Newly Wed

Phantom of the Opera fan-fiction by Igenlode Wordsmith

Every morning, the sun casts a rainbow across her pillow... and whatever her fears, they will face the future together. C/R fluff.

Christine woke to a distant squabbling of ducks, and shifting bright ripples on the ceiling of their room from the morning sun on the river beneath the window. Barrels rolled, muffled, on the cobbled quai outside, and the crack of the waggoner’s whip came faintly through the air as the team moved off again, delivery made. From the bridge beyond came the distant sound of skylarking boys, pushing or shoving in shrieks of mirth then fading away.

Down below, through the thick walls and sturdy worn floors of the old inn, she could hear a clattering of pans, closing doors, and voices raised in a cheerful morning bustle that promised breakfast later. A great cawing and a momentary flurry of wings was the jackdaws in the poplars behind the church, and somewhere very far away a farm dog was barking.

It would be another fine morning, Christine thought, watching the sunlit reflections play across the room. In another half-hour, perhaps, the sun would move to reach the bevelled mirror and set a fugitive, dancing rainbow across the pillow... and then she would think about rising for the day.

She let long lashes drift shut again, savouring drowsy warmth and routine. Already it was hard to remember that it was only a week since they’d come here; only a week since the hectic rush and clamour of that ceremony back in Paris, so very much in the public eye.

Only a week since her wedding.

The word still held a jolt of excitement and unfamiliar constraint, like the presence of the delicate gold band around her finger. Her childhood dreams had never stretched quite this far, beyond a fairytale kiss into the tangible promise of reality. Such things did not happen... and yet here they were. And even in sleep her husband held the hand with that exquisite ring clasped between both of his own, as if in wonder, and the deep peace of his breathing on the pillows beside her had become as cherished and familiar as the morning sounds of this country inn.

Christine reclaimed her hand gently. He stirred a little, on the verge of waking, and drew her closer, murmuring something she could not quite hear. Presently they moved together in slow shared rhythm, and lay quietly enlaced after. The sun crept imperceptibly across the mirror’s edge and cast gilded colour across Christine’s cheek in its own customary quivering miracle; but she did not get up.

She was roused again by a discreet tap on the door and the rattle and clank of the latch that heralded the innkeeper’s niece with a can of hot water. Rosy-cheeked from the kitchen, the girl slipped quietly across the room to set the polished copper can on the wash-stand, returning Christine’s smile with an unabashed friendly grin.

No sooner had the latch clicked shut behind her than the covers were thrust back at Christine’s side, and Raoul rolled out of bed with the exuberant thump that she was beginning to learn represented his usual approach to the morning. Less given to such enthusiasm, Christine turned over and curled up in the warm nest of sheets vacated by her husband, observing the male mysteries of shaving-brush and razor with amused appreciation for a proceeding that after a week had yet to lose its charm. Raoul shaved with quick, neat strokes of the blade that made light of blued steel and a murderous edge, and Christine watched with the same rapt attention she would have accorded any craftsman, coupled with a tender amusement at the little frown with which he dabbed for traces of soap, afterwards.

Washing water splashed into the basin as Raoul began to whistle, a cheerfully languorous snatch of Massenet that was momentarily muffled as his nightshirt came off over his head and he reached for the flannel. He moved with complete freedom, the utter unconcern of any sailor or farm-hand stripped for labour or ready for the plunge and unfettered by voluminous modesty. Nestled close in their shared sheets of the night, Christine watched him wash and dress, secure in the uncomplicated enjoyment she would have derived from any well-made and healthy young creature.

But she had thought him oblivious to her gaze. When he looked up for a moment and smiled, she found herself plunged all at once into the blushing awareness of a new-made bride.

Busy managing buttons and flaps, Raoul raised an eyebrow at the sudden flood of scarlet, and she was caught by an impulse half-mischief, half-honesty. “Don’t laugh... Why, has no-one ever told you that you’re beautiful?”

Men, too, could become abruptly self-conscious, it seemed. And it was small aid to her own composure to discover just how acutely aware she was that his blush ran all the way down.

She sat up on impulse and held out her arms; and when he came to her she drew him down to cradle that beloved head where some day a child of theirs would lie. After a minute, with her fingers moving softly through his hair, he looked up and met her eyes with a somewhat awkward grin. “It’s a compliment I’ve heard from dowagers who claim to have dandled my father in infancy — not from young ladies abed in a cloud of silk.”

Her arms tightened about him in answer where he knelt at the bedside, and he laid his head back against her with a sigh, warm and solid through the featherlight froth of the nightgown that cascaded from her shoulders. It was quite the most expensive thing she had ever bought — the last thing she would ever buy, now, as Mademoiselle Daaé — and when she had thrown caution and her savings to the winds and gone to the discreetly extravagant little shop on the Boulevard des Italiens to buy a trousseau that would not shame him by its shabbiness, she had scarcely been able to believe that anything so beautiful could be quite proper, for all that it covered her from head to toe.

She’d wanted a nightgown fit for a wedding journey. She’d been sold one whose silken caress was enough to take her breath away... and his too, on that first night. But they were both more daring now.

She tugged on Raoul’s hair until he looked up again. “What was he like — your father?”

She’d tried imagining her husband twenty, no, forty years older: grizzled, frowning, disapproving. Somehow she did not think the long-dead Vicomte de Chagny would have approved of his headstrong son’s insistence on a love-match with a girl for whom he’d risked his life at the Opera.

Raoul grinned again, more freely this time, and slipped up to sit comfortably beside her on the sheets, propping the bolster and pillows up behind them. One arm slid round her waist, both comfort and distraction.

“My father? If you believe the dowagers, the most angelic little boy you ever saw — with shoulder-length golden curls. If you believe the family portraits, a dour-faced old Legitimist who hadn’t smiled since the Second Empire... though to a true Chagny, of course, the Orléans were upstarts. And the Bourbons too, though I’ll swear there’s a great-great-grand-aunt in the Grand Gallery down at Drinon with a telltale Bourbon nose...”

It meant nothing at all to Christine. Held warm against her husband’s side, high in the old inn that had seen their wedding night and robed in silk and lace fit for a queen, she listened to Raoul’s easy chatter of history, houses and ancient scandal at first with amused bewilderment and then — as she began to understand just how little she knew of this world of his — with a growing sense of drifting chill.

They’d tried, after all, to tell her she couldn’t do this. Even Madame Giry, who had brought her that first note from Raoul on the day of the gala, who’d tried to warn him of the perils that he faced and who’d guided him down to be with her at the last, had tried to talk her out of the wedding.

An affair of the heart between a young gallant and a beautiful singer — why, that was Paris. That was the romance of a summer, a sweet memory to cherish over a lifetime grown older and wiser. But a marriage in the full glare of publicity after such an adventure, between a foreign nobody whose name was scandal and a scion of one of the oldest families in France — the ballet mistress had given a sad shake of the head. “My dear, you would not be happy six months. If he marries you, they will never let him forget it.”

Raoul — young, strong, hot-headed — had cared nothing for such protests, and in the certainty and joy of his embrace she had not cared either. He had been with her in the sweetest days of her childhood, and through the worst of the dream-turned-nightmare of those Opera years. He’d faced fire and water and the noose for her sake, and it had only forged the two of them closer together. They loved each other. They did not care a fig for names or titles or wealth. And in this modern day and age, what difference did it make that his ancestors had ridden to battle behind some mediæval king of France when hers had remained as loyally rooted to a Swedish cabbage patch?

It was only now, with a sinking feeling that would not let her be, that she saw for the first time just how much of an impostor she would be as his Vicomtesse. She’d thought he cared no more than she did for castles and ancestors and the politics of kings. She hadn’t understood —how could she?— that there was a world where one lived from birth with such things as naturally as breathing and equally without thought. For all the intimacies that had passed between them, there was a gulf of understanding she could never bridge and a half of his life where she would never belong...

She had made no move; but Raoul broke off, all the same. His arm tightened around her as if to draw her back across that vast space to the warmth of his body against hers, and the brush of his breath against her cheek.

“Christine?” He eased her round to face him, hands going to her shoulders. “Christine, what is it?”

Fears ebbed and for a moment seemed once more absurd; whatever else he might be, he was Raoul, her dear Raoul, whose eyes searched her own now with quick understanding. “It’s Drinon, isn’t it? The old chateau at Drinon... and the rest. The whole pompous parade of it.”

“Raoul—” She bit her lip, hating how faint her voice sounded. “I— I can’t.”

He made no pretence of ignorance.

“You don’t have to.” A swift kiss on her forehead, for comfort. He caught her gaze again and held it almost fiercely. “They can’t make you... Listen— darling, listen. That’s why I brought you here, not to some great reception in town or down to the ancestral acres. So we could be ourselves, just for a while. For a week or two, until we know who we are to each other, and what’s important. And after that... Madame de Chagny, just say the word, and we’ll put the family hôtel and all its Paris pomp into mothballs and take a little flat up in Passy for just the two of us, with everything that’s new. Or we’ll find a furnished suite in Cannes and spend the summer by the sea.

“We’ll do anything you like. Anything that will make you happy. If I’d wanted a... a chateleine for Chagny and its estates, I’d have asked one of my maiden aunts, not you. Never you. Not unless... until... it’s what you want.”

The wistful longing in that little ‘until’ caught at her heart. “But I do want,” Christine said softly, and knew she had made the right choice.

“I wouldn’t inflict Drinon as a home on anyone.” Raoul had jumped up to resume dressing, pacing eagerly about the room as he turned down his cuffs. “It’s a gloomy old pile that should have been pulled down a hundred years back — there might even be a dungeon or two — but I’d like to take you there some day to see the portraits. We used to spend weeks down there when I was little, before my father died. And every time it rained my sisters and I would make up the wildest stories about all those stiff and stilted ancestors: the robber barons and the pirates and the gamblers and their duels, and the ladies who smuggled traitors beneath their skirts and lovers behind secret panels...”

He grinned. “Our governess was terribly shocked. She said my sisters had improper minds, and were setting me a bad example. Does it occur to you”—he leaned over to drop a teasing kiss on the tip of his wife’s ear—”that she might conceivably have been right?”

Christine got her arms around his neck and pulled him down to kiss him properly, and the answer to the question was settled quite thoroughly between them in a manner that momentarily derailed the conversation.

It was Christine who brought it up again some minutes later, when she had washed and made her own modest toilette behind the screen. (Oh, it was foolish to feel shame to be thus exposed in Raoul’s gaze after all that they had been to one another; but all the same, heat came flaming into her cheeks at the very idea.)

“Raoul— darling—” The words came disjointed as the brush rippled through recalcitrant curls, and her husband, leaning against the dressing-table, set warm hands over hers and came to stand behind her, claiming the task.

Christine leaned back against him, closing her eyes, and felt him working through the tangles with the infinite gentle care of one to whom this was no chore but a new and tender discovery. Somewhere beyond the window, a bird sang in a low rippling croon that filled her heart like the sound of happiness itself.

“Raoul, if we could go anywhere, anywhere at all... where would you live?”

“I’d take you back home with me to Chagny.” The great sweep of lands down in Burgundy; his answer came without a moment’s need for thought. “It’s where we were all born, where I grew up, and it’s no grim old keep like Drinon but a wonderful adventure of a house. There’s a dainty little parlour my mother used that would fit you like a glove, and a music room in palest blue. There are wide windows that look out all across the valley, and long corridors that look inwards to lost courtyards and old forgotten rooms full of broken treasure. There are tiny panelled chambers like the shell of a fairy nut, and great cool halls for dancing or for song. There are attics enough for a whole tribe of children and their picnics—”

“And chocolate?” Caught up in his own enthusiasm, Raoul had begun to gesture rather wildly with the hairbrush. Christine got up and took it from him, laughing up into his face in shared memories of her own.

“And chocolate,” Raoul promised her in return, with a solemnity belied by his dancing eyes. He captured her hands and drew her back against him, twining an arm about her waist and resting his cheek against her hair. “And goblins enough for even Little Lotte...”

She felt him grow still abruptly, laughter draining out of him like the bitter shadow that now lay across their childhood days. “But no Angel of Music, Christine. The children of that place deserve a different tale.”

His hand at her waist had moved downwards a little, spread out in an unconscious shielding gesture, and it occurred to her for the first time, as the rush of warmth there rose to her cheeks, that there might already be an unborn child within her that they had made together. The thought brought apprehension, and then a quite astonishing sense of pride.

She slipped her own hand over his, guarding that miraculous chance. “You love Chagny very much, don’t you?”

“Not as much as I love you.” Half-whispered above her, it was no banal gallantry but simple, searing truth. “Say the word, and we’ll walk away and leave the whole thing behind: family, title, expectations. I won’t let it burden you, I swear—”

He would follow her without hesitation into obscurity, she understood at last, just as he had followed her into notoriety and shame: with all his heart and without a moment’s regret. The knowledge left her shaken and humbled both at once... and it was not what she wanted, not at all.

“Raoul, if Chagny’s the home you love then that’s where we’ll go. That’s what I want, for us both. I’m just afraid”—her voice shook a little with imagined inadequacies cold as stage fright—“afraid I won’t know what to do.”

Raoul turned her to face him; bent to kiss her softly, in comfort and in joy, as her arms came round him, holding him tight.

“Darling, you’ve played the Countess on stage, and to the greatest success.” A sudden grin she recognised from their childhood, half-boyish and wholly mischievous. “Just give them a couple of days of that, and I guarantee the whole staff will be falling over themselves with delight when they find just how sweet and gentle you really are.”

Christine flushed, shamefaced. She was not sweet and gentle, save in his eyes; she was an ordinary weak and wilful girl... but Raoul’s tender touch told her otherwise.

“And you’ll be with me?”

“There beside you.” He brushed aside a strand of the hair that still tumbled unpinned about her shoulders, and laid the faintest graze of his mouth against her temple. “Now and always...”

That was her cue to smile a little. “To hold me and to hide me?”

“You don’t need me to hide you, Christine.” Her husband’s heart beat steady and untroubled against her own, but his reassurance was more than a little rueful. “You’re the bravest, most gallant creature that ever lived... and it’s you I’m trusting to save my skin the next time I jump in feet-first to something I can’t handle.”

She didn’t remember being brave or gallant, either. She remembered grief and loneliness, and a miracle that proved the greatest betrayal of all — and Raoul, who had brought back memories of joy and trust to her past and to her present, and with whom at last she could allow herself comfort when she was afraid. She had been so very, very tired of fighting to stay whole.

When her dream had begun to hunt her through the waking world and threaten them both, it was Raoul who had halted her in her flight, and turned her back to face her fears and win a chance to live. And of that last day, when her worst fears had come true and darkness and despair had broken through her lover’s guard to snatch her for their own, she remembered only the great wave of compassion which had inspired her in the final moment. She’d found a way to repudiate both sides of that wicked —that murderous— bargain, and to say what needed to be said to save a soul and to set them all free.

But the sun outside fell warm and heavy across tiles and treetops and slow-gliding water, and poured through the window to lay a patch of dusty gold on the floor of their chamber, ebbing now as the rays climbed higher. Bees were busy somewhere in the creeper that clung against the wall, and all their dreams of summertime had come true.

Raoul’s arms around her now were the place where she belonged, in his world or in hers... or beyond this life and in the next. Whatever comedies or disasters were to come, they would manage.

“Next time, we’ll both save one another,” Raoul murmured against her, partly in jest and partly in promise, and Christine settled closer into his arms.

“Dearest Raoul,” she told him softly, “that was true long since.”

Return to Igenlode's Phantom of the Opera page