A Shadow All of Light (16 page)

“Yes.”

“To which of them belongeth the shadow, lad or lass?”

“We cannot say. When they are close together it seems to attach to both of them at once. When they are separate, it will go to one or other as it seems to choose.”

“And you first took stock of this debility only these seven days ago?”

“'Twas but five days,” he said. “Funisia first took note when she was reading to them from a book of fables.”

“They were standing before me as I sat in a chair by the table there,” she said, indicating with a nod the table behind me that was placed before the bay window. “They remained stock still, as always they do, to attend the tale of the jolly cobbler and the shoeless witch. The candles stood on the table by my right hand and when I looked up from the page, I saw what I saw.”

“May the children come forth?” I asked, and after they dispatched Mistress High Horse to fetch them, I requested that candles be set along the table. There was good light from the window, but more would be useful.

The candles were arranged and lit and Graysmock led in the children. They came forward to stand before me with Sativius on one side and their mother on the other. I gazed upon them curiously, for they made a striking pair.

They were pale of complexion, almost nacreous, like the pearly oyster shell. Slim in figure with blond hair verging on silvery, they were clad in black knee breeches and black jackets and stockinged in shining white silk. Large silver buckles were set upon their black, square-toed shoes. The boy's hair was longer than the girl's, and only this single distinction marked them apart, for otherwise they were as identical in appearance as any two raindrops. They looked up at me fearlessly, their bright gray eyes seeming as large as doorknobs in their delicate faces. They were wraithlike. I discerned with my first glance that they would be taciturn younglings. Expectant silence hung about them like that preceding the onset of a nocturnal snowfall.

I smiled and said my name and they did not reply.

Their silence was perhaps of no great concern, for I was employed to look about their shadows, or the lack thereof; yet I tried to take stock of all that I could, for I knew that Maestro Astolfo would query me closely.

They stood before me, a hand-span apart, and behind them lay a single shadow of ordinary appearance, except that it was darker in tone than I might have expected. Considering that this darkening might be an effect of the darkish carpet on which they stood, I requested their parents to part them, widening the space between by another hand-span. The shadow did not alter its shape, though it should have begun to split apart where it joined the feet of the children. Farther and farther apart we posed them until an arm's length separated the pair and still the shadow did not split, though it became difficult to discern where its nether attachment was located. At last, Sativius and Funisia placed their children a long lance-length apart and the shadow, without a motion visible to my observation, no longer attached to the girl but only to the boy. Behind her, light held all the floor-place where shade should lie.

“You seem to have lost one of your valuables, little mistress,” I said. I gave her the most gently ingratiating smile I could muster. “What is your name?”

She gazed at me with those great luminous eyes and remained as silent as a melting snowflake.

“She is called Rudensia,” her mother said. “Her brother is Rudens.”

I bowed to the children. “I am honored to make the acquaintance of so unusual a brace of youth,” I said, though the phrases sounded clumsy. In fact, all my efforts at playful diplomacy sounded lame and gauche and I discarded the notion of trying to become friendly with the strange children.

We repeated the experiment three times again, with the result that Rudensia lost her shadow once to her brother while he twice lost his to her. I was unable to see how the transference occurred, yet the motion of it—if there had been a motion—was neither swift nor gradual. At one time it was simply there, stretched out behind the lad, and next time it fell behind the girl.

“What is to be done?” Funisia asked softly. Her eyes were fearful.

“I must study upon the phenomenon,” I said, “but I have every confidence that all shall be resolved in happy manner.”

“I do wish Maestro Astolfo had seen fit to answer my call,” Sativius said. “You may tell him I am vexed.”

“I shall make full report to him concerning every aspect,” I replied. “It may be that he can postpone some part of his business and make a visitation.”

These words did not mollify the rope merchant, but I had not expected that they would effect any change in his temper. Still, I could not allow such awkwardness to put me out of countenance; this, the first task to be delegated to my own counsel, I held too important to be disfigured by trifles.

I took my leave, promising to return soon with the best and most fully detailed prognosis I could mount. Both parents received my pledge with dull grace. Making my manners, I edged toward the door. Graysmock opened it and escorted me down the stair, through the foyer, and out into the cool midday, where a threat of rain was steadily increasing. I hastened my stride, hoping to arrive beneath Astolfo's roof before the clouds let go.

*   *   *

Astolfo was absent from the kitchen, the first place I looked for him, and he was not in the large library. He was not in the smaller one either; but in this cozier room, with its book-strewn table and leathern armchairs and friendly small hearth, I chanced upon Mutano.

He gave me a noncommittal salute and returned to his disport with Creeper, pursuing a game that any babbling child might play with a cat, teasingly jigging a scrap of paper tied to a thread and whisking it away when the animal pounced. It was but an idle pastime. Where was the grave business with Creeper of which Astolfo had spoken? I settled into an armchair to await the shadow master's arrival. Rain had begun to lash the ivied walls of the villa and nothing else seemed so pleasurable as to sit at ease for a spell, finding pictures in the flames and hearkening to the fray of the elements.

The fire comported itself in no ordinary fashion. It brightened and dimmed and sent a roiling, misty smoke out over the hearth, a vapor that retained a defined shape and had not the formlessness of familiar hearth-fire smoke. Against the gently leaping flames, the smoke-shape was difficult to define precisely, but the longer I observed, the more knowable it became. Then I realized that its writhings and saltations, its turnings and toilings, were like those of a cat at play. The mist-form creature was aping, as if it were an image in a mirror, the motions of Creeper as he cavorted, twisted, and feinted in merry chase of Mutano's dancing scrap of paper.

I rose and drew closer, trying to discover of what substance this active shape consisted; it was so airy and light and agile that it must have been composed of the most aethereal of stuffs. Soon I knew it to be a shadow, the true shadow of Creeper, even though it was not attached to the green-eyed cat at any point of the body.

Here I beheld a marvel I had only heard rumored. When a shadow is taken from its subject, be that caster ever so active, ever so fluent with sinew and
vis vitae,
the shade, as a rule, loses all inner spirit and lies or stands or hangs inert. It retains its volumes and textures, its tints and tones, and something of its flavors and aromas. Astolfo is capable of detecting certain sounds belonging to a severed shadow, small noises like distant echoes from a lost valley. He is the master. But animation of the shade requires an amplitude of art I was certain Mutano did not possess. Astolfo must have had some hand in this accomplishment.

While I sat down again and pleasured in the music of rain-sweep against our walls, Astolfo came sprightly into the room, paused briefly to smile at the antics of Mutano and Creeper, and beckoned me to follow him into the kitchen, where he poured for both of us a generous drop of sweet, resinous wine into thick glass beakers.

Thus he commenced: “How went the discussion with the rope merchant? Have you learned to escape the wiles of the rope-maker's daughter?”

I was mystified; the pale Rudensia was but a child. Then I understood that he used thieves' language;
the rope-maker's daughter
is an alehouse term for the hangman's noose. “I learn some new thing every day,” I replied.

“Tell me then of your dealings with Esquire Sativius.”

In slow and careful words, I gave him as minute an account of the encounter as I was able, trying to omit naught that might be worthy of notice. Seated on the butcher's block with his head inclined toward me, he almost seemed to twitch his large ears as I spoke. When I concluded, he sat silent for long moments.

“How many years of age hang on these children?”

“Thirteen.”

His expression grew grave. “This matter may be of a darker character than we have suspicioned. Would you describe their shared shadow to me again? Come as close to the object as may be.”

When I repeated my impressions with some slight enlargement, he still seemed unsatisfied.

“You say this shadow that lay between them was darker of tint than you would otherwise observe in the circumstance?”

“So it appeared there.”

“Was it uniform of its darkness or was the center of it perhaps a little more dark than its flanks?”

“It lay upon a wine-colored carpet of thickish pile,” I said. “I could distinguish no gradation.”

“Close your eyes. Envision all again.”

I did so, but with no result. I shook my head.

“The mother and the father spoke, but the children spoke not?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose that they had spoken. Which voice would be louder, that of the boy or of the girl?”

I considered. “They would be equally soft,” I said, “with something of the timbre as of the pealing of little silver bells. But they did not speak.”

“How did you form your conjecture as to the sound of their voices?”

“I do not know. Yet the soft bell-peal comparison cometh vivid to mind.”

He nodded. “Now close your eyes and envision the shadow where it lay on the carpet. Only do not think about it.”

I closed my eyes, deepened my breathing, and relaxed the concentration of my mind. Then I recalled what I had seen but had not noticed. “The center of the shadow is indeed darker than the larger body of it. Yet that center bears the same outline as the greater shadow. It is like an inner shadow of the greater shadow.”

“Doth this dark one rest content where it lies?”

I did not hesitate. “It is a shadow,” I said. “The ways of its thought—if it is capable of thought—I never could describe.”

“Could you declare if the parents are affectionate of their progeny?”

“I believe them so.”

“Might one of them be more so than the other?”

“That is possible,” I said. “When they turned them about-face to depart the room, the mother Funisia rested her hand for a moment on her daughter's shoulder. Sativius did not bestow that small gesture upon his son.”

He hesitated long before he spoke again. “I have given this piece of business over to your care and it belongs to you to conclude successfully. But I will tell you somewhat of similar circumstances that I have heard in my years. I do so to be of some aid but not to direct the affair myself. It is in your charge. I desire also to impress upon you the gravity of this state of things.

“These children now approach that time when ‘swift-wing'd desire,' as the poets name it, first makes its trembling advance within mind and body. Those who have been innocently affectionate as childhood playmates commence to look upon each other with new eyes. They may join in amorous union. This act brothers and sisters ordinarily will not perform, but even without doing so they may draw together more tightly in mind and spirit than ever before and at last become almost a single entity. These pale-souled children of Sativius already share but one shadow. Soon they may possess only the one soul between them. If this annealment does take place and then at a later season they happen to be parted by some circumstance, one of them will surely die. Both may perish.”

“What would be the case if they were separated now, before the tumult of early desire comes upon them?”

“With only one shadow between them, one or t'other would pine away to sickness and live out a life of pallid misery.”

“I can foresee no happy result for the dilemma,” I said.

“Have you no glimmering of a notion? I thought when I found you in the library that you might be setting out upon a course of research.”

“I had thought I might pursue the genealogical line,” I said. “Perhaps this strange malady has been recorded of the Sativius family in time past. If such a case has been recorded, perhaps a remedy may have been noted down. I have also conjectured that an ancestral curse might have been laid upon the family by a rival family or by an unknown foe.”

“Beware that you do not mire in superstitious notions concerning inimical spells of witches and warlocks. Keep to our science of sciomancy. There may be something in the genealogical tables; you know where the records are shelved. But I will also suggest that you thumb some way through the pages of Morosius.”

“Morosius?
Annales tenebrae antiquitatae?
” This was a tome I held in especial disfavor, a dull, bulky volume of confused accounts from every era and territory of miraculous or preternatural phenomena: fairies that infested bakeries, toads with jewels in their foreheads, flying anvils, drowned monasteries, and so forth. Morosius was particularly fond of peculiar rains falling out of clear blue skies—pebbles, emeralds, thimbles, goats, hay carts, thunderstones, powdered wigs, etc. All this farrago of hearsay and cloudy testimonial was flung upon the pages artlessly, so that one had no indication how to join related details.