Bloodless

38

“Another biscuit?” Felicity Frost asked, holding out the plate of chocolate digestives.

“No, thank you,” replied Constance, dabbing her lips with a damask napkin.

“Hell,” the elderly woman said with feigned annoyance. “That means I can’t have one, either.” And she put the plate back on a silver tray that sat on the tea table between them. The china, Constance noted, was from an antique set of Haviland Limoges, understated but exquisite. But then, she thought, that was characteristic of Frost herself: antique, discreet, and with far more depth than a superficial glimpse would suggest.

Frost had sent Constance a note earlier that day, asking if she would like to have tea that evening at nine. And so Constance, accepting, had spent over an hour in the woman’s company. Miss Frost had proven to be an excellent conversationalist, knowledgeable about a number of topics — especially antiquarian. She had shown Constance three rooms of the penthouse: a library-cum-museum, a music room, and the drawing room in which they now sat. There were clearly others, but Frost had not invited her to tour them and Constance had not asked. In any case, these three were sufficient to provide her with a sense of Frost’s interests and personality. The rooms contained many beautiful things: first editions of neglected nineteenth-century novelists; a Steinway Model O from 1923, the final year of original production; and an impressive collection of art that ran the gamut from John Marin watercolors to several of Piranesi’s Carceri etchings. True, the rugs were not the hand-knotted Kashan or Isfahan pieces of Pendergast’s Riverside Drive mansion, and the Duncan Phyfe furniture was not original — but the reproductions were tasteful. Everything spoke of a woman of discernment who — though her wealth was not unlimited — had accumulated and curated many beautiful things.

In addition to the collections of firearms and pens, there was, curiously, a museum-in-miniature of cipher machines and pieces from the early history of computing. Several large display cases contained, Frost had explained, a Fialka M-125 Soviet cipher device, an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, a relay and rotary switch from Harvard’s Mark I, and a pair of printed circuit boards from the landmark early supercomputer Cray-1. Frost’s knowledge of computers was remarkable, and it struck Constance this must be a significant link to her mysterious past — whatever that was.

“It’s almost eleven,” Frost said, glancing at a grandfather clock on the far wall. She was sitting on a chaise longue across from Constance. A well-thumbed paperback, which Constance had noticed on her first visit, was at her side, a constant companion. “I think something stronger than tea is called for — don’t you?”

Constance reminded herself that, because of the woman’s nocturnal habits, cocktails were apparently served half a dozen hours later than usual. “If you’d like.”

“I would like indeed. At my age, self-medication is practically the only vice left to me.” She stood up with effort, then walked over to a sideboard arrayed with numerous bottles. “Would you care to, ah, smother a parrot with me?”

“No, thank you,” said Constance, a little more sharply than she intended.

“In that case, name your own poison.”

“Campari and soda, please, if it’s at hand.”

“It is. And it will be in your own in a jif.” The old woman fussed around for a few minutes, then returned with two glasses — one pink within, the other a pallid, milky green.

“A votre santé.” And, lifting her glass, Frost toasted Constance.

They drank a moment in silence.

“Campari,” Frost mused. “An interesting choice for one of your age.”

“Perhaps I could say the same of you and absinthe.”

“Perhaps. It was made illegal before even I was born.”

“Outlawed in 1915,” Constance said.

“I’ll take your word for it. In any case, wormwood seems to agree with me. As someone said, ‘the dose makes the poison.’”

With this, the old woman sat back, observing Constance with an arched eyebrow. Constance began to say Paracelsus, but decided against it. Instead, she said: “I meant to compliment you on your piano playing.” She nodded in the direction of the music room. “That piece the other night is one of my favorite nocturnes.”

“Mine as well,” Frost said. She took a sip of her drink. “Do you play?”

Constance nodded. “But I’m partial to the harpsichord.”

Frost smiled. “And very accomplished, no doubt. But I’d have thought someone of your temperament would prefer an instrument with more dynamics.”

“That’s what the choir stops are for,” Constance said.

“No doubt.” And with another smile, Frost finished her drink. “Next time, I’ll have to ask you for dinner,” she said. “I have a decent wine cellar up here. Not what you’re used to, I imagine, but serviceable.” Once again, she fixed Constance with a quizzical look. “You’re used to drinking the finest wines, are you not? Just as I’m sure your harpsichord is of the highest quality. And your snickersnee is a rare antique.”

“Thank you,” Constance said, trying to suppress a growing annoyance. “But I doubt my blade is much rarer than the Luger you pointed at me the other evening.”

Miss Frost waved this away. “I only mention wine because we were speaking of music,” she said. “The older I get, the more I find myself thinking of composers in terms of wine. To me, Mozart is like a bottle of Château d’Yquem: sweet and silky, but more complex than it initially seems. Beethoven is like a petite sirah: ill-bred, brutish, chewy, but once tasted, never forgotten. And Scarlatti” — she laughed — “Scarlatti is like a cheap prosecco, full of bubbles that bother your nose.”

“And Brahms?” Constance asked, irritated at the aspersion cast on her beloved Scarlatti, but not wishing to be impolite.

“Ah, Brahms! Brahms is like... one of the best Barolos.”

And with this, Frost rose and, moving to the sideboard, helped herself to more absinthe. While her back was turned, Constance took the opportunity to reach out and flip through the paperback on Frost’s side table.

She sat back as Frost finished diluting her drink, holding it up to examine the louche, and then turning back toward her.

“It’s a curious thing, but as you get older, as I’m sure you know, you find yourself more and more stuck in an endless do-loop.”

“Pardon?” This as I’m sure you know phrase unsettled Constance.

Frost smiled. “That’s the old programmer in me talking.”

This was the most direct reference yet to Frost’s past. Constance realized any further dancing around was pointless. She paused to take a breath. “I’d like to hear more from the old programmer.”

Frost began to laugh: a low, breathy laugh, wry but genuine. “And so we come to it at last.”

“Come to what?”

“The real reason you’re here.”

“I’m here because you invited me.”

The proprietress batted this away impatiently. “Persiflage. I’d hoped perhaps you were different.”

“Different?”

“Interested in stimulating conversation, rather than my past.”

“Your past is only interesting because you’re so mysterious about it.”

But the old lady barely seemed to hear this. Her gaze had gone past Constance to some indistinct point. She sighed. “I always thought this might happen.”

When she said nothing more, Constance prompted: “What, exactly?”

“Someone might come along acute enough to beat me at my own game. Maybe ten or twenty years ago, I would have found such parrying amusing — even challenging. But I’m tired now... old and tired.” Her gaze returned to Constance. Leaning forward, she picked up her glass, drained it, and set it back down on the tea table. “So let’s finish the game.”

There was an edge in her voice that put Constance on guard. The elderly woman had proven a surprise: far sharper than she’d expected.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Frost went on. “You’re a perspicacious creature. You’ll make a statement about me that you think might be true. If it’s true, I will say as much and you can make another statement. But once you make a statement that’s wrong, the roles are reversed... and I get to make statements about you on the same terms. Agreed?”

Constance hesitated. She had the vague feeling she’d just been outmaneuvered in a chess game. But after a moment, she nodded.

The old woman sat back. “Proceed.”

“Very well.” Constance considered. “You were very fond of Patrick Ellerby.”

Frost tut-tutted, as if this were hardly deserving of an opening gambit. “True.”

“Yet he was disobedient. He disappointed you, even betrayed you.”

A shadow crossed the proprietress’s face, but she nodded. “True.”

Constance paused. She did not want to try Frost’s patience with trivial observations, but blind guessing was even more dangerous.

“You have, at least once in your life, reinvented yourself.”

Now it was Frost’s turn to pause. “True.”

“In some respects, you have an outlaw personality. The normal rules don’t apply to you.”

A hesitation and she colored slightly. “True.”

“You have a deep knowledge of science: particularly mathematics, programming, physics.”

“True.”

Constance continued probing, using her own past as a guide. “You had a difficult childhood.”

“False!” Frost laughed in triumph. “My childhood was quiet and unremarkable, thank you very much.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“None of that!” Miss Frost resettled herself on the chaise longue. “It’s my turn.”

Again, something in the way this was said made Constance wary.

“I’ll give you a handicap,” Frost said. “I’ll make only a single observation about you. If I’m wrong, you win. But if I’m right... then you have to explain.”

Constance waited, uneasy.

“Ready?”

She nodded.

“You’re older than you look,” Miss Frost said. “And not just measured in weeks, or months, or years... but much, much older.”

Constance said nothing.

“Don’t care to answer?” the old lady prodded. “Or perhaps you’re wondering how I know. Because I do know; there’s no guessing involved. At first, I thought it was some caprice of my imagination. After all, how could your knowledge be as deep as, or deeper than, my own, which I’ve spent eight decades acquiring? So I began salting our conversation with little traps. ‘Springes to catch woodcocks,’ as Shakespeare put it.”

“What traps were those?” Constance asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

“You not only knew the exact year absinthe was declared illegal, but you understood what I meant by ‘smothering a parrot’—an expression that hasn’t been used in a hundred years. You use archaic words. The very structure of your sentences is nineteenth-century, and you knew what I meant by a ‘snickersnee.’ You recognized who crafted my antiques, who painted my paintings — even when you didn’t voice a name, I could see it in your expression. You can run circles around me in Latin and ancient Greek.” The old lady leaned in slightly. “No one can absorb so much knowledge in twenty-odd years. But what really betrayed you, my dear, were your eyes.”

“What about them?”

“They are not the eyes of a young woman. Your eyes could be those of an old woman — they could be mine — except they reflect even deeper experience. They are the eyes of... a sphinx.”

Constance had no answer.

“So,” Miss Frost went on, “I’m fascinated. Captivated. Entranced. I want to know the mechanism. I want to know how you did it.”

Quite abruptly, Constance stood up.

“Are you forfeiting, Miss Greene?” she asked. “There’s still so much we can learn — from each other.”

Constance remained motionless. Then, slowly, she sat down again.

“You owe me an answer, my dear,” Frost said.

“The answer is...” Constance stopped for a moment. “True.”

The old woman’s eyes went wide. “Really!”

Constance volunteered nothing else.

“Go on. As I said, I want to know the mechanism.” When silence was the only reply, she said: “It’s only fair—”

“My life span was unnaturally extended by a scientific experiment — one that took place over a century ago.”

This was said in a completely expressionless voice. Frost’s eyes went wider still. She looked like a medium who’d just discovered that her fake crystal ball did, in fact, have magical properties. “Oh, my good Lord.” Then, summoning her wits again, she asked: “And were you grateful for this gift?”

“The doctor who extended my life killed my sister while perfecting his experiments. He was... more successful with me.” And with that, Constance stood up again — even more abruptly — turned her back on Frost, and exited the woman’s chambers.