Masque (17 page)

The woman was tough; her hard face never flickered into smile or gained a softer expression. She sat on the couch besides her small daughter.

‘Forgive me, Madame, if I say that seems uncommonly kind of her. I have never known a Diva to show such consideration for a box manager.'

The woman laid a gnarled hand on Little Meg's wildflower patterned knee. ‘You have not yet offered tea to our visitor.'

The girl looked up at her, her expression blank. ‘It is very late, Mother.'

I interjected, glad for a chance to get rid of the girl. She was very like a terrier. I addressed the mother. ‘Tea would be lovely.'

She flicked her ringless finger towards the door. ‘Go.'

The girl slid forward off of the sofa, her hands still hidden I wondered how she was planning to bear out the tray with her fingers shoved into her pockets.

The old woman sat silently for a few seconds, examining me. Finally she came to her decision and signalled with a smile that she was ready to talk.

‘I am certain you know by now that I was a prostitute. Do not look so shocked, I hear all of the gossip.'

I closed my mouth.

She continued, ‘You also know that I was jailed for the offence, sentenced to a year or the payment of a large fine. I served three months before my darling daughter bought me out by selling her hair and teeth, her only physical beauties.' She sighed, ‘Such a pity that only one of those gifts could ever come back to her.'

She smiled sadly at the sour memory of love, ‘Have you never wondered, monsieur, how a woman like me could be trusted to gain a respectable position?'

In truth I had, and this was all very interesting, but I could not, for the life of me, see how it was connected to the matter at hand. When I told her so, she laughed, saying that I needed to learn how to listen.

She continued, ‘After my release I went back to work – this was, you recall, five years ago, near the end of the siege, but the war was still raging.

‘I was destitute. My daughter had begun ratting for the city ballet but there was little money in it. She earned a roof with her dancing, and when she was still a child, still growing, she learned to supplement her income by taking men into her bed.' Her face clouded then. ‘It was very hard to watch. Thankfully, my luck changed soon. One of my regulars was the head architect of the Opera House, Monsieur Garnier, a brilliant gentleman who, though living in severely reduced circumstances and grieving himself over the abandonment of his building and the sudden death of his son, nevertheless found room for me in his heart. I became his mistress.'

She smiled at the recollection, a lip twitch in memory of happiness long spent, ‘He would have married me, I am sure, but for my history and the fact that my first husband, Monsieur Giry, probably remains alive somewhere, though I have not heard from him since my Little Meg was an infant at the breast.

‘As for my dear Charles, he died of consumption shortly after construction began again. It was lucky for me that he had many friends who respected him enough to leave aside their disgust at my past and offer me a job which paid enough in tips to allow my daughter and I to maintain our hold on the architect's house.'

She stood, ready to show me to the door. ‘I trust that you are satisfied that neither my daughter nor myself would wreck the last visible structure that our saviour left upon the earth?'

I remained where I sat, unwilling to be ushered from her house. ‘Madame, I never suspected that your fingers set those bombs beneath the stage, but…'

‘Bombs?' She darted forward like a serpent, taking hold of my arm. ‘There were bombs? My friend said fires only.'

I disengaged her fingers, ‘Yes, Madame. Bombs. Dynamite. There was a tremendous explosion. Many were killed.' I rose now, sensing that it would be wise to intimidate her with a display of my masculine advantages of strength and height, ‘There was also an abduction. My fiancée, Miss Daaé, was taken by the man who set this destruction in motion. He planned it all, as a means of capturing her.'

Her eyes grew wide, terribly frightened. She spoke one word, ‘Erik?' Then fell silent.

Now I took hold of her, my hands on her shoulders. ‘Erik? Is that the name of the fiend?' I was shaking her, without intending to. Her head lolled loosely on the stem of her throat. ‘Her life, her innocent life is at stake, woman! You must tell me what you know.'

And that was when the girl, the loyal daughter, appeared in the doorway. She dropped the tray she was carrying and I turned to look at her, shocked at the sound of fracturing crockery.

‘Let go of my mother!' She shrieked at me, plunging her hands into her pockets.

I found that I could not loosen my grip on the old woman's throat. I watched the tea mingle with the teapot shards and seeped into the floorboards, spreading like dark urine across the floor.

Madame Giry gasped in my hands, ‘Please!'

I ignored her, of course, much to my sorrow. The woman was obviously in deep shock and yet I shook her, striking her once or twice across the cheekbones, shouting, ‘You must tell me who did this! I know that you know!'

Little Meg shouted at me once more, ‘Stop! You are killing her!' and then she shot me through my centre. I heard the bullet enter before I felt any of the pain from it. I dropped the old woman and, I remember, she fell to a faint on the floor. I turned to Little Meg as I collapsed, the edges of the room darkening around me. I think that I was going to ask her a question. I noticed that she had torn the pocket of her dress when she pulled out the gun.

I woke up several days later, in the hospital. I had been found bleeding in the gutter, robbed of my money and my watch, a few short blocks from my house. The nursing nuns told me that it was very lucky that whoever had shot me had used faulty bullets. The shells had fractured as the gun fired. I was filled with shrapnel that I would carry for the rest of my life, but none of my organs had been punctured.

It took me nearly three weeks to recover. My brother visited often, but told me nothing about either the Girys or Christine, other than to let me know that the body that they took for hers, the headless mystery, had been given to the Countess who buried it next to the grave of the girl's violinist father in Brittany.

As for myself, I had almost accepted the loss of her, I had wept out my grief in an ocean of bandages brought by the nuns. It was not until I returned to the house of my brother that anyone thought to give me the letter that would change my life.

11.

I was unpacking the bags that Philippe had brought to comfort me in the hospital, shelving my favourite volumes of art reproductions and hanging my morning jacket on the handle of the wardrobe to be taken away and washed.

I had to stop and massage the sealed scar besides my navel, the site where most of the lead shards sliced their way into my belly. That damned girl. I do not know what held me from reporting her to the police to be properly tried.

No that is a lie. I knew, I know. It was pity for the mother.

When I first woke from the surgery I felt such a surge of wrath at her, the likes of which I had never experienced before. The nursing nuns were very frightened at the violence of my incoherent shouting. Thinking that I was experiencing heart failure or succumbing to stress-induced brain fever they fetched the surgeon who spoon-fed me morphine until I slept beyond the boundaries of rage, grief, or physical agony.

When I woke I was considerably calmer. I had dreamed about her, you see. Madame Giry. I saw her sitting in that filthy cell, trapped and weeping, while the only person left in the world who loved her mutilated herself to effect a rescue.

I knew that I had succumbed to violence against the dancer's mother, and that my actions were inexcusable. It must have been very frightening for Little Meg when she found us. The girl, it seemed, was protecting her still. It was almost as though their roles had been reversed; the mother was in the keeping of the daughter.

So I let them go. I told the police that I remembered nothing of the night of the fire, and bent my will to my recovery.

This was the first time that I had ever thought about a whore, about the misfortunes that could drag a woman to such sin. I have never forgotten it, and to this day I do not regret protecting them.

I sat down on my bed, thrusting the thick curtains aside and fingering my belly. I had just resolved to take another swallow of laudanum and fall into a grief-dissolving dream, (a habit that I have lately resumed) when there was a knock on my door.

‘Come!' I ordered.

A servant entered, a new girl that I had never seen before. Apparently the woman she replaced had been there that night, in the pit-audience. She never emerged.

This girl, a thin twelve-year-old in a too-large dress and a cap that slid over her eyes, curtsied once and handed me a thick letter. ‘This came for you, sir. While you were in hospital.'

I had nothing to tip her, so I thanked her with a smile and she fled, disappointed, flouncing her skirts. I could hear her muttering against me in the hallway.

I examined the envelope. It was made from a single sheet of paper that had been folded and glued. It was cheap foolscap made from badly processed pulp, flecks of wood were visible in the grain. There was no postal mark, it must have been delivered in person. My name, scrawled across the front in an uncertain hand, was the only identifying feature.

I sliced it open with my fingernail, unwilling to wait long enough to search my desk for my penknife or a letter-opener.

I found two folded sheets of that same cheap paper. They were scrawled all over, front and back, with words that were so tightly packed that they were just barely legible.

Dear Monsieur Changy,

I would like to apologise for the actions of my daughter, and for our treatment of you after your unfortunate accident. When Meg saw the way you handled me she was severely disturbed. You see, she has no malice in her, but rather she acted out of pure love for her mother.

I thank you, also, for not reporting us. I know that you refrained because if you had not the police would have been here already and they have not come. You see, I have been to jail, and I know that they treat the women that land there much worse than they do the men. The police seem to see violence in men as a natural part of all their natures, an understandable lapse. They see women as something other than themselves, something delicate and pure, incapable of anger. When women act in the same way as men they must be monsters, abominations. Not at all like their wives who never even dare to speak back to them. And so we are more harshly punished.

I was, anyway. You would not believe the beatings that I have taken.

But enough of that. I wrote to thank you, not blather, and I wish to repay your kindness in whatever way that I can.

When you told me that the fire was not caused by arson, but rather had been set by a series of explosions your words stirred up memories that I believed I had forgotten. I do not know if I would have told you this before, had things ended more amicably between us, but now I find myself in your debt. Luckily I can pay you with words that my darling daughter would see as a betrayal of the only father that she ever knew. But my darling Charles is dead and long-since in heaven where he can feel no woe and there can be no betrayal, for in death there are no secrets anymore.

Do you remember what I told you that night? How, when we came together, he was grieving for two losses; his son and the Opera House? Well, as the years passed and we grew closer he told me a little more.

The man who died was no more his natural son than Meg was his daughter, but Charles had raised him from boyhood and taught him his art. I have seen similar bonds form among dancers. The truest parent of an artist is often the one who discloses to them the secrets of creation. He had, it seems, lost the boy once before. Charles told me that the lad had been stolen from him and sold to a carnival or travelling circus. He was, apparently, quite deformed … though Charles never spoke of that. He had no images of Erik. I cannot tell you what he looks like.

In any case, my lover said that the boy never fully recovered from the years he spent as a captive before his father found and rescued him. He had become quite violent – apparently he would strike a mason across the face for marring a brick. When he disappeared, along with the other architects who worked under him, Charles at first suspected the soldiers who at that time flooded the streets with their mischief.

That was all I knew for many years. My Charles died, as I told you, and in pity I was given the job which now supports us.

Almost as soon as the theatre opened there were rumours of a ghost. Letters appeared, addressed to the managers in a frightening hand like that of a demented child who learned to write with ash and splinters…

My mind flashed back to the note I found in Christine's chambers. The love letter sealed with the lyre of Orpheus.

…demanding extortionate payment in return for protection against misfortune against the scenery and cast.

The managers refused, of course. Those men like to think of themselves as reasonable men. But when the Opera House opened and entire acts were marred by tripping dancers, falling scenery, and in one instance all of the boxes had to be closed because something that looked like blood came pouring out of the walls, Firmin and Andre rethought their position.