Masque Read Online Free Page B

furrowed forehead, a move I longed to make myself. I would have killed to taste the salt of her skin.
    He said, ‘He died, daughter. It was very hard for Lottie, then. She grieved. But in time he kept his word. The Angel came. She sang better than she ever had before. She sang so well, in fact, that her people brought her to Paris and she became the greatest diva ever to sing in that great city. She ruled the stage for many years, and lived happily, so happily, ever after.’
    And with that he ended the story. I went home, to my real home. It was time to take my place with my brother, learning the business. It was years before I learned what life gave Christine. I loved her image, faithfully, from a great distance. I never thought to write to her. In any case, it would not have been proper. At the time she was a member of the serving classes, though daughter of a great musician.
    3.
    Six years passed before I saw her again, my angel, my Christine. I never expected our reunion to come about in the way it did. My brother Philippe had been a patron of the Paris Opera since 1870 (the very year I met Christine). He continued his patronage when the opera company moved into the newly completed Palais Garnier after a long-delayed construction, interrupted by the famous siege of Paris. During that time of unrest and confusion several of the architects working under Garnier vanished in circumstances that, given the war, were not very mysterious. They seemed much more violent later, those deaths, those hangings. When the dust settled and the torn corpses were cleared from the streets, the group of architects that attended the Master was found to have been reduced to one – Charles Garnier himself. It was no great loss, he said. The three whose bodies were found were hardly better than incompetent. The sole exception was the Mussliman whose corpse they never found, a man who had apparently travelled from the courts of the Shah in darkest Persia. The man who always wore a long-sleeved cashmere kaftan and his head draped with a keffiyeh that covered most of his oddly smooth face. My brother said that his loss was the only one Garnier really felt, and that the old architect grieved that they never found the body. He was, Garnier said, the only one with any real skill. My brother commented that Garnier’s grief seemed oddly pronounced, as though he had lost a son and not an assistant.
    In any case, Philippe had long been contented to sit on the sidelines of the theatre, courting his vague little dancer (He was always rather conventionally romantic, my brother. He was the type who would have thought it daring to drink champagne from the toe of her smelly little shoe.) Philippe was deaf to every rumour of misfortune that haunted the cast almost from the time the doors opened, but my brother had a fixed idea of himself as a patron who could earn a profit. He funded the purchase of the contracts with a full quarter of the money that our father left him, and backed the managers he hired when they purchased the deed to the building itself.
    Messieurs Firmin and Andre were two of a kind, both short dumpy men with a flair for the theatrical, as shown by their gleaming brushed beaver-top hats, bright scarves and elaborate, waxed mustachios. Their facial hair was so pointed, so hardened with wax, that they looked as though they had swallowed a pair of tiny bulls. Speaking to the one was, my brother said, exactly as good as speaking to the other. But they were dedicated to turning a profit and eagerly obeyed his commands, so they were tolerated.
    The night that I returned to Paris (I had spent the last year on a ship learning the family business, accompanying reams of fabrics and spices from India) my brother welcomed me into his home, a massive, empty sprawl of bachelor opulence (his predilections betrayed by the filthy female undergarments strewn in the wash-chamber) and begged that I come out with him that night to enjoy the début