The Lantern's Dance, page 12
“After that I got busy again. As I said, I promised some new work for the show—both shows. Frankly, I’d forgot about the things until the railway station rang us last week.”
“The day?”
“Wednesday? No, it was Tuesday, because Mme LaRue’s girl was there. So, Tuesday, September first. Gervais went to Délieux to pick them up, and I had him and Pierre—did you meet him? Madame’s brother, who lives in the back—I had them put the boxes in my studio. When I’d finished for the day, I gave the contents a quick look. The only thing of any interest was a little lamp that Estelle liked, but since Aileen thought it was a bad idea to have her playing with a burning candle, I packed that up, too. The rest of it can wait until the show is out of the way.”
Holmes rested his steepled fingers against his lips, considering the sequence of events. “The fifth of August, you go to the Institut, and leave your card with a concierge. The thirteenth or fourteenth, you receive a letter about the boxes, which themselves arrive on September first. The next day, two men appear in Délieux, men described by the LaRues as ‘foreign,’ with black hair and dark skin. They ask questions about the artist Adler and the family Vernet. Two days after that, on Friday, the younger of the two men comes to Ste Chapelle, where he asks specifically about you. And then on Sunday night, just after midnight, someone breaks into your house. Your ‘lascar.’ ”
“Though as I said, that one did look Indian. The others, well, sounded as if people weren’t so sure.”
“Would anyone in the Children of Lights have known of the Vernet connexion?”
Damian’s face closed in, but after a generous swallow from his glass, he replied, “I certainly never told Brothers.”
“Did your wife know?”
“Yolanda? I don’t think so. I tended not to tell her things like that. Matters that could be, shall we say, used.”
Holmes let his eyebrow rise. “Information to drop in the right ear? Or perhaps,” he said carefully, “in the wrong ear?”
Damian started to protest, then stopped, and gave a rueful shake of the head. “I’m pretty sure that if Yolanda knew I was related to the Vernets, she’d have made use of it. Just like I know that if she had any inkling that I was the son of the world’s greatest detective, she’d have plastered your name across any review of my work. When we got to London, I knew she’d find out eventually, and I wasn’t looking forward to the argument about it.”
“I see.”
“No, if those men found me through my visit to the Institut, then I don’t see how they could have been related to that damned cult of hers.”
“You may be right.”
“So, have we finished with your questions about the men who ran me from my home? And if so, is it my turn now? Or is this the point at which you suddenly remember that you need to be elsewhere?”
Holmes stretched back into the chair, hands clasped across his belly and ankles crossed before the fire, giving an attitude of settling in for a long session. Internally, he was considerably less serene. This was a door he had agreed to open, but he was very aware of the need to brace himself for what lay within.
“I am yours,” he said.
Chapter Twenty
Holmes
Despite the go-ahead, Damian began by walking across the room to fetch the Cognac. When he had topped up both their glasses, he left the decanter on the table between them. “Do you know, I think yesterday was the first time you ever mentioned your mother. Let’s begin with her.”
Holmes ruefully eyed the liquid in his glass. Well, that was one place to start. Although he needed a deep breath before the words would come.
“My mother committed suicide when I was eleven. She was being blackmailed.”
Silence thudded down between them. Then: “Jesus. Do you know…?”
“What the blackmail was over? Not in any detail. I was given to believe she’d had a…dalliance. Father never talked about it. Mycroft did not know much more than I did. And the letter she left did not go into detail, beyond her heartfelt regrets and her wish not to bring shame upon the family.”
“I…I honestly don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing to say. She was an interesting woman. Not…motherly. Love from her was not a soft emotion. She could comfort, when comfort was needed, but she was more likely to challenge and reward. However, one never doubted the sincerity of any praise that came from her. And one felt that was how she showed her love.
“I think you’d have liked her, once you got used to her. Estelle would have adored her. But she was an ill fit in a staid country house, married to one of the landed gentry. I cannot imagine why anyone thought a vigorous young woman who had grown up at the centre of the Paris art world would be happy hidden away in the English countryside. Looking back, one speculates about the reason she left Paris and never spoke about her family. None of the Vernets ever came to visit. Not even for her funeral. As a boy, of course I thought nothing of it. When one is young, whatever one’s parents do and are seems natural.
“Still, whatever her past, with us she was undoubtedly happy—at least, while your uncle and I were growing up. She was a private person at the best of times, and though she had friends, she seemed to prefer our company to that of her peers. For one thing, she was far more physically active than women were then. She rode, she went mountain-climbing in Switzerland, she scandalised the neighbours by playing tennis. She loved to swim—actually swim, not just paddle in the shallows. She’d have fit well in the modern age.
“My father, although he could not bring himself to approve of her more vigorous activities, did look on them with a dose of amusement. He often rode with her. And they played golf. She always won,” he added.
“Instead, Mycroft and I played the role of her friends—and, I think, her vocation. We had tutors, naturally, but many of her games were like lessons, intended to hone our wits and senses. We’d dress up, as I mentioned, and see how thoroughly we could convince people. She bought a microscope to see if we could identify things she’d put on slides. We took apart and re-assembled half a dozen clockwork automata. On a trip into town, she’d challenge us to recall the shoes on the last six people we’d gone past, or the contents of a shop window.” He paused, then gave a wry laugh.
“It occurs to me that when Russell first dropped out of the skies on me and was in clear need of tutoring, I used those same methods of challenging her intellect under the guise of games.”
“I do the same with Estelle,” Damian said. “Although I hadn’t thought to dress her up as a delivery boy until now. But it sounds like a happy enough life. For your mother, I mean.”
“Whatever drove her to suicide, it was not a generalised depression. She was content, certainly while we were young. But then Mycroft went off, to school and then University, and I was soon to follow. My grandfather took ill, leaving more and more of the estate’s management to my father. Mother started spending time away, in Town or visiting friends, which must have been her attempt to counteract the lack of stimulation in the country.
“And then one week—this would have been in the spring of 1872—she went to Town to assist a friend. The woman’s eldest daughter was being presented at court, after which they were holding a ball.
“Father went down to join her for the ball itself. When they returned, something had happened. She had changed. She was…brittle, somehow. Distracted. Or rather, distracted at one moment and overly attentive the next.
“Twelve days later, she was dead. She kissed us good-bye one morning and took the carriage to the station, saying that she had some people to see in Town. And she only carried one small valise, which meant she intended to be home in a day or two.
“But a few hours after she left, one of the maids discovered a letter on her desk, with my father’s name on the envelope. He took it into the library and shut the door. An hour or so later, he summoned his valet and sent him to fetch Mycroft.
“It made for a very long day, for a boy of eleven, with the library door shut and the servants knowing no more than I did. Mycroft didn’t arrive until very late indeed, wearing his scholar’s gown—he hadn’t even stopped in his rooms before coming home.
“Father’s valet brought Mycroft up to collect me. Despite the hour, the other servants were still awake. I could see their faces, peering around the doorways. We were ushered into Father’s presence. He sat us down before the fire, told us that he was very sorry to give us bad news but that our mother had died. And then, while we were reeling from that, he read us the letter she had left.
“Portions of it are seared into my memory, although at the time, I was not altogether clear on her meaning. It said in essence that she loved us all, but that she had done something very stupid and could not live with the shame it would bring on the family, so she planned to go for a long and lovely swim, and simply not turn back to shore. That was her phrase, ‘a long and lovely swim.’ As if she wanted our last image of her to be of her swimming figure, headed towards the horizon.
“And then he burned it. Laid her letter on the fire and let her final words be consumed.”
Holmes stared into the low-burned coals, seeing the shapes of burning pages. After a time, Damian leaned over to refill their glasses. Holmes rested the glass on his stomach. “Curious, isn’t it, how certain images or events remain vivid in the memory? The next day, Father had the servants carry most of her other possessions out onto the back lawns, where he doused them with paraffin and set them alight, but it is the letter that remains with me. Wanting to dive after it, knowing I must not, merely watching the glowing line take hold of the paper.
“We were sent up to our beds a short time later, with cups of cocoa and biscuits that the cook imagined we might choke down. Mycroft, who was eighteen, understood better what the letter had been saying. He tried to explain the concept of blackmail, how a person might choose death over dishonour.
“I understood, eventually, although I clung to the thought that this all might turn out to be one of her games. But the next afternoon, attendants cleaning the bathing-machines at the place of our last seaside holiday found her clothes. A few days later, her body washed to shore. There was a funeral, since not to have had one would have invited the very questions she died to save us from. But our father never mentioned her again. He would leave the room if her name was brought up. He died not many years later.”
“He loved her.”
“He did. She was like an exotic bird that had chosen to transform his drab life. And I believe that she loved him. Although looking back, I cannot help wondering if, sooner or later, their essential differences might not have brought about a degree of…alienation between them.”
The fire whispered. The old house creaked and shifted with the night. At last, Damian spoke.
“Your mother sounds remarkably like mine.”
“Strong-willed women, the both of them. And unwilling to part with their secrets.”
“I do remember that, about Mother. The harshest arguments she and I had were when I discovered things that she had been keeping from me. I found out one day—I was perhaps fourteen—that one of her close friends was the Délieux brothel-keeper.”
Holmes laughed aloud, and Damian gave a reluctant grin. “You can imagine the fireworks when she told me who my father was. My eighteenth birthday, my first paintings in a gallery, life opening up in front of me, and I learn that I am sprung from the head of—well, if not Zeus, then some equally mythic creature.”
“You and Russell could share stories.”
“I imagine.” Damian’s smile went crooked, and the intent way he stared at his glass warned Holmes that matters were coming to a point. “I also imagine,” Damian said, “that having had that kind of pain, that abandonment, from such a young age made it all the more…difficult when my mother sent you away.”
Holmes drained his glass and leaned forward onto his elbows.
“You were right, Damian, that day on the steps of the Sainte Chapelle gaol. I should have known that your mother was with child. I, of all men, should have caught the signs, early as they were. I was too quick to believe that when a woman in her thirties did not have children, it meant that she could not have them. And having missed that, I compounded it by not questioning her reasons for sending me back to London. I was, I admit, hurt. That she did not…That my affection for her appeared to be greater than hers was for me. And since this seems to be a time of confession, I will concede that to some degree, her rejection was convenient. I did want to return to my work—I needed to. I had left things unfinished in London, increasingly urgent things that only I could do. Your mother’s decision was unilateral, and deeply distressing, but it did serve to simplify my own. I sent her a letter, no doubt as pompous as anything I’ve written, to say that if she changed her mind, she had only to let me know. But as time went by and she did not write, I put those months in Montpellier away and went on with my life. Only six years ago, when I first learned of your existence, did I begin to understand just how deadly a combination of wounded male pride and a belief that one’s work is imperative can be.”
With deliberation, he reached out to set the empty glass on the table.
“Nonetheless, you are correct. Between my mother and yours, I have learned that trust does not come easily.”
He rose and let himself out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Chapter Twenty-one
Fourth Image
The Kick
Violence fixes an image to memory like mercury vapours fix a scene to a daguerreotype plate. Before the camera’s shutter is uncovered, the world is filled with motion; afterwards, life resumes, but the moment itself, caught and then fixed, remains indelibly.
I was seven or eight, and I had seen fistfights before. Ships, docks, crowded streets, even markets would have occasional outbursts of shouting and shoving and punches thrown. I’d seen a slap once, when I was looking out of my window on a moonlit night and a young servant pressed his attentions a little too assiduously on a housemaid. And one time, a knife had been drawn, its blade gleaming in the waning sun before the man’s companions took it from him.
But this was different. Somehow I knew that this vicious act did not stem from the same impulses as the others. This was a kick, a gesture so full of contempt, it did not even require that the person delivering it so much as dirty his hands. A gesture more suited to a dog with mange than to a human being.
I was standing at the window of Pitaji’s Calcutta office, looking down at the endless whirl of activity. In the background, the river was crowded with fishing canoes and thatch-roofed ulaks and Western ships like the one we had come on, tall masts and sails waiting for the tide. The street below matched the bustle, with slow bullock carts and quick horse tangas, feathered hats and wide parasols and a hundred kinds of turbans, with bright parrots and langur monkeys on the roof-tops and bony dogs and pale, high-humped cattle below. Vendors of water and betel and naan called their wares; men with laden carrying poles threaded their nimble way between ladies in long skirts and men in brief lunghis and children wearing nothing at all. I had twice seen an elephant from this window; and once, a camel whose lofty gaze reminded me of my aunt.
This day, Pitaji and I had been following the uncertain progress of a hand-cart loaded with such a precarious mountain of straw, one could scarcely see the legs of the man pulling it. From around the corner came a European—English, I thought—in a silk hat and too-heavy suit. He was walking along the wharf past a line of our stevedores carrying bricks when the load on one man’s head began to shift. Another worker, who was circling back to take on his next load, jumped forward to help. As he reached down to retrieve a fallen brick, the Englishman was forced to take a small step to the side—and as his other shiny shoe came up, he aimed it at the stooped man’s head. The stevedore and his turban fell to the ground. The Englishman spat out a couple of words but continued on his way without a pause.
The kicked man staggered upright, swaying as he adjusted his turban. Moving cautiously, he leaned down again for the straying brick, set it atop the other man’s load, and went on towards the start of the queue.
I had seen the entire brief, vicious act, and I turned to Pitaji in shock. “What did that man in the hat say?”
“It was a rude word,” he told me. “Not in itself—if you simply mean that you’ve cut your finger, you may say it is ‘bloody.’ But in the way he used it, it is very bad manners.”
“What about the other word?”
“Ah. ‘Lascar’ is what English people call sailors from India.”
“Don’t they like them?”
“No. You remember we’ve talked about the idea of ‘caste’?”
We had talked about it, why the sweeper couldn’t do the cook’s job, why my tutor’s daughter couldn’t marry the shopkeeper’s son even though they liked each other. I can’t say that my young mind actually understood what “caste” meant. Still, I nodded.
“Most people of that Englishman’s caste—or class—feel that even an English sailor is beneath them. Those from foreign countries are little more than dirty animals.”
“But isn’t he the foreigner here?”
“Remind me to talk to you about the word ‘irony’ when you get a little older.”
The man whose load the other had rescued from falling had finished unloading it and was walking back along the boards. The rescuer was in the line of laden men now, one hand up to balance the board under his bricks.
They were both dark. Pitaji was lighter than they were, but nowhere near as light as the man in the silk hat. Skin colour had much to do with caste, but caste was also how people talked and the clothes they wore. Today Pitaji was wearing his European clothing, high collar and scratchy wool (which always smelled, no matter how thoroughly the dhobi tried to clean them). He moved differently in that suit than he did in kurta-pajama. I wondered if the Englishman would move like an Indian if you took away all those rigid layers and put him in Bengali dress. I doubted it. He was probably like his clothes all the way down. It reminded me of my life before Pitaji had taken me away, where everything was stiff, and dull, and bad-smelling.
