Archive of Our Own

Emma Peel smiled. 'All right, Steed, what's the catch?' Steed might claim a fondness for the finer things in life, but this beggared belief.

Steed grinned back at her, a gleam in his eye undermining his attempt to feign innocence. 'Why, no catch at all. Just a Saturday night out at the opera.'

Emma folded her arms. 'You hate opera.'

'You wound me, Mrs Peel. I have nothing but respect for the genius of Bellini.'

'La traviata,' said Emma, lightly smacking him with her programme, 'is Verdi.'

Steed nodded, allowing only the slightest bit of colour to creep into his cheeks. 'So it is, and this performance is the first at the Olde Towne Opera House in two years. The place has been closed ever since one of the house managers, Eric Crawford, assumed the identity of the masked Opera Ghost and began leaving ominous notes addressed to himself and his partner, Richard Monty, threatening that unless they replaced prima donna Charlotte Sharp with her understudy Christine Daniels, whom he considered more worthy of the spotlight, a disaster beyond their imagination would occur.'

'And so it did,' said Emma, nodding at the recollection. 'It was in all the papers. Crawford snapped, and then he snapped the chandelier.'

'Fortunately,' Steed went on, 'almost no one was in the audience, as the show had been most negatively received. Those few who did attend were able to get out in time. As he had no actual victims, Crawford was only charged with criminal damage to property—'

'—and only sentenced to probation,' Emma finished. 'Remind me what happened to Miss Sharp?'

'On tour with another company,' said Steed. 'She swears she'll never set foot at the Olde Towne Opera House again, says it's too traumatic. Miss Daniels has also dropped off the scene. Married a man called Ralph Chesterfield, now living a quiet life in the country.'

'So who's the prima donna of this grand comeback?'

'A new find called Sarah Dot. She was a chorus girl before, with no lead credits to her name. Yet here she is, headlining the Opera House's grand comeback, financed to the tune of one million pounds.'

Emma nodded. 'With the spectre of the Opera Ghost ever lurking in the background.'

'So it falls to us to keep an eye out for falling chandeliers.' Steed offered Emma his arm, and she laughed and accepted.

'Well, in that case, how can I refuse.'

'Rather a sparse set for a one-million-pound production,' Emma whispered, as the curtain went up.

Steed smiled. 'Haven't you heard? Minimalism is all the rage these days.'

'As long as it doesn't trigger any ghostly rage,' said Emma, and Steed chuckled.

The elderly woman behind them, however, plainly did not see the humour. 'Shh!' she hissed. Emma caught Steed's eye and grinned at him. Shushed by an elderly opera-goer, now that was a new one. If they kept this up, their relationship might start to feel positively normal.

Sarah Dot, it transpired, was absolutely magnificent. At the conclusion of Act I even Steed was spellbound, and he applauded whole-heartedly along with the rest of the audience. As the lights turned on, he turned to Emma.

'With a star like that—'

'—they'll make it all back, and then some,' said Emma. 'The Olde Towne Opera House is certainly back in business—'

'—perhaps as never before,' finished Steed.

'A triumph!' said a shaky voice, and they both turned to see the old woman who had shushed them flailing her arms with excitement. 'I knew I was right to invest. That Richard Monty is a genius, and so charming too!'

Steed and Emma glanced at each other. 'Excuse me, ma'am, did you say you had invested in this show?' Steed asked. 'I've been looking to become a patron of the arts myself. Would you mind if I asked how you came upon this opportunity?'

The old woman smiled. 'Mr Monty courted me. Oh, I knew he was after my money, but for the opera, I don't mind a wile or two. After all, it had been so long.'

Steed grinned. 'Oh, I find that impossible to believe, Miss—'

'Mrs Jones. Letitia Jones, Mr—'

'Steed, John Steed. Lovely to meet you, Mrs Jones, and may I introduce Mrs Peel.'

Emma extended her hand, and Mrs Jones shook it. For such an old woman, she had quite the strong grip. 'Did you come here much before, Mrs Jones?' she asked.

'Oh, yes,' said Mrs Jones solemnly. 'As a matter of fact, I was here the night the chandelier came down, and if you ask me, the Opera Ghost had it right. Charlotte Sharp might have been a halfway decent soprano in her prime, but her time was long done. That was my one question to Mr Monty when he came calling to my flat. I held up my cheque, unsigned, just out of his reach, and I said, “Who's going to be your Violetta? Not Miss Sharp again, is it?” He assured me they'd found someone new.'

'Charlotte Sharp had her fans, though, didn't she?' asked Steed. 'Didn't Crawford tell the Judge that was why he felt compelled to take such radical measures? Mr Monty refused to replace Miss Sharp with his favourite rising star because she was the rainmaker, so to speak?'

'Oh yes, she had her fans,' said Mrs Jones. '“Had being the operative word. By the time Eric Crawford cut the chandelier, her army of admirers had already been whittled down to a mere handful of people just as deluded as she was. It wouldn't have hurt the Opera House's finances to replace her; it might have even redeemed them.'

'Well,' said Steed, smiling, 'they've clearly learnt their lesson.'

'Oh yes,' said Mrs Jones. 'This Sarah Dot is incredible. After that Ah, fors'è lui, we'll all be expecting great things from her.'

Just then the lights began to flash, and out of the corner of his eye, Steed saw someone moving around towards stage right. A stage hand, perhaps, but why was it that the man's face had flashed so brightly in the dark? Then Steed saw him again, and the answer became clear. It wasn't a face, but a white half-mask.

Just then, he felt Emma shift next to him, and then she placed her hand on his arm. 'Steed,' she whispered urgently. 'I just caught sight of a man in a black mask up in the rafters, and now the chandelier has begun to swing.'

'And in other news, we have an Opera Ghost in a white mask at stage right,' he whispered back.

'I thought Crawford acted alone?' Emma asked, and Steed nodded.

'That was the official story, yes.'

'But perhaps not the only story?'

'Only one way to find out. You take the high road, and I'll take the low road.'

'Shh!' said Mrs Jones exasperatedly—far louder, Steed noted, than he and Emma had been.

'Shh yourself!' hissed another audience member, even louder.

'Shh, all of you!' chimed in a third spectator, and Steed and Emma took advantage of their quietening war to slip away.

Emma hurried out into the vestibule and scanned the wall for any sign of a door leading backstage. The only one she could see was, unsurprisingly, locked. She considered simply kicking it in, but as that was bound to make a lot of noise, she settled for picking the lock with a hairpin. Once inside, the first thing she noticed was a trail of muddy footprints, and then it occurred to her that there had been such footprints outside as well. Eric Crawford or no, this Opera Ghost was quite solid, and had only just arrived. She followed his trail to a staircase, made her way up into the rafters, stepped over an unconscious guard, and then caught sight of her target, balanced precariously on a wooden beam. He wasn't, as Emma had suspected, attempting to cut the chandelier. Rather, he held a gun, which was trained on Sarah Dot.

Emma considered her options. If she attacked him from behind, on the same beam, it might break under their combined weight. Instead, she catwalked along the next beam until they were roughly level, only a foot apart and maybe thirty feet apart from the ground, with little to nothing to break their falls. The Opera Ghost started when he saw her and Emma ducked, flipped herself over and held tight to the beam with her knees. At least I wore trousers, she thought as she hung upside down and lunged for the gun. The Opera Ghost wobbled and nearly fell, holding tight to the beam with one hand and clutching his gun in the other. He kicked outwards and Emma threw her head back and out of the way, and she managed to wrest the gun from his grip. He lunged forwards and caught hold of her hand, and he climbed onto her beam.

Emma heard the creak. She kicked out instinctively, and the Opera Ghost fell forwards and down, hitting the floor with a thud. She hurried back down, thankful for the nigh unbreakable spell Sarah Dot had cast on her audience, and checked the man's pulse. He was dead, all right. She lifted the black mask, but she did not recognise the face beneath it. She reached into the man's pocket and found his wallet. Indeed, he was not Eric Crawford, but one Frank Lovelace. The name told no story, but the twenty fifty-pound notes he carried revealed plenty.

As Emma disappeared into the vestibule, Steed made his way towards stage right. The Opera Ghost had disappeared into the shadows, but Steed felt certain he could not, or at least would not, have gone far. Expertly slipping past an usher, he made his way backstage unnoticed, until he was noticed...by the white-masked Opera Ghost.

'Just where do you think you're going?' asked the man, and Steed smiled.

'I could ask you the same question,' he said. The Opera Ghost, it seemed, was unamused.

'I don't know who sent you,' he said, 'but if you go anywhere near my Sarah, if you even think about harming a hair on her head, I will kill you.'

'My dear boy,' said Steed, 'I haven't come here to harm anyone, and in any case I'm not the one with a history of cutting down chandeliers.'

'There was no one under it!' said the Opera Ghost irritably. 'Why would there have been? No one was coming to see Charlotte Sharp anymore; that was the whole point! It was a message to Richard, not attempted murder!'

'So you are Eric Crawford,' said Steed triumphantly, and the man nodded.

'Yes, I am Eric Crawford, formerly one of the managers of the Olde Towne Opera House, now reduced to skulking in the shadows as the Opera Ghost, and all because I believed in art above profit! I championed Christine Daniels because she was a true talent, but Richard only cared about money. Charlotte Sharp brought in the crowds, he assured me for years, even as it became less and less true until it really wasn't at all! By the time I snapped, it was pure politics and incompetence.'

'Perhaps they were having an affair,' Steed suggested, and Crawford, as much as he could do under the mask, looked thoughtful.

'Do you know, I never even thought of that,' he said. 'I was a bit wrapped up in how I felt about Christine. She never returned my love, and if I regret anything it's that I know my actions drove her away from the stage. All I ever wanted was for all the world to hear her beautiful voice, and now only her worthless husband ever will. I've tried to do better with Sarah.'

'So you've been approaching Miss Dot, in the guise of the Opera Ghost,' said Steed, and Crawford nodded.

'It's not much of a guise when it's been in all the papers,' he said, 'but the truth is that I went through some hard times after the trial. I lost my job and I lost my home, so I moved into the boarded-up Opera House. By that point I really felt like a ghost, so I thought, why not. Then they re-opened the place, and I probably should've left, but where was I to go?'

'Where indeed,' said Steed.

'So I kept myself hidden. I'd got quite used to it by that point. I watched from the rafters as they cast La traviata and couldn't believe my eyes or ears. Sarah was awful; her audition was one of the worst I'd ever witnessed. But then I heard her in her dressing room, singing where no one could watch her, and I realised she was gifted after all. She just needed a tutor to bring it out, help her conquer that stage fright. So I made myself known to her.'

'But if she was so terrible before your tutelage,' said Steed, 'why would Monty have cast her in the first place?'

'I think I can answer that,' said a beautifully familiar voice, and Emma stepped out of the shadows, having donned the black mask of her Opera Ghost. 'We noticed it before: the sparse set. One simply doesn't need anywhere close to one million pounds to put a production like this together. Richard Monty deliberately raised far more than he needed and then cast an unknown chorus girl in the lead based on a poor audition. He intended for the show to fail so that he could get away with massive embezzlement.'

As Steed nodded, Eric Crawford let out a maniacal laugh. 'But I made her great! I foiled his plan without even knowing it!'

'So you did, Crawford,' sneered another voice, this one not nearly so welcome and decidedly masculine, and a tall, stout man who could only be Richard Monty approached them, holding a gun. 'But not for long. Once I've killed you, these two interlopers and your dear Sarah, I'll be off to Rio with a cool million in my pocket. Actually,' he added, turning to Emma, 'I suppose I ought to thank you, Miss—'

'Mrs Peel,' said Emma coldly, and that clarification had never made Steed smile as much as it did just now.

'Mrs Peel,' Monty continued. 'This way I don't even have to pay my assassin.'

'Assassin?' asked Steed.

'The other Opera Ghost,' said Emma. 'I dropped him off a wooden beam.'

'Chandelier attack?'

'Sniper shot, albeit without the proper rifle.'

'Enough talking!' snapped Richard Monty, his hands trembling as he held his gun.

'Yes,' said Steed. 'Quite enough, I should think.' He lunged forwards to disarm Monty, and Emma easily knocked him out with a blow to the neck.

'I've just read the most extraordinary news in the morning papers,' said Emma, as she opened a bottle of champagne.

'Oh?' asked Steed. 'Do tell, my dear.'

'Our ghostly friend Eric Crawford is to be reinstated as manager of the Olde Towne Opera House, and he's got a new partner, too.'

'The inimitable Sarah Dot?'

Emma smiled. 'The inimitable Letitia Jones.'

For a moment, the two of them simply looked at each other, and then, in unison, they said, 'Shh!'