The Passion of Cleopatra

by Anne Rice

  "Surely you did not come this far solely to disrupt this gathering. Am I mistaken in this, Cleopatra?"

  "You are not. You are not mistaken."

  "Very well, then," Julie said.

  With one outstretched arm, she gestured to the eastern wing of the house, opposite from where the party was currently taking place. They'd round it and then proceed straight to Elliott's beloved Roman temple. It was a good distance from the western lawn and would offer them all the privacy they could ask for.

  After what felt like an eternity, Cleopatra began to walk.

  Julie followed. They walked silently in between an empty, manicured garden and the side of the main house, before they emerged onto the great expanse of rolling green. As they walked, Cleopatra turned her head at the distant sounds of the party, at the brief glimpse of guests standing on the western lawn before the high wall of hedge concealed the party entirely.

  Impossible for Julie to read her expression.

  Suspicion? Longing?

  With each step, Julie had to remind herself that it was safe to be alone with this creature now. That she could not be overpowered, and if she could not be overpowered, then there was no need for her to be afraid. And every second she kept her away from Alex felt like a victory.

  The temple stood atop a grassy swell in the landscape, tucked against a dense wall of oak and ash trees. Its heavy steel door stood open.

  Inside, shadows and statues awaited them.

  24

  He would save her.

  He would show her his value once again.

  He would rescue her from some terrible scene in front of all these aristocrats and then she would declare him her protector and guardian and she would use him for something more than sensual release and guidance in the modern world.

  She would call him dear Teddy again and they would go back to traveling the world.

  Teddy was sure of this.

  He was sure of this because he was drunk.

  But not so drunk he couldn't scale the service gate he'd found the night before.

  Liquid courage. That was all. What he'd come to do would require a sip or two of brandy, and so he'd had several dozen before leaving the inn. Why he'd brought the small sharp knife he'd stolen from the inn's kitchen, he wasn't sure. Which immortal did he plan to use it on? The one he'd come to threaten or the one he'd come to save? It wouldn't work on either. But this hadn't mattered to him as he left the inn.

  Because he was drunk.

  Was he more drunk now than when he'd left?

  Mustn't be distracted by these senseless calculations. Must instead get the lay of the land so he could avoid a receiving area and the possibility of a guest list.

  What mattered now was that he was on the property, and that he had finally stopped crying like a humiliated little boy.

  The night before he had walked the perimeter of the estate. Learned its gates and access doors and the various points at which the height of its stone wall varied. He'd assumed she might want to enter in some secret fashion. With him, of course. And so he'd mapped out several ways in.

  The service road on which he now stood traveled towards the back of the property. There were fresh tire tracks in the dirt, probably from one of the catering vehicles. Although why it had ventured so far from the house was beyond him. Where had it parked? Next to the pond he'd glimpsed the night before, the one behind the small replica of the Pantheon and its accompaniment of trees? That was a great distance from where it sounded like the party was taking place.

  Directly ahead was a small manicured garden. Just beyond it, the main house. This area was positively gloomy with shade at this hour. No wonder they'd chosen to host the party on the western lawn. The stone terrace on this side was also smaller. And through its multi-paned windows, he saw no shadows or movement in the house.

  If the doors were unlocked, this would be his way in, for sure.

  Victory!

  He slipped through them, found himself inside a small sitting room-cum-library. Heard instantly the clop and clatter of servants rushing up from the basement with their silver trays of steaming hors d'oeuvres. This side of the house was almost entirely devoid of guests, and if he lingered here, he would draw attention.

  He moved on.

  He stepped into the hallway and was almost run down by a tall, tuxedoed man who offered a brusque smile and said, "Party's this way, sir."

  Teddy nodded and gave him a dumb smile. The servant continued on, consumed with his business.

  He was a footstep away from entering the house's front hallway when he heard a name that stopped him in his tracks.

  "Sibyl Parker!" a woman's voice cried.

  *

  Sibyl froze.

  The woman walking towards her now with her arms out in welcome was surely the hostess of this party, and she was greeting the sight of an uninvited guest as if it were a joyous occurrence.

  How many scripts had Sibyl prepared and rehearsed for this moment? Now it seemed as if none of them would be necessary.

  She managed her best smile.

  "You are Sibyl Parker, are you not?" the woman said. She took Sibyl's hands gently in hers. Nothing less than delight in her smile. "There's been an illustration or two of you in the Daily Herald. Do tell me I'm not mistaken or I'll be horribly embarrassed. You are Sibyl Parker, the author?"

  "I am, indeed, and you must be the Countess of Rutherford."

  "Please. Call me Edith. I'm a great admirer of your books. I must confess I prefer them to actual travel. Oh, of course, you must meet our mysterious Mr. Ramsey!"

  "Mr. Ramsey, yes." It left her breathless to say the man's name in such an ordinary exchange. For in her mind, it had taken on connotations almost mythic.

  "Do come inside. A glass of wine is waiting for you in the drawing room and then you'll find Mr. Ramsey on the western lawn right outside. What a privilege," Edith said, drawing Sibyl up the front steps with a hand against the small of her back. "What an absolute privilege! If I had my copies of your books here, I would ask you to autograph them. But I'm afraid I'll have to settle for your signature on a napkin, if that's quite all right."

  "It's absolutely all right," Sibyl whispered, so relieved by this turn of events she felt near tears. "Whatever you would like, Edith...I am sure it would be absolutely all right. I cannot thank you enough for your hospitality."

  "Say nothing of it. Alex, my dear boy. This is Sibyl Parker, the Egyptian novelist. You have your memories of your recent trip to Egypt. I have her delightfully entertaining books. And so it shall remain, as I have no desire to travel to any Egypt that does not resemble the one depicted in her novels."

  Her son was youthful and handsome. But there was a sadness to his eyes that seemed to intensify as he studied her.

  "I must say, Miss Parker," he whispered, "you do look familiar to me."

  "Well, of course she does. She's a world famous novelist."

  "I'm not much for books, I must confess. Certainly not fiction. Most of what I tend to read is rather...dry." He spoke this as if it were a realization he'd only recently come to, and his embarrassment over it was fresh. "Is this your first time in Yorkshire?"

  "It is my first time in England after many years."

  "Ah, well...perhaps you simply remind me of someone, then."

  She felt these words, and the intensity with which he'd said them, might be the first sort of clue to what had brought her here. But it was impossible to question him now, on the front steps of the house.

  Edith glanced quickly over Sibyl's shoulder, a sign that more guests were arriving behind her.

  "I cannot thank you enough for this reception," she said, with a bow of her head. "You have been most gracious. Both of you."

  There were more thank-yous and smiles. Then she found herself stumbling down the front hallway, towards a sunlit drawing room. Just outside the open terrace doors, tuxedoed waiters stood at attention with trays full of wineglasses. Beyond, a small sea of guests mingled on the
vast green lawn in between two high walls of hedge.

  "Care for a glass of wine, miss?" one of the waiters asked.

  But she had already seen him, and the sight of him rendered her silent.

  Mr. Ramsey. Handsome, Egyptian. Nodding and listening attentively to the person who was speaking to him now. Every detail of his physical being, from his olive skin to his handsome jawline to the startling blueness of his eyes, flooded her with such overpowering memory she found herself speechless and breathless. This was not the vague ink drawing in the news clipping. This was the man from her dreams, in the flesh.

  For now she could see the man a short distance from her had appeared not just in her more recent nightmares, but in another dream as well, a dream that had stayed with her throughout her life, a dream which had formed the basis of her novel The Wrath of Anubis.

  This was the man with whom she'd walked the streets of some vague ancient city. She was absolutely sure of it! The man whose face and bearing she'd never been able to recall once she was awake; whose presence had always been an awareness and little else. This was the man who had provided her with common garb and requested she view her own kingdom and her people through the eyes of one of its ordinary citizens. And his living, breathing presence before her now was like a dab of watercolor bringing richness and color to something that had been but a pencil sketch seconds before.

  It had not been just a dream. He had not been just a dream.

  Again this question shook the earth on which she stood: How could she have dreamed about a living, breathing man she had never before met?

  Unless she had met him, somehow, somewhere. Unless it was not a dream, but a memory. A memory of a man named...

  "Ramses," Sibyl whispered.

  His eyes met hers through the crowd.

  At that very moment, an arm encircled her waist. Too close, too suddenly intimate. She almost cried out, but she was immediately startled by a blast of hot breath against her neck. With it came the stench of hard liquor.

  "Do not move," the man whispered fiercely, giving each word terrible emphasis.

  The man stood behind her now like an old lover who had come to surprise her. But he was causing a sharp pressure against the base of her spine. "That's a knife you feel," he said. "Sharp as a scalpel. Move one inch and I shall drive its sharp blade into your spine. You'll lose the use of your legs instantly. You might never walk again."

  When she tried to speak, her breath came out in a series of weak gasps.

  "Come with me," he whispered. "Don't make a scene. We are old friends. Act any differently and I'll cut you and flee this place before anyone can see you're bleeding to death. Walk."

  He was deranged, this man, deranged and drunk. But the grip with which he held the knife against her seemed utterly, terribly confident. And so she obeyed. He walked behind her, with only an inch of space between his chest and her back, one arm looped around her shoulders to give the illusion of intimacy.

  They couldn't walk a good distance like this. It was too strange, too conspicuous. But he guided her quickly in the opposite direction of the guests, into the deserted first-floor rooms behind them, past the procession of servants and waiters traveling up and down the basement stairs. With each step that took them farther away from people, from the comfort of the string music outside, her terror intensified, and he relaxed his pretentious pose.

  Now he gripped the back of her neck. He steered her through an empty library, down a short hallway.

  "Who are you?" she gasped. "What do you want?"

  In what seemed like one motion, he'd thrown open the door to a small washroom and hurled her inside. By the time he'd drawn the door shut behind him, he'd brought the knife to her throat.

  "Who are you, Sibyl Parker? Who are you really? And why do you seek to destroy my queen?"

  *

  Impossible.

  He was seeing things, imagining things. Thoughts of Cleopatra had nagged him all day. The idea that she might make an appearance here, it was possible, of course. For what purpose, he had no idea.

  But Samir and his men had been watching the ships, the ports. So far, no reports.

  And that was all well and good.

  But still, she was on his mind, as they now said, and always would be. And that's why he'd recognized her gaze in the face of the pale-skinned, golden-haired woman who had appeared just inside the terrace doors. Her eyes. The woman had Cleopatra's eyes. Her eyes before the resurrection. Before their color had changed. Brown and wide and expressive and full of intelligence and perception. And her poise. Perfect, upright, assured.

  And then she was gone.

  Lost behind a sudden shift in the sea of guests all around him. Nowhere to be seen on the terrace or the steps or the lawn on either side of him.

  He had begun to rudely ignore the guests to whom he'd been speaking seconds before. He managed the most polite excuse he could and departed.

  Where had she gone, this woman? Perhaps her resemblance to Cleopatra was a trick of the mind. But her sudden disappearance? This was cause for immediate suspicion.

  A hand gripped his elbow.

  Alex was standing next to him. "Don't go too far, old chum. We're toasting you both in just a few minutes. Fetch Julie if you can."

  "Yes, of course, Alex. Thank you."

  Yes, he would fetch Julie. But first, this strange vanishing woman with Cleopatra's eyes.

  *

  Fear moved through her in a wave.

  What was there to fear in this small temple? A replica of the Pantheon, it seemed, with a gallery of Roman statues in alcoves lining its walls and a statue on a pedestal in the center. Was it Caesar? She could not tell. Her memories of his likeness were entirely lost to her now.

  So where did this fear come from? Not dread. Not anxiety. But a sudden, violent paralysis throughout her entire body.

  Sibyl Parker. From Sibyl Parker, this fear comes. Does she send it willfully? Or is that what she now feels? It was exhausting her to try to make sense of this.

  "You are ill," Julie said.

  No trace of malice in this statement, just a kind of gentle fascination.

  Still gentle, this Julie. Why so gentle?

  "How is it that you are so ill?" Julie asked her. "Haven't you healed completely from the fire?"

  "I healed from the fire. The illness...it is in my mind."

  "Whatever it is you want, I will give it to you, or I will have Ramses give it to you, on one condition."

  "And so we negotiate now, you and I? The queen who fed Rome and the aristocrat who wept her way into the arms of a pharaoh?"

  "Wear your cruelty however you like. It doesn't fit you anymore. You need help. You are here for help. And that is what I offer you now. Help."

  "But on one condition. So tell me, dear, sweet Julie Stratford, what is this condition?"

  "You must stay away from Alex Savarell. Forever. You must leave him be entirely."

  "Leave him be entirely," she whispered.

  How unexpected, the anger she felt at this request. The rage she felt when she saw the fear in Julie's eyes, so similar to the fear in Teddy's when she'd left him a few hours ago.

  "Leave him to forget me and our time together, you mean."

  "Yes," Julie whispered, "that is exactly what I mean."

  "And so he thinks of me often, does he? And this pains you? Do you love him still?"

  "I never loved him. Not as a woman should love her husband."

  "I see. So you think of me as poison, his thoughts of me as a corruption."

  "He is tortured by memories of your madness."

  "My madness?" she roared. "My madness born of your lover's guilt and arrogance! This is how you describe what was done to me? As a madness that comes from the fiber of my being and not his? Tell me, sweet, dear Julie, how did he offer you the elixir? Did he anoint you with oils? Did he uncap the bottle in some palatial bedchamber while musicians played? Did he explain to you its power and its defects? What you would gain, wh
at you would lose? He did me no such kindness in the Cairo Museum. He rendered me a monster and abandoned me."

  "He offered it to you two thousand years before. You--"

  "And I refused it! I refused it and still he forced it upon me two thousand years later in death. In a death I chose!"

  Why did Julie cry now? Was she simply afraid? Or was there such pain in Cleopatra's words, she too was overwhelmed by it. It seemed almost as if she felt guilty herself.

  "He has said these very things, hasn't he?" Cleopatra asked. "He knows what he did. It tortures him, because he knows."

  "He loved you," Julie whispered.

  "Twice he abandoned me. Once as my empire fell, then again at the very moment when he brought me back to a life I did not want. May you, his new bride, be forever spared the kind of love he showed me."

  "I am offering you what you want, but I cannot erase the centuries between you two. And neither can he."

  "What I want...?" she muttered, circling past Julie. The answer to this question seemed to stare down at her on all sides, from the strange, stoic face of every statue in this shadowed tribute to the empire that had conquered her. "I want to know who these men are, these men of Rome. These men whom I should know. Even if these statues, these faces, are but caricatures, there should be some facet of them I recognize. Something of the cut of their chin or their hair or their armor. And yet my memories of them fade to nothing. More vanish with each journey of the sun across the sky. Caesar..." She turned towards the statue in the center of the floor. "Is this meant to be Caesar? I would not know. The man I lay with, the man with whom I bore a son, his face is lost to me. His smell. The sound of his voice. Lost to me. And my son. I am told I bore a son by him, a son who briefly became pharaoh after my death, and yet when I reach for any memory of him I swim in a great yawning blackness in my mind. His name, it is meaningless to me. And what next? What next will be consumed?"

  "Caesarion," Julie whispered. "His name was Caesarion."

  "Do you delight in this, Julie Stratford? Do you delight in my undoing?"

  "Do you still wish to snap my neck solely because you know it will hurt Ramses?"

  "That is not why I have traveled this far."

  "Then I take no delight in your anguish, Cleopatra. And neither will he. But you have still not told me what you want."

  "I want the elixir," she said bitterly. How she hated the sound of her own desperation. "He did not use enough when he brought me back. There were holes all over my body. I could see my own bones and it drove me mad. Now there are holes in my mind, my memory. They grow bigger each day. There is only one possible thing that can heal them. And it lies with him. And it is the only reason I would ever wish to lay eyes on him, or you, again."