The Golden Fleece Read online

  “Or my stupid consciousness,” Jarndyke concluded. “Don’t have to sugar-coat it, Son. I know my limitations. Might have a treat for you Sunday. Might not—how can I tell?—but something of interest, anyhow. I’d value your honest opinion—I really would.”

  Adrian took the inference that Jarndyke had bought a Rothko—or, at least, that he’d put together an art collection of some sort, as all billionaires seemed to feel obliged to do, whether they had any eye for art or not. Apparently, Angelica Jarndyke had an eye for art, or thought she did, and had probably guided her husband’s purchases, as many billionaires’ wives seemed to feel obliged to do.

  “I look forward to it, sir,” Adrian said, not entirely dishonestly.

  “You can call me Jayjay, now,” the industrialist said. “Once you’ve been invited to Sunday dinner, you’re one of the family.”

  ~ * ~

  Adrian didn’t tell anyone that he had been invited to “dinner” at the “Old Manse” on Sunday afternoon, but Jarndyke’s security walls were specifically designed to keep secrets from getting out, while permitting their free circulation within. That circulation was supposed to be on a need-to-know basis, but research scientists were notoriously liberal in their interpretation of what they needed to know.

  “Don’t worry about the expedition to Bleak House, Ade,” said a Singaporean, who probably hadn’t been called Chester Hu by his parents but had followed the common custom of adopting a Western forename for convenience, and who had not been invited to call Adrian “Ade.” “It’s just a rite de passage, to welcome you to the extended family. Watch out for Medea, though.”

  It was a joke, of course, of the same silly ilk as the Dickensian reference, but because it was the second time that Adrian had heard it, and was a little worried about getting through the rite de passage successfully, he paused to wonder whether there might something behind it, and wondered whether Professor Clark’s joke had really been improvised out of mythological thin air rather than distant rumor.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t be scared. She won’t try to seduce you, pretty as you are. She’s a dutiful trophy wife, faithful to her bargain, and she obviously likes masculine men as well as rich ones—but she’s a little crazy, is all. People would probably have nicknamed her Medea anyway, given all the newsfeed jokes about Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece, and given that Jayjay plays along with it with his Airedale Argo nonsense, but...well, I’m not sure that she doesn’t think that she actually is a witch. Not gene-twisting witchcraft, of course—genuine mumbo-jumbo.”

  “She has no reason to put a spell on me,” Adrian said colorlessly.

  “Except that you’re the hero who’s actually promised to deliver the authentic Golden Fleece,” Dr. Hu reminded him. “No—just joking. She’s just a little weird, as I say. Don’t let her put you off. It’s Jayjay you have to impress—and you haven’t put a foot wrong so far, Golden Boy.”

  “Weird how?” Adrian wanted to know, for safety’s sake.

  “She’ll look at you in a funny way—and then, if she doesn’t like what she sees, won’t look at you again. She doesn’t like trivia, or dressing things up—won’t have knick-knacks on the mantelpieces, apparently, or paintings on the walls. It’s Bleak House up there, as I said. All plain wood paneling—brown by the acre, not a splash of color; more like a monastery than a house. You’ll find it even duller than I did, I dare say. Must be other eccentricities, but those are the ones you’ll notice. Don’t worry about it. I’d say, turn a blind eye, but that’s not really your thing, is it?” He smiled.

  Adrian ignored the gibe. “What about Mr. Jarndyke’s art collection?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t have an art collection,” Hu informed him. “Maybe he wanted one—she probably did—but if so, they shelved the project. Artistic disagreements, at a guess—real ones, not euphemistic ones. Angie paints, so rumor has it— actually has a barn of sorts for her own private space, that no one but her ever goes into, where she does whatever witchy stuff she does, but there are none of her paintings on the walls of the Hall if she does fancy herself as a painter. Not downstairs, at any rate. Maybe they’re too pornographic to be allowed out of the bedroom.”

  Adrian was puzzled, seeing a mystery in the evolving pattern. Chester Hu didn’t seem to think that there was anything to what he’d said but a report of arbitrary eccentricity, but Adrian wasn’t at all sure, now that he could put what Jason Jarndyke had said to him into a different informational context. Angelica Jarndyke had “dragged” her husband to see the Rothko chapel, but wouldn’t tolerate paintings on the walls of their home...not in the spaces that visitors saw, at any rate. She was “rumored” to be a painter herself, but the likes of Chester Hu had never seen any of her work. No one was allowed in her “barn,” but Jason Jarndyke had “a treat” for him after Sunday dinner—or maybe not. Something that might interest him, at any rate.

  Perhaps, Adrian thought, Professor Clark’s Medea joke hadn’t simply been a matter of mythological free association after all. And perhaps Jason Jarndyke’s third condition hadn’t simply been a random shot aimed to shake his exaggerated complacency and make him blink.

  Adrian was almost tempted to ring Professor Clark to ask him for a little more insight into the legend of the Golden Fleece, because he remembered something in that connection, very vaguely, about dragon’s teeth. He didn’t. He didn’t even bother to interrogate a search engine. This was the twenty-first century, after all, and the only magic abroad in the world was that of genetic reverse engineering. A genius of that sort need have no fear of “real” witchcraft.

  ~ * ~

  Jason Jarndyke’s “Old Manse” was neither old, nor a manse. Not literally, at any rate. It had been completed less than ten years before, having been seven years in the construction, to a design that Jarndyke had imposed on his reluctant architects by sheer will-power and bribery. Unkind people had called it a Folly, but unkind people always said that, and even if it had been a Folly, that didn’t mean to say that it was unesthetic. Adrian knew that they could be grandeur in a Folly, and magnificence, even when there was an abundance of mere folly.

  In fact, he rather liked the look of the house on top of the moor, although architecture wasn’t really “his thing,” as Chester Hu would have put it, and fake Portland Stone from northern France definitely wasn’t his color. He preferred the honest blacks of the old stone walls on the moors and the old stone buildings in Shipley and Bingley, and thought it a pity that they were gradually being swept away by decrepitude and demolition, and replaced with paler imitations. The Old Manse was an honest fake, not trying to be anything else. Adrian liked it, as seen from distance, and he still liked it at close range, as seen from the driveway, up which he walked because he’d never owned a car and didn’t want to face the embarrassment of asking some flunkey where he could put his bicycle. From the outside, the house wasn’t bleak in his eyes.

  Even though architecture wasn’t really his thing, one of Adrian’s carefully-planned esthetic excursions, while he was at a GRE conference in Derby, had been to see the site on the Derwent where the nineteenth-century industrialist Richard Arkwright had begun the first revolution of the textile industry, introducing automated machinery into his water-mills, and then replacing water-power with steam engines. The factories had been partially restored as a museum, and the house—the original version of which had been burned down—had served time as a hotel before being fully converted into a museum, but the ghost of Arkwright’s intention had still been visible.

  As the richest man in the north of England, and the effective kingpin of the nouveau riche of the First Industrial Revolution, Arkwright had wanted a palace from which an emperor might look down on his domain, and the source of his own magnificence—a modern palace, of course, not a mere copy of some Roman ruin or some scaled-down Versailles, but a palace nevertheless. Jason Jarndyke’s Old Manse wasn’t nearly as pretentious as Arkwright’s Victorian colossus, but that
was just a symptom of marching time: its stone walls and steeply-pitched slate roofs embodied, in essence, the same dream of domination and imperial justice. Not vulgar wealth, or even brute power— Jarndyke wasn’t as unsubtle as that—but a testament of merit, of due deserts duly enjoyed.

  Adrian could appreciate that, and approve of it; he wasn’t one of those scientific geniuses who despise men who “make money out of the inventions of others,” because he knew how unusual the talent was that such triumphs required—and he knew that Jason Jarndyke, although by no means free of egomania, had his vanity under disciplined control.

  Inside, there were, as Chester Hu had said, “acres of brown.” Adrian didn’t mind that, either, although it did seem austere, and he could understand why some people might find it bleak. Personally, he liked wood, especially old wood, with swirling grain and knots. Whoever had cut and organized the paneling hadn’t had perfect sight, but he hadn’t been a mug or a skimper.

  Anyway, Adrian thought, better austere and natural than contrived and awful. He remembered what Chester had said, en passant, about Mr. and Mrs. Jarndyke probably having agreed to disagree about matters of decoration, and deciding on minimalism as the best compromise. Adrian got the same impression. They had probably wanted different things, and had decided on neither. He could approve of that.

  It was obvious, too, why Dr. Hu had described Angelica Jarndyke as a “trophy wife.” In terms of appearances, she was a cliche: fifteen or twenty years younger than her husband, and radiantly beautiful, even now that she was past forty—so beautiful, in fact, as to be out of anyone’s league but a millionaire’s, at least—and carefully polished to boot, to the extent of seeming an item of artifice, more showpiece than person. Her dress sense was perfect, even though she was displaying “casual,” and Adrian perceived at first glance that she was an expert in applying make-up; he had never seen artifice so flawless—but he had had a sheltered upbringing, in that regard, and he knew it.

  Angelica Jarndyke was the first trophy wife he had ever actually met, and he knew that all the ones he’d seen in photographs had been airbrushed, so he was slightly surprised to find that she wouldn’t have needed airbrushing. If he didn’t find her attractive, it was only because he had trained himself, for reasons of self-defense, not to find any woman attractive, in herself. One of the advantages of enhanced color sensation, he’d found, was that a supersensitivity to color allowed him to look beyond the crude kinds of visual cues that stimulated inconvenient hormonal surges. The kind of beauty that formulated his truth was not the coarse beauty of common-or-garden lust.

  At least, he liked to think so.

  When he was formally introduced to Angelica Jarndyke, Adrian, not knowing what to do, contented himself with a stiff and awkward bow. She looked him up and down, with just a little too much attention. Adrian had expected—hoped, even— that she would simply give him the once over and think: Just one more mad scientist for Jayjay’s collection, but that didn’t seem to be what she was thinking at all. Unfortunately, Adrian couldn’t read what the thinking actually was in her lack of indifference, so it just made him feel slightly paranoid. Obviously, Jason Jarndyke had told her something about the latest recruit to his team of geniuses that had been intended to provoke her interest, and it had not been entirely without effect. In all probability, Adrian thought, she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted her interest provoked, and resented the fact that it had been.

  Even so, and somewhat to his relief, once she had given him a long hard look, Mrs. Jarndyke went on to do exactly what Chester Hu had predicted, and did not look directly at him again throughout the entire meal. That gave him pause to relax, and to avoid looking at her. He concentrated his attention on Jason Jarndyke, the man he was supposed to impress, the helmsman of his destiny.

  The cuisine was basic, but top quality. Adrian had never tasted a Yorkshire pudding that hadn’t come out of a freezer-bag, and he had to admit that there was a reward in authenticity in that case, as in so many others. The beef was tissue-cultured, of course—there was no point in taking “authenticity” to absurd lengths—but it was top quality, and Adrian would have been willing to bet that it came from cells descended from a local breed, not Aberdeen Angus. He was no wine expert, but he couldn’t find any fault with Jarndyke’s much-vaunted cellar.

  There were no other guests at the table. Adrian knew that the Jarndykes had two children, but there was no evidence of their presence in the house, and Adrian assumed that they must both be away at a fancy prep school, being groomed for Eton or Oundle. Because Angelica Jarndyke made little effort to fulfill her duties as a hostess conversion-wise, and Adrian was too shy to do anything but react to what was said to him, Jason Jarndyke had to guide the chatter and do most of the talking himself, but he was obviously used to that.

  The industrialist talked and talked and talked, but he avoided being boring with practiced ease. He didn’t come across as too much of a boor, nor as overly arrogant, in spite of his cultivated bluntness and natural ebullience. He discussed current events and future possibilities—in a general sense rather than a specific one—with equal ease, and reminisced blithely without any crass braggadocio. The further the meal went, the more Adrian came to like his new employer, and the more comfortable he began to feel in his presence—until the coffee was served, and Jarndyke changed the subject without warning, as he was prone to do.

  “Angie thinks you’re bullshitting me,” he said, suddenly. “Not about being a genius geneticist—she’s prepared to believe that you can deliver me a Golden Fleece, of sorts—but about the other stuff. I told her what you said about the Rothko chapel, but she thinks you’re bluffing, just like I thought she was. She doesn’t want to show you any of her paintings, because she thinks you’ll bullshit her too, the way half a dozen other so-called art experts have. She doesn’t want that. Claims to hate flattery, although I keeping telling her that when people say she’s beautiful, it’s not flattery because it’s the simple truth. So you might not get your treat, unless you can persuade her that it’s worth a go.”

  Adrian made an effort to try to look Angelica Jarndyke in the eyes, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. She had blue eyes, but they were a darker shade than his. She had blonde hair, but it was a lighter shade than his. She and he couldn’t have passed for mother and son, even if she’d been old enough—which she wasn’t, quite.

  Adrian considered going through the whole rigmarole that he’d spun for Jarndyke at the Savoy, but he knew that the old man would have repeated all of that to her, accurately enough to get the gist across. He thought it best to go the philosophical route, with a bit of allegory thrown in.

  “The thing about the Emperor’s new clothes,” he said, “is that the crowd really might have been unable to see them, even if they were real. Not because the members of the crowd were stupid, or uncultured, but because they simply didn’t have the right neurophysiological equipment. Imagine the predicament of some poor fellow who, when the kid shouted out: ‘The Emperor’s got no clothes,’ wanted to shout out: ‘Yes he has, and they’re beautiful! The tailors are right, and they’re men of genius. That’s the finest suit that any emperor ever had to wear.’ What could he possibly say to convince the crowd, knowing that the majority was bound to be against him? How could he ever convince them that he really could see the suit, in all its glory, and wasn’t simply crazy or—as Mr. Jarndyke would say—bullshitting? He’d be like the sighted man in H. G. Wells’s ‘Country of the Blind,’ impotent to persuade his hosts that he was anything but a deluded fool, impending rockslide or no impending rockslide. And yet...perhaps the crowd should have been prepared to hear him out. They wouldn’t have needed to give him the benefit of the doubt—the admission of doubt would have been something, in itself.”

  Angelica Jarndyke did condescend to look at him then, but not with any sympathy. “I’ve always thought that the child in the story was a disgrace to youth,” she said. “What he should have shouted was: ‘Who cares whether t
he old fool has any clothes on or not? He’s the emperor—roll out the guillotine, strike up the Marseillaise and full speed ahead for democracy.’”

  Her husband laughed. Adrian didn’t, although he wasn’t at all sure that it wasn’t a diplomatic error not to go along with the joke and let the whole issue of who could see what be swept under the carpet and forgotten. He hadn’t dared study Angelica Jarndyke as minutely as she’d studied him when they’d first been confronted with one another, and he didn’t dare to now, because he knew that staring at someone as beautiful as her was always a faux pas, but he tried now to take a better measure of her, covertly.

  Then he pointed at one of the panels on the wall behind her head. “That one’s wrong, isn’t it?” he said. “The designer did a pretty good job with the rest, but that was a slip. Maybe he couldn’t find one to fit the scheme and improvised—or maybe he did it deliberately, knowing that ninety-nine people in a hundred would only see a sea of brown, and that most of the one per cent wouldn’t know exactly what was wrong, or why, but would just be subtly unsettled by it.”

  Angelica Jarndyke turned her head. She didn’t have to ask him which panel he meant. “I’ve always thought that it was a deliberate mistake,” she said, biting her lip slightly, at the risk of disturbing the gloss. “Cocking a snook, so to speak.”