As they lie in post-coital lull, the remnants of their meal still littering the bed, Alex asks, “So have you been here before?”
“My first time. Took me years to get an invite.”
“From whom? What is all this?”
He smiles enigmatically, which she rewards with a painful twist of his nipple.
“OK, OK! It’s a … a sort of group. A club.”
“So do I get to meet them?” she asks. “This group?”
“Tired of my company already?” He pings her bare buttock in playful reproach with a flick of his middle finger.
She gives him a wounded look: The very idea!
“At some point,” he says. “But first I have some things to do.”
“Things?”
He sighs, rolls onto his back and groans, grinding the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
“I have registration first thing tomorrow. Then it’s the keynote. And after lunch, workshops, breakout sessions – all afternoon. Same thing all day Saturday, and then there’s the final wrap-up on Sunday morning.”
“This is work?”
“Of sorts,” with an apologetic grimace. “A conference.” Then, noting her apparent disappointment, “But I’ll be done by 5:15 – at the latest. Then we’ll have dinner with everyone in the evening and … and you’ll have the whole day to explore! Room-service your little heart out! The kitchens really are something, by all accounts. You’ll like that, won’t you? Hmm?” A little-fingertip begins to explore her ribs. “A little you time, all to yourself?”
She squirms away, slapping at his hand, wriggling and giggling.
“I suppose so,” she says, with a shy little grin.
Thank fuck for that. She’d been wondering how to slip his leash, but now she won’t have to.
The next morning, he’s out the door while she’s still pretending to be asleep. Summoning room service involves picking up an old-style telephone and ringing through to reception. It’s all quite low-tech for a high-class hotel or conference centre; no digital assistants, no complimentary iPads, not even a wall-mounted TV. She decides upon a flat white, made with oat milk and kopi luwak (the foie gras of coffee, so she understands), accompanied by a slice of tarte au citron, and three croissants. This is partly just to establish her alibi (he’ll ask her later what she had), and partly out of curiosity, just to put his vaunted kitchens to the test. The simple perfection of tarte au citron, a trainee chef she’d once dated had informed her, made it the ultimate test of any kitchen – that and soufflé, apparently. And the civet coffee is to see how far they will go to cater to the snobbishly exclusive. The croissants are just for breakfast. A little while later there’s a knock, another white-gloved man arrives, deposits her order with impeccable obsequiousness, and doesn’t even hang around for a tip. Seen up-close, she realises that they all look a bit the same, these white-gloved chaps – dark, slicked back hair, clean shaven – and all of them chaps, at that. As if they’ve been wiped of any individuality. Clones, obviously! Wasn’t there a thing where all Dracula’s servants turned out to be the Count himself? The same actor playing many roles.
Enough with the vampires!
She looks at the flat white, sniffs it – doesn’t smell like cat shit; doesn’t actually smell any different at all – and takes a tentative sip, which does nothing to justify its status as the world’s most expensive coffee; or the fate of those poor little Asian polecats, penned-up and force-fed till they chew off their own paws in caffeine-fuelled torment. (Incarceration and force-feeding being more economical than scouring the jungle for their droppings. Foie gras, indeed.)
She pours the cat-poo coffee down the bathroom sink, turns to the tarte au citron and takes a few forkfuls; not bad at all. Then, with an enormous act of willpower, forces herself to leave the remainder untouched (must keep up false appearances: he’s always chiding her for picking at things like a bird).
Now, on with the business of the day.
The conference format is not a surprise, of course. These things always take some such guise; by now, even the mafia and the KKK probably have keynotes, workshops and breakout sessions. But call it what you will – forum, conference, boy’s club knees-up – The Society is really just an evil cabal.
She dresses, more appropriately than when she’d arrived, consumes two of the croissants, stuffs the third in a pocket as emergency provisions, grabs the room key and a complimentary bottle of glacier-flavoured water (soon to be a lot more of that about), and heads out. The corridors are deserted, presumably because everyone is at the “conference”, and she creeps along like a sneak thief – until she realises that she is perfectly entitled to stroll around freely, which is actually less conspicuous than creeping. There must be other plus-ones in the same boat. Anyway, today is just for scouting things out, getting the layout of the place.
Her wanderings reveal that the castle is still in many respects closer to a family home than a hotel – a ridiculously big, sumptuously luxurious home, but something that shows at least some signs of mundane inhabitation. It reminds her in fact of a stately home, where beyond the roped-off areas, undisturbed by tourist foot traffic, the family owners go about their day-to-day affairs. And so, while parts are indeed equipped like a hotel – swimming pool and gym, restaurant and dining hall, laundry service – there are also more personal areas. One of these is the library, a large dark room with a vast collection of leather-bound tomes stocking shelves from floor to ceiling, the higher of which are accessible either by those little wheeled ladders, or metal steps leading up to two floors of balconies. Somebody likes their books.
There is no librarian or custodian that she can see, no security person, and none of those little foot-high railings or ropes to dissuade the public from getting grubby thumbprints on priceless cultural artefacts, so she assumes she’s free to browse. Predictably, a lot are in foreign languages – foreign to Alex, anyway: French, Italian, German, all of which she has very little of, and some Latin and Greek, of which she has even less. Thankfully, some have pictures. One book sits open on a reading stand, its browning pages illuminated by a gentle light, and protected by a glass display case. A little switch on the casing – a rare concession to technology – advances each page left or right with a delicate little robotic arm. She flicks forward, until she is arrested by a peculiar full-page woodcut, done in a crude renaissance style. It depicts a woman in some sort of bath, and into which, through a curious arrangement of little pipes, pours some unspecified dark liquid; whatever it is has risen to the level of the woman’s waist, leaving her upper torso naked, her bare breasts exposed. Around this central image, forming a sort of decorative border, are a series of intertwining forms, which on closer scrutiny reveal themselves to be young boys, apparently asleep, and from each of which the curious pipes seem to originate.
“I don’t mean to question your taste,” a female voice sounds behind her in faintly accented English, “but that is the most awful book. The seventeenth century’s equivalent of a scandal rag.”
Alex looks up to see a well turned out woman in her … fifties? Dressed simply but stylishly: a white open-necked blouse, a sky-blue and crimson patterned silk scarf, a tan calf-length skirt, expensive but comfortable looking leather pumps. The attire of a cut-above librarian, maybe – perhaps what in fact she is.
“Don’t know why we have it, really,” the woman continues, joining Alex at the book display case. “I suspect one of my ancestors was a bit of a completist. Any literary mention of the family was to be preserved, no matter how ill-informed or derogatory.”
“I’m not really sure what’s going on,” Alex points to the picture. “Who is this person?”
The woman raises her eyebrows. “Ah, you must be new to Lefatigué? Here for the annual forum?”
“Sort of. A guest of one of your attendees.”
“Then my apologies. I assume that everyone knows our history.” She gestures at the woodcut. “This is Charlotte, the Marquise de Lefatigué, my … oh, let’s see now … how many greats is that …? Anyway” – a little dismissive swish of her hand – “my distant maternal ancestor. Can you see the resemblance?” With a playful smile, she offers up her face to the light, her smooth skin barely lined, her hands two L-shapes placed catty-corner so as to suggest a picture frame; then laughs, dismissing the book’s illustration with another sweep of the hand, as if the woodcut had not done her ancestor justice. “There is a portrait in the entrance hall, which is a better likeness.”
“So what’s happening in the picture? It’s very peculiar.”
“Indeed it is. The Marquise was a very powerful woman. An intellectual – she corresponded with Descartes and Leibniz; a proto-scientist, in an age that still worshipped superstitious idols. Politically active, too, progressive; an enlightened mind. As you can imagine, in those times such qualities were viewed as very unbecoming of a woman, even with suspicion – I wish I could say that times have greatly changed. What you have here” – indicating the engraving – “is therefore a political hatchet-job.”
“But why is she … the bath … Why is the water black?”
The woman looks at Alex with what may be a slightly pitying condescension. “It is blood, my dear. And these” – she traces the pipes with her finger to the figures at the borders – “are virgins.”
Oh.
“The blood libel has been a common strategy throughout the ages – against Jews, Gypsies, religious non-conformists. My ancestor was accused of bathing in the vital fluid of male virgins so as to retain her youth. They even managed to round up some witnesses – by inducement or threat, I suspect.”
“That’s quite fascinating – I mean, in an awful way.”
The woman chuckles. “Oh, even awful things can lose their horror through the misty distance of history; can even become entertainment.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t be silly,” cutting Alex off. “All that is old hat, now. We have forgiven our persecutors.” And she smiles, somewhat enigmatically.
They walk on together through the library. Alex realises that despite herself – this is the enemy, after all – she is starting to warm to this quirky, slightly cranky, rather single-minded character. The woman – whose name Alex has still not learned, and nor has she asked Alex’s – points out some of the library’s prized possessions – a Geneva Bible, first editions of The Fairie Queene, Goethe’s Faust, Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, and other classics of literature – some of which are preserved behind similar little glass cases with their own little robotic arms. This leads Alex to remark on the general restraint that the place displays in relation to technology.
“It is called taste, my dear. Sometimes the old ways are the best; sometimes they are not. The two must be blended judiciously. Unfortunately, I fear that our next generation will not share my values, when I come to hand all this on – which I will do quite soon, now.” At Alex’s look of polite surprise, she confesses, “I am older than I look.”
“Well, if you don’t mind my saying, you wear your age remarkably well. You must give me your skincare routine!”
The woman taps her nose and smiles mischievously.
“A secret family recipe.”
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.