The members of Myrica’s welcoming party were the only customers in the upper room, which made the smallness of their number even more glaringly obvious, even without the automatic contrast my own mind drew with the far more convivial tap-room,
Myrica had not been able to gather much of a court. Hecate Rain was there, of course, and the medium Vashti Savage, but there was not a single musician, or, for that matter any other painter. Even Fion Commonal, who remained an assiduous regular in the upper room in spite of the fact that he was always complaining that his medical vocation and duties as the head of the Island Council never gave him a spare minute, was absent, perhaps having found a bone to set somewhere on the far side of the island. There were only four chairs gathered around the table, and the fourth was occupied by Niklaus Hylne, a self-styled historian who considered himself the island’s foremost antiquary since poor Ragan Barling had been sent to jail on the mainland for double murder and a few petty crimes of lesser esthetic interest. Perhaps he was, given that he had bought a substantial fraction of Ragan’s collection, and had also been conspicuous by his presence and his disdain when old Toustain’s effects had been auctioned off.
Meager as it was, it seemed that Myrica’s reception committee was about to get even smaller, because I had no sooner stepped across the threshold than Vashti Savage leapt up from her seat and ran—literally ran—twenty-five or thirty paces to meet me. I had known Vashti, casually for nearly twenty years, but I had never seen her do anything so extraordinary before. She didn’t even like me—some people don’t, incredible as it might seem.
“Master Rathenius,” she said, in a low voice, although we were far enough away from the trio who were staring after her in frank puzzlement for there to be very little danger of their overhearing, “may I ask a favor of you?”
“Certainly,” I said, there being no danger at all in allowing people to ask for favors, as long as one has not promised in advance to grant them.
“Would you call on me tonight then, after you have greeted Master Parenot? It should not take long—a matter of minutes.”
I glanced out of the window—perhaps a little too conspicuously—at the falling snow.
“I’ll send my carriage back to pick you up,” she said, immediately. “Robert can take you home afterwards. It will save you getting wet, as you obviously walked here.”
I regretted that my attempt to tidy myself up had been so woefully unsuccessful. Whatever Vashti wanted to talk to me about was evidently something that required privacy, at least in her opinion. I had no reason to decline her request to call in on her, especially as it would earn me a lift home in a closed carriage. As for the favor, I could afford to wait and see...
“That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I’ll call as soon as I can.” I assumed that I would be doing Robert a favor too, as he would have two opportunities to put his feet up in the Sprite’s tap-room for a while instead of one, and all for the paltry cost of driving me back to the headland—albeit after dark and in poor weather, in all probability.
Vashti went downstairs then. Obviously, she had not come to the Sprite in order to catch a glimpse of Charles Parenot, whose fame had clearly not spread as far as his loyal agent had hoped and believed, but simply because she knew that I would be coming. It was understandable that she had not wanted to come to my house, fearful of being turned away if I were in my studio. Jean-Jacques, being a perfect model of manservants, has a fine talent for superficially-polite rudeness that can send a chill down the spine of any but the hardiest of importuners.
I walked over to the corner table and took the seat that the medium had just vacated, where the hot toddy was soon placed before me. Everyone looked at it with polite astonishment. I repeated the explanation I had given Madame Auger, adding a remark about the seeming poor quality of the atmosphere, and the need to adapt medicinal alcohol to the specific requirements of circumstance.
“You really shouldn’t have walked, Axel,” said Hecate, maternally.
“On the contrary,” I said. “It was an exceedingly fortunate decision. Had I come by carriage, I would not have realized so soon what a prodigy the snow is.”
I was fishing, but I only caught an old boot.
“Utterly unheard of, snow in October,” said Niklaus Hylne, taking entirely the wrong inference from my allegation of prodigy. He shook his head, sadly. “I’ve been here nearly twenty years, and I’ve never seen the like.”
“Axel’s been there longer than that,” said Hecate. “Have you ever known it snow in October before, Axel?”
“No,” I said, deciding to shelve the news about the black snow, which they clearly did not deserve to hear.
“How long have you been here, Axel?” Myrica Mavor put in, curiously. She had only been my agent for a few years, and had not qualified at the outset as a seasoned dealer of long standing—she never revealed her age but had to be younger than Hecate, and much younger than Vashti Savage—but she had obviously been familiar with my reputation before I had hired her, and had probably made sufficient inquiries into my previous career to suspect some mystery there.
“Longer than I care to remember,” I said, with an artificial sigh.
“There certainly aren’t many people who’ve been here longer,” Hylne put in.
“There are hundreds,” I corrected him, “if not thousands.”
“I’m not counting the indigenes,” Hylne said, unnecessarily. “I meant us.”
His “us” was a bid to be considered part of our company: the company of artists. I could not think of many of us—my “us,” that is not his—who would have considered him part of that select number, but artists are all egomaniacs, and mostly jealous so the assumed exclusion might not have been entirely fair. Niklaus was certainly an intellectual, as well as a relentless gossip, and a serious student of his history as well as a collector of curiosities.
“And where were you living before, Axel?” Myrica put in, blithely unaware of the fact that her curiosity, if taken much further, might cost her one of her most lucrative sources of commission.
Fortunately, everyone had their own train of thought to follow, and Hecate cut in before I could reasonably have been expected to come up with the answer I had no intention of providing.
“Axel isn’t even the oldest of the incomers,” she said. “I was talking to someone only yesterday who said that she remembered him arriving on the island—although she didn’t say exactly when that was.”
I assume that I was more surprised by that remark than anyone else, but I had no intention of following it up, curious as I was; I wanted to steer the conversation on to safer ground.
“How long will it be before Parenot’s boat arrives?” I asked Myrica.
She didn’t get a chance to answer either. Niklaus Hylne asked the question of Hecate that I had not: “Who was that?”
Hecate blushed slightly. That surprised me. She must have spoken thoughtlessly, not realizing that she was exposing herself—not that I could think of any plausible reason why she should be embarrassed about talking to someone old enough to remember me coming to the island, if anyone did. There might well, as I’d said, have been hundreds, or even thousands, of indigenes who had been here when I arrived, but I would have been prepared to wager that not one of them would have actually remembered my arrival, and I could not imagine that any of the “incomers” who might have preceded me would have had any reason to take note of my taking up residence, which had been accomplished without any publicity.
Hecate employed the same tactic to avoid answering the question that I had. She looked me in the eye and said, firmly: “How is the Orpheus coming along?”
She knew perfectly well how the accursed triptych was “coming along.” As one of the very few people to whom my door was not barred, and who was even allowed into my studio, under the strict conditions that prevailed there, she had called in on me two days before, and offered me her commiserations when I explained to her why my progress was so slow that I was only part-way through painting the second panel, and had only sketched the third. Given that she knew that, and that she was supposed to be my closest friend, it seemed a trifle tactless for her to ask such a blunt question in company—especially the company of my agent.
“Very well,” I lied. “It’s slow work of course, because I’m so very meticulous, but I think the Marquis de Mesmay will be very pleased when it’s finished. I hope he doesn’t intend to spent the entire winter on the island waiting for it, though—there’s really no need for that.”
“It’s a good job he isn’t here, then, to see you slacking,” said Niklaus Hylne, smiling to indicate that it was supposed to be an amicable quip, not an insult. We had obviously embarked upon a competition of tactlessness. I had no intention of joining in.
“I did invite him,” said Myrica. “I thought he might come—I’ve sold him three of Charles’ paintings, after all—he even has one of them here on the island. Did he show it to you, Axel?”
“Yes he did,” I said, rapidly, glad to be back on safe ground. “The man has undoubted ability. Although...”
I left the remark dangling, deliberately. Surely that hook wasn’t going to be left unbitten.
“What do you man, although?” Myrica demanded, reliable as ever. “That’s almost as bad as but. I know that painting—it’s first rate.”
“You’re right,” I said. “And I really didn’t mean anything by the although. You certainly shouldn’t think that I meant to imply anything unfavorable to Master Parenot. I’m not at all familiar with his work, but if his Eurydice is an accurate measure of his talent, he is, as you say, first rate, and you can be proud as well as glad to have him as client.”
“Eurydice?” Hecate echoed, faintly—but so faintly that no one but me paid any attention.
Hylne was still determined to be tactless. “Perhaps it’s as well that Monsieur de Mesmay didn’t know that Parenot was coming to the island when he commissioned you to paint the Orpheus triptych, Rathenius,” he said. “After all Parenot has a fine reputations as a mythological painter, while you’re best known as a portrait painter—a portrait painter of genius, of course,” he added, with suspicious belatedness.
“If Mesmay had wanted Parenot he could have had him,” Myrica pointed out, scrupulously. “He had no particular reason for wanting the triptych painted on the island. He could have commissioned it in the Capital just as easily... even more easily, in a way...”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Niklaus Hylne. “From what I hear, Mesmay isn’t delaying his return to the mainland simply because he’s waiting for Master Rathenius to fulfill his commission—as Rathenius points out, there’s no reason why he should do that. The word is that he intends to settle here permanently.”
That was intriguing news, if true—although, given the general reliability of island gossip, it might be so much hot air. If the summer migrants were going to start settling, the island might be on the brink of another economic transfiguration.
“Why would he do that?” asked Myrica, bluntly, as if the very idea were insane. She often came to the island out of season to pick up paintings, but never stayed long, and didn’t bother renting the cottage she routinely reserved for three months every summer, only taking a room on the second floor of the Sprite. The idea of being permanently resident anywhere but the Capital probably seemed quite bizarre to her, even though she knew full well, at some level, that the world was a big place and populated almost everywhere. For “her” artists, on the other hand, she thought the island was an ideal location. For such a hard-headed businesswoman, she had oddly romantic notions about what made artists tick.
“That’s a mystery,” said Niklaus, stressing the final word just sufficiently to make it clear that he meant something more than the trivial meaning of the word—not that anybody cared. At least, I assumed that nobody cared.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out to my loyal agent. “When is Parenot’s boat scheduled to arrive?”
“It should be here by now,” Myrica replied, looking out of the window at the harbor, which was conspicuously empty of anything larger than the usual smattering of fishing-smacks. Parenot was supposed to be coming from the mainland in a lighter that had sufficient storage space in its hold for his luggage. Painters tend to have a lot of luggage, even when they haven’t just bought a house whose furniture has all been sold off for the supposed benefit of the poor and needy.
“It’s undoubtedly been delayed by the bad weather,” Niklaus observed.
“It’s not that bad,” I observed. “The wind has dropped, and the snow is still relatively light. The sea seems calm enough, at present.”
“It is now,” Myrica agreed. “They might have been late starting out, though, and even if they weren’t, there was a fierce north-westerly blowing earlier, which would have been directly against them.”
“It was a bitter wind,” Niklaus agreed. “Unusual, for October, and it had an uncommonly bad taste. It looks as if we’re in for a ferocious winter.”
Myrica was staring out of the window, evidently wondering where the lighter had got to, and perhaps beginning to worry already about the possibility of an accident that might cost her one of her best clients.
Hecate took the opportunity to lean closer to me and say: “What did Vashti say to you? It must have been very urgent, if she came here especially to see you.”
“Don’t you know?” I parried.
“No,” said Hecate, innocently enough. “Which is odd, I suppose, as I’m her best friend and she doesn’t even like you. Although, when we were talking about you before you arrived…” She shut up, obviously realizing that she had let her mouth run away with her again.
“Really? I said, lightening my voice to make a joke of it, trying to let her know that I wasn’t going to hold it against her. “Doubtless you were complimenting my genius, and she politely refrained from opining that I had none.”
“Not at all,” said Niklaus. “We were just wondering why on earth the Cult of Orpheus might have commissioned you to paint an altarpiece for them.”
That was really throwing a stone into the frog-pond. Hecate looked embarrassed and Myrica looked furious.
“ So far as I know,” I said, this time making my voice a trifle frosty,” Monsieur de Mesmay has no connection with the so-called Cult of Orpheus, if it even has any real existence nowadays, and what I’m painting certainly isn’t an altarpiece. As you say, had the adherents of any mystical religion wanted a work of art for ceremonial purposes, they would certainly have turned to one of their own members.”
“Niklaus is just being mischievous,” Myrica said. “Nobody was wondering any such thing—not even him, really. We were actually talking about the mystery of coincidences, although it isn’t really a coincidence, is it, that Hecate is working on a poem about Eurydice while you’re working on a set of paintings featuring Orpheus. You’re friends, after all; she simply took her inspiration from you.”
“Actually,” said Hecate, “that isn’t what...” This time, it wasn’t her who abandoned the sentence; she was cut off rather rudely.
“I know who it was!” said Niklaus Hylne, abruptly. “Of course!”
He had lost us all.
“Who what was?” asked Myrica, mystified.
“Who the person was who remembered Rathenius arriving on the island, of course,” said the supposed historian, although I couldn’t see that there was any of course about it, and I would have much preferred him not to bring the topic back into the conversation. So would Hecate, to judge by her blush.
It was left to Myrica to say: “Who?”
“The Mother Superior,” said Niklaus, triumphantly.
Myrica was unimpressed. “And who the hell is the Mother Superior?” she demanded—rather inaptly, given that Mothers Superior, of whatever religion, are supposed to be the least likely people to end up in Hell.
“Of the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar,” Niklaus added, considerably less triumphantly now that he had seen how direly underappreciated his power of divination had been.
Myrica looked at him as if he were mad. “I thought lay people weren’t allowed into the Convent,” she said.
The Sisters of Shalimar was a religious organization, of Druidic affiliation rather than Christian, although obviously founded in imitation of the Christian tradition of monachism. They were often to be seen drifting around in the distinctively voluminous cream robes and head-dresses designed to reduce them to anonymity, doing various good works—mostly helping to tend the sick who couldn’t afford pay doctors, probably more effectively than most qualified physicians, if only because they administered no treatments, and hence did not compound the harm caused by malady or injury. I had never met the Mother Superior, though. As far as I knew, she never left the Convent, and men were not allowed to enter it, so opportunities for us to run into one another had been a trifle sparse. The prohibition did not, however, apply to all lay people, as Niklaus explained
“Women are allowed to go in to seek instruction in the mysteries of the Bardic tradition,” Niklaus told Myrica, loftily, still trying to save some vestiges of triumph, “and rumor has it that Hecate has been taking advantage of that license quite frequently of late.”
At the time, that seemed to me to be almost as ludicrous as black snow. Hecate Rain, thinking of going into a convent? Hecate Rain, thinking of going into a convent without having said a single word about it to me? Utterly absurd. It didn’t occur to me immediately that there might be other reasons for a woman to go into a convent for “instruction” than consulting the Superior about joining the Order. As I have already remarked, I wasn’t quite myself that day. The poor air quality was probably affecting my brain.
“Well, yes,” Hecate admitted. “It was the Mother Superior.” She conspicuously neglected to offer any explanation for her visits to the Convent—if, in fact, rumor was right in alleging that there had been more than one.
My resistance broke down, taking my wisdom with it; curiosity won. “Why were you consulting the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar about me?” I asked.
“I wasn’t,” she said, defensively. “She asked me.”
“Asked you what?” I said, quite mystified.
“How your painting was coming along—the Orpheus triptych, that is.”
Why on earth would she be interested? I thought—but my brain was catching up now, and I didn’t ask the question aloud. It didn’t matter, it was one of those questions so obvious that it didn’t have to be voiced to saturate the atmosphere.
“It’s not really surprising,” said Hecate, still on the defensive. “She knows that I’m working on the poem about Eurydice, obviously...”
Obviously? I thought.
“...so she naturally asked me why,” Hecate continued, letting that unspoken query pass, “but I didn’t say anything about your painting. She was the one who brought the subject up, passing naturally enough from Eurydice to Orpheus. Obviously, she’d heard about the Mesmay commission, and she mentioned, in passing, that she remembered you arriving on the island. Then she asked me how the painting was coming along. She seemed really interested, and I didn’t want to lie to her… she’s a Mother Superior after all, even if her religion is dying... so I told her you were having difficulties...”
There went her mouth again.
“What difficulties?” Myrica snapped. “It’s the first I’ve heard about difficulties. Didn’t you say just now that everything was going very well?”
“It is,” I lied. “Of course there are difficulties—what’s worth doing if it doesn’t present difficulties?—but I’m overcoming them. That’s what art is all about.”
It isn’t but, unlike Hecate, I wasn’t talking to the Mother Superior of a dying religion, and saw no reason to be absolutely truthful.
“So, you see,” Hecate continued, not exactly valiantly, but at least with the substitute for courage that a desperate struggle to get out of trouble always provides, “there was really nothing to it… it was just casual conversation. And The Mother Superior isn’t what you might imagine. She might be a mystic of sorts but she’s a genuine scholar, of real intellect. She has a bigger library than yours, Niklaus, even now, and she’s told me all kinds of things about the Orpheus myth that will be very useful for my poem; she knows a lot more about it than you do, Axel... and she’s not the recluse people assume. She does go out sometimes; it’s just that no one ever recognizes her, because no one on the outside knows who she is. You and she even have… or had… a common acquaintance, Axel, why is probably why she was interested enough to ask after you. She used to go to see the old woman on the mountain, the mad morpheomorphist, just as you did.”
Eirene Magdelana had never mentioned the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar to me—or, if she had, I hadn’t understood the reference—but why should she? Whereas, as a true egomaniac, I could think of any number of reasons why she might have mentioned me to any other visitors she might have had.
Hecate till hadn’t explained, however, why she had been in the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar in the first place. She obviously had no intention of doing that here, in front of Myrica and Niklaus—but I was enough of an egomaniac to think that she wouldn’t keep it a secret from me, now that she had let enough slip to bait my curiosity. I resolved to go to see her the next day, if I could spare the time from my accursed commission.
Somehow, I didn’t think that would be a problem.