Hallelujah, the delayed chapter! Sincere apologies for the long wait, and thank you so much for being here and sticking with the story. Your reviews keep me going.

Chapter 57 — Tethered

Christine hooked her finger under the window-latch and held it, wondering as she did every evening since Erik's flight whether she might follow Madame Giry's advice and lock it.

Perhaps tonight she would do it. It would be so good to sleep in peace instead of being woken by every noise and shadow that never, ever became a man. A night of rest was badly needed after all the rehearsals and hectic preparations, or her voice would be no use at all tomorrow. She could not let them down. They had worked so hard for the past three weeks: little Marie on the piano, in her poor fingerless gloves to keep off the chill of the unheated theatre, and Pierre Ballard and Madame Giry knocking on every municipal door to secure the permits from officials who had larger concerns. Even Meg, who was already up half the night sketching for her newspaper, somehow found the time to draw and ink the posters that had been pasted outside the theatre:

Mademoiselle Christine Daaé in performance!

One night only, by special arrangement.

Come and hear the most beautiful voice in Paris!

All proceeds to the 18th arrondissement Widows' and Orphans' Fund.

The words were Pierre Ballard's, and Christine still winced when she thought of them. One night only. It sounded like an advert for a travelling fair, with her as the prize exhibit. But Ballard knew how the Folies drew its crowds, understood Montmartre and its moods, and Christine did not argue. She wondered only if they would think her music too strange, too unpatriotic, just as Erik had cautioned her...

"Can you not see," Ballard told her in agitation after she had first let him hear a few fragments, "you are Paris! And better than that: Montmartre. You are proof we need no church choirs to hear such pure beauty, and when you sing… My dear Christine, if the Prussians could hear you, they would lay down their arms."

Yet in the wake of the near-revolution at the Hôtel de Ville, it seemed unlikely that anybody would hear her. This was no time to be asking for permits to perform. The city was still in turmoil; Montmartre doubly so. The government had placated the insurgent leaders with promises of support for their grievances — only to break their word the very next morning, on the Day of the Dead, and have them arrested: as dishonourable a lie as any since the war began. Raoul and Henri Guyon spent days raging about it, and even the Prefect of Police resigned in protest. Several days later most were released, but, walking through Montmartre, Christine could see the damage was done. The last remnants of faith were gone. If people spoke of the government at all it was in the deepest, ugliest tone of disillusionment. The just Republic they had believed in turned out to be nothing more than a mundane collection of cowardly, self-interested, ordinary men with neither the skill nor the courage to resist the Prussians, no respect for their own people, and no concern for the fate of anyone besides themselves. Anger of the kind Christine had only ever heard from Louise Gandon now sounded from the lips of every woman in the ration queue, and even the men of the National Guard.

Christine understood it, their betrayal, and it made her feel more at home in Montmartre than in the city proper. In the city the siege dragged on, with every day a bleaker facsimile of the last. In Montmartre, people gathered to talk at every street corner; hungry and ill and enraged at being abandoned, but not afraid. Never afraid. Christine admired that. Sometimes they would notice her and tip their hats or nod to her in recognition, and she would smile in return. Sometimes they asked after her man, the franc-tireur, and she would keep smiling, using every ounce of her stage training to hold the muscles taut and never let go.

"Cold day to be out on the ramparts," the women would commiserate, assuming he had been drafted along with the others. All young men had to serve now; it was finally law.

"Yes," Christine would agree, despising herself for her cowardice. "A very cold day."

"At least he's got you wrapped up nice and warm then, eh? Lovely new coat that."

"Yes. Lovely and warm."

She passed Erik's house every day on her way to and from the theatre, alone or walking with Meg or Madame Giry; or occasionally riding in a carriage with Raoul, but the window beneath the roof remained dead and dark.

The very first time she came by, she discovered that Jean Gandon and Louise had been among those arrested. Perhaps it ought not to have surprised her as it did, but when she saw the police notice pasted to the locked storefront, Christine felt nothing but shock. She thought of Louise, with her rough manners and clomping boots and eyes full of pity, and Jean with his papers, facing Erik without a gun — the anguish they had caused... She might have hated them for that arrest, but how could she nurse a grudge, knowing they had every reason for mistrust? She could not resent it. She had forgiven them the instant her voice joined Erik's at the hearing and everything else ceased to matter. His voice… He had embraced it then, their music and all that they were, stripping off all the masks, and it was enough. It was perfect.

She came by the locked store again that evening, and the day after. Sometimes a movement at the fence caught the edge of her gaze, or the sound of a breath, and she would stop and wait, ignoring the neighbours' curious looks, but she remained alone.

A week passed before Louise and Jean finally returned home, looking sombre but animated with a renewed sense of purpose; a long, painful week during which Christine had found herself lingering longer and longer outside the store, or finding increasingly slender pretexts to ask Raoul to take the carriage past. When at last the counter was re-opened, Louise brushed off Christine's greeting and her relief, as though there had never been a doubt in her mind that return they must.

"Still singing then?" she asked and, following the line of Christine's gaze to the window above, added more quietly, "Ah. The missing hero. Gone again, is he?"

Christine averted her eyes, afraid of revealing the anger and hope in them, but Louise only shook her head, and set about rearranging the counter to her liking:

"You needn't worry, he's not been to the clink with our lot." And more gently, "Go on home, pet. I'll send you word if I hear anything. Jean's been posted to the mayor's office now; who knows, he might learn something."

It was not to be. Day followed day, life around the store resumed something like its normal course, but still Erik's window was unlit. And, as though his absence had the power to silence her own music, it was looking more and more likely that the permit for her performance would never be granted.

Just when Christine had begun to think she must sing regardless, unaccompanied if she could so as to spare Marie the consequences, Pierre Ballard turned up at the theatre one evening, grinning from ear to ear and brandishing the stamped permit over his head like a revolutionary banner:

"We have it!"

Marie leapt to her feet with a jubilant whoop, and even Madame Giry, tired as she was from a day of queues and doubtful about the whole enterprise, looked deeply pleased. It had been granted at last, Ballard said, because some decree or other had today allowed a cautious reopening of the Théâtre Français for an uncostumed, sombre performance of Moliére. And where there was one theatre, there could be others.

"To old Moliére!" he cried, his sharp bony face aglow. "And to music!"

They celebrated at the piano with a bottle of vinegary wine that Ballard drew proudly from a string bag and drank almost entirely on his own, and with the last of the chocolates Christine had stowed away backstage. Meg gave her a startled look, guessing their origin, but Christine only set the box on the piano resolutely, and took a chocolate herself to disguise her hands shaking. Erik had brought these one day when they were tuning the piano here. His chin had been all stubble when she kissed him, and they'd laughed… The sweet marzipan tasted of him, of hope and music and all the things he no longer wanted.

How could he not want this? How could he just turn away, thrusting aside every fragile thing they had so painfully rebuilt?

When the chocolates were gone, Christine ripped a corner of the gilt paper that surrounded them, and crumpled it into her pocket. She caught herself searching the shadows again — but it was a futile gesture: she knew before she looked that she would not see him. He did not want to be seen. She was alone.

And alone she must sing. If Pierre Ballard managed to secure her the audience, Christine thought she could do the rest. There was no choice: with the promise of a concert, her music had grown from a throbbing beat at the back of her mind to a creature winged and triumphant, impatient to break the last of its restraints and be set free.

Mademoiselle Christine Daaé in performance.

Her name with no scandals, no past. Only music. If Erik had only had the courage to stay with her, if he only understood… But he did not, or could not.

He no longer wanted music.

The man to whom she had opened her soul was the ghost of a dream, vanishing the moment she thought she held him, leaving her alone in the street to call after him with her desire exposed and echoing among the buildings. It was not her love Erik yearned for, no — he wanted the impossible: a bourgeois fantasy that could not belong to her any more than it did to Madame Giry or Meg or any of them. He had written the whole libretto for their new life together, from the false name they would share to the ordinary, respectable work he would do, never thinking for a moment that she might not accept the role.

And she could not accept it.

The window latch clinked on the wooden frame and swung like a pendulum, to and fro, free. Christine pulled her unruly hair into a braid, using the glass for a mirror, then padded barefoot to bed, leaving the window uncurtained to the moonlight, unlocked.

She could not help it. She still wanted him here, it was as simple and as hopeless as that.

Turning into the pillow, she let it stifle her wretched, foolish sobbing. When that was spent, she clenched her jaw and stroked the frustration from her body, ruthless as a surgeon amputating a limb, then curled into a ball and stayed thus a long time with her eyes open to the darkness, thinking of tomorrow. Her hungry stomach churned and whined, begging for more than an empty supper of tea, but Christine ignored it. The body could be silenced. It was the winged, clawed spirit in her that longed for freedom and could accept nothing less.

There were spaces between the notes that belonged to Erik's voice. He was hers, whether he willed it or not; he was of the theatre as much as she was, and it would always, always be so.

Tomorrow, she would stand on stage and sing, and there would be no sorrow and no shame in that music. Life, only life.

o o o

How could Chagny not see it? Was he such a colossal fool as not to seize his advantage when it was so clearly given? The Devil only knew how often Christine insisted on visiting him, and how willing she was to accompany him on carriage rides that at another time should have been scandalous — but these days nobody much cared for the niceties. Women of every creed and station spent their days tending to the wounded and sick in ambulances all over Paris, and nobody looked askance at a young officer accompanied by a charming friend.

And yet the Vicomte's conduct towards her remained impeccable, whether in the carriage or at her theatre, and he made not the slightest move to renew their association. Could it be that they knew they were being watched?

Erik found himself pacing the floor of the dressing-room and stopped at once. The last thing he needed was for the squeaking if the floorboards to betray him to Christine or to any of the others.

He ought not to have made himself known at the cemetery, that had been rash. Now he was reduced to shadowing them day after infuriating day and finding absolutely nothing to complain of. Truly the Vicomte was an imbecile: his fiancée was restored to him, the way left clear for a reconciliation, and yet the two of them spoke of politics and crutches and childhood memories, and were as polite to one another as a pair of nuns. Once or twice there was even a genuine nun present when Chagny visited Christine at the theatre, although more and more often the wheelchair was manoeuvred here by his friend Guyon, himself tediously predictable in his efforts to catch the eye of Meg Giry. Guyon brought art catalogues that Meg later pored over, engaged her in animated discussions about the Republican ideal, and was excessively polite to her mother: in short, performed all the stunts expected of a hopeful suitor that were so completely neglected by the crippled Vicomte.

It had almost looked like things might be changing when Chagny presented Christine with a glorious new coat, warm and elegantly styled, with a fox collar that was far beyond the means of any architect's savings. Christine allowed him to put it on her — a comic spectacle when her gallant suitor wobbled on his crutches — and thanked him from the bottom of her heart… but her cheeks were tear-stained and Chagny did not even try to wipe the tears away. Then they simply went on as before: Christine began the day's rehearsal; Chagny and Guyon went on their way, and nothing changed.

What was Chagny waiting for? Why could he not simply get on with it and play the hand he was being so patiently dealt? There was a limit to what one man could endure.

The theatre was becoming busier by the day as they readied it for this infernal concert, with ever more backstage rooms being cleared out and opened to the air, and Erik found his temper fraying in accordance with his shrinking domain and his growing hunger. It might not have been so terrible if he could have kept to his room at the Gandons', and starved there in peace instead of lurking here among the abandoned props — but the risk was too great, he could not chance it. Christine invariably walked along rue Fontenelle on the way to rehearsal, and each time her footsteps would slow outside the store. It was torture to think he could just return, light a lamp, wait for her there.

Not again. He was through with the lies. He was leaving the stage to the one who belonged up there, soaring towards the light with her own exquisite music upon her lips. Christine would have the fame she deserved, and the roses, and the admirers. If Chagny was too much of a fool, others would take his place. She would have her music.

Perhaps he could start again in time, if the war did not end it all. Rebuild his career, return to Sedan, finish what he had started. Learn to be grateful for the crumbs the world tossed him, just as Chagny had so eloquently advised. Perhaps he could return and see her one day, shining on the stage of the new, opulent, magnificent Opéra. Perhaps he would not hate it.

For now, he could do nothing more than observe as she tamed the theatre to her needs. Marie's accompaniment had been passably decent, if erratic in tempo; Christine had managed to turn it to a strength by entrusting the girl with her more chromatic pieces, so that their peculiar atonal quality was rendered almost otherworldly. Set to Christine's music, the words of her father's tales rang out as eerily beautiful chants: ancient, sacred, bell-like. Around her, under Madame Giry's watchful eye, the stage had been repaired of creaks and coated with new rosin, a moth-eaten velvet curtain dragged out from some forgotten box backstage and hung, several cartloads of mismatched wooden chairs brought in. The curtain was repaired at great effort by what seemed like every out-of-work seamstress in Montmartre, and the chairs cleaned and arranged in tidy rows by a swarm of their ragged children. Drunkard though Ballard was, he evidently had enough useful friends and connections to call upon, and the place was beginning to resemble a real theatre.

It had a certain style now, far removed from the tawdry dance hall it had been. Even the advertising posters Meg had drawn were graceful and restrained, making the garish words Ballard had thought up seem like nothing more than simple unadorned fact:

Mademoiselle Christine Daaé. The most beautiful voice in Paris.

And why stop at Paris? There had never been her like before and never would be after. Christine was growing ever more assured in the way she saw and heard and composed, and it gave her voice a new strength, a power that held Erik as hopelessly mesmerised as ever. Each morning he thought he must end this madness and leave.

Each evening he knew he would stay.

If her music was not torment enough, through every rehearsal Christine kept glancing at the darker corners of the theatre, each time sending his heart crashing through his chest. At times Erik was certain she saw him, but reason reminded him she had always managed to find him, ever since the chapel, as though her heart could see through walls. That was nothing new. It did not mean he was loved for himself. It was only a habit, one she needed to break.

He caught a sound now and kept himself very still, his fingertips held to the dressing-room door.

Christine was singing again.

Her voice reached him through the wooden panels and, helpless, Erik let it touch him, hold him like the ghost of her body surrounding his. Yes, there, that was the exact chord progression they had worked on together — oh God, to feel her as he had then, to lace his fingers into her hair while she sang…

The tears came, as they always did, and he could not escape.

An hour went by, perhaps more. Hunger reminded him of himself. The absurdity of one torment displacing another might have merited a philosophy treatise, but he was too famished for philosophy. Once, he could have gone days without thinking of the demands of his gut, but back then he had been as near a ghost as a man could become. Now that he was marooned among the living there was no helping it; he had to find bread and whatever foul canned bilge could still be bought and eaten uncooked.

He would survive. Chagny could take his notions of stoically accepting one's lot and burn them; he was not just going to roll over and play dead.

A quick search of his cache behind the false back of a cupboard yielded three hard biscuits, a tin of what passed for salted fish, and wine. Erik found the plate he kept along with and his silverware, filled his wineglass, and sat down at the narrow dressing-table to eat this pitiful supper. The mirror in front of him informed him that three weeks of living like a stowaway rat on a ship had done nothing to improve his complexion, but he was alive. He would survive, and he would see that Christine was not abandoned again. That was enough.

It had to be enough.

A peculiar scuffling noise outside his door caught his attention. Erik carefully replaced his fork, concealed the evidence of his meal under a pile of rags, and rose from the dressing-table. An insane thought flashed through his head: perhaps it was Christine and her suitor, searching for privacy. A dressing-room with a mirror, a faded velvet couch…

It was nothing of the sort.

"Erik."

Madame Giry's voice. Erik kept silent, though his heartbeat sounded thunderous in his own ears. She was bluffing. She might suspect his presence but she could not know he was here; she must be doing this at every door hoping to flush him out.

"Erik."

His name always sounded odd when she used it, not like a name at all, but like a confession — mea culpa…

He heard her sigh and move on. A bluff; he had been right.

Still, it reminded him not to linger overlong in one room. He cleaned away the remnants of his supper, found his coat, and after listening for a few minutes to the silence outside, opened the door.

The corridor was dark and empty. The gas was off as usual, and he could only just make out the outlines of doorframes and the passage that led towards the stage.

His fist closed on a thin wrist like a vice, instinctive as breath.

"Erik."

He jumped and cursed, dropping her wrist, and his heart jolted so painfully that he damn near passed out. A door behind him swung ajar from the impact, admitting a sliver of moonlight.

"Madame," he all but growled, "you forget yourself. I might have mistaken you in the dark for an intruder."

She was scarcely more than a silhouette, but Erik caught the thin-lipped smile that cut her mouth at his words. "No. It is you who has forgotten yourself. I might have mistaken you in the dark for a phantom."

Before he could think of how to defend himself, she was gone, vanishing into the depths of the corridor.

He could not follow her.

Instead, once his breathing resumed and his heart stopped hammering in his teeth, Erik returned to the dressing-room. With some difficulty, he found the crushed hat he had not worn for days and a roll of nearly clean linen for bandages, dressed and masked himself, and went outside.

The night was bitterly cold and the hour much too late for visits, but he did not care. The past was gaping behind him like an open grave, but he refused to look back. He would not become a ghost again. He would not.

"Chagny!" he called when he finally reached the silent sleeping house where the Vicomte convalesced, and he rattled the massive front door and the handle. "Chagny!"

After an interminable long time, the ornate lion-shaped door handle turned, and a manservant's bleary face looked out at him. At the sight of the rumpled, bandaged visitor, he appeared to be struck dumb, and only opened and shut his mouth.

Erik raised his hat. "Erik Andersson," he said conversationally. "Kindly let the Vicomte de Chagny know that I shall call on him first thing tomorrow."