Page 48 of Angel's Kiss
“I don’t trusthim,” Erik replied, much to Christine’s shock. “You shouldn’t either. You’ve refused him and still he pursues you. Men like him won’t stop until they have what they want.”
“Men like him?” Christine balked. “I know him; he’d never do anything like that.”
“He was born with a title, raised among gold and glory,” Erik went on, a new sort of darkness in his voice. “His kind take everything they want and leave nothing in their wake but ashes.”
“You hate them, don’t you? The nobility and the rich?” Christine asked in return, thinking back to things from warnings from her angel to Erik’s time as a communard. “Why? Why would you, of all people, insist on hating and judging someone because of how they were born?”
“Because I know them, Christine,” Erik said with surety that was chilling. “They made me.”
“What?” Christine braced herself as Erik stepped closer, his body coiled and tense as he held her with his glare.
“Once upon a time, in a little town near Sligo, in Ireland, a farmer lived with his family. He tilled the earth all week and took his family to sing in the church on Sunday. He had a daughter, and she had a voice that delighted the whole village. They did not own the land they worked, it belonged to the English lord of the manor, who they never saw until it was time to pay their rent. The English didn’t let them speak their tongue or sing their songs, but they did it anyway. And no one was better than that girl. Her name...was Sarah.”
“Your mother,” Christine whispered. Erik turned away from her, eyes closed as he leaned against the mantle above the fire.
“She wanted more from life than a backward village at the edge of the world, and she hoped her voice and her spirit could take her there. That was even before the famine drove her whole family to the new world, the ones that lived. She didn’t go west. She went east, to Dublin, then to London. The only work for a sixteen-year-old Irish girl there was as a maid. But she was smart and hardworking and impressed her employers.
“She impressed herself all the way into a fine house where she waited on the noble women, including a guest. A Baroness. She was so fascinated by young Sarah that she hired her away on the spot and took her home across the channel to the family’s fine chateau, near Rouen. Sarah hoped she could save enough working there to go to Paris. No one in Paris would care if she was Irish, like they had in London. There would be a chance.”
Erik turned to Christine, regret now in his eyes and voice. “She didn’t make it, did she?” Christine guessed aloud.
“She was happy there, for a few weeks. She loved the gardens and all the flowers she had never seen before. She even caught the eye of a stonemason who was building a new chapel on the grounds. Everything was hopeful and good, until spring came, and with it the son of the old Baron and Baroness. And he took a liking to the pretty new Irish maid.”
Christine gulped, her stomach dropping as she understood.
“I do not share the luxury your father enjoyed: the possibility that my conception could have been something born of love, or even mutual desire,” Erik went on. “I know what my father did to my mother. He pursued her, and when she refused him, he raped her. He took what he wanted because she was just a foreign maid, not a person. And he enjoyed taking what he wanted. He liked the fight.”
“Erik...” Christine imagined that if a scar had a sound, it would be akin to the timbre of his voice as he told the tale. She wanted to touch him, to console him somehow, but she did not want to stop him.
“And she never stopped fighting him. For months he abused her. And she couldn’t get away. She couldn’t tell anyone. It was only when the Baroness realized her new maid had somehow gotten with child that she was forced to confess. She beat the truth out of my mother and then exiled her son to Paris, but now she had a grandchild to deal with and the woman carrying it.
“My mother was a good Catholic girl; she’d agreed to come to France because of that. So she thought her soul was already damned, why not damn it further? She went to a woman in the village for help to get rid of the child that monster had put in her. It didn’t work. I think it did something else. She wanted to try again or kill herself; she told me that many times. But the Baroness stopped her, even over the protests of her husband.
“I don’t know what kind of threats or deals were made, but by the end of the summer my mother was married off to the stonemason – a useless lout named Carl who saw the arrangement as an easy way to stay on the payroll. He didn’t mind that my mother was pregnant as long as the Baroness gave him his money. They were hidden away in a little village, across the Seine, and my father was told that Sarah had been sent away. Perhaps the story could have been different if it hadn’t been for this.”
Erik gestured to his face and Christine blinked back tears.
“I was born in the dark of winter, and that was what finally broke her; to see that the child her tormentor had left her with was a different kind of monster. She went mad when she saw me. She had to be forced to nurse me, or so I learned later. She would tell me how she gave me my first mask, so she could look at me and let me live.”
Erik’s eyes were closed as he relieved the memories and so he did not see when Christine took his hand. He looked up at her in disbelief as she held it to her heart, wondering if he could feel it breaking for him behind her ribs.
“To her credit, my grandmother was the only relation who wanted me alive, in her way. She collected foreigners, the Baroness, and so she sent a half-blind maid from Finland to keep us alive. Aneka. She gave me a name when my mother wouldn’t. She’d tend to me, along with the other animals, and, somehow, I lived. My earliest memory is sneaking into her room and listening to my mother sing, and Aneka shooing me away like I was a dog when she found me.”
“They both hurt you?” Christine asked in horror.
“Everyone hurt me. My mother, Aneka, Carl – the man I thought was my father until he confessed in a drunken rage that I was a baronet’s bastard. He and my mother hated each other by the end. The only affection they shared was for the same wine. He’d come and go, take the money from the Baroness, then wander off for months to gamble it away.
“My mother took pleasure in antagonizing him. It was to spite him that she spent all of our stipend on a little piano one season, before he could take it. He beat us both for it, but the piano stayed, and I taught myself to play. It wasn’t my first instrument; I’d already learned to make melodies on my mother’s tin flute. Carl hated it when we played, so we played louder to spite him more. And it was to spite the world that she taught me to read and write. She taught me the language she had learned in secret as a child, so I could know what she was saying when she’d fall into one of her fits and scream at the walls. It was strange, once she was gone, I hated the quiet.”
“What happened to her?” Christine asked, so afraid of the answer but desperate to know. Erik looked at her, a bitter smile playing at the edge of the mask.
“My father,” he replied, confirming Christine’s worst fears. “The old baron died when I was eight, and when he did, the money stopped. Carl didn’t like that, and so he decided it was a good idea to barge up to the chateau and demand the new Baron support his bastard. He didn’t come back by nightfall, but one of the Baron’s valets did. He demanded we present ourselves, my mother and I.
“It was my first time meeting my real father. I’d always wanted to see the monster my mother blamed for me. I wanted to know if one could perceive the evil in him, like people could in me. But he was handsome. I remember the disgust on that handsome face when my mother ripped off my mask to show him mine.”
Erik’s hand was tight around Christine’s fingers now, his breath shallow. “You don’t have to go on,” she offered, her other hand stroking his arm as gently as she could manage. “It’s alright.”
“You need to know what he did. Whattheyare capable of,” Erik said through gritted teeth. “He had sent Carl to the cellar, beaten and drunk. But he had us up in his private rooms. When Mother demanded that he pay what she was owed, he grabbed me and threw me in a wardrobe of all things. I guess anything with a lock would have sufficed. I can still remember the dark. The smell of his fresh linens and shoe polish. And I remember the way my mother screamed. Even as a child, I knew what he was going to do.”
