The Passion of Cleopatra

by Anne Rice

  Once finished, she closed the diary, savoring its weighty feel in her hands.

  Writing had sustained her, had carried her through every storm: the loss of her parents, her indigent brothers, and the critics who called her work fanciful nonsense. They were liars, these critics. Stories of romance and adventure and magic helped us to imagine a better world into being, however gradually. In the telling of every fairy tale, the listener and the teller took another step towards nobility. But would her stories protect her soul if this mysterious Egyptian man, this Mr. Ramsey, turned out to be just another bewildering piece of this great mystery and not its ultimate solution?

  The thought filled her with a sense of dread that, while painful, was still preferable to the panic that had filled her when the vision took hold. With it came sudden drowsiness.

  As her mind relaxed, she heard once again the name the man on the ship's deck had called her.

  This time, she could decipher its unfamiliar syllables.

  Her eyes shot open. She reached for the diary and wrote the name down as if she were in danger of forgetting it.

  For a while, she just sat there, dumbfounded, watching the ink dry as the sunlit trees and rolling hills flew by outside.

  Cleopatra, she had written.

  But the other pieces of the vision had been distinctly modern. The deck of the steamship; the large stateroom window. These were props of her own time, and yet someone in the vision had clearly and distinctly called the woman Cleopatra.

  Had she simply filled in one of the blanks in her visions with a name plucked from so many in her obsessions?

  These were questions to which she did not have answers.

  Mr. Reginald Ramsey would. She was sure of it. At the very least, something about the man would point her to the next clue in this mystery. That alone was cause for hope. That alone was reason to continue on this journey across the world.

  When Lucy returned with her glass of water, Sibyl closed her journal quickly, as if this decisive gesture could somehow contain the swirl of mysteries in which she now seemed to dwell.

  12

  SS Orsova

  She couldn't remember returning to the stateroom, but she was on the bed, Teddy beside her, applying and reapplying wet towels to her forehead, her cheeks, her throat, all while her chest rose and fell from an exertion so desperate it gave her a dull ache throughout her torso.

  He had comforted her through other visions, but none this powerful. Pain and darkness; these things had become alien to her once she'd left behind those first few terrifying days following her resurrection. And yet, without warning, they had descended on her like a cloud of locusts capable of tearing her limb from limb.

  She had only the vaguest memory of other passengers responding to her terrible scream, of Teddy shooing them away with empty explanations.

  Vertigo, that's all, he'd growled at them. She didn't realize how high up we were before she looked over the rail.

  The face. A woman's face. Who was this strange woman?

  Ramses, she thought, and the name filled her with rage. But this rage focused her, drove the last traces of panic from her restored veins. This is because of what you've done to me. You call me back from death only to leave me tormented by madness.

  "Cleopatra," Teddy said. But his voice was tentative and weak, and he'd refrained from using her favorite title--his queen. And was that a surprise? Hers was the behavior of a mad priestess, not a queen.

  "Stop," she heard herself say.

  "You must rest," he insisted.

  The repeated touch of the damp towel and the occasional slip of his fingertips across her throat felt like acid on her skin. She reached out suddenly in an effort to seize his wrist. Only when she heard a great clatter did she realize she had sent him into the dresser against the opposite wall of the cabin. She had forgotten her strength.

  The expression on his face sickened her; it was the same terrified expression of the shopgirl she'd killed in Cairo. Wide eyed, uncomprehending, tinged with revulsion.

  "You fear me," she said.

  He didn't answer. He tried to shake his head, but he couldn't. He froze, eyes wide.

  "You look at me and see a monster."

  "No!" he cried.

  "Liar!" she roared.

  He went to her, sank to the bed next to her, took her face in his hands. It meant the world to her suddenly that he had done this. That her violent eruption had not caused him to flee the stateroom in a panic, as Ramses had fled from the site of her tattered, resurrected form.

  "The only thing I fear is that I have no cure for what ails you. I am a doctor, but I can't treat what I don't have a name for, and to see you like this, it's a torment, my queen."

  "He will know," she whispered. "That is why we must find him."

  "Of course."

  "I need more," she said. "That must be it. He has not given me enough and so my mind...it is...it is..." Not mine, were the words that almost sprang from her lips, but they terrified her, so she turned her face to the pillow like a frightened little girl as this horrible feeling tore through her with paralyzing strength. My mind, my body. They are not my own.

  And the mere thought that an episode as severe as this one might come on again, it terrified her. She had asked Teddy to teach her about the modern world, yes, but if her condition worsened she would become his slave.

  But he was stroking her hair, nuzzling his lips against her neck, trying to lure her out of her dark reverie with gentle passion. "My queen," he whispered. "I am here, my queen."

  "Prove it," she whispered to him.

  "Prove what?" he asked.

  "Prove to me that I am still your queen."

  She used her strength now in a focused way to throw him across the bed. She straddled him, tore his shirt from him with enough force to pop the buttons. And when she felt his thickness under her, saw the fear in his eyes replaced by desire, felt his lust for her even as she unleashed the more beastly side of her resurrected being, the terror receded, the taste of his lips a balm as sweet as nectar.

  And once they were naked and enmeshed, the thickness of him buried inside her, he spoke the words she craved and he spoke them without hesitation or fear.

  "Always," he whispered. "Always my queen."

  13

  London

  "And when I told her that I have the title of a lord and none of the money to go with it, she responded in the strangest way, Julie," Alex Savarell said. " 'I shall acquire the wealth, my lord, that's nothing. Not when one is invulnerable.' What on earth do you think she meant by that?"

  "Alex, you mustn't torture yourself like this," Julie answered.

  "It isn't torture. Truly. She was just so odd, so strangely confident. I can't help but wonder if she was invulnerable in some way. But if that were so, she would have survived that terrible wreck and all those flames."

  "They were ravings of a madwoman, darling," Julie said. "That's all. Any attempt to decipher them is sure to drive you mad as well."

  The only son of the Earl of Rutherford, the man Julie Stratford had once been expected to marry, brought his teacup to his lips with a quick darting movement that did little to conceal his shaky grip.

  Afternoon tea at Claridge's hotel wasn't the place for raised voices, but if she fought too valiantly to rid Alex of his obsession with the mysterious woman who had swept him off his feet in Cairo, raised voices would most certainly be the result. But afternoon tea at Claridge's wasn't the place for deception either, and what other word could she apply to her current endeavor?

  It was one thing to have never truly loved Alex; it was one thing to have never desired his hand in marriage--these facts had been readily apparent to all who knew her, even the relatives who had plotted to marry them off to each other for purely financial reasons. Even, it pained her to admit, to Alex himself.

  But her despairing former suitor remained the only member of their traveling party still wholly ignorant of all that had taken place during their trip
to Egypt.

  Seeing Alex tortured by this combination of ignorance and grief was almost more than Julie could bear. And his upset seemed terribly out of place amidst the white tablecloths that seemed to float like clouds above the red carpeting, beneath the gold-painted arches in the ceiling overhead. And all the other guests, speaking in a polite, low murmur while they occasionally glanced over at the pretty young shipping heiress who was dressed not in a traditional tea gown but a man's suit with a white silk vest and a loosely knotted scarf at her pale throat.

  She had arranged to meet him the day after she and Ramses returned to London. And she had not expected the meeting to be entirely pleasant.

  Brittle, at best. Cold, at worse.

  But it was turning out to be neither of those things. Indeed, she was astonished by the degree to which Alex remained utterly obsessed with the woman who had romanced him in Cairo, and the extent to which that obsession had transformed him into a different man altogether. Vulnerable and anxiety ridden, but also more vibrant and alive than she had ever seen him.

  Her only hope was to let him tire himself with talk of her. All the while, the truth was as close to her lips as it had ever been.

  She was a monster, Alex, and you were but a pawn in her scheme to punish Ramses, her creator. A terrible pawn. That's all. The ticket to the opera she offered you was stolen from a corpse. And while you were waiting for her to return to her seat, she crept off to the powder room, where she intended to break my neck so she could lay my broken body at Ramses' feet. It was all revenge, you see. Revenge for the fact that Ramses had refused to give her lover the elixir thousands of years before.

  But the risk in sharing these things was far too great.

  "Your glasses are drawing some notice," Alex said, startling her back to the present.

  "Are they?" she asked. "The doctor has recommended them," she said.

  "The doctor or Mr. Ramsey? He's full of ancient remedies, that one. Or at the least talk of them. In the last letter from my father, he wrote of some old tonic Ramsey gave him that completely healed the trouble in his leg."

  It has healed far more than his bad leg, my darling.

  Perhaps a small revelation would ease her guilty conscience.

  When she removed the glasses, when Alex stared into her eyes turned dazzlingly blue by the elixir's transformative power, wonder filled his expression. The grief-stricken man was replaced by a young man who seemed to be witnessing the sunrise from a mountaintop for the first time.

  "My word," he whispered.

  "It's quite startling, I know," she said.

  "And the cause?"

  "The doctors say it's either some sort of reaction to stress, or the damage wrought by the sun. The loss of my father, perhaps." Was she changing this story, embellishing it? She hoped not.

  "Grief and injury, then," he said.

  "Yes," she said, placing the glasses back on the bridge of her nose. "I didn't want to startle you with it."

  "What a wonder," Alex said quietly.

  "Is it?" she asked.

  "That grief and injury could combine to produce something so beautiful," he said, his voice sounding distant and far away. "But I guess that's no mystery, really. They say diamonds are made by the violence beneath the surface of the earth."

  "They are not diamonds, Alex. Just my eyes."

  "But they are as beautiful as diamonds," he said. "And I fear that's why you didn't want to show them to me."

  "How's that?"

  "Fear of stirring some of my old romantic feelings for you, perhaps."

  "I'm not quite that vain, I hope."

  "No. You are not vain at all. I only wish to assure you that I have released all old expectations, as it were. There was a time, before our trip, when I was content to wait forever. I was confident that one day you would come to see my feelings for you as something other than a burden."

  "I never saw them as a burden, Alex."

  "You did. And it's perfectly understandable. It was my father who wanted us to marry. My father and your uncle. And so what defense did I have against any man who truly captured your heart? As soon as Mr. Ramsey entered your life, it was clear I'd lost the game. I'm resigned to it now. My only regret is that I didn't lose with a bit more grace early on."

  He was speaking of that ugly evening on the ship bound for Egypt when Alex had quoted all sorts of judgment-laced half-truths about Egyptian history in a manner surely designed to taunt his new rival for Julie's affection. Worse, he'd refused to retreat from any of them once it was clear how much he'd upset their Egyptian traveling companion.

  Still, he was, as had become his habit, being mercifully unfair to himself. Spurned suitors throughout history had done far worse than start a small quarrel at a dinner table.

  "You are a perfect gentleman, Alex Savarell, and you always will be."

  "You are being kind."

  "Because you have earned nothing from me but kindness."

  "I simply mean to say you should not hesitate to show me anything which makes you even finer of feature. You are free now, Julie. Free of any old feelings of mine which were unreturned, however politely. Freed by my obsession with a madwoman, I'm afraid."

  "Oh, Alex. I'm not sure that's an acceptable price."

  "Well, fortunately, I'm the only one who'll have to pay it."

  "Only so as long as you insist on taking responsibility for someone else's lunacy and delusions," Julie said.

  "Then there isn't some great weakness in me?" he asked. "Something that repelled you? Something that repelled her as well, that caused her to drive off so recklessly even as I begged her not to?"

  "Of course not!"

  "So I'm without flaw? That's good to know."

  "You have the same weaknesses as so many men of high breeding."

  "And those are?" he asked with a cocked eyebrow.

  "A bit of stubbornness, and a tendency to dismiss strong feeling."

  "Ramsey has certainly encouraged you to be more free with your opinions. I'll say that much. And so you don't agree with my father?"

  "With regards to what?" she asked, straightening. She was hoping for more information on Elliott aside from the gossip that he'd been spotted in various casinos throughout Europe, and the few mentions Alex had made of the substantial sums he'd sent home. She missed Elliott.

  "It's something he said a while ago," Alex answered. "I overheard him say it, actually. He told a friend that my salvation was that I felt nothing too deeply. What would he think of me now, undone by a tumble with a seductive delusional hysteric?"

  "It was unfair of Elliott to say such a thing," she answered. She meant it. There was something so undeniably good in Alex, so undeniably innocent.

  "Was it?" Alex asked. "Perhaps not. Not when he was convinced the person about whom he was saying it had no real feelings."

  "But you are a man of deep feelings, Alex. That much is very clear. And if anything, this painful experience you had in Cairo, it's left you with a new sensitivity that you should embrace. I dare say, many women might find it very attractive." Alex smiled and averted his eyes like a young boy. "You see, sometimes, Alex, we have to lose things to learn compassion. And sometimes we are overcome by change that arrives with some measure of violence, but leaves us transformed for the better."

  "Like your new eyes, for instance," he said.

  "Perhaps."

  "Do you remember what you said to me on the ship that night? When I made such a fool of myself quarreling with Ramsey over Egyptian history?"

  "I'm afraid I only remember the quarrel."

  "What is your passion?" he said, quoting her. "That's what you said to me. You asked me what my joy was. My passion. And in the moment, I couldn't answer. You don't remember?"

  "I do now. Yes."

  "It's to be loved, Julie. It's to be loved as that woman loved me. Or seemed to love me. I'd never known that kind of passion, that kind of devotion, before. In some sense, it's why I was able to set you free so easily upon
our return. Because it was clear you'd never felt for me the way that woman did, and after she died, all I wanted was to be loved that way again. And every time I hear you or Ramsey say that her love was born of madness, my heart breaks again."

  Better to believe she was mad, Julie thought, than to know you were her pawn.

  But was she? What did Julie truly know of Cleopatra's murderous clone? What did she know aside from that awful moment of believing her life would end at the woman's hands? Had the creature in question felt genuine desire for Alex? Had she felt a love for him that was as frenzied and irrational yet genuine as her desire to exact revenge on Ramses?

  She didn't know the answers to any of the questions, and she doubted she would ever learn them. Better yet, she hoped she would never learn them. To do so would mean encountering that awful creature again.

  For now, she had no choice but to let Alex believe the flames had claimed her.

  To let him believe that someday he would rekindle just as ferocious a passion but with a woman of pure heart.

  *

  Alex seemed in better spirits when they emerged from the hotel onto the crowded sidewalk. He pulled his silver pocket watch from his jacket and checked the time.

  "No word yet on whether my father will return for our party," Alex said. There was warmth in the way he said the words. Our party. And so he wasn't hosting the event out of some grim sense of obligation, a desire to save face. This cheered her. "I think my father misses your father terribly and wants some time alone."

  "Of course," said Julie. "But I hope Elliott will return. At least, I hope he'll consider it, and I hope you're urging him to in your letters."

  "Indeed, I will. It took some work finding him. He's always on the move, it seems. He didn't linger very long in Cairo after we all left. I'm afraid the cable I sent him just sat there. I finally caught up with him at one of his favorite hotels in Rome. He cabled back to say he'd be in Monte Carlo within the week. I sent him a rather long letter there. No response yet. Here's hoping it reached him. It makes me rather nervous, I must admit. To have him abroad with all this talk of war.