Claiming the Spoils

Words slid like hands over flesh as Jacques listened to the conclusion of my tale. He offered me the last of the coffee, his heavy face suffused with tenderness and concern.

"It's your story too now," I said, finally.

"But your son, Philippe, he doesn't know."

"No. Not yet."

"It's a weighty responsibility, to know something that he does not. Do you plan to tell him? Is it absolutely necessary?"

"He's known all his life that something about him was different. I've dodged it, always."

"Perhaps now he's accommodated. Not everything concealed needs to be uncovered, Christine."

I felt my face darken. "Do you wish I had had the same thought a few hours ago, before I began my tale? Perhaps I should have ... 'accommodated' you, and left you in the same dark you wish me to leave Philippe."

"Of course not!" and he set his coffee cup down a little too hard. "It's just that his whole life will be uprooted, and he is already angry enough as it is."

I sighed, thinking of Philippe's closed, pained face when he turned away from Jacques and I in the cemetery the day before. "He has been angry before, and it passes. In that sense, he has a lot of his father in him. Raoul, I mean. 'Never let the sun set on an argument,' he would say. If only Martine had learned that. She is the one who carries grudges like the stigmata, and is always ready to unwrap them and show them to you."

"Why?" he said, curious.

"I don't know. Perhaps it was the matter of always growing up sandwiched in between Philippe on one hand, and Isabeau's shadow on the other. She was always a complacent child, very quiet. She doted on Philippe, followed him everywhere, but from the time Isabeau was old enough to walk, Philippe favored her little sister. I probably didn't handle it well. I kept Martine close to me, made her my little companion and helper, while Philippe and Isabeau made a dream world of their own. And then Isabeau died ..." I stopped to catch my breath. So many deaths, the scarcely-remembered death of my mother, my father's collapse into coughing and decline, Mama Valerius in a dusty rented room in Brussels, Raoul's stricken and paralyzed form carried home from the Bourse, and Erik's death – none of them made my heart tremble as did the loss of that little white-haired girl.

"After Isabeau's death," I recovered myself a little, "I didn't do much for months. Louvel was too young to understand, and he kept wanting to know why Isabeau couldn't play with him anymore, when was she going to come back from her holiday? Philippe showed almost no feeling at all, and later I came to know that it was because of me, that he was being strong for me. There was Martine caught right in the middle. I had been her mainstay, her companion, and it was as if I simply disappeared into this tearful, silent form who went from the couch to the bedchamber, barely eating or speaking. Raoul even thought of a sanitarium."

He pulled me over to him close, surrounding me in warmth, his words sharp and protective. "It's good that he did not, as I've seen too many women who never get out of those places. In my practice I could sometimes keep them out, but it was almost impossible once they went in." Then, softening, "She would be how old now, almost thirty?"

"I think of that all the time, but I can't imagine it. She's always a tiny girl in my thoughts. But poor Martine, even after I came back to myself, she didn't. She became clingy and even more jealous than before. Then, at school, the girls began to tease her with airs and clothes and invitations. Once it got out that we had a manor in France, there was no end to it. 'Martine, when will you invite us for a summer holiday in the country? Martine, why don't you have ponies? Why, your mother doesn't look like a grand lady at all,' and so on. She didn't know how to stop it."

"Had she been a boy, she would have knocked them down a few times, and that would have settled the matter," said Jacques. "I bruised my knuckles more than once, I can assure you, after being called 'Carrot' and 'Piggy' and far worse."

"It's different with men. Did you win?"

"Every time, and my father would slap me on the back and say, 'Give them another go-around if they need it,' but no one did. Had I grown taller, it would have stopped sooner. As it was, I became a bit of a boxer, and even played some rounds in my youth, from all that good practice."

"I would rather be pummeled by fists than sliced by tongues," I remarked. "It was something Erik never understood," and a great sad realization came over me. "I understand him lashing out when I unmasked his shame. But it was his endless needling, his sarcasm. I couldn't tell him then, how unnecessary it was, how it hurt. How even more than the bruises he left on me, that his sharp tongue left deeper marks where they could not be seen."

"Perhaps you could have loved him more, had he not had a woman's tongue."

"Perhaps. No, not perhaps. I've never said it to anyone, not even myself, but you're right. The answer is yes. I tried not to think about it. You understand why?"

"Of course. No woman's husband wants to know that she thinks of another, and no woman who loves her husband will even hint at that knowledge."

"I don't think of Erik like that, Jacques. I want you to know."

"I do know. But this story, this love, it is astounding. If Paris knew of it, Paris would be at your feet ..."

"And at the feet of the storyteller?" I interrupted. "Paris will never know. It's hard enough to think of telling Philippe." A cold little fear played at the edges of my warm confidence, my trust, the glow in my body that had not yet faded from the night before. "You cannot tell anyone. You cannot write about this, or let anyone know. That's not why I told you."

"I wish you trusted me, but nothing will assure you except time. Or perhaps there is something else that will rest your heart as well. What am I thinking?" He slid his glasses off, then slipped down in front of me and put his shaggy foxy head into my lap. Wrapping his arms around my knees, he said, muffled by his long shirt that almost covered my legs, "Marry me. Would any husband be so callous as to parade his wife's deepest secrets of the heart like a banner across the face of the world? We will find an attorney, and I will sign an agreement, so that you can see that I want not a sou of your fortune, not one coin of the inheritance that will pass to your children. I don't want your story to parade about, Christine, nor the de Chagny money. I want you."

I stroked his rough hair. "It's a cheat for you, Jacques. You'll have no children. And I won't tolerate mistresses, or a family somewhere else with some other woman."

"I would have had children by now, had I wanted them. I've had mamas throwing their daughters at me for decades, not that I'm bragging about it."

"Well, perhaps you are, just a little."

"As for mistresses, I haven't had one for years now."

"Unless you count me. Not that I mind. Perhaps I might grow to like it, even."

"Christine, seriously, don't banter with me. What do you say? Will you have me? Not as a fortune hunter, not as someone who would take your story and polish it to a jewel that would shine in every heart, but as a man, as I am?"

"I won't agree, Jacques, not yet. I have to put this to rights between Philippe and I. And how can that work, anyway, since you want me to go to Perros? Since you think this great war is coming, and don't want me swept up in the midst of it?" Then I understood his offer. "You don't have to ask for my hand, for me to believe in your sincerity." I kissed him on his broad forehead. "Besides, perhaps I like being your mistress, at least for awhile."

He sighed, and we sat like that until the noon sun stole all the shadows from the walls.

o o o o o o o o o o o

The gate around the old rectory stood half-open to the cool afternoon. In my hand I still clutched Philippe's telegram, left for me at my hotel like a yellow stain on a white dress. It was short and sharp. Since his telephone messages to my hotel were not returned, he had decided to depart for Belgium this very morning. He hoped that my current plans would not interfere with at least helping Anki get the family ready for the upcoming move to England. I was under no obligation, of course. And so on.

Broken stones welcomed me on the path up to the rectory, and I jammed the telegram message into my pocket. A little man in ragged clothes swept the newly-fallen leaves off the walk. He touched his cap and stared at me with black glittery eyes. Several ravens cawed and then swirled into flight as I brushed their hedge.

An iron gate creaked as I opened it into the little courtyard. There he was, Father Durant, the old priest. His patched and stained cassock fluttered as he pushed the spade in, pulled it out, then bent down to put something fat and brown into a bushel basket. It tumbled down over its companions, all dusty with earth.

"They're lovely potatoes," I commented, and he turned around, his seamed face stretched into a smile. "Earth apples. I've always loved that name for them." I held out my hand but he didn't take it, and for an odd second I thought that perhaps he could sense the sheen of fornication glistening under my glove. But no, it was that his right hand was the twisted one, and both hands were covered with flaky brown soil. He dipped his head in a small bow instead.

The ravens had returned to the hedge, fluttering overhead before landing. "Do you mind if I finish?" he said, and before I had a chance to answer, returned to his digging. The ground was light-brown, loamy. I wondered if he'd added the sand, or if it was like that naturally here in the Seine valley.

If I were home, I would know. Father always used to pick up dirt, run it between his fingers as expertly as the violin strings, sometimes even tasting it. Once when we first came to Uppsala, a householder angrily threatened him because he picked up a handful of earth from the man's side yard, just to see what it was like. But I didn't think Father Durant would mind, so I squeezed a bit between my fingers. It was sandy, but that made it loose and the potatoes had plenty of room to spread and grow. Their plump little brown bodies looked like children lined up in a trundle bed with earthy covers pulled over their heads.

"You need onions to go with those," I remarked. He laughed, a bright young laugh for such an old lined face, and nodded his head towards the rectory kitchen door, where long strings of onions and garlic were tied in thick ropes.

"My cook fried some up for your son yesterday," he remarked, after the last potato was laid to rest. "But he didn't eat them. A nervous man, Doctor de Chagny. Always worried that something is going to go wrong, or that someone will be unhappy. There's tea inside, if you wish."

"I'd rather sit out here, if you don't mind."

He wiped his dirty hands on his cassock as if it were an apron. "You knew him," he said, and I knew just whom he meant.

"I did. Long ago."

"How did he die?" I knew what he meant by that, too.

"There was no priest, but he died well."

"When?"

"A little before Pentecost, in 1881. He was ill, terribly ill."

"You were with him?"

"I was, to the very last. There was another there, a friend of his, a Persian man. He was a follower of Mahomet, but even he implored him to allow us to send for a priest. Nonetheless, he would not have one. I don't know how much he understood at the end, anyway. But we didn't, even though we should have, shouldn't we?"

"God knows his own," he said quietly.

"We were afraid."

Father Durant nodded. "And where does he rest?"

"Under the Place de l'Opera. No, it's not sacred ground, although to Erik it probably would have been. We didn't know what to do, or how to move him, or how to answer the gendarmes, or fill out a death notice." I looked around nervously. "Were you here at that time, Father? Right in this rectory?"

He looked away as he refilled the holes. "I thought he had died. If he had been arrested and then transported to New Caledonia, I thought I would have heard. They would have made such a mockery of him, with his face. It would have been a terrible public spectacle, and so when I heard nothing for months, then years, I knew that he had died."

"He thought the same of you. He said the last he saw you, they dragged you out and around the door. He heard your arm snap."

"It was a miracle," Durant said. "Look here," and he raised his loose dirty sleeve. The flesh twisted in a spiral, with a long fierce scar that radiated out into two prongs. "The bone pierced the flesh. They wouldn't cut it off, for I was to die soon anyway, and they didn't want to bother. I set it myself with a branch and the rags that I wore, thinking that it would fester before they shot me. But it didn't. Then they dragged us out by the dozens, all the prisoners of the Commune, and lined us up. I saw men from the National Guard still in fragments of their uniforms, men who had fought their own men when the French army tried to retake Paris, men in their carpenter's aprons, their workmen's caps still on their heads although streaked with blood.

"They lined us up and shot us. A bullet hit my shoulder, the same side as my wounded arm, thanks to the Blessed Virgin, and I fell, almost crushed by the men around me. When nightfall came I crawled out and hid for a few days, until the army came in and took the city. I hoped I would see him, but I never did."

"The two guards fought each other, and left Erik's cell door open," I said. "One fell, and he killed the other one. He hid in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera."

"Managed to elude the squads that went looking for Communards, I take it." Then his attention drifted back to his mangled arm. "I always wanted to tell him that the wound never stank, not all that time. When I recognized that beautiful sound of your hymn, because so many times he filled that stinking cell with it, I prayed with renewed hope that he was alive, and that no longer would I have to rely on reason alone, but could offer him something concrete, something real. Your son even remarked upon it, and he is not a gullible man either."

"No," I agreed. "He's not. He sat on that commission at Lourdes three years ago and examined the patients. Not one miracle in the whole lot of them."

"Sometimes natural healing can be a miracle."

I sat on the rough stone bench as he continued to dig. "Father," I began, hesitating. "I have something I want to tell you..."

"Shall I wash up and go for my stole? It really isn't necessary, you know. Face to face was good enough for the Irish priests before the coming of the Norsemen. The sanctity of the seal still stands."

"It's not a confession, Father."

"But you do have something to confess."

"Not here, and not now. Anyway, how would you know that?"

"I did speak with Doctor de Chagny yesterday, did I not? He had almost nothing else to say, besides how irritated he was at your choice of a companion."

That's what I was afraid of. "He doesn't like Monsieur Peillard."

"It's not that, Madame. Most grown children are disturbed at the sight of a mother or father in love."

"But I loved Monsieur de Chagny, every day."

He shrugged and patted the earth with his shovel. "All set for this spring. No, Madame, old love and new love are different. There is something about new love that sets everything around it aflame. You are his mother. It is natural that he feel this way. Only he is not quite like other men. He feels everything more acutely, thinks through everything more diligently. Yes, he told me about Monsieur Peillard at the Palais Garnier excavation. But I think it is an excuse."

"I don't know how to start. There's so much, it's all so big, and goes back over so many years."

"Do you love Monsieur Peillard?"

"I don't know," I said. "He loves me. He asked me this very morning to marry him," and then I felt myself redden, because of the circumstances. "Please don't scold me, or lecture. I couldn't bear it now."

Father Durant smiled briefly, a few rays of brightness breaking through the cracks of age. "In my confessional, the sins of the flesh weigh lightly on the scale. But pride, how hard I come down on pride. Your Erik knew that. I would make men walk naked through the snow if I could, for pride. Listen, daughter. Bring Monsieur Peillard and the offerings to Caesar which the Republic requires, come to the chapel here and I will bless the both of you."

"Erik was proud, wasn't he?"

"He had a lot to be proud of. I tried to get him to teach me some of his magical song, and in those long weary days chained to the wall, he did. He always acted bored, but secretly he was delighted. Once we chanted the whole Mass together, and when I remarked to him, 'Erik, you should have been a priest,' he didn't revile me or boast about how he would never live as a capon, without the love of a woman. He just looked sad. The same sadness I see in the eyes of your son."

The ravens had gone, and the small courtyard garden was very quiet. He stood expectantly, waiting.

"Philippe is Erik's son," I said after awhile. "He married me secretly early in 1881, right before Lent. Then he died within a few months, and I married Monsieur de Chagny, who raised Philippe as if he were his own. We never told him, however."

"So Erik found love after all," the old priest mused.

"Not the love he deserved."

"No man gets what he deserves," he replied. "You have an open heart and an honest face. I think you did what you could. There is nothing left on your shoulders to carry anymore. You say he died in peace."

"I know there's no way to know. But I think he did."

"All these years. So many echoes of him in your son. Tell him if you must, but this is the advice of a simple worn-out priest, a man tired of life, although I think I have something to offer here. Do not tell him unless you can do it without shame. For if you bring this to him with bowed head and shifting eyes, you show him that you are ashamed of him, of his conception, of his birth, and thus of his very life itself. You show him also that you are ashamed of his father."

"Shouldn't I be?" I asked. "He killed a woman in Persia. Maybe there were more women that he killed, like the one that you laid to rest yesterday. He could have been the one who snapped her wrists; Lord knows that he almost broke mine once in a fit of anger. His Persian friend hinted long ago that there were others, criminals and prisoners. Did you know, Father Durant, that he threatened to set off a bomb under the whole Paris Opera, to bully me into staying with him, when he thought that I would leave?" I stopped, breathless and angry. "Perhaps he changed in those ten years, Father, from when you knew him during the war. Perhaps he became more than a musician with a golden voice and a taste for revolution."

Pain flicked across Father Durant's age-seared face. "His judgment has already been secured, has it not?" His voice was gentle. "I was so young then. Perhaps I was taken in. But the Palais Garnier still stands, so you either stayed with him, or he relented. These sorrows you may or may not wish to tell your son. Perhaps it is right that they be buried with you. But unless he ravished you, there must have been something in your heart for Erik which brought a new soul into being, the young man whom I am so glad to call my friend when he comes to Paris and visits an old man."

It was true. "There was," I said slowly, testing the words which weighed out genuine and true. "I have never known anyone like him. It was like being cast into a blast furnace and melted into nothing, but later cooled and shaped into something hard and fierce and beautiful."

"He was like that," the priest breathed.

"Yes," and then I wanted to know something more acutely than I ever had. "Father Durant, did he ever tell you his name? His birth name, his father's name?"

"Never," the old man replied. "He laughed about it, said that the angels had only one name and that was good enough for him. I assumed he did not tell me in order to protect me. But how did you marry him, then, if you did not know his name?"

"Before God. There were no papers, no records, just as he passed unnoticed from this life."

"Not unnoticed, I think," the old man replied. "Never unnoticed."

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik had left me sitting in the Louis-Philippe bedroom, wrapped in his peacock-embroidered robe. The doors between our rooms were open and I could hear everything – the water's splash as he drew his bath, the slide of clothes to the floor, the curses when he removed the wrappings on his wound.

I wanted to wear the cream dress with its point de gaz collar, but only stroked it gently. The passage to the Communard prison went through damp and filthy corridors. Anyway, it seemed wrong to take it. I pulled from the back of the armoire something grey and coarse and serviceable, then pulled my hair up into a tight braid that I wound round my head like a crown. I looked like a little schoolmistress ready to take on her charges. All I needed was a wooden rod to wake up dozing pupils.

My fingers shook as I buttoned up the old black boots worn soft as gloves from walking back and forth through Paris streets. Across the apartment I heard Erik curse again, blaming the bandage that wouldn't tie properly, then rummaging for a jacket. It sounded as if he were dressing for dinner, not a trip to the other side of the Palais Garnier cellar to spring a man from a trap.

He stood in the living room, waiting for me, drinking brandy, looking just as I had seen him that first night. His coat with the broad black tails opened behind him, and a black tie like a bottomless midnight eye stared sharp out of the face of his crisp white shirt. His own face was entirely covered with an ebony silk mask. His hairpiece shone in the firelight, and he smoothed it once or twice nervously. You could have powdered your nose in the reflections of his shoes.

I sank into his wingback armchair, reeling from a vertigo of the mind. It was as if everything in between hadn't happened. But there it was, the drag and pull of his leg, the wince I couldn't see under the mask, how he fought the urge to grab his leg, to stroke it, to somehow ease the shooting pain.

He set the snifter on the table, and then looked up and down at me critically. I didn't even have to see his face to see the critical stare, the slight pull downwards of the mouth, the curling of his lip. The set of his head a little to the right told me everything.

"I'm sorry," I said. "This seemed the most practical. It's not as if you were taking me out to the variety theater."

"It's not that," he answered. "You think I don't know women, but I do. I don't like to be right all the time. Erik is right about so much, but not this. Erik will keep his promise, but can you blame him for still scenting the air for a breath of hope? You are sure of his love, or else you would not dress as if you were the governess in his estate."

"I didn't even think of it," I stammered.

"There's no need to say anything," he said abruptly.

I looked him up and down too, hoping to see the man who had lain his face on my breast, who held that softness in his mouth like a child, but there was nothing of that man there now. He stood up strong and solitary, all pulled into himself and powerful with reserve, when he didn't move and allow that weak leg to betray him. The beauty of him that I remembered from that first day came over me again.

Which of us were really who we appeared to be? Was I truly the little grey mouse fit only for the attic room of the grand manor, the small skin of my short life as a diva shed entirely? Was he not a man of fierce anger and impenetrable ugliness who had almost killed hundreds of Parisians, but instead a prince swooping by on the air currents of song itself, a black and beautiful swallow? Whose was the mask, and whose the reality?

He went over to the mantelpiece where the little fatal ebony boxes still sat, and picked up a white handkerchief trimmed with fine wispy lace. Opening it, he took from it that round gold circle which I had worn on my finger like a yoke of iron. He stared at it for awhile, then said in a low, quavering voice, "I want you to have this. Think of it as a keepsake, something by which to remember your poor Erik. Melt it down if you like and have it fashioned into something else, if its shape offends you or your lieutenant. But no matter what you do with it, or how you mold it, it will always be my heart."

I looked at the ugly thing, thick and soft, not graceful like the delicate circlets that nestled diamonds or emeralds. "It would be wrong to melt it down," I murmured. The horrific thought came, he's not giving me my freedom after all, and I struggled for control, sensing that any slip of the face or voice would catapult us back in time, unravel all the weaving so far, leaving me back where we started. "But I will keep it, I promise."

It never occurred to me then to go back on that offer, because I had learned that with Erik, no lie would suffice. I had to believe these vows, make them mine from crown to toe, because otherwise he would sniff out my deception. So I held out my hand, but he didn't offer it, not yet.

"Not for forever," he said quietly. "You're right, it would be utterly wrong to melt it. There is one more thing I want you to do with this ring."

Anything, I thought. I am this close, so close. Whatever could it be? Pierce my nose like a Hindoo woman and wear it down Hausmann Boulevard? Anything you like, Erik. I nodded, incapable of even imagining what he would want at this moment, so close to the end of our days.

"It's only a little thing," he went on. "Out of respect for me, your first husband, I ask only that you wear it for the short remaining time I have left to me, and during that time you live as brother and sister with your Vicomte. Then, when I have died, come back and place this ring on my finger before I am buried. Or put it over one of my eyelids, or in my mouth, I don't care." He laughed a little, crazily. "That would be good, under my tongue like a coin for the ferryman. Do you think you can manage that?" He turned to me calmly, his facial expression invisible to me, as if he'd made some simple request for beef instead of pork roast for Sunday dinner.

The room swayed, and I would have fainted had not anger rushed up through me like another spine. Control, I told myself. You gain nothing by flailing about, or worse yet, flying at him. I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood and said in my sweetest stage voice, "But Erik, surely you will live years and years," thinking, I would never have called him a devil before, but devil is the word. Does he think he can trick me with some vow like that? What will he do, hunt me down if he hears I have not kept it? I shivered in the midst of my rage. He could. He's entirely capable of it.

He didn't notice the cloying artificial tones in my honeyed words, and said only, "A couple of weeks, Christine. A month at most."

I said it slowly, each word drawn out of me like a corpse dredged from the water. "You want me to not marry Raoul until you are dead."

"Surely you don't plan to commit bigamy, while I am alive?" He spread his hands as if to say, everyone knows this, what are you trying to pull? Then he sensed my mood, for he said petulant as a child, "You won't have long to wait, I assure you."

"You plan to kill yourself, then." I stated it baldly, frustrated that I could see no reaction. "Take that mask off, anyway. What is the point? I have seen your face for the longest time."

He turned away and said barely audibly, "I am ill. I know the signs, and you don't."

"You are ill? What's wrong with you?"

He grabbed my hand still wrapped from the sprain, and I winced as he thrust the ring into it. "Take it, and either care for me, or do not. Either make yourself indifferent to my fate, or stay with me while I meet it." He thrust his masked face close to me, and I could hear his teeth grind beneath it. "Erik doesn't want your concern anymore, do you understand? I ask one thing, one simple thing that any man would expect, and all I get are your infernal and endless questions. The Vicomte is welcome to them. Perhaps he will find a way to stop them, as clearly I have not." He looked at me full of bitterness. "This is not a condition. If you choose to throw it down the sewer, feel free. If, when you read in the agony columns of L'Epoque that Erik is dead, and you leave me to be eaten by rats, it matters not. I will still take you to Raoul's cell."

Turning away, he pulled over his long cold hands black gloves thin and delicate as skin, and completed his ensemble with a top hat. "Let's go," he said. "Monsieur le Vicomte is no doubt roaring by now."

I jammed the ring and its kerchief into my pocket, and then slid it surreptitiously onto the heart finger of my left hand.

o o o o o o o o

You would think that the cavernous corridors underneath the Palais Garnier would be silent, but they were not. Gas jets flickered and hissed along the walls at intervals just enough to keep back the thick dark. Water rumbled in pipes. One had broken, spraying the walls with a shining mat that looked like darkened blood, and Erik escorted me around the spray so I wouldn't wet my skirts. Footfalls echoed down a corridor, but if he heard them, he didn't react. Something skittered, squeaked loudly, and was silent.

He walked ahead of me, unspeaking, and while normally I had to almost trot to keep up with his long-legged pace, now I had to slow down to avoid running over his heels. Once he leaned against the wet wall, almost at a stop, but then pushed on.

Ahead was a blacker patch of corridor than the rest, and a faint rush of air came from it. There were more footfalls, and this time Erik stopped cold, so that I ran into his rigid back.

"What is the ..." I began, but he whirled around me and slapped his hand hard over my mouth. I struggled and tried to protest. Was he back to manhandling and dragging me around again? I'll bite him this time, I won't stand for this, and the anger boiled through me until I heard a little snick, then a whoosh, the sound of a match being lit. In the black maw ahead of us came a tiny pinpoint of light.

Erik pulled me, still struggling, into a side alcove cut into the corridor wall, and pressed me into his side. "Silence," and I felt the word more than heard it, the low vibration so close to my ears.

He was so close, he must have been able to feel my pounding heart. A second "snap" and the smell of burning phosphorus said that another match was lit. Then someone spoke, a man, and at first I thought he spoke in Swedish, but none of the words made sense. German? I wondered. They exchanged a few garbled phrases, and I recognized some. English. Someone, or a pair of them, were wandering around the darkest and bleakest corridors of the cellars, smoking and speaking English.

Erik released his hand from my mouth and breathed, "Shhhh" closely into my ear. I nodded that I'd heard, and he relaxed a little, though still coiled like a snake ready to strike.

Then one growled in one of the few English phrases I understood, "Speak French, damn you."

"Bloody language. Bloody country," said the other, and then he switched to clear, unaccented French in a young, almost piping voice. "Why? There're no frogs to hear us now."

"There's that chap that comes like the night, the one with the hat. You don't know he's there until he's right on top of you." The second voice was gruffer, older.

"The one that nabbed your predecessor, as I recall," said the younger voice.

"We had to scramble for cover that time, didn't we. We almost had an incident. He's very clever, that one. Used to report to Thiers himself down at Versailles."

"A bit wrong in the head, I hear."

"More than that. But bloody efficient. He guards what's down here well."

"You ever seen him?" the younger man asked.

"Only the back of him a few times, sneaking around, always right before they carry out a shipment. Once he was talking to that tall fellow, the one we can't ever get to."

"The engineer?"

"That's him. You've never seen him, have you? Ghastly, ugly fellow. I'd love to get my hands on him. But when the bloody frogs put their best operative on him to watch him, you know there's something there."

"And we want it."

"We'll get it. It's just a matter of time."

"Damn him," the younger man said. "Why can't he make his contraptions in the Marais district with the rest of them, instead of down here in this bloody damp? You stand here long enough, you can feel the mold grow on you like moss."

"Sometimes I think it would be so much easier, just to catch that sneaky chap out, set him up with a clean knife between the ribs, and then onto that ugly fellow's laboratory or whatever it is. But the Home Office says no. Too much risk of infuriating the frogs."

"Damn them, damn the frogs, and and damn this bloody country as well."

"It's all for God and Queen," the older man laughed in English, and their footsteps receded into the black.

Erik trembled against me, not with fear, I guessed, but rage. Finally he whispered to me, "I'm going to put an end to this right now."

"Who were they?" I said as quietly as I could.

"Spies," he hissed, "English spies," and he moved away, leaving a hollow in the air where he was.

"No," I said, and pulled him back. "Don't leave me here."

He leaned on me, still shaking a little, and suddenly the world grew darker, thicker, and more impenetrable than ever. I put my arms under his, laid my head on his chest, and we stood like that for a long time in that musty little alcove, the scent of the men's tobacco on the air but nothing else of them left. Somewhere on the other side of the cellars Raoul sat imprisoned, but right now Erik and I clung to each other like sailors in the last life boat, the one that you think will reach land after all, until it suddenly begins to take on water.

His promise hung between us. I wouldn't remind him. It depended on Erik now. Finally he let me go and said, "Just pray they didn't get to Monsieur le Vicomte before we do."

I had been breathing again, but now it choked me.

"We have to take a detour," he commented. "It won't be comfortable."

We crawled up a narrow set of stone steps, then into some kind of crawlspace that had been cut above and adjacent to the corridor. It was just short enough that I had to bend over, but Erik was twisted almost double, and it must have put additional strain on his leg, because he winced and gasped, and the sweat ran down from under his mask onto his collar. We climbed a little, then went down, and it was very dark. Finally we dropped through a trap into the corridor below.

I recognized it at once, the far end of the long passageway between the Communard cells. It was unbearably silent, and I looked around wildly. Erik seized my shoulder and said close to my ear, "Don't call out to him. We may still have unwelcome guests."

"You said he'd be roaring by now."

"I was wrong. Perhaps he's worn himself out. Perhaps Erik gave him a little too much perfume and he's died."

He said the last matter-of-factly, and I almost snapped out, That would get you off the hook, wouldn't it? Instead, I pushed past him angrily. "Where's the cell?" I said, a little too loudly. "Which one?"

There was a rustle, like a chain rubbing against rock, and Raoul called out, "Christine? Is that you? Christine?"

"Yes, it is, it is I. Where are you? Keep talking, I can't see you at all through these little holes, where are you?"

I ran like a wild thing up and down the passage, Raoul's voice echoing off the walls and making it impossible to tell from where it came. I pulled on all the iron-wrapped doors, but none would open.

"Is that demon with you?" he called out, hoarse and raspy.

"Erik is here, Raoul. He brought me with you, to set you free."

There was silence, then a few coughs. Erik stood at the far end of the corridor, lit from behind by dim bluish light, leaning against the stone-cut wall, his face buried in his arm.

"I think he comes to kill me," Raoul said, quieter now. "Let him unbind me first, and I will give him a fair fight. But he is without honor, and no doubt plans to slaughter me like a sheep in a pen."

Erik rummaged in his trouser pocket, and my heart choked me as I thought of a knife, a noose, some instrument of murder, but no, it was none of those. Just a key. "He has honor," I said to Raoul, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on Erik as I walked towards him. "He has brought me here to let you out. Haven't you, Erik?"

"Wait," he said, and took my hand in his, cold even through the glove leather.

I misunderstood. "No, Erik, you promised," and I struggled a little.

"Christine," he breathed. "Foolish woman. Do you think I am going to stand here and let the Vicomte charge me? Do you know how to get out of here?"

"Get out of here?" I repeated, stupidly. "You're going to take us out of here."

"No, I'm not. Listen to me. Down at the other end of the corridor you will turn to the right. There are two passageways close together. One, the wide and brightly lit one, goes into the maze that leads to the boilers and the steam pumps. Travel down it for about a hundred meters or so, then take the small passage to the left. It winds around and bridges the lake, leaving you on the side by the Rue Scribe exit. You have the key with you, I hope."

I patted my reticule, then looked at his inexpressive silk face that showed nothing. He might as well have been a merchant selling me gourds or onions. But his exhausted depression was all revealed in the slump of his shoulders, in the tiredness of his voice. "Which one is he in?" I said. "I can't see him at all."

He didn't answer, but instead started off down the corridor, banging on each door as he went, heedless now of any excess noise, the spies forgotten. "She comes, Monsieur le Vicomte, Monsieur Lieutenant, Monsieur Heir to the family name. Take your prize and go."

Again came the rattling of chains, and we stood before one of the cells on the farther end. Erik rattled the key in the lock and pulled the creaky rusted door open. Deep inside, mired in dark, stood Raoul, or stood as much as he could, pulled down by the chain on his leg and around his waist. He stared at me with wild animal eyes, then at Erik.

"You, at last," he said. "Erik. Take off that mask, and let me see the face of my adversary," and he crouched down, prepared to fight for his life.

Erik gave a mocking little bow. "You will never see the face of Erik, not till your dying day. Let that be a torment to you. Perhaps she really does lie after all, and beneath this covering lies the beauty of Apollo. You will never know with certainty, so don't deign to speculate." Then he turned to me as if Raoul wasn't even there. "You will do as I asked," he said, a statement more than a question, and grasped my hand, running his fingers around the ring.

"Yes." I meant it.

Raoul, who stood staring like a blind man, trying to look, but not seeing all the same. He tried to pull himself as upright as he could. "You will do what?" he said to me, hoarse and anxious.

"Raoul..." I started, but Erik interrupted me, thrusting his head into the cell to address the chained-up man. "Monsieur le Lieutenant, this woman that I leave you with has promised to continue to wear the ring I have given her until I leave this earth, at which time she will return it to my cold form, and it will go into the earth with me."

Raoul's eye's flew open wide. "What manner of mockery is this? Damn you, fiend, unchain me now and I will pound you until your blood waters these stones, and then there will be no question of any token of bondage on her hand." Erik pushed himself a little further into the cell, but Raoul did not flinch. "Coward," he spat.

"Please, be quiet," I said to Raoul, begging him with my eyes, praying that Erik would not say anything further or call me his wife. Let me explain it to Raoul myself, I begged silently. Not here, Erik. Not now, or we will never get out of this alive. "It's true, I will wear it, but he says not for long. Raoul, please, you have to trust me."

"Indeed," Erik said. "She's proven herself so trustworthy already."

"He's not a coward," I said to Raoul. "Please sit down, if only for a moment."

He collected himself with a great shudder, and squatted on his haunches, trying to touch the filthy straw as little as possible. I pleaded inside with every power I knew that Raoul would stay quiet and that Erik would finally let us go.

Instead, Erik walked into the cell and stood just out of arms' reach before Raoul, whose eyes shone like silver coins, and who began to pray silently, certain that he was going to meet his death after all. His shirt hung open and around his neck hung his brown cloth scapular, moving faintly up and down with the pounding of his heart. I thought Raoul would lunge for Erik or grab at his mask, but he did neither, just as the bird doesn't resist the captivating snake.

"None of your nobleman's tricks," Erik said to Raoul in fierce, angry tones. "No deceits, no more trips to the Bois late at night for you, young monsieur. I may be dead, yes, I am a walking dead man already, but if you beget any bastards, or give this woman a foul disease, or break her heart over another woman, Erik will come back from the dead and haunt you, ghost that he was, that he is, and will be, and you will feel the force of his curse."

"No fear of that," Raoul said, his dry voice calm and under his control now. "You see what I wear next to my skin."

Erik picked up the burlap scapular that hung around Raoul's neck, and fingered it tenderly, almost lovingly. "Half those behind the greenery at night in the Bois wear the same."

"It matters not to me what hypocrites do. I bring Christine to a marriage bed undefiled. Could you say likewise?"

I sank inside down to the bottom of my wet boots. But instead Erik gently placed the scapular back inside Raoul's shirt, and while I could see Raoul's flesh shiver at the touch of that marble-like hand, he said nothing. His hands were under his control and his face was a wall of uncarved stone. "No," Erik said. "I cannot." Then he walked away, defeat heavy upon his shoulders, and Raoul wisely said nothing.

Back in the corridor, Erik said to me, "Take this," a little sliver of metal, not even really a key. "It is for the shackles." My hand shook as I took it. "Don't drop it," he said. He ran his fingers around the golden ring, once, twice. It felt like good-bye. He took off his top hat, and gave an elaborate bow.

"What if we meet ... those men again?" I asked, and Erik laughed harsh and loud.

"Just pretend you're hiding down here for a tryst. That shouldn't be difficult for the both of you." Then he started to walk backward, at first slowly, then faster. "Good-bye, young pride of the seven seas, enjoy your status as head of the family." Then he fell silent and turned aside entirely, walking with the same impersonal purpose of any well-dressed gentleman on a Paris boulevard, his heels clacking on the stone.

When he was entirely gone from sight, I walked into the cell, trying not to let my nose wrinkle at the strong stench of sweat and human waste and fear within. Filthy straw covered the floor and I almost dropped the tiny metal scrap. "What's that, there, the key?" Raoul said. He no longer looked angry. "Christine, calm yourself. Here is my hand, look, give the key to me. I've clapped men in irons before, and know how to get them out. Shush, look, it's all right," and even though he tried to settle me, I started to shake all over, and then to cry.

"You mustn't drop it," he said, trying to stay calm although his voice was almost broken, "We'll never find it again."

Finally I opened my hand, and had to pry it out of the flesh, where it had made a deep imprint. Raoul took it as delicately as the priest holds the Host at Mass, as if it were the Body of Life itself, which in a way it was. With a few twists and clicks he was free. But when he tried to stand he stumbled, his legs all numb from being cramped so long, and he gasped, "Get out of the cell, unless that devil comes back and locks us both in."

I looked around anxiously, and offered him my shoulder. "Oh, God, it hurts," he said, as the blood rushed back to his cramped legs, "They call them pins and needles, but these are knives," and together we staggered out of the dark, foul cell.

At first I didn't know which way to go, to the left or right to get to the corridor that led us to the Rue Scribe passageway, but Raoul had overheard Erik's direction and steered us towards the proper path. As he walked the use of his legs came back, and that was good, because Raoul was wide-shouldered and densely built, and his weight was hard to bear for any length of time. He kept looking anxiously behind him, expecting Erik to leap out at us any second, and his fear spread to me.

"He's gone now, it's all right," I kept saying, hoping it was true.

We found the passageway of which Erik spoke, and it was a long walk through a crack barely wide enough for Raoul's shoulders. A few times he staggered and fell, and I tried to pull him up, but he had to recover under his own power. "I'm so thirsty," he whispered once.

The rage came back, but helpless this time because the damage was done, and I had no way to soften it. "He didn't bring you any water?" I asked.

"He did, but I upset the bucket by accident, and then there was no more. I screamed so loudly, too, hoping someone would hear, all to no avail." Then he shook himself, trying not to complain, and pulled himself up, supporting his weight with his arms on both the walls.

I felt the fresh air, but he was the first to see the crack of light. We came out into a large irregular chamber, and through a narrow aperture at the other end I could see the faint twinkle of the lake, and around it the snaking stone stairway that led to the Rue Scribe gate. "Oh, thank you, Maria," I said, "it's not far now." Then even more welcome came the sound of trickling water. Someone had built a little fountain into the wall, one so like that by which Erik had held me on his lap and bathed my aching head, throbbing from the drug which he'd given me to the point of unconsciousness.

Raoul ran to it and buried his face in the shallow water of the basin, drinking noisily, the stream pouring on his head. No Pan-face spewed water from its mouth. Instead, this time there was a fat little boy who watered the basin in another way, the spigot protruding from under his plump stone belly, and I laughed a little.

Irritated, he looked up, but when he saw the cherub began to chuckle. He threw handfuls of water over himself and a few at me besides. Then he grew suddenly serious, and when I went to embrace him, he waved me aside. "I'm foul, I won't have you sullied by me. There will be time after we get out. So much time," and he poured another handful of water on his head, "so much, you can't believe how good this feels, Christine, as good as the water that poured over the Daroga and I when we were in that catacomb of fire," and then he started upright. "God forgive me, where is the Daroga? As soon as I saw you, all thought of him flew out of my mind."

"I think Erik took him to his home," I said as we walked on. "He talked about delivering a package, and he walked the Persian out, as he did you."

"It was like a dream, but like no dream I've ever had before. The last I remembered, the Daroga and I lay on the floor of the torture chamber, and he came up from behind me with that infernal cloth of his. I caught his reflection in the mirrored wall, but it was dark, and he was all in black, just a shape, really.

"Then I passed into the strangest dream, where I was lying in what looked like a Paris apartment, with a roaring fire. It was so real, Christine, the elaborately carved mantelpiece, a pair of chairs, one wide and leather, the other embroidered all over in bright colors. But it couldn't be, under the ground like that, and anyway, I felt this incredible floating happiness, as if I had Mercury's wings on my feet. Then that tall black presence was there again, and he loomed over me.

"He looked beautiful, like some huge raven with bright wings, and when he told me to walk with him I did it gladly. I would have done anything for him at that point," and then he looked at me with a strange realization. "Dear God, it wasn't a dream, was it?"

I shook my head silently. "What do you remember then?"

"Long grey passages with faces that leapt out of the walls, grinning or laughing, but I couldn't hear them. Lights danced just out of my sight, but when I turned they were gone. It seemed to me that he led me into a chamber lined in black velvet, and then came that cloth over my face once more. When I awoke, it was to reality this time, and a sickness like that of knives piercing my head. I was sick, more than once, and though he left a bucket of water for my use, I upset it in my sickness, and there I lay chained until you came to me."

"He must have given you some potion which mesmerized you. He really is ill, Raoul, because he couldn't carry you or the Daroga."

"And the apartment..."

"I told you, remember, when we sat on the rooftop?"

"I confess," he said, somewhat ashamed, "that I didn't entirely believe you."

We reached the great iron Rue Scribe gate, mysteriously open. So I didn't need the key after all, but I patted the reticule at my waist absently, just to feel its reassurance there. I put my arm through Raoul's, and when he tried to pull away, said, "I don't care if you're dirty. Dirt will wash out."

He squeezed me back, saying, "I can't wait to tell Philippe of this. I doubt he'll believe such a tale, but he must."

Then we stood out on the Rue Scribe itself, and the pavement was wet with rain, one of those cold spring rains that are almost as dark as night itself. A few people stared when Raoul looked up at the great grey sky, spread his arms, and let the rain fall over him, onto his hair, into his mouth, over his face. Then I did the same, and the crowds of Paris swarmed around us, parting for us as if we were a few rocks in the middle of a great umbrella-laden and black-clad stream, and only a few people stopped to stare momentarily before trudging wetly onward.

(... continued ...)