Death of a violin

I had every intention of saving Erik's violin from the funeral pyre; I never liked the way Leroux buried Christine's father's violin in his grave, which is as bad as sacrificing your favourite horse to take it into the afterlife. I even had the line all picked out and ready (along with Erik's violin, which he had found leaning abandoned in a corner and which Christine, a fiddler's daughter, had refused to leave to a fiery fate).

But I forgot to put it in when I got to the relevant section, which is now part of an awkward-enough-as-it-is transition from the idea of Erik's treasure to the idea of Kulla via Christine, and I really can't retrofit that line in there now.
I'm already uncomfortable with the amount of time being spent on dealing with the treasure, which was not intended as a significant part of the plot (and am still debating uneasily the question of whether or not it might have been better to have excised that element altogether). I cannot feel that it would be a good idea to set up a fresh complication here: the existence of the violin has barely even been implied (Christine when chained up hears Erik in the house making jagged, disturbing music, and at the time I had in mind a violin as the most canonically probable and portable means of producing it), and I don't want to distract the reader by effectively introducing it for the first time at this juncture.

So Erik's instrument has tacitly been sacrificed; if anyone ever wonders about that aspect of the plot, it existed and got burnt along with the rest of his belongings :-(