A/N: A long chapter for you this time; I hope the wait was worth it! Thank you, again, for reading and for continuing to encourage me. Your reviews matter very much.
Trivia: The Châtiments (Chastisements) is poetry cycle by Victor Hugo which was banned under the Empire and only made legal again under the Republic. It was massively popular and widely performed in readings in Paris during the siege not only by Hugo himself, by also by many others.
Chapter 63 — Bugle Calls
The dream was heavy and blazingly hot, dragging at his ankles as Erik struggled uselessly to wake up. He was in Bazeilles again, a stranger stumbling through a burning street in somebody else's battle. Grey smoke, stinking of gunpowder, rose before him like layers of scrims, revealing vaguely human shapes sprawled on the cobbles at his feet. Panic squeezed his chest. Which way? He had to get out. He had to get out! In the smoke all façades were an identical grey. Suddenly the ground shifted and a shriek pierced through the roar of the guns as a shell hit — and a black hole gaped in the nearest façade. Around it, the ragged edges of the wall began to peel away like paper. Pasteboard, Erik recognised it, and almost laughed in relief. The entire town was only a set-piece for an opera. He should have known! Catching hold of the peeling edges, he stepped easily through the breach, even as the remnants of Bazeilles collapsed behind him in a hot cloud of dust.
On the other side was a stage. A vast, unlit stage, where there was no scenery at all, only a row of footlights beyond which he could see nothing. Erik moved toward them and realised this was the Variétés, and he stood alone in full view of the audience. They were waiting for him. All Montmartre was waiting for him. 'Sing!' Christine's voice commanded frantically from deep in the wings, but it was too late: he slashed the chandelier's rope and opened the trapdoor and the cold stone steps to his lair were spiralling down from it, down, down, down…
He woke with his face ground into the worn parquet of the living room, numb to his teeth with cold.
Thin uncertain light of early morning filtered around the edges of his vision. Stiffly, Erik turned his head. The divan loomed above him like an upholstered cliff, familiar by now to the last frayed thread: just as well he no longer attempted to sleep on it, or he would have certainly roused the others. Nothing said good morning quite like the thud of a falling body hitting the floor.
Squirming to free an elbow, he extricated himself from the straitjacket of tangled blankets, rolled over and listened. The apartment slumbered on. His keen hearing confirmed three separate voices breathing in long, slow, steady waves. All was well. Another night safely gone.
Erik waited for his heart to slow down, then waited longer still for the fight to go out of his bunched muscles until he felt sure of himself. He spat out the wad of soggy linen that had prevented his voice from betraying his repertoire of nightmares, and wiped at his chin. The gag's pressure had left his mouth feeling wooden, and the linen furred his tongue with its usual disgusting taste, but he was reassured that it had done its job. A little discomfort was a small price to pay for silence, and silence meant peace. The madness that filled his nights was for him alone.
The clock above the fireplace showed a little before six. Past time to get up, if he did not want to miss the morning's bread.
He climbed to his feet and went to dress and attend to himself with the supplies he had learned to keep in the corner in this transient home of his. A ewer of icy-cold water waited on a stand beside the piano, where it took the place of a lamp. Beside it were the essentials he had brought from rue Fontenelle: a clean shirt, a cake of ludicrously overpriced soap, his razor and comb, a roll of fresh bandages boiled to whiteness and the jar of ointment to relieve their incessant chafing. And there, beside all this mundane paraphernalia, masquerading as nothing of importance, a slim silver hair comb that belonged to Christine.
Erik hid the comb in his breast-pocket and began to shave. This life was his, and no nightmare could erase the reality of it. As long as the siege held, he was entitled to carry Christine's things in his pocket, and provide her with fresh bread for her breakfast, and accompany her to the theatre. When he had helped in the kitchen last night, it had not mattered that he could not prevent her having to do the scullery work, or that he could not give her the life she deserved. All of it dissolved later, in the feel of Christine's mouth seeking his, and the little gasps she made with each painful sundering of their bodies, and the weight of her leg thrown over his hip afterwards, still embracing him as she rested. She kept a rosette now, a flimsy silk thing which she assured him would delay their unions' natural consequences, but Erik had no faith in its good-luck charm, and did not forego his self-control. Even so, it drove him to distraction to see Christine reach for the little box hidden in her dressing-table, and know that she did this because she chose him, and she meant to lay claim to the poor vessel that was his body.
"I wish..." she had murmured breathlessly into shoulder, "I wish we could just catch a train… to the seaside…"
"A train?" He had stopped in astonishment, trying to find her face in the dark by the glint of moonlight in her eyes, but Christine arched after him with so delicious a sound of frustration that for a while he forgot all about trains.
Later, lying languid in the warmth of her bed under their shared covers, he remembered again.
"There is nothing at all romantic about trains, you know." He was trailing a fingertip idly down her spine, revelling in the little undulations of it, and the perfect dip in the small of her back. "They're full of steam and noise and soot, and even a second class carriage is a cursedly uncomfortable way to travel."
"I should like it, all the same. Ahh," she squirmed, but not in protest, and Erik took that as encouragement to continue his exploration, — "I think you would like it too. Everything is beautiful from a train window. The way the world streams past, the sky, the trees…"
He found the spot she liked best at times like these, and gently worked it until she let his fingers follow more sedately in the path they had learned together.
"I do like it," he admitted, and realised the unintended lewdness in his words just as Christine laughed, reaching down to touch his hand: "Do you?"
He gave up his half-hearted attempt to rouse her to another effort and wrapped her instead in a hard embrace, so that she could not see his eyes. The pressure of her body all along his was a wonder he could not get used to. "Forget the trains, Christine. The world outside is miles away. It doesn't matter anymore."
"You're wrong," she said softly, without rancour. "It matters. Madame Giry is mourning, after that awful letter, and Meg too. If I could, I would buy us all a ticket to Perros, and walk by the shore again… Have you ever seen the sea in winter?"
"Not that I recall."
"It turns silver, the same colour as the sky. I will show you, one day."
"We should get some sleep." He could not refrain from a last chaste kiss on her hair before he left her, and a less chaste one on her lips, nipping the skin ever so lightly. He did not want to think of the sea he had never seen and never would, nor of any other impossible future. The present was all he needed.
But now, as he made his way through his early-morning routine, Christine's words returned to trouble him. The letter from Perros had stirred memories best left buried, of the years of his utter solitude when the young woman who did not yet call herself Madame had disappeared to bear her child. He did not want to think of those empty years, or of what he had become by the time she returned.
He went to the sideboard in the dining room to collect the week's ration cards, and paused at the sight of the drawer left slightly ajar. Had not Madame Giry hesitated rather too long over it the previous evening for it to have been only the affirmation of his invitation to stay?
Erik pulled out the drawer to its limit, and looked within. Ration cards, household ledger, receipts… And an envelope he did not recognise. He pulled it out, careful not to disturb the other items.
It was addressed to him, and stamped with an official government mark. He slit it open with a thumbnail. The return address belonged to the War Office.
Erik hesitated only a moment. Then he grabbed his hat and overcoat, stuffed the burning-white envelope in his pocket, and within minutes was striding through grey morning fog, down towards the boulevard.
o o o
"Will you stop a second! Andersson!" Raoul went stumbling and puffing and cursing after the retreating figure, irritated at the rain-slick pavement for offering no purchase to the crutches, and at himself for not being able simply to turn back and limp away from this ritual morning struggle.
"Damn it," he spat at Andersson's back, having finally caught up at the Boulevard de Sébastopol, where the road was jammed solid by a procession of caissons, horses and heavy guns dripping with rain. The artillerymen themselves were barely visible, hulking under their wet overcoats. "Surely you realise I cannot move so fast in this wet!"
Andersson half turned to glare at him from under his hat-brim, his mouth curled crookedly beneath the edge of his mask. "How do you know you cannot, if you do not try?"
"I'm turning back."
"By all means." Andersson flicked his gaze over Raoul's shoulder, and Raoul had to look behind him. The artillerymen were followed by a detachment of Mobiles, their ragged column indistinct in the damp fog and stretching on and on, cutting off his retreat.
"All right," Raoul gave up. "We walk on, but only as far as my apartment and back, and not at that insane pace. I have no wish to wring my neck trying to outrun a madman with two good legs."
Andersson snorted at this, but Raoul saw he had accepted the compromise. Their usual route for these morning walks took them past his shut-up apartment, empty of servants ever since his departure for the army but still useful for its coal store, and from there to the makeshift market stalls around Les Halles, where Andersson acquired whatever the foragers had gathered under the cover of night. The day before, Andersson had goaded him into continuing all the way to the unfinished new Opéra, a feat Raoul was repaying today by black bruises under his arms where the crutches dug in, and legs too sore to move. The wet pavement and continued drizzle only added to the aggravation.
They waited for a gap in the artillery movement, Andersson tapping the ground with his cane in a hideously complicated rhythm. Its jittery tension communicated itself to Raoul loud and clear, whether the effect was intended or not.
"They've been moving the guns all night," he remarked as much to distract Andersson from his anxious tattoo as to maintain at least a semblance of civility. "Materiel too. And Guyon swears they're preparing pontoons."
Andersson stopped tapping. "What?"
"Pontoons. Bridges, such as they used in—"
"In Bazeilles. Yes, know what they are!" Andersson jerked his shoulder irritably, staring across the road. "It means nothing."
"It means they are to cross the Marne, down past the Bois de Vincennes. Come on, Andersson, you know all of this cannot be just for another skirmish." Raoul watched another gun carriage lumber past, its huge wheels turning steadily. "We're breaking out." The 'we' felt strangely difficult to speak, when he himself could be nothing but a useless bystander.
"Do me a service, Vicomte. Shut up."
Raoul bristled. He was still deciding whether to take offence, considering the man was so obviously wound up about something, when an opportune gap between the wheeled traffic intervened. Andersson plowed into it, and Raoul found it took all his attention just to keep close enough to make use of the space left by Andersson's passage. Behind them, the river of wagons closed again.
When at last they had made it across, splattered to the knee from the overflowing gutter but for a wonder unharmed, Andersson did not even pause. He continued straight on into the nearest side street, barely moderating the breakneck pace he had kept up all morning. Tap-tap-tap went his cane, striking each cobble with vicious force.
"Andersson!"
Fed up, Raoul drew up to a hard stop under the canvas awning of a boarded-up restaurant, out of the drizzle, and braced his aching hip against a crutch. He waited for Andersson to turn around.
"Either you tell me what's going on, or I shall be forced to send someone to make enquiries. Is it Christine?"
Andersson's eyes became wilder than Raoul had seen for some time, reminding him unpleasantly of all this man was capable of. He had thought it madness once. Now, he recognised it for what it actually was: fear. Intense, mind-numbing fear, the sort that could paralyse a man in the middle of battle as easily as a hunted animal.
"No."
Raoul had expected him to pretend ignorance of any trouble, but Andersson's reply came so quickly that he must have been expecting the question. Indeed, he seemed almost relieved:
"Christine is safe. Do you seriously think I would be here if she were not?"
"Then why in God's name are you running?"
"If I were running, you would not have a hope in Hell of catching up."
Raoul refused to dignify this with a response. He waited. Sure enough, after a brief grumbling pause, Andersson reached into his coat pocket and dragged out a roughly opened envelope. Raoul recognised the stamp at a glance, and felt an unexpected twist in his gut: part sympathy, part hatred, for this man who cared nothing for the plight of France.
"Conscription," he said, and Andersson's silence confirmed it.
They looked at the crumpled envelope for a moment before Andersson stuffed it back in his pocket. His voice when he spoke was that of a mourner, low and uncharacteristically toneless. "I am to make myself known to the battalion commander by December 1. Two days."
"Two days!"
"It appears the letter took some time to find me." He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and added viciously, "If I knew to whom I owe its delivery, I would be sure to thank them for their diligence. In person."
"This is not a hunt," Raoul pointed out, "we're at war. I saw the order that went out: every able-bodied man from 25 to 35, unmarried or widowered, and married men of 35 to 45…"
"If it is able-bodied men they want," — Andersson grimaced; a peculiar spectacle when only the unmasked part of his face moved, — "why should they send such a letter to me?"
"Why should they not? Are you less than a man?"
"Are you? I don't see you hobbling off to join the march!"
Raoul swallowed down the burst of anger which he knew Andersson had been trying to provoke. "I know my duty."
"I don't give two sous for your duty. Or your war. This," he brought out the fistful of crushed envelope for a moment, "has nothing to do with me. Nothing."
"No?" Raoul could not stop himself, "Then walk away. Go hide in a basement, or sleep in the cemetery again, or live like a hunted rat in a sewer! Go and have others fight in your place, and owe them the rest of your own miserable life."
The outburst died in the damp foggy air between them. Raoul held Andersson's heavy stare, resenting how easily he had been riled. The pain was real enough, but it was his own shame he exposed, not Andersson's. To Andersson, all this truly meant less than nothing. "Do as you will. But if you live as a man in the world, you can hardly be surprised when you are treated as one."
Andersson blew out a breath and turned to look back the way they had come, to the boulevard, where the Mobiles were now crossing.
"I cannot do this, Chagny. Call it what you will. I cannot." His shoulders rose and fell.
"I know that." Raoul leaned back on the boards that covered the shop-front, taking the weight off his arms, and scrubbed at his face. What a mess.
"Have you told Christine?"
"Don't be absurd. Of course not." Andersson shook the rainwater from his hat furiously and wedged it back onto his bandaged head. "Madame Giry knows."
"Christine must be told."
"No," Andersson snarled suddenly, teeth bared so that Raoul flinched back involuntarily. "Do not even think of informing her. I will take care of it."
"Take care of it, how? I warn you, I am not going to lie to her. Last time you left, I spared Christine the tale of how I came across a raving drunk stalking her father's grave…"
"I was not drunk!"
"Ah of course, that makes it so much better. A deranged stalker sleeping with the cats, but stone-cold sober for it."
Andersson looked thunderous, but Raoul went on, "Have you a plan that does not involve going to prison, or worse? We are under martial law. Deserters and truants can be shot."
"Enough," Andersson said curtly. "We have purchases to make. Move fast, Vicomte; Christine is on for the matinee and I will not have her go hungry because I spent the morning arguing with you."
o o o
The show was cancelled. The theatre was abuzz with a frenzy of anticipation that spread through every level and every room: the grande sortie, it was starting at last! No official announcement had yet been made but everyone had seen the columns and the guns: it had to be today, tomorrow at the latest. Christine found herself shunted back and forth between backstage and front of house, with the stage manager and Michaud running themselves ragged trying simultaneously to gather news, pacify the wounded in the ambulance downstairs, and keep the crowds entertained. Finally she was propelled to the front to sing at an open window, wearing a tricolore sash over folds of hastily pinned drapery, adorned with a crenellated crown, and brandishing a faux gold staff which the management deemed suitable to represent the city of Paris arising. Instead of the required Marseillaise, she sang a folk song from Perros, but in the din and mayhem, nobody much minded. The spectacle was what mattered.
She was soaked to the skin and half-frozen afterwards, and could have sobbed with relief at being released at last to her dressing-room. Did the people hear her voice, or would they have been just as ready to applaud a dressmaker's dummy dolled up in the republican colours? She was fairly certain that the mood of the crowd was such that any girl from the chorus could have been thrust into the frame of that window to be applauded just as fiercely. She had thought of saying as much to the other singers arrayed behind her, some of whom she knew from her time in the ballet, but she could find no tactful phrase that would not make her sound the conceited star, and while she hesitated, that moment of possible friendship was gone. The girls trooped off, chatting among themselves. "The sortie—" she caught as they went past, but whatever the news was, it was soon beyond her hearing.
Christine blinked at her reflection in the dressing-room mirror as she tried to remove the heavy eye makeup without making a smeary mess of her face. She had never been much good at this; it took forever and like as not would still require Meg's help to get rid of the last bluish shadows. But Meg was not here now, nor Madame Giry. It was only now that Christine fully realised how far their protection had extended. She had never had the knack of making true friendships with the others in the ballet, but at least while she had been a strange little orphan wrapped in her dreams, she had aroused no animosity. It was when she was thrust into sudden stardom that they might have grumbled, but she had been Meg's friend, and the foster-daughter of the ballet mistress besides. Between them, they shielded her ascent: Meg, by her easygoing manner and known loyalty, and Madame Giry, by force of her undisputed authority. And besides, that brief spell in the limelight had ended almost before it began. This, on the other hand…
But this could prove shorter still, now the army was moving to break through. A hundred thousand or more, both of the regular troops and the National Guard: a torrent greater than anything Christine could have imagined. Since the morning, the regular booming from the forts had grown so frequent that even indoors, with the windows shut, she could feel it like an oncoming thunderstorm. Each deep thud made the glass in the windows jitter.
Christine set down the sponges and towelled off her red, wind-chapped skin. She wondered what was going on outside, whether there was any news, but her dressing room remained isolated in the bubble of privacy she herself had requested. Funny; she had never imagined that she might empathise with Carlotta, but she understood now how easily this separation of her world could become the secluded cell of a paranoid mind. It was not a comfortable feeling.
She gave up on the remnants of the make-up, ate the small meal of bread and jam from the packet she had brought with her in the morning, and checked the time. The afternoon shift in the ambulance in the lobby was the part of her day which she had been dreading.
"But my dear Mademoiselle Daaé," Michaud had remonstrated, pacing his immaculate office with his kepi in his hands, "all the artists in Paris are doing as much. Just look at what Mademoiselle Bernhardt has accomplished at her Odéon! The wounded there have soup prepared by her own chef, and the artists nurse the patients and attend at the operations."
Christine could only stare at him in dismay, which poor harassed Michaud was glad to interpret as admiration. She could not explain to him how deeply it disturbed her to see the rows of sick-beds placed right in the lobby of theatre, with the arms of marble statues used as coat-hooks to hold blankets and crutches, and bedpans on the marble floor. The Variétés was not the American Ambulance, with its antiseptic seaweed beds and the breezy warmth of the tents. Already the lobby had acquired the stale, suffocating air of a room converted to a hospital, and the sounds and smells of it were familiar to the very pit of her stomach. They had no place in a theatre. They reminded her too much of the end of her childhood.
"I will not nurse the wounded," she had told Michaud, astonishing him, and undoubtedly adding another mark to her catalogue of strange fancies to be humoured only because she was now a star. "But I could sing for them. If you like."
The compromise they had reached was not what either of them wanted, but it was the best Christine could do. She was to sing in the lobby as she had suggested, a simple uncostumed recital for the benefit of the patients, and then to walk among them to talk to the more lucid of the men, allowing them to pay their compliments and turning the ambulance into a sort of soirée. It was little enough, but Christine could find no way to be at ease in the joint role of hostess and ministering angel. Worse, every other young woman in the theatre seemed eager to play nursemaid, especially to the more attractive of the wounded officers, and Christine knew they regarded her reluctance with amusement and condescension, and gossiped about her just as much as her fellow dancers ever had.
In some ways, nothing had changed at all since she had been in the ballet before the war. Save one: she was known to keep a lover, a wounded architect from Montmartre who attended her every performance and shadowed her like an ill-tempered ghost. But he was corporeal enough, and not especially intriguing when there were so many more interesting wounded men to go around, and so she and Erik were left for the most part to themselves. Christine wondered whether he had tried to come today and had been turned away with the cancelled performance, or whether he had deemed it best not to brave the crowds. Or perhaps he was out on the boulevards with everyone else, waiting for news. She wished he was here. The afternoon's recital was private; he would not be admitted now until it was over, and Christine found herself half-hoping he might find some way to hear it. This recital would be easier to bear knowing he listened.
She drew a steadying breath, crossed the corridor to the stairs, and descended into the lobby.
"Please welcome, Mademoiselle Christine Daaé!" A burst of applause greeted her from audience and chorus, and she saw Michaud over by the entrance doors mop his brow with a handkerchief, relieved to see her appear on cue.
It was not as bad as she had feared, once she had steeled herself to the surroundings and was able to meet the waiting gaze of the wounded men, uniformed for the occasion and seated in the upholstered chairs arranged in a semicircle around the staircase. The performance had been underway for a good half hour before her entrance, with a series of songs accompanied by a string quartet drawn from the orchestra, and a reading from the Châtiments by an invited actor whose name she did not know. Many in the audience looked visibly tired, and Christine thought they might be willing to let her go after an aria or two — but as she stepped up to take her place at the top of the staircase, the applause intensified and she knew she had their full attention. They had been waiting for this; for her. There were men with crutches by their side and others with all their limbs bandaged; there were men whose faces were entirely concealed by bandages and others whose injuries were less overt but who had the overbright look of fever. The insufficient lamplight leant a waxy yellowish cast to their skin, making it look cadaverous against the red velvet and mahogany, but their faces were lively and they followed her every gesture just as though she were a nurse offering laudanum. There was no question of refusing her duty now. They listened — and so she sang.
One face in particular caught her eye: an elderly working man in a National Guard uniform, a craftsman by the look of him, with white hair and a neat peppery beard, who sat perched on a wooden stool at the back to one side of the others. His wrinkled eyes were closed and as Christine sang, she saw him mark the rhythm with his fingers on the kepi he held in his lap.
For an hour or more afterwards she stayed and talked to these men, not so different after all from Raoul in the frustration at their confinement, and eager for any breath of news the city outside. Of news she could offer none, but she shared their stories from the ramparts and the awkward humour of those less accustomed to mixed company. They were predominantly lower-ranked officers of the regular army, and some Garde Nationale from the bourgeois battalions, picked no doubt by the Variétés for their suitability to being housed within its lobby. Among them, the old National Guardsman was an outsider, and Christine found herself gravitating to him curiously, drawn by his contemplative air.
He raised his head as she squeezed her way to the corner from which he had not moved.
"Ah," he sighed in recognition, and she realised it was his vision that was damaged, for he had to narrow his eyes to see her at all. "I knew I was not wrong: you are indeed the young lady who sang at our Folies a fortnight ago." Christine acknowledged this gladly, even as he went on: "But why did you not sing your songs today?"
He seemed genuinely curious, and Christine felt her polite smile become strained, like an inappropriate garment she was not at liberty to adjust. It was true; she had avoided singing her own music at the Variétés.
"I was asked for something in keeping with the occasion." She disliked how cowardly that sounded. "My music isn't like that… It's… Simpler."
"Ah, now that's a thing. Simpler." He looked past her, towards a smoking lamp behind which two of the girls from the chorus were talking to a young officer with a splint over one hand. "There is not enough of the simple around, if you ask me. All this," — he nodded at the ornate chairs around the lobby — "what'll it be worth if Paris goes the way of Saint-Cloud? Beautiful buildings, but they all burn just the same, and ash is ash. You can't buy coal with it, or milk for the little ones."
"You fought there," Christine guessed. "At Saint-Cloud."
He turned his attention to her incredulously, trying to focus his eyes, and shook his head as though she had said something very silly. "It doesn't matter where I fought. It is the same everywhere, in every city and every country. You must have seen how it is in Montmartre. That is where the real fight is." She saw him prepare to continue, but he seemed to change his mind and instead said, "You should sing your own songs, Mademoiselle Daaé. We could all do with something less suited to the occasion."
Christine dipped her head in a nod, though she was not certain what it was she acknowledged — perhaps only what she had known all along, even when she had signed on with the Variétés:
"My songs do not belong here."
"No," he conceded. "Not yet. But I hope to live long enough to see a world where they do."
A movement at the edge of her vision alerted Christine, and she turned a moment before a familiar silhouette separated from the shadows. Erik, an inner voice whispered in her mind, and as he stepped into the light, that first sharp pleasure of recognition mellowed into a new warmth inside her. She lifted a hand to him, aware that she was smiling.
"You heard me sing."
Erik did not move to take her hand. Instead, he tipped his hat and gave a small stiff bow, scrupulously correct. "An admirable performance, as ever." The words were correct as well, and his expression in the flickering lamplight was stony. "I have the carriage. If you're ready."
"Erik…"
"Your coat, Mademoiselle Daaé."
.
ETA: Another bit of trivia, which I didn't want to include in the note at the start because of the inherent spoiler: a "silk rosette" was a form of barrier contraception for women, similar to a sponge.