Time for Eternity

by Susan Squires

  Then, blackness.

  Frankie raised her head and wished she hadn’t. “Shit, howdy,” she moaned. Vampires didn’t get drunk. How could she have a hangover? Something hard poked into her shoulder. She wasn’t where she expected to be. Unless she had rocks in her bed.

  She cracked open an eye.

  Merde. Merde. Merde. Above her in the dimness loomed the great golden machine, its gears still and silent against a ceiling of uneven rock. She was in some kind of a cave.

  She pushed herself up on one elbow, groaning, and blinked to clear her vision. Reddish afternoon light filtered through the entrance to the cave. Outside, green trees fluttered leaves in the breeze. Was it a cave? Some of the walls merged into bricks. Where the hell was she? And when the hell was this?

  She got to her hands and knees and pulled her skirts up around her thighs. She didn’t trust herself to stand yet She half crawled toward the entrance. It was partially blocked by a huge marble statue. It appeared to be a naked man surrounded by six nymphs.

  She gasped. She knew this place! It was the grotto built for the statue of Apollo in the gardens at Versailles, long gone in the twenty-first century.

  Tears sprang to her eyes as she struggled for breath. The damned machine had actually worked! She blinked back the tears of shock and surprise. Could … could it really be? Was she really in 1794? It didn’t seem possible.

  The first time she saw this statue and its two companion pieces of Apollo’s horses was when she’d been to Versailles with Henri. A flashing cascade of images from that night threatened to overwhelm her. The feel of his flesh, the gleam of passion in his eyes seemed so real, so near. That night had been her downfall. She must avoid it this time around.

  She had meant to come back to Paris. The machine must have gotten lost somehow. Was it the summer of 1794? Or did the machine mistake that too?

  But maybe the machine hadn’t made a mistake. She ran her hands through her hair and tried to think. At the last minute, just when she’d given up hope that the machine would move, she’d thought about Versailles.

  Okay, okay. This wasn’t a disaster. Versailles was only twelve miles from Paris. And one of her gold coins would probably buy a hundred coach tickets to get there. The village of Versailles was used to supporting the court of Louis XVI. Surely she could change her gold coins there for sous she could actually spend in 1794.

  She felt the sun set, as her kind always did. She must act quickly in the gloaming that would follow. She gathered up her leather bag. She pushed out into the grove around the grotto and down the little incline, past the marvelous marble horses that looked as though they might spring out into the intricate formal gardens of Versailles just ahead. The grand palace façade itself was far away to her right. Its creamy austere stone and a fortune in glazed windows caught the sun in the upper stories. Around the gardens, members of the Gendarmerie Nationale in their blue uniforms herded people toward the main gates. Ever since the court had been forcibly moved back to Paris so that they might be accountable to the people, the grounds had been open to the public. The hoi polloi dressed in the working-class fashions of 1794—the men in wide-legged trousers and clumsily made boots, the women in aprons and caps with coarse fichus thrown about their shoulders, roamed the grounds. But it wouldn’t have taken the clothing to tell her it wasn’t the twenty-first century anymore. No smell of diesel from tour buses or hot asphalt from parking lots. The crowd chattered and laughed. Children screamed because they were tired but there were no ring tones insisting on attention, no angry car horns.

  Frankie took a breath, blinking. She’d done it. Or rather Leonardo’s machine had done it. She was in 1794.

  A feeling of nausea cascaded over her. Her knees felt weak. She put her hand out to the marble basin of the fountain to steady herself and hung her head, breathing slowly and deeply. What was the matter with her? She almost chuckled. I mean, besides just having traveled through time? Besides being in revolutionary France, where being an aristocrat is grounds for beheading? Or that I’ve come here to kill Henri Foucault, vampire extraordinaire?

  She blinked and gathered herself. She couldn’t fail, no matter how repugnant the task.

  Frankie took a breath and started down the path around the pool that surrounded the great rock supporting the statue of Apollo. She made for the main gate, through hedges once neatly trimmed in fantastic shapes now going back to nature, shoots and errant leaves obscuring their design. The flower beds were clogged with discarded revolutionary tracts, and here and there some muddied piece of clothing. Public access was hard on the place. There must be no money for upkeep these days, and no desire to keep up the ultimate symbol of aristocracy.

  Now for the village. There would be coaches leaving to take the picnickers back to Paris. And she’d be on one of them.

  Frankie stumbled from the diligence among a hail of other bodies and took a deep breath. The stench of Paris might be bad, but anything was better than the body odor inside that coach. Would she get used to this again? The coach held eight comfortably, but there had been twelve inside and about twenty clinging outside. Frankie had been crushed between a woman with a crying child and a man with roaming hands. Only when she gripped his wrist hard enough to leave bruises and deposited his hand back into his lap did he cease and desist with a sputtering protest. Respectable young women didn’t travel alone. That thought made Frankie smile grimly. If the man only knew how unrespectable she really was, he would probably shit a brick.

  She looked around the busy yard of the posting inn. Carriages clattered as they wheeled around, jockeying for position, horses snorted and whinnied. The air smelled of soot and night soil. People shouted for coffee and toasted bread. She was close now. If only she knew exactly in what moment in her previous life she’d arrived. If she’d come too late—if even now, across town in the Marais district, he was infecting her then the whole thing had been for naught. If she was early enough, she might even save her employer and friend, Madame LaFleur, from arrest. She’d force the old lady to leave Paris before Robespierre and his bitch-mistress got to her.

  Somehow she had to avoid her former self, the one that was living through this whole disorganized, dangerous mess for the first time. Time travel stories always said meeting yourself was a bad thing. If she succeeded in killing Henri, she would probably cease to exist as Frankie, vampire. Maybe she’d just blink out, leaving only the innocent girl she’d once been. She refused to get lost in the conundrums of whether, if her vampire self ceased to exist, she would be there in the twenty-first century to use Donna’s time machine and come back to prevent herself from becoming vampire. That was what she hated about time travel stories. You couldn’t avoid the inherent circular logic. All that hadn’t seemed to bother Donna. Frankie held to that.

  Frankie hefted her leather bag, tossed a sou to a vendor in return for a bun filled with unknown meat, and struck out into the sultry night, munching on dinner.

  She hurried past cafés where men shouted their political views over the hum of laughing diners, and taverns where others drank their dinner. Paris had never gone to bed early.

  As many times as she had imagined killing Henri, the prospect of actually doing it was much different. She set her lips and hurried over the Pont Neuf across the Seine, striding down the Quai de l’Horloge toward the Marais, her heart pounding. Lord knows why Henri still lived in the Marais. In the seventeenth century it had been the height of fashion, but the aristocracy now lived across the Seine in the Faubourg St. Germain. He was just contrary enough to avoid trends. Or maybe, being so old, he held to tradition. For whatever reason, she would find him in the faded grandeur of the Marais, the only place Madame LaFleur could afford.

  She smelled the smoke. Her heart skipped. An orange glow over the Place Royale told her that she’d arrived on the exact night she joined the wicked duc’s household. Some part of her was relieved. It was perhaps a week before the fatal moment when she had been made vampire. She had time to kill Henri. Bu
t was she in time to save Madame LaFleur? She turned into the huge open square. The beautiful façades of the houses across the park were in flames. Or rather one house. She broke into a run, her heavy leather bag banging on her hip. A shouting crowd threw rocks at the blaze not buckets of water.

  She staggered to a halt. Madame LaFleur was already being loaded into a black beetlelike carriage, bars at its windows, by gendarmes of the Committee of Public Safety. She was too late! A woman stood on a box under one of the arches of the covered arcade that ran around the ground floor of the entire square, shouting the crowd into a frenzy. Madame Croûte. Frankie couldn’t hear the words but she knew the sentiment. Aristocrats were an infection. They must be rooted out lest they poison the Revolution. Madame LaFleur was a devout Catholic, in spite of churches and priests being declared illegal. She could never bring herself to enter one of the new Deist churches the government had created. Maybe it was that which brought Madame Croûte and her rabble of sans-culottes, the most rabid of the revolutionaries of the third estate who spied for Robespierre and his committee, to Madame LaFleur’s house.

  Robespierre, first member of the Committee of Public Safety, looked on as the mob pushed over the stone urns on either side of the doorway under the arcade, shouting. A small smile lit his face. Flames flapped from the windows like orange bedsheets snapping in the wind.

  As she approached the scene, she slowed. There had been nothing she could do the first time around and there was no way to change things now. Madame LaFleur’s life was forfeit at the guillotine. It hit her harder than she would have expected. Somehow she thought that two hundred years of experience with the world’s evils would make a single woman’s death hurt less.

  The gaoler’s wagon moved off. That meant that in a moment …

  She turned. Bingo. A carriage with elegant lines and a defiant crest on its doors trotted up the street toward the flames. Four matched black geldings sidled in the harness, made nervous by the smoke. A driver liveried in black and gold stopped the carriage well away from the crowd. A postillion, likewise liveried, jumped down and opened the carriage door.

  Henri stepped out. He stood, surveying the chaos through a quizzing glass, his expression bored and disdainful as always.

  The roaring mob, the crack of flames, the smoke all receded. Frankie stood, transfixed.

  He was even more beautiful than she remembered him. He looked thirty-five or forty though she knew he was centuries older. His hair was black—he eschewed powder—and brushed back from his face in a long queue. He wore no wig. Who had need of a wig when you had thick, lustrous hair like that? His eyes were so dark as to almost be black. Their look, as they drifted over the crowd, was as contemptuous as ever. He was tall and powerfully built. He dressed in black, his only nod to the austere fashion of the Revolution. Or maybe he had dressed in black even when the fashion was for wild colors like yellow and magenta. It certainly suited him. His coat fitted his shoulders perfectly. The satin of his breeches hugged his muscled thighs. His cravat and cuffs sported lace though lace was banned. He looked, and was, every inch the aristocrat. How did he manage to flaunt the tyranny of the plebian so openly?

  Perhaps by looking as though he didn’t care.

  She drifted closer to the edge of the crowd, drawn by him. How are you dangerous to me, Henri? Let me count the ways … She steeled herself. She must harden her heart to match his. She must commit a sin in the eyes of God and man. She must do unto him before he could do unto her and deprive him of no more than a few months of living that she might live again.

  “What have we here?” he murmured. She heard him clearly with the vampire hearing he had bequeathed her. The curve of his lip was all insouciant condescension. He strolled forward, surveying the crowd of sans-culottes.

  “Monsieur, surely you will help us!”

  Frankie turned at the sound of her own voice. She gasped. There she stood, the she who had been, Françoise Suchet, not Frankie, her face a mask of innocence in distress, a gendarme holding each elbow. It was the face Frankie still saw in the mirror each day, streaked with soot. Her blond hair glowed copper in the red light of the flames licking out the windows above her. Frankie knew intellectually she hadn’t changed with all the years, but to know this face was not a mirror image but one that lived two hundred years ago shook her sanity.

  Françoise stretched her arms as far as she could toward Henri in supplication. Foolish girl. The last thing she needed was Henri Foucault. That way lay vampirism.

  Then the young Françoise stilled. Her head turned slowly. Her eyes locked with Frankie’s. Frankie saw the eyes that were her eyes, blue and innocent, grow wide.

  Frankie couldn’t get her breath. Françoise seemed to grow nearer, even as the crowd behind her receded. Frankie dropped her bag, gasping, and bent over, grabbing her belly against the pain there. This was bad. Really bad. She should never have met herself. She felt like she was breaking up. A shriek escaped her. All those time travel books were right, she thought.

  And then she was hurtling toward Françoise. She felt herself disintegrating into a mist.

  Then nothing.

  Three

  Françoise shook her head to clear it. She had seen a woman at the edge of the crowd. The woman had looked like her, though dressed a little strangely.

  But there was no one there now. Françoise felt … full. Her head felt tight and her chest almost burst with … with something. She looked around, dazed. There had been a woman … hadn’t there? She couldn’t quite remember. She must be mad to be daydreaming at a time like this. Everything she owned was in that burning house. The mob seemed bent on tearing down what was left brick by brick. Robespierre had ordered Madame LaFleur arrested and Françoise was about to follow her. That meant prison and the guillotine.

  She glanced to the edge of the crowd. She had seen something there, hadn’t she? Something that made her uneasy. But she didn’t quite know what. She felt as though all her senses were dulled, somehow. She couldn’t quite see as far as she expected, hear as much as she ought. Something inside her was vaguely … disappointed.

  Enough. She turned to the Duc d’Avignon, crossing from his carriage, quizzing glass raised to survey the crowd and the burning house that shared a wall with his own, much larger dwelling. She must be mad to think of asking him for help. The wicked duc would do nothing for her. But no one could help her once she’d been arrested, so he was her only hope.

  “Please help me, Monsieur.” She hated that her voice was small and pleading.

  His quizzing glass turned toward her and her two burly guards, magnifying his eye until he looked like a monster. This was the first time he had even noticed her in all the months he’d lived next door. She blushed, acutely aware that her skirts were torn and covered with soot.

  “You mean to call him ‘Citizen,’ do you not?” Madame Croûte asked through gritted teeth. “We have no forms of respectful address for the nobility. France belongs to the people.”

  The quizzing glass was turned on Madame Croûte. The duc frowned then surveyed the burning building. “Really, this crosses the line.” His voice was quiet, yet somehow the crowd around her subsided. Only the roar of the flames filled the night air. They must be reacting to that electric energy he always seemed to give off. She had watched him secretly as he went out every evening for months now. One could not help but be riveted by him. He was a handsome devil who seemed much more alive than everyone else. He flaunted his wealth and taste in the teeth of the revolutionary zealots as though he were fearless.

  He cast his gaze over the crowd. “You’ll burn down the Marais, and, more importantly, my house, with your nonsense.” His dark eyes seemed to glow red in the light from the flames. “Put it out.” His voice almost echoed in the night.

  To her shock, the four men nearest him began exhorting the crowd to put the fire out. The crowd milled uncertainly, then gained purpose.

  “To the mews! The stables’ll have buckets.”

  “Take ’e
m to the fountain.”

  The crowd split into purposeful streams. This enraged Madame Croûte. “Citizens!” she screamed. “This refuge of antirevolutionary sentiment must come down!” But the crowd wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. She turned on Robespierre. She was a handsome woman with a fine figure, albeit with a rather long face and slightly protuberant pale blue eyes. She was dressed in the style of a poor woman, with apron and cap, but the fabrics were rich and very clean, unlike those of her followers. “Citizen,” she accosted Robespierre, “Do something.”

  The duc looked over her shoulder. “Ahhhh, dear Robespierre, what brings you to this sordid scene?” He glanced to Madame Croûte. “And your minion as well.”

  Madame Croûte glared at him.

  “Rooting out a traitor,” the little man said primly. He was dressed with the greatest propriety in sober black, plain wool, his hair concealed by a modest wig with only two rolls over each ear. He wore a ribbon on his lapel with the revolutionary colors.

  “I wonder”—the duc sighed—“that the Committee of Public Safety should be involved in starting fires. It seems such a contradiction.”

  The little man drew himself up, frowning. “You make light of our sacred charge, Citizen Foucault, but the cause of freedom must be protected at all costs.”

  “So I’ve been told.” The dark eyes flicked back to Françoise and away. “And an old woman is certainly a worthy target of your wrath. I positively quake to think that I lived next door to such a dangerous character.”

  Was it her situation that caused Françoise’s wobbly knees? Or was it whatever had disconcerted her at the edge of the crowd? She shook her head again. She couldn’t remember what she had seen. But she had a feeling she had done all this before, in a dream perhaps.

  “But what has my ward to do with all of this?” the duc drawled.