“You have, yes.” It was a few dozen acres of land and something that sounded like a small palace. Cornelius was mostly to be found there when he wasn’t in his apartments in the city. It was where his wife spent most of her time, if I recalled correctly.
“War isn’t something we want the women to understand,” Cornelius said, “but we can’t pretend it isn’t still inside of us either. Sometimes we need a place to go to face that war, in privacy, where nobody can be harmed. I speak from experience when I say these things. And so, when the need arises I have been known to collect wayward souls such as yourself and offer them the use of my estate, which is far too large for my family alone. My advice is to accept this offer. We have a carriage waiting.”
* * *
I accepted the offer.
There were other options. I could have abandoned my station in life entirely and gone off somewhere alone, but the fact that I was on an island at the time—an island rapidly filling up with civilized people—made disappearing into any remaining wilds less feasible. It wasn’t exactly a temperate zone either. If I let go and became completely unhinged, when winter came I’d probably end up hurting someone just in the interest of finding a warm place to stay. I also didn’t know how close I was to becoming that completely unhinged person, so getting out of the city was probably a good thing.
Helping my decision was the fact that every time I looked at one of the two men at the door I swore I was looking at king Khufu of Kemet, an Egyptian pharaoh who had, needless to say, been dead for some time. I took heart in the fact that the other guy didn’t look like anyone in particular. Hopefully that meant I was only about 50% insane.
Cornelius’s mansion did not end up being nearly as countrified as I might have hoped, but it was quite large and quite private, taking up what had to be a sizable portion of the county of York. It was one of those vast structures that made one think of Versailles in terms of architectural ambition if not grandeur and pomp.
We arrived at the door of the estate by mid-afternoon the following day, having not bothered to rest or pack clothing. We literally exited the gentlemen’s club, hopped in the carriage, and rode straight off without a break. He didn’t say so, but the sense was that I had been legally remanded into his care with the understanding that he would be getting me out of London as quickly as possible.
My friend’s penchant for collecting wayward souls was clearly no exaggeration on his part, as became evident the instant the carriage came to a stop before the main entrance. There was no way to get advance word to the house to expect us because we didn’t delay in any way and there were no phones or telegrams back then, and carrier pigeons were no longer in style. The closest thing to advance word was the horn Cornelius’s man sounded when we crossed the gates. Despite this, Cornelius’s wife—Margritte, whom I’d met only twice—his youngest daughter Joanne, and five members of the household staff were all standing there when we arrived as if our appearance had been anticipated for days.
“Why Mr. Bates, it is such a pleasure to have you!” Margritte exclaimed, clutching my hands with the strength of a drowning woman. (I was using several surnames at this time, and Bates was one of them. The more money I had the more last names I found it necessary to collect.)
“It’s lovely to see you again,” I greeted back. “Thank you for opening up your home to me.”
Margritte was a handsome woman for her age, the echo of a great youthful beauty still detectable. It was more obvious in her children—all daughters—who had inherited most of it. The eldest daughter, Mary, was the kind of beauty men told stories about. Appropriately enough, she was wed to a viscount.
Joanne was the least fortunate of the sisters, genetically. She was quite lovely, but not breathtakingly so, which in this family made her unattractive by dint of comparison. She was the only unmarried daughter left for Cornelius and Margritte, but if the rumors were to be believed, it was not due to lack of suitors.
This was my first time in her company, but our formal introduction would have to wait, for she nodded, turned, and went back inside without a word. It was a mild social rudeness everyone present chose to ignore.
* * *
There was a room prepared for me already, after a fashion. The estate had enough guest rooms to host a king and his retinue, so I was really just taking one of the many already-prepared bedrooms as my own. It was a whole lot better than any prison I might have otherwise been enjoying had someone not spoken for me, so I had no complaints.
I also had no clothes. I’d attended the evening’s events in my finest suit, and fled London in that same suit, and everything else I owned was in an apartment for which I had the only key. Cornelius offered to send a man back for my things, and that was fine, but I had to tell this man what to fetch and where to find it, and so far I was having trouble arranging my thoughts around that task. The problem was I couldn’t seem to visualize the flat in my mind, because whenever I tried I realized I was actually thinking about this little home I used to have in Italy about fifteen hundred years earlier. And when I was able to get that out of my mind the next three locations that came up were a Spanish villa, one of my homes in Carthage, and the top floor of a bordello in southwest India. Not only were all of those places utterly wrong, they ceased to exist long ago. (Except possibly the bordello.)
I could have sent his man along with the key and let him figure out where my clothing and so-on was, but the other problem was that I couldn’t remember if I’d left anything nobody else should see and/or get their hands on. Two or three times in my life I’ve had things in my possession that were harmless to me but not to people with normal immune systems. Beyond that, I’ve been known to keep things that are just difficult to explain to people who don’t know I’m extremely old. Like the occasional skull of a dead friend. (Long story.) And on top of that I kept company with creatures most humans just don’t know about. What if I had a pixie in the apartment? I couldn’t remember.
But I also couldn’t wear the suit constantly, so Cornelius donated some clothing. He was (or so I thought at the time) the only one there with a decent amount to spare other than the women, and I was confused enough at the time that dressing in drag probably would have only made it worse. On the other hand, a dress might have fit better.
I didn’t emerge from the room for close to twenty-four hours, during which time I mostly slept and tried to keep a grip on where and when I was. This wasn’t all that easy. I had a set of windows overlooking the carriageway in front of the property, which was helpful because while carriages are as old as Rome, the designs have a generational flavor to them. Of greater pertinence was the existence of glass in the windows, for while glass as a creation had been around for centuries, we didn’t get good enough at making it to put it in windows until comparatively recently. That helped keep me grounded. On the other hand, Margritte was French on her mother’s side, and decorated her home—or if not the entire home then the room I was in—in a style that made a lot more sense in Paris, and not even the current Paris; the Paris of about a hundred years earlier. So when I was awake I wasn’t sure if I was in England in the eighteen hundreds or Paris in the seventeen hundreds, and since the latter location meant I was probably in a good deal of trouble (very, very long story) I kept having mini panic attacks.
On emerging, I wandered around the mansion for quite a while before discovering the veranda, which became my new favorite place in the world. It jutted out from the back of the house and led to a nicely manicured lawn that went on for a quarter of an acre before ending at a densely wooded area. It was a lovely view, the weather was perfect, and I felt a certain peace I couldn’t seem to obtain in either the city or the room I’d consigned myself to.
As soon as I picked a chair at the edge of the railing, food and tea appeared on the small table beside me, and I realized the reason I had decided to leave the room was that I was extremely hungry.
I stayed in that seat for the rest of the afternoon, and then returned to it t
he following morning, and again the morning after that. Nobody approached me aside from the girl bringing food and tea, and I only left for long enough to avail myself of a chamber pot when there was a need.
I can’t say I was surprised to have all that time alone. The way I was dressed suggested I’d recently lost a tremendous amount of weight and grown three inches taller. The pants were actually cinched with a curtain stay, since I couldn’t find a belt that was tight enough to do the job. Not that anybody else knew this about the pants, since the shirt I had on was long and loose and hid the waist, but I knew. And none of that probably sounds all that terrible, but this was in a time when men wore suits to the breakfast table and women buried themselves under five layers of petticoats before they took tea. My clothes marked me as a person not to be approached, and I was still sane enough to be embarrassed by them.
It was for the best though, because while I seemed to have been able to arrest a total slide into madness—it was touch-and-go in the Parisian-themed bedroom—I couldn’t completely stop myself from seeing things that weren’t there.
I had succeeded in isolating the things I was seeing to the wooded area at the edge of the lawn. This was fantastic as it reduced the number of odds of my mistaking an actual human for something else significantly, and also made it easier for me to sleep at night. But at the same time I couldn’t quite take my eyes off of those trees, at least not for the first few days. At first it was because I just didn’t know when something horrible was going to sneak out of there so I wanted to be ready at all times, but that soon morphed into my trying to force myself to not see what I was seeing.
I knew what I saw wasn’t real, but that awareness didn’t appear to help. Every shadow was a predator of some kind: a dragon, an angry tribe of satyros, an ancestral species of cat, or something worse. Twice I thought I saw a unicorn, which I’m sure sounds lovely to everyone who never encountered a real one, but they’re awful.
I even started seeing things I’d never witnessed. The satyrs used to worship a god called the Duh-ryadh, and this god was supposed to be the most terrifying thing in the forest. I had no reason to think it actually existed, except for the one time thousands of years ago on the Greek peninsula when I ended up fleeing from something that sounded very real and very large and really awful. Sitting on the veranda and staring into the woods, every time a tree moved in the wind I worried that this was the thing coming for me.
Considering my fallback plan if I couldn’t get my head straight was to disappear into the wilderness, it was alarming how frightened I was by a few trees.
It was maybe my fourth or fifth day on the veranda before someone developed the courage to strike up a conversation. That person was Joanne, of all people. She hadn’t even been interested in introducing herself upon my arrival, and so was just about the last person I expected to find in the chair next to mine.
“Papa goes hunting,” she said, after a lengthy silence in which we took turns sampling cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea.
“Pardon?” My voice sounded weird to my ears, as I’d not used it for a little while. Her voice sounded very pleasant. She was also comelier than memory served, but that might have been because it didn’t look as if she was making any particular effort to impress. She had her auburn hair down and wore a casual dress, and her face had no heavy makeup to it. Everyone in her family was a natural beauty, but somehow when she tried to make herself attractive she looked worse than when she made no effort at all.
“In the trees you can’t seem to stop looking at,” she said. “Papa goes hunting in there, on Sundays. Fox hunting, with the dogs. I’m certain if you asked he would happily bring you along.”
“Ah,” I said. “Thank you. Is Cornelius here?”
“Oh no, he’s in the city for a time. He’s not expected back for a month or more. Business, I’m told. As much as I’m told anything.”
“I see.”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed I went back to staring, while Joanne remained where she was and we made a game attempt at not feeling awkward.
She started and stopped two or three different sentences, before settling on one. “They want me to talk to you,” she said. It was in a conspiratorial near-whisper. “But I don’t know what to say.”
I leaned forward. “They?”
She nodded over her shoulder. Behind us was a set of French doors that led to an indoor sitting room. As it was bright and sunny outside, the inner room appeared dark, but not so dark I couldn’t see Margritte and another woman trying hard to pretend they weren’t looking at us.
“I don’t think I understand,” I said.
I sort of did understand, but it was hardly polite to say so. At twenty-seven, Joanne was approaching spinsterhood. It was something of a minor family scandal that she had thus far failed to land an appropriate suitor, although it must also be said that as the youngest daughter she had the least pressure of any of them to marry. Cornelius and Margritte didn’t need her to wed for political, social or financial reasons, so far as I knew. She should have been more or less free to marry for her own interests alone. That she’d not done so I took to mean she simply hadn’t found the right man.
“Oh, sir, of course you must,” she said.
“It would be my pleasure to enjoy your company for as long as you wish to extend it, but surely all concerned are aware of my current mental state.”
“There is your unseemly preoccupation with the local flora. But you are hardly mad. I have met madmen, and you don’t meet the qualifications.”
“You are an expert?”
“I have become one. Papa has been tending to the… exhausted, shall we say… for some time.”
Looking down the lawn, she pointed out another guest. “There, that is a madman.” There were several tables and chairs set up on the manicured grass, and sitting at one such table was a man I’d seen a few times but not spoken to. (Not that I’d been speaking to anybody.)
“He’s reading a book,” I pointed out. “I fear your definition of madness is wanting.”
“That depends on what he’s reading, doesn’t it? I agree right now he doesn’t appear fearsome, but he is very much mad. Speak to him if you don’t believe me.”
“Perhaps I will.”
There was a second guest on the lawn, one who had a vague sort of foreign quality that was difficult to pin down but impossible to ignore, even for me. “Is he also mad?” I asked.
“No, he’s not mad, he’s royal, which may be worse.”
“Royal, you say?”
“So far as any of us here knows. He hasn’t said, and neither has papa, but his demeanor is a telltale. We think he may be a prince, and we’ve heard him speaking in another tongue, but it’s not one any of us can parse.”
“Your mother, surely she knows.”
“Oh yes, surely, but she’s not sharing it. No, I mean us so to say myself or my maids. I am not, at any rate, to speak to him. It’s just as well. He’s much too young to be interesting. And I’m not entirely certain but I don’t think he much cares for women as a whole.”
I laughed, which no doubt pleased Margritte to hear.
“You can’t speak to the prince or the madman on the lawn, and your third option is me, another madman, shabbily dressed and a comparative pauper. Surely there is a fourth option.”
“As I said, Mr. Bates, I don’t believe you mad, and I know perfectly well you’re no pauper. You are also not option number three. Numbers one through seven or eight precede you, and do not include either of the men seated below.”
“You’re not shy for suitors, then.”
“They are the only thing I don’t lack excess of.”
“And yet, under apparent duress, you’re being pushed toward lunatics. I worry for the quality of your prior matches.”
It was her turn to laugh, which was a lovely, infectious sound that was nearly good enough to distract me from the fact that I could see an imp named Silenus the Elder dancing at the edge of the
woods with a bottle of wine and a goblet. He wasn’t there, and I knew he wasn’t there, but it had been seemingly an eternity since my last taste of wine—and an actual eternity since I’d tasted the ancient Greek permutation—which made me wish I were wrong about him not being there. Eventually, I was going to see something or someone I so preferred to think was actually there that I lacked the strength to convince myself otherwise.
I turned all of my attention to Joanne. Hopefully, she was real.
“It pains me to say so,” she said, “but I fear my options have rolled downhill, not up. There were the younger, the wealthier, the better dressed certainly. Perhaps none so charming.”
“I thank you, but I can’t imagine how you could mistake anything I’ve evinced thus far as charm.”
“Not charm, then. A levelness of character. You’ve not spoken to me as a woman.”
“Haven’t I?” In my thinking, this meant I’d insulted her somehow. “I apologize.”
“No, no, you misunderstand. I mean you’ve not spoken down to me, or behaved as though it was my honor to be in your company. You are clearly a man with a congested mind and a deep reserve of private stories, but that only makes you more interesting. I might even enjoy pretending to be courted by you for a while. It would make mother so happy.”
“Ours is to be an imaginary courtship, then?”
This was all very confusing, but not unpleasantly confusing. She was an attractive young woman, and if I were in playing the scoundrel and not the lunatic I might consider pursuing her, only not with marriage in mind. I’m not precisely in a good position to marry someone. The problem begins and ends with the part where I don’t get any older, as this impacts my long-term relationships in a surprising number of ways.
“I hope that’s all right,” she said. “I’ve asked about, and the consolidated opinion regarding Mr. Reginald Bates is that he is not in the habit of eyeing women with any long-term perspective. And I’m afraid my assets will not be made available to you on a short-term basis, although I can arrange that for you with another if you find yourself with an urgent need.”
Immortal and the Madman (The Immortal Chronicles Book 3) Page 2
