Summary: A sheet of music mysteriously appears at the de Chagny home, stirring old memories and creating new tension. Annalise receives a reply to her letter from Erik.
(Author's Note: The bible verse is John 15:12-14 from the King James Version)
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Good morning!" Annalise chirped happily as she entered the dining room. "Do I smell warm croissants?"
Gustave sat at the table, his head in his hands. "How can you even think about food?" he wondered.
Annalise stopped to kiss her mother before moving down the table to kiss her father, taking a seat to his right. "Someone had too much wt. She knew the signs her children were displaying and wondered if they would ever mature. "I am sure that your brother has many lovely young women who would be only too happy to have him on their dance cards."
Gustave smirked at his sister who promptly stuck her tongue out at him. "Stop that," he told her.
"I did not do anything. I am a lady," Annalise told him as she stuck her little nose in the air.
"And who decided that?" Raoul asked as he put down the mail he had been reading; there was a distinct twinkle in his eyes.
Annalise responded to the look. "You did. You always said I was your special little lady."
"A vast misconception, obviher has many lovely young women who would be only too happy to have him on their dance cards."
Gustave smirked at his sister who promptly stuck her tongue out at him. "Stop that," he told her.
"I did not do anything. I am a lady," Annalise told him as she stuck her little nose in the air.
"And who decided that?" Raoul asked as he put down the mail he had been reading; there was a distinct twinkle in his eyes.
Annalise responded to the look. "You did. You always said I was your special little lady."
"A vast misconception, obviously," Raoul told her, taking her hand and squeezing it gently. "You must have cast a spell upon me."
Gustave looked at his mother. "Can you not do anything?"
"They are both impossible," Christine told her son. "I have often remarked it." She turned her attention to her daughter. "We now know what your brother did last evening, what of you?"
"I danced," Annalise replied innocently.
"With half the young men in Paris, you forget to add," her brother said through a smile full of clenched teeth. "And the other half is on tonight's dance card."
"I cannot help it everyone loves me," Annalise shot back. "You would not be so rude if you had not had so much to drink."
"And I would not have had so much to drink if I was as loved as you were and had all of Paris at my feet."
Raoul reached out his other hand to lay it over his son's. He looked down the table at his wife, one eyebrow raised, to find Christine smiling back at him. Raoul knew that look and knew he was on his own. "I find it hard to believe the two of you are arguing at your mother's breakfast table over who is loved more. Let us leave this discussion for a more appropriate time." He watched as his children stared at each other, neither willing to be the first to back down. Raoul tried looking again to his wife for help but Christine still wore that small, peaceful smile that meant he needed to resolve the situation on his own. "Children ..."
"I'll say I'm sorry, if you do," Gustave told his sister.
"You have to say it first."
"Oh no, I am not falling for that again. How old do you think I am? Seven?"
"I would think you are both acting as if you were three," Christine said softly.
That was all it took.
"I'm sorry," Annalise told her brother.
"I am sorry, too."
Christine lifted her teacup and took a sip. "A happy family once again," she said softly and looked at her husband. "What was in the morning's post?"
Raoul would never understand how she did that. "Nothing that cannot wait." He handed two envelopes to his daughter. "But you have a letter from Monsieur Pfieffer and something from Bonnard's Bookstore."
Annalise eagerly took the envelopes her father handed her; she knew what would be in the letter from the priest.
"Is Monsieur Pfieffer not the priest in Saumur?" Christine wondered aloud. "Why are you writing to him when our own priests are here at Notre Dame?"
"I write to him because he was very kind to me and very wise," Annalise told her mother without defining her pronouns and telling her exactly who it was that had been so kind and wise. "Is that so wrong of me?"
"Now she asks," Gustave muttered under his breath and was silenced with a look from his father.
"No, it is not," Christine told her daughter. "If you find comfort from this priest, then by all mean, please, write to him as often as you desire. And what have you purchased from Bonnard's?'
Annalise was delighted that she had received permission to write to her friend, even if she had not exactly told the whole truth. "I asked them to find me some new sheet music. May I go and try?"
"As long as you leave the doors open so that we can hear," Raoul told her.
Annalise stood, placing the envelope from Monsieur Pfieffer in her pocket and almost skipped out of the room and down the hall to the music room.
"Surely you could not have drunk that much?" Raoul said as he turned his attention to his son who was still holding his head, the breakfast untouched before him.
"I did not think that I had," Gustave began and stopped as Annalise's voice drifted into the dining room, familiar words from the opera "Hannibal" dancing through the morning air.
Gustave watched as the color drained from his mother's face, her lips opening in shock, frightened eyes looking at his father.
"Oh God," Christine breathed. "Those words."
He turned to his father as Raoul stood quickly, pushing his chair back so violently that it fell over. He was out of the dining room before Christine could stand.
"Raoul ..." she tried calling to him, getting to her feet, and sagging against the table. Her son was quickly at her side.
"Maman?" Gustave wondered in awe as he took her arm and felt the trembling, saw the tears begin to form. "What is it? What is wrong?" He was torn between wanting to help his mother and wanting to run after his father to discover why that music had provoked such strange reactions in both parents.
"Your father ..." Christine said as she looked at her son.
Raoul had almost run down the hallway as that familiar music had begun. He reached the door to the music room and strode in to find his daughter, fingers poised over the piano keys, studying a single sheet of music. "Where did you get that?" he demanded angrily.
Annalise looked up, startled by the tone of voice. "What?"
Raoul was at her side in barely four steps, reaching down to take that single sheet off the piano. "This," he told her. "I want to know where you got this!"
"I ... I ..."
"Tell me where you got this!" Raoul took his daughter's arm and shook it.
Annalise looked at her father, frightened by the stranger who gripped her arm so tightly. "It fell out of the sheet music that came from Bonnard's. I didn't mean ... I only wanted to see ... it is just music!"
"It is not just music," Raoul almost snarled at his daughter as he began to tear the sheet of music into little pieces.
"Raoul!"
Raoul looked up to see his wife standing in the doorway supported by her son.
"It's alright," Christine said softly. She let go of her son's arm and crossed the room to her husband's side. Christine reached up to lay her hand against his cheek. "I'm alright."
Raoul looked at his wife's face as a single tear escaped to trace a track down her pale cheek. "Christine," he breathed as he gathered her into his arms, feeling his pounding heartbeat slow.
Annalise looked at her parents and saw only strangers. She felt the pain in her arm from where her father had shaken it. It was too much and she burst into tears, running from the room.
"Annalise," Gustave said as he reached out for the girl who swept by him in a blur of long skirts and soft sobs. It took him a moment to react and then he was chasing after her, running down the hall and up the stairs to try and reach her.
Christine and Raoul had broken apart as their daughter burst into sobs and fled the room.
"Oh God!" Raoul exclaimed in despair. "What have I done?"
"Annalise, please," Gustave pleaded as he shook the locked latch on her bedroom door.
"Go away," came the muffled reply.
"Please let me in!"
"Go away!" Annalise shouted at the man on the other side of the door.
"I'll go but I am coming back with Maman and Father."
"Just go away," Annalise said softly as she struggled with her sobs and heard the sound of her brother's footsteps recede. "Just go away." She walked away from the door and flung herself onto her bed, burying her head in the pillows and sobbing until there were no tears left.
All her life Annalise had been the cherished, pampered child. She had had almost everything for which she had asked. There had been the required lessons given every daughter of wealthy parents and the education that was not required but upon which Raoul had insisted. Oh, there had been corrections and punishments from her parents but they had always been gently given. Annalise had never known harsh words or violence from anyone and to have received it from the hands of the one person she looked to most for comfort and security was incomprehensible. She was not sure she understood why or would ever be able to forgive her father.
"What did I do that was so wrong?" she asked the empty bedroom as she sat up, the sobs threatening to come again. Annalise reached into her pocket for her handkerchief and her hands touched the other envelope her father had given her that morning. She took it out and looked at it for a brief moment before trembling fingers opened it, taking out the enclosed letter
"My Sweet Annalise," she read, a small smile forming on her tear-stained face. "There are not words to tell you how delighted I was to receive your letter. I will not say that I am displeased with you for ignoring my wishes as I have missed our daily conversations very much and had begun to regret telling you to hold our time together secret. I wish to compliment you on the way you have found round my wishes - you are not only beautiful but intelligent. It is a rare combination in a young woman and I have found it in only one other."
"Well at least someone thinks I am intelligent," she sniffled.
"I am deeply honored that you feel you can turn to me - a veritable stranger - with questions of such a tender nature. I hope that what I tell you next will do nothing to diminish the esteem in which you hold me for I am not, perhaps, the wisest person to ask about the delicate matter of love. Yes, I have loved. I have loved deeply and truly and somberly but not very wisely, I fear. When I first found my Angel, I thought it was love I felt for her. She was much like you - young and sweet and innocent. She also had a voice that came from God, which is why I have always called her "my Angel". That is the reason I called you such on the first day we met in the woods for you sound much like she did."
Annalise held the letter to her heart for a moment, suddenly understanding why Erik had always looked at her as if he wanted to cry.
"And now I will speak freely to you, as one adult to another, for I feel that this is what you are seeking from me. I have said that I loved my Angel deeply but not wisely and while it hurts me to admit such, I find I must for you to understand the rest of what I must tell you. When I first met my Angel we were both very young. I found in her a kindred soul, someone who loved the joy of music as much as I, myself, did. We became each other's Muses, each other's inspiration. I lifted her voice to the heights of Heaven and she raised my music from the depths of Hell. Oh, how it pains me to even put these next words to paper! I became obsessed with my Angel, thinking that she - and she alone - would be the one who would save me from the darkness. My obsession plunged me into the very bottom of the abyss! I am afraid that I did terrible things to her and to those around her in my efforts to hold onto her."
How could the gentle man she had met in the woods be the same man who would be capable of doing any harm to the woman he loved? Instead of finding answers, Annalise found herself becoming more and more confused.
"It was not until I had finally crossed the last threshold into Hell that I was to learn what it truly meant to love another. That was the moment when my Angel made a sacrifice that showed me what it is to love and to love openly and honestly, without fear, without reservation. She showed me that to love someone meant placing their needs above your own. She taught me that the words I had only heard whispered in dark chapels - Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends - were not just mere words spoken by some man in which I had no belief but were real and true and living before my very eyes! It was the moment I finally understood what itmeant to love her and it was the moment I lost her."
"She died?" Annalise whispered into the still room, feeling the tears begin again. It was a revelation for which she had not been prepared.
"My dear, sweet child, when you are finally ready to love, I have no doubt that you will know it. You will find in your young man someone who will hold your emotions in trust, expecting nothing from you yet willing to give everything to you. You will find in him a safe refuge from the everyday cares of this life. I believe he will be your best friend and you will be his. When you can think of nothing but him, wish for nothing but his happiness, care for nothing but his continued well-being, then you will find in front of your eyes the man whom you love. Take these words to heart and know that I speak the truth for it is a truth learned from bitter, painful experience. I only pray that the man you choose is worthy of such a prize as you and that - perhaps - someday you will bring him to meet your strange, lonely friend. I remain, forever, your friend and servant, Erik."
Annalise held the letter in her hands, staring at the words, no longer seeing them. The thoughts and images that flooded her mind confused her and she struggled to sort them out. She was startled out of her reverie by a knock on the door.
"Annalise?" she heard her father call softly. She stared at the door, willing the person on the other side to go away. "Please?" she heard him try again.
Slipping the letter from Erik beneath her pillow, Annalise got off the bed and walked across the room. She turned the key and opened the door, greeting her father's worried gaze with her own angry one. "I do not wish to talk with you," she told him, turning her back to him, knowing that he would reach out for her.
"I am sorry," Raoul tried as his daughter turned from him. "I reacted badly."
Annalise turned back in time to see her father drop his hand. "What did I do that was so wrong?" Her huge eyes searched his face. "What?"
"You did nothing wrong," Raoul told her.
"Then why?" Annalise demanded as she felt the tears threaten to begin again.
"That music," Raoul begin with a sigh, "that music was something that your mother sang a long time ago in the opera house that was destroyed. When we heard you singing, it startled and frightened both of us."
"But it is only music!"
"It is not the music, Annalise, so much as it is the memories it evokes ..."
"The fire," Annalise interrupted quietly.
"The fire," Raoul willingly lied to his daughter. "Those were frightening times for your mother and I feared for her. Even now, there are certain sounds and images that bring all those events flooding back. This day, unfortunately, you were caught up in our fears." He held out his hands to his daughter. "There are no words to say how sorry I am that I frightened and hurt you. I only hope you will eventually be able to forgive me."
A sob escaped Annalise's lips and she flung herself into her father's arms, feeling them close about her. She cried there quietly for a few moments, feeling her father stroke her hair, murmuring to her as he did when she had been a small child. "I am so sorry," she finally managed to say. "I never meant to hurt you or Maman."
Annalise felt her father draw away from her, raising her chin so that she could look into his eyes. "Your mother is right, we are both impossible," Raoul told her as he reached out to touch her cheek. "You will never know how sorry I am for what I did to you. And you did nothing wrong, you understand? Nothing!"
"I understand, Papa," Annalise addressed her father as if she were a child again. She sighed. "I only wish I knew how that sheet of music got into the book. Maybe it was just an accident."
"I do not know," Raoul said as he took his daughter's arm, "but I intend to find out for I do not believe in accidents."
Annalise leaned her head against his shoulder. "I know that you shall." She squeezed the arm that held hers. "I love you." Annalise could feel the tension fade from her father's shoulder and knew she had told him what he needed to hear.
"I love you," Raoul replied, kissing the top of her head. "More than you will ever know. Now let us go and reassure your mother that we are, once again, on speaking terms."
"And then can we go riding?" Annalise wanted to know.
"Then we can go riding," Raoul chuckled as they left the room, closing the door behind them.