Yesterday Never Dies. Brian Stableford
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