Page 10 of Angel’s Flight (The Phantom Saga #4)

“A bit. You must visit if you can. How long will you be in Firenze? I must go home in a few weeks. Someone is having a birthday or a christening. Or was it a wedding? I can’t recall, but my attendance is required.”

“We don’t know how long we’ll be here,” Christine said with a mix of sadness and hope. Things were looking up after a poor start to the day. They were making friends, and maybe that could give them the confidence to put down some roots.

“We could not think to impose,” Erik added.

“Nonsense. You’re my friend now, and my house is open to you... for a price.” Jack gave a playful grin and looked around the nearly-empty restaurant.

“A price?” Erik echoed. “I don’t—”

“Play for me again. Something old or something you have written,” Jack prompted. Christine realized he had been looking at the decrepit piano tucked in the corner. “I would offer a trade of one of my compositions, but it would be a poor exchange, so I offer friendship and hospitality instead.”

Christine caught Erik’s eye as he looked to her for reassurance.

He had played for Jack this morning at Santa Croce , but this was a far more intimate setting where Erik was exposed.

There were two patrons eating in another corner, and the cook and waiter were chatting through a door.

Yet, Christine could see the spark of interest in his eyes.

Despite being a man who hid in the shadows, Erik loved an audience.

“Go ahead, my love,” Christine said sweetly. “Though we must warn our new friend that all other music will seem lacking after he hears yours.”

“Glad you aren’t setting the expectations too high,” Erik grumbled, but Christine knew he treasured the compliment. “If you both insist.”

“We do,” Jack chortled.

They moved to the piano, Jack and Christine taking seats at an empty table as Erik settled himself before the keys.

Christine wondered what was going through his mind – was it a tangle of all the different melodies she knew were constantly playing there?

Was he plucking one from the bunch to improvise upon, or would he be choosing a composition he had explored before?

Erik began and it was indeed a melody Christine had heard in his compositions.

A song of sweet, sad hope, filled with longing.

Erik changed it from the last time Christine had heard it and sung along without words.

Now it sounded like Florence itself; like the soaring cathedrals and crooked old streets full of life and tragedy, a river of love flowing through the center, like a vein from a breaking heart.

Christine tore her eyes away from the sight of Erik losing himself in the music to look at Jack.

He was entirely overcome, his mouth slack beneath his moustache, and tears in the corners of his eyes.

She had suspected he was the sort of musician who cared not for honors nor spotlight, but who truly and deeply loved music.

And so he was. The young student watched Erik with nothing short of awe, and Christine couldn’t help but beam with pride.

She only wished she could sing too, but it was not her moment.

Erik finished too soon and turned to his meager audience. To Christine’s delight, all the people in the room, strangers and friends alike, burst into applause. She saw the way Erik drank it in, and it filled her with the same bittersweet pride as before.

“You were right, Signora Gilbride,” Jack said, breathless as he clapped. “I will never be the same after this.”

“Erik has that effect on people,” Christine agreed, though the way Erik upended lives and transformed all he met wasn’t always a blessing. It had been for her, but it had come with pain.

They ambled back to their flat through the nighttime streets of Florence. The heat had faded at last, and the air was sweet and warm. Christine felt content and confident enough to lace her arm through Erik’s, take his hand, and rest her head on his shoulder as they walked.

“That was nice, wasn’t it?” Christine asked hopefully. “I like Jack.”

“Do you think I should meet him again as he asked? I worry if I critique his work, I’ll be too cruel,” Erik mused. “And I don’t want to leave you alone again.”

“I have made a new friend too,” Christine said with a smile, proud to finally share her secret. “Her name is Pauline. She’s French. Someone I can talk to.”

“That’s good,” Erik replied, but didn’t sound like he meant it.

“If you can trust Jack, I can trust her,” Christine chided, and Erik gave an assenting sort of grunt as they reached the entrance to their flat. Signore Genco was there with his mother and another man, conversing over pipes in the night.

“ Buona sera ,” the mother said, then asked Erik something else in Italian that Christine didn’t understand. She wished she had because it made her husband and the other men laugh.

“She said, ‘The night makes everyone beautiful, until a real beauty like you comes along to outshine us all,’” Erik whispered in her ear.

Christine blushed and sent the old woman a smile. “She is too kind.”

“She is right. Let us go up, my wife,” Erik went on, tugging Christine’s waist.

She was happy to return to their little rented flat. It had come with furnishings, and though they were older and worn, they were welcoming. Christine liked them and the stucco walls and the painted tile by the fireplace they hadn’t used yet, and the windows looking out onto the streets.

There was a courtyard at the center of the building that she wanted to spend more time in. It had a little fountain, and Mama Genco (Christine really had to learn the woman’s proper name) and her son had filled it with plants and lemon trees that were heavy with fruit.

“We could stay here, you know. In Florence. Stop running for a while,” Christine said aloud as the thought crossed her mind.

Erik regarded her as he locked the door behind them and took off his mask.

There was a sheen of sweat on his poor face, and Christine, for the thousandth time, pitied how uncomfortable it had to be to wear the thing day in and out.

“The heat will pass, and the people here are good.”

“The people everywhere are good. They are not the problem,” Erik countered. “In every city and village, there are normal folk living their lives, happy and content and good. I fear I'm always a wrench thrown into the works to disrupt everything and reveal the bad in everyone.”

“Maybe before, but it’s different now. You’re not alone.” Christine approached her strange husband and snaked her arms around his waist. “Everything has changed now.”

“I hope you’re right,” Erik sighed.

Christine smiled back. Some of the weight of all the questions Jack had asked that she could not answer lifted from her soul. That was the past, and this was their future. There was hope for them, and she would hold onto it.

Paris

M eg couldn’t stop shaking all day, and thus, couldn’t stop falling in rehearsal.

She had been reprimanded many times and moved to the back of the formation in the Salon du Danse .

How could she contain herself, though? After days of sneaking about her own home, trying to get into her mother’s things, she had finally achieved a triumph this morning and snatched the note from her mother’s vanity.

Meg had never seen one of the infamous notes her mother would sometimes find in box five and deliver to the management, though she had asked a thousand times.

Now Meg had one, tucked into her bodice and waiting to be read.

She had to wait, of course. It wasn’t right to read it alone. She needed her friends with her.

Meg looked to the front of the formation to watch Rochelle do an elegant rond de jambe , the skin of her back that was exposed by her white practice costume taut over flexed muscles.

Next to her was Cécile Jammes, who had not smiled for many months, and beyond her was Blanche, who kept looking up at the patrons and losing her footing.

Blanche had not secured a patron, though she was eager to.

Rochelle, who had Monsieur Tremblay, didn’t look at the patrons.

Good for her. Meg disliked the feeling of being on display as the wealthy men talked too loudly over the rehearsal pianist and flicked their cigars so that ash fell on the ballerinas below.

They surveyed the crop of women and girls with the same detachment as Meg’s mother used for selecting produce from the market stalls by the Seine.

Meg didn’t like feeling like a tomato that wasn't quite ripe.

“That’s enough for now,” Charles LaRoche sighed with a bang of the cane he used to keep time for the dancers. Meg could have sworn that it was usually an ostentatious ebony thing, but today it was a boring, worn brown. Maybe the usual one had broken. It didn’t matter – at last, it was time!

“Marie!” Meg hissed, rushing forward from her place of punishment to seize her friend. Marie looked shocked by the ambush. Meg couldn’t blame her.

“What’s gotten into Giry?” Blanche asked with a superior sigh. “You were dancing like a drunken elephant.”

“I was distracted!” Meg squealed. “I have something—” She stopped herself as Rochelle and Jammes joined them. Jammes hated any mention of the ghost ever since she had been the first one to find the body of Joseph Buquet.

“Did a patron finally send you a love letter, little mouse?” Jammes asked Meg, then turned to Rochelle. “I was sorry not to see your paramour in the crowd today, Rochelle. Maybe he’s grown bored of you.”

“I pray for that every day,” Rochelle hissed back.

“I wanted to show you something.” Meg paused. How could she get rid of Jammes? The girl had no friends.