Meg continually tripped over her own feet as her mother dragged her back to their flat. Her mother's speed, the stampeding crowd, and Meg's own shock at having seen the Phantom so close made the dancer now about as graceful as a stumbling drunkard.
She regained enough composure once they arrived at the flat to start directly in on Madame Giry. "Mother" –
"No," Madame Giry surprised Meg by barking. Inside, Giry's mind was a whirlwind. Don't see the excitement flashing in her eyes. The energy about to burst out, itching to take action. See only what you must. Don't dwell on his return. DON'T.
"No, Meg. I know what you are thinking. But we are not going to discuss this. Not tonight."
"But mother"-
"But nothing. Go to bed."
Meg almost laughed at the ludicrousness of it all. "To bed? After all this? No! Christine must be protected! We must see to it that" –
"We?" Unlike Meg, Madame Giry did laugh, harshly, but her eyes were ferociously serious. "There is no we, Meg. You are to stay out of this. Completely. You hear? You may think, mademoiselle, after your recent success on the stage that you are mature enough to take on this burden. Think again, child. As long as you live under this roof, in this flat, you will do as I say. Understood?"
Never before was Madame Giry so heated in her manner. She was a dormant volcano that finally chose to erupt with searing lava.
When she looked back at Meg she saw right away that even the novelty of the mother's anger did not quell her once obedient daughter's determination. The girl's pale emerald eyes blazed and hardened, and like her mother, her own cheeks reddened with temper.
The two stubborn ladies locked wounded yet fighting eyes. Madame Giry tried to read her daughter, but for once Meg's expressive face mirrored the usual stony mask her mother wore. There was nothing there to read but the hurt anger in her child's eyes. At last, Meg cast her one last look and then retreated to her room – rapidly, fiercely, without a word.
Her door slammed shut, reverberating like a bullet.
Giry stepped outside the flat and almost swayed as she shut the door behind her. The fury that had moments before consumed her deflated like a hot-air balloon. She felt like a gutted fish.
Then, closing her eyes and willing away her despair, Madame Giry wearily returned to the foyer to help clean up yet another of Erik's disasters.
The custodial staff all kept their heads down, muted. They looked out the corner of their eyes down the hall, where the managers were heard shouting at their staff.
After the night's fiasco, Andre and Firmin's terror turned to outright fury. They must capitulate; Giry knew they must. Erik's opera would be performed. But apparently, not without loud, strident objections from the administration.
Giry smiled grimly to herself, nonsensically imagining what a pair Firmin and Andre must look now, shouting at each other and brandishing that thick libretto while dressed as a pirate skeleton and an alligator.
She surveyed the foyer, where only bits and pieces of confetti and decoration now remained. She clapped her hands. "Very well, everyone," she announced to the janitors. "That is enough for now. I believe we all deserve to go to bed. We shall continue in the morning."
Sighing gratefully, the custodians left in record time. No doubt to try and eke out as happy a new year as they could after this inauspicious beginning.
She yearned to be close to Meg. To see wiped away by magic that hardened, furious look in her incredible eyes. To see her features soften into the pertly sweet expression that made life worth living.
Giry hurried down the hallways toward her flat.
A familiar baritone, husky with worry, called after her backstage. "Madame Giry, Madame Giry!"
She turned around for a split second and looked at the speaker. Then, heart racing, she picked up her pace again. Raoul could hear the true terror in her voice. "Monsieur, don't ask me – I know no more than anyone else."
He rushed forward. His respectful but urgent hand on her arm stopped her. "That's not true. You've seen something, haven't you?"
Oh, monsieur le vicomte, you have no idea.
His persistence, his open honesty, made her deeply uneasy. Perhaps if she were to sell hard the image of the frightened old woman – "I don't know what I've seen...please don't ask me, monsieur." There was a deliberate quiver in her voice.
"Madame!" Raoul's voice was thick with impatience. He obviously did not buy her pitiful act. "For all our sakes," he pleaded.
Madame Giry finally looked into his eyes, studying him.
He was still dressed in his Hussar costume. He must have been in conference with the managers, thus comprising one of the figures they yelled at in their thoughtless rage. Every line in his face and in his posture bespoke his earnest desperation, his wild yet controlled courage.
And finally, unwillingly, she let in the thought that had circled her unacknowledged since first meeting him.
He reminds me of Julien.
With that she felt a sharp pain in her chest and she closed her eyes, inhaling swiftly.
When she opened them again, Raoul was glad to see they were empty of any pathetic show of cringing. They were frank, fathomless. "Very well. Come with me to my office."
Raoul felt ridiculously as if he were almost an intruder on sacred ground as he and Giry walked through the empty dance studio to the office. As if he were witness to something not meant for an outsider's eyes.
The dance floor was vast and the polished wood shined in the darkness, the long bars connected to the wall-length mirrors serving as the only decoration.
His heart felt like stone whenever he thought about mirrors now. Only conjurors and lunatics played with mirrors.
He was filled with confusion and shame. He'd doubted Christine. Thought whoever stalked her was no phantom but a twisted, perverted mind who traumatized her into believing him something fantastical. And true, this man was deceitful, cowardly – but obviously something more, as well.
The novel feelings of guilt increased his resolution to do something, everything for Christine to make it up to her.
They at last reached Giry's small office at the back of the studio. Like the studio, there was little decoration, just neatly filed schedules and ledgers lined up on a shelf by the old mahogany desk. Giry seated herself at this desk now. She silently gestured for Raoul to take the seat opposite her.
Irreverently, he was reminded of his few years at boarding school, on the occasions when he was sent to the headmaster to answer for some boisterous act or another. This must be what her little dancers feel like when they're summoned here, too.
He waited for Madame Giry to speak.
She stared ahead at nothing for several moments. He'd never seen such deep, melancholy eyes. Christine's in her torment came close – but there was something harder, and yet at the same time more resigned in Madame Giry's.
Then a slow blink and she began without preamble.
"It was years ago. There was a traveling fair in the city. Tumblers, conjurors, human oddities..."
She recited this as drily and unemotionally as one would a grocery list. But at Raoul's prompt to go on, a flash of pain – a patient in pain but lost in the fog of anesthesia – crossed her face as she spoke.
"And there was...I shall never forget him...a man...locked in a cage..." Not a man, a boy, just a boy...Madame Giry vanquished the thought swiftly.
The darkness of the small office, lit only by one candle, seemed to weigh the more heavily on the two within.
"In a cage?" Raoul felt chilled to his bones.
She nodded, eyes scanning that faraway fair in her memory. "A prodigy, monsieur! Scholar, architect, musician..."
Suddenly another memory returned to Raoul: the first time he played chess with his brother. Raoul recalled the kind and methodical way Philippe pointed out just how he had cornered Raoul's king into checkmate. Once Raoul could get past his temper at having lost, he listened to Philippe, truly listened. Suddenly this vast jungle of wooden royalty, this game that had seemed but an exercise in bedlam, now suddenly took shape, had meaning, purpose. Structure.
He had that same feeling of awakening now. "A composer," he murmured.
A nod from Madame Giry. "And an inventor too, monsieur. They boasted he had once built for the shah of Persia a maze of mirrors..."
So impatient was he that he did not notice how her voice almost choked on the words, her face bitter and tormented. "Who was this man?"
She swallowed and closed her eyes, concentrating on something. She was fighting...fighting Raoul? Herself? At last she seemed to breathe again.
"A freak of nature...more monster than man." She spat the words out hurriedly, as if they were distasteful to her.
That face! So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face in that darkness. Christine's words on the rooftop six months ago came back to him. "Deformed?"
"From birth, it seemed."
Genius, composer, architect for a shah, musician...and deformed. With his skill and intellect this man could have held the world in the palm of his hands...but he was deformed. He could have been famous, lauded for his inventions, millions would have flocked to him, eager for his approbation and his love...but he was deformed. The only people who stared at him did so not with awe and envy but for a cheap laugh and a fright.
So genius had turned to madness. And a brief glimmer of beauty, of opportunity – of Christine – had turned to obsession, to murder.
"My god," Raoul said with infinite sadness.
"They never found him – it was said he died."
Raoul stared at her sharply. "But he didn't die, did he?"
The candlelight threw Giry's angular face into stark relief, and outlined her bone structure as if she, too, were a death's head. A sorrowing death's head haunted by shadows from the past. "The world forgot him, of course, as the world forgets everything after a time. But I never can. For in this great darkness, monsieur," she gestured all around them. "I have seen him again."
Raoul nodded, face hard. "And this is our Phantom."
Madame Giry seemed to shake off whatever spiritual anesthesia she'd been under. She shot up from her desk and was heading out the door. "I have said too much, monsieur...and there have been too many...accidents."
Raoul was incredulous. "Accidents?" He asked with bitter irony, standing and looking after her.
"Far too many."
She was out the door without one look back.
Raoul ran after her blindly into the studio. "Madame Giry...!"
He lost her to the darkness. "Madame Giry!"
Giry leaned against the flat door, eyes closed and head back.
A calculating trickster, that's all I am.
She'd not told him any outright lies, she assured herself. Just omitted the whole story. After all, what good would her paltry part in the proceedings really do anyone now? Just possibly cement her doom and more importantly Meg's.
Not that she thought the vicomte would betray her trust. At least not intentionally. But he was in love, and that made him irrational. As pressing and eager as he was, she noticed he failed to press her about which city the traveling fair was in, when the Phantom disappeared, and just why Madame Giry happened to know about the maze of mirrors in Persia.
But he was intelligent. As time went by, he would learn to see past his emotions and investigate the details.
She was sure Erik would give him plenty of opportunity for that.
Despite the arguments she told herself, she still felt guilty. Even with his crimes, his murders, she felt guilty calling Erik a freak of nature, an oddity. But she was angry, and she wanted to let Raoul know she was not to be aligned with Erik.
But there was something else, something deeper in her guilt.
As she looked into the vicomte's face as she told her altered story, she felt like she was lying straight into Julien's.
The devotion, the willingness to forsake his title and family all for his beloved, the dark golden hair and clear eyes...ah, if she and Julien had borne a son, how like Raoul he undoubtedly would have been...!
In almost a trance, Anahid crossed over to the cupboard always kept locked. She felt for the key among the many on the chain looped into the belt on her dress.
She sat and opened the drawers slowly, then lit the two candles close by.
First she gingerly took out the yellowed letters from the slats in the cupboard. They were silly, passionate letters Julien wrote to her in the short time they'd been together, during the few occasions when he'd been called away overnight for work. Just silly, precious notes of explanation, of love.
Next she stared into the washed out, gray and white photograph of Jules Giry, staring back at her with the noble eyes she'd sworn she just saw in her office.
She touched the glass carefully above those eyes, caressing him with her gloved hand. "Forgive me, Julien," she said in her mother tongue. "Forgive me for the lying coward that I am." Her voice was so soft even Meg, standing watching from her partly opened bedroom door, could not hear the words.
After a few pensive moments of Meg watching her mother's back as the older woman's fingers trailed the lines of her father's face – and in plain view replacing the letters in their slats – Meg withdrew unnoticed back to her room.