The Pool of Mnemosyne, page 8
“And if he wants to take Elise away?”
“That’s up to Elise and Marianne…and you. If she wants to go with him and he wants to take her, I won’t interfere. Helen really did bring her because she thought she was in danger. Do you think she was wrong?”
“Perhaps not,” I conceded. “I thought I wasn’t in any danger until I was actually stabbed. Once that had happened, I was frightened myself that I might have made a mistake in telling Elise that the Marquise couldn’t possibly want to hurt her. Given what you’ve just told me, though, it might have been a mistake to leave Parenot behind.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed. “But there were questions of practicality as well as the detail of the instructions given in advance. Helen did what she thought best...”
She broke off because she had been interrupted. The message whose imminent arrival she had just announced had arrived, brought in by a Silenus. Madame read it. She didn’t show it to me, but she nodded in satisfaction.
“Everything is agreed so far,” she said. “When I receive a reply to my reply, everything will be settled. I’ll write it now. Will you wait for a few minutes?”
“I’d rather relay the information to Elise and Mariette,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll raise any objection, but if they do, you’ll need to know about it quickly. If you have any further instructions....”
“I haven’t given you any instructions,” she interjected. “I have no intention of doing so. You’re free to act as you see fit. We really are on the same side.”
She was probably right. I certainly wasn’t about to contract her. The sun was already setting, and twilight didn’t last long in the latitude of the island, I didn’t want to have to go down the hill in the dark, although the path was safe enough, and was even fitted with lanterns at intervals, which the Sileni were careful to light.
VI. Tommaso Dellacrusca’s Proposals
I was up bright and early, although I knew that the boat that would fetch Tommaso to the island wouldn’t be able to make the two-way journey until the sun was high in the sky. I hadn’t had much sleep, mostly because Mariette hadn’t been able to sleep at all. She was the only one who seemed frightened; Elise, as I had anticipated, was both excited and intrigued by the prospect of a visit from her uncle—an uncle who had only spoken to her once, with the utmost politeness and charm. She wasn’t afraid at all, all the more so because I had emphasized the fact that it would be entirely up to her to decide what she wanted to do as a result of her conversation with her uncle, if anything. Not unnaturally, that assertion hadn’t reassured Mariette, but had merely added to her anxiety.
Equally naturally, Mariette had bombarded me with a thousand questions, hardly any of which I could answer, at least until I had seen Tommaso and had some idea of why he had come and what he wanted.
The tavern in which I was to meet him seemed eerie in its emptiness. Apart from a single waitress there was not a human to be seen, although there were Sileni posted at the door and others within earshot distributed around the harbor, where the usually daily activity was distinctly muted.
I sat down at a table in the middle of the room, which would normally have had others close by but around which an eccentric cordon sanitaire had now been contrived. I had a bottle of wine uncorked and two glasses placed on the table, and I waited. I had turned up early enough to become distinctly fidgety, but I refrained from pouring myself a glass of wine, thinking that it might be as well to keep a scrupulously clear head.
Eventually, he came in, abandoned by his escort at the door. Inevitably, he took a long look at the stony faced Sileni before coming to take his seat, but he didn’t make any comment on them. He was dressed in the conventional fashion of the young Empire aristocracy, but wore the black jacket, frilled shirt and red cravat with elegance and authority. Many of the young men who strutted around Mnemosyne during the summer season looked like fools and fops putting on an act, but Tommaso seemed born to the role—as, indeed, he had been, although no one would have been able to tell three years before. It struck me for the first time that he was an exceptionally handsome young man, and that his new-found aristocratic attitude set off that masculine beauty perfectly.
I only hoped that Elise didn’t fall head over heels in love with him at second glance.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Master Rathenius,” he said, while I filled his glass and mine. “I must confess that I find your presence quite reassuring. I really didn’t know what kind of reception I was going to get, and the sight of the hairy fellows in the square outside didn’t reassure me at all. Satyrs?”
“Sileni,” I told him, but didn’t pause to explain the difference. “You’re perfectly safe here, Tommaso. No one has the slightest intention of harming you.”
He smiled, faintly, and then said: “You have no reason at all to trust me, Master Rathenius after…you know when…but believe me, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. My world has been turned upside-down, and yours too, I think. I would really appreciate it if we could make a fresh start.”
I nodded, making no promises.
Then, without any forewarning, the surprises began. He took a sealed envelope out of the inside pocket of his impeccable jacket. “First of all,” he said, “I’ve been asked to give you this. You might not be able to believe me, but for what it’s worth, I swear that I haven’t had it opened, and I don’t know what it contains. It’s from Hecate Rain.”
I suppressed my amazement and unsealed the envelope. I took out the single sheet of paper within it and opened it, in such a fashion that Tommaso couldn’t read it. He made no attempt to do so, ostentatiously. There was an exceedingly short handwritten message on the page, which read:
Axel. It is absolutely imperative that you return as soon as possible. Remember the dark petals fallen into the pool of Mnemosyne. Hecate.
I had not an atom of doubt about the note’s authenticity, not because of the handwriting, which could have been forged, but because of the second sentence of the missive: a line from a poem that, so far as I knew, I was the only person ever to have heard recited. I was certainly the only person to whom its meaning had ever been explained. I assumed that it was there purely and simply to provide a guarantee of authenticity. As for the rest of the message, all the terms of endearment that were conspicuously missing from it were presumably absent in order to emphasize the utter seriousness of the instruction.
I folded the note up and put it away inside my own jacket.
“You’ve been to Mnemosyne,” I observed.
“Yes—incognito, this time. It’s not a safe place for me any longer. I had accumulated news of you from various sources, and while I was there I wanted to pass on reassurances to some of your friends, as a gesture of goodwill—needlessly, as it turned out. Your man Jean-Jacques had already received a copious letter, and so had Hecate. I couldn’t reach Charles Parenot. You know why, I presume?”
“I’ve heard a rumor,” I said.
“It’s true. The Marquise has commissioned him to work on a painting in her house. I don’t know any more than that for sure. If Hecate knows what’s going on between the two of them, she wasn’t about to tell me, any more than your man Jean-Jacques was willing to give me any information, although I suspect that he’s a better spy than any of mine, on his home ground. There are some who think that Hecate is working with the Marquise on conjurations of some kind, as Vashti Savage seems to be, but the one thing Jean-Jacques was prepared to say to me, insistently, was that I shouldn’t believe any gossip I heard about her. She’d been to see him too, to give him news and collect it. He insisted that she would never betray you. I believed him...but if he’s right, she might be playing a dangerous game. She’s been spending time in the Convent of Shalimar, and relations are very strained at the moment between the superior and the Marquise. She might simply be trying to smooth things over between the two of them, but I don’t think so. Something is going on. Maybe you know more about it than I do now.”
He nodded in the direction of my jacket pocket, although he must have known, even though he couldn’t read it, that the note he’d brought me was terse in the extreme.
I nodded again, and waited. He was hesitating, although he had obviously come with a plan, and a script.
“I know that it was you,” he said, simply, when the hesitation had finally run its course.
“What was me?” I asked.
“It was you who stopped me killing the Marquise on the night when your picture sang. Most of the people there, my men as well as hers, thought it was a trick on the part of the Marquise, but I knew. So did Hecate Rain. Nobody else heard it, I don’t think, but I heard her say “Adieu,” and I knew that she was saying it to you. But I’d have known anyway, because of the dream.”
“Dream?” I echoed, mystified.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you—but first, you knew, didn’t you, what Lorenzo and I went to do that night? We were outnumbered, although not to the extent that we were on the night when my father was killed, but we didn’t care. We were prepared to die, if that was what it took. There was a debt to be paid, and we had a list, by then, of the people who needed to pay it. Every one of them was in the room—including the second assassin that she sent after you, by the way. We intended to kill every last one, no matter what the cost. I was supposed to take out the Marquise. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Not exactly,” I told him, “but Madame knew that there was a mortal danger, and she wanted to stop it. She used the portrait, and me, to work some kind of spell. I don’t understand what happened, or how, but yes, somehow, in spirit, I was there.”
He nodded, as if he had needed conformation of that, and was relieved to have it, in order to remove a stubborn residue of doubt.
“What dream?” I asked, again.
“I dreamed the night before that I saw you. I dreamed that you told me not to do it, that there was a better way than murder. I didn’t know at the time that it was the dream…I thought it was just any old dream, just the product of ordinary anxiety. But when the picture started singing, and I knew you were there, I knew that it was the dream—the one I’d been told to expect, years before.”
“By Eirene Magdelana?” I had no difficulty guessing.
A cloud of suspicion passed over his face. “How do you know that?”
“I learned yesterday that Madame’s spies had reported that you and Lorenzo went up Snowspur to see her every year. It was news to me, but things are beginning to add up now. I’m amazed, though, that she told you years ago that you would one day have a dream about me.”
“She didn’t. I had no idea when she told us about the dream that it would involve you, and I don’t think she did either. She just told us that they would come a time, at a moment of crisis in our lives, when we would have a meaningful dream, in which the unconscious part of our mind would communicate something to our consciousness, using as a mouthpiece someone we thought that we could trust, and that if we were wise, we would attend to what the message said. I didn’t talk to Lorenzo about the dream until afterwards, but when I told him, he confirmed that he’d had the same dream, I’d never really believed until then that the old woman really could see the future—and even then, I suppose, it wasn’t really seeing the future...because she’d told us that was impossible…but anyway I’d never really believed she could do anything magical, until then. But I believe now, and I’m truly sorry that she’s dead.”
“So am I,” I murmured.
“The first time we met her,” Tommaso said, “we just wanted to climb the mountain—not that it was really climbing, even for a couple of kids; just a long uphill walk, really, but tiring. Anyway, she found us, and talked to us—that was rare, you know. We were treated like lepers, and we didn’t understand why. It was only years later that we realized that it was because people thought that our father was the devil incarnate…but that’s old news, and you probably remember and understand better than we do how we reacted to the way people treated us. But the old woman didn’t look at us that way. She told us that we were special because we were identical twins, that we had a shared soul, and that as long as we stuck together, and never betrayed one another, we’d always have twice the strength of any single soul.
“Looking back, I suppose that it was mostly just flattery, but it wasn’t all nonsense, and she really believed that there was something to it. We couldn’t understand most of what she said, which I now suspect is because much of it was incoherent, but what we did understand, we took aboard, She told us that she could teach us how to educate our dreams, how to make use of them. While we were children, she said, that would only help us to make them more pleasant, and help us to laugh at nightmares, but that if we stuck at it, when we were adults, it would become useful to us, because while our conscious minds were learning about the world by means of our senses, out unconscious minds were learning too, by what she called morpheomorphic resonance.
“We didn’t understand the jargon, obviously, but we got the gist of the argument…and we really did learn, over the years, to generate pleasant dreams and laugh at nightmares. But she told us that there would eventually come a time, probably at critical turning point in our lives—the death of our father was one of the examples she cited—when our conscious minds would be in turmoil. At that point, she said, our unconscious minds would have a better understanding of the situation we were in than our waking minds could grasp, and that it would be able to make its understanding clear to us, by using the image of someone we thought trustworthy to tell us something that we needed to know, in order to save us from danger. The unconscious mind couldn’t predict the future, she said, because the future was unmade and unfixed, but it could sense ominous possibilities, and offer warnings, which we’d be wise to follow.
“So, when I dreamed about you the night before we had decided to risk everything in order to obtain our vengeance, I didn’t immediately realize that it was that sort of dream—but when I did realize, I knew, and I knew that what you’d said in the dream had to be true: that there was a better way than murder, and that I should wait. So I gave the signal to abort the plan, and Lorenzo knew immediately that something had happened. We withdrew.
“The Marquise thought she’d won, that we were giving in. But you were right. Since that night, we’ve found out a great many things that we didn’t know then. In fact, we’ve found out more about our father in the last few weeks than we ever found out in all those years of living with him…or, at any rate, living in his house. He left us quite a legacy, although it took some finding, and it’s going to take an awful lot of work to figure out how to use all the information profitably. It won’t be easy, but I really do think that he’s left us everything we need to take up the reins of his operation, if we’re clever and careful, and to crush any opposition that presents itself, without having to commit suicide in the process.”
He finally paused, and waited for a reaction. All I could think of to say, for the moment, was: “You trust me?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I told you that before,” he said. “You were the only person in island of Lutecian society who ever treated Lory and me half-way decently. There were times when you could have ratted us out, and didn’t. You don’t imagine, I suppose, that I could have dreamed about my father instead?”
On reflection, I didn’t suppose he could.
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad things have worked out for you—and glad, too, that I played my part, however unwittingly in preventing a bloodbath. And now, I suppose, you want me to act as an intermediary between you and Madame, in the hope of forging some kind of alliance?”
“If that can be done, I’d be glad of it—but I’m not sure I could possibly trust her, given the history I’ve recently been studying with an intensity of which I’d never thought myself capable. I’ll enter negotiations with her, obviously, but I’ll be treading exceedingly carefully. No, that’s not why I came, and not why I wanted to see you.”
“It is because of Elise, then,” I said, congratulating myself on my superior judgment—a trifle prematurely.
“Partly. I certainly want to talk to her, and discuss the best way to prepare for her future—but that’s really up to her. I certainly wouldn’t be happy, now, to return her to Parenot’s custody, but rumor has it that Parenot’s out of the picture anyway, and that you’re now her guardian. If she’s happy with that, then I’m certainly happy. If not, I’ll be pleased to make whatever alternative arrangements we can both feel comfortable with. But there is one awkward complication, which is the real reason I’m here.”
“Which is?” I said, warily.
“I’d like you to return to Mnemosyne, with or without Elise.”
I felt an inevitable twinge of suspicion regarding the letter from Hecate, suspecting some collusion, but I suppressed it.
“Why?” I said.
“Because the one other person who knows for certain that it was you who worked the magic the night the Orpheus sang is the Marquise. She was already scared of you, which is why she tried to have you murdered, and the fact that you escaped with not much more than a scratch, and then disappeared, along with Elise, frightened her even more. When the picture sang…no matter how successful she was in convincing others that hers was the sorcery powerful enough to contrive that, she knows that it wasn’t. She knows—or at least believes—that there’s at least one sorcerer in the world more powerful than she is, and fully capable of scotching her schemes: you.”
“I’m not a sorcerer, Tommaso. I was there, it’s true, but I was just an instrument.”
“Hecate said that you’d say that. She said that you probably believe it, that you simply won’t admit to yourself that you’re a sorcerer.”
“Hecate said that, did she?” I said, dryly. It was easy to believe. I couldn’t even hold it against her.
