Chapter 19
"Émilie?"
Meg was standing beside the piano bench. Unwillingly, Émilie placed her hands in her lap and looked up.
"Did you want tea today?" Meg asked.
"Sorry," Émilie whispered, already wishing Meg would leave so she could go back to playing.
"You've really never heard music before? Doesn't Monsieur Erik play for you?"
Dumbly, Émilie shook her head.
"Christine always said he played like an angel. He sings like one. I heard it once. And he taught Christine to sing like one too."
"Sorry, but what does sing mean?"
Meg concealed her surprise at the question well enough not to make the little girl feel as infuriated and ignorant as the pianist had made her.
"Let me show you," said Meg. "They're rehearsing now. I'd sing for you but my husband says I sing like a dying cat and I can't be mad at him because he's right.
Meg chattered happily as they walked but Émilie soon stopped listening. A new sound demanded her attention, growing louder as they moved forward. It was different than the sound of the piano, but even Émilie could not mistake it for anything but music.
Meg pushed open a door and led them into the same cavernous room Erik had once shown her. Only then it had been empty and he had called it his kingdom and she had thought it beautiful.
It had been nothing.
Not when the space could be filled with music the same way she filled canvasses with art. Music and dancers with costumes like spilled paints. Émilie had always liked ballet – liked the exertion and seeing her skirt flutter prettily when she turned a pirouette, liked seeing Meg demonstrate a routine in perfect form – but it had all seemed rather pointless. Now she understood. It was a way to look at the music.
Meg didn't have to point out what singing was. Émilie already knew. The young woman in the middle of the stage sang, her voice soaring and falling, twisting and stretching. It was…it was…
"Don't you want to go closer, Émilie?"
Émilie clutched the doorframe and shook her head no.
"Well, do you want to go back, then?"
Again she shook her head. Indeed, nearly thirty minutes later, when Meg said they must return or Erik would be furious, she still had to drag Émilie down the corridor.
The music consumed her. She let it, too, finding it much pleasanter than darkness and shadows. It was an escape from loneliness and her father's distance. It was light.
She could not have it in their cellar home, though she found she could sing well, if quietly, in the silence of her room. There was no other instrument available to her here, but she hardly noticed. This music was in her head.
When Erik snapped at her for letting her mind wander during a lesson and snapped at her to "stop that annoying tapping noise," she wanted to demand to know how he could think of enlightenment literature when such a thing as music existed. But she stayed silent. Young as she was, she understood that the door had been locked for all her life and she was not to intrude. Now that it was open, she could not imagine it being closed again.