Milk-Toast
Ingredients:
Six slices of day-old brioche or other fine-textured bread
1 pint milk or half-and-half (one cup milk, one cup cream)
4 tablespoons butter
I tablespoon all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
Cut the crusts from the bread, and toast it until it is golden brown. Do not allow it to burn. Butter it with two tablespoons of the butter, and put it into a dish large enough to contain the slices and the other ingredients when combined. Make a paste of the other two tablespoons of butter and the flour. Heat the milk or half-and-half. Drop bits of the paste into the milk and stir until the bits dissolve smoothly into the liquid. Heat the mixture until it begins to boil—it will suddenly puff up and threaten to outgrow the pan.
Remove from the heat. Stir in the vanilla extract and sugar until well combined. Pour over the toast. Sprinkle with cinnamon if desired. Serve hot.
Very good and nourishing for children, invalids, and the elderly.
Erik:
Darius brought in my tray. There was a pot of tea on it, with the necessary accoutrements: tea cup and saucer, slices of lemon, a spoon. There was also a small covered tureen. Ayesha followed him, caught up to him, and managed to reach my bed before he did. She sat on my chest and looked up at him with an expectant air.
"If you would untie me, I could feed myself." I growled. My voice sounded unaccountably rough to my ears, and my throat was slightly raw. Why was that?—I wondered.
"Sir, I cannot. For one thing, you would not eat if I did that, and for another, you would burst my eyeballs with your thumbs as if they were grapes."
"I would not do that."
"Sir, last night you promised that you would, the instant you were free."
"I do not recall saying that." I frowned.
"I assure you that you did."
"Let me state that in another way. If you do not release me at once, I will burst your eyeballs with my thumbs as if they were raw eggs. If you do untie me, I will thank you for it, and do you good."
"If I do not untie you, you will continue to be unable to burst my eyeballs with your thumbs in any manner."
How I despise logic when it is superior to my own.
He put the tray down and uncovered the tureen. A cloud of fragrant steam came up from the bowl, and Ayesha became very excited. She crowded between Darius's arm and the bowl. "Away, you—cat!" he scolded.
"She is welcome to any part of my breakfast she wants. The more she eats, the less I have to. What is it, anyway?"
"I believe the boy said it was milk-toast, sir."
"Then it is cat-lap to begin with." I grumbled.
"As you say, sir." He spooned up a bit of toast and milk and held it to my lips. I took it; I could hardly do anything else.
Nadir came into the room. "Ah. There you are, Daroga. Might I beg you for the dignity of one free hand, at least?"
He came closer, and looked at me with great care.
"Any surprises? Have I perchance grown a nose?" I could not recall the last time I had worn my mask: not since the first night we had come to this inn. I did not even know where it was.
"You are speaking more rationally today." he admitted "and you are not shaking. One hand, then, Darius—after he's eaten. Perhaps when I return we shall risk unbinding you further."
"Where are you off to?" I asked.
"To settle up for the time being. Before I go, are you satisfied with this inn, or must we go on to another one again?"
I looked around. It was not an unpleasant room. The furniture was pale beech wood, and pleasingly simple. Some one had put a pitcher of irises in shades of white, yellow, and purple on the mantle. The walls were painted a soft willow green, the curtains at the window and around the bed were clean and fresh, and the bed itself was more comfortable than most. The food was…inoffensive. I don't care much for food. And Ayesha seemed to like it here. From where I lay, I could not see much out of the windows except part of a grove of fruit trees.
"I am tolerably content with it." I finally pronounced. "But why are they making you pay in advance?"
He was lost for words, and gaped for a moment. "Erik…we have been here over a week. You've lost track of the days, haven't you?"
"Over a week—It can't have been!"
"It's true, sir. You only stopped screaming the night before last. We had to gag you for three days, you were making so much noise."
That explained my throat. "This room looks and smells entirely too clean for a room I've been occupying for an entire week. Especially in the condition you say I was in."
"We moved you to this room last night so the maids could clean your old room." said Nadir. "It was noxious in there."
"Where, precisely, are we?" I asked.
"In the Grey Goose Inn, in a little town in Picardy called Evrondes, one train stop away from Rheims." Nadir replied.
He left, and Darius continued to feed me as if I were a child. Ayesha kept me from getting furious with her amusing antics—she batted at his hand, caught at his arm, and tried every seductive charm she could, to get at the spoon and the cream that was rightfully hers, all hers!
He had just undone the rope securing my right hand when Nadir returned.
"Undo the other restraints." he told Darius. "Can you come with me to the window, Erik? There is something you must see."
"If I'm going to expose myself at a window, I want my mask," I ordered. Darius got it for me. I was not literally exposed otherwise; I was dressed in a fairly fresh nightshirt.
I could make it to the window, but I was glad of the chair Darius brought for me. Nadir went into my trunk and located a pair of opera glasses, small binoculars enameled by a Russian master goldsmith. He brought them to me, and gestured to the garden.
Whoever had designed it and laid it out had a well-developed aesthetic sense, and an unusually creative one. It was a potager garden, laid out in plots, and devoted to growing food and useful herbs for the most part, but the colors, heights, and textures of the plants were carefully chosen and perfectly combined. The paths were narrow slabs of slate, and the tallest plants were around the outmost perimeter; then the plantings steadily diminished in height so the shortest plants were centrally located around the sundial, at the heart of the garden.
"Do you see those three people—the woman, the girl and the child? They're sitting on the ground to the right of the sundial. The child has his back toward us."
"Yes."
"Look at the woman. She's wearing a wide-brimmed hat."
"Yes, I see her. But why?" She was wearing a faded green skirt, a white blouse, and a dust-colored straw hat. Freckled and blue-eyed, that was my first impression. A thick plait of hair, either light brown or dark blond, hung down over her shoulder. She had wide cheekbones that curved down to a generous, wide, full-lipped mouth. That gave her face harmony and beauty.
She was beautiful—until she grinned. Her grin was dreadful. That grin ruined that impression of beauty—it was as if the finest full-blooded Arabian horse were to open his mouth and bray like an ass.
Her grin disclosed great wide expanses of her pink gums, and an upper jaw full of crooked teeth, askew every which way. It was ridiculous—it was offensive—it robbed her of the mystery and enigma that is beauty, and made her an utterly ordinary peasant girl.
She and the children were picking strawberries. Her figure was generous, too. Her breasts strained against the fabric of her blouse, when she leaned over to put a handful in the basket they were filling.
"I see her. Why am I looking at her?" I repeated.
"Do you know her?" he asked me—anxiously? Why should he be anxious?
"No. I've never seen her before in my life. Why?" I lowered the glasses and looked up at him.
"You are certain? Might you not have met her, however briefly, some night, four or five years ago?" he pressed.
"No. I would have remembered her. She'd be a lovely creature if it weren't for those snaggle teeth."
"Keep watching them," he urged. "Watch the boy. I only ask because it is important."
"Very well." I raised the glasses again. They were talking and laughing while they picked berries. The woman and girl were obviously related. The arch of their brows—the color of their hair—something about their chins—and, unfortunately, their teeth, were too similar for it to be otherwise. Sisters, perhaps, as the woman was too young to be the girl's mother.
The boy still sat with his back toward me. His hair was darker, and he had on a shirt of weathered red. The woman looked around, spread her hands in a gesture that said, "No more!", and then pointed to another part of the strawberry patch. They shifted position—and I saw his face…
I saw his face, and it was like looking back through time at myself. He, too, had a hole where a nose should have been. He, too, was a living dead boy. He, too, was horribly and pathetically ugly—I could see everything about his face.
He was not wearing a mask…
He was not wearing any mask, and the three of them were sitting, picking strawberries and talking as if he was just like anyone else…
…and he was not unhappy. He smiled, yes, smiled, at something the girl said, and then the woman beckoned to him. He leaned over. She licked her thumb, and then rubbed at something on his face, some smudge or mark. He said something—I could not read his lips at that distance—and she nodded, smiled, and then leaned in to kiss him on the brow.
Oh, happy boy! His face lit up at that gift…
I fell back in my chair. The opera glasses slipped from my grasp, which had become as weak as water.
"His name is Erik also," said Nadir softly. "His mother says he was named for his father—her husband."
"The woman you had me look at—", I began.
"Is his mother, yes. She says of her husband that he is not here. And you say you do not know her, and have never known her."
"I do not. Before you ask, I have never been so intoxicated, not by wine, morphine or hashish, that I could have bedded her and forgotten it, let alone married her. I may have lost track of time during this past week, while you weaned me off morphine, but I have never undergone such a deprivation before. And surely I could not have been capable of that sort of focused exertion, even if I had?"
Besides, there was only one woman I had ever touched; only one, and only once, at that.
Christine…"No," considered Nadir.
"What is she claiming as her married name?" As if that could shed any light on the matter.
"Touchet. Madame Anne Touchet." answered Nadir.
It was my true last name. How could she be going by that name? I had not even told Christine. Nadir did not know it. There were perhaps two people still breathing, not taking that young woman out there into account, who knew me well enough to associate that name with me—Mademoiselle Marie Perrault, my mother's best friend, and Doctor Etienne Barye, who had once wanted to marry my mother.
This was utterly incomprehensible to me.
"He has your voice, as well," added my friend.
Ayesha chose that moment to leap up on the windowsill, where she pranced and twisted back and forth, yowling to go out. I gestured to Nadir, who opened it for her. She leapt out and sped across the garden toward that family grouping. "Leave it open." I wanted to hear them.
"Oh, look," cried the younger girl, "it's Her Majesty come to bid us 'Good Morning!'"
"Hallo!" said the boy, "Look at her, she's got cream all o'er her chin…."
It was awful. Their abuse of the language was in keeping with those dreadful crooked teeth. They, both of them, —no, all three of them, I realized, as they greeted and praised my little cat, had provincial accents so thick they could be cut with a knife…and they spoke like utter illiterates.
"He doesn't have my voice." I denied.
"I understand that Edison has proven, with his recording device, that a person sounds different to himself than he does to others," ventured Nadir, "but allowing for his age, his voice is like yours. It has the same beauty."
"But I do not sound as if I were talking through a mouthful of mush! Listen to them—it's terrible—it's vulgar! Have you found out anything about her—his mother?"
"Nothing—except that she is an excellent cook."
"A cook?" This was only getting worse…
"Yes. She is the cook here, and she is well regarded and highly respected. I have found out no more than that because caring for you has taken up every waking hour of our lives." He did not allow me any chance to reply to that, but turned to Darius "That woman put a hundred francs extra on the bill for special meals!"
"Sir, consider the fare we have been eating. Those pigeons last night were inspired—."
"I will long remember that lamb," said Nadir, in the tones of one recounting a religious experience. "And the roast duck. Her rice dishes are profound, and I do not use that word lightly."
"That chickpea stew was—." raved Darius
"Her cooking is not important!" I shouted. How dare they banter like that at a moment that my world was reeling about me!
"If you had any palate at all, you wouldn't say that," said Nadir.
"I do not care. Daroga, you are, at heart, still an investigator. You are going to help me discover who she is—and how she became the mother of that boy."
Because if he were my son, then that cook was not his real mother. His real mother was, had to be, Christine. It could not be otherwise.
I had to find out.
A/N: Picardy is a province in the north ofFrance. It has no town called Evrondes, so far as I am aware, and if there is a Grey Goose Inn in Picardy, it is not this one.
Before I comment on anything, let's take a moment to contemplate Erik's situation at the beginning of this chapter. Tied down hand and foot to a bed—without his mask—wearing only a single garment, that can be pulled up easily—utterly defenseless, and unable to prevent anything.
MMMmmm.
Bit warm in here, isn't it?
Check out my bio/personal profile. There's a pic there that looks rather like the Eriks of this story. Erik senior wears a full-face mask. I think his smile is rather cute, actually….
Well! Queen Ame, I agree completely. He would not abandon his wife to run off to Paris and fall in love with Christine. This is happening after the movie. Hope this chapter clears up a few things for you.
Thank you, Lexi—hang in there!
Many many thanks to flamingices, m-oquinn, Mia26, Erik for president, Sat-Isis, and Ellen!
Still stalled on Professor Xavier. I can't get them out of the current situation! AAAaack!