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When the music is over – when Christine can think, again, when her body feels something close to her own and her fingers stop feeling like her toes (and vice versa), she rises, shakily, and goes to the bath. The wedding dress comes off her almost unwillingly, like it wants to stay shackled onto her skin, and Christine discards it on the floor in a fit of impotent spite, knowing Erik would be displeased if he knew.
The nerve of the man, she seethes, running the water, this absurd luxury he has made sure she can access deep underground only serving to fan her ire further. A jewelled cage, with a capricious and infinitely talented keeper, studying her without mercy, pulling her near and pushing her away by turns. It had been easy to be fond of him, when he was infirm, when he was something close to man, but Erik is neither Angel nor Devil nor God, as bone and blood as Christine herself, and she wearies of his inconstancy. At one moment servile and slavish, the next assailing her with his terrible gift –
The water is too hot, but Christine steps in all the same, hissing in the pleasure-pain of immersion in water that both sears her skin and warms her from the outside in. She is always cold inside, in Erik’s realm, for all he builds the fire up whenever she enters a room – cold inside, deep below the face that Erik claims to adore. She sinks down into the depths of the tub, her legs bent to the sides and only her knees and face above the water, her hair floating on its surface turning a darker blonde with the wet.
Erik is knocking, outside her bedroom door, and she can hear his voice, although the words remain indistinguishable. Good. Let him wait for a time, see how he enjoys it. Christine reaches out a soapy hand, slams the door of the bathroom closed, drags in a deep breath and lets the water close over her head.
It’s nicer, under the water. She opens her eyes and the pink marble of the bathroom above is dulled, swirled, could almost be somewhere else. Her hair fans around her like one of the women from Papa’s stories, half maid and half fish, who roam the deepest seas and drag down unwary sailors to their doom. It would be nice, she thinks, swishing her hair around in the water, to be one of them. Then she would never feel cold in Erik’s lair, could swim in the lake and hide from Erik under the water, make friends with the Siren and half-drown Erik whenever she felt like it.
Her father was full of such tales. The Angel of Music, yes, of course, and the Virgin and the saints, Papa knew all of those, but he had older tales, from before Christianity swept through Norden, although he’d told them with some reluctance. Christine had liked the Norns, the fate-deciders; she had learned Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld along with her Our Father, and only coming to Paris had scuffed at the corners of her memories of Valkyries and seiðr. There had been too much to see and do and think; the business of the city, greater than any town or village she and Papa had wandered through, the dizzy whirl of the ballet and then of course Erik, himself alone more than enough to occupy a dozen minds’ worth of thoughts at once.
Her chest hurts. She rises from beneath the bathwater. Erik is shouting now.
More than a little miffed still, Christine huffs, surges up from the tub, and stomps out to her bedroom dripping. She wraps herself in her thickest dressing gown, but the cloth clings to her almost instantly, not nearly enough to contain the liquid still on her skin. “I’m fine,” she tells the door crossly, snatching up her spectacles with one hand. “I was just in the bath.”
There is silence. Now he’s quiet, she thinks, a trifle hysterically. What a thing it would be, to be as tall and strong as Erik, to grip him firmly by his shirt and shake him like a ragdoll. He’s done the same to her. she’s quite sure it wouldn’t even be a sin. “I thought you might be… upset,” he says eventually. Christine scoffs before she can quite think better of it.
“By what?” she asks harshly. “The music? Or how horribly rude you were?” He could probably break the door down, she thinks, now firmly in the territory of panic-stricken, but she’d have some time first. Minutes, even. One can do an awful lot with minutes.
“Please open the door, Christine.” He sounds so tired. As he should be. Getting all over-excited, when only weeks ago he looked to be on death’s door –
Stupid, wretched man.
“I’m not decent,” she replies. “Like I said, I was in the bath.”
“Just for a moment.” Christine considers it, the barred door, the ease of which he could harm her, if she took down the barrier. Nowhere in his house on the lake is safe. She should get used to that notion, if he can reach her even through the barred door, with nothing more than his hell music.
She unbolts the door, and pulls it open, peeps around the corner.
Erik is a mess. His sparse hair is everywhere, falling over the forehead of the mask into his eyes, and he’s lost his jacket; his sleeves are unbuttoned. He looks like he himself has been the one debauched; he has no right to. But worse are his eyes, golden rings around pupils dilated wide and fathomless, and there is blood on his lip, the lower one, just below the edge of the mask.
“You’re satisfied, then?” Christine asks, and Erik flinches all over, she can see it, a tremor running through his tall frame. She considers that perhaps it had sounded a little… sensual. But it’s hardly her fault her voice is still a little throaty from before. A dull red flush has crept up his neck, from the loosened collar of his shirt. Erik, blushing. How quaint. “That I was only in the bath.” She has interrupted his fascinated perusal of her, and Christine crosses her arms over her chest, glares, the better to imitate Madame Giry at her most imperious.
“Yes,” Erik replies, his voice strangled, like he’s got something lodged in his throat. Probably his stiff-necked arrogant pride, Christine thinks, and her eyes narrow even further.
“Good,” she replies, and stalks back to her bathroom, shuts the door firmly. She hadn’t been in the bath for long, but she can still smell herself, even over the jasmine bath oil she’d dumped in the water. It’s on her hands, on her thighs, sticky and unpleasant, pleasure’s echo, one that she does not like.
She drops her robe, and climbs back into the bath.
If Christine herself could smell it, Erik probably could. Of course he could.
Good. Let him know how low he’d brought her, she seethes, and dips her head beneath the water once more.
Christine opens the door of her wardrobe in the morning. She’d slept defiantly bare, and why shouldn’t she? She’s fallen now, for sure; she had her fingers up inside herself last night to the very last knuckle, whatever maidenhead she had left after all those years of ballet must be shredded to ribbons. Decent girls bleed on their wedding night, Christine has learnt. Here in Paris of course; Father never spoke of such things. Someday her body would not be her own; she would be Madame Man-Who-Owned-Her, and her body would belong to him.
Monsieur Man-Who-Owns-Her would expect a virgin. Except Christine isn’t one, not anymore, not in the way that seems to count. What does a woman do with herself when no decent man will marry her? What is a woman’s life, without that anticipatory dread hanging over her like a shroud?
The question occupies Christine for long enough that she abandons standing in front of her wardrobe, sitting on her bed instead. Freyja had been married, she knows, yet she had done as she pleased with her body, bedding four dwarves in exchange for Brísingamen.
Your mother’s people, Papa says in her memory, the women of her village adorated Freyja long after foreign missionaries forced her to bow their proud golden heads to their Christian God. A male God, a single God. He gave them nothing, your mother’s forebears, but judgment and guilt and restriction. Freyja had been their freedom. And so she continued to be.
His voice had been reverent, as it always had been when he spoke of Mother. Christine eyes herself in the mirror. She has no portrait of her mother to refer to, but Father always said she had her mother’s look, the wild Norden blood pounding in her veins, the crystal-pure voice that had been the first thing Father noticed, a lifetime ago.
The decision is made, quicker than falling asleep.
Freyja, Christine thinks, and experiences a distant sort of echo, like someone very far away has roused from their sleep.
Freyja. Mardöll, Vanadís. I need your help.
The strangeness begins almost at once.
Erik is in the drawing room when Christine emerges at last. She ignores the ingrained urge to go to him, to wait upon his orders as she had for so long when she was the pupil and he the Angel. He has trained her in more ways than music, she knows; knows it bitterly, but she goes to the kitchen for a slice of bread and a glass of water – two glasses, three. Her throat is dry, and she has not eaten for almost a full day.
Her memory is not as good as she would like, but all the same she has remembered some, and cobbled together the rest, hoped the goddess would understand. She’d laid down a shining golden cloth hastily torn from one of Erik’s more flamboyant gown choices, lit every candle in her room on the improvised altar, and pricked her index finger, allowing ten drops of blood to fall into the flame of the largest. And the words rose up in her like a tide:
“Heill dagr!
Heilir dags synir!
Heil nótt ok nift!
Óreiðum augum lítið okkr þinig
ok gefið sitjöndum sigr!
Heilir æsir!
Heilar ásynjur!
Heil sjá in fjölnýta fold!
Mál ok mannvit gefið okkr mærum tveim
ok læknishendr, meðan lifum.1
Freyja, grant me strength,” she’d added, and had blown the candle out.
Christine didn’t know if she felt different, but all the same, the prayer to the goddess had given her confidence, fortified her enough to face Erik in all his wretched glory. Perhaps he would be sullen and withdrawn, or teary and imploring; she could hazard no guess either way. Still, she bearded him in his den, standing in the doorway of the drawing room as Erik raises his eyes from his book to stare at her.
Two things happened at once. Erik opens his mouth to speak, and Ayesha leaps from her place on Erik’s lap to pad across the room, stopping at Christine’s feet to twine around her ankles. It is hard to say whether Erik or Christine herself is more surprised; Ayesha has never shown so much as a speck of affection towards Christine, but here she is, rubbing her pretty face against her calf, a distinct rumble rising up from her diamond-encrusted coat. Christine risks it, bending down to lift the cat into her arms, and the blue-eyed feline willingly accepts the embrace, cuddling up against Christine’s breasts and increasing the volume of her purrs.
“Söt tjej,” Christine croons, scratching her under the chin, between her lovely soft ears. “Är du inte en fin katt? Ja, det är du.” She chances a look at Erik. His mouth is actually hanging open. How quaint. “I think she likes me now,” she announces to Erik.
“Ah… yes. It seems so.”
Christine walks off with her prize, a bundle of warm, soft fur and loud rumbling purrs and strong, beating heart. “You are sacred to the goddess, aren’t you, kitty?” she asks the creature. “Good job. You showed him, mjuk, söt katt. I wonder if he has a lovely fish for you in the icebox?”
As it turns out, Erik does.
“You seem different,” Erik ventures, the next day. Christine is in her favourite armchair in the drawing room, Ayesha a drowsy mass of fluff on her knees, as she peruses Jane Eyre in the original English. It is a struggle, almost fogging her spectacles with the effort, but she must practice her languages. Her Italian is almost as good as La Carlotta’s, although that isn’t saying much, and Erik says her German is coming along. No doubt he disapproves of her reading foreign novels – Raoul certainly would – but Christine is disinclined to care overmuch.
“Perhaps I am,” she replies glibly, and turns the page. The movement rouses Ayesha, who makes a sleepy kitty noise before putting her head back down on her front paws to nap. “Be reasonable, Erik. You can’t expect me to stay that weak, terrified child forever who cowers if you so much as raise your voice.” She glances up. Erik is rigid in his chair, elegant hands white-knuckled on the arms of it. His golden eyes are fixed on her as if he can’t believe what he’s heard.
“I don’t… raise my voice.” He sounds stunned. Christine sighs, and sets her book aside.
“Erik, you screamed at me just the night before last because I didn’t sing Aida to your satisfaction. I have given it some thought, and – why are you laughing?”
He is, darkly, like she’s made some great joke. “Nothing, my dear,” he manages, after a few more spurts of choked laughter. “Nothing indeed. It is only – to my satisfaction, what an odd choice of phrase –” Christine eyes him resentfully as the mad man dissolves into chuckles again. He can be so strange.
He liked it too much. Ask him.
The alien thought drifts into Christine’s mind almost like it’s one of her own, except for the voice. Light and feminine and amused and almost-human, except for the echo of it like the scream of a falcon and the slow slide of shifting rock.
Well. Isn’t that interesting.
“Erik,” she begins, cautiously enough. “If you didn’t hate it, then – was that it? You liked it more than you wanted to?”
Ah. So that is what they mean when they say the phrase ‘a deer in the headlights’. “Why would you ask me that?” he demands, voice teetering on the edge of a shout, eyes wild. “You holy innocent, you naïve child, what under God would drive you to conceive of such a notion?”
He really is overreacting. “The lady doth protest too much,” Christine replies archly, and adds, forestalling his comment, “Yes, I know that’s not what she meant by protest. You’re such a purist, Erik.” This may be the best day of her life. Where has it come from, this fire, this blithe lack of care? Like the inequality between Erik and herself has been corrected; like she is not his reluctant student bordering on captive, like he isn’t a lunatic who could snap and kill her at any moment. She has tasted his fury before, felt his hands wrap around her neck tighter than a torque. She is playing a dangerous game.
Oh, but he is arrogant.
He is also speechless.
“You know nothing of men,” he says hoarsely, after the shock has apparently worn off. “Do you think you are safe here with me, simply because I am hideous? Do you think me immune to the wants of other men, their desires for the touch of a willing woman?”
“No,” Christine says, mainly to cut him off from what sounds like the beginning of a very long and self-piteous rant. “I don’t think I’m safe here with you.” She taps Ayesha on the flank and the cat obligingly gets off her lap, arching her back to stretch languorously before darting away. Christine leans forward, and catches his golden eyes with her own. “You could not create such music as the other night if you were devoid of passion. But you have never intimated an interest in me beyond teaching me to sing. An honest man would have declared his intentions. Instead you call me a child and berate me for the slightest transgression.” She shrugs. “If I am honest, you behave more like a badly-tempered uncle than a suitor.”
“If I have, it is no fault of mine. You have acted the child,” Erik growls, hands flexing on the arms of his chair. “You have been meek, or withdrawn, or played the ingénue like you had no other thought in your head.”
“Isn’t that precisely what you have wanted?” Christine counters heatedly. “A weak, gullible country girl stupid enough to believe you when you proclaimed divinity? You do not want a woman. You want a slave!”
Erik recoils as though she has struck him. “I,” he begins, and cannot continue; he passes a shaking hand over his eyes and leaves it there. “I do not…”
Contrition takes over Christine like the Prussians tried to do with Paris. “Erik,” she entreats, and leans forward the last few inches, almost on the edge of her seat, so she can brush penitent fingers against his sleeve. Erik jerks, and pulls away from her touch. “Don’t be like that.” She scoots her chair closer, ignores his wince as the chair legs grind across the floor, and captures his thin hand with her own two. “I didn’t mean it.”
He peers at her through the hand shielding his masked face. “Was it my music?” he asks, voice subdued. “My Don Juan? It has put the devil in you.” Christine is dreadfully tired. She feels many years too old for this.
“I am certain the devil has far more interesting things to do than dwell within a chorus girl,” she replies. His hand is still trembling in her own. “Do you need the medicine? Are you having an attack?” He chokes out a soft sound, too rough to be a laugh.
“My nursemaid,” he says, voice wry. “No, my dear. It is not my heart that afflicts me currently. Not the physical one, at least.”
Christine chooses to ignore that. Allusions and insinuations will not do anymore. “I think you need some time to think,” she says, and rises to her feet. It is pleasant, somehow, to look down on him, his amber eyes wide. “I would like to go above, for several days.”
“You will come back?” he asks, voice a shadow of its usual splendour. Christine takes pity on him, and grips his bony shoulder briefly, for just long enough to see his expression change.
“You must decide what you want from me first. But when you come for me with your choice,” she proclaims, voice ringing out pure and strong in the musty air. “I will be ready.”