A/N
A bit of a wait on this one, I know, I apologize. Thanks to all those who reviewed, I love getting that email in my inbox, and kudos to those with long reviews full of complements, questions and criticisms.
I've gotten a lot of reviews begging me to make this an E/C phic. All I have to say is that if you haven't picked up on it yet, then I hope you will in this chapter. Or the next, or the next. Naturally I am not at liberty to say. ;)
But I digress.
So, here we are.
Chapter 7
Annette Taillé sat at her tiny writing desk, a fat candle lit against the perpetual darkness of the upper levels. Madam Boyé always insisted that the girls in the higher rooms keep their windows latched shut against the prying eyes of men. The room itself was airless, but clean with a large four-poster bed standing heavily in a darker corner. The sheets were white and bleached carefully, and above the mattress there was a large, glistening mirror.
It was nearing noon, and still Annette had not slept.
But the lack of it usually gave her energy and drive as her charcoal scraped across the page, filling it with rough sketches and designs, writing little notes to herself in the margins biting the nail of her right forefinger as she scribbled.
At first glance it looked like something an architect might draw, a large and almost perfect square of a surface with squiggles representing measurements all along the edges. But when one looked closer you could see a structural design for a huge fortress of a backdrop complete with recipes for artificial, sweeping stone walls and grand silk gardens that could easily be hidden from view, with notes on designing a structure strong enough to walk a horse across and yet able to drop open on command. The pages that followed contained notes on creating a rotating stage, and further still there were costume designs and luxurious flowing ball gowns being designed, an a gentleman's evening wear that hailed from another century altogether.
And through the scrawl at the top, if you knew what you were looking at, the script read 'The Rise and Fall of deMontigue'.
Her designs.
She had always drawn as a child, and when her father opened up his own bakery in their little town, the architectural designs fascinated her. During her days after her arrival in Madam Boye's house, she had often attended performances open to the common public. Tickets were cheap and the shows were, more often than not, poorly managed and amusingly preformed. But something about these poor shows touched Annette deeply, and became her escape.
After most shows, Annette would stay behind until it was completely devoid of people, staring in wonder at the huge stage that had been so filled with people just the moment before, a transport into another world. She had spent many hours walking the stage and examining the props and furniture, admiring the contraptions used for everything from pulling the curtain open to making smoke flow from a dragon's mouth.
The man who came to clean the stage afterwards, Monsieur Rive took a liking to the curious young woman with her wide eyes. He did not know what she was, and she was more than happy not to tell him. He explained how everything worked, teaching her how to mark the sets and how they stored the costumes and made them, introduced her to a number of stagehands (some of whom Annette had already met of an evening) who were more than happy to oblige her with answers to her questions.
And then one afternoon during a matinee of a musical version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the fairy queen's trapeze-like sleeping nest collapsed, throwing the actress and several of her companions to the ground. Although the woman was not seriously injured, many of the audience members were thrown by the accident. Annette had rushed afterwards to her beloved stage, examining the cracked surface and staring up at the torn canopy.
She stayed up all night, pleading monthly illness and hesitantly rejecting customers. Her room was alive with her footsteps and scratch of her pencil as she redesigned the posts and the sturdiness of the structure with meticulous measurements and trials on a smaller scale, as she had seen it done.
The next day she shyly handed her drawings to Monsieur Rive, who took them with a humoring smile.
But rather than cause another disaster, and on the urge on a few of the stagehands and actors who knew Annette, he examined it carefully.
And so Annette began, in a way, redesigning the entire theatre.
It had been a slow process, taking up the space of about a year and a half, and not all suggested improvements actually worked. Annette had to scratch all her sketches out in secret, burning the rough drafts (which proved to be a mistake) and keeping the finals hidden in her desk under lock and key, or beneath her mattress.
Every night she would have her customers. This was solved with a strong sleeping drug slipped into a cup of hot tea. Annette had, at first, not wanted this method to be a part of her scheme, but at Anya's urging she tried. It worked like a charm, and so her customers had her shortly and then fell deeply asleep, sometimes for the whole night, leaving Annette free; if she was slightly poorer for it. And as they slept, she would sketch, scheme and design. And in the day, she slept shortly and sweetly.
In the meantime, Annette learned new skills. She learned the skill of costume design, techniques for easier scene transitions and how to extinguish the footlights in one fell swoop.
When she met Erik, his discovery of her talent had been a mistake. One nght she was so exhausted from her efforts of the afternoon, she slept deeply. And Erik had entered her room softly at Madam Boye's urging. Uncomfortable for his intrusion, Erik began examining the simple room.
His discovery in the locked desk drawer had woken Annette quickly, though her initial fury was led to awe as he critiqued her designs. They did not leave Annette's room that night, and Madam Boye opened the door very quietly just before dawn to find them sharing the bed in the dark corner. Satsified, she had left but had she moved closer she would have seen that both were fully dressed and their fingers were stained with ink and charcoal.
And gradually, he began to incorporate her designs into his own. And she became his assistant, of sorts.
She loved working for him, working with him. She adored the approval in his eyes and worshipped the grandeur of his face set hard against irritation in the candlelight.
But the mask…
However, she now stared blankly into her drawings, all lack of inspiration as cold and black as the grief that thickened her brain.
Lost. She had lost.
There was a knock at the door and Annette quickly stuffed the pages under the lid of her desk and pulled out a book of German grammar, adopting the position of one deeply engrossed.
The candle lit one side of her face quite well. She a slight cleft in her chin that was a little too noticeable but her dark blue eyes were striking. Her stature was not unusually short, but she was small and her shoulders and chest were broad, like her brother Jacques'. There were dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep but her cheeks were flushed.
"Come in," She said. Her voice was not sweet or feminine. It was low and with a grating hoarseness earned at sharp point of a robber's blade pressed a little too close to her windpipe in a dark alley one night.
Madam Boyé pushed her severe face around the door.
"What are you doing?" Annette lifted up the book she had feigned such interest in and showed title. It had been given to her by a strange man from America who had visited her every now and then and had a nose like a parrot's.
Madam's thin lips pursed. "And last night?" Annette scooped a chinking purse of moneys from the top right hand corner of her desk and palmed three of the coins. The rest she tossed to Madam, who caught it with a talon-d hand. She glanced at Annette who innocently returned to her reading. "He comes for you often,"
"Yes," Annette agreed, uninterested. She turned a page.
"And did he have you last night?"
Annette shrugged, not looking up. "Yes, several times," she lied easily, running her finger across a particularly interesting line.
Boyé seemed satisfied. "Very well." But she did not leave. Annette looked up from her book.
"Forgive me, Madam. Did you wish to know more?"
Madam Boyé's mouth opened and then shut. She took a breath. "Does he wish to take you for his mistress?" The younger woman barely blinked.
"He has said nothing,"
"He has been coming for you for months, more and more often," She said, her voice almost accusing. "He is taking good business." Annette's hand lolled to the table and her small fingers tapped impatiently.
"I make good money and his demands are simple,"
"You had three callers last night! I had to turn them away!"
The girl sat up straighter in her chair. "So be it. Our strange Monsieur seems to like me. He pays each time. There does not seem to be a problem."
Madam Boyé regarded her haughtily. "You have not yet learned his name?"
Annette looked down at the book again, signaling the end of conversastion. "No,"
Boyé grunted. "If he does not wish to take you I shall have to limit his business. Monsieur Rand came for you lat night. He waited for you but you did not return until dawn."
"Mm…" was the reply.
"Well ask this man of yours if he wishes to see more of you," Boyé said impatiently. "Prod around, find a way through him, you're good at that." Annette nodded absently and rubbed her forehead with her thumb. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she stared into the pages. Madam Boyé lingered for a few moments as if wanting to say more, but she quickly turned on her heel and left the room.
As soon as her footsteps had died, Annette snapped the book shut and dug out her sketches again, wrestling her utensil from its recess. But she did not write.
She had lied again. And this time for the worst. Placing her elbows on the hard wooden surface, Annette slid her face into her hands. The hot tears were coming again.
"I was such a fool," she muttered, her own voice muffled to her ears. "Such a fool," She raked a hand, fingernails and all, down her face and covering it in white welts that turned crimson. The tears were coming again.
Oh before God, the tears. They never seemed to end, always coming up from the bottom less well close to her cheekbones. She had heard stories of girls crying themselves dry. Now why, why not her?
"God, damn God." She swore, and stared achingly into the darkness.
And she waited for night to fall.
Erik examined his reflection in the yellowed mirror. Akil stood behind him, almost melting into the inky shadows.
Erik looked up.
"Would you accompany me?"
Akil's eyebrows rose. "For what purpose?"
The water spashed noisily against his face in the washbasin, letting the water flow over his mask. "Intimidation," he said bluntly.
His reply was a calm shrug. "Very well."
Grabbing a rumpled towel from its rack, Erik dried his face and very little was said for some time. Akil looked out the small dim window.
"Marie is here," He remarked.
For a moment, Erik froze.
He then continued to dry his face and threw the towel over on the small dingy bed. "And?"
"She wants to see you,"
Erik gave a derisive snort. "See me?"
"Talk to you, visit with you. It has been very long, my friend."
Walking back over to the washbasin, Erik propped his arms on either side of the washbowl and sighed into his reflection.
"Is she accompanied?"
"By her daughter…"
"And no one else?"
Akil's eyes betrayed hesitation as he kept his silence, and Erik let a hiss of a breath out through clenched teeth that sent ripples flicking through the water.
Akil still said nothing.
"I see," Erik said, very slowly. "I see."
Raoul de Chagny buttoned his coat and stepped into his carriage which smelled faintly of orchids, whispers, and expensive perfume.
"Look alive," he called briskly to his footman, tapping the roof of the carriage with his walking stick. His manservant, Jowler, sat across from him, staring out the window into the rolling green hills of the estate, and watched the blades of grass blur into a melting stream as the carriage picked up speed.
"Paris again,' Raoul said, with expectation in his voice. "This may not be a particularly long stay,"
"I do hope not, sir," Jowler said hesitantly, thinking of his sweet wife and their two children at their cottage but a quarter of a mile away. "And where shall we find Miss Daae?"
Raoul sighed heavily. "She has been very ill lately, Jowler. The health spa I sent her to did not help, so she has returned to Paris to stay with a friend of hers, the Girys. They are both dangerously independent women—I'd hate for them to have a… negative influence on her. It has gotten to the point where she has not been answering my letters… and so I am going to visit her and make sure all is well."
"Ah,"
"And I plan to see Inspector Carsonne upon our arrial… he's an old friend of mine from my school days,"
This chain of lies seemed so opaque and perfect to Raoul, that he dared continue on the same tangent for several minutes, elaborating on strange incidents of their imaginary well-spent youth until Jowler found his mind wandering again.
As Raoul lavished attention on his own falsehoods, he thought of Carsonne himself. Raoul had actually met him during the Opera House catastrophe some months before and found him to be a rather wild-eyed, lean younger man who spent his nights at dogfights in the back alleys, and had a particular interest in the Opera Ghost case. They called him 'the bloodhound', because he could trace any body from anywhere in Paris.
Raoul smiled to himself.
He knew Carsonne would find his Christine.
And then, he would hand her over.
"Have you finished, my girls?" Madam Giry called from their small kitchen. Meg and Christine had unpacked the last trunk, and the apartment was beginning to look a bit more like home. Meg had on one of her point shoes and was performing arabesques before the long mirror. Her leg, sadly, did not have the lift it once did, but no matter. Christine was merely staring out the window.
"I'm going to have to ask maman to help me stretch," Meg said sadly. Her mothers exercises for regaining flexibility were effective, but extremely painful. "Look," Her leg lifted to an 80 degree angle and would go no further. Christine glanced over her shoulder to look at Meg, smiling weakly
"You'll be fine," She said encouragingly. "Your turnout is still so much better than mine!"
Meg sighed. "Come away from the window, Christine. There can't be much to look at, just passing carriages, dirty walls and a cloudy sky.
"I like it!" Christine objected, throwing open the window and breathing in the air, sharp with autumn. She hummed a few lines of a half remembered song, her voice sounding clearer in her ears.
Meg could not help but smile. "You should sing again," She said quietly. Almost instantly Christine's good mood dropped.
"Oh no," she said quietly. "No, I couldn't… I am…. I am out of practice,"
"Christine," Meg said firmly.
"It wouldn't be right," Christine whispered pleadingly, glancing out the window again.
Meg bit her lip. "And why not?" she dared to pry.
"Because he's here," Christine said breathlessly. "And he'll find me when he wants to,"
The startled expression on Meg's face would have made Christine laugh if the mood hadn't been so serious.
"Christine don't be frightened,"
"I'm not," Christine sighed under her breath. And perhaps that was the most frightening of all. Although Meg could not hear all of what Christine had said, she approached Christine anyway, taking her hand.
"Then don't frighten me," She insisted. There was a moment when the two women searched each other's eyes.
Madam Giry entered the room suddenly. "Girls," She said sharply, snapping them both to attention. "There are soup and biscuits on the table if you are hungry." She glanced at Meg. "I expect you to be practicing. Come to help me in the kitchen, please." She closed the door with a sharp snap.
Her daughter followed.
The older woman put her hands on both of Meg's shoulders.
"Tonight I must go out to see an old friend," Madam Giry whispered urgently, being deliberately vague. "Be certain that Christine knows nothing,"
Meg stared up into her mother's dark eyes and swallowed.
"Yes, maman," She said, casting her eyes downward.
Talley and Rand sat again in that dark, mysterious room, awaiting their musical benefactor.
"Why is he never on time?" Talley asked irritably.
Rand, who had been examining the contract the contract in his hand looked up at the clock. "Well he's not late, just yet,"
There was a minute and a half until the due meeting time.
"Have you anywhere so important to be, Talley?"
"Robert, it is not a question of that,"
"Ah," Rand straightened the contract paper with a sharp snap.
Talley stood up and began to pace. "And you? Where do you have to be?"
Rand shrugged mildly. He enjoyed seeing Talley worked up, and sat back for the show.
"Oh, returning to the brothels of Paris again, I see," Talley said sarcastically. "A fine occupation,"
"Is there an alternative?"
"Have you not a wife to dine with?"
"Yes," Rand admitted.
"Then, my dear Robert…"
Madam Rand, who was called Rose, was a thin, rather flimsy woman in her early thirties, and her only contribution to her husband's life was providing him with a delicate daughter with black hair and her mother's pale blue eyes, and a thick, chubby son whose name was Michael. The daughter was called Chantal.
Robert Rand did not love his children as perhaps a husband should. The son was gruff and over-aggressive, and the daughter was mousey and silent most of the time.
Rand chuckled darkly. "You could say I find something… lacking in supper conversation."
Talley gave a rustle like an owl shaking its feathers and continued to pace.
"Besides," Rand continued, idly watching the dust filter through the rays of dying sunlight. "I have to look after my little beneficiary, don't I?"
Talley dismissed this with a wave of his hand. "That girl from Madam Boye's again?"
But Rand's reply was interrupted by the door opening quite suddenly. And in walked their composer, entering the room in a strange, silent manner, taking a seat across from the two men with merely whisper of his long cloak. His mask was concealed, and thw two gentlemen were relieved of the absence of that distraction.
He was closely followed by a large African man who stood glaring at Talley and Rand with an expression of aggression veiled with a thin mask of indifferent watchfulness.
"Gentlemen," Erik said quietly. "We meet again,"
Talley looked from Erik to the large man behind him and found himself a little short of breath. "We… we shan't keep you," He said stiffly.
"Of course not,"
Rand coughed into his thick fist. "Monsieur…" He realized that the search to put a name to the musician's face was fruitless. "Monsieur we are prepared to accept your work for our opera house. We have prepared"
With one smooth movement the musician reached into his cloak and withdrew a sheet of paper full of small, neat writing. "I have prepared a contract." He interrupted.
Staring down at the sheet in his own hand and the sheet in the composer's, Rand felt himself a little taken aback. He made a slow attempt at passing the contract into the other man's hand, but to no avail. And so he put his own onto the small table and grudgingly took up the opposing document.
He scanned it quickly.
"My demands are simple," the musician admitted. I ask only to be kept anonymous and left alone. Forty thousand francs a year."—Talley choked suddenly at the price—"Casting choices, naturally, must be put by me."
Talley straightened up and gave a pompous smile. "Ah yes, we have the perfect choice for the heroine Malvina… there is a young woman who has been rising into stardom, Genevieve Carolle, you must have heard of her. She's really very good, you see and I've already approached her"
The strange man however, held up a long-fingered hand. "I'm afraid to say that the choice for the fair Malvina has already been decided."
Talley was taken aback and Rand shifted uneasily in his chair.
"Really," Talley asked, his voice slightly strained again. "Who?"
And the man glanced up at his large dark companion whose black eyes flicked down at him with sudden warning. The stranger, however, smiled a slow, calculating smile.
"Christine Daaé,"
There was a collective breath from around the room.
"Christine Daaé?" Talley hissed. "The Christine Daaé?"
The musician inclined his head. "The very same."
"But she has disappeared from public view," Rand said slowly. "She has gone to marry that Vicomte… oh what was his name…"
But the man continued to smile. "I have my reasons to believe that she is making a return trip to Paris. Permanently."
"But… but…" Talley spluttered, objection breathing through his nostrils. "She'll be mobbed!"
"She will have protection," The musician countered. He glanced upwards and his associates looked slowly up at the intimidation standing quietly behind him. Akil said nothing but Erik could sense his displeasure. Not that it mattered now.
"But" Talley continued.
But Rand put a hand on Talley's shoulder, silencing him. This information intrigued him, and peered at this cold stone of a genius with sudden interest. And he saw in his mind the lines around the theatre that this young prodigy could bring.
"You would promise us this?"
"I promise nothing. I have only expectations."
Rand sat back in his chair, making himself appear even more broad.
"Very well," Rand said quietly. "You will have your terms, musician."
And the gentle palm to palm slapping of handshake barely stirred the still, dusty air.
