A/N – To anyone familiar with Thomas Malory or T. H. White, this chapter owes a tremendous amount to their accounts of Lancelot and Elaine.
And goodness, all these requests for character death … We'll see. ;) One more chapter to go – and the books on the happy endings are still open …
Antoinette sat down wearily and let down her hair, rubbing numbly at her temples in an automatic effort to ease the inevitable headache. Meg, who had returned above ground numb and silent, and abruptly fainted into the arms of a crowd of hysterical ballet rats, was now safely ensconced in bed with little Rachel keeping a silent vigil at her side, tears occasionally sliding down her face into her tangle of dark hair.
Antoinette's other charge – rather older, accustomed to think he could take care of himself, and unused to being told otherwise – lay similarly unconscious in a room not too many doors away from Meg's.
His bedside, however, was unadorned by the weeping brunette whose presence might just have made the horrific evening worthwhile.
It had not been difficult to find Erik. Years of his acquaintance had taught Antoinette that he was always predictable when afraid or in pain: the feral instincts that life had instilled in him at an age when most children are still lisping their way through the juvenile catechism inevitably drove him downwards, and into darkness: much like the child he had never quite been, Antoinette suspected that he felt that if he could hide himself sufficiently deeply in the darkness, he could banish the world forever.
It had been rather more difficult to persuade him to hold a sensible conversation. The broken glass of what had once been an extremely fine crystal decanter that crunched under her feet as she approached, and the redness around his eyes that was only partly due to tears gave the truth to the slur of his voice as he suggested – in terms that under other circumstances would have won him a slap – that it would be better for all of them if Antoinette were to leave him to drink himself to death in peace and quiet.
But Antoinette's firmness – for all Erik's bravado, she had never doubted that somewhere deep in his subconscious he longed to be in the thrall of someone who could care for him enough to order him around – and the increasing dizziness that the brandy, coupled with the exhaustion of sporadic illness which Antoinette knew had plagued him ever since Christine had first begun to be seen with Raoul, appeared to be the spur that could stir Erik from his retreat.
Exhausted as Erik was by grief and extreme emotion, the sleeping pill that Antoinette had added to his coffee was probably unnecessary; but she was a woman who always prepared for contingencies.
Antoinette rose and glanced in at her daughter's door. Little Rachel still knelt at her bedside, feeding her rosary through her fingers; in the moonlight that poured in through the curtains, tears shone on her pale face.
Meg, her face half-obscured by golden curls, looked very young.
The lines that the past few months had sketched around her eyes and forehead were barely perceptible in the moonlight.
Antoinette closed the door and returned to the small music room within her private apartment. A roaring fire blazed in the grate, and in front of it sat a couple who were curled so closely together that their silhouette, cast by the flickering shadows of the fire, was not distinguishable as that of two people.
Christine looked up as the ballet mistress entered the door, and rose anxiously, reaching out a supplicatory hand even as the blanket Raoul had wrapped around her shoulders slipped away from her, exposing fragile white shoulders left bare by the wedding dress she still wore.
"Is he all right?" she whispered.
Raoul rose behind her and replaced the blanket around her shoulders, easing her back into the chair. She held on to his hand, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks again, and he settled a comforting, brotherly arm around her waist.
He glanced shrewdly at Antoinette, and through the exhaustion that marked itself plainly on his handsome face, she saw concern.
"Meg?"
Antoinette sat down in her own chair.
"Is uninjured. I think you had better tell me what happened."
Raoul and Christine left the Opera House much later that night, Raoul politely but in a tone that brooked no argument refusing Antoinette's offer of shelter for the night. Weekly letters – brief and bearing the hallmark of a man who had been taught that manners mattered, but whose faith in the doctrines of his youth had been severely shaken – informed Antoinette that they were well but keeping out of the public eye.
After that first ghastly night, when the police had left and the reporters drifted away to some newer story or more lurid crime scene, Antoinette sheltered Erik, perhaps ironically, in the flat he had once given her to protect her from the cruel eyes of a judgmental world, and which she had retained even after taking up nearly permanent residence at the Opera House.
Since that night, so far as she knew, he had not succumbed to the seductively sweet promise of oblivion that alcohol or narcotics offered, but his silent passivity made Antoinette fear that this most painful experience of first love might have broken him even as years of calculated cruelty had not.
It is hard to endure the rejection of one beloved; it is harder still coming fast on the heels of the faintest hope that life may not be as unforgiving as previously believed.
But Erik was – perhaps against his own inclination – stronger than his enemies would have him be. The day that Antoinette returned Ayesha – indignant at his desertion and determined to sulk until he should be deemed worthy of her forgiveness – she almost thought she saw him smile.
Ayesha's resentment lasted only as long as it took her to realise that her master seemed – not for the first time since Christine's advent in their lives – too distressed to recognise her animosity. She forgave him at once, as women always do when their dependent men need them, and set about attempts to divert him and drive the memory of the woman whom she had never liked much, anyway, from his mind.
Of Erik's visitors, Ayesha had always preferred Meg, with her gentle fingers and liberality with treats when Erik's back was turned. Christine was too thin, too nervous, and too high-pitched.
Not that anybody ever asked the cat.
Weeks passed, and gradually things returned to what passed for normal in the Giry house. Raoul and Christine were still not to be found among society; Meg remained pale, thin, and prone to fainting fits; and Erik could rarely be prompted to engage in a sustained conversation. It was a measure of how bad the time since Don Juan had been that Antoinette was relieved by the progress they had made, although sometimes she doubted whether any of them would ever be happy again.
The day she entered the flat without announcement to find Erik seated in front of a mirror, staring doggedly at his unmasked reflection with hatred that looked like the worst kind of grief imprinted on his face, the image in the mirror made all the more hideous by the tears which slid steadily down his ill-formed cheeks, she felt as though all the breath had been snatched from her body.
She closed the door silently behind her; and she had only taken a few steps down the corridor before a scream of agonised rage that sounded not unlike the howl of a wounded animal followed the sound of glass shattering. The sounds of primal anguish dwindled to wrenching, hopeless sobs; and Antoinette finally understood why her piano had remained untouched since Erik's occupancy of her little flat.
As Erik gradually became aware of himself once more, his sense of honour began, slowly, to return to him. His honour had always, perhaps irrationally, been important to him: he had never hurt a woman, for the same reason that he had never killed a man who begged for mercy.
As a man so corrupted by vice, Erik's basic principles had always been the cornerstone to which he clung to prevent himself from tumbling into the abyss which yawned beneath him. And as that honour which had always been his most jealously guarded possession slowly ebbed back into his consciousness, he began to be aware of Meg again.
Whilst once he had threatened to tie her to a chair to induce her to be still for more than five minutes, she now sat pale and motionless in her chair, sewing badly, or staring at a book for hours at a time.
He felt guilty. He knew that he had hurt her, quite without meaning to; and it seemed to him that he ought to make what reparations he could.
It was so, about a month after the performance of Don Juan Triumphant, that he drew Meg aside after dinner and said to her, in the quaintly formal voice that he always adopted when uncomfortable about what he was about to say:
"I have not apologised for my conduct the night of Don Juan. I do so now. My behaviour to you was unpardonable."
She nodded once, and turned as if to go. His frustration broke through, and he caught at her arm.
"Oh, Meg, don't go! You seem so sad – tell me what I can do to make it up to you." He released her and stood, rubbing one arm with his left hand. "Tell me how I can make you happy."
She turned to look at him. Her face was very white.
"You could ask me to marry you," she said.
After all, he thought unhappily some hours later as he lay on his bed with his eyes closed, why not? He felt utterly empty. If he could make her happy by giving her something of so little value as his life, then how could he possibly justify denying her that wish?
His mind flew, as it so frequently did, back to Christine. He could not imagine feeling the all-consuming fire that was love and hatred and terror and the most exquisite sort of pain for anyone but her; never for a moment did he doubt that she was what novelists sentimentally termed the one.
But she was gone; out of Paris from what he could gather, and almost certainly married. Antoinette's kindness had spared him the news – he could have laughed at the trouble she took to protect his worthless feelings – but the truth was that she was gone from him in every conceivable way, and desperate, hopeless dreams that not even a brain as mad as his could longer credit were no reason to deny Meg the happiness she so deserved.
Antoinette was furious. When Meg told her the news, her lips thinned and went very white.
"Are you quite mad?" she asked, in the very quiet, tightly restrained voice that told Meg just how angry she was. "You do realise that he does not love you?"
Meg remained stubbornly silent.
"That if you wed him, you will have a husband whose every other thought will be of another woman?"
"If you are going to be unreasonable –"
"Unreasonable!"
"He has asked me to marry him. I have accepted. That is all there is to say. We should like to have your blessing, but we shall go ahead whether you give it or not."
Antoinette was accustomed to her daughter's stubbornness, but this coldness was new to her: however much they had quarrelled in Meg's youth, they had always been close. This new Meg – so cold, so closed off – was a stranger to her.
"Where is he?" she asked.
It was in this interview with Erik that Antoinette lost her temper for the first time Meg could remember. Meg could hear her shouting at him long after the parlour door had closed behind them.
At last, her fury was spent, and she sat down roughly, with an unladylike sound of contempt that told Erik better than all her tempestuous anger how far the news had damaged her self-control.
"Very well," she said wearily. "Tell me why you have agreed to this truly outrageous scheme."
Erik, who had stood quite still and endured her rage with silent stoicism throughout, crossed the room and touched an ornamental angel on the mantelpiece.
"She says it is what she wants; that it will make her happy."
"And since when have you and I allowed children to decide what is best for them?"
He stroked one hand restlessly against the mantelpiece.
"I do not want her to suffer."
Antoinette looked at him, and suddenly she understood.
"As you do."
Only his eyes moved; his body remained rigidly still.
Antoinette persisted. "You want to prevent her from feeling what you do."
"Yes, damn you, if that is how you must have it. I will not see her suffer because of me."
"Why do you suffer?" Antoinette asked at last. "What is it that gives you the greater pain – that Christine is not your wife, or that her love is given to another man?"
Erik's eyes closed; pain etched itself on his face.
"Don't."
"Would it have made you happy to have her as your wife knowing that she loved the Vicomte?"
"Stop."
"Then why on earth do you think it will make my daughter happy to have your hand when it will never be accompanied by your heart?"
Erik covered his face with one hand and was silent. Then he lowered his hand and looked her in the eyes.
"How can I tell her no, Antoinette?"
Antoinette passed her hand over her face. When she looked up, her expression was blank.
"Very well," she said, very quietly. "Do what you feel you must."
A week passed, and Erik was doing his best. Nobody could accuse him of having anything but the purest intentions towards his fiancée: he knew that nothing could be crueller than to promise her his hand and then consciously withhold his heart. Therefore, he forced himself past his instinctive aversion to human contact to take her hand; to kiss her cheek; and taught himself to call her "darling". It felt crude and wrong, but he could see no way to make the situation better. Wounds, he reasoned, must be allowed to sting and burn through the application of antiseptic before they can heal.
Meg smiled a frozen, painted smile, and curled her hair. Inside, she felt sick every time Erik approached her: this man, so determined to please, so awkwardly unnatural in every touch, was not the gentle, tender mentor who had taught her to read and given her her first piano.
She hesitated outside the drawing room, fixing her smile. She glanced in the mirror that hung in the hall, and was satisfied by the porcelain doll's face that smiled determinedly back at her. She opened the door, and felt her heart wrench within her.
Erik was seated in the hard, high-backed chair he had adopted as his own. His eyes were closed; Ayesha lay curled at his feet like a contented spaniel. He was fast asleep, and in this moment of unobserved company, Meg could have wept for what they had both lost.
He stirred, and she shrank back; but a faint smile touched his lips, and Meg stepped forward, encouraged by this unconscious manifestation of happiness which had been so conspicuously absent from his face for so long. He shifted restlessly in his sleep; his hand stroked dreamily along the soft edge of the couch. And then his lips moved.
No sound emerged, but Meg recognised the name on his lips as surely as if he had spoken aloud.
Christine.
Meg stared, stricken. For the first time, she saw their life together: she eager and hopeful, he kind but distant … and always murmuring another woman's name in his sleep. Her love would mean nothing: nothing but a tie on his loyalty, kindness to her a duty. She would be a lead weight around his neck, a friend no longer as he felt bound to her.
Oh, he would be faithful; kind; constantly and suffocatingly solicitous: his peculiarly acute sense of honour and duty would not permit him a moment's respite in the task of being her husband. But his heart would not be touched; and in that moment, as the twilight sunlight streamed through the room to reflect like the fading of autumn to winter off the white of his mask, Meg felt that the isolation of losing her best friend could not possibly find any compensation from his constant companionship as a marble lover.
There came a knock at the door, and Erik started awake. He jumped as he caught sight of Meg, and an embarrassed smile spread over his face.
He gestured to the book that lay in his lap – a bound copy of The Merchant of Venice – and said with charming frankness, "Shakespeare and warm afternoons are, I find, not overly conducive to concentration." As an afterthought, he added, "Darling."
Meg smiled uncomfortably – had it really been only months ago that they had spent whole weeks together without a moment's awkwardness? – and rose to answer the door.
Erik heard the door open, but neither Meg nor the visitor spoke, and, curious, he rose from his chair, dexterously removing his feet from Ayesha's deftly curled little body and passing into the hall.
The world spun; the very birds in the trees appeared to cease their incessant chattering in acknowledgment of a moment so fraught with intense emotion that the earth threatened to rend beneath his feet.
He was aware of Meg stepping towards him – had he paled, that his immediate reaction should distress her so? – but she remained peripheral, and intruded no more on his attention than Ayesha, who had followed him out of the way and was now arching her back and lashing her tail as she shrank back, hissing and digging her claws into the carpet.
At last he cleared his throat and stepped forward, ignoring – or perhaps not noticing – Meg's supplicating eyes on him.
"Christine."