yet shown any sign of arthritis in my knuckles, the grip was so tight and painful that I had difficulty relaxing the fingers in order to lie the cane down again—but I had no sensation of wielding it, even symbolically, as a weapon of defense; it was more a matter of clutching an amulet or a talisman: an echo of a time even more remote, I supposed, than the heroic age of swords and chivalry.
If the rest of the opera would have been an anticlimax after the dance of the nuns in any case, it was doubly or triply so after the manifestation of the ghost: the ghost, I presumed, of the mysterious and long-dead Professor Thibodeaux. I suppose it ought still have been possible for me to obtain a thrill of sorts from Bertram’s summons to Hell, if not from Robert’s marriage to Isabelle, all the more so having been given the glimpse of something even more enigmatic than the problematic overlap of 1834 and 1847 in the spectral eyes, but it was not.
I was by now, it seemed, too experienced a ghost-seer to be thrown off my stride by such a subtle hint of diabolism, and too seasoned a dealer with entities mistaken for and conflated with the imaginary devils of Christendom to find their occasional intrusion into our world anything more that a fact of life. I had been beyond the limits of the world, and had been possessed in my own flesh by an entity that most people would have identified as a demon. I was not a novice in such matters.
Indeed, I had sufficient second-hand expertise, by virtue of many long conversations with Dupin, to know that my sighting of the ghost was highly atypical in several respects. Most ghost-seers, according to Dupin, only see ghosts that they are half-expecting to see: ghosts of people that they knew in life, or ghosts of their ancestors, or anecdotal ghosts with whose stories they are familiar—because, of course, the experience of seeing a ghost is mostly, and often entirely, subjective. It was obvious to me now that the reason that Dupin had not breathed a word about what he half-expected to see tonight was his curiosity to know whether I would be able to see anything at all, given that I had never met Thibodeaux and had only heard his name in passing. He would doubtless be very interested to know that I had.
But where was Dupin? If he had half-expected to see a ghost tonight, that made it more than doubly surprising that he had missed the opportunity. Any number of things might have kept him away from a mere opera—especially one that he considered second-rate—but to keep him away from a manifestation that anyone but him would have considered supernatural...that was a different matter.
I could not help wondering whether his absence might have anything to do with the “slight indisposition” of the person originally intended to occupy the third seat in Chapelain’s box, although she had managed to arrive at the interval, even if he had not; but I knew that I had to be cautious about placing too much credence in any “deduction” in that regard. I had to remember that I was only a pupil, not a master, in Dupin’s arcane arts.
On the other hand....
Pierre Chapelain was a magnetizer: a physician who employed treatments based in the science of suggestion. He used magnetism—or hypnotism, as it was increasingly being called nowadays—as both an aid to diagnosis and an aid to make his patients feel better, whether to suppress dolor or to mobilize their innate resistance to disease. In objective terms, most of his prescriptions were elementary, with 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
