Mme. Giry had always thought that Christine Daae would have a talent for laziness if she indulged it. That the child stayed in bed until luncheon did nothing to dispel this notion. She looked as if she had not had an easy night, but then, probably none of them had except Aimée, blissfully unaware on her pallet in the kitchen. Christine was many moments pondering what she wanted to say.

"Madame," she said finally, "did you know the Angel—Erik—before?"

Of all the questions Christine could have asked, this one she would not have foreseen.

"My dear, I have known Erik since he was a child." Christine's head snapped upward, and her dark eyes bristled with betrayal. "I told the story to the Vicomte. He did not tell it to you?" Anger turned to shock, and tears brimmed in the girl's eyes as she shook her head. Mme. Giry could not understand how they had all been in such a welter of misunderstanding. The poor girl had been used by them all. She sighed heavily.

"I cannot imagine how we have come to this. I suppose the Vicomte meant only to protect you."

Telling the story to the Vicomte had been difficult enough—this was worse. She knew how tangled the girl's feelings were for Erik. The Vicomte had had no sympathy for him—the Phantom had been his enemy, and he wanted information merely to find a weakness. Christine wanted to understand, so Mme. Giry included a great many more details: the state of starvation he had been in when she rescued him, the long years of loneliness, his obsessive studies.

"We have had such a strange time of it," she said. " And there have been times when he bullied me as much as he did anyone else. Yet I have always felt responsible for him, and there have been times when he has shown me true friendship, in his own way. He was a great comfort to me when my husband died. He was the only person who would allow me to truly mourn."

Christine sat staring downward, her fingers twisting over one another. Mme. Giry didn't know whether she wanted to comfort the girl or to shake her, bring her into the realities of the world. She had always been a highly strung girl, much given to dreaming.

"How many," Christine said in a hoarse voice; then she cleared her throat. "How many people has he killed?"

This seemed beside the point. "To my knowledge? Three. The man from the carnival, Joseph Buquet, and Piangi. You know some of the accidents that he caused, but you cannot think that he makes a habit of murder."

The girl scowled. "Three people dead!"

"I will not make excuses for his actions this past year. During the time that he … taught you, he told me none of his thoughts, and by the end it is certain that he was quite mad." Christine glared at her.

"You cannot deny it. But that first death, all those years ago—that was hardly murder. He was just a boy, and that carnival was a terrible place. He was treated like an animal, with unbearable cruelty. That man would have killed him eventually. Even then, in those first years, when he was still a child, he would not speak of it. He has known so little of kindness." She trailed off, thinking back to those days of worry. It had been many weeks until she had stopped worrying that the police would find her at the theater and drag the two of them away. He rarely spoke, even then, and for the first few days she would go into the cellars to find him in the same spot where she had left him. He would clutch her hand silently and try to eat the food she took him one-handed.

"I can't even imagine it," Christine said finally. Mme. Giry felt a spike of sympathy at this and patted her hand.

"I was there for all of it, and even I can barely do so." She sighed. "Looking back, I think that I was very foolish. I worried that someone would come for him, would take him away to even more punishments. So I left him in the cellars. But if I had been able to bring him up into the world, to find someone to care for him—well. I cannot change that part. But I have often thought of all the things I regret having done and not done, as the prayer goes. I told him too little and left him too much alone." She smiled. "We argued about this, not long ago."

Christine shivered. "He's frightening when he's angry."

Mme. Giry chuckled. "It was not that kind of argument, my dear. We each of us were trying to take the blame for everything that happened at the Opéra.

Christine stared at her in confusion.

"No matter. But know that he has his own regrets, although I will leave that discussion to him. He has changed a great deal, these past months. It is as if much of his anger burned away with the theater." She looked at Christine sharply. "And I hope that you will be mindful of that. You have power over him. Do not treat it lightly."