Angel Hands (20 page)

"Figured that one out a month ago." The lad's worried eyes belied his cheeky tone.

"Take a good amount of money in there. Buy ice. Enough to fill a tub. Schedule another delivery for this afternoon. Go to the apothecary and buy laudanum, camphor, and willow bark. Have the butcher deliver bones, and cook is to make a bone broth. Run as fast as you can. Madame's life depends upon it."

A white-faced Pierre was gone almost before his last words were out.

He turned to the maid. "Go fill the tub with cold water."

She scurried off.

He looked down at Mireille, who looked hot and miserable nestled up against his chest. She was shaking, and tears ran unheeded down her cheeks.

"Everything hurts," she whispered hoarsely.

"I will make it better."

"If...if I don't get well," she said, swallowing thickly. "Promise me one thing."

He remained silent, waiting for her to catch her breath.

"Promise you will sing me to sleep."

Tears he thought he no longer possessed stung his eyes.

"I will."

26. Of Reaping and Rattles

Thirty-six interminable hours.

The sweats, the shaking, the dry heaves, the bile.

That frightening span of three minutes—one hundred-and-eighty seconds—when she had gone into convulsions.

The ice baths. The wet rags. The cooled bone broth spooned into her one painful sip at a time. The camphor rubbed onto her chest and under her nose.

The sheer amount of linen it took to keep her dry after fever sweats—sheets, pillowcases, chemises, towels.

Her exhausted, weak tears when her body hurt. The terrifying moment when she had sunk into a sleep so deep he had to lean in to hear her breathe. The anxious surveillance, listening for the dreaded rattle in her chest. 

The final sweat, drenching her as if she had been dunked in water.

The stillness.

Oh...the stillness.

The grief when the first shuddering rattle of death shook her chest.

The guilt of having destroyed an innocent life in some bizarre exacting of revenge upon the world for its perfidy and his pain.

How stupidly
blind
he had been!

He was just as stupidly prejudiced and blind as the world was. He saw nothing beyond appearances—and the excuse that the world had taught him to do so now sounded hollow and shallow.

He had hidden behind masks and angels and ghosts, thinking how clever he was to be the only one who could disappear so completely.

Now...now, he knew that he was just one of a billion souls who danced the masquerade every day.

He had seen in Kristin a lonely, shy girl in the opera chapel, and he had assumed that was all there was to her. He had missed the torment of confusion and the truth of sunshine in her nature. He had ignored the truth of her hidden depths—compassion, determination, constancy, kindness. Tenacity, too. She had never given up when his lessons had become more demanding. She had never surrendered to the idea of a life with the boy until there was no hope for a life together. Then, he had watched as her tenacity took a turn and fused steel to her heart as she made her choice and brought the full force of her heart to make his heart right. He had learned that Kristin, his muse, was but a woman, and yet, it was the woman and not the muse who had given him the humanity he longed for.

The boy Raoul had been a pretty fop, too pretty to have ever wanted for anything. Yet, now he knew the boy was a man, willing to die to save the one he loved. He would sacrifice the future he had fought for to preserve Kristin’s. Without fear or hesitation, he had pitted his wits and resources against the phantom. He had watched the love of his life sing to a monster, be seduced by a monster, and then kiss a monster. It was impossible to miss the realization in the young man's eyes that his beloved would forever hold a piece of her heart silent in mourning for her Angel of Music...and, he had loved her enough to accept that. In that acceptance, there was more love than her Angel himself could have shown her, for her Angel had demanded nothing but a full sacrifice of a living, beating heart. The young man had taught him that a beautiful face could indeed hide a beautiful heart, as well as courage and honor...and that it was not something to be scorned out of envy, but regarded with respect and aspiration.

And what of Madame Giry? The woman who had served him for so many years? In the end, he felt she had betrayed him, but no. She had not. She had tried to save him in her own way, even when she had spilled his secrets to the vicomte. He saw now the indomitable sense of justice and the rock and stone of character that enabled a young widow to raise a girl, run a ballet, and quietly prevent his own worst excesses with nothing but a raised eyebrow. He had tried to make a servant of her, thinking her nothing but a woman made weak by compassion. How wrong he had been not to see that she was a phoenix, rising again and again above the ashes of cruelty to temper justice with mercy.

Oh, and all the others. Meg Giry was no fluff-headed girl, but instead a vibrant young woman of loyalty and integrity. Monsieur Salotin the musical director was not a weak reed in an orchestra of mediocrity, but rather a man who refused to surrender to circumstance and turned grey and tired in a battle to instill a modicum of excellence wherever he could.

Montcharmin and Richard, the former managers of the opera house? One had genuinely loved music—though, his taste was unrefined. Still, who was he to judge a man who had worked all his life so that he could possess music? The other was a shrewd businessman who sought to make the opera profitable, who understood the weight of the livelihoods that rested in his hands. Yes, they were blustering, occasionally bumbling fools, but they had not been evil men.

La Carlotta had gone into seclusion after the death of her lover, Signor Strozze the lead tenor, in the fire that consumed the opera house after the original production of
Don Juan
. Oh, God, the blood upon his hands with that one...he had often compared the tenor to a singing potato, but now, he had to admit there was no cruelty in the man. He had always been kind to the chorus and never chased after the ballet girls. La Carlotta had been capricious and demanding, yet could he say that he was not the same? Her disdain had been farcical, whereas his was deadly. Now, she sat silent among the ruins of her love and life, a tragic opera written by his hands.

Even Buquet. The man had been a lech, but he had never actually attacked any of the girls. No, he had died because he was...inconvenient. What a sham of a conviction for the sentence carried out against him.

The rattle in Mireille's chest made him ache. He could scarcely bear to look at her, and yet, he could not look away, unwilling to waste any second of the precious moments left to her. She looked so white in the moonlight that flooded the room. She lay there limp and spent, her hair still damp and clinging to her forehead and neck.

Carefully, he reached over and brushed it aside, fighting the need to howl in pain when she did not stir or respond in any way to his touch.

Mireille...his wife. His unwilling wife.

Perhaps here was his greatest crime of all.

Clarity was a symphony of agony as he saw all he had done to her.

She had been her own kind of opera ghost, trying to make a life for herself when life held no horizon or opportunity for happiness. Disciplined and brilliant, fierce and unyielding, she was his match without a mask.

Yet, she, too, had glimpsed a chance of love and happiness with Raymond Lefebre. He did not know if Lefebre truly loved her or simply loved the idea of her, but he owed it to Mireille to have the freedom to discover the truth for herself.

How stupid he had been. It galled him with a touch of gallows humor to think that a stripling of a boy had guessed correctly what Mireille had really wanted in life. Young Buprès would be devastated at her death, and surprisingly, he found himself grieving for the pain the boy would endure.

Mireille would have been sorry for the pain she caused, too. She had been hard, but never cruel. Never once had she called him a monster or blamed his face. True, she had never seen it, but the fact she didn't care to see it and hadn't pried was even more remarkable. He felt the stirrings of a smile as he remembered how she had refused to accept his excuses based on his deformity.

Our choices make us monsters.

She had never wanted an opera house, and at the end of the day, he knew he had never wanted one either. She didn't want power or control or revenge. She wanted happiness. Acceptance. Love.

Just like him.

It dawned on him now that what he had felt for Kristin was not love. It was infatuation. Love only existed when it was returned. Did he love Mireille? Did she love him?

It would be easy to say yes, to write a melodramatic melody of revelation, but the truth was a more subtle harmony.

He didn't know if he loved or was loved in return. The wet stuttering breath in her chest meant that he would never know, and neither would she. Oh, the attraction was there. He had been an idiot to think she was afraid of him when he touched her. She who had shown him rage, wit, cunning, and humor had never shown him fear, either in his presence or his touch.

He was the one who was afraid. He was the one who was a coward.

What a painful harvest he reaped for his willing blindness and the endless choices to take the easy path rather than the right one.

If love was not love until it was returned, then at some point, it had to be given. All he had ever done was take. Now, his taking had destroyed the one person who could have loved him, if he had let her.

Another rattling breath caused him to fight to breathe himself.

There was one more gift he had withheld from Mireille, one that would have cost him nothing to share with her.

Now, it was time to keep a promise.

He began to sing.

27. Of Lyrics and Lazarus

Flashes of faces and fragments of memories zipped and withered before her mind's eye. She was so tired. Not cold anymore, but so very exhausted. There was a tickle in her chest and a wet sound in her ears that made her want to cough. But that required effort, and she had nothing to give.

Sleep. She simply wanted to sleep for a very, very long time.

Words slipped away. Her thoughts slowed and stilled.

There was...music.

It was lovely, and it made her happy.

Then it made her sad.

She held out against sleep, trying to understand what the music was saying. It was too beautiful to let go.

She felt the presence of her body again, with sensations against her skin and aches in her muscles. It hurt to stay in that place. The darkness of sleep was free of all that.

But, the music.

She didn't want to stop listening to the music.

It was gentle but complex. So many emotions tumbled around in the notes. Regret. Redemption. Hope. Peace. Forgiveness. Sorrow. Love.

The darkness still beckoned, and she wanted to go there, but the music ensnared her with staves and measures. Every beat stitched her mind more firmly to her body. Each shift in melody fired awareness of herself, from the faint nausea in her stomach, to her freezing toes.

Her body spasmed as she hacked a string of coughs. Pain wracked her ribs, and her lungs burned. Warm hands came around her shoulders, lifting her, holding her steady.

She blinked. A flash of crumpled white sheets. Blink. Her hand, limp and thin. Blink. Grey light. Afternoon? Rain?

Her eyes drifted closed again, but the darkness was no more than an effect of her eyelids. The true darkness she had been so close to had receded to nothing more than a thin thread, a primal filament that would bide its time until the inevitable end. But that end felt a good ways off, despite the fact she had an overwhelming sensation of having been hit by an omnibus.

The singing had stopped. Now, she smelled lemon and spice fragrance on a man's skin. She registered her cheek resting against the warm, firm muscles of a man's chest. Strong arms held her close, with one hand gently rubbing her back—which felt insanely good after so much time of feeling awful.

She coughed again, this time bringing up fluid and phlegm. A steady hand held a handkerchief to her lips to catch it, and then wiped a damp cloth across her mouth to clean her up.

"That is good," a voice said soothingly. "The more you can do that, the better it will be for you."

That voice was beautiful. She had the irrational urge to cry from the beauty of it, and perhaps from the simple pleasure of being held—something she could not remember the last time it had happened. Too weak to sob, tears streaked down her face.

She had been sick. She was fairly sure of it. But, so many things were still so fuzzy, wrapped in cotton and night.

Coughs ripped into her lungs again, and once more, she spit up fluid and phlegm, feeling it burn her throat on the way up. Just as before, the steady hand was there with the handkerchief and then the damp cloth.

"Lie...down..." she mumbled, her body's exhaustion a tangible weight.

"No, sweetheart, I'm sorry," the voice said as the arms around her hoisted her upright a bit further and then tucked her close again. "You must continue to sit up so you can breathe. But...if you will let me, I will hold you so you may simply lean against me."

"Mmm." It was too much to nod or form any other words.

"Mmm." This time, it was an irritated sound she made as she found herself lifted and repositioned, then settled again. It felt like the man had shifted and was now sitting behind her. She blinked and saw long dark legs stretched out on either side of her. Blink. Fine white linen shirt. Blink. A blanket drawn up over her shoulder.

"A little more sleep," the voice said. "Then we will try some tea with ginger, lemon, and honey."