Chapter Forty-Five
What Cannot Be Spoken
Once Éponine put pen to paper, it had been very difficult to stop. It was only with great reluctance that she had finally gone back to bed, with the result that she had great difficulty waking up in the morning. She continued to be overly polite to the servant she shared a room with, the only difference being that she started addressing her as Nicolette instead of using her real name. If the woman noticed the difference and the distance that it created, she did not let on.
When Éponine dressed that morning, she chose a moment when she was sure Nicolette wasn't looking, to pull her little book out of its hiding place and slip it into her pocket. She didn't want anyone to ask her about it. Besides the fact that she feared being ridiculed for it, having it as a secret somehow added to the joy that it brought her. She liked having it there close to her.
The morning was largely uneventful. As Éponine went about her tasks, part of her hoped that Erik, once he had the address, would come to the house. But she knew that he could not—it would invite too many questions that were none of anyone's business. And what would happen if he did? Still swirling in her mind were so many things she was uncertain about, and she did not know who could help her sort through them. She did not feel she would be able to face Erik until she had sorted out the answers to these questions, which was no good, because she suspected that some of these questions were ones that they would need to explore together. She missed him, and yet she could think of nothing more petrifying than the thought of seeing him.
That day, with the help of a walking stick, Marius attempted a walk about the garden. Watching from the window, Éponine saw Cosette guiding him by the arm, smiling, encouraging. He almost lost his balance, they both looked panicked, and then they laughed together. Supporting himself heavily on the walking stick, he leaned his forehead against hers, and they remained like that, breathless. Éponine turned away, ashamed to be watching such a sweetly intimate moment. It was so easy for them, she couldn't help thinking. Their love was so simple and uncomplicated.
That day in the hallway of the Gorbeau, when Marius had asked Éponine to find the beautiful young lady for him, Éponine had assumed it was the first time he ever saw her. But in the past week, Cosette told her that, actually, they had first seen each other in the Luxembourg, where they used to stare at each other every day. But she was always with her father, and they never spoke. Then her father decided they had to move, and they stopped going to the Luxembourg, and she despaired that she would never see him again. Then, finally, in her garden in the Rue Plumet, she found a fifteen page letter from Marius. (Éponine couldn't help but wonder privately how on earth he could have had fifteen pages worth of things to say to someone he had never even spoken to yet—and Éponine was someone who never ran out of things to say.) All the rest had just unfolded from there.
Blushing, Cosette had told her: "The first night in the garden, when we finally saw each other, we..." She lowered her voice to a whisper, dropping her gaze demurely. "We did—kiss. Only once! And then all those weeks after that, we only talked. We sat and talked for hours. We shared our souls with each other."
Éponine had affectionately rolled her eyes, unable to hold back a smile.
The only obstacles in the way of their love were circumstances. Cosette's father wanting to leave for England, Marius's grandfather refusing him permission to marry her, and—Cosette didn't say it, but Éponine thought it—Éponine's conniving to get Marius to join her at the barricade. But, Éponine mused, that was all outside of them. Because their love was uncomplicated, and their souls were so pure. Sure, both of them had darkness in their pasts. But it was a clear matter where all of those dark things had happened to them. Not things they had been tangled up with. Not things they had in any way taken part in. Their hands were clean. And thus, they could freely love each other without confronting anything unpleasant about themselves.
Nothing would ever be that simple for Éponine. Nothing would ever be that simple for Erik. And yet, perhaps she was at peace with that. She was not asking for simplicity. She was a Thénardier: She knew that hers was not to be a pretty story.
What about Erik, though? What did he want? Would she ever be enough?
It was the day for changing the linens on the beds, and she was carrying a stack of crisp white linens into Mlle. Gillenormand's room when she heard a knock at the door. It wasn't her job to answer the door—Basque did that. Still, her heartbeat quickened at the sound. She slowed her pace slightly, wondering how she would react if she really did hear Erik's voice. But it was just a young boy, delivering a letter. Shaking her head at her foolish hopes, she continued into Mlle. Gillenormand's room, singing a sad song to cheer herself. "Vous me quittez pour aller à la gloire, Mon triste coeur suivra partout vos pas..."
Setting the fresh stack of linens down on the chaise longue at the foot of the bed, she began to strip the bed, still singing. She glanced around the room, finding it very dull and uninteresting. There were nothing which seemed very personal, like you might expect someone would have accumulated by the time they reached Mlle. Gillenormand's age. This room might have belonged to anyone.
She knew that M. Gillenormand had two daughters, and the younger one was Marius's mother. She had married the love of her life, lived happy, and died young. The older one had never married, and seemed almost proud of it. She didn't seem to have any particularly strong affection for Marius, even though Éponine had learned that she helped raise him. She got on with her father, but Éponine suspected she had never been his favourite, and there seemed no particularly strong bond there either. She took some pleasure at being scandalised, but otherwise she never seemed particularly happy. But neither, apparently, was she deeply unhappy. She just...was.
And for the first time in Éponine's life, she contemplated the possibility that she might grow old.
Without really thinking about it, she had always expected to die young. She hadn't even thought to see twenty. Expected was too strong a word, as it implied more thought than she had ever given it. There was simply a certainty that she never stopped to examine, any more than she would have asked why winter should be cold and summer should be warm. She impatiently wrestled a pillow into its case, wondering what sort of old lady she would be, if she should grow old. Would she live in a soulless room, neither happy nor unhappy? Would the years march by, each one like the last, the only change being that each year found her a little greyer, a little creakier, a little more wobbly? How would she pass those years? If they should be spent here, polishing and dusting and making beds until her hands began to shake and her legs no longer wished to support her, would she find any meaning in them? Would she find any meaning if she should stay here, surrounded by people who were mostly kind to her, but to whom she did not belong, nor they to her?
It struck her, then, that she had not come here because she truly wanted to be a servant and do something honest with her life. That may have been a small part of it. But what she had truly wanted was for Cosette to punish her. To treat her abominably, as worse than a servant. To exact revenge for her childhood, and for everything that Éponine had ever done since. That was why, on that first day, she couldn't stop herself from spilling things she hoped would make Cosette despise her. Cosette had to hate her; she deserved it. It would have made sense. To live like this did not make sense. And her future seemed too long.
Smoothing the coverlet over the bed, she stared at its boring white expanse, before taking up the discarded linens in a laundry sack and leaving the room. When she walked into the kitchen, she paused to catch her breath and said, "I'll do Monsieur Gillenormand's room next, shall I?"
Nicolette, who was seated at the table polishing some silver, looked up and said curtly. "There's a letter for you there." She nodded to the opposite end of the table, closest to where Éponine stood. Sure enough, there was an envelope there. "Very strange, it's addressed in red ink."
Éponine's breath caught in her throat, but she tried to look calm and disinterested as she went and placed the linens where the rest of the washing was waiting to be sent out. Then, she went back to the table and, with hands as steady as she could make them, picked up the envelope. Her eyes watered when she saw the clumsy, uncertain letters, the red ink stark against the creamy paper. It did not say who it was from, but it did not need to. She sat down and forced herself to remain dispassionate as she broke the seal and unfolded her letter.
My Dear Éponine, What you meant by sending me the address of the household in which you are now employed, I do not know. I hardly believe you meant for me to come in daylight and whisk you away, perhaps on horseback? Like a gallant hero? No. That cannot be what you meant, or else, my dear, we do not know each other quite so well as I imagine—as I know—we do. You must understand that this would never be possible. Yes, I think you do know. What is there to say? It would appear: much. I have done a lot of thinking since you left. I confess, my dear, I have done very little else. I realise that there was much I did not
She folded the letter abruptly, slipping it into her bodice. She did not want to read it with Nicolette sitting right there. She smiled at Nicolette. "Just a letter from my family," she lied.
She wasn't sure Nicolette believed it, but she truly did not care. She went into the linen closet and got a set of clean linens for M. Gillenormand's room. All the time, her heart beat against the letter, but she would have to wait for a good opportunity to read it. She did not want to be interrupted, or observed if her emotions got the better of her.
As she made the old man's bed, she glanced up and saw a portrait of a beautiful young woman across from it. There was no doubt in her mind that it was Marius's mother—he looked so much like her. To Éponine, this confirmed not only that M. Gillenormand loved his younger daughter very much, but equally spoke to his readily observable adoration of his grandson, whose face one could easily imagine upon looking at his mother's portrait. This really made Éponine wonder what could have possibly caused the rift that left Marius so poor for a time as to be her neighbour in that rotten tenement? Why had he not been with his grandfather all along? Was it yet another case of a misunderstanding, or a quarrel that seemed to mean everything in the moment and meant nothing in retrospect, keeping people dear to one another apart for too much wasted time they would never regain?
Finishing there, she had to do Marius and Cosette's room next. But when she came in with the fresh linens, she found Marius there, on his chaise, reading.
"I'm sorry, monsieur. I didn't think you'd be in here right now."
His eyes left his book, but his mind did not seem to, for he had that clouded-over look. "That's all right. Did you need something?"
Éponine merely raised her armful of linens in answer.
"Ah, yes, go ahead. You won't disturb me." He went back to his book.
Éponine crossed the room and began to strip the old linens off the bed. She paused. She didn't want to disturb him, but there was something that she wanted to ask him about. Something that she had been thinking of late at night as she wrote at the kitchen table. She went and stood in front of him. It took a moment before he looked up, and then he still had that somewhat absent-minded look about him, which had somehow so set her younger heart aflutter, but could do nothing for her now that she had encountered Erik's ever-piercing gaze—those eyes that actually saw her.
"Monsieur, I didn't understand much about what went on in the Rue de la Chanvrerie."
Those words seemed to cause him physical pain, and he shut his book. Éponine instantly regretted ever bringing it up.
"I'm sorry, monsieur," she said quickly.
But he shook his head. "No. Don't be sorry. I just haven't spoken about it. No one else was there... But you were there."
"I must have missed the worst of it." Oh, perhaps she wasn't ready to talk about this either. But there was at least one thing she had to say, to prevent him saying it. "I know my—my brother—" it came out in a whisper, and then she had to stop.
Marius clamped a hand over his mouth, and he nodded slowly.
"I'm sorry monsieur," Éponine said quickly, hurrying back over to the bed and rubbing her eyes roughly as she went. "We can't, not now. But later—one day—I want to know." She cleared her throat and began pulling the sheets off the bed with singular concentration.
It was a few moments before Marius spoke again, and when he did, his voice was quite low. "What? What do you want to know?"
She shook out the crisp new sheet and flung it out over the bed, watching it fall, all slow and white. "What it was about."
This seemed to help him regain himself a little, so that there was less emotion in his voice when he said, "What? The politics? I hardly think that would be of interest to you, Éponine."
She bristled slightly at being dismissed like that, and was glad his back was toward her so that he didn't see. Perhaps he wasn't wrong, though. "Not exactly the politics." She grappled with her thoughts for a moment. What was it that Erik had said about it? He said the plots were rather silly, but it was the music that mattered, and the emotions. "I want to know about your friends. All those young men there."
Marius took his breath into his lungs in a horrible sort of gasping sound.
"I'm sorry, monsieur. We won't speak about it now."
"They're all dead." His voice was blunt and broken.
A terrible chill came over her, and she felt ill. All of them? Every last one? All of those bright and passionate young students? They had been so alive. And they had people, surely, who cared about them? All. All dead. It was too much. She couldn't speak.
He continued, very carefully. "I haven't spoken about this."
Éponine, again, managed to shove an apology past her lips.
"No. Don't apologise."
After a moment, she quietly said, "What I want to know—not now, but later on, perhaps—I want to know about...maybe you'll think I'm a silly woman, but who cares? I want to know about what they felt. What made them look like that? You know. That really beautiful man, I think I heard him called Enjolras?"
She heard a faint smile in Marius's voice as he confirmed it.
"I want to know what it was that lit up his eyes like that. What they were fighting for. What it was like. That's what I want to know, I suppose. Mostly the feelings."
She didn't know if Marius really understood or not, but he seemed to be lost in thought. She finished making the bed without another word. Before leaving, she told him she was sorry she'd brought it up, that she hadn't meant to cause pain.
"No. I—another time."
As she left the room, she realised she had not told him her purpose in wanting to know. That was perhaps intentional. She was not yet ready to share the ephemeral idea.
—●—●—●—●—
In the end, it was not until late at night when she crept down to the kitchen that she had a chance to read Erik's letter. Her hands shook slightly as she unfolded the paper and found the line where she had left off.
I realise that there was much I did not say to you. And as a result, you wouldn't know, would you? I have begun this letter many times already. The floor is covered with failed attempts. Forgive me, my dear: I am afraid I still do not know how to express these things with words, even in my own thoughts. They present to me as music. I could tell you that you are nothing like the sun, nor the moon. But no one would understand what I mean by that, would they? I am afraid it may not even sound like a compliment, which, I assure you, it is. So the only thing I can say, dear Éponine, is that you know where I am to be found, and I long to see you again. Perhaps when it is you that is here, and not an irritating, insufferable, blank piece of paper, I can make you understand. Yours devotedly and despondently, Erik
Éponine clasped the letter to her chest. He had not eaten or slept very much at all, had he? What had he been doing, all this time? Had he been pouring his emotions into the organ, as he'd done when she tried to unmask him? Or had he simply been sitting dejectedly, doing, as he said in his letter "a lot of thinking"? She hoped that when Kazem gave him the address, he had also been able to convince him to eat something, and perhaps to sleep. But she was not going to hold her breath, and she would not feel easy until she could ensure for herself that he was cared for.
Erik was right. There was much that had not been said between them. As much as she talked, she had still never managed to say the simplest, most important words. And though she did not dare hope too desperately, his frustrated attempt to capture his feelings in his letter were enough for her to allow herself to contemplate that he might also feel the same.
There was only one thing to do.
A/N: No one is allowed to tell Éponine how much time he spent just laying on the floor, okay?
