The Passion of Cleopatra

by Anne Rice

  "Mother, on the other hand, is beside herself with excitement. She's back from Paris. I don't believe she's spent this much time at our country estate in years. By the time she's finished her preparations, all of Yorkshire will be excited to celebrate you and Mr. Reginald Ramsey as a happily engaged couple."

  "It's so very dear of you both to do this," Julie said. "Truly, Alex."

  "Consider it an outgrowth of my new sensitivity."

  He graced her with a polite peck on the cheek.

  "Where's the Rolls?" he asked. "Didn't Edward drive you?"

  "Oh, I decided to walk."

  "My. That's a great distance. You don't want me to see you home?"

  "I quite enjoy the walk, actually."

  Because I can walk and walk now without fear of ever tiring. Much as your father is probably walking now, clear across Europe.

  "Very well, then," he said.

  But all she said was "It was a pleasure to see you, Alex. And I mean no offense when I say it is also a pleasure to see you somewhat changed."

  He reached up and slid the glasses off the bridge of her nose, exposing her blue eyes to passersby. Then he folded them and placed them gently in her hand.

  "The feeling is mutual, Julie."

  And then she was gone, and after a few minutes, she decided to keep the glasses exactly where Alex had placed them.

  14

  "Alex must leave London at once!" Julie cried.

  She burst into the drawing room without regard for who might be in it. But she could sense Ramses very nearby.

  The doors to the adjacent library opened, and he emerged, alarmed by her cry.

  The conservatory beyond was a riot of blossoms he'd planted before they'd left for Egypt. Blossoms which had exploded to fullness in a matter of minutes after Ramses had sprinkled them with only a few drops of the elixir. They would never die, these flowers, and soon the maid, Rita, would grow suspicious of their vitality and life, and Julie would have no choice but to drop them into the Thames and hope they floated away forever. And it was through the conservatory's stained-glass windows that the sun's rays had awakened Ramses months before.

  But now all of this seemed menacing, somehow, even the low, insistent gurgle of the conservatory's fountain. Overwhelming, laced with darkness. She'd known a return to London might be less than blissful. But it was grief for her father she had feared once she was surrounded by his belongings again; not this overwhelming concern for someone who still lived. Perhaps her immortality gave as much strength to her emotions, be they joyous or grim, as it did to her grip.

  Even after Ramses curved an arm around her, she still felt if she were standing on the deck of a keeling ship.

  "He is obsessed, Ramses. He is utterly obsessed. I never could have predicted it."

  "With you?"

  "No. With Cleopatra." A wolf's growl, the way she said the woman's name. The queen's name. The demon's name.

  Quickly, Ramses guided her into her father's old library off the drawing room, the one they called the Egyptian Room. The handsome bookcases had heavy glass doors to protect the precious volumes within from dust, and small statues and relics lined the top of each. Ramses closed off the drawing room, a sure sign that Rita was still about, preparing platters of food, no doubt.

  They were alone now with her father's old journals and books with his notes scrawled in the margins. None of these things was a comfort. Not in this moment.

  "We will tell him to cancel the party," Julie said, her words coming out of her in a rush. "We'll say you're being called to meet with contacts in India. Then we'll arrange for Alex to take a trip around the world. I can fund it, of course. Perhaps he can go to Paris with his mother. And Elliott's sending home all sorts of money. From every casino in Europe, it sounds like. So it should be a--"

  "But why, Julie? Why now?"

  "You want to see India, don't you? You've said so many times."

  "I want to see the world and I want to see it with you. But to cancel the party? To send Alex away this abruptly? I don't understand what drives this."

  "Don't you see? He's been shaken to his core by what's happened. And if we aren't to tell him the truth about it, he's just going to pine away for that awful, hideous creature."

  "You didn't speak of her with this anger when we learned she was still alive. What has changed?"

  "I didn't think we had anything to fear from her."

  "And now we do?"

  "Yes. Don't you see? Alex...He hasn't done what he vowed to do. He hasn't returned to the business of living, or some tepid definition of it. He's unrecognizable, Ramses. He's a new man, but he's a new man who pines only for her."

  "And you feel jealousy?"

  "No! It's fear, Ramses. I fear for him. For if she has his heart, imagine the damage she can do to the rest of him."

  "And that's why you wish to send him away? To protect him from Cleopatra?"

  "In part. In part, yes. But I also wish for him to have some adventure, some new experience. Something that will fill the need he feels for her. It's as if he's discovered new truths about himself. And if he simply crawls back into the cave of his life and licks his gentlemanly wounds, his obsession with her will grow. And then he might try to look for her. Think of what a disaster that could be, Ramses. What an absolute disaster!"

  "But you cannot send him around the world forever, Julie."

  "I cannot. But I can hope that if he strikes out with this new sense of himself, this new desire to be loved, as he puts it, it will guide him to something else entirely new. Some new passion. Some new woman. Something that will make his thoughts of Cleopatra a distant memory."

  "But Alex Savarell has no passions. This is what makes him Alex Savarell."

  "The old version of him, yes. But you didn't see the man I saw today, Ramses. He's as changed as we are, only he hasn't consumed the elixir."

  "So you wish to send him off in search of a new lover?"

  "Or maybe not. Perhaps many lovers! Let him lose himself entirely in the realm of the senses. Let him move to a tropical isle and read nothing but this D. H. Lawrence fellow. It doesn't matter, Ramses. What matters is that he satisfy this hunger he now feels in some way that doesn't involve that creature. If he needs a harem to do it, I shall fund every last courtesan."

  "Your twentieth century, it has foolish ideas when it comes to harems. Their members were not dolls or statues. They had feelings, requests, demands. The management of a harem was not quite the escape a London aristocrat would like to believe."

  "Ramses. Be serious."

  "I am, Julie," he said, stroking her hair from her face. "I see that in this moment you are very serious, and very much afraid."

  "But you do not share my feelings."

  "If Cleopatra truly wishes to do Alex harm, why did she linger in Alexandria with her handsome new companion? You asked this yourself."

  "And you have said she is unknowable. It's possible she is not truly Cleopatra at all, but some vicious clone. How else to explain her callous disregard for life?"

  "In her family, success was measured in how quickly one killed one's siblings and ascended to the throne. That is one possible explanation for what you now call disregard."

  "I don't speak of her actions in Alexandria. I speak of Cairo only months ago. She murdered at random, Ramses. Men she seduced in alleyways. We have the clippings. We know it was her. Why are you defending her?"

  "I don't defend her," he said quietly. "And I don't defend my actions in the Cairo Museum. Perspective, Julie. That is what I seek to offer you in this moment."

  "Perspective," Julie whispered, as if she had forgotten the meaning of the word.

  "I say this. If she has the callous disregard for life you claim and she wished to do Alex harm, he would be dead already."

  "But don't you see? That's not the type of harm I fear."

  "What is it, darling? What is it that you fear?"

  "I fear that she will turn him into a kind of companion. That he w
ill give himself over to her too fully and become a companion in her darkness."

  "And you fear this because his feelings for her have made him unrecognizable?"

  "Yes," she whispered. "Yes. Ramses. Exactly."

  "I see."

  But he seemed to have no response to this, and the silence that followed allowed the extremity of her thoughts to hang heavily upon her.

  "Oh, I know it's absurd. Sending him on a trip around the world. He would never agree to it. But if there was anything I could do to make him impervious to her charms should she enter his life again, I would do it. I would do it right this instant."

  "This is your guilt, Julie. You believe your lack of love for Alex made him vulnerable to her."

  "You're right. I know that you're right. But to see him so changed, Ramses. On the one hand it was exhilarating, but to know that she was the source of it."

  "And to know she cannot be stopped."

  "That's precisely it, Ramses. That's precisely it."

  "So I offer you this, and I hope it comforts you. She has made no effort to see him. She has walked this earth for months now. During that time, she has allowed him to pine for her, to grieve for her. Take comfort in this, Julie. She may have the power to seduce him. But she has shown no desire to use it."

  "I hope you're right, Ramses. I pray that you are right, even though I am no longer sure to whom I pray."

  He took her in his arms and kissed her forehead. "If I'm wrong, I shall do everything in my power to correct it. I promise you this."

  "What else can be done?" Julie whispered.

  Samir's men continued to watch each ship that arrived from Port Said. They'd also learned the possible identity of the man she traveled with, a doctor by the name of Theodore Dreycliff. His family had left London some time ago.

  "Julie?"

  "Yes, Ramses," she whispered into his chest.

  "Cleopatra. You called her the clone. You insist she can't have Cleopatra's soul. And I try to understand you, but I don't really understand you. Help me grasp this, Julie."

  "I've tried to explain before," she answered. "I often reflect upon it when the hour is late. My father, he was more obsessed with reincarnation than I realized. I learned this from reading his notes in the margins of the books he loved. When he began to study Egypt, he thought Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls. Of course, he soon realized this was a misunderstanding. And he studied it extensively, this misunderstanding. How the Greeks misinterpreted whole sections of the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

  "Yes. Once again, Herodotus is to blame, I fear. During my reign, the high priests taught that the soul went through a succession of journeys. It grew and evolved during these journeys. But they did not take place in the physical realm. They took place in the afterlife."

  "Indeed. But still, this idea that we come back again and again to this plane. It captivated him more than I knew. More than he ever let me know. What do you believe, Ramses?"

  "I believe the spirit and the body take separate journeys through this world. And the spirit's journey lasts far longer."

  "That's not quite an answer, my love."

  "Tell me this first. Do you want to believe your father was reborn? Is that what drives this obsession with your father's obsession?"

  "No. It's what I think of when I think of Cleopatra. For if her spirit moved on at the moment of her actual death, two thousand years ago, if that spirit dwells in another living, breathing mortal on this earth, then how can the creature you raised in the museum truly be her? From where did that creature's soul come? If it has a soul at all."

  Did he still harbor some great love for his last queen, the last queen of Egypt itself? If so, he didn't loosen his embrace. His breath remained steady and even beneath her cheek.

  "Surely, it must wound you, to hear me say these things," she whispered.

  "What wounds me is that I have committed an act for which the consequences seem endless."

  "It mustn't. It mustn't wound you. I don't raise these things to make you feel pain."

  "Of course you don't. But I swear to you, I shall let no harm come to Alex."

  "And neither will I."

  "Good, then in this effort we are joined, as we are in so many other things, my love."

  15

  Cornwall

  The agent and the prim, soft-spoken members of the family told her the castle was a ruin.

  She would be foolish to take it off their hands, they insisted, even for only a year.

  Clearly they did not want to take advantage of this tall, wealthy black woman from Ethiopia.

  Large holes had opened in the roof of both the tower and the great hall, and they couldn't afford to repair them. And so renting it was out of the question, they said. They were in talks to sell it to a conservancy, some organization that might one day turn it into an attraction for tourists who could scale the stair-stepped slopes of the windswept headland on which it stood. Provided, of course, this organization built a strong enough walkway to connect the island to the mainland. It was a short distance, but the drop to the crashing surf below was precipitous, and the current bridge would not hold for much longer.

  But when she pressed them, the family revealed that these supposed talks had dragged on for years now. They could not agree on a sum, and there were so many descendants, each having been given an equal share of the old Norman castle that bore their once-proud last name, they quibbled over every detail. Their pain, their frustration, was evident in the first cables and in their subsequent letter. They lacked the funds needed to maintain a piece of property which had been in their family for centuries, and this filled them with shame.

  Bektaten promised to remove this shame from them.

  She was weary of her London hotel, the venerable St. James' Court, she said, lovely as it was. She wanted retirement.

  She made no mention of the fact that she had with her as always her precious journals, the full account of all her wanderings. And it had been some time since she had copied these into fresh leather-bound parchment volumes. And that work was not to be undertaken in the bustle and noise of London, nor in some fragile city building that might be burned to the ground through human mishap. Bektaten needed a citadel.

  She did not mention at all, of course, that she'd completed her exhaustive search of the recent newspaper accounts of the mysterious mummy of Ramses the Damned discovered in Egypt, and the equally mysterious Reginald Ramsey soon to be betrothed to the famous Stratford Shipping heiress.

  It had been the international gossip of Ramses and Ramsey that had brought her from her remote palace in Spanish Morocco to this cold northern land which she'd avoided in her endless wanderings. The name Ramses the Damned had particularly excited her and disturbed her.

  Centuries ago she had relinquished the fabled British Isles to her old immortal enemy Saqnos. And up until a few hundred years ago, her spies had seen him often, with his fracti, in London. But where was he now? Was he still in existence? If not, she could not help but wonder what had destroyed him. If he did exist, hidden from the prying eyes of the world somewhere, would her presence here draw him out? She dreaded this. She knew that she was conspicuous. She knew that she herself might soon be "an item" in the London papers if she remained here. And that is why she was quite ready to retire to the country, without an attempt to glimpse Ramsey and Stratford for herself.

  If the family would rent Brogdon Castle to her for a year's time, she said quietly, she would leave the building miraculously restored, to become the foundation of a new family fortune.

  But how? they asked. And why?

  She had been blessed, she told them, using a word for good fortune that meant little to her, but which she was confident would mean everything to them.

  All because these blessings had rained down on her for most of her life, she spread them wherever she could.

  Finally, the Brogdon family was seduced, and a two-year lease with an option to purchase was signed.

&
nbsp; Of course, they did not know that the men who served her could mend the castle's gaping holes with their bare hands. It was a job ten mortals would need months to complete; Enamon and Aktamu could finish it in a week. But Bektaten shared none of this.

  Let the Brogdons think her a member of the Ethiopian royal family on a northern sojourn to escape the African sun. Let them think her eccentric and willing to live like a scurrying animal in a dank old castle, where the rooms were ravaged by fierce winds off the Celtic Sea that could rip through the broken windows without warning. No need to tell them these winds posed no threat to her health, that she was strong enough to maintain her poise amidst powerful blows, be them from the fists of several men or the sky itself.

  At last, she was here.

  The long exhausting drive from London was over.

  And with Enamon and Aktamu beside her, she found herself in the presence of the stark beauty and grandeur described in the history books.

  Fully restored, it would be a marvel. And perhaps if she loved it well enough, it would be hers--a new sanctuary for centuries to come. She did not know her mind on this as yet.

  Often new mysteries brought her to new lands. But the mystery of Ramses the Damned was not like other mysteries.

  The curtain walls of the castle were largely intact, as was much of its proud tower facing the roiling Atlantic. The stones missing from the courtyard's floor allowed space for her garden, and as she and her beloved servants roamed the tower, they found multiple rooms where she could house the new volumes of her journals as well as trunks of artifacts and old scrolls and parchments which always journeyed with her. People had lived here at least as recently as fifty years ago. It was quite possible, what she envisioned.

  "Set to work," she told the devoted pair. "Do what you can, that is, after you take me to the village inn where we'll lodge until all this is at least livable. Hire the local workmen if there are any. Spend whatever is necessary."

  A week later the great shipments of furniture arrived, including tapestries, and paintings, and within another week after that, she had softened the harder edges of the castle's vast interior, made it glittering, and even grand.