High City on a Hill (Ch4)

[igenlode]

I finally (delayed by typing two longish chapters of Arctic Raoul, and by the fact that it takes a depressingly long time to sit and listen to six thousand words being read out to you in computer tones -- it turns out that during my manual count I managed to pass the 4000 mark *twice*...) finished editing the next chapter of Hertha. Meanwhile someone unsubscribed from the story on AO3...

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Chapter 4 — “She Won’t Thank You For It”

Befriending Christine Daaé was like trying to tame a wild creature, all wide eyes and nervous limbs. I remembered, ruefully, how she had laughed with Raoul; set myself to pay a call or two upon her and draw her out.

Her father had been an accomplished concert violinist who’d performed his own virtuoso compositions before the crowned heads of Europe, and played by request for no fewer than three Emperors: Franz Josef in Vienna, the distant Russian Czar, and Napoleon III who had called himself Emperor of France. But that was a long time ago now, while Christine, of an age with Raoul and myself, had clearly been the daughter of his declining years. The favour of kings was proverbially fickle, and I did not suppose old Daaé’s savings had amounted to much by the time he died.

But Christine still inhabited his little third-floor apartment on the rue Saint-Sulpice, about half an hour’s walk from the Opera. The rooms were not large, but they were spotlessly clean, no doubt thanks to the services of the formidable middle-aged bonne who had opened the door to me with a suspicious look, prepared to defend her mistress’ privacy from the attentions of all and sundry.

For a moment, I had thought I would not be admitted at all.

“Who is it, Lisotte?” Christine’s voice came faintly from within, and Lisotte squinted down at my calling card.

“Madame la Vicomtesse de Chagny,” she reported in dour tones, and I did not think the little gasp I’d overheard from beyond had been entirely a figment of my imagination.

Christine was certainly in a state of consternation when she made her appearance to welcome me in, her hair tumbling down across a loose morning gown in a charming dishabille that betrayed she had clearly not been expecting visitors, but when I demurred and tried to make my apologies she would not hear of it. I must by all means come into the parlour, and Lisotte should fetch us refreshments on the instant, and I would please forgive the sad state of the apartment...

The place was spick and span and neat as a pin, and I could not help but wonder quite what it was that had her so flustered. Surely not the empty formality of a title? Could it be the name of Chagny in itself ... or had Christine too, by any chance, been the recipient of a warning letter from “O.G.”, telling her what she could and could not do?

We did not either of us broach the subject. I made polite enquiries after her health, and received polite social evasions in return beyond which I could not in courtesy persist. A tea-tray arrived from the kitchen, with slices of lemon in delicate painted cups, and a plate of little cakes more feather-light and delicious than any I’d tasted since we’d left Vienna. Christine, flushed at my self-evident pleasure, was eager to press upon me the name of the pastry-cook’s shop from which Lisotte had obtained them, and with a tentative bond established we spoke for a little while of Vienna, and of her father.

She had been there once, she thought, as a tiny child, but she had no memory of it; as I’d surmised, her birth had come in the dying days of her father’s career, when he’d met and married a pretty young girl newly come to the Opéra-Comique in Paris. But her mother’s hopes of success at her famous husband’s side had been cut short by child-bed fever when she had miscarried of a second infant when their daughter was only four years old. Daaé, heartbroken, had abandoned touring and devoted himself to bringing up the little girl. Lisotte, who had been her mother’s dresser at the Opéra-Comique, had taken care of them both.

“He always said I should be a singer like Maman some day,” Christine said softly, glancing up at the heavy portrait that hung on the wall. We were sitting in the parlour, where the front windows looked out over the street, and amid its rose-gold panelling and the pretty feminine touch of all the furnishings the stiffly-posed painting in its rather clumsy frame seemed out of place. But it had been hung to take pride of position, like the faded bouquet of orange-blossom, still tied in its wedding-knots, that lay preserved under its glass cover on the little table that stood beneath, where there was not a speck of dust to be seen.

From within the image, Christine’s father gazed out across the room, grey-haired, benign, with his instrument-case portrayed open on the table behind him and a sheaf of music spilling from similar piles shown all around. But his hand was held out to the lovely laughing girl at his side who had drawn off one glove to show her wedding ring, and her eyes as she looked at him were full of a happiness that took no account of the years that lay between them or of tragedy to come. She was very like her daughter, from the lilt of her lips to the irrepressible curl that had escaped its riband. It must have been bittersweet at best, I thought, for the old man to have watched that likeness grow with every passing year.

“Did he speak of her often?” I prompted politely, and saw Christine, lost in reverie, come to recollection of my presence with an all-too-evident start.

“Oh yes, very often.” Her smile was a little wistful. “I don’t really remember her, you know. Only the stories he used to tell. He said she had one of the sweetest voices he had ever heard, and if she’d lived then some day she would have been recognised as a great star, like Maria Malibran or La Catalani. It was the dream of his heart that I would perform one day in Paris. He spoke of it constantly in his last illness, and told me—”

She faltered suddenly, swallowing whatever she had been going to say, and looked down at her lap. “It was the wish of his heart, and I— I promised.”

“And so you came to the Opera Populaire? You must be very proud—”

“Oh no, Madame.” It was the first time I’d drawn a laugh from her. Her head came up, confident at last on her own ground. “I was still only sixteen when my father died, far too young for any opera company to do more than laugh at me; perhaps, if they were kind enough, to tell me to go away, complete my studies, and apply again when my voice had grown. But I was too proud and obstinate to beg for charity, or to be beholden to anyone.

“There was enough money left after the funeral, when the doctors’ costs were paid, to keep on the apartment, and to pay a little wage to Lisotte, as much as she would consent to accept. I’d practised dancing as a child, with old Mademoiselle Ligieux, when I was little enough to think it romantic to drift across the stage in a cloud of tulle”—another, rueful, laugh—“and I knew enough to get by. So I applied to the Opera Populaire, and managed to get accepted... not as an aspiring opera singer, but as the clumsiest and most often scolded member of the corps de ballet.”

Lisotte had come in quietly to take away the tea-tray, and Christine thanked her with a warm glance that softened the woman’s grim features into affection.

“And she worked hard at it, did Mam’zelle Christine,” Lisotte put in, with an upward jerk of her chin that might have been a toss of the head or an affirmation. “Harder than any of the rest, I’ll be bound, with their cabarets and their friends no better than they should be...”

“Oh, hush.” Whatever liberties Christine might permit between the two of them in private, such talk could scarcely be tolerated in front of a guest. “If I worked hard, it was because it was all I could do to keep up with the others. To tell the truth, I don’t know how it was I kept my place in those first few months; if Meg Giry hadn’t helped cover for me, I’m sure I should have been out on the street...”

Lisotte emitted an expressive sniff, hefted the tea-tray, and departed.

“Lisotte is very loyal,” Christine said on a note of apology. “But Meg Giry’s been a good friend to me — and she’s a born dancer. I never was. All the same, it was worth it just to be in the Opera House and hear great singers, to study them and learn whatever I could. I was bringing in enough to cover the housekeeping, and the other girls were not unkind. Most of them knew I wanted to be a singer, and laughed at me for working on my voice whenever I could. But our ballet mistress —Meg’s mother— always said she didn’t care what we did as long as we learned our steps, attended rehearsals, and didn’t disgrace the Opera on stage.

“I’m afraid her standards were so high that I often did ‘disgrace the Opera’, but I don’t think anyone else noticed. Nobody important ever noticed me at all. That is—” She broke off again abruptly, with a sudden stricken glance as if she’d said more than she’d intended, and I frowned. Had she supposed I would take offence at that as a reference to Raoul?

“I just... went on,” Christine said at last, with an odd quiet dignity. “Hoping and— and waiting, and working hard for when the time should come. Everything was very queer and empty without Father, and for a long time very lonely. We’d always been so close, and taken care of one another for so many years, and in those final months I’d scarcely left his side. I missed him terribly. But I had to practice so hard —‘every hour the Good Lord provides’, as Lisotte would say— that sometimes it seemed there was no time for anything save to eat and then slip exhausted into bed. In the end our old life and all the things we’d shared, Father and I, it all started to seem like a picture in a book, a distant story that might almost have happened to someone else. You know how it is...”

A little helpless gesture that plucked at my own heart; for I did know. Knew how sometimes, when you looked back, the new life seemed cut off by an endless ice-choked river of grief from the old.

A clock chimed somewhere close by in the apartment, in a cascade of rippling notes, and Christine caught her breath in dismay and sprang to her feet. “Forgive me, Madame. I— I must not take up any more of your time. You have calls to make, and people to see, and no doubt a hundred things to do, and here am I chattering away like a silly schoolgirl about things that can be of no conceivable interest. Indeed I did not intend to be so ill-mannered.”

She was right; I did have other calls to pay. But I demurred, and not from politeness alone. Artless her conversation might be —and far from unguarded, for all its candour— but tedious it was not.

Still, I could scarcely force my company on her against her will... and doubtless, it occurred to me ruefully, it was I who should not be detaining my hostess any longer. She had all the cares of a household upon her slim shoulders, and she had borne them unaided since she was sixteen; the old Vicomtesse, trade as she might upon her infirmity, showed no signs of relinquishing the reins in favour of her son’s wife any time soon. It would be years, if ever, before I had any part in the running of the great house that was our home.

Taking up my gloves to make my farewells, I found myself conscious all over again how like a wild thing she was: one frightened, insecure, and desperately uncertain of where it could trust.

“Christine—” The name had slipped out on impulse. I broke off. “I beg your pardon; may I?”

She had flushed, but I thought the look of pleasure genuine. “Please.”

“Christine, then... and you must call me Hertha, if you can.” I held out a hand, hesitant of rebuff, as if to an injured creature that might cower away. “Listen. You have my card. I won’t ask you to suffer through morning-calls at the Hôtel Chagny — but if you are in trouble, if ever you’re in need of aid, don’t hesitate to send it in with a message. Ask for myself, or for the Vicomte Raoul. You don’t have to say anything, not now. Just... believe that I want to help.”

It was a spur of the moment gesture, and I knew it for a futile one almost in the moment it was made. Whatever the web that enmeshed her, the girl might in the end have found courage to reach out to Raoul — if I had not been there to stand between. But she could not turn to another woman’s husband, and there was no reason in the world why she should trust in me.

I would not have done so in her place. Nor could I explain why I found myself of a sudden wishing so much that she might.

Christine stared back at me, mute and frozen, but a shutter had come down behind her eyes. I sighed.

“Pay no heed; I’m being foolish, that’s all. But if ever you find time for a stroll in the Jardin des Plantes, there’s a little café nearby on the corner of the rue des Arènes that I can recommend. The morning air is brisk this time of year, but I walk there quite often, and some day we might happen across one another. I should like that — truly.”

“Perhaps, Madame.” Christine attempted a smile in return, but the words were almost inaudible.

~o~

The skies cleared overnight, and the next morning was bright with sunshine. Perhaps later it would even be hot. But in these days of early autumn the air after breakfast still held a crisp chill, as I’d told Christine, and in the open allées of the Jardin des Plantes I tucked my hands more deeply into my sleeves and wished I had brought my muff.

Raoul had been called away urgently again to the Opera, no doubt to discuss some further development in the blackmail situation, and I had taken myself off for a brisk walk in the hopes that fresh air and exercise would clear my thoughts. But memories of yesterday’s conversation kept intruding, and around every corner I kept expecting to see a forlorn little figure hesitating, even though I knew she would not come.

When I told Christine that I often walked here, it had been no more than the truth. But I was too old now to run down paths in pursuit of shrieking friends and incur disapproval from staid married ladies, or to marvel as we had once done at the beasts in the menagerie. I stepped out briskly and decorously, clasping together gloved hands against the cold, and heard my own footfalls echo back crisply in the morning quiet, with the clamour of the streets left for the moment in the distance far away. I met no-one that I knew, save an old gentleman who tipped his hat to me near the great cedar Jussieu had brought to France so long ago.

As I came back to the rue Linné and the entrance gate there, the warmth of the sun had already begun to take effect, and the burnished sky bade fair to promise a day every bit as hot as I’d thought it might. A girl who was waiting, uncertain, beyond the heavy stone arch, put back her hood on a mass of rich dark hair, and as she turned I saw that it was Christine Daaé.

For a moment there was a look of relief painted clearly across her face despite the strain there. Our eyes met, and when she came quickly towards me I found that I was glad; glad in a way that had nothing to do with fulfilling Raoul’s wishes, and still less with any idea of saving face for my husband in the eyes of the world.

“Christine! I didn’t think that you would come...” I reached out both hands to her, and this time found them caught and held. She was very pale, and in the sunlight I could see a blemish on her face that she had tried to hide with powder. It made her seem even younger.

I tucked her arm firmly into mine, and drew her along beneath the house-fronts in the street. “Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee, and we can talk.”

---

There were things she did not speak of, either then or in conversation later. I did not press her, and in the face of that reticence I could not somehow bring up the subject of what had happened to me on the night of her triumph in “Hannibal”, though the memory of it disquieted me still.

Raoul was often away from me in those days, taken up with the seemingly unending arguments at the Opera House that left him preoccupied and increasingly curt-tempered and disinclined to talk. In the months since our marriage, I had begun to take it for granted that he would always be the one to rely on me more than I on him; I had even prided myself on the unobtrusive skill with which I had learned to manage our lives together.

I’d been foolish, I knew that now. Foolish to forget that he was a man grown and under no tutelage of mine, and all the more foolish to feel so oddly forlorn.

If I had not been thrown back so much upon my own company, I might not have met with Christine as often as I did. We walked together in the Tuileries and the Jardin des Plantes, joined on one occasion by her bright-eyed friend Meg Giry, who was evidently consumed with curiosity but happy to chatter away about backstage gossip, darting sidelong glances at Christine all the while. She clearly knew who I was and could not understand why I should take an interest in either of them, and once or twice I was hard put to it to suppress a smile.

A few days later I took tea again in Christine’s parlour, beneath the fond watchful tyranny of Lisotte, who had seemingly unbent enough to decide I was no direct threat to her mistress. It did occur to me to wonder just what account of that missing night Christine could possibly have provided to her; but I was hardly in any position to ask.

From Christine I learned more of what was going on at the Opera than I did from Raoul, who said little, and that only with reluctance. Doubtless the managers imagined that whatever was discussed in the sanctum of their office could be relied on to remain confidential from the rest of the building, but, as I knew very well from my father’s bank, matters supposedly kept secret at the highest level had a habit of spreading in the form of rumours of astonishing speed and accuracy. In a place with as many chattering tongues as the Opera Populaire —particularly when one of them belonged to Meg Giry, whose mother was rumoured to know more about the whole affair than anyone else, Messieurs Firmin and André included into the bargain— it was scarcely surprising that news of the mysterious notes that continued to arrive had leaked out.

There had been no more to our house, for which I was grateful, as it would have been hard to explain to the old Vicomtesse. There had apparently been several further missives that had arrived by methods of varying orthodoxy into the managers’ office, presuming to dictate —so the opera gossip ran— on matters from the ridiculously trivial and specific all the way up to casting choices for the next production. Since Christine Daaé’s name was involved, often audible from considerable distances where Madame Carlotta Guidicelli was concerned, rumour had naturally taken care that Christine should be thoroughly informed, whether she liked it or not. It was clear to me at least that she would rather have had nothing to do with any of it.

“I don’t care who sings the Countess in ‘Il Muto’,” she burst out in sudden helpless rebellion as we sat in her parlour. She was staring down at the teacup between her hands as if she had never seen it before. “I know the part and I’ll sing it if I have to. But I’m quite happy to play the pageboy — or even one of the confidantes. The pageboy is a good role, even if it’s mute... and it’s always given to a dancer to mime, so it makes much more sense for me to have it. You can make the audience laugh, and they say you can steal all those scenes from the Countess if you try. But I wouldn’t, truly I wouldn’t. All I want is for everyone to leave me alone—”

She broke off and looked up, flushing, as if afraid she had somehow failed as a hostess, and I had to assure her that no suggestion of offence had been taken. But even if it was not I at this moment whom she wished would leave her alone, it occurred to me uncomfortably that she might still have been thinking of Raoul.

She spoke about him a good deal, I’d noticed that, but only in an odd indirect way. Or rather, it was that she did not speak of him at all, but that somehow I seemed to find my own conversation led round to such matters when we were talking together. It was natural enough —after all, he was my husband, and very much involved at present with current events at the Opera, and I’d come to her at least in part to find out what concerned him there— but I’d begun to realise that Christine herself circled around the subject with a reticence that avoided all mention of his name. It was as if he was constantly there in the foreground, but never quite acknowledged.

I was not sure if she was waiting for me to speak of this first, or if she truly thought I was unaware. If anything, I had the impression that she longed to talk of him, and that self-imposed constraint held her back. But I was not going to compel confidences from her, on that topic or any other. On that topic least of all.

I trusted my husband. I did trust my husband... and whatever had passed between the two of them, at the Opera of late or in a long-forgotten past, I did not think he had ever intended any harm by it, or any dishonour. It was only that Christine herself —gentle and unassertive as she was, as no artiste of her talent could afford to be— perhaps Christine might have found it easier to submit than to be championed in any way.

~o~

From Raoul, the next day, I learned that the so-called Ghost had sent an ultimatum, and that our investment was at risk from the blackmailer in what was now open war. It was not just a matter of losing face, but perhaps of losing a great deal of money: money that I had brought to the marriage. Implicit but unspoken between us was the question of whether he should yield, or if it was right to go on.

I knew that all Sûrété involvement had ceased with Christine’s reappearance, and refusal to lodge a complaint; I knew Raoul well enough to guess that he flinched from further embroilment with an officialdom in whose eyes he must appear a meddling young fool. For my own part I had no desire to face a detective’s questioning on what little I could tell, and still less on my private suspicions. If Raoul had not given them credence, then I knew all too well that no stranger would hesitate to ascribe it all to ‘feminine hysteria’, even if Raoul had not.

That rash investment in the Opera had been no more than a gamble from the start, and I’d been ready all along to write it off. It was the idea of what Raoul might find himself up against that troubled me, though I could not have said what we might have to fear. But he had come to me once again as he used to, confided his troubles to me at last, and I could not refuse him my support.

I embraced him and told him I would be at his side for as long as he wanted me, at the Opera or elsewhere, and that by whatever means he could find he should bring the blackmailer to book. As his arms tightened around me in return, I knew from the warmth in my heart it had been the right choice.

For the rest of that week, it rained and I made no further walks, in the Tuileries or elsewhere. Once I did see Christine, but it was only at a distance, on the occasion Raoul took me to see a rehearsal of “Il Muto”. La Carlotta —the soprano Carlotta Guidicelli, instantly recognisable from the wicked imitation I’d seen from Meg Giry— had been centre-stage, thrusting out her considerable chest in argument with the conductor. It was a magnificent snowy bosom, calculated to reduce the rest of us to inadequacy, and she deployed it with all the force of one aware of her best weapons. Christine, also in costume for what was evidently a dress rehearsal, had been waiting patiently for the leading soprano to finish, as silent and attentive as if she were the mute pageboy in truth.

It was supposed to be an impudent rôle to amuse the audience, with a pretty girl in tight-cut coat and breeches designed to leave little to the imagination. Christine filled out the breeches well enough, but she looked tired and weary, with none of the cheeky charm she would need to display on stage. Watching Carlotta storm over trifles, I wondered with some apprehension if all productions were this bad before the opening night.

Monsieur Firmin bustled up, eager to obtain the Vicomte’s opinion on some matter of surpassing triviality, and Raoul, with a glance of apology, left me to observe the rehearsal on my own. It did not seem that very much progress was being made, and presently the novelty of being allowed in at this stage of proceedings had begun to wear off. I got up unobtrusively and went to stretch my legs in the foyer. It was here that, of all people, I found myself accosted by Lisotte.

She was wearing a smartly-buttoned dress that must have been a dozen years out of date, and a nervous, truculent expression, and at first I took her for one of the cleaning women. But the voice was familiar, and with a jolt I placed her in cap and uniform in Christine’s apartment.

“What is it, Lisotte? Were you looking for Miss Daaé? I’m afraid she’s still in rehearsal.”

I’d tried for a bright tone, but it came out sounding foolish. Too late, it dawned on me that the woman doubtless knew her way around backstage better than I did.

“It was M’sieu the Vicomte I wanted, but you’ll do. You’ll do better, perhaps, for they’ll never let me see him, I know that...” She smiled grimly at my expression; I must have been gaping in astonishment. “You tell M’sieu Raoul from me to stop meddling. He made my Mam’zelle Christine unhappy enough back when she was a child, and he’s not to do it again.”

The words held the rough familiarity of a nursemaid or one of the Vicomte’s old servants, and I caught my breath, suddenly certain that Lisotte knew the things I could not ask. “You — you were there?”

Raoul had not seen it as unhappy. He had looked back on those days with delight; the memory of it was vivid in my mind, along with the other memories I carried.

“It was my sister Agnes they stayed with, Mam’zelle Christine and her poor sainted father, after that bad bout they had with la coqueluche.” She caught the incomprehension in my eyes, and mimed a cough like a cock’s crow, with long whooping gasps. “All pulled down they were, and the doctors do say the best thing for it is good country air. So I wrote off to my sister Agnes who kept a boarding-house down by Montpellier....”

Old Daaé, exhausted by illness, had taken to his bed on arrival, and it had been a week or two before he had the strength to do more than sit in the garden and watch the dappled light on the tamarisks and the distant blue gleam of the sea beneath the southern sun. Agnes had been run off her feet and taken up by the needs of her illustrious guest, and young Christine, already convalescent, had been sent out of the house each morning with instructions to take long, healthy walks, inhale the sea air, and dive into the bushes or round a corner if she should feel a fit of public whooping coming on. It was May, and the weather was already warm, but Agnes had insisted that the girl should not go out without a length of red flannel wrapped around her throat. It was a remedy well known to be sovereign in the case of colds and all kinds of ailments, and Christine, chafing at the restriction, had obeyed.

But one day she had come home with the flannel all sticky with salt and the explanation that she had been down on the sea-front and the sun had been too hot, and the moment she had unwound her scarf the wind had snatched it away. Fortunately a very nice boy had chased after it and gone right into the water to fetch it back... and here he was, she had brought him back because he was all wet, and could he have some tea?

Agnes was not at all approving of young ladies who brought home ragamuffins. But the boy, however bedraggled, was well-spoken and polite, and his clothes, when she stripped them from him with a firm hand and sent him down to tea wrapped in a blanket, proved, although ruined with sea-water, to be of excellent quality. She unbent a little, and consented to lend him one of the gardener’s old suits.

Nobody, observing that scarecrow figure trotting down the road a little later, would have recognised the fair-haired boy in the rolled-up trousers as the heir to the Vicomte de Chagny. The Vicomte, a distinguished elderly gentleman, had come with his invalid wife to take the air in the famously salubrious vicinity of Montpellier, but he and Agnes did not circulate in the same social circles.

Her weekly letters to her sister were soon full of the doings of Christine and young ‘Master Raoul’, who had become a regular visitor and a firm favourite of Christine’s father, to whose stories he would listen entranced. That boy was a sad scamp and no mistake, Agnes confided, but then Miss Christine led him a regular wild dance, and she, Agnes, couldn’t be keeping an eye on what the two of them got up to every hour of the day. If truth be told it was as well the girl had found her own amusements, for her poor Pa was still ailing, and Agnes did not think him at all well...

When the Vicomtesse de Chagny discovered at long last — her attention being spared for a moment from the ever-absorbing subject of her own ailments — that her son, left to his own devices, had not only been frequenting a house of illness, but had been allowed to strike up an acquaintance with a coughing child when she was doubtless still infectious, the storm had descended. Upon Raoul, upon Christine, and above all upon Agnes, who had never heard her establishment so traduced in her life. Anyone would suppose, as she wrote indignantly to Lisotte, that she had been running a pest-house. The Chagny household’s departure had been hastened forward, and Raoul whisked away.

Christine, who had spent the summer in a whirl of barely-awakening dreams she had not acknowledged to Raoul, still less to herself, was left disconsolate, to face her father’s questions and Agnes’ grim silence. Yes, she had known who Raoul’s family were. No, not at first. She hadn’t said anything because it hadn’t seemed important. They had had fun together, that was all. She missed him. She was lonely. Please could they go home?

So she had come home and buried her face in Lisotte’s bosom and poured out the whole. And Raoul... Raoul, I thought, had borne the memories of that summer carried close for year upon year, until they had faded to little more than a lost fairy-tale, and the magic that clung there still had become the last thing that must be put away before he could take up the duties of a man. Before he could marry me.

I had wondered, and now I knew... Well, he had married me. And none of us were children any longer.

“Forgive me, Lisotte”—I drew myself up with all the dignity afforded by that wedding ring—“but I fail to see how my husband can be held accountable for these childhood stories... and still less how they are relevant to his current involvement with this Opera House. If there is any specific request you would like the Vicomte to make of the management—”

“He means well, I don’t doubt,” Lisotte conceded, with the air of one making allowances. “And you mean well too, Madame, I dare say. It’s not my place to stir up trouble between man and wife. But Mam’zelle Christine was happy, happy as she’s ever been since her Pa died, may the Blessed Virgin rest his soul, before that night she sang in ‘Hannibal’ and the two of you started in with your promises. And she’s never been the same since.”

“She’s... frightened, I know that,” I said slowly, feeling my way. Closing my eyes to other implications. “Frightened... of something she can’t talk about, not to me, and maybe not to you either?”

Stubborn silence, which I chose to take for assent.

“Lisotte, please — my husband and I, we... we heard something that night, the night she disappeared. Something I can’t explain, that haunts me still. Has she ever said— ever told you anything at all about what happened, in those hours before she came home? Where she was... where she went?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say, Madame.” Her face had closed down to a deferential expressionless blank, and I did not know if she was shielding her mistress’s privacy or if she, too, had been left to wonder. Whatever she might guess, she had made it clear I had no right to intrude.

In the distance doors closed, and I caught the sound of Raoul’s voice mingled with those of the managers. He would be looking for me. I turned to leave, glancing back for a moment at Lisotte.

“Very well, then. Unless you have some specific request you wish to convey to my husband — something that will help?”

My tone was sharp, and I had not expected a response, but Lisotte, planted stolid and incongruous amid the foyer’s echoing marble expanse, stared back without a flinch.

“Just leave her be. Don’t take up arms in a fight that has her caught in the middle. Don’t turn her life upside-down and expect her to thank you for it. She doesn’t need his kindness, nor yet his help. Tell him that, Madame de Chagny. Tell that to your husband.”

As I crossed the foyer I could feel her eyes on me every step of the way, and the dignified exit I’d intended felt more like a retreat.