High City on a Hill (Ch13)

[igenlode]

And *finally*... (six thousand-word chapters seem to be Just Too Long for me to cope with in terms of both proof-reading and editing)

Chapter 13 — “Past All Thought of Right or Wrong”

The echo of the gunshot from the auditorium, when it came, was flat and oddly distant, like the sound of some piece of stage machinery. If any of those around me in the foyer noticed it, they gave no sign. The same buzz of conversation continued to circulate, immaculate coiffures and costly pearls were reflected in mirrored glass, and spotless shirt-fronts and diamond tie-pins conferred in corners over glasses of the finest champagne — or at least the finest vintage that Messrs Firmin and André considered appropriate for their clientele. Since neither gentleman was gifted with a discerning palate and the entire enterprise continued to hæmorrhage money, the wine in question was not quite so exclusive as might have been hoped for.

All the same, refreshments had been made available in abundance, and Paris society, fickle as ever, had chosen to disregard or perhaps even to savour the stories about what had ensued at the masquerade ball, and flock to the opening night of an unknown opera by an undisclosed composer. It was not, after all, as if anyone came to listen to the music... and the rumours, ridiculously magnified no doubt —why, that creature Edmée Villiers claimed to have seen a portal opening directly to Hell manifest itself in the middle of the gleaming marble under one’s feet!— only added a delightful extra frisson to the event.

Even the waiters, discreetly circulating to collect empty glasses, doubtless took it for granted that what they had heard was the sound of another champagne cork. I was the only one here with my nerves on edge, straining every sense in case the Opera Ghost might have grown suspicious and decided to pre-empt the plans made against him... and although my heart had flown into my mouth on the instant, I had to keep smiling and maintain the flow of small-talk as if nothing had occurred.

When we'd arrived at the Opera this evening, well in advance of the time the curtain was due to rise, at the entrance to the Cour d’Administration I’d noticed one of the stable-hands scrutinising the carriage closely as we drove in, doubtless to make sure there was no hidden figure clinging to the axles or hanging on behind. There was the usual commissionaire on duty at the door as we entered, but he had laid aside his pipe and evening paper and was watching with a good deal more attention than normal. The entire building had clearly been placed on a war footing, and it would be hard for any intruder to gain entry unobserved.

It was either a bold challenge to the Opera Ghost or, depending on how you looked at it, a piece of supreme folly. I could think of few policies more guaranteed to put the Ghost on the alert, or to spread the news of Raoul’s intentions via a hundred wagging tongues.

Raoul had groaned under his breath and muttered something of which the only audible — or at least repeatable — word was ‘idiots’.

“Too late now. The game is thoroughly up, I imagine, and all that can be done is trust to our friend the Ghost’s arrogance. I make no doubt he’s already inside, biding his time; we’ll have to hope he’s over-confident enough to make his appearance in any case, in the belief that he can overcome all our precautions. If it turns out those fools have frightened him off...”

“Raoul, what exactly are your precautions?”

For a moment, as he came to a halt in the narrow backstage corridor along which we were progressing, I thought he would not answer. It came to me belatedly that, with hostile eyes and ears almost certainly on the alert for our arrival, this was neither the time nor the place.

“Strategically positioned guards, and a marksman in case of necessity,” Raoul said shortly at last. “I’d prefer not to have bullets flying around, but we may not get a second chance... Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find Messieurs Firmin and André before the audience start to arrive.”

“Yes, of course. We’ll see each other later, then.” I’d touched his arm briefly as he turned to leave, and got a quick perfunctory smile. But his mind was clearly elsewhere.

Well, bullets had flown, it seemed, and that before the audience had even taken its seats. I had no idea what was currently going on out there, and that ignorance was worse than anything. We had not even made a proper goodbye before parting in that rushed, perfunctory fashion, an hour ago now or more; it had been on the tip of my tongue to tell him to be careful, but I had hesitated too long and he was already gone, hurrying down the corridor with a swift-striding freedom of movement that my burdened body no longer afforded. With a sigh, I had told myself that Raoul was doubtless more than capable of looking after himself.

It was a thought that brought with it the realisation I was very much alone, and that the Ghost doubtless bore as much hostility from our last encounter as I did. The hallways of the Opera Populaire had seemed suddenly both very empty and all too full of menace, and I almost turned back to take refuge with the commissionaire in his little lobby for the comfort of another human presence. But the situation could not fail to be an awkward one, and the poor man would have no idea what to do if the Vicomtesse de Chagny insisted on inflicting herself upon him. Sighing again, I began to make my way down to the foyer, which would surely be bustling with activity and preparations in full swing to receive the evening’s guests, and where I might at least be of some use.

Nothing had happened to me, of course. There had been no sinister whispers behind closed doors, nor even so much as an unexplained breath of cold air or the sensation that I was being watched. On the verge of his grand premiere, the Opera Ghost clearly had bigger fish to fry. But I had begun to have an inkling of how Christine must feel, traversing this building on a daily basis in the certainty of watchful eyes, and to wonder at how well, despite everything, she had managed to keep her composure.

Those had been the last words I’d managed to exchange with Raoul, though I’d glimpsed him with the managers a time or two, all three of them clearly very much preoccupied. Presently Madame Firmin arrived, comfortably agog with anticipation, and bearing a bag which contained her tatting, just in case, she confided, the opera should prove too tedious and she might feel the need to occupy her hands. A few minutes later her husband, passing through the hall, had caught sight of us and come over to admonish her for sampling the delicacies for the interval buffet, which was just being brought in. He bestowed on me a harassed look, and requested that I should do my best to receive the guests —as he put it— as they came in, and ensure that they were kept diverted until the performance was ready to begin. The auditorium would, for the time being, be remaining closed a little while longer.

So much for the idea of staying safely in my box, if we were not even to be allowed in until shortly before the curtain was due to rise... but I had to admit it was probably a wise precaution, whatever they were up to now. The Opera Ghost’s interest in this performance had little or nothing to do with the audience, save perhaps as a vehicle to deliver him applause. As well to keep them apart as long as possible, and leave his focus elsewhere.

Better still if he could somehow be dealt with there and then, before any of those present got the idea there was anything wrong. But all I could do was hope that was the purpose of those backstage councils to which I was not admitted, and wait, and listen, even if it meant my smile grew strained and my supply of social small-talk was even more vapid than that of those who came up to greet me.

Under Firmin’s orders a chair had been produced and positioned for my benefit near the foot of the great staircase, and here —in the absence of both the managers and my husband— I had found myself perforce taking up the role of reigning hostess as the first members of the audience began to arrive. I fell back upon memories of Raoul’s mother, seated and smiling graciously upon those who came to pay court, and vouchsafed a supply of constant banalities in welcome to the endless stream of faces filtering past. How good to see you, Madame... my thanks for the compliment, Monsieur... yes, Baron, they say Signor Piangi is in great voice tonight... I trust the performance will prove enjoyable, Madame... and all the while I was in agonies over what might be happening out of sight, and could not show it.

When that shot came, it was the culmination of everything I’d hoped for and dreaded. A single rifle-report, truncated and dull, like the slam of a door in a furnished room. Then... nothing.

Unable to bear it, I made the usual excuse to absent myself for a few minutes —it was true enough— and almost ran into Raoul coming hastily in from the grand tier.

“Raoul — thank heaven! What is it — what happened?”

“He’s here right enough, but he’s playing games with us.” Raoul’s face was grim. “That idiot of a marksman let off a shot at the box... It’s all right, I’m not hurt.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face at the implications of that. It would be just the Ghost’s style to trick his enemies into self-inflicted disaster.

“Then what are we going to do?”

“Go ahead with this ‘Don Juan’ of his as planned.” Already, behind us, the word had spread that access to the auditorium was open, and those opera-goers who held tickets for the main tier of boxes were beginning to stream past. Raoul drew me back a little against the wall. “Monsieur O.G. was very full of himself just now. I don’t suppose for a moment he will be able to resist the temptation to demonstrate just how clever he is. And I can promise him this: wherever he decides to show up, he isn’t going to find it nearly so easy to get away as he thinks he is.”

“I hope you’re right.” I shivered and leaned into the comfort of Raoul’s hold.

“So do I,” Raoul said with feeling. “And— forgive me, but I have to wish you were not here.”

But I did not. However selfish, whatever the consequences, it was infinitely easier to be there to face danger than to spend the hours in equal fear, waiting and wondering. I would be sensible, I told myself, and I would do nothing that might attract our opponent’s attention or endanger the tiny life inside me any further. All the same, even if, as things stood, I could strike no blow of my own to repay the Ghost’s scorn, I wanted to be present and to bear witness if I could.

“You don’t need to worry about me, I promise you. I shan’t be doing anything exciting.” I smiled up at him reassuringly and thought of Christine: Christine, and Piangi, and the rest, utterly exposed out there on the stage, constrained to sing music for a madman’s pleasure. “Just... Raoul, try to stay safe. Don’t get yourself shot — or garrotted.”

A sudden vivid, ugly recollection of something I’d thought forgotten: the dead man swinging, swinging, while the dancers below him screamed. And that had been the last time we’d been to the opera together...

“No danger of that.” Raoul’s arm tightened a little around me. “I’m not going anywhere near the flies — I leave that sort of thing to the professionals. Come on. If we’re going to sit through this performance, we’d better take up our seats.”

By the time we arrived, Madame Firmin was already ensconced safely in the box, alongside her husband, who was in an agitated state. Gilles André was busy surveying the ill-omened Box Nº 5 through his opera-glasses, although I had the impression his attention had been somewhat diverted by a trio of pretty girls opposite, busy making great play with their fans and clearly conscious of the admiration they were attracting.

“Ah, there you are, Vicomte!” He put down the opera-glasses hastily. “No sign of our friend showing himself as yet... Madame, allow me.”

He settled me into a chair at the front of the box with heavy gallantry. Firmin, behind us, could be heard to groan aloud. “If it goes wrong this time, monsieur le Vicomte, you do realise that both he and I will be ruined — absolutely ruined?”

If that was intended as a bid for further financial support, it seemed to me ill-timed and in ill taste. We had already seen the scale on which things could go wrong when the Opera Ghost was displeased, and it went far beyond the requirement for household retrenchment on the part of a couple of sleek scrap merchants.

The overture had just come to a somewhat discordant end, and I caught nothing beyond the soothing tone of Raoul’s reply. An audience which had been restive already was making its confused displeasure vocally known.

“Oh dear, that won’t please him— that won’t please him at all—”

“But then, Firmin, we are not trying to please him.” His partner was made of sterner stuff. “Are we, now? We’ve contrived to lure him out of whatever hole he lurks in, and proved that he is present. So the sooner he is provoked into showing his head above the parapet, the sooner we can put an end to this farce — and all go home.”

‘Farce’ was perhaps not the best term for the opening chorus currently taking place on stage. A motley collection of singers apparently costumed as wenches and varlets were busying themselves about a banqueting table in a rather stilted fashion. Chief among them was the statuesque figure of Carlotta Guidicelli, who contrived both to dominate the stage and to give the impression of infinite disdain for what she was being required to perform. As for the music itself, nothing less amenable to the cheerful absurdities of farce could be imagined. It could, I decided, be most fairly described as... difficult.

“I did hope they would have improved since the rehearsals.” Madame Firmin, having evidently contrived to tune out her husband’s agitation with the obliviousness of long practice, addressed Raoul with an air of disappointment. “Tell me, is it really supposed to sound like that?”

“Well, Madame, whatever the composer may believe, I should say he is clearly no Mussorgsky.”

“Who?”

“My point precisely. Nor is he even a second Wagner— for which we may at least be grateful.”

I did not know if Raoul’s words were intended to goad an unseen auditor, or if the scorn was meant in earnest. For my part, I’d always had rather more time for Wagner’s shifting inchoate masses of harmony than Raoul could ever be induced to allow. And this... this was angular and discordant, certainly, but in a way it was also undoubtedly powerful.

The girls in the box opposite had dropped the affectation of their fans and were engaged in forthright and indignant conversation, while the aunt or mother in the chair behind could be seen to attempt vague placatory gestures. Down in the stalls below, more than a few white-bearded old gentlemen were visibly bolt upright in outrage, and one —whom I recognised as a distinguished music critic— had taken it upon himself to audibly shout out “Disgrace!”

For the most part, fashionable Paris did not have strong views on opera. It knew what it liked, however, and that was a pleasantly innocuous background noise to accompany its slumbers, gossip, or social intrigue, according to preference. “Don Juan Triumphant” was very clearly not a commercial proposition from that point of view. This was not music that would ever consent to be a mere background to anything.

On the stage, a member of the corps de ballet was performing in a featured role as a gypsy dancer. To my surprise, I was able to recognise her as Christine’s friend Meg Giry, and wondered if that promotion, too, had been by demand of the Opera Ghost. Had he sought to curry favour with Christine by boosting her friend’s career? Or had that secretive woman who was Meg’s mother —another sharp memory, that of Madame Giry at the masquerade— exacted the role for her daughter in payment for withholding what she knew?

Or perhaps the girl was simply talented, I told myself, a little ashamed of such uncharitable thoughts. She certainly twirled and leaped attractively enough in her short scene, and I was too ignorant of the niceties of ballet to be any real judge.

The audience, after its initial shock of indignation, seemed to have resigned itself to a state of either grumbling or boredom. When I turned to glance at Madame Firmin, I found her surreptitiously feeling around in her bag for her tatting, while her husband, who had evidently been haunted by visions of a mass walk-out and ensuing refunds at the box-office, took the chance to wipe sweat from his brow with a large embroidered handkerchief. Don Juan and his servant, entitled in this version Passarino, were currently engaged in recitative to summarise the plot for the listener’s benefit; some operatic conventions, at least, clearly remained sacrosanct.

A little amused at that thought, I sat back to await Christine’s entrance. The Ghost would do nothing, surely, that might disrupt the performance before the object of his attentions had had a chance to make her appearance.

Whoever had organised the costumes for this production had evidently decided that Aminta, the innocent peasant heroine, should wear a carnival version of Spanish peasant dress, with kilted-up skirts that displayed neatly-booted ankles almost to the knee. Compared to the costumes of the slave-dancers in “Hannibal”, of course, it was modesty itself. All the same, as the scene progressed and Christine, as Aminta, thrust her foot up on a bench and swirled her petticoats like a can-can dancer, the impression given was of a girl who was very far from innocent.

I’d seen Christine play the adulterous Countess in “Il Muto” without it occurring to me that there was anything indecent in the role. Perhaps it was the predictability of the music: the familiar ornate patterns and cascading chords that presented to the public scenes from the seraglio or the debauched court of the Cæsars as merely genteel entertainment.

Shorn of those trappings, this “Don Juan” held an ugly reality. Aminta, ostensibly the victim here, strutted and teased on stage as brazenly as any girl working the tables at the cabaret, and the discords of the music resolved into angular lascivious melody that mocked even as it allured.

No wonder Christine had shrunk from this role. No wonder —forced to parade herself in such a way before all of Paris— she was playing it now with an almost palpable anger and hostility on stage...

I’ll never know when the others first began to suspect. Christine, of course, must have recognised the truth before anyone else; must have known intimately the difference in timbre between one voice and another, between the weight and heft of a bulky man and a lean one muffled in the same hood and cloak. That costume in itself should have made the whole thing obvious — disguise plots in opera involve a token eye-mask or exchange of coats, not an all-enveloping robe to transform the supposed Passarino into the spectre of a faceless monk, muffling the leading man’s voice through layers of cloth like a felon with his head in the hangman’s bag.

Aminta in the story should have screamed and run at the sight of the blank cowl, not flirted with it as if it posed openly as the Don’s rascally servant. We should all have perceived something very wrong in the presence of that lurking faceless figure to carry out a seduction. But the whole of this “Don Juan” was so strange and jagged and wilfully unappealing that one more oddity had not seemed worthy of note. Perhaps the author had thought fit to discard operatic conventions of disguise along with all else.

Of course I’d noticed the ridiculous nature of the costume, and taken it for granted that Signor Piangi —who had been perspiring profusely already from the effort of the first lines— would throw back the hood when actually required to sing. But after the first raised eyebrow as the big tenor elected to continue his role in the Mad Monk guise, I’d been too distracted by Christine’s uncharacteristic performance to pay much attention. Raoul, who had been present at more than one rehearsal and for whom the opera had lost its shock value, had barely spared a dutiful glance at the opening of the scene. After that he had covertly resumed his surveillance of the chandelier, the pit, the rear of the stalls, the stage-door, and of course the recesses of Box Nº 5 and anywhere else the Ghost might conceivably choose to lurk. Monsieur Firmin, who still had his handkerchief out, was busy wringing it between both hands and snapping irritably at his wife, who was occupying herself with her tatting in full view of the audience in placid unconcern. It was his colleague, who had been attending to the spectacle on stage with evident admiration for its display of Christine’s figure, who was the first of us all to raise any alarm.

“What the deuce does Piangi think he’s up to? Pawing her around like that is going a bit too far... do you suppose old O.G. could have slipped him a little something to get his pecker up and spice up our Don Juan’s performance?”

“André, really—”

“Ah yes, of course — beg pardon, Mesdames, ladies present and all that. But Firmin, you’ve got to admit it didn’t go like that in rehearsal. Why, the girl looks as if she’s positively fighting to get away!”

The disguised Don Juan had dragged Christine down by both hands in a grip that looked very far from seductive. She broke free violently, and seemed ready to bolt off-stage, breast heaving as she looked from side to side as if for help that did not come.

“Oh God, it’s him.” It was wrung out of Raoul as a groan almost beyond bearing. “Don’t you see? It’s not Piangi there on stage with Miss Daaé — it’s him, vaunting himself in full view in the one place he knows he can’t be touched. One false shot, one attempt to seize him, and it’s Christine who pays the price... He didn’t write that music for Piangi, nor yet for Don Juan. He meant it from the start for himself, forcing her to act out a parody of lust for his pleasure—”

“Monsieur le Vicomte, if you please—!”

“Monsieur Firmin, I too have a wife present. And I have no intention of shielding her ears from the— the obscenity of what that man has done!”

Below us, Christine sang on, pouring out notes with the desperation of one who has bestridden a tiger, and dare not dismount. The duet had taken on more the air of a duel, with the participants flinging phrases of passion in one another’s faces as if they were injuries. Raoul was on his feet at my side, hands gripping the front ledge of the box so hard it had to hurt.

“I should have been down there.” It was almost inaudible. “I should have been in the wings to keep guard — I promised her she would be safe—”

It was not my fault, I told myself helplessly. It was not. If he had not been with me, he would have been in Box Nº 5 or waiting with the marksman he’d posted, or standing watch somewhere the enemy was most likely to appear. No-one, not even I, had imagined for an instant that the Ghost would make his move in full view, on the stage itself.

There were men out there in the wings at this moment, there had to be, but they made no attempt against him. They could not, any more than Raoul could give the order. The Opera Ghost —if it truly was him out there, and if so he had a trained tenor range fully the equal of Piangi, the professional— the Opera Ghost had ensured he had the ultimate hostage quite literally at his fingertips. One word or so much as one twitch out of place, and he could have a garotte around Christine’s neck or a knife at her throat.

If he really had set off this entire farrago merely in order to have the chance to perform his own music on the Paris stage with a hand-picked cast at someone else’s expense... then galling as it might seem, the most prudent course of action might be simply to do nothing and let him get away with it. Only I had heard the siren call of his voice and seen Christine’s terror, and I could not believe that it was mere artistic vanity at stake now.

At that very moment, Christine cast one last blind look out over the footlights —her eyes met mine; met Raoul and passed on, and I knew she could see little or nothing past the glare— and turned back, to break off abruptly before she finished singing her phrase, and make her own move towards the hooded singer’s throat.

I don’t know what I expected. Nor, I think, did the Ghost himself; he made no move either to fend her off or to dodge away. Perhaps he had not been able to credit her with the power to defy him, or to act.

Or perhaps— perhaps, it came to me later, he had taken the gesture for one of tenderness, and made no attempt to resist. But she snatched at his cloak, flung back the hood, and revealed the man on stage with her for what he was; not genial Ubaldo Piangi dressed up in Don Juan’s doublet and moustaches, but the interloper who had held the whole Opera to ransom.

There was a collective gasp. “Oh, Christine— my brave Christine,” Raoul breathed, transfixed, and did not know I heard.

The Ghost seemed almost shrunken, caught there in the spotlight, without the towering skull and plumes of the Red Death or the wings of shadow that had wrapped the vast dark figure above the tomb. He still wore the crescent mask that had glimmered down on me in the twilight, but the rest of his face was bared now for all to see: an arrogant, hawklike face drawn tight across the bone in lines of pride and undoubted power.

But he was a man, like any other. Only an ordinary man.

In that sharp single moment I could not seem to move. There was nothing in the world save the two of them out there in that pool of light, poised frozen on those boards that had witnessed so many painted melodramas of adultery and murder and passionate romance.

He did not try to seize her; she did not turn to flee. Christine Daaé stood there, eyes wide, unmoving, and the Opera Ghost  —the ghost who was only a man— looked back at her as if for him nothing else had existed or could ever exist.

“Christine—” His voice was pitched low, but the proscenium arch carried it out into the vast lighted bowl of the theatre, past row after row of seats, tier after tier of boxes. “Christine, I have been alone so long, a poor ragged wanderer in the wilderness with only glimpses of music to tell him of a city of refuge up above—”

That high city on a hill. A sudden chill of recognition along my spine. My thought — my own image, as if he had stolen it from a privacy I had believed inviolate.

“Open up your gates,” the Ghost whispered, not with the clarion compulsion of old but almost as a supplicant. “Open your gates of solace and hold out your hand in welcome to all I am and all that together we could be.”

He took her hand in his, and as if in a dream she yielded it. There in sight of us all he held up her slender finger and slipped a ring onto it, like the closing of a jewelled chain. “Only let me make you happy, Christine, as you make me the happiest of—”

But that avowal was never completed. Swift as a striking snake, Christine’s free hand had flashed out to rip away his mask, rip away it seemed his whole face and scalp, to leave behind only glaring, twisted deformity.

A cry broke from my throat, and someone —Monsieur André— jerked out an oath. In the audience women were screaming. But the sound I would never forget was the inhuman howl of betrayal from the stage. The creature snatched Christine with a snarl, swallowed her in the folds of his cloak, and vanished in a brimstone flash that left only the image of a fleeing figure behind.

“Don’t shoot!” Raoul was leaning from the edge of the box, his sudden shout cutting through the clamour. “Hold your fire!”

It would not have been the Ghost that a bullet would have hit. It would have been Christine, imprisoned so tightly against her captor. And I’d seen her face when she had made that final bid for freedom: that final and very public repudiation.

Raoul too had seen it, and I caught at his arm to hold him back. For an instant I’d thought he might hurl himself over the front of the box in a hopeless leap at pursuit. Not even an acrobat could have clambered down to the stage in time, and Raoul, young and active though he was, would have had no chance at that descent.

And then down on the stage someone pulled back a curtain, and the figure of Don Juan was revealed. Ubaldo Piangi lay sprawled in all the tawdry glory of his costume against the foot of the bed that was to have been Aminta’s undoing, and that had claimed a victim to lust of another kind. The dead man’s head lolled at a horrible angle, and his bulging eyes were glazed with fear. The Ghost had not contented himself with acting out a melodrama; he’d left behind his customary trail of murder.

Hysteria. Turmoil. Carlotta’s voice rose above the rest, not in stage histrionics but a raw animal howl.

Clinging to Raoul, I hauled myself to my feet. Madame Firmin sagged against her husband, her face a ghastly grey with blotches that stood out like rouge. In response he was patting her shoulder with a movement that verged on the mechanical, his own expression aghast. “We’re ruined, André— ruined!”

André’s florid cheeks had lost all their colour beneath his whiskers and seemed somehow to sag. “My God. Oh, my God...”

“My God,” Raoul echoed. He pulled free of my grasp almost blindly, heedless of how much he might betray. “My God, I sent her out there — delivered her straight into his arms, when I thought I was setting her free. If she comes to harm now, by my fault—”

“Really, monsieur le Vicomte?” Driven beyond endurance, Firmin had clearly neither forgotten nor forgiven their earlier exchange. “Then may I point out that whatever your private amours, you do indeed have a wife present — and one with the greatest claim of all upon your protection!”

He would stay if I asked it. I could read that answer in the agony of decision in his face. If I were angry or desperate enough, I could invoke public shame and the bonds of loyalty between us, and force him to choose his marriage over the woman he loved. Perhaps he would even forgive me for it, and our unborn child. But I did not think he would ever forgive himself, and any life together we might have thereafter would be poisoned beyond recall.

For a moment, hopeless knowledge boiling within my breast, I almost made that plea anyway. Bit back, with a gasp, the impulse to claw for what was mine. “No, go — go after her, Raoul. Whatever it costs. Whatever it takes. I’ll be all right. I’ll be quite safe. Just leave me and go.”

Raoul began to say something; broke off to catch up my hand and press it suddenly, fervently, to his lips. “Hertha, I—”

I shook my head and pulled my hand away, conscious of tears standing in my eyes. “Hurry — before it’s too late.”

“All right,” Raoul said quietly, his gaze on mine. A moment later, and he was gone.

Too late, a memory came to me. I blundered forward across the box, tangling myself with a chair, to call after him. “Wait. Madame Giry. She knows—”

“I’ll find her.” Faintly, from beyond.

I found the back of the chair and used it to support myself, listening to his swiftly receding steps. The hot ghost of his kiss still burned across the back of my hand, and I lifted it and pressed it to my own mouth as if to hold in a cry.

Presently, turning, I was able to glimpse him on the edge of the stage, in brief emphatic discussion with the upright dark figure of Madame Giry, while her daughter Meg plucked at his elbow. They went off together, Raoul clearly wary but in haste.

“I told you we should have sacked that woman — or else got her to talk,” André muttered, glaring at his partner. The latter had the poleaxed look of a man who has just found himself in the midst of disaster landed with the care of not one but two hapless females.

“Who cares about that now, André?” His voice shook. “Can you imagine the headlines? Can you imagine the cost?”

Madame Firmin moaned, and clutched at her heart after the manner of one suffering feminine spasms, and I located her bag on the ledge at the front of the box and found smelling salts. “Here, let me...”

I had promised Raoul I would stay put and take no risks, but this at least I could organise. On the stage below someone had at last, mercifully, produced a covered stretcher, and the body was being carried away. A crowd had begun to gather, and the mood clearly had the potential to turn nasty.

“You must have a great deal to do, messieurs. Please, don’t let us keep you. I’ll see to the lady.” The Opera Populaire would never survive this. Whatever happened now, the management was finished for good; it would be a long time before the doors opened again. “And perhaps, for her sake, you might consider a return to the scrap-metal business, Monsieur Firmin. You will find it more... reliable.”

That was not entirely kind. But it was, after all, Raoul’s money —my money— that had been gambled on this venture, and lost. And it was not only Raoul who had had to suffer that quip about the Vicomte’s ‘private amours’.

Firmin bowed and retreated, tight-lipped, to address the chaos, sweeping his colleague along with him, while I busied myself with sal volatile and lavender-water. Madame Firmin’s normally placid face was creased in distress, but she was recovering her colour and I did not think there was anything seriously wrong... and almost any activity was better than wondering what might be happening to Raoul.

Wondering if the Giry woman was not at this very moment leading him into some trap. Trying not to picture the flash and searing heat of fire that spat through the air, and the congested face of a dead man dropped from the flies. Remembering, over and over again, that I was the one who had walked out on him weeks ago, that I had set him free to go to her, and must abide by the consequences.

Even if Raoul was in time —if he caught up with Christine before her captor could subject her to his will— in the confrontation that must follow, whoever prevailed I could not win. I smiled reassurance at Madame Firmin and patted her hand, and all the time the question was not whether I would lose my husband, but how: horribly and forever at the hands of the Opera Ghost, or into the arms of the girl for whom he would lay down his life. Who was ready to throw away her reputation and her future, if there was a chance that she could be with him.