“No,” I admitted. “What?”
“They’re saying that the Devil’s come to Mnemosyne, breathing soot and sulfur all over the island—but you and I know better, don’t we, Master Rathenius?”
I did, but I was surprised that Nicodemus was so confident, given that he certainly believed in ghosts, and probably in the Devil too.
“We do,” I agreed, in order to be obliging.
“The young’uns never listen to their fathers,” he said. “Think they were all old fools telling tall tales—but just because something ain’t happened within living memory it don’t mean it ain’t ever happened, does it?”
“The black snow, you mean?”
“Exactly—an’ the pillar o’fire. Not all old tales are stupid, see. Devil be damned. We know what it really is, don’t we? Be a lot of red faces tomorrow, when the real news finally arrives.”
I really didn’t like to confess ignorance, but I didn’t have any alternative. “What is it, then, Nicodemus?” I asked.
He cackled. He really did have more faith in me that I warranted. “You know, Master Rathenius, you know. Hekla!”
I really didn’t know. It was on the top of my tongue to exclaim: “Who the hell is Hekla?”—and then, somewhere in the depths of my memory, and in spite of the choking atmosphere that was slowing down my brain, I remembered, and realized that we were indeed in for a very bad winter, and perhaps no summer at all.
“Nicodemus,” I said, “you’re a genius.”
I bought him a bottle of brandy too, to take home and drink with his ghosts.
XI. The Devil Incarnate
“I can’t be sure,” Jean-Jacques told me, before I climbed into the carriage, “because they’re all so wrapped up in this business of the Devil spreading his filthy cloak over the island—although why he’d want to take in the rest of us as well as the Christians God only knows—but if there are any Italian intruders on the island they haven’t been anywhere near the harbor, or even the town.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That puts my mind at rest.” It didn’t, but it seemed only kind to put his mind at rest, if possible.
All the way back, it seemed to me that I really could smell sulfur on the wind, although I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t the power of suggestion. Hekla was a long way away, although it must have been a powerful eruption, if its fire had been visible at sea while Iceland itself was still below the horizon, so that the eruption seemed to be emerging from the sea itself.
While Jean-Jacques was putting the horses away I opened the front door with my key and went in. There was no sign of Luzon, and I assumed that she had gone to bed. I lit a lantern and carried it into the studio, which was almost pitch dark because, although the fire was still smoldering in the grate, the embers had faded to dull red, and were shielded by ash.
I went to put the lamp down on the table, and the light fell directly upon the parchment containing the sixteen rows of symbols in the suspiric language.
For an instant, I cursed myself for having forgotten to put it safely away in the hidey-hole in the wine cellar, but my memory, reacting indignantly to the insult, insisted that I had, with such utter conviction that I could no longer doubt it.
Then the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, as I realized that someone was sitting in one the armchairs beside the fire, deep in shadow except for the faint ruddy reflection of the embers—a fact that was scary enough all on its own, even before I moved the lamp and saw who the person was.
It was the most fearsome man in the province, perhaps the entire Empire including the Americas: the man that some people considered to be the devil incarnate, and everyone except Myrica Mavor thought possessed of a heart of adamantine stone: Dellacrusca.
“Don’t be angry with your maidservant, Master Rathenius,” he said, softly—Dellacrusca speaking softly! What could be more terrifying than that? “She really didn’t have any choice but to let me in and follow my orders.”
That was the simple truth.
I just stood there, staring. Then he spoke the single most remarkable sentence that I had ever heard in my entire life.
“I owe you an apology, Master Rathenius,” he said, “and my thanks.”
It was then that I realized that any errors I had made earlier in the day were utterly negligible by comparison with the monstrous, albeit entirely understandable, error that I had made the night before.
I, Axel Rathenius, had been taken in by one of the Dellacrusca twins’ pranks! I had been a gullible fool, and had swallowed everything Tommaso had told me, hook, line and sinker. And it had all been lies.
“Do sit down,” said the evil mastermind. “I need to talk to you, and it will be far easier if we both feel comfortable.”
There was little chance of that, but I set the lamp down on the mantelpiece, angled so that we could see one another’s faces, and I sat sit down. I was still dumbstruck, though, and my diabolical interlocutor had to do the talking.
“I’m thanking you,” he explained calmly, “because, for the first time in my life, you’ve enabled me to be genuinely proud of my sons. Tommaso did all the work, of course, but the credit is due to both of them—they are twins, after all. If you were kind enough to be worried, Lorenzo’s leg is intact, and he’s in rude heath. And for what it may be worth, Tommaso really does hold you in high esteem, and was heartbroken to be forced to dupe you—but he couldn’t give the task less than his very best. He had no choice. You do realize that, I assume?”
I contrived to nod my head. If Dellacrusca had ordered his son to cut off his right hand with a rusty saw, Tommaso would have had to give it his very best shot. He would not have had a choice.
“And for that reason, and others,” he went on, “my apology is sincere. Although, in fairness to myself, I do believe that my method of persuading you to find the parchment for me, and even to copy it for me, was infinitely preferable to the method hypothetically credited to our imaginary Italian.”
At that moment the door opened, and Jean-Jacques came in, having put the horses away, to ask whether I needed anything more. He stopped dead when he saw Dellacrusca, in manifest shock.
“It’s all right, Jean-Jacques,” I told him, recovering my composure because it is never appropriate to show weakness in front of the servants. “I don’t need anything else. You can go to bed. I’ll see Milord out, when we’ve finished.”
The door closed again behind him, very softly.
“You could simply have asked,” I pointed out to Dellacrusca, finding my voice. “You’re welcome to the damn thing. I really don’t want it.”
“But that would have been much less esthetic, don’t you think?” he said, permitting himself a hint of irony as sharp as a stiletto. “You’re an artist, after all.”
Suppressed wrath can sometimes generate courage. “And you’re a man who hates artists,” I retorted—actually retorted, to Dellacrusca!—“although no one seems to know exactly why.”
He didn’t stand up and horsewhip me to within an inch of my life, which he could have done with impunity, being far above the law. “Yes I do,” he said, his voice becoming mild again, “and you more than most, for reasons I shall explain, since you seem to be interested. And yes, I could simply have sent armed men to recover the parchment, and commissioned an accurate draughtsman to make copies of it, and then delivered them into the hands of experts with instructions to do everything possible to decipher them, but I could not have provided the kind of incentives… let’s call it the kind of allure, shall we?… with which you distributed them. I have no objection to using violence to get what I want, but I wanted to exploit your intelligence, Master Rathenius, and your cunning, and I could not obtain that by violent theft, or simply by asking for it, could I? I could have obtained your obedience, but also your resentment… never your enthusiasm. Do you understand my quandary?”
I wouldn’t have called it a quandary, but I could see the logic of his argument—and he was a man long accustomed to working in sub
tle and insidious ways as well as frankly brutal ones.
“Will you set my mind at rest with respect to one thing, Milord?” I asked, as politely as I could.
“Of course,” he said. “Deception has served its purpose now, and as it happens, I have a further commission for you. As a gesture of good will, I will answer any questions that I can.”
That was doubtless a composed speech, as I couldn’t quite imagine what else Dellacrusca might want from me, or expect to acquire from me, but I took advantage of his generous offer.
“Please tell me that Sister Ursule is another of your dupes, and not another of your agents.”
“Of course she is,” he said. “Tommaso and Antoine de Mesmay are the only agents I have used. I have, admittedly, fed Sister Ursule certain information via Aethne de Mesmay that I wanted her to have, but she was glad to receive it, purely as a scholar, and even Aethne doesn’t know that I’ve been using her. Sister Ursule sincerely believes everything that she came to tell you earlier today, and her motives for coming to see you were entirely pure. She really did believe that you were in danger—and if the Dionysians knew that you had the parchment, you really might have been. Mercifully, at least so far as I know, they do not—and by the time they find out that I have it, they will need to be very brave indeed to try to take it from me.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So the Cult of Orpheus has recovered its supposedly precious relic of its supposed founder, and all’s well with the world. It still seems to me to be a roundabout way of getting there, and I’m sorry that you made a fool of me in the process, but what else is there to do? What further need do you have of me?”
“Seen from the viewpoint of politics,” Dellacrusca said, “perhaps none—but from my own personal viewpoint, the matter is much more complicated. Would you like me to tell you a story?”
The Almighty Lord Dellacrusca, volunteering to tell me a story—that was something else much stranger than black snow…very much stranger, in fact, now that I knew the true source of the ash inside the snowflakes.
“Please do,” I said.
“I was not always the man with a heart of adamant that the world believes me to be. Like you, I’m older than I look—though not as much older, if rumor can be trusted. I was, however, always a stern skeptic in the days when I more yielding in the heart. I did not believe in the supernatural. I did not believe in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or any of the other arcana of the Cult of Orpheus, into which I was inducted by my father much as I have inducted Tommaso and Lorenzo. I regarded it purely as a political organization, a network of influence and control. I have always treated it as such and used it as such, regarding the ritual aspects of its conduct as mummery, of purely symbolic value and effect—much, I suspect, as the priests of many other religions regard their cults, while exploiting the true faith of those gullible enough to believe, and those unfortunate enough to experience visions compelling belief.
“The Dionysians, of course, have one advantage over us in regard to the visionary aspects of their creed, although it is something of a double-edged sword. Like the Bards of the old Druidic religion, although the modern version seems largely purged of the habit, the Dionysians make free use of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis to induce altered states of consciousness, including visions. We have always been more inclined to use music as a means of influencing minds, which is intrinsically more subtle and refined, and arguably far less effective. Inconveniently, in order to be effective at all it requires performers of great innate ability—rare ability. You are, of course, familiar with that; my informants tell me that you save long had a great respect for the quasi-magical powers of music, and some experience thereof.”
“Yes, I have,” I confirmed.
“And that is one of the reasons why I still need you. You understand my problem, and you probably have a deeper understanding of it than most musicians, precisely because you can look at the matter from outside, clinically. You have, I know, staged more than one musical performance yourself designed to have a quasi-magical effect, with varying degrees of success.”
As he knew that, there was no need to confirm it. I waited to see where he was going, although I was beginning to get an inkling.
“Suddenly, he changed tack. “You do realize, don’t you, Master Rathenius, that although I have the reputation of treating my boys very sternly, I love them dearly?”
“I have always assumed so,” I conceded, although it wasn’t true—and I certainly didn’t think that what Dellacrusca meant by “love” was what I thought the word ought to mean, in an ideal world.
“Did you know that I also had a child by my first marriage?”
“I had only heard that our first wife died in childbirth. I had assumed that the child had died too.”
“She didn’t. My wife—whom I also loved very dearly, by the way—died, but the girl to whom she gave birth did not. I will not ask you, Master Rathenius, whether you can imagine how much I loved that child, because I am convinced that you cannot, even if, at some time in your reputedly extensive past, you have had children of your own. Take it from me that my adamantine heart loved that girl with a determination and firmness of which no softer substance would ever have been capable. But I will ask you to try to imagine the anxiety I had as result of her mother’s death, and how carefully I tried to protect her. Will you try to imagine that for me? Because I want you to understand my predicament—I really do.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I can understand that.”
“You might also imagine that I was excessive in my precaution, just as you probably imagine that I am excessive in the discipline that I have tried to force upon Tommaso and Lorenzo—and I accept that you might perhaps be right. It is important that you believe that acceptance, because it will enable you to understand why I feel partly responsible for what happened. I do understand that the excess of my protection might actually have caused its failure, by making the poor girl feel so imprisoned that her dearest wish became to break away from it, to be free of my confining love. You can understand that, can’t you?”
The teasing finally had its effect, and I saw where he was going. I saw it all, and realized the horrible enormity of it—and the horrible confusion of it.
“She ran away,” I said, flatly. “She eloped with an artist. An artist named Almeras.”
“Now that,” he said, in a voice hardly above a whisper, “is truly impressive. Your reputation does not belie your talent. How on earth do you know his name?”
“Myrica Mavor told me a couple of hours ago,” I said, realizing that I was breaking my promise to keep what she’d told me absolutely confidential, but figuring that no promise could remain unbreakable in the face of Dellacrusca, and in the circumstances in which he and I now found ourselves. “She told me the story of your first wife, insofar as she knew it—which was very slightly—and she told me another, not having any idea, because she only knew the first slightly, that the second might have any connection with it. You provided the connection, and let me know that the two stories were the same one. So now I know why you hate artists… and portrait painters in particular. I assume that I remind you of Monsieur Almeras… and that you still have the portrait you commissioned Almeras to produce of your daughter?”
“You do remind me of him,” he confirmed. “In terms of your reputation, that is—he was far better looking.”
I decided not to take offence at that. For the moment, at least, I was ahead of the game. “And now I know why it had such a marked effect on you when Myrica persuaded you, doubtless reluctantly, to visit Charles Parenot while she was trying to talk you into commissioning a new portrait of the twins,” I went on. “You couldn’t recognize your granddaughter, of course—but you could and did recognize your daughter’s antique viola da gamba. Was it a gift that you had given her?”
“Truly remarkable,” Dellacrusca repeated. “I’m glad to see that I haven’t underestimated you. I thought it was a miracle when Madame Mavor guided me
, in spite of myself, to the child, for whom my own agents had been searching fruitlessly for twelve years—but the miracle was only just beginning, was it not? Go on, please, Master Rathenius. Tell me more.”
I went on, as requested, feeling that I was being called upon to play the performance on my life. “I won’t ask what happened to poor Almeras,” I said, “because I can guess—but obviously, it happened before he could tell your… agents where he had hidden the child. Nevertheless, you found her again, in the end, by sheer luck rather than judgment. She’s your granddaughter, as you say, or at least as you doubtless think of her. But a granddaughter isn’t like a piece of parchment; she isn’t something you can simply take back, once you’ve found it. In order to get her back, in any meaningful sense, you have to do far more than take possession of her person. You have to win over her mind and soul—which you conspicuously failed to do with her mother, in spite of your best efforts. And there are complications: Charles Parenot and Mariette, to name but two—the people she loves as if they were her mother and father, even though they’re not.”
“Very good,” said the man with the heart of stone, who could and had ordered people killed with complete impunity, and had doubtless had no compunction about shedding blood himself when required. I knew now what commission he had in mind for me. I was to be his messenger, the bearer of the bad news.
“And the further complications?” Dellacrusca added, seemingly genuinely interested in probing the full extent of my intuition, now that I had demonstrated its capability.
“The music,” I said. “Orpheus… and Eurydice. As you put it, the quasi-magical music, which can affect hearts and minds… and perhaps work miracles, in the right circumstances… which you’re hoping to create, at Mesmay’s reception, with Elise’s aid. I don’t suppose that even you can organize the eruption of volcanoes, however, so I assume that Hekla’s eruption is a pure coincidence”
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