审核...去死...

还喝杯茶、、、我都快被急死了、、、度娘我恨你！！！
大家耐心等吧、

Phantom
SUSAN KAY
Chapter1
It was a breech birth; and so, right up to the very last moment of innocent ignorance, I remained aware of the midwife’s boisterous bawdy encouragement.
“Just the head now my dear ... almost there ... your son is almost born. But now we must take great care. Do exactly what I say – do you hear me, madam? — Exactly!”
I nodded and drew a panting breath, clinging to the towel that had been hung on the wooden bedstead behind my head. The candlelight threw huge shadows up to the ceiling, strange, leering shapes that were oddly threatening to me in the mindless delirium of pain. In that last, lonely moment of thrusting anguish it seemed to me that there was no one left alive in the world but me; that I would be suit up for all eternity in this bleak prison of pain.
There was a great bursting, tearing sensation and then peace ... and silence; the breathless hush of stunned disbelief. I opened my eyes to see the midwife’s face – rosy with exertion only moments before – slowly draining of color; and my housemaid, Simonette, backing away from the bed, with one hand pressed against her mouth.
I remember thinking: It must be dead. But sensing even in that confused split second before I knew the truth that it was worse than that ... much worse.
Struggling to sit up against the damp pillow, I looked down at the bloody sheets beneath me and saw what they had seen.
I did not scream; none of us screamed. Not even when we saw it make a feeble movement and we realized that it wasn’t dead. The sight of the thing that lay upon the sheet was so unbelievable that it denied all the power of movement to the vocal cords. We only stared, the three of us, as though we expected our combined dumbstruck horror to melt this harrowing abomination back into the realm of nightmare where it surely belonged.
The midwife was the first to recover from her paralysis, swooping forward to cut the cord with a hand that shock so badly, she could hardly hold the scissors.
“God have mercy!” she muttered, crossing herself instinctively. “Christ have mercy!”
I watched with numb detached calm as she rolled the creature in a shawl and dropped it into the cradle that lay beside the bed.
“Run and fetch Father Mansart,” she told Simonette in a trembling voice. “Tell him he had better come here at once.”
Simonette wrenched open the door and fled down the unlit staircase without a backward glance at me. She was the last servant to live under my roof. I never saw her again after that terrible night, for she never came back even to collect her belongings from the attic bedroom. When Father Mansart came, he came alone.
The midwife was waiting for him at the door. She had done all that her duty required of her and now she was impatient to be gone and forget the part she had played in this bad dream; impatient enough, I observed detachedly to have overlooked the matter of payment.
“Where’s the girl?” she demanded with immediate displeasure. “The maid, Father ... is she not with you?”


How could this horrible abomination be human? It was as alien to me as a reptile – ugly, repulsive, and unwanted. What right had any priest to insist that it should live? Was this God’s mercy ... God’s infinite wisdom?
Tears of exhaustion and outraged misery began to steal down my taut face as I stared at the striped wallpaper before my eyes. For three months I had struggled through an unending maze of tragedy, following the one candle that burned steadily just beyond my reach and beckoned me on – the small, flickering light of hope contained in the promise of new life.
Now that the candle had been extinguished there was only darkness; darkness in the bottomless, smooth-sided abyss of the deepest pit in hell. For the first time in m life I was alone. No one was going to shield me from this burden.
“I think it would be wise if I baptized the child at once,” said Father Mansart grimly. “Perhaps you would like to give me a name.”
I watched the priest move slowly around the room, a tall shadow in his black habit, collecting my porcelain washbasin and blessing the water within. I had meant to call a son Charles, after my dead husband, but that was impossible, the very idea quite obscene.
A name ... I must decide upon a name!
A sense of unreality had descended upon me once more, a numb, unthinking stupor that seemed to paralyze my brain. I could think of nothing and at last, in despair, I told the priest to name the child after himself. He looked at me for a long moment, but he made no comment, no protest, as he reached down into the cradle.
“I baptize thee Erik,” he said slowly, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Then he leaned forward and placed the muffled bundle in my arms with a determination I dared not fight.
“This is your son,” he said simply. “Learn to love him as God does.”
Collecting his lantern and his cloak, he turned to leave me and presently I heard the old stairs creaking beneath his heavy tread, the front door closing behind him.
I was alone with the monster that Charles and I had created out of love.
Never in my life had I experienced such fear, such utter misery, as I did in that first moment when I held my son in my arms. I realized that this creature – this thing – was totally dependent on me. If I left it to starve or freeze to death it was my soul that would burn for all eternity. I was a practicing Catholic and I believed only too seriously in the existence of hell’s flames.
Fearfully, with a trembling hand, I parted the shawl that covered the child’s face. I had seen deformities before – who has not? – but nothing like this. The entire skull was exposed beneath a thin, transparent membrane grotesquely riddled with little blue pulsing veins. Sunken, mismatched eyes and grossly malformed lips, a horrible gaping hole where a nose should have been.
My body, like some imperfectly working potter’s wheel had thrown out this pitiable creature. He looked like something that had been dead a long time. All I wanted to do was bury him and run.


Dimly, through my revulsion and terror, I became aware he was watching me. The misallied eyes, fixed intently and wonderingly upon mine, were curiously sentient and seemed to study me with pity, almost as though he knew and understood my horror. I had never seen such awareness, such powerful consciousness, in the eyes of any newborn child and I found myself returning his stare, grimly fascinated, like a victim mesmerized by a rattlesnake.
And then he cried!
I have no words to describe the first sound of his voice and the extraordinary response it evoked it evoked in me. I had always considered the cry of the newborn to be utterly sexless – piercing, irritating, curiously unattractive. But his voice was a strange music that brought tears rushing to my eyes, softly seducing my body so that my breasts ached with a primitive and overwhelming urge to hold him close. I was powerless to resist his instinctive plea for survival.
But the moment his flesh touched mine and there was silence, the spell was broken; panic and revulsion seized me.
I dashed him from my breast as though he were some disgusting insect sucking my blood; I flung him down, without caring where he fell, and escaped to the farthest corner of the room. And there I cowered like a hunted animal, with my chin pressed tightly against my knees and my arms wrapped around my head.
I wanted to die.
I wanted us both to die.
If he had cried again in that moment I knew I would have killed him – first him then myself.
But he was silent.
Perhaps he was already dead.
Deeper and deeper into the shelter of my own body I huddled, rocking to and fro like some poor, unhinged creature in an asylum, burrowing away from a burden I could not face.
Life had been so beautiful until this last summer; too easy, too full of pleasure. Nothing in its brief, cosseted length had prepared me for the tragedies that had rained relentlessly upon me since my marriage to Charles.
Nothing had prepared me for Erik!
The only child of elderly, doting parents, I had been a little princess, the center of every stage on which I performed. My father was an architect in Rouen, a successful but eminently whimsical man who loved music and was delighted by the aptitude I showed for that art. From an early age I was regularly trotted out in company to display my voice and my moderate skills on the violin and piano; and thought Mama sent me to the Ursuline convent in Rouen for the sake of my soul, Papa’s sights were set on more worldly ends. Singing lessons were arranged, to the disgust of the nuns, who considered a girl’s voice to be a source of vanity and affectation, and every week I escaped to the professor who had been told to prepare me for the stage of the Parisian opera house. My voice was good, but I never discovered whether I had the talent or self-discipline to conquer Paris. When I was seventeen, I accompanied my father to a site meeting with a client in the Ru de Lecat; and it was there that I met Charles and simultaneously abandoned all thought of a glorious career on the stage.


Fifteen years older than myself, Charles was a master mason who’s work my father sincerely admired. Papa always said it was a privilege to place plans in the hands of a man who had such a deep, instinctive feel for the artistry fo building, a perfectionist who was never satisfied with second best. Between Charles and my father the average client with an eye to economy had a hard time of it. Perhaps it was because they were so totally in accord professionally that it seemed natural for Papa to welcome Charles into the family once I had made my preference clear. Perhaps he remembered himself as the struggling young architect, with no commissions, who had been obliged to fight Mama’s family all those years ago. Perhaps he was simply determined – as he had been throughout my cosseted existence – that nothing would mar the happiness of his only child. If he was disappointed at my decision to throw away a promising future as a prima donna, he said nothing.
As for Mama – she was English, with all the characteristics that word implies. I think she would rather have seen me respectably – if rather ingloriously – married, than on any Parisian stage.
Charles and I went to London for the honeymoon, at Papa’s expense, armed with a list of architectural sites that “must be seen.” We didn’t see much. It was November, the most dismal of all English months, and for most of our three-week stay the city was shrouded in a thick yellow fog. It was a good excuse to stay inside, exploring the wonders of God’s architecture, in our neat, discreet hotel bedroom in Kensington.
On the last day of our visit the sun streamed mercilessly through a chink in the heavy curtains and lured us guiltily from the sheets. We couldn’t go home without seeing Hampton Court – Papa would never forgive us!
It was early evening when the landau deposited us outside the hotel steps. While Charles struggled with the unfamiliar coinage and an unhelpful cabdriver, I went into the foyer to collect our key.
“A letter for you, madam,” said the bellboy, and I took the envelope absently, tucking it into my muff as I turned to watch Charles enter the foyer.
I still caught my breath at the sight of him, just as I had that first day in the Rouen; he was so tall and so unashamedly good looking. And when he saw the key in my hand, his smile mirrored my thought.
We ran up the wide, richly carpeted staircase, laughing and bumping heedlessly into two elderly ladies who were descending with all due English dignity.
“French!” I heard one of them say disdainfully. “What else can you expect?”
Charles and I only laughed even louder. Charles said we should pity the french, really. They were all as stiff and cold as Gothic gargoyles – none of them knew what love meant.
Two hours later, as I lay in Charles’s ar***ike a contented, lazy cat, I suddenly remembered the letter in my muff...
It was only after our hasty return to France that I came to realize I had conceived my first child in the same week that both my parents died of cholera.


Everything came to me, of course ... the lovely old seventeenth-century home in the Rue St. Patrice and the income from my father’s many sensible investments.
“You are a woman of independent means,” Charles told me pensively, and I sensed his vague unease. He didn’t want anyone saying he had only married me for my money. For the first time I became aware of the inner conflicts any man faces when he marries above his station and I began to be increasingly convinced that we should leave Rouen and start afresh elsewhere.
I went through Papa’s house, systematically itemizing those sentimental relics of my childhood with which I knew I could not bear to part – Mama’s jewelry, Papa’s architectural library and files, the small violin on which I had screeched my first ungodly notes. And all the time stilted letters of condolence continued to arrive, expressing regret and respect in the appropriate proportions. Then one morning I opened a letter from Marie...
Marie Perrault, companion of my tedious captivity in the convent, had been my bridal attendant – possibly the plainest bridesmaid that ever was. Even Mama had raised an eyebrow at my choice. I suppose Marie had always been an unlikely friend for me. Even in the convent I had had my following, my own particular set who hung upon my every word and copied my hairstyle and the subtle little touches I added to my dresses. And certainly in looks Marie had nothing to recommend her. She was excessively plain, whey faced and pinched beneath a shock of unfashionable carrot colored hair, and she had about her that air of timidity which automatically attracts every bully in the vicinity. She must have been about ten when I first took her under the mantle of my protection. The rest of my friends found her boring, and had I given the signal, they would gladly have made her life a misery with the age-old ritual of schoolyard torment. But I did not give it. I allowed Marie to trot after me, like some faithful spaniel, and told the others that I found her useful – which was true enough and yet not the whole truth. I was the pettiest girl in the convent and the most influential by far; my word was law. And Marie remained my friend long after the rest had drifted away to homes scattered throughout Normandy, and ceased to write.
The letter I opened now was entirely Marie – full of clumsy gaffes and muddled sentiments that were written straight from the heart, but probably better left unsaid. She begged us to come and stay with her family in St.-Martin-de-Boscherville, and as I pushed the letter across the table to Charles, I heard him groan. I gave him a look and he subsided into silence. We went down to Boscherville at the end of the week.
Charles survived two days of overpowering Perrault hospitality before deciding that a contract required his urgent presence in Rouen. And the same afternoon that he left, Marie and I discovered that the isolated, stone-walled house on the edge of the village was for sale.
Covered with ivy, sprawling, inconvenient to run, its gardens and orchard entirely neglected by a previous elderly occupant ... I fell in love with it on the spot.
"It's too far from Rouen," said Charles in horror when he returned.
"It's beautiful," I murmured.
"It needs a lot of work."
"I don't care. Oh, Charles, I want that house so much! It's so—so romantic!"
He sighed and I noticed the sun picking out the silver threads that were just beginning to sprinkle his jet-black hair.
"Oh, well," he said, with his familiar air of resigned indulgence, "if it's romantic, then I suppose we shall simply have to take it."
And so we came to the sleepy village of Boscherville.
By May the old house had been completely redecorated and furnished in the latest Parisian style.
It was a perfect little palace, awaiting the arrival of my perfect little prince.


Chapter2
The third of May 1831 is a day I will never forget.
It was hot, unseasonably hot for early May, and I lay on the sofa like a beached whale, fanning myself and demanding drinks of lemonade from the housemaid.
I was tired and peevish. My two-year-old spaniel, Sasha, bounded tiresomely around the drawing room, dropping her ball repeatedly at the side of my couch and wagging her tail hopefully.
"It's too hot to go out in the garden," I grumbled. "You'll just have to wait until Marie comes. Oh, Sasha, do go away! Simonette! Simonette!"
Simonette appeared in the doorway, adjusting her apron hastily.
"Yes, madame?"
"Take this silly dog outside and don't let her in again until Mademoiselle Perrault comes to take her for a walk."
"Yes, madame."
In the romping chase that ensued, my new table lamp was knocked to the floor, smashing the white glass shade and spilling colza oil on the carpet. My shriek of fury drove both dog and maid from the room. I was on my hands and knees mopping clumsily and ineffectually at the mess when Marie arrived.
"It's ruined!" I sobbed angrily. "My lovely new carpet, it's spoiled!
"No it's not," said Marie, in her maddeningly reasonable fashion. "It's only one patch, really. If we put this rug over it, no one will ever know it's there."
"I don't want a rug there!" I said childishly. "It throws the entire room out of balance. I shall have to have a new carpet."
She sat back on her heels in her plain muslin gown and regarded me thoughtfully.
"That's not necessary, you know, Madeleine. If I were you I'd leave it as it is. No one wants to live in a house that's perfect all their lives, least of all a small child."
I glared at her. I was about to tell her that my child would never dream of romping around my lovely house, spilling things on my best carpet, when the baby kicked beneath my heart with such violence that I gave a gasp of shock.
"Nobody asked for your opinion, you little beast!" I muttered, halt angry half amused by this startling reminder of his unseen presence.
But Marie did not smile, as I had expected her to. Instead she turned away and looked intensely uncomfortable.
"I don't think you should say a thing like that, Madeleine. Mama says it's terribly unlucky to speak against the unborn."
"Oh, don't be such a goose!" I scoffed. "It can't hear me."
"No," she said uneasily, "but God can."
I laughed at her, all my good humor suddenly restored by her superstitious absurdity,
"God has better things to do than eavesdrop on the faithful, 1 asserted confidently. "Think of all the really wicked people in^ the world all the murderers and the harlots and the heathens... .
The conversation drifted to other matters and by the time Marie left I had quite forgotten my anger. Charles wouldn't mind if I had a new carpet. "Whatever you want, darling," he would say if I asked, "whatever makes you happy." And, gross and uncomfortable as I was, I could probably contrive to struggle into Rouen once more before the birth.


Suddenly I heard a great crash from the attic bedroom, the sound of something heavy falling to the floor, and I ran up the staircase in alarm.
From the doorway of Erik's room I could see the empty cradle lying on its side ... and in the center of the room, some distance away, the big spaniel apparently worrying a small, white bundle.
"Stop it, Sasha!" I screamed. "Leave it alone! Sasha! Sasha"
To my astonished relief the dog trotted obediently to my side and sat down, waving her plumed tail back and forth across the bare floorboards.
I hardly dared to look at the little bundle. If she had taken him for a rat I could hardly blame her...
As I steeled myself to go and pick him up I realized, with a shock, that there was no need.
He was coming to me!
I began to back away instinctively onto the landing, but I was unable to take my eyes off the painful, stubborn, shuffling movement with which he was dragging himself across the room. And then, with equal horror, I realized that he was not making for me, but for the dog.
Sasha was watching him warily, her head on one side, her ears pricked with curiosity. When he laid hold of one paw with his stick like fingers, she growled deep in her throat, but she did not bare her teeth.
I found that I was rooted to the spot, unable to make a move to prevent this from happening. I watched, with frozen fascination, as he pulled himself up into a sitting position, using the animal's fur for leverage, and then stretched out one hand to grope uncertainly toward her face.
"Sasha!" he said, very slowly and distinctly. "Sasha!"
I took hold of the banister for support ; I had to be dreaming this!
"Sasha! Sasha! Sasha!" he repeated steadily. The dog pushed her nose down into the little masked face and I heard the dull thud of his head striking the bare floor when he overbalanced. I cried out sharply, but I was still unable to move.
I watched the dog paw him gently.
And then, for the first time, I heard him laugh.
Three months later he was walking and mimicking my words like a wretched mynah bird.
It was impossible to ignore his presence now—his voice and his interfering hands seemed to be everywhere, and the only respite I knew was in those few hours when he climbed into Sasha's basket and slept curled up beside her. He called me Mama (God knows why, I certainly didn't teach him to!), but I am very much afraid that in those early days he believed the dog was his mother. She seemed to have taken a liking to him, treating him with the sort of rough affection she might have shown a large puppy. Marie told me I should not allow it; she said it wasn't right, that I was raising him to think he was an animal.
"It keeps him quiet for a few hours," I retorted wearily. "If you think you can do any better, you can take him home to your mother!"
That was the end of that conversation!


Already he was beginning to make Mozart look like a dull plodder by comparison. But all the time that he sat composing haunting refrains, or playing the piano with a dexterity far beyond his years, I knew that his incredibly fertile mind was plotting fresh, awesome mischief beyond my imagination.
"Where are you going, Mama?"
I paused in the act of fastening my cloak and turned to find him standing in the doorway.
"You know perfectly well where I go every Sunday, Erik. I'm going to Mass with Mademoiselle Perrault and you must stay here until I come back."
He twined his fingers around the handle of the door.
"Why must I always stay here?" he demanded suddenly. "Why can't I come with you and hear the organ and the choir?"
"Because you can't!" I said sharply. I was beginning to wish Father Mansart had never told Erik about the organ and the choir—I had had no peace since his visit last week. "You must stay here in the house where you will be safe." I added.
"Safe from what?" he challenged unexpectedly.
"Safe from—from ... oh, stop all these silly questions, do you hear? Just do as you're told and stay here. I won't be that long."
I swept out, pushing him before me with one gloved hand and locking the door of my bedroom, as I always did whenever I left him alone. It was the only room in the house that contained a mirror and he was forbidden to go in there; but I did not trust his obedience to last once I was out of his sight. He was insatiably curious.
He followed me down the staircase and sat forlornly on the bottom step, watching me through the mask.
"What is it like in the village?" he asked wistfully. "Is the church very beautiful?"
"No," I lied hastily. "It's very ordinary, quite ugly in fact. It wouldn't interest you at all. And the village is full of people who would be unkind and frighten you."
"May I come with you if I promise not to be frightened?"
"No!"
I turned my back on him, to cover my alarm. That threat had never failed to silence him before. I was concerned to find that his obsessive love of music was now strong enough to overcome a fear I had steadily fostered since he was old enough to talk. My instinct was to protect him from a world which would inevitably seek to do him harm. Even Marie and Father Mansart agreed that I must keep him away from people, and total isolation seemed to be the only answer to my dilemma.
I knew that ignorance and superstition would destroy him. Careful as I had been not to parade his presence, my windows were still smashed at regular intervals and more than one ugly, abusive letter had been pushed through my door, advising me to leave Boscherville and take "the monster" with me. It took enormous courage for me to face the grim, unwelcoming silence of the congregation every Sunday, to sit in the rear pew with Marie and hold my head high, pretending not to notice the primitive hostility all around me. Nobody wanted me here, but my presence was a mark of my defiance, a symbol of my refusal to be driven from my home and hounded from one village to the next.


It was also my one escape from a house I thought of increasingly as a prison. My house—that quaint and pretty house of which I had been so proud—was now no more to me than a dungeon in the Bastille. Returning from Mass, the first sight of its ivy clad walls was enough to make my heart sink; but the thought of the child behind its carefully locked doors, waiting patiently and trustingly for my return, always forced my lagging footsteps down the garden path. Lately, as I approached, I had been aware of the white mask pressed against the window of the attic bedroom and I sensed his growing anxiety that one day I would walk out of the house and never come back.
"Don't sit on the stairs!" I said harshly. "Go and study your text for the day and then copy it out."
"I don't want to."
"I am not interested in what you want to do!" I replied coldly. "I expect to find it finished by the time I return."
He was silent as I reached for my purse; then suddenly he announced with decision:
"I'm not going to study my text. I'm going to make it disappear so that you can't find it ... like the scissors. I can make anything disappear if I want to. Mama... even a house!"
He jumped off the stair and ran past me into the drawing room, as though he expected to be hit; and when he had gone, I leaned against the wall, trembling with apprehension. I tried to tell myself that this was just a silly, childish threat, devoid of any meaning other than vain protest. But I could not stop shaking and I found myself unable to step out through the door. I was afraid to go now, afraid to leave him to his strange, unchildish devices. I dared not think by what terrible means he might contrive to make the house disappear!
When I had regained my composure, I took off the cloak and walked into the drawing room. I found him sitting on the rug before the fire with Sasha, staring fixedly at the flickering flames in the hearth.
"I've decided not to go to Mass today," I told him unsteadily.
He turned to look at me and clapped his hands in unveiled satisfaction.
"I knew you would," he said. And laughed.
I had been his jailer; now he was mine. I felt as though I had been sealed up in a tomb to serve the corpse of a child-pharaoh m its afterlife, and I fiercely resented the captivity which he had forced upon me. Love, hatred, pity, and fear circled around me like carrion crows, spinning me wildly from one peak of emotion to another, until I hardly knew myself anymore when I looked into the solitary mirror that adorned my bedroom. I was thin and haggard, with a strange wild-eyed look, and though the contours of my beauty remained, I looked ten, fifteen years older than my twenty-three summers. It was as though all the harshness and cruelty which I was driven to show him etched itself, line by line, upon my face, a grim testimony to the endless circle of violence which characterized our life together.
It was during that year that he began to explore the mysterious power of his voice. Sometimes, almost without my noticing, he would begin to sing softly, and the hypnotic sweetness would lure me from my tasks and draw me toward him, as though by an unseen chain. It was a game he played, and I came to fear it more than any other manifestation of his curious genius. I put away the operatic scores which we had studied together and refused to teach him anymore, for


I had begun to be afraid of the manner in which his voice was manipulating me. It seemed evil somehow, almost ... incestuous.
Father Mansart now came regularly to celebrate Mass in my drawing room and spare me the ordeal of appearing every Sunday in church. And that first time he heard the child sing, I saw his eyes fill with tears.
"If it were not blasphemy to think such a thing," he muttered slowly, "I would have said I had heard the voice of God here in this very room."
In the tense, resonating silence that descended, I felt my own heartbeat thundering in my throat. I saw the eyes behind the mask meet mine and their glance was triumphant, somehow masterful. He had heard, and worse, he had understood. I dared not think what he might begin to fashion from that knowledge.
I shivered as Father Mansart beckoned him forward and told him solemnly that he possessed a rare and wonderful gift. I wanted to scream, but I was silent. I knew the damage was already done.
They walked together to the piano, the priest's hand resting on the child's bony shoulder.
"I should like to hear you sing the Kyrie, Erik. You know the text, I believe."
"Yes, Father."
How meek he sounded, how innocent and vulnerable he looked, standing beside the heavily built priest. For a moment I doubted my own senses; I wondered if I was feeding on brain-sick fancies brewed by this penal solitude.
Why had I come to fear the extraordinary bell-like purity of his childish treble?
"Kyrie eleison ... Christe eleison."
Lord have mercy upon us ... Christ have mercy upon us.
Three times he sang the invocations to heaven, and with each phrase my will receded before a wave of aching longing that made me long to reach out and touch. Whatever spiritual ecstasy Father Mansart derived from those throbbing notes, my response was utterly and unequivocally physical.
The words were for God; but the voice, the exquisite, irresistible voice, was for me and it pulled like a magnet somewhere deep and unseen inside my body.
Before the next phrase took breath, I had slammed the lid down on the piano with a violence that narrowly missed trapping the priest's fingers. The sudden appalled silence was broken only by my hysterical sobbing. Father Mansart looked at me in amazement, but in Erik's eyes I saw fear and great misery.
"You are overwrought," said the priest briskly, as he pressed me into a chair. "It is understandable. Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain."
I shuddered. "He is not to sing again, Father. ... I will not permit it."
"My dear child, I can't think that you mean that. Forbidding expression to such a gift would be positively unkind."
I sat upright in the chair, staring beyond the priest to the child who now wept silently beside the piano.
"His voice is a sin," I said grimly. "A mortal sin. No woman who hears it will ever die in a state of grace."
As Father Mansart recoiled from me in horror, one hand strayed instinctively toward his crucifix, while the other gestured abruptly for Erik to leave the room. When we were alone, he looked down on me with an odd mixture of pity and distaste.


"I think you have been too much alone with your burdens," he said quietly.
I bit my lip and looked away from him.
"You think I'm mad."
"By no means," he replied hurriedly, 'but certainly it would seem that your judgment has been affected by the strain of your solitude. Whatever you believe you hear is only the voice of your own confusion. You must try to remember that he is just a young child."
I got up and went to the bureau which stood in the corner of the room. A shower of papers tumbled out when I opened the glass door, and from the pile at my feet I snatched up a handful of musical scores and architectural sketches and pushed them into the priest's hand.
"Is this the work of a child?" I demanded coldly.
He took the papers to the light and examined them carefully.
"I would not have believed it possible for a child of his age to copy with such astonishing precision," he said after a moment.
"They're not copies," I said slowly. "They're originals."
He turned to protest, but was silenced by my expression. Placing the papers on the table, he sat down in a chair and stared at me in awe as I stood clasping my hands around my arms and shivering.
"It frightens me," I whispered. "Too much, too soon ... it isn't natural. I can't believe such gifts are heaven sent."
The priest shook his head gravely.
"Doubt is the devil's instrument, Madeleine. You must close your mind to it and pray for the strength to guide the child's soul to God."
As he leaned forward to take my hand I realized that he was trembling.
"I have been remiss in my calling," he said feverishly. "I will come as often as my duties permit to instruct him in the doctrine of our Church. The boy must be taught very quickly to accept the will of God without question. It is extremely important that genius of this stature is never permitted to stray from the teachings of our Lord."
I said nothing. The priest's intense uneasiness was merely a grim echo of my own growing certainty that the forces of evil were steadily closing in around my unhappy child.
I felt desperately in need of the guidance of the Church, but the inner light of conviction was no longer there. The harder I prayed, the less hope I had of being heard. My crucifix was merely a cunningly carved piece of wood, my rosary just a meaningless string of beads. My faith had weakened to the point where I allowed myself to be seduced by a sung Mass rendered shamelessly and sensually beautiful. I had sunk to a wickedness that I dared not even confess.
"Tell me what to do," I said in despair. "Show me how to keep him from evil."
The fire fell into ashes, and as we talked long into the night the priest warned me very seriously against any attempt to muzzle Erik's unique talents.
"A volcano must have its natural outlet,"he said mysteriously, "it must not be driven in upon itself. If you feel that you can no longer train his voice, then you must permit me to do so. Let me teach him as though he were any other chorister in my choir. I will steep him in the music of God and the ways of the Lord, and in time heaven will grant you only pleasure from his voice."
I stared at the sad, gray remnants of the dead fire.
How could I tell him it was the pleasure that I feared?