Jules.
He had always wanted to study her face up close, but circumstances being what they had been for the past several years, there had never been much of an opportunity to do so.
Tonight was different – he had originally planned to attend that evening's production of Il trovatore, but she had sidetracked him.
The thin creature was now lifeless and sprawled out on the cold, slick stone, her skin as white as the greasepaint makeup she had applied during the busiest days of the performance season. And even if her heart had still been beating, she still would have been unable to move. He was currently straddled over her stomach, although his shaking legs, instead of her delicate body, supported all of his weight. Only his gloved hands came in contact with her, the spindly fingers caressing the blank, pinched face with utmost care. However, if his gaze could have been physically felt, it would have smothered her whole body. As he looked at her with frightening intensity, a nasty thought plagued his mind.
She really was an ugly girl.
The thought made him bark out a dry, uncomfortable chortle. He of all people had no right to throw the word 'ugly' around …
And yet, she very well should have been, given her breeding.
Her ungainly complexion; her sunken eyes; her hollow cheeks; her thin, inky hair; her graceless features all wrapped tightly by her skin, like that of a drumhead … Their faces were so much alike that it seemed almost like a terrible, gaudy joke, save for the fact that one distinct feature distinguished her from him.
He traced a thumb down her nose, her one saving grace, and lost himself to a fit of laughter.
That poor, beautiful nose! It was so elegantly shaped that it seemed out of place on such a plain canvas. He had seen it years before, on the lovely face of a woman who had been wandering forlornly outside of the old, ugly opera house on Rue Le Peletier. He had seen it as it sniffed back tears shed over a dead husband – her poor Jules, who had left her so quickly, without a sou or a child to remember him by. And he had seen it wrinkle at the smell of his very own body, his corpse body, as she sadly took his money and told him he could do whatever he wished to do with her, as long as he didn't kiss her. She couldn't bear the shame of a kiss – the rest of her body was one thing, but her lips belonged to a long-gone shadow. And though he himself longed for that simple sensation unlike anything else, he could not bear the shame of removing his mask.
Her crying haunted him to that very night in the cellars, to the point where even hearing the name Jules made him shudder in disgust at himself. After looking at the dead child's nose, the memory shot through him like a bullet to the temple. He recoiled and stepped away from the corpse.
She wasn't supposed to be his. She was like that woman's beautiful pair of lips – she was supposed to belong to someone else, to that weedy bastard, Jules. The attractive progeny of two happy newlyweds …
But she wasn't.
She was ugly, like he was.
She was the physical embodiment of a night that should have never happened. And now she laid dead, blood pooling around her cracked scalp, drying locks of her dark hair into sticky, stiff clumps.
He could take solace in the fact that he wasn't to blame for her spill down the steps, but nothing would ever ease the guilt over the thought that perhaps he could have caught her and saved her poor mother the grief of losing one of the few precious things left to her. She had meant nothing to him, the child, but to her mother …
He heaved a sigh, a mix of emotions raging in his misshapen head, and lifted the body into his arms with as much tenderness as someone such as he could muster. Not that tenderness really mattered – she was dead, after all – but it was the closest he would ever get to rocking a child in his arms.
He would do a service to her mother and clean the girl up, perhaps leaving her body in a spot that wouldn't sacrifice too much of whatever little dignity her mother still had. He felt obligated to make it up to the woman some how, after all of these years of living with the shame of what he had done to her. What else could he have done …
Not much later that evening, Madame Giry gave a confused smile when she found an extra package of English sweets awaiting her in Box Five.