High City on a Hill (Ch5)

[igenlode]

Unusually I ended up deleting several sentences from this chapter altogether rather than editing them, because I decided they were just unnecessary -- I remember thinking that the subtext in the chapter was very clever at the time, but it may have been a little too clever for its own good, because after a year or so's delay I can no longer remember myself exactly what all the characters were supposed to be assuming respectively about what was going on :-(

I note that Meg somehow turns up in the corps de ballet after the quick scene change despite supposedly being dressed for a walk-on part (did she execute an incredibly quick change into block shoes and tutu?) -- I suspect that's left over from the movie, where Meg is in the cast but *not*, so far as I remember, in the Act 3 ballet, and possibly I ought to change either the one reference or the other... The trouble is that I'm reluctant to lose either, which is simply authorial laziness!

[Edit: time for some more cuts, I think, to make credible Hertha's momentary assumption that Christine is talking about Raoul when she says 'he' will never let her go -- and to omit the whole paragraph about Raoul looking relieved to have their embrace interrupted. We've already got Hertha saying that he basically looked trapped rather than guilty, and it makes more sense of her assumption that Christine is running away from her as a result.

Edit: no, we need something in there, or it makes no sense that Hertha accepts his protective behaviour at the end of the chapter without feeling betrayed by it.]

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Chapter 5 — “An Accident... Simply an Accident”

It was another opening night. Another glittering, chattering crowd, with the orchestra playing a well-worn warhorse of an overture: Albrizzio’s “Il Muto” had been a staple feature at opera houses across Europe for over eighty years, since the days when Italian opera reigned supreme. The new management was playing it safe in their choice of programme, and to judge by the packed house tonight it had been a prudent decision. I could see Messieurs André and Firmin in their box across the grand circle, toasting one another in opening-night champagne and clearly congratulating themselves on the numbers in which the beau monde had turned out tonight. The champagne had evidently been open for some time, for they looked very merry already, and I was grateful that we were not obliged to share a box with them. No doubt Gilles André’s indiscreet tongue would be running nineteen to the dozen at our expense, but at least I should not have to endure his compliments and his speculative gaze.

Raoul was looking very handsome tonight, if a trifle distant. He’d acquired a new maturity in the course of the long weeks since we’d last sat together in an opera box, weeks of wrangles and responsibility that had left their mark. The last of the youthful roundness was gone from his cheeks, and there was a new decisive set to his mouth that echoed the strong bones of his face and the little angle between temple and jaw.

I reached out to take his hand where it lay upon his knee, feeling the tension there. He was still on edge about the whole Box 5 business; less, I thought, regarding any threat to our safety from the Opera Ghost, who had apparently demanded that it be left vacant, than from the jocular comments with which the managers had seen fit to grace us as we parted to take up our respective seats.

They had taken it for granted, no doubt, that the Vicomte would be once again on display in their own box, the illustrious patron lending his presence to demonstrate his seal of support. But when I’d realised the prospect in store for us I had put my foot down in no uncertain terms, and Raoul had sent one of the footmen round to the Opera House to see if a separate box could be obtained at the last minute. The man had come back, triumphant, with the news that he had managed to secure the very last box in the house for the use of Monsieur and Madame, contriving to overcome the opposition of staff who had been most reluctant to sell. The view was excellent, and we should have no cause for complaint. Indeed, it was one of the best locations to be had: Nº 5, on the grand circle.

I had not realised, or had forgotten, the significance of that number. Raoul’s sharp intake of breath warned me something was wrong. But he’d received the news with a courteous word of thanks, and sent the man from the room with a smile and a chink of coin for trouble taken.

Afterwards and in private, he’d mentioned the Ghost’s further decree to the management that Box Nº 5 should not be sold, but reserved —in addition to the 20,000 francs of ‘salary’ to be paid as protection money against unfortunate accidents— at all times for the Ghost’s personal use. The twenty thousand had not been paid, but the box, a small matter in comparison, had hitherto been kept empty for the pleasure of its spectral occupant. If Raoul and I were to occupy it tonight, further threats would undoubtedly result. It was just possible, Raoul said quietly, that we might face more tangible consequences.

I’d looked up at him, searching his face for answers. “Has he ever actually done anything? Beyond threats and poison-pen letters?”

“Nothing that can be proved. The usual backstage accidents, all of them put down to the resident ghost — our phantom friend scarcely needs to lift a finger on his own account to terrorize the place.” A laugh, but a grim one with little humour. “Maybe it’s time to call his bluff. Are you game for it, Hertha? Do we take the last available box, or do we play it safe and spend the evening with my colleagues the managers?”

“Be sensible, you mean? My speciality...” That sally drew a real grin from him, however reluctant, and caught up on the sudden impulse of his warmth I’d pressed on. “Not this time. I don’t see why we should be scared off — do you?”

And so here we were, seated firmly in the prohibited box and waiting to see whether its would-be inmate was prepared to do anything about it. I’d already been subjected to some heavy-handed chaffing from Monsieur André on my supposed determination to adhere to my wayward husband’s side, accompanied by an arch reprimand to Raoul for taking such a delightful little lady into danger; it was not a form of address that endeared him any further to either of us, but in an odd sort of way it had been reassuring. Whatever might go on backstage or behind closed doors, life at the Opera continued in all its jocular banality out here just as it did elsewhere.

I reached for Raoul’s hand again, and this time felt his fingers tighten around mine in response. The curtain was going up.

~o~

Even in its heyday, the humour of Albrizzio’s Rococo comedy could scarcely have been considered subtle. The plot of “Il Muto” ran on well-worn lines, featuring the faithless Countess (Carlotta, in a preposterous powdered wig that had been the height of fashion back in the age of our great-grandfathers), her gouty and lecherous old spouse, an assorted cast of attendants all out to curry favour with either husband or wife, and the eponymous mute page played by Christine, a cheeky young scamp who puts on girl’s clothing and in his/her dual guise contrives by the end of the second act to seduce both the Countess and old Don Attilio, and to play them off against one another until he is discovered and sent off to sea in the final trio, to the accompaniment of lofty moral sentiments from the Countess, her husband, and her chief confidante. As if to compensate for the voiceless role of Serafimo, the principal soprano had a great deal to sing, in arias and cabalettas as highly decorated as the laced and beribboned drapes that cascaded across the stiff panniers of her skirt. To judge by what I’d heard in rehearsal, Carlotta had every intention of outshining the rest of the cast, and demonstrating to the unspeakable Ghost and anyone else who might try to have her replaced that she was very much a force to be reckoned with.

Despite her vocal talents, however, she was either not a gifted actress or did not care. For most of the opening scene the Countess could be seen directing a poisonous glare in the direction of Christine’s Serafimo, with whom she was supposed to be conducting a passionate illicit affair. Christine, doing her best to respond with coquetry as her role demanded, had evidently decided to try to ignore her co-star’s unprofessional attitude, but for all the flourishes of notes being flung around, “Il Muto” was off to a bad start. Little Meg Giry —currently figuring in a walk-on part as a maid in attendance on the Countess’s jeweller, with her curls peeping out from beneath a mob-cap, a casket clasped to her bosom, and her wide eyes busy observing the onstage drama— Meg, I thought, would have a fresh stock of tales to tell the next time the gossip began...

Of those last moments of relative normality I remember only my own impulse of well-meaning concern towards Christine’s situation, caught as she was in the spotlight of Carlotta’s enmity. It did not even occur to me that Christine might be in a far worse predicament off-stage, and that incipient disaster hung over us all.

“Did I not order that Box Five be kept empty?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, crashing out with brute force over the rippling semi-quavers cascading at that moment from Carlotta’s throat. Someone on stage —it might have been Meg— screamed that the theatre was haunted, and Christine cried out. Carlotta turned on her, whip-sharp, clearly rattled herself; she was one of those women who admit to fear only in the form of bad temper. “Your part is silent — little toad!”

Her voice carried, disastrously. Raoul, beside me, had jumped to his feet when the first interruption came, and I heard his hiss of breath. I flinched myself, both for Christine and for Carlotta exposed in all her spite. And the Ghost — the Ghost chose to amuse himself with Carlotta’s lapse by holding the proud diva up to ridicule in front of the public whose adulation she craved so much.

Despite all that came after, despite terror, death and destruction, people still speak of it as “the night when Carlotta croaked”. She will never sing the Countess again, and they say Signor Piangi would not allow the words “Il Muto” to be uttered in her presence; it would take weeks of cosseting and coaxing before she could be induced to venture her voice on stage once more, and her old arrogance, when it returned, would take on a vicious, defensive note, as if to revenge herself on a world that had somehow conspired in her humiliation.

She had courage, that woman. She did not yield her limelight easily, or without a struggle, and it made the spectacle all the more painful to bear. The Ghost’s interruption had brought the performance to a halt in disarray, and it was Carlotta —Carlotta, who had endured claques and cat-calls in her day from the famously partisan audiences of her native Italy— who commanded the conductor to recommence the scene, while the managers wrung their hands in indecision and a buzz of speculation had begun to arise from the stalls.

Her voice was not, perhaps, as effortless and well-articulated as before; it was certainly much louder, as if she were daring any interloper to drown her out. But the hideous croak that resounded from the direction of the stage was so unexpected as to leave the singer herself completely aghast.

I’d been the despair of enough music-masters in my youth —and overheard more than enough eminent professors arguing, back in our apartments on the Praterstraße— to have an idea how much of a singer’s technique is in the mind. The whole process of resonance, projection and support depends on muscles that are, for most of us, outside our conscious control and must be manipulated by imagination and superstition. It is a confidence trick, but one played not upon the audience but on the performer... and for an opera singer, who must perform well beyond the normal limits of the human voice, a single slip to either side of the tightrope of positioning means that all is lost.

Destroy that confidence, and you destroy the voice. Carlotta had pulled herself together enough to restart the phrase, and though she had traduced my husband and my marriage I found myself willing her on.

She managed only half a dozen notes before another croak burst out, and then another, until she was sobbing and could endure no more. But worse than the spectacle of Carlotta’s disintegration was the sound of laughter —out-of-control, insane laughter— rising in peals from the empty air all around.

I turned to Raoul and found him gone, and the managers’ box likewise empty. Above the stalls the lights in the great chandelier seemed to flicker and sway, as if to echo that ghastly mirth, and all on stage was chaos.

There would be no choice now. I could see that. Christine would have to be put in to take over the role of Countess —already she was being hustled towards the wings, bewildered and staring transfixed like a vole in the gaze of a stoat— some other girl would fill Serafimo’s breeches and pout her way around the stage, and the Ghost would get what he wanted. Gossip might sell tickets, but no enterprise could withstand being made a laughing stock. Here came Monsieur Firmin now out onto the front of the stage to announce the cast change, and to beg patience from the audience for the necessary delay, which would be covered by bringing forward the third-act ballet...

Would they stand for it? It would be very expensive to refund a full house. But I thought they would; already the buzz of the audience had begun to subside from outrage and alarm to grumbles and calls for hush as a sylvan backdrop wobbled down, and the first ballet girls danced out, displaying rounded limbs amid garlands of flowers. At least that dreadful laughter had stopped — and soon enough, I told myself, most of them would have convinced themselves what they’d heard had been no more than taunting from some rowdy element up in the gallery.

The Ghost had got his way, and no doubt he would get his pay-off; the managers would be tearing their hair out tonight. He had nothing to gain from further disruption. And so far as I was concerned, he was more than welcome to Box 5. I retrieved my fan from the seat beside me, and went to find Raoul.

~o~

I thought it was all over. And so, by rights and according to common sense, it should have been. Christine could have told me otherwise — poor, hunted Christine! But in all my magnanimity towards her and my patronising kindness, I had not listened enough to her silences to understand how very real her fear might be.

The pass-door was unattended, and in all the chaos and with Raoul’s name as my passport I was able to slip backstage and find my way into the wings, which, I was assured in passing by a harassed wardrobe-mistress, was where the Vicomte was to be found. There seemed to be a great number of people standing around gossiping in whispers, and up ahead I could hear the unmistakable sound of argument between the managers being conducted likewise under their breath, presumably in deference to the open stage curtains and the ongoing ballet beyond.

No doubt Raoul was also party to that discussion — or, more likely, had provoked it. Smiling a little, I spared a moment to peep out at the dancing. I’d never seen it from this angle before, so close that you could feel the scrape and thump of the girls’ shoes on the boards at every bound through the air, and overhear every intake of breath...

An audible gasp. It was Meg, Christine’s friend, dancing at the end of the line. She had missed her step, and was staring upwards, abruptly ashen beneath the tinted lights, as if frozen in the face of some onrushing horror.

A shadow fell across the stage, like the passing of a devil’s wings — plummeted, jerking and bloated, in front of my eyes, its face darkened and tongue protruding between unshaven jaws. Girls scrambled away on either side, screaming, as the swaying thing swung above the stage, dancing its horrible strangled parody at the end of the rope.

I’d never seen a man lynched to death. Never watched his body void itself beneath sightless distended eyes, while the rope that was his livelihood brought him up brutally short, entwined in betrayal around his neck.

It was one of the stagehands fallen from overhead, I understood somehow through the distant fog that seemed to threaten my senses. An accident. A horrible accident... Someone — not Firmin or André — was yelling for God’s sake to get him cut down. Someone else was cursing and trying to close the curtains. Everywhere there were shrieks and sobs of hysteria. And the dead man’s bulging eyes glared and twisted, glared and twisted, as the rope swayed him back and forth, barely a stone’s throw from where I stood helpless and could not turn away.

I did not scream; in that moment I do not know if I could have made a sound. Despite all the hubbub, everything around me seemed oddly muffled and still. Only Christine’s voice carried, in a single word as heartfelt and direct as a child.

“Raoul— Raoul!”

And with his name the fog parted, and I could step forward again, into the world of colours and sensations and warmth; step forward, and see them there, the two of them together on the stage. Raoul’s arms had come around her, and she had buried her face in his coat, clinging against him for refuge without question or thought. It was an instant’s bright perfect image, like two halves of a severed whole.

Then Raoul turned, and I saw his face. Saw the frozen helplessness of his expression, in that instant before he knew I was there.

“Hertha—” It was a note almost of relief. He shifted his grip on the girl in his embrace; began to hold out a hand. Christine’s head came up in a sudden, stricken movement, as if to shy away. She tore herself free from his clasp, staring at me. Then, with a sob, she ducked aside and turned and fled.

I went after her. I could not face Raoul with the unspoken echo between us of accusations I would not make.

The worst of it was that I knew he’d meant no betrayal, nor committed any. Neither of them had. It was not tenderness I’d read there in his face when she came to him for shelter. It was the stark knowledge that it was impossible.

Breath hitched in my throat. “Wait, Christine! Christine—”

She did not so much as turn, and I could not tell if it was my intrusion or remembered horrors that drove her on. Coarse cotton wrappers hung backstage, provided to protect the performers’ costumes as they left the scene. I caught one up to cover my evening dress and plunged in pursuit, past old hangings and dusty flats and up breakneck stairs, with only the sound of Christine’s feet up ahead and a glimpse or two of her skirts to guide me.

I’d expected her to bolt for some corner close by to sob her heart out. As we went up, and up, and I found myself lost in a labyrinth of boarded corridors and long-deserted attics, I knew what a fool I’d been.

“Christine— please—” It came out as little more than a gasp. I dared not lose sight of her now, but I had no wish to persecute her further. “Please stop— and we can talk—”

I could hear her sobbing gasps, and somewhere below us, equally breathless, Raoul’s voice calling. But she paid no heed.

One more corner, and the ring of a heavy door flung back, and suddenly she was stumbling out onto what had to be the roof itself: wide leads and parapets, and all Paris below and beyond. Christine whirled round, saw me, and went straight for the edge, her face blind and ashen-white.

I had not thought I had any breath left in me, but sheer panic lent me the strength to overhaul her in a few strides. I got my arms around her by main force, dragging her back. She fought wildly for a moment or two, then collapsed, so hysterical that I could barely hold her.

Angry, frightened, and at a loss, I tried to turn her face up to mine. “Christine, listen. I understand—”

“You don’t — you have no idea. None of you have any idea, not— not the Vicomte, not Meg, not her mother who warned what would happen if Buquet talked—”

“Buquet?” Firm footing seemed to slip away from under me all of a sudden, and I understood nothing, save that I clearly did not understand at all. I’d thought I was the ogre to be feared: the wife who had witnessed what she should not. I had absolutely no idea who Buquet might be, or what he had done.

“Joseph Buquet saw him, and now he’s dead. He killed him. He murdered Buquet, right there on the stage, and he’ll kill and kill again. I’ve seen him, Hertha”—it was the first time she had ever used my name, though I’d asked it of her, and her fingers clutched at me with a desperation that hurt—“I’ve seen him, and I’ll never escape. He’ll never give up, never relent, and I’ll never be free as long as I live. Those eyes... that face — that face...”

“Wait.” A chill wind blew across the city, and I released Christine to wrap my arms around myself with a shiver. My head was still reeling, but there were some things I could not believe. “Wait. He... this is not Raoul we’re talking about.”

A moment’s blank silence.

“No, oh no.” She had begun to laugh in sobbing shallow gasps, true laughter this time despite the edge of hysteria. “No, no, no, never him. He’d save me if he could, if he knew. If only... Just to have him here in the Opera has been a glimpse of sanity, of life beyond the darkness. Like a beacon of hope that shines with everything that’s bright. Forgive me—”

She could not know why I’d flinched from the echo reflected in her words; the echo of the image that had haunted me so long. Not, after all, the fabled city of music and banners, high above the mists, but a lone beleaguered hill, watching and waiting for a glint of light from a rider’s pennon borne amidst the forests below.

I managed a smile. “There’s nothing to forgive. Raoul does... he does shine.”

It seemed to me her face was less ashen than before beneath the stage-paint; I was aware at least of the heat that had risen to my own. At any rate, I told myself, she was no longer in the grip of blind unreason.

“Christine, what is it — who is it you’re so afraid of? Is there nothing Raoul or I can do to help? I saw that man —Buquet?— who died on the stage, and it was horrible. But it was an accident.”

“No. It wasn’t.” Christine’s face was set. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone, because they wouldn’t believe me. Even Lisotte... she’d wrap me in her arms, tell me it was all a dream, cradle me and cuddle me and try to soothe it all away. But I lie awake in the dark, and I see those eyes, burning eyes, just as they were that night. I feel hands of ice that come to drag me down— down, down, down...”

A shiver overtook her, and then another, and the wind around us seemed to moan her name. Almost without thinking I reached out to her again, and we clung together for warmth. She was trembling from head to foot and I tried to hush her, but she went on, her voice rising over mine.

“Once I heard his music and was enchanted by angel-voices, but now I know the truth... yet I hear him still. The very walls of this place seem to breathe his voice, terrible, pitiful, with a power to compel — oh, you think I’m raving, but it’s real, I swear it, real—”

A power to compel... I’d bitten back an exclamation as she spoke, but it was not one of disbelief.

“That night...” The words escaped me almost against my will. “That night after ‘Hannibal’, when first we met— is that what happened? Is that what you heard, just such a voice? Because I— I think I heard it too...”

Christine jerked back and stared at me, not eager as I’d imagined but utterly aghast. And then her head came down on my shoulder in a storm of tears that wracked us both, but seemed to bring her some relief, and Raoul’s voice on the stair was calling my name.

The door to the roof crashed back as he came through it almost without a pause and stopped abruptly short — whatever he’d expected or feared to find, it had not been this. Then I felt the warmth of his coat laid around my shoulders from behind as I held her, and his arms came about us both on a long outrush of breath.

We stood there together for a long moment, motionless all three save for Christine’s almost soundless sobs. She did not look up. But she turned her head aside into Raoul’s sleeve, and one of his hands came up to brush softly against her hair in comfort.

Below us the lights of the city shone in gathering dusk, and the cold wind stirred. I was conscious of Raoul’s heartbeat, slowing now from its urgency, and the rough woollen weight and enveloping scent of his coat over the stage wrap I’d caught up so hurriedly, in what seemed such a long time ago.

“Raoul. There’s something you ought to know.” Ill-judged words; I bit my lip to hasten on before the sudden, unwelcome jolt of tension between us could bring misunderstanding.

“I think — I think Christine Daaé must have met face to face with our Opera Ghost.”

A moment of absolute silence. Christine, in my arms, had stilled beneath his touch. Raoul’s stillness now was of a different kind, focussed and intent.

He released me and took a step back to meet my eyes, his gaze going from Christine’s pale features to mine and then back again. I felt Christine tremble and pulled Raoul’s coat more closely about us both, but her head had come up almost in challenge and she did not look away.

“It was beautiful at first. Like a dream — a dream come true.” It was an appeal for understanding, not to the Vicomte, nor to the young man who was my husband, but to the childhood playmate she’d known. “And now there’s no escape, and I’m afraid... so afraid.”

“We’ll find a way through this,” Raoul said quietly. “I won’t abandon you, I promise. Whatever it is, we’ll find a way.”

He caught a breath; caught back something raw and intimate, so completely that perhaps only I would ever have known it. His voice was steady. “Christine... we’ve barely spoken to each other since I’ve been at the Opera. You know that. You know I had no choice. But if ever you trusted me, I need you to tell me the whole thing now. Right from the start.”

I felt, rather than saw, Christine’s quick upward glance at me, and nodded. “Please.”