Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  King Charles’ stone visage seemed to melt. Instead, the face there became that of Nicolas—Polidori—looking sternly out across the square, his face not stone but flesh. The statue’s new face glanced down at her; he winked and smiled. Behind them, she heard Blake cry out in surprise; he was looking at the statue also. Polidori immediately stopped the chanting, his hands fell back to his coat, and the statue’s face was merely a stone replica of King Charles again. A few strides behind them, Catherine shushed Blake, taking his arm firmly.

  “So it wasn’t you the guillotine took,” Emily husked out.

  “What?” Polidori said in mock outrage, pressing his hand to his breast. “Why, certainly it was. You saw Robespierre’s head held up and displayed to the cheering throngs. Ah, the cheers that arose then … I distinctly remember the look of pleasure on your face, even though you tried to hide it—and I know the part you played in bringing down poor Robespierre, even though you might deny it.” Then his tone changed, and his lips tightened. “People believe what they see, Miss Pauls. The evidence of their eyes is all they need. I suspect your friend Blake is an excellent example of exactly that. If one sees angels and hears them talking, how can you fail to believe in them? If you witness the guillotine taking Robespierre’s head, then the deed was done. No questions. No suspicions.”

  “Only another innocent man killed in your place.”

  “Oh, the poor man was far from innocent, believe me,” Polidori chuckled. “Why, even you might have found him to be a fitting substitution. And it was far from easy for me, as well. That spell wasn’t as simple as putting a face on a statute for a few moments. I not only had to make my poor companion look like me, but I had to make my own face unrecognizable. I had to maintain the spell for hours and there were times when it very nearly failed me. I had to shoot the poor man in the jaw, so that he couldn’t speak and ruin my deception. The effort of that enchantment kept me in my bed, helpless, for days afterward. But you don’t care about my little sufferings—let’s return to Antoine. I’ll ease your fears, Miss Pauls. I assure you he is well and truly dead, though I’ll admit that part of me would rather continue to revel in your fear and guilt.”

  “Then why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I believe the two of us have made a mistake in being enemies.”

  “You hardly gave me any choice in the matter.”

  “I’ll grant you that. But look at how you prepared today. I could have done the same. I could have placed a pistol in my coat—a better and more devastating one than you probably have in that bag—and you know already that I can disable you with a well-placed spell. If I wanted to hurt you in that way, I could have done it the very moment you arrived; I could have brought people of my own with me, as well, to ensure that I’d have the opportunity to escape. I could have shot you, and in the confusion afterward, have hacked off your own head with a sword. Why, I could have killed your Lord Byron yesterday after luncheon, just so you couldn’t feed from him anymore, after he’d told me about Blake and Turner and all of the rest of them around you. They could be dead if I wanted it so. I could have forced you to run once more, hungry and desperate and still guilty about what you may have done to poor Antoine, if that were truly my desire. Will you grant me that much?”

  She lifted her chin but didn’t answer.

  “I’ve been Polidori for several years now,” he continued. “As Byron told you, I’ve been attending medical school in Edinburgh and will graduate next year. I’m learning so much, and I intend to learn more. Byron’s told you that I’ve been writing?”

  “He said they were strange stories.”

  Polidori laughed. The sound of his amusement nearly startled her; she couldn’t remember when she’d last heard him laugh so easily. “Certainly they are strange. My, or should I say ‘our,’ experiences undoubtedly would seem odd to someone outside them. You’ve heard the folktales about the creatures called vrykolakas or strigoi or vampyres? I’ve been thinking of working on a story concerning them, since they have, well, a certain affinity to our own situation.”

  “I fail to see how.”

  He laughed again. “Then perhaps you’ll let me explain all this to you. Meet me for dinner tomorrow night, Miss Pauls. You choose the location. Take whatever precautions you feel necessary. Just—” he glanced meaningfully behind them—“don’t bring along guests this time. I want to demonstrate that I can be trusted alone with you. Perhaps it can be the start of a new beginning between us. We will never be lovers again, I suspect, but perhaps we can be allies.”

  She started to refuse, but the look he gave her was so open that she couldn’t say the words. There was no green heart to Nicolas, or perhaps she couldn’t sense it because of the elixir they’d shared. “You’ll bring my notebooks?” she asked. “You’ll give them to me then?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, almost sadly, then hurried to speak before she could say anything else. “As I told you, Perenelle’s old notebook is in a fragile condition, and I’m loath to move it more than I need to. They’re both together, but I need to recover them from their current location. They’re currently in Edinburgh, not London; after all, I’d not expected to actually meet you yet. I will give them to you, but later. Perhaps by then you’ll understand that I’m no threat to you. Tomorrow night, Miss Pauls?”

  She hesitated, but she knew that she’d already made the decision. She hoped it was the right one. “I’ll meet you,” she said. “I’ll send word to Lord Byron this afternoon as to where.”

  He smiled then, fully, and bowed to her in an old-fashioned manner. “Merci beaucoup,” he said. He tipped his hat to her and to the Blakes. “Tomorrow night, then.”

  “Is he French?” Blake asked her, and Emily nodded, watching him hailing a carriage at the end of the square. “That explains much,” Blake said. “The angels don’t like him. They say he makes them weep.”

  “He has that quality,” she answered. “In abundance.”

  *

  Verdette slid sinuously between Emily’s legs, rubbing against her stockings under the long skirt and watching Catherine warily as Blake’s wife arranged Emily’s hair. “Really, I can put her in her cage,” Emily said, looking at Catherine in the mirror of her dresser. “She’s so badly behaved with other people …”

  The image of Catherine in the mirror smiled over her head. “Not to worry,” Catherine answered. “I’ll just stay out of Her Majesty’s way and we’ll get along famously.”

  Emily had to admit that, as people went, Verdette tolerated Catherine like no other. No, she wouldn’t allow the woman to touch her, and she hissed if Catherine accidentally came too near, but she allowed Catherine to be within paw’s reach without immediately lashing out at her. To Emily’s mind, this was a tremendous act of approval on the part of Verdette, one with which she agreed wholeheartedly. Catherine had become a true friend in the time she’d been here as Emily, and the obvious mutual respect of the Blakes for each other was a model for marriage, in Emily’s opinion.

  When I find someone about which I feel that way …

  “You’ve lovely hair,” Catherine said as she brushed. “So strong and so soft, and such a gorgeous color. I swear that mine has become little better than straw, and more gray than brown. What’s your secret?”

  “I’ve just been fortunate,” Emily answered, “and I think your hair is exquisite. Mine flies everywhere in this weather. At least yours behaves itself.”

  Catherine laughed, a rich contralto that seemed to almost shimmer in the air. “This Polidori,” Catherine said. In the mirror, she caught her upper lip in her teeth momentarily as she worked at a knot. “William’s feelings can be strange sometimes, but I’ve learned to trust his intuition. When he said the angels didn’t like Mr. Polidori, well …”

  “And you, Catherine? What did you think of him?”

  “I thought he was handsome enough, but every so often there was something in his face that made me look away, as if I’d glimpsed something I
didn’t want to see.”

  “I think you’re the angel to which William was referring.”

  Catherine laughed again at that. “Still, are you certain you’re doing the right thing, going to see him this evening?”

  “I’ll be in public,” she answered. “That will be enough.” She knew it for a lie. She’d laid out the Tarot earlier this afternoon, before Catherine had arrived, and the cards had given her hints of problems, with swords predominating both of the readings. She’d spent time in the small laboratory she rented a few blocks away, making certain she had protections against attack, though she worried about how quickly she could respond to a spell from him. She had her own spells prepared as well, but she knew that played to his strength, not hers. Being in public was no panacea, either, not if he were willing to risk exposing himself and having to change his identity once more—and that was something they’d both done often. She’d even toyed with doing the same: a bribe to the maître d’ to place a package under the table for her, and she could discover whether an immortal could survive an explosion, and she could be gone long before the police came looking for her. “I’ll be safe,” she said, though she wasn’t nearly as confident as she pretended to be.

  “I won’t be comfortable until I know you’re safe,” Catherine said. Verdette mewled at that, as if agreeing with Catherine’s comment. She bumped hard against Emily’s shin; she reached down to scratch the cat’s neck. “Promise me that you’ll call on us tomorrow morning.”

  “I promise.” Emily leaned back against Catherine, who rested her hands on Emily’s shoulders. In the mirror, she saw Catherine press her lips to the crown of her head, a touch she barely felt. “Thank you, Catherine,” she said. “You don’t know how much your friendship means to me.”

  Catherine’s lips curved upward. Her brown eyes found Emily’s green ones in the mirror. “Somehow, you remind me of William when he was younger,” she told Emily. “You’re so full of hope and light, and you’ve brought so much comfort to both of us. Please promise you’ll be careful. William believes the angels never lie to him, after all.”

  “I know,” Emily told her. “And I will.”

  *

  Lord Byron had made arrangements for Emily and Polidori to dine in a small room off the main dining room of the Society of Eccentrics, a gentleman’s club with a Covent Garden address, of which Byron was a member. Women were not permitted to either join the club or to enter its chambers, but this particular room, attached to the club, possessed a separate outside entrance and was sometimes used by members who wished to converse with a woman—often a mistress with whom the member didn’t wish to appear in public—over dinner. The waiters knew to be discreet, and there would likely be other diners in the room with them.

  Byron intimated that there were other, even more private rooms just off the dining room that could be hired if she wished, as well. She assured him those wouldn’t be necessary.

  Emily arrived a quarter hour after their arranged time, telling the coachman to wait for her. She stood for several long breaths on the street outside, arguing internally with herself. She’d tried—again—to read the Tarot before coming; again, the reading was confused and muddled, and rife with the dangerous swords. Eventually, she hefted her reticule, heavy as before with her pistol as well as a few vials, and went to the door. She lifted the knocker in the shape of an owl and let it fall once, the resulting thud sounding like a cannon shot. She could imagine the passers-by on the street staring at her and speculating as to the type of woman she might be.

  A waiter opened the door for her. There were two other couples in the room, each in their own corner at candlelit, small tables. In the corner just to her right, she saw Polidori, already rising from his seat to greet her. He was smiling, and the expression on his face seemed to be relief at her arrival. “Good evening, Miss Pauls,” he said as the waiter seated her. “I’m glad we could arrange to meet.”

  “You may thank Lord Byron,” she told him. “And as to being glad … well, that remains to be seen. I still don’t have my notebooks.”

  “Ah.” Polidori’s lips tightened into a compressed smile, “as cautious as ever, but I can assure that the notebooks are now on their way to London. But we have time tonight, and don’t need to immediately discuss business. Was your journey here comfortable? I love the evening air this time of year—I find it bracing …”

  The waiter brought the soup course as they discussed the weather and how long they’d each been in London. Polidori seemed to be familiar with Shelley’s latest scandal as well, and mentioned that he bought one of Blake’s illustrated works from a bookseller on Pall Mall. It wasn’t until the second course, with the bottle of wine between them half-emptied, that Polidori put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.

  “We should work together,” he said softly, pitching his voice so that the other diners in the small room could not hear his words. “I have ability with magic that you don’t possess, and you … well, you have the better aptitude for the science of our twinned goals. We could work together as we did before.”

  She nearly laughed at the audacity of the remark, the wine fumes in her head clearing as if they’d never been there. “We never worked together. Antoine and I worked together. With you, I worked on my part alone, when you weren’t forcing me to translate scrolls and work for you. I worked for you. Never with you.”

  He leaned back again, and there seemed to be confusion in his gaze. “Was it truly that bad?”

  “It was worse. You just never saw it because things were exactly as you wanted them to be.”

  His cheeks had the grace to color slightly under the stubble. “I didn’t understand, back then. It was a different time, with different mores and different attitudes. That was centuries ago.”

  “I assure you that you still don’t understand.” The waiter arrived again, placing a slice of lamb with carrots and a mint sauce before them. Any appetite that Emily had had vanished. Polidori leaned forward again.

  “You have to admit that we two have abilities that none of the sheep around us possess.”

  “I don’t think of them as sheep.” Emily stared at the plate in front of her; her fork scraped at the pattern around the rim of the china as she set it down.

  “Not all of them, but many of them are little better than that, and about as intelligent. Think, Perenelle …”

  “Mr. Polidori, I’m sorry, but that’s not my name, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use it. As I’ve already told you, I’m no longer the woman who once possessed that name and I’ve tried very hard to forget that time.”

  “Miss Pauls, then, if you want to use the niceties of this time.” His knife sawed at the lamb; he placed a bite in his mouth; she watched him chew and swallow, closing his eyes momentarily. “I truly don’t care,” he continued. “If you want to know why I wanted to meet with you, this is it. Think of what we could do together: we could create a group of immortals like us—people who would understand us because they would share the same qualities. We could lead them. The possibilities are staggering: why, once in place, we would never die, never lose our youth, never have to be replaced. I ask you to consider this: what if the great leaders of history could have remained in power forever: Alexander, Julius Caesar, Queen Elizabeth, Napoleon. Can you imagine the grandeur they could have achieved, the empires they could have built? That could be us. That could be forever us.”

  “Nothing lasts forever. Not even us. Not any longer. We both know that: Antoine taught us that we, too, can die.”

  He smiled as he cut another slice of the lamb, his knife grating against the plate. He speared the piece on his fork, lifting it to his mouth. “Which means that we can control the immortals we create. We can end their long lives as easily as we create them.” He placed the lamb delicately in his mouth.

  “You want to establish a Reign of Terror, only one that lasts forever—because that will feed the part of you that was affected by the elixir. You see yourself as this
great leader. You want to be the elite of the elite.”

  He shrugged and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “We both need to feed. Any immortals we create will also have their own peculiar needs. You and I, we are the true vampyres, feeding not on blood but on emotions and passions. Your Antoine, had he survived the guillotine, would have had his own requirements; we’ll just never know what they might have been.” Polidori’s words made Emily think of Verdette, back in her rooms. “For that matter,” Polidori added, “think of what you could do: all the artists and writers and scientists would come to beg at your feet for your help, and the creative arts would flourish as they never have. You could gorge on the Arts as never before. You could have all the resources and all the time you needed for your own research and interests; you could become the equal of any artist or scientist who ever lived. Yourself. Imagine that world. All we need to achieve it is the true formula. Give me that, and the world is ours. Ours alone.”

  She sniffed. “Now we come to it. You want the formula. What if I tell you that I’ve not yet discovered it?”

  Polidori took another bite of the lamb. “I wouldn’t believe you. I know you. You have it; you wouldn’t have given Antoine the flawed version.”

  She forced herself to continue to stare into his eyes. “Even if that were true,” Emily told him, “and I’m not saying that it is, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  He put down his utensils on the tablecloth, leaning back until his chair creaked in protest. His handsome, dark eyes regarded her from their deep-set sockets. “Of course not—in your position, I would say the same, because if you give me the formula, then I have no reason to leave you alive except for the pleasure I receive from your anguish. I’m assuming that you won’t divulge the formula to me.” His forefinger stabbed at the tablecloth, so hard that his plate rattled. “However, I don’t need the formula, only the elixir itself. Keep your secret, if you must, as your protection. All you need do is produce the elixir for us to use together. Examine yourself, honestly. Tell me you’re not tempted, even just the slightest bit. Tell me that you don’t want to stop hiding from the world because it won’t accept you. Tell me that you haven’t felt lonely and alone. The world is changing, more than it has at any time since our beginnings. The time of royalty and kings is gone—what happened in France has proven that, as does the defeats Britain is suffering in their new American war. The world revels in its Napoleons now and desires rulers and emperors who don’t come from royal stock. That’s us: you and me. This is our time—we should grasp it.”