Eros Element

by Cecilia Dominic

  “How many people are attending this small private performance?” Iris asked Bledsoe. He emanated irritation. Had she done something offensive to their host by insisting Marie stay with her? She had to preserve her reputation, after all. Even if the French were looser about such things, one never knew when one might encounter an acquaintance unexpectedly, and rumor of a dalliance with an unmarried Marquis would skewer her credibility as a young woman of virtue. Although she found the societal rules to be annoying and unnecessary, Iris didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of being shunned, either.

  “Enough,” Bledsoe said. “By the way, do be sure to watch yourself with Monceau. As I said, he’s a consummate flirt.”

  “I’m trying,” she replied and plucked a shallow glass of champagne off the tray of a passing waiter. Now that she had it, she didn’t know what to do with it since she didn’t drink spirits, but perhaps it would help her to fit in amid the swirling, silk-clad society members. He nodded and stalked off, presumably to warm up for the performance and run through some things with the other musicians.

  Marie hovered unobtrusively behind Iris, a feat since Marie topped her in height by at least half a foot. Iris pretended to sip her drink and watched the other guest’s faces as they saw Marie, made some gesture of surprise at the maid being with her mistress rather than with the other servants, and then, with dull eyes, looking away and resuming whatever conversation was to be had. Iris recalled how Marie pulled on the identity like a mask. How did she do it? And could she teach Iris?

  Something shifted in the room, and Iris placed her glass with empties on another waiter’s tray. Marie caught her elbow so Iris wouldn’t stumble to her knees.

  “Did you feel that?” Iris asked.

  “Yes, but no one else seems to have.” The mask slipped to reveal Marie’s concern.

  “What do you think it’s from? It feels like some sort of ancient energy.”

  “You’re the archaeologist.”

  “Right, I am. Let’s go find it.” She didn’t want to go find anything. She wanted to call the steamcoach and have it bring her back to the Hôtel Auberge, where she could see what Edward invented and spend the evening in his eccentric but safe company.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Marie said.

  “Right. There’s an ancient something here big enough to cause the entire ballroom to feel like it moved, and you’re saying there’s nothing to worry about.” But her feet carried her toward the source of the feeling.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Château Monceau, 13 June 1870

  They left the ballroom and moved past servants who scurried along with single-minded purposes, one with a fresh tray of champagne, another with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. No one challenged the two women or asked where they went. It seemed that whatever the energy was, it ground people into their preferred mindsets.

  Iris stopped and flattened herself against the wall. She focused on the cold, hard surface pressing through her bustle and the thin fabric over her shoulders, and her mind cleared. Her favorite mode was that of problem-solver, and from the conversation she’d overheard between Marie and Lucille, she knew Marie enjoyed being a coconspirator.

  “We have to stop and think this through,” Iris said. “What if it wants us to go in there?”

  “It’s bigger than both of us, but we need to know what it is, so what choice do we have?” Marie asked, but she blinked and the foggy look on her face cleared. “But you’re right. It’s clever and is drawing us right to it.”

  “Right.” Iris pushed herself away from the wall and almost into a server with a tray of canapés. He looked at her, startled.

  “You shouldn’t be in this hallway, Mademoiselle. The women’s powder room is on the other side of the ballroom.”

  “Merci, but the Marquis wanted me to take a look at his collection of ancient artifacts and Renaissance art,” Iris told him with her most beguiling smile. “Perhaps you could direct me to where they are?”

  The look the man gave her made Iris have new sympathy for how the chicken in the coop felt as it was selected for that night’s dinner. “I’m sure the marquis would prefer to show you himself.”

  “Oh, but we would be so very grateful if you could tell us.” Marie stepped past Iris and gave the man a smile with no sweetness and all spice. He drew himself up with attempted haughtiness, but the tray trembled. Now Iris wanted to look away from what seemed to be headed toward a very private moment.

  “It’s down this corridor and through the family hall,” he said, and sweat rolled down his bald head.

  “Merci,” Marie purred.

  He nodded and walked away quickly enough for his footsteps to echo in the corridor but slowly enough that the tray maintained its horizontal alignment.

  Iris turned toward Marie. “Well done, Fantastique,” she said.

  “Don’t call me that. Come on, if we’re going to wander into the lion’s den, I’d prefer it to be with one predator. Don’t tell me you didn’t see how that man looked at you. The marquis has some interesting plans for you, it seems.”

  “Right.”

  They followed the man’s directions and walked into another room as large as the ballroom, but with books lining the walls. The dim light revealed the presence of statues, and the smells of dust and old paper made Iris breathe deeply—this is a place I could belong. But the skin across the backs of her hands tightened, and her fingertips tingled. Marie went around to the lamps and turned them to full brightness, and Iris caught her breath.

  At least a dozen kouros and kore statues like the one that had waved to her at the Louvre stood in various alcoves and on the balcony above her. A large painting of Eros, the son of the goddess of love, and Psyche, the woman who dared to fall in love with him, hung over the fireplace. They clasped each other in a tight embrace. The artist had rendered Eros’s feather wings and Psyche’s butterfly ones with great care, almost more so than the two people.

  Marie walked to one of the male statues and poked him in the lower abdomen. “These Greek boys are a bit skinny for my taste,” she said.

  Iris tried to smile, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched from all sides. What sort of place is this?

  The plaintive sound of a violin warming up in a minor key made Iris jump. The simple scales moved through the air and caressed her ears like a dying lover’s touch, and she wanted to lean into it. She opened her eyes, which she hadn’t realized she closed, to see the statues moving their arms. Her thoughts raced ahead of her rising panic.

  It’s like the museum statue, they must be part of some larger piece.

  “Oh, getting fresh, are we?” Marie leaned into the statue she’d teased, and his arms moved in and out from their hinges on the elbows, tapping her bustle. “Cheeky!”

  “Marie, be careful.” Iris held on to the back of a chair to steady herself against the sensation of the room moving around her and the floor beneath her. She couldn’t see anything, but the air pressed on her eardrums. She wanted to analyze it, to figure it out, but it defied explanation.

  Marie stepped back, but the statue clasped her to it. “Um, Iris?”

  The doors slammed shut, and the locks clicked into place.

  Iris ran to Marie and reached for the statue, but she paused. It emanated some sort of power she could feel through her gloves. What if touching it put her in some sort of trance like the statue at the museum had, and she was unable to defend herself from whatever trapped them in the room?

  Now the music went into more complicated passages—Bach—and the statues turned their heads toward Iris. She knew their half smiles, called Archaic smiles due to the time period, were more due to the style of sculpture, but their attitude of vague amusement added to their sinister air.

  “Uh oh,” she said.

  “What have you done, Mademoiselle?” a voice from the balcony above them asked.r />
  Iris looked up to see the Marquis gazing down at them. Or maybe down the front of her dress. She resisted the urge to hunch her shoulders or cross her arms over her chest—there was no reason to let him know how uncomfortable she was.

  “Is this your game?” she asked. “Bring young ladies into the room to see your collection, then catch them when they swoon in fear over the statues’ movements?”

  “I do no such thing. This is the first time I have seen them act like this. They perform the movements from the great automaton of—”

  “Yes, I know, Magna Graecia,” Iris said. Her hand reached for the statue holding Marie almost of its own volition, and she kept having to pull it back.

  “Yes, clever girl.” The Marquis descended the stairs. “But do you know where in Magna Graecia?”

  Iris watched him warily. “No.”

  “Several years ago, a cache was found in Metapontum.”

  “Metapontum? Where the cult of Pythagoras was destroyed?”

  “The very same. Those who discovered these statues said they were most likely part of a temple display, but the temple wasn’t found.” Now he stood beside Iris. She found his speech to be at odds with his foppish appearance.

  “Iris,” Marie held her hand out. “Please get me away from this thing.”

  “Perhaps if we each took an arm?” The Marquis gestured to the statue that held Marie. “We can gently pry it apart, and your maid can escape.”

  Marie mumbled a word outside of the finishing school French canon and said, “I don’t care if you rip its arms off. Get me out of here.”

  “Oh, we cannot damage such a valuable artifact, Mademoiselle,” the Marquis told her. “I care deeply for my statues and would not risk them for anything.”

  Iris hesitated. “I can’t touch it.” If I do, I’ll be sucked into the past, and all will be lost.

  “Yes, you can.” Marie grasped her wrist. “I’ll hold on to you, keep you here.”

  Iris’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean?” How do you know?

  “No time. Please do it quickly. It’s tightening its hold on me, and my back will break.”

  Iris gulped a deep breath and placed her hands on one of the statue’s arms while Monceau grabbed the other one. Marie held Iris’s wrist, and Iris focused on the feeling of the other woman’s fingers digging into her own flesh, but she fell into the past anyway.

  The smell of stone and dirt permeated the air, and Iris coughed. Or the body Iris inhabited did, but the dust that clogged her lungs wouldn’t be expelled, not right away. She held on to the same statue she’d been holding at the chateau moments ago, but this time she held it steady while another worker made slight adjustments to its position according to the angle of the sun.

  This was the same temple she’d seen as the slave girl, but earlier in its construction. The dust swirled in the shafts of sunlight coming through open spots where windows would be, and painters and sculptors worked on the friezes and other decorations. A melodic language, a mix of French, Spanish and Italian, eddied around her, and she picked up a few words. One of them was Roma, and it was accompanied by a gesture and facial expression that told her that must be where they were. The position of the windows meant this place was underground, and she searched her memory but could not recall anything in her father’s journals about a below-ground temple, although there were speculations of one in Rome.

  Stinging pain across her back returned her attention to what she was doing, and she hoped her attempts to orient herself hadn’t caused a slave to be punished. How much did she affect the past when she visited? She held fast to the statue, which didn’t give her any impressions, perhaps because she was already in one?

  Her partner, an older man, nodded, and she let go and stepped back into the present.

  Now Marie clasped Iris’s wrist in a stone grip that threatened to crush the bone.

  “Let go,” Iris said and opened her eyes to see the statue leering at her with a smile wider than it should have. Stone dust swirled in her peripheral vision in time to the music coming from the ballroom.

  Now she felt a tug at her waist, and Marie said, “It let me go, but it grabbed you so fast, I didn’t see it, Mademoiselle.”

  Iris tried to pull her wrist out of the statue’s hand, but it held firm. So did her presence in the past, which overlaid her view of the present such that the temple workers moved like transparent ghosts about their tasks.

  “What do you want of me?” she asked the statue.

  The words echoed in her mind. “For our secrets to remain hidden, lest you bring destruction upon the world.”

  “What kind of destruction?”

  “The death of the free will granted to every man at the hands of the forces of chaos that birthed Aether and Eros. Chaos awaits.”

  “Big words coming from a statue installed in the temple of a violent cult by slaves.” She leaned over and felt around for something, clasping a hammer. She briefly wondered how she was able to manipulate something from the past, but she had to act quickly. She brought it up and smashed the kouros’s wrist, and its hand fell apart, freeing hers. She stepped back and dropped the hammer. When it hit the stone floor of the temple with an echoing clang, her vision of the past disappeared, leaving her in the library with a stunned marquis and maid.

  “My statue!” The Marquis de Monceau pushed past her and ran his finger over the marble splinters. “How did you do that? Why did you have to break it?”

  “Perhaps it was already weakened,” Iris suggested. Had he not seen the hammer? “As for why I had to do something, it was going to crush my wrist. I suggest you let these things go to the Louvre, Marquis.”

  The rest of the statues returned to their typical postures, and Iris glanced at the painting of Eros and Psyche. Had the latter’s butterfly wings, which were painted in brilliant shades of purple, moved?

  “What sort of spirit do you harbor in your house, Marquis?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He knelt on the floor and tried to pick up the pieces of the statue’s hand. “You’re speaking gibberish, and I would thank you to leave me be. Haven’t you done enough without bringing talk of spirits into it?”

  “Your statue attacked us,” Marie said. “We were defending ourselves.”

  A rustling sound brought Iris’s attention back to the painting.

  “Can you hear it?” Iris asked.

  “Only through my connection to you,” Marie replied. “But whatever it is, it’s big.”

  They backed away together until their bustles met the library doors, which remained locked fast. The marquis now stood by the statue and tried to piece its hand back together in his handkerchief.

  Iris knocked on the door. “Hello,” she called. “Can someone out there hear us? We’re trapped.”

  But no reply came, only the jaunty sound of Bach played by Johann and the ensemble.

  “Everyone is probably in the ballroom or kitchen,” Marie murmured.

  “Let’s think this through.” Iris tried to clear her head of the impressions of the past to focus on the present. “If this creature wanted to harm us, it would have done so by now.”

  “Or it was waiting to see what the statues would do.”

  “Good point.”

  The marquis looked at them, his eyes hard. “You have ruined him,” he said. “My poor little kouros. This one was my favorite.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” Iris said. “But he wouldn’t let go of me.”

  “No, Mademoiselle, that was your imagination running away with you. It happens to young women here in the library with all these ancient things whispering their secrets. But it is impossible for a marble statue to grab something.”

  “He’s mad,” Marie murmured. “Or maybe we are.”

  Iris bit back a sarcastic reply and tried to allow the facts of the
situation to click into place—like the parts of a clockwork, which would be meaningless separately but made complete sense as a whole. The marquis responded to whatever the spirit of the place was driving him to do, and somehow the music made it worse. The dominant piece of artwork was a painting of Psyche and Eros, favorites of the Pythagoreans, and the statues came from one of their temples, as yet undiscovered in Rome. Meanwhile, the marquis advanced on them with a crazed gleam in his eye, and they stood with their backs to a locked door.

  Or was it? A click beneath Iris’s bustle warned her to straighten before the door opened behind her, but a strong hand on her back steadied her anyway.

  “You’re needed back at the hotel,” Patrick O’Connell said.

  “Yes, go.” The marquis clutched the statue’s ruined hand in his own. “You are no longer welcome in Paris. If I hear you are in the city tomorrow morning, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Hôtel Auberge, 13 June 1870

  Doctor Radcliffe dropped a solution of foul-smelling chemicals on the handkerchief that had held the poison case, and he and Edward watched to see what colors it would turn. Both men jumped when the door to the room flew open.

  “Where is she?” Johann looked around, wild-eyed. He carried his violin case in one hand and ran his other through his hair.

  “Where is who? Iris?” Edward rose. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I was playing with the other musicians in the ballroom when she and Marie ran through the room, up the stairs, and into the front hall. By the time the piece finished, I couldn’t find them.”

  “Did you check their room?” Radcliffe asked.

  “If they’re in there, they’re not answering.”

  “Where’s O’Connell?” Edward asked. “He was supposed to be there to protect her. What if Scott got hold of her?”

  “I don’t know,” Johann said, “but we need to pack to leave. She managed to break the hand off one of the marquis’s statues, and he’s in a snit over it. He’s powerful enough to make staying in Paris very unpleasant.”