The Pool of Mnemosyne, page 7
She fell silent. Obviously, the situation was not only more complicated than I had thought, but also more complicated than she had thought.
V. Confusions
“It isn’t just a matter of dreams,” I told Madame, while she was mulling over the possibilities on her own account. “Elise thinks that her playing has been affected her playing, and that has brought back the anxieties she had in Lutèce before Myrica Mavor persuaded Charles and Mariette to relocate to Mnemosyne, when she thought that she was being haunted. As for me, I seem to have lost the vital connection between my eye and my hand. I finally put that to the crucial test today, after procrastinating for weeks, and it didn’t go well. In fact it went so badly that Elise only had to take one look at the painting before…well, at least it prompted her to tell me what was wrong. Not that I was able to help. I might already have made things worse for her, accidentally, by telling her the story of Eirene Magdelana’s long-lost son, so that the idea of morpheomorphism was bound to leap to her mind…and as soon as she’d opened up to me, I must confess, I couldn’t get it out of mine.”
Madame nodded her head. “That is one of the forms of magic most likely to have an effect, albeit a vague and haphazard one. If the Marquise de Mesmay is taking some such malevolent action, especially with the help of Charles Parenot’s art…but that’s an action we can oppose, and ward off. Now that I know about the possibility, I can make arrangements of my own...”
I wished that I had the confidence to laugh at the suggestion, but I didn’t. In fact, I was grateful for it. I realized, reluctantly, that I had more in common with Madame than I would have liked to think. I had no intention for the moment of telling Mariette what Madame had just told me about Charles, and no intention of telling Elise what she had just told me about the possible effectiveness of the Marquise’s magic. Did I really have the right to complain, then, about her inclination not to tell me everything?
“Wouldn’t the Marquise be better employed using whatever magic she has against the Dellacrusca brothers than against us?” I said bitterly. “Their vendetta against her is surely a much more urgent matter of concern than her petty vendetta against us.”
“Undoubtedly,” Madame agreed. “But it’s perfectly possible that she thinks that the two are intimately connected—especially if she has caught wind of Tommaso Dellacrusca’s intention to come here. She seems to have tried to have you killed, remember, as soon as you’d finished the triptych, because she merely suspected you of having been in league with Dellacrusca. Everything that has happened then since has probably reinforced that suspicion. And it might well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Because you intend to make a treaty with Tommaso, in which I shall be involved, tacitly if not explicitly?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t know yet what Tommaso intends to offer—but the idea of an alliance is certainly attractive, and not simply to neutralize the Marquise and her cabal. When his father was alive, it was convenient, for him and for me, to be in opposition, in order to maintain an equilibrium of opposed agencies. Things have changed, and not just because of Dellacrusca’s death. The Empire is under threat from new forces, in an unprecedented fashion. It might be the ideal time to unite against a common threat. If Dellacrusca were still alive, I don’t think there would have been any possibility of that, because of the kind of man he was and the inertia of history, but now…as I said before, you might be able to weigh up the brothers better than I can. Obviously, I can’t trust them…but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t work with then, for a while, and if I can do that…well, much depends on how like or unlike their father they really are.”
“When you say new threats,” I said, just to make sure, “you’re not talking about earthquakes? You mean steam power, and electricity? What other people call progress?” It was a discussion we’d had before, albeit briefly; she had mentioned the issue during our very first conversation, although there had been so many other things in that conversation that needed my urgent consideration that I hadn’t given that one much thought.
“It’s not the technologies that are dangerous but the corollaries of their usage,” Madame said, “Dellacrusca understood that very well, and tried with all his might to maintain control over their deployment, but the implications were simply too far-reaching. Even when you were young, let alone when I was young, the potential boundaries of the Empire were relatively stable. Communication with the Far East was manageable, the heart of Africa was cut off by the Sahara, and the trans-Oceanic continent was purely legendary until little over a hundred years ago—another world, in effect. It’s not another world any more. Commerce, of all kinds, is increasing dramatically. The plagues we’re exporting seem to be doing more damage than those we’re importing, for the moment...but that’s a danger in itself. You know about the plagues?”
“Only rumors,” I said. “Far travelers are said to be bringing back diseases that the Empire hasn’t seen before, from the east and south as well as the other side of the Ocean. There have been epidemics in numerous major ports, as well as Lutèce.”
“That’s true—and the traffic is worse in the other direction. Settled peoples seem to build up immunities to their endemic diseases, but when they begin to travel afar... Mnemosyne is vulnerable because of its annual influx of summer visitors, but even the Island of Dionysus can’t be completely secure, no matter what precautions I take. Nor is it just a matter of external threats. Railways and the telegraph are changing the internal order of the Empire is a way that politics can’t control. And they might be just the beginning. Even if the Cult of Dionysus and the Cult of Orpheus do join forces, their combined might be impotent to slow down the deluge of change that’s building…but if we don’t, the days when a balance of forces could maintain a certain political equilibrium are over.”
“Does it really matter that much?” I asked. “Even if provinces began to break away from the center...”
“Don’t be naïve, Master Rathenius,” she snapped. “The Empire’s citizens might have forgotten that there was history before the reign of the Divine Julius, and have forgotten the cost in bloodshed of the early revolts, but true scholars know what happened to all the Empires that preceded ours. Secessions and civil wars are things to be avoided at all costs, if humanly possible. Dellacrusca knew that, and Antoine de Mesmay probably knew it too...but I’m far less confident about his widow, and the twins.”
I had never known Aethne de Mesmay well; my impression had always been that she lived meekly in her husband’s shadow, as aristocrats’ wives were supposed to do, having a somewhat colorless personality and somewhat lacking in intelligence—although that, I suppose, must have been a side-effect of my awareness of her occult interests—but I had never studied her with my gaze, let alone painted her. Now I had to assume that I had been mistaken, and that she was actually strong-minded and manipulative. As for her understanding of history, that was a different matter. Her aunt was a great scholar, but the two of them seemed to be at odds now, so the possibility of Aethne taking any advice from Ursule seemed remote.
“Do you really think that the dispute between the Mesmay cabal and the Dellacruscas could turn into a civil war?” I asked.
“Yes, I do, if it escalates” she said. “And if it does, it could start a domino effect that will bring countless other old resentments to the surface, all the way from Brest to Byzantium and Scandinavia to Nubia. We stopped the split becoming an open wound at the bacchanal, but the rift still needs to be healed, if possible. It’s possible that my siding with the Dellacruscas might make things worse rather than better…but if the Marquise is convinced that we’re already in league, or even that we might be...we’ll have to defeat her quickly...if we can. Even that would only be a beginning, with the worst challenges yet to come...”
“So if Tommaso makes you a seemingly-reasonable offer,” I said, by way of summation, “you won’t be able to refuse.”
“In terms of the long game,” she said, cautiously, “if it’s possible for me to make a secure alliance with the Dellacrusca twins, assuming that they really can pick up the pieces of their father’s fractured organization, I would very much like to do so. But I really don’t know whether it’s possible. Their reputation suggests that it isn’t, but reputation is sometimes an unreliable guide.”
“So what do you want from me?” I asked her, curtly.
“That depends on what you can offer,” she said, “and what you’re willing and able to do.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I observed.
“Of course not. I don’t know the answer, yet. I’ll have a better idea when I know what Tommaso Dellacrusca wants from you…assuming that you’ll be willing to tell me.”
“Or able,” I pointed out. “He’s just as likely to feed me a string of lies as he is to feed you one.”
“Indeed. But he must want something from you, or he wouldn’t have asked to see you before anyone else. Either he thinks that you’re the most reliable source of information to which he’ll have access here, or he thinks that there’s something specific you can do to favor his schemes. I presume that we can take it for granted that he does have schemes, of a typically Dellacruscan nature.”
“Probably,” I agreed, dryly. “I can’t help wishing, though, that he’d leave me out of them.”
“He can’t,” Madame said, bluntly. “You might not like being a pawn—nobody does—but whether you like it or not, you’re on the board and in play. You do have freedom of movement, though, within the limits of circumstance.”
“Really?”
“Do you doubt it?”
“If I had freedom of movement,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“Of course you would. You arrived a little sooner than you would have done if Helen had had time to give you a full explanation and make you a formal offer, but she thought—and rightly so—that your life was in danger and that swift action was necessary. She would far rather have brought you here by invitation, I’m sure...seduction, if you like...but as you’ve observed, she was afraid of disappointing me. I’m by no means as terrible in disappointment as she might think, but I have had to cultivate that reputation, for practical reasons, just as Lord Dellacrusca was obliged to do. Over the centuries, I’ve become habituated to it. Mine has been, as I suspect that you’re on the threshold of being able to understand, a lonely existence, and experience taught me a very long time ago that it is safer and more reliable to dominate by fear than by love, even if it’s safest of all to rule by means of a deft combination of the two. But you know now, do you not, that the Island of Dionysus is where you belong? This is the only place of earth that offers you the possibility of a secure and fruitful future, as a Macrobian. Only the possibility, alas…but that is considerably more than you could have anywhere else.”
She was jumping to conclusions. I had jumped to the same conclusions myself when I had first arrived on the island, in spite of the inconvenient circumstances of my arrival, but I had had second thoughts since then, and the summary of my existential situation I’d sketched as I was climbing the mountain had the opposite implication, An earthly paradise the Island of Dionysus might be—but precisely for that reason, it wasn’t where a man like me belonged.
Even if I had agreed with her judgment, though, I would still have resented the fact that she was manipulating me, and the way she was going about it. Perhaps it was inevitable, given her situation, that she had fallen into the same habits as Lord Dellacrusca, albeit with more velvet glove and less iron fist, but that didn’t mean that I had to sympathize.
“You could have issued an invitation ten years ago,” I pointed out. “If Helen suddenly found herself forced to take urgent action, it’s only because you had been watching me for years without every taking the trouble to inform me that you even existed.”
“True,” she admitted. “Force of habit. In hindsight, it was a mistake. Had I known then…but I didn’t. This is now. I might need your help. Would you like to paint me?”
That seemed, in the circumstances, to be a low blow—and also a belated one.
“I don’t think Mariette would approve,” I said, dryly. “And in any case, I seem to have lost my touch.”
“Would Mariette’s disapproval stop you, if you wanted to do it?” she asked. I wondered whether it might be a sincere question, asked because she didn’t know the answer, and would like to know.
“Yes, it would,” I told her, wondering myself whether it was the truth, or just a move in the game. I remembered Helen’s damnation with the faint praise that, although there was no such animal as a trustworthy man, I had at least a spark of decency. Perhaps I had.
Madame shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Personally, I’m far too old for a grand amour, and perhaps for any amour at all, but you’re not there yet. While not taking yourself seriously enough in the respects that matter, you take yourself too seriously in the ones that don’t. Don’t bother to contradict me—I’m well aware of the fact that what matters to you is whatever you think matters to you, and that you’re still too young to have formed a mature attitude to such matters. And it’s no bad thing, from my point of view, for the nexus formed by you, Mariette and Elise, to be more tightly bound, even if the knots have become uncomfortable.”
“”I’m glad it pleases you,” I said, putting as much sarcasm into the remark as I could contrive.
“It does,” She told me. “Partly for magical reasons—but mainly because you’ll go into your meeting with Tommaso Dellacrusca thinking of others as well as yourself. You’ll be thinking of what might be in Mariette’s interests, as well as your own…and Elise’s. Not to mention Hecate Rain’s.”
Again I remembered Helen’s embarrassed attempt to obtain a promise of protection from me. I understood now that it was because she thought that Tommaso Dellacrusca might be harboring a grudge against her—as, indeed, he might be. Perhaps, though, the more interesting aspect of her move was that she thought I might really be able to provide her with a measure of protection—that I might actually have some influence over Tommaso. Evidently, Madame thought the same.
And perhaps they were right. He had tricked me, over the matter of the Orphean manuscript, but it was at least possible that his subsequent apology had been sincere, and that he did feel remorse—that he really did have a measure of respect for me, and that the reason he wanted to see me even before seeing his niece was that he wanted, and valued, my advice about what he should do, both about Elise and about Madame.
I had to bear in mind, though, that that might only be my vanity talking.
“What do you know about the Dellacrusca twins’ relationship with Eirene Magdelana?” I asked Madame.
“Only that they went to see her, every summer. You probably know more about it than I do.”
“I didn’t even know that much,” I confessed. “It came as a complete surprise when Helen mentioned it.”
“Is it important?” she asked. Her tone suggested that she was prepared to believe that it might be. Helen had not been on Mnemosyne during the Ragan Barling fiasco, but Madame must have had reports of it, and must, in any case, have had reports of Eirene’s morpheomorphic talents.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if Eirene was working on the boys’ dreams...well, she was a real artist, and they consented to be taken under her wing…effects of that kind can last a long time.”
“Was she as mad as her reputation suggests?”
“Alas yes, poor thing. She’d long ago lost the distinction between dreams and reality—an occupational hazard among morpheomorphists. But there can be art in madness, as well as madness in art.”
“And magic in madness, as well as madness in magic.”
“Presumably. But the point is that if the boys came under Eirene’s influence, however slightly, that influence might well have been benign. More so than mine, at any rate.”
She could have suggested that I was underestimating myself again, but she wasn’t in a flattering mood.
“I’ve sent a message to Tommaso agreeing to his requests,” she said. “I proposed that I send a boat to collect him at daybreak tomorrow, and I told him that I would request that you meet him, in accordance with his wish, and make arrangements to see his niece, but that it would be a matter for your decision. His reply should reach me very soon, and I shall then be able to send a further message confirming your agreement. I’ve proposed that you meet him in one of the inns on the waterfront of the harbor, but I can change that venue if you wish in my next communication. Is there anything you would like me to add?”
“Will he come alone and unarmed?”
“Of course. I’ve given him a guarantee of safe conduct, which I fully intend to honor.”
“Do you have any objection to his coming to the house to see Elise—assuming, that is, that Elise is willing? I assume that she’ll not only be willing but eager, although I’ll have to check that. Mariette will almost certainly want to be present, though.”
“That’s perfectly agreeable to me. In that case, do you have any objection to my coming to the house to meet him, once he’s had a chance to talk to Elise? It might me more comfortable for both of us not to meet here. What will happen thereafter, of course, depends on the specific proposals he makes. That’s when complications will inevitably set in…and perhaps conflicts.”
“But he’ll hardly be in a situation to make demands,” I pointed out. “Even if his steamer is armed and carrying soldiers, he’ll only require one glimpse of your Sileni to persuade him that he has no possibility of using force.”
“My earnest hope is that any conflicts of interest that might arrive can be settled without any threat of the present or future use of force,” she said. “Even if we can’t reach an agreement, I’d like him to go away satisfied that we mean him no harm.”
