High City on a Hill (Ch 15)

[igenlode]

Finally, the final chapter.

---

Chapter 15 — Epilogue

It had been raining all night, summer squalls lashing against the long windows, on the morning that my son was born. Now, when those hours of travail were finally over, the skies had cleared with the dawn. The sun greeted a world made fresh and new, and slipped in to lie bright across the foot of the bed, and I would not have the drapes pulled. Let the furnishings fade, just for today, if the room could be lapped in this joyous tide of light.

I lay back on the clean pillows, utterly drained but triumphant. Both the baby and I had been washed, dressed and made presentable. Now the early sunlight slid across the coverlet. Outside the window, as if by magic, the dusty roofs and treetops had been reborn, and here within, my son slept in his nurse’s arms, tiny, crumpled and miraculous.

When Raoul came through the door, it was on an anxious rush that was checked at the threshold by the intervention of the old Vicomtesse. She had been an unexpected tower of strength throughout the night, endlessly calm despite her frail condition and the memories of her own difficult labour, late in life, and now that it was all over appeared to regard the successful provision of a Chagny heir quite as much in the light of her own achievement as of mine. It was with an air almost of ceremony that she beckoned forward the nurse to make the presentation in all due form.

Confronted by the small wrapped bundle, Raoul was clearly at a loss. I watched his face soften into an astonished smile that was more than half disbelief. “Is it— he—”

He reached out towards the infant’s cheek to brush it very cautiously with the back of one finger. The baby opened a pink mouth and yawned, kitten-like, in response, and I had to laugh despite myself at Raoul’s obvious alarm.

He looked up quickly and came to my side, searching my face with all his earlier anxiety. “Hertha! Are you—”

“I’m all right. Very tired and very relieved.” He was still in his shirt sleeves from the night before, and he clearly hadn’t slept. I took his hand in reassurance, drawing him down onto the edge of the bed beside me. “It’s all over, and it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.”

That was not true. But for his peace of mind —and my pride— he did not need to know how very frightened I had been, or how unbearable the ordeal had at times become. It had been worth it. My gaze went from my husband to the oblivious face of our son. Some sufferings were worth it.

“I had the idea,” Raoul was saying hesitantly, leaning forwards, “that as it’s a boy, we could call him Rodolphe. What do you think?”

“Rodolphe de Chagny?” He would have to have a string of other names, of course, in honour of ancestors, saints, or godparents, but this one was somehow not what I had expected.

Raoul’s mother, raising thin brows, observed that while it might sound very fine, there had never been a Rodolphe in the family yet.

“Not in our family, no,” Raoul said quietly. “But I thought Hertha might care for it.”

Rudi. My heart turned over with a sudden ache. “Oh, Raoul, Raoul...”

I flung both arms around his neck and held him tight. He’d tried so hard, these last weeks— so very hard. We both had. But it was not just the gesture for my sake that meant so much. It was the knowledge that he’d cared and understood what would touch me the most: to name my son for Rudolf Graupmann, cut short on the brink of manhood one hot summer that seemed so very long ago.

We never spoke, now, of Vienna, or the young woman who had taken up her studies there under the name of Christine Lindström, beneath Professor Szekely. The Herr Professor wrote in private to my father that his new student showed astonishing promise, and that in years to come no doubt we should be hearing more of her. He was most grateful to his good friend Thaddeus for the chance to instruct such a talent.

Undoubtedly he would have asked Christine about her previous training, and the tutor who had helped form her voice. I wondered what story she had found to give, and what had become of that creature whom she had pitied and feared: mesmerist, madman, criminal, deformed to the point of horror and lonely beyond belief. Had he, too, left Paris, or did he still hide here in some other cellar amidst the ruins of his dreams? And if, some day, the voice and face of Christine Lindström were to cross Europe, like those of other great singers before her, would it serve only to open unhealed wounds, deeper yet than those my husband bore?

I would never know what had passed between Raoul and Christine on that night— in that hour when it had become clear they were both to live, and must face either the choice to go on together into dishonour, or to part. I had set him free to go to her, for good or ill... but adultery with Christine, for Raoul, had never been a bearable possibility. Otherwise he could have left together with her, that night, and let the world believe them dead.

It was a thought that had intruded itself on me without surcease, afterwards, in the long nights of discomfort before the birth when my swollen body would not let me rest. If the two of them had failed to return, it would have been set down as one more crime to the Opera Ghost’s account. It would not have spared me altogether from scandal, for by then there had been talk enough already, but in the public eye I would have been a widow and not an abandoned wife. In time, I would have been able to marry again.

Another man might even have convinced himself it was the right thing to do. I’d been jolted more than once from uneasy slumbers by the image of Raoul making just that persuasive, rational choice. I wondered, sometimes, if he too was haunted by dreams of the road not taken... and, worse, if he woke from them in horror or in aching regret.

Perhaps —I would not let myself think it— perhaps it might have almost been more honest, in the end, than going on as we were, as if nothing at all had ever happened to disrupt the quiet tenor of our lives. Only I did not want honesty at that price, or a show of arid, respectable widowhood. I wanted Raoul. Desperately I wanted Raoul, Raoul warm and solid and real.

Even if that meant a façade of pretence. Even if that meant witnessing his moments of withdrawal, and putting a name to the shadow that all too often chased across his face. I had been tired, and near my time, and since his return I had clung to the fact of his presence and closed my eyes to all else. I had set him free, and he had come back, and the rest remained unspoken.

We were painstakingly, meticulously kind to one another. There was only the faintest mark remaining where the cord had bitten deep around Raoul’s neck, but he would never again be the laughing boy who had dropped down to sit at Christine Daaé’s feet without a thought for the fragility of his own heart, or hers. Or of mine.

He did care for me, I knew that. He’d given me everything he could find it in him to give— all that, once, I could ever have wanted. I’d told myself back then how lucky we were compared to so many households, where a fine front covered only hostility or cold words. It was true. It was still true.

I held him more closely, whispering his name, and felt him pat my back awkwardly, as if he were afraid I might break. The baby —our little Rodolphe— made a snuffling noise from across the room, and both Raoul and I tensed and looked round with an almost guilty start.

But he was still asleep, face screwed up beneath a few wisps of dark hair. The nurse bestowed a reassuring smile on me and came towards the bedside. “Would you like to hold him, Madame?”

Without waiting for assent, she settled me back against the pillows, with Raoul’s assistance, and placed the baby firmly into the crook of my arm. Rodolphe woke, disturbed, and doubtless sensing my inexpert grasp began to cry.

“Oh, don’t... please don’t...” Terrified of my own deficiencies I clutched the little bundle closer, and for a miracle, it seemed to work. The wailing died away, and the baby turned his face to nuzzle against the warmth of my breast.

“There, see, Baby knows his own mama.” The nurse bestowed a beaming professional smile downwards on the infant’s head, and the old Vicomtesse sank back into a chair and dabbed at her eyes with an expression that was positively sentimental. Caught in a sudden mingled upwelling of love and panic, I scarcely dared breathe.

“It will be all right,” Raoul said quietly, looking almost equally uncertain. “We’ll work it out. Somehow, we’ll work it out.”

And for now, I thought, watching him watching our son, he was here with me entirely, in spirit as well as in body. But I knew well enough that there would come a time when an unguarded memory, a phrase of music or half-familiar turn of the head, would bring the call of that high city back through the mists, a clarion call that pierced all the more deeply because it had been glimpsed —attained, perhaps, almost to the gates— before the traveller had of his own choice turned away.

Only we would never speak of it, just as I would never speak of my own heart for the constraint that would put between us. I thought of Christine, far to the east, pouring desperation into music with a driven focus that had astonished even old Professor Szekely, and knew how bitterly she would have envied me this hour — this child.

Raoul and I had gone into marriage with our eyes open, and the resolution that we would do our best. Whatever unhappiness we might have to bear, that was our affair alone, and not something that anyone else should come to suspect... least of all, if I could prevent it, Rodolphe in the years to come.

Sun was still streaming into the room. I smiled at Raoul with equal brightness and dropped a kiss on top of the baby’s head, tired and sore and bracing myself for the future. “We’ll manage, I’m sure.”