Lost and furious in the dark below the Palais Garnier, Philippe de Chagny no longer knew if he was going to fall upon his little brother’s neck and weep when he finally caught up with him, or simply strangle the wretch. It was a mingling of emotions with which he had become all too familiar of late where the young Vicomte was concerned; tonight, however, much as he loved the boy, he had to admit that Raoul really had surpassed himself.
Only Raoul, in the first place, could have contrived to instil confusion into a perfectly ordinary intrigue with a pretty opera-singer by reviving the phantom of a boy-and-girl affair between a pair of children in a Breton village. Only Raoul, with an infuriating mixture of obstinacy and innocence, could have failed to recognise in his enchanting Miss Daaé a conniving minx who’d had her Vicomte dancing on a string for months. And only Raoul, in league with that confounded girl, could have managed to botch up their elopement in a manner calculated to inconvenience to the maximum not only his long-suffering elder brother but the audience and employees of an entire opera house.
Up above stage, thanks to those antics, the Opera was in a seething ferment. Down here — Philippe raised higher the lantern that he held, and dizzying shadows chased between beams and cables all around — down here, amid the deserted machinery and the endless dark of the building’s lower levels, a spreading silence lay in wait for the intruder and threatened to stifle every breath.
The Comte cursed between his teeth, closing the lantern’s shutter and peering into the dimly-lit distance in the hope of catching an answering flicker. “Raoul!”
The last anyone had heard of the boy, he had been talking wildly and trying to force a way down here. Which just went to prove, Philippe thought grimly, that Raoul had gone completely off his head; God send he hadn’t broken his neck down some yawning trapdoor masquerading as no more than a deeper shadow, or strung himself up in the loop of some ascending counterweight like a felon on the scaffold.
The old helpless pain caught at the back of his throat and he thrust it back down. Where Raoul was concerned, there had been too much hurt in the family already.
Philippe de Chagny had been twenty years old, the summer he’d learned the Comtesse his mother was expecting again. His sisters Suzanne and Héloïse at eight and twelve respectively had been young enough to regard it as little more than the promise of another big doll; Philippe, flushed with all the brittle sophistication of a young man who had been on the town for three seasons already, had been conscious only of the acute humiliation of his position. How could his mother do this to him? He was a grown man now in his own right, and his parents’ situation was worse than embarrassing — it was ridiculous.
His father he had regarded always with the faint contempt reserved for the well-meaning but ineffectual. Old Comte Philibert had been an armchair scholar, an amateur of history never happier than when immersed in the research of their family quarterings or in fancying himself back in the days of the Valois, and in all matters practical he had long since yielded up dominion to his wife.
It had been a dynastic match, and a good one. Éléonore de Moerogis had brought with her not only vast estates at La Martynière, wide-set blue eyes and a wealth of wheat-coloured curls, but also a cool, commanding intelligence that upheld her husband’s interests against the ambition of their de Chagny cousins and won her the respect of his man of business and everyone else who dealt with her. She had made every decision in their lives as far back as Philippe could remember, and he’d worshipped her.
Growing up, he’d ridden out with her across hills and woods or flung himself down, all coltish limbs and enthusiasm, before the fire in her parlour to argue out some burning point; as a child he brought her laces and ribbons and fairings just to see those fine eyes soften in a smile, and, later on, leatherbound journals from the best stationers, or theatre tickets for the shared pleasure they found in the stage. She’d kept his boyish secrets safe from prying small sisters, and met his gaze with veiled laughter at the pomposities of elderly generals over the dinner-table, or fluttering enticements cast out by pretty girls. He’d been twelve when Suzanne was born, an eternity ago. How could she — how dared she — make such a spectacle of herself now?
Caught up in his own sulky grievance, it hadn’t even occurred to him that a last late child might carry with it hazards beyond sniggers from the fast young set. He’d dismissed his father’s anxious circlings as the fussing of an elderly fool, and left the mother he’d adored to spend that last autumn alone with the seclusion of her burgeoning belly and the knowledge of the ordeal to come.
He’d been in Paris — with a woman — when the messenger arrived. By the time he’d reached the chateau at Chagny, it had already been too late to see his mother alive again. And his father had become a doddering invalid overnight.
She’d lived long enough to name the child: Raoul-Hilaire-Marie. It was Héloïse, a whey-faced shadow in black, who had greeted him and taken him up to see the crumpled scrap in its cradle. He remembered looking down at it, expecting to feel hate: but he’d felt nothing, nothing at all, save the aching in his head from the jolting of the road and a vague numb disappointment that there was so little, after all, to show for so much pain and devastation.
It had been three days later, at the funeral, when Raoul had turned unfocused blue eyes up from his nurse’s arms to meet Philippe, that he’d seen the sudden ghost of their mother’s gaze there for the first time. He’d made an excuse to turn away; made an excuse, as soon as the earth had begun to settle on the Comtesse Éléonore’s grave, to leave his father, leave Chagny, and leave the memories behind.
Comte Philibert had never been the same again. At the time, unforgiving, Philippe had laid that down squarely to guilt. He understood now, twenty years later, that the old man had above all been simply bereft: the guiding force that ruled his life was gone, leaving him lost and rudderless, and the seizure that struck him down a month later had only confirmed in body the lack of will that had already overcome his heart.
Philippe had been in Biarritz by the time this fresh news reached him. He had written back, tersely, with instructions that his father’s affairs should be laid in the hands of old Gaulthier the lawyer, who had worked with the Comtesse to run the estates for years and whom she had trusted completely. Then he had flung himself back into the whirl of worldly pleasures and done his best to forget that he had an infant brother at all.
There was a place, after all, for opera-girls in one’s life, Philippe thought now, remembering those years; remembering Sorelli, who had graced his arm of late, and the lovely long legs she knew how to use so well. He ducked beneath a beam, searching for the stairs that would take him down towards the cellars where Raoul in his ravings had certainly gone.
There was a place for opera-girls in one’s life, and no-one had been more delighted than he when Raoul had finally shown leanings in that direction. But one did not attempt to marry them.
He’d had grand alliances planned for Raoul: one of the Moerogis girl-cousins, perhaps, when they were a little older and the boy had some experience under his belt. But if the young Vicomte had formed a preference of his own for some other eligible maiden, Philippe would have been happy to indulge that choice. There were any number of pretty, well-bred girls who could have graced his brother’s seat at table and taken up his mother’s rôle as chatelaine at Chagny in the fullness of time, and Raoul could have had his pick among them.
Even a bourgeoise would have done, if he had set his heart on it. In the darkness below stage, with that aching fear for Raoul’s safety twisting in his throat, Philippe de Chagny admitted to himself at last that he would have set aside rank and pride for the boy’s sake, if it had come to that. They were no longer in the seventeenth century and he was not Comte Philibert, for whom purity of lineage had represented the obsession of a lifetime.
If Raoul, with that stubbornness of his, had wanted some rich manufacturer’s daughter, then in the end his brother would have yielded: if the girl herself were presentable and quick to learn, and her parents not too gross or encroaching in their vulgarity. But a girl off the public stage — a girl who paraded herself alongside a creature like Sorelli across the foyer de la danse — a girl who sang for her supper three nights a week for all Paris to ogle, and for all the subscribers to accost behind-scenes? It was out of the question absolutely. Raoul might as well have set a common courtesan up in their mother’s place, and if he’d been thinking with what lay between his ears instead of what lay between his legs he would have seen that as clearly as Philippe.
There was a place for opera-girls in one’s life. And there was no room in it for protestations of virtue.
Philippe at twenty-one had known no shortage of women. Some of them had been accommodating. Some of them had been of his own class. Some of them — the married ones — had been both.
In a life that revolved around the casino, his club and the racecourse, he’d taken time steadily and cynically to make the acquaintance of every acceptable female in town, and many who were not. He’d found them without exception to be vapid, foolish and complaisant; and he had never found an intelligence he could respect, let alone a fine blue gaze to challenge the memory that haunted his own.
He’d spent perhaps three months down at Chagny over the years that followed. He could not endure the sight of the old Comte sitting trapped and palsied in his chair, or the reproachful eyes of his sisters like trailing ghosts about the empty house. Somewhere in the nursery wing there was a small child growing into boyhood. Suzanne and Héloïse fussed over him, when they thought Philippe’s attention was elsewhere, and occasionally the boy would make an appearance, hangdog and shy.
Ten years after his mother’s death, he’d begun to take serious thought to find a wife of his own. Not because there remained any expectation of meeting the woman whom he had sought for so long, for he could see none, but with the vague idea that he would need someday to beget an heir.
He’d made enquiries of Gaulthier as to his financial position, obtained no very satisfactory answers, and come to the unwelcome realisation that with increasing years affairs had been slipping through the old man’s grasp. Hard upon that had come the news of his father’s second seizure.
He’d come home to Chagny with all thoughts of marriage driven from his head, to find Héloïse a sad-eyed spinster keeping house, Suzanne long since outgrown from her schoolgirl dresses, and the estates running fast down to rack and ruin while Comte Philibert lay curtained and silent in the great bed, with one side of his face slipped down like candle-wax, and neither moved nor spoke. Gaulthier, wringing his hands in distress, was a withered shadow of the man he’d once been, but he’d done his best to keep to the Comtesse’s trust, and Philippe could not find it in him to berate the old lawyer for infirmity in the face of a task for which he had long since merited relief. Instead he had set himself, grimly, to learn in just what state matters now stood, and how they could best be amended.
It was three weeks later, when he’d finally begun to grasp the magnitude of the task ahead of him, that he’d called a family conclave to warn the others how things lay; and it was Raoul — small, fair-haired Raoul at the end of the table — who had spoken up first of all to renounce the division of their inheritance, in the shocked silence that had followed. It had been a schoolboy impulse, of course, the gesture of a child with a head full of vows of chivalry and nostalgic tales from the days of primogeniture. But Héloïse, who was no fool, had nodded and added her voice to the boy’s, and then Suzanne, the three of them laying their shares back into his hands for the good of the land and its people... and Philippe de Chagny had looked down the length of the table into those clear blue eyes, and seen there for the first time not the painful ghost of their mother, but Raoul in his own right.
They’d all of them believed Comte Philibert could not last out the month. In the event, the old man had lingered on for two summers more, while the weight of the estates fell ever more heavily across Philippe’s shoulders and the family fortunes began at last to return to what they had been in Éléonore’s time. He’d had little enough leisure for Suzanne and Héloïse in those months of unremitting labour, let alone for a new-found brother whom he’d hardly begun to know. But it had all come to an end one quiet winter’s morning when his valet had awoken him with a deferential murmur of ‘Monsieur le Comte’, and the inevitable news.
It had not, precisely, been a surprise. But with his father laid to rest at last, the full force of it had begun to sink in. He — Philippe-Georges-Marie de Chagny, who had lived almost all his life for pleasure — was now head of one of the oldest families in France, with two sisters on his hands already overripe for marriage... and sole responsibility for a twelve-year-old boy.
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