High City on a Hill (Ch3)

[igenlode]

And we're finally back to the mesmerism I spent so much time researching in January last year (like my recent worries over Hertha's Vienna address after I discovered that my 'fictional' street was in fact a real street of an unusual name which exists in Munich, not Vienna -- all the frantic research for a plausible real address with the right connotations for the family ended up as literally one word in the finished story ;-p)

I also discovered in the process of editing that Raoul had 'appeared abruptly older' several times in the course of the chapter, in addition to having already done so in Ch2; this is what happens when you write painfully slowly and forget which phrases you have previously used ;-p I managed to cut it down to a single, less repetitious occurrence...

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Chapter 3 — “As if Awoken from a Dream”

I did not reach home until after midnight, and there was no shared supper of champagne and laughter, but only a cold collation that was put together for me in haste and eaten alone in a chilly salon downstairs. It was a far cry from the sparkle of wine-glasses and good company chez Valestre, where we’d planned to dine.

But Christine Daaé was nowhere to be found, there was no-one in authority from whom Raoul could get a straight answer, and I’d been more shaken by those dizzying moments at the door than I wanted to admit. Raoul had insisted on sending me back in the carriage while he continued his stubborn —and fruitless— enquiries, in the Opera House and outside, and for the first time in our marriage I’d yielded.

I did not want to see any more echoing, ugly corridors, nor bleak dressing-rooms sordid with torn stockings, smeared greasepaint or the hint of shaving soap and stale sweat. Shorn of its bustle of life, the opera after closing hours was no more than a rambling warren of ill-lit hallways and offices, and every half-heard sound rasped upon my nerves. I had not imagined the unseen voice, nor the door that had been closed against us.

So I had allowed my husband to hand me up into our carriage, telling myself that the horses at least should not become any more chilled and weary than they already were. I had let him tuck the rugs around me, and even clung to him a moment in a wordless quest for comfort. A minute later Raoul had swung himself back down and the grand façades were rolling past the windows, stark in the streetlight glare.

He did not return that night, though I lay awake, restless, listening for the distant sound of his bedroom door. When I came down the next morning, belated and heavy-eyed, it was to find all the newspapers full of the story and Raoul once again absent. He had returned around breakfast-time, I was informed, in a cab with a narrow-jawed Sûrété agent, had found a letter awaiting him, and in consequence had scarcely taken time to change before he left again in haste.

“A most impertinent note,” the old Vicomtesse complained fretfully, plucking at her amber beads. I found my own fingers shredding breadcrumbs into the untouched cup of chocolate that had been set before me. It was almost eleven o’clock, but my head ached and I had no appetite.

“Impertinent— how, Madame? Sent by whom?” But the old lady could not or would not divulge further, and no-one else could tell me anything save that an envelope had been left for the young master by an unknown hand, and even the hall porter had not observed quite how it had arrived.

It was all far too much of a piece with what had happened last night. Raoul, it seemed, had gone rushing back to the Opera House; at one point, I was on the verge of ordering the light barouche to be brought round so that I could go after him.

But if I did so, it would only make both of us look foolish, and become the talk of the town besides. The morning papers were all full of the events at the Opera, of La Carlotta’s sudden indisposition, of Christine Daaé’s triumph, and above all of the fact that after the performance she had been nowhere to be found. Mystery! screamed the headline in the ‘Gazette’, normally so restrained; Star Soprano’s Flight, claimed the front page of the ‘New Era’, more given to gossip, atop an article that speculated wildly as to the likelihood of an elopement. The Sûrété had been called to the case —that would be Raoul’s doing, no doubt, for last night the managers, when sought, had already left the building— and were predictably “baffled”, which meant only that they had failed to provide a statement for the benefit of the press. The rest of the coverage was given over to increasingly extravagant speculations about the probability of foul play, and the involvement of a sinister international cabal of unnamed foreigners.

Sallow, rootless foreigners such as myself, of course. It was one thing to be the daughter of Thaddeus Graupmann; quite another to be a beautiful Swedish artiste whose father had performed before all the crowned heads of Europe. There were things more overtly said in Paris than in Vienna. I flung the sheets of newsprint back down with entirely unnecessary force, and rang for Berthauld to clear the table.

I had a thousand and one things to do, and could not settle to any of them. When Raoul returned, shortly before luncheon, I was leafing mechanically through a volume of Heine from the shelves of the library. I’d always loved the simple beauty of the poet’s words, but today I found myself turning the pages almost without seeing them.

The sound of hoofs and wheels from the courtyard outside heralded the arrival of the carriage. Moments later a door closed, and there were voices in the entrance hall; Raoul, coming closer, demanding my whereabouts.

The book fell from my hand, unheeded. But before I could reach the threshold of the library Raoul burst in, still in his top-coat, eyes seeking mine.

“She’s all right.” He forestalled my questions. “Back and safe, thank God. It’s an ugly mess, and she won’t see anyone, but... she’s unhurt. Exhausted, but unhurt.”

Exhausted, but unhurt... It was clear he had not slept all night. But he was warm, and real, and unchanged, and he had come back to me. All else forgotten, I put my arms around his neck and clung tight, and felt my husband’s breath against my hair.

~o~

“La Carlotta was there,” Raoul told me grimly later, when I’d had a fire lit for him in our apartments upstairs, and a tray brought in so that we could lunch in private. “She was the soprano who should have sung the leading rôle, only she’d walked out of rehearsals at the last minute—”

“I remember.” He kept forgetting to eat. I slipped another helping of the veal galantine onto his plate, frowning at the dark rings of strain beneath his eyes, though the mirror over the fireplace showed the ravages of last night upon my own complexion.

Raoul sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“Well, Carlotta had turned up to see the managers in a fine fury over a letter she’d received like the one that came here—” He broke off again, and got up wearily to retrieve the envelope he’d flung into a bureau drawer when we came in. “You’d better see this for yourself. After all, it concerns both of us.”

I took the letter from him with an odd reluctance. The envelope was of heavy, creamy stationery, and it had not been gummed but sealed in the old-fashioned style with a great splash of wax. Only the imprint of the seal was no heraldic device, like the Chagny ibis-heads and martlets carved into the onyx seal-ring borne by Raoul’s father, and his ancestors before him. Grinning up at me instead from the scarlet wax was the mark of a great death’s-head, with its empty eye-sockets like pits of blood.

It was both pretentious and in bad taste, I told myself, thrusting back an instinctive recoil and tugging free the enclosure. In a firm, looping hand, this instructed the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Chagny to cease their condescending attentions to Miss Christine Daaé, who was in no need of their assistance either now or henceforth.

Do not seek out Miss Daaé, for the Angel of Music has her under his wing. I stared down at the page; it came to me with a sudden chill that I had already heard the echo of those wings, and there had been nothing angelic about the matter.

I did not like this, any of it. An ugly mess, Raoul had said. ‘Ugly’ was the word for it.

And Christine Daaé, whether victim or instigator, was caught up in the heart of the whole. At our first meeting, I had resolved that I did not want Raoul mixed up with her in any way, and for more reasons than one. Now, however, it would seem that someone else was of the same mind.

I looked up and found my husband apparently engrossed in the depths of his wine-glass. He was turning the stem mechanically between his fingers with a frown.

“Raoul, you won’t— surely you don’t mean meekly to do as we are bid by this...” I glanced back down, but the letter was signed only with cryptic initials. “This O.G., whoever he may pretend to be?”

“Opera Ghost,” Raoul supplied, with an upward grimace that was more distaste than any kind of amusement. “I gather the former management used to pay him a so-called salary not to haunt the Opera House. Messieurs André and Firmin received notes from this Ghost too — remarkably detailed ones.”

“But that’s blackmail!”

A grim shrug. “Yes.”

It was not only blackmail. It was, I thought, our money being demanded for this pay-off from the opera: my money, the dowry my father had laid up for my marriage with such loving care.

“And you’re just going to—”

“Of course I’m not!” The anger that lay beneath his weariness flared, and he looked abruptly older; harder, as I had rarely seen him. “I have every intention of making sure that Monsieur O.G.’s demands are roundly rejected. And I’m certainly not going to abandon poor Christine to be tossed around between Carlotta’s whims and—”

“Wait a minute.” I got up and went to set my arms around him, soothing my hands down across the shoulders of his coat. “Ghosts— Carlotta— Christine... Raoul, I think you’d better start again at the beginning.”

But even after I’d managed to calm him and extract a somewhat less disjointed account of the events this morning at the Opera House, following the fruitless search of the night before — events that had veered between farce and menace, with the star soprano threatened, the new patron sent a cryptic warning, and the two managers subjected to demands for money on the back of the production’s success — I was still not very much the wiser as to what, precisely, had been going on.

“And Christine? What was it we heard, you and I, behind that door? What became of her last night?”

But that, it seemed, no-one had been able, or perhaps willing, to tell him.

“I went to her apartment.” A yawn escaped him. At my urging, he had subsided into a high-backed chair beside the fire despite himself. With my own eyes drifting shut, I’d curled up on the footstool against his knees, as Rudi and I had done in Father’s study when we were little, my head pillowed across his sleeve. The hearth was warm, and Raoul’s fingers moved absent-mindedly in my hair.

I thrust back the temptation to doze, and nudged him into wakefulness. “Well? Go on.”

“I couldn’t see her. The maid wouldn’t let me in. Christine was asleep, she said, had come back from the Opera only an hour ago with her friend Miss Giry, and was not to be disturbed. But I spoke to the concierge who saw the two girls come in.” He yawned again. “You know how those women gossip... Christine looked dazed, she said. Not with the air of one who’d danced and drunk the night away, not —thank God— with the air of one taken by violence against her will. Just... dazed, like a sleepwalker roused from a dream, and silent, for all that the little Giry was pelting her with questions nineteen to the dozen.”

Christine Daaé would have a lot of questions to face, I thought, and the assumptions of others who did not even trouble to ask. Carlotta had railed against “that chorus-girl and the Vicomte her lover”; Raoul had not reported her words in terms so crude, but I knew enough of the world to read between the lines. He’d been even more reticent as to how the managers had interpreted Christine’s absence, but I could guess.

There were any number of comments to be passed on young ladies who returned home in broad daylight after a night that had seen no time for slumber. And there would be witticisms —if nothing worse— to be made from the knowledge that Raoul, too, had been absent for those same hours, as every servant in this household could attest. The whispers would have started already about the Swedish singer’s titled conquest, and how she’d slipped away for a night of passion in the arms of the Opera’s new patron... behind the back of his wife.

I put that question to myself in silence, my cheek cushioned against his coat-sleeve, looking up at my husband’s face all taken up with worry over another woman. At the nape of my neck, where wisps of hair had escaped their confinement, his free hand still stirred in an unthinking caress; but it was the same gesture, I knew, with which he might have greeted his father’s rough-haired pointer bitch when she came to lay her head upon his lap.

Romance had never been part of our marriage contracts. And I did not rate my own attractions so high as to believe that my husband, unlike so many others, could never be susceptible elsewhere. All the same, I knew— knew— he would never come to me fresh from Christine Daaé’s tumbled sheets. Whatever had become of the girl, she had not been with Raoul.

Other men might brush off infidelity with a casual falsehood; Raoul de Chagny was both too stubborn, and too honest. If some day his heart betrayed us both, then he would not come back to me at all.

That thought should have been reassurance. It was not.

“Hertha? What is it?” His touch had stilled.

“Nothing. I— I thought of something.” I pulled away and sat up. Inspiration flickered, and I caught at it. “Raoul were you ever— have you ever seen a mesmerist? At a party, perhaps, or a medical demonstration?”

“No. Why?”

“Something you mentioned. It reminded me....” I gathered my skirts and scrambled to my feet. Raoul was regarding me with a confused frown, but at least I had his attention.

“When I was little, in Vienna—” It felt like another world; a world of lamplight on dark panelling, of glass-fronted bookcases and rich brocade, with Mama’s rippling piano music from the room next door and the comfortable buzz of conversation, amid beards and spectacles and brandy and cigars. “My father used to have friends round in the evening. Professors, doctors of medicine, composers, shop-keepers—”

Herr Rosenthal had owned one of the largest emporiums in Vienna. I’d played with his daughter Sophie, both of us half-listening to the grown-ups discussing the latest chemical theories or arguing over foreign politics in a close-knit community taken completely for granted.

“One of them was an eminent lecturer at the Geological Institute. Quite famous in his field, I think. But when he was young, he’d been a great believer in animal magnetism, and he used to argue with my father about clairvoyance and cerebral exhaustion and the rôle of the vital fluid, or something like that. And I remember once, when I was about nine, he asked Mama for permission to mesmerize me to settle the point. He’d already tried with one of his colleagues, and with Gustl who served at table, but he said I was unprejudiced and— and an unusually amenable subject.”

He’d been very kind, and gentle, and explained beforehand exactly what he was going to do, and afterwards he’d slipped me a whole silver thaler for my own. Rudi, indignant, had accused me in private of playing off parlour-tricks for pocket-money, and I’d never been able to convince him that I was quite innocent in the matter; my father had looked at me very hard when I showed him my prize. But all I had done was watch the shiny reflection on the watch-fob held up level with my forehead, just as I’d been told. The rest... had not been me at all.

“And did it? Settle the point, I mean?” Raoul blinked up at me from the chair, clearly bemused by this turn in the conversation.

“I don’t remember. I don’t think so. They went on arguing for years... But, you see, I don’t remember — not really. I know what happened, because they told me afterwards: the practitioner made passes across my face that rendered me unable to open my eyes, or to let fall my arms, until I was given leave. And he handed me a salt-cellar, and told me it would become burning hot, so that presently I had to drop it and blow on my fingers to ease the smart.

“Only, for my part, I knew nothing about it. I went through the motions at his bidding without being in the least aware what was going on, and then like a sleepwalker found myself standing in the middle of the room, confused by the polite patter of applause.

“Just like your Christine, Raoul. Dazed like one roused from a dream, and uncertain what she might have done, or how...”

“That’s ridiculous.” Raoul was seldom sharp with me, but he was tired, and worried, and in no mood for what must seem like whimsical fancy. “Surely you’re not suggesting that Christine Daaé was abducted from the halls of the Opera last night by some charlatan showman intent on giving a display... based on some memory of an episode that happened when you were nine?”

“Of course I’m not suggesting anything of the sort!” He had not referred to it as ‘a hysterical episode’, at least. I could think of all too many men who would have done so. “But you’re not going to deny that you heard something in that dressing-room, just as I did?”

Or maybe he had not, after all — or not as I had. Maybe that note of compulsion called only to those who were weak or vulnerable in some way. Those of us who made for amenable subjects...

I thrust back that idea with a shudder of distaste and another of protest, but I could not help remembering the distant fey look with which Christine had spoken of angels. I’d been duly catechised as a child, and attended the church. Christian doctrine laid down that there were saints in plenty, and some of them might walk the earth in our own days. It said nothing about Angels of Music.

Christine Daaé, I thought, would believe vividly in things one could not see; in the superstitions of all artistes, and perhaps powers that science did not understand. Raoul might attend Mass with unquestioning respect, but he had no faith in any mysteries outside holy books. And I— I did not want to believe in forces that could animate clay, or descry distant scenes in an ink-bowl... yet I had known my own will subjected to that of another, no matter how earnest and scientific a bondage it had been, and felt a tug last night I could not explain.

Raoul was glaring at me in exasperation. “But you’re not going to deny, I hope,” he flung back, “that whatever either of us thought we heard, we neither of us saw anything inside that room? Unless there was a hypnotist hiding within the walls, perhaps?”

“I didn’t mean—” I hadn’t even been thinking of the dressing-room when I’d said it. The whole thing was absurd. I knew it was absurd. “I just— remembered, that was all. Oh, let’s not argue...”

I caught myself twisting my hands in the folds of my skirt; tried to smooth away the marks left by clutching fingers on the fabric, and abandoned the attempt with a helpless gesture. “Please, Raoul—”

“Let’s not argue,” Raoul said quietly, holding out both hands to draw me back down by the fire. I let them wrap around mine in a strong enveloping grasp: long-fingered, uncalloused, beautifully made, hands that were born to handle sword and reins and scrolls, as depicted in a hundred elegant aristocratic portraits up and down the land. Mine were small and tapered, sallow-skinned and unlovely, with the rose-cut diamonds of my wedding band dull in their old-fashioned setting. The ring had been purchased in London generations before for an emigré bride, but to my outsider’s eye it was not an heirloom but merely out of date.

But Raoul’s fingers closed over mine and held them hidden and secure, and on impulse I caught up his hand against my cheek. My husband freed himself gently and put an arm around my shoulders, and I leaned against him with a sigh.

In the corner of the room the long-case clock ticked slow and stately, and coals burned through in the grate with a soft rush and flicker of flame. Outside it was cold grey afternoon, and it would be so easy to shut my eyes and pretend none of this had ever happened...

I sighed again. “What are you going to do? About this O.G. bleeding the Opera House of money, and his demands?”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to bow out meekly the way he seems to expect.” Raoul’s voice had a bitter edge. “I promise you he is going to find it a great deal more difficult to get his own way from now on.”

He hesitated. “And... I’m not going to abandon Christine. Not with a blackmailer sniffing around like this — not when above all she’s going to need friends outside the Opera House, more than ever. Hertha, I can’t, not now. You see that, don’t you?”

I did see. I saw a seventeen-year-old who’d gained a split lip and a swollen eye in defence of a flogged carthorse; I saw a dreamy boy who’d heard the trumpet peal of the opening gates in a long-lost city and did not yet understand. I saw that everything had changed in our lives, and there was nothing I could do.

I bit my lip. “People will... talk.”

“I know.” The edge of bitterness spread; grew harsher and more aware. “I do know. I’m not quite as blind as you take me for. I know very well what they will say— are saying already. Will you believe me, if I say that it’s not true? If I give you my word that, by all the honour I have, it will never be true?”

He did not know, I thought, just what such a promise in the end could cost.

“You don’t have to say that... to me.” It came out as barely a whisper.

“Then let them talk.” His arm around me tightened a little, companionable and very sure. Loosened, with a pat. “And... try to befriend her, for my sake — if you can.”

She’s going to need friends outside the Opera House.... I remembered the red eye-sockets of a waxen skull, and an arrogant letter that bade us cease to interfere. Remembered a door that would not open, and shivers in an empty room I did not understand.

I nodded, slowly, after a moment, and laid my head back against Raoul’s shoulder, and the unthinking comfort of his hold. “I— I’ll try.”