A/N: It's only tonight that I remembered that I didn't include a historical note at the end of last week's chapter. I had intended to, and I forgot. But for anyone who is squicked over the fact that Erik is a Republican, political alignments were essentially reversed in the 1880s. The Republicans were viewed as the more progressive of the two parties, and had been since the Civil War, while the Democrats were largely supported by Southerners and ex-Confederates. The simplest way to think of it is to reverse the two parties as we know them now, but that really boils down a complex political and historical shift into the most basic of terms.
Essentially Republican in the 1880s means progressive for the time.
On a different note, I'm not entirely happy with this chapter but it will bloody well do. Updates will (I believe) return to Saturdays proper from next week on.
Erik's fingers are long and slim, gentle as they trace the violin strings. He plucks one experimentally, and hums to himself as the note rings out. "A little out of tune," he murmurs. "To be expected. You haven't played it?"
She's never played the violin, was never inclined to it, even when she was small, though she loved listening to her father play and loved even more singing along with it. It was part of the reason she was happy with piano lessons, though she let them go when he fell ill and never considered taking them back up again in any serious way after he died, though he would have wanted her to. And by then, the thought of ever taking up the violin was too painful to contemplate, in however loose a way. "No," she whispers now. "Never."
"It's a beautiful instrument." He caresses the wood, fingers trailing over the delicate inlaid designs. "Your father brought it with him from Sweden, I presume?"
"He had it as far back as I can remember."
Erik's lip twitches slightly. "It's in remarkably good condition for an instrument so well-travelled."
"He always looked after it." Even when he was ill, even when he was dying. "And I've done my best with it."
And now, at last, Erik tears his gaze away from it and meets her eye, smiling one of his rare smiles that have come to make her heart flutter. "You've done well with it." He looks back down to the violin, smooths those elegant fingers over the strings again. "I think I should like to play it sometime, if you have no objection."
"I think I would like that."
"This is how my mother taught me to play," he says, two nights later, sitting together on the piano bench. It is very nearly distracting, the feeling of her pressed so close to him, her soft hair tickling his ear. She smells of lavender, and pine, the soaps he bought for her, and a little bit of something light and airy, that has come from Mrs Valerius' house. He is overly conscious that he smells like horse, after checking on Ayesha who is soon due to foal, and working with the Khanum, and of gunpowder after breaking up an incident in the Kentuckian saloon. Perhaps he should bathe, the next time he comes in from work, before he settles at the piano. He shakes his head to focus on the music, taps the keys lightly, lightly. "As if a baby were asleep in the next room."
It is how he has played each night since Christine herself came here. Since she married him.
"It's beautiful," she says, and her voice is so close to his ear, makes something strange and not-unpleasant squirm inside of him. He clenches his jaw tighter in restraint, tries to focus on his fingers dancing along the keys. "She must have been very talented, your mother."
"She would have been a concert pianist if she were a man." As it was, she sometimes played in dive bars when he was very small. His earliest memories of her involve the piano, playing with her eyes closed, her dark hair neatly twisted back and her men's clothes. He always thought she was beautiful, and mildly frightening when she was at her music but she never frightened him, always smiled at him and pulled him close and sat him on her lap before she ever taught him to play, so that he could rest his small hands on the backs of hers and feel out the notes. She taught him to play silver dollars across the back of his knuckles to improve his dexterity and reach, and by the time he was ten he knew how to cut cards to win from spending so much time around the men in bars while she performed.
That was how she met his stepfather, whose name was denied him. His stepfather was always the problem, but those are details that Christine is best spared.
"I suspect you could have been, too. If you wanted."
He hits a wrong note, ruins the whole piece, and lets his fingers fall silent. She does not realise what she has said, cannot realise it. How he used to imagine himself…used to decide which pieces he'd play…how he might perform them for an audience, and then, what they would think of his face. The mask would add to his allure, but there would be someone, sometime.
The memory of grasping hands through the darkness makes him shiver.
"Perhaps. In another life." Too many things have gone wrong in this one.
She is silent, and then her hand covers his, and squeezes.
A handful of mornings later, Erik is on the front page of the newspaper again, and Christine is so surprised by what she reads she snorts her coffee. Erik, using the Khanum to chase down and rope a man galloping naked through town? It's incredulous! It's the most ridiculous thing she's ever read!
She loves it.
And he never said a word about it as they sat the piano bench, a mere handful of hours after it happened. If she had known she would have brought it up.
Erik makes a disgruntled noise at her barely-contained snort, and lifts his own copy of the paper higher to cover his face. Aman catches her eye and grins and she knows why he insisted she read his paper before him.
She clips out the article, and saves it, and spends all day laughing to herself at the mental image.
A rider naked except for his gunbelt and hat. Sorelli would love it! And so she copies the short paragraph into her next letter.
Erik must have looked so fearsome. She's seen him on the Khanum a time or two, the way he sways with the motion of the mare, his hands so strong on the reins. How he must have looked, his thighs pressed firm to the mare's sides to keep him balanced, hands uncoiling the rope he borrowed off some unsuspecting cowhand ("a rawhide riata," Aman laughed, as he relayed the tale to her in full after Erik left), feeding out the loop, the way his arms must have tightened as he threw it—
Her mouth is dry, and she attempts to read the rest of the paper when Aman has left, but Trev comes to call, bringing her a copy of Virgil's Aeneid like he said he would because Erik only has it in Latin. "We were both in the wrong place at the wrong time," he grins, and nods at the paper. "It's a shame to have missed such a sight."
It is barely two weeks until the Cattleman's Ball, and her dress is coming along wonderfully. Some of the other simpler dresses and underthings that only needed tailoring to her size have already been completed, and are hanging now in her wardrove. Sometimes, she puts them on, when there is nobody else in the house, and wears them just because she can, just to feel pretty. She settles at the chair in front of her vanity, ties her hair with the ribbons Erik has brought her since they started sitting at the piano together, and admires the effect, just for a little while. She will have to have a new portrait taken, to send to Sorelli, to show her how well she looks now.
Married life is not as terrifying as she expected. Maybe that's because Erik is very much not like the men she was told about.
True, she misses Sorelli, finds herself longing for her at odd times, even if just to show her something amusing in the paper, or to ask her opinion on a dress, or just to hear poetry in her accent when she reads in her soft slow way. But she has Beth, and Mrs Valerius, and while they are far from replacements, they fill the gap a little bit, each with the different sets of advice and most of it about Erik, who has at least warmed to her now.
She will tell him, soon, that she wants to hear him play her father's violin. Maybe after the Cattleman's Ball.
Such are the thoughts Christine is mulling over, sitting on the sofa at her needlepoint while Aman is in his armchair with a book, when there is a thud against the door. She jolts, stabs herself in the finger, and as she sucks on it she notices that Aman has gone rigid. Another thud, and he is out of his chair, motioning for her to stay sitting.
"If it's trouble," he whispers, eyes fixed on the door, "I want you to run. No questions. Hide in your room until it's over."
She wants to protest, wants to tell him that she'll stay, that she can fight, even if it's only a half-truth, but it might distract him, and she doesn't want him getting hurt either, not on her account. "All right."
A nod. "Good."
Another thud, and what might be a groan, and Aman is across the room, knife drawn from his belt. She half-rises, ready to run if she needs to, when the door swings open and Erik falls in. Aman catches him, and before Christine can squeak he's issuing orders.
"Hot water! And a towel! His head is bleeding!"
She had water heating on the stove already for coffee, and she rushes for it now, pours it into a basin, all the time her heart pounding Erik Erik Erik's hurt Erik's bleeding you need to help him you have to help him you can't let him die on you too… She grabs a clean dish towel and carries it and the water back to the parlour. Aman has gotten Erik to the sofa, lying full stretch, his legs hanging off the side of it because he's too tall, he's so tall.
Aman's face is grim as he accepts the water. "Looks like someone buffaloed him. I have to take his mask off."
She doesn't know what buffaloed means, but she doesn't need to. It means enough that he's bleeding over his mask, that the blood is seeping down under the black fabric. It's clear enough that Aman wants her to go. "I'm staying," she whispers, and kneels beside him. "You might need help." So help her but she cannot leave now. Someone attacked her husband, someone tried to widow her after barely two weeks, and whatever is under his mask cannot be as bad as the fact as that. He needs her to stay.
Maybe if she sees what lies underneath, they might be able to talk things out.
"He wouldn't want you to see it like this." And implicit is, he doesn't want you to see it at all. But Erik's eyes are screwed shut, and there is sweat on his forehead, and his jaw is tight even as he whimpers again. Aman is already undoing the strap of his mask.
"I have to see it." He's my husband. I have a right to. I should have insisted on it sooner. I didn't know how much it mattered to me until now, and anyway, he needs all the help he can get.
"I know." And Aman lifts the mask away.
It is difficult to tell, at first, how ravaged the skin is. The blood has stained it red, has seeped into the cracks, and Christine's stomach twists when she realises it has run through these crevasses in his face, these canyons as if they are stream beds. The crevasses stretch from nose to ear, pull at the edge of his eye (how did she not notice that before? The mask couldn't hide it fully), twist the corner of his lip. Whatever she was imagining (half his face blown off) it was not this tracking of marks, the way it looks as if someone took a knife to him and sliced and sliced and sliced.
How does she know someone didn't do that?
"It wasn't a shotgun blast, was it?" She is proud when her voice only trembles a little, and Aman shakes his head as he dips the cloth back into the water.
"He was born with it, most of it." His voice is hushed. "This," and his fingers hover over a set of ridges near Erik's temple, where the blood has cast them into relief, "was given to him."
"It's horrible." Her voce is soft, but Erik's face has relaxed and he doesn't seem to hear.
"It's why he was reluctant to show you. People have been—very cruel to him." Aman takes his handkerchief from his pocket, presses it to the gash near Erik's hairline where the blood is still welling out. "Hold this."
The blood is warm seeping through the cloth, and all the horror, all the revulsion, evaporates. Someone did this to Erik tonight, cracked him on the head and made him bleed. Someone carved those lines into his forehead. Someone hated him enough to punish him for what he can't help, for how he was born. Someone hates him still and so help her if she could get her hands on them, on that person who did this to the man who has been so good to her, so gentle and kind, who could have forced her and hurt her instead, but gave her privacy and tried to protect her and plays music for her. To do that—
"They had no right," she whispers, looking down into her husband's slack, pallid face. "No right." And when Aman hums in agreement, and washes the blood from Erik's damaged cheek, she bows her head and kisses her husband's scars.
A/N: To buffalo someone to crack them on the head with a pistol. It was the term used at the time, which I know thanks to the immensely detailed biography of Doc Holliday I read last year