#rudolfo

When Rudolfo  was taken upstairs via a ladder through a disused lavatory which lead to the kitchen through a small courtyard. He was beginning to wonder at the architecture of this place. When he entered the kitchen, a small army of kitchen maids began to scold him for getting in their way, which put him in a rather awkward situation, because the Lord Ashton had completely vanished from sight. When he finally managed to break their ranks and lodge himself in the trench that had been dug in the downstairs hallway to provide shelter from the heavy culinary artillery, he had a moment of respite to consider what he had just seen and what it meant.

Ashton had charged him with silence. Therefore, he had to ensure that the secret got out. The trouble was doing this in such a manner as to prevent implicating himself, and thus damning his companions. As crawled through the mud and into the safe-zone, he tried to piece together what they knew about the situation so far. Lord Ashton’s sister had been in love with a human. She had married a fairy instead. She went mad and attempted to kill the fairy, then Ashton turned the lover and locked him in the basement, then went to kidnap a small posse of Frenchmen to serve as a potential foodsource for the brood. While he was there, he picked up one such Frenchman’s ex-lover as his own fiance.

Aside from the fact that it would make a damn good opera, this was certainly the most useless conspiracy that Rudolfo had ever stumbled upon. It was so needlessly convoluted that it had surely been devised by a fairy for the express purposes of entrapping somebody in some sort of bargain or contract, except that the fairy was obviously stupidly amateur considering it hadn’t really succeeded in trapping anybody, so much as connecting a variety of disparate (and each uniquely melodramatic and pointless) parts.

---

Marcello had spent days agonizing over his paintings and their dilemma. He was not convinced (none of them were) that the mere knowledge of the scandal would help their case with Bucklaw, considering the information was safely sealed away. Fairies did not necessarily take well to blackmail.

Scandal did fill his mind, though, and he was something of an expert at making them - an art learned from the greatest master of all: Musetta. There were skeletons in this family’s closet, and people who hid their skeletons were usually adept at making more of them.

There was an unexpected knock at his (open) door. It was unexpected because nobody in this house ever bothered to knock except a few of the servants, and they were always conveniently out of scene. He looked up from his painting to see the Lord Bucklaw himself standing just outside the doorway with a charming, yet somewhat bashful smile. Marcello’s first thought was to redirect him to Schaunard’s room.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Arturo said. “Since I was by, I thought I would stop to visit. Are you well, since last we spoke?”

Marcello, in that meantime, had accidentally invented surrealism in his ever-growing frustrations with the painting, but he was also making a steady advance on the larger commission itself. He allowed himself a deep sigh. “If you can define ‘well’ loosely in order to encompass this never-ending monotony and imprisonment, I suppose I am quite well.” He rubbed his temples, inadvertently getting paint in his hair.

“I’m again apologetic for my brother-in-law’s ill treatment of you,” Arturo replied with a frown and a quirk of his lips. “As a man, I’m horrified at this situation. Unfortunately, I’m not just a man, and I can’t violate the law of his house while I’m in it.”

“But these paintings are for you, are they not? She’s your wife, correct?”

“That merely puts me in more of a bind. You are, for the purposes of this exercise, one of his resources; and he is freely using his resources to provide this service. I’m no more bound to him than the laws of kinship demand since she is his sister, but it would be impossible to violate our terms.”

At first, Marcello’s lungs were alight with fiery rage, but it was short-lived. He sighed, his body sagging under the weight of it. This isolation was wearing on all of them. In particular, as the difficulties mounted, his more self-reflective friends were beginning to withdraw in their various ways; Marcello, for his part, was of a much more social temperament, and he was getting lonely. Rudolfo was his chief companion, but Rudolfo’s contemplations were becoming more private by the day, and Schaunard was often occupied with his usual employment in the vampire’s dining room or parlor. Colline, it seemed, had all but vanished; they saw him frequently, but he enjoyed their company from a silent corner, and often slipped away so furtively that not even Schaunard dared to follow him.

He had intended to make a quip. None came to mind. He wanted at least to complain. He wanted an excuse to throw fists and to shout until the rafters rattled. At the moment, he didn’t have that energy, nor the foolhardiness that came with being presented with the cause of anger. He had spent too much time considering Arturo as a potential ally to become overcome by rage for him.

“May I come in?” Arturo asked quietly, breaking into Marcello’s thoughts.

“Why don’t we walk instead?” Marcello suggested, brightening his voice as best he could. “I’m dreadfully cooped up here.”

Arturo fidgeted uncomfortably. “I don’t know that it’s wise to go together into the parts of the house frequented by Ashton,” he said.

Marcello shrunk further in despair. He knew this was wise, of course, but he needed some sort of company, some sort of stimulation.

“It’s still daylight, though,” Arturo hastily added. “are you permitted in the courtyards? I’m sure we could both do with some fresh air.”

“That sounds acceptable,” Marcello said, although he was certainly days away from a complete breakdown.

~~~~

Of the four of them, Schaunard spent the most time with their vampire overlord. This was because, of the four of them, he was the only one whose art the vampire actually liked. Schaunard had taken some drastic actions in the past to get out of unpleasant positions, but four things had prevented him from embarrassing his host or sneezing on the hors d'oeuvres. The first was a sense of professional pride: he loved to sabotage his employers, but rarely in a way that made him look bad. He simply hadn’t thought of a way of getting out of this one that didn’t involve making himself look incompetent. The second was that, despite it all, the vampire (though Schaunard cursed his name with every stroke of the bow) was not a bad host; he was obsessively dedicated to proper manners and a proper aesthetic; he was always perfectly cordial to Schaunard. The third was the delightful opportunity it afforded Schaunard to see Musetta. He wanted to keep an eye on her, ensure she wasn’t being maltreated; and, when she was being maltreated, he loved to see the fallout that reigned down upon the vampire’s head.

Schaunard enjoyed playing, even as much as he hated the mere sight of his captor, even as his stomach roiled with bile. He imagined it sometimes, vividly; in his mind, Schaunard became a soldier of fortune, had been all along in fact, waiting merely for the opportunity to take a sword and a stake and drive that living corpse into the wall. He thought of tearing his shoulder like Grendel’s and mounting it on a spire, of laying his pale body in a tomb and mounting his head on a pike. Schaunard was not one to enact violence, but the scenes filled his head vividly as he played, pulling him far away to another reality. A reality where Schaunard could protect them again, keep them safe as he had in the past.

But Schaunard was not a personally violent man, and when he considered even moderate acts of defiance, a different image forced itself into his mind. That image was Colline, eyes alight like a child’s with fear, that terrifying instant when the pain had pulled him from the vampire’s enthrallment and he had been staring at his own hand, engulfed in flame, the cuff of his old shirt smoldering as it began to catch.

His breath caught, and his bow hitched on a note. The vampire didn’t take notice.

That was the fourth reason for staying compliant; in fact, in many ways, it was the only one. He wasn’t sure that the vampire would take out his wrath on him, when there were convenient scapegoats so close by.  Not when Colline’s safety was at stake.

It was just a little bit harder to breathe now that that thought had entered his mind, but he pushed himself through the muscle memory of the routines. He focused, as hard as he could; he had been practicing earlier and had found himself switching from Mozart to Strauss halfway through a piece, and his hands shaking so badly that the legato came out as a trill.

He couldn’t think about things now. Later. Tonight, when he was alone. For now, he had to get through the evening; then he would have a delightful tea with Marcello and whoever else was around, then, when all was well and he had grounded himself in the sanity of companionship, he would retreat to his room. And then he could let his mind do whatever it pleased. He would compose a song; he would let Rudolfo write the words. He would fill it with rage and fear and pain and unrequited love. That would free his mind to be happy, like he was supposed to be, like he  had  to be too keep Marcello alive and Rudolfo sane. Like he wanted to be.

~~~~~

“Why did you consent to this marriage? Why did he?”

“Lord Ashton was in dire straights when the engagement was arranged,” Arturo said. “It isn’t obvious from the arrangements here, but his status is not what it once was. He lost some key military campaigns in the north that cost him a lot of face; face, status, money, and troops that he needed to gain political allies. Had I not joined his family, he would likely have been executed.”

“Executed for what?”

“Get creative,” Arturo said, waving the question away with his hand. As it flew by him, Marcello realized he had just asked for incriminating evidence about a fairy’s brother in law, and Arturo might be physically incapable of giving it.

“Surely,” Marcello said carefully, “it would merely have been a political execution; surely there was no crime.”

“Because surely,” Arturo responded, “you would not be so bold or so crass as to suggest anything ill of my family.” He said it with a casual flair, but it confirmed Marcello’s hypothesis; Marcello had spoken nothing but ill of Lord Ashton, and that had never been an issue before.

”You care deeply for his sister, after all,” Marcello said, slowly, experimentally.

“I do care for Lucia,” Arturo confirmed. “Very much.”

“And surely that love extends to her brother as well.”

“You would be quite wise to say that.”

They had caught onto a game. Arturo, a fairy, could not lie or cause injury to the family. He could confirm any number of statements in roundabout ways, however, careful never to lie or to directly permit harm. He could point them in the right direction, a compass needle in a  twisted cave.