A/N: Dear, beloved, longsuffering readers: I haven't abandoned this story, despite all appearances. At long last, here's more.
Chapter 70 — Mrs
The ceasefire that had followed Christine's wedding lasted barely a day. In the days after it, with the final battles of the grande sortie growing ever more desperate and still no sign of Gambetta's army of relief, Raoul found it unbearable to sit idle in Guyon's empty apartment while Paris fought for her life. He had vowed to protect it. He had vowed to protect Christine too, yet here he was. Every morning he prowled the beleaguered city — alone, since Andersson, married man that he now was, no longer cared to show up for their dawn walks — pushing a little further every time, trying to determine whether his leg was strong enough to be put to service at last. The snow on the boulevards had been slicked down to ice by hundreds of feet and ambulance wagons, but he only exchanged his crutches for a cane tipped with a steel spike and kept walking.
The atmosphere in Paris was suffocating. Nobody dared to breathe the word "surrender" and yet it hung in the freezing fog, unspeakable and shameful. The English newspapers delivered to him in Guyon's absence by careful, nameless men, openly declared the outcome of the war a foregone conclusion and now, for the first time, voiced sympathy for "poor, brave France", speaking just as one did of the dead. But France yet lived.
Three days after the sortie resumed, Raoul dressed carefully in his uniform, left the cane behind and presented himself at the War Office. His officer's epaulettes drew a few looks from those in the more common uniforms of the National Guard, but they might as well have been a sham: the ageing officer who met him flatly refused his demand to return to active duty and advised, not unkindly, that he had best return home to concentrate on his recovery. Raoul returned to the apartment, fuming with indignation and unable to ignore the gnawing ache in his leg.
"They have the right of it," said Maurice, Guyon's manservant, serving Raoul slices of the roast rabbit he had bought from some enterprising acquaintance who was making a fortune breeding the animals in a cellar. "It is no use you getting yourself killed, Monsieur le Vicomte, it is enough that the young master has gone to put himself in the firing line. Here; you must keep up your strength."
"What for?" Raoul wanted to demand, "what is the use of my strength?" — but that would have only been childish and ungrateful. He was only too conscious of how little this meal resembled the sparse tables of the majority of the Parisian population, including perhaps even Christine and her new husband, and of how much effort it would have taken Maurice and the cook to prepare it, and how they relied on it for their own meals. He could no more cast aside their work than he could sling his chassepôt over his shoulder and march at the Prussians. So he thanked the servants dutifully, and ate, and felt ten times the traitor with every bite.
That evening another of Guyon's English papers arrived, with a headline that warned in fat black letters that bombardment of the city was imminent unless Paris surrendered. Raoul was about to lock it in Guyon's desk with all the others, when he happened to glance at the next article, and stopped. A balloon letter, intended for Gambetta in Orléans and detailing the dispositions of the troops for the Paris sortie and the plans for their advance, had landed instead in far Norway. He turned the page in dismay. The rest of the story spoke brightly of the way the letter was going to be delivered to its recipient over land and sea — but what good would it do, with the troops already committed and the Prussians aware of their every move? By the time news reached Gambetta all the way from Norway, it would be of precisely no use whatsoever.
Still, he could not bring himself to discard the paper. In the morning, he took up his clawed cane and returned to the mairie in Montmartre.
It was gratifying to be received there, at least, as a friend. As he had expected, both the mayor and Jean Gandon took a keen interest in this development, so he stayed to translate for them the English text, then went to stand outside in the snow for as long as he could endure the cold, smoking with the men of the local battalion. Here he was Lieutenant de Chagny, an army officer and a trusted friend of Henri Guyon and of Christine Daaé, a survivor of Bazeilles and Sedan, and his words carried weight. The tobacco smelled foul and the language was hardly better, but after Guyon's empty apartment it was a breath of fresh air.
"It's not over yet," his companions said between clouds of lilac smoke. "Think we can still turn it around, Chagny, without Gambetta?"
Raoul too exhaled smoke. "We must."
He returned from Montmartre late in the afternoon, frozen to numbness and sore but hardly limping at all. In the grey twilight, the canvas of the Red Cross flags, which flapped above every other doorway amid the ammunition wagons and uniforms, seemed a shadow of what the men were facing beyond the walls. He envied those men. They might be camped out on rock-hard frozen mud with no fire, with little to eat, ready each day to face the entire Prussian Guard ranged against them — but they were where they belonged, and they knew that what they did there mattered. If they failed and the Prussians were allowed to bombard the city as they had done in Sedan, then nobody was safe. Not he, not Andersson, not even Christine. Raoul thought of the ruins of Bazeilles, of the shattered doors and windows puffing out hot ashes into the rising smoke. This could not be the fate of Paris. It could not be.
At the entrance to Guyon's apartment building he paused but did not go inside. All he needed was proof, incontrovertible proof of his recovery. But how was he to get it?
If there was one good thing to come out of Andersson's mad rush for the ambulance, it was that it now gave Raoul an idea.
He swung around to the stables and saddled and mounted Guyon's sole remaining horse. Then, leaving Maurice gaping in the doorway, he dug his heels into its flanks and left the gate and the street and the quartier behind, heading north-west, up towards what used to be the Avenue l'Impératrice. The War Office would not turn away a commissioned officer from his duty when his physician declared him fit for service, just as the National Guard would not accept a man whom a physician had signed off as unfit. All he needed was a signature.
The horse whinnied, pleased to be moving, and Raoul grinned. Riding as an officer felt good, even when the horse barely trotted on the ice, snorting and slipping, even when his own muscles cramped in protest after weeks of near-inactivity. On the wider span of the boulevard he urged it to a canter, weaving between caissons and donkey-carts, and soon enough the tented roofs of the American Ambulance appeared in the distance, rising like an army camp out of the evening mist.
He arrived at the ambulance with a good hour to spare before curfew. After promising the bright-eyed lad at the stables a respectable sum to brush down the horse and keep it safe from horsemeat butchers, he dropped stiffly from the saddle and wended his way between the tents in search of Doctor Swinburne. The ride had roused his hip to a new hum of pain; he made himself walk faster, trying to make his stride look effortless, hoping he could keep this up long enough. A few pairs of curious eyes followed him, and once or twice he heard his name murmured alongside Christine's by the nurses and nuns who recognised him, but the ambulance was teeming with new wounded being taken down from wagons onto an endless stream of stretchers, and as he was plainly in a hurry and needed no assistance, nobody took the trouble to question him.
He had almost reached the surgeon's tent when the path between the bare trees was unexpectedly barred.
"Raoul de Chagny," said a clear voice.
Raoul looked up in surprise. The speaker was a tall, severe-looking young woman in a black coat, with a Red Cross satchel slung like a rifle belt across her shoulders and a peaked hat that hid her hair and shaded her eyes. Raoul had seen her many times from afar during his convalescence, accompanying Doctor Swinburne or issuing commands to the other American ladies who tended the wounded, but this was the first time he could recall having spoken with her. She stood directly in his way, blocking the approach to Swinburne's tent.
He tried not to look like a guilty schoolboy being caught at some mischief. "Good evening."
"Monsieur le Vicomte, this a strange place for an evening parade."
Raoul blinked, startled. He had expected the accented reprimand of an American socialite, but she was unmistakably French, and spoke with the easy, faintly amused tone of the same Parisian society that not so long ago had been his own circle. He looked at her more closely. Beneath the brim of her hat, her dark, regular features seemed vaguely familiar: did he recognise her from someplace else, before the war, from among the wider circle of his acquaintances? He frowned, trying to place her.
"Geneviève de Montfort," she helped him out, with a tight-lipped smile at his hesitation. "We met some six years ago at my engagement to Captain Edmonds."
"Of course," he apologised hurriedly, "I should have known you at once, Madame Edmonds."
She flinched, and it belatedly occurred to him that she could not be pleased to be reminded of the scandal occasioned by her marriage, which several years earlier had entertained the entire Parisian scene. A daughter of such a family, he recalled his mother saying, engaged to an American! One might imagine she was an impoverished widow courting money. Think of it! He had in fact thought of it as little as possible, not being overly interested in other people's affairs, but now the memory inevitably put him in mind of Christine. Scandals such as the two of them had endured made marriage to an American seem child's play. And yet, from what little he could recall, Geneviève had carried herself with dignity throughout that ordeal, and appeared to have come out of it unharmed.
For a fleeting moment he wondered whether he and Christine might have weathered their own storm eventually too, had she chosen to remain beside him, but that thought was only a wisp. Christine's choice was made: she had been born for music, born to fly. And he… He could just about walk.
"You have made an impressive recovery," Madame Edmonds remarked, with a nurse's unerring eye for the injury she evidently remembered. "Unless of course," — she raised her brows pointedly, "you are concealing what must be considerable pain."
His hip chose that particular moment to cramp violently. Raoul half-hopped onto his good leg, feeling as irritated as if she had made him the unwitting victim of a society joke. He resisted the impulse to knead his hand into the contorted muscle, and instead gestured toward the surgeon's tent behind her, determined not to betray the pain:
"I need to speak with Doctor Swinburne. Is he within?"
Geneviève glanced over her shoulder. "You have come at a busy time, Monsieur le Vicomte. We had six men arrive this past hour alone and more will be coming now that it's dark."
"I can wait."
"I don't doubt it — but that would not serve your purpose." She seemed to be finding some humour in this situation that Raoul could not understand.
"I don't recall explaining my purpose."
"Let me see: you arrived here splendid in full uniform, and are determined to demonstrate that that leg you are favouring is causing you no discomfort. What other purpose could there be if not to convince Doctor Swinburne of your recovery?"
Raoul stood his ground. "There is nothing dishonourable in that."
"Except vanity."
"Vanity?" he echoed, flabbergasted. "Madame, it is not for myself that I ask it. I am seeking to return to active duty. Doctor Swinburne treated my wound; he can approve it. Could you help me see him?"
"Would you really be able to wait?" she countered. "An hour or more, past curfew, standing here in the snow?"
Raoul was silent. She knew full well that he was in pain; he saw no need to confirm it.
The seconds stretched.
"The sortie is over," Geneviève said at last, and for the first time she sounded tired and deflated. "I expect it will be made official in the morning, then at least the wounded can be brought in without all this skulking around in the dark and stretchers arriving in the middle of the night."
"There have been many then?"
"Yes," she said shortly. Then she tugged the sash of her satchel more comfortably over her shoulder, and visibly composed herself. "It is much too late to get to the front now. The retreat has been going on since this afternoon."
Raoul found this did not surprise him as it should have, and yet her confirmation filled him with new dread: if the sortie had failed, the bombardment the English papers predicted could not be far off. He took a deep breath and held it, before slowly letting it out.
"In that case, my duty remains unchanged. If the losses are as heavy as you say, it is even more urgent that I take my post. More battles will be coming."
Geneviève nodded reluctantly to this train of thought. The dark shadows under her eyes gave the lie to her calm nurse's attitude.
"Doctor Swinburne may well like to see you," she sighed. "It will do him good to see at least one young man who is not out of his wits with laudanum and still has possession of all his limbs."
"Most of them, at any rate." Raoul tapped his bad hip. He was pleased to see this raise a slight smile from her, and it was a relief to think that in the midst of this chloroform-soaked horror, human warmth could still exist.
"Most of your limbs perhaps. Your wits I am less certain about. You are too young to be so eager to die, Raoul," — and at this familiarity Raoul bristled until he realised something had caught her attention. A blanket-covered stretcher that was being carried over the snow toward them, from which only the polished toe of one boot protruded. The shape on the stretcher did not move.
One of the stretcher-bearers asked Geneviève something, removing his cigarette; she gave a brisk shake of her head and pointed him to a covered wagon just visible in the dark, before turning back to Raoul. With an unpleasant twinge, Raoul realised it was a mortuary wagon.
"Wait here then, since you are determined. I will speak with Doctor Swinburne. But if you happen not to be here when I return…" She shrugged a shoulder, seeming momentarily only a young Parisienne at a soiree, making an offhand suggestion. "You must realise nobody will think any less of you. You have done enough."
"I will be here."
"Yes. I believe you will be." Geneviève's face betrayed nothing, but there was reluctant approval in her tone. "Well, then. I shall be back shortly." She pulled off a glove to rub warmth into her hand, then replaced it quickly to wave him to one side of the path.
There was no wedding band on her finger.
She met his surprised gaze squarely, making no attempt to deny what he had seen, then spun around and headed to the surgeon's tent.
Raoul stepped out of the way as she had directed, looking after her in confusion as she vanished through the doorway. Had her American captain abandoned her? Or — and the notion gave him an unanticipated jolt — had she abandoned him?
He could not help but think of Christine again, of Christine who had never worn his ring but was now wearing Andersson's, of her cold shivering fingers at her wedding as she held out her hand to be banded. He might have thought her a captured bird then, ringed, were it not for Andersson's wild eyes and fearful look and identically shaking hands. Their joining had reminded him only too forcefully of the cursed lake under the Opéra, of Christine moving slowly towards that same man — of her mouth, her hands, her body screaming the words that Raoul could not bear to hear, and which she herself could not admit. He had thought for the briefest moment that he had glimpsed a ring on her finger then, the ring that the Phantom had stolen from her, yet afterwards in the boat her hands had been bare. She had looked at him for a long time, waiting, but he had never asked.
And as Geneviève emerged again from the tent, a lone figure heading rapidly back toward him, Raoul realised with a mixture of horror and longing that she too had intended for him to see that she wore no ring.
It was no accident. Yet he could not fathom what her admission meant.
"You may go in," she said, using the familiar tu, and although she seemed to leave a pause for it, Raoul did not raise an objection. He felt wrong-footed and awkward under her scrutiny. Her eyes trained on him were disconcertingly frank and very dark; Raoul had the strangest feeling that she was looking for something, or someone, who was not him.
"Do not keep Doctor Swinburne long, please; he will need to see the new arrivals."
"I am in your debt." Raoul gave a slight bow, tried to walk, and faltered. His feet seemed to have become solid ice, and when he tried again to move, his leg throbbed menacingly.
Geneviève saw it.
"Permit me," she said. Raoul barely saw her arm move. With a quick, shocking movement, she compressed his muscle just below the wound. Her fingers were like minute pincers, precise and too strong, and the contact was so brief he barely blinked, but whatever she did seemed to release the cramp. The pain uncoiled.
Raoul tried to catch his breath.
"It will buy you some time," she advised, "but not much. Take care of yourself."
"My thanks," he said, and on an impulse added, "...Geneviève."
He made for the surgeon's tent as hastily as his leg permitted, and did not dare turn to see her response to being thus addressed, but he had the distinct impression that it had pleased her.
As it happened, his hip did not pain him for hours afterward, but that was the only gain he was able to make. The interview with the surgeon was brief and frustrating; Swinburne hardly looked up from his books except to commend Raoul on his diligence in exercising the wasted muscle and to agree, grudgingly, that he would consider his request if he could demonstrate his walking on more than this single occasion. To Raoul's desperate question of how many more demonstrations were required, Swinburne only shrugged as if it hardly mattered.
"Two weeks," he said, and Raoul struggled not to voice his dismay. "Come and see Mrs Edmonds every morning for two weeks and you will have convinced me. Incidentally," — and here for the first time Swinburne seemed to give Raoul his full attention — "what has become of your friend the singer? The husband of Christine Daaé?"
Raoul sighed inwardly; no doubt Andersson would be gratified to know that once again he had managed to intrigue. "He is well."
"Tell me," Swinburne said thoughtfully, "does he complain of his injuries?"
Raoul almost asked just what these injuries were supposed to be, before realising that the surgeon meant what lay under the bandages. "Not to me," he said tightly. It smarted that Andersson's plight was of greater interest to Swinburne then Raoul's request. "Monsieur Andersson has little to complain of these days."
Doctor Swinburne turned the page of his book. "Remind him when you see him that I hope he has considered my offer."
Raoul shrugged noncommittally. "When I see him."
He brooded on the useless interview long after he had returned to the apartment, and it was only on the cusp of morning that the surgeon's parting words struck him first as strange, and then as disturbing.
What offer was this? Was it possible that Andersson had been right after all; that no doctor could withstand the lure of examining a freak? What else could a man like Doctor Swinburne — a man of good character with an entire ambulance depending on him, but still a medical doctor, with a doctor's curiosity — hope to gain from Andersson?
The more Raoul thought of it, the less he liked the sound of it. He wondered if Christine knew.
o o o
Erik spread out the pile of drawings in front of him upon the dusty mahogany top of Monsieur Duchamp's desk, sat heavily in the architect's armchair and stared at this uninspiring trove that was all the reward for his efforts.
Three days of breathing dust and cobwebs and fashioning endless wire contraptions to open the many, many locks on the cabinets that contained the drawings and plans in various stages of completion — and this is all he had come up with.
It was a selection of six apartments from the long list of those Duchamp's atelier had agreed to build or remodel, one of which had been Erik's own project and the rest of his former colleagues. Erik had no idea what had become of the owners who had commissioned these, save the one important thing they had in common: they had all departed from Paris before the city was sealed off, leaving it to the mercy of the Prussians. It was evident to him that they had no real interest in defending their property — one could not call it 'home', since the owners cared so little for its continued existence — and therefore, their apartments could and should be put to better use.
He chose one at random and leafed through the plan. There was little to it: a new internal wall to partition a bedchamber to create a nursery, and a servants' entrance to be added to the master suite; hardly a few weeks of work in peacetime, and none of it at all necessary. As it stood, the apartment ought to be eminently liveable in its present state, if not perhaps as spacious or comfortable as Christine deserved.
He slipped the drawings back into their binder, and tapped the edge of it on the table, thinking. All Paris was deathly still in the midst of the sortie's ignominious failure, but Erik could see no reason that should affect his plans. He was not planning to build, only to live as quietly as the most exemplary of citizens. Opening the sealed apartment would present no immediate problems; what worried him was the complicated task of protecting himself and Christine from any prying neighbours who had not left the city and might question their arrival. Much would depend on the exact location of the chosen apartment; the building; the street; the quartier. What he needed was somewhere well-screened and quiet.
There was only one thing to do: he would have to visit each address in turn until he found one that offered both comfort and privacy for him and his wife.
"My wife," he said aloud, revelling in the sound of it. Impossible as it was, he wished he could have brought Christine here with him, to pore over these plans together and together to find the perfect home…
Neither perfect nor home, he halted himself, but in the circumstances it was the best he could do. Besides, it was better by far than living in the hovel in Montmartre or fitting themselves into the overcrowded home of Madame Giry. Later, he could build their perfect home brick by brick; later, when the war was over. Whether this would be in France or Prussia, or somewhere else entirely, he could not have cared less. Christine must have a place for her music; he watched daily and with growing unease how tired she was of the patriotic arias that were her repertoire at the Variétés, and how her voice seemed to fade a little more with every performance. He begged her to take up her book again, but each time she would look him in the eye and say only:
"When you tell me where you go."
"I am your husband," he reminded her gently, "my duty is to protect my wife. In good time, Christine."
She did not press the matter, but neither would she touch her music book. Erik saw the sympathetic glances from Madame Giry and had the uncomfortable feeling that he was failing at some hidden part of his new role, but what was he to do? He could hardly drag Christine along on his lock-picking expeditions. Until he had a threshold over which he could carry his wife, there was nothing for it but to persevere.
The task of investigating the apartments consumed him for several days. The caravans of wagons bearing wounded men arriving from the front made the process more complicated; he had to avoid clogged thoroughfares and posses of National Guards trying to corral anxious citizens away from the wagons. The forts fired furiously through the daylight hours, and Erik was forced to reject two promising apartments outright because their proximity to the Neuilly fort made the windows rattle and the paintings sway alarmingly on the walls. A third was deemed impossible because a homegrown ambulance had been opened on the floor below it, flooding the stairwell with the stench of carbolic and diseased flesh. Erik gagged before he had even reached the building, and fled from it all the way back to the Variétés, where he was to meet Christine.
They walked together back to the Girys' apartment; Christine holding her skirts up over the snow, Erik chafing at this indginity. There was nothing to be done: the carriage they had used had been requisitioned from the undertaker and the horse taken for its tough, sinewy meat, and there was no conveyance left in Paris that could be repurposed for their use. He tried to reassure Christine that it was only temporary, but she only huddled deeper into her coat and shook her head.
"We are losing the war," she said quietly. "So many wounded, Erik. Look at them."
He did not need to look; he could scarcely escape their bloodied faces in his dreams. Every night he gagged himself as tightly as he dared, much to Christine's dismay, but still he woke every hour in a cold sweat and would keep shaking until another wave of exhausted sleep overwhelmed him. Sometimes he woke to find Christine lying beside him with eyes open, watching him silently, and he wondered what he had done in his sleep to awaken her. Once, she had put her hand over his gagged mouth, as if to soothe his wordless moans from him, and rolled to lay herself atop him, her slight body pressing him down into her narrow bed. He had slept like that, somehow comforted, and had woken in the morning feeling better than he had in days. But still, the dreams would not leave him alone. The sooner he could find a proper residence for the two of them, a place of their own where they could wait out the rest of this miserable siege, the better.
He redoubled his efforts and the following day thought he had finally struck gold. The apartment he was looking at had been locked up before the siege had even begun, when the owners had fortuitously set off on a journey to Morocco. Erik had seen the couple; they had visited Monsieur Duchamp several times before their departure, together, husband and wife. He was not certain what they were: artists, collectors of foreign artefacts or curios, or lovers of strange climates and Moorish palaces, nor did it really matter. What mattered was that their apartment was old and beautiful in its own way, a bit shabby but full of strange gilded pipes and rugs and peculiar musical instruments that Erik did not recognise. They occupied the entire attic floor of a rickety apartment block not far from the Seine, off the Boulevard Saint Michel. The lower floors were likewise sealed off, and the building formed an eerily silent quadrangle surrounded on all sides by narrow cobbled lanes. The artists' apartment had no windows facing the street, and in addition had its own door that led from the kitchen to a stairwell that wound down into the communal cellar beneath the building.
The door to the cellar had been heavily padlocked. Erik opened it carefully, pocketed the wire-key, and descended the many corkscrew turns to what had been intended as kitchen storage for potatoes and wine, with a separate storeroom for each of the apartments upstairs. The one belonging to the artists was not well stocked, but there were some supplies: a sack of dry pulses, a little sugar, potatoes, coffee, wine: not a hoard by any means, but enough that he was cheered by the sight of it. Most importantly, there was coal. He and Christine did not need much; it would do until … Erik reined in his thoughts before they could return to the disintegrating sortie and the fate of the city.
One way or another the war would end, he reminded himself. His job was to ensure that he and Christine survived it.
He was halfway up the winding stairs to the kitchen when he heard voices upstairs. He stopped motionless, and listened.