All the Rules Rearranged, Chapter 8

[igenlode]

Chapter 8: The Master and Marguerite

“She chose Raoul.” Every time it burst out of him with the same circling incomprehension. “The petulant sot, the fool: why, he was the last of us to know! He would have yielded her to me, yielded to the better man... Beauty, youth, wealth— he has none left, and still she cleaves to him. Ten long years, and still she cannot see what an empty vessel she has married — why, Christine? Why?”

Perhaps she loves him. But Meg knew better than to say that. She had known the Vicomte young and oblivious, known all that careless hope turned sick with self-loathing, and seen constancy beneath both.

Last night she had wanted him to take Christine away. She had not cared, much, if it meant Christine’s happiness or not. She thought now that perhaps it would.

“Why?” It was the same hopeless cry, and she drew breath sharply without thinking.

“It was her choice.” She had not meant to speak; but it was no longer the Master of the Aerie at her side but a man broken on his own wheel, and if she could tear him from it she would. “You said yourself that the other would have yielded her to you if she chose it — perhaps what you see as weakness is the value she sees in him. Perhaps in the end he was ready to honour her choice — to place her happiness above his own.”

Easier to accept, maybe, than the other truth Meg had heard half-formed beneath that halting, partial account... that Christine de Chagny as wife and mother had granted only pity in the face of every overture from her lover of one night save when he unleashed the dark power of his music, and in the end had found strength through anger to break free even from that.

From his thunderstruck expression as he swung round to face her she could tell that she had been correct about one thing at least: he had all but forgotten she was there. Well, Meg told herself rather forlornly, once in a while it was nice to be right.

“You know nothing, girl!” He had unfolded abruptly to his full height, and there had been a time — yesterday, even — when she would have been utterly quenched. A time when nothing had meant more to her than his approval. But his rage did not swallow her after all, and there was a strange exhilarating closeness in facing him down.

“However the other half of the world works, Mr Y, we women don’t like to be tricked and cozened — I can tell you that much.”

“You know nothing...”

And this time she heard the desperation behind it. The long shadow that had loomed across her was a tottering, spindly creation that towered only with the threat to fall.

“I set her free... Do you hear me? He had left her and walked away — she was at my side, within my domain, within my grasp, she and the boy — happiness was so close, eternal happiness for both of us; she had only to yield one last time, yield to every pulse of the blood in her veins—” His hands clenched; the hands that held creation and death within those powerful, infinitely skilful fingers. “And she thought only of him. I was at her feet, and she was breaking her heart after a half-witted brute who had never deserved her—”

He broke off again, face working beneath the mask, and Meg dropped her gaze, unable to endure the sense of intrusion. But she could still hear his harsh breath.

“I may be blind where she is concerned, Miss Meg Giry, blind to all else but what lies between us, but it was she who said nothing, denied nothing, played games between myself and him all along. I had to drag the truth out of her about the child. And then she stood there silent and let him claim—” He turned on his heel, that last bitten off short as if he could not even bear to voice it, and Meg said nothing. But in her mind a fair-haired boy still cried “Papa!” and the Vicomte tried to make a game of it all for his sake; and the thought came to her that no-one had asked Gustave his choice, either.

She watched the tall, lean figure — so terribly lean; he had never eaten enough in the old days, and now that they no longer shared a table she did not suppose he took any care for food at all — pace jerkily across the room like some caged creature. Two strides to the fireplace; two strides away and a half-pace checked short behind her, as if some leash kept drawing him back. He halted finally with those eyes burning into her own. Both hands shot out to grip the upholstered arm of the chair as if it was all that kept him anchored, and for a moment that curve of wood and horsehair seemed all too fragile a barrier between them.

“I set her free... my Christine. I gave her my word and took her to him, and I let her go. I let them both go. Her brave husband will take her back to France — away from temptation, away from the memories that haunt her flesh — and cosset her there with the fortune he staked against her hand—”

“You mean to pay that?” Yet another flawed impulse; Meg could have snatched the incredulous words back the moment they left her mouth. But she’d bought off enough bad debts on his behalf to know just how cavalier an attitude the notorious Mr Y could take towards money he did not care to acknowledge.

“Such solicitous care for my honour?” His mouth had twisted, but in weary irony, not in rage. “I never meant to see her suffer for his faults. If she had stayed here at my side, she and Gustave would have had all that I could give. If they leave together, she and her Raoul, why then they leave with pockets full and all debts paid — and may he burn in his stiff-necked pride in the knowledge that it is my hand that keeps humiliation and want from her door, and not his.”

But it was the shattered wound to his own arrogance that bled through every whispered word. She’d seen him rebuild that fragile shield grain by grain over the morass of what he had become; seen him draw on the anger of the outcast and the fierce knowledge of his own talent. It was all that held him together.

He’d reached out far beyond the shelter of that self-belief to touch Christine de Chagny’s life, and laid open his own dark dreams to the blinding touch of day with only the power of illusion and compulsion to veil them. Behind those conjured barricades he’d bared ten years of hope and desire in the belief that she would gather them up... and Christine had left them lying naked in the dust.

His hands clenched and released on the chair-arm, clenched and released, almost close enough to touch. A moment later and the long limbs yielded, and he knelt there in the shadow beside her with both hands to hide his face.

“I set her free... before.” It was almost a groan. “I set her free, and she came back... of her own will... just one night... she came back... just once, just once...”

“Oh don’t — please don’t!” Meg felt her eyes fill suddenly at the betrayal of that terrible pathetic hope. Without thought for her own bedraggled pride she reached out to draw his hands free, laying her small hot fingers over that icy grasp. “Please, you mustn’t think like that. You mustn’t...”

Her own tears had come as the easy gift of womanhood and exhaustion; his were torn from him with a wrenching struggle that frightened her more than she dared admit. It should not hurt so— to weep.

She cradled that broken head to her, the hard line of the mask painful beneath the weight of his brow; Meg tried to ease it and felt her touch thrust almost brutally aside. He reached up for the fastenings with shaking fingers and tore free its rigid curve with a sound deep in his throat, discarding it without a glance on the floor at his side. The bared flesh of his monstrosity was rough and unnatural against her hands that hid it mercifully from view, and tears on that ruined place made it more a mockery than ever.

She must not flinch. Meg caught her breath, nursing the horror of that face like a sacred trust between her palms as he wept, held motionless as if it were some wounded creature in truth that sought shelter against her, savage with pain and yet desperate.

She’d seen him unmasked. She had never touched that deformity, where the bone lay wrong where its weight fell on her fingers and the skin was paper-thin and curdled against her own. She would not have known if she had the strength to go through with it; but all she felt now was a great wash of tenderness and of relief.

Meg did not know how long she held him, hushing the sounds of that despair. Neither of them would ever speak of this, she knew. Somewhere beyond the window, a grey dawn would soon be breaking across the striding skyline of Coney Island, with its pylons and tents and wooden frames; and this night would be tacitly forgotten as if it had never been. Confessions would be sealed away, and life would go on. He had turned to her only because she was there — Fleck or Madame Giry could have served as well — and her own blurted, hopeless admissions would be an embarrassment later to them both. He would say nothing, and she would never by one word or act betray his pride with the memory of these moments... these most precious moments.

He stirred in her grasp at last, raising that ravaged face, and she glanced aside quickly to give him privacy to fumble for the mask. But when she looked back his face was still bared to her, blotched and naked where he knelt, as if he were too exhausted to care.

He was hideous still; but ten years’ familiarity had drained the potency of nightmare. And she saw suddenly, with pity, that where she was no longer a girl, he, for his part, was growing old. The years that had taken the last of the youth from her mother’s cheeks had shown no more mercy to the flesh that hid the fierce flawed genius of his mind.

“And what will you do now, Meg Giry?” He had climbed to his feet with a cramped stiffness that told her the time had been longer than she thought. The blanket he had placed around her — oh, so very long ago now it seemed — lay crumpled in her lap, and she thrust it off, standing up in her turn.

“Five shows a day, I suppose. Work on new routines. What the Ooh-la-la Girl always does—”

“There are some things she will not be doing.” It was neither acknowledgement nor apology but a soft-voiced command, and Meg flung back her hardest, brightest professional smile.

“No, I don’t think she will. Not even for the sake of Phantasma.”

She’d thought there was nothing of her left, out there on the pier with only the hoarse thread of the Vicomte’s words between her and whirling oblivion. But somewhere along that thread had lain a self-respect she’d believed long left behind.

“For Phantasma?” The Master’s voice was bitter. “Phantasma was never worth that. It was never worth anything at all. Nothing but a fever-dream, a honey trap, a poisoned promise of tin-pan tunes and cheap delights — while music, true music, ebbed beyond my grasp. Without her—”

“Without her,” Meg echoed steadily, forcing it back on them both. I loved you, Christine, truly I did. I never wanted our friendship to fail in jealousy and pain...

“Only smoke and noise and ghosts of things that never were.” He had stooped to poke up the waning fire with harsh, implacable jabs. Embers glowed for a moment before ebbing, and a fine rain of ash pattered through to sift under the grate. For a moment, it looked dead; then the draught took effect, and thin tongues of heat began to lick up between the fresh coals.

“For all I care”—he set the poker back in its place with a crash of unintended emphasis, staring down into the flames—“Phantasma can burn.”

And on his lips, Meg thought suddenly, coldly, that was apt to be more than a mere figure of speech...

“You can’t — you mustn’t!” She’d seen the size of the payroll; could guess at the numbers involved.

“The barkers, the hawkers, the stage staff — the freaks; where are they to go?” She bit her lip abruptly. “And Mother...”

She saw Phantasma’s gates blackened and barred against them as the doors of the Opera had been; saw that proud back stooped once more to scrubbing-brush and pail. However much this night, this hate, had been of her mother’s doing, Madame Giry had beggared herself once already for the Phantom’s sake. She deserved better of him than a whim born of hurt and revenge.

“Let her take it, then.” Cold disregard for the dream that had ruled him for so long. “Do you think I don’t know how often she has fancied herself its manager and inheritor? How every detail of opening night was her concern far more than mine? Let her busy herself with employees and dependants, hot-dogs and vaudeville and aerial acts. Let her be mistress of the empire she has so desired — and its façade of tawdry illusion!”

“Do you mean that?” Meg stared at him, her mind racing. “She would do it, I promise you; and do it well.”

Better — far better — a future for Phantasma under her mother’s iron competence than for it to lie at the mercy of its creator’s moods of genius and neglect. She choked back the tiny desolate cry that told her there would be no joy for her at all in a world bereft of his music and the hope of his presence.

She knelt to pick up the mask, turning it over and over in her hands. Memories... of Paris, of the cellars, of Christine: of a time when he had meant no more to her than an ignorant shadow of fear.

It’s over now... but she had more than she had hoped for. She had her life back. And she had the memory of this night.

“So you’re leaving us?” She did not look up, trying to make light of it. “What will you do now, Mr Y?”

“Go.” The mask was abruptly plucked from her hold, as if from too-great intimacy, and she flinched. “Go anywhere. Anywhere but here. It makes no difference. All those years when the echo of that voice taunted at me, and I could write nothing — and then at last I poured out song at her feet and it was not enough. It was never enough.”

A short laugh, so incongruous that it caught her by surprise. “Just as nothing you ever did was quite enough, Meg... She saw that where I could not. I brought her with me to the pier, half out of her mind with fear for her child, for her Vicomte... and for you. I begged her to stay, swore I would see the boy safe, that any son of hers would always be a son of mine: vowed her anything, anything, if she would only sing once more. And when I was done she turned to me with that little grave air — that pity of hers which heals the soul and breaks the heart — bade me farewell... and spoke of you.”

She’d giggled helplessly together with Christine in the wings, to Mother’s fury; they’d swapped ribbons for their shoes and brushed out one another’s hair, bent and swayed together in unison in a cloud of tulle as the orchestra played. They’d known, with the easy confidence of girlhood, that they would be friends forever.

Gazing down at her empty hands, Meg felt her eyes blur. Christine... Christine had remembered.

“Meg Giry could sing it, monsieur.” It was almost a whisper. “If you will have her.”

She could not be Christine for him. She had pride enough not to try. But this... this she could do.

She raised her eyes to him again at last. He was masked once more, with the mantle of self-possession settling round him that some would read as arrogance; but one hand was held out towards her, and his gaze was intent upon hers.

“Then come, Meg. Leave the memories — leave your mother — leave this place. Follow me. Make music.”

Romance was no part of it. She understood that well enough. And the casual coupling of bodies that another man might have exacted would never be taken for granted in their travels; not when he had known too little, and she all too much.

But he was looking at her. Seeing her, for the first time in those years when it was all she had wanted. Offering her something glorious... and the chance to be at his side.

Heartbreak could not buy you love: the Vicomte’s despair had echoed her own. But they’d been wrong, both of them wrong. She’d told him she couldn’t leave Phantasma and she knew now she would walk out on it without a backward glance. She’d told him her life was as empty as the ruin of his... but for both of them, it seemed, there were second chances.

“Meg...” It was no longer that clarion summons from on high, but a hesitancy that told her with a ripple of joy that she was needed. “Meg... will you come?”

She set her hand in his and felt those long fingers acknowledge her own, holding them close. Equals; partners.

“I will.” She said it softly, making a vow of it, and knew that nothing would ever be the same.