Page 10 of Angel's Kiss
“Since you learned the truth about your teacher,” Erik finished ruefully, self-loathing replacing his fear. At least that was familiar. “And you’re afraid you cannot sing without an angel inspiring you. Without faith.”
“I do have faith,” Christine muttered. “Yesterday, when I was lost, someone reminded me that miracles or angels don’t need to actually come from heaven to be the work of fate, or God, or whatever one wishes to call it.”
“But?”
“But what if that isn’t the same? Or it isn’t enough? When I was singing for an angel, the music came from faith and joy and—” She stopped, the word ‘love’ unspoken. Shame and fear warred within Erik, a discordant symphony whose notes he could almost see writing themselves on the unfinished score open on the organ.
“Then let your music come from something else,” he said aloud, earning a look of confusion from his reluctant student. “The beauty of your voice has always come from your heart, Christine. From the feeling you put into the music. But there are more feelings than joy to be expressed. What do you feel right now?”
“Afraid,” she answered, soft and honest. “And angry.”
“And hopeless and sad,” Erik continued, looking towards his reams of music singing songs of despair and longing no one had ever heard. “All of that is in you, especially now, thanks to me. And all of those can be music too.”
Christine swallowed, tears now at the corner of her eyes. “I spent three years trying not to feel anything after Papa died,” she confessed thickly. “I was so scared of hurting. I’m scared now. What if it’s too much? What if I can’t find a way out?”
“You will. That is what music does, it takes what we feel, makes it into sound, and helps us understand. Even the painful, terrible things,” Erik replied, caressing a score and recalling the thousands of times that music had taken his pain and transmuted it into something more. “That is the magic of art, Christine. We take something ugly and real and transform it into something beautiful and true.”
Christine stared at him, something like hope dawning in her eyes. “I don’t know where to start,” she whispered. It wasn’t a protest; it was a plea for someone to teach her.
Erik strode to his shelf of scores, grabbing a well-used one without hesitation and leafing through as he approached Christine. He placed the music in her hands, and Christine stared down at the familiar staves ofThe Marriage of Figaro,open to The Contessa’s aria from Act Three.
“I barely know this. I haven’t warmed up,” Christine protested, scurrying after Erik as he moved to the piano. “I—”
“This is not about technique. It’s about what she feels and what you feel, right now.” Erik sat at the piano and played the opening arpeggio, looking at Christine in anticipation. “Don’t run from it. Feel it. Feel all of it. However much it hurts, feel it, and make it into music.”
“And Susanna does not come,” Christine sang shakily, her voice so small and rough no one would ever believe all of Paris had applauded her days before. But Erik did not stop her. “I am anxious to know what the count said to her proposal.” Her Italian was imperfect, her breath support non-existent; but she sang on, letting the music become more important than the words as she had months ago in a dark theater when a ghost had first heard her sing.
The melody was unsettled, distrusting and despairing, just as Christine was thanks to her false angel’s deceptions. The Contessa sang of her fear that the man she loved, who had hurt her in so many ways, would hurt her again. Christine no doubt understood the sentiment.
“Oh heavens, to what humiliation I am reduced by a cruel consort!” Christine sang, her voice suddenly ringing with fire through the house on the lake as her hurt and rage finally broke through, her voice far too loud for the delicate notes. Erik winced with the shame he deserved. He had made a fool of her, deceived her, and yet brought her joy and faith; the same as the Count had done to his wife. Christine had every right to hate him for it and that despair filled her song.
“And now I must seek help from my servant.” Like the Contessa, she was reduced to seeking hope in the most unlikely of places – with the very man who had caused so much of her pain. Her voice was thick with emotion as she finished the recitative. She closed her eyes, unable to even look at Erik. How could she?
“Where have the beautiful moments gone, of sweetness and pleasure?” she sang, beginning the aria proper, the longing melody welling up from her throat like a cry. Like the prayer she had offered in song months ago that only Erik had answered. “Where have they gone? Those vows of a deceiving tongue?”
But not everything had been a lie. Not what he had taught her, even today. Erik listened to the beautiful anguish, pain seeping out like putrid blood from a wound. “Then why, if everything has changed to tears and grief, has the memory of happiness not faded from my breast?” Her song rose gradually, achingly, but beautiful as the weight of grief was taken from her soul bit by bit with each note.
“Where have the beautiful moments gone?”The Contessa returned to the first melody, stuck in her own despair. “Where have they gone? Those vows of a deceiving tongue?” The question lingered in the music, the chord and melody hovering unresolved with anticipation, questioning...and hope.
“Ah, if only my constancy in languishing in love could change his heart.” As the music changed, bouncing with an unfulfilled promise, Erik watched the light within Christine growing brighter with each note. “It will bring me hope to change his unfaithful heart.” The words repeated, but the music changed, rising with each bar to new heights and new hope, until it became something more. The song bloomed from his incredible student’s throat, the notes soaring into the darkness of Erik’s lonely home. Beautiful and true.
Erik didn’t bother with the final bars of the accompaniment as Christine finished. She was beaming with wonder.
“Now, are you ready to begin?” Erik asked as they composed themselves. Christine nodded. “Good. Breathe.”
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It had taken Shayaunder a week to learn the addresses of Messieurs Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin after they had taken on the unenviable task of running the National Academy of Music. Their respective stations were evident from the places they called home. Moncharmin had a flat, handsome to be sure, but there were those that would consider its place scandalously near to the ninth arrondissement, home to the more libertine theaters and establishments, a mark against the man. Richard, on the other hand, lived in a house off theRue du Faubourg Saint Honoréamongst the higher echelons who still could not afford a manor in theFaubourg Saint Germain.It suited the man who now controlled the finances of the largest opera in France.
Shaya squinted at the dim windows of Richard’s stately home, trying to make out movement within. Perhaps he saw a shadow stir, perhaps nothing. This was what hunting Erik was like: staring into the fog and darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster, and even then, not being sure if it was real or a dream. But in the last few weeks, there had been more glimmers of light, more clues. Christine Daaé was at the center of it, somehow, but she was currently a dead end. So Shaya continued to stare into a different corner of the dark.
The sound of a carriage rattling through the stately street startled Shaya, and he withdrew more into the sheltering shadow of the alley between two manors where he now stood. It was well after supper and no valets or maids would be using it right now. His heart leapt when the brougham stopped in front of Richard’s door. A visitor at this late hour meant something. It had to. The figure that emerged might have been hard for a regular Parisian to make out in the flickering gaslight, but not Shaya, who was both observant and a regular attendee of the Opera.
Carlotta Zambelli cut an unmistakable profile in her furs and feathered hat as she swept to Richard’s door. She barely waited for the door to open before striding in and slamming it behind her, right in the face of her little secretary, LeDoux. The poor man returned to the carriage, Shaya assumed, to wait. And Shaya waited too.
It took ten minutes for someone to emerge from the house again, but not Carlotta. A butler this time. He had words with someone in the carriage and the coachman gave a nod, the horses a whinny, and they were off into the night –withoutthe diva.
Shaya smiled to himself as he watched the light in the bedroom – he assumed – above the street go out with Carlotta nowhere to be seen. The prima donna was making her own moves, and Shaya now knew something that Erik didn’t, at least not yet: Christine Daaé was in great danger.
