A/N: Thank you for your reviews, guys, and for continuing to support this saga. I am puzzled but thrilled to find not one but two apparently longstanding readers who post as Ianthe!
There is a lot in this chapter and I am very, very interested to hear your thoughts.
Chapter 46 — Rations
"Chocolates for breakfast!" Meg said in amazement, then darted a cautious glance at her mother, who was busy pouring out steaming black coffee, her favourite silk shawl draped like wings from her arms, looking for all the world like she had nothing to do with this extraordinary luxury. The heady aroma of cocoa from the open gilt-paper box wafted with the smell of fresh coffee, and it was the Opéra all over again — Carlotta and her retinue of admirers with their boxes of chocolates left forgotten, the ballet dormitories where those stolen chocolates were consumed in conspiratorial haste, and her mother's little room, where together with Christine they would sit drinking scalding coffee and refuse to admit any knowledge of chocolates.
Meg accepted a coffee cup gratefully and slipped into a chair, shuffling her sketches aside. Behind the table, the balcony door was uncurtained and the pale morning light turned steam into white clouds. The edges of last night's sorrows had softened in the light of day, and it was impossible to sulk at Monsieur de Gas' dismissal when her mother had at last seen her art. She would simply have to find another job, that's all there was to it. There had to be ways to survive, at least until the armies from the provinces could reach Paris and free them from this unending limbo.
She took a sip, returning her mother's smile, then nodded at the chocolate box:
"What are we celebrating?"
"Art. And the lack of common sense." Madame Giry set down the coffee-pot and took her own seat, reaching up to adjust the coiled braid at the back of her head. "I made the grave error of asking our guest to go out for bread this morning. He returned with these."
"Madame, if you had seen the queue for the manure-like substance the bakery labelled bread, you would understand. Good morning, mademoiselle."
Meg gulped her coffee in surprise. "Uh. Good morning."
The former Phantom — Monsieur Andersson — came from the parlour to the table and Madame Giry passed a coffee cup to him. The porcelain handle looked flimsy in his long fingers, but he held it lightly and carefully as he set it down. He put his hands in his pockets, took them out again, pulled out a chair, but did not sit.
"Christine?..."
"Is still asleep," Madame Giry confirmed.
"It is rather early," Meg pointed out, trying not to sound like she was complaining. He was her friend's suitor, and perhaps that gave him the right to enter their lives now, but it had been pleasant to have a few moments alone with her mother before Christine woke up. She took a chocolate and bit into it… On the other hand, she reflected, this was a better breakfast than they had had in weeks, and most welcome after a supper of nothing but black tea. She took another. It had marzipan inside. Her empty stomach growled embarrassingly in appreciation.
"I have instructions to convey to you, mademoiselle," Monsieur Andersson looked down at her across the table. "Your artist was most anxious that you are on time for today's sitting."
Meg wished she had not tried to eat that chocolate whole.
"I don't understand," she said in a sticky cocoa-flavoured mumble, and finished the last mouthful in unseemly haste. "He saw my sketchbook…"
"Take it with you. And these." He swept an arm at the previous night's drawings.
Meg's eyes widened. "Monsieur de Gas asked to see my work?"
"Not yet. But he will." He stared at his coffee as if he had forgotten what to do with it. "Art must not be permitted to remain unshared, as useless as a conversation with your own echo. Your Monsieur de Gas will know that, if he is truly an artist."
"He is. But the things in that sketchbook... " Meg sighed, fingering the corner of a drawing. "He must think it a mockery but I didn't intend it, not at all. I just thought it's funny, he sees us dancing at the Opéra, but he doesn't know how it is, not really. So I copied a few of his sketches, but from inside, the way things look backstage. The way things used to look that is, before — before the fire."
Meg bit her tongue and looked to her mother for support, but Madame Giry only stirred her cup, sending new tendrils of steam swirling above the surface and over her hands:
"In this, Monsieur Andersson is right. Art is no different from dance, or music: it needs to be seen, and heard, and questioned. And understood."
"He will not like it." Meg pictured with dread displaying her drawings to Monsieur de Gas' critical gaze, inviting the lashing criticism of which he was more than capable.
"He does not need to like it, my dear. It is your art, not his. You cannot please everyone, but that does not mean you should confine your audience to the mirror. You will go, today?"
Meg nodded mutely, and saw the hidden pride in the corners of her mother's mouth.
"I'll go," she said, stronger.
"Good." Madame Giry studied the former Phantom over the coffee cup in her hands, as if she was measuring him against a role in some new choreography.
"There are no news from the defense?"
"I saw the ramparts only briefly," he admitted. "I regret there was no time to ask questions. But the battalion was heading for their regular patrol, nothing more. They are expecting Gambetta's armies."
"Very well." Madame Giry nudged the chocolate box towards him. "Let us eat cake and live in hope. At least while the chocolates last."
He hesitated and for a moment looked like he might finally sit down, but just then a small sound made him pause. Meg heard it too. He looked over his shoulder, then turned and froze like that, coffee cup still in one hand, the coffee threatening to spill on the parquet.
Christine stood in the doorway, bleary and sleep-rumpled, with a hairbrush in one hand and her hair undone, as though she had been surprised at her dressing-table.
"I heard you," she said softly, to her suitor.
He replaced the cup and saucer on the table, with a noise like chattering teeth.
"Good morning. You… slept well?"
Christine gave him a lopsided smile as she came closer, and noticed the chocolates. "You are courting our favour."
"Not exactly."
Madame Giry reached for the coffee pot, expecting Christine to take a cup, but Christine shook her head.
"I just need some water, Madame Giry, my head is aching." She returned her bruised gaze to her suitor. "You disappeared last night."
He inclined his bandaged head. "I thought it best to speak with your friend's artist. He is not as big a fool as he might have been."
"To speak with him…"
Meg said, "Monsieur de Gas wants me back today." She was beginning to believe it.
"Oh." Christine fidgeted with the hairbrush, then seemed to draw herself together. "Excuse me, please."
She disappeared in the direction of her room, and it struck Meg suddenly that there were any number of things the Phantom might have done in the name of "art unshared"... She glanced at him warily, but could not reconcile this man, with his untouched coffee and the bandage he kept adjusting, with the monster of their old nightmares.
Madame Giry set down her empty cup, and took out a few small blue papers from her pocket. She fanned them out to show the official stamps. One hundred grams of meat, or two meals at the cantine municipale, Meg read. It had taken her mother three hours of waiting in the line at the municipal offices to receive them.
"Chocolates are very well, monsieur, but you know as well as I do one cannot live this way. These are ration cards, but we cannot eat them either. They must be filled. You might accompany Christine on her errands this morning, if you have no prior engagement."
He accepted the cards, and Meg saw the flicker of gratitude in his eyes. "It would be my pleasure, madame."
Madame Giry looked back at him for a long time, seeing Meg knew not what, before Christine came back, now calm and properly dressed.
"Chocolate?" Meg offered, and Christine nodded:
"If I may."
o o o
With her belly full of chocolate, Christine thought she ought not feel as empty as she did, yet she would have gladly exchanged all the delicacies in the world for some bread and cheese. Erik was clearly determined to make up for the previous night's flight by not straying a pace from her all morning, remaining by her side as they walked from store to store in search of vegetables then waited outside the butcher's for the miserable ration of meat they were permitted. The grey and shadowless day was getting on her nerves. She could feel Erik glancing over at her uncertainly, and once making a move to offer her his arm, but she could not take it, not yet. It shamed her that she had suspected him of something unworthy last night, when all he had done was try to straighten out a misunderstanding: not so different, surely, from what any other man might have attempted…
Yet no other man would have chased a stranger through the darkness. And it would be more shameful still to forget it.
She wanted to forget it. If her mind accused him when he had done no wrong, if her trust was so fragile, what was the use of this courtship? Were they to shackle each other to the past, each pulling the other down, again and again? You need no mask with me, she had told him, believing it, wanting him to believe it. But this grey morning, she wanted only to be left in peace, to suture the old wounds that refused to stay closed.
"Christine," Erik warned, taking a step back from a squabble breaking out.
"Just a moment!" A corpulent woman in front of them waved her umbrella at a young girl who had run up to take the place of an elderly lady, presumably her grandmother. "The rest of us have been on our feet for hours, mademoiselle. There's a queue!"
The national guardsman policing the line was immediately there to quash the disturbance. After some argument the replacement was permitted, but it took a long time for the grumbling to die away. The queue slowly shuffled forward. Christine tried to focus on the hidden stream of music that flowed deep in her thoughts, the way she usually did during these tedious hours spent queuing, but it was difficult to concentrate with Erik so near. He glanced at her again, but said nothing.
"Your cards, please, mademoiselle."
The meat they finally received was pink and sinewy and flecked with white fibres, nothing at all like beef, but Christine did not argue. Even horseflesh was better than a diet of rice and tea. She surrendered the precious blue cards and took the wrapped parcel.
"All gone!" called the butcher's boy from the doors, and at once the guard shut the heavy metal grille, amid cries of outrage from the remaining queue.
Christine walked the gauntlet of the disappointed, with Erik a step behind her. Around them, servant girls who had arrived too late to fill their cards glared unhappily at Erik's civilian clothing, muttering comments behind their hands about cowards who took meat from the families of the enlisted defenders, and the women who profited by it. Christine could scarcely wait to be gone, before all that simmering bitterness could spill into something more dangerous.
"Where to?" Erik asked her when they were clear, his voice tight with the effort of pretending he could not hear the whispers.
"This way."
A few produce stalls had been run up directly on the footpath, backing up against an empty advertising booth that no longer carried theatre posters. The vegetables sold here came from the foragers who stole out of the city to dig in the soil right under the noses of the Prussians, risking their lives for parsnips and potatoes. Perhaps some traded with the Prussians as well. Christine had tried to avoid them at first, but she had long since grown used to their presence.
"I've got no parsnips," the woman at the stall declared. She poked a few shrivelled little things on her trestle table, "Turnips, nice and fresh, or carrots. Ten sous for the turnips, carrots are twelve."
"Turnips then."
"Carrots too. Permit me."
Reluctantly, Christine allowed Erik to leave the last of his coins at the stall; her own purse was virtually empty, and with prices like this she could ill afford to insist on propriety. How long could she and Meg and Madame Giry hope to keep this up, when they could scarcely pay for a bunch of turnips? Perhaps Meg truly would keep her job, but that did not make Christine feel any less indebted. All she had was her music, and that could not serve to put bread on the table.
Still, at least the music was hers. Its rhythm in her mind was the sea, pure and vast, and she could share it as she chose. Perhaps that could be enough.
They started to make their way back. Low cloud turned to drizzle and Christine kept her face down, pathetically grateful for the excuse not to make conversation. The last thing she wanted right now was to imitate a strolling young Parisienne of the old days, gazing up in trusting infatuation at her suitor. Women, ordinary busy middle-class women, were coming in and out of a nearby café-concert that had been converted to a hospital, marked with a large Red Cross on a white flag drooping over the stonework of the porch. At the next corner, their way was briefly barred by the bulk of a military bier bearing a coffin, crowned with an officer's epaulettes. The sad gaunt-looking horse waited for a succession of carriages going the other way, before plodding patiently onward. Another dead man. The sight was as commonplace as a milk cart would have once been, and in truth, a milk cart these days would have drawn far more attention, but Christine hated it all the same.
When the apartment building was in sight, Erik raised a hand to stop her. Christine looked up in surprise. His bandage, damp from the drizzle, was wrinkled as in a frown, though the open side of his face remained impassive. There were bags under his eyes; he had not slept well either. Christine fought the impulse to touch his wet cheek, to remind herself of the feel of his skin.
"Let us go back to the theatre," Erik said.
She had expected anything but that. It took a moment to recollect her thoughts. "We were followed, yesterday."
He shrugged. "It may have been nothing to do with us. Someone coming to collect a box of pamphlets. Or simply a thief."
"Perhaps," Christine allowed. "But if not… it is a risk, you said so yourself. There are spy stories in every paper. A poor man was shot for nothing more sinister than popping his head out of a sewer at the wrong moment, and being taken for a Prussian. He was only a sewer worker."
"And I am only a curiosity. A deformed man in an architect's suit who goes shopping instead of standing guard. If they wanted to brand me a spy, they could do it as easily at the butcher's shop. Am I to spend my days cowering in a corner and cringing in shadows?"
"That is not what I meant. Erik, I don't want to risk you being arrested. Last night…"
Erik winced and dropped his gaze, and for a moment Christine felt a sick swoop of fear in her stomach: surely, surely he had not lied; he had done nothing wrong.
"Chagny would not have left you."
Christine thought she had misheard. "Raoul?"
Misery was so plain in his eyes that Christine felt anew the dreadful guilt of having suspected him for even a moment and, equally dreadful, the knowledge that it could be no other way.
"Chagny would have had a carriage for you, or a servant to send along, or whatever it is these people do! I cannot tell. But it was wrong of me to leave you to go home alone. Unchivalrous."
Christine burst out laughing, hysterically, until her eyes were brimming and a passing gentleman shied from her as if she were a lunatic. Unchivalrous!
"I am not a child, or a duchess, to go everywhere escorted. But perhaps next time you might give me warning."
He looked thoroughly baffled. Perhaps he had honestly thought her black mood due to nothing more than his departure. She took the groceries from him.
"Wait for me here," she told him. "I'm going to fetch my music book."
o o o
"Again." Christine flipped through the pages back to the start of the second movement. "It doesn't sound right, there. Too messy, the parts should not blur like that. Let's try it with a pause."
Erik sat back from the instrument and tried not to scratch at the cursed blisters under his bandage.
"Enough," he said. "You cannot do this to your voice, you will push it too far."
Christine came over to perch on the edge of the piano bench, and Erik saw her study their warped reflection in the polished lid. Her hip was warm against his.
"Perhaps. But it is so close to how it should be. How it sounds in my head."
"In that case, we must certainly stop. There is only room for one mad musician between us, and I'm afraid that part has been cast."
He reached out and stroked the image of her cheek, lightly. Christine glanced away, as distant again as she had been that morning, though she did not move her hip.
Tentatively, Erik touched her hand where it lay in her lap. His shameful conduct of the night before weighed on him, entwining with the mutterings of the resentful crowd outside the butcher's. A coward. Less than a man.
Well then, was it not true? He was playing at courtship and music in a city where death was ranged at the walls, where the men wore guns and the women the black of mourning, and where the only music permitted was mass. Men of every class and station joined the battalions on the wall, ready to protect their home. But Erik Andersson had stood instead under the roof of another man's home, and wasted his right to fight as a man there, in that nightmare, as another might waste his ration cards upon a chunk of rotten meat. And now he had nothing left but the stink of his own sin.
He brushed his fingertips over the back of Christine's hand, following the undulations of her knuckles, the skin gone dry from household soap and too many chores. Her Vicomte would have known how to protect her.
Christine clutched his hand abruptly. "Oh! I almost forgot. Here, this is for you, I had a bit left from the Variétés."
She leaned down to lift her music satchel from under the bench and rummaged within it, bringing out a brown glass medicine jar half-filled with something white. She put it into his unresisting palm.
"It's a salve for blisters. Take it, I have no need of it — I am not dancing now."
Erik stared at the jar suspiciously. "Neither am I."
Christine smiled then, for the first time all day, and Erik understood suddenly how badly he had missed it, craved it. His entire being followed the light of that smile.
Christine's gaze moved to his bandage and her smile faded slowly away.
"It is no better, is it."
"If you are expecting me to grow a new face, I fear it may take some time." He regretted the words before they were out, but he could not call them back. The jar of salve was a small weight in his palm; he shut his hand on it resolutely.
"Forget it, Christine. It is hardly worth your concern."
"All right then." Christine took something else from her bag. It took a moment for Erik to recognise it as a roll of linen.
"I have sufficient—" he began, but she cut him off.
"No. I want you to put it on me."
Erik stared at her, unable to comprehend what madness possessed her. Christine unrolled the linen, flowing it through unsteady fingers. Then she held it up to her own perfect face, marking a sharp white diagonal from forehead to jaw. A cold wave of horror washed over him. He did not want to see this. It was strange and repellent and wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Put it on as you do yours." She tilted her chin up, daring him to object.
"In God's name, what for?"
"For you. I want you to see this thing as I do."
"I have a little more need of it, don't you think?"
"Tell me how to tie it myself then. Perhaps then I can wear it daily, and adopt it as a fashion statement of our times, just as you said to the surgeon."
Erik watched her fumble with the cloth. It was incomprehensible, unbearable.
With a hard angry noise, he grasped the thing and wound it around her head, wrapping it over her curls and her hairpins and her lovely unblemished skin. He pulled the knot tight at the base of her skull, not kindly.
"Christine…"
She looked back at him, half-hidden, one eye shaded by the roughly formed slit of the eyehole. He wanted to weep, because he did know what she had meant by it, and it hurt so badly he could barely breathe. Christine was gone, concealed behind the mask, right here and yet separated from him.
He all but ripped it off her, sending hairpins flying, indecent in his haste to get rid of the horror. Christine helped him, pulling at the linen too, until finally the thing was just a mess of cloth on the keyboard, powerless.
Christine gathered him tight against her, her slender arms around his hunched shoulders and her hands on the back of his head, letting him bury his shame in the hinge of her shoulder and neck, inhaling the sweet warmth of her living skin.
"Five minutes," Christine said softly, her breath touching his ear. Her hands were in his hair, weaving unconscious patterns. "Five minutes a day when you are with me, that is all. The rest of the time you can keep all the bandages you want."
"Not yet. There are sores — Christine, it is foul…"
"They will never heal if you go on this way. Erik, you have taken this to the edge of sanity."
She untangled herself from their embrace and moved back a little on the bench. She raised her hands to his face, palms to his cheeks. It took all the courage Erik could muster not to pull away, but Christine only held her hands there, one on his still-damp bandage, the other on bare skin. Then she guided his head around, until he saw the mirror to one side of the stage. A strip of reflection showed only her hand upon the mask.
"I want to see your face when you sing," she told him. "The way you see mine."
He looked past her, upstage and into the wings, to the swarms of dust motes sparkling in the halo of a gas-jet. "You used to ask for that very thing. Do you remember? As though angels have human faces."
"People have human faces."
"But you did not know what I was…"
"I had some hope." Christine gave him a tiny secretive smile, and something about it shot Erik's body with a surge of desire. "You see, it is not easy to picture yourself kissing a voice from heaven."
Erik felt as though he had just downed a glass of wine in a single gulp. The heat spread over his neck, to his chest. "You… pictured us kissing?"
"And you did not?" She put one hand on his chest and looked at her splayed fingers over his heart, lost in a past before betrayals. "Neither of us knew what you were, back then. But I thought I should like to kiss the music from your mouth."
Erik was struck dumb, staring at her in what he knew must be an utterly undignified manner, but all he could see was that tiny glorious smile that filled him at once with hope and the basest of human longing. The only consolation was that Christine's cheeks were burning too. He knew what night she now remembered, their white-hot confusion of limbs and faces, the end and the beginning of things. Human, both of them. Only human.
Before he could form a response, Christine stood up from the bench, and held out a hand.
"Erik, come, I want to sing. Just once more and we stop; this passage is driving me to distraction."
The temptation was too great. A decent suitor should have brought her home hours ago — would never have brought her here at all… Erik raised his hands to the keyboard, brushing the clump of bandage out of the way, and turned the music back a page.
Christine sketched a phrase to show him the place she wanted. "From here."
They sang again, and this time their two parts came together well enough that Erik felt Christine relax into it, at peace with the music and with him. He closed his eyes and allowed his hands to find the shimmering chords that merged and grew to a crescendo, supporting her voice and his own — and just for a little while he thought he glimpsed a future beyond the walls and the war.
They were free to see the world in that vision, and their faces were bathed in sunlight.
When the music came to its end, Christine collected her bag and the two of them circled the little hall to turn out the lights and restore boxes and chairs to they way they had found them, stepping through the now familiar ritual in companionable silence. It was good, frighteningly good, to share this space with Christine, to breathe the same air and hear the same song and move as she moved, in unison. The last flame vanished with a sigh, and the velvet darkness enveloped them together.
Erik opened the side door and felt Christine take his hand in hers. Cold evening rain slapped his face.
"No," Christine said suddenly, in the voice of a child.
A detachment of men in national guard kepis and coats surrounded the exit. Others were running here from the main doors, all armed with breech-loaders. The orange light of a single streetlamp glinted on black-oiled steel.
One stepped forward, and Erik at once recognised those glasses and that slope of the shoulders.
"Erik Andersson?" Jean sounded almost apologetic. "In the name of the Republic, we are here to arrest you."