If I were Vicomte (ch2)

[igenlode]

I'm still not particularly happy with the first chapter of my Hammerstein-story, despite having rewritten three pages of it to cut out most of René and add in old Oscar himself. My suspicion is that it's a boring info-dump — and while I'm usually pretty good at those, the trouble is that this time no-one has any reason to care about any of the characters involved, Jos, McWhirter or René. So it's effectively just a massive plot summary to describe 'how Christine managed to go missing in the middle of New York', as told from the point of view of characters who didn't actually witness it :-(

It's frustrating, because I still think the idea in itself is original and promising; the experience does at least have the merit of making this preceding story seem better in contrast, even if this one is pretty fragmentary!

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2. Matelot

It was three years before he saw Christine again, and when he did it was under very different circumstances. His father’s boat, caught by unseasonal gales, had put in at Toulon, and there the boy had caught the attention of the navy. Well-grown and muscled for his age, and handy on the water, Yann Le Coennec was just the type of sailor on whom the fleet had had its eye for centuries immemorial, and the long and the short of it was that young Yann had found himself enlisted almost willy-nilly into the Marine National — the service which he soon learned to call ‘La Royale’, the nickname for the navy time out of mind.

Yann accepted it with a shrug, as he accepted most things these days. But when he found himself with a few days’ embarkation leave a brief flicker of independence woke, and he turned aside from the long road back from his dépôt to call at the little house in Perros-Guirec.

It had ben a hot week of merciless sun, and his new uniform smock, still stiff from the slop-chest, was powdered with whitish dust from the road. He brushed at it vainly, his throat dry, before tugging at the bell.

Would anyone be at home? Would Daaé be there? Would it be some new rich family fresh down from Paris, who would turn a footsore sailor away from their threshold as a vagrant or worse?

But it was Daaé himself who answered the door, Daaé with his broad frame shrunken by illness and grey in his beard, so that Yann was hard put to it to keep the first impulse of shock and pity from his face. “Monsieur? Monsieur, I’m Yann... Yann who learnt the violin — do you remember?”

The greying beard broke apart in a great smile of welcome, and road-dust or no road-dust Yann found himself enfolded in a bear-hug embrace whose affection brought a sudden rush of tears to his eyes. He hugged the other man back tightly. “I wondered,” Daaé was saying, “I often wondered...”

And then somehow he was being invited into a neat little parlour where he scarcely dared sit down, and Christine came through from the kitchen beyond, blushing and smiling at once, with a tray in her arms. He took the cool drink she offered him, but kept it awkwardly between his hands despite the dryness in his throat. Indeed, his throat seemed to have seized up altogether.

Her touch had brushed against his when he took the glass, and his heart was racing unaccountably. After all, they had gone hand in hand so often before... but it was not the same any longer. Christine’s figure was no longer that of a child, and he was suddenly conscious of the new gruffness in his own voice, and the breadth of his shoulders. From where he sat he ventured a glance up into her face, and found her very red and looking the other way. But the lace at her throat was rising and falling in a way that it had not done before, and he felt colour rise to his cheeks in response.

Her father was surveying the pair of them gravely, with a certain expression that Yann could not interpret. “Perhaps you would take our visitor out into the garden for me, Christine? He has had a hot day’s travel, and the two of you must have much to say to each other.”

And presently, the cool glass with its dewdrops of moisture still clutched in one hand, he found himself sitting in a little roofed shelter all covered with some climbing plant that bore flowers in profusion. The garden behind the house was green and manicured to a degree he had never imagined, with winding paths and hedges all around, and they were quite alone. Christine Daaé hesitated a little and then took a seat at his side, a decorous distance away so that her skirts just brushed his knee, but with every breath that she drew he was intensely, confusingly aware of her.

Christine’s attention seemed fixed upon a nodding blossom to her right that swayed in the breeze. Hands folded in her lap, she cleared her throat without looking at him.

“So, monsieur, I see you are in the navy now?”

He could not bear this new stiffness between them.

“I’m just Yann, mademoiselle. Still Yann...” He swallowed likewise and reached over to brush her sleeve with his fingers, where her own lay locked inviolate in her lap.

She trembled beneath his touch, and he flinched and snatched the importunate hand away, staring straight out into the garden in his turn. But a moment later small, hesitant fingers crept across into his, answering the shy pressure of his response with movement of their own, so that his stilted answers to her conversation came more and more at random than ever, while their fingers made reply to each other on a subject that neither could voice.

They remained outside all that afternoon, talking together with polite constraint on a dozen matters of no real concern. When the sun grew low her father came out to find them, with a smile for Yann and a quizzical look for his daughter. But Christine only blushed again, most charmingly, and got up to escort their guest out to the road.

So it was by the roadside that Yann made his farewells to Christine Daaé. His heart was full; full of things he could not say and only half understood, most coherent among them a mutinous fury against a stroke of fate that had granted him the chance to see her anew only to compel him off to sea almost in the same breath.

If he were a man of position — it was the old cry — if he were the merest vicomte, born into some great family, then his life would not be decided for him like this. He would not be sent off to join a ship and sleep among fifty others, subject to the whim of any officer on board. He would be able to go when he pleased, and stay when he pleased. And no-one would be able to frown at him for courting any girl in the whole of France...

He had never been more conscious of his own coarse clothes, the garments of a common sailor, compared to the neatness and delicacy of everything she wore. Her feet were tiny; was it possible that he had once chafed them cheerfully and obliviously between his hands, when he trembled at the very thought of kneeling before them now?

Somehow he stumbled through the conventional forms of goodbye with a hard, pulsing knot of misery lodged within his breast. At the last moment he caught up her hand and pressed a hopeless, clumsy kiss to it. “I’ll never forget you — never!”

Then he turned and went away as fast as he could, cursing himself for having said so little and said it so late, and above all for having said it at all. For he knew very well that Yann Le Coennec could never aspire to the hand of a girl like Christine Daaé.