Beneath Ceaseless Skies #56

by Cheney, J. Kathleen

  Issue #56 • Nov. 18, 2010

  “Fleurs du Mal,” by J. Kathleen Cheney

  “As Below, So Above,” by Ferrett Steinmetz

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  FLEURS DU MAL

  by J. Kathleen Cheney

  “Where did you meet her?” I spoke loudly to be heard over the crush in the place, and then had to repeat my query as Jeremy hadn’t heard me the first time.

  Understanding lit my brother’s weary features, and he gave me what he must have considered a wolfish grin. “Why, here, Bertrand. At Le Boeuf. At one of Nicolas’ parties.”

  I shook my head and surveyed the smoky room. In the four years since it opened in ‘22, Le Boeuf sur le Toit had become a gathering spot for a ‘fast and loose’ crowd. Jeremy would have been an easy target, laughably innocent compared to the type who frequented this sort of place.

  The nightclub’s denizens reminded me of nothing so much as a horde of desperate butterflies, all flitting about a handful of glowing flowers. A few would be satisfied, but most would starve and die. And the seductive blooms? They would be fulfilled, serviced by the abundant insects’ cravings.

  I couldn’t help seeing my younger brother as one of those starving creatures. He looked ill, his dinner jacket hanging loosely across his broad shoulders. He’d lost a great deal of weight. Father paid Jeremy’s bills, so he wasn’t in dun territory, and I doubted that my brother—once an athlete at university—would turn to the false comfort of the cocaine or morphine that flowed so freely here. I had no simple explanation for his decline.

  Mother had actually dispatched me forth, worried by the tenor of Jeremy’s letters. Promising my superiors at the Royal Botanical Gardens a side trip to Berlin to visit with Dr. Baur regarding his recent work with pelargoniums, I’d been given leave to visit Paris to check on my brother.

  Recalling that charge, I frowned at him and yelled. “Do you come to this place regularly?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer but gazed past my shoulder as if he saw his salvation there. I turned, and spotted his Anne returning.

  The notes of a tango slid through the voices of the crowd, and Anne Dubourg moved with it, gliding through the close-set tables. Under a dark cloche hat, one blonde curl showed on her forehead. Her shapeless dress revealed little of her figure, but her breasts—larger than fashionable, I noted—swayed as she walked. Her hips writhed under the silk.

  Jeremy rose stiffly, like an old man, and pulled out a chair for her. He leaned down to kiss her as she sat. She looked away demurely, whispering, “Pas sur la bouche.”

  Not on the mouth. How I’d been able to hear that over the crowd, I didn’t know. It was more as if her voice had come into my head through some avenue other than my ears.

  Jeremy complied, pressing a fevered kiss to her ivory cheek rather than her lips. Her blue eyes flicked upward and met mine, a pained look in them as if she were embarrassed to receive such a salute in public. A demure flower, I decided, which had the same goal as any other flower. The violet wanted the same thing as the tiger lily.

  Jeremy sat again, and Anne smiled at him and patted his hand. The tango grew louder and the smoke whirled about us as we worked through the second course, our voices almost impossible to hear above the din. The truffled eggs were too rich for me, so I watched my brother eat, noting with some satisfaction that he devoured the entire selection before him. He wolfed down his lamb chop as well, although he bypassed the peas, having always had a dislike for his greens.

  The deserts were pedestrian and, afterwards, I was more than happy to leave the stifling atmosphere of the club to make our way along the rue Boissy-d’Anglas. The night was still young. Chattering people passed us on the street, likely heading off to scandalous pursuits. Automobiles trundled by, and I turned away from their headlamps to spare my eyes.

  I looked at Anne instead. She clung to Jeremy’s arm with one hand as we walked, her hips swaying as if she still heard a tango in the night air. I couldn’t decide what to make of her attachment to him. He is far out of his league, I thought, my trusting little brother.

  Anne’s eyes fixed on me then, the look in them not innocent at all. Her strawberry lips pursed as if blowing me a kiss. “You must come visit my home.”

  “Yes, Bertrand, come,” Jeremy inserted, apparently oblivious to his paramour’s defection. “It’s a lovely house.”

  I agreed, thinking I might find some leverage there to ease Jeremy out of her grip.

  We walked through the traffic past Boulevard Haussman and then turned onto a side street whose name I didn’t catch. Houses crowded onto each other, most three or fours stories tall. Along our path I saw window boxes full of faded flowers—colors leached by the night, but I recognized their shapes even in the darkness: pelargonium, lobelia, petunia, and verbena. Under a streetlight, I caught a flash of red in the petals of a hybrid musk rose which, no doubt, Pemberton would find fascinating. I made a mental note to come back later in the daylight and ask a cutting of the homeowner.

  Anne produced a jingling bunch of keys from her purse and led us up the steps of one of the houses. Once inside, she showed us to an elegant sitting room on the first floor. Like her, it was outfitted in the most current style, all straight lines and geometric shapes. Two spare-looking chaises waited on either side of a low black table, a Japanese tea service on a small stand to one side. An open book lay next to the delicately painted cups and pot.

  “Please sit down,” Anne said.

  I did so, and watched her settle next to Jeremy on the other chaise. One leg slid along the other, and for the first time I noticed a tattoo on the inside of her shapely calf, visible through her fine beige stocking. A design of angel’s trumpet snaked its way up her leg and disappeared under the edge of her skirt. Pendulous blossoms in a pale color hung down, their edges curling upward. I knew though, as many do not, that angel’s trumpet is deadly poisonous.

  “Jeremy tells me that you’re a botanist,” Anne said brightly.

  My brother yawned, as he often did when the conversation turned away from himself.

  I wondered what else he’d told her. “Yes.”

  “And how does one make a living at that?” she asked. “Or do you?”

  “I make an excellent living,” I said, and then added what I expected she wanted to know. “Although, as I’ll inherit all the Everslee estates on our father’s death, money isn’t truly an issue.”

  She shifted closer to Jeremy. Her legs moved along each other again, setting off other thoughts in my mind, of skin against skin. “So what do you do, exactly?”

  “I’m at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew,” I said, “currently working on breeding new geranium cultivars.”

  Her eyes did not—as most women’s would at that point—glaze over into a mask of polite attention. “How successful have you been?”

  “Quite,” I said. “I’ve created two new cultivars, and I have another line I hope to breed successfully this season.”

  “Breeding successfully is always important.” The tip of her tongue appeared between her red lips.

  My brother yawned again. “Bertrand, do stop going on about plants. You’re boring us.” He turned to her and added in an aside, “He likes plants better than his own family.”

  “No,” Anne assured him, “I don’t find it boring at all. I love plants.”

  She ran a hand along his cheek, and his head lolled against the high back of the chaise; he’d fallen asleep. That sent a frisson of warning down my spine. I didn’t know how, but I felt certain she’d caused his sudden somnolence.

  She turned bac
k to me as if nothing unusual had happened. “Have you named one of your new cultivars for yourself?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t yet produced one distinct enough that I want it to bear my name.”

  I intended to choose carefully from among my botanical children. I wouldn’t have any human ones. None of my many affaires had produced a child, and although my wife Millicent had died in childbirth back in ‘18, it was clear that the stillborn child wasn’t mine. (I’d been long out on the front at the time, fighting for Home and Family for over a year. My younger brother, who’d been too young to interest the War Office but old enough for my young bride, had fallen under her spell. Unwilling to think her darling Jeremy capable of such moral weakness, Mother chose to believe a footman at fault instead, but Jeremy and I knew better.) Either way, my brother would have to carry on the family line, or the family’s fortunes would pass to a distant cousin on my own death.

  Anne rose and held out a delicate hand to me. “Would you like to see my workroom? It’s up on the third floor, but I think you’ll find it worth the climb.”

  I didn’t know if this was a euphemism, but either way I had nothing against accompanying her, whether to her workroom or her bed. Either would serve my ends in prying my hapless brother free of her.

  I followed her swaying hips up the narrow stairwell to the third floor. She took out her jangling keys and unlocked the first whitewashed door. Bright light streamed from the open doorway, produced by what looked like a dozen large lamps. I shielded my eyes until they adjusted. “They prefer darkness,” she told me. “They’ll still grow in the light, but slowly enough that I can judge the results.”

  Inside the room, shelves lined the walls. Dozens of glass globes larger than a man’s head rested on them, each encasing what seemed to be a withered plant. I stepped over the threshold into the workroom, eyeing a single globe that rested on the wide worktable—a forcing glass of sorts, in which a bulbous plant grew without soil. The morphology of the plant, though, was one I didn’t recognize.

  The ivory-fleshed bulb had the smooth, elongated shape of the Resurrection Lily (or Naked Lady, as they are sometimes called), but the leaf habit was wrong, more like the delicate fronds of the asparagus fern. The color of the leaf was peculiar as well, almost the tone of human flesh. At first I wondered if it might be a sculpture, intended to mock life, but then I saw the fronds move as if a wind reached them inside that glass. “What are these?” I asked, turning my attention to the others lining the wall.

  “I don’t actually know what they’re called,” she said. In the small room, she stood close enough that I could smell her skin, the sweetness of lilies under the scent of smoke that lingered from the club. She lifted the globe from the table and set it on a bare spot on one of the shelves. While she held it, the fronds bent and writhed against the glass as if they sought the warmth of her touch.

  I inspected the other globes, seeing inside each a similar growth. A few of the plants looked much like the one she’d had out on the table, although none were as large or as vigorous. “Where did they originate?”

  “The original was a...gift,” she said, “so I don’t know.”

  Or she had no intention of telling me. I kept my hands behind me and peered at one of the more robust specimens. “And what does my brother think of these?”

  She laughed dismissively. “Young Jeremy has never been past the first floor.”

  I was fairly certain that was a euphemism, but one can never tell with French girls. I’d learned that during the War. I turned and gazed down into her innocent face. “Are you lovers?”

  “Ah, les Anglais,” she said in a despairing tone, shaking her head. “So blunt. No, we have not been. He is too young for my tastes.”

  “Then why lead him on?”

  She fingered my sleeve. “He is charming company. It is no more than that.”

  Or more likely, she’d discovered Jeremy had an older brother who would inherit the family’s money. French is, sometimes, not difficult to understand. For a moment we regarded each other in heated silence. “Why do you grow these?” I finally asked.

  “They are like my children,” she said.

  “And you keep them caged like this, rather than in the soil where they belong?” When forced so, most bulbs would not survive coming into bloom, their strength depleted by that effort.

  She stroked the globe of one of the sickly plants. The fronds inside followed the motion of her fingers, but feebly. “You work with hybrids, Bertrand,” she said, pronouncing my name in the French way so that it sounded soft and seductive. “You know many do not survive, and of those that do, many do not ever reach fruition.”

  “It’s difficult to predict one’s results,” I said, “but given a sufficient number of trials, it isn’t impossible.”

  She nodded. “I’m very selective which of these children of mine I allow to grow to maturity, so I start them here. Those that are successful, I move to proper...soil. The others should not be allowed to live.”

  “The weak ones?” I asked, thinking inadvertently of my brother. I felt disloyal then and pushed that thought aside.

  “I fear they end in the incinerator,” she said with an unapologetic shrug. “The strong survive.”

  I believed I understood her better then. “I am not easy prey,” I told her.

  She smiled wisely, those strawberry lips drawing up into a tight bow. “I never thought so.”

  “I want you to leave my brother alone.”

  She stroked one hand down my lapel. Her fingers slid to rest on my hip. “What would you give me in return?”

  I set my hands about her waist and lifted her onto the worktable. The many lamps kept the room overwarm, and the table was hard, but I didn’t intend to go looking for her bedroom when this was so much more convenient.

  “Not on the lips,” she whispered, as she had to my brother. She turned her head away when I tried to kiss her, but everything else was clearly acceptable to her.

  * * *

  In the morning my brother still lay on the sofa on the first floor, sleeping like the dead. It took some effort to wake him, but then I dragged him forth to his own flat.

  I told him, of course, which not only made him angry with me but also caused him to swear off women altogether. “After Milly, I guess I deserved that,” he said in a resentful tone.

  “Women are eternally fickle, little brother,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. I couldn’t help wondering how many of them would use him before he figured that out. “Your family is forever.”

  I didn’t feel too sorry for him. Even so, I decided to stay in Paris to keep an eye on him, relegating my many projects at the Gardens to my assistant (a capable young man, but lacking in vision). Jeremy didn’t go back to Anne, which was the important part.

  After a few bitter days, his spirits lifted and he seemed to have forgiven me. He actually got out his oils and sat on his rooftop, recreating the sunset on canvas. He’d not painted in weeks and expressed relief at getting back to his art.

  For my part, I wrote letters to our mother and father and detailed instructions to my assistant. I tried not to think about those fascinating plants in Anne’s forcing globes or wonder about their origin. I tried not to recall how they had moved like infants reaching to touch their mother’s hands—or carnivorous plants seeking prey.

  * * *

  Visions of strawberry lips haunted my days, along with the smell of lilies. I spent the nights in my hotel room, sweating in my narrow bed, feeling the phantom slide of Anne’s skin against mine, a siren’s call just as potent as my curiosity about the bulbs in that workroom.

  I expected Jeremy to improve but, despite rising spirits, he grew even gaunter under my watchful guardianship. He became listless, sitting unmoving before his canvas as if something sapped away his strength. His breathing grew increasingly shallow.

  The doctor had no explanation for Jeremy’s continued wasting—not tuberculosis, nor any other sickness he recognized. I s
uspected that if anyone knew what ailed Jeremy, it would be Anne Dubourg. After the doctor’s visit I knew I would be going back to that apartment near Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

  Following a trail I recognized only by the contents of the window boxes, I arrived at her house before the dinner hour. I expected to find Anne at home, preparing for an evening on the town. I stood on the steps for a moment, a shiver chasing itself along my skin, feeling a sense of anticipation like catching the first scent of brandy after too long without.

  She came to the door wearing her dressing gown, a silken affair with flowers painted on it, twining branches like the tattoo that snaked its way up the entire length of her leg. “Bertrand,” she said, affecting surprise. “Please come in, I’ve been hoping you would come to see me.”

  “You knew I would.” I followed her inside and up the stairs to her dressing room. I leaned against her black-lacquered vanity table as she applied her lipstick, painting strawberry red over the plump flesh of her lips.

  “What’s wrong with my brother?” I asked.

  She sighed heavily and her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Ah, Bertrand, I am so sorry.”

  “So you do know what’s wrong. What can I do?”

  She turned and faced me. “There is nothing. The seed was sown weeks ago.”

  I grabbed her arm and hauled her up from the boudoir chair. “What do you mean?”

  A teardrop glistened in the corner of one eye. “What I said, Bertrand. The seed was sown. I have no way to take it back.”

  I held her close to me, trying to see past her façade of innocence. This close I could smell her skin, the heady scent of lilies this time not masked by smoke. My body recalled that fragrance, tightening in anticipation, but I forced my thoughts away from that. “What seed?”

  “You only choose the best specimens for breeding, n’est ce pas? Jeremy was vigorous and young, which gave promise of a healthy fruit. The seed was planted. It must have nourishment to form a bulb, so it takes from the body in which it grows. It is the way of life.”