“Who?” she demanded, automatically.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s confidential.”
She sighed, deeply. “If you weren’t a valued client…,” she said.
“And if I didn’t need an agent in the Capital…,” I said, cruelly, and left it at that.
“Well, she said, sourly, “I suppose you wouldn’t keep me on because you had designs on my body. In all the years we’ve known one another, you’ve never propositioned me once.”
“I’m sorry if the omission has offended you,” I said, “but I thought it best to keep the relationship strictly professional—just as you did.”
She took a deep draught of her own brandy. “All right,” she said, “now that we’ve finished sniping at one another, will you tell me why you think Charles’ household is about to explode.”
I hadn’t quite finished sniping. “You’re the one with all the inside information,” I said. “What do you think is going to happen now that they’re safely ensconced in the chilly isolation of the old Toustain house? Do you really think they’ll live happily ever after?”
“God, I hope so,” she said. She raised a hand with the thumb and the forefinger half an inch apart. “I’m this close to getting him a commission from Dellacrusca himself,” she said, “and you know how hard that is. I’ve even got him to come along to the studio, and got the little girl to play for him, in the hope of breaking the ice—and you should have seen his face! Absolutely enraptured. Believe me, the things they say about that man’s heart of stone are all eyewash.”
“You got him to commission a portrait of the twins from me,” I pointed out, “so it can’t be all that difficult.”
“You have no idea,” she told me, bitterly. “Artists think agents just ferry their stuff around and collect their twenty per cent for next to nothing. Believe me, it doesn’t work like that… well, it works more like that with you than Charles, because you were already established when you hired me, and I’ve had to work tooth and nail to get him out of Yvain Deloffre’s shadow. Believe me, if I can get Dellacrusca to commission a new portrait of the twins, Charles’ reputation will be solid gold. Everybody knows that Dellacrusca hates artists like poison, and only commissioned you to paint the twins way back when because the family gallery would have had an embarrassing gap if he hadn’t. I’m doing everything I can to persuade him that the gap isn’t full, now the little swine have grown up.”
“He certainly didn’t seem to like me any better because of it,” I remembered. “I was slightly hurt by it, I must admit. His heart of stone certainly convinced me.”
“It wasn’t anything personal,” Myrica assures me. “As I said, he hates all artists.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—something that happened before my time. Nobody talks about it. If he were anyone else, of course, everybody would talk about it, whatever it is, but he’s Dellacrusca. Nobody dares open their mouth. All I know is that something happened while he was still in Italy, perhaps during his first marriage—the boys are the product of his second, of course. I think his first wife died in childbirth, although why that should make him hate artists, I really haven’t the slightest idea.” She insisted on the last part a little too much, in order to imply without having to say so that perhaps Dellacrusca’s first wife had liked artists a little too much.
On another occasion that might have seemed interesting, but I wanted to get back to Charles Parenot. “I might actually be able to help, if I knew what was going on with Parenot,” I told her, quite sincerely. “And this is me you’re talking to, not Niklaus Hylne. Whatever you tell me won’t leave this room. But there is a problem, and you can’t solve it from the Sprite, let alone the Capital, whereas I might be able to pour a little oil on troubled waters from next door.”
She thought about it for three long sips, and then had to refill her glass.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know—but you must never let Charles suspect that I’ve told you. What Niklaus said last night is broadly true, but not exactly. Elise isn’t Charles’ and Mariette’s daughter.”
“I’d gathered that, simply by looking at them,” I said
“When Charles was a student with Deloffre, maybe fifteen years ago, he had a fellow student who was a bit of a Romeo—which is hardly out of place among art students up on the Mount, as you can imagine. The other student—I think his name was Almeras—was more interested in historical painting than mythological, and he went on to Italy to study the Old Masters there. In Rome or Florence, or maybe Venice, he played the Romeo a little bit too seriously, and eloped with some girl he shouldn’t have eloped with. The father sent his people after them, as Italians tend to do, and they probably pursued the fleeing couple all over the Empire.
“It’s probably a long story, but Charles only knows the denouement, which is that Almeras turns up at his studio one night, ten years ago or thereabouts, with a kid and a package, and begs him to hide them for a while, promising to come back and collect them when he can—a month at the latest, he says. Charles is reluctant, but the bonds of comradeship being what they are, he can’t say no. He stuffs the package in his loft without even opening it, but the kid is more difficult. She isn’t a baby, exactly—she’s maybe two and half or three, and can talk, albeit in Italian, which Charles doesn’t really understand very well, having interrupted his own education to follow his vocation—but she still needs care and attention. Next day, Charles is in the middle of painting a seductive siren, and the kid is into everything, and it’s obvious that he can’t cope—so, as Niklaus said, his model volunteers to help out, and does, and Charles lets her move in, and one thing leads to another, as they do.
“Now, Niklaus isn’t entirely wrong to say that the model was a whore, but that’s not the whole story. She was the daughter of a whore, who had been absolutely determined to see to it that she didn’t follow in her footsteps, and did everything humanly possible to keep her out of it, even though she was living on the Mount, in an environment that wasn’t actually conducive. And she very nearly succeeded in that quest, and probably would have, if she hadn’t fallen ill—and I mean seriously ill, nothing trivial—and suddenly, instead of being looked after and supported by her mother, the roles are reversed and little Mariette has to look after and support her. She tries hard…very hard…to follow her mother’s wishes and do it without resorting to the obvious, but in the end…and then the mother dies, quite possible of a broken heart, leaving Mariette is exactly the situation from which she wanted to spare her. Until Charles’ inability to cope with Elise offers her another alternative.
“Well, Charles falls in love with Mariette, but he’s already afraid that she might get fed up with looking after a kid that isn’t her own, and he doesn’t want to rock the boat in any way at all, and he can’t propose marriage because he’s still living, at that point, on an allowance from his parents, who would cut him off without a penny before dying of shock and shame—or so he imagines—so things drag on while they wait for Almeras to come back. Not only doesn’t he come back after a month, though, or a year, but he doesn’t come back at all, probably because the thugs who’ve been chasing him all over Europe have caught up with him.
“Naturally, Charles doesn’t want them catching up with the kid as well, so he keeps her hidden, as much as possible, and tries to pass her off as his daughter, which is surprisingly easy, even though she looks nothing like him—and everything would probably have gone swimmingly, if the little girl hadn’t pleaded with him to teach her to play the fiddle. He just played it himself in the evenings, for amusement—popular tunes from his childhood, essentially light—and not very well, but even so, he was reluctant to teach her. She’s difficult to resist, though, so he showed her the rudiments. She proved to be very good at it—uncannily good, in fact… and that, for Charles, was something of an affliction.”
“Why?” I asked, when she paused for breath. “Was he jealous?”
“Charles? No—if it hadn�
��t been for his little quirk, he’s have been delighted, but he got a weird bee in his bonnet from when he was a kid himself, and he’s never quite been able to shake it loose. He was taught to play the fiddle himself by a character who played at all the local weddings, for the dancing—it’s quite a tradition, apparently, not only in Bretagne but Normandy and Flanders too. There’s always some local wizard who plays jigs at all the weddings, and has a reputation of being a bit of a real wizard, although he’s just an ingenious story-teller. This particular one used to tell a story about how, when he was on his way back to his own village from a wedding late one night, he stumbled across the Devil holding one of his Sabbats—if you think the locals are superstitious here, you should visit Bretagne some time and see the real thing. They aren’t even Christians, for the most part, but they all believe in the Devil.
“Anyway, according to the fiddler, he thinks the Devil is going to tear him limb from limb and feed the pieces to his minions, but not at all. The Devil greets him like an old friend, and asks him to play a jig for his guests, which request he’s too scared to refuse. And then he plays another, and the party is going full tilt when he breaks a string. The fiddler is distraught, but the Devil tells him not to worry, and that he’ll give him a new string. But the fiddler doesn’t like that idea, and he tells the Devil that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his career playing at weddings with a fiddle that has the Devil’s string on it. Then the Devil laughs uproariously enough to start an earthquake, and tells the fiddler that his fiddle is one of the Devil’s own manufacture, and that he’s been playing the Devil’s instrument and doing the Devil’s work his whole life, without knowing it, and that the he really appreciates all the sin and mayhem that he’s been sowing for the him to reap, at every wedding in the neighborhood for many a year,
“On hearing that, the fiddler accepts the string, and plays till dawn—but as soon as the cock crows and the Devil and all his minions vanish, the fiddler smashes that instrument, and finds a new one—except, of course, that he has no way of knowing, and never will, whether the new fiddle might also be one of the Devil’s own manufacture, and whether or not he might still be sowing sin and mayhem for the Devil to reap every time he plays.
“Obviously, it’s just a silly story, like hundreds of others that circulate in rural regions—but Charles happened to hear it at a vulnerable age and it stuck with him, and he always wondered, after he learned to play the instrument himself, whether the instrument he was using was one of the Devil’s manufacture. He always made light of it, obviously, and never believed it, but he never shook off the thought entirely. He was convinced that particular instrument was safe when he let Elise play with it, and he was convinced, in any case, that she was at least half way to being an angel, and couldn’t possibly serve any evil purpose. And then, one day when she was rooting around in the loft, she found the package that Almeras left at the same time as her. What do you suppose it contained?”
She was expecting me to say a fiddle, but I was one up on her. “A viola da gamba,” I said, not even certain what a viola da gamba was, except that it was an antique, long replaced by more modern viols.
“Right,” she said, only slightly deflated. “It was obviously mentioned when Mesmay came up with his bright idea. Well, that’s when the haunting started, and that’s when Charles, even though he’s consciously a skeptic, and a rationalist, and everything else that befits a man of the Age of Enlightenment, gradually started convincing himself that his daughter’s new instrument might somehow be one of the devil’s instruments, and might be sowing sin and mayhem in the last place in the world he wanted to see it sown: his adopted daughter’s soul.
“You know and I know that she was just growing up—hormones beginning to flow—although that’s certainly not without its hazards, sin-and-mayhem-wise, in a place like the Mount, where a pretty twelve-year-old is in as much moral danger as you can find anywhere in the Empire, without any assistance from the Devil. Mariette knew that only too well, and she joined forces with me to try to persuade him that it was only the house that was haunted, not the viol or the little girl, and that now that he actually had a little money put aside, they could move away from the den of iniquity and leave all their troubles behind. I really think it might work, given time, although I can understand why they’re both still anxious, for the moment—Mariette about Charles as well as the kid, and Charles about Mariette, but not, perhaps, in a way that make it easy for them to talk about it.”
It did make sense, in a way, of their evident failure to communicate their confused and uncertain fears and feelings. “Might,” I observed, “is very much the operative word.”
“True,” she admitted. “But it is all in their minds, isn’t it? If Charles can just convince himself that the move has done the trick, it will have done, won’t it? And the kid really is a lot safer reaching puberty here than living among all the whores and apaches on the Mount. And if you can lend the weight of your awesome skepticism to mine, we can probably convince him, can’t we? Especially as there’s nothing he wants, deep down, more than to be convinced… of Mariette’s love as well as Elise’s safety.”
It was only then that I realized that she had always intended to tell me the whole story, and that all the talk of confidentiality had just been a tease, to stimulate my interest. She had honestly thought that might be necessary.
“All right,” I said. “Now I do understand much better why they’re both on edge, and why they’re in such a state of confusion that they can’t just sit down, tell one another they love one another, and get on with living happily ever after. And I’m absolutely convinced, now, that it would be a very bad idea for Elise to play at Mesmay’s reception. You need to talk him out of that—you really do.”
“Why?” she asked, maliciously. “Do you think she might actually conjure up the Devil with his very own instrument, and sow sin and mayhem though the entire island.”
“That crop was sown a long time ago,” I told her, “and I’m sure the Devil has bigger fish to fry—but if you want to hold Charles and Mariette together, in a fit condition for him to paint, it would probably be a great help to keep the little girl’s fiddling under wraps, for as long as possible. If her mother will let me paint her…except that I can’t do that until I’ve finished the accursed triptych. You really shouldn’t have landed me with that, Myrica.”
“Don’t blame me,” she retorted. “I only slave away day and night to put food on your table—you’re the one who says yea or nay. You took it on because it’s a challenge, so rise to it. You’re Axel Rathenius, remember, the man who’s hardly ever wrong. And don’t worry about the portrait; I’m already trying to persuade Charles to start using Elise as a model as well as Mariette. Dellacrusca even mentioned the possibility of commissioning one; he didn’t really mean it, but it’ll be easy enough to find a buyer if Charles puts his best effort into it.”
“It won’t be as good as mine would have been,” I asserted confidently.
“Of course not,” she agreed, as a good agent should. “But if you’re busy, you’re busy. You can’t do everything. You’re only human.”
“Not according to rumor,” I muttered.
“True,” she said. “Go on, then—your turn now.”
“My turn for what?”
“I’ve told you my secret—now it’s your turn. Where were you before you came to the island, and how old are you really?”
“You’ve told me Charles Parenot’s secret, not yours,” I pointed out. “You don’t have one of your own to trade. You’re an open book.”
“Cheat,” she said. “Tell me someone else’s secret, then. Why was Vashti Savage so very keen to talk to you that she came to my reception and then didn’t stay to meet Charles?”
“You won’t tell her I told you?” I checked.
“My lips are sealed,” she promised—not very convincingly, in view of the way they’d been flapping for the last half hour.
“She wanted me to sketch
a face she’s been seeing in a recurrent dream, in the hope that we might be able to identify it.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“Charles Parenot’s Mariette—except that I manage to convince her that she was really channeling Eurydice, since she wouldn’t admit that she could possibly be channeling anyone alive.”
Myrica thought about it for a moment or two before saying: “Of course—she’s tried to contact Aethne de Mesmay’s mother, seen the portrait in the Marquise’s drawing room, and remembered it unconsciously.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And do you want to know another secret?”
“Of course.”
“Aethne de Mesmay’s mother is—or was—the sister of the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar. The real sister, that is, not a member of the Order.”
“So what?”
“So nothing. It’s just something that nobody knows—a secret. I didn’t say that it was an important secret. Now you owe me another one—but I can’t collect right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night and I need an early night. Don’t forget to talk to Mesmay. Take over his reception if you can, and arrange the music yourself. You’re an agent, after all.”
“I’ll do my best,” she promised. “On your way out, ask Madame Auger to send me up another bottle of brandy, would you—we seem to have killed this one.”
I was alarmed for a moment, until I remembered that it hadn’t been full, and that Myrica had done her usual heroic share of drinking, as agents invariably can.
Downstairs, I collected Jean-Jacques, and was on the point of giving Nicodemus Rham a polite nod as I left when he beckoned to me.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” I said to Jean-Jacques, and went over to the old man’s table.
“I always seem to be in a hurry when I’m passing through, Nicodemus,” I told him. “I’m truly sorry. I’ll stop and have a drink with you next time.”
“Have you heard what the fools are saying?” he asked, waving his arm to indicate the crowded room, where the conversations did seem to be more than usually animated and intense.
Euridyce's Lament Page 13
