Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

I refrained, of course, from pointing out that Vashti was projecting her own lament into Hecate’s, and reading it as an allegory of her own existential plight rather than her friend’s supposed predicament—with the crucial amendment, of course, that it wasn’t my failure to embark upon a more committed and exclusive relationship that Vashti was regretting, but Hecate’s. Hecate was her Orpheus, and had been for a long time, although I wasn’t entirely sure that Vashti had admitted that to herself, let alone anyone else.

  I understood and sympathized, of course. I didn’t love Hecate in quite the same way that Vashti did, but I did love her, and I could understand perfectly how someone else could. What’s more, I could do that without being jealous—unlike Vashti, obviously.

  Vashti tightened her lips, but she forced herself back to the matter in hand, from which she’d allowed herself to be drawn away at a tangent.

  “What do you think the answers to your questions are?” she said, this time with a marked lack of venom, because she really did want help in figuring it out.

  “Why Eurydice and why now don’t really seem that mysterious, given that the character is on everyone’s mind at the moment—but perhaps that’s too simple. Myrica thought that Hecate had started her poem because I’d taken on the Orpheus triptych for Mesmay, but Hecate denied it. She hasn’t even seen Mesmay’s Parenot, so she didn’t get the inspiration there either, and there’s no connection, so far as I know, between Parenot’s decision to take up residence on the island and Mesmay—Mariette didn’t know that the Eurydice was here rather than in Paris. Thus, we’re dealing with a pattern of coincidences rather than a manifest chain of cause and effect—which doesn’t, of course, exclude a hidden chain of cause and effect whose links we can’t yet see. As to what your Eurydice is trying to communicate to you…well, if it’s your unconscious mind trying to shove something up to the level of consciousness, you might have to work that one out for yourself.”

  “And if it’s not?” She meant: what if there really are supernatural forces at work? But there are no “supernatural forces”—there are only natural ones that lie temporarily beyond our artificial and blinkered conception of the natural, which will become perfectly understandable if and when we can obtain the right data on which to build our theses.

  “I don’t know,” I said, in order to be on the safe side. “Let’s await further developments, shall we?”

  At least, I thought, she won’t have a heart attack when Hecate introduces her to Mariette. Forewarned really is forearmed in that instance, and it was an exceedingly fortunate inspiration on her part to ask for my help—not that she seems to be fully appreciative of the good I’ve done.

  “I’d better go home,” I said. “It’s beginning to get dark, and although it’s not a long journey, I don’t want poor Robert to have to make his way back in a nocturnal blizzard.”

  She accepted that excuse. She had enough food for thought now without subjecting me to any further interrogation or accusations. So had I.

  V. Threat and Mystery

  I thanked Robert sincerely for driving me home, and gave him a good tip. As he maneuvered Vashti Savage’s carriage around in order to head back to town I put out my right hand to catch a few clusters of snowflakes, in order to ascertain whether they still had black hearts, or whether that tiny measure of abnormality had stolen quietly away.

  It hadn’t. The melting snow still left tiny black particles on my palm. I peered at them more closely, trying to make out some kind of detail, but they were too tiny.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice close to my right ear said: “Master Rathenius?”

  The twilight had almost faded away, but Jean-Jacques had set a lamp over the front door, as he always did when I was out after dark, so I was able to make out the features of the youth who had spoken.

  “Tommaso?” I said. “You scared me half to death. Where’s Lorenzo? What are you doing here?”

  The questions lacked logical order, but not logic. The one thing one always wondered on seeing one of the Dellacrusca twins was where the other one might be, since they were usually inseparable. The mighty Dellacrusca had returned to the mainland four weeks previously, as he always did when the end of his “vacation” fell due, always taking his unruly sons with him; Tommaso and his brother should have been raising their particular brand of hell in the Capital, or enduring one of their father’s legendary punishments.

  “I need to tell you something,” Tommaso Dellacrusca muttered.

  It was then that I realized that he must have been there for some time, waiting for me. He was wet and cold.

  “Come inside and get warm,” I said, as soon as the door opened. “Why didn’t you wait for me inside?”

  “I did ring,” Tommaso said, directing a reproachful glance at Jean-Jacques, “but your man wouldn’t let me in.”

  Sometimes, Jean-Jacques can be a little too strict in his duty, and it had to be admitted—even by Tommaso—that the Dellacrusca twins would not be high on anyone’s list to obtain instant admission to a house in the absence of its master.

  I set out to repair the damage: “Tommaso needs some hot soup and a glass of brandy,” I told Jean-Jacques. “Is there a fire in the drawing-room?”

  “No sir. You didn’t...”

  “I know, I know—but there is one in the studio, at least?”

  “As always, sir.”

  “Good. Bring the soup there. Take Tommaso’s coat to the kitchen to dry by the stove, and fetch him one of my mantles. I need to talk to you before I go to bed, by the way—important matters.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jean-Jacques, dutifully, looking at Tommaso almost as reproachfully as Tommaso had looked at him.

  I put some extra logs on the fire in the studio, and stoked it up. Then I sat Tommaso down in a chair beside it and studied the condition of his trousers. They were dirty as well as damp, but it wasn’t his fault.

  “What do you need to talk to me about, Tommaso?” I asked—and added, because it seemed a natural question in the circumstances: “Has something happened to Lorenzo?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy replied, unconsciously picking to Jean-Jacques’ manner of address to go with his carefully respectful tone. “I don’t know quite where to begin...”

  “At the beginning,” I suggested.

  He nodded his head, as if acknowledging wise advice.

  “Yes sir. Well, sir, as you know, Lory and I have… something of a reputation.”

  “Indeed I do,” I agreed.

  “And you won’t be surprised, I suppose, to know that it’s even worse in the Capital than it is here, where we’re old enough now to pass for real bravos… apaches, they call them on the Mount and in Bellevue, but my father always says bravos, so that’s how we think of it. Not that we are real bravos, you understand… if anyone does, you do… but we do like to give the impression… to pose, I suppose you’d call it...”

  “I do understand,” I assured him.

  “Well, the thing is, three days ago we were out on the Mount, having a good time, and we were a bit drunk—not very, but enough. We’d been in a bit of a brawl—nothing serious—and we slipped away afterwards into a tavern where we thought no one knew us, needing to lie low. Except that somebody there did know us, and might have been following us, because this fellow comes to sit down with us, and buys us a drink, and then asks if we know the island of Mnemosyne.

  “Well, obviously, we want to be seen to know what’s what, especially when we do, so we assure him that we know Mnemosyne like the backs of our hands. And then he asks if we know a way of getting from the mainland to the island and back again without anybody knowing—and of course we do, because we’ve done it dozens of times, so you could say that we’re past masters at it… and that’s what we told him.

  “Then he asks us whether we’d like to earn a little gold—he specified gold—by showing him the way, and giving him a helping hand getting across and back, so we naturally said yes we would. And then he buys us another
drink, and tells us that he has a little business to do on the island that isn’t exactly legal—which we’d already worked out, of course—and that he could do with some help. So we, naturally enough, ask him what kind of help, and he says, the kind that’s paid for in gold.

  “That was good news, of course—or so we thought—so we asked him for more details. He was tentative, as you might expect, but he tells us that it’s a matter of a robbery, and that although he doesn’t intend or expect anybody to get hurt, he might have to take some time looking for what it is he wants, and that it would be necessary in the meantime to keep the occupants of the house quiet—bound and gagged, that is—maybe for a couple of hours, and make sure that they didn’t get up to any mischief.

  “So we, naturally… or maybe not naturally, but it seemed so at the time… ask him how many people we’re talking about and are they the kind of fellows who might be difficult to handle, and he, probably by way of flattery, says that two lusty lads like us could certainly take care of it, especially with a couple of good American revolvers to threaten them with, and that the number involved would be three.

  “Well, we asked him to name a fee, and he did, and it seemed rather tempting—Father, as you know, although he’s as rich as Croesus, tends to keep us on what he calls a tight rein, money-wise, and we were drunk… and anyway, to cut a long story short, we said that we’d do it—and then, which was obviously the wrong way round, but we weren’t quite thinking straight, we asked whose house it was he wanted to burgle, and he said it was yours.”

  I had seen that punch-line coming for some time, but he paused expectantly, so I said: “Ah!” in order to encourage him to continue.

  “Well, Master Rathenius, that put us in a bit of a quandary, as you can imagine. I mean, of all the people on the island, you’re the only one who’s ever treated us half way decently. I won’t say you’ve encouraged us, except for that one time when we rather let you down, but you’ve always seemed more amused by our pranks than disapproving, and once or twice you’ve even supported our stories when you knew full well we were lying, which takes guts when you’re talking to Father, who isn’t a man you want to get on the wrong side of....”

  He was right about that. If ever there was a man one did not want to be on the wrong side of, it was Dellacrusca. He was reputed to the most powerful man in the province, and the nastiest, both of which reputations I was willing to believe, having had various dealings with him during his summer visits. I’m not easily intimidated, but he could send a chill down my spine with a glance. He didn’t like me—or any artist, apparently. I had no idea why he came to Mnemosyne for the summer, although he’d certainly helped to make it fashionable with highly placed people. Perhaps it was a conveniently remote place to discuss the darker aspects of provincial security in relative peace.

  “Go on,” I said to Tommaso.

  “Well, the long and the short of it is that we told him we couldn’t do it. We weren’t nasty about it, and we apologized, but we said that you were the one person on the island that we couldn’t do a bad turn to, and certainly couldn’t hold at gunpoint while we tied you to chairs and let some Italian thug ransack your house. I don’t say there aren’t people on the island that we could and would have done it to, but not you. I mean, when I came up behind you in the dark just now, you knew right away that it was me and not Lory. Even Father wouldn’t have known that. You’re the only man I know who can tell us apart. So no, I wasn’t going to help him rob you.”

  I had painted the Dellacrusca twins—the only commission that the rich but somewhat miserly Dellacrusca had ever deigned to give any of the island’s artists, thanks to one of Myrica’s little miracles—and I had studied them with all my usual intensity as well as my gift. They’d been a good deal younger then, but I could still tell them apart at a glance. It wasn’t really a compliment, but I was perfectly prepared to let Tommaso think that it was. One can never have too much moral credit with people who like to cultivate the image of being bravos and practical jokers.

  “He seemed to take it in good enough part,” Tommaso continued, “and he didn’t get nasty any more than we had. He left, and so did we—only, when we’re on our way home, and maybe a little unsteady on our feet, but not helplessly drunk, as we’re crossing the street, this carriage comes hurtling out of nowhere, straight at us. Lory manages to push me clear, but because he thinks of me before himself he can’t get out of the way, and the horse knocks him down, and the wheel runs over his leg. Broken tibia—not that serious, apparently, but he won’t be able to walk for weeks.

  “We thought about telling Father, who would have turned the city upside down looking for the fellow, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes if he found him, but some of the hell he’d have raised would surely have rebounded on us, so we decided to let him think that it was just an accident—except that we figured that I’d better get out here as fast as humanly possible, to warn you that someone has it in for you. Without us, of course, he won’t find it quite so easy to find a way to get back and forth from the island without any inconvenient indiscretion, but it’s not that difficult. It won’t be as easy for him to find his way around if all he’s got by way of hired help is a couple of thugs from the Mount and some local fisherman he’s recruited in the tap-room of the Sprite… but all things considered, he’s not likely to be more than a day or two behind me.

  “Anyway, I had to come—and after what happened to Lory, you can be absolutely bloody certain that if the bastard wants to get to you, he’s going to have to go through me to do it, so two thugs won’t be enough, even if they do have fancy American pistols. I know that you can handle yourself, and your man looks like a scrapper, so between the three of us, we should be able to hold the fort. What do you think?”

  I had a great many thoughts, but I wanted to get them in order before I discussed them with Tommaso, so I left him to eat the soup that Luzon had warmed up for him while I went to have a word with Jean-Jacques. Rapidly, I told him what Tommaso had just told me.

  “Shall I recruit extra troops, sir?” was his immediate reaction.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want a war, I want to know what the hell is going on. I don’t think anything’s likely to happen tomorrow, but I was going to ask you and Luzon to go over to the old Toustain house anyway, to help the new owner move in. We’ll stick to that; it’ll make certain that Luzon’s out of the way, and you’ll still be within easy reach if I need you back here. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is a rumor I’ve picked up about Toustain. Apparently, Guillot—that’s the notary looking after his affairs—has let something slip that he shouldn’t have. Have you heard anything?”

  Jean-Jacques was not an islander himself, but in the twelve years he had been in my service he had made a lot of friends and acquaintances, and the servants’ gossip circuit is always more reliable than the ones to which Niklaus Hylne belonged.

  “I have heard it said that Toustain wasn’t his real name, and that if word of who he really was had got abroad while he was alive, he would have been in trouble—not with the law, apparently, but something worse. The Cult of Dionysus has been mentioned, although I’m not sure it even exists any more, although the other one certainly does. I can fish for more details, but you know what notaries are like, sir—they love to tease, dropping hints one by one. You might get more out of him by confronting him.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Direct pressure would make him clam up. His is a profession that thrives on prevarication and procrastination. Find out what you can—and thank you.”

  “Do you want me to acquire one of those American pistols, sir? Just in case?”

  “No. I don’t want any shooting. First of all, I have to figure out what on earth it is that this mysterious individual wants to steal, why he thinks I’ve got it, and why he hasn’t simply offered me the gold he’s apparently willing to shell out in order to get his hands on it.”

  In order to do that, or at least to make
a start, I went back to Tommaso, who had finished the soup and was sipping his brandy while warming his stockinged feet in front of the grate.

  To begin with, I thanked him warmly for the trouble he’d taken to bring me the warning, and expressed my regret for what had befallen his brother as a consequence of his scruples. Then I got down to business.

  “Did this mysterious Italian give you any idea of what it was he wanted to steal?” I asked.

  “No. One of your paintings, I assumed.”

  “Not if he thought he might have to spend several hours searching. The likelihood is that it’s something I’ve acquired recently, and could, in principle, hide away. How do you know he was Italian? Did he speak to you in Italian?”

  “No, but he had an accent. I’ve only been to Italy once or twice, but Father used to live there before he married Mother and set his mind to taking over the province He still has lots of Italian friends and he’s always jabbering away with them, so I’m familiar with the accent—it was odd, though, not Roman Italian. Venetian, maybe? I don’t know.”

  Venice, I thought, was where real real bravos came from. But the would-be burglar had wanted someone with local knowledge—hence the Dellacrusca twins. Local knowledge and reputedly no scruples… but how was he to know that the twins, in spite of their image and reputation, had a few, specifically in respect of my person?

  Silently I thanked the mischievous inclination that had always caused me to approve of at least some of the terrible twins’ antics.

  “Right,” I said. “First of all, we’re going to try to make a picture of this enemy I didn’t know I had. You describe, I’ll sketch, and between the two of us, we’ll get a picture that we can give to Constable Clovis.”

  “The Constable!” said Tommaso, alarmed. “I don’t want any of this getting back to Father!”

  “I’ll keep your name out of it,” I promised. “Nobody needs to know that you were ever on the island.”

  I fetched a sketch-book and repeated the operation that I’d carried out earlier in the day with Vashti Savage—with much more difficulty, given that Tommaso had been at least half-drunk during his encounter with the Italian, and I had no convenient resource that would allow me to help him out. We ended up with a portrait of sorts, but I wouldn’t have bet money on it being a good enough likeness to permit recognition if I happened to bump into the man who wanted to rob me.