By the time the Marquis de Mesmay had gone, my head was so full of potential raw material for meditation that I needed distraction and absorption, so I ate a hasty lunch, prepared by my own hands, and returned to the studio to take up my paints for a while. I was also feeling a trifle guilty at the slowness of my endeavor, to which the Marquis had made every attempt to apply a spur. I launched myself into work on the middle panel, on the host of shades charmed by Orpheus, visible only from behind as a silhouette, although a part of his lyre could be glimpsed and his stance left no doubt that he was playing.
The absorption worked, and I was soon in a near trance, losing track of time completely once I had lit a lamp to assist the dim gray daylight that seemed to be crawling rather than flooding through the windows. When the doorbell rang I naturally ignored it, and it was not until it rang for a second time that it occurred to me that there was no one to answer it, because Jean-Jacques was still at the old Toustain house.
I cursed, and blinked, and realized, too, that the light had become positively sepulchral, perhaps more suited to the painting of an Underworld scene than bright and cheerful sunlight, but so gloomy nevertheless that it was not providing adequate assistance to my vision, even with the aid of the lamp. Night had not yet fallen, though; behind the masses of gray cloud, the sun was still above the horizon.
It was snowing again, and this time, the snow was swirling in a capricious wind.
When the doorbell rang for the third time, I could not ignore it any longer. Cursing even more volubly, I went to open the door.
It was a woman I had never seen before, short and a trifle stout, although it was difficult to estimate her age because her features were partly hidden by the voluminous hood of a black cloak, which she had pulled up to protect her from the wind and snow. Because the garment was black, it was impossible to tell at a glimpse whether or not the snow was still polluted by soot from the alleged pillar of fire jetting from the Ocean.
“Please tell your Master that Sister Ursule wishes to see him—Sister Ursule from the Covent of Shalimar,” the visitor said, not really looking at me because she was hunching her shoulders and bowing her head to shield herself from the elements, but obviously assuming that I was a servant.
There was no carriage in the road. The sister had evidently walked. I hastened to usher her inside and took her into the studio, sitting her down in the chair by the fire and stoking it up yet again before even introducing myself.
“I’m truly sorry for making you wait, Sister,” I said. “It had slipped my mind that my manservant is not here to answer the door, so I did not respond immediately.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” the sister replied, pushing back her hood to reveal the cream head-dress of the Sisters of Shalimar. I hastened to take her cloak, and found the remainder of the costume underneath, unstained by the snow because of the protective cloak, which I carefully hung on a peg in the hallways before returning to my unexpected visitor. A few wisps of silvery hair were protruding from the severe head-dress, and a slightly wizened face that must have been regally handsome a long time ago, revealed her age; they gave their owner a commanding presence in spite of her short stature: antiquity and desiccation had weathered the features into a quiet but firm authority.
While she was realizing that I was, in fact, Axel Rathenius, I realized in my turn that she was not simply a sister bringing me a message from the Mother Superior of the convent, but the Mother Superior herself.
We looked at one another for a few more seconds, in rapid appraisal, and then her gaze strayed, to take in the studio, and all its clutter. I could see how she had impressed Hecate and convinced her that she possessed a wisdom beyond the usual. I sensed that her glance really was taking the measure of me, as an artist rather than merely a person who could not quite keep his art in order.
All I could think of to say was: “You really shouldn’t have walked all the way out to the headland in weather like this, Sister Ursule.”
“I walk everywhere,” she said. “I’ve been up Snowspur in worse. I’m getting old, but I’m not helpless.”
I sat down in the other chair, not yet fully recovered from the broken concentration, and still not knowing what to say. Somehow, even though I’d been told that she sometimes went out, the fact that the Mother Superior of the Convent had come to call on me seemed more prodigious than any mere blizzard of black snow or pillar of fire.
“I felt that I ought to come in person,” she said, once she had realized that I wasn’t going to say anything more for the moment. “And I confess, in fact, that I was curious to meet you. One way and another, I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“From poor Eirene,” I said, “and Hecate Rain.”
“Mostly,” she agreed.
Who else, then? I wondered.
“You have me at a disadvantage, I’m afraid,” I said, as my mind finally clicked into gear, like a well-oiled press. “I’ve hardly heard a single word about you, in more than twenty years, from Eirene Magdelana, Hecate or anyone else. I can’t even console myself with the thought that what you’ve heard about me might be misleading, for no one knows me better than Hecate... although no one could see quite as far into my soul as Eirene.”
“Their accounts did seem more reliable than others I’ve heard,” she said, without naming the others in question. “I fear, Master Rathenius, that I’ve come to bring you a warning: the parchment you’ve discovered is something that certain people might be prepared to kill to obtain. I understand that you’ve made other copies than the one you sent to me. Do you mind my asking who has seen them?”
“I sent one to the Capital,” I told her, “and gave another to Niklaus Hylne—and the Marquis of Mesmay has seen the original. I was alone with him at the time, but he didn’t make any attempt to kill me.” I was trying to lighten the tone, but I wasn’t entirely sure that it warranted lightening.
“Oh, Antoine won’t try to kill you,” she said. “In fact, it might be as well that he’s seen it—he might be able to defend you more effectively than you could yourself.”
The most surprising thing about that remark was her use of what I assumed to be the Marquis of Mesmay’s first name. I had never heard anyone refer to him in any other way than by his surname or title. I had assumed that his first name was only employed by his wife, and probably only in the privacy of their bedroom.
“Who might try to kill me to take possession of it, then?” I asked.
“If my understanding to the situation is correct, the Dionysians,” she replied, forthrightly.
“You can read it, then?” I queried.
“I can’t read it,” she replied, “but I believe that I know what it is—or, to be strictly accurate, what the late Monsieur de Toustain believed it to be.”
Naturally, she stopped there. She was not without a sense of theater. She was, after all, consciously acting out a melodrama of her own, and seemingly taking some pleasure in it.
She stood up, and walked over to the table. It was only then that I realized that I had not taken the parchment back to the wine-cellar after showing it to Mesmay. If anyone had turned up who was intent on stealing it, they would not have had to go to a great deal of trouble to find it, once they had shot me.
Sister Ursule peered at the parchment as intensely as Mesmay had done, for what must have been almost exactly the same lapse of time.
“Interesting,” was her verdict. “How did you send the copy to the Capital?”
“Discreetly,” I said, and left it at that.
She nodded her head, apparently willing to take my word for it. “It was probably a wise move,” she said. “The parchment itself is a copy, of course, albeit an old one; the original, if there ever was one, was destroyed a long time ago. Your copies are very artful, and you might well have disseminated them too widely for anyone to think it practicable to seize and destroy them all without attracting far too much unwelcome attention. Did you do that deliberately?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So you knew that there was danger—and yet you gave a copy to Hecate?” She might have added “to give to me,” but she didn’t.
“I didn’t have any other way of getting the document to you,” I said, “and I thought, given what Hecate had told me about your library and knowledge of the myth of Orpheus, that you were probably the one person on the island who might be able to cast light on the matter. I didn’t think that you’d be in danger. If the Dionysians, or anyone else with an interest in acquiring the parchment, don’t want to attract attention, they’re hardly likely to invade the Convent of the Sisters of Shalimar and murder the Mother Superior.”
“It had occurred to me,” she said, “that that might have been your principal reason for sending it to me.”
I shook my head. “Hecate really did speak highly of your scholarly credentials,” I said. “Evidently, she wasn’t wrong. Will Niklaus Hylne be able to discover what the document is, do you think?”
Sister Ursule pursed her lips slightly. “I doubt it,” she said. “The legend is sufficiently well documented, but in order to connect the document with the legend, he would have to be able to recognize the symbols in which it’s inscribed. That’s a more esoteric matter.”
“And what are the symbols?” I asked. “Or is that a secret between you and the esoteric Bardic scriptures?”
She came back to the armchair and sat down. “Of course it’s a secret,” she said. “Somewhat less so now, thanks to you… or Monsieur de Toustain. But the legend, as I say, is documented, accessible to any dedicated antiquarian. If Monsieur Hylne is clever enough, or sufficiently inspired, he might be able to guess that the symbols are a fragment of the suspiric language.”
“The language of sighs?” I queried.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“No—but I have some Latin.”
“Of course. And you’re acquainted with Madame Savage, are you not?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I don’t believe she’s ever mentioned the language of sighs to me.”
“It’s one of the arcana of her discipline; she probably wouldn’t have mentioned it to you even if she didn’t think of you as an unsympathetic skeptic.”
Hecate had obviously told her more about me, and other things, than she had implied. “I’m not quite following this,” I said. “To be best of my knowledge, Shalimar was a visionary Bard, and your Order is a Druidic one. Vashti Savage is a spiritist medium. I thought they were two very different faiths.”
“There is a philosophy that holds that there are no different faiths, but that all are one, cloaked in various symbolic languages—but in any case, spiritism is a method rather than a faith; it’s not incompatible with any religion, including Druidism and Christianity, although neither faith really approves of it. On the other hand, the mystery religions are quite hospitable to necromancy of all kinds, perfectly willing to employ it on occasion.”
Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The Marquise de Mesmay was a spiritist, but that apparently didn’t mean that she couldn’t be a member of the Cult of Orpheus too—or, at least, married to one.” But it still didn’t explain how the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Shalimar knew the Marquise de Mesmay—although, admittedly, she seemed to know a great many things that one wouldn’t have expected her to know.
The simplest way is sometimes the best. “Do you know the Marquis de Mesmay well?” I asked, bluntly.
“I’ve never met him,” she replied, equally bluntly, but added: “I don’t really have much opportunity to enjoy the company of men; this is a rare privilege for me—but to answer the question more fully, I do know a good deal more about Antoine than most men, because he’s married to my niece.”
I must have looked more surprised than the revelation warranted, because she continued: “Even Sisters of Shalimar have actual sisters. Mine was Aethne’s mother. Aethne and I aren’t close nowadays, but we are still in touch. She used to seek my counsel quite often; it’s less frequent now, but communication hasn’t entirely ceased.”
“Giving the Sisters of Shalimar a line of communication to the heart of the Orphean cult,” I said.
“Not its heart, Master Rathenius, or even its wing… but a part of it, yes.”
“Do you have other nieces married to Dionysians?”
“Alas, no… which might, I admit, give me slightly distorted view of that rival cult, most of whose members are probably meek clubmen. Still, just as there seem to be some Orpheans who regard the Dionysians as the direct descendants of the murderer of their founder, so there are rumored to be some Dionysians who regard the Orpheans as the treacherous slanderers of theirs. It probably seems as absurd to you as it does to me that a vendetta occasioned by an imaginary crime could extend over more than three thousand years, still drawing blood, but there have been political complications and schisms, as I suppose you’re vaguely aware, which have served to keep hatred alive and occasionally to stoke it up. Even if that document is utterly meaningless, as it might well be, the mere fact of its existence and its history has been enough to cause murders in the past, and might continue to do so in future.”
“Would you care to tell me why? Given that I’m currently holding the object of desire in question, albeit reluctantly, I’d like to know why someone might be prepared to kill me to take it from me—if, in fact, your judgment in that matter is correct.”
“You’re probably correct to doubt it—I’m uncomfortably aware myself that my knowledge of the world is limited to what I can obtain from books and the fragile lines of communication opened to me by a few confidantes. I might be completely mistaken—but I’ll tell you what I know… except that some of it, I fear, is mere conjecture. No one really knows the truth, because no one really knows how to decode the myth of Orpheus’ excursion to the Underworld.
“The legend pertaining to the manuscript of which your parchment is a partial copy claims that that when Orpheus succeeded in charming the shades with his music—including Hades and Persephone themselves—he was able to do it because he was inspired with the ability to play or sing the language of sighs: the language of the dead, which only Hades and the infernal judges were supposed to know how to write. Having learned to sing it, though, when Orpheus came out of the Underworld again, he contrived to write down the song he had sung: the song that has the gift not merely of charming shades, but of charming Hades, the god of death, himself. Whether he supposedly wrote it in Hades’ own script, or whether he invented his own notation, is unclear, as is the precise content of what he wrote, which is probably more akin to a sequence of musical notes than words.
“Whatever the truth of the matter, Orpheus’ alleged record of the charming of the dead, and of death itself, became one of the most precious artifacts of the ancient Orphean cult, guarded with the utmost jealousy, even though no one, after his death knew how to read it. The Orpheans believed that if and when the time came for it to be read and sung, the spirit of Orpheus would possess or inspire the destined player, and Orpheus’ quest to liberate and reclaim Eurydice would be reenacted—successfully, this time.
“Before the appointed time arrived, however, in the course of one of the conflicts between the Orpheans and the Dionysians, the original document was destroyed. The Dionysians thought that that would put an end to the Orphean cult, or at least what the members of the cult regarded as their sacred quest, forever. However, the Orpheans believed, or at least put the word around, that several copies of the original document had been made, and that they were still being preciously guarded, all the more carefully because the original was gone. It’s said that the Dionysians tried to hunt them down, and found one or two pieces of parchment that they burned religiously—but they could never be sure that what they’d destroyed were the actual copies, or whether or not they had destroyed them all. The rumor persisted for a very long time, as one might expect, that one copy was still out there, somewhere.
“Eventually, the Dionysians began to claim that they had found the last copy, but that, instead of destroying it, they were preserving it themselves, preciously, in order that when appointed time came, it would be one of their members, inspired by Dionysius, rather than one of their rivals, inspired by Orpheus, who would be able to charm death, and thus claim Eurydice and all that she represented, for themselves.
“The likelihood is that the assertion in question just a provocation: a kind of challenge, turning the tables on behalf of the cult that refused to die. In my personal opinion, what you have there is a forgery, of the same ilk as thousands of other supposedly sacred or magical documents, grimoires and the like—but I might be wrong. Even if it is a fake, though, and perhaps a fake of something that never had any real existence in the first place, it retains a certain symbolic value. If the Dionysians think that they had it, but that they’ve just lost it, and the Orpheans think that they’ve reclaimed it… well, even if it’s a worthless piece of gibberish, it might have too much talismanic importance for the Dionysians not to want it back… and to want all the copies you’ve made destroyed.”
I weighed all of that up, as carefully as I could. It was a farrago of nonsense, and I was inclined to agree with Sister Ursule that the parchment had to be a fake, of no real value—but the kind of fake that could nevertheless become a powerful desideratum.
“In effect,” I said, “I’ve been caught in the middle of a feud between two gangs of lunatics. But why on earth would Toustain bequeath the poisoned chalice to me? Why not to one of his Dionysian friends?”
“I don’t know,” said the Mother Superior. “I never met the man. But if he really has been living in hiding here for more than a decade, the probability is that he was hiding from his Dionysian friends rather than, or as well as, the Orpheans. Mystery cults are always prone to schisms and dissent. If he went into hiding in order to keep the parchment away from both parties, it’s possible that he genuinely thought that leaving it to you would be a secure continuation of its concealment.”
“Which it would have been,” I murmured, “if his stupid notary hadn’t carelessly broadcast his real name, as a matter of teasing gossip. I could wring his neck.”
“As an officer in the Bardic Order,” the Mother Superior observed, “I’m obliged to counsel you against that. Respect nature, respect life, do no murder. That’s the creed we live by.”
It was a creed I approved of wholeheartedly, even though I had no religious affiliation myself. I approved of the Christians’ creed too, although I wished that all their ostensible adherents took those creeds as seriously as Sister Ursule and the Sisters of Shalimar seemed to do.
“And what would your creed counsel me to do with the parchment?” I asked.
“I’m not sure that the creed has anticipated the situation,” she remarked, not without a certain ironic appreciation. “As a scholar, of course, I could never recommend that you burn it—and as an interested observer, I’d have to say that it probably wouldn’t do you any good to do that, because no one would ever believe that you had. The same interested observer might guess that the reason Antoine de Mesmay didn’t attempt to take it from you is that he’d rather you were a target for the Dionysians than him. Handing it over to the Dionysians probably wouldn’t do you any good either, because the leader of the Orpheans in the province isn’t a man it’s safe to annoy, if what Aethne tells me is true.”
I weighed up all of that too, and thought that it probably wasn’t too difficult to improvise a language of sighs, if one had an appropriate incentive.
“Is there any mention in the legend of black snow or pillars of fire?” I asked.
“Not in the versions I’ve read,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”
“Because portentous prophecies about appointed times for great deeds usually come with signs attached, and as we have the signs, I thought that time might have arrived for the ritual charming of death to be attempted.”
“What signs?” she asked.
I stood up and went to fetch her cloak from the peg in the hall. Holding it up before her, I brushed my hand down the sleeve. As expected, it came away dirty,
“Black snow,” I said. “And at least a couple of the boats that docked in the harbor this morning brought back rumors of a pillar of fire sprouting from the sea way out in the Ocean.”
That, at least, was something I had known and she had not. “That’s odd,” was her only comment, though.
“Odd, indeed,” I confirmed.
At that moment, the door opened, and Jean-Jacques came in, having returned from the old Toustain house, as instructed, at dusk.
He was not alone. Mariette and Elise were with him, along with a man who had to be Charles Parenot, the haunted painter of Martyr’s Mount.
As Hecate had pointed out to me, when catching me out in a trivial lie, I fit the standard image of a mature, established and experienced painter very well: distinguished rather than conventionally handsome, a trifle stout, sober, fastidious and utterly confident. Charles Parenot, still at the younger end of the spectrum, was completely different: handsome without being distinguished, slender, excitable, a trifle unkempt and anxious. He was also pale, blue-eyed and fair-haired—three more features that he did not share with me…or with his adopted daughter.
Enthusiastic as I was to meet my neighbor, rival and potential friend, however, I cursed the interruption. Accepting the inevitably, though, I simply handed the Sister’s cloak to Jean-Jacques, telling him to hang it up again, and got ready to make the introductions.