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beautiful, not because of her metallic blonde hair or her striking pale blue eyes, or the delicacy of her nose, or the symmetry of her ears and chin, but because she was Rosalind, the Queen Bee, in all her absolute majesty. Web chatter sometimes likened her to Cleopatra or Catherine the Great, but those models were morally compromised; the most frequently-cited analogy by far was to Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
    Rosalind had twenty children, but she had never married, and never would. The idea was unthinkable. Unlike Elizabeth, she didn’t even have “favorites.” She was always unescorted, at social occasions of every sort.
    She looked magnificent. I had no doubt that she would be magnificent. It was Magdalen’s funeral, but it was her show.
    â€œHe’s not here, is he?” said Professor Crowthorne, in a whisper that had horror in it as well as amazement.
    â€œNo,” I said, in a much more level tone. “He’s not here. He hasn’t come.”
    My first instinct was not so much to explore possible reasons for Rowland’s absence, but to find excuses for him—excuses I hadn’t been able to find, in the event, for myself.
    Perhaps Rowland and Magdalen had enjoyed—or had at least believed that they enjoyed—such a close union of mind and spirit that Rowland felt that his presence in spirit made any physical presence at her funeral quite irrelevant. Perhaps they had been so close—and yet, paradoxically, so far apart—that Rowland had been overwhelmed by grief. Perhaps he was ill in bed, unable to travel. Perhaps….
    Rosalind, I knew, would not have tolerated any excuses of those sorts. She was the kind of hard-line positivist who thought all talk of “spirit” nonsensical; the only kind of presence she recognized was physical presence. Grief she did believe in, but did not believe that it could or should be incapacitating. Illness she undoubtedly believed in too, but similarly believed that it could not and should not be incapacitating, unless literally mortal. In Rosalind’s view, I had no doubt, Rowland should have been sitting meekly in the front row, with all his sisters—perhaps positioned arrogantly at their head, but nevertheless with them, in the junior ranks of the family.
    In theory, I suppose I agreed with her standpoint—but I admit to being a slightly fuzzy thinker, and when it came to Rowland, and Magdalen too, I was prepared to think in terms of spirit, and incapacitating grief. There had always been something slightly uncanny about Rowland, and if there was one person in the world who might be capable of surviving death as a ghost, in the minds of people who had known her, it was Magdalen. But still, Rowland should have been there. Whatever excuse he had, he should have set it aside, for Magdalen’s sake.
    I could only speculate, of course, as to the effect the Magdalen’s return to Eden, after little more than a year in Venezuela—her desertion, as he would have seen it—must have had on Rowland. That was one of the many things about which he maintained absolute web-silence. I could understand that he might have felt deeply offended—angry, even—but not to the extent that he would refuse to attend her funeral.
    Obviously, I wasn’t the only person who had expected to see Rowland there, although there was probably only one other who had turned up for that express purpose, because there was a ripple of reaction when the other members of the crowd realized what the professor and I had realized. It wasn’t exactly a murmur of disapproval, but it was audible and tangible. Magdalen’s brother wasn’t there: only her sisters, and her mother.
    All eyes were on Rosalind anyway, but the general awareness of Rowland’s absence focused that attention even more intently, and lent an extra dimension of sympathy to it.
    Rosalind probably wasn’t quite as old as Professor Crowthorne, but