Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  Mariette, judging that she and Elise had warmed themselves up sufficiently, and that they had done all that they could to respond to Myrica’s misfired gesture of welcome, made their apologies and took their leave, wanting to start the difficult business of settling into their new home before nightfall. There were more smiles and reassurances, and I think they really did go away feeling considerably more confident than when they had arrived, even though the snow was still falling indolently, and still presumably hiding its secret blackness. Hecate went with them, and I had every confidence that she would put them further at their ease, and would make a friend of Mariette.

  “It could have been worse,” I said to Myrica, when the three of them had gone.

  “Really?” she said, although she knew that I was right.

  “Eurydice is truly charming,” Niklaus opined, attempting subtle provocation.

  “Yes she is” I said, “but from what Hecate has shown me of her poem, she doesn’t quite fit her image of the woeful nymph.”

  “Too blonde?” Niklaus suggested.

  “Too… composed.”

  “Unlike her daughter,” he suggested, although he was following up his own judgment rather than responding to mine. “If I didn’t know that she was a musician, I’d suspect that one might grow up to be an Amazon.”

  “You shouldn’t have said straight away you wanted to paint her, Axel,” Myrica said. “You worried her mother.”

  “If I did,” I observed, “it’s because you haven’t given her a sufficiently accurate portrait of me. I’m not an ogre.”

  “She’s not her daughter,” Niklaus reminded us—but was quick to add: “That’s obvious just by looking at them. She must take after her father.”

  “Actually, no,” said Myrica. “Not really—not at all, in fact...” She conspicuously didn’t add: If he is her father... She didn’t want to add fuel to Niklaus’ malicious gossip.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve done my duty and I must be going. Don’t worry about the commission, Myrica—difficulties there might be, but nothing that true genius can’t handle. Mesmay will be satisfied… eventually… and my reputation will not only be intact, but broadened. Next year won’t be as lean as this one… especially if I can contrive to overcome Mariette’s unjustified suspicions and paint that divine child entranced by her music.”

  “I think you’re confusing her with Orpheus,” said Niklaus, trying once again to be witty and failing dismally yet again.

  “There’s no danger of that,” I assured him, while I made my exit and headed for the tap-room. Robert did not seem overjoyed to see me, having obviously made himself comfortable while waiting.

  I nodded once again to Nicodemus Rham, still in his corner and still on his own. I was tempted to linger for a few minutes and exchange a few words with him, but I was curious to know what favor Vashti Savage wanted to ask of me.

  She lived in town, so it was only a five minute drive. While Robert fed and watered the horses, without unhitching them, because he had to keep them in readiness to take me home, I rang the doorbell, and was immediately admitted to Vashti’s drawing room by her kitchen-maid.

  “Thank you for coming, Axel,” she said. It wasn’t the first time she had called me by my first name, but it wasn’t usual.

  “It’s no trouble,” I said. “You’ll be doing me a favor if the weather gets any worse—it wouldn’t be pleasant walking back to the headland if the roads have turned to mud and it’s pitch dark. It’s good of you to lend me Robert and your carriage.”

  She got straight to the point. “I understand from the constable that you’ve sometimes helped him in the apprehension of criminals by making sketches from the descriptions of felons given by victims.”

  That took me by surprise. I hadn’t known what to anticipate, but certainly not that.

  “Have you been the victim of a crime, Vashti?” I asked her, as delicately as I could.

  “No,” she said, blushing.

  “Ah,” I said, coming to what seemed to be the natural conclusion, given that she made her living as a medium, supposedly channeling the communications from the spirits of the dead for the benefit of the living. “I didn’t realize that you had visions as well as hearing voices.”

  The principal reason why Vashti didn’t like me, albeit not the only one, was that she knew that I was a skeptic. Although I had never accused her of being a charlatan, she was well aware of the fact that I did not put the same interpretation on her artistry as she did.

  “It’s true that I don’t usually see the souls that communicate with me,” she said, “but in this instance… you’ll probably consider it to be nothing more than a recurrent dream, and I’m willing to admit that you might be right, but still, it is recurrent, and vivid, and I can’t help thinking that it’s an attempt to communicate, made by someone who can’t, for the moment, find her voice. I want to help her, if I can.”

  I was genuinely interested, all the more so as she had made the effort, for once, to concede that she really didn’t know what was happening to her, or what its significance might be.

  “And you think that externalizing the image that you see in your… vision might help with that?”

  “Yes. If nothing else, it will help me focus my own mind, which tends to go adrift when I’m entranced if I can’t concentrate. And then...”

  “You hope that one of your clients might be able to recognize the spirit in question, so that you’ll discover who it is that is trying to communicate… which would be half way to deducing what it is they want to communicate?”

  “Exactly. I knew you’d understand, even though you don’t believe.”

  I made a slight apologetic gesture. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Vashti—it’s just that you and I put different interpretations on what it is that you hear... and see. I don’t doubt that your experiences are real, and meaningful, and I’ll be happy to help if I can. Do you happen to have a sketch-pad and charcoal in the house? I don’t have mine with me.”

  She did—and had them ready to hand, having anticipated the necessity.

  “She, you said?” I queried. “It’s a woman, then. How old, would you estimate?”

  “Thirty, perhaps—no older.”

  “Can you give me an idea of the general shape of her face: round, thin...?”

  “Lean and delicate… a trifle meager, but naturally so, not starved. I don’t think she’s a pauper. Fair hair, by the way, and pale eyes—green, I think, although you won’t be able to indicate that with charcoal...”

  I drew a few tentative lines, questioning her about the adjustments that needed to be made, and we proceeded in a fashion that, without quite becoming routine, I had practiced a number of times, not just for Constable Clovis in the service of the law.

  We had not even got half way through the procedure before I was struck by a strange suspicion. My hand began to move more rapidly, and I did not have to dirty it any further by wiping away incorrect lines. I finished the sketch in record time, with a remarkable alacrity, and used a damp cloth to clean the excess charcoal from my hand.

  Vashti was suitably amazed.

  “How did you do that?” she said. “You must have been reading my mind. You seemed to know what I meant while I was still groping for the right words to express it.”

  “I’m an artist,” I told her. “Tell, me, Vashti, have you ever held a séance at the Marquise de Mesmay’s house? I believe I’ve heard that she has an interest in spiritism.”

  “Twice,” Vashti conformed, “but that’s not a member of her family. Aethne asked me to try to contact her mother, who was in her sixties when she died.”

  “Did you hold the séances in the small reception room?”

  “Yes—the big one’s practically a ballroom, far too large for something as intimate as a séance. Why?”

  “Did you happen to look at the portrait hanging over the mantelpiece?”

  “Portrait?” She was catching on, and her expression took on a hint o
f resentment that was quite unjustified. “I vaguely remember there being a picture, but I have no memory at all of what—or—who it was.”

  “Not consciously,” I agreed. “But you did see the portrait, twice, and your memory did record it, even though you can’t summon up the memory in your normal state of consciousness. When you’re asleep, on the other hand...”

  “A portrait!” Vashti repeated, uncertainly. “I suppose... but how could you possibly know? How could you recognize it from the vague description I was giving you. I hadn’t even contrived to bring it into proper focus in my own mind.”

  “I had help,” I admitted. “I was looking at the face in question less than an hour ago, and quite intently, hoping that I might get the chance to paint it myself. As soon as I realized the direction in which your description was heading, it was easy to complete it.”

  “But you weren’t in the Marquise de Mesmay’s house an hour ago… surely you were in the Sprite.”

  “Yes, I was—and so was she… not the portrait, but the model. Her name is Mariette. If you’d waited for Charles Parenot’s boat to arrive, you’d have seen her yourself, and you would have recognized her instantly.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “I can assure you that it isn’t, and I’m certain that you’ll have a chance to prove it soon enough. Hecate is befriending her as we speak, and she’ll certainly introduce you to her when the opportunity arises.”

  “But she’s dead!”

  “She is, I can assure you, very much alive. There’s not an atom of doubt about it.”

  Vashti seemed quite agitated—more agitated, in fact, than the situation seemed to warrant. Reluctant as she might be to admit that she had made a mistake, and that the image that had appeared in her dream was that of a portrait, rather than one of the dead souls who employed her, as she saw it, as a means of communication with the living, she had no grounds for doubting what I was telling her—the speed with which I’d completed the sketch was proof enough that I too had seen the image that had come to her repeatedly in her sleep.

  “She’s dead, I tell you!” Vashti insisted. “I know it.”

  I thought I understood, but I knew that I had no chance of convincing her with the aid of reason. I had never experienced it myself, but I knew that people who have visions sometimes acquire, along with those visions, an unshakable conviction that what they’ve seen, no matter how improbable it might be, is true and indubitable. It must, I knew, be a matter of some physiological trigger in the brain, some mechanism that attached faith to certain items of belief, and set them beyond doubt. On such psychological stuff are the foundations of religions based—and the fact that such visions sometimes produce flatly contradictory accounts, making it logically impossible for them all to be true, or even very many of them, the logic in question is impotent to defeat the faith that each visionary has in his own vision; whatever has happened in the mysterious depths of the brain has made such doubt literally impossible, on the part of the visionary.

  There was, therefore, nothing extraordinary, in principle, in the fact that Vashti’s vision of Charles Parenot’s Mariette had come with an attachment of the conviction of her demise, even though I had seen her in the flesh and blood, alive if not quite entirely well, less than an hour before. And what I had said to Vashti was undoubtedly true: Hecate Rain would introduce the two of them, when she had the chance.

  I was not sure that Vashti, always a rather highly strung individual—as mediums tend to be—would come through that encounter unscathed, if she retained her unshakable conviction that the image in her dream was someone deceased. I wanted to shield her from the effects of the seeming paradox. Even if she didn’t like me, she was a friend of a friend, and I ought to help her if I could. But I couldn’t do that with logic. It would need art.

  “I think I can see where the confusion arises,” I said, in a voice as soft and soothing as I could contrive. “You and I are looking at this from different angles, as usual. Yes, there is a sense in which the image you saw is dead, and in which the person your unconscious mind is trying to channel—whatever we can mean by that—really does belong to the spirit world… very much so, in fact.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’ve seen the model, but that you’ve only seen the portrait, and the portrait specifically identifies the image as a shade, not merely by the artistry of the representation, but in its title. Parenot is a mythological painter, and in this instance, he painted his wife as Eurydice... perhaps the most famous of all the shades in Hades, according to the relevant mythology.”

  I wasn’t expecting effusive gratitude, necessarily, but not was I expecting her to look at me as if I were a scorpion that had just crawled out of her shoe. I realized, a trifle belatedly, that substituting a fictitious character from mythology for a living individual wasn’t necessarily an advance, from the strict spiritist point of view.

  I hastened to paper over the crack.

  “We have no idea what the real Eurydice looked like, of course,” I said. “If she appeared as herself, given that she seems to be unable to speak, how could she make her identity known? Whereas, by adopting the appearance of a portrait—a portrait that you had seen—she had an opportunity to be recognized. And it worked. You needed a prompt from me, but you did work out who it is that has been trying to call herself to your attention: not Mariette Parenot, but Eurydice herself.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it, of course; I knew perfectly well that there had never been a “real Eurydice” and that she was a fiction, a work of art in every sense of the term—but that didn’t mean that Vashti couldn’t believe it, if it gave her a lifebuoy to grasp while she was in danger of drowning in paradox.

  She was hesitant, but that meant that the battle was half won.

  “You don’t really believe that I’m channeling Eurydice, do you?” she challenged, suspiciously.

  A simple yes would have been too blatant a lie. I had to hedge. “Why not?” I said. “In my way of thinking, it makes perfect sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as you know, I don’t believe that there is a literal Underworld, or spirit world, in the sense that the myth of Orpheus and the faith of spiritism represent them, but I do believe that there is meaning and significance in the ideas. You think of me as a skeptic and disapprove of me because you think that means that I must consider you a liar or a fool, but that’s not the case. I believe that you do experience what you say that you experience, and that even though the images come from within you rather than without, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have anything valuable or interesting to communicate. If we can set aside for the moment the question of whether your interpretation or mine is the correct one, we can examine the truly interesting questions that arise, and the ones to which you quite rightly and very reasonably want answers: Why Eurydice? Why now? And what is she trying to communicate you, albeit in silence?”

  Although I say it myself, it was a very clever deflection, and it did, indeed, succeed in focusing her attention on the three questions with which I’d concluded the speech—which really were the interesting ones, for me as well as for her.

  “Not quite in silence,” she said, by way of amendment.

  “Oh?” I queried.

  “She doesn’t speak—but she sighs.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Lamentation, then?” In Hecate’s unfinished poem, though, the lamentations of her Eurydice were much more voluble.

  Vashti knew that too. “She’s not like Hecate’s vision of her,” she said, tacitly accepting, at least for the time being, that it really was Eurydice who was trying to get in touch with her from the Other Side. “She’s too...”

  “Composed?” I suggested.

  Again, I wasn’t expecting gratitude, but the venom in the glance she shot me seemed far too excessive for such a harmless suggestion.

  “You do know, don’t you,” she said, waspishly, “that Hecate’s poem is really ab
out you?”

  That was a surprise too. I blinked. “What do you mean?” I queried.

  “That it’s not really Eurydice’s lament that she’s pouring into the poem but her own.”

  So I was being cast as Orpheus now. It was better, I supposed, than a Bacchic consort of maenads… although there was something of the maenad about Vashti, for the moment, and even Hecate had her moments...

  I wrenched my train of thought back to the matter in hand. “Did she tell you that?” I asked, skeptically.

  “No, of course not—I’m not even sure that she’s conscious of it, but it’s obvious.”

  Not to me, I had to admit—and, indeed, I couldn’t believe it. I shook my head, which was enough to annoy Vashti again. Obviously, doing her the favor that she’d steeled herself to beg from me hadn’t made her any better disposed toward me.

  “You do know that she loves you?” she shot at me.

  “Of course—just as she knows that I love her.”

  “Not enough to marry her.” Another surprise. That was Vashti’s own idea too; I was absolutely certain that Hecate Rain would never have told her that she had the slightest desire to marry me.

  “I love her enough not to marry her,” I told her. “It’s not the case that good friends make good spouses. Hecate and I have been lovers in the past, but neither of us felt any inclination to perpetuate a circumstance that both of us, by virtue of our essential nature, can only experience ephemerally. You’ve misinterpreted the poem, Vashti. Of course Hecate’s own feelings are entangled with her version of Eurydice’s lament, but I’m not what she’s regretting. If you’d waited until the poem was finished, you’d have understood that.”

  “Have you seen the ending, then?”

  “No, because she hasn’t written it yet—but I understand Hecate, better than you do, I believe, and I know, at least, where it isn’t going. I’m not her Orpheus, and if I were, it wouldn’t make any difference, because that’s not the real substance of her lament. I can’t speak for your Eurydice, obviously, or for Charles Parenot’s, but I can speak for hers.”