Prisoner of Love
I woke to find myself locked like a rabbit in a hutch, five cellars down below the National Opera. Crouched in front of the solid oak door in that ordinary bedroom, I cried and called myself all sorts of names, stupid, blockhead, blind as a bat. I had long suspected that Erik was not an angel, but chose not to peer too closely down that particular dark hallway of truth, for fear of finding some. Instead, he claimed to be a man who deceived me out of love. He was right, of course, as I probably would have ignored him like all the others, had he sent me notes and flowers. So many did, after my indifferent little performances as Stefano or Siebel.
It was not so much that he was as ordinary a man as this underground chamber was an ordinary bedroom. Ordinary men do not suffer demotions from angel to man. Instead, injured pride stabbed me. Someone had tricked me, caught me out, taken advantage of my good and gullible feelings.
To him had I poured out my heart and soul, all my longing for poor dead Papa, all my suffering under the snubs and insults of Carlotta's claque, all my fears for my future as Mama Valerius's health declined. He had told me nothing of himself, but it didn't matter. Here at last was a friend, a confidant who understood my heavily accented French and never asked me to repeat words, who always showed patience with me both in music and in my little recitations of cares and woes.
In front of that uncompromising door, I tried to remember my first suspicion that human agency lay behind "the Voice." It wasn't when I practically skipped with delight into my dressing room because I had seen Raoul de Chagny again. Rather, it was after the Voice had been teaching me for about six weeks. I had rehearsed Schumann the previous afternoon for a revue. Too often I stumbled on one or other of the German phrases, until in exasperation Carlotta called out, "Why can't you get it right, Daae? You're such a little Prussian, anyway, it should be easy for you."
"She's a Swede," one of them laughed.
"Swedish, Prussian, what's the difference?" Carlotta snapped. "With that gabble of hers, she should get the German straight. Then we can be done that much sooner. It's almost time for the first show at the Chartreuse Cat."
The rehearsal shut down in shocked silence. It was one thing for a woman to call another a petit cochon if her costume was a little tight, or a scarecrow if too loose, or to make a rude remark about her hair. But ten years after France's humiliating loss to the Prussians, Carlotta's comment still implied a dreadful insult. Even her claque sat open-mouthed. I looked around for one friendly eye, one face not closed as wax-work, but found none. Tears filled my eyes and I could no longer read the score in front of me. I fled the hall.
The next morning, when I appeared for our lesson limp and dispirited, my "Voice" knew at once that something was wrong. At first I didn't want to tell him, but he gently prodded and pried until I relented. From him came an extended hiss like a tea-kettle just starting to boil, the long drawn-in breath of a terrible anger. Then the hiss cut off abruptly, as if "the Voice" feared such a display of passion revealed too much. You knew it from then on, I told myself. But it was so much more delightful to believe in a magical "voice," than a man filled with obsession.
He is going to take off that mask, I resolved. And then I am getting out of here.
I gathered myself together and once more explored the room. There seemed to be no escape unless my captor released me. Even though I tightly gripped the small scissors from the sewing kit, never did I deceive myself that I was any physical match for the man who imprisoned me. The minutes dragged on, and so did my melancholy thoughts. I resolved that if I got out of here, I would never come back to the Garnier Opera again. I would tear my contract up in their faces.
My watch had stopped. Time passed, but how much? Bored, I explored the room again, then opened the mahogany armoire for a closer look inside. A beautiful grey dinner dress hung there. Made of some dark, smoke-colored wool and linen mix, with no ornamentation whatsoever, it fell soft and flexible as India cotton. Rather than buttoning up in the back, which would require a lady's maid, it had ties in the side that lay cleverly flat and concealed, making it possible not only to slip over the head, but to adjust the tightness. It was adjustable enough even to be worn without a corset. That certainly showed the shameful thoughts of its designer, to suggest such immodesty. What dressmaker made this? I wondered, having never seen anything its equal.
I fingered the fine fabric and knew at once that he had designed it, planned it so that the wearer could dress herself without help, and still look elegant. He made it for me. He's prepared this for a long time.
That was when he came in, and not through the bedroom door. The wall itself on the other side of the room opened seamlessly, the ingress hidden in the pattern of the wainscoting. I jumped back with a gasp, flustered that he'd caught me looking in the armoire, embarrassed that I'd admired that which should have horrified and disgusted me. His arms were full of awkwardly balanced packages, and he left the door open behind him. One parcel fell to the floor, and when he stooped to retrieve it, I flew past him, thinking to escape through that hidden portal.
Swiftly and effortlessly he whirled about, then thrust forward his shoulder and hip. All the force I'd mustered in my flight was turned against me as I collided with a body unyielding as a wrought-iron gatepost. I spun off him and thudded against the open armoire door, slamming the side of my head against the hard mahogany. Gape-mouthed and dazed I stood while he placed the packages painstakingly on the bed. He carefully closed the door, which seamlessly disappeared into the wainscoting, and trapped me with his eyes. Or rather, where eyes might have been. Instead, there were only two tiny glittering points in the cavernous blackness, made darker by the full-faced mask.
"You can't keep me here," I said angrily, trying to ignore my throbbing head.
He disregarded that remark and said instead, "Christine, do you have any idea of the time? It's almost two o'clock in the afternoon, and you look as if you have spent the night in the alleyway behind the Opera, serving as the tomcats' frowzy prey."
"What do you expect?" I snapped. "You locked me in." It hurt, that I still heard the voice of my teacher, my friend, who came so close to my heart. This was the voice that told me stories of angels, who described the angelic life in the heavenly realms so clearly, so blissfully, that it made me long for death myself just to experience it. Now he not only locked me up but mocked me as well.
"I've prepared a table for you, but it hardly seems fitting to break your fast in a theater costume," and his eyes swept over my legs not with lechery but scorn.
Confused, I stammered, "Someone will miss me. They'll come looking for me."
"When you do your hair," he went on, as if I hadn't spoken at all, "don't knot it so tightly in the back. I'm glad you had the sense never to go in for those ridiculous spit-curls. They make one look like a ragged little poodle. Keep it instead soft and natural," and he reached out to move a tendril of hair across my forehead.
I slapped his spidery hand aside as hard as I could. "Madame Valerius will call the police!" I shouted.
"I don't think so," he said lazily, ignoring the blow, "as I took the liberty last night of writing to her. I explained that you had gone away with your angel of music for an extended visit, and that you would be returned to her spiritually renewed and an even better singer than when you left. Monsieur Moncharmin has been informed that due to the strain of witnessing the chandelier crash, you require a leave of absence to regain your composure. He's well aquainted with the nervousness of artists. Besides, it's in your contract that you may take a leave of absence from the opera for reasons of your health."
"The only threat to my health so far," I said icily, "has been you." Then I thought of Mama Valerius, delivered from the worry that I knew would have followed. "But I thank you for writing Mama."
He nodded gracefully. "You will bathe now," he said abruptly, gesturing towards the bathroom, "and then you will dine with me."
I thought of arguing, but squirmed with irritation at the scummy clamminess of the renaissance-style boy's costume. Wordlessly I nodded, and he left through the main door, the visible one, but did not lock it. As soon as he left I turned the bolt, and then ran over to the far wall. Careful feeling showed me where the door was. A small louvered window sat up high on the wall, right below the ceiling and directly above the invisible door. However, its slats were closed and nothing could be seen on the other side of the glass. There's some kind of passageway to the outside through that door, I thought. However, there seemed to be no way to open it or make it unlatch.
In later years I played this scene over and over in my mind, like a rehearsal for the performance which never came. As the children grew and made their feeble little stabs at lying (always strenously deflected by Raoul or myself), I grew to understand what was born of deception and what came of impulse.
The bureau drawers were empty, yet a dress and fine slippers had hung in his armoire. That told my clearer, older head that he had not planned to necessarily bring me to his apartments when he did.He was not expecting me to be wearing a breech role boy's costume, but instead assumed I would have my own underthings and boots for trodding the slushy Paris streets. The dress and slippers were purely gifts, to win my confidence and admiration.
His own participation in the chandelier disaster was a mystery to me at the time. Later, when I learned of his agency, it became clear to me that he planned the chandelier crash independently of my visit. It was after he witnessed the screaming and the blood, the glass and the destruction, that we both felt the same compulsion to rush to each other's side. It was then, I surmised, that he decided to act and bring me to him.
Back in that cold tile room so long ago, I drew the bathwater. A jar of salts sat on a shelf and I absently tossed some in, enjoying their rich lavendar scent. I carried the little scissors with me, points open and ready to stab.
I soaked in the bath for a long time, dunking my head and letting the hair float up onto the surface. At first I thought I'd take the scissors directly into the bathwater with me, but some old prudent respect for tools kept me from getting their small sharpnesses wet. I balanced them on the rim of the tub where I could reach them easily. The thought of actually sticking one of their razored points into my flesh, or into Erik's, for that matter, made me queasy. Perhaps if he did enter the bath, I could nick myself enough to make him think I was serious, or slice him enough to make him think twice. However, he did not seem to be a man who would be frightened by blood.
So much easier to lie back in the fragrant tepid water, rather to face my captor, or to decide how to escape. I listened hard but under the earth was free of apartment noises. There were no tromping footsteps on the stairs; no clapping hooves on stone; no calls or cries from the street. Other than the faint hiss of the gas jets, the splash of bath water, and a ringing echo in the pipes when I turned on the water, the room was blanketed in utter silence. I strained to hear him moving about, but there was nothing, not even the click and creak of the door that I expected at any moment.
I couldn't stay in the bath forever.
The bedroom was empty as I crept about apprehensively in a thick white towel almost as large as a bedsheet and of unparalleled warmth. I rested my ear against the bedroom door, hoping to gain some clue to my jailer's movements. Nothing came through but silence. I dragged a heavy wingbacked chair over to the door and lodged it in front. It wouldn't be enough to keep him out if he wanted entry, but it would give me time to grab my little weapon and draw some blood.
My curiosity overcame me, for the packages from the Au Printemps department store lay on the bed, smelling faintly of lilacs. Au Printemps shopgirls dressed more beautifully than the women of the theater. Sneering at their women customers made their noses grow unnaturally long, although they turned up smartly when fawning on the men. These elaborate creatures worked there only if they were kept by some banker or lawyer who provided their beautiful clothes, as they did not earn enough to buy them for themselves. Both the prices and the sales girls frightened me. I had wandered about several times under the department store's great glass skylight, but each time came away empty-handed, feeling like a clumsy, ill-dressed, clod-hoppered peasant.
Inside the fragrant paper were underclothes of the finest quality cotton. Several of the chemises had insets of guipure embroidery, the tiniest work I had ever seen. Under the stack of chemises was a side-lacing corset, and a slim negligee of tender silk. A little note fluttered out as I opened the nightgown's package, telling me that the quality of this silk was such that it could be passed through a ring with no difficulty. It was true – the entire garment slid through my mother's silver filigree band like water through the neck of a funnel.
The clerks no doubt thought he was buying lingerie for a mistress, and I blushed again, first with shame and then with furious anger. How dare he make some shopgirl imagine what the lucky recipient was like, perhaps even envy her and wish that lovely piece of Egyptian cotton was for her. Did she flirt with him as he picked each piece up, testing its softness between his lizard-cold fingers? When she asked for the size, did he look her over and say, A little smaller than you? At least she got to see his face, or so I thought then, while he hid it from me like a thief.
Wrapped in tissue were two pairs of stockings in dove-grey, made to match the beautiful dress in the armoire. As I handled them, their fine silk snagged on the tiniest flake of dry skin. With them were two embroidered ribbon garters light as a spider's web. He considered everything, didn't he?
I went to the vanity table and there, as if some djinn had made it appear at my command, rested a tiny jar of hand cream. It smelled of lemons as it melted into the skin of my palms, richly warming the skin under my finger's strokes. That will keep me from snagging those stockings, I thought, and then I slammed the little jar down. Why should I care about them? I should rip them to shreds in front of him. If I were a man, I'd wrap them around his neck. But I hungered for fine things, for soft fabrics and rich scents, and it seemed wrong to deliberately destroy anything that beautiful.
There were also two pairs of shoes at the bottom of the closet - ladies' dress boots for tromping about the streets of Paris, and a pair of soft leather slippers, fine enough for dancing at the Tuileries Palace, had it not been reduced to a rubble-strewn wreck in the war. I dressed. Never had I worn a corset so light, or a chemise so fine, with cotton woven so tightly I could barely see the weaving.
To complete the effect required earrings, and there on the vanity table rested a grey velvet box. As in one of Scherezade's stories, opening the jewelry box revealed a dangling pair crafted of antique silver. My hands trembled as I slid the delicate teardrops into the holes of my ears. Now to see what my host had wrought. Curiously, there was no mirror on the vanity table, not even a hand mirror in the drawers. But inside the armoire, on the back of one of the doors, was a three-quarter length long one. Stained with specks, flawed in the silver, its dust coating proclaimed it long forgotten.
Stunned, I admired my image. In those days I had a kind of delicate cornflower-and-cream prettiness, but in the man in black's ensemble I glimmered with a rare beauty. The grey of the dress made my eyes look smoky instead of their normal bright blue, and my hair shone like a blonde-white flame. I was pale in those days, so pale. One little blue vein pulsed at my temple, and another crept up from my neck, threads running through marble. Venus might have drawn out a marmoreal woman for Pygmalion, but this mysterious man had cast into marble a woman of pale icy beauty. Previously I had envied other girls their full bosoms and round arms, their curved hips. Now, I raised my arms and did a few swaying movements, admiring the slender fairy who wavered thin and wispy as mist in the warped old mirror.
Shaking and troubled, I stepped back. A few moments ago only one purpose filled me, to fly past my captor and escape. Now everything seemed muddled and confused. I took stock of myself, and my situation. No one had molested me last night. He hadn't entered when I bathed. With his strength and height, he could have forced himself upon me anytime he wished. But he had not.
On the other hand, I had to admit, I honestly had little memory of the trip down here, especially on horseback. It's not my fault, I told myself. It was some drug that weakened my resolve. The only memory I could fish from that foggy pond of dreams was of his strong arms keeping me upright on Cesar, arms that pulled me close into him when I slipped and was about to fall. His body was neither wraithlike, nor icy like his toadlike hands, but warm like any man's.
No wonder he thinks he can make himself so familiar, I thought with furious blushes. On horseback, did I really lean back into his arms as if I were used to lying there every night? Did he wrap his arms tightly around my waist, to further hold me onto Cesar's rocking, rolling back? Did I imagine that he gripped my hips with his thighs, as if the horse and I were one? I could not remember. It was all lost in the fog. All that remained was a soft echo of drugged pleasure.
Through the other side of the door, the weight of his waiting pressed on me. A few centimeters of oak separated me from that endlessly patient presence, anticipating talking to me, eating the supper he'd prepared. This is so unusual, I thought. The singers and dancers have their patrons, their protectors, their lovers, but no one has been in quite a situation as this. A great sensation of exploring an unknown country overwhelmed me, and for the first time I knew why fallen women were called "adventuresses." This wasn't a stranger, after all. I had not seen him until last night, but this was a man who knew me, whom I knew, even if I had not known him as a man.
He was wrong to trick me into coming here, of course. Still, he had taken me out of the cramped confines of my own life and cast me into the sky to soar on musical wings. Further, he cut a fine figure in his long lean black clothes, even though his face and head hid under wig and mask. Perhaps he's bald, I thought. Some men are vain about it, and wear wigs even today. So I went on, telling myself one fond nursery tale after another, until I accumulated enough courage to open that door and face him.
He had set a table for us, a white sparkling confection of silver and candles and lead crystal rimmed with gold. When I entered the room he stood, and I heard again that long hissing breath, fueled now not by anger but admiration. He looked at me as if a sculpture crafted by his hand had walked across the room on her own accord.
" 'White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,' " he whispered.
"I don't recognize that," I said, touched.
"Swinburne, an Englishman, from whose well I draw often. He and Lord Byron are the only two worth reading."
"I don't know either one."
"Stay with me, and you will," he said in low tones.
All lights save the fire and the table's candelabra had been extinguished. When he pulled my chair out his hands trembled. His eyes glittered like two gold coins in the dark deep hollows, drachmae in the eyes of the dead, and I shivered, but tender attention soon dispersed the chill. He filled my glass, retrieved my napkin when it fell, sprinkled pepper on my salad, then placed a dish of garlic prawns and rice in front of me. A wicked thought bubbled up: if he could have chewed for me, he would have. I bit my inner lip to keep from laughing. Not a move of mine went unanticipated.
"It's too much wine for one person," I remarked as he poured a little more Tokay into my glass. "Won't you have some with me?"
"I cannot eat or drink, knowing that you want to go."
"Tell me why I should stay."
"Because in five days' time, we can do more with your voice than we could in three months' of work upstairs," by which he meant up in my dressing room. "Sound does not float through the air, bodiless. The movement of air is sound itself, and nothing moves the air save the action of a body. Bodies make sounds, not fleshless spirits. Do you know how thick air is, Christine? It seems insubstantial, ghostlike, but it is not. It compresses us every second, on every square centimenter of everything live or dead. Just as light moves between the stars through the vibrations of the lumeniferous ether, so the sound from your tender throat comes from a body, and goes to another, where it registers on the ear, but penetrates to the heart.
"Were you to stay, I could watch your throat, your movements. I could see the breath leave your mouth, watch it hang in the air before it flew over to one heart or another. Not with my eyes would I see that soft cloud, but with the vision of my ears, with the vision of my heart. Were it to go amiss, I could guide it back on its proper path, steer it with the tiniest movements. If you stay for five days, it will amaze you how you will sound. What you did at the National Conservatory will seem like the play of children with blocks in the nursery."
"Why is it necessary for me to stay here? Could we not continue to work in my dressing room?"
"Five days is not so long. What else would you do? Sit in a cafe? Darn your stockings? Go to yet another rehearsal of stale, unimaginative Meyerbeer?"
I cut into a chicken wing, its tender meat marinated in the same wine which I drank, and considered. It would take at least a week for the ruin of the chandelier to be repaired. During that time there would be no performances. There was Raoul, however. "There is one more friend I have to write," I said defiantly.
"Who?" he demanded.
"It's not your concern. Since it's most clear you are not an angel from heaven, do you still believe you can choose my friends?" I thought back to his prohibition of worldly pursuits and friends outside of my art, with the threat that he would "return to heaven" if I continued them. He seemed to be in no danger of unfurling his wings and ascending now.
He jerked spasmodically, and while his already inky and unreflective mask could not have grown any blacker, the atmosphere around him suddenly waxed heavy and oppressive. "Five days, Christine. Then it will be up to you what pleasures of the world you wish to pursue. Raoul de Chagny can no doubt find sufficient diversions to amuse him for five days. I deceived you, it's true. Now, I tell you exactly what is in my heart, my heart that is cut into pieces by a single strand of your pale hair. For that fatal wire pulls ever tighter around it, and I cannot breathe for love. If you stay with me for five days, I will let you go. Erik won't force you to come back, even. But if you let me give to you that part of our art which only bodies can bestow, then perhaps you will not want to stay away, ever."
He had already deceived me once about being able to come and go, so I was suspicious. "What if after five days I should decide to leave Paris?"
He interlaced his fingers, forming a ten-legged spider that threatened to trap me in its sticky web. "I do not think you will," he said softly. "But you would be free to."
"You told me that I was free to go last night, and yet I woke to find myself locked in my room," I pouted.
"Tell me what you would have done, had you left your bedroom and found me gone."
"I would have found my way back upstairs, to the Opera," I said primly.
"Really," he said drily, leaning back in his chair. "And how would you have accomplished that?"
I sat, stunned. Even if I could have maneuvered his boat through the underground lake, which was doubtful, how would I have known where to disembark? The canals themselves were like a maze, as I recalled from my fog. Then there were pathways to find, stairs to climb, corridors to navigate. A small town could have fit underneath the National Opera, but at least in a town one could find a friendly face, a guide to find one's way. I remembered he carried a lantern, and that some of the passageways were very dark. Finally I said, "I see. I don't know the way. I could have been lost." Then a horrible thought struck me. "When you went out to shop, what did you expect me to do if you had been hit by a carriage? I would have been entombed down here."
"My chances of being hit by a carriage were far less than the chances of you wandering out and falling into the lake, or breaking your leg on slippery stones, or meeting some of the others that live down here. They are not so civilized as Erik."
"Others?" I asked, gulping.
He told me of the wars in France in 1870 and 1871, when Paris was besieged by the Prussians, and the Opera House was used as an armory and supply depot. Then during the partisan revolution it was occupied by the Communards, who used it as a prison, stockade, and even torture chamber. Throughout both wars he himself hid in the cellars of the unfinished Opera, and he was not the only one, although only a few stayed after the Communard revolutionaries were disposed of, either by execution or exile.
"After the uprising, the gardens of Versailles ran red with the blood of the executed, and not all who lost their heads had defied the Third Republic. This is a good place for them to hide. Some day they will proclaim an amnesty, but for now..." and he shrugged, his point made.
Suddenly the inside of this apartment felt very safe. "Were you on the barricades with the Communards yourself?" I asked. "You said you were in Paris during the war, so what did you do?"
"You are so full of questions. From Pandora on downward, it is the hallmark of your species."
"Of course I am curious. How often does one meet a man who lives underneath a theater? Look, I don't care what side you were on, if that's what worries you. I was a child, and I didn't even live in France then, after all."
"The only side I was on, the only side I am on, is Erik's side," he said shortly. "It took all Erik's efforts to stay out of the way of both the National Guard and the Communards alike. I had no interest in their stupid causes, their revolutions, their emperors or kaisers or presidents. Had the Prussians taken the city, I would have found a way to elude them as well. I used to wish the Prussians would take Paris, then at least these infernal interruptions to my work would cease."
"And what might that work be?"
He waved his long, elegant hand around, that hand whose skin glistened cold and waxlike as a corpse's. "You see around you these walls, this multitude of stories and the stairs which link them, and the lake which we crossed. When Garnier's men first dug into the foundation here, they hit a veritable swamp of groundwater. The more they dug, the faster they dug, the more the water filled in. For all their academy training, they couldn't seem to calculate the flow of water through a pipe, and Monsieur Bernoulli spun in his grave until Erik came upon the scene. I designed and built the great tub that houses this lake, the pumps which fill and empty it daily, and I connected it to the sewers of Paris. Even when Paris was sieged and the sewers blocked, I had inlet and egress to the city, as if those fools' politics could keep me ensconced."
"You helped build this place?" I asked, astonished.
He shrugged, as if it were a minor distraction. "That was the work of my daily bread. But there are other types, such as the work which occupies one's mind, and then," he paused, deeply sighing, "then there is the work of the heart." He turned to me, leaning forward, and all his intense focus seized me in its steely grip. "I give you a choice, Christine. My daily work you saw all around you every day, and in your heartless innocence you knew not that it was even mine. But man lives not by bread alone," and he gave a snide little chuckle. "Which would you like to see now, the work of my mind, or the work of my heart?"
I nodded, trembling as if on the verge of some great mystery. "Either."
"I have never shown this to anyone," he said. "Erik has never shown it to any of the others. It remains here, in the heart of my rooms. But I show it to you, because I love you."
"Please," I said. "You don't have to tell me that."
"But why not?" he cried.
"Because I don't wish you to. Because if you beg me like this, it will make me not want to come back."
"Then you will stay?" he asked, anxiety rising from his body like a cloud. I didn't need to see his face to know his mood. "If I mention it no more, you will stay with me for five days? If you do, Erik will be gentle with you, and your person will be utterly safe. Your room will be your own, the room with my poor dead mother's furniture, the bed in which I was born and where she died. If you stay with me, you'll find that you'll never be troubled by ennui. I know stories, Christine, and more songs than you imagine. There is a whole world down here, and I can show it to you.
"I beg you ... " and he stretched his hand out to me, but I shrunk back, shaking my head. "No, he said, "you are a pure woman, not like the others. I presume nothing, expect nothing of you. Be safe in your room, Christine, and secure in your dressing room as well, when you do return to Paris. Erik will not spy upon you, as he did before. No more talk of love, then, unless you offer it yourself."
He gave a little half-choked sob, and wetness streaked down and collected at the bottom of the thin dark cloth which covered his face. The flexible mask stuck to his chin, which seemed sharper and more bony than a chin should have been. A thin thread of tear crept down to the ascot, tied up so closely to his face as to make the neck almost entirely invisible.
I didn't know what to say. As I told Raoul later, he had placed a great love at my feet. It was not the same as having love confessed by a stranger, for this wasn't a stranger. This was "my Voice," this tense strange man who picked up my fears one by one and gently laid them aside. Then neither of us spoke, until he rose and held his hand out again. "What will it be, first the heart and then the mind, or first the mind and then the heart?"
It shames me now, as it did not then, but I could not take that hand. Papa's dead flesh, the memory of a smell, but most of all, the fear that if our fingers touched his good resolutions would vanish, all these kept my hand at my side. He lurched away in an attitude of terrible hurt, pulling the rejected hand close to his vest, and said, "Never mind, of course you would not touch Erik's hand, you are a good woman, forgive me, forgive me."
He can't help it if his hands are cold, I thought. He is lonely, and lovely to listen to.
"Your heart," I breathed. "I want to see your heart's work."
"It's in my bedroom," he said, hesitating, watching me carefully. "If you choose not to enter, I will understand."
"It's all right," I said. "I trust you will keep your word and behave with honor."
"Then come," he gestured dramatically, "and you will see the work of Erik's heart."
Opening a door previously closed to me, he stepped aside to let me in.
(continued...)