The Devil's Bride

It took half a day to get to Liverpool, as there were few ports of call. You bundled me into a corner of a bunk in the men's barracks, wrapped up in a cloak so that I looked like a small black package. "Stay here," you said. "There are a lot of people coming and going on board, and the fewer who see you, the better." When one or other of the men asked about "the boy," all you said was "Seasick," in your gruffest voice, and they moved away.

In the blue afternoon, we saw Liverpool from far off, and it not only dwarfed LeHavre; it was covered with a pall of dense dark smoke besides. "What is it?" I whispered to you, trying to imitate your trick of motionless voice. "Is the city on fire?"

You arched your head a little, which for you passed for laughter, and said, "That's coal smoke from the factories, and it pours out night and day."

The crowds, the noise, the bustle almost knocked me over. We came to a dingy hotel, with ragged lace curtains on the windows, and trash piled up near the steps. Two women lounged on the stairs; their painted faces and red-dyed hair served as their membership badges of the universal sisterhood.

"Give us a kiss, love," said one, looking right at me. I had to strain to understand the accent so different from the Welsh.

"Not you, guv'nor, you old fart, the young one."

My first instinct was to cast my eyes down, but you shoved me in the small of the back, hard, and my eyes came up. Boldly and insolently I looked at the first tart, with as rude a stare as I could muster.

"Oh, he's a bright penny, ain't he? Got no hair on him at all, yet."

"I bet he's got a few somewhere else. Eh, love? Want to come on and show me?"

We swept past the laughing women, and as your body brushed past mine, it shook with suppressed laughter.

In the faded brown room, I threw my head back and cried out, "Did you see them? Could you believe it?"

"Quiet," you said, "You're still on stage; these walls are thin, and you're going to disappear tomorrow, anyway. Now I'm going out to buy our passage before the bank closes."

Before I could protest, or ask exactly how I was going to "disappear," you slipped out of the room. In the small bathroom was a clawfoot tub. Oh blessed relief, a bath. I can actually take off my clothes, unbind my poor chest, and have a bath. A dozen girls in the Opera dormitories used one tiny bathroom. Even my mother, with her own room at the Opera, still shared a bath. I wondered if all the rooms had the same – if so, the English must be among the most well-scrubbed people on earth.

Then I looked the bathroom over, and remembered one unpleasant part of my Wales visits. English bathrooms had no bidets. How was I supposed to keep myself clean?

I put that problem off till later and threw the hateful cloth that bound me to the floor. Sinking into the tub, I rubbed soap all over, rolling in the water like a seal, until wrinkled and cold, I could soak no more. Then I sorted through my meager belongings, and stared regretfully in the mirror at my almost-shaven head. Without long hair to comb and braid, I didn't know what to do with my hands.

Curled up on the bed, trying to nap, a snare of longing for my mother wrapped itself around me. You wouldn't want me to write her, I knew, but her worry seemed to reach and tear at me so that no sleep came.

It was her greatest fear, that I would find you. Everyone in the Opera knew more about you than I. Whenever someone would bring you up, mentioning that they'd seen you in the scaffolding above the stage in a flash of sweeping black, or moving through the corridors only to disappear suddenly into a wall, I would follow them with questions, wanting to know everything, because my mother refused me everything.

Her faraway glances didn't fool me, either, when I grew old enough to recognize them for what they were. In one summer, it seemed, I learned about men. The line of a man's jaw or the slope of a shoulder sent tingles all through me. I knew what a woman's face showed when she looked at a man, and my mother's face said clearly to me that she pined for no "ghost."

One day, when I had just turned fifteen, when my legs smarted from the bruises she left from flicking them with her cane, when I refused to go to rehearsal, when her stares and sighs drove me murderous with irritation, I said bluntly, "He's my father, isn't he?"

She whirled around and her taffeta gown snapped like a rifle shot. "Who?" she said between gritted teeth.

"The man you're always looking out for in the corridors. The 'opera ghost.' The one you call the 'phantom of the opera.' Everyone calls him that now. "

She advanced on me with terrifying madness in her face, so that in my fear I barely felt the slap that jarred my head and dimmed my sight. "Never," she said. "Never even think it," and then cried with dry, strangled sobs. She looked like a child herself, huddled on her narrow iron bed in her mausoleum of a room.

I bathed my flaming cheek and never spoke of it again, never spoke to her of you again. You hung like a black shadow between us, and from that day on I decided to find out everything about you, to spy into every corner and lift every cobweb, to tease out your secret, the secret that must be so closely linked with all of hers.

I'm not going to write her, I thought, because I don't trust her. I don't trust her with you. Now that I'm with you, she has no reason not to hand you over. She wouldn't need thirty pieces of silver.

It was deep into the night when you came back to the hotel with armloads of packages. I jumped out of bed to look at them, and you showed me bread, wine, some sliced meat, and figs for dinner. The larger packages, though, contained two dresses, some underclothes, and a brown wig with a veil attached. The first dress was brown, gusseted at the front and trimmed with wine velvet; the second was a sober grey, like something a governess or housekeeper would wear. "What did you tell them when you bought this wig?" I wondered, but still speaking very quietly.

"That my sister had scarlet fever and had lost her hair."

"You had this whole route planned out, didn't you?"

"I always leave myself a back door," and you said no more about it. The meat was greasy and tough. We washed it down with wine and you said, "Get used to it. English food is barbarous."

Then you poured the rest of the wine for us, "Unless you want to drink it for breakfast," and when we finished, I lay back on the lumpy bed with limbs warm and heavy with wine and the coal fire. On the stained brown wallpaper, olive-colored hummingbirds stabbed idly at beige trumpet flowers, fading into mushy patterns as you dimmed the gaslights.

"You didn't get me any nightclothes," I said, half-drifting away. I thought you would say something facile like, you won't need them, but instead you looked stricken, because it was something you had forgotten, like a missed dance step that could throw off the whole performance. I rummaged through the pile. "No pantalettes, either?"

"Pantalettes?" you said blankly.

"You know, pettipants, for under the chemise?"

You shrugged as if to say, what for?

"Girls in the country don't wear them, but in Paris … It's all right. I'll just wear the chemise to bed, and I can do without pantalettes for now. It'll be less to wash, anyway." My head waved and my legs felt so heavy. I was used to a glass of wine with dinner, not half a bottle. Then something floated past me. "You're from the country, aren't you? From up on the Cote-du-Nord? I hear it when you speak. It reminds me of the Welsh."

"That's right. You have a good ear."

"What town?"

"You wouldn't know it; it was a pestilent little hole in the wall."

I opened some tissue paper and drew in my breath at the fine slipperiness of peach silk in my hands. "I've always worn cotton or linen," I said softly. "You didn't have to get this. It's almost too fine to wear."

"It suits your coloring," you said. "Look in the wrapping; there's a cotton one there for you, too."

I ran my hand over the fine Egyptian cotton, almost as delicate as the silk, and edged with tiny lacework. "You have such an eye for beauty," I said, and you really almost did smile this time; I saw it play on the corner of your mouth.

"It's gotten me into trouble before."

I shrugged as I turned and hung the dresses up. I never thought Christine Daae that beautiful, with her sticklike arms and glazed expression. When she started to get strange, and snuck from her bed at all hours of the night or morning, she grew white and gaunt. Jealousy flicked up in me.

"Tomorrow, then?" you said as you headed for the door once again.

"Where are you going now?"

"To my room, of course. Across the hall."

I shook my head, as much from confusion as this strange turn. "You have a room across the hall? Why?"

"Because there wasn't time to marry you today."

I thought back to your fierce pressure against my body, in the dark. "I think you've married me already."

"But not in the eyes of the concierge."

"The concierge thinks you're sleeping with a boy?"

"Don't try to outrun the fox, Meg. This will work if you let me do what I have to. I told the concierge you were my errand boy, that I'd sent you home, and that I needed a room for my fiancee, arriving late tonight."

"Lies on top of lies. At least you could tell me what lie I'm living today. How much attention do they pay here, anyway?"

"Not much, if you're generous with the shillings. But it's better if you do exactly as I say, and don't ask."

Your manner was a little cold as you withdrew. The glow of the wine had evaporated, leaving only a stiff leaden feeling.

"This would be easier without me, wouldn't it?"

You stood by the door, your face closed, saying nothing.

"Do you want me to go back to France?" I asked. "I won't leave unless you send me away. But I couldn't live with it, if something happened to you because of me."

You came over to me and buried your face in my neck.

Say it, I willed. Say it, say it. Say that you love me, but you didn't say it.

You broke from me, and from the smallest of the packages still on the sideboard, you produced a small box, and showed it to me. Within was a plain gold wedding band.

I caressed its roundness gently, over and over in a little circle. It wasn't Christine's, heavy with gems, but instead beautiful and pure and plain.

"This is for me?" I asked, unbelieving.

You nodded. I put the ring to my mouth and kissed it, saying, "I'll never take it off." Nor will I wear it around my neck on a chain, I thought, but some finger lighter than air touched my mouth and the words stayed inside.

You led me to the bed and I thought you would lie down too. I held out my arms to you and cried softly, "Stay, stay with me," but under the covers you tucked me, saying, "I'll be right next door, across the hall." You turned the gaslights down and I watched you slip out of the room into darkness.

Sleep was impossible. I ran through all the reasons you might have left me. I told myself you didn't want to attract attention; that you needed sleep, as did I, and that we would get very little together. That embarrassed me, that I might selfishly want you to stay and lose sleep, get clumsy, get us caught.

What if you never came back for me? The ring sat in its box on the table. I could sell it and find passage back to Paris. That would be the end of my life at the Opera, however. I couldn't go back there, not so humiliated. Mother might not even take me back in. And what if there was a child?

I sat up in bed and black shadows lunged out at me from the corners as I crossed my hands over my womb. I recalled how you had taken me in the pitch dark, as if we were both blind creatures, and after the first sharp short pain you filled me with delight - not so much delight in my body, but delight in my heart, because you clung to me, you rested on me, and because you let me stay with you.

Back and forth I rocked, fearing a child, wanting your child at the same time. How fitting, I thought, that I should end up like Mother, who married at a young age. Her husband went to the Beauce region of Quebec, looking for gold, and was gone for a year. Then Mother had me three months after the man that was supposed to be my father returned to Paris. She never said anything to me, she never did. Did she think I was stupid, that I wouldn't learn to count to nine? He returned to Canada right after I was born and never came back. The letter from the mining company told her that he had died of pneumonia.

At least he gave me a name. In France, your mother's husband was your father, even if he was gone for a year, or seven years. But any child in my womb would have no name for it, if you left me.

It's stupid, I said to myself. I'm being stupid. Why would he do all this, if not for me? Without me along, he could have been halfway across the Atlantic by now. Look how I've slowed him down already.

I woke exhausted to a cold, clear day. After my time as a boy, it felt odd to put on skirts once again. On the bathroom floor I saw the pile of rag strips that had disguised my chest, and I stuffed them in my bag. I'll have need of them if there's no child, I thought, and the cold fear stabbed at me once again that I carried a nameless baby.

At first I was afraid to speak, not wanting you to cuff or growl at me. In the cramped, bare government office, I stared at a picture of Victoria Regina on the wall, and wondered why the English were so willing to marry people. I murmured something to you about it, and you said shortly, "For the fees." Several other couples with luggage at their side sat in line after us. They looked faintly embarrassed and talked quietly among themselves just as we did.

The bored magistrate heard our vows, stamped our papers, and grunted sarcastically as we left, "Shipboard weddings. Half of 'em don't last the passage. At least you made the effort. Most don't even bother anymore. I like to see an older gentleman with a young lady, myself. More stable, they are."

When we boarded the great ship later that day, the British officers inspecting tickets frightened me with their grim faces. You navigated our way through the paper-stamping men and I marvelled at your smooth English, and wondered what other languages you knew.

"You have to help me with my English, or I'm going to be lost. None of it sounds like the English I learned in Wales. They all have different accents."

"We'll speak the Queen's English from now on," you said. "Although in America it will all change."

(To be continued)