Northbound Train
Erik was dead, so with Mama Valerius in tow, we crept to the railway station in darkness to catch a midnight train. Her swollen bluish legs pained her as she shambled from the ticket window to the platform. There was no one to hide from any longer, yet we crept like children in the dark who feared to be caught by some grown-up.
None of the few travelers gave us a second glance, with Raoul in plain black clothes and I dressed in simple mourning. We looked like a middle-class couple embarking on a holiday, rather than a disgraced lord and an ex-diva. Only Mama Valerius looked like herself, an ailing old woman. When Raoul motioned us towards the second-class carriage, I looked up at him in surprise, but said nothing.
We aimed for Stockholm, but we only got as far as Brussels.
Mama breathed heavily on the hard-upholstered seat, her face pinched. We had to change trains in Brussels, and while waiting in the station, Raoul and I watched in horror as her drawn, gasping face changed from white to blue. She lay on the hard wooden bench sweating, her legs swelling alarmingly. Two porters from the station carried her to a rooming house nearby. The physician came and pronounced her too ill to move.
It was her heart, the physician said. There was nothing he could do. Just make her comfortable.
Raoul took a bachelor's room upstairs, and he engaged two comfortable rooms down below for Mama and I. He mentioned a nurse, and at first I protested, how would he manage the expense? Sadly he pointed out that he had his whole portion of inheritance from his father – had I forgotten that? Further, as soon as he was cleared once and for all of Philippe's murder, he would inherit from Philippe as well. He said this so sadly, it shamed me to have asked.
For three weeks we sat together in those rooms where I sponged her face, cleaned her body, and listened to the incoherent mumbles that slowly drifted off into rattling, restless sleep. Raoul left only to return to his room to slumber, and I shared the wide bed with Mama. Even the wet sheets, her thrashing, and her clawing for air couldn't break through my exhaustion. In some ways, it was more of a tomb than even Erik's rooms beneath the Opera Garnier, a tomb not of the dead but of the suffering and dying.
One night she drifted in and out of consciousness. I begged Raoul to stay, and after the nurse arrived, he agreed. Then Mama woke and cried for me. With the nurse resting on a small cot, I crawled into bed with Mama and held her until she slipped into sleep. Through the long watches of the night Raoul tossed and turned on the narrow divan in the tiny parlor, his legs draped over the edge. In the darkness he sobbed for Philippe like a child, calling his name over and over, lashing himself with blame.
When I couldn't bear the whip of Philippe's memory across my back any longer, I crept out of bed. Crouching next to him on the floor, because the divan was too narrow for both of us, I put my arms around him and kissed his wet cheeks. After a few minutes he pushed me away, saying without sarcasm, "Go back to the bedroom, Christine. You may be a widow, but you must still think of your virtue."
Such as it is, I thought bitterly.
It was past midnight on one of those long vigils when Raoul stood quietly at the bedroom door, listening to Mama's rattling gasps for breath. He said that it was time to fetch the priest, and he was right. The nurse was sent away and soon returned with a young one, scarcely older than Raoul. His nervous, tentative manner showed that he lacked experience with the dying. By the time he draped his purple embroidered stole around his narrow shoulders, she was deeply unconscious. He anointed her barely breathing form with oil, touching her head and hands and feet, absolved her, and put a tiny fragment of the Eucharist into her mouth as "bread for the journey."
Don't be afraid, I said to him silently as he stumbled through the prayers. If this deathbed pales you, how would you have endured the one I attended, and the confession which I heard? You give the viaticum to a woman whose soul was pink and sweet as a newly picked peach, whose mind was beyond any capacity for sin. But who is there to unburden me of what weighs down my soul? Would you like to hear the confession I carry around with me, tender and innocent cure, a confession of sins not my own, but embroidered onto my soul with threads of blood?
The priest left, and Mama died with the first light of morning.
After the funeral Mass we sat in a café over cups of steaming coffee unrelieved by bread or cakes, unspeaking, afraid to ask each other what came next. The first lunch customers arrived, so the waitress stopped occasionally to look daggers at us. I told Raoul I was too ill to eat anything, and it was true. Food before noon brought the bile up to my throat and I could bear nothing but coffee or tea. The cozy, warm restaurant glowed with blue checkered tablecloths and the late morning sun. I fingered a corner of ours, admiring the heavy linen. In comparison I felt cheap, like a kept woman who couldn't keep up her end of the bargain.
Finally I said to him, "Do you want to return to Paris? We can cash in the tickets for our passage to Stockholm, and there's Mama's ticket as well."
His shoulders bent around a face bleak with tiredness. "Paris has nothing for me anymore, and I would hope it holds nothing for you as well." He drew a letter from his pocket. "This arrived early today, before we left for Mass. I read it while you were getting ready, and I'd like you to see it too."
Trembling, I picked up the thick paper, embossed with Raoul's family's seal. Out of it came a single handwritten page, and a frighteningly official document with seal, dominated by several thick, flourishing signatures. The words "accidental drowning," "no malfeasance," "Raoul Jean-Marie de Chagny," "signs of strangulation or asphyxiation absent," "no charges recommended," all rolled past my blurred eyes. Wiping away tears, I read on. "You're cleared," I stammered.
"Yes," he said. "But there was no justice done here."
"I don't understand," I replied. "Did you want them to indict you? The one who did this made a career of contriving murders to look like accidents. I don't see how you could have hoped for anything better."
He put his head in his hands for a moment, then looked sadly at me. "The one who did this has his reward."
I thought of Erik's whispered words that trailed off and then hoisted themselves up with renewed vigor, each a recitation of a monstrous act. I would never tell Raoul what he had said, never. How do priests bear it, I asked myself, and nothing answered me.
"This is wonderful news. It's as if you have your life back, or part of it anyway," I added, as his shoulders continued to droop. "Do you want me to read the letter as well?"
"Go ahead," he said dejectedly. "If you are to be my wife, you need to know what vipers slither around the base of the family tree."
"He calls the judge of inquiry an incompetent baboon, a political hack, and the doctors who came to testify are 'barber surgeons' and 'blood-letters.' Is he a doctor himself, who knows medicine?"
"They were incompetent, Christine, in that they couldn't determine that Philippe was murdered."
I didn't know what to say to that.
Raoul managed a small snort, the most humor in weeks. "Uncle Auguste hates doctors, all men of science, actually. He says that they are setting themselves up as a false aristocracy, in deadly opposition to the true aristocrats."
"And who might those be?" I asked, rankling.
"Why himself and our family, for one thing. He mouths allegiance to the republic, but secretly I suspect he keeps a shrine to Napoleon III in some untraveled niche in that drafty mausoleum he calls a home, and lights a candle to it every evening. He probably celebrates his death anniversary as a feast day."
He laughed, so I did, too. Then he took my ungloved hand, his face boyish but his manner grave again, the momentary sunburst obscured by cloud. "There's something I have to tell you, Christine."
The nausea had retreated but now it attacked, firing a cannon of sickness up my throat. I took a sip of cold coffee and waited. Now it's coming, I thought. He's free and clear, no fear of arrest. He has his father's estate, and there will be Philippe's, too. He's of age, so even Auguste de Chagny can't touch his money or property. This is when he tells me that he's changed his mind, that he's leaving me. What does he need a cuckoo-fouled nest for, anyway? If there is a child, its father killed his brother. He says he'll be fair, but how could he look on it with anything other than hatred?
Just don' t let me cry or faint in front of all these people.
Raoul twisted his napkin a few times through the wooden ring. Go on, get it over with, I wanted to scream. He cleared his throat a few times, smoothed his silky reddish mustache, and finally said, "I'm going to renounce my title."
Stunned, I said nothing. Worry creased his face as he went on, "I had hoped it didn't matter to you. But I can't live that life any more. I've turned it over again and again in my thoughts, Christine. To my death I'll be convinced that Erik strangled my brother. Yet why did my brother die? It wasn't to save me from danger. It was to keep me from going after you."
"Raoul, that isn't fair to his memory," I said quietly. "He knew you had headed down to find me. He wanted to rescue you."
He took my hand gently. "You didn't hear him the night before, Christine. I thought he would collapse from apoplexy, with that purple face. His sole mission was to dissuade me from a marriage to you, because it 'diminished the nobility,' as he put it. Marrying you would 'taint the family heritage.' It was foul, and it went on and on."
The waitress at this moment interrupted us with a glare. "Would Monsieur like to order lunch? As you can see, our tables are filling rapidly."
"Potage St-Germain for two, if you please," he said in a clipped authoritative tone. "And some of those soft rolls." Then he turned back to me, intently. "Please know that I will keep you comfortable in every way. I do not intend to take a vow of poverty, or make every day but Sunday a fast-day. Nonetheless, this course is set out before me, and follow it I must. If you want the life of a high-flown lady, I will not, no, I cannot provide it. My conscience will not allow me."
Relief like hunger opened up in me. "You thought I would want you for your title, for your position? I'm a farm girl, Raoul. One of my earliest memories is of my father spreading manure, and my mother helping him. They were coated in the stuff. I never wanted your title, despite what Philippe thought. I'm glad to hear it, actually."
Together we sat quietly, waiting for food. "It means no 'seasons,' no receptions, no elaborate parties, no landau to ride around in so as to show off the latest fashions."
"You never wanted those in the first place," I remarked. "Neither did I. How many parties or balls did I attend when I sang at the Garnier? Save for the Masked Ball, practically none. Receptions and jewels and summers in Switzerland are not why I am here with you, now."
The soup came, green and savory, fragrant with leeks.
"There's something else, too," he said tentatively. "I want you to give up life on the stage."
I laughed, and the couple next to us looked up questioningly. "You raced me to the finish line. I wanted to tell you that I was through with the theater life for good, and feared what you'd say. Take me as far away from it as possible please, Monsieur de Chagny."
"Not Monsieur le Vicomte," he mused, "but Monsieur. I like it. It will do."
"Your family will think you mad."
"No doubt, although I haven't heard recently of anyone being locked up as a lunatic for wanting to live a simpler life."
"It's a relief to me," I said. "I can manage servants, and run a household, but I seriously wondered how I would live the life of nobility."
Softly he said, "I am glad we are in agreement." Then abashed, he asked, "Have there been any signs? Other than the obvious, I mean?"
"No," I said. "Perhaps it's too soon. We might have to wait another month or two. I don't want to you to be saddled with me unless we know, until we're sure. That way, if nothing's happened, you can go back to Paris and rejoin your family. I can find work here. You're not bound to me." I spoke bravely but gagged down my sickness, terrified that he might leave me alone in Brussels.
Abject, flushed, with lower lip set he said quietly, "What have I been saying to you? Perhaps I have not made myself plain enough, as you still seem to think that I might abandon you. Do you think that what you did under duress would make me stop loving you? There was a newspaper account last week, I didn't mention it for fear that it would upset you, but I must tell you now. A French girl, the daughter of a collector of antiquities excavating in Northern Africa, was kidnapped in Tunisia and imprisoned for several months in a harem. A few well-placed cannon shots and she was rescued. But she was engaged, and both the girl and her family fully expected her fiance to abandon her."
He paused. "What happened?" I asked.
"They were married the Saturday before Ash Wednesday."
I lowered my eyes. "Do you think he would have married her, had there been a child?"
"If it mattered to that man, it's of no importance to me. How many ways, in what kind of plain language do I have to tell you?" He lowered his voice, so not to embarrass me in front of the curious onlookers, straining to have their lunch spiced by our conversation. "I don't care what happens next month, or the month after that. Others may blame innocents for the sins of the fathers. I do not. Do you have your papers, the ones I told you to get before we left Paris?"
I nodded, dazed, and he said, "As for the rest … I'm not going to wait any longer. We waited once, and look what happened. Today we buy a ring. Tomorrow we go to the registry office and file for the posting of the banns."
"You mean it," I whispered. "After all that's happened, you mean it."
"I have something else for you too," he said, pulling a little package out of his pocket. "I meant to give this to you when we arrived in Stockholm, but Mme. Valerius's illness drove it entirely out of my mind. It was my mother's," and he opened the tiny velvet pouch to reveal an old pearl ring, the band so thin that it might have been almost worn through. I stared, afraid to pick it up or touch it. The buffed and pinkish pearl was almost as wide as the nail of my little finger.
"It will take some time for the marriage paperwork," he said, "and I want you to feel really engaged. To finally believe me."
When he slipped the ring onto my finger, two men raised their beer glasses and called out, "Give her a kiss!"
Looking around, I fixed the shabby little restaurant with its yellow painted walls and blue-checked tablecloths into my heart.
We stopped at the first jewelers' shop we came to on the boulevard. "Two rings in one day," I remarked. When the jeweler fit the woven golden eternity band onto my finger, I dropped a few tears onto the glass counter top. The old jeweler pushed his black velvet skullcap around, perhaps from embarrassment. Raoul wiped my face with his handkerchief, then took the wedding ring and put it securely in his vest pocket, snug and warm against his heart. The pearl gleamed pinkly on my finger, and the jeweler admired it. "Fine work," he said.
"Why did you cry?" Raoul asked, as we left the little shop with its fiercely glittering display window.
"Because it won't fall off," I said. "Because it fit."
continued...