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Musichetta has waited until just before daybreak to set out for the little house on Rue Plumet where Cosette and Marius now live.
She passes through the streets like a ghost, under the streetlamps and their feeble illumination, down the cold avenues where urchins chase each other and laugh into the morning air. She approaches #55, sees the latch left unlatched, as it often is these days. Entering through that garden gate, Musichetta does not know that she is passing through a sacred space, where two pale pairs of hands once clasped between the iron bars like convicts waiting for their execution, seeking out the last familiar warmth of human touch before that desperate distance of the death which is the separation of two lovers. What bated breath was there, all caught up in their flowering lungs! What fragrant words travelled between them!
Musichetta pauses on the dewy grass and looks up to the window of their room. No light shines out through the glass. There is no movement behind the lacy curtains.
Earlier, lying sleepless in her narrow bed, she had bargained with herself that she must wait until sunrise to come to the house, to knock on the gray door, to see the blinking pair of gray eyes. She did not want to wake them. She did not want to be a bother. She did not think that she could wait until the day had properly begun.
She sits down with her back against the front wall of the house, her feet in the wet grass, and tries to guess at the proximity of day. In the sheltered bower of the garden, she is reduced to watching the sky through the gaps between silvered leaves. It is difficult, she thinks, to measure sunrise in a city. She will wait, she decides, until she hears the first lark sing.
As if in answer, the door opens, and Cosette appears.
Musichetta stiffens where she sits, caught in her awkward extension between arrival and announcement, between approaching the house and knocking at the door. This is the uninvited space thieves occupy, she thinks, entering a garden unannounced and waiting for the moment they can strike. What would a passerby think, seeing her sitting there in the yard, poor grisette with unwashed hair and fortune-teller’s eyes.
Cosette crosses to her calmly and easily, and sits beside her on the cold ground.
“I heard the gate,” she says, and Musichetta lets the breath fall out of her, and lets her head droop down to Cosette’s narrow shoulder. They twine their hands together, like they had on that first day when Cosette first met her, appearing like a sorrowful angel at Musichetta’s door.
“Was it a dream, again?” Cosette asks.
“Yes,” says Musichetta.
Cosette does not ask further, and Musichetta decides to spare her the details of her sleeping vision, the blood, the distant gunshots, the empty rooms gathering dust. Cosette, she knows, has had her fair share of nightmares.
The two of them watch a moth flutter between the closed-up flowers in the nearby flowerbed. Its pale wings lap frantically at the air.
Marius is probably still asleep upstairs, Musichetta thinks. She tries to picture him, lying there. She has never really met him, not properly, even during those nights in which they both laughed brimful in the back room of the Musain. She has only a vague sense of his voice, his tousled hair. More tousled, no doubt, as he sleeps. Or perhaps he woke when Cosette closed the bedroom door behind her, or at the creak of the stairs. Or perhaps Cosette, herself waking, laid her hand upon his arm, and whispered Musichetta’s name into his drowsy ear.
For a moment, Musichetta entertains the idea of Cosette leading her by the hand into the house, up the staircase and through that bedroom door, folding her into bed against Marius’ warm back and climbing in behind her, the two of them closing around her like two pages of a book around a pressed sprig of rosemary. The three of them could fall asleep like that, as the pale pre-dawn light turns into a real sunrise, and the birds call to each other, and Musichetta forgets all about her dream, and the hours in her lonely bed, and her morning journey through a city that betrayed its revolution.