Part 9 (1/2)

The man was masked as ever but I knew when I saw him that it was he who had been the Union officer who had sung that amazing duet with the prima donna at the opera house and brought the audience to tears. The voice was the same, but this was the first time I had ever heard it.

'Where is Pierre?' he asked.

'He is in the coach still,' she replied. 'I asked him to give us a few moments. He will come shortly.'

My heart leapt. If the boy was in the coach there was a good chance that Darius, hunting somewhere in the park, would not find him.

'What do you want of me?' she asked the Phantom.

'All my life I have been rejected and rebuffed, treated with cruelty and mockery. Why ... you know too well. Just once, all those years ago, I thought for one fleeting hour that I might have found love. Something bigger and warmer than the endless bitterness of existence ...'

'Stop, Erik. It could not be, it cannot be. Once I thought you were a real ghost, my invisible Angel of Music. Later I learned the truth, that you were a man in every sense. Then I came to fear you, your power, your sometimes savage anger, your genius. But even with the fear was a compulsive fascination like a rabbit before the cobra.

'That last evening, in the darkness by the lake far beneath the Opera I was so afraid I thought I would die of fear. I was half-swooning when what happened ... happened. When you spared me and Raoul and vanished again into the shadows, I believed I would never see you again. Then I understood better all you had been through and felt only compa.s.sion and tenderness for my fearsome outcast.

'But love, true love, anything to match that pa.s.sion you felt for me ... this I could not feel. Better you should have hated me.'

'Never hate, Christine. Only love. I loved you then and ever since and always will. But now I accept. The wound is cauterized at last. There is another love. My son. Our son. What will you tell him of me?'

'That he has a friend, a true and dear friend, here in America. In six years I will tell him the truth. That you are his real father. And he will choose. If he can accept this, that Raoul has been everything for him that a father can be, and done everything for him that a father can do, and yet is not his real parent - then he will come to you and with my blessing.'

I found myself rooted behind the hedge, stunned by what I had heard. Suddenly everything that had drifted by me un.o.bserved and not understood became too clear. The letter from Paris that had told this strange hermit of a man that he had a son alive, the secret plan to bring mother and child to New York, the tryst to see them both, and most terrible of all the crazed hatred of Darius against the boy who would now displace him as the heir of the multimillionaire.

Darius ... I suddenly recalled that he too was somewhere among the shadows and was about to throw myself forward with the too-long-delayed warning. Then I heard the approaching feet of the others to my right. At this point the sun rose, flooding the glade with a pink light, turning to rose the dusting of snow that had fallen in the night. Then three figures came into view.

From separate paths to my right the vicomte and the priest appeared. Both stopped in their tracks when they saw the man in the sweeping cape, the wide-brimmed hat and the mask that always covered his face, talking to Mme de Chagny. I heard the vicomte whisper: 'Le Phantome.' To my left the boy Pierre came running. Even as he did so, there was a low click close to me. I turned.

Between two large bushes, not ten yards away, almost invisible among the remaining deep shadows, was the crouching figure of a man. He was all in black but I caught a glimpse of a bone-white face and of something in his right hand with a long barrel. I drew in air and opened my mouth to shout a warning but it was too late. What happened next was so fast that I have to slow the action down to describe it to you.

The boy Pierre called to his mother, 'Mama, can we go home now?' She turned towards him with her brilliant smile, opened her arms and said, 'Oui, cheri.' He began to run. The figure in the bushes rose, extended his arm and followed the running boy with what turned out to be a Navy Colt. That was when I shouted, but my cry was drowned by a much louder noise.

The boy reached his mother and pa.s.sed into her embrace. But to avoid being knocked off her feet by his weight, she swept him into her arms and turned, as a parent will do. My shout of warning and the crash of the Colt came together. I saw the lovely young woman shudder as if she had been punched in the back, which in fact she had for, in turning, she had stopped the bullet intended for her son.

The man in the mask whirled towards the gunshot, saw the figure amid the bushes, pulled something from beneath his cloak, extended his arm and fired. I heard the crack of the tiny Derringer with its single bullet, but one was enough. Ten yards from me the a.s.sa.s.sin threw both hands to his face. When he fell he crashed out of the bushes onto the snow and lay face upwards in the frosty dawn, a single hole showing black in the centre of his forehead.

I was rooted to my spot behind the hedge. I could not move. I thank Providence there was nothing I could do anyway. What I could have done earlier, I was too late to do now, for I had seen and heard so much and understood so little.

At the second gunshot the boy, still uncomprehending, released his mother who sank to her knees. There was a red stain already spreading on her back. The soft leaden slug had not penetrated her to hit the son in her arms, but had remained inside her. The vicomte gave a cry of 'Christine' and ran forward to take her in his arms. She leaned back in his embrace, looked up at him and smiled.

Father Kilfoyle was on his knees in the snow beside her. He ripped off the broad sash around his waist, kissed both ends of it and draped it around his neck. He was praying rapidly and urgently, tears streaming down his rugged Irish face. The man in the mask dropped his small pistol in the snow and stood like a statue, head bowed. His shoulders heaved silently as he wept.

The boy Pierre alone seemed at first unable to take in what had happened. One second his mother was embracing him, the next she was dying in front of his eyes. The first time he called 'Mama' it was like a question. The second and third time, like a piteous cry. Then, as if seeking explanation, he turned to the vicomte. 'Papa?' he asked.

Christine de Chagny opened her eyes and her gaze found Pierre. She spoke for the last time, quite clearly, before that divine voice was silenced for ever. She said, 'Pierre, this is not really Papa. He has brought you up as his own, but your true father is there.' She nodded towards the bowed figure in the mask. 'I am sorry, my darling.'

Then she died. I will not make a big production out of it. She just died. Her eyes closed, the last breath rattled out of her and her head tilted sideways onto the chest of her husband. There was complete silence for several seconds, which seemed like an age. The boy looked from one man to the other. Then he asked of the vicomte once more, 'Papa?'

Now, over the past few days I had come to think of the French aristocrat as a kind and decent man but somewhat ineffectual, compared, say, to the dynamic priest. But now something seemed to come into him.

The body of his dead wife lay cradled in the crook of his left arm. With his right hand he sought one of hers and slowly removed from it a golden ring. I recalled the closing scene at the opera, when the soldier with the shattered face had given her back that very ring as a sign that he accepted their love could never be. The French vicomte took the ring from her finger and pressed it into the palm of his devastated stepson.

A yard away Father Kilfoyle remained on his knees. He had given the diva final absolution before death and, his duty done, he prayed for her immortal soul.