Ironically, although this final chapter is narrated from Christine's point of view it's really Gustave's backstory, just as the previous chapter was as much Christine's backstory as Raoul's...

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Ch 4: Mort pour la France

Paris in the autumn was as busy as ever. The leaves on the trees were dusty as the streets and beginning to turn brown, and the sun through the windows of the tramcar struck hot on Christine’s cheek as it had not done all summer — or perhaps, she thought, adjusting her blue uniform cloak, perhaps it had, and she had not been in any condition to notice it.

She descended from the tram at the corner of the boulevard Mont-St-Fleury with a nod to the lady conductress — the war had changed many things — and began to walk rather slowly towards the little café further down. In the pocket of her dress, behind the red cross sewn at her breast, lay the letter that had brought her here, dragging at her steps like a weight from which she had believed herself cut free. She was tired: too tired to feel anything, she told herself, with a bone-deep weariness born of long nights of strain and endless exhausting days of labour over shattered bodies in improvised wards behind the lines.

There was nothing romantic in nursing; Raoul had been right — poor Raoul! But that reflex jolt of memory was nothing more than a dull echo now.( Read more... )

I actually got a 'Please update' review on this the other night :-)

Not that I don't appreciate the involved, coherent, multi-sentence reviews I get from my regular reviewers, but there's an ironic cachet to discovering that you're apparently reaching the mass-market readers as well!

I'm currently trying to juggle three stories at once - this one, "Blue Remembered Hills" and my still-untitled "Gone With the Wind" one-shot, which is supposedly complete but I'm not entirely happy about (it feels very unfocused and random). So things are feeling a bit hectic. And it's slightly worrying that the more recent the material, the less happy I am with it; I actually found myself reading ahead in "Blue Remembered Hills" in preference to checking over this chapter...

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Ch2: Make an end

Eight days of leave had done little to ease nerves rubbed raw by shellfire and snipers. A burnt coal fell through the grate with a rattle sharp as a rifle-shot, and Raoul had to stifle a sharp, instinctive movement that brought him halfway to his feet. The sleeve of his uniform caught against the decanter tray as he sank back, sending the glasses clattering together, and he was barely in time to field the nearest as it toppled. Thought caught up with reflex a moment later, still flinching in anticipation of the averted crash.

He stared down at the tremor in his hand, unsteady now as if it had been a grenade and not a wine-glass snatched from mid-air. There had been a time, once — a distant lifetime on the far side of this last winter — when violence had been an affront and not a familiar part of the world. A time when it was still something one expected to happen to other people.

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Various 'extra bits' that I created in response to readers who wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes; it would be nice to say that these characters are created with a depth and attention to detail that runs deeper than what actually makes it onto the page, but I'm afraid that, like the backstory in the actual text, these are mostly details that 'emerge' as and when it occurs to me to look at them, in other words that I make up as I go along...
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I'm increasingly concerned that Raoul comes across as getting rather an 'easy ride' in this story — a magical snap of the author's fingers, and then he's the Perfect Father and Husband overnight. The trouble is, I think, that I'm basing these chapters on the corresponding scene in canon where he really does miraculously scrub up and vow to do better... but without the corresponding tension of the unspoken bet on his marriage, and without the Phantom lurking around in the background waiting to make his own claims on Christine. Having been prevented by a fluke from being taunted into his reprehensible bet in the first place, all that is left of the character here is his genuine attempts at reformation. Which makes it come across as if I arbitrarily decided that Raoul is really a Nice Guy because I want him to be :-(

I considered replacing "mon vieux" with "fiston" as Raoul's form of affectionate address to the child, having come across this in Violonaire's Fantômes -- but I'm just not confident enough with it, and a check on Google Ngrams suggests that while the term 'fiston' did exist in the literature of this period, it's a term that has only really taken off in the last generation or so. So I'd better stick with what I'm fairly sure of so far as the French goes!

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Chapter 5: Before the Performance

There were police at the Manhattan Opera in the end, that night. Not in the auditorium or outside the gallery entrance — the Daaé had scribbled a note for McWhirter to enclose with the ticket, promising there would be no trap, and she was dead-set on keeping her word — but outside the star dressing room, where a couple of big cops tapped nightsticks lightly on their holsters like they were just spoiling for someone to start making trouble.

If Mr. Y took a fancy to try something, of course, it wouldn’t be that crude. Jos could have told them that, and Miss Daaé had to know it better than any. But if fixing up protection for her with the management made her husband feel warm and wanted — well, it was no business of his how the theater was run. For Jos Perlman, the job had ended at ten o’clock this morning, when he produced the missing artiste and her party at the door of McWhirter’s office, signed, sealed and delivered. Another foul-up cleared; another disaster averted. His specialty. He’d gotten a fat commission out of it, too... and if at half six that evening he found himself paying a backstage call at the opera house, then it was purely on his own account. Besides, he told himself, he had to make sure she’d gotten everything she needed after their little undercover exit.

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And the other material I've been working on this week...

I'm amused to gather from reviews that what I hear as 'Americanisms' the US readers hear as 'period talk' -- appropriate for this setting, of course, but it certainly dates the material from which I obtained this vocabulary!

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Chapter 3: Once Upon Another Time

“I guess... what we do don’t always look too good, when you step back,” Jos said slowly, measuring out words like sips at the rough liquor he still nursed. Round here the stuff could strip your throat numb, if you let it. But it numbed other things. “Not too good, or too wise, maybe. But then it comes hard when your fairytale romance has you all set to fight off the dragon to save the pretty maid, and you wind up as the prince in ‘Rapunzel’ instead.”

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I see that I finished writing this at the start of October, which indicates just how long it has taken me to push it (and myself) through the 'beta' process!

The original "American-picking" beta eventually dropped out after a series of month-long gaps, not all of which was her fault, and I was very lucky to pick up a replacement who steamed through the remaining three chapters in nine days -- the delay had at least given me time to get the whole thing typed up, which is always laborious for me. He found a lot more lapses in chapters 4 and 5 than the previous beta did in Ch1–3, as well, which makes me a little nervous about the earlier chapters...

After going through various Hammerstein-related titles I eventually settled on simply "The Daaé Case", since if the story is being seen from Jos's point of view every case he's involved in is some kind of 'Hammerstein Affair'! And I think that version conveys the 'private eye' overtones of the story well enough.

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The Daaé Case

Chapter 1: Christine Disembarks

“What do you mean, the Daaé’s disappeared?”

John McWhirter was a big man with gray in his wiry black beard, but his voice had cracked into a schoolboy’s high-pitched incredulity, and Jos winced. When the boss blew his top, he could make you feel mighty small. And right now, in the face of a foul-up this colossal, Jos Perlman would give a fair sum to shrink clear away and out of McWhirter’s sight.( Read more... )

Right, I sincerely hope this works, since I'm still unable to log in to fix broken syntax or do anything other than post new articles... If this lasts much longer I shall be forced to join the great majority on Dreamwidth. Which would be a pity, because there's a lot of history (most of it not mine) on LiveJournal.

Oh, and I haven't mentioned the site's new and endearing habit of apparently loading every page twice with about twenty seconds' delay between them, so that you have just typed several sentences into the browser form before the page rerenders and wipes everything...

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So here we're into what is basically the epilogue of the story, from the point of view of Gustave who is essentially an optimistic and sunny-natured child, and who is busy forgetting all the less pleasant parts of the last couple of days. It's basically Raoul-and-Christine fluff being observed through the largely oblivious eyes of their ten-year-old son :-)

I tried to model my Edwardian boy's PoV on the various heroes of E. Nesbit's pre-War stories, which deal with such prosaic matters as comforting crying little sisters, explaining to grown-ups how your best clothes came to be soaked through, and various imaginative pursuits that made perfect sense at the time but get you into no end of trouble when reality intrudes. Although Gustave doesn't really have to deal with anything more than traumatised parents :-p

(Apparently I don't have a tag for Gustave. Well, under the circumstances I can't very well insert one retrospectively :-( ) [Edit April 2017: finally going through and inserting tags via Dreamwidth, two years later!]

Chapter 9: A Hero of Our Time

Mrs Morrison had been a lot more friendly this morning since their luggage had come. But Gustave couldn’t help remembering the way she’d looked at Mother last night as if she didn’t approve of her or of Father at all. He was polite, of course, and let the landlady ruffle his hair and smooth down his new jacket and tell his mother what a fine boy he was in a New York English so broad it might as well have been Flemish so far as they were concerned. But he was glad when the carriage she’d sent for finally arrived and they could load everything up again and get ready to leave. He wasn’t sure he entirely liked Mrs Morrison or her house.

It had been fun to sleep in his clothes and be tucked up at the foot of his mother’s bed and wake up in a strange little room with the sounds of the street outside. He could see it was the sort of adventure you got tired of quite quickly, though. And when they’d heard a heavy vehicle stopping outside and footsteps running up the stairs to come banging on their door, he’d seen his mother go white as a sheet.

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I've been going backwards and forwards on whether Meg Giry is actually 'in love with' the Phantom or not (especially since I'm using the original London production canon here, after which we were assured that her interest is purely professional, though this frankly isn't what it looks like at all...) In the end I've largely left this part of the story in its state of confusion, since if there is one thing for certain in canon it is that the Phantom is not in love with Meg.

I never really thought much about the consistency of Meg's backstory before starting this chapter (not least because I was proceeding on the initial assumption that this dialogue would be seen from the Phantom's point of view!), so I've leaned quite heavily on aceofgallifrey's analysis, though I haven't swallowed this lock, stock and barrel because it's based on hyper-interpretation of the 2004 movie version in which Meg's role is considerably embroidered...

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Chapter 7: Notes from Underground

Meg Giry had been the one on her way up out of the chorus, before any of this had ever started. She had been the one people noticed: the bright one, the quick one, the girl with the spark that said Look at me. She’d been the one who’d been featured in the minor rôles — serving-maids and confidantes, pageboys and peasant dancers, tiny parts all of them, but she’d been there on the programme with her name in print, she’d been there on the stage with her clear voice and her vivid grace and she’d made an impression.

She’d been the one with initiative and ambition, the one who was going places: her mother’s daughter. And it hadn’t been fair, because dreamy, quiet Christine Daaé had talent of her own that no-one ever saw. Christine could have done just as well as Meg if anyone had given her the chance. But if it had been left up to Christine, no-one would ever have looked twice.

So when Carlotta, the diva of those days, had let loose her temperament one time too many and stormed off the stage before the start of the production, Meg had followed the impulse of a moment — as so often in her life — and spoken up on her friend’s behalf: “Christine Daaé could do it, sir.” She’d known Christine was good; she’d heard her practising for her new teacher. She hadn’t had the faintest idea Christine was that good...

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This was originally planned to be the end of the preceding chapter; but not only did the 'pier' scene overrun, it rapidly became obvious that the characters had an awful lot to sort out that wasn't appropriate to Gustave's presence. Also, having all been through the wringer by this stage, they were worn out.

The result was that the ending didn't come out at all the way I had originally anticipated, and a couple of completely new settings come into the story to accommodate the 'delayed matter'...

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Chapter 5: The Seagull

Christine buried her face in Gustave’s hair again, nuzzling the warm small-boy scent of him and enveloping him in a tight embrace until he began at last to wriggle and pull away. She was still shaking with reaction.

She’d believed the Phantom fully capable of taking her son from her and keeping them apart to hold her to his will; but he would never have harmed him. Not the child he had so ardently believed to be his own — the boy in whose quick mind and talent he had seen an unmarred reflection of what he might have been. If she’d had any doubt of that, the man’s horror and distress when the boy was found missing from backstage had made it clear: Mr Y would never hurt Gustave, she was certain of it, even in heartbreak or despair.

Harm to Raoul... was a very different matter.

And so in those first few bewildered moments it had been Raoul’s life she feared for, cut short at the hands of some trap or over-zealous lackey when he’d plunged out after their son in the grip of blind misery and the desperate need to act. She’d been afraid for Gustave at the first when the boy had failed to return, and again when she understood that he was truly missing. But he’d wandered off before, caught up in the flush of some unforeseen interest or following a trail that no adult could make out: as a mother her worry was acute enough but tempered by the pangs of experience.

She had not truly panicked to begin with. Not until frenzied inquisition had brought to light Meg Giry’s hand in the whole affair, and a tumult of insecurity and rage at which Christine, horrified, had never guessed. Not until Meg’s mother, herself on the point of breakdown, had flung accusations that betrayed all too clearly the direction of poor Meg’s heart, as Christine’s presence stole everything from her that she had wanted or might have had. Not until the loaded gun that had been called for, against Christine’s protests, had turned up missing, with Meg Giry as the last to have entered the high Aerie without its Master’s knowledge...

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Raoul, naturally, doesn't have the faintest idea why Meg Giry would want to kidnap his son -- and of course he isn't the rescuer that Meg is hoping to see...

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Chapter 3: Diary of a Madman

Gustave. Raoul would not let himself think of anything else. He kept the boy’s face before his mind’s eye with a fierce, willed concentration, as if that small fair head could blot out the rest.

Gustave’s face — lost. frightened — haunted him round every corner, with every glimpse of a child through the crowd and every furtive shape that whisked away down dark alleys at his approach with what might have been a struggling burden in tow. Gustave...

The persistent small shadow trailed in memory at his heels, demanding acknowledgment — attention, affection — again and again with the same uncomprehending hope, until Raoul’s teeth had been set on edge by the knowledge of it. The child had wanted the old days back. He’d made himself a living reproach to the father he’d lost, and it had been one more reminder that Raoul neither wanted or needed to tell him what he had become.

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