by Megan Chance
“Like the snake in Keats’s poem,” he said softly. “The lamia.”
“Yes,” I said, though the reminder was not comforting. I thought of Byron, who had called me a witch, a devil, but one he could not live without. And Robert Schumann, who had, in his madness, called me a demon as often as he had called me angel. And suddenly I realized that the angel/demon in Joseph’s painting, the one whose face could not quite be grasped, was me.
The fear I’d been holding at bay pushed back hard. Joseph was staring at the painting as if it tormented him, as if it held what he most wanted—but just out of reach. I whispered, “Who are you, really? You and your sister—what are you?”
He looked at me. There was no puzzlement on his face, no surprise at the question, as if he’d heard it before, or expected it. “Nothing special.”
But I saw the burning in his eyes when he said it, and I knew it wasn’t what he believed. I knew too that I wanted him to tell me that she was nothing to him, that this painting did not hold the whole of their history, though I knew it did. I knew with a searing, painful certainty that she could not be fought or overcome, and I was jealous of her as I had never been of any woman.
I was to be his inspiration. I was to be the one who made his art and his life complete. I was to be everything, not this niggling little part he gave me. But how could that be? I’d made the bargain. I’d felt the rapture. I’d felt it bite and lock.
He said, “Are you all right? You look in pain.”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m perfectly fine.”
But I looked into his face and felt the world tilt and distort—not what I expected at all. And I was deeply afraid.
NICHOLAS
Sophie was so heartbroken and weak that when we arrived back at the palazzo, I put her to bed. I stayed with her as she fell into sleep. Just before she did, she grabbed my hand and said, “Bring him back to me.”
I wonder if I can adequately describe how devastating were those words? Here was the woman I loved to distraction, a pale ghost of herself, calling for her brother after having just told me she could not live without him. We must save him. Be a friend to him.
I wanted to save Joseph Hannigan of my own accord; I wanted to do whatever she asked of me, but as I watched her sleeping, her hair spread over her pillow, that soft exhalation of her breath, the need to have her entirely to myself was overwhelming. To be without him . . . for a moment, the vision was so tempting it was all I could do not to give in to it. But that was only my impetuous nature talking, and what had that ever brought me but trouble? I made myself think of the soft promise in her eyes, the way she’d thrown herself in my arms as if I were her salvation. I made myself think of the promise I’d made to him. Keep her safe. Love her.
I wanted to be what each of them needed. The truth was that I could not imagine them apart. I suppose it was the twinness of them, the magic I’d felt that had me half in love with both of them the moment we’d met. The loss of him would destroy her, I knew. I would do whatever I must to prevent that. I had no real hope that I could. But for them both, I would try.
Sophie could not get to Joseph or Odilé, and that would not change. Odilé must know as well as I the bond between the twins. She would allow nothing to weaken the hold she had on him. She would do her best to keep Joseph away from Sophie. But me . . . I thought Odilé would see me. She had no idea of my own connection to them.
So I went to confront her. When I arrived at the Dana Rosti, I did not bother to hide or dodge but went to the door and rang the bell. There was no answer, and I had not expected one. She would want no one to encroach upon the enchantment she wove. I crossed to the fondamenta of the palazzo next door, settled myself on the overturned boat there and waited for her to catch a glimpse of me.
The breeze coming off the Canal was brisk and wet; it was too chilly to stay there long, and fortunately, I did not have to. It was only a quarter hour before I heard the sound of the balcony door open, before she came out to the balustrade, her long hair blown from her face, her dressing gown gaping, her shadowed cleavage trailing to a darkness that even now raised my own hunger—but it was a faint monster now, a temptation but not a lure.
“Ah, Nicholas,” she called down. “I have been watching for you.”
“I’ve been otherwise engaged.”
Her smile was piercing and oddly desperate. It struck a wrong note within me, but I could not understand why. “With your new little love? Miss Hannigan, is it? Dare I hope that she has snared you deeply?”
So she knew. I did not bother to deny it. “Return her brother to her, Odilé.”
“Does she miss him?” Odilé’s eyes glittered strangely in the overcast light. A serpent’s eyes. “Does she dream of him?”
“I imagine as often as he dreams of her.”
Her mouth tightened. Her face seemed to waver before me—for a moment I saw the demon, its terrible pale coils, and my mouth went dry.
“Ah, but this one is so different.” Her voice held strange echoes, deep and terrible, a rasp like a raging wind. “He is nothing like the others, and so I think I shall keep him. Tell her he belongs to me now. The bargain is set.” She laughed, and it too was terrible.
My last bit of hope evaporated.
“He will not be returning. He has given her up.” Again, her face seemed to ripple. She clutched her dressing gown as if she felt a spasm of pain or distress.
This wasn’t right. I felt as if I’d glimpsed a fissure in the world that closed again before I could view it. The fondamenta seemed to lurch beneath my feet.
When Odilé turned to go back inside, I said urgently, “Odilé, wait—” But she disappeared into the darkness. The door was still open; I took the last of my opportunities, shouting, “Joseph! Joseph Hannigan! Your sister asks for—”
The door slammed shut.
I had no idea if he’d heard me. I struggled to make sense of what had just happened, and why I felt so strongly that something was not as it should be. I raced back to the Moretta, relieved when I arrived to find Sophie in the sala. But she looked drawn; her skin so pale I saw the blue of her veins beneath her skin. She wore only her dressing gown, and she was sprawled on the settee.
When I came inside, she took one look at me and froze. “What is it? Oh . . . no . . . no, please, tell me he hasn’t!”
I felt the world closing in on me, a realization hovering at the edge of my consciousness that I could not quite grasp. I hurried to her side, falling to my knees beside her, grabbing her hand. As Sophie stared at me with uncertain eyes, all the words I’d lost rushed back to me—a flurry of poetry. I wanted to stare into her eyes for a lifetime. I took a deep breath. “Odilé has chosen Joseph. He’s agreed. It was what I was afraid of.”
“But there’s still something that can be done. You said you could help him—”
“If he hadn’t made the bargain, yes,” I corrected wearily. “But he has.”
“No. You promised. You promised to save him.” Her eyes glowed fiercely in the pale of her face.
“Sophie, I—”
She gripped my arm so hard her nails bit through my coat. “This will destroy him. Do as you promised. It’s all I ask of you. If you love me, you will do this. I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.”
She did not know what she was asking. She could not possibly mean what I thought she did.
Save him. He would not want to live that way.
He would not want to live. . . .
He is everything to me. I could not live without him.
The life I’d only just begun to imagine faded, the man I might have been had I not stumbled into Odilé in a Paris street. A man with poetry flowing from my pen once more. A house and children. A life instead of the ceaseless burden of chasing a myth, so much energy focused on destruction.
And all I could say was, “It will be all right, Sophie. It will be all right.” When I desperately feared it would never be so again.
SOPHIE
I heard N
icholas’s words, It will be all right, and I heard too the fatal despair within them, and I knew he believed Joseph was gone. I knew he felt there was nothing that could be done, and of all of us, he knew Odilé best. I could not blame him for his hopelessness.
But he did not know Joseph as I did. And he didn’t know how well I had saved my brother before, or how he’d saved me. And perhaps I was naive, but I believed I could redeem him this time too. If I could get to him, if I could talk to Odilé, I could save him.
I knew Nicholas would not let me go near her now—at least not without him. And even through my grief, I understood that he could not help. This was between me and my brother. I remembered the way Joseph had said, You’re in love with him, and I knew he’d meant to put me in Nicholas’s hands. I knew it was why he’d taken Odilé’s offer. He’d meant to save us both from bonds we both feared—and hoped—could never be broken.
I would not let him do it, and I knew that if Nicholas was there, it would only strengthen Joseph’s resolve to release me. This was something I must do alone.
But Nicholas was so protective and concerned that it wasn’t until late the next night that I finally managed to make him go home, to at least tell Giles he wasn’t dead and to get a change of clothes. He went—very reluctantly—which warmed me, I must admit.
“I’ll stay in bed until you return, so don’t hurry,” I told him. “I’ll just sleep.”
He smiled and leaned to kiss me and said, his pale eyes bleak with worry. “An hour only. Sleep well, my love. We can talk about what to do about your brother when I return.”
When Nicholas left, I crawled from bed. I was shivering. Too hot. Too cold.
I dressed—too slowly. It was so hard to get the buttons right when I was shaking this way. Finally I gave up, leaving some of them undone, leaving my boots unfastened because I could not manage them. I wrote Nicholas a note and left it on the bed, and then I stumbled down the stairs to find Marco half asleep in the felze of the gondola.
“Take me to the Dana Rosti,” I said, rousing him. “And quickly.”
Once I was in the felze and the gondola began to move down the narrow rio, out toward the Grand Canal, I closed my eyes, bringing my stories to life as I always did when I was afraid. Instead of dark and creepy Venetian canals and algae, peeling plaster and ominous shadows, I saw turrets and pennants, a moat gurgling with a monster’s breath, a golden bridge swinging over a chasm filled with demons. I imagined a princess bearing a glowing crystal, her love for her brother her shield as she went to beard the demon-queen in her tower.
I tightened my hand on the strap as the boat tilted on a wave, and with that motion, my strength came to me. It felt right somehow, that we should come at last to this strangeness, that everything we’d done and been should lead us here, where there was no ambivalence, no disguising grays. Where the demons wore their real faces, and the horrors—for once—were those everyone understood.
ODILÉ
He was failing.
“When will I feel it?” he asked me again, his dark-blue eyes filled with frustration and anger. He threw a paintbrush so it skittered across the floor, leaving streaks of yellow in its wake. “Where is the inspiration you promised me?”
“Soon,” I assured him, though the truth was I no longer felt such assurance. How could I? Everything about him now was foreign to what I’d known. He left me disoriented, feeling as if parts of me were folding in on myself and then smoothing back again.
He stepped over to the paintbrush he’d thrown and picked it up, mopping up the swash of color with his bare fingers and then wiping it on his white trousers, which were now so marked with paint they seemed a strangely compelling work of art in themselves. He plopped the brush into a jar to soak and stalked away. I felt his anger and exasperation lingering as I covered the painting, and then I went to him, meaning to make him forget, to ease his despair, to feed him again, but he was already curled in bed, asleep, searching for the inspiration he found only in dreams. Not in me.
Had he ever found it in me?
Sophie, he said in his sleep. Sophie. When it should have been my name he was calling.
I sat beside him as he slept, twining his dark, thick hair through my fingers, my desire for him flaring at the slightest touch, a look. I was not sated as I usually was. I could not go, not until the painting was done and my work finished, but I wanted to. I was increasingly afraid of my desire for him and the still-growing vortex of my hunger. I wanted to leave the mess I’d made of him, but I told myself not to be impatient. He would be the best of them. It must work the way it always had. In time, he would find his inspiration in me. He would finish his painting. I would give him what I’d vowed to give him.
I heard the ringing of the bell from the far part of the house. It was very late—nearly midnight—a strange time for anyone to come calling. I ignored it, as I had ignored all the others. I touched his cheekbone. He stirred, raising a hand, brushing me away in his sleep as if I were an irritating mosquito. I felt that quiver inside me again, that folding in, a growl. I pressed my hand into my stomach to calm it. Strange. It shouldn’t—
“Padrona?”
I sighed and rose, noting with dismay that he seemed insensible of my leaving. Maria stood in the doorway, looking nervous.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It is his sister,” she said, lowering her voice as she said it, glancing past me to see if Joseph were there to hear.
“His sister? So late?”
Maria said reluctantly, “She seems . . . she looks very bad. Should I send her away again?”
I glanced over my shoulder to see Joseph, enervated, listless, and felt a surge of anger. Time to get rid of her once and for all.
“No. I’ll see her in the courtyard. Do not wake him.” I swooped past, out the door and down the courtyard steps just as the bell rang again. How long would she ring it, I wondered? What had Nicholas told her? Everything, I assumed, and felt a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that she must know the power I had.
I went into the cold, crypt-like courtyard, into the dim yellow glow of gaslight. I heard a soft sob on the other side of the door, a quiet, “Please.”
I opened the door. She had been sagging against it. How pale she looked. Her hair was in a loose braid falling over her shoulder. She wore no hat, and a coat that looked to be a man’s; it seemed to swallow her.
I saw the moment it registered that it wasn’t Maria who had opened the door, but me. She put out her hand as if to stop me from disappearing. She pushed past me into the courtyard. “Please, Odilé. Please. I must speak with you. Where’s Joseph?”
“He belongs to me now,” I said coldly. “Why have you come?”
“Because I want my brother back. I know what you are and I want you to release him.”
“You know what I am,” I repeated.
“Nicholas told me.”
“What? You believe him? No rational denial? No ‘It cannot be true; such things are just horror stories?’”
“Stories are not always only stories,” she said.
I laughed lightly, a little bitterly, remembering the princess lover, the map to a land only they knew. “Ah yes. You are no stranger to worlds that should not exist, are you, Sophie?”
“Is Nicholas right—did you make my brother the offer of fame? Did he sell his soul to you?”
“You know as well as I that he did.”
“Then you must give it back.”
“Would he want that, do you think?”
“He cannot live without it.”
“He knew what he was giving up. Still, he asked for it. He begged for it. Even now, he paints away, asking me when fame will come to him. When? he asks—every day. When?” A true thing, though not precisely as I told her. “Do you think he wants to take it back?”
“He did it for me,” she said sharply. “And so I want you to undo it. I know there must be a cost. I’m willing to pay it.”
“Ah, I see you know the rules
.”
She regarded me steadily. “I know this: if you can beat a demon without sacrifice, then what you’ve won is not worth having. Can it be undone?”
I felt as if I looked at him when I stared into her eyes. That terrible, bizarre twinness. “No. But he will have the fame he desires. And the painting is a masterpiece already, even unfinished.”
She let out her breath, sagging against the wall.
“He will be the greatest of all of my choices, if it comforts you to know it. Greater than Canaletto or Keats. Even surpassing Byron.”
“But after that he’ll never paint again.”
I shrugged. “He may, but it will be nothing. Pictures for children. Uninspired landscapes. Canaletto painted until he died.”
“They made a mockery of him.”
“But he inspired so many before that. Is it not enough?”
“Joseph paints to save himself,” she said. “And me. We only wanted to prove we were special. That we endured for a reason. That it wasn’t all just . . . meaningless.”
“You endured what? What wasn’t meaningless?”
She looked away.
I thought of the horrors in Joseph’s painting. Secrets laid bare, things better not faced, better locked away. I thought of the shadows in his eyes, in hers. The image of a small dark room in Barcelona swept, unasked for, into my head, the terror of a hunger that could not be appeased, a nightmare that led to such a desolation of spirit I would have done anything to feel again, no matter what that feeling was, so long as it was something. Enough to take a pointless razor to my wrist in a tattered Parisian room. And I thought: she is like me.
I turned away from her, staring at the wall beyond, the cracked, glowing marble. And I heard myself saying to her as if she were demanding it, though she’d said not a word, “I felt once as you feel. That suffering must mean something, that it holds at the end some reward, some justification. But now I think . . . it is just suffering. I have searched for meaning, just as you do now. I am no philosopher, but what I have seen these nearly three hundred years is that the world moves as it always has. There is no meaning. Only balance. Only symmetry.”