Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 9

Ch. 9. Cartesia Boniface

9. Cartesia Boniface

She awoke naturally to the muted thumps of rain on her double-paned bay windows high above the street, and slowly stretched her arm out to caress Lee’s side, all the while knowing that she would not be there. Lee only slept over Saturday nights into Sunday mornings, working all the others. Cartesia had asked her twice to let her take care of her, and she would not ask again. She had tried to reason with Lee. Lee and her friend Tee had kept in good touch with their old baby sisters-in-law, and Cartesia had ensured that they had made good impressions upon the princes—they were already partners. She pulled her arms back to her sides, hugged herself and admitted that she had not reasoned but that she had shamelessly pleaded and begged. Thereafter Cartesia had begun to feel endangered, as though she were holding herself carelessly open. She had caught herself searching Lee’s face for signs of strain or deceit, perhaps in the form of averted eyes or a stolen glance, and she had felt ashamed when their eyes met last night, and Lee’s face lit up, and her own breath quickened when she saw Lee seeing what Lee saw in her. She knew that Lee could never betray her, because she wielded state power, and she knew that Lee loved her, in her own way. And likewise.

She had shared her bed with beautiful and powerful men and beautiful, powerful men, the best of whom had wanted nothing more than for her to love him as he loved her. In her youth she had believed that such a thing were possible and even desirable, but her long experience tending that delicate flower had taught her that one must always be loved more than one loves, and that any man who thinks otherwise is a fool, born to be treated rough and made to like it. For a man to claim to want nothing more than to share a life and a love, nothing more than to be valued as he values, is to admit that he has nothing of superior value to offer. Possessed of any treasure worth having, he would resist such encroachments, demand gestures of submission, and tend more to the withholding of his affections.

Her first had left her his Lincoln Park fortress and his security services operation, which was the first licensed to police New Ark’s markets and stores. Since Appall’s death, its operation had been restricted to Feelharmonica’s principality. Her second bequeathed her his scholarly library and his land holdings in the Great Swamp. She made use of the former.

Each in his own way had failed her. Each had debased and humiliated himself in his eagerness to love her, and both had demeaned themselves in pursuit of her love. Their bequeathals, gifts, and concessions were the smallest of consolations, the coldest of comforts. But she had learned to take that comfort in that coldness.

And so she tended to strike fear into the hearts of those around her, men and women alike.

◆ ◆ ◆

A sort of all-purpose executrix from Piscataway, who also happened to be the daughter of a large landowner there, Cartesia Boniface had first made a career as an assistant prosecutor for Appall, then chief prosecutor, then jurist under Feelharmonica, then also councilor and jurist, during which time she also managed to raise two children, bury two husbands, and publish several well-respected articles on the major part of her work: criminal psychology and related practical applications. Her work in that field, though written in a crabbed, sui generis “academic" style, surpassed that of any recordkeeper in insight and understanding. Tellem underwrote a non-exclusionary dig through his collection in search of criminology records confirming or denying the work of the Councilor Justice Cartesia Boniface.

There is no doubt that she was useful to the state and to the prince, particularly Appall, where she crafted Appall’s legal strategy for domestic pacification, in which political dissidents were prosecuted under a set of guidelines, not laws, under which crimes against the state and the prince (defined elsewhere, in law) were divided into vague and fuzzy bands, to which clouds of fog were assigned explicit and harsh minimum punishments. The circumstances of the deaths of her husbands have always been disputed, and obscured by loss and mishandling of important evidence in each case. Let the obvious be stated, that the Black Lady was everywhere assumed to have killed them, and there is no way that she could not have known this. Her children from her first two husbands had grown, and while she remained capable of bearing children, and while she appeared only to grow in beauty, no third man submitted a bid for her hand.

She made great use of the criminology research with which Tellem’s team had provided her, particularly the criminal use of psychology in the Americas of the early twenty-first century. Organized crime concerns, including governments in whole or in part, concurred on the use of the particularly effective tactic of social isolation to heighten and then to exploit the emotional reactivity of suspects or targets, depending. These tactics, reinforced by easy control of the electronic communications infrastructure prevalent in those societies, served a strategy of self-destruction—to encourage the targets or suspects to destroy themselves, to alienate themselves from their own support systems, families, friends, etc., and eventually to break under the strain. Of course, this is an uncertain strategy, and in certain cases more forceful tactics were required, including the surreptitious administration of mind-altering substances capable of inducing alarming states of conciousness in which the target or suspect might seem capable of harming themselves or others, which would then require conveniently lethal self-defense from well-placed operatives or at least involuntary restraint by law enforcement. Their testimony is thereby also pre-emptively impeached.

Her main takeaway was that recalcitrant cases could be eliminated or incapacitated to a greater or lesser degree more or less easily depending on their addictions, habits, and predilections. The more exotic, perverse, and distasteful the better. If there were no such vulnerabilities, well, then, one could surreptitiously administer other types of substances.

Who would know? Who could know? If there was one thing she herself knew, it was that dead men tell no tales.