Rumbullion by Molly Tanzer

Author:Molly Tanzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2021-05-15T12:46:06+00:00

—Cloudsley

***

Cloudsley’s letter—the information it contained, the sentiments expressed in his closing—shocked me. I was speechless; nay, powerless upon finishing, and sat limply staring at it for some time in my study, as the afternoon light waned and distant thunder began to promise a dreary evening.

My former (apparently) friend was correct in his assumption that I had not heard the whole of what transpired during the time between when I put Phylotha to bed and hearing, much later in the night, that she had been apprehended, bloodied and insane, and locked in a closet for fear of her injuring additional guests. And yet, Cloudsley’s account was so very outlandish it left me perplexed as to whether I could rely upon his sanity.

Cloudsley, despite all of what I must call his “notions,” could never be described as fanciful. Additionally, he simply despised the classics, and especially Greek tragedy; I still recall allowing him to use my notes our first year at Wadham to study for an exam on Sophocles. Thus, my first conclusion—that Cloudsley was leading me on, claiming to have had some sort of modern experience of The Bacchae—felt wrong, the more I thought on it. No, it just didn’t seem like him, not at all. While he had always been a practical joker, Cloudsley’s larks always favored the sophomoric rather than the esoteric. Salting your wine when you looked away, tucking a guinea pig between your sheets before bedtime, shooting off a firework during a formal dinner…all that and more I would believe Cloudsley capable of, but not this sort of extensive, literary deception.

Which left only one conclusion: that something at least similar to what Cloudsley described had gone on during the night of the Count of St. Germain’s concert. That is not to say I believed that the Count had actually summoned a god. Drugged wine would explain any eccentric or lewd conduct on behalf of my guests, for example. And as for Vandeleur, well, Cloudsley himself had suggested that he might have had a prior arrangement with St. Germain. That seemed most likely—after all, the Count had hastily suggested the diversion when Vandeleur became agitated, and Vandeleur, though so angry he was threatening Mr. Bernard with violence, had consented. Also, the Count had denied Dionysios the privilege of being his volunteer, though the boy, of the two of them, seemed more amenable to high jinks. The juice-into-wine routine could have been a mere mummer’s trick. All this, taken together, could very well simulate some sort of genuine bakkheia. And as for Phylotha herself, if under the power of smoke and drugged wine she had indeed committed those vicious acts, she may have gone mad in the wake of realizing just what she had done.

Fortunately (if such a word may be used in any way as regards that fateful night) Cloudsley didn’t perfectly reprise the rôle of Pentheus in The Bacchae. And yet, his description of Phylotha’s “maenadism” for lack of a better term seemed too bizarrely accurate to Euripides to make me wholly comfortable with my theories of drugged wine and narcotics.

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