The ship continued its slow progress southwards, initially under sullen skies but eventually under brighter ones, without running into any violent storms. Sir Julian Templeforth kept a low profile; he did not appear on deck again and did not come to the dining room for the evening meal.
Caroline not only maintained her appearance as the day gradually brightened, but seemed, to Mathieu at least, to become even more beautiful, becoming extraordinarily striking. Few of the mariners had noticed her when she first boarded the ship, however, and none had seen her while she was in her cabin suffering from seasickness, so the extent of her metamorphosis was not generally appreciated, although her presence aboard the ship during the final phase of its journey certainly attracted a great deal of comment. Mathieu found himself the objective of many glances of naked envy, it being generally assumed about the vessel that Caroline was his mistress.
Mathieu managed to have a long and more detailed conversation with Philippe regarding some of the transfusion experiments he had carried out and those he hoped to carry out with the aid of Mathieu’s filter, but Philippe remained coy about certain aspects of his work that he had inherited from previous generations of occult research, saying that his mother, the Marquise, would be far better able to explain that. He did, however, reassure Mathieu’s by means of his insistence that the abundance of available donors meant that only small quantities of blood needed to be taken from each one at any one time.
“The filtration of the golden fluid might still have deleterious effects,” said Mathieu, dubiously.
“We shall be careful,” Philippe promised. “It will be necessary, in any case, to treat Sir Julian.”
“If I can,” Mathieu. “I really don’t know whether any infusion of golden fluid will suffice to restore the condition he desires, and if the fluid comes from a dozen different donors, I’ve no way of knowing what kind of complex interreactions might take place, or what effect they might have on the recipient.”
“Mother might be able to give you some vague indication on the basis of her precious archives,” Philippe said, dubiously, “but she’s a trifle secretive even with me. She says that she doesn’t want to prejudice my expectations, but I sometimes think that it’s mere force of habit. Myrtille has been initiated into more of the mysteries, but she appears to be acquiring the same caution, even though she and Mother have their differences.”
Mathieu made no attempt to follow up those intriguing hints, estimating that there would probably be time enough when he eventually reached the Château de Valcoeur.
He also found time in the afternoon to begin teaching Caroline the rudiments of the French language, while they sat together on the deck. She did not seem to have been unduly modest in saying that she was a slow learner, but there was no faulting her determination. She seemed to have become remarkable intense, but his attempts to find out what was troubling her came to nothing.
Her insistence on not being separated from him continued, but he did not think that it was a specific fear of Sir Julian Templeforth and Cormack; the environment of the ship was entirely alien to her, and the attention she attracted increased her nervousness. She seemed to feel that there was a unique security, or at least a unique reassurance, in his protection.
He knew that the insistence in question might soon become problematic, and had little or no idea what effect it would have on him as time went by. He felt that he had an obligation to her that he had to honor to the fullness of his ability, but he had no clear idea of what that ought to entail, or what she might expect or demand of him in the longer term, especially if, or when, her seemingly-supernatural beauty began to fade again, as the fluid that he had injected into her veins began to lose its force. He could not tell how rapid the likely deterioration would be, how far it would go, or what her response to the eventual circumstance might be.
He continued to curse himself for ever having started this experiments, for ever having involved himself with Sir Julian Templeforth, and for continuing to take blood from prostitutes even when he became fully aware of the toll that it was taking of its donors, but Sir Julian’s laconic judgment that what was done was done and that one could only move forward from the present situation kept coming back to haunt him.
When the evening meal was concluded and Mathieu and Caroline retired to their meager cabin with the lantern, Mathieu asked her whether he would like him to hold her for a while again, as he had on the previous night. If she was surprised or offended that he did not want to make love to her, she did not show it, and she simply said that she would, indeed like him to hold her. It seemed to him that there were a great many provocative or ironic remarks that she might have made, but she appeared to have become very guarded and very docile, and it occurred to him that she must have even less idea than he had as to how their peculiar relationship might progress, what she might expect or demand of him, and what he might expect or demand of her. For the time being, she seemed to have settled, as he had, for seeing out the rest of the journey to their immediate destination.
He could not resist asking her once again, as they lay together to he lower bunk, what Myrtille de Valcoeur had said to her, what the Frenchwoman’s cryptic remark about being unable to settle her anxieties meant, and why she had referred to Myrtille as a witch, but Caroline simply said that she had been asked not to reveal what had been said to her, and that it was perfectly obvious that Myrtille was a witch.
Mathieu had asked MacBride to attempt to obtain some clarification about that particular mystery from the usually voluble Isabelle, but he reported that she did not seem to know anything about it. He added that when he attempted to interrogate her about the mysterious blood rituals of the Château de Valcoeur she had fallen silent, apparently respecting a stern command of secrecy.
The Pendark reached Bordeaux not long after dawn, and The Valcoeurs immediately set off with MacBride and Isabelle on a further shopping expedition, leaving Mathieu and Caroline to wait in a harborside café. Sir Julian and Cormack set forth on business of their own, visiting the telegraph office before going to a bank. Neither party was gone for long, and when they returned the Valcoeurs had hired a four-seater carriage for themselves, Mathieu and Caroline, while Isabelle sat beside the coachman and MacBride took the position of postillion. Sir Julian and Cormack had hired their own two-seater carriage, in order to travel in convoy with the larger vehicle.
As the Valcoeurs had promised, the scenery was far more spectacular and delightful than the tedious aspect of the sea, but the further away from Bordeaux the two vehicles went, the poorer the roads became. While they were following the Garonne along the road to Toulouse the highway was well-maintained, but when they turned away from it in the late afternoon of the first day of the journey, the jolting became far more noticeable. Although the territory was by no means mountainous, one they had left the Garonne valley there were hills a-plenty, which forced the road to wind around their contours, between the slopes of vineyards. They changed horses three times in the course of the day, which caused further delays. It was a great relief eventually to halt at an inn for a late meal and to spend the night.
Caroline insisted on sharing a room, and even a bed, with Mathieu. Although he assured her of her security, she still did not want to be alone, and the continued proximity of Sir Julian and Cormack gave her a ready excuse, even if it was not the whole reason for her fear. Mathieu had found self-restraint becoming increasingly difficult, but he still wanted to take his role as guardian seriously, and was reluctant to commit what seemed to him to be a violation of his promise of protection.
She accepted his decision, but did not seem happy about it, and was subdued and sulky during the second day of the journey, which began to seem exceedingly tedious—a tedium not relieved by further interruptions to change horses at way stations where the Valcoeurs were obviously well-known, but where Sir Julian’s mysterious attire and Caroline’s beauty both attracted embarrassing attention.
The second overnight stay was to be the last; Philippe assured them that they would reach the château the following day, provided that the carriages did not suffer any accident. Again, Caroline insisted on sharing Mathieu’s room, and seemed insulted by his reluctance, although he could not tell whether her dominant emotion was annoyance, frustration or mere puzzlement.
“You’ll have your own room when we reach the château,” he told her, a trifle uneasily, looking at the bed, which, without being capacious, was large enough to hold two people far more comfortably than the bunks in the cabin on the Pendark.
“I’ve asked Mademoiselle de Valcoeur about that,” Caroline told him, in a neutral tone. “She says that I can share your room, if I wish—and if you’ll permit it, obviously.” She looked at him, tacitly asking the question of whether he would.
“Mademoiselle de Valcoeur presumably thinks that you’re my mistress,” he muttered.
“Perhaps,” said Caroline, “and perhaps not. Everyone else does, I think. Why am I not?”
Mathieu hesitated, and eventually said: “It wouldn’t be right.”
“It wouldn’t be wrong,” she countered, the attempted boldness of her voice undermined by a certain nervous tremor. “You want to, and I want to, so why wouldn’t it be right? I know you can. Is it just because I’m a whore? You didn’t object before. Or is it because you don’t think of me as a whore any longer, and you’ve only ever slept with whores?
The last question was too close to the mark for comfort. After another pause, Mathieu said: “Are you really so frightened that you need me to hold you every night?”
It was her turn to hesitate. She sat down on the bed, and reached up to start unbuttoning her dress, but she changed her mind. Instead, she looked up at him, as if mustering every vestige of her courage. Eventually, she said: “No. That’s not the reason. And that’s not what I want. Can I tell you what I do want—or, rather, why I want it?”
He sat down on the bed beside her, as if to reassure her, but in fact to make himself more comfortable. He met her eyes as steadily as he could, and said: “Go on.”
“I’ve been screwed a lot,” she said, her voice firmer now that her decision was made. “Since I was a little girl. More often than not I was a…willing donor, but even then, it was something done to me, not something I did. I…took myself away. I was never really there. It was never something I did, as I say, always something that was done to me. Well, this time, I want to be there. I want to be doing it, not having it done to me. And I want to be there with you, and do it with you, because you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to be there with, to do it with. I suppose it’s a lot to ask, but this might be my last chance, so I wanted to. We’ve done it before, I know, but that was like every other time—it was just something done to me. I want it to be different, this time, if you will. Anyway, that’s what I want, and why. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you tell me I have to go, I’ll go.”
Mathieu thought about that. He realized that for Caroline, what she was asking represented what Sir Julian Templeforth might have called her personal progress. She thought of it as a way of moving forward. Could he deny her that? Would it not be cruel even to suggest that he might? And would it not be perverse, given his own desire?
“No,” he admitted, finally. “I don’t want you to go.” He knew that it sounded like a concession, and he didn’t want it to sound like that, so he added, swiftly: “It might seem absurd, but I’m not sure that when we did it before, I was really there. I was answering a physical urge, a kind of itch. I was just using you. I’m not sure that it’s ever been any different, although I’ve sometimes tried to persuade myself that it was. But if we do it again…when we do it again…it won’t be the same. I know you now. I’ve held you in my arms…and I’m sure I got as much comfort out of that as you did, because, to tell the truth, I was just as scared.”
Still looking him in the eyes, she said: “No, you weren’t. Believe me.” Then she uttered a deep sigh. “So I am your mistress, then.”
“Yes, you are,” he agreed.
“And?”
He nodded his head. “And,” he agreed, presuming that she would take the right inference.
Presumably, she did, but she didn’t fling her arms around him, or resume undressing immediately. “It’s all right,” she said, slowly. “You don’t have to say you love me. No one who ever did ever meant it, so I wouldn’t believe it if you did. I know that nothing can some of it, in the end. I know that it probably won’t last long. I just want to be with you while I can.”
Mathieu stared at her, examining her beautiful face. He did not find any difficulty at all, at that moment, in thinking that it was something more than mere physiological bait, that it was a kind of ideal in its own right.
“And you’re not going to say that you love me?” he queried, eventually.
She blushed and lowered her eyes. “No,” she said.
“Because you think I wouldn’t believe you?”
“I don’t see how you could. I don’t know if I can believe myself. I don’t know whether what I’m feeling is love. How can I? People talk about it all the time, but I don’t believe any one them can ever know what they mean, let alone mean what they say. So no, I don’t think you’d believe me, and I can’t say that you’d be wrong. I just know that I want to be with you, more than I’ve ever wanted anything before, and more than I ever thought it was possible to want anything. I can’t promise you that it will last, because I don’t know whether I can trust my feelings, but what I feel is that I want it to last for as long as it can, for as long as you’ll have me. I know I’m worthless, and that you probably won’t want me for long, but while you do, that’s what I want.”
Her courage gave out, and she lowered her eyes. He put his arms around her.
“You’re not worthless,” he said. “You’re…”
She stopped him.
“Don’t make any promises you might regret,” she said. “I don’t want that.”
He hesitated, and then said: “I once thought I was a benefactor of humankind, or at least a doctor, a good man,” he said. “Now, I don’t. I see myself sowing harm and misery wherever I go, and everything I try to do to make things better…goes wrong. I wish I could promise you that what my treatment has done for you will be permanent, but I’m afraid…well, perhaps you’re right to claim that you’ve been more scared that I can ever know, or can ever be, but believe me, my fears aren’t trivial. Sometimes, I think I’m accursed.”
She looked up at him again, this time in frank surprise. “I don’t believe that,” she said. She touched her face. “As for this, let it fade. That’s not why I…why I feel about you the way I do, why I want you the way I do. I’m glad I’ve got it for now, if it helps you want me. But what you’ve given me is worth far more to me that a pretty face. Nobody ever…well, I suppose I haven’t seen a lot of kindness in my life. You were kind. I probably didn’t stand a chance. As soon as you held me the way you did, and even before that, I was bound to…well, I won’t say fall in love, because that makes it sound like just another thing that happened to me, and it wasn’t. This is something I’m doing for myself, something that’s really me.”
A thought occurred to him. “That’s what Myrtille de Valcoeur whispered to you on the deck, isn’t it?” he guessed. “She read it in your gaze. That’s why you called her a witch.”
Caroline shook her head. “I wasn’t surprised that she saw it,” she said. “I was just surprised that you couldn’t.”
Mathieu was momentarily puzzled. “Then why…?” he began, and then he jumped to the further conclusion. “She told you that that’s why the treatment is working so well, didn’t she?” he guessed. “That’s why she was so curious about the way you felt. She thinks that the mysterious interaction that defied my calculations of probability was caused by your falling in love with me…or your deciding to love me.”
Her admission was a mere nod of the head.
“And you think that if you can’t keep on.…”
She didn’t give him the change to finish. “No, I don’t,” she said. “If that was all it took to make sure that the effect doesn’t fade, there wouldn’t be a problem, because no matter what happens, I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving you. But I know that it might fade anyway, because the agent isn’t strong enough. I didn’t need her to tell me that, and I didn’t need her to tell me that it wouldn’t be my fault if it does fade, that it wouldn’t be because I didn’t love you enough. She thought I thought that, but I didn’t. Satisfied, now?”
“And that’s why she couldn’t settle your anxieties. I see. You could have told me.”
“No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Because if I had, you’d have told me that it wasn’t true that what I felt about you had anything to do with my becoming pretty again…and I didn’t want to hear you say that.”
After a pause, Mathieu said: “I don’t know whether it’s true or not. It might be. It’s not as if there’s any lack of evidence. Love does often seem to make people more beautiful…and lack of it certainly makes them uglier. It’s too simple an answer, though. There are too many obvious exceptions. Sir Julian isn’t one, I admit, but…well, there are too many exceptions.”
“So now you know what the witch told me,” she said. “But it doesn’t alter anything, does it? I’m still your mistress. It’s what every man wants, isn’t it? A mistress who’s besotted with him, without him having to care about her in his turn…no, forget I said that. I’m not accusing you of not caring about me. I know you care. That’s obvious.”
“But you wouldn’t believe me if I said I loved you?”
“No. Caring is one thing. Loving…well, you couldn’t…or shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because people like you can’t love people like me—or if they do, it’s bad for them. You need to love someone like Myrtille—not her, if she can’t love you back, but someone like her. Respectable. Honest. Not…spoiled.”
“Just because you had to sleep with men for money, it doesn’t mean that you’re spoiled.”
She laughed, briefly. “You have no idea, Doctor…no idea. But I can be your mistress, until the time comes when you find a wife and have to get rid of me, because she won’t be able to tolerate another woman loving you. I think I always will, but that’s not really a bad thing, for you or for me.”
When he made no response to that, she looked pensive for a few moments, and then said: “Is that why you haven’t screwed me these last few days? Because you were afraid that if you did, you might start to love me?”
He mimicked her brief laugh. “That’s not the way the psychology works,” he said. “I was doomed that first night. No matter how hard I pretended that I was only doing it for you, I knew full well that I didn’t want to let go of you. It must have become obvious by now…at least to Myrtille de Valcoeur, if not to you.”
Caroline tilted her head slightly, as if assessing him to see whether he had become any better looking of late. “She did say that the effect wouldn’t have been so pronounced if the feeling wasn’t mutual,” she admitted. “I didn’t believe her.”
“Will you believe me if I tell you now that it is?”
“No, because you couldn’t possibly feel the way about me that I feel about you—but I’ll believe that you didn’t want to let go of me, because I felt that, and I can’t help being glad about it, even though I know that, in the end, it will be bad for you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I’m glad about that, too, even though I know you’re wrong. I want you to believe the opposite, with all your heart, at least for a while, although it’s selfish of me.”
“That’s too complicated,” Mathieu told her.
“Yes, it is, she agreed. It’s really quite simple, and we really shouldn’t be wasting time talking.” Again, she started unbuttoning her dress. Mathieu had to withdraw his arms to give her room to do it.
“It is simple,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You want me and I want you. What more is there to say, or to wish for?”
She had pulled the dress off, and he reached out to put his arms around her again. She moved into them. “To say, nothing,” she murmured, seemingly wanting to have the last word. “To wish for…you have no idea, my darling doctor—no idea.”
* * * *
The following morning, when they boarded the four-seater to complete the last stage of their journey. Myrtille de Valcoeur sat down facing Mathieu. She looked at Caroline, and then at him, and then back at Caroline, before reaching out with a gloved hand to touch Caroline gently on the knee, through the light gray fabric of her skirt. Mathieu understood by the gesture that Myrtille had not, in fact, assumed that Caroline was already his mistress, in the full sense of the word, but that her piercing gaze had had no difficulty detecting that she was now.
He looked out of the window, trying hard to suppress a blush. Myrtille did not say a word, but she seemed strangely satisfied, as if some machination that she had concocted had taken a further step.
They had been on the road for more than half an hour, and the conversation had not risen above the banal, when Myrtille suddenly said to Mathieu, in French: “How much do you know about the three seventeenth-century documents on which modern Rosicrucian organizations are based?”
“Almost nothing,” Mathieu said, in the same language. “And when I invited you to tell me more, on the boat, you said that it was a task best left to your mother.”
“And so it is, at least with the first two documents, which are broadly in line with the pervious heritage. The third is an allegory laden with Biblical symbolism, and appears to be a contemporary transfiguration of a much older story, which embellishes and distorts it considerably. Mother can give you the details. Its title is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz—slightly misleading, in that Rosenkreutz is not the one who gets married, but merely a guest invited to a wedding, in the aftermath of which he’s knighted. It describes the stages of a journey analogous to the path of spiritual enlightenment—but the ending is missing and the intended meaning gnomic.”
“And what relevance does it have to my project?”
“Perhaps none—but the notion of a chymical, or alchemical, marriage might refer to a combination of two factors necessary to the reproduction, or fructification, of the azoth. Your system of filtration extracts or purifies the principle, but its activation might require a second component. In your world-view, of course, that would be a biological component of some kind, in ours a spiritual one, the soul of the blood—but in either case, a stimulus, or perhaps a catalyst. At any rate, the point of the story, either in the seventeenth century version or the original, appears to be that the wedding isn’t the end of the story, and not the objective of the journey, but a means to a further end, that of the distribution of wellbeing: a difficult mission in which few succeed. and even Christian Rosenkreutz, for all his virtues, seems likely to fail.”
“You’re suggesting that even if I find the missing piece of the puzzle, and figure out how to enable the golden fluid to maintain and renew itself, that I might still fail in some further objective?”
“I’m suggesting that things might be far more complicated than they seem, and that if we are working out a design, the objective of the design might not be clear, as yet.”
“Not Amor omnia vincit, then?”
“Perhaps not—but it does help, I suspect…provided that you remember that it’s a stage on the journey, not the end.”
“Thank you for the advice. I’ll bear it in mind.”
Mathieu glanced at Caroline, whose language lessons had been completely inadequate to permit her to follow the conversation, and who seemed resentful of the fact that Myrtille had spoken in French in order to exclude her from understanding, and that he had followed her lead. Then he glanced at Philippe, who seemed utterly disinterested, deliberately unconcerned with weddings, alchemical or otherwise.
The roads were now almost deserted, save for the occasional cart drawn by a weary Percheron; they no longer crossed the path of any vehicle similar to their own or Templeforth’s. Peasants leading donkeys or mules could occasionally be seen, but all were on foot; MacBride was the only mounted man they encountered once the sun began to decline from the zenith.
By the time they finally came within sight of the Château de Valcoeur, perched on a hilltop, the sun was already low in the western sky, and the oblique rays of light cast the long shadows of trees around over its walls. It was not the fortified dwelling that Mathieu had imagined; it had no crenellated towers, and no ramparts. Its only tower bore a close resemblance to a belfry, although it had no clock-face, and Mathieu doubted that it contained a bell, and was more akin to a watch-tower.
There was a sizeable hamlet in the valley below, extended along the banks of a broad stream, but the absence of a church prevented it from qualifying, strictly speaking, as a village. The valley had fields of wheat and rye as well as vegetable-plots and the inevitable vineyards. Everything seemed somnolent, although dusk had not yet fallen even on the valley floor. No heavy farm machinery was visible; there was nothing obvious to link the scene to the nineteenth century. The road to the château was, however, in better condition than some they had recently traveled.
“It has been suggested that it warrants the description ‘the middle of nowhere’ better than anywhere else in France,” Philippe observed, in English, “but we prefer to think of it as the heart of the nation that might have been, but for Simon de Montfort and his murderous bandits. There are compensations in remoteness, however, for scholars. Obtaining equipment can be challenging, but endeavor is undisturbed.” He looked at Caroline, who was watching him, and added: “You’ll find it very different from London, Mademoiselle.”
“Good,” she said.
As they drove through the hamlet, people came to their doorsteps to watch them go past. Many of them waved. Children ran to the roadside to get a closer view.
Myrtille waved a gloved hand in the direction of a group of young women who had gathered, seemingly to discuss the unusual convoy.
“I told you that the girls here are pretty,” she sad. “The domain includes half a dozen hamlets like this one, scattered over an area that would take more than a day to circle around on foot. The forests are full of animals, but we don’t hunt, so they don’t fear us.”
“A true Eden,” Mathieu commented.