The Angel of Music
by aeipathy.
Notes: I don't really have that much to say this time around, or that much time in which to say it. I tried to update as quickly as I could, but this chapter was long and emotional for me to write, I suppose. In any case, I want to thank you all for reading, and reviewing; you don't know how much it means to me.
Part Nine
The sensation in Giry's stomach as she looked at Erik was like a combination of all the things it had ever felt before: a gnawing, acidic bitterness, sharp nausea, and perhaps most strongly of all, the vacant ache of hunger. Her hand loosened around her cane, but she didn't hear it fall as it clattered on the stone floor. Instead, unconsciously, her hands drifted to curl around the fabric of her skirts in loose, restless fists.
"Erik," she said again, dumbly. Suddenly everything, including the power of articulate thought, flooded out of her mind. She quickly forgot the fuzzy toy lamb at his side, and what it was meant to remind her of. Her chest filled with a painful warmth. "I feared you for dead."
It seemed he could tell that she was speaking a truth of which even she had been unaware. He watched her silently, his expression unchanging, but it seemed there was a tiny flicker in the eyes behind the unfeeling black mask. He said nothing for a moment, but his right hand moved onto the cushion beside him, and his long, dexterous fingers toyed absently but lovingly with the false wool of the lamb. The thin flesh of his lips, so like scar tissue, jerked again into a tiny, fleeting smile – twitchy like his hands – and then it disappeared, leaving his face hollow and hurt, stony and shifty.
"Mademoiselle," he said again, and his voice was soft, music even when he spoke in low tones. She almost flinched, made suddenly to recall the shy, lilting notes he had sung when she had encouraged him to accompany her playing during those first clumsy violin lessons. He said, "You would do wrong to put so little trust in me. Your Erik, dead? Fallen?"
His faintly mocking tone startled her into a numb search for an explanation. Never before had she felt compelled to explain herself; it was only now, when faced with an older, crueler Erik, that she had lost her prevailing sense of dignity. "No one else knows you're here – you could have grown ill, with no one to care for you. You could have run out of food." She grasped at straws, realizing that she had no idea how he managed, how he lived, on his own – yet clearly he must have found his own ways, in her absence. "You could even have slipped and fallen – or the walls of your own home could have crumbled down upon your head. I didn't know. I – I feared."
Erik's fingers tensed momentarily on the lamb's ear. "I do not fall ill, mademoiselle, you know that," he said simply. "Despite what my appearance would lead others to believe, my constitution is not so weak. As for food, I have developed my own methods of obtaining what I need, and – well, as for the rest – I am not so clumsy, nor so unsuspecting."
His words stung her. She resented him, for saying these things, for seeking to hurt her outright with his own strength – but she knew she had no right to resent him, and that only made her resent him the more.
"You have been so creative in inventing the possibilities of my death, mademoiselle." His voice was shielded by the façade of morbid humor, but there was something beneath it that struck her ears as sharply as a blow. "I almost feel as though you might have hoped for it – as though, perhaps, you were counting on it."
She stared at him, aghast. This was not the Erik she remembered. "How can you say such things?" She felt the need to hit him across the face, to shake him by the shoulders, to bring him back to his senses. "Do not act a fool, Erik – do not suspect me of such cruelty."
The word "cruelty" summoned another small smile to twist his lips, but this time it was a steady one, and when it finally did disappear, it disappeared slowly, taking its time. It forced her to remember the accusation she had placed upon herself, when she had confessed to him her intentions to marry Briand – she had accused herself, then, of cruelty. It had been cruelty with which she had treated him, in abandoning him, but she would never have been so cruel as to pray for his death – not after having worked so hard to save his life.
She looked at him now, a grown man, nearly as old as herself, and for the first time she felt as though she didn't recognize him, as though she needed to second-guess herself – as though this may not have been Erik after all. Tall and thin to the point of frailty, this young man sat regally before her with long sections of hair that brushed to his shoulders and fell lightly against his mask, and these things were somewhat familiar to her; but there was something new about him which was new and frightening – a stiffness, a remoteness, as though the core of him had hardened and was now as cold and untouchable as stone.
Had she done this, then? In spite of all her pride, all her unflinching immovability, Giry felt a momentary weakening of her resolve. She tried to find the right things to say, the right questions to ask, and then all at once her mind cleared – what surfaced was an image of her daughter, of Meg's heart-shaped face, of her pretty blue eyes.
"Meg," she said suddenly. "Erik, what have you done with my daughter?"
He furrowed his brow, though his hand moved more smoothly over the wool of the toy lamb as though he found this distraction to be a reassuring one. "Done with her?" he repeated slowly.
"That is her toy. I know she's here, Erik. Please, do not do this to me." She feared that at any moment she might sink into a pile on the cobbles. Her pride mattered nothing to her now, not so long as her daughter's location, her state of well-being, remained unknown. "I know – I know I've hurt you, I know I've hurt you terribly. And I know I have no right to ask you for your forgiveness, not now. Things have not changed, and nothing has happened to pardon me for my heartless actions towards you. But please, please, Erik – Meg has done nothing. She is only four years old – she had never set foot in any room in this Opera before today. Give her back to me."
Erik became still, but his posture remained straight and elegant, and his eyes, which flicked back upon her, seemed to sharpen and gleam. "You have become afraid of me," he whispered.
She said nothing.
"You have always been a little bit afraid of me, but now you can scarcely look at me without turning as white as a sheet." He closed his fingertips around the tail of the lamb and pulled it slightly nearer to the side of his leg. "You suspect me of such horrors, now – are you so quick to forget the hours you spent with me, night after night, sitting patiently by my side and reading me stories? Are you so quick to forget all the foolish awe and adoration I lavished upon you since the day you saved me?"
Giry's arms shivered, and the tremor spread to her hands and fingers. "Erik," she said.
"I suppose I fault only myself for being insufficiently clear in expressing my feelings," he murmured. "Though the circumstances were nothing of the sort, one would have thought I were some ridiculous usher-boy about to confess my love to a blushing ballerina, the way I always shrank from you, from the very idea of you. No – you need not search for the words to interrupt me, mademoiselle." His eyes flashed. "I understand your hesitance to hear such things, but please keep in mind that I have had very few genuine conversations in the last five years, and so I feel it necessary to make the absolute most of this one."
She fell silent.
"I would like to be able to say that I cherished the idea of you more than the reality with which you presented me, but I fear I would be lying – for the idea of you became the reality, soon enough. The day you freed me from my cage and led me away from the carnage and the captors I had known nearly all my life, I had no choice – I had no choice but to see you as a godsend, as an angel. I thought you were my angel, mademoiselle, for quite a long time: the angel that had been sent to save me. And I did not feel this way only at first, only until I grew out of such childish notions; on the contrary, with nothing to show me otherwise, to prove me wrong, you remained perfect, perfect and good, for a number of years."
He picked up the lamb now and held it in both hands with all the caution of a mother, smiling gently at it. "I was like a lamb," he said softly. "A silly, stupid little lamb. A lamb kept in a cage and beaten by its shepherds, perhaps, but a lamb – for the moment I was pulled away from the gypsy caravan and down into these cellars, I found another shepherd, a shepherd much kinder than any of the others, and I followed her with all the wonder and love of any mistreated, misguided little sheep."
The edges of Giry's vision blurred, and for a moment she wondered if she were slipping through time – if five years had not passed at all – if in fact ten years had not passed, and if she were still the thoughtless little girl who came each night to comfort and read to her despairing, helpless charge.
"Erik, please," she said densely, speaking through the thunder in her ears. "Please give me back my daughter."
But he ignored her, merely dropped the lamb in his lap and leaned forward, away from the back of the settee. His hands were in his lap, folded delicately. "Every day seemed longer and emptier than the last, and every night when you appeared at the bottom of those stairs – when your face appeared like a specter in the shadows – all I wanted to do was to take your hands and kiss them, to kneel before you and worship you like the god that everyone else holds responsible for their own salvation."
Dismayed, she shook her head. "I am no god," she protested in a stifled voice. "I have never been anything but myself, Erik. I have never been anything but someone who wanted desperately to help you."
He looked up at her. "You are lucky I am not a lamb," he said mildly. "For if a shepherd were to suddenly abandon his flock, each and every lamb would die – they would die, along with all their memories of their master."
She felt as though she had been slapped. Worse, in fact, she felt as though he had stabbed her through the heart – but the wound would have been fully deserved. Never in her life had she felt so full of this ache, the soreness of her own guilt, and yet he continued to sit there, looking at her calmly, describing the ways in which she had injured him with scarcely the barest sign of ever having felt the pain of her blows.
"Tell me," he said, and she caught a furtive undertone to his voice. "What exactly do you think I've done with your daughter?" When she said nothing, his lips twisted wryly. "Speechless? Do you find yourself incapable of speaking aloud the horrors of which you suspect me guilty?"
"Please don't," she said.
Erik studied her, and though his words were harsh they were nearly whispered, rushing out of him like soft fire. "You should be ashamed of yourself," he said. "I have told you now more than I ever thought I would have the courage to tell you. I have told you that I thought you an angel, that my heart raced at the very sight of you, at the very sound of your footsteps. Do you think I would even permit myself to dream of laying a finger upon your daughter?" His eyes watched her, penetrating her defenses; he did not blink, and although he almost smiled, the smile chilled her. "No matter what rifts may exist between us now, mademoiselle, she can be nothing but innocent to me. I would rather die than do her the slightest harm."
Giry's lips parted and her breath slid out of her all at once, her lungs collapsing in relief. Somehow, she believed him, and she locked his words inside her heart like a promise she intended to keep for always.
It took her a moment to catch her breath again, and he watched her silently. For an instant his face nearly softened – his eyes nearly showed concern – but then he caught himself, and turned his face away. He looked briefly at the lamb and then fixed his gaze on the far wall, tensing.
"But I cannot claim to be free of guilt," he murmured. "The laws that I obey regarding you and your daughter do not, unfortunately, apply to everyone else."
Giry almost didn't ask. "What do you mean?"
"Would you like to see?" He slowly looked back at her, and then began to speak aloud to himself, quietly, having a one-sided conversation. "Perhaps you have the right to see, you above all others. But then, perhaps it would be too much – you have not done enough to merit that kind of trust, that kind of loyalty on my part. It may be too shocking. Even you may not be brave enough to withstand such a sight."
"Erik," she began, her voice not entirely steady, "what are you talking about?"
His eyes sharpened and returned to her face, returned from whatever invisible sight they had been so preoccupied with. "I will show you," he said then. "You ought to see what kind of friends I have been making, in your absence."
He lifted his hand into the air, no higher than the area level with his shoulder, and crooked his index finger in a peculiar fashion. She watched the strange, beckoning gesture, and almost mistook it as a signal for her to come forward – but before she could move, she saw the reaction occur, as quickly as if his finger had been attached to a thin thread leading across the room. A door which she had previously ignored suddenly came open, and sliding slightly out from inside it, as though supported on an unseen set of wheels, was an open, upright coffin.
The coffin itself was of inferior quality, no better than a cheap wooden box, and the form laid inside it was dressed in plain, shabby clothing. Giry immediately drew back, alarmed and revolted by the sight, and she pressed her hand against her mouth to suppress her gasp. The body indicated that the man had been dead for at least a year, but as he had not been buried beneath the soil, he had been untouched by the wear of rain and insects – his dry flesh clung against his bones like old parchment, his mouth agape, his teeth almost black. His thin hair, every bit as greasy as she had expected, hung in limp strands from where it clung feebly to his skull.
So this, Giry thought to herself in disgust, was what had happened to Anton, the stage man.
Erik's voice shocked her eyes away from the corpse. "Those who are not you or your daughter," he said calmly, "are not treated with such courtesy."
Unknowingly, she looked at him as someone might look at a child who has done something horrible, but something which he isn't old enough to understand is horrible. She could barely form the words to chastise him, for in her mind she knew she had no place to chastise him at all. "Erik, how could you do such a thing?"
"Anyone so heedless and misguided as to wander through my home," he said slowly, "is not deserving of a fate other than the one I would offer him."
There was silence, as Giry tried desperately not to look back over at the corpse of the stage man. Noticing her distress, Erik made another gesture that she caught only in the corner of her eye, and so quickly that she took another step backward, the coffin rolled back into the dark space and the door closed shut over it. She stared at the door for a long second as though disbelieving that, behind its mysterious barrier, the coffin, and the body, still existed – as though disbelieving that they existed at all outside of Erik's own secret world.
Unfazed, he picked up the toy again. "How old did you say your daughter was?"
"Four – four years old."
He studied the lamb quietly, turning it over in his hands, and nodded his head. "She is very graceful for her age," he said simply. "I heard you telling Celeste that you would like to have her dance with the other girls, while you teach them. I think this would be a very good idea – a wonderful way to exploit her blossoming talent, and her interest, at the same time."
Giry nodded wordlessly.
"I heard of the unfortunate death of your husband, and wish I could have extended my condolences earlier. I am sure he was a good man."
Though his voice contained no audible trace of contempt, she felt sure that he meant to hurt her – that his intention was only to make her suffer by mentioning her husband, whose loss still grieved her terribly. Her fists tightened, and she moved forward, limping painfully without her cane and yet feeling none of the pain. As she approached him, Erik rose to his feet, the lamb still in his right hand. He was taller than before, and now she was forced to tilt her chin further back than she remembered having to, and only so that she could look him in the face.
And his face – the mask was in the way, she could not see it. She could barely see his eyes. Her mind was blank as a slate when she lifted her hands, and as there had been no thoughts for him to read, Erik was entirely unprepared when she removed the mask from his face.
"No!"
The cry escaped immediately from his lips, before any other part of him reacted, and the sound of his voice lifted in panic made the blood in Giry's veins change direction. She almost dropped the mask to the floor, but she was unable to, for his hands were faster – the lamb having fallen from their grip, they came out of nowhere, seizing the mask from her and pressing it to his face, and even before it was properly secured his left hand flew into the air, poised in position to strike her.
To her own surprise, she did not flinch; a part of her expected his blows and would have welcomed them. The sight of his face, for the first time in over a decade, was enough to drive all feelings and thoughts from her brain and, in spite of herself, make her want to die.
Somehow it was worse, far worse, than the sight of the stage man's corpse had been. It was worse than anything. She had been granted only an instant to look, but perhaps that had been too long. The mask, smooth and sculpted, gave him the solemn, narrow-eyed appearance of a black marble statue, its lines long and straight, its edges crisp – but the reality was so very different. His face was not precise, not a measured thing – it was unruly and ruined, what he had once called one of God's mistakes. She remembered the flattened ridge of his nose, the empty holes of his nostrils, and suddenly even the dank stench of the caves smelled as beautiful as a field of flowers – the grimace of his mouth, his thin stretched lips and pointed bestial teeth, made her for a moment forget how well she knew him, made her imagine him ripping her open with his fangs and devouring her flesh. He could have killed her, she knew, in any number of ways, and the most painful of all was simply to let her look at his face.
Again covered by the mask, Erik seemed to struggle in that moment, his eyes wild. He would have hit her, she knew – but then he remembered himself, and his arm drooped and fell to his side, his hand joining the other in pressing the mask more securely against his face. His eyes darted madly, his chest heaving with the great gulps of air sucked in through his mouth. He was like a wild animal.
"How dare you," he hissed, his voice like acid, like poison. "How dare you think yourself worthy to look at my face?"
She let her hands, which had remained hovering in the air, fall stilted and broken back to her sides. "It was wrong of me," she only said, too shocked by him, and by herself, to say any more. "I'm sorry."
"How dare you think yourself worthy, after what you've done?" He too let his hands fall, and he looked at her with hatred from beneath his riotous hair. Through the hole of the mask, she could see the shine of his bared teeth. "No woman is ever meant to look upon a face like mine! One glimpse would be enough to strip her of her soul, of her freedom. Why do you think that is, mademoiselle? Do you think it must be because of how handsome I am?" He laughed then, a loud and screeching laugh, full of pain and rage. "How ironic, that a woman like you, who finds me so ugly, would remove my mask of her own free will! How ironic that the woman who deserted me would finally return, only to make a mistake that would keep her forever by my side."
Giry looked at him in pity, and what she knew to be disdain. They did not surprise her, these silly games of his. "I apologize," she said quietly. "I – shouldn't have done that." She struggled with herself for a moment, with the mechanics of her own voice. "I do not find you ugly, Erik. I have never found you ugly."
"No?" he said mockingly, staring her in the face. "You mean to say that you find this pleasant to look at – that you find this beautiful?" He snarled at her, his shoulders bristling like the back of an angered cat. "I'm sure it would be wonderful – being able to say that you spent all those years taking care of me because you liked to look at me." His voice had lowered, and was stilted, infuriated. "It would be easy, wouldn't it?"
"Erik, stop this."
"Then, even were I as handsome as your valiant Briand, you still would have left me? Surely, then, it was not my face which chased you off, made you leave, you say – it was something else. You wanted a home, you wanted a child – could I not have given these things to you?" He bore down upon her like a predator, his hands in mid-air, always bare inches away from seizing her wrists, her throat.
She stared at him, shocked. "Erik –"
He saw the color her eyes had turned and scoffed at her in disgust. "Do not think so highly of yourself. I am the first to admit my own foolishness, and naiveté – for a man cannot marry a woman, nor have a child, without taking her to bed, is that not right, mademoiselle? And I had no desire to take you to bed, not then and certainly not now. I say with pride that I am above such loathsome desires, which clearly you are not." He looked at her sideways again. "My idea of love, of marriage, was apparently quite different from what yours turned out to be."
At the other end of his stare, Giry abruptly felt unclean, ashamed of herself. She brushed the palms of her hands over her skirts as though trying to wipe the dirt from them.
Slowly his breaths began to regain an even quality, and they grew softer, less violent. Turned away from her, he seemed to recover his composure, and he took a long stabilizing breath, reaching down and picking up the lamb which he had dropped to the floor in his haste. "Forgive me for my outburst," he said in a much quieter voice, his breath still slightly audible between his words. "My temper is something I have never quite succeeded in bringing under my full control."
All she could do was nod, though surely he did not need her forgiveness, not now.
"It is a strange, strange world we live in," he mused, "though we live in very different worlds, now." Lowering the lamb, he looked up, his eyes on her face, and somehow, they had lost all the intimidating gleam with which they had been previously infused. "Marguerite, little Meg – you are truly afraid that I will kill her? That I have killed her already?"
She felt another quake run down her spine, but when she opened her mouth, no words emerged. She closed it again and shut her eyes as well. He was not asking her in seriousness; he did not truly want an answer, not after what he had said before, what he had promised her. There was hurt in his voice, in his eyes – hurt, that she would think it of him to begin with.
"You truly suspect me of such a crime?"
His tone remained serene, as though he were speaking to a child who has been shaken by a violent fall or a petrifying thunderstorm. She lifted her eyes to look upon his face again, upon his mask, and she saw with surprise that he was looking at her sympathetically. She said simply, "I know that accidents have happened, in the past."
"Not that accidents have happened," he corrected her, but still, his voice bore no trace of whimsy. "That I have killed before."
"Yes," she said. "I know."
Erik exhaled, flexing his fingers over the lamb, and looked her in the face again. "More," he said, "than you know."
"I have seen you kill only once," she said, "but I know you've killed again."
Erik looked as though he pitied her. "You know only what Celeste has told you, and she knows very little," he responded. "But I cannot deny that she was right in what she did say." His voice was almost sad, but he succeeded in concealing any trace of it. "You may at last, if you wish, join the others from whom you have always fought so hard to put yourself apart. You may think of me as a monster."
Giry caught his gaze and held it. She said, "You are bitter." When he did not answer, she said, "You hate every member of humanity for what has been done to you, and while you may look at me with pity, you do not have enough mercy in you to stifle your own desires when you feel the want to cause pain. I have seen you kill with no regrets and I do not have to struggle to believe that you will have killed again, and with the same brutal ruthlessness." She took a long breath in a last attempt to compose herself. "But in spite of all this, Erik, you are capable of – you are filled with the capacity for so much more, and there is so much love lying dormant somewhere inside you. You could not kill my daughter. You would not kill her."
Erik merely looked at her for a long moment, utterly unmoving. His voice was still quiet, still the same kind murmur with which he had been speaking to her since he had calmed himself following what he referred to as "his outburst". She marveled at his newfound sense of composure, at how, after five years, he had managed to suppress his childish tendencies to throw tantrums, at least when she was concerned. She marveled at how someone so calm, so held back, could be the same person they were discussing: the same person who was able to kill, and had done so at least twice, with "brutal ruthlessness".
He said, "If I were capable of such a sin, what would you offer me, for her life?"
Again Giry finally released the fabric of her skirts, and her hands and fingers ached with the sting of having been in one tense position for too long. "Mine," she said. "My life, however you would have it."
He gave no sign of whether or not her answer impressed him. Instead, he continued to regard her, his refined hands poised like a gentleman's at his waist; she suddenly remembered the day she had seen his shadow in the rafters from the rehearsal stage, and then the space behind her eyelids filled with a vivid portrait of him at the Opera, in the audience, studying all the other men and arranging himself into their poses.
She said, "I will take responsibility for her, if her presence has offended you."
Erik continued to stare back into her eyes, undaunted.
"Erik," she said. "Forgive me."
His lips tensed, and his right hand seemed to twitch as well.
Giry realized then that she had expended all her strength, all her courage, and at this point she felt so exhausted and afraid that she might at any moment disappear into the floor beneath her feet. She could do nothing else but resort to her typical defense; she could only retreat behind an indifferent pretense, a mask not unlike Erik's – a disguise to give the impression of peace when the reality beneath the surface was chaotic and full of pain.
She took another long breath, almost a sigh, and said, "I will be moving back into the Opera very shortly, as you know, and Meg will be joining me." She ignored the hitch in her own voice when she said her daughter's name. "If you will permit it, Erik, I intend to resume my visits to you in order to make up for my unforgivable absence over these years."
As always, Erik was able to see beyond her mask, and he nodded his head, his throat moving. He said, "I will permit it." He said, "But I have become a busier man than you may remember, mademoiselle, and I occupy my time with much more important things than sketching and playing the violin, now."
"I understand. I will not bother you." She bowed her head. "I will see to it, as well, that my daughter does not bother you."
As her gaze was turned towards the floor, she did not see if Erik made any gesture or mouthed any words above her head, but it was as though he had cast some form of mysterious hex while her eyes were turned away – for all of a sudden something tugged on her skirt, by her right side, and she nearly jumped a mile. When she whirled around, she saw her daughter, unhurt but wide-eyed with curiosity and perhaps a pale shade of fear, at being in such a dark, frightening cavern.
"Meg!" Giry couldn't help herself – all of her tranquility was swept away in the largest flood of relief that she had ever known. She threw her arms around her daughter and lifted the child off the ground, embracing her more tightly against her chest than she would ever have done normally. It was only with all her strength that she managed to keep herself from bursting into tears.
"Never do that again, Meg – never go off alone in a strange place without telling me first! What were you thinking?"
Meg looked at her with an annoyed frown, absently pushing at her mother to escape the fervent kiss which Giry pressed against her forehead. "But Mama, you talked for so long – I got so bored. And Monsieur said he would show me his house – I wasn't alone."
Giry finally managed to calm herself down, but she continued to grip Meg tightly in her arms as she slid her eyes away from her daughter and back onto Erik. He had been watching them expressionlessly the entire time, giving no indication of surprise at Meg's sudden appearance, which only enforced Giry's incredulous suspicion that he had somehow conjured her out of thin air. Additionally, Erik had retrieved the toy lamb, and with a smile, he held it out to Meg, saying, "Little Meg is quite right; though I suppose that next time I must ask your mother's permission before I give you a tour of the cellars, mustn't I?"
Meg took the toy and smiled back at him, shyly. It seemed she had taken quite a liking to Erik during whatever exchanges they had been able to have. After all, she had no idea that he had killed – she had no idea that he had a loathing for all children, that he was able only to remember their screaming and laughing on the other side of the bars of his cage.
Erik's eyes flicked back onto Giry, and his smile broke and then disappeared. "Forgive me if I do not escort you and your daughter to the exit, mademoiselle," he said, for Meg's benefit. "I have a great deal to attend to."
She nodded speechlessly, and allowed Meg to slip out of her arms and onto the floor. With a final little curtsy to Erik, the little girl turned and began to run off, but when the lamb slipped from her hands and into a puddle on the stone, she stopped with a cry, temporarily distracted with retrieving it and cleaning it off. Giry watched her open-mouthed, but then turned back to Erik, bewildered.
Behind the mask, Erik's face tried to be cold – it tried so hard that Giry's resolve nearly crumbled into dust. She looked at him for a long time, silently, her eyes scanning his face, and tolerantly he let her do it, though he clearly itched to turn away as soon as he possibly could, after having had to show his weakness to her once again. Giry reached out and closed her hands around Erik's, drawing them towards her. He flinched violently and looked at her with murderously shocked eyes, clearly forced to stifle his first instinct, which was to snatch back his hands or strike her across the face.
All I wanted was to take your hands and kiss them, to kneel before you and worship you like the god that everyone else holds responsible for their own salvation.
She lifted his hands to her face and pressed his lips against his palms, more cautiously and gently than she had kissed Meg's irritated face. She could feel a tremor shake his fingers and run up his arms, a tremor of fear and disgust as though he had touched something wretched or filthy, and without looking up she knew that he was staring at her in horror, that his lips had fallen open and that he was struggling to think of something to say, a curse with which he could chase her off. She released his hands and he drew them back immediately, but did not curse her, and did not hit her. She looked up into his face and said, again, "Forgive me."
He said nothing, but that was thoroughly acceptable to her; the sounds of Meg swiping at the wool of her lamb with her sleeve were more than enough for her ears at the moment. Giry looked up into his face, trying to fight against the tightness in her throat. She said, "I will spend the rest of my life trying to give you back what I have taken away."
He began to speak, but his voice failed him, it came out small and broken. He tried again. "The rest of your life," he repeated. "You are so willing to promise away the rest of your life to someone like me?"
Somehow, Giry smiled. "The moment I made up my mind to save you, I knew I was making a choice that would forever change my life. I have no reservations now."
Erik might have faltered then – she could see in his eyes that if he were at all to come apart, to drop his guard, it would have been at that moment. His eyes seemed too large, about to swallow up the mask in front of them, and they had suddenly grown pink and filled with moisture, but he made a strange noise in his throat as though trying to clear it, and the redness faded. He looked at her again, for a long moment – it seemed that he was testing her, searching her for falsehood – and finally he nodded his head, swallowing a second time.
"Foolish little girl," he murmured, so softly that she almost couldn't hear it. "You always were so much more foolish than you supposed yourself."
But despite his damning words, there was no malice in his tone, only sorrow, and exhaustion. He suddenly looked as weary as though he had lived for a hundred years, and as though he had spent each year of that hundred down in those chambers, an eternity below the surface of the earth.
He spoke, and despite his words, his voice was unexpectedly thick. "It is a great shame." He said, "It is a great shame that you have not visited the Opera in five years; they have been putting on shows of Idomeneo which are quite a bit better than average. And for once, even the vain little dancers have not been tripping over their own feet… unless I decide to step in, of course – and make them trip."
To be continued.
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