The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [122]
THE NEXT MORNING, Lucien had breakfast with Codruta in the main residence of the Georges, where a retinue of servants was busy preparing for her imminent departure to the Loire Valley for the summer.
“I apologize for the lack of tranquillity,” she noted with a wave of her hand at the hallway behind them, “but I appreciate you arranging your schedule so that I could indulge my continuing interest in your affairs.”
“It was far from an imposition,” Lucien offered truthfully, since he always made a point to visit Guillaume for a few weeks at the beginning of each summer. “My father was also anxious for me to see you.”
She nodded. “I won’t pretend he didn’t ask me to talk to you,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat his advice.”
“No, I don’t think so, either,” Lucien glumly agreed.
“Not that I’m questioning his motives,” she added pensively. “He’s worried about you.”
“I know—I understand.” Lucien nodded. “And I wish I could be more like him—I wish I could work through my grief in a more productive manner—”
“That can be admirable,” she offered, “but I don’t think that kind of sublimation—while suitable for a scientist—necessarily conforms to an artistic temperament, do you?”
Lucien considered this. “No, or at least not for me,” he admitted. “I want to sing—I’ve tried—but I can’t. I think back to Munich, and how at the time it felt like something crystallized in me—as a singer and a person—and though I thought it made me stronger, since Eduard, I feel like it turned me into someone I don’t want to be.”
She waited several seconds before responding. “It was a beautiful performance,” she acknowledged, “and I think it would be naïve to suppose that there would be no costs.”
“But death?”
“If you mean Eduard—absolutely not,” she emphasized. “As we’ve discussed before, you can’t hold yourself responsible for that tragedy, although I understand the impulse.” She slowly arched one of her painted eyebrows. “But I don’t think death is necessarily the wrong word to apply here, if we might remove ourselves from its more literal meaning.”
Lucien saw himself as an adolescent, nervously sipping his tea and hanging on her every word, and as he watched this vision dissipate, any sadness he felt at what had been lost was—perhaps for the first time—tempered by a relief that he was no longer filled with such improbable hopes and ideals. “My youth?” he suggested.
She tilted her head in a way that seemed to acknowledge his response along with her intention not to reply in a direct manner, which—in keeping with his revelation—he understood was not her place. “As much as we like to think we grieve for others,” she said, “it bears keeping in mind that we are also grieving for ourselves and, above all, what has inevitably passed us by.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Guillaume—who had spent the day at the university—returned and joined Lucien in the garden. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, “about the vaccine.”
They had not discussed Guillaume’s work in great detail for some time, and Lucien was operating under the assumption that his father had done little more over the past several years than test the formula on mice, most of which still died. “What’s wrong?” he asked and then corrected himself. “Or is it good news?”
“That depends,” his father offered cryptically before explaining how a month or so earlier—desperate to get some insight—he had made the mistake of confiding in a colleague at the university about the exact nature of the experiments; had even gone so far as to show him the surviving mice. While the professor in question had been suitably impressed, he had betrayed Guillaume’s confidence, and word had since leaked out to the faculty and beyond.
“How far beyond?” Lucien asked.
“As far beyond as you can go,” Guillaume sighed. “All the way up to the emperor.”
“To the emperor?” Lucien repeated. “Are you sure?”
“Yes—I was summoned to see him.”
“You were? When?”
“This morning.”
As Lucien digested this news, the surrounding leaves seemed to turn