Stones throe, p.10
Stone's Throe, page 10
At her side sat my beloved angel, my Paul-Gabriel, le Monstre aux Yeux Verts.
In profile, as I saw him, he was perfect, his beauty untouched by fire. He wore black with touches of green: green shot silk, as Commander Knapp wore. His hair touched his collar, unfashionably long, and even across the distance I saw the shape of a mask lining his nose.
He must have felt the weight of my gaze; surely it had weight, like an anchor pulling us both down to depths whence there was no return. He looked at me suddenly, far too suddenly for me to look away, and I saw the fire in his green eyes, still fierce and brilliant despite the years, across the intervening space. But the entirety of the right side of his face was hidden beneath pitted grey metal: pig-metal, the same rough-cast stuff he had made his dastardly chairs from.
I shuddered to think of the damage done to that beautiful face, though my horror was tempered by the memory of Maman's slack jaw and dull eyes; it had taken her months to recover from le Monstre's ministrations, and my father had only survived, not lived, for years before slipping emotionlessly into the grave. Some of Maman's reclaimed passion had gone with him; she was an entirely quieter person than she had been in my youth. Remembering that, I was able to cast aside my pity for Paul-Gabriel Laval and remember him only as le Monstre.
But I could still read him, whether I wanted that skill or not. He moved twice, both times so minimally as to be hardly visible. The first was a nod of acknowledgment: he saw and remembered me as clearly as I saw and remembered him. The second was a tip of his head: an invitation to speak in the lobby.
I wished, with fierce, youthful pride and stupidity, that I had worn a gown, and I stood to meet my enemy on the field of his choice.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Had it been anywhere else, anyone else, I should have said that it was only my imagination that opened a pathway between le Monstre and myself as we came our separate ways down opposite staircases within the opera house. Hundreds of people enthralled by a stunning performance could not be so aware of their surroundings as to part, as had the Red Sea for Moses, to allow three people unimpeded passage.
Three, because Commander Knapp was on le Monstre's arm as they came down their sweeping staircase. I had only myself as accompaniment, but then, I was the only one at the Opéra dressed as I was; perhaps my thick leather boots and beaten white shirt beneath a battered leather jacket were enough to split the seas for my own part, and le Monstre's mask was enough to send anyone a step backward. The cunning thing was that many of them moved without seeming to see him, as if he had an aura of warning about him.
We met alone in a crowd, in an empty circle greater than my own doubled arm span. Conversations rose and fell, loudest from those closest to us, who strove to prove their disinterest with false joviality. Le Monstre carried a walking stick now, silver-headed black wood, and wore black leather gloves over hands I had once known as elegant. I could not help but look and wonder, and was taken aback when he spoke.
"It seems you will have no need for my cloak tonight, Amélie. You are warmly dressed now."
His scent, the weight of his fine cloak, the lingering heat of his body: they came back to me as if I had donned that cloak only yesterday, but I would not let such sentiment show. "I am not here to be charmed or romanced, Monstre." He flinched to hear that name from my lips, and the satisfaction of leaving a palpable mark warmed me more than any memory or cloak might do. "I will keep Madame Baker from your clutches. I will not let you have another one."
Mademoiselle Knapp breathed in at that, a short and sharp sound that brought my attention to her. Her eyes, I could see now, were green too, though not the same vivid green that le Monstre's were. There was barely controlled fear in those eyes, and a spark of hope that had, I thought, been born from my bold words.
Convictions fell into place. I knew already that le Monstre had trucked with fascists in the past; that this girl was his pawn in attempting to retrieve the crown should it fall into Nazi clutches suddenly seemed clear. That explained, without a doubt, how she had gained commander ranking; a favor from one monster to another.
"I will not let you have any innocent," I said to le Monstre, but the words were a promise and an offer to Knapp. The faintest flicker pulled at her lips, and her wide eyes remained intent on mine.
Le Monstre smiled, though it seemed to stretch his mouth painfully. "Indeed. Let me introduce you to Kiera, then. The poor child is Irish and German in extraction; she was born fighting and will, I suppose, go to the grave that way. Kiera, this is...Amelia Stone. I loved her once."
"Non. That was not love, but use and abuse. I was a fool to ever believe it."
"Non," le Monstre echoed softly, and the sure ground I stood on shifted beneath my feet. "I was a fool to abuse you, Amélie. I was a fool to take from you what I did, and to shatter what we had together in the way I did. I learned much in the fire, ma chérie. I have hoped all these years to see you again, that I might say I was sorry."
My stomach twisted with disbelief and rage. "Sorry? Sorry, Gabriel? Sorry for destroying my family, for murdering my father and reducing my mother to a shell of herself? Non, mon ami," and I spat the word friend with all the contempt I could muster, "you do not get to be sorry for that. I meant to kill you that night and I only regret that I failed."
"I regret," le Monstre said with sonorous clarity, "much."
Again, Knapp— Non; I would think of her as Kiera, a softer and gentler name that suited the tremble that again shivered over her skin. She had fought me, perhaps, but I would have done no less in the days that Paul-Gabriel Laval held me in his thrall. She had fought and she had failed: I had escaped with the crown, and I knew too well the price of failing le Monstre. My parents had paid that price and, through them, so had I. But it was no easy thing to escape his grasp, and few could claim the incentive I had had. If she could not fight her way free, then I would fight my way in, and rescue her from him. "Regret all you like," I said through bared teeth, "but expect only a few short days in which to revel in those regrets. I will not allow you to walk away again."
Le Monstre's gaze slid sideways to alight on Kiera. She could not see it, but I could: the challenge, the amusement. "Not even if I have something you value to trade?"
The threat hung between us like a darkness, thickening the air and engendering rage in my throat. But then as if the miasma was real, le Monstre brushed it aside with a stiff motion of his right hand. "Non," he said more gently. "It is hard, Amélie, not to be fed by your anger. Not to play to it, as I once would have. I am no longer the man you remember. My regrets are real, as is my—"
"Pain?" I said, when it seemed he would not.
"It is constant." With small, controlled actions, he lifted both hands to his head, and there unhooked some sly fastener that freed the pig-iron mask from his face.
The crowd encircling us could not ignore that, no matter how hard they tried. Nor could I, and my breath rushed out as did all of theirs: a circle of silence began with me and rippled across the whole of the opera house's lobby, broken only by the faint hiss and swish of silk and satin brushing against itself as patrons turned to look.
It did not matter to him that they looked; it only mattered that I did, and—like them—I could not look away. Fire had ravaged his features and the healing had not been kind. On the cheek he showed to the world, the scars were faint and silvery. With the mask full removed, I could see that he must have protected his face with his arms: that was the width of the barely-scarred skin, narrowing as it crossed his face toward the temple. Around it, red weeping scars and lumps of flesh were left where beauty had once reigned. His hair was not burned away, though I suspected a wig rather than his scalp having gone unscathed. The revelation of bone-deep lashes across his face was more than enough; he did not need to show how the fire had bit into his skull as well.
Kiera, who must have seen his true face before, kept hers averted; around me, soft gasps and louder cries of horror sounded as men and women alike turned away from the ruin of an angel's gaze. Only I, who had condemned him to this, could not allow myself to look away, much as I might wish to.
Unmasked, his eyes were depthless and full of stories. I might have expected rage and hatred; instead I saw compassion and regret, an awareness of tragedy. I could not read those things on his twisted features, but nor could I read anything else: it was all in his eyes, and too much of it at that. He did not ask for forgiveness with that quiet pained gaze; instead, he offered it, and like a drowning man reaching for land, I wanted to claw at it.
I could not look away, but I could steel myself: stiffen my belly and tighten my thighs and proclaim non! within the confines of my own thoughts. I did not regret, could not regret, although in my peace of mind I had thought and wished him dead, not burned and in everlasting pain. I was not, I hoped, that cruel, even toward le Monstre who had so shattered my own life. "I do not need your forgiveness, Monsieur Laval. I do not want it."
Even as I spoke I knew my own words for a lie; no one who called herself human could look on that ruined face and not wish that somehow the tortured soul within might find it possible to forgive the one who had so disfigured him. But he lowered his gaze, accepting what I said before lifting his eyes, still so richly green, to mine again. "And if I were to beg yours?"
Seventeen years. The span of my life, doubled since I had last seen this man. My mother, long since recovered; my father, long since dead. My choices now could not affect them, though I did not want to forgive him, even with a lifetime between us. Perhaps my hatred should have run its course in that time, but it bubbled deep within me, bound inextricably with the love I had once had for this man.
And yet I had done him as much lasting harm; perhaps more, as my mother's pain had faded and my father's ended, while Paul-Gabriel Laval lived in eternal torment. I could only believe the regret in his eyes, and I could not deny the awareness within them that he had greatly been the orchestrator of his own dreadful fate. Filled with shame, I was finally forced to avert my gaze.
When I did, le Monstre replaced the mask using the same small, controlled actions with which he had removed it. "It is too much to ask," he said then. "I would not cause you more pain, Amélie; I have offered you enough of that in this lifetime. Merci, ma chérie, for speaking with me. That is a gift I cannot repay.
"Kiera," he said and drew her away, back up the stairs. The crowd opened for them again, leaving me to stand alone in a circle of awe and fear until finally the lights dimmed to announce the next act.
CHAPTER TWENTY
For all of Josephine's beauty, I could not watch her in the second half of her performance. My attention strayed time and again to le Monstre and to his companion, who looked so frail and young at his side. Her frailty was an illusion; that I knew, having been the recipient of more than one blow from her small fists, but I could not shake the idea of it, knowing as I did how easy it was to fall under Paul-Gabriel Laval's spell. More than once I caught her looking my way in turn, as if I were a kindred spirit, perhaps one of a few truly able to understand her precarious position.
Le Monstre himself never looked my way, though I did not know what measure of willpower that cost him. It may have been none at all: Josephine may well have commanded the entirety of his attention without fail. She was, after all, the reason we were all here. It was only a shame that I could not properly enjoy the richness of the show. Even her final aria passed me by: the sudden swell of ovation and the roar of admiring voices took me by surprise.
It happened, though, that because of that surprise, it was myself alone whose attention was drawn not to the stage at Josephine's moment of triumph, but rather to the audience, who stood before their seats as one, waving, cheering, clapping, shouting—but not moving, and yet there were men in the aisles, sweeping toward the stage with far less subtlety than the fascist incursion of the night before.
Uniformed police, led by a man with a captain's ranking on his hat, charged through the theatre, making rings around the seating sections with their bodies, the better to keep barely aware patrons confined. Their protests began to rise only as police blocked their view of the stage, but redoubled as they realized they were reined in. Excitement, rather than anger, seemed the emotion at hand; this was, to the theatre-goers, precisely the encore they had hoped for to the previous night's performance. Shrill voices exchanged theories as women clutched each others' arms and men puffed up to establish themselves as persons of authority. Had I not suspected the police's motivations, I might have smiled at the crowds; but my focus was not on them, but on my old rival, the green-eyed monster.
He alone remained focused on the stage, where, at a glance, I saw Josephine standing in pique, with arms akimbo and her fine features caught between aggravation and amusement: surely no other diva had had two performances interrupted in such outrageous ways. It would sell papers, and that was publicity better than money could buy. Assured that she was well—if moderately infuriated—I looked back to le Monstre with such will in my gaze that it seemed he tore his attention from Josephine under a compulsion. It was not a quick thing, the finding of my gaze with his own, but when he did he offered that terrible, twisted smile before he spoke.
I could not, in truth, have heard him, and yet I saw his lips shape the words and heard them whispered in my ear: Je t'adore, Amélie, but you should never have returned to Paris. Most of all, you should never have interfered with Josephine Baker.
No sooner had this little warning faded than a hand landed firmly on my shoulder. Suspecting foul play, I instantly came to my feet, catching the wrist of my assailant and twisting it as I turned.
To my dismay, it was a small, balding man with a pinched expression beneath his glasses whom I had in my grip and had driven to his knees—Robert Langeron, Prefect of police. I released him swiftly and yet too late: he came back to standing, his face burgundy with anger, and snarled, "Madame Stone, I name you a collaborator with Nazis and a threat to the peace of la Ville-Lumière. You are under arrest as an enemy of the state!"
By this time every eye in the theatre was on me: I could feel the curious gazes prickling my spine. A palpable excitement hovered in the air, as if the flimsiest of excuses was all that would be necessary for chaos to break loose. Bearing this in mind, I drew a slow breath and spoke clearly as I raised my hands to shoulder level. "Prefect Langeron, pardonnez-moi my rudeness in seizing you. Had I known it was your august self I should never have reacted in such a way."
Though I knew it for puerile drivel, a touch of his florid coloring faded at that. I offered a winsome smile, wishing again that I wore an opera gown; innocence was more easily feigned in elegant clothing than in duds that had clearly already seen a fight or two—or more—in their time. Still, unless Professor Khan was to develop a time machine whilst fiddling with other sciences, I would have to keep the cards I had dealt myself, and took comfort in knowing that at least I had freedom of motion in my fighting gear.
But a fight was the last thing I should engage in here. I had already undermined Langeron with my decisive response to his approach; now it was necessary to be agreeable and respect his authority above all else, at least while we remained in public. To do otherwise would be to invite the certainty of arrest and face no chance for extradition until it was far too late for Josephine and Kiera both. "Bien sûr, this must only be a misunderstanding, but I will go with you gladly, Prefect, to sort it out. Your duties as the protector of this city are paramount."
I could barely contain a sigh of relief as his anger faded under the onslaught of my sniveling admiration; had he retained ill humor I did not know what I would have done, as I had already reached the limits of my ability to pander to his ego.
"We will go to the station," he announced loudly enough for the entire theatre to hear, but as luck—or devilish fate—would have it, I had an admirer in the audience.
"No!" that worthy bellowed. "That's Amelia Stone! I was here last night! I saw her fight the Nazis herself, holding a dozen of them off with a wooden sword and a whip! Mon dieu, the legs on that woman—!" Raucous laughter met the last exclamation, and while I would have far preferred him not to say such a thing, it would have been better had he said only that, and not flown in the face of the police chief's proclamations. But he had, and other voices rose to carry the banner he had flown, supporting me, claiming that they, too, had seen my antics the evening before. Indeed, it seemed that there was nary a man or woman in the audience who had not attended the previous night's performance as well. Their enthusiasm became pushy, but the rings of police held firm, not quite pushing back.
Langeron had become purple again, his accusations of my faithlessness booming out over the crowd. They grew more virulent, ready to be part of the events surrounding Madame Baker, and I, concerned for their safety, cried out, "Fear not, fellow citizens! We all must realize this is a misunderstanding and best concluded out of the public eye by such wise minds as our Prefect! My faith in his decisions is—"
A strange contraption flew into the air from the opposite side of the theatre, its little propeller buzzing so loudly that it silenced all of us into peering curiosity. No bigger than my doubled fists and quite round, it glittered dully, like pitted iron, and dangled from the wildly rattling propeller as if it might fall at any moment.
When its lower hemisphere dropped two inches, every living being in the theatre surged back, our gasps drowning out the propeller's song for an instant. Half a dozen tiny nozzles protruded from within the ball, which now proved to have a second smaller ball inside; this was what the nozzles were attached to.
A fine mist hissed from the nozzles and drifted down over the audience's upturned faces. Too late I realized its source and flung my arm over my face, taking care not to inhale the falling Emotion as I shouted, "Cover your faces! It's a trap! Don't breathe it in!"
