Chick nor Child (Ch2)

[igenlode]

In the course of six days I have had 19 hits on chapter 1 of Perrette, and 3 kudos, and one person has even subscribed to the story -- either in the hopes of more, or in lieu of a bookmark :-p (Well, I can only presume that was the rationale of those people who have previously subscribed to one-shots that were already marked as complete on upload... although since AO3 allows you to have 'hidden' bookmarks I don't quite see the point!)

No idea what the figures on FFnet are, since the stats there have been down since the start of the month (and users are howling that the sky is falling as loudly as the Replika users, who are still at it with their accusations of 'gaslighting' and fraud...) All I can say is that the story has received zero reviews and zero favourites there :-(

This chapter, being considerably shorter, was of course exponentially quicker to deal with... (And of course it is entirely concerned with OCs and their preoccupations, which makes it of extreme minority interest so far as fanfiction readers are concerned; at this point it is pretty much straight historical fiction, although the same could be said of Hertha's family worries.)

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Ch2 — Glimmers of Goodbyes

The death of the Count de Chagny was always a notable event in the local district, but on this occasion it was a nine-days’-wonder that showed no signs of dying down, even weeks after the news had reached them from Paris. It was years now since old Count Philibert, struck down by a palsy, had taken to his bed and dwindled away, and by all accounts that had been a merciful release, and one long-awaited. It was the death of his wife in childbed, folk said, that had taken all the heart from him... and the Countess Éléonore had been a masterful woman, to be sure, still remembered among the tenantry with equal parts affection and dread.

But not every Count in the past had perished as peacefully — or as blamelessly. Tradition still spoke of Count Gilles, slain in a quarrel during a boar-hunt, and Count Adhemar, who had died in a duel over another man’s wife. Count Robert the Slow, it was true, had entirely failed to be martyred during the years of the Revolution, having made his peace with the First Consul at the earliest possible moment and returned to live placidly upon his lands along with his equally uninspired daughters. But his namesake and distant ancestor, Robert the Wild, had died in mortal agony while on pilgrimage to Rome — a pilgrimage imposed upon him, so the tales had it, as penance for crimes long since lost in obscurity, but which in consequence grew at every telling.

Perrette knew all the old stories; had told them over with relish to her own children, and now her grandchildren, just as she’d passed on the songs and fairy-tales she’d heard from her elders when she was young. But never in all her born days, as old Goody Frémas lamented over and over again, had there been a stir the like of this.

The Count de Chagny, murdered! Laid low in the prime of his days, and by his very own heir, the young Viscount Raoul as ever was... Those newspaper-men up in Paris did say the poor young man had gone clean off his head, and maybe that was the kindest way to look on it; at all events, there had been quarrels, and shouting, and Count Philippe had turned up drowned as dead as a doornail — and the Viscount had fled abroad with suspicion black against him, and never a word to clear his name. The world would see a Chagny beneath the guillotine yet, if the law had its way.

It was the talk of the district, and further afield. Ensconced comfortably in the window-seat of the old farmhouse over which she had reigned undisputed since her Gaspard — God rest his soul — had died, Perrette could hear tongues busy wagging even now in the kitchen beyond. It should have been a birthday celebration for little Gabrielle, who had just turned seven... but Charlot’s daughter was out in the yard now with the other children, running and shrieking in the excitement brought about by sugar-cakes, ribbons, and the gift of a brand-new doll, and indoors more than enough of Gaspard’s good wine had flowed to unlock the matter that was on the minds of family and neighbours alike.

“Drowned like a kitten in a barrel, they say, the poor creature.” That was Gabrielle’s mother, Charlot’s little mouse of a wife. “And after all he’d done for that boy. I don’t see how anyone could be so wicked.”

“Ah, but there was a girl in the case. A man’ll do anything for love.” An easy guffaw from Bertrand, her son-in-law. He’d pursued and won his scornful Agathe, and could survey life now through the satisfied eyes of a thoroughly married man. There were fireworks between them still, but fireworks of another kind... and two children already, and, if Perrette’s experienced eye was not mistaken, another to come.

“Not that one,” Agathe flashed back, half-pity, half-disdain. “Why, he was a lily-white innocent who couldn’t say Boo to a goose — I’d as soon believe it of old Goody Frémas as of the little Viscount. Maybe she’s all string and bone, but there’s spirit in her yet—”

“Happen he’s grown since you saw him last, sister.” Charlot, like the rest of them, had heard Agathe’s story of the coach-ride more than often enough over the years; it had been too good a tale to waste, though she’d kept quiet on the awkward relationship between them. Perrette had told her daughter the tale of her origins as soon as the girl was old enough to appreciate the need for secrecy. While there was a certain thrill in having a distant, rarely-glimpsed Count for a father, Gaspard’s heavy hand and belt-buckle had been a much more constant presence in their lives.

Besides, Perrette had no desire to shame her husband. She’d been bored, she’d been curious, and she’d taken the chance to give a young Philippe de Chagny some education, that was all. And if Gaspard had been too preoccupied, that summer, to do his duty by her as he ought, he had not questioned the strapping daughter with which she’d presented him afterwards. Perrette, who had counted her days, had a shrewder idea of what was possible and what was not... but what a man didn’t know had never yet hurt him, in her experience, and she had no intention of making trouble up at the chateau. She was a married woman with two little ones already, and every expectation of more. Besides, her Gaspard was more than capable of taking a horsewhip to the young Viscount Philippe, and that would make trouble of a sort they didn’t need, then or ever.

She’d kept a certain fondness for Philippe, with his little haughty air —not so haughty back then, before he got his town-polish and his mother, poor lady, had passed away— but they’d seen little enough of him down at Chagny for years. As for the youngest, the baby Raoul, he’d been shut away up at the big house with his sisters, then sent off to an aunt when their father finally died. She’d scarcely spared him a thought before that summer, nor, if truth be told, since — not with beasts and crops and children of her own to worry after.

But she brought him to mind now, with the same half-maternal, half-speculative air with which she regarded Philippe: the little Viscount Raoul, who’d gone off to be a sailor. Who’d travelled round the world, they said, and arrived back as small and shy and fresh-faced as before. He’d come back on leave as the apple of his brother’s eye, and grown a moustache that no doubt he fondly imagined would make him appear older. By her reckoning, he would be twenty-one; for all his efforts, he’d looked no more than eighteen.

At fifteen, on the stagecoach, he’d been all too clearly a schoolboy still. Perrette did not suppose he was quite such an innocent now... but she simply could not, however hard she tried —however stubborn and quarrelsome he might have become— picture that same boy whom she had so gently teased holding his brother’s head in cold blood beneath the water until he drowned. A stabbing she could credit, perhaps; a wild shot, a crime of passion. He’d been chafing already against the Count’s authority when they met, and Philippe had never been a patient man... not, at least, in those months of his hasty youth when she had known him best.

To be sure, he’d grown into a fine stately gentleman. Comfortable and plump, she looked back with a smile across more than twenty years to those summer days, and a certain haystack and his eager face. Yes, she’d taught Philippe a thing or two before they’d gone their separate ways. Hard to picture, even now, that he was gone — that the world and the certainty they’d all known was gone, washed away in an ugly struggle in a pit of dirty water.

“The land’s to be cut up and sold off, that’s what I heard.” Another voice from the gloomy huddle in the kitchen: Francine Renard, the neighbour from Les Trois Pins. “There’s a dozen cousins come out of the woodwork to take their cut, so they say, and the tenants all to be given notice, and factories built, you mark my words...”

“Don’t talk so soft.” Agathe’s Bertrand, with a settled trade of his own, had little to fear and no time for doom-mongering. “The land’s in good heart, and’ll fetch a fine price. There’s none here behind with the rent — who’d turn you off? Let them build their manufactories all they like down in Lyon — we’ll go on here just as before, Count or no Count.”

“Better, maybe.” Charlot had been known to harbour Radical views.

“There’ll be belts pulled tight if the chateau stands empty,” Francine persisted. “Maybe you young’uns don’t recall how it was when the Countess Éléonore passed away and the old Count left all to go to rack and ruin, neighbour Edouart, but your Ma and me, we had to put food on the table, and we know.”

Young Raoul would be a pauper, whatever came to pass. Even if justice failed to take his head from his shoulders, it could cut off the culprit from his inheritance and leave him to make what shift he could abroad by his own wits, if he had not the courage to come home and prove his case. But he could not, Perrette thought, bewildered still, could not have done it; not that slender boy, to kill a tall, strong man of one-and-forty; not that shy shadow with an adoring brother’s arm forever about his shoulders...

“He should have taken himself a bride long since.” Charlot’s wife was still lamenting the loss of Count Philippe, and the coming dismemberment of the estate. “All those years bringing up that brother of his, that snake in the grass, and him with never chick nor child of his own — and now this!”

“Say what you like, neighbour Edouart”—Francine’s voice rose again—“ but you knew where you were with Count Philippe. Now we’re to be parcelled off left and right to pay off a crowd of jackals—”

“Aye,” Charlot broke in bitterly, “parcelled off to those as has money to burn. Speculators down from Paris, most like — that pack of cousins will be out for cash on the nail, I’ll warrant, with no chance for the likes of us—”

And with that, the cat was regularly amongst the pigeons. It was an old family grievance, and one on which everyone from Agathe, her elder sister Nanon, up from Dieuville, and their youngest siblings had views, and loud ones delivered all at once. The matter of the Count’s murder was, for the moment, forgotten in favour of injustices of longer standing and closer to home, and the ancient grudge of countryman against town and of the Midi against the drab grey close-fisted North. There had been Chagnys up at the chateau since the days of the Crusades, good lords and bad across the centuries, endured with dumb resentment or a shrug like the fickle cruelties and generosities of the weather.

But they had been a constant. They, too, had a stake in the land to which they were born, and on which for the most part they came home to die. Even in these modern days, with the Count de Chagny by law no more than a landlord like any other, there was both anger and a recoil at the idea of some stranger reducing fields that had been worked for generations out of mind to a prospect of cold hard cash — cash that would forever be beyond the reach of those that cared the most.

Well! there would be a new owner, and chances were, more than one — Francine was right about that, at least. And none of their wrangling here and now would make any odds to that. Perrette shrugged her shoulders with age-old patience, watching the children outside in the barnyard.

Gabrielle had scrambled up onto the shafts of the empty hay-cart and was nursing her birthday doll while younger cousins chased around her, absorbed in some game of their own. Agathe’s daughter Louise at four years old had cornered one of the half-wild cats that hunted among the outbuildings, and was trying to poke it out from beneath the barn steps in a way that would get her scratched, or worse. Perrette rapped on the window and called out sharply, and the little girl looked up and bestowed a smile of saintly innocence upon her grandmother, while the cat made its escape.

Across the yard her younger brother, toddling busily between two straw-piles, lost his balance and sat down plump in the middle of a particularly muddy patch. He opened his mouth to howl, and Louise, with an air of great importance, went hastening over to offer alternate comfort and scoldings, in imitation of their mother.

When the child turned just so, Perrette thought, watching them, she was the living spit of the Count’s sister, Miss Suzanne as was. Blood would out... but best, perhaps, if there were no questions asked. Count Philippe had sent down a cask of wine for Agathe’s wedding, but then he had done as much for Charlot, and for others hereabouts. Had he ever set eyes on Agathe’s daughter and seen the echo in her of his own stamp?

He’d been no fool; the likeness would have led him at least to suspect. Perhaps he had. Perrette, who had never spared time for sentiment, found herself hoping with a sudden nostalgic wish that it had been so.

“And him with neither chick nor child,” Charlot’s wife was moaning again from the kitchen, with an air of grievance, and Perrette, driven for once beyond distraction by her daughter-in-law’s prating tongue, swung round and snapped out a demand for silence. There was a gratifying lull, and the distant shrill clamour of the children outdoors.

There would be no more Counts up at the chateau; for better or worse, no more lordly Chagnys, father to son. But there would be something, after all, of Philippe when he was gone to dust — when she too was laid to rest beneath the quiet earth. It was as much or more as any of them could ask.

Francine Renard was gawping at her in indignation, less accustomed than her own tribe of offspring to their matriarch’s whims, and Perrette returned her a smile with an easy shrug. “Eh, pay no mind to me. I’m crotchety tonight. Agathe, I’ll take another cup of that wine, and we’ll drink to old times.”

“Best get the little’uns in, Bertrand,” Agathe said over her shoulder, bringing the wine. “It’s turning cold.”

Her husband took a kiss and a generous pinch at her rear as she passed, and dodged her slap, reaching for his coat. “I’ll do that, then.”

He drained off the last of his own glass, raising it with a nod in Perrette’s direction. “To old times — and new beginnings.”

Enthroned in the window-seat, Perrette surveyed the crowded room: family, wives, husbands, friends... life in all its chaotic warmth.

“Your man has the right of it, Agathe.” A shared smile with her daughter, as Agathe held out the drink she’d brought. Perrette took it and came to her feet, pitching her voice to carry. “Here’s to old times, and new beginnings!”

The roar of agreement echoed to the rafters. Outside, in the last light of afternoon, two happy, healthy children paid no heed.