Cheating Death

by April White

  The salon faced the gardens and had big windows that looked out on a small, glittering moonlit pond. The room was decorated like something from the Orient Express, with low divans, layers of Turkish rugs, and engraved brass trays on wooden stands to serve as tables. The same servant who had shown us to our rooms – an older Italian woman with an easy smile – brought a tray of glasses with a bottle of Italian wine and then drew back a heavy velvet drape on one wall.

  Behind the curtain was a spectacular and horrible painting. A naked, bearded man lay on his back, covered by a red velvet bed coverlet. He pushed against a woman who held him down, while another women grabbed his hair and stabbed a sword through his neck. Blood sprayed from the wound and ran in rivulets down the white sheets of the bed. The violence of the painting was astounding.

  Artemisia sipped her wine silently and watched as we took in the scene in front of us. The room was silent for a long moment, and I had the sense that even Mary hadn’t seen this particular painting before.

  Ringo met Artemisia’s sharp gaze. “It’s probably a good thing it’s not hung in the dinin’ room,” he said mildly.

  She burst out in delighted laughter and waved the servant in who had just appeared in the doorway. A quick exchange in Italian, and then she turned to us. “Your friend has arrived. Shall we see his reaction to Judith before I explain?”

  I carefully schooled my expression into something totally neutral and said nothing. Mary stood to greet Tom, and Ringo got to his feet because the ladies did. Tom looked haggard and accepted Mary’s surprising hug with reserve. He was tight-lipped but gracious as he met Artemisia, nodded warily at Ringo, and then turned his gaze to me.

  “Saira,” he spoke formally, “you’re looking well.”

  I studied him in silence for a long moment, then sighed and got up. I took both of his hands in mine and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Go take a bath. We’ll talk in the courtyard when you’re done.”

  He looked stunned but not, I was glad to see, angry. Ringo’s eyebrows were up around his hairline, but he said nothing as Tom made his excuses to the ladies and followed the servant out of the salon.

  “Quite a tragic young man, is he not?” said Artemisia.

  It felt like gossip to talk about Tom with a stranger when he was out of the room, so I ignored the question and looked back at the horrific and beautiful painting. “You were about to tell us a story, I think?” I sipped the light red wine and curled my legs under myself. “When did you paint this?” I studied the people individually, examining fine details so the whole image didn’t work on my imagination.

  “A few years after I married. My father paid my husband well to accept his soiled daughter.”

  “You’re no longer married?” As much as I wanted to ask about her use of the word ‘soiled,’ I wasn’t walking in that minefield unless she led me there.

  “It was useful to cover the birth of my daughter. When she was born, his purpose was finished.” Artemisia wore a radiant smile at the mention of her daughter, and it transformed her from a striking woman into a stunning one.

  “How is Palmira?” Mary cut in, obviously wanting to skip over the part about Artemisia’s daughter’s actual parentage.

  The gorgeous smile got even brighter as Artemisia waxed poetic about her daughter’s marriage and her family in Naples. “Palmira’s little son, Doriano, looks just like his grandfather with the same fair hair and the same playful nature, but of course no one would ever imagine their relation.”

  I was starting to get an itchy feeling at the back of my neck. Artemisia wasn’t talking about the husband she’d left after using him to legitimize her daughter’s birth. She was describing Palmira’s father, a fair-haired playful man his grandson may have been named after? A man no one would think was the boy’s grandfather.

  I looked at the crease between Ringo’s eyebrows and the itch got itchier. His brain was riding the same track mine was, and the train we were about to collide with felt too close.

  I suddenly jumped up and smoothed the wrinkles out of my caftan nervously. “I … I need to … I’ll be back.” I bowed my head slightly to Mary and Artemisia to try to make up for my rudeness and then hurried from the room.

  I found myself in the double-story entry hall, staring up at Artemisia’s magnificent paintings. I tried not to think, but memories and stories and facts kept intruding on the carefully-wrought blankness of my brain. My hand went to my pocket, where I’d put the emerald Archer had bought for me from the gem dealer who could see the past written on stones.

  “Are ye thinkin’ about the woman, the art, or ‘er lover?” Ringo asked quietly. I’d heard his light footsteps on the stone floor.

  “All of them,” I said, still looking at the painting. “These two guys, and the one being murdered in the salon, are the only men in her work.”

  “Do ye find that odd?” Ringo stood next to me and considered the painting in front of us.

  “If her lover was the father of her now-married daughter, and she still speaks of him in present tense, where are the paintings of him?” I wanted to know what he looked like. I wanted to know if I was right.

  Ringo knew why I’d asked the question, and he considered for a moment. “Where would ye keep a paintin’ of Archer?”

  I smiled with the sudden wave of memory. “I drew him once, and I stuck the drawing in the mirror of my bedroom.”

  He spoke carefully. “Maybe we should take ourselves on a tour of the villa.”

  I met his eyes, hesitated for long enough to look at my good manners and toss them over my shoulder, and nodded. “Yes, let’s.”

  We started upstairs, as the logical place to find the master bedroom, and chose the wing opposite ours. The first two rooms were additional guest rooms, one of which appeared to be occupied by Mary. The third room was at the end of the corridor with a huge bank of windows that faced out toward the eastern garden. It was a huge room, the size of two bedrooms, and Artemisia had set it up as an art studio. Because the floor was wooden, much of it was covered by a large canvas sheet, and cupboards with slots for rolls of canvas dominated one wall. Paintings in various stages of completion were propped against the walls, and two easels stood proudly in the center of the room.

  Moonlight made the east end of the room glow and was the only light we used to search the room. The other option was candlelight, which seemed to be a fairly bad idea in an art studio filled with oil paints and turpentine. Ringo strode to the semi-finished canvases, while I poked around in the cupboards first. The smell of the paints was like catnip to me – I inhaled deeply and felt the familiar giddiness that art supplies and small puppies always inspired. I trailed my fingers along the fine sable brushes, the course boar brushes, and a brush I had to smell to guess it was made of squirrel hair. I missed making art. I missed the rattle of the ball at the bottom of a spray paint can. I missed the hiss of the aerosol and the fine cloud of color that misted my clothes on a windy night. I missed the time when discovery was the biggest danger I faced, when gang bangers would give a reluctant nod to a fellow tagger with stealth and skill, and when secret alleys and hidden stairwells were my canvas.

  I missed home.

  I studied the sketch on the easel closest to the window. The outline was faint, but the image was unmistakably feminine. I smiled at the lush curves of the nude woman who reclined on a bed and looked happily up at a child who might have been Cupid. The painting promised to be beautiful, and I imagined I would see it hanging in a museum someday.

  The other easel held a half-complete portrait of a young boy with fair hair and laughing eyes. The boy looked as though he had a secret and was holding back a fit of giggles. The boy had a familiar cast to his face, and I thought I’d seen him somewhere, maybe in the art downstairs?

  “Oh … no,” I gasped. I hadn’t seen this boy in Artemisia’s paintings. The few she had depicted were baroque angels with full cheeks and golden curls. This boy – this painting – was done in a post-impressionistic st
yle; the style of artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne who painted in the late 1880s.

  My suspicion was confirmed.

  “I wondered when I’d see you again, Saira.” A low, masculine voice came from the doorway, and I forced myself not to jump or turn or move at all.

  “Hello, Doran,” I said to his painting as Ringo spun to face the man himself.

  “Are ye followin’ us, then?” said Ringo.

  “It would seem, in this instance, that you are following me.” Doran’s voice was careful and quiet, as though he were measuring his words.

  I infused as much casual calm into my body as I could when I turned to face him. Doran looked as he always looked – like the guy who could step off a plane with nothing more than a passport and a credit card in his back pocket and be totally comfortable in any situation.

  Doran had always irritated me so much with his enigmatic smile and his dribble of information that I had never really paid more than cursory attention to how attractive he was. The boy in the painting … Doriano – I chuckled – he had the same bright eyes as Doran, the promise of the same broad cheekbones, the same strong jaw.

  “Your grandson is beautiful,” I said.

  I hadn’t recognized Doran’s expression as wariness until it softened. “He is, isn’t he? Palmira was my treasure, but little Dorio – he is a playmate and compatriot and best friend all in one tiny, energetic package.”

  “Does Artemisia know you’re here?”

  He nodded, and the softness stayed in his eyes. “Of course. I arrived two days ago and stayed to meet her friend, Mary Shelley, whom I had heard so much about. Imagine my surprise to discover who else had joined us, though I admit, I was less than pleased to see the young Vampire enter the villa.”

  “Archer’s dead,” I blurted, and then I realized he meant Tom.

  Doran’s eyebrows rose. “Is that so? You’ve managed to Clock back to your own time stream then?”

  I just accepted that he knew there’d been a split, despite the fact that we were having this conversation in 1842, before the split had occurred. Nothing about Doran surprised me anymore. I shook my head and Ringo answered for me. “No. Tom did – before the split happened.”

  “Ah, and you have reason to trust what he says?” Doran took a lantern off a shelf and pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket to light it. The grinding sound of the striker was so incongruous in this Moorish villa without flushing toilets or running water that I almost laughed.

  Warm lamplight bathed the room in the kind of glow Dutch painters loved, and I noticed that Doran actually looked almost relaxed. Almost.

  “Lying about it would be pretty counter-productive. He wants to get back to the right time stream so he can try the cure Mr. Shaw’s working on. Archer’s dea—” I cleared my throat. “If Archer isn’t there, it kind of puts a damper on my burning desire to risk myself to fix the split, you know?”

  “I see,” he said simply.

  Doran strode to the window and looked out over the garden. Ringo stepped back, as though he wanted to disappear into the shadows, and I thought it was on purpose. There were a lot of pieces to the puzzle that was Doran, and confronting him never seemed to get me any closer to the answers.

  I studied him while his back was to me. He wore a loose white shirt, the kind I’d seen seventeenth-century poets wear in paintings, and his hair was longer than the fashion of the times dictated. There was a spot of blue paint on the elbow of one sleeve, and my gaze returned to the painting of his grandson.

  “Do you not age because you’re out of your native time, or is there something else going on?” I finally asked.

  He exhaled and turned to face me. “Why are you in Rome?”

  Not going to answer the question, clearly. “I made a deal with Tom.”

  This time, only one eyebrow went up, in an expression that reminded me so much of Archer that my heart stuttered.

  “Of what nature, may I ask?” He sounded a lot more British when his tone got arch, and I thought about getting annoyed but decided I was too tired.

  “You can ask.” I paused, and Ringo smirked. I turned back to Doran’s painting. I actually loved post-impressionism, and the style was really kind of perfect for a painting of a kid because it often looked like a very talented child had done it. “Do you have a lot of children running around history, or is Artemisia’s the only one?”

  My question made him angry. I wasn’t sure if it was the question itself, or if it was the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours nature of the exchange. I probably should have backed off if I really wanted answers, but the apathy I’d felt still lingered, and I really was curious.

  Doran must have sensed this, because the squinty-eyed glare I’d gotten had been rubbed away in the kind of tired gesture people usually make when they’re too old for this crap.

  “Come,” he said. “The terrace is a nice place to sit.”

  Ringo shot me a quick look as we followed Doran out of the studio and through a room that must have been the master bedroom. A big, rumpled four-poster bed dominated one end of the space, and a huge fireplace with low divans in front of it filled the other. I pointed to a gold-framed pencil drawing next to one side of the bed and looked meaningfully at Ringo.

  He peered at it in the dim lamplight, then scoffed and shook his head. It was a portrait of Doran, laughing in a way I’d never seen him, happy and in love.

  Doran either didn’t or pretended not to notice our exchange as he led us through big folding doors to a terrace overlooking the interior courtyard. It was a breathtakingly lovely spot, and I thought that if it were my house I would move my bed out to the terrace to sleep.

  We settled into settees so comfortable that I thought it likely they were often slept on. I looked down at the courtyard below. “Were you up here earlier, watching Mary and Artemisia talk?”

  He looked down at the places by the fountain where we’d sat and nodded. “I love to watch her laugh. She does it easily with her friends, and there are so few I can allow myself to be seen by.”

  “You’ve been coming here a long time,” I said simply.

  He nodded. “I met Artemisia when she was sixteen. I’d come merely to paint with her father, but I left his studio feeling as though I’d met one of the Muses.”

  Whether he meant the Greek goddesses of the arts, or his own personal Muse, I couldn’t tell, because the reverence in his voice fit both.

  “She was nineteen when I returned to discover that two years prior, an art tutor hired by her father had raped her.” I sucked in a horrified breath, but Doran continued grimly. “And although she sued him and won, the bastard got away with a slap on the wrist. After that, as one could imagine, Artemisia despised all things male.”

  Doran studied his hands for a long moment before he looked up at me. “It took two years of trying to make her smile for me to fall irrevocably in love with her.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?” I asked without thinking.

  Pain flashed in his eyes. “I was called away by my father. I was gone for two months and hadn’t thought to return the day after I left.”

  He meant that he Clocked away and should have Clocked back to the next day instead of allowing the two months to pass. I wondered, yet again, what Doran’s native time actually was.

  “Her father had already paid her dower, and he refused to back out of his agreement with Schiattesi. They were married, and only then did she finally admit that she loved me in return.”

  “Is Artemisia a Descendant?” I asked him carefully.

  “No.”

  “But she knows about us?”

  He gave a slight smile. “It would be rather difficult to explain this otherwise.” He indicated himself.

  I studied his face for a long moment – longer than I’d ever looked at him before. He looked relaxed here, and a little bit sad. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him to watch the woman he loved age, although honestly, it probably wasn’t any different than a nor
mal human couple who gets old together.

  “Tom wants me to help him steal the Monger ring,” I finally said.

  Doran looked at me in surprise while Ringo sat in the shadows of the terrace wearing his usual inscrutable expression.

  “And you’re in Rome in this time because the ring is here?”

  Ringo leaned forward and spoke quietly. “It went missin’ from the Vatican in 1842. The next time the ring showed up in Descendant records was in 1871 – on Rothchild’s ‘and – during the Council massacre.”

  “And you couldn’t go there, for obvious reasons,” Doran said.

  “The only other person we know had it for sure was George Walters in 1944 – he was wearing it when the bomb exploded in the British Museum ghost station.”

  “The explosion that split time,” he said.

  “We all spent time in 1944 before the explosion, so going back to find George and the ring before we got there is sort of a needle-in-a-haystack.”

  Doran shook his head. “Coming to 1842 to find the ring in the Vatican isn’t?”

  “The pope ‘as it,” said Ringo in a tight voice. I didn’t think he liked agreeing with Doran about anything, and coming here to steal the Monger ring was definitely not his favorite plan.

  Doran scoffed. “Which is approximately like saying ‘the king has it.’ Vatican City has its own army, and despite their ridiculous uniforms, the Swiss Guard are quite deadly.”

  “Have you ever been inside? Can you Clock us in?” I asked.

  “My dear cousin, I cannot help you with this. My involvement in anything you do breaks a great many rules, and puts people I love very dearly in danger.” That statement opened a big box of questions, but it was clear Doran’s patience had ended. He stood and waited for us to do the same. Considering we were on the balcony of his bedroom, he couldn’t exit dramatically without making sure we left too.