High City on a Hill (Ch2)

[igenlode]

And finally, after almost eighteen months, we have an edited and proofread chapter 2!

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Chapter 2 — “We Can Make it Work”

I’d been married to Raoul for nine months, but I’d known him since we’d first come to Paris.

We’d left Vienna and the big house on the Praterstraße after my brother Rudolf died. It had been a hot summer, and he’d gone swimming with his friends and taken a chill that turned into a fever. I could still remember those last days, with all the windows shuttered and my mother drifting like a ghost through empty room after empty room, in those apartments that had once been so full of music and eager talk.

Without Rudi, nothing had ever been quite the same. My father had taken us first to Baden Baden, then to Paris, where he had business interests. My mother’s piano stood unplayed and she rarely left our lodgings. I was lonely and awkward, a growing girl in a city that made little distinction between Viennese and the hated Prussians. We’d been outsiders back home, though my grandfather had been baptised as a Christian, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. Now I was an outsider and a foreigner.

But I was Baron Graupmann’s daughter, and potential heiress to millions, and that was enough to ensure that there were ladies prepared to sponsor me into society alongside their own offspring. I mingled, shrinking, with adolescents my own age. It was there that I first came to know Raoul de Chagny.

There was nothing romantic in it. Indeed, later I would see him withdraw politely but unmistakably before girls who grew flirtatious. Father observed drily that the boy had doubtless lost his heart to a lady out of some old tale and regarded himself as her very perfect knight; but it was said with a smile, for he liked the young Vicomte.

Raoul did not make fun of my accent behind my back, or my halting schoolgirl French. His own mother was a querulous invalid who rarely left her chair, and he was endlessly cheerful and patient with Mama and courteous to my father, with a respect for grey hairs and culture that went beyond lip-service. He could not fill the gap that Rudi had left, and sometimes just to hear of his escapades and those of the other boys made that empty place all the more present. But I was in his company often enough to ease the ache, and came to look out for him eagerly across the room.

And where a Chagny led, others, it seemed, were prepared to follow. Gradually, as my French grew more fluent, I found myself accepted and made new friends. Even if there were days on end when Mama rarely left her rooms and her meal trays were barely touched, there were other parlours open to me now in which I could laugh out loud or swap foolish stories without feeling guilty. And Raoul helped initiate me into the excitement of expeditions to the Jardin des Plantes or the covered ice rink, and the skylarking that could be had there by a party of high-spirited youngsters as yet untouched by concerns of adult decorum.

I’d thought I could never be at home in Paris, but by the summer I turned nineteen the old life in Vienna had begun to seem very distant and a very long time ago, as if it had belonged to someone else. Girls I’d once known — Miriam, Anna, Sophie-Therese — had become young women, and the letters we still exchanged from time to time had grown increasingly perfunctory, or else full of gossip about scandals among new acquaintances and prospective alliances with wealthy marriage partners of whom I’d never heard.

My own duty would be to make a good marriage; I’d known that ever since Rudi died. My father took me into his confidence more and more these days over affairs at the bank that bore our name, and sooner or later he would need grandchildren, and a son-in-law to satisfy the lawyers when I came to inherit. I knew well enough that it might some day be my lot to bestow my hand on some rising financier on whose loyalty the firm depended, or contract a brilliant match with a Serene or Illustrious Highness at Franz Josef’s court; our blood did not rank alongside the ancient nobility, but I could reckon to the last thaler on the balance books the size of my inheritance, and knew enough of the world to understand how such transactions worked. In the last fifty years, there had been a dozen or more intermarriages made.

Or if, as it seemed, we were settled in Paris, my father might seek to establish me on the marriage-market here instead. There was the Duc de Maresne, whose wife had lately died and who was rumoured to be in search of a young bride who could give him an heir; his estates were greatly encumbered, and he might be induced to overlook my father’s mean title and Middle European origins by the prospect of moneybags to come. That would be a fine catch, and one that would make me the talk of the season, if I could achieve it.

It was true I would be married to a man of close on fifty with few interests in life beyond the race-course and the bloodlines of his horses, but I was sufficiently aware of how these alliances worked to know that I need see little enough of an unwanted husband. Marriages were made in the name of shared family interest, not of interests in common between the spouses. A discreet husband paid regular visits to his mistress between the hours of five and seven, before coming home to dinner; the wife entertained her cavaliers at home, and gained a reputation for wit along with whatever favours she might bestow. Paris was the most sophisticated society in the world, and such things were understood.

After all, I knew I wanted children. And I’d known plenty of mothers — in Paris and in Vienna both — in whose lives the husband served as little more than a vaguely tolerated background means to that end. From that perspective, if one were to be sensible, it really made very little difference whom you married... and becoming a Duchesse would have its own compensations.

I’d always been sensible, even when Raoul, frustrated in some more impractical flight of fancy, had flung that description at me in terms that between boys would have led to a fist-fight. I was not of the line of de Guise or de Rohan, and I could not afford to aid him and abet him in escapades that might draw down the world’s censure. I was an outsider whom Paris chose to tolerate, and I could not forget just how quickly that could change.

As a young woman priding myself on new-found sophistication, I was no longer the girl who’d needed above all to learn again how to laugh. It had begun to seem to me that it was time for Raoul, too, to grow up.

I expressed as much to my parents that summer in frustration, down beside the water in the Luxembourg Gardens on a blazing hot afternoon. From the distance there came the squabbling of ducks where small children gathered with their nursemaids; higher up, along the terrace, older boys were yelling amid the rattle of hoops. I had a new dress with fashionable sleeves, trimmed with cherry-red ribbons that suited my colouring, and was very conscious of how well I looked in it. Even Raoul’s mother the Vicomtesse had been known to commend my sense of style, and it was hard sometimes to have patience with youths my age, and their lack of interest and slapdash ways.

Mama had helped me dress my hair; it was one of her good days, and the rosy parasol she held cast a pretty colour into her cheeks. Father was looking very distinguished, despite the foreign cut he still obstinately favoured in his coats—“my dear, no-one would ever mistake me for a Frenchman, and I am too old to change”—and Mama had her hand tucked into his arm despite the heat, returning his fond smile. It was almost like the old days... except that Rudi was not there, Rudi who should have been freshly-shaven for the outing, with his dark unruly curls sleek with pomade, and I— I was not the coltish child who’d once been Rudi’s little sister.

I was not anyone’s little sister any longer, to waste my time on fairy tales and youthful pranks. I was ready to grow up and take my place in the world, a world where life could be hard and unfair and dreams did not always come true. Raoul’s father was well over sixty and almost a recluse; it was past time the young Vicomte took up some responsibility.

But Mama simply laughed when I tried to find words for my stumbling indignation, and reached out to touch my cheek.

“Sweetheart, you’ll find women grow up faster than men. At your age, it’s natural your interests should drift apart. The boy has a good heart, and he’ll come to no harm.”

She took my hand in hers. “Some day, when you have a home of your own, you’ll learn that men are just big strong babies who like to think they protect us. But when the world hurts them, they come running home for comfort behind closed doors in the shelter of a woman’s arms.”

I looked across at my father instinctively, a little shocked — hadn’t he been the one to be strong for Mama all this time since Rudi’s death? — and saw him smile at my expression.

“It’s true, Hertha.” He reached out to take my other hand and drew Mama closer, putting his arms around both of us. “We’re a poor helpless sex, and you mustn’t take us at our own estimation. Your husband will rely on you more than you’ll ever know.”

As he released me I saw him exchange a glance with Mama, and it came to me in a sudden rush of certainty that they were about to speak of M. de Maresne; that Father would tell me that the Duc had made an offer and I was to be married off. What had seemed a pleasant fantasy dawned all at once into the realms of possibility, presenting itself there in a very different light. My heart had slipped up into my throat.

But whatever my parents had in mind, nothing passed between them save a smile. The sun was hot; by the water’s edge a child was scolded sharply and began to wail. The ducks rose up with a clatter of wings, and presently, when we began to stroll on, the conversation had turned to other matters and nothing more was said of marriage.

It was not until over a year later — long after the Duc de Maresne had wedded a wealthy Belgian widow, and thereby set the noses of quite half the eligible young ladies of Paris out of joint — that my mother took me aside and told me, in confidence, that there had indeed been serious enquiries made by M. de Maresne about the possibility of an alliance, and that my father in the end had decided against it. He had wanted to establish me in the world with a great match, but not at any cost — and not at the price of tying me to someone I did not know, and whom Father had not liked.

But I never did learn what it was the Duc had said or done to give Father such a distaste for him, for Mama brushed lightly over the subject. There were more immediate matters to discuss for both of us, for it was the night before my wedding to Raoul de Chagny.

~o~

Of course Raoul and I had seen each other socially, and even danced together at the Maresne wedding, the most glittering event of that year. But now that we were grown we’d spent less and less time in one another’s company, and never under the old easy terms. He was a young man, after all, and a very eligible one. A Vicomte might, if he wished, pass his afternoons casually with a young and pretty milliner’s apprentice, or an opera-dancer, and excite no remark, but he could not do so with me without the world reading into it intentions that neither of us possessed.

That did not mean, however, that others might not have plans on our behalf. The alliance between us, however unsought, had in the end been as orderly and prosaic a transaction as any that passed across the counters of a bank. The contracts had all been worked out between my father and the Vicomtesse’s family lawyers, the eventual arrangements had taken months, and the only unorthodox thing about the whole affair was that I had first heard about our parents’ proposals for our future from Raoul himself.

I’d been paying a call on a friend, Eugénie d’Hapageon, and Raoul, who happened at that moment to be talking to her brother downstairs, had caught sight of me through the door of the small salon. Impulsive as ever, he’d run up the staircase in my wake to catch up with me and deliver his news, heedless alike of Eugénie awaiting me above and of the expostulations of Gideon, her brother, who’d followed him out into the hall below.

It hadn’t quite been the decorous announcement that one was led to expect. Nor —for all that Raoul was flushed and out of breath— had it been in the least like the impassioned declarations in novels.

“I thought I’d better give you advance warning just in case you wanted to object.” As ever, he’d been disarmingly direct. “Your father’s offering very large settlements, but there are other heiresses, and we can always find a way out of it if you really don’t like the idea.”

Caught aback by sheer surprise, I found myself staring, my mind awhirl. Whenever I’d pictured a husband, it had been as a distant, self-contained figure, with concerns of his own to absorb him. I would smile serenely at his side, defer with grace to a worldly knowledge greater than mine, and form and guide the minds of our children amid the interests of my choice. None of my imaginings had ever encompassed marriage to anyone like Raoul, or even — it was an odd thought — to someone who might be not only husband, but friend...

Raoul, a few steps below me on the staircase, was still searching my face with anxious concern. If we went through with this, we’d have to find what worldly wisdom we could between the two of us; there would be none of that calm detachment I’d pictured.

But there would be companionship along the way, and perhaps a deeper tenderness in time. My heart ached a little, picturing a child upon my knee with Raoul’s eyes and ready smile.

I smiled at him in reply, and held out my hand. “I think... we could make it work. Don’t you?”

For a moment he hesitated, words still unspoken hanging between us. Then, with a rueful little shrug, he lifted my hand, kissed it lightly, and came up the steps in a rush to drape an arm around my shoulders, all warm angles and familiar consoling weight. It was the gesture not of a lover, but of a shipmate offering strength against pitfalls ahead, and drawing reassurance in return.

“I think we could make it work. We’ll try.”

And we had made it work, I thought now, retrieving cape and muff from the cloakroom and bestowing a coin in thanks. In those nine months we’d learned to live together and run in joint harness, making our appearances side by side at the most exclusive social functions and rising late the morning after, elbows sprawled comfortably across the breakfast table, until we were called to order by his mother’s look of reproof. The old Vicomtesse had begun to ask querulously when she might expect grandchildren, but Raoul and I had performed our duty in that respect with the prescribed regularity of all our other marital obligations; it was early days yet, I told myself, and turned a deaf ear to her urging of teas and delicacies said to be of aid to the young wife.

I played chess from time to time with Raoul’s father in his own apartments. The old man, meticulously dressed and courteous in the style of a bygone era, said little, but encouraged me to talk. In his quiet way he had made it clear that where Raoul was concerned he approved of my influence.

If since the first mention of our marriage Raoul had seemed, not subdued, but resigned — if something had gone out of him, like the farmer who turns his eyes from the distant city on the hill down to the sturdy soil of his own acres and the work at hand — then it was no doing of mine. He was irrepressible as ever; proud of me, so far as I could tell, after the manner of any young man with a costly new possession, and glad of my company and of our shared laughter.

My father had made sure I was not marrying a stranger, and every day taught me just how wise he had been. He had liked and approved of Raoul de Chagny, and trusted him as a husband to protect and take care of me as best he could, and in return I’d done my best to become indispensable. I was there whenever I was wanted; quietly, unobtrusively ready with advice, and conscientious over everything that was required of either of us. I’d done my best — I truly had — to learn what made him happy, and found pleasure in watching for his smile. He would be loyal to his duty, a diligent father, and someday, I was sure of it, an adoring and indulgent grandparent, adored in return. With every passing month of our life together I had begun to see more clearly the course of those long years that lay ahead, and to know that if I had the choice again, I would ask for nothing more.

Only... I’d known him since I first came to Paris. And the Raoul of those years, immature and unformed as he had been, had somehow carried a flame of expectation that made him more vividly alive than any of us. I had not set out to take that from him; but that far-off city had gone, the prospect of its banners and towers wiped away as if by the closing of a book, with whatever it meant to him set aside when he took me as his wife.

Ours was a world of affection and common-sense, of cheerful acceptance and allowances made. I was lucky in what we had together, I knew that, luckier than I’d had any right to hope. That did not make it any easier to watch Raoul’s face light up as it had done tonight, and know that music still had the power to waken something in him that I could not.

Music... and memory. ‘All legs and elbows and flying feet’, he’d called her— that girl— Christine. She was firm enough of flesh now, I thought bitterly, and flinched to hear the unaccustomed edge of spite. The wealth of unbound hair that had tumbled across the lace at her throat had a rich brown hue that left my own lank and dark by comparison, and her complexion held a wild-rose flush of colour.

I too had been a bony, unattractive child. Womanhood had filled me out acceptably, though my figure would never turn heads, but I had not bloomed into beauty as Christine Daaé had done.

It was foolish to make comparisons, and I knew it. I was a Vicomtesse and happily married. She was the daughter of a Swedish virtuoso, a child of the stage with nothing to sustain her but the fickle tide of public favour. And Raoul had enlisted my aid in coaxing her out to dinner; had sought to share his delight at her talent and in their reunion just as he always had, on impulse and without a shade of artifice. Messrs André and Firmin might share winks and whispers about their patron’s ‘new discovery’, and if gossip should reach the old Vicomtesse doubtless she would take it as gospel truth. But she would turn a blind eye, and presume that I had done likewise. The Vicomte de Chagny’s enthusiasm for the latest singing sensation might raise a guffaw or two, but there would be no scandal — not unless I chose to stage a jealous scene over insinuations that I knew very well were unfounded.

Infidelity had not so much as crossed my husband’s mind tonight; I was sure of that. Christine was the one to be pitied, not I, and however little he cared for gossip Raoul should have had more thought for her. Ours was no love-match, but I could still feel the echo in my breast of that stricken look in the girl’s eyes.

We would throw her that champagne party and convince her just how much she deserved it, I told myself firmly, hastening as ever to keep up with Raoul’s eager pace. It would do Miss Daaé good to see something of society for once, and shed the cares of her career. And there would be other men —though even to myself I did not admit the thought— other men there to smile on her who would not be Raoul de Chagny...

Trying to keep up, I stumbled and nearly dropped my muff.

“Raoul, please”—I was breathless and half laughing—“you’re rushing me off my feet.”

He had caught me and steadied me; now he tucked my arm through his, muff and all, with a rueful grin of apology. We’d almost reached the dressing-room, and the crowds backstage had begun to clear. For the moment we were alone in the corridor.

“Sorry. It’s just— well, I did tell Christine we’d only be a couple of minutes, and I’m afraid we’re keeping her waiting.”

“Oh, Raoul.” This time I couldn’t help laughing outright. “Believe me, it takes a lady much more than two minutes to dress, and she won’t thank us for bursting in on her. We’ll give our guest a while longer before we come knocking to sweep her off into the lap of luxury...”

My hand was nestled warm and confiding in the crook of my husband’s arm, and there was a shared smile in his eyes, and everything between us was just as it had always been. It would be better, far better, not to ask... but I had to know.

“You—” I swallowed; drew closer, glancing around as if to somehow elude the memory of Monsieur André’s wink. “You must have known Christine Daaé a long time?”

“We were fourteen.” Simple and direct, without a trace of guile. The smile had shaded into reminiscence of a time in which I had no part. “Inseparable, for a while. She’d been ill, and sent off to the seaside to recover. We ran wild together for a whole summer — scared each other stiff with ghost stories and her father’s old Swedish legends. She was a long-legged child, as tall as I was in those days, and by the end every bit as quick on her feet. I nicknamed her ‘Little Lotte’ after the heroine of her favourite story, and she retaliated by dubbing me ‘Ragnar the Pink’, after a day when I got sunburnt all down my neck... Funny how it all comes back — all those little things you think you’ve forgotten.”

Rudi and I had teased each other just so... I bit my lip against memories of my own; burst out, with more force than I had intended, “Then why have I never heard of her, Raoul? All these years we have known each other—”

“That was— different.” He had stiffened. For the first time I felt him withdraw from me a little, seeing me perhaps through new eyes. Becoming conscious, I thought, of himself and Christine in a way he had not been before. I could have wept for the folly of what I had done.

Behind us in the corridor a door opened, and a gust of voices drifted down. Raoul glanced up and drew me around the corner, to where the short flight of stairs began.

“Listen.” He sounded older somehow, not bleaker but more measured than before. “You never chattered to me about your summers back in Vienna — where you swam, who your friends were.”

“No...” It had never even crossed my mind. At seventeen, in a new city, one does not seek to talk of childhood. “Why would I? It was another time. Another place.”

“Exactly...” He still had my arm in his. His other hand came up to cover mine. “Hertha, I’m not hiding anything from you. If you want to hear about my boyhood scrapes, you only ever have to ask. You know that, don’t you?”

His hand tightened on mine, and I managed a nod, warmed as much by the unshielded honesty in his eyes as by his clasp.

“Or you could just ask Mother.” The grin had returned, with a hint of mischief at his own expense. “She’d be only too delighted to spend hours discussing the more embarrassing escapades and disreputable acquaintances of my youth — not to mention all the adorable things I apparently said when I was small.”

He’d always been able to make me laugh. I choked back an unladylike snort in response, and felt him press my hand again before he let me go.

“Come on,” Raoul said quietly. “Let’s take Miss Daaé to dinner, and drink to old friends and future success.”

A moment later, he had launched himself ahead down the flight of steps, pausing to wait for me at the bottom, and together we traversed more decorously along the rest of the shabby little hallway to where the dressing-room door awaited. Raoul seemed on the point of rapping briskly on the panels, then halted, as if abashed. I stepped up to take his place, with a smile to acknowledge his gesture, and, in the moment before I could knock, heard the man’s voice within as he must have heard it.

So the girl was not the guileless innocent she appeared. I knew a brief, ignoble stab of satisfaction, succeeded almost at once by chill.

Those were not murmurs of passion, still less the laughter of a flirtatious exchange. It was a voice that echoed from somewhere immeasurably distant, and with an inhuman compelling power.

“Christine!” Raoul caught hold of the doorknob; rattled it, to no avail. “Christine, who is that in there? Are you all right? Christine—”

He flung his weight against the door, careless of consequences. The voice from beyond called in irresistible summons, surrounding me with dizzying tendrils of command. Half-sobbing, I found myself clawing for the handle, pitting all the force of my own slight strength against the panels that separated me from where I needed to be, and the call that must be obeyed.

There was no splintering crash. The door simply sprang open quite suddenly, as if it had never been locked after all. I fell into the room, hard enough to hurt, though I paid it no heed.

In my ears there was an odd ringing that was the sound of silence, and in the pit of my stomach a hard knot of ice. Christine was nowhere to be seen. But her dress lay still untouched across the couch in the corner, and where she had been sitting the chair was thrust back all askew, as if its occupant had sprung to her feet.

Raoul’s arms were round me, lifting me from where I had fallen, and I turned and clung to him, aware absurdly that I was trembling and could not stop.

“Did you hear it?” I managed, face buried in his coat.

“I heard— I don’t know what I heard.” Raoul’s voice was grim. He pushed the skirts of Christine’s abandoned dress gently aside, easing me down to sit on the couch. “But I don’t think Christine has gone for a stroll in her dressing-gown.”