Divine Fire

by Melanie Jackson

  “My German is rusty. Does that really say that it’s the daily journal of Johann Dippel from December of seventeen thirty-one?”

  “Yes.” Damien waited, hand outstretched, offering her a chance at knowledge.

  Afraid and yet unable to resist, Brice stepped closer and reached for the journal.

  It hit her at once: the same sensation of heat that had charged through her when she had opened Byron’s letter. It was a passion driven by a mix of adrenaline and the knowledge that she was seeking, if not forbidden fruit, then the fruit of knowledge that had been denied most men. It felt a lot like desire, and a bit like terror, and it made every other emotion seem pallid.

  She couldn’t refuse it, whatever ugly thing she learned, even if the knowledge banned her forever from the innocence of Eden, she had to know.

  Eyes very wide now, and face too pale, she looked up at her mentor. Finally, as the world began to gray at the edges, she remembered to breathe.

  “I am in so much trouble,” she whispered. Then she gave a small, inappropriate gasp of laughter that was two parts joy and three parts hysteria.

  “What? Out with it,” he said, sitting on the edge of his desk where he had made love to her. “I’d like to know what there is to laugh at in this. So far, it seems very unamusing.”

  “You’re wearing jeans,” Brice said, throwing up her hands.

  His lips twitched. “I see. And?”

  “Given what we are talking about—what you are suggesting—I am just so relieved that you don’t smell like something that’s been taxidermied.” The teasing words came out against her will.

  “Or cooked?” he suggested, starting to smile. Perhaps that was the only thing to do in this situation. He reached out and took her free hand, slowly drawing her toward him. The small band of flesh at his wrist was crisscrossed with the golden net of scars. “And here I have been romantically thinking of myself as a phoenix, not the main course at a barbecue.”

  “If you’re a bird, you could be roasted or stuffed,” she pointed out, allowing herself the joke. It was odd that his touch excited but also calmed. He was a man, a special man, but still human. Much of her supernatural fear died away.

  “The first response that comes to mind at that observation is entirely too crude.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” she said.

  “That I can be crude?”

  She shook her head. “That I’m holding hands with history.”

  “Ah! It’s more exciting and strange than you guess. Go read,” Damien said, standing up suddenly and guiding her to her borrowed desk. He switched on a light. “Later, we will talk about the rest.”

  “There’s more?” she asked, amazed.

  “Yes. Dippel’s story—and his evil—is not ended with that journal. Unfortunately.”

  Brice, head swimming with too many experiences, sat down and began to read at the place where the journal was marked. Damien opened his desk and pushed something. Soft music filled the room. He didn’t bother trying to read or scribble out a new review, but sat watching her attentively.

  A few minutes later, Brice lifted her head and glared.

  “What?” he asked, his voice virtuous, his expression innocent.

  Brice didn’t want to admit that his gaze bothered her, but she heard herself saying, “I can feel your eyes inching up my nightgown.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “It’s a damned distracting thing. I’m trying to read about the greatest scientific experiment known to man here.”

  Damien smiled, but obligingly turned his gaze to the manuscript on his desk.

  Two hours later, when the fire was nearly dead, Brice shut the journal. Byron put his manuscript down too. This time, neither of them smiled.

  “I don’t know if I believe it,” she said. She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “But then, I have to believe it, don’t I? This madman’s ravings actually prolonged your life.”

  “No, you don’t have to believe. You can let yourself suppose that this is all a dream. Or that I am a pathological liar. Or deranged. There are many options if you can’t accept it,” he answered.

  Brice shook her head. “No, I can’t believe any of that. Could you?”

  “Honestly? No. I’ve never had the capacity for vast self-deception.” He added, looking closely at her face, “I’m sorry. I should have waited to tell you about this. It’s shocked you.”

  “Literally.” Brice finally smiled. “I’m still tingling, you know.”

  “I don’t actually feel bad about that part,” he confessed, eyes heating. “The attraction between us all but danced in the air. How could I ignore it?”

  “Why should you feel bad? I enjoyed myself hugely. But, Damien…” she said softly, then paused. Her brow furrowed. “What should I call you now?”

  “Damien is best,” he answered. “You must not think of me as being anyone else. It wouldn’t be safe. You see, there’s a lot more that I have to tell you about this situation. Until you understand, Byron must remain dead.”

  “There’s a lot more?” she asked unhappily. Brice knew she was in deep and would eventually have to know the truth, however terrible. A few hours ago—yesterday, even—she would have said that she had no expectation of this affair being more than an exciting interlude of escape from her work. It had been years since she had allowed herself to hope for anything more from a relationship than that there would be a quick mercy-killing when it came time for it to end. But that had all changed. This was the man of her dreams. And more. Hell’s bells! He had loved several lifetimes and she was certain they had each been dangerous and exciting. And someday she would want to hear all about it. But not tonight.

  “Yes, there’s further to go in this tale. But that’s for later. You’ve had enough dark stories and warnings for one night.”

  She nodded, face again sober, brow creased with concentration.

  “Your intuition is speaking again?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Was Ninon de Lenclos one of Dippel’s…”

  “Experiments?” Damien suggested.

  “Patients,” she corrected. “Don’t make it sound so bad. For heaven’s sake! You were seeking medical treatment, not an audience with the devil.”

  Damien didn’t look convinced that so harmless a concept described what Dippel was doing, but he nodded without arguing.

  “I’ve been thinking about the stories of her endless youth, and also her eyes. In early portraits her eyes were pale, but in that locket, her eyes are black. Your eyes only changed after…?”

  “Yes. Mine were blue. It was only afterward that my eyes became so dark. It is one of those physical changes I mentioned.”

  “I’m thinking of that mysterious man in black who brought her that elixir to mix with her bathwater. Could that have been Dippel and not the devil?”

  “I’ve wondered.” Damien began searching through the papers on his desk. “There is another version of the story that she recounted to Abbé Scarron, claiming that the dark man appeared three times in her life. The dark man was said to be able to produce thunder and lightning at will. Ah! Here we are! Read this. Right before Ninon’s eighteenth birthday she and Gentilly sought out a dark magician living on the outskirts of Paris.”

  Brice took the letter and read aloud in French. Her accent was improving with practice:

  Upon entering the village, we enquired after the building where there lived a famous necromancer; and a guide presently presented himself to lead us thither. After proceeding five minutes along an underground passage, we found ourselves in a circular chamber hewn from the heart of the mountain.

  I stared at the figure on the throne before us, a dark man, oddly scarred, with eyes as black as midnight.

  “Approach!” he cried in a terrible voice. “What do you wish?”

  Brice stopped reading aloud and scanned the rest of the letter. “Amazing.”

  “Yes. It reads like bad fiction, right down to their being blinded by lightning. And the
re are several other intriguing incidences. Twice in her life, Ninon’s hair began to fall out, and twice, after she retired to the country for a rest, it grew back completely—in a matter of weeks. The second time it happened, she went to England. It was when she witnessed the execution of Charles the First—a king who had been lame as a child but who was miraculously healed as an adult. A king whose eyes had also gone dark.”

  “Charles the First?” Brice’s voice was awed. “He was Dippel’s patient also?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I recall this story about Ninon. Rather than wear a wig, she arranged her short curls in a style called se coiffeur à la Ninon. It was very popular. But everyone in Paris marveled that her hair grew back so quickly. I think they were dismayed at finding themselves with such short crops when her own hair grew in so rapidly. Do you think that this is when she…renewed herself?”

  “It’s suggestive, isn’t it? But as for it being Dippel’s brand of eternal youth, I don’t know. I always suspected it but could never be sure. Reason says Dippel couldn’t have done it. Not if he was actually born when he said he was.”

  Gooseflesh raced up Brice’s arms. She put the letter down carefully. “But was he?” she asked. Then, shaking her head: “But Ninon eventually died. There was a funeral, and many people saw the body.”

  “I had a funeral too—several of them, in fact. And people thought they saw my body as well,” Damien pointed out. “Services and burials really don’t mean as much as one assumes. I have a lock of her hair, so DNA testing would be possible—and I’ve had French lawyers petitioning to have the body exhumed so a comparison can be made, but the odds of them ever granting the request aren’t good. And so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to try grave-robbing.”

  “Has there been any sign of her? Any…anything?”

  “No. Not that I’ve found. But I still think it may be possible that she survived beyond her nineties.”

  “I think my brain just imploded,” Brice said weakly.

  “I’m sorry,” Damien apologized again, genuinely contrite. “It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?”

  Brice suddenly wanted noise, everyday noise—a vacuum, a telephone, traffic, voices—anything to break the weird spell that surrounded them. But there was only that eerie wind that pawed at the windows, and the last soft crackle of ashes falling in the fireplace.

  “Such a fierce expression. What are you thinking?” Damien asked.

  “That I know very little about you, other than you prefer your coffee mercilessly black. Also, it seems a pity that I can never tell the world the truth—that the immortal poet Lord Byron really is immortal,” Brice finally said, forcing a smile to go with her understatement.

  “Not immortal.” His face was serious as he tried to explain. “Only indefinitely alive. Understand, I can be wounded. I can even be killed, though my body has a great capacity to heal damage. Frankly, in my more fanciful moments, I find this fact reassuring.”

  “How so? Afraid of eternal boredom eventually setting in?” The question just slipped out.

  “Not yet.” He smiled briefly. “No, my thoughts are actually more gothic, more morbid. I don’t know that a twenty-first-century mentality can understand them.”

  “You worry about your soul,” she guessed, certain that she was right. It would worry her, and she had not been raised in the nineteenth century when religion was treated more seriously.

  “Yes. And it is odd that I should wonder about it now, for I never did when I was young.” Damien frowned.

  “And what have you decided?”

  “It seems to me that unlike a vampire or fictional Frankenstein’s poor monster—or Dorian Gray, perhaps—since I did not seek out this quasi-immortality, and since I can die, that I have not actually sold my soul for this gift of long life. And therefore, I have not rendered myself unfit for heaven.”

  “Do you often think about this?” Brice asked, feeling sympathetic.

  “No, not often. In fact, until the last few weeks, I hadn’t thought of the matter since April of nineteen sixteen.”

  “Why nineteen sixteen?” Brice asked. Then, guessing, she said: “Because it was the anniversary?”

  A noisy buffet shook the window. The wind howled like a wounded animal and threw itself at the building, and like a wounded animal after its attacker, the wind seemed dangerous. She was glad that the glass was thick. Heavy shutters would have been even better.

  “Yes, the centennial.” Seeing her distress, he went to the window and pulled the drapes against the storm. “But suddenly I find myself thinking about these things again—and being watchful. Perhaps it is just this strange weather that has plagued us this winter, but I’ve felt as if Fate is closing in, that the wheel of life is turning in a new direction.”

  Brice shivered and made an effort to push back the tiny fear that was making the hairs on her nape stand on end. It was an atavistic fear, a sudden dread that reached out from the blackest night and the earliest primeval awareness of evil. Timeless evil, intelligent and calculating—though probably mad—was once again walking among men, and was stalking them.

  Oh, bullshit. What evil? This wasn’t intuition—it was just the storm. And Byron or no Byron, she’d had enough of the macabre for one night. It was time to turn the subject to happier things, like the miracle she had just made love to. A miracle who could answer all the questions she’d ever had about his life as a great poet.

  She laughed softly.

  “I heard a rumor that you gave Murray a bible—a very handsome one which he liked to display,” she said. “Or he liked it until someone pointed out that in John 18:40 you had changed the verse from ‘Now Barabbas was a robber’ to ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher.’ ”

  “But can you blame me?” Damien asked, answering her smile. He seemed as relieved as she to have the subject turned.

  Brice thought of her own situation with her publisher, which involved as much hate as love, and grinned wryly. “What of you going about London eating nothing but hard biscuits and soda water? I always thought your supposed creative diet was a sham or caused by a tricky stomach.”

  “Of course it was a sham, but it got me attention—and so many of those fools actually followed it, waiting for the muse to visit them. It was inconvenient, but I could eat other things at home—sparingly, of course. In those days, when my health was so fragile and I could not exercise, I was prone to fatness.”

  Lord Byron fat? Brice shook her head, still feeling more than slightly dazed.

  “And the story about you swimming the Grand Canal in Venice with a lantern in your left hand?” She tactfully left out the part about him doing this after visiting his mistress.

  “Well, I tried it the night before without the lantern and kept getting whacked by oars from passing gondolas. It turned out there was a law that everything in the canal had to carry a lantern after the sun was down. I was only obeying the ordinance.” He was smiling easily now, more relaxed.

  “And did you really keep a bear in your rooms while at university?”

  “Only briefly. And only once. I quickly discovered the difficulties in sharing living quarters with the beast, and there were more convenient ways of expressing defiance of scholarly authority. I also got expelled for using the bear to tree one of the dons.” He shook his head. “But that’s enough of my past sins for one night. It’s nearly dawn. Time you were in bed.”

  “I’m only going if you come with me,” she said quickly, perhaps fearing that he meant to leave her to the storm now that his secret was revealed.

  “I’ll come with you—but only if you agree to stop asking questions. Your eyes look bruised. And I can see you’re half dizzy with lack of sleep. I’ve not treated you well. You must rest.”

  “It’s just the brandy that’s made me tired,” she assured him, wanting him to know that he hadn’t hurt her when they made love.

  He shook his head and then took her hand. Sparks flew, though they were invisible to the eye and com
paratively tame. He began to lead her toward her bedroom.

  “You won’t be able to resist me,” she predicted smugly. “Not with the storm still raging.”

  “We’ll see,” he answered. “I am certainly going to try. And you will help me.”

  “I will?” she asked doubtfully.

  “You will,” he said firmly.

  “And what will happen if I don’t? Will you spank me?”

  He looked back, eyes amused. “Nothing that enjoyable. I’ll just leave you to sleep alone.”

  “That’s cruel. I knew you were an alpha,” she muttered under her breath.

  “And I knew you’d be my undoing.” His voice took on a stronger accent and he slid into his lecturer role. “Now, let’s talk about something dull and un-arousing so you can sleep. Let’s see. Victorians, they’re the dullest of the dull. Frankly, I found the era of the nineteenth-century absolutists more depressing than anything that came before. It took the world a long while to shake off the Victorians, since they attempted to smother any new ideas at birth and precious few innovations survived to challenge their way of thinking. It was better in America, of course. At least here ideas were given a chance if they showed any hint of economic viability.”

  “I’m a historian. That’s not a dull subject,” Brice warned him.

  “It will be,” he promised. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s always baseball.”

  “Please! I know it’s un-American, but anything but baseball.”

  Chapter Ten

  And thus did I instruct my assistant: These volumes should be your study day and night, your familiarity with them sufficient that you should retain an understanding of the material that you may perform these experiments without recoursing to notes. Until such a time, no experiments should be undertaken, for this is not something to be enterprised lightly. We are treading in the realm of gods and must beware.

  —From the medical journal of Johann Conrad Dippel