Immortal Muse (13 page)

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.

I
N 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.

The first years immediately following her departure from Nicolas and Paris in 1402 had been miserable ones. She had thought several times that the fate of the mice on which she'd experimented was about to fall on her. She was both ill and lethargic; she had no energy and found the one thing she'd always been able to do—to concentrate and focus on a creative task—stripped from her. She expected that she would wake each day to find herself suddenly ancient and dying. Instead, the illness and weakness only persisted and became more acute.

She began to think that the elixir had been only a curse: a long, youthful life, yes, but one that was a miserable, muted, and sick existence. A black mood wrapped around her. She prayed to God to take her, to end this. It would be better to die than to live this way.

And God gave her a sign.

She had noticed the green-hearted people even as she prepared to leave Paris, though they were rare creatures. A few of the customers who came to Tremeur Pelletier's manuscript shop near the university were the first she noticed, but even on the street, she might pass one of them. It was as if she could see inside them, into the very core of their soul, and there deep inside would be that pulsing, throbbing verdancy like a second heart: a
soul-heart
is how she thought of it, sometimes very small, and a few of them—a very few—so large that the light of it seemed to threaten to overwhelm the person who contained it. The
les personnes vertes
were usually, she came to realize, people with occupations that required both creativity and inventiveness: writers, poets, artists, musicians, the occasional scientist or thinker, male and female both.

She found, also, that
les personnes vertes
drew her, as if she were a dusty iron filing attracted to a lodestone. When she was near one of them, the weariness and sense of illness seemed to briefly lift in that emerald radiance, to return like a veil of rain afterward.

It took her another miserable year and more to realize that she was able to attach herself to the green soul, that she could touch the radiance with her mind and coax it from the person, that the energy of their soul-hearts could feed her and give her back at least some of the vitality she thought she'd lost forever. It took yet longer to understand that when she did that, the green heart inside the person would also grow in response to her touch, slowly but certainly, and that the growth of their soul-heart led to a corresponding increase in their creativity.

She could exist in a symbiotic relationship with the soul-heart where each fed the other.

Her first experience with that phenomenon was with a musician in Troyes, one of the many towns to which Perenelle traveled on leaving Paris. His name was Philippe, a composer of chansons and motets, who possessed a heart of the most beautiful emerald that Perenelle had yet seen. She heard him playing a lute in the town square and singing. He was perhaps thirty-five, his temples already touched with gray, and he seemed pleased that this handsome, if tired-looking and poor young woman appeared to be entranced by him even while the townspeople passed him by with a few glances and occasionally tossed a denier in his lute case. Perenelle, for her part, was held in the pull of him, and as he played, she could see in her mind the tendrils from the soul-heart, snaking out from him and wrapping about her. It was like nothing she had experienced before.

This was true magic, this was a mage's spell, and she gasped at its touch. Instinctively, she drew the power in with her breath, released it redoubled with her exhalation so that it returned to him. The malaise that had afflicted her for a year now fell away in that instant, as if she were a starving person presented with a feast.

She wanted nothing more than to be with him, this Philippe, forever. Yet it wasn't love—at least not love as she'd thought of it before. There was no romance, no lust, no stirring within the loins. This was another type of communion altogether.

As she stood there, entranced, his voice became stronger, his fingers loosening and nearly flying on the strings of the lute; those passing by stayed a moment longer to hear him, and by the end of the day, there were silver sou mixed in with the deniers. He asked her name; she told him that she was Giselle Boulanger. They talked as he counted his coins—“You were good luck for me, Giselle; I've never made so much before”—and he bought her dinner that evening and shared his bed with her that night. She listened to the compositions that he said he had in his head but never played, and his green soul-heart held them both.

“Giselle” stayed with Philippe a year. He taught her to play, and she found she had a small talent for music herself; he taught her the chansons and told her she had a strong and lovely singing voice. She remained with him until a passing noble heard Philippe and invited him to play for the court in Paris. She had shaken her head sadly when he told her he was going to Paris, when he asked her to accompany him.

“I won't go back there,” she told him. “I can't. But you . . . You should go, Philippe. Play for the king. You belong there.” Allowing him to leave had devastated her inside, though she tried not to let him see it. His excitement, his pride, and his new ambitions were too obvious, pulsing in the soul-heart of his. She had smiled bravely, had allowed him to give her a pouch of sols he had saved. He had told her that he would return for her, and she knew it to be a comforting lie.

She remembered her father's words: “. . .
that's your gift, daughter . . .”
Her gift—and, it would seem, the payment she must make for the gift the elixir had given her. She realized it as he left her, when she felt the dull malaise slip over her again with the absence of his green heart.

Her gift. Her curse. This would be a bitter payment, which she would make far too many times.

 * * * 

After Philippe, there had been a parade of others, and a parade of false names for her as well. She had been living with Jean Petit in Chartres for two years, since 1416, watching his skill painting miniatures strengthening with each passing month. Already, he'd been commissioned to illustrate a Book of Hours for the Archbishop of the cathedral. His star was ascending fast.

She learned with him and assisted him: she now knew how to mix pigments so the colors would be vibrant and long-lasting; how to trim a brush; how to mix the colors to create new shades and hues. She practiced alongside him, and he helped her find her own skills with painting.

And for two years, and longer, Perenelle/Giselle/Isabelle also tried to rediscover the secret of the Philosopher's Stone, the elixir that had given her this extended youth—for now, sixteen years gone from Nicolas, she still appeared to be in the mid-20s, her joints blessedly loose, her hair luxuriant, her skin flexible and soft, her eyes unglazed by the film of cataracts. She still feared that each day might be her last, that her age would spew suddenly through her in a matter of seconds or minutes, leaving her an ancient, withered, and dead husk, but each day eventually passed and she was still the same. Often, as Jean painted, she would work in a small laboratory in the back, mixing potions and chemicals, poring over manuscripts she had managed to buy, attempting the spells that she half-remembered, reading the Tarot for guidance.

It was a laborious climb back. The indefinable, ineffable spark was still there in her efforts—at least while in the company of another's green soul-heart. But there was a cloud over her mind of the last years with Nicolas. She had to begin again at the beginning, with the experiments she'd started with her father. She began to think that this, too, was a payment for her youth: the elixir had not only made her dependent on the talent of others for her health, but she was little better than a rank apprentice, struggling to comprehend everything set before her.

If she had the notebook, where she'd written it all down: all the formulae, all the processes, all the observations . . . But that was gone. That was in Nicolas' hands. But she persevered, taking in the radiance from Jean's talent and using it for herself while at the same time she strengthened him.