Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  That was really throwing a stone into the frog-pond. Hecate looked embarrassed and Myrica looked furious.

  “ So far as I know,” I said, this time making my voice a trifle frosty,” Monsieur de Mesmay has no connection with the so-called Cult of Orpheus, if it even has any real existence nowadays, and what I’m painting certainly isn’t an altarpiece. As you say, had the adherents of any mystical religion wanted a work of art for ceremonial purposes, they would certainly have turned to one of their own members.”

  “Niklaus is just being mischievous,” Myrica said. “Nobody was wondering any such thing—not even him, really. We were actually talking about the mystery of coincidences, although it isn’t really a coincidence, is it, that Hecate is working on a poem about Eurydice while you’re working on a set of paintings featuring Orpheus. You’re friends, after all; she simply took her inspiration from you.”

  “Actually,” said Hecate, “that isn’t what...” This time, it wasn’t her who abandoned the sentence; she was cut off rather rudely.

  “I know who it was!” said Niklaus Hylne, abruptly. “Of course!”

  He had lost us all.

  “Who what was?” asked Myrica, mystified.

  “Who the person was who remembered Rathenius arriving on the island, of course,” said the supposed historian, although I couldn’t see that there was any of course about it, and I would have much preferred him not to bring the topic back into the conversation. So would Hecate, to judge by her blush.

  It was left to Myrica to say: “Who?”

  “The Mother Superior,” said Niklaus, triumphantly.

  Myrica was unimpressed. “And who the hell is the Mother Superior?” she demanded—rather inaptly, given that Mothers Superior, of whatever religion, are supposed to be the least likely people to end up in Hell.

  “Of the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar,” Niklaus added, considerably less triumphantly now that he had seen how direly underappreciated his power of divination had been.

  Myrica looked at him as if he were mad. “I thought lay people weren’t allowed into the Convent,” she said.

  The Sisters of Shalimar was a religious organization, of Druidic affiliation rather than Christian, although obviously founded in imitation of the Christian tradition of monachism. They were often to be seen drifting around in the distinctively voluminous cream robes and head-dresses designed to reduce them to anonymity, doing various good works—mostly helping to tend the sick who couldn’t afford pay doctors, probably more effectively than most qualified physicians, if only because they administered no treatments, and hence did not compound the harm caused by malady or injury. I had never met the Mother Superior, though. As far as I knew, she never left the Convent, and men were not allowed to enter it, so opportunities for us to run into one another had been a trifle sparse. The prohibition did not, however, apply to all lay people, as Niklaus explained

  “Women are allowed to go in to seek instruction in the mysteries of the Bardic tradition,” Niklaus told Myrica, loftily, still trying to save some vestiges of triumph, “and rumor has it that Hecate has been taking advantage of that license quite frequently of late.”

  At the time, that seemed to me to be almost as ludicrous as black snow. Hecate Rain, thinking of going into a convent? Hecate Rain, thinking of going into a convent without having said a single word about it to me? Utterly absurd. It didn’t occur to me immediately that there might be other reasons for a woman to go into a convent for “instruction” than consulting the Superior about joining the Order. As I have already remarked, I wasn’t quite myself that day. The poor air quality was probably affecting my brain.

  “Well, yes,” Hecate admitted. “It was the Mother Superior.” She conspicuously neglected to offer any explanation for her visits to the Convent—if, in fact, rumor was right in alleging that there had been more than one.

  My resistance broke down, taking my wisdom with it; curiosity won. “Why were you consulting the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar about me?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t,” she said, defensively. “She asked me.”

  “Asked you what?” I said, quite mystified.

  “How your painting was coming along—the Orpheus triptych, that is.”

  Why on earth would she be interested? I thought—but my brain was catching up now, and I didn’t ask the question aloud. It didn’t matter, it was one of those questions so obvious that it didn’t have to be voiced to saturate the atmosphere.

  “It’s not really surprising,” said Hecate, still on the defensive. “She knows that I’m working on the poem about Eurydice, obviously...”

  Obviously? I thought.

  “...so she naturally asked me why,” Hecate continued, letting that unspoken query pass, “but I didn’t say anything about your painting. She was the one who brought the subject up, passing naturally enough from Eurydice to Orpheus. Obviously, she’d heard about the Mesmay commission, and she mentioned, in passing, that she remembered you arriving on the island. Then she asked me how the painting was coming along. She seemed really interested, and I didn’t want to lie to her… she’s a Mother Superior after all, even if her religion is dying... so I told her you were having difficulties...”

  There went her mouth again.

  “What difficulties?” Myrica snapped. “It’s the first I’ve heard about difficulties. Didn’t you say just now that everything was going very well?”

  “It is,” I lied. “Of course there are difficulties—what’s worth doing if it doesn’t present difficulties?—but I’m overcoming them. That’s what art is all about.”

  It isn’t but, unlike Hecate, I wasn’t talking to the Mother Superior of a dying religion, and saw no reason to be absolutely truthful.

  “So, you see,” Hecate continued, not exactly valiantly, but at least with the substitute for courage that a desperate struggle to get out of trouble always provides, “there was really nothing to it… it was just casual conversation. And The Mother Superior isn’t what you might imagine. She might be a mystic of sorts but she’s a genuine scholar, of real intellect. She has a bigger library than yours, Niklaus, even now, and she’s told me all kinds of things about the Orpheus myth that will be very useful for my poem; she knows a lot more about it than you do, Axel... and she’s not the recluse people assume. She does go out sometimes; it’s just that no one ever recognizes her, because no one on the outside knows who she is. You and she even have… or had… a common acquaintance, Axel, why is probably why she was interested enough to ask after you. She used to go to see the old woman on the mountain, the mad morpheomorphist, just as you did.”

  Eirene Magdelana had never mentioned the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar to me—or, if she had, I hadn’t understood the reference—but why should she? Whereas, as a true egomaniac, I could think of any number of reasons why she might have mentioned me to any other visitors she might have had.

  Hecate till hadn’t explained, however, why she had been in the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar in the first place. She obviously had no intention of doing that here, in front of Myrica and Niklaus—but I was enough of an egomaniac to think that she wouldn’t keep it a secret from me, now that she had let enough slip to bait my curiosity. I resolved to go to see her the next day, if I could spare the time from my accursed commission.

  Somehow, I didn’t think that would be a problem.

  III. The Image of Eurydice

  I still felt damp, and uncomfortably aware of the invisible blackness that was insidiously dirtying my clothes, and I felt the need to dry myself off a little more rapidly, so I picked up my hot toddy and moved to stand with my back to the fire, muttering an apology.

  Hecate and Niklaus automatically turned their chairs to face me, in order to include me in the continuing conversation, but Myrica, equally automatically, took another glance in the opposite direction first.

  “There!” She stabbed a carefully-manicured finger in the direction of the gray gloom, which was even mo
re intense out to sea. This time, in spite of the fact that the snow hadn’t completely stopped falling, she had caught sight of a black dot somewhere in the white wilderness. I screwed up my eyes and concentrated, and eventually saw it too: a visible black particle, amid all the invisible ones sheathed by the snowflakes.

  It was definitely a boat heading for the harbor, and it was not far off. I swallowed the last of my drink, set the cup on the mantelpiece, and edged a little closer to the table again.

  “It’s him!” Myrica added, although one black dot looks sufficiently like another, especially through a curtain of snow, for the one we could barely glimpse to be any kind of boat.

  Convinced that it was the lighter bringing Charles Parenot and his luggage to the island, however, Myrica remembered yet another of the questions raised by left unanswered, and turned back to me. “You never did tell me what you thought was wrong with Charles’ Eurydice,” she said accusingly. “Come on, Axel, spit it out. Why did you say although when you agreed that it was a first rate painting?”

  I sighed, remembering that I had wanted to draw the discussion away from my murky past when I had issued the provocation, but no longer feeling sure that I wanted to go down that road, especially if Master Parenot was about to make an appearance. This time, though, no one got in the way. Even Niklaus Hylne had run out of the tactless desire to stick his oar in.

  “It is a fine painting,” I agreed, “But it’s just a picture of a pretty girl’s head set against a dark background. When Mesmay showed it to me, I could see immediately that she’s supposed to be a shade rather than a living individual, but I couldn’t see why she’s supposed to be Eurydice rather than any other shade of a pretty girl. It’s not really a criticism of the artist, and I suppose it arises from the fact that I have exactly the same problem myself, and don’t know how to solve it. The middle panel of my triptych depicts Orpheus charming the shades in Hades, and although we can infer that Eurydice is among them, there’s no way of telling her apart from any other shade of a pretty girl. There’s nothing in the myth by which to identify her, except in a painting that isolates her with Orpheus in a recognizable situation, as in the scene where he reaches the threshold of the Underworld and looks back—but that was excluded by the terms of the commission. Mesmay specifically asked for a depiction of Orpheus charming the shades. Crowd scenes aren’t my forte anyway, so yes, Myrica, it posed difficulties… but I’m tackling them, with my customary artistry.”

  Myrica didn’t seem satisfied, but it wasn’t my explanation that was failing to satisfy her.

  “He does use her rather a lot,” she said. “Too much, in my opinion. But it’s difficult for me to broach the subject diplomatically. You could mention it though, Axel… artist to artist and setting diplomacy aside. He’s seen a lot more of your work than you’ve seen of his, thanks to my expertise in placing your work in the Capital. He’ll respect your opinion more than mine.”

  “I’d probably be glad to help,” I said, “or at least willing, if I had the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “He uses his wife as a model far too frequently,” Myrica explained, succinctly. “No matter what his subject is, he tends to cast her in the part—and sometimes, as you say, there’s nothing but the title he puts on the picture to indicate who she’s supposed to be. It’s in danger of becoming something of a joke, and affecting his sales.”

  Niklaus had got his second wind. “She’s not his wife,” he put in. “She’s just a whore.” He must have realized instantly, from the hostility of the three gazes that fixed themselves upon him, that he had gone too far. “A retired whore, I mean,” he added, swiftly. The amendment did not reduce the malice of the insult or save the situation, and he actually made things worse by adding: “But once a whore…,” before shutting up.

  Myrica sighed. “What have you heard?” she asked, trying to make it clear that it was her professional interest in a client that was making her ask, not the kind of vulgar appetite for gossip that had evidently activated Niklaus Hylne’s over-eager ears.

  “It’s an old story in the Capital, apparently,” he said, slightly defensively. “The fact of his moving out has reactivated it, though. It’s said that the girl who passes for their daughter was dumped on his doorstep one day, presumably by the mother, who must have thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was the father. He didn’t have the heart to take the baby to the foundling home, possibly because he made the same assumption, so he took it in and tried to look after it. He was hopeless, and the girl who was modeling for his current painting—one of the whores from the Mount—volunteered to help. She moved in, and apparently gave up general whoring to become a full-time mistress… and substitute mother. The girl’s too old to need much looking after anymore, but he seems to have got habituated to having her around, so, instead of using the move to the island as an excuse for breaking with her and leaving her on the Mount to resume her old career, he’s brought her with him. He comes from a respectable family, it’s said, albeit from Bretagne—ours, that is, not the islands—so there can’t be any question of marriage.”

  “That doesn’t exclude love,” Hecate murmured, although no one else bothered to follow that train of thought.

  “Is that all?” Myrica demanded—riskily, since it was a virtual confession that there was something else to know, which Niklaus would become avid to discover, if he didn’t know any more already.

  Apparently he didn’t. “Why, what else is there?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” said Myrica. “All right, so far as I now, that story’s not so very wide of the mark—but it’s completely irrelevant. Charles and Mariette live together now in perfect respectability. The past is dead, gone, erased. The fact that they’ve never made any official registration of their relationship is neither here nor there, and it ought to matter less on Mnemosyne than anywhere else in the province, or the Empire. There’s no call whatsoever for any sniggering behind their backs, and I certainly hope that there’s no one on the island who would stigmatize the child for the fact that she was a foundling. She’s perfectly charming—Axel will love her, just as he’ll love Mariette, and he’ll want to paint them both—and Elise is a talented musician, quite the child prodigy.”

  As a professional agent and skilled saleswoman, Myrica was a dedicated enthusiast, never shy with her praise, so I took her assurances about my feeling an instant urge to paint both the mistress and the adopted daughter as soon as I clapped eyes on them with a pinch of salt. I only hoped that she hadn’t fed the child’s ego with too much talk of her supposed potential. A man of my age can cope with the conviction of being a genius, but it’s the sort of idea that can throw a child seriously off balance.

  “Oh, yes,” said Niklaus, as if he had just remembered something. “There was that.”

  “What?” Myrica demanded, impatiently.

  “Nothing,” he said, paradoxically. “It’s said that Parenot is something of a fiddler, and that he’s taught his… wife and kid too. Learned it from a wedding-fiddler back in the sticks, apparently—an old lunatic who told silly stories. You know what Bretons are like with their fanciful tales. Nothing damaging… except… well, the word is that it has something to do with him having to leave the Capital… the fiddling, that is. Nobody knows what, exactly...”

  The black dot was now quite obviously a lighter. It had passed the harbor entrance and was maneuvering to dock at the quay. The snow had eased considerably, and it was possible to see three passengers standing on the deck, motionless among the busy crewmen. They were looking toward the shore.

  I screwed up my eyes again, trying to make out their faces, but they all had the hoods of their gray cloaks pulled up, and the snow, light as it was, still distorted my vision sufficiently to make it impossible to discern any detail. It was obvious that they were a man, a woman and a child, though, and easy enough to imagine that they were looking up at the lighted window on the first floor of the Sprite, able to see us limned by the glow of the lamp
s that Madame Auger was in the process of lighting, even though nightfall was some way off. Perhaps, I thought, all three of them were wondering whether we were looking at them, and what, if so, we might be thinking.

  I was looking at them and wondering, but Myrica was still looking daggers at Niklaus Hylne, wanting to clear the air of slanderous taints before her client arrived.

  “Charles plays the violin,” she was telling him, sternly, “purely for relaxation. He taught Elise to play, but she’s overtaken her teacher now. She has a natural ability that he lacks. That has nothing to do with his decision to leave Martyr’s Mount. I’ve been recommending strongly that he move here for some time, because I’m convinced that he’d benefit from a change of scene, and that the island will suit him as much as it suits Axel. When the Toustain house came up for sale, I told him it was too good an opportunity for him to miss, and I finally managed to persuade him that it was a logical step in his career, now that he’s on the brink of major commissions. I’ve got a big client lined up for him, and he was kind enough to back me up on the suggestion.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, interested.

  “I don’t want to say until the deal is firm,” she told me, shaking her head. “It might jinx it.” She wasn’t talking superstitiously; she meant that if the potential client found out that she’d been bragging about the commission while it was still only a possibility, he might be annoyed.

  “Anyway,” she went on, still addressing Niklaus. “It will do Charles and Alex good to be close together. A little competition between artists always stimulates the inspiration. He’s a great admirer of your work Alex, obviously, and he’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  So there it was, exactly as I’d hypothesized. Myrica had been urging Parenot to make the move for some time, because of her silly notion about the stimulating effects of rivalry—except that, now she had voiced it, I no longer believed that that was the only reason for the move. There was something she wasn’t saying: something she’d been afraid that Niklaus Hylne might have heard on the mysterious grapevine that carries scurrilous gossip all round the world. But what?