Thanks so much for your reviews of the previous chapter, guys, I truly appreciate your support! I've had a request for more trivia, so here's a little bit for this chapter: The division of the 12th army corps that was ordered to occupy Bazeilles, made up predominantly of Marines and associated troops, was called the Blue Division because of their uniforms. They were some of the best troops the French army had at this point, although as you will remember, the 12th was also full of green recruits and untrained officers like Raoul.

Please note this chapter contains scenes of violence. Keep the M rating in mind.

Chapter 30 – Ein Leid

Christine could not remember when she had last felt so frustrated. Meg had retreated to her room and was stubbornly pinning the Giselle poster to the wall, standing on her bed to straighten it out, taking exaggerated care in smoothing the edges. She was determined to go back to the artist's studio tomorrow. The money for her sittings lay on the dressing-table under the lamp: sixty francs in rumpled banknotes. It was enough for a pair of gloves, more than enough for the gas bill. Christine had no right to argue with it, but the pain she had seen in Madame Giry's eyes pricked her with hot needles of guilt. To make things worse, Madame Giry must return to see Meg's poster, this copy of the little watercolour sketch she had seen in her letters. Christine dreaded the silent stand-off that would follow. It was rare for Meg and Madame Giry to quarrel, but when they did it was always like this: with icy, brittle politeness. Meg would become stubborn and silent, Madame Giry distant and implacable. Sometimes Meg apologised. This would not be one of those times.

It made Christine want to scream. She could half-see herself grabbing Meg by the shoulders to spin her around and say, "This is your mother!" It made her think of Sweden, the stink of seaweed, the cold granite that was all that was left to her of her own family. The unfairness of it numbed her to the very tips of her fingers. People died. She knew that. Meg knew that. Her mother could come down with influenza, could be driven over by a cab, could be killed by some madman... The war was coming closer, maybe even to Paris, and Meg was fighting with her mother over this, over money. Christine thought she would give up all the money in the world for the chance to apologise to her father for the childish hurts she had done him, for every one of her silly complaints, for all the times she had pretended to pay her respects in the chapel but waited only for the Angel of Music.

She could not tell these things to Meg.

"Do you want coffee?" she asked more brusquely than she intended. She had to address the question to Meg's back where she stood on the bed.

"No." Meg gave the poster a final smoothing. When she turned around, her mouth was as small and hard as Madame Giry's became when she was upset. "Don't ask me to give this up, Christine. I won't. Not even for maman."

"I didn't ask," Christine said quietly.

She closed the door behind her and went to the parlour, turning down the lights in the corridor and the living-room as she passed. There was no sense wasting gas; she was no longer a child to be afraid of the dark. When she got to the piano, she lit the two lamps above it and found the letter where she had been forced to abandon it on the divan earlier that evening. There was a vocal line, piano... She ran her hand over the paper. It calmed her a little, even as it made her think of the chapel again, of the music in the walls. A single page. It was so easy to pretend the music came from an Angel, from a friend who knew her.

She picked out the first few bars with one hand, the notes rippling through silence like a handful of skipping stones. She had not played in a long time, but it was not a difficult piece, simpler than anything she might have expected from him. Christine moved the bench to the piano and played properly this time, letting herself see only the keys yielding to her touch, the black and white, alternating.

She forgot herself. The music was eerie, low; she followed it like the great turns of a spiral staircase. When she came to the abrupt unfinished line, she skipped right over the incomplete last bar and kept going, drawing out the theme he had been building, strengthening it, changing it subtly. She added Sweden, her father's violin, the whisper of waves in the winter fog. Once, she got up to fetch more paper and ink, put a line through the three bars that recalled the Moonlight Sonata and replaced them with an echo of the music in the chapel, a child's voice raised in counterpoint. They had sung the same melody at the tomb of her father, and she could not bear to be ashamed of it now.

"Do you know what ein Lied means, little Angel?"

"Yes. A Song."

She crossed out the vocal line, all of it, with a fat wavy line of ink over all his hastily penned notes. Then she wrote a title across the top margin, changing the vowels around: Ein Leid. He would appreciate the variation, she thought. A Sorrow.

When Madame Giry came home, it was very late. Christine heard her making coffee in the kitchen, the muffled, light sound of her footsteps in the dining-room. If Meg came out to meet her, Christine did not hear it. She turned her head to the wall and thought of the music she had written. She wished she could have told her father about it.

o o o

"Chagny, stay put. Keep the men back."

Raoul gave a sign to Cloutier that he'd heard, and the lieutenant vanished again into the near-darkness. The men of their company remained where they were, down on one knee behind the barricade, apprehensive. Raoul crouched behind the pile of paving stones, rifle aimed at the end of the street. Further along the barricade were several Marines; grim battle-hardened men who knew what they were doing. Experienced troops who were not dropping with exhaustion were few, and for once Raoul was glad of it. It meant he was here, instead of with the rest of the army behind the walls of Sedan. Their orders were to hold the village and keep the Prussians from taking control of the only pass out of the valley. Raoul prayed silently that his numb, sweaty fingers would not slip on the trigger.

Time passed slowly as they waited. There was little talk; they were too nervous, too hungry, too sore from the march to waste the energy. Chatelin, a sullen kid from Paris, tried to roll a cigarette; Raoul snapped at him before he could light up. The kid made a crude gesture in response, but obeyed. Raoul did not push it. What authority he had over these green recruits came from his being singled out by the Emperor at Mouzon, and he knew it was tenuous. Even experienced officers were having trouble. There were other units in position closer to the river, Raoul strained his ears but could make out nothing from that direction. Perhaps the enemy were further away than they had thought.

He was not prepared when he saw them. One moment there was nothing, a quiet village, a barricade in the street. Then all at once a gunshot rang so loud Raoul nearly dropped the rifle, coming from somewhere near the river. A hundred more shots, dogs barking, shouted orders in French and German – they barely had time to load – then plumed Bavarian helmets were filling the street and chunks of plaster the size of books raining down on their heads, exploding on the cobbles, the air zinging with bullets.

"Fire!" bellowed the man next to him, a corporal, doing what Raoul knew was his own job. Raoul opened his mouth but no sound came out. All around, others were shooting into the night, hardly able to see enough to take aim.

He sighted at a silhouetted group of Bavarians ahead, braced himself. The gun was alive in this hands, shaking violently. A bullet ricocheted off a stone over his head. It clanged against something metal in the distance, and Raoul's hand spasmed on the trigger, almost accidentally. The rifle slammed back into his shoulder; one of the Bavarians went down heavily. He could not tell whether the bullet had been his. He reloaded.

"Hell!" swore Chatelin, and kept saying it with each shot, like an angry young judge condemning a line of convicts, his thin moustache moving as he took aim. "Hell, hell, hell." Two more Bavarians went down, one clutching his shoulder, but others came from behind them at a run. From the abandoned houses on either side of the barricade, General Reboul's Marines picked them off with rapid fire, but there were more coming, wave after wave.

The smoke thickened to pale grey, almost white, screening the street. Raoul fired indiscriminately now, on impulse, like the others. Everything stank of gunpowder and hot metal; they kept shooting at where they knew the Bavarians were, but could hardly see the man next to them. Above them, in the house which they had thought abandoned, a child began to cry. The high-pitched wail sawed through the noise of battle, discomfiting the soldiers, and it was so out of place there that for a few precious moments the shooting stopped. Raoul felt the others glancing up at the shutters even as he knew it was a mistake; in the next instant Chatelin shrieked in agony and lost his rifle.

Raoul slung his own gun back and dropped down beside him.

The young man was face-down on the cobbles, a black pool spreading around his head. Raoul seized his shoulders to turn him over, and felt himself falling, swaying back, faint with horror.

He had no jaw. The bullet had ripped right through his teeth and only a hinge of purple bone remained on the right side, wedged into red meat under his moustache. He was still alive. Raoul saw the whites of his eyes appear all around his widening pupils.

Then, mercifully, incredibly, he heard Cloutier's voice over the din:

"The park! Move on, Captain wants us to push them back!"

Raoul tore his gaze away from the dying man. The Bavarians had penetrated a barricaded street that led to Montvilliers park; if they seized it, they would as good as have the village.

"This way!" he called out, rising into the smoke that seared his eyes, trying to keep to what cover there was as he and the men struggled across the street. Somebody had broken down the door to the nearest house, where Marines were still firing from above. Raoul and the others ran through the carpeted corridor into some family's living-room, vaulting over armchairs, then out through the dark kitchen into the garden and the back street. Behind them, the barricade was already swarming with Bavarians, but they could not spare the men to defend it until the park was secure.

A shot tore straight through the opened house.

"Close the doors!" Raoul shouted, and two men ran to do just that. For a split second he saw the blue flash of a foreign uniform, and then, horribly, knew his order had been too late. Fool; he should have made them shut all the doors at once. The first man collapsed on the back stairs, his red-trousered leg turning dark. The other managed to slam the door, then crouched down beside the wounded soldier. Raoul hesitated.

"Let's go!" said the corporal, giving Raoul a shove in the back with his beefy palm as though he were not a commissioned officer but another of his young recruits. "The medics will get him; there's nothing we can do." Two men with a stretcher were already hurrying out of a nearby house.

Raoul ran after the others across the across the garden and the back street, climbing through a broken fence into one of the gardens on the other side. They had to get through the next line of houses. There was no sign of Bavarians in this little street yet, but that would not last.

The second garden was obviously well-tended; there were neatly raked paths, grape vines over the back wall of the house, young apple trees tied to stakes for support. It was the apple trees that stopped them. Soldiers clustered around, hunger momentarily more important than the battle, stronger than fear. With their bayonets, they knocked down the little red apples, eating them in two crunching bites.

"Lieutenant!" called one, and threw him a stolen apple.

It was looting, Raoul knew, but he ate the apple anyway, the juice wonderful in his parched throat, washing down the taste of metal and dust. He saw the house was still occupied, for washing had been hung out behind the kitchen window and the geraniums in the window-boxes were not dry, but all the windows were firmly shut and the heavy doors barred.

The men had started breaking down the back door, but Raoul called for them stop. He looked along the side of the house to where the ground rose up towards the park. In the grey morning light, the distance was still hidden by smoke.

"We'll go around."

For a moment he feared the soldiers would refuse to leave the shelter of this house, but when he led the way out onto the next street, they followed.

They emerged straight into chaos. The street was black with bodies and metal: no barricades, hardly any cover except what the fences and walls could provide. Nowhere to run. Before he could give an order, Raoul turned – and saw a skinny Bavarian taking aim.

He froze. The rifleman was as clear before him as an oncoming train. He had reddish hair and long drooping moustaches; his hands were steady and certain on his weapon. Behind him, a solid line of German bayonets was approaching like a tide, step by step.

The Bavarian's gloved hand squeezed the trigger. Raoul thought of Christine in Perros asking him if he played the violin, and started to laugh. He was going to die.

He did not expect the shot from above. As the skinny Bavarian collapsed, Raoul realised numbly that there must have been an open window in that house after all. Gasping, he turned to see a little attic room facing the street. A second shot from it made him whip around; another Bavarian fell. He could not see the man shooting above, but it had to be a civilian; the bullets came too infrequently for the gun to be a breech-loader of the sort soldiers carried.

Counting on the cover from the house, he tried to get his bearings and work out where his company was, how far they were from the park. He turned this way and that, searching for familiar faces.

A chunk of ice ripped through his side. Surprised, Raoul looked down at himself. A patch of fabric on his hip was missing. In the oval hole, he saw bone. Then his leg folded out from underneath him and he fell.

o o o

Erik ran, stumbling across the muddy open fields, no longer seeking cover, forgetting where the road was. Tears and snot leaked from his face, but his mouth was dry and bloody, his chest raw from the wind. Sedan was chock full of soldiers; by now they would be camped in town among the freshly mortared walls of his courthouse, ripping his precious scaffolding apart for firewood. If he turned he could see its medieval fortress beneath the low mass of clouds. Even higher were the hills all around the valley – and upon these were black dots by the thousand, lined up in formation like a diagram from a strategy book. They were Prussians, and there was more of them than Erik could have imagined, more men than he had ever seen in one place. They made the French column staggering into Sedan seem laughable. When they crested a rise he could see them taking up positions against the lead-coloured sky, encircling the valley, installing artillery on the high plateaus, tightening the noose.

If he remained in this place he would be strangled with the rest of them. Architect or no, he would never see Christine again, not even from afar, not even as a stranger on the street. Twice in his life he had been hunted, and twice he had evaded pursuit – but he had been guilty, he knew, he did not deny it. But now? To be caught now, when he had done nothing wrong?

He had to run. Once he reached the woods to the north, he could cross the border into Belgium.

He stopped abruptly and leaned his shoulder into a tree, breathing hard. The morning air was like razors in his throat, and his arm was sore from the weight of the rifle. A bugle played in the hills; the Prussians were moving. He had to keep going.

"I don't want you to go," Christine had said, in his lodgings in Montmartre.

Erik squeezed his eyes shut, but she was still there, in his head, in his body, in the ring hidden in his shirt pocket. He ground his knuckles into the rough bark. It did not help. In another moment he was running again, a fugitive, a piece of filth, not even a man.

He did not know how he lost his bearings. All he knew was that when he found himself in the same damn radish field he had left that very morning, it was not a surprise, and when he saw the dark church spire of Bazeilles ahead, all he felt was a low bubbling fury. Cowards ran away. What kind of coward could not even bring himself to do that?

It was this fury that propelled him through the town, through the fighting, the screaming bullets, as he slipped between Bavarians and French alike in his muddy trousers and shirt. The ground was littered with paving stones and debris; he leapt over them without looking, without pausing. He refused to see the corpses. Nobody could shoot him now, nobody could see him, he existed in a dimension their world could never touch. He was the Devil's Angel, the Opéra Child, the Ghost of Music, he was...

He was lost.

He came to a halt near a fence. This was somebody's garden but he had no idea to whom it belonged. The fence had been smashed; most of the windows in the house were bolted shut. Bravo, he thought. In a town of some fifty houses, where he had lived for nearly a month, he could not find a single familiar wall or a street corner. He was losing his mind.

A gun went off right behind him, followed by an agonised shriek.

Erik turned around slowly. It took an effort of will, as if the sooty air resisted his movement. He recognised this street now, but that was of no consequence.

He had heard that scream before. It was impossible that he should hear it again, here, now, yet it there it was again, as solid as a blade pressed to his throat or a heavy rope in his hands.

With no regard for the soldiers running, shooting among the ruined barricades, he stepped out into the street. He did not hurry. He walked forward with his back erect, not seeking cover, stepping over corpses as if he was the patron god of this place and nothing dared touch him.

"Ah," he said at last. "So it is. Monsieur the Vicomte de Chagny." The noise of bullets masked his voice.

The man who had tried to take Christine from him sat on the cobbles with his body contorted into a monstrous knot over his extended right leg. He was no longer screaming. Erik would never have recognised him in his muddy officer's uniform had it not been for that first sound.

Perhaps the Vicomte had felt someone standing over him, for he craned his head up and stared at Erik with bloodshot eyes, dim with pain. The movement exposed the dark blood pulsing out from between his fingers where he clenched his trouser leg. The gaps in the cobbles were filling up with red.

"You're... Opera Ghost..."

"The same. And you are dying."

The Vicomte's shock was lost in his pain-contorted features, but to give the man his due, he continued to cling to awareness. The army must be truly desperate if they were taking pups like Christine's would-be protector.

Erik lowered himself to one knee, avoiding the blood. With the butt of his rifle, he sent the Vicomte's gun skidding out of his reach.

"My... gun," the Vicomte ground out. The effort made veins stand out on his aristocratic forehead. Erik had to lean in and shout to be heard over the noise of battle, but he would have dearly loved to stand tall over him now:

"You have no further use for it, Vicomte."

"You want ... to kill me. Now ... it's easy."

"It was always easy," Erik said contemptuously, but he could not help a tremor of revulsion at the memory of sharp steel at his throat.

The young Vicomte gave a sharp, ugly little laugh. In the face of a dying man, this laugh was a horror Erik could not have imagined, worse than the bubbling last breath of the stagehand in his lair.

"We are both dead," the Vicomte said, and his voice was suddenly clear, as if the pain had gone. "Look up there, Phantom."

Erik raised his eyes. The attic window was a little black square high above the roiling mass of men, and against its frame rested the barrel of a hunting gun exactly like his own. Egrot's house.

Even as the gun swivelled towards him, Erik refused to believe what he could plainly see. It was not Egrot reloading it. It was his wife.

Pauline Egrot's hair was down around her shoulders over the gun in her thin hands, making her seem a mad, feral creature, something he might have seen in a neighbouring cage at the circus. She still wore her dressing-gown.

She tilted the gun until it pointed square at his face. She was going to kill him.