It was his Magister, his teacher, who had finally convinced him that liberation was not going to be achieved through conventional means. When Iveson was diagnosed with the cancer that has so reduced him, he made it plain to Cox that his death was going to change things for ever. Iveson has been the only truly loyal servant; guarding his home, his resources, his secrets, these long years. But Iveson has weeks to live, and in his absence and Cox’s continued incarceration, the bohemian palace of his childhood will fall into ruin. The labyrinth of accounts that permits the upkeep of the property will be beyond Cox’s reach. And when the house is seized by creditors, they will conduct a survey on the property and grounds. They will see the peculiarities. They will take soundings of the lake. And they will find the subterranean room where he has spent three decades turning beautiful, exceptional young men and women into works of art.
Cox sits in the company of the beautiful dead, and breathes in so deeply that he feels briefly dizzy. His whole being fills with the mingled aromas, sights and sounds. He feels high; intoxicated, drunk on the sheer hedonistic pleasure of being here, again: situated in the place to which he has returned again and again these past years. His Magister has sustained him with descriptions, of course, and he has been permitted to glance at the occasional photographs when his legal team have visited and slipped him the envelopes for which they have been quietly but handsomely rewarded; no doubt telling themselves that the contents are items of sentimentality rather than criminality. But to be here, to be beneath the water, in the cool and the damp and the slime-scented air, is to glimpse Elysium.
It was his Magister who discovered the tunnels when he was making Procne’s vision a reality. She imagined the giardinera descending to a clear, silver-blue lake: neat stone bridges curving in from each side to meet at an ornamental fountain topped with a statue of David. And his Magister did as he was bid. He drained the lake, and happened upon the network of secret rooms and tunnels that had been flooded, silted over, and hidden from view two centuries before. They learned that the rooms were once a lower floor – a lower floor of a long-vanished bridge that arced over the central span of the water in Jacobean times. Griffin, still not much more than an infant, was made privy to the secret. He was carried through the stinking silt and foul-smelling water to explore the cool, dark place that nobody knew existed. And he recalls his mother insisting that the secret space be maintained. That its existence remain a secret. That the little entranceway beneath the boathouse be concealed so perfectly that none could stumble upon it. She never ventured down – even before suffering the cerebral event that altered her life and accelerated its end. Her Renaissance garden was barely completed before her fragile brain tore itself in two and reduced her to the pale, dead-eyed thing he tries not to let himself remember. It is a comfort to him that she died looking at her statues, in a place that mattered to her above all else. He does not feel any guilt for his part in it. She had seen him. Seen him pressing himself up against the exquisite alabaster Aphrodite, tucked away behind the cypress trees at the entrance to the wood. She had seen him pressing his adolescent self to a vision of something perfect, something his mother held up as a transcendent symbol: a bridge between the heavens and earth. And despite the twist of her cheek and the lack of control of her facial muscles, she had twisted her mouth in a scornful sneer. She was laughing at him. She was amused by his pathetic, inexpert thrusts, banging himself painfully off moss and stone. So he had done what was necessary. He’d pushed her wheelchair down the path, and tipped her onto the wet earth. And then he had walked away, tucking himself into his pants unspent and staring up at the rolling black clouds.
Cox looks around him, basking in the absolute beauty of the objects before him.
There are nine of them. Seven girls. Two boys. Each were beautiful, in life. Exceptional, even. Pure, virginal, timeless, angelic … each had seemed like a gift from the gods. Each was perfect: exquisite blocks of marble which he could transform into something exquisite and eternal.
Cox first learned of corpse wax at the foot of his Magister. Iveson had discovered something long since dead in one of the chambers beneath the lake. Whatever it had been in life, in death it had been transformed into a wax effigy; a monster carved in soap and tallow. The process, the substance, is called Adipocere. A product of decomposition, it turns dead flesh into a soap-like substance. It develops in damp, alkaline-rich environments
