A/N: The fictional opera referenced here is based on the instrumental fragment ALW composed for Christine's journey to the cemetery in the 2004 film, where she mourns in voice-over the deception of the Angel of Music ("her father promised her…"). The same music was later turned into a melodramatic duet for "Love Never Dies", called "Beneath a Moonless Sky". I really wanted to resurrect the original meaning of the music, and the disaster that is LND provided the perfect "opera". (I can post a complete version of the modified lyrics, if anyone wants them). Massive thanks to my wonderful beta, the multi-talented LadyKate, for her gorgeous French translation.
Chapter 43 — Another Sky
"What is all this?" Christine cautiously raised the lid on the nearest in a stack of boxes that had been piled in place of the orchestra. She and Erik had turned on only the wall lamps set over the mirrors, finding no way to light the chandeliers, but in the muted golden light the little theatre seemed warmer than Erik remembered it, less tawdry.
"It looks like newspapers…" Christine read the top sheet, "The Montmartre Vigilance Committee?"
"Leaflets, from the clubs that hold meetings here." Erik recognised the newsprint from the many publications littering the Gandons' storeroom. "Take one if you are curious, I assure you they would be only too happy to have them distributed. In fact, I believe they dropped a few hundred copies on the heads of the Prussians recently, from a balloon."
Christine looked horrified. "What for?"
"Oh, not as a form of bombardment, I imagine; they opened the boxes first."
Christine blinked, then gave a laugh of pure astonishment. "You're teasing me!"
"A little," he admitted, "forgive me."
But Christine only shook her head, the laughter still dancing in her eyes. "No, I like it." And after a moment, "Did they really drop the leaflets? What did they say?"
"That the French people have no further need of kings, and that if the Prussians were to follow our shining example and overthrow theirs, we would all—"
"Live happily ever after?"
"Something like that."
"It is a good dream." Christine let the lid fall shut, leaving the leaflet untouched, and the two of them headed on towards the stage. "And stranger things have happened."
"Like what?"
She stopped by the empty footlights and looked at him over her shoulder. "Like the almost civilised conversation with Raoul this morning. There was practically no gnashing of teeth."
"Now you are teasing me," he said, frowning.
Christine turned to face him, and Erik forgot his chagrin: she was here with him, in an echoey theatre filled with golden shadows and whispering gas-jets and the rhythm of their footsteps, and there was nothing, nothing the world could do to take this moment away from him.
"Christine…" He brushed his fingertips over the exposed sides of her neck above her collar, making her shiver, making her smile. She had swept up her hair beneath her hat, and Erik found it unendurable now, wanting her free of all bonds, released, soaring beautiful and wild. He unpinned her hat. Christine took it off and shook out her mass of dark curls gratefully.
"Could you give me a lift?" She nodded back towards the stage.
With his heart in his throat, Erik reached out to hold her by the waist. Under the barrier of her corset, he felt her muscles bunch in preparation, a dancer's leap, and then she was in his arms and he was lifting her onto the stage, between the footlights. He followed her up; Christine gave him her hand and he held it, and did not want to let go.
"Here we are…" Christine took in the darkened stage, from the wings to the unguarded crescent of the drop before them. She moved towards it slowly, as if recalling a dream.
They were on stage, together.
She tried a low note, with a depth that made Erik's own voice resonate to her, irresistible as breath.
The empty theatre echoed their chord strangely, and Erik felt Christine flinch from it also, breaking the sound.
She turned, half woman and half burning angel, dark hair and dress silhouetted against the lamps.
"The sound is wrong here."
"A moment," he hold her, "let me try something."
He dropped back to the orchestra and selected a box. Working with a will, he moved it out to the periphery of the barren hall, to where he thought the reverberation could best be restrained.
"Sing," he asked her, looking back, and then heard himself and took a risk: "Sing for me!"
Christine laughed instead, with the walls laughing a chorus, and Erik thought he had grown addicted to that sound of joy, to her unbearable lightness.
"Give me an E."
Christine did, and guided by her voice, he rearranged the boxes and chairs and drapes, until the resonance was dampened and tamed, leaving only what they needed. It was not perfect, but it was good, much better than he had expected this place to be able to furnish.
When at last he paused to dust off his hands and Christine fell silent, he stood to breathe and watched her there on stage. Her face was upturned to look at where in a larger theatre the gallery should have been, but where were only the inverted trees of zinc chandeliers growing down from their stucco ceiling roses. She was human, neither angel nor saint, only a young woman in street clothing and gloves, but there was something sublime in her that filled him with the awe of a miracle. His miracle. Her every movement felt like an extension of his own body, of his heart.
"Erik?" She sat down, dropping her legs over the edge of the stage, quick and unconsciously graceful. A sharp longing pierced Erik from belly to thighs; he knew he should look away, but he did not.
"Could we find something to eat? It's getting late. I will have to go soon."
"Of course." Desire at once shrank to guilt, and the fear returned. What kind of suitor forgot his duty amid the rush of his own pleasure? And yet, and yet, he could barely tear his eyes from Christine sitting on that edge, legs swinging, unafraid. She returned his gaze directly, head tilted a little to one side, as though studying him in turn.
"I'll be back presently — wait, Christine. Wait here."
The moment he had her assent, he flew out towards the street, hoping the shop he had in mind still remained open, thinking only to be back before the clock could impose on her the duties of a woman towards her family and herself. Her time was not her own; with Meg's artist's fees their only income, Christine had taken upon herself the majority of the work of keeping house, and much as it pained Erik, there could be no way around such things. Not until this was over. He allowed himself to daydream of better days while gathering what food he was able to buy; dreams both ludicrous and seductive of lavishing upon Christine every imaginable luxury, but in those visions of happiness and plenty he could not see himself.
Summer preserves, chocolates, wine… A peculiar time this was, Erik reflected as he brought the basket back with him, when a man with sufficient means could buy any number of small luxuries, but not the basic foodstuffs from which one might hope to make a meal. No cheese, no meat, no butter. The bread he had managed at last to find was more bran than flour, and a dubious shade of brown, but at least it smelled fresh.
The theatre was even darker inside than he expected.
"Christine?" He crossed the murky foyer and opened the inner doors to the theatre.
And stopped.
The music that captured him was everywhere: in the walls, in the floor, in the empty air, in his mean little basket of victuals; in his hands, his chest, his mouth. It took all his strength not to let the food smash on the worn marble floor.
Christine was singing. And she had done something to this space… Erik looked around, and saw above and in front of the stage, upon the acanthus leaves of decorative pilasters, several frilled umbrellas that must have once been props, suspended upside down like the baskets of so many balloons. Behind Christine was a pile of leaflet boxes and a ladder. Erik felt nauseous at the thought of her climbing up there with the damned umbrellas, but even so he had to own the effect was spellbinding.
Christine broke off when she saw him, and Erik felt the cessation of sound like the loss of one of his senses.
"What do you think?"
He heard a harsh rasp from his own chest, mourning the end of that music. He barely recognised his own speech:
"I brought some food. Wine."
"Oh… Thank you."
Christine knelt at the front of the stage and accepted the basket from his hands as Erik lifted himself up to sit beside her. She had removed her coat but she was warm; the brush of her hand against his was life.
"It doesn't work?" she said, crestfallen.
In response, Erik could only gaze at her in wonder, struggling to find the words for what he had just heard. Christine's delicate brows quirked a little, uncertain of his verdict.
"How did you know?" he asked at last. "Those umbrellas…"
She shrugged. "I saw what you were doing before. But the ceiling here slopes up and the sound disappears too soon, it needed something to stop it. It works then?"
Without warning, he leapt off the stage and clamped his hands upon her waist to whirl her down into his arms. She gave a startled cry, "Erik!"
"You need to hear it yourself."
He held her close like a new bride brought to the threshold of his home, real and awake and warm in his hold, and carried her to where he had stood before. He set her down near the back of the hall. She brushed out her crumpled skirts, still looking at him doubtfully.
"This far back?"
"Yes. Right here. Listen, Christine, listen to what you have created."
"All right. Show me."
Erik returned to where the basket of provisions rested near the footlights, vaulted up and took a few steps upstage, judging the place. His boots struck the boards, setting the beat. Christine was a slight lone figure in the back, but the entire room, the lamplight and shadows, radiated from her and returned towards her, filling Erik's vision completely.
He drew a powerful breath, and saw Christine's eyes widen in that split second before the sound was born: she caught an answering breath, waiting for him to sing — and then the tide of music descended upon him and, exultant and terrified, he yielded to become its instrument.
He sang opera, a Meyerbeer aria unabashedly magnificent in scope and style, grand opera in which he had once dreamed to hear Christine and which had been the daily accompaniment to their lives. The import of the words did not matter now; only that there, on the other side of the empty hall, stood Christine, and that he knew she caught every note within the magnificent sound she had uncovered in this place, with the very walls singing for her. Erik saw her listening, her arms opening to it unconsciously from her chest, surging towards it with all her heart. The last of his reservations fell away as the music swelled: Erik felt it commanding him out from the twisted shell of his body, demanding all his soul. He could not withstand it, he strode forward, closer, closer the edge of the abyss…
It was then Christine entered the music. She stepped into it tentatively at first, like a bather discovering cold water, but almost at once the music itself changed to meet her. Erik could not say what she did, or how, only that a moment earlier he was drowning and now they were singing together across the empty space, joined by something stronger than the music.
Christine led him in a new duet, walking towards him as she did so, and her words reached him clear and strong. He knew the duet; it came from another Opéra folly, a heartrendingly ridiculous story of love and betrayal — but Christine had changed the words to her part:
Il y avait une place sous un ciel en couleurs,
Où les anges viennent a prier, où la musique pleure
Là, seule, je murmurais mon espoir à la froide pierre,
Mais puis j'entendu une voix, comme la mienne solitaire
Once there was a place, beneath a painted sky,
where angels came to pray, where music came to cry
I whispered my hopes to cold, unfeeling stone,
But there I heard a voice as lonely as my own…
Et je t'ais appellée—
And I called you—
He sang his part faithfully, confessing deception, confessing sin:
—Et je t'ais entendu,
Et j'ais prétendu
—And I heard you,
And pretended
She responded, but not with the platitudes written for her:
—Et je t'ais laissée faire
—And I let you…
He understood then, and joined her, kneeling before her upon the stage as she came to him at last:
Et avec chaque souffle et chaque soupir,
Je n'etais plus seule—
—Je n'avais plus peur—
Et nos voix s'entendaient sous le ciel en couleurs.
And with every breath and every sigh,
I felt no longer lost—
—I felt no longer shy—
At last our voices heard beneath the painted sky.
Christine gripped his hands, fingers in fingers, knuckles hard against knuckles, and the pain of that joining was the sweetest thing Erik had ever known.
"I prayed for an angel," she spoke and her words made music, "and you gave me an angel."
De la silence du deuil, j'ai entendue ton cri…
Et tu m'as retourné ma voix.
From the silence of my grief, I heard your cry...
And you gave me back my voice.
"Christine," he crushed her to his chest and buried his hideous aching face in the veil of her hair, weeping without tears, every nerve and sinew stripped bare.
"I don't regret it." She looked up, red-eyed, her hands still wound in his. "I need you to know it, I don't regret what we did, not a single note. I never will."
He released her long enough to permit her to climb up to kneel by his side, and they held on to each other with all their joint strength, rocking with the force of the past, the grief they still shared, and the new, searingly bright pain of release.
"Come here," she muttered and, obedient, Erik brought his face to her open palm, closing his eyes to her touch. He stiffened as her other hand pushed at the bandage. He tried his best to keep still against the sting of pressure on the angry sensitised skin of his deformity, but did not manage it; Christine felt him flinch and stopped at once. Erik reluctantly opened his eyes.
"It hurts you," she said in dismay, fingertips hovering at the edge of the linen. "But it did not hurt before, when I touched you there…"
Erik could not bear the anxiety in her voice, the way she watched him for fear that he had been concealing something from her.
"It is nothing." He felt acutely embarrassed by the sorry reality of his pathetic injury. "The flesh is just chafed by dust and cloth. It hardly makes a difference."
"That surgeon was right then. You should not be bandaging it."
Erik looked at her incredulously, but Christine was apparently in earnest. "You have no need of a mask with me."
"No." He drew back a fraction.
"Why? Would you risk pain and infection rather than permitting the air to touch it?"
"Christine…" he said in warning. She made no move to take the bandage from him, but he did not mistake it for surrender. The silence stretched.
"Let's eat now," she said at last, "then I will need to go home. I should be glad of some company on the walk back."
"Of course." There was no question of her returning alone. Erik thought of the signwriting workshop he was still expected to be outfitting, but it would do the freshly plastered walls no harm to wait another day.
Christine opened the basket and unwrapped the bread. She broke it apart and passed him half. "Erik, the clubs you spoke of, how often do they hold their meetings?"
"Daily, I imagine."
"Do you know the times?"
"It would not be difficult to find out." Erik tried a bit of the brown bread; it was not as abysmal as its appearance first suggested. "Why? Would you like to come back again?"
Christine ate the last of her bread and brushed the crumbs from her hands, then stood and looked around speculatively, adjusting her gaze to the space as if seeing it properly for the first time. She looked, Erik realised, like the displaced refugees he had seen haunting the city, sizing up their new home.
"Can the doors be locked?"
Erik glanced out towards the foyer. "Naturally."
"Good," she said. "Because I have an idea."
"Oh? You intend to haunt the meetings of the Montmartre Vigilance Committee?"
"To the contrary. They have little enough use for this theatre. I don't see why we could not share it peaceably." She gave a wistful sigh. "I miss the music, Erik. Don't you? And I'm out of practice. Madame Giry is certain they must open the theatres eventually… It does no harm to keep up the skill."
Erik's skin crawled with an old dread, the expectation of the mob. "It is outlawed, Christine. Theatres, music, dancing: all frivolous and unpatriotic."
"You don't believe that."
"But I do. It is exactly what theatre ought to be. Can you picture anything worse than serious and patriotic dancing? And you forget this is Montmartre; the people here would gladly tear down the Opéra itself as a monument of the old Empire. This is no time for arias."
"They cannot arrest us for singing. And besides, nobody needs to know. We are not staging a spectacle."
"We will be heard. And whatever you believe, it will appear a rehearsal. They will not like it."
Christine picked up her jacket from where it had been thrown over a box and Erik placed it carefully around her shoulders. She lifted her hair clear of the collar and twisted it away under her hat, and Erik could not restrain himself; he reached over with shaking hands and did up the buttons on her jacket, letting his fingers graze the fabric of her dress beneath. Christine watched him do it.
"Erik?"
He could not look at her eyes. His fingers fumbled on the last button, over her collarbone.
"You are frightened," she said.
"Yes." He could not release the button, his fingers were white to the knuckle. If he was caught — he, who had never been seen on the ramparts, who was already the peculiar fugitive returned from Sedan, what hope was there that Christine would not be tarred with the same brush of suspicion, when the spectre of spies lurked everywhere?
"Erik, we don't have to return here. Perhaps you are right, it is a foolish notion."
"It is."
He relinquished the cursed button at last. Then he leaned down and kissed her neck hard, just below the ear.
"Ahh…" Christine made a sound of shock and pleasure, tilting her head away. Erik caught the soft fold of her earlobe against his teeth, drunk on her skin and the taste of fear. He was certain Christine could hear his frantic hunted pulse.
"Tomorrow afternoon. The meeting should be done with by then."
"Yes," Christine said, holding very still, permitting him to nuzzle the curve of her neck, her ear, her cheekbone. Then she turned and caught his mouth, in a kiss so possessive it hurt. The flame of her tongue was music in his mouth, and Erik opened to it with sharp, desperate need.
"I want to sing," Christine told him when they could breathe. "With you."
Late in the evening, when he had at last left her to the comfort of her evening with Meg and Madame Giry, Erik took himself up to his tiny room at the top of the store. Though Jean had said nothing of his absence from the business of building the workshop, Erik saw the new placards waiting by the rear door and knew tomorrow he would have to make good on his promises and install easel and pulleys. But tonight… He turned the key in the lock, heard the click, and removed the key to the table. After a moment's thought, he wound a cravat over the door handle and tucked it over the keyhole. The ewer of water from the washstand was before him.
Erik closed his eyes, felt for the knot at the base of his neck, and pulled.
The mask came off all of a piece, the linen strips gummed together in places by the weeping of raw flesh on what passed for his face. He grit his teeth as he sponged and dried his scars, and applied a liniment that stung like the devil. He cut a fresh length of bandage and hesitated, holding the mask in his hands a fraction longer than necessary. Then he put it on, and tightened the knot.