Fyrea's Cauldron

by William Maltese

  “I suppose I shall have to believe you.” Marie folded her arms around her bent legs and rested her chin on her knees. She watched her husband’s activities, enjoying just the watching—as she always enjoyed just the watching. “Although, my mother shall think I’m definitely going a little fishy when and if I should ever write how you and I shared a goldfish, between us, for lunch.”

  “Does sound a little ludicrous when described in quite that way.” He checked his watch to make sure the fish wouldn’t overcook and float free of its skeleton. “However, I don’t think your mother is the type to be all that interested in how my grandfather, an avid dabbler in amateur ichthyology, decided an island with so many fresh-water streams and ponds deserved some fresh-water fish as well. It just so happens to be goldfish he seeded in this neck of the woods. I can show you elsewhere that has fresh-water carp. None of those, however, are near any as convenient boiling pot; unless, of course, one has sprung up quite recently.”

  “Quite the possibility, from what you’ve said.”

  “You’re remembering more and more about Saint-Georges. Good for you.” His eyes sparked appreciative amusement. Obviously, he was having a good time.

  Marie was having a good time, too. Charles was fun to be with, and each day she discovered she liked him (as well as loved him) more and more. If they had gotten off to a weird start, upon her arrival, well, then, they had surmounted initial obstacles and become stronger and closer because of them.

  If only she knew what part Cécile played in her husband’s life, things would have been nigh on perfect.

  That particular day, though, she wasn’t even tempted to ask her husband about Cécile, because she didn’t want to spoil the moment. She just knew (her intuition again!) that any mention of Cécile would somehow throw a wrench in the present good mood of marital camaraderie.

  “Ah, our lunch is already almost done,” Charles observed, having pulled the fish out for a quick examination before returning it to the bubbling water. “Karena would be proud.”

  “I’ll save my judgment until after the tasting, if you don’t mind, thank you,” Marie observed. She was, though, eager to taste it; the ride up the mountain had left her more than a little hungry.

  Charles removed a knife from its sheath on his belt, and used it to help remove the fish from the cooking liquid. He let their beached meal momentarily drain of excess water before placing it on a rock, pool-side. With the knife’s sharp blade, and his fingers, he skillfully removed the fins, cut off the head, and peeled off the skin. Then, cutting off the tail, he pinched the end portion of the reveled skeleton with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and lifted the fish as he did so. He began working off the meat with the blade.

  “They do this better in a restaurant, I know,” he apologized with a sheepish grin. “So, be sure you watch for any small bones I’ve missed.”

  “We’d rather be at a loss for a doctor getting up here to rescue us from any fish bones caught in our throats, wouldn’t we?” Marie smiled back, despite all of her efforts to sound serious. Certainly, she couldn’t count upon Lucie and that old woman’s two gladiators to come to the rescue a second time.

  “Before our fine, dining, though....” Charles walked over to his saddlebag and produced salt and pepper shakers.

  “You are full of surprises.” Marie broke off a piece of unsalted fish in order to taste it before any seasoning. Actually, the flesh was already quite tasty, tender, and flaky. Or, possibly, she was just hungry enough to eat even a boiled shoe.

  “I’m not quite through with surprises, yet, either,” he said with evident glee. “So, don’t go wolfing down this gourmet meal I’ve prepared until you see what additional goodies I’m capable of conjuring by way of our little rustic lunch, here, on our mountain.”

  Despite what he requested, Marie indulged with another piece of fish, concluding that it would likely have been just as tasty even if she weren’t half starved. Its flesh was moist and had a pleasantly mild taste and texture. She tried to think of what other fish it reminded her of, and decided, finally, trout was the one that came closest.

  “Just hold on, Miss Piggy,” Charles said and got up. Instead of delving, again, into his saddlebag, he disappeared into a stretch of underbrush that completely overpowered the nearby small stream he’d recently, successfully, fished.

  “You want me to put your fish in the warmer?” Marie called after.

  “Funny!” he answered and appeared shortly with an ice bucket, complete with stream-cooled bottle of Dom Perignon in one hand and two tulip glasses in his other.

  “You’re kidding!” Marie laughed in evident pleasure. There was something about the very idea of volcano-boiled fish and mountain-stream cooled champagne, halfway up a jungle mountainside, which had all of the charm from which fictional love stories were made.

  “After all, there is a limit to how much roughing it any civilized man can expect of his wife. Right? Right!” He handed Marie her glass, gently balancing his on the rock next to the fish. He popped the champagne cork and filled their glasses.

  “You want to tell me how you managed this?” she asked, her champagne glass, rife with twirling small bubbles, in one hand, another piece of flavorful fish pinched within the thumb and fingers of her other.

  “I had one of the natives bring it up a couple of days ago,” he confessed, obviously pleased with his forethought.

  “I shall confess, risking your head swelling up as big as a balloon, that it is, indeed, the perfect touch.”

  “Then, you must drink a toast with me to our love,” he said, raising his glass. “You do know I love you, don’t you?”

  Marie couldn’t help herself: she began to cry.

  * * * * * * *

  Afterwards, it was only too obvious they had been ridiculous to continue up the mountain, because the day would have been memorably perfect as it had stood. The lake in The Cauldron was bound to be anticlimactic, under the best of circumstances.

  As it was, the euphoria Marie had felt building as she dined with her husband on fish and stream-cooled champagne, dissipated considerably as soon as the sun disappeared behind billowing curtains of damp fog. The mist wafted through the trees and settled like a shroud around horses and riders.

  “It’s cold,” Marie said, never having expected it this chilly anywhere on Saint-Georges.

  “I should have warned you that this sometimes happens,” Charles apologized. “I’ve a couple of rain slickers in the saddlebag. They’ll keep out the wet but not the chill.”

  “How much farther?” About the only thing she could see any longer was the path immediately in front of her horse. She had vision of her suddenly getting lost in the pea soup. How would a rescue party ever find her? She could have passed by Charles, no more than six feet between them, and never seen him.

  “Not changing your mind, are you, honey?” His question sounded like a challenge, even if he hadn’t intended it that way. “Getting cold feet, literally and figuratively?”

  ”I just pray you know where you’re going, because I haven’t a clue.”

  “Just be sure to say something every few minutes, so I’ll know you’re still with me.” His little laugh indicated he was merely having a little fun at his wife’s expense.

  As much as she might genuinely have liked to be amused, Marie couldn’t quite muster up much humor.

  It was very easy for her to get the impression she and her horse weren’t moving at all. The fog was all around them, cutting off not only her husband, for seemingly infinite minutes at a time, but, also, all the outside world.

  “Shhhhhh!” Charles hissed just as Marie began to say something to let him know she was still there.

  Marie’s horse stopped automatically when her husband’s horse did. At least, that was one advantage of being on the only trail that seemed readily available to them.

  Marie wondered when Charles was going to quit hissing for silence, and, then, realized it was no longer her husband supplying
the sound effects.

  “What is it?” she asked. It sounded more and more like a gas leak.

  “The possible reason why the haze is thicker today than usual,” he said. “I figure a new cluster of steam vents has opened up somewhere dead ahead.”

  Marie blamed her shiver on the cold, but a closer analysis would have revealed she had been thinking of Father Westbrook at the exact moment her latest chill took root at the base of her spine and shivered on upward.

  “Caused by the earthquake?” Marie spoke mainly to hear some other sound besides the breathless hissing.

  “Donalds and Cromwell didn’t report any new activity.” Those were the two scientists who had returned to France after taking seismographic and other scientific readings. “They were up this way for several days running, if you remember.”

  “Maybe, we should head back down the mountain,” Marie suggested tentatively.

  “Let’s take a closer look, first,” he said. Then, possibly realizing his wife was getting unduly frightened, he reassured her. “There’s nothing to worry about. As I’ve told you, before, these vents are always springing up, one day, only to disappear, the next.”

  He nudged his horse forward. Marie’s horse automatically followed.

  If possible, she thought the fog got denser. If possible, she found the air got warmer and wetter.

  “Definitely, it sounds like steam vents!” Charles decided.

  The muggy atmosphere played tricks with sound. Marie thought her husband was farther away than he was. For a moment, she had almost panicked; thankfully, before she did, she’d seen him through a sudden break in the mist.

  The hissing got louder.

  “Off through there, probably,” Charles said; Marie sensed, rather than actually saw, in what direction he pointed. “We’d better not leave the trail, though.”

  Marie was pleased her husband’s adventurous nature didn’t tend toward the extreme. Also, she was pleased when the fog began to thin, and temperatures returned to pleasant.

  Their arrival at the crater was, indeed, breathtaking, in that, just at that point, the fog blanket abruptly ended, the crater rim and the deep water below unveiled; the latter seemingly blue paint in a massive bowl edged with whipped cream. All of it was bathed in brilliant sunlight.

  “It’s about twenty miles around,” Charles said. One look at Marie told him she was impressed, as he knew she would be, by the exceptional beauty of the panorama. “Before the big prehistoric boom, where we are is estimated to have been about two-thirds of the way up the mountain. The upper third blasted so far and wide into the upper atmosphere that a good inch of it settled in parts of Central and South America as topsoil.”

  “Decidedly beautiful!” she admitted.

  “Glad you came?” He dismounted. “There’s a way down to the water just over here.”

  The ground sloped to give a steep, but manageable, access to the lake edge. Across the way, however, cliffs rose to over two-thousand feet, making any approach to the water impossible from that direction.

  Charles was already taking off his clothes for a swim when Marie and her horse joined him at the shoreline.

  “Come on!” he invited. “Last one in...and all of that.”

  “You go ahead,” Marie said. The visible crater rim reminded her of the gaping maw on all of those Fyrean carved amulets. As ridiculous as it seemed, even to her, she found the lake ominous in spite of its ethereal beauty. It was possibly made even more sinister because of its unworldly loveliness.

  “Spoilsport!” Charles accused good-naturedly. His tanned skin exposed to the sun, he began his animated scamper along the rocks to climb atop one large slab of smooth black stone that extended, like a table, over the water’s edge.

  “Charles, do be careful,” Marie warned, finding a spot and sitting down. “I’m counting on you to guide me back down the misty mountain, remember?”

  As her husband exited the rock, in an impressively graceful swan dive, Marie saw the liquid into which he was about to enter suddenly begin to boil.

  “Charles!” she screamed, too late, in warning.

  * * * * * * *

  She was hysterical. Not unusual, since she’d thought The Cauldron about to turn her husband into part of a giant stew.

  How was she to know its bubbles were merely releases of benign subterranean gas?

  “It’s harmless, like the fizz in soda pop,” Charles tried to explain, once he was safely out of the water and able to figure out what Marie had thought had happened. He hadn’t known what to think when she’d let out her initial shriek which had caused him the painful belly-flop that had temporarily left him disoriented and winded.

  “I thought for sure it was boiling! I thought it for sure!” she kept repeating. Knowing what he told her was undoubtedly the truth, considering he wasn’t scalded, didn’t erase how she’d felt when she’d seen him leave that rock and enter that water. She had felt so utterly helpless...helpless...helpless...helpless.

  Truly, she had thought the man she loved was going to be boiled to death, like that fish they’d eaten earlier.

  * * * * * * *

  That night, after the trauma of The Cauldron, and after Charles’ exhibited tenderness had convinced her he loved only her, she finally asked him about Cécile. She asked, because she was suddenly sure he would have the simple and harmless explanation that would put her needless fears and jealousies finally to rest; just as he had been able to explain away the bubbles in The Cauldron as nothing more than harmless gas.

  She was wrong. She knew that the moment his body tensed beside hers on the bed.

  “Who?” His voice was very guarded, calm only because he was so obviously making every conceivable effort to keep it that way. “What makes you think I know someone called Cécile?”

  “You’ve mentioned her in your sleep,” Marie said, but it was already obvious she’d be getting no answer. How could their love be expected to remain healthy when there were still secrets which couldn’t be shared?

  “I must have been dreaming about school,” he said. “There used to be a girl called Cécile who sat next to me in chemistry class. She was the class brain. On the other hand, I was always afraid I was going to flunk out.”

  Marie didn’t press him. She let his feeble explanation stand, even though she knew it for the lie it was.

  She loved him, despite the lie, and she was positive, now, that he loved her. So what hold did this Cécile have on him that made that woman a secret he couldn’t share with the wife he loved?

  Even if Charles didn’t seem to believe it, Marie believed their relationship was made of firm stuff. Knowing that, she was prepared to find out, once and for all, just who Cécile was, if just to put that particular bugbear to rest.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SECRETS REVEALED

  If Saint-Georges resembled paradise, with its strands of white-sand beaches, green hills, verdant valleys, jutting mountain, and cascading fresh-water streams, then Isla Charlotte could only be described as hell, by comparison, in that it was little more than a mesa of black volcanic rock, thrust from the sea, and topped by an ugly colorless town constructed of stone blocks hewn from the very rocky upon which the town precariously squatted.

  Carrying the analogy one step farther, Marie felt, during her boat trip to get there, like some poor soul making her journey across the River Styx, next stop Hades. If her resistance to seasickness had been low on the large steamer that had bought her to Saint-Georges, then it was virtually nonexistent on the small boat that took her to Isla Charlotte. The young, attractive youth, at the boat’s helm, kept eyeing Marie as if she was a little out of her head...which she possibly was.

  Marie suspected she had, just possibly, allowed her quest for an answer, regarding Cécile, to get the best of her. She hadn’t been any too clever in her sleuthing, up until now, having come right out and asked Jannette what that girl knew. Jannette had tensed and clutched the talisman around her neck: a reaction Marie hadn’t really u
nexpected, in that the girl, up until then, had seemed so level-headed and so unlikely to fall apart as easily as...say...Madeline had been expected to do.

  Marie got little shivers when she thought of how Madeleine had reacted to the same query about Cécile. Marie’s idea had been to scare the facts out of the nervous little parlor maid. Where Jannette had merely clammed up, like a mute, Madeleine had started running around the room like a chicken with her head cut off, waving her arms, and babbling an onrush of words Marie couldn’t understand. The noise attracted every servant within hearing distance, all of whom must have thought someone was being murdered. As a result, there was no way news of the incident, and its cause, hadn’t reach Charles who, when he heard, was quite livid.

  “What kind of a woman sends a young servant girl into a fit of hysterics?” His face was beet red through his tan.

  “How was I to know one question about Cécile would send her off like that?” Marie had countered.

  “What is this phobia you have about Cécile, anyway?” He’d paced back and forth like a nervous jungle cat.

  “Then, you’re no longer denying there was a Cécile in your life!” Marie felt she might finally be getting somewhere. If so, then all of the fuss had been worth it.

  “I don’t recall ever denying it.” His blue eyes had narrowed to mere slits.

  “Back to the chemistry class story, are you?” So what that Marie had had the express opinion she was skating on thin ice?

  “Cécile is dead if you must know!” he had snapped. “It would be best for all involved if you and everyone else let the poor girl rest in peace.”

  He had left Marie, and gone for the horseback ride which brought him back sweaty and un-talkative at supper time.

  Back to being convinced her answers were never going to come from her husband (even though she had not lessened her resolve to have at them), Marie tried to be entirely charming and non-threatening throughout that evening meal. She’d figured Charles, as soon as he realized she’d dropped the subject, would return to his normal self. What convinced her otherwise was that he hadn’t come to her suite that night—or any night since.