After the funeral, Mathieu went up to the top of the tower in order to think, intending to stay there and watch the sunset, hoping that he would not find it too symbolic. The valley was, as always, peaceful. He mapped the changes that had overtaken it during the twentieth century, as the farms had been modernized and the cottages in the hamlets renovated, but did not find them too drastic to have changed the essential identity of the domain.
His mind was dominated by a single, absurd question for which he knew that he could not possibly find a satisfactory answer.
Why had Caroline died?
The fact that she had been a hundred and forty eight years old made the question seem ridiculous. Why had she not died seventy or eighty years sooner? Obviously, that was because she had been one of the five original recipients of the longevity serum. But of the other four, all of whom had been older than her, two were still alive, at the age of a hundred and sixty. So the question might more reasonably be formulated as: Why were he and Myrtille still alive?
Myrtille, of course, had always been convinced that the serum could not take full effect in isolation, that its effect needed to be complemented by other factors. Her long-held belief that her eternal chastity was her shield against the advent of decrepitude that had eventually afflicted Caroline was plausible, if one considered that Philippe the libertine had died more than thirty years before, and if one assumed that Caroline’s wretched childhood had left ineradicable scars on her body and soul alike. The Marquise, too, had been far from chaste in her youth, and had already been well over sixty years old, as well as paralyzed from the waist down, when she had taken the serum—it was hardly surprising that it had had far less effect on her than anyone else.
But in that case, why was he, Mathieu, still alive, giving that he had been living in intimacy—in sin the Catholic Church to which he still belonged in theory, would reckon, given that they had never undergone any kind of marriage ceremony—for a hundred and thirty years; in active sin, thanks to the effects of the serum, for all but the final months. Did monogamy count as chastity? And was the judgment of the Catholic Church in regard to sin irrelevant in Valcoeur, where the institution had no purchase and a secret paganism still ruled all lives—even Mathieu’s and Caroline’s, in spite of the fact that neither of them had ever been initiated into the cult of the Rose Cross?
His own longevity, not Caroline’s death, he thought, was the real enigma—but how long would that last now, now that he was alone? Would he deteriorate rapidly himself, under the affliction of loss and loneliness? If that turned out to be the case, should he really care? Had he not lived long enough? Did he still have sufficient reason to carry on living, isolated as he was by being an outsider, a man who did not truly belong to Valcoeur, and never had? He had his work, of course, but was he not continuing his research, in desultory fashion, by virtue of habit and inertia, having lost any authentic intellectual impetus many decades ago? What did he still to offer Valcoeur—and what did Valcoeur still have to offer him, now?
He reflected, with bitter irony, that for a full century, he had been secretly unsure in his own mind whether he actually loved Caroline, and whether it was not responsibility that maintained their relationship, the debt that he had contacted, and his sharp awareness of her dependency on his affection. That doubt had faded, slowly, but it was not until she had been on her death-bed that he had realized the full force of his love—and then he had immediately felt that he had failed her, and himself, because he had not fully appreciated it before. Did he deserve to live, while she had died? Her love for him, he felt sure, had never wavered in its force since it had first awakened, even before they had reached Valcoeur. If love were a fact in maintaining the vitality and force of the golden fluid, as Myrtille had always claimed, then surely Caroline should still be in the best of health, and he should the one whose mortal remains were dispersed in the air with the smoke of his pyre?
It’s over, he thought. Whether I’m dead or not, my story is over now. For decades, I thought that the perfection of the elixir was the adventure, extracting the full advantage from the golden fluid, in spite of the fact that it couldn’t renew itself in vitro, and decayed even within a body to which it was not native—albeit far more slowly in some than others, with the right support. But even if that had been the adventure, it ended decades ago, and in truth, the real adventure, the real core of my personal progress, was Caroline. And now, Caroline’s dead.
Dusk had only just begun to fall when Myrtille came to find him. He would have known that it was her even if he had not recognized her footsteps on the stairway, so he did not turn round immediately when she reached the top. There was no point in trying to hide his emotion—when had it ever been possible to hide anything from Myrtille?—but even so, he did not want her to see his tears and measure his distress with her typical clinical accuracy, so he maintained his stance, staring out over the valley.
When she came to stand beside him, he still did not look at her, even when she placed a hand in his shoulder, a trifle awkwardly. She seemed to be respectful of his wish, deliberately standing slightly behind him as well as to his right, apparently gazing in the same vague direction.
“Well,” he said, dully. “The experiment’s over now. How did it work out, do you think?”
“What experiment?” she asked. She did not sound surprised by the slight tone of surly provocation in his voice, but her retort did not sound blatantly disingenuous.
“Your experiment—the one you planned and set in motion a hundred and thirty years ago, aboard the Pendark. I suppose, even though you couldn’t have had the slightest inkling that it would run for so long, you must reckon it a tremendous success—or at least a triumph of scheming.”
“I never thought of it as an experiment, Mathieu,” she said, with a studied mildness that he found a trifle irritating. “I was just trying to do what I thought was best—and you mustn’t give me too much credit for scheming. I thought of it as simply greasing the wheels of inevitability.”
“But you did know what you were doing, didn’t you. Even before you made us share a cabin on the ship, instead of putting Philippe and me together and taking Caroline in with you and Isabelle. You knew when you extracted the formal declaration from me that I would take responsibility for her at the hotel in Rockley road.”
“But the design had already been put in place by then. My contribution was belated, and probably unnecessary. You had carried the poor child out of a burning building. Given her dire past and her fragility, how could she not cling to you thereafter, and fall in love with you? All I did was facilitate the process slightly.”
“But you did manipulate me.”
“Did I? You had incurred a debt that was already weighing too heavily on your conscience for you ever to think of abandoning her. Perhaps you weren’t absolutely bound to fall in love with her, but whether you did or not—and I suspect that even after a hundred and thirty years, you’ve never quite admitted it to yourself that you did—you were never going to let her down. All I did was to make it easer for you not to do so. Do you really resent that?”
Mathieu shook his head, but refused to emphasize the weak negation with any verbal admission.
“She never really believed it,” he said with a sigh. “No matter how many times I told her, and no matter how many times you told her, she never trusted either of us fully. Right to the end, to the day of her death, she still thought that I was just being kind. And she never believed in your chastity. Not only wouldn’t she believe that I wasn’t sexually attracted to you, she wouldn’t believe that you weren’t sexually attracted to me.”
Myrtille shrugged. “She wasn’t wrong, was she? The point is, that neither of us did anything about it.”
Mathieu almost turned round at that, but suppressed the gesture by putting his hand up to his forehead.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “I’ve always been able to read you like a book—you’re not exactly difficult. As for me—well, chastity is a decision, not a natural inclination. I had urges, like everyone else—and still have, now and again, thanks to your magical elixir, in spite of my antiquity. Given the proximity in which we’ve been living these last hundred and thirty years, how could my temptation not settle on you as a potential target, at least occasionally. It was worse for Mother, of course, in the early years—her urges were always stronger than mine, and less afflicted by conscience.”
“The Marquise?” Mathieu queried, not particularly surprised, except by the fact that Myrtille had never mentioned it before, in the eighty years that her mother had been dead. He had got to know the Marquise quite well, even if he had never been able to read her like a book.
“Of course. Don’t be too flattered—proximity was a much more important factor for her, given that you and Philippe never did manage to find a cure for her paralysis. Wheelchair or no wheelchair, though, and the twenty-odd year age gap notwithstanding, she’d have had you fifty times over if I hadn’t forbidden it, no matter how much she liked Caroline.”
“You forbade it?”
“Of course. I had to. You’re not laboring under the delusion that you’d have had enough moral fiber to turn her down, are you? Don’t tell me that you resent that too?”
Mathieu shook his head again, this time with more bewilderment than negation in the gesture. “Didn’t she resent it?” he asked.
“Of course she did—but she saw the logic of the argument. She knew that I was saving you and Caroline from a lot of heartache, and her from a burden of guilt. She just needed to be strictly forbidden, to save her from her own weakness.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing with me all these years—saving me from my own weakness?”
“If you like. In saving you from Mother’s seduction, certainly. As for anyone else’s, I didn’t think you were in much danger.”
“Because you didn’t think that any of the women in the valley would ever try to seduce me?”
“No, because I thought that if they did, you probably wouldn’t even notice, and that if you did notice, your loyalty to Caroline would stop you. Mother was a special case—she had a power of command that no one else could match.”
“Except you.”
“Except me.”
“But you never tried to exercise that power it over Philippe, while he was alive, before or after his marriage. Or did the fact that he was your brother give him a special immunity to you commanding authority?”
It was Myrtille’s turn to shake her head, but because Mathieu was still refusing to look around, he was unable to see whether she exercised the option.
“Why would I have tried to forbid Philippe anything?” she queried. “I didn’t stop Mother on moral grounds—I did it because it would only have done harm if she’d let herself surrender to temptation. Philippe needed his dalliances, before and after his marriage—his droit de seigneur, as he insisted on calling it. Trying to forbid it would have rendered him unhappy, and wouldn’t have been of any real benefit to his…willing donors as Caroline used to put it. You and he were very different. He needed his distractions in order to stabilize him in his endeavors—including his marriage—whereas you needed exactly what you had: certainty and reliability: a secure anchorage. You were never made for philandering. Fortunately, you’re a hundred and sixty years old now, so I’m hoping that you won’t feel Caroline’s loss too badly.”
The extent to which he might feel bereft without the love of his life was not a topic that Mathieu wanted to discuss with Myrtille at the moment, or even to think about.
“Philippe’s womanizing could have had long range repercussions in a community as closely knit as the estate,” he said, “but all the DNA test results are in now, and he doesn’t have quite as many descendants as one might have imagined. He seems to have been careful, at least after the marriage. It’s way too late now, anyhow, to worry about any of his unacknowledged children getting together, but the situation still needs monitoring. Given that his sons seem to be taking after him in that regard, the possibility of unwitting sibling marriages won’t disappear.”
“Étienne and Raymond aren’t short of common sense, mercifully,” said Myrtille. “Even when I’m not here to guide them any more…well, I have high hopes of Esclarmonde, even though she isn’t exactly a carbon copy of me.”
“I thought you were convinced that the interaction of the serum with your chastity would ensure that you’d outlive all of us, including the boys?”
“Perhaps so,” she retorted, seemingly more amused by the slight bitterness of the remark than annoyed by it, to judge by her tone. “But you’ve never believed in its relevance, have you? And I have to respect your expert opinion. I dare say that you’ll make every effort to outlive me just to prove your point—and I won’t hold that against you, even if you succeed.”
Mathieu grimaced, not wanting to talk or think about that either, for the moment.
In order to change the subject, he said: “There is one slight oddity in the DNA analysis, concerning Isabelle’s son—her firstborn, that is, the one conceived before her marriage.”
“I’d always assumed that he was fathered by Michael MacBride before he returned to Ireland,” said Myrtille, with a hint of puzzlement.
“So had I. The tests couldn’t confirm that, of course, because we don’t have a stored sample of MacBride’s blood—but the son’s DNA does make an interesting comparison with one of the samples we do have in store.”
“Whose?”
“Sir Julian Templeforth’s.”
Myrtille must have let a little amazement show, because her left hand, which was still resting on Mathieu’s shoulder, twitched slightly. “Are you saying that Templeforth fathered Isabelle’s first child?”
“No, not that. Isabelle might have been a slut and a half, as Caroline used to put it, but she didn’t lack taste. There’s a margin of uncertainty, obviously, but what I’m saying is that there’s reason to believe that Templeforth might have fathered the father of Isabelle’s child. The droit de seigneur isn’t just a French institution, after all.”
“Sir Julian Templeforth was Michael MacBride’s biological father? Perhaps it’s as well that they’re both long dead—I’m not sure that’s news either one of them would have be glad to hear. So some of Sir Julian’s genes were imported into the valley without our knowing it—and they’re still around?”
“Much diluted, and harmless in context. There is a certain irony, though, isn’t there, in Sir Julian Templeforth having fathered a hero of the Easter Rising and an eventual member of the parliament of the Irish Free State. He was from a military family, though, so Sir Julian might have been able to find a little consolation in the rank to which Michael rose in the IRA.”
“He must have had a beautiful mother,” Myrtille mused.
“Certainly—and beautiful without any artificial aids, unlike his father…or Isabelle, eventually. Not to mention…”
Mathieu knew perfectly well what Myrtille looked like: still beautiful, even at the age of a hundred and sixty, but with a kind of beauty never seen on earth before, superior to the one that her mother had briefly attained, and superior too, to the remnants of her former beauty that Caroline had been able to preserve once had had passed the age of eighty. Whether that beauty was associated with a special spiritual enlightenment, as Myrtille had always hoped and sometimes claimed, he did not feel that he was in any position to judge, even though he had made prolific and productive use of the serum himself. Myrtille had always claimed that his commitment to the rigidities of science would bar him from true enlightenment; given that her version of enlightenment seemed to be essentially mystical, she was probably right, although he still clung to the stubborn assertion that he was he enlightened one and she a mere dreamer. They had agreed to differ a century ago, and it was no longer a bone of active contention.
“So, even if Simon de Montfort’s reputation for chastity was overstated,” Mathieu observed, maliciously, when Myrtille did not respond to his latest provocation, “some of his genes might have made their way into your Rosicrucian utopia anyway, if Sir Julian was telling the truth about his ancestry. Not that it matters, now that you’ve got your revenge.”
“Revenge?” Myrtille queried, her voice taking on a slight edge for once as he finally tempted her into a hint of reaction.
“Of course. By hoarding my elixir in the valley, you’ve lopped more years off the lives of far more northerners than the butcher of the Midi stole in the course of all his massacres.”
“Let’s not rake up all that again, Mathieu. It was settled long ago, with your consent.” There was no anger in her tone, and even a slight hint of supplication. That, combined with the fact that Mathieu thought that his tears had now dried up, caused him to look over his shoulder, at last.
Myrtille’s tears had not quite dried up—which amazed him, and made him feel slightly guilty about trying to needle her in order to release a little of his own ill-feeling. He had seen her in tears before, obviously, but it was more than thirty years since Philippe had died, and he had been her brother, whereas Caroline…
Obviously, Caroline had not been nothing to her, and certainly more than an experiment.
Mathieu made no comment, but she could read him like a book. “Don’t be so surprised,” she said. “I loved her too. Not in the same way as you, obviously, but she was every bit as close as a sister. And it wasn’t just you that felt a sense of responsibility to her, even if my so called scheming did only amount to smoothing the path of inevitability.”
Mathieu sighed, feeling that now that feelings were out in the open, there was no reason to put on a show of bottling them up. “It’s going to be difficult,” he admitted. “It’s going to leave a hell of a gap.…”
“I forbid you to die on me, Mathieu,” Myrtille said, abruptly. “You hear me—I forbid it. There’s just the two of us left now. I need you.”
Mathieu raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised by the outburst.
“There isn’t just the two of us,” he said, pedantically. “In spite of your strict rationing there are half a hundred people in the valley now who have had the full dose of the longevity serum.”
“You know what I mean,” she retorted, bluntly. “Of the original five, there are only two. Only a handful of the others are over a hundred, and you and I are more than thirty years ahead of the oldest. That’s a generation—or used to be, before we started engineering the valley’s demography. It still is in the deceptive statistics we continue to send to Toulouse and Paris, in which you and I are now on our fourth identities and still in our fifties.”
“Before you started engineering the demography and falsifying the records of births and death,” he corrected her. “As you never initiated me into the cult, in spite of the preparation you put in before we arrived here, I’m still an outsider. Not that I mind—but Caroline did, a little. She thought there was an element of insult involved.”
“There wasn’t, but I couldn’t initiate her without you. And the tentative preparation that I put in was a way of testing the water. By the time we arrived here, I could see that you’d never be able to take it aboard. It’s not your fault. You weren’t born here; you hadn’t grown up with the traditions. Other people who’ve married out have never gone very far from the valley, but you’re a Breton by birth and a scientist by vocation. Philippe could look at the work from both sides, although Mother would have hesitated before initiating him if she hadn’t need his active involvement so desperately. She always thought that you’d do better work outside, and I always agreed with her. But you’re right—you have always been an outsider, in that sense. I still forbid you to leave me alone, though. I really do need you—not for the science, any more, but for the company. You’re only other person on earth of my antiquity, and you’re my doctor…and the only person still alive to whom I have a debt that I can never repay.”
Mathieu stared at her for a moment, and then smiled wryly. “Likewise,” he said. “With regard to the unrepayable debt, that is…and I still feel that I’ve short-changed you with the serum. We both know, now, what its limits are. I never did manage to make the effect of the golden fluid truly permanent. We’re still vampires, you and I. As you say, three out of the five vampire elders are dead, and I…”
“Will go on until you I give you permission to stop, damn it.” The edge in her voice almost became a snap, although he had given up trying deliberately to needle her, and his own tone had been wistful, without a hint of accusation.
Mathieu nodded, by way of weak assent, but then changed his mind, and shook his head. “Sometimes,” he said, “even befor Caroline began to deteriorate, when I tried to weigh things up retrospectively, I wondered whether all I’ve achieved is to waste a long life on a futile quest.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Myrtille, sternly “I forbid you to wallow in self-pity, too. I’m trying to be sensitive to your loss, but you really aren’t making it easy. We’ll both be better off if we both make every effort to console one another and build up one another’s morale, don’t you think?”
Mathieu knew that she was right, as usual, but it really wasn’t that simple. “In that case,” he said, after a pause, “speaking as your doctor, may I give you a prescription?”
“Have you developed something new?” she asked, taken by surprise and suffering a slight lapse of foolishness. “Why haven’t you mentioned it?”
Again, he smiled, wryly. “No,” he said, “It’s something very, very old, but it worked wonders once. Would you like me to hold you or a few minutes? Just to hold you, with no further agenda…to help you feel a little better.”
She considered the offer for twenty seconds, and then said: “Yes, I think I’d like that.
So he held her, just for a few minutes. He knew that it was completely different in its implications from the time that he had held Caroline all those years ago, because there was no possibility at all that Myrtille was going to fall in love with him. In retrospect, as Myrtille said, it had been inevitable that Caroline would, because it was the first kindness she had ever known in a wretched life in which she received nothing but violence and violation even from the people she loved. It was equally inevitable that Myrtille would not.
He knew too, however, that the situation was not completely different, in that he was deriving just as much benefit from the gesture as she was, and was not at all sure that he had not issued the prescription entirely for his own benefit. No matter how much Myrtille might think that she needed him, he was very well aware that he needed her far more, if he really was going to go on living—and he did not have the authority to forbid her anything.
When he let her go, she immediately stared into his eyes, plumbing the depths of his soul. He made no attempt to hide anything, not because it would have been futile, but because he no longer had anything to hide, now.
“I’ll try,” he promised. “I won’t say that it’s going to be easy, because it won’t, especially if your conviction that you’re far better equipped for emortality than I am turns out to be true—but I’ll do my best to make a new start, to find new goals, to manufacture a reason for going on. At the very least, I can set myself a target—two hundred’s a round number. Assuming that the world at large lasts that long, of course—which, given the way things seem to be going, it might not.”
“Things could be worse,” she told him. “You could have published your results…and that really would have precipitated disaster…but as I say, let’s not rake up old arguments. Let’s concentrate on the future, and what there is for us still to do. Is there really no hope left of stabilizing the fluid?”
Mathieu shook his head. “We’ve tried everything,” he said. “It can’t be isolated from an organism, and even switching the organism accelerates its deceleration. You know how hard it was even to get the result we did. I need a new direction, a new preoccupation. And at my age…”
“Stop it,” she said. “You just need time. Talk to the boys, and Esclarmonde…or even the grandchildren. They’ve all got work in progress. You’ll find something. You have to.”
“I’ll try,” was all the Mathieu would say, again. He did not feel confident. But even her insistence that she needed him was something, and the authority of her prohibition. Simply knowing that somebody cared was always a plus…as witness Caroline, who had seemed virtually finished at eighteen, and had almost managed a hundred and fifty, with various kinds of assistance.
“I’ll do my best too,” Myrtille told him, still looking at him, but no longer trying to plumb the deaths of his thoughts, merely holding his slightly distraught gaze. “I need a renewal of my motivation too, a reason to go on. And I will go on—not for the sake of vanity, or love, and perhaps not even for the quest for perfect beauty and spiritual perfection, or the search for the soul of blood and the authentic elixir of life, but I will go on. If all else fails, I’ll do it for the sake of sheer stubbornness.”
“And progress,” Mathieu added.
“That’s true,” she replied as they clasped hands to seal the optimistic bargain. “There’ll always be progress.”