“Father dear—” It was the old chirping demand; but Gustave’s face, upturned an instant ago to Raoul’s own, was turned suddenly away as he broke off. He had all too obviously remembered.
The boy stood scuffling at the stones of the quayside, staring down at the battered toes of the boots he was fast outgrowing, and Raoul drew breath without thinking as so often before to upbraid him. Stand straight, child, for God’s sake—
And the instinctive glance that went with that impulse: the appeal, all too often in vain, for Christine’s support. For a moment he had almost swung round to find her.
Her face in his mind’s eye smiled down at Gustave, gentle, a little weary, interposing as always between childish impulse and adult impatience. “Raoul, darling—”
Five days. She had been dead for five days, and still he heard her voice. Looked for her at his elbow. Wakened to the silence of the breathing that was not there at night.
And now on the docks of New York, in his last parting with her son, angry habit betrayed him again when he’d thought the pain numbed for a moment.
Father dear, play with me — listen to my music — see what I made with Nounou — father, father—
All the demands of a small boy, heaped time and again on unheeding or unwilling ears. Raoul had been young enough to want his wife to himself in those first years of marriage; to resent the prior claims of that new arrival, the wedding-night child whose swelling presence had been thrust between them almost before they’d known it, conceived in that first clumsy rush of passion...
Or so he’d thought. So Christine had prayed, perhaps — had hoped.
How could she? Oh, how could she have — how could she ever—
The blind pain of that had eaten into him night after night since disbelief had ebbed its final defences. It had been a lie, then: ten years shared together had been built on sand. Ten years when he’d never doubted... and yet he could not doubt her, even now, looking back, even with the knowledge of that defilement stark across the bridal hour. She had chosen to give her heart. And maybe it had been a willed choice, maybe Raoul could only ever be second best, but she had given her love where she gave her hand, and in the years when he had deserved it and the years when he had not she had given it without stint and without reserve.
And in these past days of enforced proximity and waiting — while the formalities were gone through, the cargo booked, the passage paid — he’d learned enough of those last bitter hours to know the loyalty she’d shown to the life they’d made together. She’d denied the Phantom once and then again. She’d meant to take the boy, take her secret and go: go home. It was his own folly, he told himself savagely, his own drunken insecurity that had delivered his rival a final, fatal chance — and delivered her to death in another man’s arms.
Now she lay cold and embalmed in the hold of the ship that was to carry him away, and still memory set her warmth just beyond his reach and the light touch of her glove in the curve of his arm. They’d stood together like this on the dockside at Le Havre with the liner’s great hull towering over them. He’d been short-tempered with worry — over the arrangements, over the servants and Anne, over Christine’s voice and the antics of Gustave, who was to come with them — when she had reached up to smooth his frown with her fingertips, teasing it away with little gloved kisses that promised the sweetness of her mouth... and he’d turned away.
That knowledge was bitter now, curdled like so many other might-have-beens. He’d taken so much for granted. Assumed, always, there would be a better time, another opportunity when they were not both busy and on edge and distracted.
He’d turned away from what he might have had, and now the dictates of Society would have him wipe it from his life as if it had never been. Errant wives were not to be spoken of: mothers who cavorted with lovers were dead to the children left behind from the day they first eloped. No-one in Paris would speak of Christine once they knew what had happened... at least, not to his face. No-one would mourn.
Society had mocked at a Vicomte who married a chorus-girl, an opera-dancer fit only to be a rich patron’s plaything. Society would smile in triumph to see that reputation borne out at last.
But he had never, from the day that he was fourteen, cared what Society might think of Christine Daaé.
He ought to hate her, he knew, for what she had done. For the son that was not his, and renewed betrayal in the arms of the mountebank whose consuming power she had once learned to dread. By all Society’s dictates, he ought to hate her; but he had sworn to make her happy and failed her, and he would have crawled to her feet to beg forgiveness now.
He had knelt there once and felt her mouth awaken on his, and believed they had another chance. If he had found more strength — if she had come to him — if somehow he had only loved her enough, she would be alive today: the knowledge ate at his heart.
He would have died to bring her back. So would Mr. Y: it was the sole unspoken thought they had in common, a rivalry of grief that remained by mutual consent unacknowledged. But they were both held back by responsibility to a child: her child.
The ship’s whistle brayed high above him, and Raoul flinched and cursed his own shattered nerves. Not drink: not this time. He hadn’t touched a drop since that night. It was one reason why he slept so badly.
The crowd around them was flowing more purposefully now, and scarves and hats were being waved from the towering boat deck, waking a fluttering tide of reply.
“I need to go.” For the moment he was almost grateful for the interruption: Gustave, head averted, was still scuffing one foot, and the memory of that “Father” — cold mockery now — still hung between them.
But what else in heaven’s name was the boy to call him? Even before these last few years they’d both known well enough that Christine’s first-born would never hold the favoured place in his heart; but Raoul had been father enough for all that, hadn’t he? He’d carried the boy; he’d dealt with his endless questions; he’d been there to see him clothed and fed and tutored. He’d sent him to bed, woken him in the morning, and known a pang at the likeness between the sleeping face with its long lashes and Christine’s dreamy features by the firelight when he’d first known her.
He’d had “Father” clamoured in his ears for the child’s whole lifetime. What was he supposed to hear from Gustave now?
His rival called him “Monsieur le Vicomte”, with punctilious biting courtesy: to hear the echo of that from the boy would be more mockery than he could bear. “Monsieur de Chagny” from a child he’d known in his cradle was a slap in the face. And “Raoul” plain and simple was an intimacy that had no place on any lips but hers...
The ropes on the foot of the gangway were being unlashed now, and stewards were ushering visitors up from the cabins, voices echoing in response. Raoul cleared his throat hesitantly, with a glance at the bustle above.
“Gustave, I need to leave. If there’s anything you want—”
The defiant fist the boy dragged across his eyes left a damp streak as he looked up. “I want to see Nounou again. And Anne. And Minette. And Zazie—”
Zazie was the striped donkey in the day-nursery, Raoul remembered, after a groping moment of panic. He fell back on platitudes. “Well, maybe we can send Zazie over to you by ship. But you’ll have lots of toys on Coney Island, you know. And Minette can’t go in a parcel — she wouldn’t like it. She’s getting to be a big cat now...”
Both of them had reverted unthinking to the baby talk of years ago, from an era when Gustave had reigned as the unquestioned small tyrant of the household without rivals or discipline. Raoul caught the echo of his own words and flushed, feeling a fool. But child of his or not — Christine’s wishes or not — did he have the right to leave a boy of ten alone in a foreign land among strangers, away from the only home and family he’d ever known?
Gustave was wanted here; very much wanted. Raoul had seen the Phantom’s eyes clinging to the child from behind the mask with an awkward devotion that he had been forced to admit — between gritted teeth — was more than he, in the shocked void of his own loss, could offer. The man was wealthy and to all appearances successful. Gustave would have the whole of Coney Island as a plaything, and every whim that money could buy.
The boy was getting too old for nurses, Raoul assured himself, thrusting down the guilt that told him he was abandoning Christine’s son. He would soon forget his Nounou and find new playmates his own age...
“And Anne?” Gustave was insisting unhappily as if he could read his father’s mind. “Mother said she wasn’t to come. Can she come next year?”
No. Raoul had thought he’d plumbed the depths of horror five days ago on Coney Island, but the idea of the Phantom so much as setting eyes on her wrenched guilty places in his soul he’d thought numb beyond repair. Oh God — if he got the idea—
“You’re not to talk about it — do you understand?” Propelled by fear, it came out harsher than he’d intended, and he winced as Gustave’s face closed in on itself in familiar sullen retreat.
“Listen — Mr. Y—” A desperate attempt to regain lost ground. “He cares for you a lot, Gustave. You don’t want to make him unhappy — you don’t want to talk about your old home all the time.”
Gustave nodded, looking down again.
“We... we talked about Mother last night, before I went to bed. And he”—the boy swallowed, uncertain—“he cried.”
What right has he to wallow, to subject the boy— Raoul bit his lip, choking down distaste with an effort. Perhaps — the thought stole in painfully — perhaps if he had been able to show his own heart to Christine in front of the boy, Gustave’s birth need not have come between them as it had. And perhaps they could have found more comfort in each other in the bad times.
“Monsieur le Vicomte.” The voice was smooth and resonant, and as hatefully beautiful as in the horror of his sweat-filled dreams. Despite himself, Raoul jumped like a startled cat and cursed, not quite under his breath. As if he’d really thought the man would not be watching Gustave every moment the Vicomte de Chagny was near him — as if the Phantom would ever trust him with his son at all.
Time had taken its toll on them all: it was no longer, at least, a voice that one could have mistaken for an angel, Raoul told himself in a moment’s arid comfort. Unless, of course, one was a sheltered girl of twenty with a head full of legends of the North...
The cold, gloved hand on his elbow swung him round in a merciless grip. But it was not the pang of that icy grasp that had driven Raoul’s breath in its inward hiss.
“Well?” He swallowed memories of her and found his own voice commendably steady, letting mockery bite. “Am I accused of abduction, perhaps? An intent to take what is not mine?”
He let his other hand rest on Gustave’s shoulder, deliberately, and saw contempt flicker behind the mask in the moment before he felt the boy flinch. A stab of self-knowledge, to be choked down in turn. It was not he — had never been he — who had begun this game, or made a pawn out of a grieving child.
The mask glanced smoothly up the quayside, and the grip on his arm propelled him inexorably round in turn.
“It would be a shame, Vicomte, if you were to miss your passage. I believe the soil of America can spare your presence at last...”
“Why — do you fear for the boy’s loyalties?” Goaded as ever beyond finesse, Raoul struck out, and won a flash of anger in response.
“Believe me, I find your continued existence a matter of complete indifference. But I will not have my Christine left to travel unescorted—”
Raoul caught his breath, betrayed into a half-sob. “She was my wife, damn you — my wife!”
Ten years. He’d had a wife, a family, for ten years, and this man — this creature — could not say the same. And now the Phantom’s victory was hollow, utterly hollow for both of them... and all the vows of marriage came down to nothing now but six foot of brass-handled oak in a cold packing case.
Under the law, she was his still. His — to bring home and to bury, by kind forbearance of the master of Phantasma. A fair exchange, after all: a dead wife for a living heir.
Ten years. He’d had ten years: his rival had had half an hour. And between them they’d brought her to her death as if it had been meant all along, he by surrender and the other by jealous possession. It was that day beneath the Opera House all over again. All for you, Christine, and all for nothing—
Around them heads had turned at his outburst, and for a moment they’d found themselves ringed by a curious crowd; but whistles were blowing overhead, and the last travellers were hastening past before the gangplank was swayed up. His blind bludgeoning had led them only to this: this aching silence.
“Go.” The Phantom released him abruptly, with a thrust that sent Raoul stumbling forward. “Make your goodbyes—”
And Gustave’s hand was suddenly small and hot in his own. Raoul dropped to one knee and held Christine’s son close against his shoulder. He’d never known how to talk to the boy: all he could think now at the last was that she, somehow, would have known what to say...
“Father—” The voice was muffled against his coat, and Raoul tightened his grip, turning the child’s face upwards.
“Father, is — is Mother an angel now?”
Raoul swallowed, hard.
“Yes, Gustave.” His own voice was muffled. “That’s just what she is. Your very own angel.”
Angel of Music... but he could not say it. His rival had wanted this: let him be the one to do it, then. Let him play father and mother both — let him tell the old, comforting lies.
Gustave drew back a little, meeting his gaze. “And... shall I see you again?”
“Yes, of course.” The assurance came almost easily this time, untruth covered with a smile. “Of course you will.”
He stood up hastily, dusting off the grime of the quayside. “And now I really must go.”
He wouldn’t be back, he knew that — unless by the charity of Mr. Y. Debts mounted; and he would be needed now, needed too sorely at home. Without Christine—
The future stared him in the face, impossible, unbearable. But there was Anne... and he had to go on.
“Goodbye, Gustave.” He kissed the boy lightly as Christine would have done, and stepped back a little shamefaced. The gaze of the white mask seemed to hold a mocking irony.
“Monsieur, I bid you farewell. Do you think that I would harm him?” The murmur was for Raoul’s ears alone, and he flushed stiffly.
“For her sake”—he flung it back in the same undertone—“that’s all I ask of you.”
They were starting to raise the gangplank. He had run long ago for Christine’s sake, as a boy of fourteen. He ran again now.
Behind him, the other two were silent. Gustave’s hand slid upwards, hesitantly, into the long fingers of the man who was his father.
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