Inamorata (11 page)

“No. No, in fact, he quite pointedly ignored the question. I don’t think I’m going to get very far with him, Joseph. I think it might be better if you handle him. He wants to be your friend. He already likes you so much.”

He curled a strand of my hair around his finger. “He’s fighting his desires. I don’t know why.”

“He’s hard for me to read.”

“But not hard for me.” He looked up at me with the full force of his dark blue gaze. “Trust me. He wants you. Keep trying. We’ll think of something he can’t ignore.”

I tried to hide my dismay. Joseph was not usually wrong when it came to people, but in this case, I thought he was. I saw only futility in my pursuit of Nicholas Dane. He was handsome enough to have his choice of women—why should he look twice at me?

But I only sighed and nodded, changing the subject. “Did you like Whistler? I couldn’t tell.”

Joseph shrugged. “He’s brilliant, there’s no doubt. I can learn from him, and I will. And he fits in well there. He’s eccentric and he says what he thinks. He’s everything they want to believe about artists.”

“And he doesn’t speak of money.”

“He doesn’t, though he thinks of it.” Joseph laughed. “He thinks of it a great deal. He and I are alike that way. He knows what I do: those people like to pretend money means nothing. They’ll run from anyone who finds it important.”

“Well, they have plenty of it, don’t they?”

He went quiet again, twisting a strand of my hair into a paintbrush of sorts, running the soft ends over his mouth. “These people make stars, Soph. Never doubt it.”

I didn’t. I’d seen it in the way Mrs. Bronson turned me into the guest
du jour
. “Well, you were shining tonight. The brightest in the heavens. They love you already.”

“We’ve been given carte blanche,” he said. “Welcome anytime. You heard her say it, didn’t you?”

I nodded. He smiled, and then he frowned again just as quickly. “God, I nearly forgot.” He let go of my hair and reached for his sketchbook on the bedside table, along with a stub of charcoal. He drew something quickly, and then handed it to me.

“Is that it?” he demanded. “That courtyard you told me of, the one with the bead girl?”

“The one off San Bartolomeo?” I looked down at the sketch. He’d captured it almost perfectly, from only the words I’d told him. “Yes, that’s it, but the stairs were on the other side.”

His forehead furrowed. “I wonder if that matters. Perhaps he’ll just think I misremembered it.”

“Who?”

“Whistler.” His frown became a satisfied smile. “It was how I caught his attention today. Drawing it for him. I could tell by speaking to him that he had no interest in the usual views. He’s looking for something more sublime. I agreed with him and showed him this.”

His cleverness astonished me, as it always did. “Oh, Joseph, this
is
going to work!”

I nestled into his side, laying my head on his chest. “You’ll be the most famous artist in Venice before next year.”

“You mean in the world,” he said, his voice rumbling against my ear, his long fingers pressing into my shoulder.

I put my arm around his waist, holding him tight. “In the world,” I agreed.

N
ICHOLAS

I
was impatient and irritable all day. I disliked waiting. Idleness annoyed me—I was too easily bored, too restless—and I was troubled by the way my mind leaped to things I did not want to be thinking about.

Twilight softened the usual blur of Venice, melting edges, holding them in wavering suspension. The chill of fall was in the air now, and as I pulled my suit coat closer, I tried not to think of Joseph and Sophie Hannigan and the desires her words had raised.
I’d hoped you might find me interesting too.

I cursed beneath my breath, banishing them both to some far part of my mind, ordering myself to concentrate as I came upon the cafe where the organist had agreed to meet me again tonight. I had told him what I’d told all the others, trying my best to persuade him, but as much as I wanted to win him, I was not sanguine about my chances. How often had I done so, after all? Once or twice perhaps, out of dozens.

I went inside and ordered a bottle of wine, poured a glass, and drank it slowly, waiting. The time came and went; still I waited. An hour passed, and then two. I’d half expected him not to show. He was no better than Nelson Stafford, than any of the others—still enraptured with her, even as she was draining him to nothing.

But then the door opened, and I saw with surprise that it was him. He came over to the table, giving me a guilty look, which told me better than words what he’d decided. “I wasn’t going to come. But then I thought you should know. I don’t want to leave her. I love her.”

Well, that wasn’t news, was it?

Still, I smiled. “Then perhaps you’ll prove me wrong about her. I hope you do. Come and have a drink with me.”

“I’m to meet her—”

“Not until later, I think,” I said. “Am I right? I won’t keep you from her, I promise. But we’re friends now, and surely a friend can spare the time for a glass of wine.”

He said, “Very well. But this time you must let me pay.”

I cannot remember what we talked of—perhaps he told me his life story; they often did. We ordered more wine, emptying three bottles. He drank most of it.

It was late when he finally staggered to his feet, saying, “I must go. She’s expecting me.”

“Let me walk you there,” I said, though I intended to do no such thing. He was drunk enough that I thought I could get him to his own rooms without a struggle. Even a night away from her would help him.

He wavered, catching himself on the edge of the table. “I can do it.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can, my friend.” I rose and put a hand on his arm. “But I’ll see that you get there without falling into a canal.”

“Oh yes.” He frowned. “I can’t swim. Perhaps . . . a gondola—”

“So late, you’ll never find one. It’s only a short walk to the
traghetto
station.”

We stumbled out of the cafe. He fell into me at the door, and then again in the street, bouncing from the wall to my shoulder until I grabbed him to keep him from plunging into the canal that the
calle
opened into. He gave me a grateful smile. “You’re a good friend, Dane,” he slurred. “Have I told you that? A very good friend.”

We turned onto a narrow
fondamenta
. A flickering candle from one of the hundreds of corner shrines reflected across the dark silk of the canal running alongside. He stopped, reaching out to finger the petals of a rose that had been left for the saint. A glazed porcelain statue of the Virgin was set within the alcove, the candle casting a soft shine over her—someone had cared for her recently, as there was no sign of mildew or dirt. She looked polished and only a little worn. Bouquets of dead flowers lay about, little plates of half-eaten food, no doubt nibbled at by the huge river rats, all left for her consideration, gifts for prayers granted or hoped for.

Murphy took up the rose. It was pink and tied with black grosgrain. He swayed as he put it to his nose and frowned. “There’s no smell. She wouldn’t like it. She likes the smell.”

“So she does,” I said softly. “And it’s bad luck to take anything from the shrines.”

He dropped the rose back at the Virgin’s feet.

“Has she told you her stories?” I asked.

The candlelight lit him oddly, sending one half of his face into shadow while the other half looked yellow and jaundiced, his eye watery and glittering. He put his hand to the wall near the altar as if the world were spinning. “Stories? Something
’
bout . . . Schumann.”

“Schumann?”

“He saw angels.”

“Has she told you of John Keats? The tale of his Lamia?”

“What’s that?”

“His poem,” I said impatiently. “Have you never read it?”

He shook his head. The motion seemed to dizzy him. He staggered, catching the wall hard with a shoulder. “I’m not much for poetry.”

“
‘Lamia’ was about her. About Odilé. She was John Keats’s inspiration.”

“His inspiration? But . . . wait—isn’t he dead?”

“Some fifty years or so ago. One of the disadvantages of her patronage, I’m afraid.”

“Fifty years? But then how—” he put his hand to his head. “I’ve had too much wine.”

I pressed, “How could she have been his Lamia, you mean? If he’s fifty years dead? She could not be so old, could she? Look at her—such a beauty. Why, you’d think her not above thirty-five. But that’s all a lie. She’s very old, my friend. Older than you or I can fathom. Two hundred years or more, I think, though I’m not completely certain. She’s never told me, you see. I’ve had to guess.”

He looked at me blearily. “Two hundred years? What’re you saying? I don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.” I stepped close. “She
is
Lamia, don’t you see? The serpent who turned into a woman, who seduced Lycius with her beauty. It was Odilé that Keats described. He saw the horror of her, but he died before he could tell the world. But I’m here now to do it for him. I know what she is.”

“A serpent?”

“She’s draining the talent from you. She inspires you now, but in a few days, you won’t be able to compose—her hunger will take everything from you.”

He stepped away from the wall, frowning, wavering. “You’re not making sense. How could she do that? How could anyone?”

I let out my breath in frustration. “My God, must I put it in words an imbecile could understand?”

He blinked. “Why are you telling me all this? What has it to do with anything?”

It was useless, as pointless as it ever was. “She’s a succubus, you fool.”

He started, jerking away from me, too fast, losing his balance. I reached for him just as he flailed again for the wall, this time missing it. His head cracked hard against the brick. His eyes rolled back, and he crumpled, unconscious, onto the edge of the narrow
fondamenta
, rolling into the canal with a soft but heavy splash—all before I could do a thing to help him.

I fell to my knees to grab for him, but he was already out of reach, sinking below the surface, slipping away so that my fingers only brushed him but there was nothing I could grasp. I could not swim, and so I could do nothing but watch him disappear beneath the murky black. He bobbed and then he was gone, leaving nothing but bubbles, sinking to a shallow and watery grave, food for the crabs and the rats that haunted the canals.

I kneeled on the
fondamenta
, watching the surface of the canal. He did not rise again, and the water returned to its quiet lap as if nothing had disturbed it. I stayed there, staring, for a very long time, feeling failure and sorrow and a terrible dismay. I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer for his soul. I told myself it was a better fate than what had awaited him. A mercy, in fact. Then I climbed to my feet and walked away.

N
ICHOLAS

A
h! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”

Thackeray could have been talking about me when he wrote those words. There were times when I felt that my inability to be satisfied was the defining element of my character. Add to that impetuousness and impatience, and you will understand why, when I was twenty-two, my father asked me to leave home.

He didn’t put it quite that way, of course. What he really said was, “It’s time to put these scribblings behind you, my boy, and find something that will pay you a good wage. I can’t support you forever, you know.”

My father was a barrister with political aspirations, and he raised his children to be examples of his intelligence, charm, and reliability. My older brother, Jonathan, took up the banner and ran with it, deciding early to follow in our father’s footsteps and study law. My younger sister, Amelie, married very well, bringing a fortune to help support my father’s—and my brother’s—ambition. I was the only failure, leaning as I did toward study and poetry—what could a scholar ever be but a teacher?

I felt I was better than that. I knew, somehow, deep in my soul, that I had the talent to be something special, to be the kind of poet who influenced and inspired others. But when I told my mother this, she only smiled and patted my cheek and said, “You needn’t try so hard, Nicholas. Jonathan will make a splash for all of us. He’s quite brilliant. You know, I wonder sometimes how you can belong to us. No one else in the family has such an interest in books.”

“Perhaps I was a changeling,” I told her, and the truth was I felt it. If there was a family in the world to which I did not belong, it was my own.

But I felt no real impetus to leave it either. I had no great love for suffering, and I was as aware as my father of the difficulties of making a living as a poet, and so I stayed until people began asking questions about my prospects, until my father began to look toward an arranged marriage with whatever heiress he could find who might not think an idle scribbler too great a burden. When he found one, a Miss Isabelle Blakely, who it seemed liked the look of me, if nothing else—“It’s a blessing that you’re at least graced with good looks,” Father said—I knew I no longer had any choice but to go. Isabelle Blakely was long nosed and weasel faced, and pretending I was enthusiastic about bedding her, not to mention spending the rest of my life with her, was more than I could do.

So I left. I had no plans and little money—only what my mother pressed into my hand and what my sister, out of sentiment, provided, a small stipend that my father knew nothing of. She kissed me as I left and said, “Don’t get lost, Nick. Promise me to keep in touch.”

“Well I shall have to, won’t I? If I’m to receive your contribution to my great escape.”

She laughed. “Yes. So you see, I’ve my hooks in you yet. And I shall keep them there, my dear, until you find your way home again.”

Which I planned rarely to do. But the money was little enough, and I knew Amelie would not miss it, and that she liked the idea of having me in her debt, so I didn’t feel guilty over it either.

I had one or two successes, nothing stellar, but enough to make me believe—wrongly, as it turned out—that I was well on my way to finding the recognition I craved. I published a small book of poems. When I sent a copy to my father, it occasioned not even a reply. The book garnered decent reviews, one critic going so far as to say, “Dane is a talent, if a lesser one.” That stung, but I held the words
a talent
close and tried to ignore the rest. It became a motivation to prove the second part of the review wrong. All I needed was some new scenery, some inspiration. The publication brought me funds enough to travel for a few months, so I set off for Paris. Twenty-three years old, and with a burning ambition of my own, to become the poet everyone said I could not be.

I had an ease with people born of years of being paraded before the most well-connected and influential in London, better-
than-decent looks, and a faith that doors would open for me wherever I went, which, for the most part, they did. Paris was the city of my dreams; I had rooms overlooking a picturesque market, and I made friends of other expatriates, like-minded artists and writers. If there existed a place on earth where I might find the success I longed for, I thought Paris must be it.

Instead, it was where I found her.

She had the kind of beauty to strike a man dumb. Dark hair heavily threaded with red. Gray eyes, slightly slanted, as if there’d been some Eastern stain in her ancestry, that made one think of Circassian women and harem girls and unbridled, exotic sex. Her unblemished skin held those dusky Eastern undertones as well. And her body . . . large, full breasts, shapely hips. She was older than I by probably ten years, but that only added to her appeal. She had a ready laugh, and there was a frankness to her that startled, a will to take what she wanted that younger women didn’t possess. Experience, I suppose, but it was more than that. It was as if she held innumerable secrets, and she held them like a temptation and a challenge—
discover what I know, and I can show you the world.
I could not imagine anyone walking away from her. God knew I couldn’t.

I stumbled into her as I stepped from a bookstore, and she invited me for a glass of wine. It wasn’t until much later that I thought to wonder why a woman like that would want me— though I’d had my share of pretty women, and I was not ignorant of my own attributes, she seemed well beyond my reach. But when she proffered the invitation, I was thinking with a different part of my anatomy, and impetuously—my flaw again—I accepted. As the evening wore on, and she cajoled my stories from me, I didn’t realize how few of her own she revealed. When, after hours of my half-drunken revelations, she put her hand on my thigh and purred that she wanted to take me home, I nearly spilled my wine in my impatience to go wherever she might take me.

I barely noticed the rooms or what part of the city they were in. I could not have found my way there again if she’d chosen to abandon me that night. All I knew was a peeling green door, unlit narrow stone stairs, the smell of damp and her. She gave off a scent I cannot describe: musk and almond, subtle and pervasive—it made me mad with desire. It seemed I’d been hard for hours by that time; she no sooner unlocked the door than I pushed her through it. Before I knew it, I was naked and her hands were all over me, drawing me down to the floor, the glow of streetlamps through the window casting shadows on her perfect skin. I felt I could pump her for hours, for nights, for days. I felt unstoppable, invulnerable. The energy that coursed through my veins, the smell of her, the taste of her . . . I understand it now, but at the time it was so foreign to me I couldn’t begin to comprehend it. Had I died in that moment, I would have felt complete.

I don’t know how long I was in those rooms with her. Days, I suppose. Weeks. She told me a story of John Keats I’d never heard. That he had despaired of ever having fame, that he knew he was destined for an early death and expected his poems to fall into obscurity. “Here lies a name that was writ in water,” was what he’d wanted on his tombstone.

“But there was a woman,” she said in her strangely accented voice—French, but faint, corrupted by something else, something obscure.

“A woman?” I asked. “You mean his fiancée—what was her name? Fanny something?”

“No.” She shook her head so her hair trailed across my chest where she lay in my arms. “A different woman. His greatest inspiration, it was said. The woman he wrote ‘Lamia’ for.”

I quoted it, because I was vain enough to want to impress her.
“
‘She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self . . .
’
”

She turned her head into my chest so I felt her smile. I felt her lips move against my skin, felt, rather than heard, her say, “Yes. That one.”

“She truly must have been his inspiration then. It’s a beautiful poem.”

“I have always thought so,” she said. “Though like all poets, he exaggerates.”

“Like all poets?” I teased.

She ran her hand down my chest to my navel, slowly, steadily. “No one knows about the woman. They believe he was inspired by a dream or a vision. No one sees that it was really about her.” Her hand crept lower. I felt myself stir, aroused again so quickly. “And, like every woman, she did not receive her due.”

It was all I could do to say, “Yes she did. She was immortalized in ‘Lamia
.
’
”

“Spoken like a man,” she whispered into my ear. “Will you forget me that way, I wonder? When the poems you’ve written for me are published, will you tell no one my name?”

I had written so many in these days with her. My best work, I knew. She fired me like nothing else ever had. I could not write quickly enough. “I’ll tell the whole world,” I said, rolling her onto her back and plunging into her so she stiffened and gasped in pleasure. “I’ll let no one forget what you are to me.”

She told me of Byron, of how many women he’d had in Venice, and the one among them who had been the most important of all, the one who inspired
Don Juan
, but who had gone unrecognized. “He wrote a hundred lines or more a night,” she told me as she stood against the window, silhouetted in the early morning light. “He was insatiable—both for her and for words. It was as if he found them in the very air.”

I was impressed that any man had the strength to write a hundred lines in a night.

“The story,” she went on, “is that she made him an offer. She promised fame and fortune. She vowed to be his greatest inspiration.”

“And what did he say?” I asked.

“He disdained fame—or so he said. He wanted everyone to think he hated it. He wanted to pluck fame out.” She made a sharp, fast motion with her fingers to illustrate. “He said he did not want to be beholden to a woman. They had already caused him such problems.”

“His wife, you mean. It’s said he hated her.”

“He hated what he’d done to her,” she corrected softly. “She alone knew his cruelty—how could he forgive her for that? But no, it was his sister’s betrayal that burned most painfully.”

I frowned. “His sister?”

“They were lovers, you know,” she said, turning fully from the window. “It was why he left England. It wasn’t the scandal of his marriage, but his affair with his sister. Ah, no . . . that’s right . . . she was only his half-sister. Does that make a difference?”

“Not in England.”

“Well, in the end, even she was no match for his new muse. He was . . . overcome. Or so the story goes. And while he needed no more fame, he wanted immortality. He wanted to guarantee his genius would live on. And he could not deny the inspiration she brought him. Once he’d felt it, none other could compare. So he accepted her offer. But he grew arrogant and left her before
Don Juan
was finished, and so . . . it never was. A pity, isn’t it?”

“Is this true? How do you know it?”

She came to the bed, which was covered with my papers, covered with words, and kneeled on the edge. “Why, everyone knows it, my love. If you go to Venice, you’ll hear whispers of it still.”

But I was confused. “Her offer, you said. What offer was it he accepted?”

“I told you. She inspired him to immortal genius.”

“And in return?”

“His very soul, of course.”

She pushed aside the papers and pulled up her chemise to straddle my hips. “Would you have taken such a bargain, if she had offered it to you?”

“Why not? Isn’t that what inspiration is? Losing your soul to something more sublime?”

She pushed away the sheet between us, wriggled so she was against me, burning hot. Her hands were on me, and I let the notebook and the pencil I held fall away. She kissed me softly. “Oh how well you understand it, my love.”

But the truth was that I didn’t understand at all, not until much later.

When did things begin to change? It’s hard to remember now, but it couldn’t have been more than a month. For days before that, words had been jumbling in my head. The simplest things eluded me.
Angel
became
goddess
because suddenly I could not remember how to spell the former, and the rhyme never came right after. I could not find the words to describe her mouth. I reached back through my memory, trying to find inspiration from others. Songs of Solomon. Keats. Byron and Browning and Coleridge and Shelley. I could not retain more than fragments of what I’d always known. Then one day I woke before she did. I sat up, noting the way the morning shadows fell across her face, feeling the beginnings of a poem stirring in my head, and grabbed my notebook and my pencil. But the moment I touched the lead to the page, the whole thing fell away, leaving me only with one word. Love.

It was all I knew. Love.
Love love love love love.

When she opened her eyes, I was in despair, and I saw some fleeting emotion cross her face, something I couldn’t read, soon gone.