CHRISTINE

13.

When he kissed me I knew that I was wrong. Not about everything, I still believe that I was right in trying to extricate myself from Raoul, and the time that I had spent underground perfecting my art and helping Erik to compose his masterpiece was the best and most fruitful period of my life. Then or since. No, I learned that I was wrong about what my master was to me.

He was not the ghost of my father. He loved me, as my father did, but his love was not pure in its source or filial in its expression. He did not love like an angel would, at a distance; he wanted my flesh as well as my spirit, no matter how hard he tried to deny it to himself. I decided then that I would help him to realise it.

Of course I was frightened of the things that he hid from me, beneath his mask, his gloves, his terrible history. He had killed before and showed no repentance for it. He would do so again. I was young enough, then, to believe that I could show him another way. And who knows? If events had played out just a little differently I might have had the chance.

I did not know it, but I had reached the high point of my life, standing there in that sweat-stained white costume exhausted and exalted all at once while he ordered me to close my eyes and touched me with his naked lips. And that is so pathetic I could scream.

It only lasted a second, and when I opened my eyes he had lowered his mask and was standing a full foot away from me, as though he had appalled himself. I stepped toward him and spoke, ‘Erik,’ I have no idea what I would have followed, what I would have said given the chance. Whatever it was, I was interrupted by the sound of a crash as the barrier came down. It was the invasion of our world.

He stepped around me, moving as swiftly as the deadly butterfly knife that Little Meg carried in her cleavage, placing himself between my body and the door.

‘Erik?’ I touched his shoulder, felt his bones shift, his ropy muscles stiffening beneath the silk suit he wore. ‘What is it?’

He turned to me. Behind his mask his flat yellow eyes seemed suddenly to glow. ‘They are coming for you, Christine. Your would-be fiancée comes to your “rescue”.’ He took my hand. His own was trembling. ‘They are not taking the route that I would have had them choose, we would have heard the explosions by now.’

He looked to the door, as though expecting them to defy physics as easily as they defied our plans and materialise immediately in the hallway. His voice sounded dead, defeated already. ‘I could let you go, now. Feign a change of heart and give you to him. That would certainly be easier, and we would both be allowed to live.’ He said these things, even as he squeezed my hand tighter, even as he shook with grief at the thought. ‘Or we could fight. Head them off. I could kill them. Then we could remain together and continue our work, and you would be reborn to the world as a singer.’

I looked at him, raised my free hand to the side of his mask as though it were his real cheek that I were cupping and not a painted model made of wax. It was as warm as flesh. ‘Fight. I have never known the easy path to be the best one.’

Erik hugged me, close enough to smell the foulness seeping through the seams of his clothes. I drew back, continuing, ‘Fight, I say, but try not to kill them. There has been enough death.’

You see, I was already trying to change him.

He agreed to it, however, promised to avoid a slaughter if he could. And that is how I doomed us both.

‘Come.’ He pulled me to the closet at the other end of his chambers and motioned for me to sit on his bed. I was too surprised to be scandalised. I sank, a little, into the feather mattress. He opened the door, revealing a small room with (of all things) a long mirror at the end. There, among his clothing, his costumes, was a large trunk carved of rosewood. He flung open the lid, lifted out folded carpets, some curious porcelain oriental figures, and a small ebony box inlaid with fine shards of mother of pearl and ivory. Turning to me, he said, ‘You have seen my store of explosives. Those are deadly. These begin from the same source but the effect is different. Those explosions cause a bloody death. The bombs in this box bring only sleep. It will not be the sweetest slumber of their lives, but it will have the properties of Lethe.’

He opened the lid, revealing balls the size of cherries wrapped in black paper, a wick protruding like a stem. I could smell them from here, a perfume like Attar of Roses, a bitter bite underneath. ‘They will wake eighteen hours later, perhaps in the market near the Seine, and they will discover that the last week of their lives has become a blank.’

I smiled at him, ‘That sounds perfect.’

He stood, ‘Yes. I should have thought of it sooner.’ Taking my hand, he helped me to stand.

‘What will happen, after?’

‘I have no idea, child.’ He laughed a little, ‘But we will have the better part of the day to work it out. If they are coming by the safe route then they will emerge in your room. The ventilation in there is good; I can use these little bombs without risk to ourselves. Still, just in case, you had better wet a handkerchief and tie it around your nose and mouth to serve as a filter to breathe through. Do it now, they might move faster than we think and if they do I will have to risk throwing it, no matter where we are.’

I took the scarf he offered, immaculately white, and did what he asked.

‘But what about you, Erik?’ When I spoke my voice was muffled, though understandable. I wondered how he managed to sound so clear even with a constantly covered mouth.

‘My mask is lined with cloth, it will serve the same purpose.’

In less than a minute we were in my rooms, standing beside the beautiful bed that he made for me from marble and rugs.

I asked, ‘How much time do we have?’

‘They will be here any minute.’ He walked to the door that they would enter through, counting his paces to calculate his throw. ‘I must be ready for them.’

When he returned to me he held three of the small bombs in one hand, a Lucifer match in the other, ready to light the fuses.

Anxiety was gnawing at my stomach like a rat. I had to tell him, I couldn’t tell him. ‘Erik, I am afraid. What if they really did make it through one of the other doors?’

‘No. We would have heard the explosions. They must have found the safe path.’ He touched my shoulder with the hand that held the matches, brushing my hair from my neck, ‘The very devil must be giving them luck! But the angels themselves are on our side, my dear, I have…’

And that was when the door opened. The first face I saw was Raoul, leading the others, his handsome young features looking older and drawn, whitely furious. Absurdly, I noticed that he’d shaved his moustache, that he was bleeding from the knuckles. It took me what felt like forever to notice that he was holding a gun.

His brother, Comte Philippe, had a revolver, too. The eight men they brought were armed with knives and firearms all their own.

They came to us armed, as though chasing an animal. And I had asked Erik to spare them.

My lover stepped in front of me, in one fluid motion pushing me slightly to the side so that I stood on the marble lip of the tub that I slept in. He struck a Lucifer on the side of his mask, lighting it and marring the finish, lighting the fuses of the three bombs he held as the invaders raised their guns to fire.

He threw them quickly, the bombs already smoking. Fear flooded my mouth like the taste of new coppers and I grew drunk on the stench of roses.

Guns went off as the bombs fell. I could not see who fired. Erik leapt backwards, aiming low, hooking his arms around my belly and diving with me into the bed where we landed. I was too shocked to struggle as he buried me in blankets, blinding me with velvet, shielding me from danger.

The room was full of shouting for a moment, and then drenched in stillness that hit us like a flood of water. I felt Erik’s body pressing mine down, felt him moving, and then heard his voice speaking right next to my ear as his old ventriloquist tricks returned for the final act.

‘Keep perfectly still, as though you were a corpse.’

And then he was gone. I heard him climbing up the side of the pool, heard the sound of his feet gaining traction on tile. I heard him as he muttered, a meaty thump that must have been the sound of him testing the awareness of our attackers with a well-placed kick.

‘Christine!’ His voice, so jubilant, ‘All is well. You can come out now!’

I was doing just that, untangling myself from the blankets he had shielded me with, when I heard Raoul’s voice shouting, ‘Monster!’

I hurried to my feet, trying to stand, failing, frightened by the sound of struggle going on above me. I tried again and this time I rose, in time to hear the report of a gun, the crack of a bullet shattering tile, a loud clatter.

By the time I pulled my head above the rim the main part of the battle was over. The floor was littered with bodies. Most of the men had stopped in terror as their corner of the room filled with smoke, and that doomed them. They breathed in the smoke, and they fell. Raoul had been different. He told me, later, that the sight of ‘the monster’s’ hand on my shoulder had filled him with an incredible rage. When the smoke flooded the room, he hadn’t been breathing. He ran right through it, firing his gun.

When we plunged into the pool a wave of dizziness hit him and he fell, for a moment, beside my wash-basin, well away from the lingering fumes. When Erik emerged, Raoul was just gaining consciousness. His memory was not impaired in any way, though he felt unbalanced and terribly ill. He bided his time until Erik kicked his brother in the side, testing the drug’s effectiveness. The sight of that shining shoe connecting with Philippe’s fat ribs reignited Raoul’s rage and sent him leaping at my teacher, gun drawn, then blazing.

The first bullet missed, hitting the tile. Erik had inhaled none of his drug, he was clear headed and quick as ever. He struck the gun from Raoul’s hand with a well-placed strike at the younger man’s wrist, but that was not enough to incapacitate a boy just entering his prime, even if he was still recovering from an injury.

Raoul leapt at him, snarling, pinning him down on the tiles.

This is what I saw when I raised my head above the tiles.

Erik was lying face-down on the floor, panting loudly, his hands pinned behind him. Raoul was sitting on his spine, digging his knees into the thinner man’s kidneys. Their heads were pointed in my direction; my master was looking at me, sorrowfully, silently. Raoul was cursing. The white scarf I’d been using as an air-filter had tightened in the struggle. It was wedged between my teeth so that I could not speak. Frantically, I moved to untie it so that I could shout to Raoul (he hadn’t seen that I had risen yet), I would take this gag off, undo the knot. I would beg him to let Erik live.

But then I heard a voice, very soft, behind my left ear. ‘No Christine, no. Remain perfectly still. Do nothing. I love you too well to see your life ruined.’

What could I have done, but obey him?

Besides, by then Raoul had seen me. His blue eyes blazed with the mixture of fury and possessive wrath at a theft that he called love. He tied Erik’s hand with a rope he had carried, attached to his belt, dragged him from the ground so that he was standing and bound him to the nearest marble pillar, looping the rope around a mounted lamp so that his hands were held above his head.

When he had finished with that he returned to me, lifting me out of my bed and setting me gently down in a chair near the door. My body felt very cold, just then, and though I was sweating I was also shivering, so badly in fact that when Raoul untied the gag from my mouth my teeth began chattering so hard that they hurt.

Seeing this, Raoul went to the bed and returned with a blanket that he tucked around me. His touch was repugnant, my skin crawled receiving it, but I could not move, could not fight him in any way, not even when he used his bloody fingers to smooth back my hair.

I was so frozen with fear, with exhaustion, that I could not scream when he kissed me on the forehead.

I wish that I had fainted, then. I wish that I had lost myself to the world, that I had breathed in some of Erik’s smoked Lethe or tasted another sip of his sleeping cordial, before I witnessed what followed. But I was awake, and aware, though unable to move. This is what I saw, then. I saw Raoul check his brother’s pulse and, satisfied that he lived, I watched as he plucked the gun from his hand.

I watched him cock a bullet into the chamber.

I watched him walk to my master as he hung from the pole, his arms visibly straining, nearly screaming in their sockets.

I watched Raoul lift the barrel so that it was pointing into the socket of the mask, the oiled metal nearly touching the flat eye of the man that I loved.

I saw Raoul’s finger tighten on the trigger, then release the pressure before the shot was fired. He lowered the muzzle, looked back at me, and asked, ‘Do you not wish to look upon the face of your abductor?’

With one fluid motion, hooking his fingers into the space where wax met the pale skin of Erik’s chin, Raoul tore it away in one fluid motion.

The mask was off; Erik’s terrible face was exposed. I felt my afternoon meal churning in my guts, and then I vomited the contents across the floor tiles.

14.

The mask was off. Raoul held it in his hand. The black wig that Erik wore over it had fallen to the floor. The face beneath seemed hardly human – much more resembling the desiccated face of a mummy than the flesh of a living man. He had barely enough skin to cover his skull. There were lips, of course, he could sing and speak without impediment, but they were shrunken, dry slits that could not totally cover his huge white teeth. Instead of a nose there was a gaping, moist-looking hole that provided the only colour on his face. It reminded me of a leaf-nosed bat that I’d seen a picture of in a book once, an image that frightened me so badly that I could never stand to look at it again. His cheeks and scabrous skull were covered with dried lesions and scars that had healed badly, long ago.

But worse than all of this, by far, were his eyes. They were sunken deep into the orbits of his skull, like those of a week-old corpse that had been left out in the sun. His lids were not sufficient to cover them totally so that when he closed his eyes now, to escape my horror-look, the effect was even worse than it had been before. The yellow gleamed through the gaping lids, seeming to invite the scavenger birds to come and peck.

And yet, they were sentient. I had to remind myself. Those eyes looked at me and knew me, loved me, and that knowledge struck me like a knife. I wiped my reeking mouth with the back of my hand, knowing that if I could only stand to love a mask it wasn’t love at all but a delusion unworthy of enduring.

The strange spell that had held me to the chair, the shock of sudden cold and trembling, had passed. I found that I could move. I tried to speak, ‘Erik.’

I had forgotten about Raoul.

The young man was still standing there, holding the mask in one hand and the revolver in the other, aiming the black muzzle into his captive’s chest. When I spoke he wheeled round to face me, dropping the mask to the floor with a clatter. He said, ‘Close your eyes, Christine.’

I saw him bring his foot down on to the face that I knew, deforming the wax with the weight of his body, destroying it irreparably. It flattened, then shattered. He said, ‘Close your eyes. I’m going to get rid of the monster. You don’t need to see this.’

How could I have stopped him? I was totally unarmed. True, the fallen men around me had hold of their guns, but when I tried to rise and reach them my legs gave way beneath me and I fell to the ground. The sound that I made, landing on tile, distracted Raoul. He turned to see what had happened to me, jerking as he squeezed the trigger so that the barrel pulled a little to the left as it fired. Not that it did any good for Erik.

I saw a gout of blood burst from the new hole beneath his ribs, I smelled the burnt stench of cordite and smelled something terrible, like a dead rat with a burst stomach split by the sun on the sidewalk. I tried to scramble to my feet again, my legs felt like blocks of wood beneath my white skirts.

Raoul looked at Erik, face flooded with disgust, about to fire at him again. I called out to stop him, ‘Raoul, no! Help me!’ I gave into my weakness.

The boy shoved the still-smoking gun into his belt and left the body where it hung. He came, running, to my aid, taking me in those well-formed arms of his and laying kiss after kiss on my cold, wet face. I had no idea that I was weeping until I saw the glimmer of my tears on his red lips. He stroked my hair, drew me up into the heat of his body, so that I leaned against him as we sprawled across the floor.

‘Christine, Christine, you can stop shaking.’ He rocked me in his arms like a colicky child, ‘The monster is dead, and you are safe now. You are safe, and pure, and we shall be married. You’ll leave here with me, I’ll carry you, we’ll go out and get help for my brother and the men.’

I could not take my eyes off the corpse.

Raoul struggled a little, lifting me back into the chair. He was winded and still aching from his wound. He would need assistance rescuing his men. I watched him thinking, pacing the floor between Erik and myself, coming to conclusions. Finally he stopped and turned to me, ‘I’m going to need some help, my darling. You cannot walk yet, you cannot come with me. The monster is dead. You are safe now.’ He looked to the lightly breathing bodies on the floor, ‘My brother will need a doctor’s care.’

He came to where I was sitting, lifted my hand to his lips, ‘Christine, my darling, I must leave you here for a few minutes. One of the doors we passed opened out on to the street. I must go there and get help. Any help I can. I will have to leave you here for a few minutes.’

I shook my head, how could I remain in the same room as the body of the man that I had betrayed with my silence?

‘Christine, you’ll be safe, I swear it. You will be safe. I will not be more than a few minutes.’ And with that, he left me, fleeing through the doorway he had entered through into the darkness, seeking out the light again.

I knew that I did not have more than a quarter of an hour. Raoul was moving quickly, spurred by grief and fear. Soon this cavern would be filled with people, prying eyes, policemen. They would take Erik’s body, drag it into the daylight, naked. I could not allow that to happen. I had to make a decision.

I forced myself to stand, expecting to find myself sprawling again. My legs held. Somehow I made it over to the pillar he was pinned against. I hate to admit that I was fighting my own repugnance at the sight of him. Every step I took forward I had to force. And then, when I got there, I had to look. You see, I thought I owed him that much at least, an unflinching, unafraid look, into his eyes. It almost didn’t matter that he couldn’t see it.

And then I closed my eyes, strained my body up on tiptoes, and kissed him once upon the lips. Blind, they felt human. They tasted sweet, still warm.

I drew back, as though burnt. I thought I felt a breath between them.

I reached forward, touched his neck. There was a slow, strong pulse.

Examining the wound I saw that the bullet had passed through the flesh above his left hip and exited again, lodging in the tile behind him, sundering a painted Krishna from his woman. There was a chance, a small one, that it had not pierced any major organs, that the stench of death that emerged from the wound was just the odour of himself.

Moving in a panic now, I fetched the chair and stood upon it and undid the rope that bound him to the wall-sconce. I used a paring knife from the hotel trolley to split the strands and left it there, in a pile with the rope. Erik was very thin, I did manage to catch hold of him beneath the shoulders and lower him to the ground without either dropping him or getting much blood on to me. I could not lift him, I wasn’t strong enough.

I laid him out flat onto the tiles, lifted his jacket and shirt up far enough to expose the wound. It was clean, like a cored apple. I fetched the scarf that I had used to bind my mouth and wet it again in the water from the basin. I used this to bind the wound, hoping that it would stop the bleeding, I pulled it as tight as I could. I watched the white scarf turn red. It would have to be enough.

There was no place I could drag him but my bed, so that was where I took him. I drew him the few feet across the floor, entering the depression and hauling him in after me. Once he was settled I checked his breathing – still strong – and before I covered him, while there was still time, I ran to my desk and wrote him a note. Ten words on a white slip of paper that I folded into his pocket before covering him up with layers of silk rugs.

I knew my time was very brief now. I had to hurry. I scrambled out of my bed to cover my tracks. Thank God, there weren’t many. A few smears of blood on the floor, easily wiped up. I was disposing of the rag I’d used when I heard Raoul coming at the head of what sounded like a small army of men. Knowing that I would have to answer fewer questions if he seemed to find me unconscious, I sprawled out face down on the floor and began breathing shallowly. It was only half acting. I was beyond exhausted.

I heard the boy cry out when he saw me, felt him lifting me into my arms, checking my face, my throat, laying kisses on my eyelids. I opened my eyes to put a stop to it.

The fear fled his face, the ruddy colour coming back to it. He spoke to the people who had followed him into the room, ‘She’s alive! He did not kill her in his escape!’

A shadow fell over me, a middle-aged policeman hunkering down to speak, ‘The fiend is not here! Are you certain that you shot him?’

Raoul looked angry for a moment, gestured over to the pillar. ‘You’ll see his blood there. The place where the bullet passed through his body. There is a hole in the wall.’

A deputy, I knew his rank by the small size of his hat, examined the wall and said, ‘The lad’s right, sir! This pillar is all bloody. And look,’ he lifted up a piece of rope, the pearl-handled paring knife, ‘this is how he done it! He must have had the knife up his sleeve the whole time. He must have been waiting for this opportunity.’

The Chief looked at me with new respect, laying his fat hand onto Raoul’s shoulder, he said, ‘Your fiancée is an incredibly lucky lady.’

Raoul hugged me close to his breast, rocking me gently. ‘Yes, she is. We both are.’

The police searched the rooms, as far as they dared to, but of course no one thought to examine my bed. I asked the officer who searched Erik’s room to fetch me the folder he found there, a black bound thing, full of musical notations: the full score of Don Juan, nearly completed. I hid it as soon as I returned home to the Countess. For five years the manuscript remained obscure in a drawer, growing a shroud of its own fine dust. It eventually made my name as a singer, and the revenue from it has supported me adequately for the last fifteen years.

They needed twenty men to remove all the bodies.

I left first, on a stretcher. Raoul insisted.

After a search that lasted two days and turned up nothing (an anxious time for me) Raoul decided with the managers to seal up the secret passage leading from the office to the hidden stairs. They used a solid slab of marble this time, to keep out the Ghost. In addition to this, every outdoor entrance they found was filled with earth and cemented over. The newspapers said that it was an appropriate tomb for the Opera Monster. Who knows, if Erik did die (and I have no way of knowing otherwise), I would say that was right.

Philippe woke from his slumber in his own huge bed, the day after his adventure in the basement. He had no memory at all of the week proceeding, and he had to be shown the letter that Madame Giry wrote to convince him that any of it had happened at all. The soldiers recovered in a charity hospital, and were totally paid off.

As for me, I lost everything. In order to avoid a scandal I volunteered nothing of my motives, agreeing with everything that Raoul surmised. Not even my fiancée could keep my name from the papers, but I was depicted as the delicate victim, who stayed pure. My name was touted through society. I found myself much in demand at the ‘better’ kinds of parties, where the people of the theatre could never go.

Raoul and I were married three weeks later, in the church in Brittany. The priest performed the wedding without charging us. I wore a new snowy dress, a hand-made lace veil, and the roses in my bouquet were white. The Countess and Philippe were our only witnesses. We honeymooned for two weeks in Florence. I settled in to being a wife. It was a life without song.

15.

I sang Don Juan Triumphant again tonight, it was the tenth revival tour. The opera is a perennial hit, and I am always, always cast as Doña Ana. It has got to the point that I feel like I am playing a parody of myself as I once was; the passionate, dark-haired post-adolescent who wanted nothing out of life but the freedom to sing. Well, I finally have it. It comes at a cost.

I stood under the new, hot gaslights, greasepaint melting down my face, my greying scalp itching beneath the wig I wear, a mockery of my own former chestnut curls. I clasped my hands above my white dress, in agony at my loss of innocence, singing, ‘For oftentimes it is when Pegasus seems winning the race, he sprains a wing and down we tend, like Lucifer hurled from heaven!’

Byron would laugh, if he were not so long buried. Erik and I inverted his romantic parody, applying his lines to our own script in a way that held the plot before a mirror so that comedy reversed itself to tragedy. Well, now it has become comedy again. The Don Juan that I sing to now on stage is fifteen years my junior. He woos me like a gentleman rogue; I simper like a girl.

Leaving the stage, I knew that Raoul was out there, somewhere, in the audience. He comes to watch every one of my performances, though since the divorce was finalised in court (a scandal I weathered, though it nearly did unseat me from my chances at fame) he has respected my wishes, ceased sending his sad little flowers, and stopped attempting to contact me after the final curtain winds down.

It has been over a decade since the last time I found him, uninvited, in my rooms. I am certain that Madame Giry had much to do with that. After the suicide of Little Meg (who could not live without beauty), she was, in pity, promoted to House Inspector in charge of security. She is the first woman to ever hold that position and, at sixty-five years old, she remains effective in the role. There have been no more robberies in the foyer; she routed all the pickpockets. There have been fewer fights among the Lords. I needed her help. Even after the first round of paperwork went through the courts I am convinced that Raoul still believed that someone else, some unseen presence, was forcing me to leave him. He couldn’t understand why on earth I would want to leave the life he built for me, safe in his shadow, where the only thing that worried my pretty little head was maintaining my body to build status for him.

Even after five years of marriage I doubt that he rightly heard a single word that came out of my mouth. Of course, by the time we were married, when I buried my hopes in favour of him, nearly every word I spoke was couched in lies. It took me half a decade to build up the nerve to start telling the truth.

By that time my luck had turned. His brother Philippe, poor man, never recovered from the death of La Sorelli. I remember going with Raoul to visit him, three years after my abduction. We found him lying in his enormous bed; it was absurd in the small rooms he took in the Hotel de Bouvier after ceding the mansion to my husband as a wedding gift. He called the bed ‘the site of my greatest joy in life’ and insisted that it make the move along with his other, more portable possessions. I believe that the workmen were forced to remove the two huge panes of the picture window that the room boasted – a feat they managed, somehow, without breaking either sheet of glass – in order to force its passage to the room.

Philippe was fading fast by then. I could see that he had lost quite a bit of weight; even smothered as he was in counterpanes his body seemed sunken. Well, I could relate to that. I was growing fairly thin myself. His skin and eyes were yellow (that gave me a start!) and the skin sagged beneath his shadowed sockets. Even when he slept his fingers never released from the stoppered neck of the bottle he clutched.

When he saw us he smiled, called Raoul and I over to sit beside him on the bed. He laid his claw-like hand on mine and, in a broken voice, he said, ‘True love is a treasure that should never be squandered.’ He pulled his brother’s hand to mine so that all three of us were joined together, ‘I am so glad that you have found completion in each other. You strengthen one another, and in your love, neither is reduced.’

He died three weeks later. In accordance with his will the massive bed was burnt. He was buried with a small sample of the ashes in one hand, contained inside of a locket shaped like a heart. In the other he held a small, worn, dancing slipper.

After the funeral, Raoul said, ‘I cannot understand it. Why did he throw away his life like that? She was a fool and a whore; wholly unworthy of him.’

I did not reply; I had learned by then that it was better not to bother. Besides, I felt so cold inside that few things could fire me into any complex discourse. It was as though the shivering shock I’d felt underground had never really departed. Riding back from the funeral my teeth chattered in my skull.

It took me two more years to finally leave him. I admit, to Raoul it had probably seemed sudden. Really, I had decided before the funeral. My mind was made up in the moment that his brother joined our hands together and spoke those blasphemous words on the subject of love.

Raoul came home one night after a day-long absence. He called for me to join him in the library where he was sipping brandy and indulging in a cigar that stank like burning cat fur. He rose when I entered, offering me a seat by the fire. I gazed into the flames, lost in a robe that had fitted me a year ago, rubbing my arms to keep me free from the cold. Raoul offered me a blanket. As I was tucking it around my legs, he told me that after two years of struggle (the company hadn’t played to a capacity audience since the night that I left) he had sold his shares in the Palais Garnier to a foreign investor who worked from afar. Raoul had never met the man, he did all of his work through an agent, but he seemed to know what he was doing and had already begun implementing plans designed to keep the theatre from shutting its doors. This man, a Monsieur Reynard, immediately fired the managers that I had known and hired two others more fitting for his purposes. Raoul had turned a tidy profit through these negotiations, and he was proud of it.

He could not understand why I continued to press him for the less-important details; which dancers remained, which members of the orchestra had been fired, who sang the lead roles? All of this was entirely unrelated to profit, and uncomfortably reminded him of our own unfortunate history.

Raoul looked at me, his bland face clouding with concern, saying, ‘Christine, I knew that I shouldn’t have told you all of this. The doctor was right when he forbade you to attend the performances. They were unsettling your womb.’ He came around behind me, massaged my neck. It felt like a stranglehold. He continued, ‘Perhaps that is why we have never had children. For the sake of your health, I will say no more.’

He kissed me, once, upon the forehead. ‘Now be a good girl, and go off to bed.’

It was the last time that I ever obeyed him.

The next morning, after Raoul rolled over on to my side of the bed, I showed him my back. He shrugged, good-naturedly, kissed me, and went down to breakfast.

I remained between two sheets, staring at the celling until I heard the front door slam and the clatter of hooves against cobbles as the white carriage rolled him off to his day at the trade-offices. I saw, in my mind’s eye, the horses as they strained against the traces, their hair streaming with sweat, running until the bonds that held them broke.

I got up once I was certain that he was gone for good. I rang the bell for the maid, a girl of seventeen who favoured overlarge garments. Her slatternly mob cap slid over one eye, lending her a strange, cycloptic look. She was shocked at my orders. It had been years since I asked her for breakfast.

Once I had eaten, pastry and ham, a third of a small, jam-spread baguette, I dressed in maroon silk (bemoaning the way my figure had withered – the fabric flapped around me) and began, quickly, to pack.

I took only what I thought that I would need to live, luxurious things that had a high retail value; the jewellery, of course, what loose gold came easily to hand, all of my most expensive dresses. I took my music box, as well. The cymbals that the stuffed monkey held jangled as I slid it into the bottom of the suitcase; this was one thing that I did not intend to rid myself of. Since, as my husband, he legally owned everything that I brought into the marriage (including my person) he could have called the constable to fetch me from my adoptive mother’s house. He never did, supposing that this was but a temporary illness on my part. A fever better starved than fed with attention.

As for the Countess, when I arrived on her doorstep she was ecstatic, greeting me with open arms and practically pulling me across the threshold. She had, it seemed, never approved of our union though she had hesitated to say so at the time, fearing that her disapproval would be misinterpreted. And, in truth, it might have been, although not by myself.

Immediately, she began helping me to plan my escape, her blue eyes blazing in her glorious Nordic ruin of a face. She poured the strong tea she favoured into a cup of delicate red porcelain saying, ‘Well, my dear, where to begin? You have no funds of your own, I expect. I shall hire the lawyer.’ She laughed, ‘After this is over I shall finally be able to write you back into my will.’

I flinched at that. She leaned forward, patted my knee, ‘No offence my dear, but had I died he would have inherited, and I could not have borne knowing that one day, while my corpse was rotting, that idiot boy would be trampling my carpets and selling off my land.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he was counting on doing just that. The forest you own in Britany would have been sold to a shipyard.’

She laughed, ‘Of course he was! Why do you think he would risk attempting to clip the wings of an artist, unless the risk would pay him.’ She refilled my cup. ‘Enough of that. In six months or so you will be a free woman.’

Her eyes glittered. ‘I have very good lawyers. Now is the time to discuss your future. You are still young, my pet, the whole world before you. What is it you want?’

I had to laugh with her. It had been so long since anyone had asked me that. I took her warm hand, said, ‘I want to sing.’

She squeezed back, ‘Then you shall. The Opera House has new managers, of a progressive political bent. Once you are free you will have two points of leverage; your marvellous voice – no one could take that from you – and the score you brought back from the pit.’ She paused, ‘Unless you left it at that idiot’s house. If you have, I could get it. Claim that you did not own it when you brought it. We’ll have to have it if it is as good as you said it was, it will help with contract negotiations. I’ll find proof somewhere of a previous claim….’

I interrupted her, ‘No, no Maman,’ it was her turn to startle, I’d never called her by that name before. She had been afraid to ask me. ‘The score is in this very house. In the desk, in my bedroom.’

She smiled with relief, ‘So that is that.’

And so it was. While the papers were filed and my status shifted from married to separated and on to divorced, I practised every day, returning my voice almost to the height of its lustre, though there was a new veil across my lower register that added a sense of sorrow to whatever I sang as a mezzo. I had finally learned to sing for myself, wearing the roles I chose and no other. It was difficult, satisfying work, returning to myself. I was happier than I had been in years and, for a while, I stopped dreaming of the face I saw, once, deep below the surface of the earth.

In the end my guardian was right about everything. The new managers had heard about the quality of my voice, and they were indeed progressive – if that term means that they were willing to see profit in scandal. They paid me more than double my usual salary, triple if you include the fee I negotiated for the rights to my opera. And as for the scandal, the newspaper headlines shouting, ‘Divorced Diva Dares the Stage!’ filled them with pride. The right kind of scandal can stuff a lot of gold into coffers. My divorce was considered exceptionally daring; they milked it for all that it was worth.

I played the role of Carmen exclusively for a full five years, to a packed house. There is nothing quite so exciting to a certain type of audience as a fallen woman, dressed in crimson, displaying her beautiful sorrow before all the world.

By the time I finally got to debut Don Juan Triumphant I was thoroughly sick of playing the Gypsy. My opera was greeted with lukewarm reviews; I was even then a little too old to be playing a fresh-faced maiden like Ana, and besides, I couldn’t give credit where it was properly due. The critics believed that it had been written by a woman and they judged it accordingly.

In spite of that, possibly because of that, the crowds clamoured for it. I performed two encores at every showing. The seats were always sold. The intake was enormous. It still packs the house in its once-yearly revival show. Whoever the invisible theatre-owner was, he must have been pleased by the revenue. I never met him. He never wrote me any notes or contacted me in any way, save through his managers. I assumed that he enjoyed the hypocrisy of gaining profit from a source whose morality he disapproved of. In nearly fifteen years he never so much as sent flowers to my room.

But Monsieur Reynard is gone now, whoever he was. He has sold his stock to the company of Andre and Reichmann. And I am growing tired of singing the same damned roles. I do not know how long I will continue to endure it.

Sitting before my mirror now, my ageing face garbed round with plaster angels whose beauty never fades, or changes, I strip off the wig I wore on stage and let down my own sweat-dampened tresses. I am ready for a change that goes beyond a coat of grease-paint and a flattering wardrobe. The paint is terrible for the skin, in any case. A mask is no good if it cakes in my wrinkles.

In a moment I will have to dress again, don my fancy party clothes to flirt and preen with my new managers, earning my keep. I dab my neck with more of Monsieur Andre’s wonderful, outrageous perfume and, God knows why, I start singing an excerpt from the redemption scene that takes place when Don Juan and Doña Ana are reunited in heaven at the very end of the play.

It is a musically complicated verse, ‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ’twixt night and the morn, upon the horizon’s verge.’ Somewhere, somehow, the music has swung again, away from comedy. But it isn’t a tragedy any more, not the way I’m singing it now. If I didn’t know any better, listening to myself, I would have to say that my spirit was rejoicing.

I finish, hitting all of the high tones, ‘How little do we know that which we are!’

As the last note dies, I hear a knock at my door. I shout, ‘Come!’

It isn’t the girl I expected, the little foul-toothed rat who has been serving as my dresser, coming to say that the managers are ready for me to charm investors in the foyer. It’s Madame Giry, dressed in her usual ratty black crepe, leaning on the man’s walking stick she uses to keep the box-boys in line. There is a letter in her hand, a thick envelope, written on expensive linen paper. She smiles at me inscrutably as I take it.

My name, my old name, is written across the front in handwriting I know.