A/N: If you haven't already, I highly recommend going back and re-reading the whole thing from Chapter 1, as some minor but important details have been altered, a few errors have been corrected, and quite a few chapters have gained some extra clarifications – especially Chapter 1, which has been majorly revised, and Chapter 20, which now has about thirty-five added sentences. If nothing else, do it to refresh your memory on bygone events. Excessive time-gaps between updates are never good for one's memory, as I know from long experience.
Some parts of this chapter beg some questions, which, I promise, will be answered in Chapter 22.
He stared at the stone in his hand. It was smooth, polished, from the shallows around the wharf. Small enough not to cause any damage to glass if thrown properly...he hoped.
It clacked quite loudly against her window, making him wince.
A dog barked, somewhere. It was the barking, and not the stone, that woke her.
"Merde," she mumbled, baring her teeth. She had gotten far too used to sleeping late.
In her half-stupor, she saw her masked man (the exact moment when she had begun to think of him as hers wasn't quite certain, though, she reflected lazily, it had probably been in Paris), standing at the foot of the bed, and began to ask him what was the matter."Erik, qu'est-ce que le..."
A loud clack resounded on her window, much like the one she had vaguely heard in her sleep. She jumped, barely suppressing a startled instinctive shriek.
"Good God, Patrick," she groused, flinging back her covers and treading carefully across the creaking boards. The hanging neck of her nightgown fluttered a bit when she opened the window, for the breeze came in, assaulting her nostrils with the overpowering but not altogether unpleasant odors of sea-salt and fish.
He stood below, the little ferret, looking very lost and almost not like a ferret at all, but more like a timid mouse. His legs looked nice in those breeches, she reflected, and then nearly slapped herself.
"Are you ready?" she whispered vehemently.
He was a bit dazed by her tangled wavy-curls whipping about in the breeze, not to mention the bit of cleft shown by her nightgown, and didn't answer.
"Are you ready, Patrick?" she hissed, her eyes catching fire. A splinter lodged itself beneath her fingernail, and she let forth a stream of lovely French curse words, realizing she had been gripping the sill too hard.
He laughed, nervously. "Y...yes!" he whispered, attempting to sound carefree but sounding more like someone who had recently eaten too much chocolate.
"Good," she muttered, sucking her finger, which was quite bloody from the violent extraction of the tiny sliver of pinewood. She turned from the window and spat the blood out in the chamber-pot, where it settled viscously into a small puddle of pink-tinged saliva.
"I'll get my things," she whispered brusquely, poking her head out the window, hair blowing and getting in her mouth. She pulled her head back in again disgustedly, wiping frenziedly at the tangled hairs.
Tora threw off her nightgown – glancing suspiciously at the window and subsequently drawing the drapes from a discreet angle – and proceeded dressing in the least possible amount of womanly layers that she could manage without being completely immodest. She left her corset in the suitcase, but the petticoat, she supposed with a disgruntled sigh, had become an embarrassing necessity.
She struggled into one of the dresses that Aunt had insisted on buying for her with Constance's borrowed money – "practically pretty" was as good a description as any. It wasn't nearly as beautiful or extravagant as Erik's dresses, nor was it as homely as her old Opera clothes. She looked wonderfully middle-class in it.
Closing her neatly packed suitcase quietly, and pulling on her equally middle-class shoes, she tiptoed to Aunt's room and slid a letter under the door. She had already told Agnes that she was leaving in the near future; she had said goodbye, in a fashion. She had no stomach for Aunt's pleas, and she loathed having her be privy to the secret deception she and Patrick were planning beforehand, which was why she hadn't explained it all outright. On the other hand, she hated leaving her mother's sister with no remembrance or acknowledgment of their time together, as if like a puff of smoke. The letter would do. Although she was sure Aunt wouldn't see it quite that way.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, more like a breath than words, and kissed the door.
A hand descended on her shoulder. Tora gasped, and her back straightened like a rod.
Constance's fingers were like slender talons. The nails dug into her flesh.
"Leaving so soon, dear?" she intoned in her lazy, aristocratic way. "But we've only just begun to get to know each other."
Get to know each other metamorphosed from slow aristocratic drawl into viciously nasty triumph mixed with schoolyard taunt. She sounded, Tora thought, rather like a harpy.
The girl shivered. "Take your fingers off," she said. "I'll go when I like. Besides, shouldn't you be rejoicing, and not standing in my way?" A few epithets had threatened to follow, but Tora bit her tongue quite wisely.
Constance sneered. "You deign," she said, hissing like a snake, "to dictate to me what I am to do! You humiliate me in front of my guests! You upset the balance of my standing in society! You – " (here she seemed at a red-faced loss as to what to say next.)
Tora slapped her hand away. "Don't touch me," she snapped in a whisper. "At least I don't play the rich and simpering harlot while my husband is away."
Constance's face was white for a moment. "Ah," she said, recovering. "But I have a husband. And what do you have for a lover at all, weakling? Perhaps it is the puling little Irishboy, whose face alternates between red and milk, and whose trousers," she laughed, throwing her head back, letting her red curls cascade mockingly, "commonly bear embarrassing proof of not only his doglike eagerness, but his adolescence as well!"
Tora took a step backward, smarting over both the implied liasion and the cruel innuendo directed at her boy – for he was a boy, not a man, nineteen or no, and he was hers, after a fashion. They were...were...friends, at least. "You would think that," she began bitingly...
"Ah, yes," Constance sneered, regaining her sultrily snooty pose, inclining her neck at just the right ways so as to denote utter superiority. "You toy with him, dear. His parents will be most displeased." The drawl had come again, and Tora wanted to grip her throat and choke that voice until it smothered.
"Enough," she said, meeting the wretched woman's eyes with her Glare. The flaming eyes, the frighteningly curled, pinched, and white mouth, the altogether semblance of a wild prophet rebuking the wicked, never had failed to make her quail, and to Tora's grim delight, it didn't fail now.
"I'm going now," she said. "I hope that Aunt, at least, realizes who you are, and not who you were, and leaves this house."
Constance spluttered, attempting to regain her composure.
Tora pushed her to one side contemptuously, regarding the polished stairs, and decided, simply because she never had, to slide (suitcase and all) down the bannister.
"Do you know," whispered the Angel, from a place unknown (it seemed his voice could be everywhere and nowhere at once),"that your triumph is but seven days from today?"
Christine shivered, glorying in his lovely, dark, and proudly appreciative tone. "I must confess," she said in a confident way, "that I'm not quite sure whether to be excited to the point of sickness or to be terrified beyond reason."
The Angel was silent for a moment. "Your birthday," he said in a conversational tone, "is coming, is it not, my sweet?"
Christine shivered again, that he should call her his anything. It was blasphemously delicious to imagine h...
Oh, no. No. Out, damned spot!
He was an Angel, after all!
"You remember my birthday," she murmured, blushing extravagantly. She could not know it, but the sight made him rather weak.
She bent down to examine a shoe, exposing her cleavage, and the voice was silent. When it spoke again, it had that tone – that strange, almost awful tone – that she had only heard very recently, and rarely. It was a raw tone, an almost primally savage and desperate one, and it made her wonder whether or not her Angel really was...
"May the seventeenth," it gasped, "I shall give you a present on that day..."
Christine looked up, both delighted and alarmed. "Why, Angel!" she said, with a bright smile, but then looked concerned. "Whatever is the matter? You sound so strange sometimes...why, if Angels could be ill, I should think that you..."
"Never mind it, Christine!" boomed the voice, sounding...angry? Disquieted? It sounded a bit rattled, at any rate.
Christine was beginning to have serious and lasting doubts of her Angel's...er...heavenliness. Divinity, she supposed, was the correct word, blushing a bit.
But perhaps...oh, perhaps...he was becoming more human every day, and he really would forsake heaven for her! That would be...sacreligiously wonderful. Would God strike her dead for causing such a thing to happen? Would He strike them both?
The voice cleared its throat, sounding as though it was trying to regain some composure. "On that night," it rumbled, "you must give your soul! You must sing, sing as you never have before, never even in this room where we have practiced, and you must astound them. You shall make them see God!"
Christine's foot slipped, and she fell backwards. "Angel!" she whispered. "You do mean non-literally..."
"Of course," said the voice, sounding almost disgusted.
Christine winced. "I was only making sure," she said. "With you, I can never tell whether you're serious or..."
"Enough, Christine," said the voice brusquely. "You shall now sing Mozart's Alleluia, much as I hate the tune."
Christine opened her mouth, but the full impact of what her Angel, her Angel, had just said hit her like a blow to the head.
Her eyes went wide, her mouth slack, her face white.
Erik covered his mouth too late. His eyes nearly rolled back into his head. His skin felt clammy, claustrophobic, as though he were being crushed by stones.
Quick, quick, you fool, think, THINK!
"It does not do Our Lord justice," he managed to say pompously. "Mozart never was, in my opinion, enough of a genius to compose for God."
Christine's eyelids fluttered, and her taut muscles relaxed. Her eyes darted, though, and her breath, he could see, was still a bit quick.
"Oh," she said. "You really think so?"
Erik suppressed a massive sigh of sweet relief – he had not lost her yet. Not yet had he made the fatal error. The unravelling thread had not yet come full circle.
"Angel!" she said loudly, when he had been silent for far too long. Her tone was surprisingly unsubserviant.
He blinked his eyes. "Yes, sweet?" he breathed.
"I thought I was to sing," she said.
Erik closed his eyes. "Yes, yes, go on...child." He felt his patience and ironclad resolve wearing dangerously thin. He had just allowed his eyes to feast upon her half-exposed breasts, had he not? The lovely, milk-white things...
O, merde alors.
They walked, hand in hand, though she didn't know why. It had just happened, really. They held hands more like brother and sister than like lovers, however, the vague realization of which made her both smile and falter.
"It says here," said Patrick, stopping on the street to show her his paper, "that the steamship Bonnie will take us to France in fifteen days or less."
Tora's eyes opened wide. "Really?" It had taken her and Aunt almost three weeks to cross the Atlantic, but then the boat had been cheap, and slow, and had stopped often to gather fish.
Tora saw an urchin inching towards Patrick's abandoned suitcase. She quickly stepped in front of it.
The boy, who could not have been more than six, looked at her solemnly.
She was not sure if she wanted to weep or laugh. "What is your name?" she whispered.
He grinned, showing three lost teeth. "Ivan," he said, with a bit of a lisp. She delighted in the way his little eyes crinkled up when he smiled, and the red gaps where his baby teeth had gone missing.
"Where is your maman, cheri?" she asked, bending lower so she could be almost level with his chubby face.
He shrugged, and pointed upward.
Tora stumbled back.
Patrick tugged her arm. "Come on!" he whispered urgently. "It leaves in an hour and a quarter! And we might have to get inspected!"
Tora resisted the pull, reaching her hand out for the boy, but the crowd itself dragged her away. The urchin's solemn, crystal-blue eyes kept staring until they too were lost in the bland color of the moving masses.