I, the Virgin Queen.
Rosalind had twenty children, but she had never married, and never would. The idea was unthinkable. Unlike Elizabeth, she didn’t even have “favorites.” She was always unescorted, at social occasions of every sort.
She looked magnificent. I had no doubt that she would be magnificent. It was Magdalen’s funeral, but it was her show.
“He’s not here, is he?” said Professor Crowthorne, in a whisper that had horror in it as well as amazement.
“No,” I said, in a much more level tone. “He’s not here. He hasn’t come.”
My first instinct was not so much to explore possible reasons for Rowland’s absence, but to find excuses for him—excuses I hadn’t been able to find, in the event, for myself.
Perhaps Rowland and Magdalen had enjoyed—or had at least believed that they enjoyed—such a close union of mind and spirit that Rowland felt that his presence in spirit made any physical presence at her funeral quite irrelevant. Perhaps they had been so close—and yet, paradoxically, so far apart—that Rowland had been overwhelmed by grief. Perhaps he was ill in bed, unable to travel. Perhaps….
Rosalind, I knew, would not have tolerated any excuses of those sorts. She was the kind of hard-line positivist who thought all talk of “spirit” nonsensical; the only kind of presence she recognized was physical presence. Grief she did believe in, but did not believe that it could or should be incapacitating. Illness she undoubtedly believed in too, but similarly believed that it could not and should not be incapacitating, unless literally mortal. In Rosalind’s view, I had no doubt, Rowland should have been sitting meekly in the front row, with all his sisters—perhaps positioned arrogantly at their head, but nevertheless with them, in the junior ranks of the family.
In theory, I suppose I agreed with her standpoint—but I admit to being a slightly fuzzy thinker, and when it came to Rowland, and Magdalen too, I was prepared to think in terms of spirit, and incapacitating grief. There had always been something slightly uncanny about Rowland, and if there was one person in the world who might be capable of surviving death as a ghost, in the minds of people who had known her, it was Magdalen. But still, Rowland should have been there. Whatever excuse he had, he should have set it aside, for Magdalen’s sake.
I could only speculate, of course, as to the effect the Magdalen’s return to Eden, after little more than a year in Venezuela—her desertion, as he would have seen it—must have had on Rowland. That was one of the many things about which he maintained absolute web-silence. I could understand that he might have felt deeply offended—angry, even—but not to the extent that he would refuse to attend her funeral.
Obviously, I wasn’t the only person who had expected to see Rowland there, although there was probably only one other who had turned up for that express purpose, because there was a ripple of reaction when the other members of the crowd realized what the professor and I had realized. It wasn’t exactly a murmur of disapproval, but it was audible and tangible. Magdalen’s brother wasn’t there: only her sisters, and her mother.
All eyes were on Rosalind anyway, but the general awareness of Rowland’s absence focused that attention even more intently, and lent an extra dimension of sympathy to it.
Rosalind probably wasn’t quite as old as Professor Crowthorne, but she was certainly in her seventies, at least. She had made far more use of somatic engineering to modify her appearance than he had, but she had been equally wise in not attempting to preserve the visual illusion that she might be in her twenties. She was not interested in seeming venerable, but she was even less interested in seeming youthful. She wanted to appear mature in her distinctive beauty, not because maturity implied wisdom, but because it implied power—real power, not the ineffectual sham manifested by such historical lightweights as Elizabeth I. The cast of her features was not masculine, but it was not feminine either, unless one assumed—as some sycophantic commentators had been willing and eager to do—that it was the type-specimen of a new femininity, which would eventually redefine the notion.
She seemed capable of redefining such terms as “beautiful” and “regal,” and I mean no insult in saying that the funeral brought out the best in her. She was clad in black, but she was no mute butterfly. She was a human Queen Bee from top to toe, in her sober and somber mourning-dress. Lesser mortals still hired minister-substitutes to act as masters-of-ceremonies in humanist funerals, but not Rosalind. Rosalind took the podium herself, and it was obvious that she would be in charge from beginning to end, no matter who else she might invite to eulogize or sing.
There were eulogies, of which Rosalind’s was the most elegant, if not the longest; there was also music, some of it accompanied by voices. There was no mention, by anyone, of the cause of Magdalen’s death. There was no mention either, by anyone, of Rowland. How Rosalind improvised a eulogy without mentioning that Magdalen had a twin of sorts, I’m not entirely sure, but she did. She spoke about her love for her first-born daughter, and her other daughters’ love for their eldest sister, and she said something about Magdalen’s significant contributions to the work of the Hive of Industry, but she never mentioned that Magdalen had ever visited Venezuela. I noticed those absences far more than the words that were actually pronounced, perhaps because I was numb with the shock of Rowland’s absence.
As soon as the disbelief wore off, I resumed thinking, with all the force that mentality could muster: I shouldn’t have come. I should have had the courage to stay away. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? I actually felt resentful. I felt as if I had somehow been tricked—as if the possibility of seeing Rowland had been dangled as a lure, but that, on taking the bait, I had found nothing but a cruelly-barbed steel hook.
It was nonsense, of course. I hadn’t even been invited to the funeral, let alone lured. I had merely been given permission to attend, if I wished, not because I had once known Rowland, but because I had once known Magdalen. I had been given permission to attend because I had once loved Magdalen, very dearly, and because Rosalind had known that Magdalen—however she had died—would have wanted the people who had loved her dearly to be at her funeral. Rowland didn’t come into it…except that what had sprung first and foremost to the minds of ingrates like myself and Professor J. V. Crowthorne, who had known and loved Magdalen as a component in a dedicated symbiotic relationship, had been the possibility of seeing the living remainder of that relationship, not the corpse of its extinct fraction.
Not that we actually got to see a corpse. There was a container, in the geometrical center of the circle mapped out by the dome’s circumference, but it wasn’t even a coffin. The legally-required cremation had already taken place, in private; all that was offered to the contemplation of the mourners was a casket the size of a tea-caddy, which presumably contained her ashes. I say presumably not because I doubted that she was really dead, or because I doubted that that the contents of the casket really were the residue of her cremation, or because I had any cynical reservations about identifying post-cremation ashes with a person, but simply because we had to presume. All we could actually see was a casket. We had to imagine its contents.
Would it have been better if we had been able to see her, rebeautified by the embalmer’s art, lying on a silk cushion in a human-sized box? I doubt it—but the presence of the casket did serve to emphasize the mystery still surrounding her death. It did imply, however unreasonably, that there had been, and still was, something to hide.
In all probability, no one else in Britain would have been able to hide the circumstances of a death, in spite of all the legal and moral restrictions associated with the New Privacy, but the Ushers were true masters of the game of virtual invisibility. What they did not want to be known remained unknown; that was all there was to it.
The ceremony did not last long. It was over in ten minutes less than an hour, although a
