Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  Precisely because I had never done anything similar before, it had seemed an intriguing challenge, and I had had no doubt, when the Marquis and I shook hands on the deal, that I would rise to it heroically and meet it triumphantly. The thought that I might not be up to it had never entered my head.

  Now…well, I still would not grant it official entry to my head, but the snagging suspicion had crept in anyway, through some unsuspected fissure in my supposedly-impregnable wall of self-confidence.

  The very idea that Axel Rathenius might have accepted a painterly task that was beyond his artistic reach was, of course, as unthinkable as…well, as unthinkable as black snow… but still...

  The fact remained that I had come out to walk to the Sprite—beneath a sky so dismal that any child or moron could have judged that something was likely to descend upon me before I reached my destination, even if only a lunatic could have offered an exact prediction—because I had wanted space to meditate on the problems of painting the Underworld, and I was not doing that. Indeed, I seemed to be doing anything but that, allowing myself to be distracted by Toustain’s bequest, the gloominess of his former dwelling, and the eccentricities of the weather. Clearly, I was out of sorts, not quite myself. I had to shake it off, pull myself together…and above all, stop thinking in clichés.

  For the time being, however, I used the back of my left hand to brush the dirty snow off the right sleeve that my right hand had, inevitably, been unable to reach. Then I reached into my pocket, very gingerly, to take out a handkerchief with which to wipe both hands.

  Then, of course, I had a dirty handkerchief. There are some situations from which a fastidious man simply cannot emerge unscathed.

  Fortunately, I had reached the Sprite. Before going upstairs I went into the tap-room in order to borrow a towel and a clothes-brush from the proprietor’s wife, Madame Auger, who was at her invariable post behind the counter. While she went to fetch it I nodded a greeting to old Nicodemus Rham, who was sitting in a corner with a glass of red wine. There were half a dozen other men in the room I knew by sight, but no one to whom I owed a greeting. No one was taking about the weather, presumably because no one there was yet aware that it was snowing, let alone that the snow was dirty. My clothes, of course, were uniformly black; they did not show the snow because it had melted, and they did not show the sooty deposit it had left behind, because it matched them.

  I tidied myself up as best I could before going upstairs to the upper floor, where I knew that Myrica’s little reception party would be gathered by the bay window in the far corner, so as not to be far away from the fireplace, and asked the proprietress to send the serving-girl up with a hot toddy. Her eyes expressed the surprise that her mouth dared not express.

  “It’s cold outside,” I explained. “We have bleak winter ahead of us, it seems.”

  Madame Auger nodded sagely. A bleak winter would not be bad for business, given that there was always a good fire blazing in the Sprite—two, if the upper room were in use—and when the nights became twice as long as the days, the humble folk of Mnemosyne still sought company, and still told tales around the fire, as if the Age of Enlightenment were something that only affected the upper stories of finer houses.

  The fishermen, stevedores and domestics who formed the regular custom of the tap-room had a habit of referring to the first floor as “the summer palace,” as if the mere presence of the occasional Lutetian aristocrat could create a palace out of bare floorboards and poorly-papered walls, and reduce a population of artists to the ranks of mere court jesters. Given that the one regular summer visitor possessed of real political power, the fearsome Duc de Dellacrusca, never set foot in the Sprite, the designation seemed more hopeful than appropriate.

  II. Awkward Expectations

  The members of Myrica’s welcoming party were the only customers in the upper room, which made the smallness of their number even more glaringly obvious, even without the automatic contrast my own mind drew with the far more convivial tap-room,

  Myrica had not been able to gather much of a court. Hecate Rain was there, of course, and the medium Vashti Savage, but there was not a single musician, or, for that matter any other painter. Even Fion Commonal, who remained an assiduous regular in the upper room in spite of the fact that he was always complaining that his medical vocation and duties as the head of the Island Council never gave him a spare minute, was absent, perhaps having found a bone to set somewhere on the far side of the island. There were only four chairs gathered around the table, and the fourth was occupied by Niklaus Hylne, a self-styled historian who considered himself the island’s foremost antiquary since poor Ragan Barling had been sent to jail on the mainland for double murder and a few petty crimes of lesser esthetic interest. Perhaps he was, given that he had bought a substantial fraction of Ragan’s collection, and had also been conspicuous by his presence and his disdain when old Toustain’s effects had been auctioned off.

  Meager as it was, it seemed that Myrica’s reception committee was about to get even smaller, because I had no sooner stepped across the threshold than Vashti Savage leapt up from her seat and ran—literally ran—twenty-five or thirty paces to meet me. I had known Vashti, casually for nearly twenty years, but I had never seen her do anything so extraordinary before. She didn’t even like me—some people don’t, incredible as it might seem.

  “Master Rathenius,” she said, in a low voice, although we were far enough away from the trio who were staring after her in frank puzzlement for there to be very little danger of their overhearing, “may I ask a favor of you?”

  “Certainly,” I said, there being no danger at all in allowing people to ask for favors, as long as one has not promised in advance to grant them.

  “Would you call on me tonight then, after you have greeted Master Parenot? It should not take long—a matter of minutes.”

  I glanced out of the window—perhaps a little too conspicuously—at the falling snow.

  “I’ll send my carriage back to pick you up,” she said, immediately. “Robert can take you home afterwards. It will save you getting wet, as you obviously walked here.”

  I regretted that my attempt to tidy myself up had been so woefully unsuccessful. Whatever Vashti wanted to talk to me about was evidently something that required privacy, at least in her opinion. I had no reason to decline her request to call in on her, especially as it would earn me a lift home in a closed carriage. As for the favor, I could afford to wait and see...

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I’ll call as soon as I can.” I assumed that I would be doing Robert a favor too, as he would have two opportunities to put his feet up in the Sprite’s tap-room for a while instead of one, and all for the paltry cost of driving me back to the headland—albeit after dark and in poor weather, in all probability.

  Vashti went downstairs then. Obviously, she had not come to the Sprite in order to catch a glimpse of Charles Parenot, whose fame had clearly not spread as far as his loyal agent had hoped and believed, but simply because she knew that I would be coming. It was understandable that she had not wanted to come to my house, fearful of being turned away if I were in my studio. Jean-Jacques, being a perfect model of manservants, has a fine talent for superficially-polite rudeness that can send a chill down the spine of any but the hardiest of importuners.

  I walked over to the corner table and took the seat that the medium had just vacated, where the hot toddy was soon placed before me. Everyone looked at it with polite astonishment. I repeated the explanation I had given Madame Auger, adding a remark about the seeming poor quality of the atmosphere, and the need to adapt medicinal alcohol to the specific requirements of circumstance.

  “You really shouldn’t have walked, Axel,” said Hecate, maternally.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “It was an exceedingly fortunate decision. Had I come by carriage, I would not have realized so soon what a prodigy the snow is.”

  I was fishing, but I only caught an old boot.

/>   “Utterly unheard of, snow in October,” said Niklaus Hylne, taking entirely the wrong inference from my allegation of prodigy. He shook his head, sadly. “I’ve been here nearly twenty years, and I’ve never seen the like.”

  “Axel’s been there longer than that,” said Hecate. “Have you ever known it snow in October before, Axel?”

  “No,” I said, deciding to shelve the news about the black snow, which they clearly did not deserve to hear.

  “How long have you been here, Axel?” Myrica Mavor put in, curiously. She had only been my agent for a few years, and had not qualified at the outset as a seasoned dealer of long standing—she never revealed her age but had to be younger than Hecate, and much younger than Vashti Savage—but she had obviously been familiar with my reputation before I had hired her, and had probably made sufficient inquiries into my previous career to suspect some mystery there.

  “Longer than I care to remember,” I said, with an artificial sigh.

  “There certainly aren’t many people who’ve been here longer,” Hylne put in.

  “There are hundreds,” I corrected him, “if not thousands.”

  “I’m not counting the indigenes,” Hylne said, unnecessarily. “I meant us.”

  His “us” was a bid to be considered part of our company: the company of artists. I could not think of many of us—my “us,” that is not his—who would have considered him part of that select number, but artists are all egomaniacs, and mostly jealous so the assumed exclusion might not have been entirely fair. Niklaus was certainly an intellectual, as well as a relentless gossip, and a serious student of his history as well as a collector of curiosities.

  “And where were you living before, Axel?” Myrica put in, blithely unaware of the fact that her curiosity, if taken much further, might cost her one of her most lucrative sources of commission.

  Fortunately, everyone had their own train of thought to follow, and Hecate cut in before I could reasonably have been expected to come up with the answer I had no intention of providing.

  “Axel isn’t even the oldest of the incomers,” she said. “I was talking to someone only yesterday who said that she remembered him arriving on the island—although she didn’t say exactly when that was.”

  I assume that I was more surprised by that remark than anyone else, but I had no intention of following it up, curious as I was; I wanted to steer the conversation on to safer ground.

  “How long will it be before Parenot’s boat arrives?” I asked Myrica.

  She didn’t get a chance to answer either. Niklaus Hylne asked the question of Hecate that I had not: “Who was that?”

  Hecate blushed slightly. That surprised me. She must have spoken thoughtlessly, not realizing that she was exposing herself—not that I could think of any plausible reason why she should be embarrassed about talking to someone old enough to remember me coming to the island, if anyone did. There might well, as I’d said, have been hundreds, or even thousands, of indigenes who had been here when I arrived, but I would have been prepared to wager that not one of them would have actually remembered my arrival, and I could not imagine that any of the “incomers” who might have preceded me would have had any reason to take note of my taking up residence, which had been accomplished without any publicity.

  Hecate employed the same tactic to avoid answering the question that I had. She looked me in the eye and said, firmly: “How is the Orpheus coming along?”

  She knew perfectly well how the accursed triptych was “coming along.” As one of the very few people to whom my door was not barred, and who was even allowed into my studio, under the strict conditions that prevailed there, she had called in on me two days before, and offered me her commiserations when I explained to her why my progress was so slow that I was only part-way through painting the second panel, and had only sketched the third. Given that she knew that, and that she was supposed to be my closest friend, it seemed a trifle tactless for her to ask such a blunt question in company—especially the company of my agent.

  “Very well,” I lied. “It’s slow work of course, because I’m so very meticulous, but I think the Marquis de Mesmay will be very pleased when it’s finished. I hope he doesn’t intend to spent the entire winter on the island waiting for it, though—there’s really no need for that.”

  “It’s a good job he isn’t here, then, to see you slacking,” said Niklaus Hylne, smiling to indicate that it was supposed to be an amicable quip, not an insult. We had obviously embarked upon a competition of tactlessness. I had no intention of joining in.

  “I did invite him,” said Myrica. “I thought he might come—I’ve sold him three of Charles’ paintings, after all—he even has one of them here on the island. Did he show it to you, Axel?”

  “Yes he did,” I said, rapidly, glad to be back on safe ground. “The man has undoubted ability. Although...”

  I left the remark dangling, deliberately. Surely that hook wasn’t going to be left unbitten.

  “What do you man, although?” Myrica demanded, reliable as ever. “That’s almost as bad as but. I know that painting—it’s first rate.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “And I really didn’t mean anything by the although. You certainly shouldn’t think that I meant to imply anything unfavorable to Master Parenot. I’m not at all familiar with his work, but if his Eurydice is an accurate measure of his talent, he is, as you say, first rate, and you can be proud as well as glad to have him as client.”

  “Eurydice?” Hecate echoed, faintly—but so faintly that no one but me paid any attention.

  Hylne was still determined to be tactless. “Perhaps it’s as well that Monsieur de Mesmay didn’t know that Parenot was coming to the island when he commissioned you to paint the Orpheus triptych, Rathenius,” he said. “After all Parenot has a fine reputations as a mythological painter, while you’re best known as a portrait painter—a portrait painter of genius, of course,” he added, with suspicious belatedness.

  “If Mesmay had wanted Parenot he could have had him,” Myrica pointed out, scrupulously. “He had no particular reason for wanting the triptych painted on the island. He could have commissioned it in the Capital just as easily... even more easily, in a way...”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said Niklaus Hylne. “From what I hear, Mesmay isn’t delaying his return to the mainland simply because he’s waiting for Master Rathenius to fulfill his commission—as Rathenius points out, there’s no reason why he should do that. The word is that he intends to settle here permanently.”

  That was intriguing news, if true—although, given the general reliability of island gossip, it might be so much hot air. If the summer migrants were going to start settling, the island might be on the brink of another economic transfiguration.

  “Why would he do that?” asked Myrica, bluntly, as if the very idea were insane. She often came to the island out of season to pick up paintings, but never stayed long, and didn’t bother renting the cottage she routinely reserved for three months every summer, only taking a room on the second floor of the Sprite. The idea of being permanently resident anywhere but the Capital probably seemed quite bizarre to her, even though she knew full well, at some level, that the world was a big place and populated almost everywhere. For “her” artists, on the other hand, she thought the island was an ideal location. For such a hard-headed businesswoman, she had oddly romantic notions about what made artists tick.

  “That’s a mystery,” said Niklaus, stressing the final word just sufficiently to make it clear that he meant something more than the trivial meaning of the word—not that anybody cared. At least, I assumed that nobody cared.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out to my loyal agent. “When is Parenot’s boat scheduled to arrive?”

  “It should be here by now,” Myrica replied, looking out of the window at the harbor, which was conspicuously empty of anything larger than the usual smattering of fishing-smacks. Parenot was supposed to be coming from the mainland
in a lighter that had sufficient storage space in its hold for his luggage. Painters tend to have a lot of luggage, even when they haven’t just bought a house whose furniture has all been sold off for the supposed benefit of the poor and needy.

  “It’s undoubtedly been delayed by the bad weather,” Niklaus observed.

  “It’s not that bad,” I observed. “The wind has dropped, and the snow is still relatively light. The sea seems calm enough, at present.”

  “It is now,” Myrica agreed. “They might have been late starting out, though, and even if they weren’t, there was a fierce north-westerly blowing earlier, which would have been directly against them.”

  “It was a bitter wind,” Niklaus agreed. “Unusual, for October, and it had an uncommonly bad taste. It looks as if we’re in for a ferocious winter.”

  Myrica was staring out of the window, evidently wondering where the lighter had got to, and perhaps beginning to worry already about the possibility of an accident that might cost her one of her best clients.

  Hecate took the opportunity to lean closer to me and say: “What did Vashti say to you? It must have been very urgent, if she came here especially to see you.”

  “Don’t you know?” I parried.

  “No,” said Hecate, innocently enough. “Which is odd, I suppose, as I’m her best friend and she doesn’t even like you. Although, when we were talking about you before you arrived…” She shut up, obviously realizing that she had let her mouth run away with her again.

  “Really? I said, lightening my voice to make a joke of it, trying to let her know that I wasn’t going to hold it against her. “Doubtless you were complimenting my genius, and she politely refrained from opining that I had none.”

  “Not at all,” said Niklaus. “We were just wondering why on earth the Cult of Orpheus might have commissioned you to paint an altarpiece for them.”