Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  I started with the simple matter. “I know why the weather is so terrible,” I told her. “One of the volcanoes on Iceland has erupted. It’s said to do it once every hundred years or so, but it’s been a little longer, and the eruption seems to have been unusually violent. The black particles in the snow are tiny particles of ash falling back to earth, and the bad smell in the air is residue from the gases the volcano has vented, fortunately diluted by distance to the threshold of perceptibility. The effects might linger for some time, I fear, but when the cloud eventually clears, we’ll have some spectacular sunsets.”

  “So it’s not the Devil’s work, then,” she said, lightly, to emphasize that she had never believed that it was.

  “The indigenes won’t be convinced,” I said. “There’s an opinion that holds that volcanoes are the mouths of Hell, and eruptions a matter of the Devil’s belches.”

  “How very decorous,” she said. “On Martyr’s Mount they’d be certain to invert the metaphor. Is that what you called to tell us?”

  “No,” I said. “Some time this morning, a note will arrive from the Marquise de Mesmay inviting you to her house tonight for a séance by a local medium, Vashti Savage—Myrica might have mentioned her to you. Then, the Marquis will invite you to a reception two nights later, ostensibly to introduce you to the Island Council and other local notables. He’ll ask you to permit Elise to play her viol.”

  She studied me carefully,

  “And you think we ought to refuse?” she said, speculatively.

  “You won’t be able to refuse. The man organizing the reception doesn’t permit refusal.”

  “Mesmay?”

  “Dellacrusca.”

  “I didn’t know that he was on the island. He’s already heard Elise play. Myrica Mavor brought him to Charles’ studio on the Mount to see his paintings—as we told you last night, she’s trying to persuade him to commission a new portrait of the twins.”

  “I know,” I said. “An understandable effort on Myrica’s part, as Charles’ agent—but one whose consequences you might not like. What I was sent to tell you is that Dellacrusca recognized your daughter’s instrument as one that he gave to his daughter some fifteen years ago.”

  Once again, Mariette’s complexion attempt to attain unprecedented extremes of pallor. She almost fainted, and I was actually ready to catch her, but she pulled herself together. Eventually, she managed to speak.

  “Elise’s mother...,” she began.

  “Was Dellacrusca’s daughter,” I finished for her, to spare her the effort.

  She finally invited me to sit down, presumably because she wanted to sit down herself. Unlike me, she had a fire set in what was obviously destined to be the Parenots’ reception room, although it must have had some other purpose in Toustain’s day, as he never received.

  She stared at me with frank hostility. “So you’re his messenger?” she queried.

  “Reluctantly, yes,” I admitted. “As I said, he doesn’t permit refusal. Madame Parenot, I know that I somehow contrived to make a poor impression when we first met, but I truly want to be a friend to you and Charles. You have no reason to trust me, especially now, but I really do not want anyone to be hurt, if it’s possible to avoid it.”

  “Is that a threat?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “Even Dellacrusca, for the moment, isn’t thinking about threats.”

  “But he does want his granddaughter?”

  “Yes, and he intends to take her, after the reception—but more importantly, he wants her to want to go with him. That’s the difficult bit, for all of us. I hate to have to say it, but it’s in your interest and Elise’s to make every effort to grant his wish.”

  She thought about that for a few moments, and then said, presumably just to break the silence: “I’m not Madame Parenot.”

  “Yes you are,” I said. “In every meaningful way.”

  That surprised her. “You haven’t heard the rumors, then?” she said.

  “I have, and I know exactly what they’re worth. But I have eyes, and I pride myself on their keenness. I know that you and Charles are more securely married than the vast majority of those who’ve taken the trouble to obtain some futile official certificate. You love him, he loves you, and you both love Elise. That’s a true family, no matter what hauntings have come to disturb it.”

  “Do you mean Dellacrusca, or have you been talking to Myrica Mavor?”

  “Both, although she swore me to secrecy, and I suspect that he wouldn’t entirely approve of my telling you bluntly what the situation is. The circumstances demand honesty, though, and you shouldn’t be jealous of the fact that Charles confided his troubles to Myrica rather than talking about it to you.”

  “He was trying to spare me, I suppose,” said Mariette, bitterly.

  “Yes, he was,” I told her. “Misguided he might have been, but disloyal he was not.”

  “He doesn’t really owe me any loyalty,” she said, in a low voice. “No matter what you say, we’re not married. I’m just a whore he took in to help him look after his foundling.”

  “There is no such thing as a whore,” I told her. “And he certainly does owe you loyalty, not because you love him but because he loves you. He understands that, I think…unlike Dellacrusca, who has a very different notion of love, in which every obligation is owed to him, and only those he cares to impart are owed by him. He’s an unfortunate in his way, all his native artistry perverted by his heart of stone. But he is what he is, and I doubt that he can be changed now, even by Elise.”

  She focused on the heart of the matter. “He could just take her.”

  “He could,” I said, “but he wants more than that.”

  “And he wants us to help him—Charles and me?”

  “Yes, and me too. For some reason, he thinks that I can.”

  “How?” she said, scathingly. “By magic.”

  “Oddly enough, yes,” I said. “Although, when he said it, he was almost as sarcastic as you. He wants me to persuade you and Charles not merely to accept the inevitably, but to make things easy for him, in order to spare Elise’s feelings, although I’m certain that you can see the necessity without any help from me. I suspect that he’s putting extra responsibility on me in order that, if things do go awry, he’ll have a convenient scapegoat.”

  “So he wants us to pretend that we’re absolutely delighted to have found her grandfather for her, and eager to send her to her true home… to Dellacrusca! Do you know how he treats those two boys of his.”

  “All too well,” I assured her. “But he wouldn’t treat Elise the same way. He’ll even try not to make the same mistakes again that caused his daughter to run away with the most undesirable man she could find.”

  “Do you know what happened to Almeras?”

  “Dead, obviously. I’ve no idea how—I didn’t ask. I don’t know how the daughter died either, although I’m prepared to believe that it was in childbirth.”

  “I must confess,” she said, “that I wouldn’t have been glad if Almeras had come back for her himself, and certainly not if anyone else had come try to take her away, even if they had a legal right... but Dellacrusca!”

  “I know how you feel,” I said. “So does he. That’s why he’s taking the roundabout route—but he is determined to get there.”

  “Why the séance?” she asked. “I can understand the reception, but surely Dellacrusca isn’t a spiritist?”

  “No,” I agreed, “but he is the figurehead of the Cult of Orpheus, at least in the province, perhaps in the whole Empire. He doesn’t believe in omens, but he has to pay attention to them when his followers discover them. He knows that something is going on, with the various hauntings that have been reported back to him, even though he thinks it’s all in the mind. He wanted me to explain it, and I tried—but he hated the explanation. He’s looking to be convinced that it’s all hot air, although he can’t be certain that it is. Hence the examination of Vashti Savage…and Hecate Rain,
if she’ll consent to be examined, come the reception…and, of course, Elise.”

  “Will she consent? Hecate Rain, that is?”

  “I’ll have to talk to her about that. It’s not my decision.”

  “I liked her. I thought she might be a friend.”

  “She will be. She is.”

  “But he’s already examined Elise. He’s heard her play—in the supposedly haunted house, if Myrica can be believed; on the haunted viol, if the other explanation is true.”

  “That’s not the test he wants her to undergo. He wants to see whether she can obtain any inspiration from the parchment that was on my table last night when you came to call. It’s an important artifact in the arcana of the cult. He presumably wants her to fail, along with Vashti and Hecate, so that he can rest easy in the conviction that it really is all flimflam, to dress up their ceremonies and throw dust in the eyes of the gullible, but he really is interested to see what her music might do.”

  “And she will fail, presumably, because it really is all flimflam?” She didn’t believe that. She couldn’t, any longer.

  “Exactly what form did these hauntings take?” I asked. “Myrica was very vague about that.”

  “Sensations,” Mariette reported. “Always when Elise played, and lingering thereafter, although she didn’t seem to be aware of them herself until she went to bed, when she had lurid dreams—what kind, I can’t tell you, because by the time we’d calmed her down and woken them up she’d forgotten them. I was awake, though, and haven’t forgotten. I can’t really speak for Charles, although it was obvious he was disturbed, because he’s not one for communication—except, apparently, when he pours out his heart to Myrica—but for me the sensations were annoyingly clichéd: sensations of inexplicable chill; the feeling that there’s a presence in the room of someone or something invisible, distant sounds like someone sobbing and sighing. The usual stuff of popular ghost stories. I’d like to have been able to treat it with contempt, but when one actually experiences these things...once or twice I could have put behind me, but it wore me down.”

  “Have you felt them since you’ve been here?”

  “No—but Elise hasn’t played her viol yet. That… examination is still to come. I dare say that your keen sight hasn’t overlooked my anxieties—they must be painfully obvious.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I wasn’t sure how to interpret them, at first, but I understand now.”

  “The news you’ve brought hasn’t exactly helped to soothe them,” she said.

  “I understand that too,” I told her. I thought I was making headway, and was on the way to winning a measure of trust, in spite of everything—but then the doorbell rang. I assumed that it was the delivery of Mesmay’s invitation

  “Don’t get up,” she said, as she went to answer it. I did as I was told.

  Two minutes later, she ushered in Hecate Rain. I could have taken the view that it saved me a trip to visit her, but I could see that it was going to complicate matters in the short term.

  No sooner had Hecate responded to an invitation to sit down, in fact, than Mariette said: “Did Dellacrusca send you too?”

  “Dellacrusca?” Hecate queried. It was obvious that she had no idea why the name had been thrown at her.

  Mariette did not apologize. “Your friend Rathenius,” she said, “was sent by Dellacrusca to request our meek co-operation in his claiming of Elise.”

  Hecate was utterly nonplussed. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  I had hoped to fill her in rather more gradually, and more fully, but there was no time now.

  “Dellacrusca is Elise’s grandfather,” I told her. “He came to see me last night, to reclaim the parchment that Toustain bequeathed to me, and to demand that I assist him smoothing the way to winning his granddaughter’s heart. As you can imagine, it was a request I couldn’t refuse, no matter how distasteful it seemed.”

  Hecate’s instant reaction was to throw her arms round Mariette. “Oh, you poor dear!” she exclaimed. “Dellacrusca!”

  Mariette was not in a mood to be hugged. She pulled away.

  “You’re involved too, it seems,” she said.

  “I am not!” Hecate protested.

  “She doesn’t mean involved in taking Elise away,” I hastened to explain. “Dellacrusca’s… concerned about various artistic and seemingly supernatural manifestations bearing on his Cult’s mythology. He doesn’t really think it’s of any importance, but he’d like to hear your version of Eurydice’s Lament. You’ll receive an invitation to the Marquis of Mesmay’s reception later today.”

  “The poem isn’t finished,” she said, bewildered.

  “I did mention that,” I told her. “His only reaction was to suggest, unsubtly, that I hurry you up—but he’s not insistent about that, any more than he’s insistent about my finishing the triptych. He isn’t prepared to brook any delay simply to let the artistic process take its course. The only thing he’s absolutely determined to see, or hear, is Elise trying to play the language of sighs.”

  “And suppose she doesn’t want to, or can’t?” Hecate asked.

  Mariette sighed. “As for the first, I suspect that she’ll be only too eager. As to the second…knowing Elise, if she can’t, she’ll try with all her might to pretend.”

  “Which might, in fact,” I observed, “come to the same thing. And if the viol really is haunted...”

  They both looked at me expectantly.

  “Well, what?” said Hecate.

  “I really haven’t the faintest idea,” I said, “but if it could produce all the classic symptoms of spectral visitations in the Capital, I’d expect no less here, and given the additional circumstances, maybe more.”

  “You think she really might summon Eurydice from the Underworld?” Atypically, Hecate put all her reserves of skepticism into her voice.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “The real question is: what might Eurydice do if she gets here? What will she want?”

  Nobody could answer that. In any case, no one had an opportunity to try, because the three of us heard the sound of the front door opening, and a few moments later, Elise came running into the room, obviously expecting to find Mariette alone, She stopped dead, and scanned the three of us suspiciously, as if wondering whether we’d been talking about her behind her back.

  I looked at Mariette. Unless and until I could get Charles on his own, it was her decision as to what to say, to whom, and when.

  For the moment, she was not about to make any revelations. There was an empty pause

  Elise suddenly decided that it was time to play the grown-up instead of the embarrassed child.

  “Madame Rain,” she said, “Master Rathenius, it’s good of you to call to see us. I didn’t mean to interrupt.

  “Please don’t call me Madame,” said Hecate. “It makes me feel so old. Call me Hecate.”

  Elise nodded, and turned to me. “And may I call you Axel, Master Rathenius?” she asked, with a conspicuous mock-politeness.

  “Please do, Mademoiselle Parenot,” I said. “May I call you Elise?”

  “You must,” she said. “I insist.”

  Charles Parenot finally arrived, having deposited his purchases in another room.

  “Shall we complete the process, and all call one another by our first names?” I said, as I shook his hand.

  Surprisingly, he blushed. “I hardly like to, Master Rathenius,” he said ingenuously. “It doesn’t seem appropriate.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “If Elise insists, we must all comply. We’re neighbors—we must at least attempt to be friends.”

  Mariette’s expression said that I did not seem to her to have proved myself worthy of friendship yet, but Charles Parenot was not paying attention.

  “Would you like to see my new studio, Master Rathenius?” he asked, conveniently.

  “I would,” I said. “It’s always good to know what the up-and-coming generation are doing, lest we ancients get left too far behind.”
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br />   Once we were in his studio, however I dropped the act, unable to keep it up out of Elise’s earshot.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” I said. “This isn’t exactly a social call. I brought bad news, I fear, Mariette is informed, but it’s perhaps best for both of you if I don’t leave the burden of telling you to her. I’ll have to be blunt, I fear. Elise’s grandfather has recognized her, and intends to claim her. He wants to do so with a minimum of anguish, but there’s no way of changing his mind. It’s Dellacrusca, alas.”

  Once again, I was subjected to the kind of glare normally reserved for discovering a scorpion in one’s shoe. Being a bearer of bad news never adds to one’s popularity.

  “Dellacrusca is Elise’s grandfather?” he repeated, with appropriate incredulity.

  “I fear so. When Myrica brought him to your studio in the capital, he recognized her viol.”

  “That accursed viol!” Parenot exclaimed, rather too loudly, given that Elise was not so very far away. “I knew it was the Devil’s instrument. I knew it!”

  “Alas,” I said, “you’re right.”

  “But I could have bought it,” he said. “He can’t prove that Elise is his granddaughter.”

  “He doesn’t have to prove it,” I said. “He doesn’t even have to know, for sure. He just has to believe, and he does. He’s Dellacrusca, and he can’t be denied. You’re fortunate, in a way, that he’s using kid gloves for once, because he doesn’t want Elise to dislike him—in fact, he wants her to love him.”

  “And he thinks he has a chance of achieving that? He’s Dellacrusca!”

  “Exactly,” I said. In fact, those two words said it all.

  I never got a chance to take a good look at Parenot’s studio or his artwork. Elise came bounding in, with news of her own.

  “I’m going to play at the Marquis de Mesmay’s reception!” she announced, as if it were the best news she’s ever had in her life. And then, yet again, things took an unexpected turn. “I’m going to accompany Hecate’s poem—I told you could persuade her!” The last remark was addressed to me.

  I was content to stare at Hecate, who had just come in behind her, arm in arm with Mariette. “Yes, she confirmed. “I’m bowing to the inevitable. Sister Ursule is too polite to tell me so, but I’ll never learn to play that accursed instrument if I practice for a hundred years. So I’m going to allow myself to be accompanied, by the entire orchestra of Sisters of Shalimar on marine trumpets, and Elise on the viola da gamba. It will be spectacular: the language of sighs, reinvented for the present day.