A/N: Rumours of my demise have been slightly exagerated. Thank you for your messages, your questions and your support of this saga. This chapter was a long time coming!

Chapter 69 — Their First Tomorrow

Christine did not return that afternoon, nor that evening. Madame Giry watched her daughter watching the clock as she went about her chores, jolting every time a distant cannon erupted, and did not have the heart to admit that she had expected as much. No, Christine would not be back tonight.

"Perhaps they were delayed by the crowds," Meg suggested, looking up from the drawing she was half-heartedly inking at the dining table. It was a depiction of the morning's chaos at the mairie, the crowd that had come for the spontaneous wedding and stayed to question the mayor and Jean Gandon and anyone who would speak of the battle. Meg's pen had picked out a face here and there: worried, tense, desperate people jostling for attention, with hope written in every wild movement as they surrounded the portico. The mayor had come outside eventually to speak with them, flanked by Jean and the young Vicomte, and Madame Giry had judged the moment a good one to take Meg and return to the city.

Meg pushed the drawing from her. "Christine said she and Erik would go to see Louise Gandon, arrange the rent, and return. Something must have happened."

"Something did happen. It was a wedding, my dear, peculiar as it was. Give them time."

"Christine meant to come straight back, maman, all her things are still here. This morning she said nothing would change — please don't look at me like I'm six years old!" Meg flushed and gave an impatient shake of her head, "I know what a wedding night is. What goes on between women and men."

Madame Giry lifted her brows silently.

"I know enough," Meg insisted. "And it's not because of that. Even if it were, Christine did come back when—"

Madame Giry raised a forbidding hand a split second before Meg cut herself off, appalled at the near-betrayal of a confidence. "I know enough, Meg."

They looked at one another in the echo of it, and in those moments all her own youth seemed to rise and fall before Madame Giry's eyes: Jules, his paintings, the smell of oils, her last Giselle, the money from his family that she rejected in all her righteous, innocent fury; then Perros and the sea and the house of Madame Duchamp-Pierot…

"You were born such a tiny thing," she said at last, to her daughter's infinite confusion at the change of subject. "Seventeen years tomorrow. Let's get some sleep, my dear."

She touched Meg's hair in passing, and left her to clear up her drawing tools in peace.

In the night it began to snow. Fat silent flakes promenaded past the dark window, ghostly in the moon's limelight, and Madame Giry spent longer than she cared to admit watching their grand choreography. Nature staged her white act in defiance of the edict that forbade public performances of dance, beautiful and mercilessly cold. By two in the morning the courtyard below was covered in a fine veil; by three, the snow had thickened to a blanket. A bitter night for those without fuel.

How were they faring in Montmartre in this cold, those two stubborn souls building a fantasy of peace while the rest of the world boiled around them? They had vanished in the crowd the moment they stepped outside the mairie, with no backward glance for those left behind. They were newlywed. If Christine thought marriage would change nothing, she was mistaken: what passed between lovers could only ever exist in the present, in the endless today. They had never before had their own tomorrow.

And if Christine did not yet recognise it, Erik would. He had coveted the role of a husband too long not to throw himself into it now, and God alone knew how he would interpret it. Was Christine truly ready for such a future, in the midst of a war? Was he?

Madame Giry took down Monsieur Duchamp's letter from the edge of the mirror on the dresser, where it had been waiting for her to work up the courage to pen a reply, and lit one of her few remaining candles. She wished there was somebody to whom she might have turned for reassurance, a woman with experience of marriage — but the only one she could have trusted with it was gone. Madame Duchamp-Pierot was dead, and there was nobody left between her and the unknown.

My dear Monsieur Duchamp, — she began,

I can find no words to your news, save that I...

I miss her. Marguerite the Elder, she had laughingly called herself when the infant Meg was first placed in her arms to make her acquaintance, and even then, the title fit. Marguerite Duchamp-Pierot was then a woman at the very height of her powers, several years widowed and supremely at ease within her domain. She must have been, Madame Giry calculated wryly, perhaps thirty-five years old. Ancient, by the reckoning of a silly young ballerina struck down with child at the dawn of her stardom, who was only beginning to realise the full depth of her fall. From the moment she had declared to Madame Pierot that she would raise the child herself, there could be no going back. A year's absence from the stage, a year of sleepless nights and fevers and teething and vomit and perfect infant laughter, was an eternity at the Opéra. Her place in the footlights had been taken by others, and theirs by others still. To return there would have meant humbling herself before the very people whom she had previously commanded, to petition for a lowly place backstage. It would have meant killing her dreams and then living out the rest of her life among their ghosts, watching the curtain go up on all the roles she would never dance.

"Stay," Madame Pierot had advised her then, with a benefactor's generosity Madame Giry did not appreciate until years later. "What is there in the Opéra for you, or for the child? You are young, Agathe. In another year or so you will have quite regained your spirits, and little Meg will have grown sturdy enough to face the city coughs and smoke. Stay and keep us company. You know how my girls dote on the little one."

And stay she did, month after month, because she had not the courage to imagine approaching her former home as a beggar. It was peaceful by the sea. She began to forget.

Later, she would wonder if anything might have been different had she returned at once with her infant daughter in tow, instead of lingering in that sleepy fragrant world of gardens and seaside walks until the first Paris headline in months gave her a start:

'Tragic accident in cellars of the Opéra,' it ran, in heavy black print. 'Stagehand found dead.'

The man had drowned in the lake that fed the hydraulic machinery, tragically entangled in a broken line after he had wandered into a disused part of the cellars. The rope around his neck had by some ill fortune caught him as a noose and tightened as he struggled to free himself. An accident.

"I must leave," she had told Madame Pierot, all her own fears forgotten in the memory of another rope, and Marguerite Pierot nodded and did not ask what had made up her mind. She simply accepted it as a decision made, not by a child but by a woman like herself.

Had she been a little wiser then, she would have recognised how priceless this gift was, coming from one she respected: the right to become her equal.

When she returned to Paris, she did not petition the management for anything. She simply informed them that she would be rehearsing the principals in the morning.

...Tomorrow Meg will be seventeen. She is an artist now, and growing more confident in it by the day. Had she but applied herself to ballet the way she does to art, what a dancer she would have made! But it is true, we do not choose our passions. It grieves me more than I can say that your sister can never see her work.

As to Christine: I find I must tell her news for her, for it may concern your business interests. She has requested my leave to permit her marriage to M. Andersson, of your atelier. Seeing them determined I have given my blessing, although you can well imagine my doubts at any marriage in the current situation. By the time you receive this, our sortie will one way or another be over. Would that it was over tomorrow.

She set her pen aside and flexed fingers gone stiff with cold. The letter was terse, but further effort was unlikely to improve it, and she had not the luxury of wrapping her grief in silence. It told the essentials. In any case the weight constraints of balloon post made long letters a thing of the past. Hunger, a constant dull companion, was becoming sharper and making a nuisance of itself. She ought to try to sleep; there was still an hour or more to wait before the morning bread queue.

On the way to Meg's room she peered into the dining room and the empty parlor. The apartment was quiet and oddly deserted. Meg, at least, was sound asleep in her own bed, her hair tousled about her face, her mouth slightly open, just as she had slept as a child. By her bedside lay her latest sketches alongside the three English papers her suitor had sent, with her own illustrations as grey-and-black oblongs in the moonlight. Seventeen. How much longer would she be content to remain here and keep her mother company?

Stay, she thought, knowing that when it came to it, she would have to let her go as well.

She ushered her thoughts away from Christine's absence. Even so, the night was restless and what few dreams she had were for the most part snatches of memories, passing too quickly to be deciphered. Once she thought she saw Gustave on the shore, embracing his violin to his shoulder as though bidding a lover farewell. Another time she saw Christine, emerging white and shivering wet from the Opéra cellars, and woke from that suffocating wave of guilt and relief. She went to check Christine's room after that, despising herself for her irrational hope, but of course her bed was empty.

All things considered, Madame Giry was just as glad to be up for the day before dawn, in time for the bakery opening.

Habit and stubborn hope made her buy enough bread for four. She spent the early hours in the queue for it, and the rest of the morning fighting her way back through the clogged thoroughfares that carried the endless procession of National Guards out toward the ramparts. By rights, Erik ought to have been one of them, if truly he intended to live in the world, and yet Madame Giry found she did not care to see it. He had fought enough. They had all fought enough.

Was it too much to ask that they might have peace again, and beauty, and white bread, and theatre with music that did not feature the Marseillaise? Was it too much to hope for a reprieve?

As the snowfall thinned gradually and the sky started to pale, a peculiar silence settled over the city. It took a moment to identify the cause, and surprise first slowed Madame Giry in her tracks, then made her walk faster, looking for an open news kiosk or a paper boy to confirm the evidence of her ears. It seemed impossible, and yet… The cannonade had stopped.

The forts that had thundered for over a week did not make a sound, even though it was now full daylight, nor did the Prussian batteries installed on the surrounding hills resume their daily fire. This silence, coming at first almost unnoticed, gradually crept into the awareness of everyone she passed, and the murmurs began to rise from every queue and along every boulevard: Why had they not resumed firing today? Was the sortie all over? Was it victory? Defeat?

Every paper boy she passed cried a different story, but it was evident they knew nothing. There had there been no communiqué from the front, no news from the Governor at all, and yet the trickle of wounded men pouring in through the Vincennes gate was fast becoming a river. Madame Giry was forced to walk that way by the gathering crowds seeking news, and what she saw did not comfort her. Every carriage in the Avenue du Trône and the surrounding streets was draped in the white-and-red flags of the Red Cross. Around her, people ran up to the incoming soldiers, questioned them, importuned for news, but even the most highly ranked and least injured of the officers could tell them nothing of substance. Those who could talk indicated by gesture and cry that they had come from a battle that was still going on, somewhere near Brie or perhaps Champigny, through the first of the Prussian lines. One raised a rifle with the bayonet snapped clean off, drawing a ragged cheer from the crowd.

The sortie was going well, it seemed. And yet the forts remained silent.

Outside a closed draper's shop, Madame Giry passed among a gaggle of new Garde Nationale recruits, men of every age and shape who milled around like geese left behind by their migrating flock, uncertain of their orders, smoking or slacking off. They were armed, and the newly minted battalion numbers on their kepis glinted as they watched her go. Among them were men who must have been shopkeepers, gentlemen, clerks, cab drivers, artists: all Paris in uniform. Well, almost all. There was a distinct lack of deformed architects.

When at last Madame Giry reached home, out of breath and caked in snow, Meg was still out on her own errands and there was no sign of Christine. Christine's clothes, hairbrush, even her music book were all exactly as she had left them, just as Meg had remarked.

No doubt Christine would return later. No doubt she and Erik were delayed by the crowds or the mystery of the silent forts. No doubt. And yet…

Madame Giry stayed only long enough to drop off her purchases, and within a quarter of an hour was back outside, battling her way through the still-gathering crowds up towards the heights of Montmartre. A preposterous quest, she chided herself, and much too late. Surely if she was going to do this sort of thing she ought to have followed Christine a year ago, mirrors be damned — but there was no use denying the anxiety that goaded her onward. She might no longer be Christine's guardian, but she had permitted this marriage amid chaos, and if anything had gone awry, the responsibility was hers.

At number 15, rue Fontenelle, the shutters were closed on every window. There were footprints in the snow all along the side passage, but none looked light or small enough to be Christine's. Gustave's daughter, if she was within, had not left the house. Or had never come in.

Madame Giry considered the barred store-front, then pulled off a glove and rapped loudly on the shutter.

o o o

He needed food. Base as it was, this was no longer a whim for the body to triumph over but a signal of danger such as could not be denied, and it forced Erik to stop work and reacquaint himself with his surroundings.

The bare plaster walls were unexpected. He frowned. What had become of his room's yellowed wallpaper and the bed and — ah.

Slowly it came back to him. He raised his head to look over the wide work table. He was in the outbuilding, the same one he had helped Jean to convert into a signwriting workshop, where he had come in search of a place to continue working by moonlight while Christine still slept. The shed was unheated, and had been left cluttered and dusty as any abandoned workshop, now that Jean was busy politicking at the mairie. But the work table was pristine, and upon it rested a drawing: a cutaway view of a residence so perfect that even in the uncertain pre-dawn light its beauty made him catch his breath. Three storeys, a verandah, a library overlooking the garden, and beneath all this, in the corner, his signature in red chalk: Andersson. Even the tiny, precisely drawn chairs in the sitting-room were positioned just so.

It was perfect — no, not perfect, ideal. Ideal like Oppenord's plan for the never-built Opera of Mount Olympus that had hung in Monsieur Duchamp's office, like the flawless portraits of Christine he had once drawn, like the smooth surface of the Opera Ghost's mask. Erik crossed his arms, trying to contain the tremor that shook him, then dug his fingers into his shoulders. It was more than hunger and cold: it was fury, a helpless fury he could do nothing about.

This house did not exist. It could not exist. Not in this besieged city, not now. Not ever, or at any rate not as his residence or Christine's. A house like this required land, and an income the likes of which he could not command, and freedom.

These things were cold facts. He had to fight the shadows in his mind that insisted it was not so, that with a small effort of will he could conjure a better world for himself and Christine, that he could find some other mask or identity that would come with the things he needed to make their marriage perfect and then they could live in peace, and then, and then…

He went out into the yard and scooped handfuls of snow in his bare hands, packing it into snowballs until the skin of his palms turned red and numb. Then he kicked open the door of the shed, dragged out the beautiful drawing, and nailed it to the door.

There was something intensely satisfying about unleashing the snowstorm to pound the wretched paper into pulp, and the exercise warmed him and dulled his hunger pangs. Even his hands, the same hands that put the gold ring on Christine's finger — a ring he had never earned — those same hands felt at home obliterating it. When the snowballs proved insufficient, he tore down the paper in long ragged strips, ripped them across once, twice, then brought out the hammer again and drove more nails into the scraps that were left hanging.

He did not know how long it took before the drawing was entirely gone. Its destruction seemed like a single moment that went on and on until, spent, it faded into silence.

It was full daylight now, and the snow had stopped falling. The crooked nails driven here and there into the door made it a ghastly sight, and Erik forced himself to return into the shed to find the pliers, and one by one pried out the nails. Then he tidied up the worst of the papier-mache that should have been his house and Christine's. It was gone; so beautiful and dead and gone.

He leaned his elbows against the hole-riddled wood of the door, put his head in his hands, and closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids glowed the afterimage of the drawing, superimposed on the memory of his burning opera house. He felt very tired.

And into that tiredness seeped music, like blood dissolving in the waters of the lake. He was too weak to hold it back. It was born of the same melody that Christine had shown him at the piano when she had changed his Marseillaise to a song of peace, but grown stronger, more vital, pulsing with purpose. From a quiet contemplative air it had turned into a song of action.

Build the house, the music urged.

"I cannot." Erik spoke the denial aloud, but not even the sound of his voice could silence the music. "I cannot!"

Build it. Be an architect again. The music grew more complex, dragging him unwilling after it, teasing him with the suggestion of a new theme before turning abruptly in another direction so that he had no choice but to follow where it led. It speeded up, becoming frenetic, a cancan rhythm that demanded an answering wildness from him. Erik Andersson, architect! And why not, he thought crazily, dizzy in the whirlpool of the music, why the devil not? The courthouse in Sedan was just one project, just one building in the provinces, it was gone and good riddance, but a house — not the perfect one he had sketched, but a real house that Christine would love, their house where they would live as husband and wife — this was the true test of his skill. If he completed it to prove himself a husband in more than mere words, Christine would be his forever. She would be proud to call herself his wife.

He had vowed to provide for her, and provide he would. There had to be a way to build their house. He only had to find it.

The music reached a crescendo and burst into a violent chord that struck a sob from his throat and reverberated painfully through his head. Erik pressed his hands to his temples. His fingers met a strip of the linen mask, a reminder of what and where he was — then it was over. The music released him and the world went blissfully quiet. He breathed.

Behind him, the back door of the house gave a sharp squeal. The noise in the centre of that silence sliced razors into his headache. If it was Louise Gandon, he thought, God help her: coal or no coal, he was in no mood for her tirades or her politics.

He turned towards the sound, head pounding, and felt all the air leaving his lungs. It was not Louise. "Ahhh…"

Christine stood at the open door wrapped in her coat and shawl, ready for the day, cold and red-nosed and impossibly lovely. Her hands were bare, the wedding band gleamed on her finger, and the doorway framing her might have been an open mirror, waiting for him. The rest was all whiteness, glittering snow.

"You must be freezing." She looked at him and spoke so softly that Erik wondered how she had guessed that sound would pain him. "You've been out here all night. Will you come in?"

He felt he was still not quite himself; the music had unnerved him. He gazed at Christine, at this incredible woman who had taken him for her husband, and could find no words.

"Madame Giry has come." Christine did not seem to notice the state of the shed door behind him, nor the confetti of torn paper at his feet. "We should go home. It's Meg's birthday today, she is expecting us."

At this, Erik found his voice. "Yes. We must go home. And we will, as soon as we have a home to go to." He stood taller before her. "I have promised it, Christine, and it will be done. You have your husband's word."

Christine huddled closer into her shawl, looking perturbed, and he wanted nothing so much as to take her in his arms and kiss her, kiss the line from between her brows and drop kisses like promises on her lips — but this was not a matter of more promises, this was the start of their life together and it had to be done right.

"Go with Madame Giry," he told her, raising the collar of his coat against the cold as he ducked back into the shed for his gloves and hat. To his relief both were on the table, and he congratulated himself on having had at least that much forethought. "I shall be back in the evening, with news of our house."

Christine made no move to return. "What house? The drawings you started…" She tried not to look at the torn paper, but a flicker of her gaze have her away. "Erik, you know these plans cannot be."

"I'm through with plans." He adjusted his gloves and flicked a hand contemptuously at the remnants of the drawing scattered in the snow. "I am no longer planning. I'm doing."

"That is hardly a comfort." Christine took a step nearer to him, letting the door fall shut behind her. Her voice, already quiet, became a whisper, and Erik had to come nearer to hear. "I know Doctor Swinburne made you some offer yesterday at the ambulance. Please say you are not going back there." One corner of her mouth lifted wryly, but there was no humour in her eyes. "I cannot marry you every time you have a notion like this."

"Swinburne?" Erik said, taken aback. "He has nothing to do with it. His offer was only a surgeon's greed, no more. This is simple, Christine: we must have somewhere to live. We cannot stay here."

"I have already paid Louise the rent. She was here at dawn with some of the others from the Committee; there is a whole caravan of wounded come in from the sortie that they are housing in the empty house at the end of the street."

Erik caught his breath at the first part, "You paid her?"

"Of course." Christine looked affronted, "I am not without income, you know, I was paid for the last three concerts at the Variétés. It isn't all charity galas."

"You paid her! To live here, in this dump."

"It is hardly that. Besides, we need not spend all our time here, when Madame Giry and Meg have need of us."

Erik felt a familiar heat rise to his neck, shame. He forced himself to remain very still. "You would have us live like gypsies." The word came out as a hiss.

"I would have us live as we have been living. What is so wrong with that?"

An ugly laugh was building in Erik's chest. "You would pretend this marriage did not exist."

As if on cue, the door opened behind Christine and Madame Giry stepped through. She set one hand soothingly on Christine's shoulder and surveyed the state of the shed door, noting the raw holes left by the nails.

"Good morning, monsieur. Christine assured me the ferocious banging I heard earlier was only some repairs."

"Home improvement," Erik said grudgingly, with a glance toward Christine. She seemed as agitated as he felt, and for some obscure reason that was a relief.

"I am glad it is not the start of a new musical tradition," said Madame Giry. "I was hoping you would join us today."

Erik touched his hat brim. "You will have to excuse me, madame. I have urgent errands in the city."

Madame Giry's expression turned grave and she lowered her hand from Christine's shoulder. "It is a shambles in the city, with the wounded coming in from Champigny. And something more is amiss. You have noticed the forts are silent?"

Erik listened. She was right, he realised, the storm seemed to have passed entirely, and the Prussian guns were equally mute. He was no expert in the manifestations and rules of war, but logic said it was impossible for any army to have neutralised all Prussian artillery simultaneously.

"There is talk of a ceasefire," Christine voiced his suspicion.

"That is possible," said Madame Giry. "But the papers are going wild with every sort of rumour, and there has been no word from the the governor."

"Louise Gandon said deserters from the lines have been talking of it in Belleville today. They say it's only a day's quiet, to remove the wounded. That must be why there are so many."

"And tomorrow it all begins again." Erik went to Christine and took the tips of her bare hand in his, the only intimacy a man in his position could permit himself. It was both not enough and too much; it made him long to seize her by the waist and embrace her and warm her skin with the heat of his mouth.

"Let's go home," Christine said under her breath, for his ears only.

"Madame Andersson," he addressed her formally, and saw Christine flinch. He released her hand to retreat to a decorous distance, bowed slightly, and sketched a small bow toward Madame Giry as well. "I regret I am unable to join you this morning. Please convey my best wishes to Mademoiselle Giry. Ceasefire or not, I must go into Paris to make my enquiries."

Christine pinned him with her gaze. To Madame Giry she said, her eyes never leaving him, "Madame, would you give us a moment? I will follow you shortly."

As soon as Madame Giry retreated, Christine turned from the door towards him, and before Erik could react, thumbed his mask aside. "Look at me!" She bunched the linen in her fist as Erik gasped at the freezing air. "I need to know what you intend. You say this has nothing to do with Doctor Swinburne's offer, yet you will not say what he wanted of you."

Erik grasped her wrist, hard. "I tell you this has nothing to do with him. Have faith in your husband, Christine."

Christine held him by the bandage for a moment longer, then let go. Her fingertips skimmed his ridged flesh, with a tenderness she seemed unable to halt. "Then tell me where you go today."

"Soon," he promised, acutely aware of his bare face under her touch. He had to step back, beyond her reach, lest he lose this battle.

"Very well," Christine said in a voice suddenly quite level. "This evening before curfew then, at the apartment. Don't be late."

With that, she turned back through the doorway and Erik watched the door being shut and locked.

He had a few hours to justify her trust. He hoped it would be enough.

o o o

Her birthday brought not one but two surprises. For one thing, there was the absence of noise. For the first time in days the guns did not resume their pounding with first light, and the morning dawned perfectly quiet. Nobody on the snowy boulevards seemed to know why the batteries had stopped firing, although plenty of theories were advanced. In the queue at the butcher's Meg heard them all, from the patriotic (the Prussians had turned tail in the night) to the mystical (the Lord took mercy upon wayward Paris and stayed His hand) to the outright revolutionary (Prussian workers rising up against their masters had demanded a withdrawal). All equally desperate, Meg thought, and equally unlikely, but the silence remained. Perhaps the snow was the answer, and the freezing air that seemed to bite her throat as she breathed — but why such things should stop the voices of the heavy guns atop the forts was a mystery to her. Henri Guyon would probably know the answer, but he and his regiment were somewhere deep in enemy territory by now, and all Meg could hope for was that the guns' silence was a good sign.

Perhaps it meant the troops had advanced beyond the reach of the forts. But that was the one theory that nobody dared to voice. After too many disappointments, hope was too fragile to speak aloud.

When Meg returned home, empty-handed for the rations of horse-meat had again been depleted before all the ration cards could be filled, she discovered her mother was already home and the second surprise waiting for her in the parlor.

Christine stood up from the piano and beamed at her, just as if yesterday had never happened. "Happy birthday."

"You're back!"

Meg flung her shoes aside and ran to envelop this near-sister of hers in what was an embarrassingly tight embrace, given she had only been gone a day and a night. Still, it was such a relief to see her here, to know she was fine after that crazy wedding. Christine wrapped her arms around her just as fiercely. Meg sniffed; the fur on Christine's coat collar was tickling her nose.

"Oof," Christine gasped, catching her breath as Meg finally loosened her hold. "If I knew I'd get such a welcome I'd have brought a proper present. Here."

From the top of the piano she removed a sheet of music and passed it to Meg. "It's a duet really, but it doesn't sound too bad as a solo. I could sing it for you later, if you like. Happy birthday."

"This is new," Meg said, turning the sheet over. The melody twined under her gaze, at once powerful and oddly tender. "You wrote this? It's yours. It must be. Christine, it's so beautiful…"

Christine smiled, but something in her eyes, a too-familiar shadow, made Meg pause.

"Erik didn't come with you," she noted after a moment. "You wanted to sing it with him." There was no need to make it a question, the answer was plain in Christine's face.

"You see?" Christine said easily. "It is as I said. Nothing needs to change."

"But you mean to live with him. You will go back there."

"Not for a while. Come on," Christine said, turning cheerful again, "let's see if we can get the stove going. I brought some food."

This turned out to be a kind of thick broth with the consistency and smell of glue, but when served with the fresh bread Madame Giry brought out, it proved a surprisingly filling meal. They dipped their bread in the bowls, and laughed, and had some wine. Her mother told them stories of Meg's childhood escapades, only a little faded by the years that had passed, and of their first months in Perros-Guirec. Christine was called upon to perform the song she had brought — quietly, to avoid unwelcome attention from the neighbours — and it was every bit as lovely as Meg had anticipated. She could not see how it could be improved upon as a duet; it was perfect as it was.

Replete for the first time in days, at home and free from the ceaseless noise of battle, Meg thought it was quite possibly the most peaceful birthday she had ever enjoyed. Even much later, when right on curfew there came the knock on the door and Christine hurried to open it, Erik's arrival could not disturb that peace. He was both stranger and family now, and the sounds of Christine's voice and his entwined together had somehow become part of her home.