Douglas Preston - Two Graves

At last, Constance resumed. “For many, many years, we lived a solitary, reclusive life in that mansion. I continued my courses of study in literature, philosophy, art, music, history, and languages, partly with the doctor’s help and partly on my own, making free use of his library and scientific collections. Meanwhile, Dr. Leng continued his work. Around 1935, he achieved his second success. Using various chemicals and compounds that had been previously unavailable, he managed to synthesize an arcanum that no longer required… human factors.”

“In other words, he stopped killing,” Felder said.

Constance nodded. “As long as it prolonged his life, he felt no special compunction against taking lives. However, as a scientist, it offended his sense of purity and aesthetic. Yes—he stopped killing. He no longer needed to. The arcanum we both continued to take was now purely synthetic. But his greater task remained incomplete. And so his scientific research continued until it finally stopped, rather suddenly, in the spring of 1954.”

“Why 1954?” Felder asked.

A thin smile appeared on Constance’s face. “Once again, that isn’t germane to my story. But I will tell you one thing. Dr. Leng once explained to me that there are two ways to ‘cure’ a patient. The common way is by restoring him to health.”

“What’s the other?”

“Putting him out of his misery.” The thin smile vanished. “In any case, with his work finally complete—or, more precisely, no longer necessary—Dr. Leng ceased to take the elixir. He lost interest in life, became even more reclusive, and began to age at a normal rate. But he gave me a choice. And I… chose to continue treatment.

“And so things remained for another fifty-odd years—until we were the victims of an unexpected and violent home invasion. Dr. Leng was killed, and I went into hiding in the deepest recesses of the house. Ultimately, order was restored, and the mansion passed into the hands of Leng’s great-grandnephew: Aloysius Pendergast.”

“Pendergast?” Felder repeated, hugely surprised.

Constance nodded.

Felder shook his head. It was too much to take in—too much.

“I watched Pendergast for many months before I finally revealed myself to him. He very kindly took me in as… as his ward.” She shifted on the bench. “And there you have it, Dr. Felder—the story of my past.”

Felder took a deep breath. “And—your child?” He couldn’t help but wonder who the father was.

“I gave birth to my son in Gsalrig Chongg, a remote monastery in Tibet. Through a complicated process, the monks of the monastery recognized that my son was the nineteenth incarnation of one of Tibet’s holiest rinpoches. This proved a great danger. The occupying Chinese authorities have been ruthlessly suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, especially the idea of the reincarnation of holy men. Back in 1995, when the Dalai Lama proclaimed a six-year-old boy as the eleventh incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the Chinese seized the boy, and he hasn’t been seen since—perhaps murdered. The Chinese learned that my child had been proclaimed the nineteenth reincarnation of the rinpoche—and so they came to get him.”

“So it was necessary to convince them that he was dead,” Felder said.

“Precisely. I pretended to flee with the child and then throw him overboard, all as a diversion. My arrest was highly public, and it seemed to satisfy the Chinese. Meanwhile, my real child was being smuggled out of Tibet to India.”

“So you brought a dummy aboard the Queen Mary and threw it overboard?”

“Exactly. A life-size doll. It went over the side in midpassage.”

There was a brief silence before Felder spoke again. “There’s something else I don’t understand. Why did you send me after your lock of hair? I’d always assumed it was a…” Here he colored. “A labor of love. To exonerate myself, to prove myself to you. But you’ve made it clear that you—you have no feelings for me along those lines.”

“Haven’t you guessed the answer, Dr. Felder?” Constance replied. “Actually, I suppose there are two answers.” She smiled slightly. “That day you came to visit me in the library here, I’d just learned my child had reached India safely. He’s in Dharamsala, with the Tibetan government in exile, very well protected. Now he can grow up and undergo the proper training to fulfill his position as the nineteenth rinpoche, in absentia. Safe from the Chinese.”

“So there’s no longer a need to maintain this fiction that you murdered your child.”

“Exactly. And as a result, there’s no need for me to remain any longer in Mount Mercy.”

“But to be allowed to leave, you’d have to be certified as compos mentis.”

Constance inclined her head.

“Which meant convincing me of your sanity.”

“That’s correct. But there’s also the second answer that I mentioned. By convincing you of my sanity, it would resolve the agonizing doubts in your own mind. If you knew I was speaking the truth, it would help you resolve the difficulties in my story—difficulties that I know have been wearing on you.”

So she did care for him—in some manner or another. At the very least, she’d noticed his internal struggle and taken pity on him for it. In the silence that followed, Felder found himself—in light of all this new information—framing the arguments he would put forward for overturning Constance’s commitment. He realized, with growing dismay, that nothing she’d just told him could be used as evidence. It would not even begin to stand up in a court hearing. He would have to find his own way through the legal maze—and the maze of demonstrating that the distant child in India was hers—but, he knew, he owed that to her… and more. At least, proving the child was alive would be fairly straightforward—thanks to advanced DNA testing.

He still had so many questions to ask that he found himself somehow unable to frame even one of them in his head. Instead, he realized he needed time to process all that he had heard. It was time to leave.

He picked up the two envelopes, held the old, yellowed one out to Constance. “This is rightfully yours,” he said.

“I’d be happier knowing it was in your possession.”

Felder nodded. He slipped both envelopes into his jacket pocket. He stood up, but did not leave, hesitating a moment. One important question still remained to be resolved.

“Constance,” he said.

“Yes, Doctor?”

“The, ah, arcanum. When did you stop taking it?”

“When my first guardian, Dr. Leng, was killed.”

He hesitated. “Does it ever bother you?”

“What?”

“The—sorry, I can’t think of a delicate way to put this—the knowledge that your own life has been artificially extended by the murder of innocent people.”

Constance regarded him with her deep, inscrutable eyes. The chapel seemed to go very still.

“Are you familiar,” she asked at last, “with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quotation: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function ?”

“I’ve heard it, yes.”

“Consider this. I was not merely the beneficiary of Dr. Leng’s experiments. I became the ward of the man who murdered and mutilated my own sister. I spent over a hundred years beneath his roof, reading his books, drinking his wines, consuming his food, conversing pleasantly with him in the evenings—all the while knowing who he was and what he did to my own sister. A rare case of opposing ideas, wouldn’t you say?”

She paused. Felder was struck by the unusual look in her eyes—of what? He could not say.

“So I ask you, Doctor: does that mean I have a first-rate intelligence—or that I am insane?” She paused, her deep eyes glittering. “Or… both ?”