Our Lady of Darkness

19

Donaldus took a generous sip of brandy, rolled it around on his tongue appreciatively, and settled back in his chair.

“In 1900, as the century turned,” he began dramatically, “Thibaut de Castries came to sunny, lusty San Francisco like a dark portent from realms of cold and coal smoke in the East that pulsed with Edison’s electricity and from which thrust Sullivan’s steel-framed skyscrapers. Madame Curie had just proclaimed radioactivity to the world, and Marconi radio spanning the seas. Madame Blavatsky had brought eerie theosophy from the Himalayas and passed on the occult torch to Annie Besant. The Scottish Astronomer-Royal Piazzi Smith had discovered the history of the world and its ominous future in the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. While in the law courts, Mary Baker Eddy and her chief female acolytes were hurling accusations of witchcraft and black magic at each other. Spencer preached science. Ingersoll thundered against superstition. Freud and Jung were plunging into the limitless dark of the subconscious. Wonders undreamed had been unveiled at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, for which the Eiffel tower had been built, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. New York was digging her subways. In South Africa the Boers were firing at the British Krupp’s field guns of unburstable steel. In far Cathay the Boxers raged, deeming themselves invulnerable to bullets by their magic. Count von Zeppelin was launching his first dirigible airship, while the Wright Brothers were readying for their first flight.

“De Castries brought with him only a large black Gladstone bag stuffed with copies of his ill-printed book that he could no more sell than Melville his Moby Dick, and a skull teeming with galvanic, darkly illuminating ideas, and (some insist) a large black panther on a leash of German silver links. And, according to still others, he was also accompanied or else pursued by a mysterious, tall, slender woman who always wore a black veil and loose dark dresses that were more like robes, and had a way of appearing and disappearing suddenly. In any case, de Castries was a wiry, tireless, rather small black eagle of a man, with piercing eyes and sardonic mouth, who wore his glamour like an opera cape.

“There were a dozen legends of his origins. Some said he improvised a new one each night, and some that they were all invented by others solely on the inspiration of his darkly magnetic appearance. The one that Klaas and Ricker most favored was moderately spectacular: that as a boy of thirteen during the Franco-Prussian War he had escaped from besieged Paris by hydrogen balloon along with his mortally wounded father, who was an explorer of darkest Africa; his father’s beautiful and learned young Polish mistress; and a black panther (an earlier one) which his father had originally captured in the Congo and which they had just rescued from the zoological gardens, where the starving Parisians were slaughtering the wild animals for food. (Of course, another legend had it that at that time he was a boy aide-de-camp to Garibaldi in Sicily and his father the most darkly feared of the Carbonari.)

“Rapidly travelling southeast across the Mediterranean, the balloon encountered at midnight an electrical tempest which added to its velocity but also forced it down nearer and nearer to the white-fanged waves. Picture the scene as revealed by almost continuous lightning flashes in the frail and overweighted gondola. The panther crouched back into one side, snarling and spitting, lashing his tail, his claws dug deeply into the wickerwork with a strength that threatened to rend it. The faces of the dying father (an old hawk), the earnest and flashing-eyed boy (already a young eagle), and the proud, intellectual, fiercely loyal, brooding girl—all of them desperate and pale as death in the lightning’s bluish glare. While thunder resounded deafeningly, as if the black atmosphere were being ripped, or great artillery pieces let off at their ears. Suddenly the rain tasted salt on their wet lips—spray from the hungry waves.

“The dying father grasped the right hands of the two others, joined them together, gripped them briefly with his own, gasped a few words (they were lost in the gale) and with a final convulsive burst of strength hurled himself overboard.

“The balloon leaped upward out of the storm and raced on southeast. The chilled, terrorized, but undaunted young people huddled together in each other’s arms. From across the gondola the black panther, subsiding, stared at them with enigmatic green eyes. While in the southeast, toward which they were speeding, the horned moon appeared above the clouds, like the witch-crown of the Queen of Night, setting her seal upon the scene.

“The balloon landing in the Egyptian desert near Cairo, young de Castries plunged at once into a study of the Great Pyramid, assisted by his father’s young Polish mistress (now his own), and by the fact that he was maternally descended from Champollion, decipherer of the Rosetta Stone. He made all Piazzi Smith’s discoveries (and a few more besides, which he kept secret) ten years in advance and laid the basis for his new science of supercities (and also his Grand Cipher) before leaving Egypt to investigate mega-structures and cryptoglyphics (he called it) and paramentality throughout the world.

“You know, that link with Egypt fascinates me,” Byers said parenthetically as he poured himself more brandy. “It makes me think of Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep, who came out of Egypt to deliver pseudoscientific lectures heralding the crumbling away of the world.”

Mention of Lovecraft reminded Franz of something. He interjected, “Say, didn’t Lovecraft have a revision client with a name like Thibaut de Castries?”

Byers’ eyes widened. “He did indeed. Adolphe De Castro.”

“That much alike! You don’t suppose… ?”

“…that they were the same person?” Byers smiled. “The possibility has occurred to me, my dear Franz, and there is this additionally to be said for the idea: that Lovecraft variously referred to Adolphe De Castro as ‘an amiable charlatan’ and ‘an unctuous old hypocrite’ (he paid Lovecraft for rewriting them completely less than one-tenth of the price he got for his stories), but no”—he sighed, fading his smile—“no, De Castro was still alive pestering Lovecraft and visiting him in Providence after de Castries’s death.

“To resume about de Castries; we don’t know if his young Polish mistress accompanied him and possibly was the mysterious veiled lady who some said turned up at the same time he did in San Francisco. Ricker thought so. Klaas was inclined to doubt it. Ricker tended to romance about the Pole. He pictured her as a brilliant pianist (they’re apt to say that about most Poles, aren’t they? Chopin has much to answer for) who had totally suppressed that talent in order to put all her amazing command of languages and her profound secretarial skills—and all the solaces of her fierce young body—at the disposal and in the service of the still younger genius whom she adored even more devotedly than she had his adventurer father.”

“What was her name?” Franz asked.

“I could never learn,” Byers replied. “Either Klaas and Ricker had forgotten, or else—more likely—it was one of the points on which the old boy went secretive on them. Besides, there’s something so satisfying about just that one phrase ‘his father’s young Polish mistress’—what could be more exotic or alluring?—it makes one think of harpsichords and oceans of lace, champagne, and pistols! For, under her cool and learned mask, she seethed with temperament and with temper, too, as Ricker pictured her; so that she’d almost seem to fly apart or on the verge of it when in her rages, like an explosive rag doll. The fellahin feared her, thought she was a witch. It was during those years in Egypt that she began to go veiled, Ricker said.

“At still other times she’d be incredibly seductive, the epitome of Continental femininity, initiating de Castries into the most voluptuous erotic practices and greatly deepening and broadening his grasp of culture and art.

“At all events, de Castries had acquired a lot of dark, satanic charm from somewhere by the time he arrived at the City by the Golden Gate. He was, I’d guess, quite a bit like the Satanist Anton La Vey (who kept a more-or-less tame lion for a while, did you know?), except that he had no desire for the usual sort of publicity. He was looking, rather, for an elite of scintillating, freewheeling folk with a zest for life at its wildest—and if they had a lot of money, that wouldn’t hurt a bit.

“And of course he found them! Promethean (and Dionysian) Jack London. George Sterling, fantasy poet and romantic idol, favorite of the wealthy Bohemian Club set. Their friend, the brilliant defense attorney Earl Rogers, who later defended Clarence Darrow and saved his career. Ambrose Bierce, a bitter, becaped old eagle of a man himself with his Devil’s Dictionary and matchlessly terse horror tales. The poetess Nora May French. That mountain lioness of a woman, Charmian London. Gertrude Atherton, somewhere close by. And those were only the more vital ones.

“And of course they fell upon de Castries with delight. He was just the sort of human curiosity they (and especially Jack London) loved. Mysterious cosmopolitan background, Munchausen anecdotes, weird and alarming scientific theories, a strong anti-industrial and (we’d say) antiestablishment bias, the apocalyptic touch, the note of doom, hints of dark powers—he had them all! For quite a while he was their darling, their favorite guru of the left-hand path, almost (and I imagine he thought this himself) their new god. They even bought copies of his new book and sat still (and drank) while he read from it. Prize egotists like Bierce put up with him, and London let him have stage center for a while—he could afford to. And they were all quite ready to go along (in theory) with his dream of a utopia in which megapolitan buildings were forbidden (had been destroyed or somehow tamed) and paramentality put to benign use, with themselves the aristocratic elite and he the master spirit over all.

“Of course most of the ladies were quite taken with him romantically and several, I gather, eager to go to bed with him and not above taking the initiative in the matter—these were dramatic and liberated females for their day, remember—and yet there’s no evidence that he had an affair with any one of them. The opposite, rather. Apparently, when things got to that point, he’d say something like, ‘My dear, there’s nothing I’d like better, truly, but I must tell you that I have a very savage and jealous mistress who if I so much as dallied with you, would cut my throat in bed or stab me in my bath (he was quite a bit like Marat, you know, Franz, and grew to be more so in his later years), besides dashing acid across your lovely cheeks and lips, my dear, or driving a hatpin into those bewitching eyes. She’s learned beyond measure in the weird, yet a tigress.’

“He’d really build this (imaginary?) creature up to them, I’m told, until sometimes it wasn’t clear whether it was a real woman, or a goddess, or some sort of metaphorical entity that he was talking about. ‘She is all merciless night animal,’ he would say, ‘yet with a wisdom that goes back to Egypt and beyond—and which is invaluable to me. For she is my spy on buildings, you see, my intelligencer on metropolitan megastructures. She knows their secrets and their secret weaknesses, their ponderous rhythms and dark songs. And she herself is secret as their shadows. She is my Queen of Night, Our Lady of Darkness.’”

As Byers dramatized those last words of de Castries, Franz flashed that Our Lady of Darkness was one of De Quincy’s Ladies of Sorrow, the third and youngest sister, who always went veiled in black crape. Had de Castries known that? And was his Queen of Night Mozart’s?—all-powerful save for the magic flute and Papageno’s bells? But Byers continued:

“For you see, Franz, there were these continuing reports, flouted by some, of de Castries being visited or pestered by a veiled lady who wore flowing dresses and either a turban or a wide and floppy-brimmed hat, yet was very swift in her movements. They’d be glimpsed together across a busy street or on the Embarcadero or in a park or at the other end of a crowded theater lobby, generally walking rapidly and gesticulating excitedly or angrily at each other; but when you caught up with him, she would be gone. Or if, as on a few claimed occasions, she were still there, he would never introduce her or speak to her or act in any way as if he knew her. Except he would seem irritable and—one or two said—frightened.”

“What was her name?” Franz pressed.

Byers quirked a smile. “As I just told you, my dear Franz, he’d never introduce her. At most he’d refer to her as ‘that woman’ or sometimes, oddly, ‘that headstrong and pestiferous girl.’ Perhaps, despite all his dark charms and tyrannies and S-M aura, he was afraid of women and she somehow stood for or embodied that fear.

“Reactions to this mysterious figure varied. The men tended to be indulgent, intrigued, and speculative, even wildly so—it was suggested at various times that she was Isadora Duncan, Eleonora Duse, and Sarah Bernhardt, though they would have been, respectively, about twenty, forty, and sixty at that time. But true glamour is ageless, they say; consider Marlene Dietrich or Arletty, or that doyenne of them all—Cleopatra. There was always the disguising black veil, you see, though sometimes it carried an array of black polka dots, like ranked beauty marks, ‘or as if she’d had the black smallpox,’ one lady is said to have said nastily.

“All the women, for that matter, uniformly loathed her.

“Of course, all this is probably somewhat distorted by my getting it mostly as filtered through Klaas and Ricker. Ricker, making a lot of the references to Egyptian wisdom and learnedness, thought the mystery lady was still the Polish mistress, gone mad through love, and he was somewhat critical of de Castries for his treatment of her.

“And of course all this left the way open for endless speculations about de Castries’s sex life. Some said he was a homosexual. Even in those days ‘the cool, gray city of love,’ as Sterling epitomized it, had its homophiles—’cool, gay city?’ Others, that he was very kinky in an S-M way—bondage and discipline of the direst sort. (Quite a few chaps have accidentally strangled themselves that way, you know.) Almost in one breath it was said he was a pederast, a pervert, a fetishist, utterly asexual, or else that only slim little girls could satisfy his Tiberian lusts—I’m sorry if I offend you, Franz, but truly all the left-hand paths and their typical guides or conductresses were mentioned.

“However, all this is really by-the-by. The important consideration is that for a while de Castries seemed to have his chosen group just where he wanted them.”