It was the sort of August night where sweat and vapor mingled so heavily in the air that one could not tell where skin ended and the night air began—the sort of humidity that ruined hair and silk and any appetite for labor. The sort of heat that chased millionaire and milliner alike out of their homes, for want of distraction and respite, forcing all to collide against one another until that great heap of Paris was nothing more than a thrumming mass of mischief.
And what mischief was swirling in the ether outside the Café des Ambassadeurs! It was a loud, raucous, and cotton-clad sort, a beast whose roar sounded like laughter and clinking glasses; it was trumpets, bar maids calling out orders, ice being shoveled from bucket to bucket, all blending into the sounds of a million other such audiences in the city.
They cried out for beer—We will drink this city dry, it is so hot!—and for the pretty corbeilles who sat along the footlights of the stage, dressed to the height of fashion and rouged so heavily that one could see splotches of red from St. Denis, if one so happened to squint in the general direction of the Champs-Elysées. They cried out for lovers who had gotten separated in the general hullabaloo of the crowd, for the small children that had crawled out of their mothers laps to amuse themselves in the dirt.
But mostly, they cried out for song.
And tonight, it was La Suédoise whose name sat upon their lips.
She was no Thérésa, that great and wonderful bull of the stage, but anyone with functioning ears and enough sense to know their ass from their elbow felt the immense power radiating from La Suédoise's core the moment she opened her mouth. She was pretty enough in her own right—certainly enough to have taken her place with the corbeilles, each of whom had croaked a song or two to the audience before resuming their preferred positions of quiet, glacial elegance. Her beauty, however, ran sauvage, dressed as she was in little but a sleeveless white shift and a dark blue smock embroidered with snowdrops. With her wheat hair braided into a crown, her golden skin dusted with freckles, she was the very postcard of Nordic charm. Yes—charming was the word for La Suédoise, at least upon the brain's first impression of the singer.
When she opened her mouth, however, words themselves began to fail. A voice, somehow as light as crystal and rich as cream, smothered the crowds into silence. The random children romping about the lawn, the harried waiters bearing trays, even the other acts of the night—they all paused to savor such sunshine. La Suédoise was no pretty street girl, paid a few measly francs a week to dress fashionably and bleat a tune to an unappreciative audience. Hers was a voice that bore the stamp of the Conservatoire, to say nothing of the wild touch of Bragi that ran through her entire essence.
To see and hear such unblemished and powerful magic pour forth from that figure, plainly contrasted as her carnation lips formed the crude words of a concert-hall song—
To think of you, like that
Without a dime
It makes me ache!
You're too proud to pick up cigar butts
Whilst I am working at Saint-Lazare
—it was potent, to say the least. Let the Opera have their Gabrielle Krausses, their Gounods, their grand scenery, their velvet seats! Pull any Parisian man by his elbow off the street and ask him where to find real music—they would all tell you the same:
It lived in La Suédoise.
#
Alas! The moment La Suédoise left the stage, the masses shouting for another song, the poor acrobat who followed her act twiddling his thumbs nervously, the sylph was transformed back into a mere woman. The smock was ripped off. The blisters from her shoes, decried and cursed. The pewter pitcher of water, demolished so rudely and hastily that she might have very well been an elephant.
But no—she was just Christine Daae. The Christine Daae who fussed over what makeup she had yet to sweat off. The Christine Daae who longed for a drink, followed immediately by her soft bed. The Christine Daae who was polite enough to remember her company before abandoning them to the night.
She darted out into the audience, her costume discarded in favor of a light blouse and skirt; as was her usual custom, the braids remained—and every eye in the café looked in her direction, murmuring their admiration as she pushed past the tables and chairs and ambled to her usual spot in the back, where she often finished the night; there, Roulez awaited her presence, a fountain pen in one hand, a glass of chilled wine in the other. He kissed her cheeks, rosy from her exertions, and passed her the drink.
"Lovely as always, Christine," Roulez crooned.
"You're too kind," she sighed, cracking her neck. "It's hot as hell up there on that stage tonight. Even the inside of my throat was sweating. It's a miracle anyone could hear me sing."
"The inside of your throat sweating," he cried, his pen dashing across the little open notebook on the table. "I will have to remember that one. Do I write poetry, or do you?"
Christine rolled her eyes and smiled guilelessly. "Perhaps I am feeling particularly clever tonight."
Roulez laughed, his handsome face alight, a green eye glowing behind the ridiculous monocle he wore. The nickname. The low-slung hat, like a criminal. Such were rich eccentrics.
"Would that some of your cleverness rub off onto me. I've been stuck on this verse all day, and Alain will hear none of it." Roulez glanced in the direction of the stage, where the man in question's broad shoulders were pistoning in time with his conductor's baton. Under Alain's hand, the orchestra was usually as pleasant as anything you might hear in a theater of better repute; tonight, however, the music sounded as if it was being ripped from the pit, like weeds in a garden. Christine had noticed it earlier and was canny enough to sing over it as best as she could manage. Unfortunately, the poor acrobat currently gamboling across the stage could not flip so loudly.
"He's in a bad mood, then?"
"A positively foul one," Roulez mumbled, his fair mustache bristling.
"And what did you do to put him in one?"
"Ha! As if I would do anything to wind him up. It's bad enough being in the same room with Alain when he's in such a state." Roulez shook his pen, ink dripping across the otherwise immaculate cuffs of his shirt. "It's the last act of the night that has him so mad."
Christine blinked. "Is he not ending with Orpheus?"
"God, no! Did you not hear? Ducarre went and re-booked a violinist for the slot just this afternoon. Alain is beside himself."
Poor Alain—it mattered little that the Cafe des Ambassadeurs was his home, nor that he had made himself a comfortable life conducting Offenbach five nights a week, to say nothing of how the Comique and the Opera were constantly trying to pluck him from such regular and admirable work.
"Is it a good violinist, at least?" Christine asked, trying her best to sound sympathetic.
"That's the trouble," Roulez continued. "No one seems to know who this man is, and Ducarre is completely button-lipped about the matter. You should go up to him and ask directly. He likes you." And here, Roulez winked.
Just as Christine was about to rebuke him, a wave of hisses and laughter overcame the vast garden; the acrobat had fallen into a heap on the floorboards, limbs like pie crust, the stool he had been balancing upon completely upended. If his palms were half as sweaty as hers had been when she had taken the stage, she couldn't imagine how he'd even managed to get through half of his act. The corbeilles fanned themselves, laughing, as the poor man limped away with the help of a stagehand. In that moment, Christine had never felt so awfully for someone, nor so acutely aware of how ridiculous and petty her life's work sometimes felt.
"The poor man," she murmured.
"I'll say," agreed Roulez as he gestured to a waiter for another glass of beer. "I suppose we're about to find out just how good this violinist is. It's nearing midnight."
The little dandy had been right. After several minutes of waiting—during which the crowd refreshed their drinks and unbuttoned their shirt collars—the stagehand rushed back out onto the stage, dripping in sweat and swearing under his breath. He tore down the title card that had been sitting on the easel downstage right and replaced it with a new one, bearing a name written in spidery, dripping curlicues.
Le Chrysanthème.
Despite the hot weather, Christine felt a chill run down her spine.
"Le Chrysanthème? How quaint!" Despite the fact that Alain looked even more miserable than humanly possible, slumped low in his conductor's chair, Roulez could not pretend to suppress his excitement over the man that brought his lover such anguish. "I don't suppose you'd recognize the name, Christine?"
Christine barely registered the question, so deeply did that stage name run through her. She thought of the voice that she'd sometimes heard over the last several months when she was alone, seeping out from the walls of the little studio off Boulevard Barbés where she practiced three times a week—the otherworldly man's voice, who she sometimes supposed was the product of too many awful memories and too much drink; how else could it have gutted her so thoroughly, with its immense beauty and rough sadness? How else could it have made her weak in the knees, made her thighs quiver like doves?
She'd attempted to find the source of such enchantment on her own, but it never revealed itself to her; instead it sang without ending or any sense of regularity, molding everything from parlor songs and lieder to music so exotic and unearthly that Christine could imagine it was plucked from the stars themselves. And every single, strange visitation it bestowed to her was always foretold by the presence of a single Chrysanthemum, its perfume shimmering in the summer light like halo. Sometimes it sat atop a new piece of sheet music, or else a new pair of gloves, or else nothing but the expectation of its presence. But where one was, the other was never far behind.
It never called out to Christine directly, yet it seemed to be only meant for her. The other occupants in the building gave her bemused glances when she'd asked if they'd witnessed a similar phenomena; the doorman simply laughed in her face. "I know every single face that crosses this threshold, mademoiselle, and I have never seen, let alone heard, of such a man coming through here," he'd said, wiggling his eyebrows. "As if I'm watching over some anonymous cathouse."
So be it. It was hardly the strangest form of flirtation she had received ever since she'd taken to the stage.
Christine had yet to unwind the mystery of its source, and with every friend who laughed at her story, the more firm Christine was in her resolve to keep it to herself. They did not deserve the strange benevolent aura of the voice, nor the way it ricocheted through her memory at night—compelling her to sing with all of the lightness she had left to her, to slide her hands across her body in search of it, cresting her breasts and woman's place.
All they deserved was what the voice had made of her own, her song exploding into full bloom with the passing of spring—a pale imitation, or so Christine thought. And yet, they loved her all the more, with a growing fervor that made her question her feelings about that glorious, unknowable instrument—
Her thoughts were interrupted by the quiet, collective exclamation of the audience as the little pavilion stage abruptly plunged into darkness, with only the little table-top candles and garden lamps left for illumination. From where Christine sat, their glow cast everything in a slick, oily film, as if she were looking at her surroundings through filthy water. She thought she might be sick, or else faint, the murmuring of the crowds and the heat had become so oppressive. Just as she stood on shaking legs, Roulez's eyes darting towards her in concern, music bit its way through.
A violin. A voice. The promise of relief.
The grass is soft for sleep beneath the cool poplars
On the banks of the mossy springs
That flow in flowering meadows from a thousand sources,
And vanish beneath dark thickets.
It was him. Unfiltered by walls or bound to whatever tricks had kept them separated for all of these weeks, but it was him, all the same.
That voice was ice water, sluicing between her shoulder blades as she bathed in a stream. It was a silk pillowcase caressing her cheek on a hot night. It was standing in front of an open window with no clothes on, the breeze wrapping itself around her body before it dispersed into the ether—cool and familiar and fleeting.
As the stage lights began to come up at a turtle's pace, the violin took precedence over its master's singing, each passage undulating across its strings like an aurora. Christine thought of Papa's playing, and would have called it an uncanny imitation of it, were it not for the undercurrent of something dark lurking amongst those chords. Something dark that revealed itself slowly, in the form of a man, emerging from shadow as if the light were carving away at it.
And yet shadow he was, the long and thin sort that one caught out of the corner of their eyes at sunset. It was hot enough that even the orchestra had begrudged their customary jackets, playing in shirtsleeves, yet Le Chrysanthème was dressed from head-to-toe in deepest black. His boots, buckled snugly around thin ankles, his tailored trousers and exotic hat, his woolen cape with the heaping, cowled neck—it would have been freakish enough in this weather, even before registering the strange leather mask that covered his entire face. The only color to him was a deep purple flower that shared his stage name, pinned neatly above his heart.
How does he play like that, Christine wondered, amongst the hundreds of questions and emotions that sawed through her being. How does he make such music without dying?
Christine looked around her, and saw everyone else similarly transfixed—a man suspended in awe as he pressed a kiss to his lady's fist. Alain sitting upright in his chair, sweaty hair askew. Roulez with his pen hovering above a page. She blinked again and noticed she was still standing, yet unable to sit, as if cast in ice herself. When Le Chrysanthème resumed singing—what mercy, what ecstasy!—she looked back at the stage, as if her head was hinged on some unseen string.
And then Christine thought her heart would spit out its last, lonely knock. Because in that moment, across the frizzy, sweat-logged heads of hundreds, the shadow stared directly at her, his matchstick eyes locked onto her form while he skimmed across the lyrics as easily as a hummingbird over clover. As Christine felt her pulse slow into honeyed slowness, he leaned into his violin, the weight of the world resting in that starboard arbor of chest; with all of the sweetness in the world, Le Chrysanthème continue, singing as close to sotto voce as his voice would allow, like wind in a cave.
But when the sun, low on its dazzling curve,
Sees its brilliance wane,
Let your loveliest smile and finest kiss
Reward me for my waiting!
On its own, such words, such musicality, would have been enough to make Le Chrysanthème a legend in a single night—the sort of garish and marvelous creature that artists and poets would forever attempt to capture with a few banal strokes of a pencil. But as the violin swelled—as Christine let herself be carried away by every perfectly rendered tone, every small little gesture that had touched her heart over those humid weeks—all came to a dazzling and hellbound crescendo.
For as that last sweet note left Le Chrysanthème's lips, he dropped his bow to the ground with a clatter and ripped off his mask.
#
That face lingered above the audience as the moon did, incandescent and cratered beyond legibility. It leered at the masses, the lips so misshapen that Le Chrysanthème might as well have been smiling down upon them. It was not uncommon for singers here to costume themselves strangely—did Christine not tease at a long-gone Scandinavia? Did not many of them men sing their bawdy songs with fake humps and noses and motley?
But the lights were not so bright, the wine not so potent, as for any person with common sense to be mistaken. No clown among them could claim such natural ugliness, to say nothing of the unearthly hole that pitifully lay where a nose might have. They had all been staring at a human face made beyond imagination, sent to mock them all for letting him be their buffoon.
She might have been mistaken, too sun-beaten to make sense of right from wrong, but Christine swore he glanced at her with one last, pointed stare.
And just as quickly, the stage lights darkened again, as if on queue with the collective gasp that swept across the café. When the lamps rose once more, Le Chrysanthème had disappeared entirely, the seraphic music that had set the garden afire now washed away by the very confused and frantic din of the audience; some booed, some wept, some swore. All were incensed, one way or another. At a nearby table, a woman wailed with such profound and disturbing sincerity that she had to be escorted off the premises by the house manager.
It was hard to say what had upset the audience more: the genius with which Le Chrysanthème sang and played, the swiftness of his act, or the immense hideousness of his face, if it even was his face. Such was the brilliance of the artist who had materialized and disappeared before them like a vision of the Virgin Herself. Only gods could cause such casual calamity.
"Oh, Lord!" cried Roulez, his voice one of many amidst the barely-controlled chaos. "Lord, Lord! Was that the devil?" A shocked laugh bubbled up from his lips, as he rose from his chair and applauded the empty stage with abandon.
Christine's left hand, which had lain at the base of her throat for the last minute, found purchase on Roulez's shoulder.
"I must go," she whispered. "I must—" And for the first time in many months, Christine flew through the grounds of the café unmolested, the crowds too perplexed and upset to have any interest in her fair form. When she reached the pavilion stage, the orchestra whispering amongst themselves, the corbeilles having long since fled in terror, she panicked. The only sign of the frightening and wonderful apparition she'd witnessed lay half-trampled beneath her boots.
With detached reverence, Christine stooped to pick up the flower, plum purple and bruised beyond rescuing. Despite having long been in the throes of death, cut from its roots, bereft of water, it sat wilting in her palm with all the loveliness of a bird.
He came for me.
Christine knew this as well as she knew her own name.
"Where is Ducarre," she cried fruitlessly, eyes glued to her hands. "I must speak to Ducarre!"
When no one answered her, Christine pushed her way into the little building that connected the café to the Hôtel de Crillon. There, amongst the throngs of people leaving the café in confusion and the backwash of wealthy travelers turning in for the night, she thought heard the manager's raucous laughter ringing out from the lobby bar. She pivoted on her feet, sweat dripping down her back, and made to run for him.
And then a hand, so cold as to shock the system, grabbed Christine by the wrist, pulling her down some unknown hallway until they were both suddenly encased in the darkness.
#
The gas jets wheezed to life, revealing a well-appointed bedroom and a man dressed like he'd just walked out of the ninth layer of hell.
"It's you," she whispered. The mask had been replaced with an even stranger disguise—a false nose that glowed sick under the street lamps. It did little to cover or erase the memory of his face, his bandy and bloated lips still visible, those high cheekbones perched above rotting skin like vultures circling carrion.
The shade nodded and continued to gently tug at her hand.
"Sit with me," he said simply. "The night is young, and we must talk." If his singing voice was glorious, it was nothing compared to the demure beauty of his speech, where each word was unfettered by the constraints of music, each syllable its own strange animal.
"I can't," Christine stammered, the terrible beauty of his being frightening her back to her senses. When she turned away from his grasp, she felt his entire being slacken in disappointment. "Not without knowing who you are."
"As you've already said, mademoiselle," he replied calmly. "You know who I am." His eyes sparkled. Distantly, Christine registered thunder and the opening percussion of rainfall outside of the shuttered window.
"You know well what I mean. Who are you, Monsieur?" She thrust the dying chrysanthemum up towards him, her brows furrowing.
"An admirer who wanted to make himself known." As easily as if she were his lover, the stranger snatched the flower from her hands and tucked it lovingly behind her left ear.
"Then talk to me like one," she hissed, shoving his hands away and stepping backwards. "Or are you making a game of me? What is the meaning of all of this? The singing? The gifts?"
The man's head dropped, and in the dim light, Christine saw flashes of his piebald scalp. She suddenly remembered those last insane seconds of his performance—the emotions so high, a face so ugly that half the audience accepted it as false one, or else could not accept it's existence at all, owing to the sublime music. She was still furious, and yet there was a sliver of her that had to admire Le Chrysanthème's daring.
"You are the voice," Christine said, after a moment's consideration. Her exhaustion was catching up on her—and all she longed for was sleep. "Aren't you?"
"I am," he said, grinning sheepishly as he tilted his eyes upwards to regard her form. Christine hated herself for the warmth that flooded her. Wicked man—who could sing like that, look like that, act as unhinged as he did this evening—and still make her reflexively smile like a young girl. Christine pulled the flower out of her and regarded it.
"What is your name," she asked, after a long moment.
"Erik."
"And why are you here, Erik" she continued, knowing the answer would not be a straightforward one.
"Love," he said. "'Twas love that brought me here. Love of music. Love of your music." Here their heads snapped up to stare at one another—her, a sunflower, him, sepulchral. She looked into those eyes and detected no trace of mockery, let alone lewdness. But still, she understood his meaning.
"Love," she echoed, feeling weak. "Could you not send me roses? Or approach me like any other gentleman?" She was startled by Erik's sad laugh.
"Look at me, Christine," he whispered, gently grasping her hand and bringing it to his face. "Do I look like any other gentleman?"
Christine could not bring herself to insult him with an answer. Nor could she tear her fingers away this time, so pleasant was the feeling of his voice vibrating beneath her palm, to say nothing of the chill from his piecemeal skin.
"You will never know peace," she said quietly. "Not after tonight. Ducarre is already counting his money, and half of the café-concerts will be seeking out Le Chrysanthème by tomorrow afternoon."
"I have never known peace," he answered. "Nor do I ever expect to. But now you know me, Christine. And that is worth everything."
And here, as if holding a butterfly in those pale hands, Erik lifted Christine's hand from his face and brought the knuckles to his poor excuse of a mouth, whereupon he kissed them, one by one; each caress was as disorienting as his face, as soft as those first melodies that enticed her from the unknown.
"Your music," she said, tears running down her face, "It was—it is beautiful."
"As beautiful as the music that inspired it. As beautiful as the spring night where I first heard Cerridwen herself, calling to me from across the boulevards from a humble café." Here he sighed, pensively stroking her palm with his thumb. "Oh, Christine. How your voice has only grown since then."
He was so ugly, it was true. He was as strange to her as any other man who gamboled down the streets ogling her from across the sidewalk. And yet a memory of herself, alone in that studio, embraced by his voice as it sang DuParc or Berlioz and made every hair on her neck stand up in joyful worship, gave her courage.
When she kissed Erik's cheek, it was on her tiptoes, with a timidity that belied her other experiences with men. His face, just as brisk as his hands, was welcome underneath her mouth. The low, ragged keening that ripped from his mouth in response, however, was hot and wet as the night itself against her neck. The tall shadow nearly collapsed upon her, so shaken was he by her petting.
"I did not seek you out for this," Erik panted, clumsily trapping them both against the patterned wall. "Christine—"
She felt him against her belly, all hard where she was soft. When his protest continued, it only seemed natural to quiet him with a kiss to his lips. And that man, all sinew and mortification, stiffened as if lighting ran through him, moaned as if her kiss recalled something too large and tragic for her to name. His large palms trembled as they skimmed the column of her neck, the calloused whorls of his fingertips brushing lightly across the shell of her ear, the horizon of her jaw. When his mouth slackened against hers, Christine boldly thrust her tongue forward.
Let your loveliest smile and finest kiss
Reward me for my waiting!
It was all Erik had asked for this evening, wasn't it? All he had wanted in return for his music of relief, of music that spoke of succor and comfort and coolness. The café-concert had long disposed of the custom of passing money baskets around, and yet applause felt too paltry of a reward for such a gift.
He sucked on the tip of Christine's tongue as if he heard her thoughts, and she thrashed so wildly beneath him that she knocked a nearby picture frame off the wall; the sound of it crashing against the floor seemed to have revived both singers of their surroundings. With slow deliberateness, Erik straightened himself up. The false nose had been knocked slightly askew, and he backed away from Christine, ashamed.
"You don't have to wear that thing," Christine begged, her throat a furnace, "if it bothers you."
Erik smiled sadly, his lips somehow impossibly more swollen than they were in their untouched state. "I meant what I said. I did not come here to make a whore out of you."
Christine laughed in exasperation, running a hand over the mussed heap that was once a hairdo. "You wouldn't be the first or last man who has tried."
They stood still as stones in that hotel room, as if waiting for one to dare the other into sweet madness again. The sweat, which Christine had once cursed, ran down her spine, in between the cleft of her cheeks, making her all too aware of the wetness that had collected between her thighs.
"Let me walk you home," Erik said. "It is too stuffy to be inside." And despite her disappointment, despite the fact that the rain was beginning to come down in sheets, Christine bowed her head and gave the bizarre man her peach fingertips. They stepped out into the night, a weird magnetism tethering them together, despite the eyes of several passersby looked over at the odd couple from beneath their umbrellas; her, drenched in perspiration, fashioned in the image of a milkmaid, him dressed like he'd just walked out of the ninth layer of hell.
When they approached the steps of her apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, they were both soaked to the skin. Her hair was a sodden mess, her pale clothes nearly see-through. His face, already so uneven, seemed to have melted off of its very bones—makeup that covered the worst of the discoloration, she realized with a small sadness. The wool of his cloak must have felt like iron, yet it did nothing to diminish the gracefulness with which Erik took Christine's hand again.
"Until later," he said, pressing a firm kiss to the clammy skin, a brief and cheeky slick of his tongue across the back of it setting her afire.
"Until then," she murmured.
Christine watched Erik leave for those long ensuing moments, her blood still like lava, and nearly wept at the sight; that shadow, so rough and inhuman looking, strolling down the deserted and dark sidewalk as if the world was nothing but sunlight, head high, neck cocked. When she finally climbed into bed, half-damp and exhausted, she spent herself to that image, on the fingers he himself had just kissed, that music still ringing in her head loud as church bells.
If she had never seen him again, it would have been enough. Christine supposed it was a fool's errand to expect regularity from a man as singular and strange as Erik was, despite how much it might hurt her feelings. But there was work to be done, life to live, and endless new music that she meant to uncork from the world. By the next afternoon, Roulez was already pounding at the front door and begging to know what had occurred to rip her from his company so suddenly.
"You'll forgive me," she had said, smiling dreamily. "The heat had me feeling unwell." It was half-true, wasn't it? Had she not sought out relief?
Roulez cocked an eyebrow.
"So you say." He pulled out a cigarette from its mother-of-pearl case and stuck it between his perfect lips. "Do you know if we should expect Monsiuer le Chrysanthème to grace us again with his presence any time soon? Even Alain has not stopped talking about him."
And here, Christine wondered if that was maybe all the shadow man had wanted from her—to be seen and to see. To know that they could both exist in the wide, strange world in one spot, together, if only for a night. Maybe only music such as theirs was meant to collide once in a lifetime, as meteors or people did.
Tuesday morning came in hot and dry. The three stories up to her little studio were as long and arduous a climb as they had ever been, to say nothing of the sensation of Erik's lips suckling Christine's tongue still warming her to the point of wanting to be naked. The key struggled in its lock, and the door swung open as sap runs down tree bark.
And there, in the middle of that bleached and airless room, sat a small chrysanthemum upon Christine's music stand; this time it was as yellow as sunshine itself, its stem the green of paradise. Without blinking, she crossed the room to cup it in her hands.
As Christine lifted the bloom to her lips, a breeze wafted in, despite the fact that the windows had been shut all weekend. It licked the nape of her neck, smiled into the crevice of her collarbones, settled into the juncture where her spine met the flesh of her bottom. Sweet relief.
"You are here," it said.
"I am," she smiled, her lips nuzzling velvet. From behind her, a violin yawned into life.
"Good. For now, our real work begins."
Biggest thanks to Flora for giving this story a one-over and her stamp of approval!
This story was inspired by a fantastic journal article on the subject of café-concerts, the women who performed in them, and how the artform contrasted with the perception of opera at the end of the 19th century. You can read it here: .
The piece Erik sings is based on the lovely Henri DuParc art song, Phidylé, which debuted in 1882. You can hear a simply gorgeous version of it, sung by one of my favorite baritones, here: watch?v=NH1ap-xwma8