Chapter 12
I turned to face my dressing station, tallying everything I needed to do in order to make it out before Raoul returned, but I stopped short.
There was something about the room that felt different.
Heavier. The air seemed potent with potential, all but sparkling at its edges, and I was struck dumb, knowing what it must mean.
My Angel had returned, and he’d heard…everything.
“That boy,” he growled, confirming it, and the bricks around me seemed to shake under his thunderous timbre.
“You’ve come back,” I whispered, both giddy and heartsick, filled with a dreadful sense of shame that I couldn’t put a name to. It wasn’t my fault Raoul had come. I’d not asked for his presence. I’d not hoped for his roses. And yet…
“What a slave of fashion this insolent fool is,” the Angel raged.
“I didn’t…I didn’t ask for him to come,” I said, quavering but quick to defend myself. “He’s the opera’s new patron, and—”
“I know him. I know all about him,” the Angel snapped. “The Vicomte de Chagny. I wasn’t aware you knew him.”
“I don’t. Not truly. Angel, please forgive me. It was so long ago. He’s nothing to me now.”
I wandered closer to the mirror, leaning beside the frame as I so often did during our conversations. I needed to find a way to end his fury.
“I’m glad you returned,” I began. I knew I’d done nothing wrong, but I still felt the desire to smooth his temper, to calm, to soften. “I’ve missed you.”
“I…I missed you,” he admitted, and the words sounded strange, as if he’d never used them in that order, as if he’d spoken a thought he’d not even known he had.
I traced my fingers over the glass, marring its gleam with disordered swirls. “Did you hear the performance?”
“I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said. “You were…Christine…Tonight, you were perfection.”
My lips stretched into a smile, one of relief, one of delight. “There was a moment in Act III when I almost thought I heard your voice, and I so hoped that…I’m so pleased you were there. Tonight was your achievement just as much as it was mine. Do you…do you think Father heard it? In Heaven?”
Another sigh, this one sounding wistful and so near me. If I closed my eyes, I could almost persuade myself we were standing beside one another. “I’m certain he did. And he…we…I’m so proud of you.”
I took a deep breath to hold back the rush of euphoria which swept over me. This was what I’d been waiting for ever since I’d stepped onstage. The applause of the audience, the cast, Raoul, even Madame Giry—none of it meant anything without the Angel’s approval.
“Thank you,” I managed, grabbing the mirror’s frame to steady myself.
I felt faint, my head swimming as if I’d very quickly downed a coupe of champagne.
His words were like effervescent bubbles dancing through me, and it was too much, all too much.
His praise, his presence, his ever being here in the first place.
Who was I to deserve any of it? I was no one. I was nothing. Not without him.
“Christine!”
I shook my head, wanting to wave away his concern. Another thing I had not earned. “I’m all right. I only…I’m so very happy you’re here now. You were gone for such a long time…I fear the day you’ll leave and not come back,” I confessed. “I don’t know how I’ll ever go on.”
“I could never stay away from you,” he said quickly, his haste a comfort.
I paused, weighing my curiosity. “Where do you go when you’re not here?”
It was an honest question, but a dangerous one, tiptoeing to the edge of a towering precipice. One wrong step, and I could plummet into a fall I wasn’t entirely sure even my Angel could save me from.
“I’ve…been working.”
“With other singers?” I guessed. I’d tried, and failed, to not sound jealous.
“There are no other singers, Christine. There is only…there has only ever been you.”
I closed my eyes, overcome by his implication.
“I’ve been working on my opera,” he admitted. “I wanted it ready for you, for this moment. I knew it would come. You’re about to take the whole of Paris by storm, and my music, my words, will catapult your voice to the entire world, to the heavens above.”
“And you?” I asked. “The world needs to hear your voice too.”
He hummed, sounding pleased. “Oh, my flattering girl, isn’t it enough that you do?”
“I know it should be…” I began. A series of shivers trembled through me. The precipice was shifting, the rocks beneath me breaking to pieces.
“But?”
“Oh, Angel!” I pleaded. I felt as if I were on a train, hurtling toward some destination I could not guess or see but I knew we had to reach. I knew that we had to finish what had been started so many months before. “You’ve given me so much. You’ve become my guide, my guardian. My…my friend.”
My voice, my praise, didn’t feel wholly mine.
It was as though I was so caught up in a soaring chorus that my identity was swept aside, leaving space only for the music.
I might be the bell, but it was the Angel who controlled when I rang.
I sank to my knees, vaguely aware of my posture and pose.
It was the same bow I’d given to Mephistopheles, the same reverence I’d shown Hannibal.
But this devotion was for him and him alone.
Before coming to Paris, Father and I had spent the summer in Rome.
We’d enjoyed wandering through the chapels surrounding Vatican City, and I vividly remembered our trip to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
In the Cornaro Chapel was a niche dedicated to Saint Teresa of Avila.
Bernini’s sculpture showed her reclining while an angel readied to pierce her heart with a spear as golden as the rays of Heaven raining down around them.
With eyes closed and lips parted, she appeared to be in the throes of spiritual ecstasy, pleasure and pain mingling together into the euphoria of transverberation.
Kneeling before my own angel, I understood how she’d felt—overcome by a pain so great and yet also, so sweet and holy. I’d been chosen by the divine, appointed and trained, and though the weight of this commitment seemed crushing, it was a responsibility I had no desire to be rid of.
“Angel…I…I know I have no right to ask anything of you, but I so badly want…Won’t you come to me now? Please? I beg you. I want to see you. I need to…I need—”
“Christine,” he whispered helplessly.
“Please.” It was less than a whisper, a breath, a puff of air escaping me. But it was everything.
When he finally spoke, his instruction sounded uneasy, as if his own desires were, too, at war. “Look in the mirror.”
With a soaring heart, I glanced up, then watched as my face’s reflection darkened, turning confused and wounded. “I see only myself.”
“See the shadows. See where I hide.” His voice was warm and hypnotic and compelling. It wrapped around me like a thick blanket, cocooning me in a muddling heat. I wanted to bask in it, to revel in its mesmerizing depths like a pagan god of old. “Do you see me?”
I tilted my head, still not understanding. “I—”
“See me,” he hissed, and there was a strange twist of light, a dazzling refraction of candlelit beams arcing across the room in a rainbow burst. Then a gloved hand reached out from behind the frame, sliding through the opening where the mirror’s glass should have been, slipping into this world, and somehow, a figure stood before me, beckoning.
“Come to your Angel of Music.”