September 18th 1892: Christine
There surely were many bad things that could be said about Victor – the fact that he had been tempted to force himself on me while I had been a prisoner of his master sprang to my mind at once – but he was a man who seized the chances he saw. The moment Gabriel had let go of him to run after Jacques, Victor tried to free his master. The other henchman made a half-hearted attempt to help him, yet the man Marielle had called Pierre took the arm Jacques had been clutching and held it in a firm grip.
It soon turned out that the man's decision not to do anything was far better than Victor's decision to help his master. Seeing the man aproach him, Erik tightened the noose around the neck of Marielle's father.
"Would you like to have a dead master?" he asked conversationally, tightening the noose further. The eyes of Marielle's father were bulging, making him look more insane than ever. He shook his head frantically.
Victor did the same, his eyes almost as wide as his master's.
"Please don't kill him… please," he begged, looking as though he were about to throw himself at Erik's feet.
"I won't kill him," Erik said coldly. "But it has nothing to do with you… or him, as a matter of fact. If I was determined to kill him, nothing you could say or do would hold me back. Yet most unfortunately, Marielle seems to prefer her father alive, though I can't imagine the reason."
"My father must go to prison," Marielle declared. Her voice was shaking ever so slightly, but her hand with the pistol in it was quite steady. "He must go to prison and… and rot there! It would be just like him, letting his henchmen go to prison for him, while he found a quick way out. It simply wouldn't be just."
"I could make his death slow and painful," Erik suggested, sounding like a friendly uncle offerng his favourite niece a treat because she had been such a good girl. "I know a hundred ways of killing with the Punjab Lasso."
His casual voice sent shivers down my spine, and they were not shivers of pleasure. I looked over to Raoul and saw that he was holding the henchman with one hand only, while the other one was at his throat. Even after more than a decade, he traced the by now invisible line the lasso had left every now and then.
Noticing my gaze upon him, he looked up and shook his head dismissively. I knew him long enough to understand that this meant ´How can you have any kind of positive feelings for that madman?´. I answered his glance with one of my own that said ´Loving someone means accepting them the way they are, with all their strengths and weaknesses´. I wasn't sure how much of that message he actually understood, yet seeing him roll his eyes, I knew he had at least got the right idea.
"I want him to go to prison," Marielle repeated, and for a moment I was startled, thinking she was talking about Erik. Then I realised she was still referring to her father, of course. "All the things he did to you! And if something happens to Jacqueline, it will be his fault as well. She always was like a sister to me…"
At once I looked over to the house, but except for a mass of smoke, I couldn't see much. Quickly I looked away again, since I still didn't feel ready to see more than a glimpse of the fire and all that it had destroyed.
In order to distract myself from that distubing thought, I asked Marielle something that had been on my mind for a while.
"And you really didn't know anything about what your father was planning?" I asked, trying not to sound accusing. "If you did, this would be the right time to tell us. Neither the children nor the other servants are here. They'd never know. And we… I think we could forgive you… but only if you're honest with us now."
"I didn't have the faintest idea of what my father was up to," Marielle replied. "I swear it. I knew he was up to something because he had endless discussions with his henchmen behind closed doors, but that was nothing unsual. He's always up to something, though normally it's nothing more sinister than his next burglary. You see, he's no longer talking to me about such things because I told him that I don't want anything to do with it. I did so right after I had returned from living with you. I turned my back on crimes."
"Yes, suddenly you were too good for us," her father called, sneering. "But you weren't good enough to come back and stay with me again, to eat my food and sleep under my roof, were you?"
"Only because I had nowhere else to go," Marielle stated softly. I opened my mouth to utter another apology, but she shook her head and went on herself. "I should have never returned to you. But I needed a place to stay while I was looking for a new position…" Her voice trailed off. The expression on her face told me that she was not recalling the happiest time of her life.
"You never found one," her father said, sounding almost triumphant. I couldn't believe how insensitive he was, putting his finger right on the spot where it hurt his daughter most. What kind of a man was this? "And I know the reason why," he continued. "You were too honest. You could have lied. You could have made up a nice little story about the child you had been looking after… dying of a sudden disease, maybe. But no, you had to be honest and tell everyone you had been dismissed. Stupid girl!" He spat on the ground.
"And it's all your fault!" he addressed me after a moment. "And yours," he added, looking at Raoul. "She had no problems with lying before she came to you, and look at her now! She's a pathetic shell of her former self., unable to earn money with her father. You… you corrupted her!"
I could hardly keep myself from bursting into hysterical laughter. I wouldn't have believed that there was a father who complained because his daughter was telling the truth.
"They showed me the right way of living," Marielle said quietly. "They showed me that there are families in which the children do not live in permanent fear of their father, families that are kept together by love rather than the number of crimes they have committed together. As long as I was living with the de Chagnys, I never told a single lie…except for the things I had to say in order to keep my brother's activities quiet, that is, and I'm very sorry for it."
"It doesn't matter now," I assured her gently, moved by her words. I had had no idea that she regarded our family as as ideal. We were far from perfect, after all. I went over to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned against me with a little sigh, but kept her pistol aimed at Victor, even though he seemed to have given up any attempt to move.
Her father gave a cry like a wounded animal, making both of us look up in alarm. Yet Erik hadn't done anything.
"How can you let that… that woman comfort you?" Marielle's father cried.
"If I were you, I'd choose my words very carefully," Erik warned him in a low voice.
"Don't you understand that she's the worst of all?" the man went on, as if he hadn't heard Erik. "She had to be punished. Yes, I didn't tell you about what I was planning, but that was because it was meant to be a surprise! A surprise!" He gave a horrible laugh. "There would have been a report about the fire in the newspaper tomorrow, and I'd have shown it to you and said ´Look what I've done for you´. And you'd have been grateful. But you were too curious. Why did you have to show up here?"
"I had a bad feeling," Marielle replied, wisely choosing to ignore the ´You'd have been grateful´ part of her father's little speech. He was beyond normal reasoning now anyway. I could only guess that this was why Erik had spared him as well. "No one wanted to tell me anything about your latest plans. So I waited till everyone had gone today and read the notes you made for yourself. I knew I had to come here at once. And that was what I did."
"And you corrupted Pierre!" her father called, acting as if this was the first time he truly noticed that fact. A disgusted expression was on his face. "And Lazlo, too! Where is he, anyway?"
"I sent him away," Marielle answered, her lips curling into a tiny smile. "You taught him obedience, and I thought I should put it to the test. It worked very well. Aren't you happy about it, Father?" She gave the last word an ironic stress.
Unable to keep looking at her, Marielle's father turned away and caught Pierre's gaze.
"You!" he shouted. "What are you doing there, holding a man who should be your friend? You should be on our side! I give you food, shelter and money! What can my daughter give you?"
It was an interesting question. The last time I had seen that man, he had knocked me unconscious. What had caused this change of mind?
"Hope," Pierre replied simply. He was no longer looking at the furious man held back by the Punjab Lasso, but at his daughter. They exchanged tentative smiles. "She gives me the hope that she and I have a future together… that one day we'll have one of those good, honest families she was talking about…"
"You're in love with her!" Marielle's father cried. He made it sound as if it were the worst thing that could happen to a person. "Well, you'll see how long this love will last once you rot in prison!"
Erik had been surprisingly quiet during the entire conversation. Yet now he didn't seem able to control himself any longer. He gave the man a hard push in the small of his back, making him stumble forwards. For a second, the Punjab Lasso was all that suspended him over the ground. Then Erik pulled him back roughly by the shoulders.
"True love lasts forever," he growled. "But I can't expect a man like you to know that. There are few fortunate enough to experience it. So don't talk about things you don't understand." Though he wasn't as much as looking at me, I knew that he was talking about me and himself. Yet since I had no intention to discuss that delicate topic in the presence of so many other people, I changed the subject quickly.
"And as for prison," I said. "I don't think Pierre will go there. After all, he didn't do anything. Come to think of it, I've never seen the man before. He just happened to walk by outside, noticed that something was wrong and went in to help us. A very noble thing to do." Marielle and Pierre both beamed at me.
"Even if you manage to make the police believe that story, there are a few others I could tell as well," Marielle's father snarled. "Terrible stories. He'll end up in prison, whether you like it or not."
"So you're a story-teller as well?" Erik asked. "Well, I'd advise you to keep them to yourself. Otherwise I might be tempted to visit you in prison, and you know how quickly dreadful accidents happen in there. So – "
A cry coming from the house made all heads turn.
There were indeed many bad things that could be said about Victor, but he seized his chances. This time, it happened the moment Marielle lowered her pistol.