The Angel of Music
by aeipathy.
Notes: Thank you to everyone who reviewed the last chapter; I was a bit worried about Briand. It's always a bit uncertain when a new character is introduced, especially one whom you know isn't going to last very long. I've done my best with him, in the short of amount of time that he's had, and I hope I've set things up properly for what's going to happen next. Thank you again -- I really do appreciate your reivews!
Part Seven
As it turned out, marriage was exactly as Giry had imagined it; following the elaborate procession of the wedding itself, which had taken place in a small chapel somewhat close to the Opera, everything seemed to settle into a comforting, inescapable calm, a calm in which the days seemed to melt together – so similar was one morning, one evening to the next. Briand, who worked at his father's shop, would leave promptly every morning and return home at the same time every evening.
However, Giry found this monotony soothing, much in the same way she had found her monotony with Erik soothing – it was a way to distract her thoughts, to keep her from thinking of her lost chances. Briand was courteous and kind, and he doted on her constantly; at times it was almost irritating, but for the most part, she enjoyed watching him. She, who had little experience with men, had less with gentlemen, and despite his humble breeding he carried himself with an air of gallant sophistication, a refinement that was as mild and unassuming as the pale glow of his eyes.
Additionally, his patience with her seemed to know no bounds, and for this Giry was grateful. Somehow he seemed able to sense that the internal pain caused by her accident was far greater than any physical pain she had so far endured, and so he never spoke of her injury aloud, nor of her history in the ballet. He was unendingly sensitive to her situation, particularly to her physical impediment, and he would slow his pace so that she could walk beside him and hold his arm.
She gave herself over to the life of marriage readily, more than eager to escape the constant torture of living in the dormitories of the Opera Populaire, where she had been forced constantly to watch the other girls in their nimble flight. Now that she was able to put them behind her, she did so with no misgivings.
Shortly before her wedding, she had gone to the cellars of the Opera to speak to Erik for the last time as an unmarried woman, and this time, he had not appeared immediately near the entrance in order to offer her his arm and help her down to the bowels of the catacombs. She walked alone, leaning heavily on her cane, navigating the twists and turns of the cold stone as easily as if she were recalling the features of a childhood friend, and before long she had come to find Erik. He was not drawing, or playing his violin, or scribbling away in a blank book; on the contrary, she almost missed him, he was so still and silent. Clearly he had been practicing music, before he had heard her approaching – the moment her footsteps reached his ears, he had left the bow and violin abandoned on the desk, covering old sheets of music, and had raced across the chamber to perch on the rocks as quickly and silently as a shadow.
Upon sighting him, she had stopped, less startled than she likely should have been. As he tended to do whenever they spoke of unpleasant things, or when they quarreled, he sought to be as high above her as possible – he could not bear the possibility of looking her in the eye, and instead he roosted in the space between the boulders and the curved stone wall, hiding in the shelter of dank darkness. She had brought him more clothes the previous week, but he had not touched them until after she had left; now, the crimson of the shabby velvet coat caught a faint glint of the candlelight, and when she sought out his hands with her eyes, she saw them clutching his knees, almost covered by the too-long sleeves. Too big, she knew, was better than too small.
"Erik," she had said.
He said nothing and did not move. His eyes were invisible; he had bowed his head to crush the instinct of looking at her face, and his dark hair fell over the mask that covered his deformity.
"Erik, I will understand if you do not wish to speak to me." She pressed her body against his desk, leaning on it with care to take the weight off her leg. "I only wanted to tell you that my wedding takes place next week, and that there will be much to take care of between now and that time. I didn't want you to be frightened when I didn't come to visit you."
He was silent.
Giry swallowed, and the sound of her throat working angered her; it was louder than she had predicted. "I imagine you're still angry with me," she said softly. "I told you that I understand, and I do – I would not have you pretend to be civil to me, in order to satisfy my own guilt."
Again, he made no response, nor any gesture of having heard her; he was so motionless that she imagined he must be holding his breath, refusing to breathe if only to keep her from seeing the rise and fall of his shoulders.
"Erik," she said, and her voice was choked.
He was silent.
"Erik, if you don't tell me that you want me to return, I won't." She let her fingers shift over the edges of the music sheets, feeling their coarse corners pressing into her skin. Despite what he had said, her stillness did not extend to her hands; in moments of pain, of grief, she could never keep them from moving without her consent. "I need you to speak to me. If you say nothing, I can only assume that you – that you will never forgive me. And if that is true, then you have no further use of me. I have no desire to cause you more pain."
He was silent.
"Say something, please." She swallowed again. "Tell me that you want me to come back. Tell me that you need me. If you say nothing, I will know that you feel only hatred for me. If you say nothing, I will leave you alone, Erik, I will leave you in peace – I won't come to see you again."
He was silent.
She had not imagined this. She was very familiar with the desperation of his pride; though she couldn't imagine how it had been able to flourish, constantly stripped from him as it had been in his early life, it seemed stronger than any of his other characteristics, any of his other emotions. It seemed to dominate him with an iron hand, even when his weakness or his need would have him act otherwise. But now, when she, his only friend and caretaker, was saying to him that she would never come back, that she would never see him again if he did not speak – it was inconceivable to her that he would not swallow his hurt, his indignity, and tell her that he wanted her to stay.
Her throat began to close, and the sensation that she hated, the sensation of being on the verge of tears, overtook her with a vengeance. She felt as though she would fly apart at any moment, as though if she didn't hold herself upright she would crumble and shatter on the cobbles beneath her shoes. In that moment she would have done anything for him – if he had only spoken, she would have obeyed any command. If he had told her to break off her engagement with Briand, if he had told her that he wanted her to spend the rest of her life sitting in the graveyard of his catacombs and telling him that she loved him, she would have done it.
"Erik, please," she whispered, "please, tell me that you need me."
He said nothing.
When she left it was suddenly almost impossible to walk, and both legs seemed to fail her – her body seemed as heavy as if she were trailing a ball and chain behind her. At the very corner of the passageway, just as she was about to leave him out of the range of her sight, she paused and turned around, wiping at her eyes with the side of her hand, peering up into the shadows of the boulders.
It was almost impossible to see, but a soft noise carried over to her where her footsteps might have muffled it, and somehow hearing it made her eyes work harder. Erik remained on his perch, huddled almost up against the ceiling, but he had removed his mask and in his carelessness it had slipped over the edge of the boulders and slid silently to the stone below him; and now, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, suddenly he was crying, nearly inaudible sobs wracking his chest and shaking his shoulders with the force of their anguish. The sound itself was only that, only the incarnation of grief, the desperate tears and his attempts to keep her from hearing them.
Giry did not return to see Erik after that; instead, she forced down the longing to go back, the unexpected hole that seemed to form in her when she did not see him, and she busied herself with matters of her marriage. The wedding was a small affair, as was the small house on the edge of town that she and Briand moved their things into, but it helped her to distract her mind and to keep her from thinking of things that could no longer be helped.
Almost exactly six months after her wedding, a change took place in Giry, manifesting itself first in a sudden sickness that seemed to consume her entire body, making her head and her bones ache and refusing to allow her the slightest form of nourishment without forcing her to eject it from her body moments later. Briand called for a doctor, who inspected Giry and informed her with an affectionate pat on the hand that she was with child, and that she seemed in spite of her weakness to be in good condition.
The moment she heard the diagnosis, Giry felt a bizarre sensation in her stomach that made her feel as though something were tugging at her innards and trying to make her collapse in upon herself. Part of it was inspired by joy, she knew; she had never wanted to marry and thus had never planned on having children, but now that she knew she would have one, she found, with much surprise, that she felt the same wonder and anticipation that she was certain all other expecting mothers must feel. However, the pleasure was mixed with fear, not so much fear of the physical dangers of childbirth but fear of the idea that, once again, she would have the responsibility of someone else's life in her hands. She tried as hard as possible not to think of Erik, to keep him from her mind so that she did not become consumed by doubt and grief, but now that she was going to have a child, she couldn't help but feel that she would be losing him all over again – she would be saving someone, shielding and nurturing a life, and dedicating herself wholeheartedly to that person in Erik's absence. It was something that she didn't feel able to do all over again.
Unsurprisingly, Briand was delighted by the news, and he doted upon Giry even more than he had before, certain that the moment he turned his back she would break. His instinct to protect her was almost fierce, unusually so, considering his typically quiet and composed demeanor; he would walk beside her on the streets like he was guarding her, and refuse to allow her to let go of his hand, even for a moment. Giry was unaccustomed to such attention, and whenever it showed itself she couldn't help but smile like her mother had smiled and feel her cheeks burning like roses.
One evening when she sat near the window of their sitting room, attempting with clumsy fingers to knit together a garment for a very small child (a project that was giving her a great degree of frustration), she happened to glance up from her work to look across the room.
Briand had been sitting in his armchair, reading through an old leather-bound book, but he had lowered it and set it in his lap, and now he sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed intently on her as she worked. His typical composure seemed to have melted away, leaving the expression in his eyes bare for her to see, and it startled her; it was nothing terrible, nothing like disapproval, or disdain, emotions with which he never regarded her, even when she forgot to sign her letters as Madame Mortier and put her maiden name instead. On the contrary, it was an open look, a look that went deep into the pupils of his eyes and seemed to come out through his soul – a look of pure love. It was such that it darkened his eyes' shade of blue, and even the light of the lamps could not salvage it and chase the love out of it.
As though startled from his reverie, he gave a small jerk and his eyes seemed to let down their guard, allowing some of the light from the candles to infiltrate their defenses and lighten their color once more. But the look did not entirely go away, even when he smiled at her, and she thought that it never really did go away, so long as she looked into his eyes.
On a snowy afternoon in December, Giry's labor pains began, but they were hardly severe; in fact, the entire process of labor cost her very little and left her surprised but unharmed. Briand sent for the doctor immediately (as he had nine months earlier) and within a few hours, Giry gave birth to a daughter – a tiny, blushing child so beautiful that Giry could think of no name good enough for her. Therefore, she allowed Briand to come up with a name, and he decided to name their daughter after his deceased mother, Marguerite.
Little Meg, as her parents came to call her, was a dear and daring child. Her hair was not autumn leaves, like her mother's, but nor was it golden wheat, like her father's – it was something in between, just as her eyes were neither gray and silent nor blue and warm.
Her face was pretty and sweet, and her body dainty and strong. As soon as she could struggle out of her mother's arms, she began attempting to crawl up stairs and underneath tables, and she put her delicate fingers into everything, from Giry's hair ornaments to Briand's lukewarm soup. As soon as she could speak, she couldn't stop, for it was as though the first word she learned was a password that allowed everything else she had been wanting to say to spill out of her.
And though Giry had not been expecting it at all, all she could feel whenever she looked at her daughter was love – the kind of love that had always been strange and inexplicable to her, the kind of love that looking at Erik would sometimes make her feel somewhere just beneath her ribcage, though she had never been able to identify it before. Meg occupied her thoughts every hour of every day, even when the infant was sleeping, even when Briand was taking her for a stroll so that Giry could rest alone. Only one thing disturbed her – at times she would sit by the window with Meg in her arms, and looking out at the way the clouds swept around the sun, all she could think was that however much Meg needed her, someone who needed her just as much lived and breathed without her care.
Meg was not quite three years old when Briand began to develop a habitual cough, but despite Giry's urgings he refused to see a doctor. It seemed that his instincts to care for Giry and Meg did not extend to himself, for though his cough worsened and his skin began to grow thin and pale, he consistently brushed off any comments of concern.
As time passed, his symptoms only worsened, and whatever sickness held him in its grasp, it began to affect his mind as well as his body. He started staying inside when Giry and Meg went for their Sunday walks, claiming physical discomfort though Giry could see fear in his drawn eyes. Unable to read for long periods of time, as his head would begin to throb, he would simply fall asleep in the sitting room while Giry played with Meg on the carpet. His stomach began refusing certain kinds of food, and if Giry mistakenly allowed forbidden ingredients into his dishes, Briand would be unable to get out of bed for a week, and once or twice she even spied blood in the vomit that stained the basin in the washroom.
Soon he was not able to go to work at all, and though his father tried to support him for as long as he could, Briand and Giry began to suffer from their lack of income, and it seemed that before long they would not be able to afford their home any longer. However, Giry never voiced her concerns to Briand, so worried was she for his health and how her own fears might have affected him.
It was eight o'clock in the evening when she, and Meg, heard a strange thud from the upstairs. Meg, who was sitting on Giry's lap and playing with a small lamb, looked up from her toy, her attention distracted by the unusual sound, and Giry sighed slightly. At times Briand, while sitting in bed, would drift off in the middle of something, and whatever he had been working on would fall to the floor as he dozed open-mouthed. Giry whispered assurances to Meg and stood, setting her daughter down on the chair where she had sat.
"I'm going to go upstairs and check on your father," she said, tucking a strand of Meg's long hair behind her ear. "Sit and be good until I come back, all right?"
"All right, Mama." Meg nodded, but seemed to sulk, disappointed that her mother would not bring her up to see her father.
As she ascended the stairs, Giry felt overcome with fatigue, and the old pain in her leg returned for a brief moment after she bumped it against the banister. Her life, she knew, was better than she deserved; she had a husband, a good husband, and a daughter whom she loved; but at times she felt overcome, as though something weighed upon her more heavily than she could allow. It took so much effort to care for Briand, now that he was so ill (yet still, still refused to let her call the doctor, even for a brief examination), and for Meg simultaneously. But she did not resent Briand, and it was with a kind tenderness in her heart that she took care of him – she thought, though she rarely let herself think of it, that it might even be love. It might even be love that she had developed for him, the sort of love that a woman was supposed to have for her husband, and not the grateful, friendly kind of warmth that she had felt for him when he had proposed to her.
He was ill now, and she could see it, but she knew it would pass, it would lift itself away from him and give him back his vitality and spirit – for now, she could bear his pallor, his voice weakened by the cough, his fingers made to tremble by something that lived inside him and fought desperately to steal him away. For now, she could bear it. Whenever he looked at her, no matter his exhaustion or discomfort, his eyes still filled with that look, that flood of real, pure love.
When she reached the top of the stairs and opened the door that led to their bedroom, she felt sure in her heart that she could carry on, with that knowledge.
As she had suspected, Briand was asleep, his head turned on the pillow, his pale hair – even paler these days than it had been before, but perhaps that was her imagination – escaping to lay flat across his forehead. His eyes, closed, were encircled with shadows, and his lips were dry, slightly ajar. One of his hands lay across his stomach, his fingers half-open as though they had been holding something, and the other hand drooped off the edge of the bed, a book open face-down on the floor below it.
It had been a book this time, to cause the noise. Giry crossed the room quietly and bent at the waist, picking up the book and closing it properly, trying to straighten the pages that had been creased by the fall, and then she set it on the night-table beside Briand's half of the bed.
She moved closer and sat down softly beside him, moving his hand to place it on his stomach, over the other hand. Then she leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss against his cheekbone.
Somehow it was in that gesture, that tiny, momentary touch – the realization that Briand was suddenly, inexplicably gone. His flesh was still warm, but there was a chill beneath that heat, like a fire flourishing on dirt that has already been frozen by winter, and his eyes, closed, did not flutter even when her lips touched his skin. When she pulled back from his face she sat silently and looked at him, her mind racing but her eyes and fingers, for once, perfectly still. She had been wrong, then, and so had he: the disease burning inside of him had been stronger than either of them had surmised, and it had chosen not to let him go.
She reached over and draped her hand across his two, her palm against the backs of his fingers.
And though she didn't know exactly where the words came from, she said softly, "I'm glad." She tried to fight against the sudden constriction in her chest. "I couldn't bear to see you like that for much longer."
She moved her free hand up to his face to gently push the hair from his forehead, and as she leaned down she pressed her eyes tightly shut, tears beading underneath her lashes, so that she did not have to see his face. She kissed his brow, her hand resting on his cheek, and whispered, "Good night, my darling."
To be continued.
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