In Regret, Always (ch2)

[igenlode]

I actually got a 'Please update' review on this the other night :-)

Not that I don't appreciate the involved, coherent, multi-sentence reviews I get from my regular reviewers, but there's an ironic cachet to discovering that you're apparently reaching the mass-market readers as well!

I'm currently trying to juggle three stories at once - this one, "Blue Remembered Hills" and my still-untitled "Gone With the Wind" one-shot, which is supposedly complete but I'm not entirely happy about (it feels very unfocused and random). So things are feeling a bit hectic. And it's slightly worrying that the more recent the material, the less happy I am with it; I actually found myself reading ahead in "Blue Remembered Hills" in preference to checking over this chapter...

---

Ch2: Make an end

Eight days of leave had done little to ease nerves rubbed raw by shellfire and snipers. A burnt coal fell through the grate with a rattle sharp as a rifle-shot, and Raoul had to stifle a sharp, instinctive movement that brought him halfway to his feet. The sleeve of his uniform caught against the decanter tray as he sank back, sending the glasses clattering together, and he was barely in time to field the nearest as it toppled. Thought caught up with reflex a moment later, still flinching in anticipation of the averted crash.

He stared down at the tremor in his hand, unsteady now as if it had been a grenade and not a wine-glass snatched from mid-air. There had been a time, once — a distant lifetime on the far side of this last winter — when violence had been an affront and not a familiar part of the world. A time when it was still something one expected to happen to other people.

---

Adrenalin hammering suddenly through his blood as the carriage swerves and lurches, throwing Gustave across the seat and piling them both on top of one another into the corner. There are angry voices from in front, and his first thought is of a road accident: some fool without side-lights, driving too fast.

But they haven’t stopped. The near wheel scrapes along something, and through the dirty glass he can see a wall looming far too close, cutting off what little light had been filtering in from the street. He shouts out sharply to the driver and gets no reply, only another lurch and a shuddering halt.

“Papa?” Gustave’s voice is small and shaky as if from a much younger child, and Raoul, still struggling to untangle himself, gropes round in the darkness and locates a sleeve and then a hand that grips onto his own painfully tight.

“I’m here. Don’t let go—” With his other hand he finds the off-side door handle.

It rotates under his grasp. Tugs open, yanking him out sprawling into a dark alleyway as his fingers slip through Gustave’s frantic clutch.

A circle of figures half-glimpsed in the shadows surround him, hands plucking him to his feet ungently from the mud and twisting his arms behind him, others plunging past into the carriage. There is a scream from Gustave and a flurry of curses; the boy cries out again furiously and Raoul jerks against his captors with an oath of his own.

A waft of sickly smell that makes his head spin for a moment; in memory, Christine is moaning from the great bedchamber, whimpering cries of exhaustion and pain, and he is helpless downstairs as her labour stretches on into evening and a second sleepless night. The scent of chloroform clung to the doctor when he came at last to announce that the Vicomte had an heir, and still tainted the room when he was allowed up to see Gustave, and for weeks afterwards it had seemed to haunt the house like the traces of a nightmare. It’s an aroma he’d thought long since forgotten. Will never forget.

They are dragging out Gustave now, a small body limp and horribly unmoving, and for Raoul understanding spills over into panic. From the reek of the stuff in the air, they’ve used enough to stupefy a grown man or even a horse. This isn’t a robbery by street Apaches, it’s something more... and they could kill the boy like that.

He yells out again in fear and helpless outrage, and another voice crashes over his, in quick, vicious English laden with fury that brings a cringe from the brutes who have him pinned. A glimpse of white and a shape sweeping past him; a crash of glass as the bottle slips and smashes to the ground. A great gust of chloroform that sets them all coughing and the horse plunging nervously in the shafts with a clatter of hoofs in the dark.

“Simonov, you imbecile, do you want us all suffocated on the spot? You were to use that on the Vicomte, moron — when did I ever tell you to use it on the boy?”

A feeble rejoinder—“But boss, the kid bit me”—is swept aside with a snarl, and the figure turns.

Raoul already knows what he will see. The pale mask in the gloom allows of no mistake... but the voice, that hateful voice with its resonant edge of rage, has been all too familiar from the start. Some things are becoming very clear; others more obscure than ever.

He chokes back anger of his own as the mask bends almost timidly over his son. The chloroformed cloth they’d used to overpower him has been pulled hastily from Gustave’s face, but in Simonov’s grasp he is very white and still — painfully still, for a child whose fidgets have tried Raoul’s patience time and again — and Mr Y reaches out to check for a pulse.

Flinches back, as the boy stirs; a moment later Raoul finds his old enemy’s eyes blazing directly into his own, above a snarl of victorious fury. The words are for his ears alone, hissed in scornful, intimate French.

“Did you think — did you really think you’d get away with this?”

“That I’d get away with— you dare ask me that?” For an instant, staring round the narrow alley at his captors, Raoul chokes on disbelief. “Have you taken leave completely of what little sanity you ever had? You wanted me out of Coney Island, out of New York, out of your way”—his voice shakes shamefully on that, and he struggles for control, nails biting into his palms—“what the devil do you mean by sending your thugs and enforcers to drag me back?”

“You have something that belongs to me, Vicomte.” Icy insinuation. “Something you should never have had. Something you had no right to take. Gustave.”

The man really is mad. The shock of that understanding leaves Raoul momentarily limp and unresisting in the grip of the burly arms that have him pinned; he feels his captors’ grasp slacken, and wills himself not to react. There may be a chance, later.

“That again?” He has no need to feign scorn. “Do you really believe I’d swallow a claim so blatantly false... coming from you?”

It’s all part and parcel of the man’s nasty little delusions of possession over Christine’s life, he knows that, but it’s a delusion in horribly poor taste. He’d written it off, earlier, as an attempt to get a rise out of him, taunt him into dangerous folly. But seemingly his enemy has actually convinced himself that Christine’s son belongs to him.

“Listen to me. Gustave and I are going home — just as you wanted. Just as you demanded. You’ve got what you were after; what you’ve been scheming for all along. You’ve ripped our lives and our family apart with no more thought than a boy pulling the wings off flies in the window...” His voice betrays him again, and he swallows. Sets his teeth. “You win. I’m not fit to touch the hem of Christine’s petticoat, we’re agreed on that. But if you ever assumed I’d simply abandon our child to your tender mercies, then you’re out of your mind, for there’s no reason on earth why I would!”

“Oh, I think there was, Vicomte.” From the other man’s mouth the title is an insult, smooth and somehow obscene. This is all a game, Raoul knows helplessly; he’s being trapped and toyed with, made to pay the price for Paris and all the years since. And when the game is over, when his struggles cease to amuse, then the jaws will close. His enemy will take what he wants and make an end.

He’s caught in the madman’s noose — and Christine won’t be coming to save him now. His own actions have made sure of that...

“I believe we made a bargain.” The reminder strikes hard on the heels of that wave of shame, as if the monster can read Raoul’s mind. “A dirty commercial little deal. If you won our wager, you were to receive a colossal sum of money. And if you lost, if Christine chose freedom from your whims, chose music, chose me” —the words slide in like knives in the dark, gloating, triumphant—“then you were to leave alone. Or did the meaning of that not penetrate your tiny mind? Alone. On your own. Without her— and without him!”

“You think I care anything for the terms of your damnable bet? Do you think that’s why I’m here?” Only it is, isn’t it, a small voice whispers in the back of his mind. Hadn’t it been loser’s remorse that penned that letter and took him out of Christine’s life? If Christine had abandoned her song and come with him, if she were nestling close against him now in the carriage taking them to join their ship... would he be steeling himself to admit the truth and undergo the consequences? Or would he yet again be playing the coward’s part, as he has done by leaving her with only scribbled words on a page? Is it truly himself he has been punishing, or is it equally her?

He thrusts treacherous whispers back into silence. Too late for self-loathing now. If he’s going to lose, then at least he’ll go down fighting.

“Are you going to try to play lawyers’ games with the wording of a gambling debt?” He manages to achieve derision. Of course the bet had never been meant to cover Gustave, they both know that, but it isn’t the point here. It’s a matter of how long he can keep his head high before the end. “‘Not enforceable in law’, isn’t that the term? You claim Christine has chosen you; let me tell you how the real world works, then, the world outside your little sanctuary of freaks and murderers. When a man’s wife walks out on her marriage, she doesn’t get to take the children away from home and family to share in her dishonour — and there’s not a court in France or the United States that would ever agree to expose them to the corrupting influence of the seducer and the adulterous wife!”

He reads the retaliation in the moment before it comes. Welcomes it, almost, as an admission and a tiny significant victory. His captors have grown slack; he gets one hand free and up to guard his throat—“at the level of your eyes,” the Giry woman mocks in memory—in the last instant.

Only it isn’t the lick of the noose around his neck. It’s a low blow to the pit of his stomach that sends him doubling over, wheezing. He feels his arms grabbed again from behind, and there’s nothing whatsoever he can do to stop the second blow that sinks coldly, scientifically, into his gut.

He hangs there gasping, waiting for more. There are sniggers from behind him, but no-one stirs. And after a while he finds his breath again, his head comes up and he meets the expressionless stare of the mask.

“You can’t make black white, you know.” He flings it back in defiance. Beyond his enemy, Gustave dangles limply in Simonov’s grasp, his face a glimmer in the dusk. “Not with blows. Not even with words. You can’t turn the boy into something he’s not. I can count nine months; I was there for the wedding, and when he was born. Where were you?”

“And where were you, on the night before that convenient marriage? Not with her, not siring a son — oh, no-one can assure you better of that.” He laughs, and the insinuation takes Raoul by the throat in choking disbelief. “Do I need to describe it to you, tell you just what happened? Every sigh, every gasp... ah, but you’re a man of the world, Vicomte, you know all about how it’s done. And she was a quick pupil, our Christine, urgent and oh, so very responsive—”

A moan has escaped from someone, somewhere. It might have been Gustave. It might have been Raoul himself.

“You— you foul—” He’s strangling on his own words, clotted loathing and fury thick in his mouth.

It’s a lie. He wants to cry it out, howl it to the world. It’s a lie; a thousand times a lie.

But above the harsh sound of his breathing he can hear the other man’s answering laughter, light and derisive. “You counted the weeks, did you... loving, trusting husband that you were? Didn’t they ever tell you a first child can be overdue? Come now, watching him grow up, so quick, so creative, so unlike your own hidebound caste — it must have occurred to you to question your own part in it. Not least when the little brothers and sisters failed to appear...”

“Best ask that of Christine — if you’re planning to set up household with her, that is!” Raoul flings back. He no longer cares what he is saying. Anything will do, any words he can grasp at and hurl like bludgeons to smash the smiling confidence beneath the mask. “It’s not every husband who’s prepared to be quite so... understanding in his demands!”

And much joy may he have of her then — as much as Raoul has had, in all these years. For a moment, the thought carries only the blind satisfaction of rage.

He gets only a chuckle in response.

“So she wouldn’t let you? Well, well, well...” Another chuckle, laden with speculation that sends the heat in Raoul’s face flaming from anger to humiliation. “And did it never once sink into that wine-sodden haze you call a mind that your wife might have been comparing your efforts unfavourably with her memories of another man?”

It’s more than he can take, on more levels than he can bear to acknowledge. Gustave is stirring with another moan, moving weakly in his captor’s clutch as the heavy sleep of the chloroform begins to ebb, but for all his vaunted paternity Raoul is blind to everything save the hatred consuming him. He struggles wildly against the hands that have him pinioned, fighting for freedom like a goaded bull. He manages half a lunge before his tormentor steps forward to strike him again.

This time it’s not scientific or controlled. Between blows, as his head rocks back, Raoul glimpses a veil lifted on ten years of darkness, desire and insane rage. The mocking veneer has been split asunder, and the eyes that burn down on him now bear the lashing fire of an avenging angel.

He loses track after a while. Concentrates on riding the pain, trying to keep his feet, trying simply to breathe. He doesn’t have enough pride left not to cry out. There will be no rescue, he knows that. Knows that only knife or gun or the choking horror of the noose will put an end to this, if his enemy so chooses. After a while — a few minutes or an eternity, with all dignity gone — he cares only that the end be soon.

“Stop it! Stop it — leave him alone!” A child’s voice, cutting through the haze. Gustave. It registers dimly.

Another, wordless protest. Then the old shrill name from babyhood: “Papa! Papa!”

Everything stops.

His throat is flayed hoarse, and he’s down on his knees despite his resolution; from the smell of the dirt on his clothes, he thinks he’s been down lower than that. The thugs have closed in behind him in a tight knot and his arms feel half-wrenched out of their sockets, but there’s no-one holding him now. Beyond the looming bulk of the carriage there’s a glimpse of sky at the far end of the alley... but there’s a frightened, plunging horse between him, Gustave, and any hope of escape. Not to mention the man who has just done his best to reduce him single-handed to a pulp.

He looks up at the mask, closer now. There’s a dark splash of mud across it — no longer so pristine, Raoul thinks, and has to fight against weak, incongruous laughter — and it’s turned away. Towards Gustave.

For a moment, on the exposed half of the man’s face, he can glimpse the most extraordinary expression. If he did not know better, Raoul would have said it was one of yearning and almost of tenderness.

Gustave has struggled back upright. Simonov is still clutching the boy’s collar, with a helpless look at his boss, but gingerly, as if afraid his captive will break. And indeed Gustave is already beginning to sag.

“Papa, I feel—”

From the colour of his face it’s all too clear what he’s feeling. Cursing every wince, Raoul makes it to his feet and discovers that he can move after all.

Taking advantage of the moment’s frozen confusion, he reaches Gustave’s side just in time, holding the boy’s head clear with the ruthless hand of long experience as the retching starts. He’s been on far too many endless coach journeys with Gustave, and the child is a very poor traveller.

Big Simonov has shunk back, unthinking. Raoul’s lip curls. Easier to smother a small boy into drugged insensibility, evidently, than to cope with the inevitable consequences.

Gustave is shaking under his hands with little sobbing breaths. Raoul locates his handkerchief in the stained wreck of his jacket, cleans the boy’s mouth and goes through the familiar motions. But he finds himself smoothing the hair back from his son’s damp forehead with an unaccustomed defiant tenderness that is not—entirely—an act.

He is aching all over. He lets himself collapse down to an ungraceful sitting position in the filth of the street, pulling Gustave against his shoulder as the boy retches once more, blindly, then turns and clings to him.

Raoul raises his head again, with an effort. His son’s breath is sour against his cheek and his face tear-slimed, but he no longer cares. Mr Y is staring at them both, and the mask cannot wholly hide what Raoul sees as flinching revulsion.

He stares back. The words between them are unspoken.

Is this what you wanted, then? Is this your fantasy of family life — snivelling and mud and a queasy stomach? Because this is what it looks like. This is how it goes. And there’s no lie or deception — not even from you — that will make Gustave any the less my son in the eyes of the law... or in his own.

“Gustave—” The other man’s voice is shaking a little, and he has extended a hesitant hand. But Gustave cries out and shrinks back, and Raoul takes a brief, savage pleasure in that.

“You’ve attacked us, injured us, set on your thugs to waylay us — what did you expect, monsieur? Don’t you think the boy’s been hurt and frightened enough?”

He feels Gustave stiffen. “I’m not frightened, Father.”

It’s a tiny stubborn voice in his ear, and he holds the boy closer. They are both trembling.

“Neither am I,” he whispers back. It’s an equally brave lie.

~o~

A rapped command, and Simonov is moving in again to drag them apart. Raoul resists, mutely, uselessly — as if he and Gustave could somehow shield one other against the future to come — and gets a backhander for his pains that rattles the teeth in his head.

Stupid, he thinks muzzily, stupid to manhandle him thus in front of the boy if they hope to gain Gustave’s trust. He remembers with a sharp pang Christine’s frightened face at her father’s grave and a younger self, bright with honour and love still uncompromised, who’d walked unarmed into fire for her sake. Those two people are gone... but it seems that the final participant in that scene has learnt nothing across the years at all.

Gustave’s struggles are far from silent. He is kicking and yelling like fury, and in the end it takes reinforcements in the shape of two more of the hired bravos to carry the boy back across the alley without hurting him. Raoul raises his own voice, with an odd catch in his throat. “You can’t win him over by making him your prisoner — if you recall!”

“And what have you given him — given either of them — these last ten years that is deserving of loyalty? Debts, self-indulgence and drunken neglect? You’ve seen what your pitiful allegiance was worth to her tonight”—the words bite deep—“now let the boy make a choice in his turn!”

“I don’t understand.” Gustave’s voice is very small and high in comparison, and it wobbles a little. “Let us go. I want to go home.”

He is half-hidden by the bulk of his captors and Raoul, left alone in the mud, can’t see the boy’s face. But he sees the mask bend down, with a hesitation that is almost a grave courtesy, in front of Gustave where he stands pinioned between two men twice his size.

“Listen to me, Gustave,” Mr Y says quietly. He had addressed Raoul with an intimacy that was a calculated insult; he is speaking to the child as if to an adult and an equal. “The last thing I ever wanted was for you to be hurt. I know that has to be hard for you to believe, but I promise you that it was all a mistake — and that those responsible will bitterly regret it.”

His tone is sheathed in ice for a moment, and the hapless Simonov, who has fallen back to stand with the rest, shifts uneasily beneath his glare. Then he turns back to Gustave.

“If I ask them to let you go... will you stand quietly and hear me out? I swear to you that I will not lay a finger on one hair of your head if you do not wish it — nor tolerate that anyone else should do so ever again.”

Raoul himself being foremost among those who are not to come near the boy, no doubt. “Gustave, no! Don’t trust him—”

“Your rôle in this is silent, monsieur.” The words lash out like a whip; but there is the faintest croak of a toad, and a mocking echo of amusement from somewhere at his side.

It surprises a crow of laughter out of Gustave. “Wait, was that you? How did you do that?”

At a signal from their master the two men holding him have loosed his arms and stepped back, and now the boy is standing straight and defiant on his own, looking up into the masked face like a small soldier on parade. But for the moment suspicion has been overcome by sheer curiosity.

Mr Y chuckles fondly, as if at a favoured pupil. “It’s a mere entertainment, child — a trick of the voice. I’ll teach it to you if you would like; it can be the first thing we learn together. Oh, but there will be more for you, so much more: music and marvels, automata as fine-tuned as the ticking of a watch and as mystical as a fakir’s illusions, all the miracles of the world in one small space in our home in Coney Island...”

Gustave stiffens, all his wariness returning. “I don’t live here. I live at home in France. And I don’t live with you!”

“But you could.” The other man’s words are almost too soft for Raoul to hear; it’s the honeyed invitation of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the same sweet caress of sound that must have wrapped around Christine, alone in the Opera so long ago. “Wouldn’t you like it? You belong here, you know you do. You belong in my world — our world — where beauty moves hidden in the dark and music runs through your veins like fire and ice, burning with ecstasy that is almost pain. Not the daylight world of meaningless rules and of lessons that turn knowledge dry as dust, until all that’s left when they’ve finished with you is a hollow shell that calls itself an aristocrat — and moves like a brainless puppet, dangling on other men’s strings!”

There is a silence.

“You hate him, don’t you?” Gustave sounds oddly desolate, and older, somehow, than ten. “It’s not just because he’s a Vicomte. You really do hate my father.”

The words hang there like an opening, and Raoul waits for the lie. Waits for his enemy to repeat his obscene claim in the child’s hearing.

The moment stretches on; but the lie does not come.

“Let’s say that... we hate one another.” It’s more honesty, from him, than Raoul had been expecting. “It’s an old story, and an ugly one. I—”

“You pretended to be my mother’s friend so you could tell me lies about all the wonderful things you’d show me in the park. Only it was horrible. And then when I ran away, you came after us next day and stopped our carriage and beat my father in the mud and tried to carry me off again... and all this, all these games, now I know it’s all just because you hate him so much. Isn’t it?”

“No — Gustave, no!” And in that outcry there is an agony that even Raoul cannot deny. “Forget him — he means nothing. It’s you and your mother, you who are special, you whom I need. You’ll have everything I can give. Everything I have, all that I am and ever will be. You are the future I thought I would never see, and I’ll set the world at your feet—”

He is leaning down over the boy, closer and closer in the grip of the devouring intensity that drives him, until Gustave shrinks back with his hands over his ears, crying out. And still, somehow, still he makes no claim of fatherhood to the boy himself; and it’s clear now he will not. For whatever reason, it’s something he does not want the boy to hear.

“Stop it!” Gustave is half-sobbing, and he is trembling from head to foot as if about to break and run. “Stop it — I don’t like it. I want to go home. I want Mother.”

And caught in the morass of his own half-truths, Raoul doesn’t know how to explain to his son that he can’t have both. Neither of them can, not ever again.

“And Christine wants you, Gustave,” Mr Y puts in swiftly. “She sent me to fetch you — after this moron of a Vicomte tried to steal you away.”

Raoul tries to struggle to his feet, every bone aching, and finds a choking grip on his collar that lifts him effortlessly and casts him aside.

“Fool”—it’s a hiss in his ear—“did you think you could take a child from his loving mother? Was that your revenge on Christine for her choice? Did you think she would come crying after you when her song had ended, begging you to take her back? When she left the stage, she had no thought of you, or of weeping; she was in bliss. And an instant after, with her in my arms, so was I!”

He knew it. Has known it in some fashion all along, even as he was writing that letter. But to hear his own pitiful delusions put into words hurts all over again.

“I’d be more touched by the grieving mother’s errand,” he manages between set teeth, “if you’d brought it up before and not after your own desires. You’ll do as you please — you always have. And heaven help any mere mortals who get in your way.”

“Just as I please?” His enemy stoops down on him with a flash of teeth, so close he can glimpse deformity above the snarl, and despite himself he flinches. “That’s what you believe — you, who’ve never wanted for anything in your worthless parasitical life? And supposing it pleases me to put an end to you here and now, supposing the spendthrift Vicomte de Chagny should simply disappear, do you think the police would come looking for me? Do you think anyone would even care?”

“In Paris, no. On Coney Island, yes. Or are you going to kill me in front of the boy? Are you going to show him what you really are?”

The one witness the monster is not prepared to silence — the one whom even Christine may perhaps believe. It’s the last card in this game of high stakes they are playing; Raoul flings it down with a confidence that veils despair.

“Gustave—” The boy has shrunk into himself. His eyes cling to Raoul as if he were the only fixed point in the world. One way or the other, Raoul thinks, this may well be the last time he ever sees his son. His stomach twists.

“Gustave, I’ll find you. Whatever he does, I’ll find you. I’ll get word somehow. And if you don’t hear — I’m dead, and you’ll know why. That’s what he is. That’s what he does. Remember— and remember who we are.”

He looks up grimly, straight at the mask.

“You’ll have to arrange a murder, monsieur.” His voice is hoarse. “For while I live, I’ll never stop coming. And I swear to you that you are not above the law.”

Empty words. Empty defiance. “In God’s name,” he bursts out, “you’ve got your claws into her. Isn’t that enough?”

He could have bitten the words back the moment they escaped him; but he is not sure his enemy has even heard. The other man has reached out with an odd, abortive movement towards Gustave, only to freeze as the boy flinches and draws back.

“So you believe it of me, then.” It is almost an accusation. Gustave says nothing. His small mute face is answer enough.

“And you would choose this over all that I can give you”—a glance round at the mud and dark—“flee your mother’s longing arms and cling to that?” The lash of his final words falls across Raoul like a scornful blow; but it is the child who cries out.

“Yesterday, after I was scared, she said I should be sorry for you instead. But I’m not any more. You’re evil and I hate you. I hate you!”

There is another, terrible, silence.

“Take him.” Mr Y’s voice as he stoops over Raoul is low and almost unrecognisable. The hands that reach down to propel him roughly to his feet are relentless in their insistence, but they hold an unsuspected tremor. “Take him and leave for France, now, tonight. There’s a tug down at Flannery Quay, the Mary Ann — she’ll take you out to join the Atlantic Queen before they pass the harbour limits. Never speak of tonight with the boy, or anyone else. I never want to hear from either of you again. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Raoul says steadily, although it’s far from being the truth. His head is reeling, and all he knows for certain is that Gustave is clinging at his side, and that he is alive; they are both alive.

He finds himself leaning against the wall of the alley for support, with cold brick damp beneath his fingers. There is a curt exchange in English going on that evades his tired mind, and dark shapes shoulder past, ignoring him. Someone is backing the carriage out towards the street with jerking competence; Raoul glances up at the box and recognises the hired driver, head crudely bandaged and using the excuse of the nervous, sweating horse to avert his gaze.

Wheels roll past, heavily. Come to a halt. “Get in.”

It’s not until Gustave tugs on his hand that he realises, from out of the odd surrender of exhaustion, that the command is meant for him.

---

The lines on the Vicomte’s face were bitter with memory. The hand that had held the wine-glass was clenched on the edge of the desk, and the other pulled again and again at his collar where the blue-grey cloth had grown shiny with wear. He released his grasp on the mahogany and caught the cursed gesture midway; straightened the fingers of that hand also, with a slow, deliberate movement that did not tremble, and thrust it into the breast of his uniform tunic to keep it from straying up again.

General Bonaparte to the life; appropriate, was it not? His face had grown harsher at his own expense. After all, he had won that night — come away with life and child intact, when he’d had every expectation of losing both. Just as he’d been the hero of Christine’s rescue in everyone’s eyes, stumbling out from beneath the stage arm-in-arm with the missing girl... and what was the truth of physical humiliation and abject inadequacy compared to that?

In the carriage from Coney Island, conscious of the reek from his own soiled clothing, he’d been trembling with reaction throughout the whole of the journey, with Gustave’s small hand clutched in his just as Christine’s had once been. He’d barely listened to what the child was saying, at first. Some prattle about magical powers...

“But aren’t we going to save her? Like you said — we’ll keep coming back and we won’t give up!”

He’d come to his senses with a jolt at the note of hero-worship in the boy’s voice; one that God knew he had done nothing to deserve.

“Gustave, what—”

“He’s a magician. Mother said so. And he’s got her under his power, hasn’t he?”

Raoul flushed dully now, remembering. He’d taken, as ever, the easy way out. Where the man’s inexplicable influence over Christine was concerned, after all, it scarcely seemed so very far from the truth.

“Yes”—he’d stumbled over the facile words—“yes, in a way, he has.”

“Then she won’t be able to come after us.” Gustave’s voice had risen in panic. “We’ve got to stop and get her back!”

There had been tears, devastation, betrayal; in the end, with the boy wrapped in his arms, weeping, the bitter confession of truth.

He’d pressed his cheek into the boy’s hair, and felt the words quiver through them both. “He’s too strong for me, Gustave. And sometimes... sometimes you can’t get people back.”

They were words that had haunted him throughout the years that followed. And now — now, with all that had just passed — the memory was harder than ever to bear.

He’d written that letter with one desperate, unacknowledged sliver of hope remaining: that the renunciation would reap its own reward. That by setting her free he could tug on her heart and win her all over again.

Huddled in the carriage in a journey by his enemy’s charity, forced to face the image of Christine flushed with happiness in another man’s embrace— for all his words to the boy, would he have gone back to save her in that moment, even if he could? Or had he begun to nurse a secret, unworthy resentment that his wife should have dared take him at his word?

My dearest wife—

The letter in front of him on the desk was blank, save for the opening words like a mocking echo.

My dearest—