Euridyce's Lament

by Brian Stableford

  “Not entirely pure,” he said. “No, I couldn’t possible arrange to have the volcano erupt, but when I heard that it had erupted, and spectacularly—receiving the news well ahead of anyone on the island, by means that are supposedly secret, but have nothing supernatural about them, it immediately occurred to me that its effects, which will extend over a good many days and weeks yet, if not years, might provide the ideal backdrop for the recovery and employment of the suspiric parchment. I already knew that you had it, but you didn’t know that you had it, and I hadn’t previously felt that there was any urgency about recovering it, give that no one else knew either. Loosening Guillot’s tongue and sending Tommaso to play his prank were moves improvised in a hurry, but they were not without a certain style, I think.”

  “Did you also arrange for the haunting of Parenot’s house on Martyr’s Mount?”

  “I wish I could say yes, but that is a complication that I did not contrive, and of whose significance I am far from certain. At first it seemed irrelevant, or even unwelcome, but then... I had, of course, originally intended to take possession of Elise in the Capital, employing Madame Mavor as an intermediary, but when she told me that she had finally persuaded Parenot to move to the island by negotiating the purchase of the Toustain house, the coincidence was so striking that I almost believed that there was more to it than mere chance—and it did not take long for me to see the potential for turning the complication into a convenience. Everything seemed to be coming together neatly, of its own accord. I am not yet ready to concede that there is anything supernatural in that, but I am prepared to admit that it is… puzzling.

  “Thanks to that real or imagined haunting, you now have the great advantage of immediate and natural access to the Parenot household—hence my desire to extend your service with a further commission. You must understand that in saying this, I am not asking you to do anything that will offend your conscience. I do not intend any harm to anyone. Quite the contrary; all I want you to do is to help me to do the most good, for everyone concerned.”

  I didn’t believe a word of the last affirmation, of course, but I did believe that his judgment was accurate, and that I was a better messenger than anyone else to whom he could have delegated the role—even though I did not relish it in the least. That, I knew, would increase his pleasure in obliging me to do it. He hated artists, and me in particular. He was deriving real pleasure from playing cat and mouse with me.

  I promised him my full cooperation. I didn’t suppose that he would believe me, but he thought it politic to pretend.

  “Good,” he said. “You will explain to Parenot and his whore all the things that I have just explained to you and you have explained to me. I intend to take the child after Mesmay’s reception, after she has shown what she can do, if anything. They must cooperate fully, and so must she. As you say, taking possession of a child is much more difficult and delicate than taking possession of a mere piece of parchment. I want to you do your utmost to smooth the process. I have every confidence in your ability to do that.”

  Perhaps he did—but that didn’t alter the fact that his principal motive for forcing me to be his messenger was that he was punishing me, because he couldn’t punish Almeras.

  “I’ll try to smooth things,” I said dully, “although my efforts really won’t be necessary, Charles and Mariette know who you are; they know they can’t oppose you. The law is on your side—not that it matters, since you’re above it.”

  He smiled, not pleasantly.

  “Good,” he said. “Now tell me about Orpheus and Eurydice, and why Eurydice’s lament has suddenly become so loud in this strange community of yours.”

  I knew that he wasn’t just making small talk. It was something that puzzled him, and he really thought that I might be able to provide some clarification. Nevertheless, I hedged. “As the leader of the Orphean cult, at least in the province, and perhaps throughout the Empire,” I countered, “You’re surely in a better position to answer that question than I can.”

  “Do you think so?” he said. “No, of course you don’t—you think you understand all these matters far better than anyone else, because you’re an artist.” He practically spat the last word out. “And in any case, Sister Ursule, with a little prompting from Antoine, via Aethne, has doubtless already explained to you the core of the supposed occult knowledge of the ancient Cult, which ceased to be truly occult a long time ago, at least with regard to conscientious scholars. So stop prevaricating, please, and tell me your version of the myth and its meaning, your version of what the parchment contains, and your estimation of its value, if any.”

  XII. The Deadline

  “Do you mind if we put the theoretical discussion off until tomorrow?” I asked, boldly. “I was up all last night copying your parchment for you, and I could really do with some sleep.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do mind. Time is of the essence. Tomorrow night, Madame Savage will be holding a séance at the Marquis de Mesmay’s house, and although I am certain that there will be no authentic supernatural manifestations, I am still interested to hear what she has to say, and if she does imagine that she is channeling Eurydice, I want to be able to put what she says in context.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Dellacrusca knew what I had communicated to Vashti only a little more than twenty-four hours earlier. Nothing is truly secret in houses where there are servants.

  “Who else will be present?” I asked, although I could guess,

  “Vashti will invite your friend Hecate Rain—and the Marquis will, of course, invite Charles and Mariette. You’re very welcome to attend yourself, and I hope you will. Elise will be there, but not as a participant in the séance. Her turn will come two days later, when the Marquis hosts his reception, and she will play the viol. Hecate Rain will also be invited to perform—and again, I hope that you will be present.”

  There was no point at all in my telling him that I didn’t think it was a good idea. He had decided.

  “I suppose you’d like me to put the triptych on exhibition as well?” I queried.

  “Certainly, if you can finish it in time,” he said. “Although I must admit that you’re further behind than I’d hoped. Still—miracles can be achieved when the spur of inspiration stabs. It’s not essential, though. The only essential thing is that Elise plays. I want to hear and savor the artistry of my own flesh and blood, magical or not. And I want her to know who she really is—and welcome the revelation”

  “You wouldn’t consider a postponement?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Now, tell me: how and why is Vashti Savage experiencing visions of Eurydice? What, if anything, does it signify?”

  He really wanted to know. He was convinced that the entire mythos of his cult was just hot air, flimflam to confuse the gullible… but even the most cynical of showmen can’t remain entirely immune to the seductions of their own patter. He knew that something was going on, haunting the island as well as the Parenots, and he wanted to understand it—in order to take control of it, if he could. I supposed that I ought to be glad that he hadn’t simply had the Parenots murdered and Elise assigned to his custody by the generous operators of the law, and then issued an edict forbidding any more manifestations of Eurydice in art or dreams, with the expectation of being obeyed.

  “Vashti really does have a gift,” I told him, “although it’s an artistic gift rather than a supernatural one. I don’t believe in a literal underworld or any other kind of world of the dead, any more than you do, but there is a sense, nevertheless, in which the dead survive in memory, and not just in the trivial sense that the living people who knew them remember them consciously. Our consciousness is only a part of ourselves, less capacious and less powerful than we like to believe. Much of our motivation comes from the unconscious part of our minds, which lies, by definition, beyond the scope of our apprehension and reason.”

  “I know all that,” Dellacrusca said with a hunt of impatience. “Get to the point.”

  I k
new that he didn’t know as much as he thought, and certainly didn’t understand as much as he thought, but he was setting the deadlines, so I stepped up the pace, while resolutely maintaining the line of the argument.

  “Although we can’t know, directly, what the contents of the unconscious mind are,” I said, “things can and do emerge from it, continually, in the form of images, which provide much of the substance of dreams, much of the substance of myth, and much of the substance of art. We don’t usually understand them, and perhaps we can’t really understand them, because our intelligence is too limited, but we can influence them, operate upon them, and summon them—at least, some of us can: morpheomorphists, mediums, hypnotists, musicians, poets, storytellers and painters are all able, to the extent of their talent, to weave connections between the conscious and the unconscious that at least give us an illusion of…I suppose it might be called mastery, or control, although it’s more likely that we’re the ones being mastered than the ones doing the mastering, the ones being controlled rather than the controllers.

  “So, the myth of Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld has to be construed, in my view, as a symbolic account of a descent into the unconscious. Orpheus, to my mind, is symbolic not of a particular musician, but of music itself, of the mysterious power that music has to appeal to the emotions, to charm them, to excite them, and more…to work a kind of magic, beneath the level of consciousness. He never was an actual human being, in my view, although the whole point is that he’s symbolic of a human ability. In one story, where he joins the Argonauts in order to defend them from the temptation of the sirens, he functions as a shield against the supernatural, but the story of Eurydice is different. It’s a love story—a tragic love story, of love spoiled by death, and an attempt to defy death, in order to recover love, which can be seen as heroic, but which might also be seen as foolish.

  “Classical myth is full of love stories, of course, but its images of love tend to be more various than those find in modern love stories, which are, on the whole, much more certain in offering a particular idea of love: ‘true love,’ in which phrase ‘true’ doesn’t mean genuine, but faithful. The modern fiction of love is much more heavily committed than the Classical one to the ideal of a single, unique, all-encompassing love: an obsessive love, which imagines love primarily as possession, in every sense of the word.”

  I could see Dellacrusca stirring now, letting a certain irritation show for the first time—but he had asked for my opinion, and I felt that lying to him would probably work out worse in the long run than telling him the truth.

  “Classical myth is, in general, much more aware of the often fleeting nature of passion, the essential unreliability of the emotions that surge so mysteriously from the unconscious—but in the myth of Orpheus’ love for Eurydice, Orpheus’ love is certainly represented in that all-encompassing, all-devouring fashion. The whole point of the story is that Orpheus is prepared to defy the dictates of death itself in order to recover his lost love: prepared to go into the world of the dead, to charm the shades, and Hades himself, in order to get what he wants. But he can’t. In the end, although he comes to the very brink of success, to the actual threshold of the Underworld, he can’t bring Eurydice back with him. He turns around; he looks—and when he looks, she vanishes, as dreams so often do as soon as we become conscious of them.

  “All that is easy enough to understand, viewed from my perspective. The addition to the story of the symbols on the parchment, I assume to be an embellishment added by the cult, which wouldn’t have any ostensible raison d’être unless it maintained the conviction that what Orpheus had done, in simple matters like charming the animals and warding off the sirens, can still be done, on a routine basis, and that even the quest to redeem Eurydice from the Underworld might still be possible in theory, given the right circumstances. So the cult’s founders invented a formula—unreadable, to be sure, but nevertheless solid, that was potentially capable of doing what Orpheus had failed to do at his first attempt, given a musician with sufficient talent, and the inspiration that would allow him… or her… to read the cryptic script.

  “Tommaso was right, by the way, to call the parchment a cryptogram, even though it isn’t encrypted in the vulgar and trivial respect by which the symbols of a comprehensible message are substituted in such a way as to hide the meaning in the absence of the key. It’s encrypted in the deeper and more literal sense of being buried, or entombed. It doesn’t have a simple meaning that can simply be read by substituting letters, words or musical notes for the symbols, but it does have a meaning in the sense that it appeals to the unconscious, to artistic inspiration—and because of that, there’s a sense in which it could potentially be read, and interpreted, by someone who understands the language of sighs.”

  I was on safer ground now—but I wasn’t convincing him.

  “And can it really bring Eurydice out of the Underworld?” he asked, his voice dripping irony.

  “That depends,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “Perhaps on whether Eurydice wants to come. That’s what’s missing from the myth, you see: it has no account of what she thinks, what she wants.”

  “She loves Orpheus.”

  “She did while he was alive… but did she love him in the same way that he loved her? Did she love him obsessively, possessively and imperiously… or did she love him in a more moderate, more fragile, more merely human fashion?”

  “What are you getting at, Rathenius?” he snapped, losing his veneer.

  “I’m relating my interpretation of the myth, as you commanded me to do, Milord—and doing it honestly, because I think I owe you the truth, in spite of the fact that you’ve inveigled me into this affair with lies, because I’m an artist, not a back-stabbing hypocrite.”

  That was way over the top, and might have got me killed, but I was still a little drunk, still a little poisoned by the exhalations of distant Hekla, and very tired.

  Dellacrusca was capable of enormous self-control, however, and he wanted to hear me out. “Go on,” he said.

  “Nobody knows what Eurydice wanted,” I said. “The members of Cult of Orpheus least of all, precisely because they are the cult of Orpheus, whose sole concern is what he wanted. Perhaps she didn’t want to come back from the Underworld, even if it is the bleak and dismal place that Homer painted it. Perhaps, even if she wanted to, she knew that she couldn’t, that there was no possible future in a relationship with Orpheus. Perhaps she loved him enough to know that it wouldn’t do either of them any good for her to make an attempt or put on a pretense of becoming his possession. Perhaps she turned back at the threshold because she felt that she couldn’t do otherwise. Nobody knows, because nobody ever listened to Eurydice’s lament—only to Orpheus’ obsession.

  “Nobody knows, so I can’t tell you. Vashti will be able to give you her version, with the right stimulus, and Hecate will eventually finish hers, when the inspiration comes, but if they conflict, as they probably will, I won’t be able to tell you which is correct, if either of them is. And if Elise Parenot really can read the parchment, by means of whatever mysterious intuition, and summons her own Eurydice from the Underworld, that one will be hers too, and no more reliable. Nobody knows, Milord, because nobody can.”

  “Her name isn’t Parenot,” said Dellacrusca.

  “No,” I agreed, “it’s Almeras. But nobody knows that, except for you, me and Charles Parenot.”

  “And what about the maenads?” the master of ceremonies demanded. “Where do they come in?”

  “Even the myth claims uncertainty about that. Perhaps Dionysus sent them. Perhaps it was Hades. Nobody knows.”

  “You’re not, at least, going to suggest that it might have been Eurydice who inspired them?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “Even she didn’t love him anymore, she had loved him once. I can’t believe that she’d do that to him. I won’t believe it. It might have been Dionysus or Hades—or, to be strictly accurate, the for
ces of the unconscious symbolized by those figures—but it wasn’t Eurydice. My opinion is that however he died, he died with her image still in his eyes, and that she mourned him sincerely, even if she couldn’t be what he wanted her to be. If the roles had been reversed, of course, it would have been different. Men can and do kill, all the time, out of frustrated love. They kill their rivals, and they kill the objects of their love, simply for being unable to be what they want them to be. But women, for the most part, don’t. Eurydice wouldn’t, and didn’t. That’s what I believe, at any rate.”

  Dellacrusca thought about that for two full minutes. Then he said: “You’re a clever man, Master Rathenius, and a brave one. I was right to think that you were the messenger I needed. You won’t let me down, will you?”

  At least he hadn’t resorted to violence—yet. “I really don’t know if I can,” I told him, ruefully. “I can deliver the message for you, since you give me no option, but beyond that… I really don’t have any influence at all.”

  “Do your best” he said, in a voice of adamant. “You’re an artist, after all, and something of a sorcerer if your reputation can be trusted. If anyone can work magic, it’s surely you.”

  XIII. Working Magic

  I slept late, inevitably. When I had had breakfast, I wondered briefly whether I ought to go to the studio and start work frantically on the triptych, but I knew that there was no point. It couldn’t be finished in three days—not to my standards, at any rate. In any case, heretical as the idea might seem, there were more important things to be done than painting.

  My first port of call, obviously, was the Parenot house.

  Mariette answered the door, and told me that Charles and Elise had gone into town to make necessary purchases. She didn’t invite me in, but she couldn’t politely refused me admission when I simply walked in, as if she had.