I'm frankly not sure if Raoul is coming across as a complete idiot for not working out what Perrette is talking about, or if the reader is going to be equally mystified by it — the intention was supposed to be that the reader gets it and Raoul perhaps understandably doesn't :-(

Chick nor Child

Raoul has an encounter with Philippe's past, and Perrette faces the future: side-stories from The Sons of Éléonore".

Ch1 — Strange Meeting

The local diligence was slow, ancient and crowded, the old man next to him smelled strongly of garlic, and the good-looking motherly woman and her daughter sitting together opposite kept exchanging whispered confidences and giggling in a way that made Raoul acutely uncomfortable.

He had, of course, no business to be in the common stagecoach in the first place. His trunks for the Naval Academy at Brest had been strapped up and sent off already, and his brother Count Philippe had been expecting— indeed eager— to drive into the station with him this morning, in one of the family’s own well-appointed, well-sprung vehicles, so that they could make their final goodbyes there on the platform. But Raoul was fifteen now and almost a man, and he had stood upon his dignity and insisted that he could undertake this journey all by himself... and the Count had laughed, embraced him, and let him go.

It occurred to him belatedly now, as he shifted yet again on the poorly-upholstered seat, that his brother’s amusement had doubtless stemmed from a shrewd idea of precisely the discomforts that awaited him on any such adventure. So much the better. Raoul set his teeth and endured, defiant. At least it had not crossed Philippe’s mind to question for one moment his actual destination...

He was not, precisely, running away from home. And he had every intention of arriving in Brest — eventually. But free from well-meaning tutelage at last, he had seized with both hands upon this chance for escape.

After that one enchanted summer, they had not let him go back to Perros-Guirec. Christine and her father lived with the old Professor in Paris, he knew, but perhaps they still came down each year to hire that old house by the sea, and spin music out of thin air with the aid of fiddle-strings and a sweet childish voice.

His own voice had slipped abruptly lower this past few months, cracking between octaves in a way that brought him far more embarrassment than pride, and Count Philippe had clapped him on the shoulder last night and told his valet to pack the boy an entirely unnecessary set of razors. Christine was his own age. If she were there in Perros now, she would not be a child any more.

He tried to picture the little girl he had known transformed into a prim young lady, but could not. She had had long fair plaits, and she had liked to tug on them when she was listening hard; he could see her again now curled up on the doorstep of some ancient Breton goodwife, with the day’s clean pinafore tucked neatly round her knees, and the fingers of one hand twining through the end of her braid as she sat transfixed by the old woman’s tales.

She’d had one plait pulled down quite straight by the side of her face the last time he’d seen her, when they were saying goodbye. It had been the end of summer, and Raoul had been summoned home to his sisters’ joint wedding, a very grand affair indeed. Christine and her father were leaving Perros in any case, returning to Paris with kind old Professor Valerius and his wife, and she was worried about her father, who had become ill of late, and who was always, she said, unhappy in Paris.

The Christine Daaé he remembered had never had the china-doll prettiness of little girls in picture books, but when she smiled her face lit up. On that day she had been crying before they met, and her eyes were swollen and her nose very pink.

“I’ll come back next summer and we’ll see each other again,” Raoul had insisted, trying to comfort her. “It will all be just as good as before. We’ll go up on the moor and— and maybe I’ll even see the korrigans.”

The korrigans were all in Christine’s imagination, he was almost sure of it, but there was a chance... and at that moment he would have said anything to make Christine less miserable.

“You promise?” Christine had been tugging on her hair so hard he thought it must hurt, eyes on his with almost fierce intensity. “Promise, Raoul?”

“Word of a gentleman.” That got a laugh out of her at last, but Raoul had meant every syllable of it all the same. “I promise.”

Only he had not come back. Tante Marguerite had been old, and tired, and snappish, and it had been quite out of the question, she announced, for her to make the long trip north again to Lannion just so the boy could run off on his own and spend all his time at the seaside. There was a perfectly good harbour here at their very doorstep, and that new tutor of his could teach him to row...

And he could not tell her that he had promised —that he had more than promised— that sea and ships and all the interests of a growing boy meant nothing at all beside the knowledge that a little girl and her father were waiting for him, and he would not be there.

Christine must have known it had not been his fault. She would have understood. She must have.

What would she think if he came to Perros now? Would she scorn him as a little boy seeking the lost sweets of childhood? He did not know himself what it was he hoped for. But he had this chance, this one chance of freedom to travel on his own and do as he pleased, and he was not going to go meekly down to his training ship and sign on board without so much as a backward glance.

He had been packed off this last June like a parcel with his tutor to spend the summer at Chagny, where Philippe had paid off Mr Jackson. Raoul had been sorry to see the young Englishman go, for they had been good friends and the young tutor’s cheerful company had been, at times, all that made the last few years bearable — but with the other cadets he would be entering a very different schoolroom now. And this year for once he had begun to feel himself an equal and a companion to Count Philippe, and not a mere baby brother and encumbrance. They had sat together over their wine after dinner or ridden out to inspect the tenants’ repairs, and the Count had brought down their father’s old genealogy books and traced every last quartering in the family coat of arms, and the marriages that, one by one, had brought rich lands into that estate.

When he was older he, Raoul, would have to make a suitable marriage some day. It was his duty to the family, just as when he went to sea it would be his duty to obey his captain and the senior officers... but he had already promised himself he would not take mistresses as other men did. No, he would love his wife, and they would live together and be true to one another— whoever she might be. Philippe would find someone for him, or perhaps Philippe’s wife... though it had begun to seem that the Count was not ever going to marry.

He had tried to tell Philippe of his virtuous resolutions, one evening when they had discussed current affairs and the nature of duty. Raoul’s cheeks still burned, remembering it.

He had thought his brother would be pleased. It had been a noble and a faithful vow to do just as he ought. But the Count had simply laughed, and sent Raoul off to bed with a pat on the shoulder as if he had been no more than twelve.

It was in that humiliating moment that the idea had come to him. He would prove his own independence, and he would go back to Perros-Guirec without Philippe’s knowledge and without his permission. It would be quite easy.

And it had been easy. He’d packed up the one small bag that held all he would need for the journey, got one of the grooms to set him down on the high road, set off at a brisk walk in the opposite direction to the railway station and simply had himself picked up by the local diligence half an hour later when it came lumbering past.

He had grown somewhat over the summer, though not enough for his own satisfaction, and his new clothes had all been sent off to Brest, so that his wrists jutted out a little from the cuffs of his coat. But that was all for the best; no-one on this journey would guess who he was, or where he was meant to be. And if his errand to Perros proved fruitless, as in his heart of hearts he knew it very well might, he would not have to admit to the folly of the act.

The heavy coach, travelling uphill, had slowed to a crawl. Raoul wondered if he and the other male passengers might be asked at any moment to descend and assist the horses, as he had read in his childhood stories that travellers had once been required to do. But the old man next to him on the bench clearly had no such concerns. Not content with periodic gusts of garlic-soaked breath, he was in the process of extracting a large and even more odorous sausage from within some inner pocket of his jacket, and preparing to carve off chunks with a decidedly grimy clasp-knife. He broke off for a moment to dust at it with a handkerchief that had clearly seen better days, and Raoul, unable to look away, found himself caught between a shrinking fascination and the awareness, entirely against his will, that it had, after all, been a long time since breakfast, and that he had been far too excited to consume more than a bowl of coffee and a dry roll.

His neighbour bestowed a gap-toothed grin upon the occupants of the entire vehicle and began to chew loudly, smacking his lips with every sign of relish, and Raoul, averting his gaze rather desperately, found himself looking directly into the dancing dark eyes of the girl opposite. Her amusement was undoubtedly at his expense, but it was not, he thought, unkind.

She was a tall, well-built young creature a few years older than himself, with a healthy peasant colour in her cheeks and a bright kerchief arranged across her dress in a way clearly designed to draw attention. She was also very pretty, and one of those girls who obviously knew it and took great pride in the fact. He’d seen the way everybody looked at her when she laughed and tossed her head, and the way she responded to that gaze, not demure at all but to all appearances one receiving her due.

Now she looked straight back at him with a smile and an air of frank interest, and Raoul squirmed a little inwardly, remembering how she and her mother had nudged and whispered before. The mother was a handsome, generously-made woman in her forties with the same dark eyes full of shrewd humour, evidently the wife or prosperous widow of one of the tenants hereabouts; it came to Raoul with belated force that she and any number of people locally must have seen him riding out with Count Philippe, and that she might very well recognise him now.

But a Viscount was as entitled to travel by stagecoach as any other man, if he so chose... and the girl had unfolded a corner of the linen napkin that covered the basket on her lap, and produced from it the end of a loaf of bread and a handful of small plums, which she was holding out to him in a friendly way. “Here, m’sieu. You look hungry, and there’s plenty to spare.”

Raoul, flushing, wondered if she took him instead for a poor seminary student. But he was hungry, and she was a good deal more pleasant to look at than the old man at his elbow, and anyway he did not want to seem ungracious.

She had dimpled at his confusion. Blushing more than ever, Raoul reached forward and took the offering with a mumbled word of thanks. The bread was a little stale, and the plums were soft and squished between their fingers as he took them.

The girl smiled at him, held his gaze, and licked the juice from her fingers very deliberately. Evidently she was trying to show him the etiquette, Raoul thought gratefully, following suit. But to his confusion her mother directed a glare at her.

“You quit your tricks right now, Agathe, or young Bertrand’ll have something to say on the matter.”

Agathe stopped watching Raoul and tossed her head. “Who says I want Bertrand as a sweetheart, anyhow? There’s bigger fish in the sea...”

“That’s as may be, my girl, though you’re a fool if you mean to let him slip. He’ll be a master saddler one day, and the likes of them don’t grow on trees. But throw over a steady sweetheart, if that takes your fancy — chase after the chance of a silk dress and maybe a necklace or two. Make eyes at the gentry, and see what you’ll get. But you lay off this one, d’you hear me? It’s not right—”

“Ma! He’s only a baby — I never would—”

Raoul swallowed hastily, ears burning, and stared down at the handful of plum-stones he had let fall, still uncertain as to what either of them had even done wrong. The diligence had surmounted the immediate slope but still seemed to be creeping at a snail’s pace, and the other passengers —a hatchet-faced woman in a poke bonnet and a couple of open-mouthed rustics— were all by now gawking at him in fascination...

A moment later a welcome distraction ensued, as the vehicle drew to an unscheduled stop. A head appeared in the window to announce that one of the lead horses had loosened a shoe, and there would need to be a halt while matters were put right.

“Yer can get out if yer wants,” the head added in grudging concession, unlatching the door, and withdrew.

It was a permission of which Raoul availed himself with almost stumbling haste, without looking round to see whether or not the others intended to take the air. He scrambled down out of the vehicle into the dust of the road, and found himself by a ford, where a tumbling stream crossed the highway and disappeared behind a few whitewashed cottages — one of which, he saw, was a smithy to which the afflicted horse was already being led.

At another time he might have gone to watch the smith at work, or at least paid a visit to admire the mechanism which drove the bellows. But at present the prospect of solitude held far greater appeal. A trampled track led away from the roadside and around the corner of the nearest building, and he followed it without a moment’s thought. It bore every evidence of having recently been used by cows, but he paid little heed to that.

After a minute or so he was out of sight of the coach, and able to breathe more easily. The track proved to run down along the bank of the stream, and he scrambled out along a tangle of tree roots and got a handful of water to splash across his face. He had not realised how much his head was swimming from the jolting and the musty smell of the coach interior...

The sun struck down in slanting bands through the trunks of the trees on the hillside above, and glittered back from the surface of the water, and the little river ran murmuring on, all mottled green and brown, with the occasional flick of a fish in an overhung pool, and a chuckle of silver where the flow slid across rocks or round a fallen branch. Somewhere close at hand a bird was sounding a shrill, repeated note and a squirrel scolded high above.

Raoul stood still for a moment to listen, and was presently able, a little ruefully, to laugh at his own precipitate flight, and the spectacle he must have presented. He still did not understand at all what he had done wrong, or why the girl’s mother had seemed so angry... but experience with two elder sisters and an aunt had long since taught him that the thing to do in such circumstances was to allow time to elapse and make a duly contrite appearance.

In any case, there were flies buzzing where the cows had passed, and the aroma was beginning to make itself felt... and this was perhaps not the best place in which to linger, after all. He turned back, towards the desultory sound of the blacksmith’s hammer that had begun to ring out from the sheds by the ford.

His fellow-travellers had spread out in a discontented straggle along the side of the high-road, with the exception of the old man with the sausage, who had found a large stone upon which to seat himself and was still chewing cheerfully away. Nobody seemed to have remarked Raoul’s absence, and to his relief none of them —save one— appeared disposed to take any great interest in his return.

The girl Agathe had evidently been picking daisies, and had a chain of them looped from one ear in a way that made her look decidedly less grown-up and superior than before. As she caught sight of him she scrambled up with a second daisy-chain between her hands and an expression of lively curiosity.

“Ma says you’re my uncle,” she confided, in precisely the tone of a schoolgirl imparting a shocking secret.

Raoul, who had last seen his two nieces when they were crumpled, squalling scraps, and who had recently been regaled with the news that his sister Suzanne’s daughter had just learned to walk, stared at her in the blank assumption that he must have misunderstood. It occurred to him to wonder if it was a customary hazard of diligence travel to be accosted by strangers talking complete gibberish. But his ears really could not provide him with any other interpretation of what she had just said.

“No, I’m not,” he pointed out, slowly and clearly. “And besides, you’re older than I am — and taller.”

The last admission rankled —his continuing lack of inches was a sore point— but it seemed to him a conclusive argument.

The girl simply laughed. “Course I am. Don’t play the innocent — you’re not the oldest in your family, are you?”

This was another fact of which Raoul was all too well aware, but he failed to see what relevance it had to this preposterous conversation, and was about to say so. Salvation intervened in the form of the mother, bustling up in agitation.

“You come away right now, Agathe! Forgive me, m’lord — I didn’t mean to cause trouble. Only I couldn’t let her— not kin—”

“Not m’lord.” Raoul had flinched, still unaccustomed to country deference. He had not been “m’lord Viscount” in Tante Marguerite’s household — most certainly not. “Just Raoul. I’m—”

He cast around for usable truth. “I’m going to join my ship. As a cadet.”

“Bless you, Master Raoul, I know you well enough. You’ve a great look of your mother, poor lady, and she was well-liked in these parts. You don’t know me —why should you?— but I knew your brother when he was Viscount, with naught but a year or two more than you have now. Not so shy and shrinking, though.” Her beaming smile became reminiscent. “Not by a long shot...”

But a moment later she gave herself a brisk shake. “Still, that’s all water under the bridge, as they say, and I’ve no regrets. I’m Perrette Edouart, m’lord, and my man’s Gaspard Edouart who holds the farm down at La Jouye, and our son Charlot after him. And this is my girl Agathe — and if she’s been causing annoyance, I’ll have her know she’s not too far grown yet to feel the heavy side of Gaspard’s hand, for all that she’s well-nigh promised in marriage...”

Agathe gave an indignant gasp. “Ma, you never would!”

“Just you try me, my girl.” Perrette folded her arms and fixed her offspring with a glare beneath which the girl quickly wilted and Raoul, still bewildered, shrank in his turn. But she patted him maternally on the arm.

“If you’ve a fancy to travel unknown, then trust me, mum’s the word. There’s any number of reasons a boy your age might want to try his wings... and any number of pretty faces only too happy to meet him halfway, I can warrant you that.” At this point, kind as she was, she let loose a quite unmistakable wink, in a way that made him most uncomfortable. “Only not my Agathe, see, on account of... well, that wouldn’t be right. It’s not your fault, mind — nor yet your brother’s, for he didn’t know. She’s a fine girl, for all her flighty ways... but there, blood will out. I’ve no complaints.”

After which extraordinary and almost entirely impenetrable speech —from which Raoul, grasping at straws, could gather only that he was not to be unmasked in public as a runaway Viscount— she proceeded to observe briskly that the horses were being put to the carriage again, and they had all better take up their seats.

The journey was resumed in blessed silence, and, on Raoul’s part at least, a resolution to leave this vehicle if at all possible at the next town, and resume his journey towards Perros by some other conveyance. No doubt word of his antics would reach Philippe with mortifying speed.

Agathe, assisted by her mother’s sharp elbows, confined herself to stealing bright-eyed glances at him from time to time when she thought Perrette was not looking. He did not enjoy the sensation of being a specimen in a zoo... but presently the hatchet-faced woman, who had clambered back on board with a grunt of general disapproval and a sourer expression than ever, struck up a satisfactory vein of complaint at the delay, the state of the roads, and the shocking conditions to be observed in wayside villages, to which Perrette, in what might either have been a spirit of tact or of pure mischief, contributed in her turn. It was a topic of conversation which, once launched upon, rapidly expanded to include the whole carriage. Complete strangers found common cause in relieving their feelings at the expense of the authorities, and a convivial atmosphere ensued in the process of agreeing that a comfortably unspecified Something should be Done.

Raoul, who harboured a suspicion that the Count de Chagny might be numbered among those deemed obscurely responsible, found himself in a position of some constraint. But as the youngest member of the party, he was not in any case entitled to hold an opinion. His rôle was to sit tight and attend to the views of his elders and betters, and since this was precisely the position he had occupied until lately in the household of Tante Marguerite —and, he thought sometimes, rebelliously, since the day he was born— he was in no danger of forgetting it.

Just at the moment, however, he had no desire for further adult attention, and was content to wedge himself into the corner of the hard seat and allow the conversation, like the dusty glimpses of the countryside, to flow by. He was thus able to ascertain, among other interesting titbits, that the hatchet-faced woman was on her way to visit her lawyer in town, that Perrette possessed a married daughter in Dieuville in addition to Agathe and a seemingly endless string of younger siblings, and that the two yokels rejoiced in the improbable names of Guyon and Lavalle respectively. And, along with everyone else, he learned far more than he had any desire to know about the intestinal ailments of the old man’s goats.

It had begun to seem like endless hours before the horses’ hoofs finally rang hollow under an arch, and then there were suddenly houses creeping past on either side when he looked out, and a long low dray rumbling down the street behind a merchant on a fat dappled cob. The prospect of escape presented itself. Raoul caught up the small bag that held all his possessions and sat clutching it in his lap, ready to dismount from the vehicle upon the instant.

“Leaving so soon, dear little uncle?” Agathe, irrepressible beneath her mother’s glare, had made it into a nickname, and he could only grit his teeth and scowl back at her laughter. “Now, where was it you said you were going?”

“I told you,” Raoul said, goaded. “I’m a cadet. I’m going to join my ship.” And it was none of her business, his scowl implied, if the sea-coast was still very distant indeed. At Perros-Guirec there was not a railway station nearer than Lannion, and he did not know how he was to get from there down to Christine...

“Really? What’s her name?”

“Christine,” Raoul blurted, unthinking, and knew himself swamped by an instant, betraying tide of scarlet. Even Perrette, he was certain, must be laughing.

She was, he saw; but there was a note of approbation in it.

“Well, well, well — and so the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree after all...” She leaned forward as the carriage drew to a halt and he scrambled for the door, humiliation complete. “My best wishes to your brother, young cadet, when you see him next — and fond memories of that haystack. And you’d best be finding a haystack of your own to share—”

Laughter followed him across the cobbles as he fled, and when he was grown, he promised himself hotly, ducking behind a market stall, he would never, never have anything to do with women...

But life, in its course, had quite other intentions, and when at length he found Christine at Perros-Guirec, it was only to leave with his heart in a state of agitation that he had never once anticipated. As for the half-mocking message of Perrette Edouart, it was a great many weeks before the young Viscount set eyes on his brother again... and by that date, the whole encounter, baffling as it had been, had struck him as best forgotten.

Count Philippe could, if he chose, have enlightened Raoul on the matter of a youthful indiscretion which he, too, had been known to recall upon occasion with appreciation and without regret. As to the outcome of that liaison, the Count was, in years to come, after Agathe’s marriage to form certain suspicions of his own. But it was not a matter of which Perrette had ever seen fit to apprise him, or which she considered, frankly, to be any of his concern.