Yesterday Never Dies. Brian Stableford
more emphasis on physical exercise than drugs; he was an opponent of sanguination, and was even suspicious of antisepsis—of which Dupin approved wholeheartedly, being a covert to François Raspail’s theory of disease. Chapelain’s opinion was that many ailments, not excepting the most familiar infectious diseases, were best treated by attempting to encourage the power of mind over body, although that was frustratingly difficult with many patients, whose habits, tastes, convictions, and petty manias were often unwittingly antithetical to that kind of natural self-defense.
Chapelain had the reputation of being a good physician, and what little I had seen of his treatments supported that contention, but he suffered from a certain lack of self-esteem, and was often frustrated by the imitations of his hypnotic technique. He had told me more than once that the best physicians of his sort worked in pairs, employing what modern parlance was beginning to call “mediums”—hypersensitive individuals who, when entranced themselves and guided by a magnetizer, sometimes had more far-reaching insight into a patient’s mental state than either could have achieved alone. He was as insistent as Dupin that there was nothing supernatural about such intuition, which was based in a capacity for sympathetic identification with others that most women, and even a few men, possessed to some degree.
In that respect, the doctor made no secret of the fact that he deeply regretted the loss of the best medium with whom he had ever had the opportunity to work: Jana Valdemar. At least, he made no secret of that to me—but he had not been nearly so ready to confess it to Dupin, who had once got into a contest of wits with the young woman in question, and did not approve of the manner in which she had attempted to deploy her undoubted talents. The Comte de Saint-Germain, I knew, also had a strong interest in her, having once been her mentor, and had been enthusiastic to renew that situation for some time. Now I knew that she was the person who should have been in Chapelain’s box when the fake Comte barged into my box, it explained why Saint-Germain had been so eager to spot the absentee, and so disappointed to find the seat empty. If Chapelain were associated with the medium again, that might also explain why he had been keeping us—or, more specifically, Dupin—at some distance of late, fearful of Dupin’s disapproval.
I took a certain pride in having worked all that out long before the fifth act came to an end, but I was still deeply frustrated by the questions into which I had no insight at all, however hazardous. Why was Chapelain’s patient here, along with Lucien Groix, both of whom had apparently seen the 1834 performance—and along with Thibodeaux, who had turned up in spirit, and Dupin, who should have turned up but had not? Something was, as Saint-Germain had readily observed, going on—something of which I had only scratched the surface thus far. And now that Saint-Germain’s curiosity had been piqued, presumably by virtue of a mere coincidence, how might his potential involvement complicate the situation?
Such preoccupations were still weighing upon me as I made my way out into the street. Convention demands that the first waves of fiacres parked outside the theater waiting for the sortie should go to ladies and their escorts. Many unaccompanied males dispersed to look for cabs a little further afield, but I always waited, knowing that once the first fleet of fiacres had taken off like a flock of startled birds, others would begin to arrive to pick up the stragglers. I moved some forty meters along the trottoir, in order to find a deserted spot, but I took up a station under a réverbère so that I would be clearly visible when I got the chance to flag a cab down. I knew that I would have at least ten minutes to wait, so I sank into an absent-minded reverie—or, rather, sank back into the same one that had possessed me ever since my sighting of the ghost.
After two minutes or so, a private carriage drew up alongside me and stopped. I recognized Pierre Chapelain’s carriage, but it was the older masked woman who put her head out of the portiere.
“May we offer you a lift, Monsieur Reynolds?” she asked. Obviously, Chapelain had told me her name, even though he had shirked the formal introduction. Chapelain and Jana Valdemar were presumably inside the carriage, but neither showed their face.
“Thank you, Madame, but no,” I said. “It would take Dr. Chapelain out of his way.”
The carriage did not draw away. “Forgive me for asking,” said the masked woman, “but are you feeling ill?”
I was slightly surprised by that, although it was easy enough to guess what she was getting at. Evidently, she had seen someone else in my box, briefly. She was curious.
“Quite well, thank you, Madame,” I assured her. Until she asked, I had not suspected otherwise, but I realized that I did feel a trifle queasy. We were still in the precincts of the Comique, however. Etiquette still ruled.
Still the carriage did not pull away, although more fiacres were now beginning to arrive, and it would soon be causing an obstruction.
“Forgive me again,” the lady persisted, “but you really do look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
The game was obviously up. Even etiquette could not excuse a blatant and transparent lie.
“As a matter of fact, Madame,” I said, “I have—but the experience was transient, and the phantom did not appear to mean me any harm.” I looked her in the face then, almost challenging her to find a permissible conversational countermove.
“In that case,” she said seemingly quite unperturbed, and probably having obtained the conformation she wanted, “I’ll wish you bonsoir. Sleep well, Monsieur Reynolds.”
The masked face disappeared from the portière. I heard Chaplain rap twice on the wall of the carriage’s compartment with his cane, and the coachman, meekly obedient, flicked the horses lightly with his whip, instructing them to move off. They obeyed.
I was, however, in no mood to go meekly home to my bed, to sleep—if I could—and then to wait for Dupin to call on me at his leisure. I wanted to see him, and I wanted to see him right away, if I could find him. I was not so certain of my powers of deduction as to take it for granted that I could find him, but there was only one place I could think of to look, and I certainly intended to try it before admitting defeat.
When the fiacre finally collected me, I told the coachman to take me to the Rue Dunot, where Dupin’s lodgings were. I did not expect to find him at home, in the strict sense of the term, but I did think that he would be in the house, and that he would open up to me, even if he would not do so to anyone else.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THREAT OF INFECTION
When I got down from the fiacre, I paid off the driver. There was no point asking him to wait. If it turned out that I could not find Dupin, I could walk home easily enough; the night was fine and mild, considering the time of year, and brightly moonlit. I was not afraid of footpads at such a distance from Montmartre and Belleville.
I went to the door of the concierge’s lodge at the coaching entrance of Dupin’s building, and knocked on it with the pommel of my stick, in a peremptory manner. There was no answer—which did not surprise me. I knocked again, and waited a further half minute before calling out: “It’s me, Dupin—let me in.”
I would have added an extra incentive had I got no response with my self-identification alone, but I eventually heard movement on the other side of the door, and then a voice said: “Go home. I’ll come to see you tomorrow afternoon.”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“It’s not a good time,” he replied. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the theater. Tomorrow afternoon, without fail.”
It was obvious that I had to deploy the extra incentive after all. “I saw the ghost,” I said, and baited the hook further by adding: “Thibodeaux’s ghost.”
Had I been wrong in that deduction, the cast of the hook and line would have gone wrong, but I knew before he had finished hesitating that I could chalk up one hit, at least.
“Are you wearing gloves?” he asked, finally, unable to prevent himself yielding to temptation.
“Of course,” I said.
“Don’t take them off,” he instructed.