Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  He didn’t get angry, only shook his head and reached for his camera bag. “You really have the wrong idea about me,” he said. “Y’know what, I guess this was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  A mistake … The hunger and the need for caution warred within her as he started to slide out of the booth. She felt the tendrils of green heart recede from her. As he started to rise, she reached out, putting her hand on his bare arm. The warmth and softness of his skin reminded her of other days, other times. “Stay,” she said. “I’m sorry. The problem’s not you. It’s me. Every time …” When I let myself get close, I put the other person in danger. Every time, Nicolas feels it, too, and until I deal with him, finally … But David wouldn’t understand any of that. For that matter, Camille wasn’t certain she did herself. She stopped the words, giving him a smile. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. He was staring at her hand on his arm. She felt muscles slide under her fingers. “Besides, you don’t know what you ordered yet.”

  He smiled then, and she felt him relax. He pushed the bag back toward the condiments and settled himself again. “Let’s start over,” he told her. He held out his hand toward her. “Hi. My name’s David.”

  She took his hand. “Camille,” she told him. “It’s good to meet you, David. I take it you’re a photographer?”

  *

  After lunch, she walked with him down Rivington and onto Pitt, moving leisurely toward the Williamsburg Bridge. David had plucked his camera from the bag—not a Hasselblad, but a Canon SLR—and occasionally snapped a picture as they walked, though she noticed that he was careful not to place her in any of the shots. She watched him as he crouched down and focused in on a battered wooden sign on the door of one of the storefronts, so close that the grain and the flaking, painted curves of the letters made an abstract canvas.

  “ ‘Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual,’” Camille said, and David straightened.

  “ ‘Making the commonplace unusual,’” David quoted back to her. “I’ve heard that before. Is it Ansel Adams?”

  Camille shook her head. “Edward Weston. In some ways, a better creator of aphorisms than a photographer.”

  “Ouch!” David said. “So have I made the mistake of asking a photographer to sit on the wrong side of the lens?”

  “No. Mostly I …” She shrugged. “I paint a little, do a little singing, and dabble in chemistry.” She leaned across his arm, looking at the picture on the screen of the camera. “If you crop in along the right and bottom to get rid of that blue edge that’s sneaking in, then I think the composition will really pop.”

  He stared at the image on his camera screen, tilting his head. “Huh. I think you’re right. Should I have heard of you?”

  “Not me. Some of the people I’ve known, maybe.”

  “The Bent Calliope Group?” he asked.

  She let that go; if she told him the truth, he wouldn’t understand it. “Yeah,” she said. “Them. I’m … I’m part of the group.”

  “Then I’d like to see your work.”

  “Maybe one day you will,” she said automatically.

  “That’s a gorgeous cameo, by the way. Is it an antique, or something new?”

  Her hand went to her breast; she realized that when she’d leaned over, the pendant had swung out on its chain from under her blouse. The oval of carved sardonyx, wrapped in a band of gold petals, glinted brick-red and ivory-white in the sunlight: a woman’s profile carved into the white layer, her hair—in the upper layer of red—coiled on top of her head and bound in a swirl of ribbons. “It’s an antique, yes,” she told him. “It’s very old. Been in my family for generations.” The lie came easily; she’d practiced it often enough.

  “May I?” He held out his hand, then pulled it back. “But if it’s something private, then …”

  His politeness and concern fed her nascent hunger even more. He could be so much more for you than mere sustenance. Wordlessly, she slid the chain over her head and took his hand, placing the cameo in his palm. She watched him as he turned it in his fingers, knowing he didn’t understand how much her gesture had meant. He nodded, finally, and gave the piece back to her. She quickly slipped the chain back on, tucking the pendant under her blouse again. “It’s exquisite work,” he said. “I think I can see a resemblance to you: in her nose and the shape of her chin. The color of the hair’s about right, too—too red to be brown, too dark to really be just red.”

  “Other people have suggested that,” she told him. “Look, David, I … I have to think about all this a little more. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he told her. “We don’t have to push anything or rush. Take your time. If you want, I could send you my standard model release, so you could look it over …”

  She was already shaking her head. “I don’t need the release.”

  “Then you’ve already decided?” The disappointment in his voice was palpable.

  “No. If I trust you enough to model for you, then I’ll trust you enough that I won’t need a sheet of paper to protect me. Would you …” She looked away for a moment. If you do this, then you’re taking the first step toward more. You know it. You won’t be able to stop, not if he’s anything like you suspect him to be. “Would you like to swing by the Bent Calliope again on Friday, maybe around 9:00 or so? You wanted to meet the Calliope Group, right? Well, I can introduce you; you might like them, and we can talk some more.”

  He was already nodding before she’d finished. “Sure. On Friday. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

  They’d reached the corner of Delancey Street, loud with the hush of taxi and car tires on asphalt, the air scented with exhaust. New York was like all large cities she’d been in recently: full of movement and sound, and fragrant with the aromas of people and ambition. “Okay, then. I’m going this way.” She pointed westward. “It was good talking to you. I’ll think about this, and maybe I’ll have an answer next Friday.”

  She was already feeling awkward. Had he been anyone else, any other of her friends, she would have hugged him and maybe kissed him; but he wasn’t, and to do anything else seemed wrong. She smiled at him instead. “Next Friday,” she said before he could say anything else. Then she turned and began to walk away from him, glancing back once to see him still standing at the corner watching her. The yearning hunger surged inside her, and she forced it back down.

  Not yet. Maybe never. It’s too dangerous right now.

  But she already knew.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  Perenelle & Nicolas Flamel

  1352 – 1370

  Perenelle Flamel

  1352

  PERENELLE HAD EXPECTED to be happy with her second marriage. She’d hoped for a wonderful new start to her life.

  Life, it seemed, intended to disappoint her.

  Rue des Saints Innocents was a noisy chaos as Perenelle approached the market square. The shop ledges were down in all the windows along the avenue as curious passers-by examined the proffered wares; the banners above the market stalls fluttered in the desultory (and sadly fragrant) breeze off the Seine. Ahead of Perenelle, a crowd gathered around a young man with a dancing bear. The man looked handsome enough in his scarlet tights and broadcloth tunic, a battered viol propped up in a case at his feet. The bear appeared to be ancient and arthritic, its muzzle silvered with gray. The creature snarled as its owner struck it on the snout with the viol’s bow, and Perenelle saw that the beast was missing most of its teeth. The poor creature’s coat was scabrous; islands of scaly patches created a painful map on its flanks and the creature’s fur was gone entirely under the spiked and thick leather collar. Flies seethed around the open sores. The bear’s claws were brown and cracked, dulled from scrabbling on the cobbled streets. Still, children screamed and ran when the man struck the animal with the bow again—across the front paws this time. The bear roared in irritation but reared up. On two unsteady legs, the beast to
ok several mincing steps as the owner scratched out a poor tune on the viol and sang in a warbling baritone:

  “Je puis trop bien, Madame

  Comparer a l’image que fait Pygmalion”

  Perenelle shook her head at the poor bear and the poorer performance, but tossed a denier into the viol case—maybe the coin would mean the bear would be fed that night. She walked on, listening to the calls of the merchants. It had rained the night before, and she skirted the pools of water and the piles of offal in the street’s central gutter, lifting up the hem of her dress. The two maidservants with her followed, chattering to each other and giggling as they cast their gazes back to the dancing bear—or more precisely, to the young man. “He has a lovely bum, don’t you think?” she heard the older of them, Marianne, say to the other; Marianne was fourteen, and (Perenelle suspected) rather too interested in what men and women did in their beds. Perenelle tsked and frowned at the girls; they ducked their heads with a last glance, hiding their faces under the brim of their wimples, and hurried after her.

  The market was crowded with throngs of Parisians, which was a delightful change from three years before, when the terrible pestilence afflicted the city. That appalling spring and summer, it was whispered, over 700 people within the city walls had died each and every day. In those horrible times, the stench of death stretched black tentacles through the streets of the city and those who could fled from the terror.

  Perenelle remembered those days too well; they still haunted her dreams. She had been married to Marlon then, but her husband had been taken by the pestilence like so many others, his body racked with fever while horrid, dark mushrooms of stinking pustules sprouted from his armpits, neck, and groin. Perenelle’s father, Cosme Poisson, had been an apothecary and alchemist; she’d learned some of the craft from him in her childhood—her mother had died birthing her; her father had never remarried, and Perenelle had taken on the role of helpmate for Cosme until he’d died, five years before. By the time Marlon became sick, most of the physicians had either died or fled the city with the others, and there’d been no one to help. She’d mixed potions to take the fever from Marlon’s body, to ease his breathing, to reduce the swellings.

  She might ease his symptoms, but she could not cure him.

  Marlon’s eventual death had been a blessing given his suffering, but she hadn’t witnessed his passing. The fever had taken her, too, though her symptoms had been less severe and she’d eventually recovered, but long after Marlon’s body had been taken from the house. She didn’t even know in which of the several mass graves outside the city walls he’d been buried.

  For months afterward, she’d lived with the guilt that she’d survived while he’d died. It wasn’t that Perenelle grieved horribly for Marlon; she’d married him, a mere musician, in the heat of a youthful infatuation and against her father’s wishes. After the initial fire had faded, she found that while she liked Marlon, she also didn’t truly love him, but there was no good escape from the iron bonds of marriage. Still, she’d been with him for eight years before he was snatched away by the plague, and she liked to believe that it was her presence and her support that had helped Marlon rise within the court before his untimely death, an entertainer whose ballads were often requested, even by the king.

  But in a Paris seemingly half-emptied by the horrors of the pestilence, she found herself lonely and lost. She’d thought that she was essentially already dead: twenty-eight, widowed and childless, her parents gone, her red hair already beginning to turn brittle—though her body stubbornly insisted on breathing.

  Then she’d met Nicolas Flamel. He’d courted her hard, used every advantage he had with her. He’d gained first her trust, then given her what she’d thought—again—was love.

  And maybe it was love. Maybe that’s all love ever was and ever could be, despite the grand tales and stories. Maybe love was something that bloomed like a bright flower in spring, only to inevitably wither away and eventually pale into a withered, brown husk: a mocking reminder of what it had once been.

  But now, with love a barely-remembered and colorless stem, she carried another gift for Nicolas …

  “Madame, here, you must smell these!” A peppercorn seller thrust his wares under her nose, bringing Perenelle back to the present. The astringent smell wrinkled her nose and nearly brought back the nausea that struck her every morning recently. “Fresh, and ready to spice your supper. Only six deniers for the lot, just half a sol. You won’t find a better bargain anywhere in the city.”

  Perenelle hefted the bunch. “Two deniers,” she said. “They’re small and so old that they barely have any smell at all, but I might be able to make some use of them.”

  The man’s eyebrows sought to reach the eroding shore of his greasy black hair. “Two deniers!” he nearly shouted. One of the dogs wandering around the stalls glanced up at them, then continued sniffing the ground as it searched for dropped food. “Why, Madame must wish my children to starve and be cast out in the streets. The very least I could accept is five deniers, and even then I’m barely paying for my own costs.”

  They eventually settled on four deniers, and Perenelle tossed the peppercorns to Marianne, who placed them in her basket. They continued walking the stalls, buying fish, vegetables, and wine, and stopping in the nearby boulangerie for bread. With the servants sufficiently burdened, they walked back down the street toward home.

  *

  The houses of the rue des Saints Innocents leaned against each other like gossiping washerwomen or old men crowded around an ale-spattered tavern table. Nicolas’ house—Perenelle no longer really had any belief that it was at all her house—nestled among the others, three stories high, with Nicolas’ store taking up most of the ground floor. The sign, Nicolas Flamel: Scrivener & Manuscripts, was nailed above an open stall window stuffed with scrolls and flyspecked parchments bound in frayed leather. Rust stains from the nail heads flowed in static red rivulets over the gilded scrollwork. Perenelle saw Telo, Nicolas’ apprentice, a thin boy of eleven, sitting on a stool in the open doorway.

  “Where’s your master?” she asked him as the maidservants slid past him, taking their baskets into the kitchen at the rear of the house’s ground floor.

  He lifted his chin. “In his laboratory, Madame,” he said. His voice was high, still that of a child. “I’m to call him if we have any serious customers. Otherwise, he said not to disturb him until dinner, as he’s working.” He ran a finger under his nose, smearing snot across his upper lip and cheek. “There’s been naught but idlers, though even that’s terribly hot work today.” He sighed dramatically.

  “Go on to the kitchen,” she told the boy. “Tell Marianne to give you some wine, cheese, and bread, and you may bring it back here. I’ll watch the store while you’re gone. Hurry back!”

  Telo jumped down from the stool, bowing his head. “Merci beaucoup, Madame,” he said, and ran off. Perenelle watched him go and leaned against the doorway of the house, her hands rubbing her stomach. She imagined she could feel a swelling there, though it was far too early for that. Still, it was enough to cause her to smile; maybe this news would help with Nicolas. Maybe the flower of love could bloom again.

  Nicolas … She’d met him in the winter of 1349 after the death-scythe of the pestilence had passed, at this very shop. Without any source of income except for the rent that came to her from her father’s house, Perenelle had come here looking to sell her father’s old alchemical manuscripts. She was surprised to see how young the owner of the shop was—younger than she was by several years, yet he had the sophistication and the knowledge of a much older man; in that, he reminded her of her father. His fingers were stained with ink, he smelled of old paper, and there was a severity in his thin face. Yet his dark eyes were alight, and the way he swept his hand through the unruly mass of his hair as he leaned over the parchments she’d brought was disarming. It was apparent that he also knew alchemy, claiming to be a student of the art, and that also softened her toward
him.

  “This is a copy of the papyrus Graecus Holmiensis,” she told him. He only nodded, his lips pressed together. “And this is one of Jabir ibn Hayyan’s manuscripts—an original.”

  “You’re familiar with these?” She could sense doubt in his voice, but he tempered it with a faint smile.

  “A little,” she told him. “Like you, I’m a student of the art, though a poor one. I helped my father with his work. I made a copy of his experimental notes also, if you’d be interested in that. He was working on chrysopoeia.”

  “Weren’t they all? You are the copyist?” The smile broadened. She liked the way his eyes crinkled as he grinned; that, too, was like her father. The somber air about him vanished with the expression. “So you can write, as well.”

  “Oui, Monsieur; my father schooled me. I’m keeping the original for myself.”

  “To conduct your own experiments?”

  “Perhaps.” She shrugged. “I haven’t yet decided.”

  That was how it began. Nicolas asked for time to look over the manuscripts, and that evening he escorted Perenelle to a tavern, where they ate and talked. She found it wonderful to converse with him: he was full of energy and ambition, doing well enough with his business, and had aspirations of doing more. He was fascinated with alchemy, yes, but he claimed to be even more interested in spells and incantations held within the ancient manuscripts. That first evening, he showed her how he could, with a single word, cause a small flame to appear on a wick. But he didn’t, as so many other men did, try to dominate the conversation. She noticed even then how Nicolas listened intently as she talked about her father and his work, coaxing her with gentle questions to say more. She thought it flattering then.

  This attraction was so very different than what she’d felt with Marlon, whose face and easy manner had managed to capture her, but who didn’t have a serious or ambitious bone in his body. She thought this was the way it was supposed to be between man and woman. She was quickly infatuated with Nicolas for his mind and for his passion.