Christine left me a most galling letter in the last chapter. Not to be completely pessimistic, Julia and I did say that we loved one another.
A thank you to Teresa for assistance with evil Biblical/Mythical women.
Ch 38
My first thought was to tear up the letter or send it to the hearth. For God's sake! She couldn't even spell his name correctly yet she wanted him back! Dreadful, callous woman!
Her words meant nothing to me. I balled the note into my fist and tossed it onto the desk. How dare she ask for him, how dare she even assume I would relinquish what was mine, what she had discarded without a thought.
My anger scattered, running like horses quartering a man. The note found a way back into my hands. I smoothed the paper onto my lap and read it again. And again. Twice became three times, then four, then…then I lost count.
So much of what she said galled me. Each word, each line left me trembling with pure revulsion, complete abhorrence for her. She wanted Alexandre. She wanted to take him from me.
Little things began to stir my already boiling blood. She called the previous day unfortunate. Indeed it was unfortunate. The day she first came to the opera house was the greatest misfortune of all. Delilah, I muttered, a little Jezebel, a perfect little Eve offering up the apple with the snake still attached.
She didn't want anything to happen to me. What a lovely Siren song to befall deaf ears.
She was nothing more than Circe poisoning the blood in my veins, Medusa rattling her snake tails to charm.
Insult after insult and she still wanted more from me. She would receive nothing! She must see him, she wrote. She said she must see him, her son, her own son that she abandoned, that she hadn't even named—whose name she didn't bloody know!
She would never see him. Never! I would not allow her near him! For as long as I lived, she would not have the opportunity to hurt him in the manner she destroyed me.
And she thought I could not care for him. How dare she insinuate that I could not care for him! She wouldn't have given him to Madeline had she known I lived within the house. Who else would have owned the damned place? Who else had the funds to purchase property of the size, in the location of our home? A ballet teacher? Never! Fool of a woman!
My anger consumed me until I read the last line again. It became the only line I could read, the one sentence that thrust the knife deeper than any other.
I must know who he belongs to.
That line stole the breath from my lungs.
It was impossible. He was mine. He was my son. He was everything in the world to me. For the past nine years, I had lived for him, not for Christine. My nights had been filled with cradling him in my arms, with soft-spoken words and whispered lullabies. Alex was my son. He was mine, damn her, only mine.
I could not have taken in another man's son. I couldn't have. I couldn't have…
The note was once more balled up in my fist. I slammed it into the drawer and stared at the latch still swinging back and forth.
Another man's son, I thought, the one person who had kept me alive for nearly a decade may have belonged to another man. A man I hated with every ounce of energy, no less.
No, she was playing another game. Alex was mine. I didn't care what Christine said. She wouldn't have the chance to ever look at him, to ever wonder if he was mine or not. She already knew the answer. We both did.
He had to be mine. He couldn't belong to the boy, he couldn't, damn it, Alex couldn't belong to him. Christine and her letter made me want to scream. I knew I had to keep quiet unless I wanted Julia to come running back into the guest room. My anger needed to safely be snuffed out on its own before my poor Julia came into the room again. It would be a while, I knew.
Everything Christine had taken from me paled in comparison to this. Each time I turned she waited with a white glove to slap me in the face knowing full well I would not act against her. Why would she do this to me? How could she wake each morning and never think of him but now suddenly want him back? She had a family of her own. She had someone with her always, wherever, whenever she traveled. She had children of her own, legitimate children of her own.
Her own conniving ways stumbled back into my mind. She had a family of her own, a family of all girls living beneath her roof. The vicomte? For all I cared he was considered part of the fairer sex as well and that was where I suspected the problem.
Three daughters, two living.
No sons.
Only mine.
I knew in my heart that no matter what she claimed, Alexandre was my son. Blood of my blood or not, I had raised him. He was my child, not Christine's and certainly not that damned vicomte of hers. Alex would always be my son.
For three months she had kept him. That was long enough to pass him off as her husband's child, assuming they had consummated their marriage at once. She could have said he was born early. It would not have been unheard of. What did she think when she relinquished her son to Madeline? She probably envisioned an entire household of little boys running about. Not once, I expected, did it ever cross her mind that her womb would only produce girl children.
No sons. No heirs to his money, no carrier of his name, no followers in his footsteps. Some might consider that a fruitless wife, one of which was slowly reaching an age where she would not be able to bear children. With her career, I wondered if she had interest in birthing more babies. The ones she had already were far from infancy.
Frantically, I dug into the drawer and removed the letter. I read it again, line for line as though there would be something more. I don't know what made me do it, but I turned the page over. Even if she said she had never left me a heat-sensitive message I knew that wasn't true. Nothing she had ever said to me was true. Each moment that I had worshipped her was all in vain.
Cursing her, I was about to light a candle and hold the page over heat but paused. The message was unintentionally quite clear.
It was nothing more than a smear, a splash of red meeting blue on the stark white page. I ran my finger over the two colors and blended them into one.
She must have forgotten my love of art is broad, and that in my years of solitude I spent many years reading about painting and sketching and the Old Masters. When my muse for song abandoned me, I swept up charcoals or paints that Madeline brought and tried my hand at different forms of art. I imitated the crème de la crème, attempted miniature Sistine Chapel's and more modern Monets and Renoirs. Christine saw my work though I doubt she would remember it. If she had remembered, then I would have hoped for to use a bit more care.
Christine, it seems, was lazy. As any artist knows, a blend of blue and red makes one color.
Purple, a deep, dark, painful shade of purple appeared before my eyes.
I rubbed the stage make up onto the back of my hand and grit my teeth together. How very clever, indeed, Christine, but not nearly clever enough for my mind, my dearest. Stage make up, which I was quite familiar with over the years. A fine trick indeed, though one of which was poorly executed. After all of my deceptions she should have known better.
If this was how she thought she would steal Alexandre from me she was sorely mistaken.
I'd be damned if she ever saw my son after that. Ever.