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She opens her door to Daaé from the chorus line, looking like a drowned river rat, thin green dress clinging to her, hair soaked dark blond hanging lank, strands clinging to her forehead. A cut high on her cheek has blood streaming down her face, mixed with the water of rain, of tears.
“I didn’t know where else to come,” her voice is hoarse and faint, eyes shining blue, and something inside of Carlotta lurches and breaks free.
She opens the door wider. “Come in.”
She was not always Carlotta. There was a time she was Mária Katarina, and what she tells people are the traces of Italy or Spain are really the remnants of a childhood in Hungary. But the world turned when she was twelve and Mária Katarina became Katarina, then simply Rina, or Kat.
He was English, a medical student, and she never doubted he loved her, and he turned her into Kate. But he was not well when she first knew him, a gaunt frailty in his smile, in his touch, and he died choking on his own blood as she cradled him.
(Their whole life lived in six months.)
The baby came much too soon, named for his father, and lived a mayfly life without opening its eyes, held close to her heart.
She was seventeen and there was nothing left for her, except to sing.
Her singing, like her Latin, was always a treat.
Kate became Charlotte.
She has the maid draw Daaé a hot bath. She knows the chill that creeps into your bones when you’re soaked to the skin, the way moving is stiff but staying still makes you shiver and you think you’ll never be warm again. She was a drowned river rat once, on the night she met John.
(And again, later, After.)
Her green second-rate dress would suit Daaé very well. It would draw out her eyes and make her hair shine, and she would, perhaps, be quite pretty.
The thought of the Daaé girl being pretty makes something flutter inside her.
It is not the first time she has considered a chorus girl pretty.
She arrived in a Paris wrecked by the siege. She had only a few small things — John’s family never considered their relationship worthwhile, never wanted anything to do with her, after she lost their chance of an heir, partly blamed her for his death but that wasn’t her fault, that was consumption — and so help her but she would never part with them.
Her grandmother’s silver-backed hairbrush.
A string of pearls from John.
A linotype of her parents.
A sketchbook that was a gift, though she has never been an artist.
She hid them under a loose floorboard in her room, and set out.
She taps on the door lightly, so the Daaé girl knows she is there, and steps into the bathroom.
The girl is still frightfully pale in the water, the bath foam protecting her modesty. The cut on her cheek is still weeping and now Carlotta can see scratches on her arms, her hands, nothing serious.
Heavy make-up will hide that cut. She hopes it is not deep enough to need stitches.
The girl’s face is damp, but not from the steam of the bath.
“Do you need anything?” Carlotta knows what they say about her, the petite rats and the chorus girls, and she keeps her voice gentle.
Daaé, she has heard, is easily frightened.
The girl shakes her head, biting her lip as fresh tears trickle from her eyes.
“Did he do anything to you?”
There was a man. There must have been. There almost always is, and with the tears and the cuts and the scratches it is the most likely thing.
Another man, trying to claim what he thinks he is entitled to.
The girl shakes her head again, more emphatically this time, and her voice is groggy. “I didn’t let him.”
“Good.”
She will tend to that cut afterwards. There is nothing left from dinner, but she will direct the maid to make a soup.
Days she sang for centimes, nights she lay down for francs. Men and their grunts and grasps, pinning her down. John was always gentle, his touches light and fingertips soft, and it was always her choice, never solely his. She wept silently beneath a big sailor, remembered a crooked smile and pale hands, and lips brushing her own, and tried to get control of herself because no one would want a crying whore.
No one wanted a pregnant one either. She was careful, and when her courses were late, there was an old woman who told her what to do.
The cramps were terrible. But she could never be a mother, not like that.
There are heavy towels, and when next she looks in Daaé is wrapped tight in them, hunched on the floor with her back to the bath, blood still fresh on her cheek.
There is lint in the cabinet, and she takes a pad of it, and sits down beside her, and presses it to her cheek.
The girl shivers, and Carlotta takes her hand.
“Squeeze my fingers if you want.”
The first squeeze is hesitant, the second firmer, and she nods, satisfied.
“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”
There were hands and a knife and darkness, lashing rain and flashes of lightning and she was kicking and kicking and kicking and scratching.
She impaled the man on his own knife.
A voice in her ear whispered, run.
She ran. Ran and tripped and fell and got up and ran again. The flashes of lightning guided her way. She did not have the linotype or the sketchbook or the hairbrush, but she did have the pearls and they were carried close to her heart.
She stumbled to the site of the opera house, great stones rising high like ruins but it was not ruined it was just in progress. She came there every day to see it, the workmen and the rising castle for music. Not a building, but something more.
She leaned against a wall, hands on her thighs, gasping for breath, lungs heaving, heart pounding.
If she was careful, she could hide there until morning.
If she was careful, she could hide there forever.
She coughed and tasted iron and for a horrible moment remembered gagging and blood on lips but there was no blood in her mouth, just the taste of it, the memory.
It was only when the image dissipated that she heard the singing.
The singing, like an angel. Like a demon. Like a sign, a whisper of what that place would be.
She straightened up, heart pounding anew, and stepped inside.
There was darkness, the lightning died away, but her feet guided her and she sang, sang to drive out the emptiness in her chest, sang to join that voice too beautiful to be singing alone.
The singing stopped and so did she.
A movement flickered in the shadows.
The glowing of eyes.
Fingertips, darkness where there ought to be a face.
“What is a thing like you doing in a place like this?” Breath against the rim of her ear, made her shiver. “Drowned river rat.”
The bleeding has stopped. Carefully she cleans away the traces of it.
Daaé’s tears, too, have stopped. Her eyes bloodshot, rimmed in red.
She is barely more than a child.
The voice, that she has heard, singing to itself alone on the stage, deserves to be heard by more than her, more than he who haunts the opera house, more than those who cannot pick single voices out when there are so many singing together.
She can give that voice so much more. It is within her power to do that.
Christine. Her name is Christine.
Unbidden, Carlotta smiles.
His name was Erik and he tells her her voice was a gift.
She stayed with him ten days, and never saw his face.
(She feared he might want her to love him, but he only wanted her to sing.)
He had a battered violin that he played. Some day, he swore, he would have a pipe organ.
(She thought him mad, but not dangerous.)
He went to the run-down room where she had stayed and stole back her linotype and hairbrush and sketchbook.
He was tall, his frame gaunt beneath his cloak, shrouded in black, black jet beads shining beneath the candlelight. The impression that he might be late to his own funeral.
(She has had enough of funerals.)
“You should be singing on the stages of Italy,” he told her. “I can give you money to get there. All I ask is that you give your voice to the world.”
(“Those pearls were made to be worn.”)
(“He must have loved you very much.”)
“It was Erik who told you to come here.”
The look of surprise that crosses Daaé’s face is worth giving up one of her secrets. She has suspected, for some time, the traces of his handiwork, though she sees him so little. Theirs was not a partnership made for spending time together.
And she knows, now, his attraction has never been to women. Only to their voices.
“He said if I was ever in trouble…” There is uncertainty, still, in those blue eyes like turquoise, as if she might have done something wrong.
Carlotta smiles to cast away those doubts, squeezes those slim, delicate fingers.
“He has always known about talent.”
She went to Italy. She bought dresses to flatter her figure and sang on stages. There were Roberto and Angélie and Lucianne and Marianne’s lips were soft in the darkness, her touches gentler than even John’s.
She studied Italian and Spanish. She wore the pearls. She learned about notes and absorbed every score.
She was given the starring role in Tristan and Isoldt and people came to hear her sing, to see her beauty, and because it was said she had killed a man. And that three more had died of love for her.
She let them think whatever they wanted. None of it made any difference to her, so long as they wished to pay to see her.
Loving Marianne there was no risk of a baby.
She never heard from Erik.
Charlotte became Carlotta.
There was a fight and it was vicious. The Garnier was newly opened. She could command stages in her own right. Everyone whispered of her private life. They called her difficult but that was just protection.
It was 1879.
She was twenty-eight.
Paris was more beautiful than she remembered.
Her first night on the Garnier stage, there was thunderous applause and a laugh that went with a voice that she heard in the beginnings of an opera house, echoing through empty halls.
They are so close to each other she can feel Christine’s breath brushing her lips.
“I can be anything you need me to be,” she whispers. “Anything at all. I will always keep you safe.”
Christine’s eyes flicker, and she nods.
“I want to sing,” she breathes, as if it is something sordid, something she ought not ask for. But a voice like hers deserves to be heard, to be shared with the world and known and loved and remembered.
To be remembered.
“I can help you.” Their lips are almost touching. “We don’t have to, if you don’t want to.” The girl has just escaped a man. What would she want a prima donna for? She might not care for ladies at all though ladies are often a good deal better than men.
(There have been whispers for years about her own proclivities, but no one could ever understand.)
“I want to.”
The low voice. The brushing of fingertips over her arm. A hand, gentle, cupping her cheek.
She brushes her thumb over the cut beneath her eye.
The kiss, when it comes, is soft.
Carlotta’s eyes flicker closed and she sighs, a world of feeling blooming within her.
(Someday, she will give her pearls.)