by Megan Chance
By then, I’d been on my own for many years—since I was twelve, in fact. But twelve was not so young then, and I’d been trained to tricks and pleasure long before my whore of a mother sold my virginity to an old, rich man. I had thought to treat him as any pretty adolescent treats older men—as if I could enchant and beguile my way to anything, as if he were too stupid and addled to see my manipulation.
I had been disabused of that idea within moments. He was inside me nearly before he’d cleared the door, holding me down, saying through clenched teeth as I screamed at the pain of it, “Shut up, little dove. I’ve just paid a fortune to fuck you first, and I mean to enjoy it.”
He hit me then, over and over, savoring my cries and moans. He took me twice more that night, finally leaving me half dead on the floor and sick with the knowledge that I was nothing—less than nothing. He was gone without a backward glance—I was not worthy of a second thought.
It should not have been a surprise. I’d been born in a brothel and raised among whores, and I knew how ephemeral was such a life. Women often disappeared in the hours between twilight and dawn without explanation. They were never thought of again. I had always believed I was not meant for such a fate, as did my mother, a Belgian farm girl who’d run away to Paris and ended with an opiate-sotted life of pain and degradation instead of the exciting one she’d hoped for. On the days she remembered I was even there, she would comb my thick hair with her graceful fingers and whisper to me, “Your beauty is your fortune, my love. You won’t be like the rest of us. You will be something fine.”
But that terrible night, as I stared up at a stained ceiling, gasping with pain, tears wet on my cheeks, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew I was no different than the rest of them, and in the end, my beauty would not save me.
My mother died two months later. She was found in a ditch in the backstreets of Paris, strangled. No one ever investigated her death. No one cared. I only knew what had happened because I’d gone looking for her. We always checked the city morgue first in those days, and there she was, pale and cold on a slab. I did not even claim her body—what would I have done with it? As far as I knew, she was buried in a potter’s field along with a hundred other nameless, faceless souls. I was the only evidence she had existed, and even I chose not to acknowledge her at the end.
The fear of such a destiny haunted me. I tried to tell myself she was right, that my beauty must mean something. Why else had it been given to me? Surely I was meant for something fine. Surely I could not die unseen and forgotten, just another anonymous body in a pauper’s grave.
In those days there was only one real way for a woman like me to be known in the world. It was a hard ladder to climb, but I was determined. I meant to become one of Paris’s famous courtesans. I meant for the name of Odilé León to linger forever, to never be forgotten.
By the time I was fifteen, men vied for my favors. They sent me candy wrapped in franc notes, jeweled toys and fine perfumes. By seventeen, I held the lease on two houses. I had caskets of jewels, silks and expensive laces. I had my own carriage with four matched gray horses. At nineteen, I was the most coveted courtesan in Paris. It was rumored that I was an exiled princess, an aristocrat in hiding, a slave escaped from an Oriental harem, stories it pleased me to never deny—in fact, I planted some of them. Mystery and allure were all-important. Rich men needed to feel as if they possessed something of unique value.
I decorated my rooms in Byzantine splendor long before it was fashionable to do so. I scented it with exotic incenses and served the best wines and foods that were aphrodisiacs. I was said to have skill enough to bring back any man’s vigor. I taught young men how to be good lovers, and now and then a young woman hired me to teach her the ways to please a husband. I chose my patrons well; I became a luxury only a few could afford, a prize that only the most well-connected could win.
I thought I had beaten my fear at last. Surely my name would be remembered now? And for years, I had no reason to think otherwise. I was the best and the most expensive. Everyone knew who I was. But time is no woman’s friend. I began to notice the fine wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, the faint sag at my jaw. Strands of gray began to appear in my dark hair; I could not go to sleep at four a.m. and rise at eight without looking as if I’d done so. I began to lose my favorite lovers to younger women whose eyes sparkled guilelessly, whose breasts were more pert, whose skin was whiter and more fine.
I began to feel afraid again—and that, too, showed. Men sense desperation; they are like animals, wanting always to be at the top. I was thirty-six. My influence was waning, and they felt that too. I was no longer the prize I’d been, but a fading symbol of another time. I began to notice the way men looked past me when I came into a room, and I realized I had not beaten my fear after all. In a few more years, it would be as if Odilé León had never existed. It was too late to change the path I’d taken—I was destined for my mother’s fate, for the one I’d seen as I lay bleeding on a barren floor.
But then I met Madeleine Dumas. The great courtesan, Ninette, held a salon to showcase an artist everyone was talking about—his newest canvas was scandalous and brilliant, and it was rumored that he meant to bring with him the woman who’d inspired it. I wanted to meet her. I wanted to know what she had done to win such immortality. But when I arrived, the artist was alone. There was no woman hanging on his arm and none he seemed to adore, and so I did not suspect that his lover and his muse was Madeleine, though I should have known the moment I saw her across the room, sparkling and smiling, jewels bedecking every inch. That night, she’d worn a gown so crusted with tiny rubies and beaded with pearls that I wondered how she could walk in fabric so heavy. Golden combs had glittered in her blond hair, but her eyes . . . her eyes had been dark as obsidian. Eyes I’d been drawn to, unable to look away from. I thought I saw something strange in them, something captivating and exciting. She’d smelled of confidence and lilies. She was my age, and yet she had what I did not—a lack of care or fear.
I wanted to be her, which was something I had never felt before—why should I have ever felt envious of another woman? The singularity of the emotion brought me up short, the sheer, brutal longing.
She gestured to me as if she’d seen me staring at her. I went as if compelled. She smiled at me and asked me who I was, and when I told her, her smile broadened. She tilted her head in amusement, though all I’d told her was my name. “I know you, don’t I?”
“I think we’ve never met,” I said. “I would have remembered.”
“Perhaps not.” She glanced across the room, to where her artist-lover was engaged in animated conversation with some other man, and she leaned close to whisper to me, “I am the one who made him everything he is. Do you believe me?”
“Of course.”
“How he loves to ignore me in public.”
“But he will not be ignoring you when you are home,” I reassured her.
“No, not if I am there, which I have not quite decided yet.”
“You mean to leave him?”
She shrugged; it was a pretty, elegant gesture. “I leave all of them. It is my life, is it not? Mine to live. Mine to manage. Why give it to them to squander?” She paused. “What do you think of his talent?”
“I think he will be very famous.”
“Oh, I mean for him to be famous. That is never in doubt. But I wonder: do you think he will last? Will men laud him centuries from now?”
I considered her question. “I don’t know. Perhaps. But while he is very skilled, he is showing nothing truly new, so perhaps not.”
Madeleine sighed. “So I have thought. I wonder if perhaps it is a flaw in me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have done this before. So many times. Before him, there was a musician. He was just the same. He had a great deal of talent, but he was penning songs for school children. I took him up. I was his muse, his inspiration. His new compositions were well received by the church, published in psalters, and f
or a time, he was very famous indeed. And quite rich.”
“He must have been glad,” I said.
“For the money?” she asked.
“For fame,” I said, unable to keep the envy from my voice. “People knew his name. They remembered him.”
She looked at me, and I saw something in those black eyes, a piqued interest. “You wish that for yourself?”
“To not die in obscurity? Yes, of course. Who does not wish to leave a mark on the world?”
Her gaze slid away. “Ah.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected from her, but her response disappointed. I felt I’d lost her attention, and I wanted nothing more than to call it back. “What happened to him? The composer?”
“His songs have fallen out of favor. He has not had the influence I thought he should.” She leaned close again. “I think I do not have the eye. Do you think you could do better, given the chance?”
“Me?” I laughed. “I hardly know.”
Her words lingered throughout the nights that followed. I had been enraptured and ensorceled. Madeleine had shown me how small was the world I’d lived in. She had shown me how much more there was, how much to be had.
What do you most desire, Odilé?
Even as I stood on my Venetian balcony and smelled Venice, it was Paris that was in my head. Paris, and Madeleine. I thought of everything she had given me, the years as I had known them, but I no longer felt a sense of wonder. Only exhaustion. There were times, like now, when the curse of my nature overwhelmed everything. It was too late in the cycle for joy. My hunger cramped, squeezing tight and painfully. Time was running out. Somewhere in this city must be the man who could inspire a world. Somewhere. And if I did not find him—
Barcelona flashed through my mind. A vision of waking from a nightmare only to discover that it was no nightmare at all, but real. Real and terrible, and I was nothing but darkness writhing, a vortex of need, and him standing in the doorway, haloed with sunlight, a look of horror on his face, the monster I had become reflected in his gaze. . . .
I closed my eyes, forcing the memory away. He was not even here. He had not found me. I had days yet to make a choice without fear of his intervention. He could not destroy me, but what he could do, what he could force me to become. . . .
Another stab of pain, worse this time. Enough of memories; it was time to hunt. Usually I liked the Rialto—it was one of the busiest places in Venice, and I never failed to find someone there—if not true and lasting talent, then at least someone to ease my hunger for a time. But today I had something else in mind. I remembered the faint strains of music I’d heard coming from a church last week, sweet and alluring. The sound of possibility.
I called for Antonio to ready the gondola, and I was just stepping into the boat when he said, “He is dead, padrona.”
For a moment I had no idea whom he was speaking of. I’d already forgotten the writer, you see.
“Signor Stafford,” Antonio said.
“Oh. How do you know this?”
“He was found in his courtyard.”
Gossip in Venice never lacked speed. The gondoliers knew everything nearly the moment it happened.
Antonio made a slicing motion across his wrist. “Suicide.”
Another one. I did not have to manufacture my dismay or my sorrow. I had not wanted this. I never did. I thought of the poet as I’d seen him last, collapsed on the floor. The tears in his eyes when he realized I was banishing him. My appetite surged at the memory. Antonio put his hand suddenly to his heart, frowning—and I felt a rush of nourishment and remembered with a start his gondolier’s songs. A bird calling from a nearby cage went suddenly silent.
With all my strength, I forced the darkness back. Antonio took a deep and shuddering breath, and I said, “Take me to San Maurizio. And quickly, before mass begins.”
He nodded, still looking puzzled, and it was all I could do to control the gnashing inside me. When we arrived, the organ music was already drifting from the simple white stone edifice, and the campo with its huge square wellhead was nearly empty. I went to the door of the church, peering into darkness. I heard the creak of the organ bench as it was pushed aside, a few words exchanged, a pleasant voice, and then footsteps.
The man who came out was red haired, blue eyed, pale and lithe and lovely. I saw the expression I loved on his face—startlement, then awe and desire—as I stepped into the light.
“Was it you who played?” I asked him.
“Y-yes,” he stammered.
I smiled. “It was wonderful. I knew I must come and discover who had such talent.”
He flushed. I felt a sudden stab and bit back a gasp as I put out my hand. “I’m Odilé León.”
He took my fingers in his, caressing my hand as if he’d waited his whole life to do so. “Jonathan Murphy.”
In the end, for me, there was only this: desire and addiction and hunger, a craving that made the world look hard-edged and brutally lovely.
“Would you have a glass of wine with me?” I asked Jonathan Murphy.
SOPHIE
The police kept me for two hours, though I had nothing to do with the body or with the place it had been found. The landlady was hysterical, and I was not much better. Marco was the one who sent for the police, and Marco was the one who drew me gently away from the courtyard after they’d asked their questions, firmly ending the interview, leaving them with my name and situation in the event they had need to contact me again.
But as I watched the oily, dusky reflections on the water glide by on the way back to the Danieli, I could not shake the vision of that body in its pool of blood, or stop hearing the buzzing of flies.
Marco frowned as he helped me disembark. “You should rest, padrona.”
I smiled at him—I felt how strained it was. “I will. But you must promise to come back tomorrow—I won’t take that place after all, you know. I couldn’t bear it.”
He looked alarmed. “No, you must not, of course! Not with such an angry ghost.”
“An angry ghost? But it wasn’t a murder. It was a suicide.” That was what the police had decided. The pool of blood was from his wrists, which had been neatly and fatally slit. The landlady had said, He looked ill, that is true. I begged him yesterday morning to eat more. He said he had no need of food, that love kept him alive.
Not anymore, the inspector had said in distaste.
“An unhappy ghost then,” Marco said to me now.
“Whether there was a ghost or not, I would never be able to go into the courtyard,” I told him. “You will be here tomorrow? There are other places to show me?”
“A hundred places, padrona. You can rely on Marco.”
I managed to keep my composure as I left him and walked through the grand lobby of the Danieli—full now with people returning from their day trips, looking to rest before they went out again for the evening—but I couldn’t manage to smile or talk to anyone. By the time I finally reached our rooms, the day had caught up with me; I could not stop trembling.
Joseph was already there. He was lounging on the bed, barefoot, sketching, leaving charcoal dust all over the coverlet. When he saw me, he looked up, smiling. “I think I’ve found the way in.”
I swallowed, trying not to show my distress. “Have you? So quickly?”
“I told you I would. I met him this morning. A poet. He’s been in Venice for a while. He knows Henry Loneghan, Soph. Loneghan. They’re friends.”
“Loneghan? Oh . . . that’s very good.” I sat on the edge of the bed, drawing off my gloves, which stuck to my sweating palms. My fingers fumbled with the hat pin.
“He’s amusing. I think you’ll like him.”
I dropped the pin; my hands were shaking too badly to keep hold of it. I lifted my hat from my hair, pretending it didn’t matter. “What is this paragon’s name?”
But Joseph had seen—he always did. He put aside his sketchbook. “What happened? You’re white as a ghost.”
A ghost. I
couldn’t help it; I laughed. Even I heard the edge of hysteria in it.
“Sophie, for God’s sake . . .” He moved to sit beside me. “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing to worry about. The police said it was a suicide—”
“A suicide? What do you mean? Who was a suicide?”
“Mr. Stafford. Oh, Joseph, it would have been so perfect! The sala was so bright and your room was to overlook the canal and he was a writer—”
“Sophie. Look at me.” As he spoke, he turned me firmly to face him. “You’re not making sense. Who is Mr. Stafford? What sala are you talking about? Start from the beginning.”
He reached for my hands, gripping them hard, stilling my trembling, and I felt myself regain my composure, moment by moment returned to myself.
I explained it to him, the search for lodgings, the landlady. But I could not bring myself to leave it so bare and ugly and meaningless, and so I tempered it, my imagination painting it in different colors, ones I could bear. “She said he died for love. It’s so romantic really, don’t you think? Something kept them apart, perhaps, and there was no way to be together. He couldn’t live without her. Or perhaps . . . perhaps there was a reason she had to leave him, but she refused to be parted, and so he made the most honorable of sacrifices. For her. It was all for her.”
Joseph gave me a thoughtful look, and then he said quietly, “You’ve had a shock. Let me get you something—chocolate, perhaps? Would that help? Or no . . . sherry.” He released me, getting to his feet. “Damn me, but there’s nothing in this room, is there? I’ll have to go downstairs—”
I grabbed at his arm before he’d gone a step. “No. No, please, I don’t want anything. Don’t leave me.”
I thought he would protest, but then he looked at me, and his expression softened. He sat beside me again on the bed, drawing me into his arms, pulling me back with him until we were leaning against the carved, gilded headboard, my head on his chest. Gently he smoothed a loose tendril from my cheek.