Chapter 5
“I can’t believe that woman!” I shouted at the walls of my little apartment once I’d returned home.
That my voice carried farther now than it had during any run I’d tried in my dressing room was more insult than I could take.
If I’d thought my walk through the damp spring night would be enough to cool my temper, I’d been sorely mistaken.
Every step had irritated me, spinning my anger until I was muttering like a madwoman.
By the time I’d let myself in, I was so infuriated, I grabbed a pillow off my tattered settee and screamed into it with all my might.
How dare she!
It was one thing to rail and rage at me in front of the company, but to do this! To take my private conversations, my deepest sorrows and wishes, and to use them as a way to mock me…it was too cruel, too wicked.
I whipped around, pacing with a crackling frenetic energy. I wanted to spring to action, wanted to make demands, wanted to do something. But what could be done?
Monsieur Lefèvre wouldn’t listen to me. Just hours before, he’d threatened to have me thrown out of the company if I dared to step out of line again. Whenever his prima donna was involved, he’d always take Carlotta’s side.
I balled my hands into fists and bit down hard on my fingers, stifling another scream.
I hated feeling like this—so helpless, so out of control.
I hated the way my heart raced, pounding in my chest as if about to burst. And I hated, hated, hated that she’d used my own words against me, my memories of my father and all the dreams he’d given me.
Some things were sacrosanct.
But not to Carlotta, apparently.
With a sharp exhalation, I flopped down. My insides continued to roil, but I was physically spent. It had been a long day, and tomorrow already promised to be worse.
“You need to calm down,” I said, speaking aloud to myself, pretending it was another’s voice making commands of me.
My apartment felt painfully lonely just then, and, not for the first time, I wished I had someone else living with me.
I’d felt so grown-up when I’d told the Girys I was moving out.
It had seemed so grand handing over my first rent payment.
I pictured myself as a mature, sophisticated woman, able to make her own way in the world, ready for whatever life would throw at her.
But now, I was curled in misery, ready to burst into tears, and desperately yearning for someone with better sense to come along and order me to bed. I didn’t feel grand. I didn’t feel grown-up. I felt like a small girl, lost and alone and aching to be wrapped in a parent’s warm embrace.
“I wish you’d never told me of the Angel of Music, Father,” I confessed in a horrible rush. The words were as sharp as the blade of a razor, slicing my heart as they escaped, but I was powerless to stop them. “I wish I’d never known, never hoped. Why…why would you lie to me?”
The sobs overtook me then, and I scrunched my eyes closed, trying to hold back the multitude of tears.
Lies.
That was all the story had ever been.
Not a pretty fairy tale to tell on long winter nights.
Perhaps it had started out that way, a passing fancy meant only to occupy a child’s mind, but my father had continued on with the tale for years, promising that it had happened to him, promising that it would happen to me.
And that—that—had been the point where the story had tipped into a lie.
It shamed me to realize how long it had taken to see it, and now that I had, I wished I could go back in time and yell at my younger self for ever being so gullible and foolish, so quick to accept.
“The Angel of Music,” I scoffed. “Oh, Father, how could you? How could—” I stopped short, suddenly aware I was asking the wrong question. “Why would you? Why did I? Why did I fall for such an outlandish story?”
Because you wanted to be extraordinary, a little voice inside my head answered, sounding all too much like the voice from the dressing room. As extraordinary as he was.
The voice was not wrong.
Father had been extraordinary.
He’d been the youngest violinist to ever be accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Musique.
Every one of his professors and mentors had said he’d easily make concertmaster with any of the great orchestras across Europe and have his choice of solos each season.
They’d predicted he’d play for heads of state—emperors and kings.
They’d said his music was divinely given.
No one else could play as he had. I remembered being wedged into cramped backstage corners and peeking round curtains to stare at the people in the audience, watching them as they watched him.
It didn’t matter where we were, or what song he played.
Every audience member’s face would soften into a similar expression.
Their pupils would widen, and their smiles would grow, as if Father’s music was drawing out the very best of their memories, letting them relive their happiest times for the duration of his song.
If such a gift wasn’t heaven-sent, I didn’t know what was.
So the Angel had come for him, just not for me.
I’ve come for you at last. The Angel’s voice welled up from my thoughts, unbidden and unwanted.
Not the Angel. Carlotta. Or Ubaldo. Or whoever she’d enlisted to carry out her mean-spirited retribution.
Only…
I’d seen the look on her face as she’d left the stage. She’d been frightened, acutely so. Would she really dare such a prank after being so traumatized by the Opera Ghost’s supposed trickery?
I stilled.
The Opera Ghost.
It was an intriguing possibility I’d not considered until now.
I sat up, turning the idea over and over in my mind, working through its quirks like a tantalizing puzzle to pick apart and solve.
The Opera Ghost could have overheard my conversation with Meg. The Opera Ghost could have infiltrated my dressing room tonight. He was anywhere and everywhere all at once. All-knowing. Omnipotent, even.
Like an angel…
There was no doubt in my mind he really existed. His fingerprints were left smattered over every aspect of the company. His reach was inescapable, his influence felt throughout each room and corridor of the Opéra Populaire.
But could a ghost speak?
Countless mediums and spiritualists across Europe would say yes, and I’d certainly seen Monsieur Lefèvre carrying enough crumpled notes in his hands to know the Opera Ghost’s preferred style of communication.
I closed my eyes, remembering the voice’s languorous tone, the rise and fall of its cadence, the lingering pitch which haunted me even now. The voice was certainly more than human, something strange and beguiling, otherworldly and transcendent.
I sighed and pushed myself from the settee. A sudden chill had come over me, and I went to the kitchen, searching for something warm and comforting. If I could not have parental reassurances, I could at least make myself a cup of tea.
As the kettle began to heat, I paced the small space, feeling my restlessness begin to rise again.
I didn’t want the voice to be the Opera Ghost.
It didn’t make sense. I was a minuscule part of the company, a tiny cog in a great mechanism, easily replaceable and never to be remarked upon. There was no reason for the ghost to have ever noticed me.
A heavy ache began to spread across my chest, blooming with dreadful recognition. The only person who had ever believed me special was no more. My singularity had died along with Father.
I was nothing. My days, my weeks and months, the whole remainder of my life stretched before me with terrible, bland anonymity.
But there had been the promise of more to come, once. I remembered kneeling at Father’s bedside, his thin hand clasped around mine with the fierce vitality that seemed to infuse every soul just before death.
“Christine,” he’d said, his voice gruff with urgency. “I soon will be in Heaven.”
How I’d cried then, horrified by his acknowledgment of my misery to come, pained by his acceptance of it. “No,” I’d insisted, shaking my head, refusing to listen. “No, you’re going to get well. You’re going to get better. All will be well. All will be—”
“When I am in Heaven,” he’d continued, steamrolling over my protests, “even then, I will watch over you, like I always have here. I’ll watch over you, and I will send you signs. I will send the Angel of Music—”
“I don’t want the Angel!” I’d shouted, surprising us both by the ferocity of my resolution. “I want you! I want you with me always. You can’t go. You can’t leave me!”
He’d smiled then, regret clouding his eyes. “I’ll never be far. I’ll always be here,” he’d swore, reaching out to touch my temple. “Inside your mind.”
I traced along my forehead, a poor echo of his final moment.
Signs.
Father had said there would be signs.
I’ve come for you at last.
I released a long, shaky breath, struck dumb by the fierce yearning lighting my insides.
I so badly wanted to believe the voice. Because if it was who it claimed to be, it meant that Father hadn’t lied.
It meant he really was in Heaven, with Mama, watching over me, just as he’d promised.
It meant I wasn’t alone. It meant I was still cared for.
I would do anything to feel that way again.
That included suspending my disbelief, ignoring the logic which reared up, wanting to dispel the magic, to repute the impossible.
I would let them slip to the wayside and choose faith instead.
Faith in my father, faith in a benevolent God who would allow him to send me his promised signs.
Faith in the Angel who had carried them to me.
It was faith which made me douse the stove’s fire.
Faith which brought me back to the opera house.
Faith which drove me down its dark corridors, to my even darker dressing room.
And faith which made me call out, crying for the Angel’s return.
“I’m sorry!” I all but shouted, bursting into the room. The gas lamps flared high and bright. “I’m sorry I ran. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Please come back. Please forgive me. Please—”
“Christine.”
I let out a cry of relief as the Angel’s voice washed over me, every bit as wondrous as I’d remembered it. Gratitude filled my lungs with so much buoyancy I felt dizzy. “You’re still here!”
“I am.”
“But…where are you?” I asked, unsure of where in the room to look. “I don’t see you.”
He made a soft sound of consideration. “For now, it is enough that you hear me.”
“Yes,” I agreed fervently. “I…I wasn’t sure if—”
“I’ll never leave you,” he promised. “Now that I’ve come, now that I’m here, you’ll never be alone. I’ve come to be your teacher, your tutor. I’ve come to offer you the most precious treasure this world has.”
“What’s that?” I whispered. I felt myself drawn to the mirror, hungry to have a person to address, even if it was my own reflection.
“A chance.”
The words hung in the air before us like a sparkling jewel, as bright and burning as a fine diamond.
“A chance,” I repeated, feeling cowed by the enormous possibility of such a simple phrase.
“A chance at greatness,” the Angel murmured.
“A chance to be more. A chance to become exactly who you were meant to be. You are destined for extraordinary things, Christine. Your voice was meant to sing for courts and kings, to dazzle, to take on the finest music and make it even more lovely, more beautiful, more empowered. Together, we will achieve it all. Close your eyes and picture it.”
I did as he asked, shutting my eyes against the drab reality before me: the dusty, spare dressing room, my current role as a dancer confined to the same precise identicality as everyone else around her.
From behind closed eyelids, I dared to imagine all that the Angel spoke of.
A confident voice, soaring over every seat of the Opéra Populaire, of any theatre I could dream of.
The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
I imagined the roles I might take on: Elissa and Carmen, Tatyana and Rosina.
What worlds would open to me if I could sing as the Angel promised?
What sights would I see? What fame could be mine?
I closed my eyes and listened as he told me of all the wonders that we would claim. He laid out every detail of my ascent, explained exactly how we would work together to accomplish it. And then he asked me if it was what I wanted. He asked if I understood what such instruction would entail.
I would have to be focused.
I would have to be dedicated.
I would have to pledge myself to the art and to the Angel alone.
I could not let the outside world and all its silly distractions tempt me from this path.
The Angel’s path.
My father’s path.
“All of this can be yours, Christine, if you only do as I ask. Do you understand?”
I think I nodded. So caught up in the electrifying fantasy he’d spun, entranced by the melodious baritone of his beatific voice, it was hard to be sure of anything. I felt as if I’d fallen into a soft haze, a living dream.
It was too beautiful to wake from. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
“Do you swear to me? Christine?”
Only when he prompted, stirring me from my sensuous reverie, did I open my eyes and dare to answer him.
“Yes.”