Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  By the time I got to Hecate’s house, the sun was some way above the horizon. Even so, she was still in bed. I didn’t have to kick my heels in her drawing room, though; I still had access to Hecate’s boudoir, although—or rather because—the only thing we did there nowadays was talk.

  I watched her take off her night-dress and begin putting on her underwear, admiring the contours of her thighs and hips. She was still beautiful, even though her face was showing more evidence of age than she would have wished, and I was still able to obtain a full measure of artistic appreciation from the texture and movements of her body as she clothed it delicately in silk. I had painted her five times, but never in the nude; her nudity had always been a private appreciation. Once, the appreciation had been confused by lust, but we were past that now, and it was far purer, in esthetic terms. I could have made love to her of course, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but I felt no animal urgency to do so. It was primarily as an artist that I savored her appearance and her odor, and primarily as an artist that I loved her—no less deeply for the quietude of animal lust.

  As soon as her most intimate areas were covered, white she was still making her selection of outer garments, favoring dark garments for a change, in case it snowed again, she interrogated me with her gaze. I showed her the piece of paper on which I’d made the second copy of the symbols of the parchment—or the third, if the one that Tommaso Dellacrusca was already transporting across the continent in the direction of the Capital were reckoned to be the first, as it was probably entitled to be.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “It’s a secret. The late Monsieur de Toustain thought it important enough to warrant burying himself away as a hermit for the last decade of his life and more, and didn’t want it to go up for auction with the rest of his paltry belongings. Why he left it to me, I don’t know—perhaps because he’s hidden it in the binding of a book and he figured that the best place to hide a book is in a library. He knew I had one, of sorts, and probably wasn’t in a position to compare its size with any of the others on the island. At any rate, the secret is partly out, thanks to that unctuous idiot Guillot, and secrets being what they are, it’s not going to rest until it escapes its prison.”

  “And you think I might be able to help you solve it?”

  “Yes I do.”

  She laughed. “By mans of poetic intuition?”

  “No—by taking it to someone who might have the necessary expertise, to whom you have access and I don’t.”

  Hecate didn’t need that spelling out—not simply because of her intelligence, but because she was feeling twinges of conscience.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “I was going to tell you about it. You know I don’t have any secrets from you…not for long, anyway. I just wanted to see whether I could do it first, so I didn’t risk making a fool of myself.”

  Intelligent as I am, I couldn’t make sense of that without further information. “You don’t owe me an explanation, Hecate,” I told her, mildly, “and you’re perfectly entitled to keep as many secrets as you wish. It’s really none of my business why you’ve been visiting the Convent, or even why the Mother Superior has been asking you questions about me. But if what you said yesterday about her having a better library than Niklaus Hylne, and being a genuine scholar, is true, then she probably has a better chance than he has of helping us figure out what this weird script might be.”

  Hecate nodded. “I’ll take it to her,” she agreed. She kept her eyes on the mysterious symbols, not because she was trying to understand them but because she didn’t want to meet mine. “I’m probably too old to be learning new tricks, and after some of the things I’ve said in the past, I feel a bit of a hypocrite, but… thanks for understanding. Why did Vashti Savage ask you to go to see her yesterday?”

  It really didn’t seem fair that Hecate was asking for my explanations while stubbornly refusing to let go of hers, but I knew that she wasn’t trying to cheat me. She really was embarrassed about whatever reason she had for visiting the Sisters of Shalimar, and needed a little more time to collect herself.

  It could have been argued, too, that as Vashti had been so careful to conceal the favor she had asked of me from her companions in the Sprite, including Hecate, I owed her an obligation of confidentiality, but I’m a painter, not a physician or a notary.

  “She’s been having a recurrent dream,” I told her. “Naturally, she construes it as a vision. She thought I might be able to help clarify it. I tried.”

  “A vision of what?” Hecate asked.

  “Eurydice. She didn’t know it was Eurydice, but she does now.”

  “Ah,” said Hecate. It was more of a sigh than an exclamation of comprehension.

  I waited; I knew there was more to come, on that subject as well as the matter of the Convent.

  There was, of course, a third topic of interest suspended between us, and Hecate still needed time, even though she was now fully dressed.

  “I’ve made friends with Mariette Parenot,” she told me. “I like her. I promised that I’d go to see her tomorrow, when they’ve sorted things out. That shouldn’t take long, as you’ve lent them Jean-Jacques and Luzon.”

  She paused, but that was merely the preface. She had something to tell me.

  “And?” I prompted, obligingly.

  “She’s frightened. You probably noticed it in the Sprite.”

  “I did,” I confirmed. “The little girl seemed uncertain too… except that in the mother, it’s a straightforward anxiety, whereas in the child… well, perhaps it’s simply because she is a child, and hasn’t yet learned how to be frightened.”

  Hecate looked at me directly for the first time. “That’s an odd thing to say, Axel. Does one have to learn how to be frightened?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “The thrill of the nerves might be reflexive, excited by stimuli external to consciousness, but conscious fear, the interpretation of fear, requires education and practice, just like every other conscious emotion.”

  “Including love?”

  “Especially love.”

  She was looking at me hard now, but for the moment, she went back to Mariette’s anxieties, “They didn’t leave the Capital because Myrica talked them into coming to the island,” Hecate told me. “If my guess is right, all three of them would rather have stayed where they were, and maintained their relationship as it was, in the safety of established habit, but… Vashti’s not the only one afflicted by recurrent dreams, and not all of them are as ethereal as visions of Eurydice. Mariette has been troubled, and has become convinced that their house on Martyr’s Mount was haunted. I don’t know whether Parenot has felt anything directly, but in a household, one person’s haunting automatically becomes everybody’s. They felt they couldn’t stay there. Except, of course… you know how these things work.”

  “Not really,” I admitted, “but if what Niklaus said is true, I assume that what Mariette is really frightened of is that now Parenot no longer needs her too look after the child, he’ll no longer need her, period—and she doesn’t want not to be needed. And what the child would probably be frightened of, if she’d learned how, is what all sensitive children ought to be frightened of when they get to her age: growing up.

  “I gather from Myrica that Parenot has a long struggle to arrive at the kind of financial security he’s now acquired, not because he lacks ability but because his work is too conventional, too ordinary. He trained with Yvain Deloffre in the days when the great man used to take in pupils and was at the height of his arrogance, and Parenot is still painting the way Deloffre taught him to paint, still following Deloffre’s rules and conventions, like a dozen other mythological painters I could name.

  “While it was all a struggle, compounded by the responsibility of looking after the foundling, they were presumably a tightly-knit unit, just trying to get from one day to the next. Now… Elise is growing up, very evidently, even without praise being heaped on
her supposed musical ability, Parenot has all kinds of possibilities in front of him, and Mariette must fear that she might become surplus to requirements. They’ve represented coming to the island to themselves as making a fresh start, but they’re probably all anxious that it might actually be the end, the disintegration of what they had and a plunge into the abyss of the unknown.”

  “I told you that you know how these things work,” Hecate said, with a wry smile. “Except that in this particular case, there’s something else, something strange...”

  “There always is,” I said. “Generalizations only see the pattern, but every individual case is different. Eurydice is everywoman, but every woman is different. Mariette isn’t your Eurydice—or Vashti’s. As I said about Parenot’s painting, although it’s obvious that she’s supposed to be a shade, there’s nothing else distinctive about the image—she could be anyone. I thought of that, reflexively, as a flaw, but perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s the whole point: Eurydice can be anyone to the contemplater of the image and the legend, and her lament can be anyone’s lament. She’s ubiquitous.”

  “It isn’t just growing up that’s frightening,” Hecate observed, with a sigh. “That’s just what’s frightening at twelve. When you get to our age... it’s growing old that frightens us.” She wasn’t thinking about herself, although she was keenly away of every hint of deterioration she saw in the mirror. She was thinking about Vashti Savage, and the possible significance of her visions of the potentially-ubiquitous Eurydice.

  “It comes to us all,” I said, simply because it was neutral, conventional and meaningless.

  “Except you,” said Hecate, with a hint of envy. “You don’t look a day older than the day I met you.”

  “I’ve been fortunate,” I admitted. “My deterioration has been mostly internal. If I really were the sorcerer that Constable Clovis and all the other superstitious fools on the island suspect me of being, though, I’d take twenty years off my appearance and manifest myself as a young Adonis.”

  Again, the comment was conventional and expectable, and that was why I had made it—but Hecate was still looking me in the eyes, and she knew me better than anyone else in the world.

  “That’s a lie,” she said, with a slight hint of surprise at the realization. “Doubtless, if and when you were a young Adonis, you reveled in it—but it wouldn’t suit your image now at all. Now, you’re a great artist, and you can’t project that image without a suitable maturity, an appropriate appearance of experience that implies wisdom and world-weariness. If you really were a sorcerer, and could paint your own portrait in your flesh, you’d be exactly what you are, and have been for... for as long as I’ve known you, and God only knows how much longer.”

  She was absolutely right of course, but it was only to be expected. I couldn’t have loved her as much as I did if she hadn’t had that intelligence and insight as well as her physical charms.

  “Is Vashti’s infatuation becoming problematic?” I asked her, by way of deflection. “I don’t know what the precise significance is of the stirrings of her unconscious, but she’s certainly wound up.”

  Hecate sighed again. “Yes,” she said. “I thought that might be one of the advantages of getting older—that I wouldn’t give rise to any more obsessions. And it seems to work, with the boys, although, as you know very well, that relief is mingled with regret. But with Vashti… it’s a different matter. I’d have no problem with allowing her to make love to me, although it’s not my preference, as you also know… but she wants far more than that. She wants possession. That I can’t give her, and can’t pretend—but there doesn’t seem to be any way of curing her of the ambition. I have more sympathy with Mariette, if you’re right about her fears, although, in the abstract, she could do without that level of commitment much more easily than Vashti. She’s young, beautiful…but none of us has command over her heart, does she? At the end of the day, no one can command their emotions… except perhaps you.”

  “Not even me,” I told her, and not because it was as the conventional, neutral, expectable thing to say. I was swift to add: “I hate to hurry you, but I really would like to get that puzzle to the Mother Superior as soon as possible. There seems to be something of a race developing, and you know how I hate to lose a race.”

  “I’ll go right away,” she said. “You must be in a hurry, if you’re prepared to send me away before I’ve explained why I’ve been going to the Convent.”

  “As I said, you’re perfectly entitled to keep secrets from me, for whatever reason you please,” I assured her, knowing that she was at least going to tell me, even if she wasn’t going to provide an elaborate explanation.

  “I’ve changed my mind about musical accompaniment,” she said, bluntly. “But I don’t want to work with anyone else, so I’m learning to play an instrument myself—the marine trumpet.”

  She was already on her way out of the door, not so much hurrying to fulfill my commission by taking the cryptogram to the Mother Superior, but running away to hide her embarrassment.

  I let her run.

  VII. Clarifications

  One puzzle, at least, had now been clarified. Hecate had not said much, but she had said enough for me to work out the rest. She was a lyric poet living in an artists’ colony replete with ambitious musicians, many of them as ambitious in the business of seduction as they were in their art—and many of whom made no little or no distinction between music and seduction, considering the playing of their instruments as an intrinsically amorous exercise. Players of stringed instruments, in particular, expert in fingering the strings and wielding the bow, tended to be keenly aware of the potential symbolism of their actions and the potential effects of their harmonic productions. Nor was there any misrepresentation in that awareness, because music really does have the power to stir the emotions, to simulate and to stimulate amour.

  Hecate was a beautiful woman. Some men, in fact, might consider her even more beautiful now, in her maturity, than she had been in the full bloom of her youth. Tastes differ, and change. In my youth—when I was, I fear, by no means an Adonis—I had yearned and pined after young women, who had set the standard of beauty for me. Now, although I could still appreciate the beauty of youth, and still pay homage to it in my art, I could also appreciate a broader spectrum of beauty, with more subtle hints and hues, and I was a better artist for it, because it increased my sensitivity. Hence, I appreciated Hecate no less now than in her younger days, and perhaps even more.

  In her younger days, however, the tendency of young men to become infatuated with her and obsessed by her had been more marked, and by virtue of her environment, the laws of probability had dictated that a high percentage of them were musicians, who did everything possible to use their own artistry as temptation. One such stratagem, obviously, had been that of aspiring to accompany her lyric poetry with their instruments, to fuse their art with hers in a representation of the carnal fusion they desired.

  Abundantly possessed of carnal desires of her own, Hecate had never been unafraid to indulge them, with musicians as with others, but she had been no more willing then than she was now to grant anyone possession of her body, her soul, or—above all—her art. She had known full well for a long time, aided by a few bitter experiences, that she did not have sufficient command over her emotions to sustain her particular lusts for very long. Like me, she was incapable of sustaining the kind of ideal of love that Vashti Savage and many other people tried to maintain: the notion that one single individual could supply all of a person’s emotional and existential needs permanently. Like me, she considered that notion of “true” love to be essentially illusory, and the obsessive determination many people seem to have to find or achieve to be rooted in psychological anxiety rather than reality.

  For that reason, although she had surrendered her flesh to musicians when the whim took her, she had never allowed them to become her accompanist in what she considered to be the more precious and intimate sense, by allowing them to fuse
their music with her poetry, and their creative process with hers. She had always justified that refusal by means of an esthetic argument, insisting that her poetry, although lyric in a technical sense, was wrought for the voice alone, and could not be ameliorated by any musical accompaniment.

  Ill-wishers, of course—and even Hecate had a few, beauty having its costs as well as its benefits—had always suggested that her insistence was simply a consequence of her inability to play a musical instrument, and her incompetence in fully understanding the potential of music. It was an argument I had heard voiced several times, sometimes by jealous women and sometimes by discarded lovers. False or not, it had inevitably become something of a sore point, relative to which even I could not have a safe discussion with Hecate.

  Now, apparently she had changed her mind, or at least retreated slightly from the position she had defended so assertively for so many years. She had decided that her latest work, “Eurydice’s Lament,” would benefit from musical accompaniment, and therefore needed musical accompaniment, which she was determined to provide herself. I had no doubt that she had come to that conclusion on purely artistic grounds, and that her choice of an instrument was made on the same grounds, and not because she thought that a marine trumpet might be the easiest instrument to learn, by virtue of only having one string—an assumption which would, I assumed, have been false, although I could not claim to be an expert.

  A marine trumpet is not a kind of trumpet. It is, in fact, a single-stringed instrument from which a range of sounds can be extracted by various manipulations of the single string, adapting its length by applying pressure at various points along an extent considerably greater than the typical length of the strings of multi-stringed instruments. Effectively, one can imagine a marine trumpet as a kind of viol—perhaps more akin to a cello than a violin—which has its strings mounted sequentially rather than in parallel.