Читать книгу Yesterday Never Dies - Brian Stableford - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

THE UNMASKED WOMAN

Perhaps I did sleep a little, but only fitfully, if so, and only between the hours of three and four o’clock, when my tiredness reached its inevitable extreme—a trough rather than a peak. By five, long before dawn, I was wide awake again, tossing and turning blearily. By the time I actually got out of bed at six-thirty, Madame Bihan had already set off to help Dupin care for her cousin, so it was her husband who made my breakfast.

That seemed an imposition and annoyance, so fractious was my mood, although I had insisted for some years after first renting the house that I did not need and would rather not have any servants, and would be perfectly capable of fending for myself, as a good American should.

The problem with servants, I thought, with Dupin’s mysterious relationship with Madame Lacuzon in mind as well as my own trivial plight, is that one falls into the habit of relying on them, and soon convinces oneself that one cannot possibly do without them.

When I had restored my spirits with second-rate pain-au-chocolat and coffee, I went into the library—which always seemed more like a library than a smoking-room in the morning, when the air was still relatively fresh, at least until the first blasts of the winter wind forbade the opening of the windows. I did not intend to stay there—Bihan had lit the fire in the reception-room—but I wanted to search the books that Dupin stored there, his own meager quarters in the Rue Dunot no longer being able to accommodate his collection. I had a vague memory that I might have seen the name Thibodeaux there.

I had. Indeed, such was the reliability of my half-memory that I laid my hands on it almost immediately.

La Résonance du temps by Blaise Thibodeaux had been published by a perfectly respectable Parisian press; it was evidently not one of Dupin’s fabulously rare “forbidden books.” The copy was slightly battered, although it was only dated 1833, but that was because it had evidently been bought second-hand from one of the bouquinistes along the Seine. Thibodeaux had obviously not been such a close friend of Dupin’s as to give him a complimentary copy—or perhaps he had been the kind of author who expects his friends to purchase brand new copies out of loyalty to his purse...a futile expectation in Dupin’s case.

I carried the thick volume into the reception-room and sat down in my customary armchair on the side of the hearth next to the bay window, which was letting in a gray but nevertheless abundant light. The page count—well in excess of four hundred—and the small size of the typeface were hardly incentives to leisurely reading, but I assumed that the previous night’s mystery would provide me with sufficient motive to keep turning the pages. Had the publisher been enthusiastic to offer the book to the public, I presumed, he would have set the text in two volumes, so the fact that it was uncomfortable crammed into one suggested that Thibodeaux had probably paid for it to be printed, and had been anxious to keep the cost down.

I had hardly opened the book when the doorbell rang. I closed it again and waited. Bihan, as usual, seemed to take so long to answer it that I began to wish that I had answered it myself.

Finally, the old man appeared on the threshold of the reception-room.

“There’s a lady at the door, Monsieur, wearing a domino. She would not give me a card, but said that you would be willing to see her.

Marie Taglioni! I thought. Marie Taglioni, here! Given her curiosity outside the theater, however, I was not entirely surprised.

“Show her in,” I said.

“Yes Monsieur. Madame Bihan will be out all day, Monsieur—may I go to the market in her stead?”

“Of course,” I said, a trifle impatiently.

Bihan shuffled out, and shuffled back in again a minute late, escorting the lady in the domino. It was not Marie Taglioni. I reproached myself sternly for having jumped to the wrong conclusion, when I could just as easily have jumped to the right one.

She waited until Bihan had closed the door behind him before reaching up and taking off the hooded cape, mask and all.

Jana Valdemar was less than two years older than when I had seen her last, but she seemed to have aged at least five years. Oddly enough, maturity suited her—or would have done had she been entirely well. She did indeed seem a trifle indisposed, both physically and emotionally: pale, drawn, and a little sad. I knew one or two connoisseurs of art who considered that a touch of melancholy or consumption always added to a woman’s charms rather than detracting from them, but I had never been of that opinion myself. She was still beautiful, but she no longer looked like a parody of a femme fatale; indeed, she seemed a trifle forlorn. She gave the impression that she might still have been able to play the femme fatale had she pulled herself together and made an effort, but at present she was not casting herself in such a role. Perhaps it was too early in the day. I guessed that she had slept even less than I had.

I reminded myself that she was a expert mesmerist, and that I might perhaps have cause to beware, especially given that she had planted a suggestion in my mind once before, which had not entirely ceased to plague my dreams even now.

“Mademoiselle Valdemar,” I said, politely, trying to conceal my disappointment that she was not Marie Taglioni, although I did not doubt that she had taken note of my reaction. “Do sit down. How may I help you?”

She sat down. “Firstly,” she said, “I wanted to thank you for pretending not to recognize me last night, and for warning me about Saint-Germain’s presence in the auditorium. That was...chivalrous.”

I was no longer in the theater, under the tyrannical rule of etiquette, but once a course has been taken, it is difficult to change tack.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “And secondly?”

“Secondly,” she said, with a faint smile, “I was asked to come to see you by the...other lady in Dr. Chapelain’s box.”

I could not resist the temptation. “Madame Taglioni,” I said.

“She is Madame in the theater,” the younger woman said, refusing me any tacit reward of evident surprise for my powers of deduction, “but Mademoiselle in private life. Yes, Mademoiselle Taglioni asked me to come, to invite you to call on her today. She would like to see you again...and she is particularly keen to meet Monsieur Dupin.” Her voice was slightly hesitant. I could imagine that the thought might make her apprehensive. I did not suppose that she was here by choice, but Marie Taglioni was presumably a woman used to giving out instructions, and having them obeyed, by her physicians and everyone else.

“I would be delighted,” I said, “but I cannot speak for Monsieur Dupin. As you know, he was unable to get to the theater last night, although he dearly wanted to be there. I am not sure that he will be free today—certainly not this morning.”

“The time is immaterial,” Jana replied. “I would be very grateful if you could help me in this matter. Dr. Chapelain suggested that you might be willing to do so...in spite of our past history.”

Since she had raised the subject, etiquette no longer forbade me to make any reference to it. “That’s very kind of him, I’m sure,” I said. “I have to admit, though, Mademoiselle Valdemar, that I’m not at all sure that you have any right to claim a favor from me, given what happened last time you introduced yourself into my house.”

“I’m truly sorry about that,” she, putting on a show of sincerity of which only an accomplished magnetizer—or, of course, a genuinely sincere person—would have been capable. “I have no excuse to offer for my behavior in that instance, and I take full responsibility for my actions. It is true that I had been under the sway of Monsieur Saint-Germain for some time—it was through him that I first made contact with Dr. Chapelain, as well as the Baron du Potet—but what I did when I tried to plant a suggestion in Monsieur Dupin’s mind, and, as a corollary, in yours, was entirely my own idea. It was, I suppose, an aspect of my attempt to break free of Saint-Germain’s influence. I wanted to go my own way; alas, I knew no other way to go, at the time, but to take a path parallel to his. I know better now.”

Jana Valdemar had attempted, with the aid of one of her father’s old acquaintances from New York, to establish herself as the sole possessor and dispenser of a fake elixir of life. Not content with recruiting the unwitting help of Honoré de Balzac, whose somewhat unfair reputation as a confirmed hypochondriac and insistent seeker of quack cures might have excited as much skepticism as credence, she had hatched a convoluted plan to involve Auguste Dupin, whose reputation as a hard-headed rationalist would have provided a much better advertisement. Her plan had, of course, misfired; Dupin had outsmarted her—and Saint-Germain, annoyed by his protégée’s attempt to escape his control, had helped him turn the tables on her, somewhat to Dupin’s annoyance.

So far as I knew, however, Saint-Germain had not been able to reassert his control, and Jana had fled from him. He had been searching for her ever since. Evidently, rumor had reached him that she was working with Chapelain again, and he had set someone to watch the physician’s home. He must have gone to the Opéra-Comique last night expecting to find her there, probably intending to follow her to her present lodgings after the performance. Obviously, the much-vaunted seers of the Harmonic Society had been unable to locate her by less conventional means.

“What is it that you want me to do for you, exactly?” I asked.

“I would like you to smooth things over between Dr. Chapelain and Monsieur Dupin, if you can—but most of all, I would like you to persuade Monsieur Dupin to see Mademoiselle Taglioni, as soon as possible. She is very insistent. For what it may be worth, I believe that Monsieur Dupin will be very interested in what she has to say. There is a mystery involved.”

“Which has something to do with the 1834 performance of Robert le Diable at the Comique, and Blaise Thibodeaux?” I queried.

“Of course,” she said. She seemed to be on the point of saying something more, but did not. She was not sure whether it would be politic to raise the question of the ghost just yet. I thought that I ought to try to put her at her ease.

“I doubt that any ‘smoothing over’ will be necessary,” I told her. “Chapelain and Dupin have always been on the best of terms, and I cannot imagine that Dupin will hold it against him that he’s working with you again. He’s not a man to bear grudges. As for Mademoiselle Taglioni, I’m certain that he will be interested in what she has to say, and that he will consider it a privilege to meet her, as soon as he is able to do so—my only reservation, I assure you, is that I cannot be sure when that will be.”

She smiled, albeit wanly. “Thank you, Monsieur Reynolds,” she said. “You really are very kind. Perhaps I should not have been intimidated by the thought of coming here, especially after what you said to me last night. After all, we do have something in common, do we not?”

“Do we?” I queried, genuinely puzzled.

“Yes,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to maintain her smile. “On that night when Dupin beat me at my own game, you saw what I saw, didn’t you? Dupin didn’t see it, because he was watching me. Saint-Germain didn’t see it, because he was outside, playing with the balloons that the two of them used as a trigger. Poor Falconer caught a glimpse of it, but immediately lost his head and shut his eyes, blasting away with that stupid pistol in the hope of keeping the Dweller with the Eyes of Fire at bay. But you didn’t close your eyes. You saw what the trick with the balloons triggered, in all its awful glory, just as I did. You saw my phantom, my demon.”

That seemed a roundabout way to introduce the topic of phantoms, but I was not unsympathetic to her desire for circumlocution. I felt, however, that I ought to correct her apparent misapprehension.

“I only saw it because you had put the suggestion in my mind,” I observed.

She looked at me, but she looked away again almost immediately. She really did not seem trying to mesmerize me...either that, or she was playing an exceedingly subtle game. But why should she try to mesmerize me, given that I had agreed to help her, and had even shown myself to be “chivalrous” in her regard?

“That’s not entirely true, Mr. Reynolds,” she said, in a tone of conscientiously mild reproach. “Yes, I had planted the suggestion in your head while you were asleep, just as I had planted in Dupin’s...and, of course, my own. But that suggestion only had the powerful effect that it did because it was reflected by something real. You have had experience enough by now, I think, to know how intricate the relationship is between suggestion and reality.”

Chapelain had obviously told her something about our adventure with the Cthulhu Encryption. And why should he not? Dupin and I were not his patients, after all. I had thought that the greater part of the adventure had slipped Chapelain’s mind, as extraordinary events often do flee into forgetfulness in the minds of all but a few extraordinary individuals—but I had no doubt, too, that he remembered it subconsciously, if not consciously, and that Jana Valdemar sometimes hypnotized him, just as he sometimes hypnotized her. The more intricate aspects of their relationship were not something I cared to think about too deeply.

“Does it really make a difference what I saw that night?” I asked, gruffly—although what was really on my mind was wondering what a difference my more recent ghost-sighting was going to make, when Dupin finally got around to explaining what was going on.

“It makes a difference to me,” she said, softly. “You were the only witness to what really happened—the others have nothing but conjecture and inference on which to draw. I’m not asking for your sympathy, but I am asking for your understanding, and I really do believe that you’re uniquely placed to understand.”

She was still looking at me, without quite looking. She was not trying to hypnotize me—at least, so it seemed—but she was still trying to exert an influence upon me. And it was working; I really did feel that I wanted to understand, and to sympathize, even though I knew that Dupin might think me weak for doing so. I even wondered whether I ought to fight it, or at least attempt some sort of protest.

“Are you trying to seduce me, Mademoiselle Valdemar?” The words just slipped out. I probably blushed crimson.

She laughed, but rather bleakly. “What would be the point of that?” she asked. “Since Saint-Germain put that curse on you, you’re one of the few men in the world that I would stand no chance of seducing, no matter what I did.”

“What curse?” I said, utterly bewildered.

“The curse of The Mad Trist, of course. But that’s not what concerns us now. My curse is a very different one, just as insidious, though not entirely without its advantages. Do you understand why I have been so determined not to let Saint-Germain find me, if I can avoid it?”

The turn that the conversation had taken was utterly unexpected. I tried to clear my thoughts and focus on the question she had asked.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. She wasn’t content with the mere affirmation. She wanted proof. “He was your first...partner,” I continued. “You were presumably aware that you had mediumistic skills before you met him, but he was the one who helped to develop them. He forged a bond...a bond that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t entirely break. You’re avoiding him because you fear that he might be able to hypnotize you in spite of all your efforts to avoid it. You’re afraid that he might be able to...take you under his influence again, even without your consent.”

“What a delicate way you have of putting things, Mr. Reynolds,” she said, with a slight sigh, attempting yet another faint smile, and not quite succeeding. “Yes, he was the first to magnetize me...and the first to rape me while I was magnetized. And even though he pimped me out thereafter to the Baron and Chapelain, in the hope of obtaining a kind of ascendancy over them, too, he retained the power of that violation. Yes, I fear that if he were able to hypnotize me again—and I do, indeed, fear that I might not be able to prevent him from doing so, by virtue of the residue of our former magnetic relationship—he would rape me again.”

I was speechless.

“I’ve shocked you,” she said. “But only by pronouncing the words, surely? You understood the situation, in spite of your circumlocutions. You know, do you not, that a person in a magnetic trance is a uniquely vulnerable position, all too easily manipulable? And you can see the logic of the situation in which the medium is a young woman and the mesmerist a man? Perhaps you think my use of the word ‘rape’ unjustified—and I dare say that others would agree with you and claim that nothing was or is ever done without consent—but do you really think that a medium in a trance is capable of consent?”

I was still virtually speechless, but I eventually managed to croak: “Chapelain...?”

“I have, as you can see, made an exception for Chapelain. With him, I am now...and perhaps always was, a willing...partner. Since it is a medium’s vocation...well, suffice it to say that I have made my choice, and that I have every confidence that I can stick to it, resisting all temptation except one, if I am given the chance. Perhaps, if the circumstance arose, I could resist even that one...but I’m afraid, and certainly would not care to test the case yet. In time...but in time, of course, mediumistic abilities fade, as beauty fades. In five years, if things were to stay as they are, I might be solidly conjoined with Chapelain in alchemical marriage, if not in legal wedlock...but by then, I would be no further use to Saint-Germain, and he would not want me.”

She sounded oddly desolate while making that speech—perhaps, I thought, because she could not think without a certain sadness about the prospect of Saint-Germain no longer wanting her, even though she did not want him to have her. She was rambling slightly, showing the effects of tiredness. I wished, belatedly, that I had offered to make a pot of tea—but the time had passed by now.

I felt that I could speak again, but I had no idea what to say. In the event, I did not have to improvise, because the doorbell rang.

“Who is it?” she asked, fearfully. Reflexively, she reached for her domino, although she could not have imagined that it would provide adequate protection against recognition by anyone she knew.

There was a certain angle through which I could look through the window and catch a glimpse of the person at the door, although it required a rather ungainly contortion. I looked.

“It’s Saint-Germain,” I told her.

I should have been amazed. Saint-Germain was not in the habit of calling on me, in spite of his insistence that we were friends, and I could not imagine why he should be doing so this morning.

“How does he know that I’m here?” she lamented.

“Perhaps he doesn’t,” I said. “Even if he does, I can send him away.” I knew from past and recent experience, however, that Saint-Germain could be a difficult man to put off.

Jana Valdemar clutched at the straw, eagerly. “Perhaps he doesn’t,” she echoed. “Is there somewhere I might hide, until he’s gone?”

“Upstairs,” I said. “Bihan will come back eventually, but there’s no reason for him to go up there, and even if he does, he won’t give you away. You know the way, I believe.”

She ignored the hint of sarcasm. “Thank you,” she said, apparently sincerely. I didn’t bother to point out, knowing that she could hardly miss the observation, that because the stairway had a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn halfway up, she would be able to hear what Saint-Germain and I were saying if she were prepared to take the risk of sitting on the lowest step of the second half of the flight, out of sight behind the banisters.

I had no idea why I had abruptly entered into a tacit conspiracy with her, but I think it had far more to do with her mention of the word “rape” in connection with Saint-Germain than any shared experience in confrontation with the Dweller with the Eyes of Fire. In any case, had I not already taken her side, by warning her at the Comique that Saint-Germain was present?

I answered the door.