In Regret, Always (ch3)

[igenlode]

Well, I finally received one of the reviews I was holding out for on this (not sure if that was divine reproof for having doubted it or intervention for having mentioned it), so I now have no excuse whatsoever for not getting on with the next part...

Tweaked Raoul's reaction to the Phantom's death a little (previously he seemed to more or less ignore it). One thing that does strike me, reading over this after a lapse of time, is that it's really not made nearly so explicit as I thought it was that Gustave has taken up writing poetry in place of music :-(

---

Ch3: Some unknown grieving woman

Somewhere outside, a motor pulled up. Voices carried faintly through the window. Raoul glanced back up at the clock; down at what he had written, where a long blot straggled across the paper. After a moment he set his pen aside and tore up the unfinished page with unnecessary force.

He dipped the pen again, drew up a fresh sheet, and began to write, jerkily and with hesitation. Above the fireplace the ghost of a portrait looked down, as always. But it was not the shy young face painted by Boldini that was intruding upon his letter, but that of an older woman.

Fresh memories, these, from the near side of the howling swathe of steel that had swept across France. Her face danced between him and the phrase he sought, marked with lines of unhappiness and held high in defiance. He crossed out a word, cursed under his breath, and tried another.

Outside the windows the afternoon sun was ebbing, and long shadows lay across the courtyard from the roofs beyond. Someone coughed lightly in the corridor, in a well-trained preliminary to the rap on the study door.

“Sir?”

Raoul sighed and looked around as the door opened.

“Yes, Valentin?” But he already knew the answer.

“The motor has arrived for the luggage, sir. Shall I send it down?”

As if they were setting off in the style of years ago for a month in the country, with a pile of trunks each for himself and Christine, and a whole case of fresh napkins to be laundered for Gustave... Raoul’s hand tightened, unseen, on the desk. Those days were gone; gone in more ways than one.

“You’ll find my kit by the door in my room; the two grips Georges packed for me last night, and the sword.” Although —uniform or not— he wouldn’t be using that for anything short of a dress-parade, Raoul thought bitterly; an arm’s-length of patterned steel was no weapon for close quarters in the trenches, let alone the hell of mud and wire that lay between them and the enemy.

“Very good, sir.” Old Valentin hesitated a moment, and Raoul took pity on him.

“You can tell them I’ll be down in a quarter of an hour — as soon as I’ve finished this. Send in the post-bag when you’re done, would you?”

The old man bowed briefly — or bowed further; he was stooped enough already — and left soft-footed. He’d been pensioned off before the start of the war, and it was hard on him to be pulled back into service. But there were too few men for the running of the house — too few able-bodied men left in France now, with so many at the front — and Georges, who looked after Gustave, could not do it all.

It was a pity for the boy’s sake that they’d lost Hänsl, Raoul thought. The young man had been a cheerful and a tireless presence, and he’d got on well with Gustave; taught him scraps of Bavarian German, thick on the tongue as heavy cream, and accompanied his young master to Mass when Raoul could not. Only... ‘German’ meant something different, these days.

It was hard to picture fresh-faced Hänsl shivering grimly beneath a grey overcoat somewhere in that world of rain and mud. Harder still to picture him as part of the faceless invading masses — or to know that some day, in some enemy trench, they might meet again at the end of a bayonet.

War was madness. Eight days ago, arriving into Paris on this brief respite of leave, his first since the whole thing began, he’d been almost overwhelmed by the normality of all around him: cattle glimpsed in the fields through the train window, spring flowers beneath the trees, life continuing sane and safe and brightly-coloured on the streets, as if two great armies were not straining every sinew to overthrow one another only a little way further north. By the time his cab pulled up outside the house, he’d had the numb sensation that he was gazing through a sheet of glass at a world to which he no longer belonged.

Set back and shuttered behind its courtyard walls, the Hôtel de Chagny had held out the prospect of retreat into an older, more private numbness. But that too had been an illusion.

---

Aching shoulders, and a pounding in his temples as if from the thunder of the great guns. His uniform — the cleanest he has left — is travelstained and crumpled, and his head is still swimming a little from the journey. The entrance hall is wide and empty and blessedly dim; he is two hours earlier than expected and Gustave is not there to greet him, only old Valentin, obliged perforce to hide his beaming welcome behind a correct and restrained exterior.

Just as well, Raoul decides. It’s easier that way on both of them.

Everything seems a little shabbier, a little smaller than he had remembered it in those long months of war, and all that the idea of ‘home’ represents to him in that moment is the chance to bathe, to shave, and to snatch a few hours’ much-needed sleep before dinner. A dinner over which he will have to face Gustave’s guarded silences and closed, unhappy gaze; he has made a poor job of bringing the boy up, Raoul thinks wearily, but he does not know what more he could have done. In these last few years Gustave has withdrawn ever further into his notebooks and his scribbled poetry, as he might once have done into music — before that old unspoken absence that had cut across both their lives. Nor have they seen each other since last summer, with Gustave’s letters to Raoul at the front as stilted and infrequent as Raoul’s own brief self-censored replies: to describe the truth of the war is impossible, and he would not do it if he could. God send an end to it before his son need learn that reality for himself.

Boys of eighteen are fighting in the English lines. France has not descended that far — yet.

He sighs, stretches tired shoulders, and yields up his kit to be whisked discreetly away by Valentin with a wince of distaste. Just now he does not care if he never sees it again.

“Sir?”

Raoul already has his foot on the first step of the staircase that will lead him up to the attentions of Georges, and a freshly-drawn bath. He turns back with an effort, suppressing a frown. “Yes, what is it?”

“Sir, there is... a caller to see you. In the blue salon.”

“Now?” He hasn’t been in the house ten minutes; ten minutes of the leave so belatedly granted. His duties to Society can wait. “You will kindly inform this person that I am not at home tonight — do you understand?”

“Sir...” Valentin’s face is troubled. They have known each other a long time, man and boy, since Raoul himself was a graceless scamp with a head full of operas and troll-tales. “Sir... this is someone I think you should see. Truly.”

He catches an unfamiliar quaver of distress in the old man’s voice, and yields. “All right. I trust your judgement. But this had better be important.”

Valentin says nothing at all to that. Only stands aside in mute sign that Raoul should precede him to the blue salon, and then steps forward to swing open the tall double doors.

“The Vicomte, madame.”

The air in the room is musty and disused, and the little grand piano in the corner has been under Holland covers for years. The egg-shell blue paint of the panelling is dimmed by dust — there have been few enough callers, with Raoul away — and the chairs in all their dainty gilt are ranged back against the walls in severe lines, like girls too petrified by shyness to converse. The woman seated by the window is wearing a plain dress of unrelieved black, and a hat with a short black veil.

Raoul’s heart sinks. Some widow; some unknown grieving woman left behind, equally the victim of the shell or trench-fever that had taken her man. He has signed too many interchangeable notes of condolence, and the faces have long since faded into a grimy, bearded blur.

He is already calculating how much he can afford to give her — his debts are a thing of the past, though it’s not a subject he cares to dwell on, but the estates yield less than they once did — as she puts back her veil and rises, turning towards him. The familiarity of the gesture catches at him with an old pain: Christine used to sit just there, used to rise just so...

For a moment, caught up in that memory, he sees her face without really seeing it. A woman of his own age, worn and hardened, with the remnants of great beauty overlaid by the marks of unhappiness—

And then memory and reality jolt into one, with a lurch that hits him in the pit of the stomach as if he had just been turned inside out. He puts out a hand to the wall, instinctively, for support.

“My God—” His heart is hammering wildly, as if with horror or desire, and he can feel the blood draining from his face. “You.”

As her expression closes in on itself and the shutters come down, he would give anything in the world to take that exclamation back.

“A pleasure to see you likewise, Vicomte.” Christine drops him an ironic little curtsey that raises a further wall between them, and he finds himself stammering.

“Christine, I—” He abandons that attempt. “You, here — how?”

“The Andromache, from New York, a week ago,” she says drily, giving him an odd look. “Or did you mean here, profaning the sacred soil of your ancestral home?”

And the cutting edge of that has nothing in it of the woman he has known. It’s as if there’s another presence in the room with them: an unseen ghostly mark on her that cannot be erased.

She comes towards him.

“I called in, as soon as I reached Paris,” she is saying, cool and composed as if there were nothing strange in her arrival — nothing unspoken between them at all. She glances behind him, at the closed doors.

“Valentin always had a soft spot for me, if you remember, and he told me you were expected, so I delayed my journey on the off-chance... I hadn’t been sure I’d still find you here. If we’d—” For the first time, she hesitates. “When I left for America, Levancourt was threatening to foreclose.”

He doesn’t need a reminder of that from anybody. Least of all from her.

The dirty little broker had bought up all the mortgages on the estate at a knockdown rate that was itself an insulting valuation of the Vicomte de Chagny’s word. Then he’d begun to turn the screws. To call in every sum Raoul had ever sought to raise. If the letter hadn’t come from Phantasma, the Paris house would have been the first thing to go — they’d needed the money from that contract desperately to pay off Levancourt’s demands. And Raoul had come back without it.

It was the least of his concerns there on the boat, with Gustave’s misery and silent accusations to amplify his own. The Atlantic Queen shouldered steadily through the waves towards a cold and empty horizon, and New York and the shards of his dreams vanished behind him for ever... and in the evenings, with Gustave at last asleep in the cabin that should have held three, he’d cared very little about what would become of them now.

“There’s a saying among gamblers: unlucky at love and lucky at play.” He watches for the judgement in her eyes. The shadow of distaste. “And I won. On the voyage back, when I no longer gave a silver shekel which way the cards might fall — I won. My wife’s parting gift... if you like.”

He won a fortune in one wild night, when he’d never meant to stake at all. But young Winston Hathersby had gone out on deck to smoke a cigar and found him by the rail in the dark, staring over the water. He’d all but dragged him in to join the cheerful party in the starboard saloon, without taking No for an answer. And the card-table had offered company when his own thoughts were beyond bearing, and old habits died hard. It was only money, after all. Another of the things that meant very little any more.

All he remembered of that night was young Hathersby’s white face as he stared down at the pile of IOUs in front of him; the boy’s unsteady voice as he promised the Vicomte payment in full. It had been the last night before England, and he’d seen Hathersby only once more to speak to, with a chauffeured Rolls at the foot of the gangplank waiting to whisk him away.

“Yours too,” the young man said in English. A gesture at the automobile, with a tremor behind the bravado. “Fair play, old man — but you’ll leave me the use of her for now, I hope?”

He smiled and clapped Raoul on the back, and was gone. A week later, courtesy of Coutts’ Bank in London, the Vicomte de Chagny commanded a sum in francs large enough to send Levancourt packing, and redeem his other debts besides. And three months afterwards, still moving in a haze of aching might-have-beens, he learned by chance of a minor country-house scandal across the Channel. A boy who’d blown his brains out on a bankrupt estate.

Paris asked no questions; there were other, meatier scandals to fry. He had nothing to do with it, he tells himself. He had no idea. A gambler is a gambler. He couldn’t have known.

In the presence of the Christine he’d once loved, he might have unburdened himself; sought understanding if not absolution. But this collected, cold-edged stranger would offer neither.

“I played. I won.” He flings the bald statement down at her feet like a challenge. Watches imagined reproaches rising to her lips as she draws breath to speak. “Oh, it was for the last time, I assure you... but my thanks for your so-kind concern.”

For a moment he’s not even sure this is happening. He’s dreamed so often of opening a door to find her there, dreamed of seeing her rise and smile, dreamed— and woken to despair on a grey morning, and Christine gone. And now, with reality close enough to touch, a hedge of bitter words has sprung up between them. It’s as if all those dreams, all those unvoiced betrayals of hope, have been hurled back in his face.

He had no right to hope. He knows that. The knowledge wakes more unreasoning resentment than ever.

He draws a breath. “So Valentin let you in. Told you to come back today. And what of this journey of yours, so casually laid aside? Some errand of his, I make no doubt — what whim of fancy is it that brings you all the way to Paris, yet can wait for a call on a dear old friend? Is he so sure of you then as all that?”

A second or so of absolute silence as she stares up at him.

“He’s dead, Raoul.” She says it slowly as if to a backward child, with a gesture at her unrelieved black. “He’s dead. Phantasma is sold. And I... I came back to our poor suffering France to be of some use, somewhere. To help at the front, if you will aid me now.”

Dead. Dead at last, then. With Christine here as his relict, offering herself up as if she is doing them all a favour...

“If you plan to make a nurse of yourself, you can think again,” Raoul tells her roughly. “They take women with hospital training, over there — not opera-singers with unsoiled hands and half-baked romantical ideas.”

She envisions herself as an angel of mercy out of the picture papers, no doubt, laying cool fingers on some tastefully bandaged young brow. He’s seen field hospitals after a battle in all their abbatoir stench; seen the reality of nursing there, and come across a pile of gangrenous limbs stacked behind a makeshift operating theatre when the surgeons were through. Raoul had thought himself hardened, after life in the trenches. He’d folded over and thrown up.

“It’s no place for you. You should have stayed in America, stayed away from the war, stayed away”—his voice shakes despite himself—“and paraded your widowhood somewhere else.”

“Oh, Raoul...” Her eyes soften briefly, and she holds out her hands, but he draws back and turns away, cursing himself for the childish impulse even as he does so.

“What happened? To him, I mean?” he manages, muffled, after a while. It’s a peace-offering, of sorts, and she seems to accept it as such.

“It was an accident.” Christine sighs, draws up another chair from the wall and gestures for him to do likewise. She sits, neatly, folding her legs under her with heels together beneath the sombre hem of her skirt. “A simple accident, that was all. A blow to the head; a batten struck him where it fell from above the stage. They say the skull is always thin in that place, and his...”

She hesitates. Raoul remembers against his will the monstrosity he had witnessed in those snarling minutes beyond the lake, half a lifetime ago. A growth on the head could affect a man’s brain; he’d wondered, once or twice —in the days when he’d still been young, and in love, and in charity with the world— if that had been the source at root of the Phantom’s mania and rage. But if that bulging deformity had eaten likewise into the bone, then a single blow could have done untold damage. A single shrewdly-placed blow... if one had only known...

“Are you so sure it was an accident?” It slips out on the heels of that bitter reflection before he can stop himself, and he sees her flinch. “After all, your beloved maestro was hardly a popular man — even without other aggrieved husbands in the offing.”

Had the man even been faithful to her, after all that? Surely, surely, his face could have left him no alternative... but Raoul had glimpsed in that cursed Don Juan the seduction he could wield with his voice, had a sight of the elegant figure he could cut when he chose, with a slick wig and a commanding air, and there were foolish women enough in the world who would fall for the romance of a mask without asking themselves what might lie beneath. He’d somehow won over Madame Giry and her daughter to his service, after all: the very two who, in that last night at the Opera, had once been foremost in seeking to end his reign.

Raoul remembers Meg’s clawing nails on the back of his hands, and the wild look in her eyes. He’d seen the way she looked at Christine; he’d put it down to envy of her marriage. The alternative that occurs to him now leaves him more than a little sick.

For a moment he isn’t sure whether the renewed wave of fury at his rival is jealousy over Christine or on her behalf. He knows only that if the power to halt that batten had lain within his grasp, he would not have raised one finger to turn it aside.

For the first time, he sees that the ungloved hands lying twisted together in her lap are bare of all ornament. It was his own actions eight years ago that had stripped away the wedding band he had once set so tenderly upon her finger... but none other has taken its place. Not even a mourning ring.

“So he didn’t marry you after all?” Any thought of conciliation has flown from his head. “A disciple of free love, no doubt. Or do you wish me to believe that notification of the divorce never reached New York — after all the trouble I took to ensure that you were informed of your liberty at the first possible moment? It’s not hard to dissolve a marriage in Paris, you understand, when the foreign papers report one’s wife already living openly with another man!”

Not hard at all, save for the endless gossip, the speculations in the evening papers, the helpful friends who wondered if he’d heard the latest from Coney Island... His own hands are clenched rigid on his knees, and he leans forward in his chair.

“‘Disgraced Vicomtesse de Chagny appearing nightly on vaudeville stage’ — ‘Masked lover’s seduction of titled lady’ — do you know what it was like to endure that, Christine? Do you know what it was like to be pointed out and laughed at as a cuckold on the street; oh, not the usual complaisant husband whose wife knows how to arrange these affairs, but the poor fool who went so far as to divorce her? Can you imagine trying to shield Gustave from the names they called you, from the spectacle of his mother cheapening herself for the holiday crowds at the beck and call of a man without a name?”

“Yes, I sang for him. Yes, I took him to my bed.” Christine’s voice is shaking on the edge of an icy fury of her own, and her head is held high in defiance. “What choice did I have, alone and penniless in New York? What choice did you ever give me, either of you, when you sank to trading me like some creature from the harem? Which one of us was it who chose to walk out on our marriage, Raoul, which of us decided that he alone was the arbiter of what a woman could and could not forgive? You left me; you took my son and left me a coward’s confession in exchange, because you couldn’t even face me with what you had done. And then you presume to judge me because I turned to the man who offered me the shelter and security and affection that you had just ripped away?

“No, I didn’t refuse him. How could I, when he asked so rarely and so little — was so pathetically grateful for whatever I had? He wanted my voice, and I yielded it to him. That was all he ever demanded of me. The rest... he craved, but would never ask. But when I sang for him, then it was the music that spoke his desires, and I who gave. Gave of my own free will — can you understand that?

“I knew what he had done. I knew how he had begged a promise from me with pleading and then used the certainty of that same pledge to taunt you into betraying our vows with a bet you would lose. I knew he had killed for me and would have killed again. I learned of more darkness in his past than you ever dreamed of, as he wept and sought my pardon. He cared nothing for marriage, or for any man’s laws. He was old enough to have sired me, and as helpless in my arms as a nurseling child. He was not safe, or sane, or wholesome — he was a man I barely knew, with whom I’d spent only scant hours face to face. But in his music I could lose myself, and in his eyes I was always glorious, always adored.

“So I lived with his jealousies and his rages and his crawling tears of abjection. I was the harmony to his melodies and the muse to his art; I worked in Phantasma like all the rest, and took my share of the burdens and the hard graft behind the scenes. I gave him all the love I had, and shrank sometimes, a little, from the unreasoning ardour of his. And I held him in my arms like any wife as he died... until there was nothing for me in America, not any more. Then I came home.”

The indescribable turmoil in his gut must have shown in his face.

“Oh, not here, Vicomte.” A small, sad, wintry smile. “I’m damaged goods; I perfectly understand that. I’ve no intention of embarrassing us both by trying to force my way back into your life — or your home. Or of performing in Paris with my name plastered all over the playbills, not even with scandal the lifeblood of the stage. I’m not afraid of hard work, and my hands aren’t those of a fine lady any more: see.”

She gets up suddenly and slips her hand into one of his, with a jolt like a galvanic shock. Her touch is warm and a little damp; engrained courtesy has pulled him to his feet without thinking, and he finds himself standing there wordless with his fingertips brushing across her own. Roughened skin, callous marks, joints thickened by age; he traces them all, and feels the almost imperceptible pressure of her fingers in response, hands reacquainting themselves with each other without any conscious volition.

His grip has tightened, and she draws free a little hastily, with a look of surprise that brings a dull colour to his cheeks. He’s exhausted and on edge, and the imputation stings. Just who does she think she is —by her own account— to play the coquette with him?

“Your pardon, Madame.” He makes her a tight little bow, and she cries out.

“Oh Raoul, I didn’t come here to quarrel with you. All I want is to be of some use when men are dead and dying — and you stand there in your country’s uniform and set your stiff pride ahead of everything else. Neither of us matters any more, can’t you see that? I mean to go ahead with this with or without your help, even if all I can do is scrub sheets and wash floors; I came to you because you were the first person I could think of in Paris... and because I hoped, however foolishly, that whatever else we had been to one another we could at least remember that we were once friends.”

“Friends?” Raoul keeps his hands, with an effort, from clenching at his sides. “Such friends that your face haunted me in Gustave for years, every time I caught sight of him in passing. That my first thought when his voice began to break was not pride at a growing son but gratitude that the new gruff tones were his alone and no longer any echo of yours. This house was full of you for so many years that no effort of mine could strip the ghost of your presence from its walls — and I tried, believe me, I tried!”

He had done this. He had put her there. He destroyed their marriage. The wound of losing her, that he had believed healed to a dull ache, is as raw now in her presence as ever it was.

“I— see,” Christine says, cold and very distant. His own words are still hanging in the air, aching and ugly, and from the look on her face Raoul understands that she doesn’t see — how could she? She doesn’t see at all...

He wants to reach out to her, hurl accusations, crawl for her forgiveness. He wants her in his arms so much that it hurts; wants her out of here where he never need see her again. He wants to fling every drop of his agony back in her face and curse her for his own folly. He would give up his life to set the shield of his body between her and the world, and everything it has done to her and will try to do.

It comes to him suddenly, lucidly, that this is what insanity is like. And if it drives a man to blackmail and murder, and long years waiting for a woman who has chosen elsewhere... then perhaps, at last, he begins to understand his old enemy better than he would wish.

“Christine—” But the plea dies helplessly unspoken, foundered on the reefs of words he cannot find and the final shreds of his pride. She has been another man’s concubine. And it’s clear enough she wants none of him.

“If that’s how you feel,” Christine is saying swiftly, clipping the words off short, “then I make no doubt Gustave has been taught the same. It’s a thousand pities, is it not, that you chose to take him, if the sight of his mother in him causes you such pain. You knew how much I loved him. All these years I thought of you together, finding some comfort in each other, remembering me a little perhaps. What am I, then, in his eyes? The errant wife? The shameful secret that one does not discuss?”

He can see her swallow. She turns away.

“I tried so hard to let him know he was not forgotten. I wrote to him for so long in the hopes that some day you would let him reply...”

Raoul cuts her off. “I gave him those letters when he was fifteen.”

He remembers the yellowed, worn envelopes, creased where he had so often turned them over and over, breathing their dry-leaf scent as if that might tell him what was inside. Remembers the frozen understanding in Gustave’s eyes as the boy had looked from his father’s face to the faded packet of papers on the breakfast-table between them. “If since then you’ve had no reply — then that’s a matter between the two of you. And of whatever you chose to write.”

“You gave him my letters?” Her head comes up swiftly, forgotten tears blazing in her gaze. “You so very kindly gave him my letters, after keeping me in silence for so long? How dared you play such games with people’s lives? Just who do you think you are?”

And if he’d ever questioned the wisdom of that long-ago decision, faced with female hysterics there can be no doubt of it now.

“The one man with a duty to shield a suffering child from a correspondence that could only distress him,” he flings back at her, hearing the pompous edge in his words; unable to stop. “The one man with the most right in the world: the boy’s father!”

Christine stares at him as if at a stranger. Her shoulders are shaking, and after a long minute it dawns on him that the sound she is making is a horrible sobbing laughter.

“That’s the one thing you are not,” she says softly. Every word is a dagger of bitterness. “So you gave him those letters unopened, then, at least. You were told the truth yourself on Coney Island, but you never believed it, did you? The child you stole like a thief in the night wasn’t even of your own getting. Gustave’s illegitimate — a bastard — another man’s son. And you know very well whose!”

And where were you on the night before that marriage? Every sigh, every gasp... she was a quick pupil, our Christine, urgent and so very responsive—

For a blind, staggering moment the darkness of eight years ago sweeps over him, foul words from the alley taunting in his ear. It’s not true. It was never true. It’s one more long-forgotten lie.

Only it’s Christine — Christine — standing there to say it, eight years older and harder and more hurt; Christine who has never once lied to him in anger or in love. And even with that abyss of betrayal opening up beneath him, he cannot believe in falsehood from her now.

“No.” It’s not so much a denial as a helpless, hopeless protest. The world is spinning beneath him, and he tries to grasp for something, anything beyond the enormity that blocks his path. “No, I—”

The spindly gilt of his chair has come up to meet him, and someone is loosening his collar. He finds Christine leaning over him, eyes full of unendurable concern, and tries to push her away.

Never once lied to him? If this is true, if she fled to their wedding to cover up the consequences of her lover’s bed, then every day of their lives together has been an unspoken lie from the start. He thrusts her off blindly, with a groan.

“Raoul.” Anger ebbed, she looks almost as stricken as he. “Raoul, it wasn’t the way you’re thinking. I never meant for it to happen. I’m sorry— I didn’t mean for you to know—”

“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t!” He fumbles with collar-buttons, swept by a mounting fury. “And you have no idea what I’m thinking. You never did. You never even thought to ask.”

He’s on his feet again now, breathing hard, staring down as if to fix every line and every cruelly betraying change in her face into his mind’s eye for the future. “I wrote to you, you know. About Gustave. Twice. Only it’s clear now those letters never made it, did they? You never thought to ask yourself that. You never thought to wonder why I wouldn’t care — because you had your dirty little secret and your precious lover to keep you shut away. Those letters that went to Phantasma, do you think he kept them in linen, as I did? Do you think he saved them for you to read later, when the boy was grown? I think we both know better than that. They went straight back to sender — by way of the fireplace!”

But Christine, sobbing, has her hands over her ears.

“Does he have a name?” He is twisting the blade in his own breast even as he turns it in hers, but something within him is broken, and the words spill out like tearing knives. “Am I to know who fathered my son? Or did you whisper “Mr Y’ across the pillow, when you woke in the dark watches of the night?”

Her head comes up at that, held high in defiance as she backs away. The look on her face is something he’ll never forget; never be able to remember, now, any other way.

“Yes, he had a name,” Christine says softly. She turns on her heel, and walks to the door. “But you’ll never know it. Goodbye, Raoul. I doubt we’ll meet again.”

The door opens, and she is gone. A murmur of voices outside, and the sound of the front door. Raoul cannot move.

It seems like hours later that he stumbles into his study and buries his head in his hands. Tears come, and a long wave of despair.

~o~

“Father?”

It’s later still that he hears Gustave’s voice behind him. Raoul raises a ravaged face from his desk and turns.

The boy hesitating in the doorway has grown visibly older in the months since the start of the war, the line of chin and cheek becoming clear-cut, more adult, a foreshadowing of the man he will some day be. The dreamy poet’s eyes are his mother’s, troubled now and dark in concern; the brows so often drawn down in sullen retreat are thicker and darker, but unmistakably hers. It’s a fine-boned face with the delicate beauty of a young Perseus or Apollo, but the nose is a little too large, the jaw a little too strong ever to be mistaken for those of a girl.

They have not seen each other since the summer. Raoul should have been there to meet him at the door, to enquire after his schoolbooks and return a warm embrace. Instead he finds himself scanning Gustave’s features as if searching for a stranger. The sudden moods, the withdrawal of these last few years — he understands it all now with a sudden bitter pain.

The boy knows. Of course he knows. He’s spent years living with the shadow of that monstrous taint and the stain across his name... ever since Raoul had been fool enough to pass over those accursed letters which Christine — damn her — had sent to a ten-year-old child.

Oh God, Christine... Something of what he was feeling must have shown in his face, for Gustave comes quickly across the room and drops to one knee beside his chair, looking up with a swift frown of distress. “What is it? Are you all right?”

“She came back.” It’s torn out of Raoul like a groan from the heart as the boy’s arms come round him. His own hold tightens around the slim young shoulders in response. Gustave’s face is buried in his tunic-front, and tears can fall unseen against the boy’s rough-tumbled hair. “She came back. After all these years your mother came back — and she’s gone. I let her go.”

In this moment it’s all that matters; not hard words, not betrayals, not even the imposter’s blood in the son he loves... and has loved more fiercely because she was not here. She had come back, beyond all hope and all expectation. And in the petty sting of his wounded pride he had stood there and watched her walk away.

Gustave has pulled back a little, his eyes searching Raoul’s gaze. Raoul nods, slowly.

They both know, now. But they will never, ever speak of it, not even between themselves. Raoul gathers his son closer; hears him whisper “Father” again, and brushes away dampness along the boy’s cheek.

---

The Vicomte’s pen had halted once more. On the page, the word “Gustave” stood out thick and black where ink, freshly dipped, had been left to dry.

He could still feel the weight of the boy’s head on his breast from that first night of his leave, when they had sat here together for long unspoken hours; but they had made their goodbyes this morning, before Gustave left for his lessons. It was easier that way.

The house was full of memories just now, and most of them — all of them — hurt. Perhaps war was easier after all, Raoul thought grimly. The final, unfinished letter lay open before him. He dipped his nib back into the inkwell, eased his collar automatically, and began to write without hesitation or rereading, barely even looking at the words as they came. On the last line he paused briefly, as if a wheel had come full circle. Signed, blotted, sealed the envelope, and wrote a few covering lines on another sheet to complete the packet.

A brief discreet knock on the door was Valentin. Raoul stood up, stretched, and sighed.

“Is it time? All right, I’m coming... Here, these are for the post. My regards to the Vicomte Gustave, and I’ll see him again in a few months — God willing.” The other paper with its enclosure was still in his hand. He held it out quietly. “Valentin, if... if by any chance I should happen not to return, I want you to give him this.”

Their eyes met, acknowledging the possibility. For a moment the old man seemed about to speak; Raoul gave him a tiny shake of the head, managing a smile. “Just give it to him. He’ll understand.”

A few minutes later the room, with all its ghosts, was empty. A distant door closed, and the Vicomte de Chagny was gone.