Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  The first years immediately following her departure from Nicolas and Paris in 1402 had been miserable ones. She had thought several times that the fate of the mice on which she’d experimented was about to fall on her. She was both ill and lethargic; she had no energy and found the one thing she’d always been able to do—to concentrate and focus on a creative task—stripped from her. She expected that she would wake each day to find herself suddenly ancient and dying. Instead, the illness and weakness only persisted and became more acute.

  She began to think that the elixir had been only a curse: a long, youthful life, yes, but one that was a miserable, muted, and sick existence. A black mood wrapped around her. She prayed to God to take her, to end this. It would be better to die than to live this way.

  And God gave her a sign.

  She had noticed the green-hearted people even as she prepared to leave Paris, though they were rare creatures. A few of the customers who came to Tremeur Pelletier’s manuscript shop near the university were the first she noticed, but even on the street, she might pass one of them. It was as if she could see inside them, into the very core of their soul, and there deep inside would be that pulsing, throbbing verdancy like a second heart: a soul-heart is how she thought of it, sometimes very small, and a few of them—a very few—so large that the light of it seemed to threaten to overwhelm the person who contained it. The les personnes vertes were usually, she came to realize, people with occupations that required both creativity and inventiveness: writers, poets, artists, musicians, the occasional scientist or thinker, male and female both.

  She found, also, that les personnes vertes drew her, as if she were a dusty iron filing attracted to a lodestone. When she was near one of them, the weariness and sense of illness seemed to briefly lift in that emerald radiance, to return like a veil of rain afterward.

  It took her another miserable year and more to realize that she was able to attach herself to the green soul, that she could touch the radiance with her mind and coax it from the person, that the energy of their soul-hearts could feed her and give her back at least some of the vitality she thought she’d lost forever. It took yet longer to understand that when she did that, the green heart inside the person would also grow in response to her touch, slowly but certainly, and that the growth of their soul-heart led to a corresponding increase in their creativity.

  She could exist in a symbiotic relationship with the soul-heart where each fed the other.

  Her first experience with that phenomenon was with a musician in Troyes, one of the many towns to which Perenelle traveled on leaving Paris. His name was Philippe, a composer of chansons and motets, who possessed a heart of the most beautiful emerald that Perenelle had yet seen. She heard him playing a lute in the town square and singing. He was perhaps thirty-five, his temples already touched with gray, and he seemed pleased that this handsome, if tired-looking and poor young woman appeared to be entranced by him even while the townspeople passed him by with a few glances and occasionally tossed a denier in his lute case. Perenelle, for her part, was held in the pull of him, and as he played, she could see in her mind the tendrils from the soul-heart, snaking out from him and wrapping about her. It was like nothing she had experienced before.

  This was true magic, this was a mage’s spell, and she gasped at its touch. Instinctively, she drew the power in with her breath, released it redoubled with her exhalation so that it returned to him. The malaise that had afflicted her for a year now fell away in that instant, as if she were a starving person presented with a feast.

  She wanted nothing more than to be with him, this Philippe, forever. Yet it wasn’t love—at least not love as she’d thought of it before. There was no romance, no lust, no stirring within the loins. This was another type of communion altogether.

  As she stood there, entranced, his voice became stronger, his fingers loosening and nearly flying on the strings of the lute; those passing by stayed a moment longer to hear him, and by the end of the day, there were silver sou mixed in with the deniers. He asked her name; she told him that she was Giselle Boulanger. They talked as he counted his coins—“You were good luck for me, Giselle; I’ve never made so much before”—and he bought her dinner that evening and shared his bed with her that night. She listened to the compositions that he said he had in his head but never played, and his green soul-heart held them both.

  “Giselle” stayed with Philippe a year. He taught her to play, and she found she had a small talent for music herself; he taught her the chansons and told her she had a strong and lovely singing voice. She remained with him until a passing noble heard Philippe and invited him to play for the court in Paris. She had shaken her head sadly when he told her he was going to Paris, when he asked her to accompany him.

  “I won’t go back there,” she told him. “I can’t. But you … You should go, Philippe. Play for the king. You belong there.” Allowing him to leave had devastated her inside, though she tried not to let him see it. His excitement, his pride, and his new ambitions were too obvious, pulsing in the soul-heart of his. She had smiled bravely, had allowed him to give her a pouch of sols he had saved. He had told her that he would return for her, and she knew it to be a comforting lie.

  She remembered her father’s words: “… that’s your gift, daughter …” Her gift—and, it would seem, the payment she must make for the gift the elixir had given her. She realized it as he left her, when she felt the dull malaise slip over her again with the absence of his green heart.

  Her gift. Her curse. This would be a bitter payment, which she would make far too many times.

  *

  After Philippe, there had been a parade of others, and a parade of false names for her as well. She had been living with Jean Petit in Chartres for two years, since 1416, watching his skill painting miniatures strengthening with each passing month. Already, he’d been commissioned to illustrate a Book of Hours for the Archbishop of the cathedral. His star was ascending fast.

  She learned with him and assisted him: she now knew how to mix pigments so the colors would be vibrant and long-lasting; how to trim a brush; how to mix the colors to create new shades and hues. She practiced alongside him, and he helped her find her own skills with painting.

  And for two years, and longer, Perenelle/Giselle/Isabelle also tried to rediscover the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, the elixir that had given her this extended youth—for now, sixteen years gone from Nicolas, she still appeared to be in the mid-20s, her joints blessedly loose, her hair luxuriant, her skin flexible and soft, her eyes unglazed by the film of cataracts. She still feared that each day might be her last, that her age would spew suddenly through her in a matter of seconds or minutes, leaving her an ancient, withered, and dead husk, but each day eventually passed and she was still the same. Often, as Jean painted, she would work in a small laboratory in the back, mixing potions and chemicals, poring over manuscripts she had managed to buy, attempting the spells that she half-remembered, reading the Tarot for guidance.

  It was a laborious climb back. The indefinable, ineffable spark was still there in her efforts—at least while in the company of another’s green soul-heart. But there was a cloud over her mind of the last years with Nicolas. She had to begin again at the beginning, with the experiments she’d started with her father. She began to think that this, too, was a payment for her youth: the elixir had not only made her dependent on the talent of others for her health, but she was little better than a rank apprentice, struggling to comprehend everything set before her.

  If she had the notebook, where she’d written it all down: all the formulae, all the processes, all the observations … But that was gone. That was in Nicolas’ hands. But she persevered, taking in the radiance from Jean’s talent and using it for herself while at the same time she strengthened him.

  As for Jean himself, he was a good person, a devout Christian who treated her well, though she told herself that she wasn’t in love with him, that she wouldn’t allow herself to be
in love with him. He had asked her to marry him several times; she had refused each time even though she knew her obstinacy both puzzled and hurt him. But she could not, knowing that she would either age suddenly and die, or that she would stay eternally the same as he aged. Either way, at some point she would be forced to leave him, because it would be obvious that she was something other than mortal. That was a dangerous thing, for accusations of sorcery or of pacts with Satan could lead to arrest, torture, and a painful, public death.

  She would enjoy Jean while she could. And when she no longer could stay with him, she would leave him and Chartres behind and change her name yet again.

  Jean came in from his studio, his tunic dotted with paint specks where he’d absently wiped his brushes. “It’s too pleasant a day to stay inside,” he told her. “Why not take the air with me, Isabelle?” His long nose wrinkled at the smells in the room; he was already looking older to her, the wrinkles deepening around his eyes and on his forehead. We change so quickly—was it that way for me, too? “It would do you good.”

  She sighed and put a cover over the bubbling retort with its smell of sulfur—a walk might indeed be good for her, clearing the fumes from her head so she could think better. “Give me a moment,” she told him. “I’ll meet you at the door; we could walk to the boulangerie for some croissants …”

  Outside, the air was more pleasant than in her laboratory, she had to agree. They walked with arms linked along the rue Saint-Julien, nodding to the passers-by who knew them, passing the street musicians, the jongleurs, the puppeteers, and the simply indigent who all vied for the loose change of the townspeople and the devout. With the political uproar in the wake of the horrific, costly defeat of Charles VI’s army against the English king Henry V at Agincourt; with the Duke of Burgundy’s capture of Paris last month (though the dauphin had escaped the city); with the king being called le Fou, the Mad, more than le Bien-Aimé, the Beloved; with English troops holding many of the northern cities; with all that, Chartres was uneasy and its mood solemn. The troubles had increased the numbers who came to worship at the great cathedral, the white steeples of which could be seen for miles and which held the Sancta Camisia, the tunic of the Blessed Virgin.

  “I don’t know why you lock yourself inside with the terrible smells,” Jean said to her. “I could teach you to paint portraits of ladies for their lockets—pieces they would wear proudly, like the pendant of your mother’s that you wear: beautiful work, that. But this alchemy …” He shook his head. “It’s not good for your health, Isabelle, and it’s dangerous as well. I’d hate for you to die before your time.”

  She nearly laughed at that. “That’s not something you should worry about,” she told him.

  “Ah, but I do,” he answered. His hand patted hers possessively. “Though that reminds me of something I wanted to tell you. Speaking of alchemy, the news from Paris is that Nicolas Flamel has died.”

  Nicolas dead …

  She couldn’t breathe. She staggered, and Jean’s arm tightened around hers to steady her, stopping in the middle of the narrow, cobbled street. “Isabelle?”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I … I knew Monsieur Flamel once. He’s dead? You’re certain?”

  “That’s what I’m told,” Jean answered. “You look pale, Isabelle. You see, it’s the fumes; they affect you.”

  “I’ll be fine in a moment,” she told him. “Just let me catch my breath …”

  Nicolas dead … If that were true, then she needed to return to Paris to see if she could recover her notebook, and with it, the formula for the elixir. This might be her only chance before it was lost, if it wasn’t already too late.

  *

  She was first told on entering the city that Nicolas Flamel had last lived in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, but that turned out to be a house for the indigent set over a tavern, an edifice that Nicolas had built a few years after she’d left: another one of his charitable efforts to mask from the public the ugliness that she knew was the true Nicolas.

  After establishing that the house was the wrong one, she went back to their estate on the rue des Saints Innocents; she knocked on the door and asked the servant who answered—not Marianne, whom she doubted was still alive—if this was the residence of Monsieur Flamel. Indeed it had been, the maid told her, but the Monsieur had recently died. Perenelle gave her name as M’mselle Jacqueline Fournier, and said that she had unfinished negotiations with Nicolas Flamel and wished to speak to whomever might be in charge of his estate.

  The maid brought her into the front parlor. The room had barely changed from the time she’d left, other than being a decade and a half older and shabbier. Not long afterward, a man entered the room. He was in his mid-to-late 40’s, portly with red-veined cheeks. His clothing was aristocratic and well-made; his hands were fat and looked unused to any labor. He looked at her with eyes half-lost in folds as he inclined his head to her. “M’mselle Fournier,” he said. “I’m Didier Dubois. I am the grandson of Nicolas Flamel and the executor of his estate. I’m told you have been in negotiations with my late grandfather?”

  She nearly could not speak. She stared at Didier, whose name she well remembered: Verdette’s first son, who she’d last seen when he was ten. She marveled that her grandson could appear to be so much older than she, that he had no recognition of her at all, that she could see traces of Nicolas and herself in his face. She wanted to pummel him with questions: how are your children, my great-grandchildren? Why, your firstborn Verdette, who you named after your mother, must be old enough to have children of her own already. What of your brothers and sisters? Are they well? Do you ever talk about your grand-mère Perenelle and remember her?

  But she sat in silence until he cocked his head at her. “M’mselle?”

  “I represent my father, who’s unfortunately too ill to travel,” she told him finally. “Like your grand-père, he is an alchemist. We were negotiating with Monsieur Flamel for some alchemical manuscripts—particularly those that had once belonged to your grand-mère Perenelle Flamel.” Saying her own name again sounded strange in her ears. She described the notebook to Didier as she remembered it: the red leather, the shape, the size. “He had agreed to sell the notebook to us, but then we heard the news of his unfortunate death. I’ve come to see if we can complete the negotiations and take possession of the notebook, which would mean so much to my father’s work.”

  Didier was shaking his head before she finished. “I regret that I’m aware of no such negotiations. I’ve gone through my grand-père’s correspondence and I saw nothing from your father concerning such a notebook.” He raised his hand as Perenelle started to speak. “In any case, I regret to tell you, M’mselle, that the very day that my grandfather died, a young man was seen leaving the house with most of the valuable notebooks and manuscripts that were in the laboratory and library. There’s nothing left of any significant value in his library, and certainly no notebook as you describe. I assure you that I would know of it.”

  A young man, taking with him all the notebooks and manuscripts… . A fist of suspicion clenched her heart, squeezing hard. “How is it that a thief could enter the house so easily, and at so auspicious a time?” she asked.

  “Indeed, M’mselle,” he answered, scowling. “I have asked the household staff that very question, and none of them can give me a satisfactory answer. Unfortunately, I live in Reims and so I wasn’t present at the time. The funeral arrangements were handled by two of my grandfather’s assistants—who are also now suspiciously missing, though neither of them matches the description of the thief. I arrived in Paris after my grandfather’s body was interred. I understand that there are rumors that some of his manuscripts were buried with him in his tomb, but …” His shoulders lifted in a shrug. “You’ll understand that I’m not willing to disturb my grand-père’s grave for rumors. I’m afraid, M’mselle, that your journey here was wasted. If you would like, I can accompany you to the library and his old laboratory, and you may
see for yourself …”

  She was certain that there was no hope, though she allowed Didier to show her the library and laboratory, if only to walk again in her old house. The library had been stripped bare of the important papers: the Book of Abraham was prominently missing, and none of the books on the shelves were her notebook.

  All of it was gone. Vanished.

  She was terribly afraid that she knew where the notebook might be.

  *

  Perenelle spent three days watching the Flamel tomb and noting the flow of people around the Cimetière des Innocents, owned by Saint-Germain-des-Auxerrois—a church to which she and Nicolas had heavily contributed. She made especially certain to pass by the cemetery at various times of the night: to see how it was secured; to determine if there were guards or keepers who patrolled the grounds when the sun fled. If any did, they seemed to stay inside the small church attached to the north end.

  She couldn’t blame them. The stench of the cemetery was nearly unbearable. The Cimetière des Innocents had a fabled reputation, for to be buried in the consecrated soil here, it was said, would release the interred soul immediately into heaven. As a result, the cemetery’s popularity had led first to the establishment of mass graves for the common people, then to the creation of charniers: galleries and arcades built along the cemetery’s walls where the dead were placed on display after the flesh had rotted away from their bones, all so that the ground they’d formerly occupied could be used to bury fresh (and freshly-paying) bodies. During the day, merchants hawked their wares from stands set among the charniers, selling religious trinkets. The stench of decaying flesh was as eternal as the sleep of the dead; Perenelle, like most of the visitors, wore a perfumed scarf during her excursions to the cemetery.

  The Flamel tomb—where she was supposedly interred as well—was near the entrance to the church. A polished granite sarcophagus mounded over the grave with a newly-carved tombstone set on top of it, the marks of the mason’s chisel still fresh on the letters. Three figures dominated the top of the stone, with alchemical signs between them. She stood before the tombstone for some time, trying to imagine Nicolas’ body under the sarcophagus.