High City on a Hill (Ch14)

[igenlode]

This needs to be the climax to the whole story and hit like a hammer, and after quite a lot of tweaking I'm still not sure that it does. (Or that the thought-process behind Hertha's final conclusion is clear, which is something that was worrying me when I originally wrote this section, over a year ago -- I see that I have just been through exactly the same process of trying to fit more explanation into the ending of the chapter and then taking it all out again because it wasn't working!)

This is the scene that I was envisaging from the start as the main point of the story, and it's just got to work...

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Chapter 14 — “Tell Him How You Feel”

It was from Christine Daaé that I heard the true story of what happened that night — Christine Daaé, bedraggled and defiant in the great salon at the Hôtel Chagny, and still wearing the remains of the white dress into which the Ghost had forced her in a mockery of marriage. She had both hands braced on the back of the couch on which Raoul lay; the doctor had been, and gone, and left behind a sedative draught which she had refused to take, just as she had mutely shaken her head at the offer of more seemly clothing. But the Vicomte, his principal patient, had submitted in exhaustion to the doctor’s ministrations, and had now succumbed to a deep and most merciful slumber in front of a roaring fire in the salon, while his own bedchamber was being prepared. I could not look without horror upon the livid rope-scars that ran up under his jaw and encircled his throat in a deadly embrace.

It was I who had been responsible for bringing the two of them back to the Hôtel Chagny, when they came stumbling back from that unseen ordeal. It was the only thing to do; I was Vicomtesse still and could give orders here, and in the condition he’d been in he could scarcely go anywhere other than straight home. It had been the aftermath of “Il Muto” all over again... save that there had been no-one to carry him out on a stretcher, and that this time —as I knew now— he had not been able to set the shield of his body between Christine and intended harm. This time, it was she who had held the fate of two men in her hands, and who had saved the soul of one and the life of the other not by the bravery of defiance, but by the greater bravery of acceptance and pity.

“I kissed him.” Christine’s head was held high and her voice very steady. “I kissed the Opera Ghost just as if he had been any other man, as if I had been his mother— his sister— his lover— any woman in the whole world who might have showed him a scrap of understanding, and never had. He stood there in his black despair and his rage, and tried to force me into a hateful choice, one that I could not and would not make. So I took my courage in both hands and made a choice of my own: to show him that he was not an outcast, and bring him back to humanity if I could. To break the spell of madness and horror that had us all in its grasp, and help him believe that he, even he, was not beyond redemption. In the end—”

She hesitated for the first time.

“In the end, I think I saw him suddenly, after everything, as less a monster than a child — an ugly, unloved child who shouts evil words and does wicked, hateful things because he has never been understood, or been given the chance to understand. He demanded from me a Yes or a No, and I gave him neither. I put my arms around him, and kissed him on the mouth —on that bloated, twisted mouth— and felt the thrumming cord of madness snap.” She had shut her eyes; opened them again, no longer seeing the lamps or the fire, but the flickering darkness of a place I would never know. “I am not sure... that it was any mercy. But he let us go. He could have taken me by force, could have killed Raoul, or kept us both as hostages against the vengeance of the crowd, but he let us go.”

I’d watched that crowd gather, after Raoul had gone: angry, frightened men and women jostling together in a sullen mass that grew savage and bayed for blood. A hundred years ago, driven beyond endurance, Paris mobs had lynched their enemies from lamp-posts and butchered prisoners in the gutter, the innocent and the guilty alike. Barely ten years ago, when the self-styled Emperor of the time had fought Prussia, Paris had risen again in insurrection, and the Commune had ended horribly. The broad boulevards outside the Opera with their wood-block paving had not been built so that carriages could roll swiftly and silently; they had been built to quell the citizens of the city in the constant uprisings of the turbulent century in between. In Paris, it was not safe to underestimate the ordinary man.

If the Sûreté could or would do nothing — if the management could or would do nothing — then the murderer would be dealt with by other means. The Ghost could terrorize them no longer. Christine had ripped away his mask and his mystique, and shown him even to the most superstitious as nothing more than an aging man pulling off his conjuror’s tricks at their expense. Those who had been the most credulous were the loudest to shout against him.

I had no love for mobs —they had too often been turned against my ancestors— but I would not have rated my chances at curtailing this one, had I made the attempt. Monsieur Firmin had tried to exert his authority and restore order, and had been howled aside for his pains. All that was lacking was a destination, and when Meg Giry had claimed to share her mother’s knowledge of the Ghost’s passages, she had been swept off in their midst. For her sake at least, I hoped she had been able to find some convincing hidden route. A mob that felt itself cheated was apt to turn upon the victim nearest at hand.

But I did not know if they had found the Ghost, or if they had come back empty-handed in shamefaced ones and twos as their blood cooled. I had not been there to see. My concern had been only for Raoul, coatless, soaked and filthy, limping forward —after what had seemed an endless wait— out of the shadows with one arm draped for support around Christine Daaé’s neck.

Very little had been said on either side. Raoul had managed only a few hoarse words to stem the torrent of questions and demands that threatened to swamp them both; the girl, head held high and a fierce glitter of unshed tears in her eyes, had spoken only to fling her resignation in the teeth of Gilles André, who had happened to come injudiciously close. At least she did not, as Carlotta had done, follow it up with clawing nail-marks and accusations of neglect amounting to murder. In the wake of Piangi’s death, the Italian woman had been all but demented.

Impossible to suppress the story — or the scandal. It would be a matter merely of preference in the various newspapers as to whether the chief headline tomorrow featured the financial collapse of the Opera Populaire, the murder of the leading man in mid-performance, or the Vicomte’s pursuit of his abducted paramour. But there would be no more. Raoul had insisted on that much, through a bruised and swollen throat. The reign of the Opera Ghost had been ended once and for all, and we would have to live with the consequences.

I did not know what Christine and Raoul intended to do now. She would go back to Lisotte, I supposed dully, at least for the moment; he could not very well take her openly under his roof. She was here now by my doing and at my forbearance, for the sake of the desperate appeal in her eyes that she should not be sent away until she had seen him safe and well. In her place— in her place, I could not have endured that either.

There had been no triumph in her, back in the Opera, when they came out together into the light. Only unhappiness, and a burden stubbornly borne.

“The Ghost let us go,” Christine said quietly again, still gazing unseeing into the past, “and it was over. Over...”

Her fingers tightened on the back of the couch as Raoul murmured something blurred in his sleep. It might have been her name.

When she looked down, it was with the desolate desire of the barefoot child outside the baker’s shop, for whom the fragrant warmth and light are forever on the far side of the glass; an ache that mirrored my own dull pain, and brought it to sudden vivid life.

“Over...” It was barely a whisper. She slipped round to the front of the couch, with one quick upward glance —“You permit?”— sank to her knees, and leaned over to kiss him, long lashes closed on tears.

I could say nothing past the anguish in my breast. Could only watch, as Christine Daaé took my husband’s mouth with her own in a single long, tender moment that seemed to last forever.

“Hush...” He had stirred, half-waking, at her touch, and she drew a hand down his cheek in reassurance. “Hush, my own heart, my dearest love... it’s a dream, only a dream... the sweetest of dreams...”

The tear-drops were stark on her cheeks when she turned. “The first time, Madame —will you believe that of me, at least?— and the last.”

One more look back, as she rose. Then she thrust past me and made blindly for the doors with an almost violent effort, as if to tear herself free by force.

“Take care of him.” Her hand tightened on the handle; opened one panelled door enough to slip through. “You won’t be troubled with me again — either of you. I give my word.”

And then there was nothing of her but a vanishing murmur of soiled white skirts, and a choked-off echo of breath. Raoul slept on in the lamplight, and there was an emptiness in the room, and a numbed tumult in my heart.

I’d braced myself and been ready to face what I must. And now... now the world, it seemed, had turned over beneath my feet.

“Wait.” I went after her, made clumsy by haste and the burden of the child. Managed to catch up with her in the antechamber beyond, only to fall back as she swung round. “Wait. I thought... Christine, I— I don’t understand.”

“Do you not?” Her face was drawn and white, and her voice broke on a half-sob. “You— oh, you have nothing to fear. He’ll never leave you. Never walk out on a wife and child — never betray you even one moment for my sake, even behind your back. If he had died down there”—the tears slid and rolled—“that might have been easier for us both — for us all.”

“Don’t say that!” My hand moved almost against my will in an old, superstitious sign, as if to ward off evil. “Don’t ever say it...”

He had come, by her own account, all too close to death tonight at the hands of one who saw himself as a monster. And perhaps, I could see that all too clearly— perhaps that sacrifice had seemed a mercy in contrast to the conflict between duty and desire, between friendship and trust and romance. But not to me, Raoul — oh, Raoul, not to me.

“I’d go with him, if only he would take me,” Christine burst out unheeding, “and never mind the shame. I wouldn’t ask for marriage, or a home. Others like us live abroad, drifting from one watering-place to the next, from one second-rate hotel to another, among the half-pay gamblers and the women with their younger lovers. I could bear it all... if it meant I could be with him. But he— it would destroy him, I think. Not the shabby life, or the humiliations, but the knowledge of what he had done, and at what cost. He could never be with me at your expense, and if he could”—her head came up a little—“then he would not be the Raoul I have known.”

More tears were trickling now, but she made no move to hide them, or to wipe them free. “So I have to go. To say a goodbye that will be an adieu for ever, and try to forget. I can do it. I have to. I promised for both of us, promised myself—”

Her lip quivered; contorted, as she strove for control, then gave way altogether, until all dignity had left her, and her face twisted in great heaving sobs.

“Only if it’s all I have of him, all that I’ll ever have” —it was a child’s helpless outcry— “I don’t want... don’t want to forget!”

If this was victory or security in my marriage then there was no comfort in it. I went to her on impulse; put my arms around her awkwardly, as if that could somehow ward off the sick wash of loneliness that haunted me. Christine resisted a moment and then yielded, stifling sobs in my shoulder with the abandon of exhaustion and despair.

“You don’t need to forget.” I tried to keep the bitterness from my voice. “The more heartbreak you can put on stage, the more the audience will applaud the performance. They won’t know —or care— how it was learnt. And in twenty years’ time, the critics will be busy comparing the singers of their day to your magnificent Dido or impassioned Marguerite... and all this can serve for something, at least.”

“You don’t understand. The world will go on turning. I know that. Only—” She faltered, muffled. “Only, I can’t endure it...”

I did understand, I thought, and all too well. But I was no forty-year-old matron with a cupboard full of trite, soothing commonplace; I was no older than she, and did not know what I could say.

It was not the future I had steeled myself to face, less than an hour ago. Still less was it the one of which I’d so foolishly allowed myself to dream. It would have been better, far better, if I had never known him... or else if he had never known her.

There was nothing to do but hold her numbly as best I could and stroke her hair, as some day I would have to comfort a child of my own. Between us the baby kicked, restless as ever with the coming night, and Christine flinched and pulled away from me with a force I had not expected.

Her breath caught and hitched. “I have envied you... so much. Tried so hard not to hate you for all the things you have of him that I cannot: the right to stand at his side, be with him openly, bear his name, share his home, lie in his arms— and to carry his child. I’ll never have that from him, never. Never have anything of his to hold or to keep—”

“Except the dream of his heart!” It was torn out of me against my will. “You carry that, and it seems you always did. What does that leave— for me?”

Silence. She was staring at me, eyes bright and wild, both of us breathing hard.

“You... too?” Barely a whisper. “Oh Hertha, I—”

“Yes. I love him.” The words carried an odd taste in my mouth, as if they did not belong to me or my world. They belonged in the opera, or between the pages of novels. They had nothing to do with Raoul, or myself, or the knot of feelings inside me that I could no longer deny.

Raoul had never kissed me on the mouth; never looked at me with the desperate, unvoiced longing I’d seen in Christine’s eyes. He’d been a good and considerate husband, a glad companion, an irreverent friend, and I had never asked for more, or expected it. Until Christine had come into our lives, I had not even known I could crave anything else.

What business had love to overset my life — my happy, contented life? I had not wanted it to happen; had not wanted even to admit to it.

“I love him.” It hurt as much to say as to acknowledge. “But what use is that?”

“You should tell him,” Christine said very quietly. “At least give him a chance.”

“And hurt us both all the more?” The very thought of that avowal and the strained silences that must follow was a sharp-awaking pain. “I don’t want his pity. I want—”

I wanted none of this ever to have happened. To shut my eyes and go on pretending, even to myself, that Raoul and I had everything we could desire. We had so much. It had to be enough —I could feel my own tears scalding now— it had to.

“Still he has the right to know,” Christine whispered, and I turned on her.

“My husband has the right to be left in peace— by both of us!”

“Forgive me, Madame.” She had stiffened. “I had better go.”

“Yes, I think you had.” I bit my lip, hearing the echo of my own cruelty. “I— Oh, Christine, I’m sorry. Sorry for all of it. If nothing else, I should have held my tongue and let you send Raoul away, that first night in your dressing-room, as you tried so hard to insist...”

“Why, that was you, wasn’t it?” Christine’s breath caught again suddenly in something like a laugh. “I had forgotten... But if you— if Raoul had not come in that night, I would have been utterly alone for what was to come. And the Opera Ghost would not have been any more easily appeased. I would be down there now, not standing here... and I would never be coming back.”

A shiver. She held out a hand. “Tell him that, when he wakes. Tell him that I’ve gone, as we both knew I must. Take care of him. I—”

“I know. You’re sorry, and I’m sorry.” I managed a half-laugh of my own. “Do you have any place to go? Any offers of work outside Paris? My father has contacts in Vienna, or Leipzig, if you want to continue your studies under a good teacher — perform perhaps, under a stage name.”

“In case my reputation might have preceded me in the popular press?” This time Christine did laugh, ruefully. “Raoul always did say that you were— were the one who could be relied upon to arrange things.”

That I was the sensible one. I could hear him say it now; feel the old prickle of resentment at the earthbound existence to which it reduced me, and a fresh flinch at the knowledge he’d been discussing me with her. But someone had to be practical. Amidst the dreamers and the questing-knights there had to be someone to take care for the morrow.

“Go and see my father in the morning. I’ll give you a note... and you had better borrow a cloak of some sort as well. You can’t go home through the streets of Paris in that dress. Someone will take you for a revenant strayed out of her grave, or worse. And you’ll catch your death of cold.”

So when we parted, in the end, it was not with tears or recriminations but calmly and almost matter of fact. I watched her small figure recede across the courtyard of the hôtel towards the entrance lodge, the bedraggled dress glimpsed beneath an old grey cloak the housekeeper had found. She did not look back, even at the gate. Presently, like a shadow, she had slipped past into the street and was gone.

I should have to send back to the Place Clignot-les-Pins for my own clothes and possessions tomorrow, I thought, closing the shutters on the long window and turning back into the lamplight. Mama at least would not be surprised... and the staff here at the Hôtel Chagny, so far as I could judge, had already taken my return from my family visit entirely for granted. After all, I was Vicomtesse de Chagny still — and servants were used to the unannounced vagaries of those who paid their wages.

The choice, it seemed, had been made almost without my knowing it. We would go on. We would take up the threads of our lives and go on, to all appearances just as before, and no-one would know —or care— otherwise. The world would say that the Vicomte had tired of his pretty little opera singer and found ways to appease his foreign wealthy wife, and doubtless it would shrug its shoulders. There would be the old whispers: Baron Graupmann’s daughter, you know. The... financial family. And Raoul would face the future and the dregs of a lost past with all the stubborn courage of his honour and in silence, with a smile for my sake, and for his sake I would smile in return, both of us longing for what we could not have... and perhaps we might come to find some comfort together, as good companions will.

At midsummer there would be a child. When I had been younger —younger, and unspeakably foolish— I had seen a husband, I remembered, as a mere necessary step where children were concerned. I had not known that one could ache for scraps of attention or simple proximity, or that ordinary rational affection could transmute by unperceived degrees to this visceral pain.

I had never felt any impulse to swoon in admiration of Raoul's appearance, or to view him as somehow elevated above other mortals; I knew, better than anyone, of his flaws, and I had not ceased to see them. It was not worship that I felt. He was Raoul, as he had always been — the boy who had been kind to a Viennese girl new to Paris, the young man of whom my father had approved, the husband to whom two winters ago I had made the vows of marriage. Only... two winters ago I had not longed for his touch, or lived with this forlorn knowledge of emptiness.

“Madame?” A deferential rap on the door was Berthauld in livery and gloves, come to seek me. “Madame, the bedroom is ready. Should we wake Monsieur le Vicomte?”

“Thank you, Berthauld. I’ll do it.” I lifted my head and swept past him, conscious for the first time that I was still en grande tenue, with the Chagny emeralds bright at my throat and the stiff silks rustling about me. My feet ached. So did my back, and I was in urgent need of a few minutes’ privacy.

Raoul, in the grand salon, had not stirred. The ugly marks of what he had endured were more livid than ever about his neck, and even in his sleep his face was drawn and older than I remembered it. For a moment, I knew a sudden impulse to let him sleep — to let him rest a few hours longer with the memory of Christine’s farewell still dreaming upon his lips, and spare him for a while that awakening.

But if he were to spend the night here, he would be stiff and chilled in the morning. Better by far for the manservant to get him upstairs into a warm feather bed. I gave myself a firm mental shake, and leaned over to take him by the shoulders.

“Raoul? Raoul, wake up. Let’s just get you somewhere more comfortable. It’s all right. It’s me.”

From the sudden clutch with which he’d caught at my arm, I could guess at looming memories. Christine Daaé had kissed two men this night; given herself to both with her whole heart, but for very different reasons.

“Take care of him,” she had whispered, but she had spoken also, at the last, of something else; of a dark, tormented man who had found the courage to tell her openly that he loved her only when all was done, and it was far too late.

I covered Raoul’s hand with my own, watching recognition dawn. Saw the strain behind his smile, and managed familiar reassurance in return. “Here, sit up — I can’t lift you... That’s right.”

You should tell him, Christine’s voice insisted in memory. But I knew I could not.