Chapter 12
At the shrill cry, Monsieur Simon instinctively turned his head to check the chandelier. Seeing it still attached, he hastily flicked through the articles copied into his brain. After shouting up to a boy who had clambered up the rafters, he resolved to look for himself, but was prevented by Meg Giry's scabbling hands. Her pleading reminded him of the note, which in turn reminded him of the girl.
"Where is Justine? Has she been taken?"
"Why, of course not, you fool, she's over there," she replied, pointing a long-fingered hand to a space directly below the riggings. There, a flurry of ballerinas had collected, peering at the riggings above or bickering over who saw what: one or two figures, or three, or no figure at all but simply a cloak and hat held up by nothing at all. The quieter ones simply peered up at the riggings; another girl picked up a crumpled piece of paper. As she uncrumpled it, her face took on a bemused look.
"Look, it is of us."
"No – it is of Justine."
"Give that to me," Monsieur Simon interjected. His voice was quiet but it was not gentle.
Smoothing out the paper, he tried to remember what the other one – Daae, whatever her name had been – had looked like, and whether there was a resemblance. The truth is, he had never looked at the soprano with interest and had only really cared about the Phantom of the Opera when its reality was thrown before him; that is, when Piaggi lay rolled over and bleeding on the stage, his dead hand dangling into the orchestra pit where young Maurice Simon had been playing his violin. He had reached out and touched that hand. It was still warm. He remembered Carlotta with her feathers in her hair and her tears mingling with her powder, and stamping her foot that she didn't care about that little brat Christine, that all this was her fault and that she would not leave her Ubaldo, and slapping the manager when he tried to pull her away. It was hard to remember the face of a mousy chorus girl amid all that. He summoned Mademoiselle Giry, who strode over slowly to show she did not appreciate his briskness.
"That girl is to be supervised from now on. Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, I expect to know about it."
"Why, whatever for?"
"Safety, hers and ours. I understand your mother worked here. When did she leave?"
"She died, Sir, several years ago," Meg replied, with a low note in her usually cheery voice. He saw her skirts swish as though she was crossing her feet below her long skirt. She would be thirty or so years old now, and still not an empress as her mother was promised. To her credit, she never seemed forlorn at this turn, preferring the satin and gossip and crème de la cassis of the Opera House. Teaching the ballet girls gave her the attention she craved; furthermore, the younger girls loved her for her morbid stories, which she told with a little too much enthusiasm. It had not been unheard of for a ballet girl to run crying on her first night because Giry had informed her, quite seriously, that the Opera Ghost liked to snip off the toes of lazy ballerinas. "She caught a chill after the Opera Ghost."
Monsieur Simon cringed: did she have to say it so loudly?
"And she left no diaries, I assume?"
"Nothing, Sir, but she told me a great deal. She spoke to some journalist a few years ago, I believe."
"I've already read those articles." He thought back to his reading. "The dressing room that Christine Daae used, is there anyone in there now?"
"Why yes, it is La Therese's room."
"And is the room as it was then?" he asked. Whatever else he made of Meg Giry, he appraised her quickly as an expert on the Opera House, though she was a little too imaginative to be taken at her word on other matters.
"Why, yes, it is the same bed that Christine used, and all the same furniture and much of the same objects. I even saw La Therese using her hairpins once, the mother-of-pearl ones," she added.
"Which one is La Therese again?"
"She is a soprano, Sir, like Christine. Surely, you must have listened to her at least once."
"Probably. In any case, she's going to need to be somewhere else. Are there any rooms not in use?"
"I am not a concierge, Sir," the young woman replied sharply. "If you need to know about rooms then I will happily point you to the correct person but for now why don't you tell me what you mean asking me about my mother and La Therese's dressing room?" As she asked the question, she began to move the fingers on her left hand over the fingers of her right, then vice versa. "You think it is the Opera Ghost, don't you?"
There was no point hiding it.
"I do. And concierge or not, you do not need a ghost bothering your dancers. Now I want that girl watched like a thief, La Therese out of that room and all these girls moved somewhere else for tomorrow's rehearsal and as many days after that as it take to get the chandelier reinforced. Do I make myself clear?"
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