The Angel of Music

by aeipathy.

Notes: I can't apologize enough for the lateness of this update; the degree to which I have been lacking internet is absolutely horrendous, and debilitating to someone who has become so dependent on the web. Thank you to everyone for your wonderful attention and reviews!

Part Five

It was in the middle of a dress rehearsal that Giry began to realize the undeniable strength of Erik's will. She and the rest of the ballet girls were scattered across the stage in a careless mimicry of their intended arrangement, dressed in their slippers and skirts though their costumes on performance night would be much more taxing to their concentration. The immense velvet curtains were drawn back to reveal the unending, vacant seats of the audience, the boxes dark, the chandeliers extinguished – it was hardly inspiring to the impatient, indolent girls, who seemed to make no connection between the informality of tonight's rehearsal and the stress-wrought spectacle which they would be expected to enact starting on the fifteenth of the month.

The ballet mistress was beginning to lose patience with them all, and she put her weight upon the banister at the edge of the stage, her hand lifting to hide her eyes – a picture of exasperation and disappointment. "These dancers are a disgrace," she muttered aloud to no one in particular, but loudly enough so that they all could hear. "Everyone will demand their money back on opening night."

Giry was overcome with exhaustion from constant practice and, despite her passion for her craft, felt no desire to continue straining her already aching limbs. The characteristically melodramatic words of the ballet mistress had no effect on her. On the contrary, she found them a bothersome irritation, and she rolled her eyes towards the ceiling, exasperated.

As she did so, a flicker of light from far above caught her attention, and she paused, squinting.

Another girl plucked at her skirts, hoping to catch her attention and bring it back to rehearsal before the ballet mistress noticed and had further cause to complain. However, Giry simply batted at the girl's hand carelessly and took another step towards the curtains, peering up into the darkness of the riggings and rafters.

The maze of rope bridges and corridors was perfectly still and silent, almost completely shadowed in darkness from her eyes, as the illumination from the stage below wasn't enough to reach so high. Giry felt a slight sinking in the center of her chest, and though the other girl was whispering nervously to her, "Quick, before she sees," she couldn't drag her eyes away from the bleak rafters, feeling that if she were even to blink, she would miss something.

And surely enough, a second or two later, a rope, hanging down from a banister, seemed to have been touched by something – very faintly – it shifted, swaying a bit in a nonexistent breeze.

Giry drew in her breath sharply, and it seemed that the cause of the motion must have heard the sound of her dismay – the invader, creeping and sneaking along in the rafters like a cat, twitched suddenly, and her eyes were drawn to a narrow corridor built along the interior wall of the domelike opera. It was almost impossible to see – but as she squinted harder, she could make out the dim outline of a boyish figure, pressed back against the wall and bowed down, and she couldn't help but think of a cat crouched in the middle of a road, too petrified to move as a speeding carriage barreled towards it.

"Mademoiselle Giry!"

The shriek of the ballet mistress's voice snapped Giry's attention away from the figure, and, startled, she whirled and looked at the older woman.

"Perhaps you do not value my counsel enough to favor me with your attention while I attempt to instruct you? Perhaps you feel that your dancing is satisfactory as it is and needs no further improvement?" The ballet mistress's chin was lifted haughtily, her lips pursed. "If you truly feel you are sufficiently prepared for opening night, perhaps you are wasting your time here. I give you leave to go, little mademoiselle, and if you change your mind and decide that my teaching is worthwhile after all, feel free to attend tomorrow's rehearsal."

Such thinly-veiled commands were not lost on Giry, and cursing violently in her mind, she murmured apologies and turned to go. As she made her way towards the edge of the stage, she cast another final glance up at the rafters – but it was in vain, for now the corridor was empty: the intruder had fled.

Giry pushed the pin back into the coil of hair at the base of her skull with an unusual strength, and, satisfied that it was in place, arranged her hands in her lap once again. "How would you like me to pose today?" she asked, without looking at Erik.

"With your head turned to the left again, please. You have a wonderful profile."

She nodded and obeyed, moving her eyes even further to the left, fixing her gaze on the dripping stone wall in the distance. Normally she would have flushed slightly; even with her firm resolve, she could not help but feel flattered by Erik's occasionally ridiculous compliments, for he gave them so infrequently that when one was bestowed upon her she knew that he was being very sincere. However, her mind was still very far away, replaying over and over again the memory of the figure she had seen creeping through the rafters during rehearsal the previous day. He, as well, seemed somehow grave, and unsettled, as though he knew of what she was thinking and couldn't bring himself to raise the topic.

Over the past month or two, Erik had begun to overcome his shyness around her, and after much deliberation had gained the courage necessary to ask her to pose for him.

"My drawings are empty," he had said, looking at the papers scattered across his desk in disdain: the battered old desk Giry had managed to push down the hallway towards the lock door, from one of the old offices that was no longer in use. With only the thousands of candles, the shabby furniture, and the cold formations of rock and stone and iron, he had soon run out of subjects to sketch. He refused to draw any of his memories. There were no drawings of his mother.

Then one day, he seemed atypically quiet, as though mentally dancing around an idea he was too uncertain to voice. At last Giry had lost patience with him and asked him what was on his mind—and, obediently, he had made his request, which was simply that Giry sit for him from time to time so that he could draw her. "I've never drawn a person before."

"Really?" she had asked, surprised. "Not even yourself? You have a mirror, you could try a self-portrait."

She had regretted the suggestion as soon as she had made it, but refused to show it on her face. Erik did own a mirror—she had brought it down for him, naively—but he kept it quite far away and never seemed to look into it; and Giry had the sneaking suspicion from the cloth that always remained on the floor below it that when she was not there, Erik kept it covered.

Similarly, he had given no response to her proposition, but seemed to flinch beneath his mask. The papier mache, made to fit the form of his face exactly, gave little indication of the deformities it concealed; it showed with smooth outlines and subtle curves the way he might have looked, while revealing enough of his eyes and lips to maintain that it was not a costume mask—it served a purpose and was meant to hide terrible secrets.

The chamber of the catacombs had become flooded with portraits of Giry. When she walked through alone, she preferred to keep her eyes on the watery floors so that she did not have to look at them. It wasn't a question of his skill – for one who had done little more than scratch images in the dirt with twigs (prior to his gifts of heavy paper and drawing utensils), the portraits were remarkably accurate and lifelike. They characterized with remarkable honesty Giry's pointed chin, her large, wary eyes, her small, pinkish lips. It was more the fact that his skill was too great, that at times he made her look too beautiful. It was admiration for her normality, she knew; despite her flaws he likely thought her, in his own dispassionate way, the most beautiful woman in the world, simply due to the fact that she had shown him kindness, the fact that she saw him every day,continued to come and see him.

Giry was most alarmed by his use of the tools with which she provided him – he used sticks of charcoal to create bold, sweeping lines, filling them with lead-tinted shadows, and once she was able to provide him with pastel chalks and colored pencils, the drawings of her came to life. The tatty velvet of one of her old coats would look so much like velvet that she would reach out to touch it, surprised when her fingers came away stained with violet grease. Her hair swept past her face like hills in autumn, her eyes gleamed like pools of pale water, and her skin flushed very faintly just over her cheekbones.

Giry felt shame when she looked at her own exaggerated beauty, so much more evident than in real life; she felt shame to see portraits which exaggerated her standard prettiness and made her seem infinitely more striking, portraits which were created by a man who had to wear a mask even in the darkness of his own dungeons.

But lately, Erik was becoming more and more dissatisfied with his work. His rapid improvement led him to become bored once over with his drawings.

Indeed, now, as he stood creating yet another portrait of her, the back of the easel all she could see of it at present, a look of displeasure seemed to have become a permanent fixture in his eyes. Giry finally moved her eyes away from the wall, without moving her chin, and studied him while he was too busy to study her. (And she noticed now that the trousers, shirt, and waistcoat he was wearing, like all the rest of the clothing she had given him, was becoming threadbare and constrictive. When she looked more closely she saw a tiny hole growing in the cavity beneath his arm, and another near the waist of the trousers. It seemed that providing him with food on a regular basis and removing much of the stress from his daily life had inspired a sudden growth spurt, and he was finally catching up to his age, developing the body of a man rather than a boy.)

Aloud, Erik mused in disappointment, "You look far too still in this one."

"Too still?" she repeated, forgetting the matters of his clothing and of yesterday's incident for the moment.

Erik looked at her then, his eyes slit and speculative under his mask, and it seemed that he as well was too focused on the process of art to remember his hesitation. He was no longer afraid to look her in the eye; on the contrary, his eyes often became daring, demanding contact with her own at times when she, having been raised in a society governed by manners and laws of propriety, was used to looking away. He now regarded her with the critical eye he reserved for when she posed – an eye that made her feel somehow imperfect, not up to standards that she knew nonetheless he wasn't cultured enough to have.

"You aren't so still," he said. "Not in reality. In fact, you seem alive with movement, all the time. You fidget constantly – your fingers are always moving, at the very least."

Giry felt embarrassed to realize that it was the truth.

"I want to draw you as you truly are," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "I don't know if such a thing is possible, but I'd like to attempt it." And then all of a sudden he seemed to remember his uncertainty again, and he moved his eyes back down to the drawing, his posture sagging a bit. "Mademoiselle Giry," he began in a wilted voice, "you are a dancer, are you not? You dance for the Opera?"

"I do," she responded, keeping her fingers absolutely still. She watched him now, feeling herself bristling.

"I have never seen you dance," he lied.

It was so easy to tell that he was lying, even without having caught him in the rafters. Instead of addressing the subject directly, she continued to play along as though unaffected. "Of course you haven't. I don't exactly trust my ballet slippers to survive the environment in these catacombs."

Erik seemed to be thinking intensely, and on the little table next to his easel he began to sift through his older sketches of her. In each of them she as well seemed to have matured, and as the drawings progressed her face became less childish, more womanly, her body less awkward and more graceful. Erik had not yet grown more talented at concealing his guilt, and though he tried passionately to hide it she could hear in his voice the note of a child who knows he has done wrong and hopes to evade punishment. "Forgive me for being so presumptuous, mademoiselle, but I would ask a favor of you. Would it be very inconvenient for you to dance for me, from time to time?"

"Dance for you?" she repeated, startled. "Here?"

"The floor in the sitting room," he began, for he had begun to refer to certain chambers as the sitting room, the dining room, and so forth, "is quite level. Level enough for you to dance on, don't you think?"

"Well – I suppose –"

"It would be so marvelous to sketch you in motion," he said softly, and his voice sounded unexpectedly sad, sad enough to make her destroy her pose and turn to look at him, feeling as though she had been stricken. "It would be wonderful. It would be like going to the Opera, like being able to go. Or like having the Opera perform for me – only for me." He set the piece of charcoal down on the rim of his easel, his long, thin fingers coming away stained with gray. "Youwould be able to dance for me, mademoiselle – wouldn't you?"

Giry nodded her head mutely. She found herself unable to refuse; no favor seemed too great to grant him. Though he had begun to occupy his days with other things than drawing, such as writing and reading and, most consistently, absorbing himself in music, it seemed there was never enough for him to do. He always sought more things to bury himself in, and if dancing for him and allowing him to sketch her movements would please him, she wasn't capable of refusing him that pleasure.

"Of course I would," she said quietly.

She did not talk to him about having seen him in the rafters. For the rest of the evening she couldn't look him in the eyes; every time she did, they were too filled with sadness, having been able to glimpse what the Opera was like and then having reminded himself that he would never be able to see it.

Once she danced for him the first time, he continually requested that she dance again, that she show him nearly every dance she had ever learned. Initially she felt remarkably embarrassed, dressed in her ballet skirt and slippers and dancing in the silence of the catacombs, with only the sound of her soles sweeping against the stone as accompaniment – but Erik scoffed at her bashfulness, and it became easy to forget such paltry self-consciousness.

She saw herself in tiny lines, in little pencil drawings of a long-haired girl in a bodice, tutu, and slippers – she saw herself en pointe, in first position, third, her arms spread, her feet arched, her back perfectly straight. She saw her coltish legs, her bent fingers, her small ears, her downturned gaze – the laces of her slippers, the sashes about her waist, the ribbons in her hair – the way her skirts puffed bell-like above her knees.

She saw all these things as though with new eyes and it seemed that all the drawings and paintings of her seated, of her draped on a sofa, became somehow null – inapplicable, irrelevant, empty of meaning. It seemed that she did not exist in any other way.

It was not her clumsiness this time but the cruelty of fate, the slippery surfaces of the rocks, the darkness in Erik's realm that prevented proper sight. On the day after her eighteenth birthday, when coming to visit Erik, Giry tumbled down an incline of stone and rock and found herself in a heap in the shallow water – in addition to crushing her leg beneath her, her head had knocked against the rocks on the left bank and she had lost consciousness.

Erik found her shortly afterwards. She could not remember much of the incident – the intense pain in her right ankle and shin was enough to cloud her senses and make her feel as though lingering in a dream – but she remembered his worry behind the mask, the fear in his eyes, the anger. She remembered the feeling of floating, being carried in his arms, and then, being deposited, gently, being laid onto a sofa in a dressing room in the Opera – but by the time she opened her eyes and began to regain consciousness, he was gone and others were hurrying in, shocked by her state.

As it turned out, a number of the bones inside her right ankle had been displaced and fractured by the intensity of her fall. They would heal, surely enough, but the doctors insisted to her that the injury was more serious than she had expected – it would be nearly impossible, even once it healed, to walk without the aid of a cane, let alone to dance properly.

As soon as she was able to walk at all, Giry came down to Erik's chambers and, as he watched silently, destroyed all the drawings that he had made of her in her ballet slippers – all the drawings of her spinning through the air and balanced precariously on the perch of her toes. Nowthey were the ones empty of sense, nowthey seemed cruelly irrelevant.

"You were wrong," she said to him afterwards, her voice devoid of anything beyond fatigue, weariness. It was so difficult to walk, leaning all her weight upon a thin wooden cane.

"I was," he said. His voice was childish in its sorrow. "Youare still, after all."

To be continued.

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