Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  So close, so close …

  There was something missing yet, something critical. She knew that. She could feel it. She spread out the cards of the Tarot again; they mocked her. There was the Magus, but the card was reversed, and flanked by the Seven of Swords, representing futility, and the Five of Swords, defeat. There was no solace to be found there.

  She went to their shared library, sneezing in the musty air as she examined the Mappe Clavicula, the Turba Philosphorum, the fragments of the works of Jabir and Albertus Magnus that they’d managed to collect over the decades. She searched them for additional clues.

  “What are you doing, wife?” Nicolas asked her one morning not long after, finding her at the reading desk in the library. He limped into the library—gout had bothered Nicolas for the last several years, making it difficult for him to walk when it flared. He shuffled close enough to peer over her shoulder. “The Turba?” he sniffed. “Why?” His eyes, already heavily overshadowed by the white wings of his eyebrows and the ledge of bone above them, narrowed even more, suspiciously. There was only the bare glint of brown pupils in the shadows, coaxed out by the candles on the desk. The nostrils of his wide nose flared. The flames wavered in the breeze of his movement as a knobbed fingertip stabbed at the text. Perenelle longed to tell him that it was none of his concern, that her research was for her own work alone.

  But instead she looked away from him, staring at the finger that impaled the parchment. “I’ve been looking at Abraham the Mage again,” she told him. “I had a dream that I mistranslated some of the lines, one I couldn’t get out of my mind, and was using the Turba to check.”

  He sniffed again. “If you have mistranslated,” he said, “you’ve set back my work, woman. I’ll use your miserable hide for a shawl for the precious time you’ve wasted. A stupid dream, she says …” He huffed. His hand slapped the desk hard close to her hand and she jumped, her body protesting the sudden movement.

  He left her. She stroked the pendant around her neck, but it took her long minutes to calm herself again enough to continue reading.

  That evening she went to the laboratory. She took the small vial of her elixir and held it up to a candle, staring at the amber liquid. She shook her head. “We’re starting over,” she told Musetta. “From the beginning. Maybe this time …”

  *

  The work took nearly the rest of the year. Perenelle consulted the astrological charts for the timing of each step; she found the purest ingredients she could scavenge in Paris; she had Musetta boil and scrub and scour each of the beakers and retorts so that no contaminants could enter; she oversaw the distillation of the essential oils herself. She measured and remeasured each component.

  The mice in the second cage died, one by one, as she worked, all falling to the same rapid and sudden aging. The untouched mice in the first cage gave birth to a new generation, following the usual pattern of life and dying in their normal time.

  The work was tedious and long, and she entered each painstaking step of it into her leather-bound notebook: as the winter of 1402 gave way grudgingly to spring, and spring to the sweltering heat of the Paris summer, summer to the colors and slow death of autumn, and autumn to winter once again.

  Once more, she had the elixir in a small vial. Once more, she took old mice from the first cage and dribbled drops of the precious elixir into their food. Together, she and Musetta watched the transformation she’d witnessed once before: their fur losing their gray, the bodies becoming young and muscular once again, their energy returning—and this time, the change was more rapid and decisive than before. “You’ve done it, Madame,” Musetta breathed, staring down into the cage.

  “We’ll see,” Perenelle grumbled. “This much I’ve done before.”

  Perenelle went to the writing desk to jot down her observations. Musetta cleaned the workbench, then asked permission to leave the laboratory. She seemed strangely eager; shaking her head, Perenelle told her to go. She thought nothing more about it, though her dreams that night were strangely troubled. She woke well before the sun rose, lying there for a time before deciding that sleep wasn’t going to come to her, and that she might as well work.

  She went to the laboratory, wanting to see if there was any change in the mice, a strange feeling of foreboding enveloping her. She found the door open. Nicolas was inside, her notebook open on the reading desk before him, along with the pages of the missing portion of Abraham the Mage’s book, the pages she’d never allowed him to see.

  “What are you doing here, husband?” she asked, though she already knew: Musetta. The girl had betrayed her. She wondered how long she’d been whispering to Nicolas about her experiments. Her hand trembled on her cane; her voice did the same.

  Nicolas straightened, his wizened face set in a furious scowl. “You!” She saw spittle fly from his lips. “You’ve kept this from me! Devil! Deceiver!” He pushed away from the writing desk and the chair went tumbling onto the floor. He went to the workbench and his hand swept angrily across the beakers, retorts, and jars there, sending them crashing down in a thundering spray of glass and pottery.

  “No!” Perenelle screamed, hurrying toward him before he could do more damage. The vial of the precious elixir was still there, shivering in its stand. Perenelle struck at Nicolas with her cane; with a laugh, he spoke a word of Arabic: the cane was wrenched from her hand by an invisible fist as she cried out in pain and frustration.

  “You miserable, treacherous old hag!” he shouted at her. His hand described an arc in the air as he spoke spell words again. The cane whipped through the air by itself; her hand came up too late. The ivory and silver head slammed into her skull. For a moment, the world went white, as if the snow outside blinded her, and the pain … She found herself sprawled on the floor amongst the shattered glass, her head and jaw throbbing, a red stream spilling over her left eye, her body cut in a dozen places, her mouth full of the metallic tang of her own blood. She tried to push to her feet again, glass shards digging into her palms, but the cane came down again, on her ribs this time, and she had to gasp for air. “You did this and you didn’t tell me!” Nicolas was raving, his hands still moving. “Well, I don’t need you now, wife. I have your notes. I can replicate everything you’ve done, and do it better.”

  She managed to get to her knees. She grasped the edge of the workbench to pull herself up, her entire body protesting. She didn’t know where Nicolas was, didn’t know if the cane would come down again in the next moment. She blinked away blood from her eyes, tried to suck in a breath.

  His arms swept across the workbench once more, more glass cascading down. The vial of the elixir shivered in its stand but didn’t fall. She heard Nicolas begin another chant, his hands moving in the pattern of a spell, and she knew he intended to kill her, kill her as he had Provost Marcel, so many decades ago. In desperation, she snatched at the vial; he saw her at the same moment, and the chant stopped. “So that’s it!” he exclaimed. “Give it to me!” His hand reached out.

  She felt she had no choice. A quick spell, and he could snatch it from her. She wrenched out the cork that plugged the glass. Blood from her mouth dripped down into the mixture, but she tipped it over her mouth despite that. She gagged, feeling the bittersweet, oily stuff mixing with the blood there, and forced herself to swallow. She couldn’t drink it all. It burned like fire in her throat so that she couldn’t breathe. She told herself that she didn’t care if it killed her: she would go to God gladly and plead her case.

  Nicolas plucked the vial and the remaining elixir from her nerveless hands as her cane struck at her again; she flailed back, blindly. Her throat, her stomach, were being consumed by fire, the ferocious heat spreading through her body. She felt as if her ligaments and muscles were being ripped apart and knit back together once more. She wiped at the blood in her eyes; she could see clearly again, more clearly, she realized, than she had in many years. Nicolas, his face a rictus of fury, was moving his hands directing another blow of the cane, and she reac
hed out for it—she snared it easily in mid-strike, and she marveled at the hand she saw attached to her arm: the swollen knuckles gone, the skin smoothed and supple: young hands. She heard Nicolas gasp; felt the spell dissolve with his shock. As the cane clattered on the floor, Perenelle doubled over again, her body heaving, the large muscles in her back spasming. She screamed, and the pain released her.

  She felt something else as well: the sardonyx cameo that she’d worn for so long also burned on her chest, and she felt something inside it break with the heat of the change being wrought upon her by the elixir: a spell, an old, old spell—and with its death, she knew how Nicolas had held her here for so long. A Binding, placed within the pendant … He forced you to stay …

  Nicolas was staring at her, one hand up to his mouth. “What have you done, woman?” he gasped. He took a step toward her, the anger still in his eyes, and she …

  Still in pain, confused, afraid that he’d use another spell to kill her, she ran. She ran, marveling at the feeling of it, at the ease, and at her ability to make the decision she had wanted to make for so many decades. Her clothes were huge around her and she had to clutch at the folds to keep her dress from falling from her body. The sardonyx pendant, empty now of its spell, swayed underneath. She could hear Nicolas shouting behind her, shuffling after her with his old man steps, and she ran. She didn’t stop running until she was in the street, until she found herself out of breath before Notre Dame on the Île.

  There, she sank down to her knees, and she prayed, not caring about the stares of the passers-by around her.

  *

  She didn’t attempt to go back, though she felt regret at her decision to immediately flee: with her new youth, she could have fought him, could have at least taken her precious notebooks when she fled. She might have had time before he could throw another spell at her.

  But the decision had been made in the moment, right or wrong, and could not be undone. She knew that Nicolas would have alerted the house staff. Those among the staff that she might trust, such as Marianne, would undoubtedly no longer recognize her. Her notes—the work that had consumed her life until now—were gone. He would have taken them, locked them away for his own use.

  Her long decades of labor were lost to her.

  Perenelle was living in rented rooms on the Left Bank, on rue de Feurre near the university. She was still amazed by the glimpses of herself that she caught in windows or bits of polished metal, in what she saw when she undressed at night. She was a young woman again, shed of the weight and wrinkles she had acquired over the years. Her breasts were small and firm, as they had once been; her stomach flat as if she’d never borne Verdette. Her hair was long and lustrous, its dark plaits sparkling with the red highlights that she’d thought gone forever. She was younger in appearance than when she’d married Nicolas; she was, perhaps, the age of the Perenelle who had fallen in lust with and married Marlon, the poor musician.

  She marveled. But Perenelle also remembered her mice, and she wondered when the same fate would come for her, to age decades in a matter of hours and die in agony.

  The elixir had gifted her with a renewed youth, but she had no idea for how long. The gift had not been without pain and without cost: she was nearly penniless now, the few francs she’d found in the purse tied to her dress’s belt had dwindled to bare sols and deniers. Waves of the continuing transformation had racked her body during the first few days; pain that had doubled her over and made her cry out aloud. To the landlady, a middle-aged grandmother named Elita Pelletier, Perenelle had pleaded that her monthly visitor inflicted terrible cramps on her. The woman was sympathetic and brought her a tea that she said would ease the pain—it didn’t, but the kindness helped.

  Worst, the transformation had touched her mind. The fire that had burned in her body had burned there as well. Her final confrontation with Nicolas was a haze, a memory seemingly overlaid with the mists of years rather than mere hours. And the knowledge she’d spent so long learning… . Where was it? She could recall snatches of what she’d once known so well, but those remnants were fleeting and incomplete. She could remember them one moment and they would have vanished in the next. She couldn’t hold any of it, couldn’t concentrate, and that bothered her most of all.

  The languages she’d learned while translating the Book of Abraham and her skill of writing: they remained with her, though. Perhaps she could make a living as a scribe for some of the scholars who lived in the area. Right now she needed time: time to decide what to do, time to figure out what had happened to her, time to plan how to get her notebooks back from Nicolas so she could begin her work again.

  Time. She didn’t know how much of that she had.

  There was also a nagging sense of absence inside her. Something was missing; she felt a need akin to physical hunger inside herself. She thought at first it was the spell that Nicolas had placed in the pendant. Perenelle had taken off the pendant quickly after leaving Nicolas, afraid that some remnant of the Binding would cause her to go shambling back to him. But she borrowed Madame Pelletier’s Tarot cards, and the reading told her that the pendant was now merely that: a cameo of herself. She put it back on and held it—it was like holding any piece of jewelry, so she kept it on.

  It would remind her to never let anyone deceive her that way again.

  The sense of something missing inside remained, however, and was stronger in the presence of certain people—mostly the scholars in the area—as if they could draw her to them, but she wasn’t certain why that was or how it manifested or what it was that she could do with it. She felt … incomplete. Hollow.

  The third morning after her escape, she went from her rooms down to the ground floor of the house. The landlady’s husband, Tremeur Pelletier, was a seller of manuscripts as Nicolas had once been, his clientele largely drawn from the professors and students of the university, and the bottom floor was given over to his shop. Perenelle found the shop ledge already open and down, the morning light streaming into the shop, his assistants scurrying about to move the least valuable manuscripts outside for the passers-by to browse through. There were already three or four customers in the shop.

  “Ah. Bonjour, M’mselle Cantrell,” Tremeur said as Perenelle descended the stairs: he was a stout man, his hair still brown though it had long ago retreated to a thin fringe around his ears, the top of his head so polished it glistened in the sunlight. She had given the Pelletiers her name from when she had been married to Marlon; it had seemed easiest. She doubted that, even if Nicolas tried to find her, he would remember Marlon’s surname.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Pelletier,” she answered. “It appears that it will be a profitable day for you.”

  The man laughed—a genuine laugh that boomed loudly enough that those in the shop glanced over to him. “A busy day, but probably not all that profitable,” he answered. “Academics are quick to tell me how lamentably poor they are, and students … Phah! They’re beyond poor.” He laughed again at his own joke. “Oh—seeing you has made me remember. I heard news yesterday that I thought you might find interesting. Perenelle isn’t a common name and so I wondered if perhaps your parents hadn’t named you for Madame Flamel, the wife of the alchemist. Well, the news around the city is that Madame Flamel has died. Not surprising, I suppose, given how old she was. I suppose that means she and old Nicolas haven’t yet managed to create the Philosopher’s Stone, eh?” He loosed another barrage of laughter, but it died quickly. “M’mselle?”

  His announcement had caused the world to spin around her once, as clumsily as a dancing bear. Perenelle gripped the railing of the staircase hard with both hands to steady herself. Her heart pounded against her rib cage and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. “M’mselle,” she heard Pelletier ask, “are you ill?”

  She forced a pale smile, and straightened, taking a slow breath. “Thank you, Monsieur,” she said, “but no. It was just a momentary dizziness. It has passed now.”

  “Good,” the man said. “Why don�
�t you go to the kitchen? Madame Pelletier is preparing breakfast; I’m sure some of her tea and croissants would help. I confess I’m rather hungry myself.”

  “Then I’ll bring you tea and croissants myself, Monsieur,” Perenelle told him, and the man beamed.

  As she made her way past the bins of manuscripts to the kitchen at the rear of the house, the musty scent of old paper brought back memories. Nicolas has declared me dead. She could do nothing to deny it; certainly no one would believe that she was Perenelle Flamel, looking as she did now. If Nicolas said she was dead, she was dead—he had the money and the influence to silence any questions. He could have an empty coffin placed in the tomb he’d had commissioned for himself a few years before, in the small cubby reserved for her underneath his own lavish final resting place.

  She was afflicted with a sudden loathing for the city, with the desire to be somewhere new, somewhere fresh. How could she remain in Paris, knowing that he was also there, knowing that she might come across him, that she might have to deal with him? He was nothing without her; let him be without her, then.

  She could feel the cool stone of the pendant under her clothing. She clutched at it through the cloth: the only beautiful thing that Nicolas had given her other than Verdette—and like Verdette, a reason she had stayed with him.

  So Perenelle Flamel was dead. Très bien. She would be someone else.

  Perenelle Flamel: 1418

  IN NEARLY EVERY WAY that the statement could be interpreted, she was no longer Perenelle Flamel. The woman who’d been Nicolas’ wife for half a century was a phantom glimpsed through a fog.

  She called herself Isabelle Leveque now, the model and lover of Jean Petit, a miniaturist who had once studied with the master Jacquemart de Hesdin and who was now trying to establish his own studio in Chartres near the great cathedral. Jean was one of those Isabelle thought of as “les personnes vertes,” the people with the green hearts.