The car that was waiting in the forecourt was a black sedan with opaque windows—nothing as ostentatious as a limousine. It looked like a glorified taxi, and when I climbed into the back I saw that it did, indeed, have a privacy partition like a taxi. The partition was raised, even though rocks are legendary for their deaf-muteness.
“Thank you for coming, Peter,” Rosalind said, although I had been under the impression that I had been the one to demand the information that she was about to impart, or at least dance around. Apparently, she didn’t want to cast herself as the proverbial mountain making an improbable concession to some mere mortal who didn’t even have a prophet’s credentials.
“No problem,” I said, and waited. She knew the agenda as well as I did.
For a long moment, however, she was content to look at me, studying me with her gaze. I honestly don’t think that she was trying to intimidate me, or to emphasize her authority in any way. She really was studying me, perhaps even wondering whether it really might have made a difference if Magdalen had been prepared to suffer me as a lover, or as a suitor—and whether, if so, there was anything that she might have been able to do to further that eventuality.
In the meantime, the car took off, initially turning south-eastwards along the M25.
When Rosalind finally broke the silence, it was to begin long before what I might have identified as the appropriate beginning. “Do you know why I never had any more sons after Rowland?” she asked.
I figured that she was probably expecting a negative answer, and that the question had only been asked as a prelude to an explanation, but as it happened, I thought that I did know the answer—or, at least, that I could make a guess that wouldn’t leave me looking foolish if she had something else in mind. What I actually said, therefore, was: “I believe so.”
Her eyes didn’t grow wide with astonishment—in fact, they narrowed slightly with suspicion. “What did Rowland tell you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “In fact, when we talked about the matter, I was the one who initiated the discussion and made the suggestion. I have an interest in those sorts of genetic choices too, remember.”
She had probably forgotten, but it only took the slightest of prompts to remind her. “Of course,” he said, nodding her head slightly. “Peter Bell the Third. You’re part of a scientific dynasty too—but you weren’t selected in the same way as my children.”
“Not the same way,” I confirmed. “My grandfather thought he knew exactly what he was doing, though, when he decided to produce an heir, and so did my father. They could hardly be unaware, given the advancement of genetics and neurology during their lifetimes. They both knew that taking what measures they could to produce a son pre-equipped to be a scientist carried certain risks…and potential penalties. They had their own experiences to draw on, and they both had to justify the decision to go the clonal route. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of them that it might be safer to find a wife or a surrogate and produce a daughter instead…or as well. I have no sisters, and no aunts, except on my mother’s side.”
“Do you regret that?” she was quick to ask.
“Not particularly,” I said. “I suppose I did envy Rowland, more than a little, back in the day, and there would have been a certain beautiful symmetry about our little molecule of community if I’d had a sister too…but no, I don’t regret it, now.”
“That’s wise,” she said. “Regret is a burden, if not a poison.”
The car had already turned off the M25 at the first southward exit, but I didn’t imagine for a moment that we were heading for the coast. I assumed that the driver had instructions to follow a vaguely circular course, so that we’d always be within comfortable striking range of Heathrow, able to make a swift return once Rosalind decided that the interview was over.
I didn’t attempt to fill the conversational gap. I waited for Rosalind to begin speaking again, and she did. She didn’t ask me to fill out what I’d meant by “I believe so”; she was prepared to take the hint from my remarks about my own family history as evidence that I was on the right track…sufficiently, at any rate, for her not to have to spell out her own thinking, which was bound to be afflicted by a measure of uncertainty. Instead, she cut to the chase. “The bond between Rowland and Magdalen was too tight,” she said. “I hadn’t anticipated that the other circumstances of their planning would affect that. I thought that they’d be much like other pairs of non-identical twins. If anything, I thought the fact that they had different fathers would inhibit their closeness rather than intensifying it. I was wrong.”
“I don’t think you made any mistakes,” I said, quite sincerely. “Nothing culpable, at any rate. There are some things that can’t be anticipated. There’s always a random factor. The fact that Rowland and Magdalen became as close as they did, and that their closeness worked out in the way that it did, wasn’t something you could have anticipated and taken action to prevent. It was just an accident of happenstance.”
She didn’t bother to thank me for my concern. “What I wish now,” she said, “is that they’d been able to follow through—if they’d just got on with it. This is the twenty-second century, damn it. We don’t need to be afraid of incest any more. Stupid taboos of that sort can be set aside, now that there’s no genetic peril involved. Once she’d decided that she couldn’t have you, or anybody else, because of Rowland—however silly that decision was—Magdalen should have had Rowland. Separation, in those circumstances, turned out to be the worst of all worlds. I did urge her to contact you, Peter—and to keep in contact with Rowland too. She did that, after a fashion, but obviously not with any substantial result. I really did do everything I could, Peter—and I need you to make that clear to Rowland. I didn’t forbid anything, and I didn’t compel anything. All I wanted was for Magadalen—for both of them—to be safe and sane.”
She was no longer the perfect model of control she had been when she had summoned me to the Pyramid to receive my orders. I was on board now, doing what she wanted me to do—but she no longer seemed entirely certain what that was, or exactly how I ought to go about it. It was almost as if she were in search of reassurance. Some men might have put out a reassuring hand, and laid it lightly on her wrist, but I was my father’s son, shaped to follow in his footsteps as a scientist, just as Rowland and Magdalen had been shaped to follow in Rosalind’s. After Rowland, she had not had any more sons, and I knew why.
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. “If there’s anything I can do to help repair your relationship with Rowland, I’ll do it—for his sake. I know that you and I seemed to be on opposite sides, ten years ago, but that was just a by-product of the situation. I don’t know what to say to him about Magdalen, though—I don’t know what happened, or how, or why.”
She pulled herself together then, and fixed me with her artificial stare. “The exact details don’t matter,” she said. “I suspect Rowland knows more than I do, although I can’t be sure. If he wants to know whether I was treating her, yes I was—but not in any drastic way. I prescribed her mild euphorics, nothing more.”
“Aether?” I queried. It seemed a natural enough enquiry.
“No,” she said, sharply. “I never prescribed Aether.”
Not a Hive product, I thought. The brainchild of someone else’s genius.
“Some of the stuff I persuaded her to take wasn’t even real,” Rosalind added. “I was hoping for a placebo effect. Love, or lust, or whatever is mostly illusion—if there’s one thing in the world that the placebo effect ought to be able to demolish, it’s the kind of sickness Magdalen had…but nothing worked. Illusory or not, her trouble was stronger than my ingenuity. Whatever you might have read in the yellow fraction of the web, I’m not really making rapid progress in mind control, with the aid of fleurs du mal, and if I were, I certainly wouldn’t be testing them on my daughter. I tried to make her feel better—that’s all. I failed.”
I believed her. Perhaps she regretted, now, that sh
e hadn’t tried anything more drastic, but I was prepared to believe that even Rosalind would have taken a gentle and discreet approach to her daughter’s unhappiness. Her failure to help must have cut her to the quick; she wasn’t used to failure.
“I didn’t know whether the treatment would help,” she said, “but I was sure that it wouldn’t do any harm. I thought it would at least stave off disaster. I really didn’t expect to find her dead. If anything, I’d have expected….”
She didn’t finish that sentence. At a guess, she’d been about to say that she’d have expected the first and only suicide in the family to be Rowland’s, if there were ever to be any at all.
“I’m sorry,” I said, offering my condolences for the fact that Rosalind had not only failed to save her daughter, even by means of subtle trickery, but had been the one to find her dead. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know that there was anything else I could say.
If I’d had to offer my own hypothesis about Magdalen’s suicide I would have guessed that Magdalen had committed suicide because of a sense of desolation that she couldn’t shake off by any means, including Rosalind’s pychotropics and placebos. She had felt that sense of desolation, I estimated, because she couldn’t be with Rowland, but felt that that she couldn’t be with anyone else either, because of Roland, and had felt, in the end, that she couldn’t bear to be alone either. Sometimes, sisterhood isn’t enough, no matter how highly developed it might be. Guessing all that and knowing it, however, were two different things. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Magdalen in years. What did I know? Wasn’t I just projecting from what I’d observed when we were all a good deal younger? Perhaps Magdalen had changed in the interim. I hadn’t, but perhaps she had. I didn’t have any right to offer hypotheses to Rosalind—so I kept quiet. I just kept quiet.
A few moments ago, I’d been surprised that Rosalind had suddenly seemed human, for once in her life. Now, she seemed very human indeed—more so than me, in fact. I felt profoundly uncomfortable.
“I need to know that Rowland’s all right,” she said. “He doesn’t have to talk to me, if he doesn’t want to, but I need to know that he’s all right. He’s my son.”
I could have told her, yet again, that I would do what I could, but she already knew that, and the promise was effectively empty while neither of us knew what I might be able to do. I couldn’t believe, any longer, that she was here in order that I could be more fully informed when I had to answer Rowland’s questions. She was in search of something else, and probably didn’t know what it was. Neither did I.
She didn’t say anything more, though. She looked at me, still probing for an opportunity to meet my eyes. It was my turn; she wanted me to take the conversational initiative—but I had no idea what to say. I glanced out of the window, noting that the setting sun was now to the left of the car’s course and deducing that we had turned northwards, somewhere in the rural wilds of western Surrey or eastern Hampshire, but the dusk seemed gloomier than usual because of the tinted windows and the landscape was too vague to allow precise identification.
Rosalind took the glance, and my consequent expression, as a hint. She switched on the light. Her brass-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes seemed to flare up and intensify their beauty. Rowland, who had rarely descended so far as to refer to his mother as “the Queen Bee,” had sometimes referred to her, just between the two of us, as Ayesha—knowing that I could and would translate that as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
She was still waiting for me to talk. Wherever the car was, it wasn’t skirting the runways at Heathrow. Eventually, I talked.
“My father was a scientist through and through,” I said. “A physicist, like his father before him, not a namby-pamby biologist. A solid-state physicist…and in person, a man of very solid state. He’d probably heard the name Shelley, but he’d never read a poem in his life, and probably wouldn’t have been able to grasp its meaning if he had. He named me in all innocence.”
That broke through her mental blockade efficiently enough. She had little alternative but to raise her stately eyebrows and say: “What on earth are you talking about?”
“There’s a poem by Shelley called ‘Peter Bell the Third,’ which is a parody of a poem by Wordsworth called ‘The Tale of Peter Bell.’ Wordsworth’s poem is about a potter who goes off the rails but is redeemed by an encounter with a supernatural ass—a literal donkey, not a metaphorical one. Wordsworth though it was a masterpiece, but other people—including Shelley—thought it was absurd. There’s a possibility that Wordsworth might have had Shelley in mind when he wrote the poem, Shelley’s initials being P. B., or, at least, that Shelley might have thought so. Shelley’s reply is about a posthumous Peter Bell and his misadventures in Hell. It’s quite amusing—unless your name happens, coincidentally, to be Peter Bell the Third, in which case the sarcasm takes on a considerably sharper edge, and one or two of the insults become decidedly offensive.”
Rosalind thought about that for a moment or two, and then said: “So you understand about the Usher thing, then?”
“Yes,” I said.
I did understand about “the Usher thing,” and why it might add measurably to the embarrassment, if not the tragedy, of two siblings tempted to incest, whether they resisted the temptation or not. That was what I was trying to get across to her.
She took my word for it, and nodded. “I thought it was harmless,” Rosalind told me. “After all, I didn’t call Rowland Roderick, and I didn’t call Magdalen Madeleine. I thought the faint echo was harmless—and I was always slightly disapproving of Daddy’s effective rejection of the name, on what seemed to me to be silly grounds. I hadn’t realized that you were similarly afflicted…but I suppose it’s not that uncommon, given the sheer abundance of the English literary legacy. There can’t be many people around whose names haven’t been pre-echoed in some stupid story—and given the nature of stories, few of the echoes are likely to be flattering. We’re not dealing with curses, though. There’s no causality here.”
“No solid-state physical causality,” I agreed. “But you understand the placebo effect as well as anyone.”
Her blue eyes seemed actually to become brighter as that thrust struck home, and I realized that, for once in her life, Rosalind really wasn’t in control. The blaze in her eyes was just an illusion, though.
I hadn’t even meant what I’d said. It had just been wordplay. Eddie Poe had had no more effect on Magdalen than Percy Shelley had had on me. There was no metaphorical placebo effect in operation. There was no pseudocausal link at all in any echo there might have been in Magdalen Usher’s fate to that of any imaginary predecessor, any more than there was any pseudocausal link between Percy Shelley’s jeu d’esprit and any sensation I might ever have had, or still might have, that I was living in Hell and eternally damned. In both cases, it was purely and simply a matter of the effects of unrequited love—a cliché so old that it had been “pre-echoed” a million times over in life and literature alike.
I wondered whether Rosalind was really capable of understanding what had happened to Magdalen, given that she had probably never experienced unrequited love herself…unless you counted her love for Rowland in that category. Could I be certain, though, that she hadn’t ever loved anyone in the utterly hopeless fashion that Magdalen had loved Rowland? Rosalind’s life-story, as I knew it, gave the impression of someone who had never had the slightest romantic interest in anyone, but publicly-available life-stories can sometimes be deceptive, even when they seem to make sense. What did anyone actually know, after all, about the intimate life of Elizabeth I? And Rosalind did make sense. No matter what other criticisms could be leveled against her, she certainly made sense.
“You need to be careful,” Rosalind said to me, returning to the nub of the matter, “in what you say to Rowland, and how. I’ve told you what little I can about Magdalen’s death, and—more importantly—I’ve told you what I don’t know. I can guess, you can guess, and Rowland will guess too—but at the end
of the day, we don’t know. We never can and never will.”
That was true, in a strictly logical sense.
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
“If I thought I could do this myself, you know, I would,” she told me, unnecessarily. “If I thought one of his sisters…but such is the cruelty of circumstance that we could only make matters worse. You’re the only one who can help him, if he does need help. The only person in the world.”
I wasn’t at all sure that I could help, if Rowland really was in need of help, but I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t make things worse—and I tended to agree with Rosalind that she, or any one of her many surviving daughters, might have made things worse, if they’d tried to force themselves upon him.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised.
She was still looking at me, still studying me. Perhaps she had learned more from our brief encounter than I had. She’d never bothered to study me before, when I was only Rowland’s friend, even though she knew by then how difficult Rowland found it to make friends.
“I do wish things had worked out differently,” she said, in a tone tinged with wonderment. She had always had such control over her life and surroundings that she had never been able to see herself as a victim of circumstances. Now she knew regret, as a burden and a poison. She had more than dozen other daughters, but that didn’t reconcile her in the least to the fact that she no longer had Magdalen, and now had to live with the suspicion that if only she’d done things differently—if only she’d known what to do differently—things might have worked out differently.
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