocket and dangled it in front of me, the way I used to swing a bit of yarn in front of my kittens. "Aren't you curious? Wouldn't you like to see inside of it? No matter, I won't show you. Perhaps you will never have to see inside it." Then sighing as if the whole weight of the Opera itself rested on his back, he continued his packing and ignored me.
I went back into his workroom. The forms of Poligny, the faceless Persian girl, the headless torso on the work table, all were gone. That same sharp peculiar smell was in the air, so tantalizingly familiar, yet I couldn't place it. Closing my eyes I breathed in heavily, tasting the air on my tongue, and then it came to me. On an autumn day crinkly-crisp with pine needles underfoot, the nobleman rode haughtily astride his horse. His footmen shushed me when I tried to run up to Papa and climb into his arms. But Papa couldn't hold me, for his hands were busy as he carried the long gun. The men had gone out to shoot elk and had come back with a young doe. When I pushed past one of the men and grabbed Papa's leg, he put his hand on my hair and that same smell came to me, of black powder. Gunpowder. Erik's work room smelt of gunpowder.
A door was open at the back of the workroom, one I'd never seen ajar before. Looking anxiously behind to see if he noticed, I crept through it. It wound around behind my bedroom, it seemed, and came to another door without handle or apparent hinges, shut tight. I pushed and prodded on it, but like that strange extra door in my bedroom, it would not budge. But the smell was stronger here, stronger by far, and on my fingers were a few faint smudges of some sharp chemical, like the gunpowder but not quite the same.
Not wanting to wipe my hands on my skirt, I hurried back, only to find him staring at me from the bench where he sat.
"Did you find what you were looking for? Perhaps the secret passage into the enchanted forest?"
"Erik," I asked, heart pounding, "Why did you ask me here?"
"Isn't it enough to know that your loving husband wanted to see you, especially when he has completed all that he labored on for so many years?"
"You finished the opera, then. Really finished it."
"Yes, and both the funeral and the nuptial Mass setting. Life and death, bookends on either side of the shelf, with passion in between." He glared at me when he said this, pounding his fist on the work table for emphasis.
There was something terribly wrong here, and I didn't know what. "Perhaps you might show them to me."
"I hardly think you want to hear either one. No one wants to contemplate his own death, and you do not love me, so why would you even want to hear the wedding Mass?"
The gaslights had been turned down very low, and the work room was chilly. I wanted to spin about on my heel at that very moment and leave, but the weight of his sarcasm pressed me down. "I want to hear your funeral Mass," I finally said.
He laughed low and slowly. "It will be yours, too."
I turned on him. "You know I hate that. Stop saying that." When he continued to chuckle, not looking at me, I wandered to the door of his bedroom, then cried out in surprise. Up until then it had not seemed real, that Erik could actually vacate these apartments under the Opera. So long had I come to associate Erik with an underground life that even when I went to market with him in the dimness of dawn, he still seemed subterranean. Yet the long Japan-style scroll with the words of the "Dies Irae" had been pulled down, as had the black hanging crepe. They sat crumpled in a corner, and the bare stone walls gleamed shiny in the white gaslight.
A faint brush of wind and the cloth of his coat touched my arm, making me jump. He passed by me and wiped his finger over the organ's keyboard, showing me the faint grey trail of dust. "You see, I have not played since you last left. Nothing has come forth. It's as if there's nothing left for me. I sit in front of the keyboard and I am blank, like a freshly washed window."
"Perhaps another instrument," I suggested. "You might pick up the violin."
"I might. Or I might simply take it into the coffin with me. I am sure there will be enough room between the two of us for it. So romantic, wouldn't you say, for the father and daughter both to be buried each with violins?"
Against my will I looked over at his coffin-bed. The red laminar veil had been taken down and the bedclothes removed. Books, crumpled papers, some music folios, even a few popular magazines were piled in the center. "I think you should play your violin now," I remarked. "It will perhaps take you out of your black mood."
Instead of saying anything, he started to sort through sheet music and tossed most of it into the pile on the bed. I left him and went into my room, and noticed at once that the bed had been rumpled, the pillows slightly skewed, the coverlet pulled up half-heartedly. As I straightened it I picked up a pillow and over me washed his scent, musky and thick. He was sleeping in here, I thought sadly, and as if in perfect timing with my mood, the soft strains of the violin came from the drawing room. It was another composition of my father's, one that I'd sung for Erik during the first month of our angelic coupling, when he was only a voice behind the mirror, when I envisioned him tall and white, with wings that spread out in bright gold and silver and snow-colored feathers.
I hugged the pillow to my breast and breathed in deeply. Then I knew, this was where he slept, not in that mockery of a sarcophagus. In the past, before I came, he must have changed the sheets so that none of his scent was on them. But he must have wanted to see me on some impulse, and left the old ones on the bed, and there he was, silhouetted in smell. The rich masculine odor rose up to embrace me as the pillow molded itself around my breast.
The sweet haunting melody wrapped itself around me too, and behind my eyes I saw the wide forests of never-cut pine that rose to the clouds. My father wasn't a farmer, really. He had inherited the farm but in his soul he was a wanderer, a tinker, one of those violin-players we would always see at Midsummer, the old men who would appear in town and wink at the girls, or play some roguish melody for the children, whom some feared because you never knew if one of these odd grizzled players would be the Bad Man in disguise. In that melody, Erik had captured the soul of my father and reflected him back to me. A harsh wave of homesickness overcame me – not so much for Father himself, but for the deep pines that had taken root in his soul and never left it.
Sitting on the bed while Erik played, pressing my face into the pillow, I thought back to those first few weeks when I believed without reservation, when I really thought that a piece of heaven had opened itself in my little room, and how little of that time we spent together was actually devoted to music. Yes, Erik had taught me how to breathe, and his simple exercises for expanding and deepening the chest had thrust me from the margins onto the center stage. But when I wasn't breathing for him, when I wasn't ululating in those long passages that I now recognized to be the lead soprano parts of his Don Juan opera, we talked.
We talked about my father. I told him everything I could remember, hour after hour, week after week. As I talked the ice in my heart melted, the cold armor I'd built up over the years softened and washed away. It wasn't simply missing my father, it was the loss of everything, the house with its big wide red barn, the gentle cow, the well where Mother always used to give me the first drink from the bucket when she drew it up. It was the loss of Father as I remembered him before Mother sickened and died. And one day, hesitantly, full of fear and trepidation, I asked my angel, "Do you ever see him? Please tell me he's there with you, not in that other place. Tell me how he is."
And he had told me then, from the other side of that mirror. I hugged and stroked the pillow, breathing in Erik, breathing out sorrow, and my tears soaked the feathery softness that should have been his wings but were only goose down feathers slipping around inside the smooth fabric of the casing. The houses in heaven were built of cloud, and each person had one, Erik had said. My father's house was a little one built of the kind of summer evening when the sun sets in red and violet bands broad against the sky, and the roof and lintels were decorated with streaks of gold, the color that the sun leaves right before it sinks entirely behind the horizon.
Does he speak of me? I demanded. Does he miss me?
He misses you, Erik lied, for truth mixed with lies is still a lie, but there is no sorrow in heaven, and I tell him every moment of our lessons, of our talks. And he plays the nyckelharp, yes, there are nyckelharps in heaven, not just trumpets and ordinary harps and fiddles, and he has one, and he thinks of you every day, and he is happy.
He told me, too, how each heavenly inhabitant had with them a perfect little white stone that God Himself had given them when they first came before him, and in the pockets of their robe they always keep it, because on that little white stone is their secret name, their true name, the one no one else knows except themselves and God.
Does every angel have one too? I wanted to know.
Indeed, he answered.
Tell me yours, I demanded. Tell me your true angelic name.
I can't, he said. If I did, I would be banished from heaven for good, never to return. I would have to live the rest of my life on earth as a man.
Tell me, I said. Then I could see you. But he said nothing.
Lying on the bed in the arms of Erik's pillows, I knew something. It was from that week on that my angelic "voice" became so much more human – making demands on me, insisting I never go to parties or supper with men, threatening to return to heaven permanently if I disobeyed. I hit the pillow a little, weeping openly now, arguing with myself. He lied to you shamelessly, deceitfully, and yet so much of what he said was true. If there was a heaven, then Father certainly was in it. That he would think of me with love even from the other shore was no surprise to me, as I had heard since childhood of the "cloud of witnesses" that surround us everywhere we go. It was true that when I left my meetings with that unseen angelic voice I walked home as if on clouds myself, for sheer happiness. A happiness based on lies.
Erik stood in the doorway and made a gentle cough. Swift and fluid, he moved to the foot of the bed, and said softly, "I have never seen you weep like this." Then he buried his face in the coverlet, clutching it convulsively back and forth until I feared it would tear. It was true, I had cried before him in anger, in ferocity, in desperation, but never this self-abandoned weeping.
Starting to weep himself, he said over and over, don't leave me, please don't leave me. Then something cold inside me curled up. When I was little I used to touch the snails with a pine needle, not so hard as to hurt them, but just to watch them shrink inside their shells and pull the tough foot over the opening. That was how my heart curled up inside me, and so I said nothing as he continued to cry himself, not looking at me.
"Stay with me tonight," he said, muffled in the coverlet. "Sleep with me in this bed."
Then all my meditations on lies flew out the door, and before I thought more about it, I heard myself say, "I can't. I'm in the way of women, and I want to go back home. To the apartment, I mean. I have to rest before tomorrow night if I'm not going to be too fatigued to sing." Then terror seized me at the enormity of the lie, because all he had to do was flip me over and examine between my legs to know that nothing could be further from the truth.
He shuddered a little. "Your courses came," he said in a dead voice. "So even that is to be denied me." Then he breathed out softly, "Of course. Go back now."
Wiping my eyes, I said, "But I haven't heard your compositions. Isn't that what you called me here for?"
He pulled himself up and wrapped his arms around himself all the way, rocking a little. "I have work to do here, as you can see. The fabrication room must be packed, as I'm not building any more automata here. There are still piles of sheet music to go through." His hands traced around the embroidered flowers on the coverlet, always restless. "I told that miserable Persian he could have the furniture, if he could manage to get it out of here. To lift some of it would probably kill that scrawny servant of his."
"What?" I said. "Aren't we going to need it? I thought you liked it, that it was from your family."
"We won't need it," he said in a strange voice. "We'll have furniture far better, or at least you will."
So many knots of feeling, so few ways to untie them. "Margot said that you and I were going abroad. Please, Erik, I want to know where."
"Farther than you can imagine," and he closed his eyes, still clutching the coverlet.
Then I knew he wasn't going to tell me anything. Once he got me into a coach (for I could not imagine him risking a scene in a railway station or on board a train), he could take me anywhere, and I would never know. He could slip a handkerchief over my face, and carry me in a daze on board some ship, perhaps even take me to Algeria or Morocco, where I would disappear behind the walls of some sun-baked fortress. Then the urge to flee overcame me again, with the overwhelming sensation of being trapped with Erik forever in some subterranean, voluptuous, walled-in dream. Trembling, I said, "Erik, I'll go now. I will see you after Faust tomorrow, you know that."
"Of course you will see Erik tomorrow," he said. "There was never any doubt of that. In this last twenty-four hours, can you still keep to your promise?" Up from the bed he rose, cold-eyed and composed, as if he had not stopped to weep at all.
I thought I saw two vague black shadows walking back and forth on the other side of the lake as I headed back to the Rue Scribe gate, but they vanished when I stopped for a closer look.
Instead of going home, I headed straight for my dressing room. It had been a long walk up through the Rue Scribe gate, then around the Opera and into a side entrance, where I slipped through the corridors like a ghost, into my dressing room, and I was tired. Raoul was there, pacing, face pale and distraught. Immediately he fell on me, "Where were you? It's been hours, I didn't know where to find you. I was about to go to your apartment. I went to the rehearsal hall, they hadn't seen you this afternoon, they were most rude, making jokes about how Mademoiselle Daaé had no need of rehearsals anymore, she just communed with the composers with her fairy magic and knew how to sing it all perfectly. Look, I took the liberty of having tea sent up, but it's all cold now, and ..."
I sank onto the sofa. "I forgot entirely. No, don't be angry, I didn't forget our meeting, just the rehearsal."
"Christine," he said. "Your eyes, they're balls of flame in your face. What happened? Why have you been crying?"
"I'm sorry I was late, I was ... delayed. I couldn't help it," and I started to cry a little from the sheer vexation of all of it, of my lies to Erik, my courses that hadn't come, and for all the lies I was to tell Raoul, sweet Raoul who could not help now but believe me.
"It's him, isn't it? It's always him, he makes you miserable, why can't you leave him?"
"Where would I go? Wherever I would go, he would follow me. You can't know, Raoul, you have no idea how clever he is, how much he knows, and how well he knows me."
Raoul clenched his hands into fists, and his face was cold. "If I don't know, it's because you will not tell me." Then, as if he pulled some string inside to bring himself back to himself, he said, "You're shaking. When was the last time you ate?"
I shook my head. "I don't remember."
"Then look, have some tea, even if it's only warm. There, put some sugar in it. Have you tried it English style, with a little cream? No, not cream and lemon together, that will curdle. I tried that once, and my sisters laughed at the face I made."
After we had eaten, he pulled an envelope from his waistcoat and laid it in front of me. "Open it," he said, and my eyes swam at the well-crafted hand, the short, crisp words. "It's not dated," he said as he watched my face while I read. "That can be added anytime. But unless you tell me what troubles you, who this man is who makes you weep, what you plan to do, I will not get on board that ship. We have vacillated, we have played back and forth, but the time for play is over. I will resign, Christine, and I will devote my time to freeing you from him, even if that means I have to challenge him in combat. If you tell me that you are marrying Erik and that I have no cause to worry for your future, then next week I will salute my captain and ask permission to come aboard, and you will never see me again. Not that I will not love you, on the contrary. But I will not live half in the shadows, never knowing what is going to spring out at me."
I set the letter down and he placed it in my lap. "It's entirely in your hands. I go, or I resign, and stay with you, and fight this Erik if I must."
"Stop!" I cried out, putting my hand over his mouth. "Please do not say his name. Please, I can't bear it. He will hear you, and his promise to stay out of my dressing room he will break, I know it. Please don't speak it here."
He took my hand as if it were fine crystal, and set it aside as he went on, "Or you tell me who he is, what he wants with you, and if it is honorable I will leave you, and trouble you no more. That is, if I mean nothing to you at all."
"That's not true. You know it isn't."
"Then tell me. Tell me the secret of this man, this 'voice.' I promise you, Christine, if you want me to, I will take you someplace safe, someplace where he won't be able to find you. No," and he waved his hand at me, full of energy and purpose now, "no more talk of how you've promised not to marry. You know what I think of that promise, but since it was yours to make, it is yours to set aside if your conscience allows. What is important is that you be safe. I have a place in mind. It's ..."
"No!" I said. "Don't say it here. But tell me, this place is safe? Really safe? Erik could not find me there?"
"He would not even think to look for you there. You could stay until you made up your mind, until you decided whether this promise you have made to him is worth keeping or not." He saw me hesitate, and took my hands in his. "Not as my mistress," he said. "Never that way. Please, let me tell you my thoughts. If not here, then where can we talk?"
"I know," I answered, and so we went once more up into the great fly-tower above the stage, and I held his hand as we went, trembling with fear but exhilarated too. "Up we go. He won't come up here. He's told me so. There's a staircase, that spiral iron one over there. It's where the workmen go to get to the roof."
"How do you know he won't come up here?" Raoul asked. "Why shouldn't he, if this building is his from top to the farthest cellar, as you say?"
"He just won't," I repeated stubbornly, more to convince myself than Raoul.
We went out onto the broad metal walkways, and our feet made faint metallic echoes as we walked to the edge. "It's a river valley," Raoul commented as we looked over the Seine that glowed purple and red in the setting sun. "All of Paris is in a valley, cut through by the river. It must have been far wider in earlier times."
The first few twinkling lights came on in the city's broad expanse of grey and brown and marble. "So many trees," I remarked.
"Are you cold?" he asked. "We've left our coats. But never mind," and he put his arms around me, pulling me to him in the ghostly twilight, so that I could warm myself against the wool of his jacket and the comfortable front of his body. It was very still, as twilight often is. I listened for more metal footfalls like ours, but heard nothing.
"We're safe up here," I said. "Tell me, tell me where you could take me."
"You're right, I shouldn't tell you directly. What if he tried to force it out of you? I'll say only this, down on the Dordogne river, atop the limestone bluffs, there is a convent. My sister Martynière stayed there for a time. The sisters are kind, and the village nearby is very small, so any strangers or unusual behavior would be noticed at once. The convent has a cloister deep within the walls. It's a fortress, Christine, built almost a thousand years ago, and inside there is a honeycomb of a thousand cells and rooms. No so-called ghost can pass through those thick walls. You could stay there as long as you liked. I could not visit you, of course, but we could write, and you could rest and meditate on what to do."
"Could this be?" I asked. "You would really do this?"
"Yes," he said, pulling me closer. "If you want me to, I will."
"It doesn't seem possible."
"It is. It can start tonight, even. You can leave with me right now. I will have to find a hotel for you, as the carriage must be arranged. We will stop for nothing, we won't even go back to your dressing room for our coats."
"No," I said, "I have to think. My mind is in a turmoil. I don't know what to say, or what to do. I do want to leave him, Raoul. But I owe him so much, and he has waited to hear me sing Marguerite for so long."
"That's the first time I've heard you say it. Say it again, Christine, and mean it. You want to leave Erik. Say it, and believe it."
"Oh, God," I said. "Please don't say his name."
"Why? What is so special about it? What is so special about him?"
I swallowed hard, drew up every resolve of strength from within, and so I told him. Not the truth, not all of it, but most, from the time I first heard a strange ethereal singing in my new dressing room. Raoul cried out, he almost wept at one point or two, but mostly he grew red with rage and redder at the strain of suppressing it. I told him how I had first heard a silver voice from heaven through the walls of my room, how I had run into the corridor to see if some singer unknown to me practiced in the hallway. I told him how credulous I was, how Mama Valerius was worse, when she told me to ask the angel if he indeed was one, thus giving Erik a direct entry into the deception.
I recounted how on the night of the falling chandelier Erik had taken me drugged and compliant down to his apartments by the lake, then imprisoned me. Raoul winced as I recalled the beauty and terror of Erik's and my reenactment of the Otello scene, and wrung his hands with frustration as I described how Erik had buffeted me about afterwards. He gnashed his teeth as I told him how pity brought me back to Erik at the end of those two weeks.
But I lied, too, how shamelessly I lied, things done and left undone. I told him I feared and loathed Erik's face, and that was the reason I wanted to escape. Tears sprang to my eyes and Raoul thought they were tears of revulsion, of terror at Erik's ravaged features, but they were tears of shame, the shame of the falsehoods that poured from my mouth as the Seine poured through the heart of Paris.
And of the ring, of its giving, and all that followed in the hollow of the night from my acceptance of that ring, I said nothing. "He is a monster," I said at one point. "A monster made of death from head to toe."
Then I went too far, because Raoul pulled away from me a little and said soberly, "Remember, Christine, I saw his unmasked face before you did, even, when you still thought he was some kind of spirit. He frightened me in the dark and cold of that Perros church, where the superstitious expect to see supernatural beings. But I thought about it all the way back to Paris on the train, that he was in no way supernatural, but simply a man of great ugliness and greater cunning. I am not a man of the world as my brother is, but I do know enough of women to know that ugliness in a man is no impediment to a woman's love. Then I saw him again on the grand stairs of the Garnier Opera in the full light, and while it was clear his face was grotesquely painted, it was in no way monstrous. What is monstrous, Christine, has been his treatment of you, and if I call him monster it is not for the unfortunate accident that marred his birth, but the deception and violence he has used against you in the name of love."
We had walked around the whole perimeter of the roof and came to rest at the foot of Apollo's great bronze statue, sheltering from the wind that slowly rose up from the deepening star-filled sky.
"But I don't understand one part," Raoul went on. "You say he kept you for two weeks, and then let you go. Why did you return to him? It makes no sense the way you told it. Here is a man who had taken you against your will, lied to you, beaten you, and I will kill him if I ever see him, Christine, for that beating, and yet when you are free you return to him."
I sat a long time, wanting to pull his arms around me, but something cold in him kept me apart. "He loved me," I said finally. "He still does. It is a love that will never rest."
"Is it a love you share? Because it sounds as if you do. This is not the first time I've asked, and not the first time you've refused to answer. You say you hate his face. I don't say you lie, because to me your heart is unclear. But I want to know – would you love him were he beautiful? If he had still lied to you, deceived you, threatened you, hurt you? Imagine the handsomest man you can, and then imagine him doing these things, and still being Erik in every regard, in the genius you say he has, the musicianship. Would you be sitting here with me if Erik were beautiful?"
He breathed in great straining gasps, like a train climbing a hill, although he sat at rest. I couldn't look at him, and focused instead on a great red star close to the horizon. It seemed to glare at me from far away, so I couldn't look at it anymore either, and had to face Raoul. A bell rang in my heart, the bell of truth that could not be refused. If Erik were beautiful? I tried to imagine him, tall and slender, with shoulders of iron and his same long graceful limbs, as lovely under the dress black as in it. I saw in my mind his head, large and impressive, with long swept-back hair of deepest black streaked bright with silver. I saw the bones of his face layered over with fine muscle, a warm mobile mouth with lips turned out instead of in, his same sharp brows covered with smooth skin, and a nose strong and fine. Clear skin covered his face, and his eyes looked out from their deep sockets, but ringed with long black lashes instead of pouched black. I imagined what he would look like if he smiled.
Raoul was right. I would not be on this roof, sitting with him. For the Erik of my imagination was the man I thought I would see the night I so foolishly took off the mask. Had that face looked out at me, even though twisted with anger, even had he struck me then and shouted, I would have admitted my wrongdoing, and most likely had crawled before him on my belly, rather than watching him crawl on his.
It was a terrible thing to learn about myself that night, and even more terrible not to acknowledge that I had learned it.
So instead of answering, I told Raoul that he was the one I loved, that he should not violate my conscience by asking me what I kept hidden inside my heart "like sins," as I put it, and then I kissed him. At first he shook a little in surprise, but soon under my mouth he yielded, not getting the answer he wanted, but getting another answer that pleased him in a different way.
"I cannot take you to a convent," he said finally, pulling himself away from a kiss so deep that I had to pull in great mouthfuls of air.
"No," I said. The night grew colder, and we clung tighter together. He took off his coat and wrapped it around me, running his hands up and down everywhere my corset was not, pulling me into his mouth harder now.
When we broke to breathe, before we kissed again he said over and over, "You love me. Please, let it be true. Because I love you more than anything. I can't be without you for a day, even. Please go with me tonight. Please leave Paris with me," but I pleaded with him for one more night, and under my caresses and entreaties he yielded. "Tomorrow, then. It will be tomorrow. We'll go directly by stage, as soon as your performance is over," and he wrapped his coat tighter still, until our breath mingled into white fog and made our faces wet under the wool.
"Mama," I murmured. "You know I can't leave her."
"Christine," he said, surprised. "Whatever made you think we would? When I told you about the convent on the Dordogne, it was of course with both of you in mind. Whether you leave to go into retreat, or leave to become my wife, it is the same."
"But there's Margot," I said. "What if she doesn't let her go?"
"Let her go? Of course she'll let her go. There's my coachman, and I'll have another one of my men with us besides. I'll knock her flat if she tries anything. Look, bring your head down here, right on my chest. Warmer now? You can't be consumed with fear, Christine. It's going to work, you'll see. I still wish you would not wait, that you would simply come with me now and let me send my men to bring Mama Valerius. But I agree that another day will give us more time to prepare. Better?"
Then he held me close and all time stopped. I played with the buttons of his vest and the linen shirt behind them, and inside my hand crept to rest on the warm skin beneath. He opened my jacket and chemise and sought my breast, stroking the skin all around the tip until he found that as well. Our mouths moved together, not kissing all the time, sometimes just resting and breathing as we moved back and forth through hand's-widths' opening of fabric. He drew in his breath with a great shudder, and I didn't have to touch him any lower down to know that he was consumed by desire. He gave a soft little moan and pressed my hand harder against him, and then we both jumped up so hard his coat fell off of us.
A dull metallic "thud" had sounded directly behind us, followed by another, softer one.
"Oh, God," I said in a whisper.
Raoul scrambled to his feet. He looked at me wildly, and we shared the same thought. It would be nothing for Erik to toss us off the roof one after another. Raoul held himself entirely still, listening. He put his finger to his lips, be quiet. Slowly we walked towards the stairs, buttoning shirt and vest and jacket as we went, and it was not until we were on the staircase itself that we began to race, not seeing but feeling the deep black eyes of the night that penetrated our retreating figures.
When we climbed down the stairwell from the fly tower, I pulled on Raoul's sleeve suddenly, begging him to stop. There in the deserted backstage moved a shadow of black, but not Erik. From the black emerged a brown hand with a pale palm, beckoning. Raoul put his arm around me, holding me back.
"It's all right," I whispered. "I know who he is." Taking Raoul's hand, I led him to the beseeching form, and as soon as we were close enough he signaled to us to be silent, then swooped on ahead, his patched black cloak swirling in the dark. We followed him to a panel that he pushed, to find another passage that I had not seen before. We went down and around a dimly lit crawlspace full of cobwebs, only to emerge next to a servant's closet underneath the grand stairway of the foyer.
"I thank you, sir," Raoul said to Erik's Persian friend, giving a slight bow. Raoul looked short and pale next to the tall man whose skin glowed like cream-filled coffee. "Monsieur le Vicomte Raoul de Chagny at your service."
"You may call me 'Daroga,'" the Persian answered, and inclined his head in return. "No one in Paris can remember my name, or pronounce it if they do."
"Daroga is a fine name," I remarked. His beautifully-curved eyes shone green, with little threads of brown and blue throughout.
"It is not a name ... Mademoiselle," he said with a slight hesitation, giving my finger a hard glance. "It is a title. In my home country I was head of security. But that was a long time ago, and a long way off. Now I urge you, leave the Opera, or find some suitable place where you will not be seen."
He turned to go, but Raoul called out, "Wait! I have some questions..." but with a swish of his cape the tall black-clad man was gone.
"Quick, Raoul," I said. "To my dressing room, at once."
He stood square and obstinate. "Who is that man, and how do you know him?"
"Please, not now ... Let's go."
Raoul crossed his arms, jaw set. "I'm going nowhere until you tell me who he is. It's bad enough, to run from the roof where you said we were safe, and then this."
Shocked and irritated at his obstinacy, I turned and walked off, and he followed, red-faced. He didn't speak again until I shut the dressing room door firmly behind us. Swallowing down his frustration, he came to me with arms extended, inviting me in. "Please tell me," he said softly as he rocked me under his chin.
"He is someone who knew ... that man from long ago, in Persia."
"Why is he here? Did he see us on the roof?"
"I don't know. I've seen him around the Opera during intermissions. He wears that odd hat and really stands out."
"Another one who chases the girls of the theater, no doubt."
"No, Raoul, I've never heard of him doing that. One of Sorelli's friends tried to catch his eye, but he wasn't interested. He leaves the girls alone, from what everyone says. Perhaps he has a wife or mistress elsewhere."
"Perhaps," said Raoul, doubt in his voice. "But that's neither here nor there. Christine, please reconsider and leave with me tonight, right this instant."
I pulled away. "You know I can't."
"But why not? What do you owe Erik? Yes, I said his name, and I'm going to from now on – Erik, Erik, Erik, do you hear? Let him come through his mirror or out of the walls if he likes. Is that how you're going to go to him, through the mirror again?" He strode over to it, feeling it all over, smearing it with hand prints. "How does it work? Not by magic, surely, but by some ingenious trickery worthy of Hero of Alexandria. There must be a latch here somewhere, if I could only find it."
"Stop it, Raoul," I cried, pulling on his sleeve. "What if you opened it and it dragged you into the corridor? You would be stuck there, and while I couldn't get to you, he certainly could."
"It's ridiculous," he answered, but he left the mirror alone. "How did he expect you to get to him anyway?"
I patted the reticule tied to my waist sash. "I have a key. To the gate on the other side of the Rue Scribe entrance, the one no one ever goes to."
"In there?" Raoul said in a commanding tone. "A key? Let me see it, if you please."
Reluctantly, slowly I opened the drawstring to my little purse and pulled the iron key out, clutching it tight.
"You should let me have it," he said. "I will talk to the police, they will bring men, and we will go down there and find this Erik."
"Absolutely not," I said, pulling it to my breast and gripping it even tighter.
"So you won't come with me tonight, and you won't let me take the measures necessary to keep not only you safe, but us safe, for good. For it is not just you, Christine. When you pull me into the dressing room, tell me to be quiet, clutch at my sleeve, obviously you think something is going to happen to me as well. Yet that doesn't seem to concern you. It's all Erik's hurt feelings. It's Erik, Erik, nothing but Erik. God help me if I ever hear that name again."
"Then stop saying it," I said.
He turned back to me, imploring. "Please come with me now. Walk with me to the stable, and we can watch them hitch the horses to the carriage. I won't let you out of my sight."
"Raoul, you don't understand."
"Then make me understand. You tell me this story of a man extraordinarily deformed, who repulses you by the merest touch of his finger, who has dominated you as a teacher for three months, so that you could not even greet an old friend when he came to see you. Then he has done worse to you for over a month now, having the audacity to take you from your home. Even after all that, no, I don't understand. You say you love me, but you think you show that love by clinging to another man, even if only for one night?"
It seemed hopeless. "I don't want him to kill himself."
He crossed his arms, astonished. "He's threatened suicide?"
"He has. And he makes threats, vague threats, I don't understand them, but they make me feel terrible, afraid and guilty all at once."
"If he kills himself," Raoul said in a voice hard as ice, "it is good riddance."
I flew towards the door, to grab my coat from the hook. "I won't listen to that. You can't mean that. It's the worst thing a person can do, and you can say that about someone? How cold can you be, Raoul de Chagny?"
"I'm sorry," he said over and over, desperate now. "But it's driving me mad, Christine. You know I am not superstitious. I don't believe in signs or portents. I leave that to the old women who close their eyes and pick out prayers in the breviary, thinking if they say the one their finger lands on, they will get their wish. But I have a sense that we should leave right now, and like Lot's wife fleeing the cities of the plain, we should never look back. Please don't sing tomorrow, Christine. Please, if you love me, and by the love I have for you, I beg you. Please leave with me now."
"I can't," I whispered. "Just as I can't give you my key to the Rue Scribe gate. I do love you. I will go with you tomorrow. But not tonight. To go tonight would be a betrayal."
Then my little room seemed to stretch out like a tunnel with Raoul on the far dim end of it. He was walking forward to hold me, but very slowly, and he seemed to be a little doll, or a man standing on the dock shrinking slowly from view as the boat sails out to sea. He said something but it was lost in the roar of blood which flooded my ears. "Betrayal," I whispered, but it was Erik's voice I heard come out of my mouth. "As long as you wear Erik's ring, you are safe."
The third finger of my left hand was entirely bare.
My knees gave way and I slumped toward the floor, but Raoul caught me in time. Cradling me tenderly, he took me into the boudoir and laid me on the day bed. I pulled him down next to me and we clung together for a few moments before he pulled himself away. I showed him my finger, waving my hand around, mute with terror.
"You took it off," Raoul said. "I am so glad, for you don't know how I hated that thing."
"I didn't take it off," I started to sob. "It's gone, I've lost it. He'll kill me, I know he will, when he finds out."
"Then we won't let him find out. We will leave, and he will never know what happened. It is not your responsibility, Christine. If he chooses to harm himself, it is on his head, not yours."
"You have to leave," I said. "Please go now. I'm safe here, really, I am."
"Let me take you home."
"No, I want to stay here and search, but I need to rest and think first. I'll be all right."
"Then I'll search with you."
I laughed a crazy small laugh, and he looked affronted. "Raoul de Chagny, you are stubborn. It's probably down in the settee cushions, or somewhere around the dressing table. Perhaps it's in my reticule, fallen in there when you made me take out that key. Please, Raoul. If we are to leave tomorrow, you have to plan and pack, and so do I. You need rest as well as me. Really," and I gave one of those false, brave smiles that while they don't fool men, at least reassure them a little.
"Why do you want to find it so badly?"
"I don't know. If I don't go to him tomorrow after Faust, that means I will never see him again," and for the first time the enormity hit me, a life entirely without Erik, without even the feel or presence of Erik around and above and, God help me, inside of me. The glimpse I had of him earlier in the day would have been my last. "Perhaps like the magic ring in the fish, it will make its way back to him. But for these last twenty-four hours, let me do this as I see fit, Raoul. Please."
He sighed heavily, but instead of getting up, wrapped me all in his arms as deep as I could go as we lay body to body on the narrow bed. "I don't want to lose you," he said over and over. "I'm so afraid he'll take you from me, that you will go down into that subterranean darkness forever, as you feared. Tell me you won't see him later tonight, oh, please promise that at least."
"I won't," I said. "You can trust me on that. I won't see him again, ever."
He rolled his mouth over mine then, in a long stretch of soft kisses that all blended into one long caress of mouth and tongue. Then I felt him full and erect against my hip, and down his tongue went farther into mine, till tongue wrapped against tongue and he pressed his long full heat harder into the tender flesh at the top of my leg. Slowly he let me go and looked up to the ceiling as if he prayed.
"What?" I said, for he looked like a man tied between opposing horses, almost torn to bits by them.
"I have to leave," he said, "or I will beg you to let me stay, and not just stay, but to lie with you right here, and once I fall into your arms like that, I don't know if I will ever emerge from them."
"Stay," I said. "You've said we'll be married. I trust you," and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to feel him up against me in the night, to fill me with his heat, to not be alone in the dark little room with the thought of Erik moving silently behind the walls.
He pulled himself away, sitting up. "It's not right. You don't have to say that to me."
Confused, I clung to him. "Raoul, I love you. I want you."
Taking my face in his hands, he kissed me softly on the forehead, the kiss a brother would give a sister, or a mother her child. "I love you more than life. But I will not ruin a maiden. I can wait. Tomorrow, then, although I wish you would come with me now. But tomorrow."
After he left, I sat for a long time, staring at the blank finger of my left hand. At first I thought to run after him, calling out, no, you've got it wrong, I'm no maiden and no innocent, and that's why I can suggest such a foul thing. But it didn't seem foul, not at all. I had had my hand on his breast, and knew his skin would be smooth or lightly roughed up with soft hair when my hands glided over him like birds that skim the ocean. A terrible curiosity possessed me, to leave the lights on and see all of him naked and revealed, to run my hands around his thighs to see if they were as round and strong as they appeared. Then I collapsed, face in hands, full of shame and desire all mixed in at once.
Then fear washed away shame and desire both. The ring. Somewhere in the Opera lay Erik's ring. I could hear my father when I lost a ribbon or my darning egg, Don't cry, lill-jänta, little girl, just think back to where you had it last. Walk backwards in your mind and you'll find it. So I did, walking back through the halls, up the stairs, up to the metal roof where Raoul and I sat in the shadow of that great statue. Then a thought struck me. When the Persian led us through the corridors, Raoul held me by my left hand, leading me along as he followed the Persian. He wouldn't have touched my hand with the ring on it. I tried hard to remember Raoul's hands on mine, and I grew cold. Had Raoul slipped it off? Or had he seen it gone from our time on the roof, and just not mentioned it?
He would never take it off, I told myself. That would give him no pleasure, for I would just replace it. But it could have fallen off then. The most likely place therefore is the roof.
So even though I yawned with tiredness in the deep of the night, I climbed all that long way back up the flies in the echoing, abandoned building, and once again up those twisted stairs. The night was thick with stars, one great sweep making a white band against the blue night. It was cold and silent, and although I crept across almost the entire metal surface bent on my hands and knees like an old woman, no lost coin appeared to me in the crack of the floor, nor ring either.
I had stood by the edge of the roof when we first came up, as Raoul and I looked out over the expanse of the Seine river valley. Perhaps it had slipped off my finger and fallen to the street below. The thought of going down to the street, where no doubt someone had already picked it up, pocketed, and pawned it, filled me with despair.
Cold, bereft, I started to cry. A vast black emptied itself out inside me. There was no point in continuing this farce. Raoul would soon find out that he brought a trull to his bed and a cuckoo into his nest, for my courses had not yet come. And I had invited him to lie with me like a common streetwalker not an hour before. The sidewalk below lured me. It would be so easy, a rush of wind, a fall for only a few seconds, an incredible shock of pain, and then nothing, nothing that is save the flames of hell, which I would find at the end anyway.
Joined with Erik, and then a great lump choked me, the thought that the pains of hell for me could include being joined to Erik forever in eternity, chained together on the same burning brazier, lying in an eternal embrace of fire. Then I cried freely, sobbing into the night with no one to hear as I leaned over the low edge of the roof.
"Mademoiselle Daaé," a voice called from behind me, soft but full of command. "Mademoiselle, please turn around very slowly. I don't wish to frighten you. I fear for your safety. Turn around and take your time, so you don't startle."
I knew who it was before I even saw him. "Monsieur Daroga," I said. "It is late for you to be up on this roof."
"Late for you, too, Mademoiselle. Good, that's fine. Step down off that little stair near the edge, that's right," and when I had both feet firmly on the metal roof, he sped over to me, wrapped two long strong arms around me, and pulled me several meters away from the edge. Panting, he said, "Can I let you go now with assurance that you will not jump?"
I flushed with shame. "You saw that."
"I thought that for you followers of Isa it was a grave sin. It was what Erik always told me, although he was not the most reliable sometimes in matters of his religion." Then he turned those beautiful almond-shaped eyes on me, full of green compassion. "To get away from him, you must resort to that?"
Looking away, I said, "What do you know of me? What has he told you?"
"That you are his, and that you are to leave together tomorrow night. I didn't believe him. Erik ..." and here he sighed heavily, "Erik has a tendency to stretch the truth."
"Does he stretch the truth when he says he will 'leave a hole in Paris humanity' if I leave, when he says insane things like that?"
His brown face grew paler. "He has said that to you?"
"Or something like it. Something raving, anyway, something about being like Lucifer falling in a ball of flame, only he's going to rise up, I can't remember, Monsieur Daroga, those words of his all blur into one great mass of madness. I try not to listen to them."
"I wish I had not." He looked out over at the city, his face in his hand. "Why did you come up here?"
"I lost his ring. The one I waved in your face."
"Yes," he said in a musing tone. "I know that one. It was said of the dwarf Andvari when he forged a ring from the Rhine river's gold, 'While love he could not gain by force, through cunning forced he love's delights.'" I looked at him blankly. "Wagner," he said. "But never mind. He's not popular in France. Would you like me to help you search?"
"I don't know if I want it back, now. Raoul and I … we leave tomorrow. When I am gone, I don't think a lost ring will be Erik's greatest worry."
"The young officer, you love him?"
"Yes," I said. Then I looked at him, hard. "It's not all on my head, you know. He told me about you, and about your sister. Erik said that on the morning after he killed her, the two of you had coffee and worked on your building plans as if nothing had happened."
"Those two young men no longer exist. Do not judge me too harshly, Mademoiselle. Then I was a cold, hard youth, caring only for my own place at court and advancement. But my heart has been softened since by suffering. Do not judge him too harshly either, even though you want to get away from him, and I understand why you do. For he was not the man then that he is now, and I have my own sins to bear, sins that contributed to the hardening of his heart."
"He calls you 'betrayer.'"
"I know," the dark man said, and when he sighed he reminded me so much of Erik, as if those sighs came from the same chest. "And before the cock crows on the morning after the morrow, he will no doubt have cause to call me betrayer again."
"You will help us?" I asked, a small hope flickering. "Because I do not see how we can get away without Erik seeing."
"I will watch, and wait. Do not look for me, for if you do not need me I will not be seen." He offered me his hand and I took it, feeling the cool palm and the firm clasp of his fingers. "It would not be prudent for us to go down together," he said. "But just to reassure me that your life is secured, I want you to go ahead of me. Take heart, Mademoiselle Daaé. It is a difficult position in which you find yourself, but I think you aim at the right target."
"He is going to suffer."
"I know," he said, with such compassion that the pain radiated through my heart. "But I will try to help him, even if he does not let me."
As I went down the iron staircase, I listened for his steps behind me, although they had vanished.
(continued...)