The pool of mnemosyne, p.23
The Pool of Mnemosyne, page 23
I looked at Mariette, trying to judge what she was making of Elise’s improvisation, but she did not seem to be reacting. She had heard Elise improvising many times before. To her, it seemed normal. Her eyes were dry, in contrast to Charles’ rather tearful expression; but that was not surprising. She would be going home with Elise when the party was over; he was uncertain as to whether he would ever hear her play again.
I tried to focus on the music, to feel its significance. I tried to recognize it, although I knew that I had never heard it before. There did seem to be something in it that struck a chord within the unconscious part of my mind, but I could not obtain any symbolic echo of what that resonance might be, until I heard Fion Commonal mutter: “Looming disaster.” Then I did obtain a feeling of recognition. What Elise was playing suddenly seemed to me to be a tentative response to my unfinished painting.
But the petals aren’t finished, I thought. And in any case, she’s only glimpsed it.
But I accused myself, promptly, of being silly. She wasn’t responding to my painting at all. She was responding to something much further away, to which my paining was also a response. Perhaps, I thought, she had heard Hecate recite her reconstituted poem—almost certainly, in fact—but what she was doing wasn’t simply a response to that, either. In fact, it couldn’t be, precisely because it echoed my painting, which was a deliberate variation on what I could remember of the gist of Hecate’s poem.
What is she doing? I asked myself. And why?
Had she been called upon to account for it, I suspect she might have said that it was the result of a sudden inspiration, which she wanted to follow immediately in case she lost it by virtue of setting it aside. Playing the cycinnis had suggested to her variations that she might make to its fundamental theme, so she had made them, experimentally. That exploration had led her mind to invent, or discover, further possibilities, which she had wanted to try out immediately: possibilities relevant to the music she had been trying to compose for two days, in collaboration with Hecate, specifically in order to accompany Ananke in the Pool of Mnemosyne…or, as Fion had dubbed it, with deliberate insult but not without a certain propriety, Looming Disaster.
It did not seem to me that it was the right time for Elise to be doing that, and it was certainly not the right place, but any true artist, especially an artist as naïve and inexperienced at Elise, would have felt fully entitled to reply to that sort of criticism that when inspiration occurs, one is not merely entitled but bound to follow it—that precisely because one has free will, one is compelled by conscience to obey the impulse, even if the circumstances seem inappropriate.
In all honesty, the piece wasn’t very good. Elise wasn’t at her best, by any means, and the composition obviously wasn’t properly finished, any more than my painting was—the melodic petals, so to speak, were woefully incomplete, and she was barely doing more than indicate their position, without detail, or even clarity—but she wasn’t playing the music in order to show off her virtuosity to an elite company of connoisseur dinner guests. She certainly wasn’t playing it for the Marquise de Mesmay, or for me, or even for Hecate.
A rapid glance at Hecate told me that she understood what was happening, and understood that, even though the piece wasn’t being played for her, she needed to pay the most scrupulous attention to it, in order to obtain whatever inspiration from it she could. Her concentration intensified, becoming almost tangible. Even though the others didn’t understand, some of them realized that something significant was happening. Mariette certainly did, as time went by, and her stony expression gradually became anxious.
Vashti Savage knew too, if only by studying Hecate’s reaction, and I could feel the resonance of waves of jealousy that she was emitting. That reaction was utterly ridiculous, of course—there was no possibility whatsoever of a sexual relationship between Hecate and Elise, now or in the future; the nexus they had wasn’t that kind of nexus at all—but Vashti was possessive; in wanting Hecate, ultimately futile as her desire might be, she wanted all of her, body and soul. It was an impossible covetousness, but Vashti had never been the kind of person to be intimidated by the boundaries of the possible; and in the final analysis, she simply couldn’t help feeling what she was feeling, even though she must have known herself that it was ludicrous, and unworthy of her.
I turned round again. The African twins were listening intently too. Their faces were no longer impassive and inexpressive. The music was finding some kind of echo in them too, and they were smiling. They liked it; something in their shared soul was responding to it, at a deeper level than mere hearing.
Fion still didn’t like it. Neither did Alectryon.
Parenot still had tears in his eyes, and others trickling down his cheeks. I felt sorry for him. Stealing his mistress was one thing; he hadn’t deserved her—but stealing his adoptive daughter was something else entirely. For that, I felt culpable. She didn’t love him, but that wasn’t his fault. He had done his best.
The Marquise appeared to be studying the piece intently, but as if from a distance, clinically, examining it without feeling it. That reaction worried me; I would far rather that she had yielded to it, allowing herself an emotional response. But that, I thought, was the entire problem with the Marquise’s dreams of mastering the fragments of the Cult of Orpheus and becoming a power within the Empire. She considered the whole affair as a matter of strategy, devoid of empathy.
I realized that it might, in fact, have been preferable had she reacted to my return to the island as Tommaso Dellacrusca had imagined that she would react, viscerally, perhaps even violently, rather than in the calm, intricate fashion in which the ultra-methodical Lord Dellacrusca would have reacted, had he not had the fatal flaw of nursing deep-seated grudges, in the spirit of vendetta.
It wasn’t the Marquise’s reaction and its possible implications that held my attention, though. Unlike her, I did react emotionally to the music and the situation alike, and my concern, primarily, was for Mariette. Mariette, I could see very clearly, was gradually becoming frightened by the music, increasingly anxious for an adoptive daughter who could create such things…or who could allow such things to possess her. Seated as she was, between Parenot and Alectryon, she did not feel that she could turn to either side in search of reassurance. She met my gaze, but I was distressed to see that there was uncertainty there too. She did not trust my affection. She felt alone. She felt estranged even from Elise.
Had I been seated next to her, able to take her hand, perhaps I could have eased her anxiety, but I was not. In retrospect, perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps she needed that anxiety.
And who, in fact, could blame her for not trusting my affection? Who, in all the world, could have trusted the affection of Axel Rathenius? Even Hecate doubted it.
I, by contrast, felt increasingly frustrated as the piece went on. The music wasn’t right. It might be Looming Disaster, but it wasn’t Ananke in the Pool of Mnemosyne. Neither was my painting—not yet, at least—but it seemed to me that Elise’s inspiration should have waited until it was. It had no right to seize her now, prematurely. It was untimely, inept, stupid and wrong.
But we do not work magic, no matter how hard we might try or hope. Magic works us. And we cannot choose the timing of disasters, or expect them to wait for us to complete our preparations and perorations.
Elise felt frustrated too; that was obvious. In the end, she stopped playing, and apologized for not feeling able to continue.
“I’m not at my best,” she said, apologizing to the Marquise. “It’s too soon, I fear. I thought that coming back here wouldn’t affect me, but…”
“Of course,” the Marquise was quick to say. “It’s entirely my fault, my dear; my haste was undue. The responsibility is entirely mine, and I am the one who owes you the apology.”
She was right, but it was only her politeness dictating the words. She didn’t feel a thing. Perhaps, in fact, she was actually glad that Elise had been unable to measure up to the occasion, pleased that she had played poorly. Perhaps she had measured her, and had been glad to find her wanting.
If so, it was a mistake—but I didn’t realize it at the time. At the time, I just thought that things weren’t going to plan. That was vanity speaking. Had I been humbler, I would have realized that the fact that things weren’t going to my plan didn’t mean that they weren’t going to Ananke’s.
The Marquise, I thought, failed in her duty as a hostess then. She should, at the very least, have given me permission to take Elise home, or to ask Mariette to take her home—but that was the last thing that the Marquise wanted. She still had her own pièce de resistance in reserve, and I had already provoked her sufficiently to make her utterly determined to show it. She insisted that we all go to the small drawing room, in order that Vashti Savage could summon spirits to advise us. Politeness required us to go.
Before we had even left the dining-room in order to make our way along the corridor, however, Elise took urgent possession of my right hand, and murmured: “I’m sorry, Axel; I couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t help it. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to get it right. It’s too hard...and I think it’s already too late.”
“I know the feeling,” I murmured back. “But hold on; there’ll be time yet to do whatever we need to do. Trust me.”
She did trust me. I felt that. Perhaps she was foolish; perhaps it was just naivety; but she did trust me. And she wasn’t entirely wrong. At any rate, she had no intention whatsoever of surrendering the hand she had seized, although she didn’t have to fight hard for its possession. If the Marquise had had a seating plan for the séance, nobody would have taken any notice of it. There was a keen but scrupulously polite competition for hands, some attempted seizures, and some determined evasions.
Elise having staked her claim, there was a tacit competition between Mariette and Hecate for my other hand, which both elected in the end to lose gracefully by mutual consent, surrendering my left hand to the Marquise, whose own left hand grasped Alectryon’s while his grasped Vashti’s. Parenot claimed Elise’s other hand, avidly, and surrendered his own to Hecate, who placed Fion Commonal between herself and Mariette. That left Mariette’s free hand with no alternative but to grasp Vashti’s—thus sealing, purely by the accident of elimination, a bond between two mediums, one very conscious of her power and the other still unaware of it.
Was that a crucial factor in determining what happened? I don’t know for sure, but I think so.
The two African women also came into the room, but they sat down on the floor again, only holding hands with one another, seemingly in a world of their own. Was their presence a crucial factor? Again I don’t know for sure, but I suspect so. I suspect that we were all crucial, that we all formed a bizarre nexus of sorts, full of psychological tensions of every possible kind, and perhaps all the more powerful for it. None of us was ready yet to work his or her own magic, but the magic didn’t care about our readiness at all.
The one thing of which I can be certain is that the phenomena manifest at the séance were not all due to trickery, nor to the conventional summoning of shades. That at least some of the shades that came were no mere figments of our collective imagination, I have no doubt at all—and that the climactic manifestation came from further afield than the Underworld of Hades, even if it channeled Eurydice in the process, I am absolutely certain.
I had no active part in it, however; my part was to become evident later, and to be perfectly trivial in itself, although it was fortunately magnified by circumstance to have a very considerable effect.
The room was furnished and arranged in much the same way that it had been the last time I had been seated in it, with one important exception. The wall on which Charles Parenot’s portrait of Mariette as Eurydice had gone—a crime against art, if it really had been burned—and the other painting that had been carefully positioned on the same wall had also been removed. They had been replaced by a single image, so fresh that I strongly suspected that the paint was not yet dry: a flattering full-length portrait of the Marquise, in a pose normally characteristic of military men, although she had no sword.
I would have liked to be able to agree with the Marquise that it was unsatisfactory, even poor, but it was not. Charles Parenot might have his limitations, but he was a true artist, and a good one. When painting with passion, he was capable of greatness of a sort. The passion with which he had painted the Marquise was by no means purely erotic—although I knew from experience that the fact that he did not like her would not necessarily have undermined the intensity of his attraction to her—but it had been no less intense for being mixed, and no more perverse. The painting was good—but it was not Eurydice Redeemed. I was naturally reluctant to plagiarize Fion Commonal, but it was Looming Disaster—and definitely not Ananke in the Pool of Mnemosyne. It was not an image of triumph, but of vainglory, although I could understand why the Marquise, in spite of her tendency to lay hypocritical claim to that sin, had not been able to see herself accurately within it.
The Marquise and Parenot were both on the alert to catch my reaction to the sight of the painting, but I don’t know what they saw in my reaction, or what their own response to that reaction might have been. Elise only squeezed my right hand more tightly.
The Orpheus triptych, of course, was still in the grand hall. I had not seen it, and had not wanted to see it.
The lights were dimmed, as convention demanded. Squeezing my left hand with a surprisingly strong grip, as if determined to demonstrate greater strength than Elise, the Marquise leaned toward my left ear and whispered: “Now we shall see, my dear Axel, who is a mere instrument and who is not. I truly hope that we can still be friends.”
I had no doubt that she meant friends on her terms, not mine, Madame’s or Tommaso Dellacrusca’s. But she was out of her depth. It was her vanity talking, and her vanity alone.
Evidently, the Marquise had faith in Vashti’s abilities—and equally evidently, she had provided her with a program of sorts, in order to assist her to use them fruitfully, from her point of view. I knew, though, that such programs often fall apart when there are more minds in a circle of summoners than a medium’s sensitivity can easily encompass, especially when some clients are unknown to the medium and difficult to weigh. In my experience of séances, the spirits much prefer the comfort of the familiar—expectably, given that the Underworld from which they come to drink metaphorical black blood is located in the depths of the medium’s unconscious rather than the bowels of the Earth.
First of all, Vashti summoned the shade of the Marquise’s mother; who was, of course, also Sister Ursule’s sister. She advised her favorite daughter—the Marquise, naturally—to be wary of wolves in sheep’s clothing, who pretended to virtue, but were essentially unreliable, if not actively treacherous. She did not mention a name, but there was no one present who did not know to whom she was referring.
Then came Fion Commonal’s father, who had nothing much to say of any interest, even to his son. Both spirits, naturally, spoke with Vashti’s vocal cords, albeit with recognizable simulacra of the voices that they had presumably had, which I had no way of recognizing.
The next voice, however, I did recognize, although it was a long time since I had heard it. I suspected that Vashti had summoned it many times before, and had mastered its intonations very well. Vashti, of course, had known Roxane d’Alectryon while she was alive.
This time, she had not come from the other world to offer comfort to her father, but to admonish me.
“I can see you, Axel,” she said. “I have always been able to see you. No one ever forgets the man who caused her death.”
I had not caused Roxane d’Alectryon’s death, by any stretch of the most malevolent imagination. Even Claudius Jaseph had not caused her death, although there was a sense in which he really had stolen her soul. She had committed suicide, for foolish reasons. I raised no objection to her slanders, however. I merely glanced at Mariette, sitting beside Vashti—but Mariette did not even seem to be listening. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be descending into a deep trance herself. If the Marquise hoped to attack our nexus through her jealousy, the artillery fire went completely to waste.
Roxane accused me of being heartless individual, who discarded those who loved me heartlessly, leaving them wounded and vulnerable, putting their very souls in peril. It was puerile, and also inaccurate. I thought that Hecate was about to intervene at one point, but she looked at me first, seeking my authorization. I shook my head slightly, and she let the moment pass.
But Roxane was only the warm-up. Next came the Marquis de Mesmay, and after him Lord Dellacrusca. The latter worried me a great deal more than the former—not because of the expectable demands he made for vengeance, in ostentatious harmony with Mesmay, pointing the finger of accusation a trifle obliquely, but unmistakably, against the bacchantes of the Cult of Dionysus, but because I was worried about what he might say thereafter.
I was not mistaken. The Marquise was not a gentleman, and nor was Vashti Savage. The fake shade turned his attention to his granddaughter, and advised her to beware of deceptive and unworthy guardians. He did not name names, but a glance at Parenot informed me that he did not consider himself to be omitted from the judgment.
The shade did not go so far as to say that there is no such animal as a trustworthy man, but the fake Lord Dellacrusca was not about to put in a good word for his own sons. That was not implausible, in fact. In what Fion Commonal thought of as the good old days, Dellacrusca had often seemed as exasperated by his sons as everyone else. Nor was he about to exempt women from his judgment…and that was not implausible either, at least insofar as he and Elise might have Mariette in mind.
