“Their experiences with the governments of Spain and Britain had demonstrated that tangling with the affairs of common men was too dangerous. It could lead to the loss of one’s estates, to the slaughter of one’s colleagues, and, eventually, to watching one’s own body be dismembered.” Marcel took a sip of coffee. “And so paranoia became our policy. It defines us almost as much as our work does.”
The Grafters kept themselves to themselves, Marcel went on to explain. They did not seek out the supernatural. However, sometimes, much to their horror, the supernatural sought them out. It was not clear if there was something about the Grafters that attracted these elements or if the Grafters encountered a standard number of them but were slightly better equipped to survive them than normal people. Regardless, every experience was isolated, and inevitably violent. Sometimes the Grafter would triumph, sometimes all that remained was a smear, or some bones, or a crater.
From what the Grafters could tell, throughout Western Europe there was no equivalent of the Checquy. European supernatural manifestations were not policed in any way, not by the supernatural, not by any government, and certainly not by any supernatural government. Whether through sheer luck or some other factor, there were very few large-scale manifestations. Rather, there were people and creatures who deployed their unnatural abilities discreetly. They might use them for profit or to do horrible things, but they were circumspect enough that the normal population didn’t know about it.
“Without the protections and the order imposed by something like the Checquy, the European continent is, secretly, a savagely dangerous place,” said Marcel. “These people — these things — are free to do what they want. They have the power to indulge their whims and their tastes. People get killed; children go missing. They can act without fear or consequence.”
“It sounds dreadful,” said Felicity. The old man gazed at her for a long moment. Without taking his eyes off her, he spoke to Alessio.
“Alessio, would you please go to your room? I need to talk to Pawn Clements privately.” The boy left the room, closing the door behind him. “Let me tell you a story.”
*
In 1914, Marcel Leliefeld was born into the world, delivered expertly by his father with some expert direction from his mother. He was joined ten minutes later by his twin brother, Siegbert. From a young age, the two boys were completely aware of the Broederschap. This was unusual. As a matter of policy, the Grafters kept their true occupations (and their physical capabilities) a secret from everyone, including their own families. Merely being the spouse or child of a Grafter did not automatically qualify one for a membership. The most that such a relationship guaranteed was a seemingly lucky immunity to various infectious diseases, a lack of cancer, and blessedly perfect offspring who were conceived and delivered with an abundance of ease. To become a Grafter, one needed to demonstrate exceptional aptitude.
Marcel and Siegbert’s knowledge of the Grafters was a result of their parents’ unorthodox approach to, well, pretty much everything. The parents in question, Hendrika and Arjan, were both Grafters. Important Grafters.
Arjan was the son of a Grafter, and Hendrika had been brought into the organization as a child from Delft when a neighbor, who was also a Grafter, had been struck by her facility with a paintbrush. The neighbor’s justification had been that anyone with that level of unorthodox imagination and such fine motor control would make a marvelous Grafter. Hendrika and Arjan had served their apprenticeships at the same time and, after the (predictable) period of intense competition and mutual loathing, had (predictably) fallen in love (slightly less predictably) over an autopsy table of Siamese quintuplets (who had been longtime friends of the Grafters, as they would not have been born without some Broederschap assistance, and who had died simultaneously after living a good, long collective life, leaving behind three widows, two widowers, thirteen children, a wardrobe of intricately tailored clothes, and a well-established mercantile business).
Arjan and Hendrika were married in Amsterdam in a huge church full of well-wishers and then promptly moved to Paris, where they embarked on dazzling careers of experimentation and research, constantly on the cutting edge (as it were) of innovative surgery. Their home was renowned, not only among the Grafters but also among the artists, intellectuals, and scientists of Paris as the place to come and talk and argue and drink.
It was a salon unlike any other, where the good and the wicked, the rich and the poor, the unearthly and the earthly came to meet and disgust and inspire one another. At any given moment, there was a wide variety of visitors.
In the parlor, one might find a debate involving Arjan, a Turkish cabinetmaker, a Catholic priest, and a drunk individual whom no one seemed to know but who kept muttering about some goddamn beekeeper and the dynamics of rocks in space.
Lounging on the front stairs, a centuries-old Grafter drinking oolong tea might be discussing scissor technique with an apprentice hairdresser, while on the back stairs, one might find an Oxford don locked in a passionate embrace with a Cambridge don (both dressed in full academic robes). In the kitchen, one could come across a cellist and a boxer smoking opium and staring fixedly into each other’s eyes as the cook and the scullery maids bustled around them, laboriously sewing the front end of a dead pig to the rear end of a dead peacock in preparation for cooking.
In the library, Baron László Mednyánszky had painted a now-famous portrait of a hermaphroditic Grafter cousin.
In her studio upstairs, Hendrika had once removed the Spanish ambassador’s appendix and put in a fresh one before descending to have afternoon tea with Marie Curie. Architects fought in the garden, mathematicians and sculptors folded origami in the gazebo, and rosellas and parakeets flew freely through the rooms, never relieving themselves on guests’ heads, since they had been altered to subsist entirely on sunshine and secondhand cigarette smoke.
In that house, children and theories were conceived. Lectures were given and drawings drawn. Venereal diseases were contracted and then effervesced away after the infected person drank some of Arjan’s jasmine tea. Symphonies and viruses were composed, and hypotheses and cadavers were deconstructed. There were fabulous dinner parties in which the guests feasted on meats from animals that had never existed and drank wine that glowed faintly in their mouths and left them in states of heightened creativity.
This was not to say that Arjan and Hendrika were indiscreet. Or rather, they were not indiscreet about the fact that they were Grafters. They were indiscreet about most other things, but as far as their non-Grafter guests were concerned, the Leliefelds were a naturalist and a (woman!) surgeon, both possessed of great wealth and intellect. The glorious nature of their hospitality always carefully straddled the line between the improbable and the impossible, and guests who caught a glimpse of the unexplainable were left to doubt their own eyes and swear off drink.
Above the second floor of the house, however, all doubt would have been removed. In their separate studios (they maintained that the key to a happy marriage was being able to get away from the other person), Arjan and Hendrika developed startling new techniques and pushed biology to its limits. In the bedrooms, Grafter guests slept, hanging from the ceiling or cocooned in the closets.
And in a vast rooftop greenhouse of wrought iron and stained glass, two identical little boys romped amidst flowers that nuzzled them like kittens, beneath vines that gave off perfume that hung in the air like trails of smoke and tasted sweet on the tongue.