“Madame, you must let me see her at once!”
Erik’s grip on his lasso, which had unconsciously loosened, tightened angrily. That was the Vicomte de Chagny’s voice. What was he doing here? Maybe Christine was in danger after all. He adjusted his position on the railing, ready to break through the window and defend Christine should the vicomte enter.
“Not for you, vicomte, and not for any-vun!” a woman’s voice exclaimed, heavily accented. It must be Madame Valerius, Erik thought. He had never seen her, but Christine spoke of her often enough. Christine sat up, looking confused at the shouting. After a moment, she got out of bed and began stoking the dwindling fire in the hearth. Erik was relieved to see this movement, taking it to mean that, if she was in fact sick, it was probably not serious.
“How dare you?!” demanded the vicomte loudly. From the resounding footsteps, Erik deduced that the vicomte was attempting to get past Madame Valerius and into Christine’s room, but the good woman would not allow it. Erik, half amused and half disgusted by the vicomte’s feeble attempts, decided that he would not be forced to break the window. It was obvious now what was happening: Christine must have caught some illness—but she was getting better, so it was nothing to be unduly worried about—and the vicomte intended to prove his devotion by bringing her flowers or something of that sort. But Christine, of course, did not wish to see the vicomte, so Madame Valerius had taken it upon herself to keep him at bay.
Well then, thought Erik, it isn’t necessary to let Christine know I’m here. She might take it to mean that I don’t trust her. Why else would I be crouched outside her window? When she returned to the opera house, he decided, he would pretend that he knew nothing of her whereabouts.
As he began to climb down the railing, he could clearly hear the vicomte shouting, “Let me past, Madame!” and Madame Valerius’ sharp reply, “Not if you vere ze Pope himself!”
With a slight smile, Erik dropped the few remaining feet to the ground and made his way back to the Opera Garnier.
Two days later found Raoul in the opera house, tapping his cane against the side of his boot and wondering just what had possessed Philippe to take on such a worthless and time-consuming enterprise as opera patronage. He frowned and checked his pocket watch yet again; this was taking entirely too long. It was absolutely criminal for anyone, yet alone inconsequential plebeians, to keep him waiting like this. “I’m afraid I am engaged elsewhere, gentlemen,” he said, tapping his cane against the dusty wooden floor with impatience.
“It can’t possibly take much longer,” said Moncharmin, tugging at his moustache in embarrassment.
“Well, I have to be off to a very important luncheon. I’ll just have to see the set another time.” He turned to leave. “And have someone clean this floor! It may be backstage, but it’s absolutely shameful!”
“The cleaning staff is on strike because we cut their wages, but we can—wait, vicomte, here he is,” said Richard hurriedly.
A stagehand rushed out of the props room, skidding to a stop in front of the managers. “Beggin’ messieurs’ pardon”—he doffed his hat and twisted it between nervous hands—“but we can’t find it!”
“You can’t find it?” repeated Richard. He and Moncharmin shared an angst-ridden glance, unable to believe the incompetence of their employees.
“No, messieurs! We searched everywhere!” The poor man—shaking with some ailment and seemingly quite overly-thin—looked so afraid of being fired that Raoul expected him to collapse from the strain. “Please, good messieurs, don’t—”
“Nevermind,” interceded Raoul, glancing at his watch with a sigh. A gentleman must never keep a pretty woman waiting, and he was already five minutes late. “It was very good thinking on your part to attempt to recycle sets from Orfeo ed—ed—whatever the name of that opera is—”
“Orfeo ed Eunice,” Richard said.
“Orfeo ed Euridice,” corrected the stagehand before he could stop himself. Raoul and the managers glared at the worker, the managers embarrassed, and Raoul just impatient.
“Yes, yes, whatever,” said Raoul. “As I said, a good plan, but it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. I suggest you tell your men to stop looking for it and start painting a new one.”
“Yes, vicomte, that’s what we’ll have to do.”
“Beggin’ your pardons, messieurs,” the stagehand offered hesitantly, “I’m sure th’ Ghost knows where it is. You could ask him—”
Richard snorted. “It’s probably due to him that it’s missing.”
“I thought we agreed he didn’t exist,” Moncharmin muttered.
“O’ course ‘e does!” said the stagehand, surprised. “Haven’t you been gettin’ th’ letters from ‘im requestin’ that you raise our salaries back to—”
“Of course he doesn’t exist,” snapped Raoul, his impatience getting the better of him. “I’m sure some absurd prankster—probably an employee, at that—fancies himself marvelously amusing by sending these notes, but I assure you, there is no phantasmal force haunting this establishment.”
“Just so,” said Richard.
“If there is nothing else, gentlemen, I’ll take my leave.”
He turned again to leave, but Moncharmin called after him, his voice overly-loud (no doubt the strain was getting to him), “Vicomte, you don’t have the list!”
“List?”
“The employee list Monsieur le Comte requested.”
Raoul scowled, suppressing the urge to glance at his watch again. Leave it to Philippe and these two amateurs to ruin a perfectly good seduction. “Yes, yes, hurry and give it to me so I can be on my way.”
“It’s in our office.”
Raoul sighed and strode off towards the stairs leading the managers’ office. Moncharmin instructed the nervous stagehand to take the latest copy of the script to the props department (the script had been revised by the managers and unrevised by the so-called “Phantom” several times already) and begin construction of the Cretan backdrops. Both managers hastened to catch up, but Raoul refused to slow down; he was late, so inexcusably, ungentlemanly late—
Suddenly an angelic figure crossed the hall a distance away, a stunning blonde vision in a skimpy white tutu. Raoul halted in his tracks and stared after her, admiring those delicious curves and wondering if he really was in a hurry. After all, he was already late; surely a few more minutes wouldn’t matter to Dominique, would it?
Richard and Moncharmin barely managed to avoid running into him. “Vicomte, what is the matter?” demanded Richard.
He jumped, startled out of his trance. “Nothing, nothing…who is that rare beauty?”
“Who? Oh, that’s Madame Giry’s daughter. What was her name again, Moncharmin?”
“Margaret. No—Meg. Yes, Meg.”
“Meg,” repeated Raoul, savoring the taste of the name. It was short, innocent, unpretentious…. And what a sweet, childlike little thing she was…. “What do you know about her?”
The managers shrugged. “Not much,” said Richard. “She’s very pretty—”
“A good dancer,” interjected Moncharmin.
“—and under the stern protection of her mother—”
“I’m sure I can reason with her,” said Raoul.
“She’s a good friend of Mademoiselle Daaé, I think—”
“Yes, she and Meg are always chattering during rehearsals.”
“Oh.” Raoul frowned and rapped his cane against the floor disappointedly. He couldn’t risk Christine finding out that she wasn’t the only girl to enjoy his affections. Normally he enjoyed living dangerously, but Christine was more than just another seduction—she was the magnum opus of his career. Or at least, she would be soon. He supposed, for the moment, darling little Meg Giry was off-limits. What a shame.
“Why do you ask, vicomte?” Moncharmin wanted to know. “Do you have a specific part in Idomeneo you think she would be good for?”
“If Mademoiselle Daaé is absent much longer,” frowned
Richard, “we may be forced to choose someone else for Ilia.”
“No, no, don’t do that!” exclaimed Raoul. “No being on earth could possibly match her exquisite beauty, her heavenly voice! You can’t replace such an angel!”
The managers agreed, though rather reluctantly (Christine wasn’t trying very hard, always skipping practice and forgetting her lines, so Raoul couldn’t entirely blame them), and after voicing his adamancy of Christine’s perfection, Raoul realized that not Meg—nor any other woman—could measure up to Christine Daaé. The thought assuaged his disappointment. “Nevermind, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll just pick up that list and be on my way.”
The fourth day after Christine’s dinner at Les Ambassadeurs found her back at the opera house. Though her hangover had only lasted for two of those days, she had thoroughly enjoyed the reprieve and managed to convince herself that she wasn’t entirely well yet. But after three days of indolent absence, the managers had sent a note explicitly stating that she would lose the part of Princess Ilia if she missed any more rehearsals. This seemed overly harsh at first, but then she remembered all the days she’d missed when she had been down in Erik’s caverns and reluctantly admitted that maybe it wasn’t so unfair after all.
Raoul had delivered the managers’ message, but Mamma refused to let him see her. She blamed him for Christine’s ailment—not entirely unjustly, Christine thought—and had staunchly endured his fiery speeches and endearments to Christine, finally convincing him that she wasn’t well enough to have visitors. And indeed, it was Raoul’s fault that she had gotten such a terrible hangover—he should have warned her that the wine was so potent! Admittedly, he was probably used to dining with other nobles who were well-accustomed to the effects of various drinks, but it was much easier to blame someone else than to admit that it was her own fault that she had drank so much.
The rehearsal had not gone well, as she had missed the choreography for the second act. Carlotta had stood in for her, apparently, and had probably proved to the managers that she would make a better Ilia than Christine. Fortunately for Christine, the part required a sweet, gentle demeanor that Carlotta simply did not possess. And the opera was too well-known for the managers to corrupt Ilia’s character without the critics taking exception. Besides, as the opening night of Idomeneo was to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the opera’s first performance, they were especially loathe to change anything.
After an exceptionally long and aggravating rehearsal, Christine fled to her dressing room in shame. Besides not knowing the choreography, three days of inactivity had faded her previously-memorized lines into a muddy blur. Even though she had tried to apply herself—working hard to keep from daydreaming about her future as a vicomtess, as she usually did—she had only succeeded in embarrassing herself over and over until Mercier had cut the rehearsal short. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing Erik, either—not just because he’d probably seen her dismal rehearsal, or because she never wanted to see him again now that she knew what a fiend he was, but because he would ask her where she had been for the past three days. And that was something she had absolutely no desire to answer.
Before the rehearsal she had interviewed more potential instructors, but there was still no hope. No one could hold a candle to Erik’s genius. She was starting to wonder if it was worth her time to look for a way out of his tutelage. Erik, despite his monstrous appearance, didn’t seem like a very violent type, and he was very useful. She wasn’t sure what to do.
On top of everything else, she had been worked so hard during the rehearsal that she had sweated a great deal of her makeup off and she was certain she smelled disgusting, so on her way to her dressing room she had been forced to dash into a broom closet to keep Raoul (coming down the hall with the managers) from seeing her in such an ugly, unattractive state. It wasn’t the first time she had had to hide from him, either. It was absolutely exhausting having to keep in full and perfect makeup all the time and be constantly vigilant of Raoul’s arrival at the Garnier. But it would all be worth it when he proposed.
Not that she wanted him to propose right away—she was enjoying his courtship very much, and besides, she had to become a world-renowned diva first. She was already a diva, yes, but she had only performed as a diva in one opera at this point (and she had botched most of those performances), and while she was becoming marvelously famous in Paris (she took walks around the city and entered shops and restaurants just so she could be recognized, which was becoming increasingly common), she couldn’t stop until the entire world worshipped her as the Goddess of Music, the Empress of the Opera—and if she married Raoul too quickly, she’d have to give it up. It would be improper for a wealthy aristocrat’s wife to work, even if the world clamored to hear her fabulously beautiful voice. So she had decided that if she kept Raoul madly in love until after Idomeneo—anxious and amorous but quite to the point of proposal—she would be able to have it all.
She entered the room as quietly as she could, glancing quickly about for any sign of Erik. There was no reason for him to be there, of course, but she was too nervous to think straight. It had taken her several hours the previous day to come up with a believable excuse for her absence; she finally decided that, as the managers had assumed she was ill, Erik probably had too. It was as good a reason as any. And she had been feeling poorly, even if it had been from an excess of alcohol.
It was a perfectly believable explanation. But somehow that didn’t quell the knot of unease in her stomach. It wasn’t that she really minded lying, especially in this situation; he had made her promise not to see Raoul, which was such an unreasonable request that she felt he deserved to be lied to. What worried her was the possibility that Erik might discover that she had broken her promise. She would lose her ticket to divahood. Worse than that, Erik might order the managers to dismiss her altogether.
But if she married Raoul, she reasoned, fixing a loose pin in her hair, she’d be leaving the Opera Garnier anyway. But then, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to give up her father’s dream. He had spent the last years of his life training her for stardom. He would be so disappointed if she gave it up for anything, even the title of vicomtess and a mansion overlooking the Seine on the Champs Élysées, the most aristocratic and exclusive street in Paris. What would she do? What if she had already lost her chance for divahood already by going to dinner with Raoul?
She pushed the thought away, annoyed by it. “It’s too late for thoughts like that,” she lectured her reflection sternly. “You’ve already done it, and that’s that.”
“Already done what, Christine?”
Christine nearly fell off her stool. Whirling around, she saw Erik surveying her from the empty frame of the trick mirror. His expression was more enigmatic than usual, and she unintentionally blushed. What would he think if he knew the reason behind her absence?
He was wearing a perfectly tailored black suit and an equally black silk cravat. It was all so dark that it seemed to absorb all the light around it, a sharp contrast to the glowing white of his mask. It would have been quite striking if she could make herself forget about his face—but that was quite impossible.
She shuddered and tried to forget the gruesome image that had been indelibly imprinted in her mind. She knew she could never tolerate, let alone like, something so disgusting. She could bring herself to appreciate him as a tool working towards her ascension to divahood, but nothing more. She still wondered if he was some sort of troll from the Ironwood or a botched experiment of the dark elves’ magic.
“Christine,” queried Erik, breaking into her thoughts, “have you been ill?”
“What?” she yelped, having forgotten all about the situation at hand. “What?” she repeated, before she realized what was going on. She’d put many hours of thought into the moment, and now she’d ruined it! “Um, yes—yes, I’ve been quite sick!”
Erik nodded gravely. “I am sorry to hear that. You are better now, I trust?”
“Y-y
es.” Christine could not discern the nature of his mood, and she immediately jumped to the conclusion she feared—he must know about Raoul and Les Ambassadeurs! With a wail of despair, she covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry!” she cried. “It was all my fault! It will never happen again, I promise—”
Erik instantly crossed the room and gently pulled her hands away from her face. “Christine, what is wrong? You have done nothing to be ashamed of.”
She frowned, confused. She had been so certain that if he knew about Raoul, he would be angry. This made no sense at all! Dabbing at her ruined makeup with a plain, white handkerchief that Erik handed her, she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Sickness is not something we can control, Christine. Your unfortunate absence will make catching up in Idomeneo harder, of course, but you have no cause to apologize to me.”
Oh. Of course that was what he meant. About her illness. Her lie.
But it wasn’t a lie, she told herself firmly. I was as good as sick.
Oblivious to her turmoil, he studied her with a puzzled (and yet slightly amused) air. “You cut your hair,” he observed.
She fingered the ragged edge of her new bangs, rather embarrassed. “Yes, I—well—a fringe is in style now.” The memory of the noble women at Les Ambassadeurs, laughing at her ridiculously out-dated clothing and hairstyle, burned like acid in her stomach. She knew she would have to wait until she received a diva paycheck to afford fashionable gowns, but she had decided that she couldn’t wait on her hair and had rashly cut it herself. It had been a terrible mistake. Why, why couldn’t she have waited and paid a hairdresser?
Costumes and Filigree: A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera Page 18
