If I were Vicomte (ch1)

[igenlode]

After much procrastination, I finally managed to get this typed-up over the course of a couple of days by virtue of running a 'changeover' scheme with the other stuff I was supposed to be transcribing; every ten minutes an alarm was set to go off on my computer advising me to switch material and start typing in the other document! Of course this theoretically meant that the original task took twice as long as normal, but in practice it didn't seem to make much difference (nobody noticed), presumably because the change in source material helped prevent me from getting as bored as usual.

I currently have it split into four chapters, roughly according to chronological jumps (although the last two scenes are separated by a not insignificant period). The main trouble is that the scenes get shorter and shorter as the story goes on, with the last two even when paired together still coming in at under a thousand words, while the first chapter is about two-fifths of the total length all on its own. But the only other sensible division would be to run all the 'adult-epoch' scenes together, and there really is a sizeable shift across this material, both in time and in Yann's relationship with Christine.

Weirdly, I seem to have averaged a lot more words per page on this story than in the previous story in the same notebook; still, four chapters is a lot for a story that's only just over 5,000 words in all. Especially as the previous one was published as a single 3,800-word chapter! (The cynical approach on fanfiction.net, of course, is to upload across as many chapters as possible in order to accumulate maximum reviews and keep the story boosted back to the top of the fandom listing...)

Still wondering what 'category' to put this under and whether it's humorous at all; I'm tempted to do Angst/Humour.

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If I Were Vicomte

1. Jeunesse

The sun shone bright across Trestraou’s sands on the day the wandering fiddler came, and the wind raced across the wide bare sweep of that great strand with nothing to halt it but the church high above and the handful of cottages down by the shore. The fiddler and his little daughter had roamed from village to village for weeks, playing and singing as they went and refusing all payment save a bed of straw for the night and a dish of fresh milk in the morning, and much talk had been made of it thereabouts. But to the barefoot children who scuffled amidst their fathers’ nets, the big man with a fiddle-case slung over his shoulder was simply a stranger in a place where no new face was seen from one season to the next, and they watched him from a distance and with wide eyes.

The newcomer and the little girl came down to the shore and stood hand in hand, gazing out across the unmarked sands that stretched away beneath that vast overarching sky. The wind stirred in the man’s fair beard and blew his forelock across his eyes, and the girl drew her scarf more closely round her face to cover her hair. After a time her father drew out his instrument and began to play there on the empty beach, a music that was not written down but echoed back the wide waters and the golden strand and the seabirds that soared upon the breeze, crying, their voices as plaintive as the sound of the fiddle far below.

The little girl stood and listened for a while, entranced. But presently she began to stray from her father’s side to gather shells and stones at the water’s edge, where the tossing waves foamed and rushed in and died, each leaving behind a momentary glistening treasure of sea-jewels and shining coral that dried to dullness in the seeker’s hand.

The fiddler’s uncanny music came drifting in snatches down the wind to where the fishermen’s children watched, and his daughter came nearer and nearer to them unheeding in her lonely game. Then, as she stooped once more to the sand, it happened. A gust stronger than the rest caught teasingly at her scarf and tugged it loose, sending it dancing for an instant just beyond her outstretched fingertips as she cried out. Then it was whirling away and out over the waves to settle at last for a final few moments on the surface of the glittering sea.

Her father, caught up in his fiddle-playing, could surely not have seen what had happened. For he went on with his wild tune, oblivious, while his daughter wrung her hands in dismay and seemed about to plunge into the breakers, warm and well-clad as she was in her heavy skirts and the sturdy button-boots that would weigh her down.

The children of the coast had been schooled not to mix with strangers. No good ever came of interfering in the lives of outsiders, they learnt from the cradle, no matter how well-meant. But they took in also with their mothers’ milk the pitiless nature of the sea. For those few fatal seconds they murmured, but did nothing.

One among them, however, had not paused for thought. He was much the same age as the stranger girl but already apprenticed to his father, with hands that had learnt to handle the tiller or to run a boat up the shore, and with the reddish-fair Breton hair and clear blue eyes. Barefoot and lightly clad in his worn shirt and trousers, he was already sprinting towards her where she stood undecided on the shore.

“Don’t worry, mademoiselle,” he promised, “I’ll fetch your scarf!” And with that he had plunged waist-deep into the surf in pursuit of the wisp of cloth which was even then beginning to sink beneath the waves.

For a moment his fair head seemed to vanish in its turn as the seas rolled remorselessly in. Then he reappeared, soaked and bedraggled but triumphant, like a knight of old with the lady’s token clutched in one hand. As he came up the beach towards the girl whose scarf he held, he had already begun to shiver in the biting wind. But he seemed oblivious to the water that streamed from his clothes. And so did she, as she flung her arms about him in gratitude and gave him a kiss.

“What’s your name, monsieur? I’m Christine Daaé.”

The title of ‘monsieur’ brought a flush to his cheek where the childish kiss had not. “I’m just Yann, mademoiselle. Yann Le Coennec, of this parish.” His French, like hers, held an accent; but it was the Breton lilt.

~o~

In the weeks that followed, the children came to spend almost every day together when Yann was not out with the boats. The warm clutter of his home was a happy one; but he had never known anyone like Christine. His mother, for whom Yann’s lack of brothers and sisters had always been a source of sorrow, welcomed the little girl into their cottage.

His father was more wary. Christine was artless, and it had not taken long for them to discover that she was no vagrant fiddler’s daughter, but that she and her father were living with a university professor who had come as a summer visitor to Perros-Guirec, and that Professor Valerius was overseeing Christine’s education. Yann had learned his letters from the village curé, and even that was more than his parents had ever done. It was not right for the Daaé girl to be mixing with the likes of them. She would turn up her nose at a poor fishing family.

But Christine paid no heed to Yann’s darned clothes, or the rough fare his mother cooked. She envied the hard, sure soles that let him climb over rocks and run barefoot without the cost of shoe-leather, and by the end of the summer she too had schooled herself at the cost of much practice to set aside boots and stockings and run wild with the rest. She would sit at the chimney-breast while Yann rubbed her little pink feet with salt-water-and-vinegar, which he had most earnestly promised would take away the soreness and make them strong and hard, listening with rapt attention to the tales his mother told as she stirred the cooking-pot.

In turn Christine would coax her father to recount some of her childhood favourites for Yann. The curé, who had a fondness for the boy, had persuaded Daaé to give Yann some violin lessons; and so after fiddling his way with increasing confidence through a few old folk tunes, to Christine’s patent delight. Yann would sit cross-legged by the wayside at his teacher’s feet, beneath the old tree where their lessons customarily took place, and listen enchanted to tales of the far North in Daaé’s soft Swedish accent. And often a small hand, uncalloused and eager, would slip into his grasp and squeeze tight at the most exciting moments.

They shared the same taste in stories; the same calm and dreamy nature that took pleasure in music or the spinning of words, that carried Christine away when she sang her father’s songs in a strong small treble, and that captured Yann’s imagination when the winds sang harsh and clear across the sea, and the tiller leapt joyously in his hand like a live thing. And Christine took such pleasure in the old Breton tales that she and Yann were soon to be found roaming all over the moors and down the little lanes. He would lead her to all the old gaffers and gammers he knew who could be begged, argued or pleaded with to lay aside whittling-knife or spindle and unfold ancient legends and yarns of former days, while the children listened, hand in hand. Christine’s gentle ways won her friends wherever she went, and Yann did his best to mould his manners on hers. People remarked upon what a fine-looking pair they made: the pretty Swedish child and the fisherman’s boy with bare feet and a crop of red-gold hair, who seemed to look up to her and look after her almost in the same breath.

But the story they both loved best of all was one that her father told. It was the story of the Angel of Music, who once in a lifetime would come down from heaven to visit those children who showed talent and studied hard, and bestow upon them that elusive touch that men called genius. Christine had heard this tale since infancy, but every time it held her spellbound with its promise that some day she too might share in that magic. And all the while Yann would gaze at the little girl with the fair plaits and the dreamy eyes, his very own angel of music, who had unknowingly brought enchantment into his life.

~o~

Autumn came, and the children were parted. The winter in Brittany was hard that year, and there was not always enough to eat; but Yann’s clothes had begun to gape at wrists and ankles, and his mother sometimes went short so that he should have enough. When the storms abated, around the turning of the year, his father began to take him out with the boats every day to set his growth to good use, and Yann obeyed without complaint, so there was food set on the table and a warm fire at night and the lean times began to fade. All the time he was waiting for the news that Professor Valerius had returned to Brittany once more.

But Christine’s father had already begun to cough that last summer, and he was no longer strong enough to roam the villages or sleep in the hay. Christine and Madame Valerius were constantly in attendance at his side. And the fishing fleet went out with every tide, so that Yann’s hands were cracked with the salt and torn by the ropes and grew to a horny hardness that was too clumsy to finger the delicate neck of a violin; and he had no time to make the long walk up to the house at Perros-Guirec to find out why Christine did not come.

He said nothing. Indeed, he grew very silent, and his father took it for sullenness and spoke sharply to the boy. But at the back of his mind there was always the thought that he was only a poor fisher-lad and Christine had been brought up to mix with those of gentle birth.

“If I had a title,” he burst out one day to the curé, “if I had even the smallest, least grand of titles — if I were some young baron or vicomte, and not just plain Yann — then I could see her whenever I liked. Her father would have all the medicine he needed. If I were vicomte, when winter came my mother would be happy and well and my father would be kind to me. If I were vicomte, none of this would be happening!”

But the old man could only lend a sympathetic ear, for they both knew that such things were the stuff of fairy-tales.