Costumes and Filigree: A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera Read online



  Costumes and Filigree

  A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera

  Dayna Stevenson

  Copyright Dayna Stevenson

  Cover Art by Kamil Jadczak

  Chapters

  Chapitre Un: Le Voix

  Chapitre Deux: Le Apparition

  Chapitre Trois: Le Enseignement du Ange

  Chapitre Quatre: Les Directeurs Nouveaus

  Chapitre Cing: Le Vicomte de Chagny

  Chapitre Six: Dans Son Vestiaire

  Chapitre Sept: La Notoriété

  Chapitre Huit: Le Vérité du Ange

  Chapitre Neuf: Christine a un Plan Astucieux

  Chapitre Dix: Le Masque

  Chapitre Onze: Ce qui Se Trouvait Dessous

  Chapitre Douze: Les Quelques Jours Suivants

  Chapitre Treize: Le Retour á la Surface

  Chapitre Quatorze: Christine Renie le Récit du Enlèvement

  Chapitre Quinze: Les Fraises et le Filigree

  Chapitre Seize: Les Conséquences

  Chapitre Dix-Sept: Las Incertitudes

  Chapitre Dix-Huit: La Attaque de Buquet

  Chapitre Dix-Neuf: La Infidélité du Vicomte

  Chapitre Vingt: Le Suicide Manqué de Christine

  Chapitre Vingt-et-Un: La Madeleine

  Chapitre Vingt-Deux: La Beauté Importe Plus

  Chapitre Vingt-Trois: Le Anniversaire Triste

  Chapitre Vingt-Quatre: John 11:44

  Chapitre Vingt-Cinq: Un Conversion et un Contusion

  Chapitre Vingt-Six: Abandonner le Ange

  Chapitre Vingt-Sept: Christine Lit la Bible

  Chapitre Vingt-Huit: Le Enlèvement

  Chapitre Vingt-Neuf: Le Décision de Christine

  Chapitre Trente: De des Statues et des Salons

  Chapitre Trente-et-Un: Les Fenêtres dans Enfer

  Chapitre Trente-Deux: Christine Écrit une Lettre

  Chapitre Trente-Trois: La Accalmie avant le Orage

  Chapitre Trente-Quatre: Idomeneo

  Chapitre Trente-Cing: Le Duel

  Chapitre Trente-Six: Ensemble à la Fin

  Chapitre Un: Le Voix

  Christine Daaé sat down heavily on the old, creaking stool in front of her dressing table and rested her head in her arms. A sigh escaped her lips as she felt the strained muscles in her limbs shake, as if unable to finally relax after such a trying performance, even though hours had passed since the curtains had closed. Her gypsy costume felt damp against her back, and she thanked the gods that its dark color obscured the appearance of sweat. Even though her part was minor—merely a member of the chorus—the dances accompanying Carlotta’s arias in Carmen were exhausting. And since the diva had been throwing more fits than usual, there had not been much chance to practice. But even so, Christine had done much worse than the other chorus girls. She had thoroughly destroyed the song “La Cloche a Sonné,” hitting multiple wrong notes, and then she stretched a muscle too far in one of the dances. The ballet mistress, Madame Giry, had not criticized her out loud, but her expression clearly stated that she felt Christine wasn’t trying—that she could do much better. But Christine thought she was trying as hard as she could.

  She had heard the other chorus girls whispering about her, about how she didn’t belong at the Opera Garnier—her voice just wasn’t good enough. And a rumor was circling that when the Garnier came under new management in a few weeks, a third of the chorus would be cut to save money—and she was certainly part of the bottom third, both in talent and in popularity with the management. She would never be able to make her father’s dream come true. She could feel tears of frustration welling up behind her eyes; no matter how hard she tried to hold them back, they still threatened to spill forth onto her pale cheeks and soak the sleeves of her gown.

  She glanced around to make sure that there was no one else in the chorus dressing room. The last thing she needed was for one of the meaner chorus rats to see her crying. But it was late at night, and she was alone.

  Forcing the tears back, she reached for her street clothes and proceeded to change out of her costume, regretfully viewing the spots of perspiration on the bodice and tossing it into a corner. When she picked up her own dress, made of ugly brown wool, her heart sank even lower. It was horribly plain in comparison to the sequins and embroidery of her costume; no matter how itchy and abrasive it was, it felt so glamorous to wear such beautiful things and pretend that she was not quite so poor. When she got home, she would tell Mamma that she wanted new dresses. She knew they couldn’t afford it, but perhaps she could persuade Mamma to take in a little extra seamstress work. She was sure Mamma would do it; the woman never denied her anything.

  She shouldn’t be so unhappy, she knew; she had a fairly good situation, for a chorus girl. Her wage was pathetic, but she was paid a little more than the other girls for taking on the duties of both the chorus and the ballet. It was insufferably difficult and time-consuming to hold down both positions, but the extra money was desperately needed. Still, her wage was more than the average Swedish peasant girl could expect; it would almost be enough to get by on if she could control herself enough not to spend it all on trinkets and cheap jewelry that made her feel less poor.

  She fingered the edge of one sleeve, studying the pattern of rosemary sewn into the wool. It kept her warm, she supposed. That was all the good that could be said about it. She’d never had a nice dress in her entire life. Even when she’d been little, she’d been forced to wear cheap, ugly things. It wasn’t fair—her father had been the most talented violinist in the entire world. They should have been swimming in money, not scrounging for coins on street corners.

  It hurt her to remember those days, and she forcefully pushed the memory away. It was painful to think of her poverty, and even more painful to think about her father. How she would sit at his feet for hours, and he would play song after song for her as the waves crashed against the cliffs in the distance….

  With a sigh, she pulled the ornaments out of her hair and stared at the picture of her father visible in an open drawer of the vanity. She couldn’t stand to look at it often—to realize how much she had disappointed him. What a failure she was. It was better to forget him entirely.

  But tonight her eyes sought the faded daguerreotype of their own accord, forcing her to face her shame and guilt. Oh Father, she thought miserably, how will I ever learn to sing, as you always assured me I could? Her father’s eyes, a light grey in the colorless photograph, bored into her, cold and condemning. Turning away, she thought to herself, Why am I not worthy of the Angel’s presence? Of his guidance?

  His voice echoed in her ears, from a distant memory, its deep quality unaffected by the hoarseness that reduced it to a mere whisper: “Fear not, child, and do not mourn my passing—whether I go to Heaven or Niflheim, I shall petition the gods to send the Angel of Music to you. I promise.” Those were the last words he had ever spoken.

  But it had been years, and no Angel had ever appeared. What did it mean? Did her father never reach the Angel? Or did the Angel not deem her worthy of his guidance? She had tried praying to Bragi, god of poetry, and Freya, goddess of love and beauty, but neither had answered her pleas to aid her voice.

  She was no longer trying to hold back her tears. Openly sobbing, Christine put her head forward onto the dressing table and wished that she would just die. But even then, she wouldn’t ever find her father in the endless abyss of Niflheim. The souls of the Underworld spent eternity wandering through the dreary, never-ending mists, lonely, lost, never seeing their loved ones again.

  The only way to avoid such a
fate was to die in glorious battle, when the Valkyries would carry your soul to Valhalla—where endless feasting awaited those lucky enough to die in the name of the gods. But Christine didn’t have a chance at attaining this highest honor, and neither had her father. She was condemned to exist forever in meaningless torment, without her father ever beside her again. This was perhaps the worst thing about her faith in her father’s Scandinavian gods; but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to abandon them for the hope of Heaven in Christianity. Many of the memories she had of her father were of his stories of the Norse gods. She wanted to believe that she would rejoice in the clouds, united with her father forever. But it wasn’t true. And even if it were, it would break her father’s heart if she discarded the beliefs he held so dear!

  As she contemplated the terrible eternity that awaited her, she began to shake and cried all the harder. It was so frightening to envisage the endless wandering, the constant sorrow, the torture of an intangible form; and it would last forever. The thought of time without end, and such terrible loneliness….

  She fell to the floor, sobbing, torn between the two fears, and wished she could just be blotted out of existence.

  Erik sat down at the bench of his pipe organ, rubbing his hands together to warm them against the cold, damp air of the cave, and wondered what he should play. He flipped through a thick stack of sheet music, watching the titles go by—Schumann’s Fantasie Op. 17; Beethoven’s Appassionata; Chopin’s Prelude Op. 45; Brahms, Bach, Haydn, Handel, Debussy, Mozart—and felt no inclination toward any of it. He didn’t feel like playing. He thought about working on his own opera, Don Juan Triumphant, but that appealed to him even less.

  He thought for a moment about blaming it on fatigue or illness and going to bed, but he knew the real cause, and that a night’s rest, or even a fortnight’s rest, wouldn’t make it any better: after a lifetime of complete devotion to music, locked away in the caverns below even the deepest cellars of the opera house, his passion was dwindling. Though his internment was voluntary, his cavern seemed much less like a haven now then it had when he had first sought refuge from the world and its cruelty.

  He turned to look at his austere home, consisting of a few old, unwanted pieces of furniture to hold his instruments and books of music, providing no welcoming feeling against the cold, dark setting of the underground lake that marked the boundary of his dwelling, and felt his spirits sink even further. Much as he hated and shunned the world for its intolerance, its persecution, it was almost worse to be alone—no matter how safe it was.

  As he was thinking, his hand raised of its own accord to touch the mask that concealed the right half of his face, and he flinched at the feeling of the porcelain under his fingers—an unwelcome reminder of what he was. He forced his hand to move down and rest against the seat of the organ bench, thinking bitterly to himself that even the loneliest hell was better than the torment he had endured at the hands of mankind.

  Erik glanced again at the pile of sheet music, trying to force himself to play something, anything, to keep these depressing thoughts at bay, but the idea made him sick. All the musical talent and knowledge in the world didn’t make a bit of difference if there was no one to share it with. He wasn’t wanted—wasn’t needed—by one living soul. Existence without meaning, he thought to himself, even with the sweetest music to mask its brackish taste, is still a poison.

  He shoved the music away and cast his eyes bitterly around the dank hole in which he lived—his cave wasn’t a haven anymore. It was a prison.

  In the minutes that followed, as he stared despondently at the pages of music, he slowly became aware of a sound—a very faint sound. At first he paid no attention; sounds often drifted down through the pipes and shafts to torment him. But after a moment, he realized that it was a girl crying. The sound resonated with his despair, and he continued to listen, contemplating the world’s cruelty. He wondered who the girl was—a seamstress, a chorus girl, perhaps a patron—and what had happened to her to make her cry.

  As he sat, the sounds of her sobs deepening his own bitterness about life, a tiny, unsure thought appeared in the back of his mind; it was an absurd impulse, and he pushed it away. He couldn’t help her. He couldn’t help anyone.

  But as he kept listening, the sound of her sobs, so forlorn, so disconsolate, tugged at his heart. The very least he could do was go see if the girl was all right, even if he couldn’t help. But if he could… To be able to have helped one person—even if it was over a trivial, insignificant matter—would give his life a meaning that it had never possessed.

  The impulse strengthened into a desire, and he stood, secured a candle from a nearby table—for it was dark in the caverns day or night—and made his way up the tunnels towards the sound.

 

  Christine couldn’t stop the tears as they coursed down her cheeks, and she curled into a ball to warm herself against the freezing floorboards. She was worthless and a failure. She wished that she could just die. Please, gods, please, just let me die.

  Then, suddenly, like a lifeline in an abysmal gale, a soft voice broke through her torment.

  It was singing—singing an aria from an opera she did not know. She could not even recognize the language, but the voice was so beautiful that her fears melted away, and she felt a strange comfort settle within her chest; for the slightest breadth of an instant, she could swear she had seen a glimpse of the eternity that awaited her, and it did not frighten her at all. It was warm, and comforting. An image of her father flashed before her eyes, and she heard his deep, quiet voice:

  “Christine.”

  And suddenly the vision of her father was gone. She felt normal again, and yet strangely not. The touch of Heaven was no longer there, but she still had the inexplicable comfort within the depths of her soul. The voice was still singing its seraphic notes, and after she had calmed down, she began to wonder if it could possibly be—

  No, it couldn’t. The Angel of Music had never come before; why would he come now? But there was no Norse god of music, so what other divine being did that leave besides the Angel?

  It was an aria she could put no name to—far more beautiful and heavenly than any she had ever heard. Slowly standing, so as not to startle the Voice, she searched the closet. There was nothing there, or behind her dresser. Briefly she cursed the chaotic disorder of the dressing room; she had to search behind each and every one of the piles of costumes and music piled on the numerous chairs, and every second was a second longer that the Voice could slip away unseen. She opened the door and peered down the hall—but she could find nothing. But the Voice was still singing, even more beautifully than before. The tears had long since stopped, but a poignant ache pulled at her heart, demanding that she find the source of the music. Surely something so perfect, so divine, had to be an angel!

  Christine walked out into the hall and entered the room to the right of hers. It never occurred to her that she could get in trouble for getting caught in other dressing rooms; the power of the Voice was too intoxicating to leave space in her mind for anything else. The room on the right was empty; so was the one on the other side. And what was stranger, she couldn’t even hear the Voice from anywhere except from within the chorus’ room. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind. Was she hallucinating?

  Dismissing this thought, she decided to enjoy the aria and not worry about where it was coming from. After all, if it was an angel, she probably wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. She felt the tears start to flow down her cheeks again, but they were warm and unobtrusive, evoked from reverence for the song’s beauty, so unlike the burning tears of moments before,.

  After the aria came to a close, the Voice beseeched, “Please don’t cry.”

  The beautiful tones were smooth and resonant, as commanding as the bells of Notre Dame, yet sad and sweet as the laments of her father’s violin. She dared not even allow herself to hope that it might be her promised Angel.

  After an eternity of silence, she gathe
red up the courage to ask, “Who are you?”

  But the Voice was gone.

  Chapitre Deux: Le Apparition

  “And so I asked who he was,” Christine explained to her adoptive mother, Mamma Valerius, over dinner that night. She had hardly been able to wait to tell her—Mamma had always held on to the hope that the Angel would come. She had an unshakable faith in the supernatural—so much like Christine’s mother—which the girl had revered since her childhood.

  The kindly woman nodded, enthralled by Christine’s story. Her dark Romanian eyes, even under heavy, wrinkled eyelids, were bright with eagerness of hearing the girl’s encounter with the divine. Her attire was as simple as Christine’s—an unadorned dress and a well-worn apron. The pewter cross hanging from her neck was the only piece of jewelry she owned. “And vot did he say?” she prompted impatiently, passing Christine a bowl of stew. Her worn sleeve whispered sadly as it brushed against the cracked, empty butter dish, and Christine looked away, feeling a hint of her depression return.

  “He didn’t say anything,” she sighed, absentmindedly staring out the dingy window at the early September frost. She had never seen frost in September in France before. Thinking that it was promising an unusually cold winter, she shivered and looked away. “Just silence.”

  The old woman looked very excited, brushing aside the fact that the strange voice had not identified himself. She ignored the dinner they were supposed to be eating, deeming such a miraculous event much more worthy of her attention. “It must be ze Angel! You can do no harm by asking him!”

  “Do you think he’ll come again?”

  “Oh, child, of course he vill! Ze Angel is here to help you!”

  Christine smiled politely and mulled this over, drawing lines in her stew. Of course that’s what Mamma would say. The few perfect notes she’d ever hit, the single compliment she’d received from a patron of the opera—to Mamma they had all been signs that the Angel had come. Christine’s hopes had been raised numbers of times in the past few years, and the Angel had never come. But could it be? Could the Voice really be the Angel her father had promised her? It was almost too wonderful to imagine.