Yesterday Never Dies, page 16
“Then I shall restrict myself to logical ratiocination,” Mademoiselle Valdemar retorted, coldly, “which is a language that we all understand, and of which we all approve. I cannot compete with Monsieur Dupin in that field, of course, but I hope that he might forgive me my naivety.
“Let us suppose, as a basis for argument, that you and the Pythagoreans are correct about the capacity that human souls have to establish resonances in time, given a properly-tuned receiver of some kind. Let us also accept, as a virtual axiom, that the phenomenon of coherent and elaborate reproduction must be rare, and somewhat fugitive, given that we are not permanently surrounded by a cacophony of that kind. Perhaps that does open up the possibility of the kind of reincarnation that you describe, of which you have cited yourself as a prime, if unconvincing, example—but let us also consider some of the other, perhaps equally interesting, possibilities.
“Are you correct in your assumption that the chief determining factor of the phenomenon is the power of the initial transmission? Yes, I think you must be; there must be some discrimination at source, and I cannot think of any other word to describe it but power—a power that must be renewable and reproducible in the chain of echoes as they extend through time, because it cannot be sufficient merely to provoke an accidental response in future receivers; they too need to be developed as powerful transmitters if the sequence is to continue over long periods of time before fading away...or meeting a more abrupt fate.
“Perhaps, though, we ought to be careful about conflating—as you just did—the notion of the kind of power necessary to function as a powerful transmitter of temporal resonance with the power of the human will. Perhaps it is a natural conflation for a man, especially one besotted with assertion and domination; but as a poor, weak woman I cannot help wondering whether one might conceive such power in other terms—perhaps, for example, pure animal instinct, devoid of intelligence...or maternal instinct, possessed of a very particular focused intelligence. But we need not be exclusive, need we—much as you would doubtless like to be? In purely logical terms, there might be more than one kind of power capable of self-replication over time...three, or seven, or any other number seemingly possessed of more than merely descriptive power.”
Saint-Germain frowned. “Demonic power, you mean?” he said—although I had not taken that inference from what she had said...not exclusively, at any rate.
“Obsolete terminology of that sort does more harm than good,” she said. “Let us reject out of hand the notion that Robert the Devil really is the Devil that he was imagined to be by Christian commentators when the legend was first written down—which is to say, the son of a fallen angel, a hereditary follower of Satan. But let us reserve judgment, too, on whether he was even a Robert—which is, of course, the French equivalent of a whole host of names in other languages, including the Norse Hrolf and the English Robin, the latter also being the name of a kind of sprite, malicious and mercurial without necessarily being evil...but not, I think, Oberon. That etymologically-unjustifiable connection was surely a phantom of Monsieur Thibodeaux’s imagination.
“All of that is obsolete terminology too, of course—but the idea of fays is perhaps a trifle more apt than the idea of fallen angels. Accounts of the activities and habits of the fairy folk were once commonplace, of course, including the legendry of changelings. We inherited one rich set of folktales from the Norman invaders of the Kingdom of the Franks, who became such an important force in the realm of France—but those tales, and their literary embellishments, undoubtedly overlaid and confused an older set, more closely akin to the legendry of Brittany, whose most important sprites are korrigans.”
“Whose primary feature,” Marie Taglioni suddenly put in—although, as a Swedish-Italian, she could only have known it as a stray item of supposedly-useless information, “is that they dance.”
“And they are certainly not alone in that,” I observed, “for folklore is replete with images of entities that dance...and whose dancing sometimes warps time....” My voice trailed off, however, not because I could not have continued to elaborate the train of thought, but because it had been interrupted by a flash of memory: the remembrance of the eyes of the phantom of the Opéra-Comique, and the difficulty I had had in evaluating the particular quality of their malice. Korrigans and the like, I knew, had a great reputation as tricksters—and a horrible thought suddenly crossed my mind.
In the meantime, however, Jana Valdemar had fixed her eyes on Dupin. “Do you like my story, Monsieur Dupin?” she said. “Have I atoned adequately for my sins?”
“I have already told you that I have forgiven you for your past errors,” Dupin reminded her.
“The forgiveness of a chivalrous man is easy to obtain,” she said, “and the forgiveness of an unchivalrous man only a little more difficult”—she glanced at Saint-Germain then—“but that was not what I asked.”
Dupin frowned. “It is not for me to measure atonement...,” he said. He would certainly have added something more, but at that moment Saint-Germain banged loudly on the partition separating the compartment of the coach from the driver’s seat, and the interruption made us all jump in our seats.
“Anton!” he shouted, loudly enough to make us all wince. “Lanterns!”
I looked out of the window then. It really was exceedingly dark outside—but no longer completely dark.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU
The carriage came smoothly to a halt, and I heard the coachman climb down from his perch and move to the rear of the vehicle, where Saint-Germain had assured us that everything we might need for our excursion had been packed.
The coach’s lanterns had, in fact, burned very low and needed replacement. The thunderous noise of Saint-Germain’s command had inevitably drawn my attention back to the walking-stick that the fake Comte had used, and I studied it carefully, trying to see it not as a ugly and ill-stained piece of wood whose only function was to lend support to arthritic ankles, but as Blaise Thibodeaux’s talisman: a crutch for his ailing beliefs as well as his stiffening limbs.
It was possibly, I knew, that there was nothing in this infectious fantasy but Thibodeaux’s own dreams: that his idiosyncratic Robert-the-Devil-cum-Oberon-the-Fay was merely a product of his unhinged imagination, and that the only product of 1834 that was resonating in 1847 was the urgency of the professor’s delusions. But what did that matter, since they undoubtedly were echoing, and that they consisted in themselves of a nest of far more distant delusory echoes, having no other possible form to take?
As he laid the stick down again, Saint-Germain took his watch out of his pocket and flicked the case open. “Midnight,” he declared, as the lantern outside his portiere flicked. He giggled as he added: “The witching hour.”
“Have we reached our destination?” Marie Taglioni asked.
“Not yet, I fear,” the Comte replied. “We have a way to go yet. The dangerous hours are the hours of resonance; midnight is merely the hour of transition: from one day to the next, if not one world to the next.”
“But I can see lights,” said Lucien Groix, peering past Dupin into the darkness that fell outside like a black curtain as soon as the coachman had removed the external lantern on that side from its hook. Dupin and I looked too. I had been correct in judging the night not completely dark. There were, indeed, faint lights in the distance, which illuminated nothing, and seemed quite eerie. They were definitely not fireflies, but for a moment, I could not imagine what they might be.
“We must be on the outskirts of Melun,” Chapelain declared. “They’re night-lights in houses.”
“I doubt it,” Dupin demurred. “Surely we have not been traveling long enough to reach Melun. Some village or hamlet perhaps, accessible by a side-road.”
“Let’s leave the logicians to argue the point,” Saint-Germain said, laconically. “Logically, of course, they cannot be the hopeful foxfires of Faerie, gathering in order to follow us to out appointment with destiny. They can only be tiny candle-flames, kept burning by people who are afraid to go to sleep in the dark, for fear of...well, anything at all. Utterly useless, of course, but somehow comforting—the memory of light, rather than true illumination. Dupin’s right, though: we’re not so very far from Paris, although we’re already moving into the limits of the ancient forest of Fontainebleau...and thus the borders of Brocéliande. People hereabouts still harbor ancient fears, as well as modern ones.”
“Given that we’re steadily nearing our destination,” Dupin said, “and that it’s certainly too late for any of us to have a change of heart, will you consent to tell us now what you found in Thibodeaux’s papers?”
Saint-German opened the carriage door before replying and leapt down to the ground, but immediately turned to offer his hand to Jana Valdemar. “Of course,” he called back to Dupin. “Have I not been advocating that we tell one another stories to while away the remainder of the journey? I don’t mind doing more than my share—but I expect a quid pro quo. When I’ve told you what I found among Thibodeaux’s papers in the Society’s Archives, you must tell us what you know. But first, we ought to stretch our legs—we have a way to go yet, and Anton will have to water the horses as well as renewing the lanterns.”
Jana Valdemar accepted Saint-Germain’s hand in order to get from the carriage, but immediately drew away from him thereafter. He did not attempt to go after her, but helped Marie Taglioni down.
In the meantime, I opened the other door and leapt down myself. I offered my hand to Dupin, who took it, and then helped Lucien Groix get out. Chapelain had followed the ladies on the far side.
I immediately drew Dupin to one side and whispered in is ear “I suspect that we’re being duped, Dupin. This excursion might not be what it seems. We are being manipulated—by Thibodeaux, if not by Robert the Devil, or whatever entity lurks behind that name. The whole purpose of this haunting was to gather us here, so that we might produce the resonant phenomenon that Thibodeaux planned.”
“We already know that,” said Dupin, tiredly.
“Yes—but have you considered that it might be a trap?”
“What kind of trap?”
“How do I know? But you must admit that we’ve been lured, perhaps by a baited hook.”
“It’s possible—but as Mademoiselle Taglioni said, I have no sense that whatever is luring us wishes us harm. Have you?”
How could I tell? But I looked around anxiously, staring into the darkness, and wondering whether those distant gleams might be predatory eyes.
“If it is a trap,” I said, “then you must be one of its prime targets. Pierre, Jana, and myself might only be making up the magic number, while Saint-German is an instrument, but you, Lucien, and Marie Taglioni must surely be the focus of the endeavor.”
“Of course,” he replied, calmly. “We are completing a pattern. I cannot see the whole of it as yet, but its intricacy is...amazing. Thibodeaux was quite mad, of course, toward the end, but that, I think, is what has enabled him to reach out from beyond the grave.”
“But it really might be a trap,” I said, insistently. “What Thibodeaux said to you all thirteen years ago was intended to bring you here like this. I’m a supernumerary, but you and Lucien were intended to come. Even then, Thibodeaux had been invaded and possessed...or infected by something. We really might be in danger—Lucien in particular. Prophecies can be self-fulfilling, as you’re fond of pointing out.”
“Of course they can,” he said. “Why do you think I’m here, except to play my part? Don’t you think I’d rather be in bed? I wish that Saint-Germain would stop playing games, though, and tell us exactly what his magic wand is supposed to do, and how, and why. It’s possible that he’s still uncertain himself, but we wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have information that might allow us to work it out.”
“You realized that he wasn’t drunk as soon as you saw him, didn’t you?” I hazarded. “You realized that he’d been...infected?”
“I realized that his drunkenness had assumed a particular and peculiar form, By the way, I think that you ought to keep an eye on Mademoiselle Valdemar, as Chapelain seems direly distracted. She made one mistake, though, in her little speech.”
“What mistake?” I asked, utterly confused yet again by all the abrupt changes in conversational direction that seemed to be whirling us around, preventing us from settling on any coherent train of thought and sending us around in circles.
“We are surrounded by the cacophony of time’s echoes; it’s not coherency that’s lacking, but melody. The problem is not a lack of power, however conceived, but a lack of continuity, of artistry. The echoes of the past are around us all the time, they constitute the world of the mind, just as they constitute the world of the body; we have become so used to their ever-presence that we take them for granted. It is not ghosts that are rare, whether human or unhuman, or even the circumstances that permit them, on occasion, to resonate, as it were, plangently. What is missing is any measured, choreographed dance.”
“But you think some kind of dance will be possible tonight—between three and four in the morning...the dangerous hours?”
“I hope so.”
“And you really aren’t afraid of harmful repercussions?”
The coachman had just suspended the replenished lantern outside the coach, and climbed into the compartment to replace the internal lamp, so there was light enough for me to see Dupin’s expression of ironic astonishment.
“You and I, my friend,” he reminded me, “have gone into the bowels of the Earth in the hope of catching a glimpse of something strange, and have stepped beyond its limits more than once. This is not some invasion of the Crawling Chaos that is threatened, but something in and very much of this world—but things of this world are never free of danger any more than invasions from without. If there are dangerous repercussions as well as, or instead of, pleasant ones, we shall do our best to counter or withstand them, shall we not?”
I lowered my voice again. “But what about Lucien?” I asked. “He’s the one being tormented by a prophecy of death.”
“He is anything but a coward,” Dupin pointed out, “else he certainly would not be still in Paris, clinging to his functions as Prefect of Police. His infection is not controlling him, you know, any more than Saint-Germain’s is driving him. We are all free agents, my friend, else we would not need such subtly trickery to steer us.”
“But you and I...,” I began, in protest.
Dupin raised a single finger; it was enough to silence me. “Mademoiselle Taglioni is right: we are legion, by virtue of all the echoes of the past that radiate through us...and the opportunity to find, not merely a brief note of distinct harmony in all that inchoate multiplicity, but a sustained composition, is certainly not to be missed. Now that the lanterns have all been renewed, let’s climb aboard again and be on our way.”
I thought that I had drawn Dupin far enough away from the Prefect not to be overheard, but I had underestimate Groix’s hearing, and his curiosity. As we climbed back up into the compartment, he leaned over to whisper in my ear: “Have no fear, Monsieur Reynolds. I have no intention of leaping into the Seine—but if it so happens that I cannot help but fall in, rest assured: I can swim.”
The seven of us took our seats again, in exactly the same arrangement as before, and the coachman cracked his whip. Chapelain still seemed subdued and preoccupied, and I judged from the frown on his face that he had exchanged words with someone during the halt, although I had not seen him in conversation. Jana Valdemar seemed quite serene, and Marie Taglioni merely impatient. Saint-Germain was a little less ebullient, as tiredness finally began to break through his flamboyant resistance, but when Dupin suggested that it was time for him to keep his promise and tell us what he had found in the Harmonic Society’s Archives, he formed a childishly eager smile.
“As Monsieur Dupin knows,” he said, as we drew away from the night-lights of the distant hamlet into the pitch-darkness, “I had never heard of Blaise Thibodeaux before last night, and would probably have remained in ignorance forever if I had not chanced to go to the Opéra-Comique last night...with no intention, initially, of watching the performance, having heard unenthusiastic reports of the preceding revival of Robert le Diable. When I changed my mind, though, I contrived to find a place in a distant corner in the crowded house—and afterwards, when I returned to the Rue Vivienne, I made haste to consult one of the members I had overheard talking about the performance thirteen years before. He was the one who mentioned that Blaise Thibodeaux had left an account of the incident among his papers, which were still where they had been deposited after his death, awaiting cataloguing before being properly deposited in the library—these things can take time. I found the papers in a cupboard, along with Thibodeaux’s walking-stick and his old...well, I suppose I can call it a violin, although when I showed it to Anton, he merely sniffed and said that it was a gypsy fiddle of recent manufacture and no intrinsic value.
“Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I started going through the papers, searching for a document relating to the 1834 performance of Robert. I found it—and I also found the papers that Thibodeaux had gathered together with it, in the same envelope. In particular, I found the one of which Eugène Scribe must have heard mention when he improvised the libretto for the five-act version of Robert in 1831. Ours is a Secret Society and Scribe has never been a member, but people do talk, especially about trivia...folktales and the like. Thibodeaux had found the document in the library, and had never taken it back—and no one, alas, had noticed during the last thirteen years that it was missing. That’s irrelevant, though...the document itself is no more than a legendary romance, the core of which must have been handed down over a long period of time, and doubtless perverted in the process, as legends always are. In all probability, no one would have bothered to preserve it had it not been for the Carolingian connection, slight as it is, and the fact that it’s quintessentially Norman, and intimately concerned with the foundation of the Norman kingdom in France.
