The Secret History - Donna Tartt [121]
“Where did you get these?” I said.
“Ah. You’re quite observant,” he said, pleased. “Aren’t they marvelous? Quite rare. Henry brought them to me.”
I took a quick swallow of my wine to hide my consternation.
“He tells me—may I?” he said nodding at the bowl.
I passed it to him, and he spooned some of them onto his plate. “Thank you,” he said. “What was I saying? Oh, yes. Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died.”
I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.
“They’re quite good,” said Julian, taking a bite. “Have you gone with Henry on any of his collecting expeditions?”
“Not yet. He hasn’t asked me to.”
“I must say, I never thought I cared very much for mushrooms, but everything he’s brought me has been heavenly.”
Suddenly I understood. This was a clever piece of groundwork on Henry’s part. “He’s brought them to you before?” I said.
“Yes. Of course I wouldn’t trust just anyone with this sort of thing, but Henry seems to know an amazing lot about it.”
“I believe he probably does,” I said, thinking of the boxer dogs.
“It’s remarkable how good he is at anything he tries. He can grow flowers, repair clocks like a jeweler, add tremendous sums in his head. Even if it’s something as simple as bandaging a cut finger he manages to do a better job of it.” He poured himself another glass of wine. “I gather that his parents are disappointed that he’s decided to concentrate so exclusively on the classics. I disagree, of course, but in a certain sense it is rather a pity. He would have made a great doctor, or soldier, or scientist.”
I laughed. “Or a great spy,” I said.
Julian laughed too. “All you boys would be excellent spies,” he said. “Slipping about in casinos, eavesdropping on heads of state. Really, won’t you try some of these mushrooms? They’re glorious.”
I drank the rest of my wine. “Why not,” I said, and reached for the bowl.
After lunch, when the dishes had been cleared away and we were talking about nothing in particular, Julian asked, out of the blue, if I’d noticed anything peculiar about Bunny recently.
“Well, no, not really,” I said, and took a careful sip of tea.
He raised an eyebrow. “No? I think he’s behaving very strangely. Henry and I were talking only yesterday about how brusque and contrary he’s become.”
“I think he’s been in kind of a bad mood.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Edmund is such a simple soul. I never thought I’d be surprised at anything he did or said, but he and I had a very odd conversation the other day.”
“Odd?” I said cautiously.
“Perhaps he’d only read something that disturbed him. I don’t know. I am worried about him.”
“Why?”
“Frankly, I’m afraid he might be on the verge of some disastrous religious conversion.”
I was jarred. “Really?” I said.
“I’ve seen it happen before. And I can think of no other reason for this sudden interest in ethics. Not that Edmund is profligate, but really, he’s one of the least morally concerned boys I’ve ever known. I was very startled when he began to question me—in all earnestness—about such hazy concerns as Sin and Forgiveness. He’s thinking of going into the Church, I just know it. Perhaps that girl has something to do with it, do you suppose?”
He meant Marion. He had a habit of attributing all of Bunny’s faults indirectly to her—his laziness, his bad humors, his lapses of taste. “Maybe,” I said.
“Is she a Catholic?”
“I think she’s Presbyterian,” I said. Julian had a polite but implacable contempt for Judeo-Christian tradition in virtually all its forms. He would deny this if confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.
“A Presbyterian? Really?” he said, dismayed.
“I believe