Ships had come and gone in the great bay at Brest Roads, over the years. Raoul had become an uncle three times over as his sisters burgeoned into contented domesticity and families of their own, and had grown out of his shy childhood into a quiet but determined youth. He and Philippe had had a trial or two of wills already, for all their mutual affection; but under Mr. Jackson’s tuition he had been preparing his mathematics to enter upon the rigours of navigation in that nautical training on which his heart remained set, and at this juncture the Comte had more than once been consoling himself with the prospect. Naval discipline might do wonders to curb the boy’s impetuous streak, and with their mother’s excellent understanding and sound judgement he bid fair to shine in the ranks of the cadets. There had been an admiral among their ancestors, after all: the great Chagny de La Roche, who had held high office under Richelieu and brought confusion to the Spanish off Cadiz.
What Philippe hadn’t known — hadn’t had the faintest idea of, until Raoul cast it back in his teeth last night — was the first use to which his little brother had put his new-found independence. With his place at the Academy secure, with his cadet uniforms tailored and his trunks packed for the forthcoming term, he’d chosen to ignore the future’s beckoning glories and taken himself on the off-chance back to Perros in quest of a childhood dream.
Before taking up his new life, he’d gone looking for his playmate Christine. He’d found her a girl on the brink of womanhood just as his own manhood had begun to dawn. And he’d let her entangle him, hopelessly and foolishly, beyond belief.
Philippe didn’t know how she’d done it. From Raoul, of course, one could get nothing: the Daaé girl had brought him to the stage where he would hear nothing against her. She’d been a pallid nobody in Paris, and until she’d blossomed forth on that gala night Philippe had seen her name half a dozen times or more on programmes at the opera and never thought twice of the girl he’d met for one afternoon all those years ago. But she’d set her claws into the Vicomte, and for that he could not forgive her.
He couldn’t forgive Raoul either. The boy had made a fool of himself from start to finish, made a fool out of Philippe and a laughing-stock of the family name. With his head full of fairy-tales of chivalry and chastity and knights in shining armour, back then he’d already pledged that preposterous adolescent vow of fidelity in love to a future bride.
Philippe had laughed in the boy’s face when Raoul had admitted it, and regretted his mockery in the hot flood of shame that stung his brother’s flushed features. It had taken courage, he knew, to admit to such a thing beneath the lash of adult scorn. But he caught back a bark of angry laughter again now, remembering: as if one loved the lightskirts with whom one sought amusement. As if love had anything to do with bedsport, still less with marriage.
If he’d had any idea, he would have seen to the boy’s education in the matter long since. But young officers in the navy — La Royale — were not known for their monk-like habits, and he’d hardly expected that after a year in foreign parts Raoul would come home as lily-pure as a girl who’d never left her mother’s side.
Philippe had made his own discoveries behind the proverbial haystack at sixteen with a tenant’s sturdy young wife in a spirit of mutually unabashed curiosity, and she’d been good enough not to laugh. He’d learned a good deal from Perrette in the course of their snatched meetings, that summer; not least the gentle way she’d sent him packing when the cool nights came, with no hard feelings on either side and no injury to his young pride. It was a lesson he’d put to good use in more ways than one where women were concerned, and he’d remembered her fondly for years. She was a grandmother now, ruling her numerous tribe with a rod of iron, and her second daughter’s eldest girl had a look of Suzanne.
At the time, he’d wondered. But he’d had no reason to suppose that her husband wasn’t ploughing the same furrow on a nightly basis and with far more vigour, and Perrette herself had given no sign of doubt.
Raoul though... Philippe tried to imagine the boy in the toils of a lusty peasant, and failed. But there were any number of bored Society matrons who would have been only too willing to oblige, at a hint from the Comte or even without. As a question of pure comparison, of course.
He cursed beneath his breath, feeling for the steps of a steep splintered staircase in the flickering below-stage dark. In the distance faint lights glimmered behind glass like dying embers amid the shadows that clustered at his heels, and he held the lantern higher to peer for footmarks in the dust.
“Raoul!” Silence.
He should have done something. He should have got the boy some experience when he first brought him to Paris, before Raoul had begun hanging around the Opera like a mooncalf, before the girl had poured her ghost-stories into his ears — and then none of them would be down here now, in this labyrinth of trap-doors and endless black.
If only Raoul’s cat-ghost could be real after all. If only there were a rival of flesh and blood, the Comte would gladly shake him by the hand... if he could just whisk the Daaé girl out of their lives as if she had never been, and give Philippe back the little brother he loved. And at this moment would so cheerfully throttle.
Another staircase. This time, there were tracks. Philippe plunged down the breakneck flight, all composure briefly forgotten. Confused marks... He raised the lantern again, revealing vaulted halls like some vast undercroft, and strained his eyes up and down those long galleries for some distant glimmer of a white shirt-front or a pale unconscious face.
This must be the cellar of Raoul’s ravings. By all accounts, he’d been trying to make his way down here the whole time the Comte had been chasing after him on the road to Brussels. Fine fools that had made them look — but what else was Philippe to think, when Raoul had jumped up mid-performance and the girl had been whisked off the stage as if into a lover’s arms?
Raoul had had the whole thing planned. He’d laid it out like a naval expedition: route, provisions, men and horses, papers in a neat packet to cross the border. He’d done it all in twelve hours, with a fierce efficiency no captain could have faulted and their mother’s calm, cool determination, and Philippe, unravelling the trail, had been torn between pride and fury.
The boy had taken top honours in his training ship. He’d been on the point of joining an expedition that could make his name: a chance which had cost considerable influence to gain. He’d given every evidence of fine abilities, when he chose to use them. Instead, he’d been ready to throw his future away in the name of some slip of a Swedish-born singer who’d thought scandal could blackmail the Comte de Chagny into consent — a consent they would not get, not under the laws of the Code. And he’d funded it all by pawning their mother’s jewels.
It was that discovery, some three hours before the performance, that had tipped Philippe into cold rage. The de Moerogis garnets had been meant for Raoul’s bride. They’d been a beautiful set, ear-drops and necklace fringed with filigree silver, but their sentimental value was far greater than their worth. They were a memory from Philippe’s earliest childhood, and the Comtesse Éléonore wore them in the portrait that smiled down on her sons from the staircase every night. They’d been entrusted to Raoul on his twenty-first birthday this very winter as a sacred gift. And the Vicomte, whose brother administered his entire inheritance, had found himself in need of sums quite beyond his allowance and had blithely dishonoured the legacy of the mother he’d never known.
The jewels, redeemed, lay locked now within Philippe’s desk where they had always belonged. He’d done his best to forestall Raoul’s flight by bribery and browbeating, had largely failed, and had arrived at the Opera tonight in a state of icy self-control beneath the eyes of every gossip in town. He’d hoped to learn exactly what his brother had to say for himself, but if the Vicomte lacked the courage to face him, then he’d had every intention of pursuing the fugitives and overtaking them before they could leave Paris. And when he’d seen Raoul’s hasty exit, he’d rushed to do just that.
Between the two of them, Philippe decided bitterly, they’d stirred up enough scandal in the last few hours to keep Paris in a ferment for a twelvemonth. But down here, in these crypt-like halls, scandal was beginning to seem very distant and the cold silence of the cellar all too real. His own breath seemed a deafening intrusion in the dark, and yet the walls drank and swallowed the sound of his footsteps as if in a suffocating fog, and the long passage stretched out ahead like a gullet to the bowels of the earth.
He drew breath sharply to call to Raoul again, fear for the boy flooding over him, but the thick silence caught in his throat and the impulse died.
There had been no trace of Raoul anywhere along the road. The Comte’s own horses were better than any his brother could have hired, but not so good as all that; Philippe had grown first suspicious, then — remembering Raoul’s wild talk — alarmed. He’d ordered his driver to turn back for the Opera House with all speed, and arrived in time to find the whole establishment in chaos, a police inspector holding forth on the stage, and Raoul’s hat lying forlorn and abandoned together with an empty pistol-case... but he’d found no sign of Raoul.
Whatever the young fool had planned for his elopement, it had clearly gone very wrong. If there ever had been an elopement and not some mere construct of a love-sick mind: the thought slid in sidelong like the caperings of a zany in the street, and Philippe thrust it back swiftly, unacknowledged.
It hadn’t taken long to learn that Raoul had been repeatedly denied access to the mezzanines below the stage, or to guess that he had in the end found some way down there in despite of the prohibition. Nor had it taken long, once he demanded it, for Philippe to gain access in his turn: doors that were closed to a pale youth of twenty opened miraculously before the anger of the Comte de Chagny. He’d plunged down in pursuit, prepared to drag his little brother out by the scruff of the neck and shake him back into sanity if he had to.
But he was cold and alone and increasingly unsure, and somewhere along the line the last of that saving spark of fury was ebbing and ebbing away. He had lost Raoul — lost him no less surely to the encroaching dark than to the bitter words they’d hurled at each other last night and to the boy’s silent determination of this morning. Raoul had never meant to come back, he understood that too late: each stubborn adieu had been a dull knife-blow between them, cutting off all the family the boy had ever known and everything he’d ever hoped or cared for... all for her.
She was not worth it. Nothing was worth it, not Philippe’s anger or his authority or the de Chagny name. He’d loved Raoul so much, brought him here with such joy and such pride... and in that moment he knew in his heart that he would have given anything in the world to see his little brother come limping forward out of the shadows, half shamefaced and half triumphant, with the girl of his choice held safe within his arm.
He stared around in something like desperation. At his feet blurred marks mocked him in the dust: the shuffling trace of some old workman or merely the sweep of a rat’s tail. Or a heartbroken boy wandering in the dark...
There. Philippe caught the ends of his moustache between his teeth, biting down fiercely as if to capture the moment. He’d seen something. There, in the distance, a dim flicker... fugitive, then gone. Then — as he began to run, faster and faster, shaking off disbelief — then a pale shifting gleam up ahead, like—
Like moonlight. Moonlight filtering across sullen water, motionless and utterly black. All else forgotten, Philippe came to an abrupt halt, staring.
Somewhere unseen and far above the moon rode serenely overhead, cool Diana untouched by human hope or by desire. And through some distant air-shaft or iron-clad grate her light came drifting down, an eerie silver-blue that gleamed across the hidden lake but left its shadowed depths untouched.
The lake of Raoul’s Christine, he realised at last, stunned mind beginning to work slowly. The sunless sea of those wild rumours, across which she claimed she had been carried off to duress like some latterday Proserpine... he’d scorned his brother’s naïvety at such a convenient tale, but there the water lay, heavy and silent, swollen with secrets and names it would never disgorge.
And Raoul— would Raoul, desperate, have plunged across those depths in quest of a shred of hope? The thought was an icy touch that could not be banished; Philippe went swiftly down to the shore. Surely Raoul would not have plunged in fully-clad — there would be some sign...
The water was oily beneath the lamplight, lapping gently with a soft sound he had not noticed before. There was no sign of the discarded coat and boots he had half-feared to find, and he breathed more easily, listening to the quickening ripples in the dark. They had a music of their own: an invitation that washed away fears and anger and soothed the soul.
Indeed, it seemed to him that he could hear true music, the sweetest and softest of sighs. He knelt to set down the lantern and on impulse closed the shutter; the music was brighter when freed from that harsh yellow glare. As he leaned out it sang to him like crystalline tear-drops, like moonlight on snow... and it seemed to him suddenly that he was there in Raoul’s tale of the winter churchyard in Perros-Guirec, kneeling before a cross drenched in weightless light with Raoul at his side as the music of the heavens poured out across them both.
It was no earthly instrument, and yet some part of his mind found it in memory; recognised the tune. The old fiddler had played it for him at Professor Valerius’ urging on a distant summer’s day, not the rustic dance he’d been expecting but Schubert’s “Lazarus”, transfigured beneath Daaé’s hands into something sublime.
Memory rose around him, coiling softly from the water and drawing him closer, entranced. Afternoon sun crept thick and warm across the threshold of the cottage where he listened to Daaé’s art, the last drowsy drops of the dying day... and somehow Raoul was with him there too as the fair-haired child of those golden sands, wide-set eyes shining with the joy of one who has just been promised a summer and a violin.
Ripples became an arrowhead. The water swirled. But when arms reached up around the elder brother’s neck to wind as tightly as could be, Philippe made no attempt to resist.
In his dream, he pressed Raoul in turn in his embrace, and the choking grip clung fiercely close, a small hard head nuzzled up against his throat, forgiven and forgiving. When dizzy blackness brought him beneath the surface and monstrous hands held him under, he was too far gone to struggle. Or — despite his brother’s wild grief, later — to be afraid.
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