Immortal Muse (37 page)

Marie-Anne turned away, with a quiet sob, then turned defiantly back. She would watch, and wouldn't give Nicolas the satisfaction of seeing her fear. She watched the blade fall, heard the crowd's approval, felt Lagrange's hand on her shoulder. She wondered if it would have been better if it had been
her
head that had been separated from its body, but she knew that wasn't what Nicolas wanted.

“I hate you, Perenelle, and I know that you hate me in return,” he'd told her. “That mutual hate nourishes and sustains me; if you were gone, that would be lost to me.”

“Let's leave here, Madame,” Lagrange said, not understanding her grief, her sorrow, and her regret. He gave a huff of indignation. “It took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century.”

“I've made arrangements for the body,” she told him. “I have to take care of that.”

“Then I'll accompany you.”

Most of the bodies were simply thrown into common mass graves outside the city. Two-wheeled tumbril carts collected them—heads in sacks, the bodies piled into the tumbrils until the cart was full. Those few bodies that were to be claimed were set aside briefly. Marie-Anne and Lagrange moved past a fully-laden tumbril from which thick blood was leaking. Large black flies buzzed thickly around the tumbril and the blood pooled on the cobbles of the Place, stirring as if in irritation as Marie-Anne and Lagrange, holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their faces against the stench, came near them: some of the bodies had evacuated their bowels and bladders during their execution. “Here,” Lagrange said, moving toward a body stretched out on an unhitched tumbril a little away from the others. “Madame,” he asked again, “are you sure . . . ?”

“Is it Antoine?” Marie-Anne asked, and Lagrange nodded silently.

Seeing him was worse than she'd thought possible. His head was in a canvas sack at the feet of the body, the fibers liberally soaked with his blood. The bed of the tumbril was tilted, so it appeared that the headless body was leaning back against the bed of the cart. The wound on his neck was horrible to see, still seeping blood onto the linen shirt. The body was still and unmoving. For a moment, seeing Antoine's body, the world shivered around Marie-Anne as she remembered seeing Paolina's murdered body, and she thought that she would faint. She clutched the side of the cart and took several gulping breaths. She felt Lagrange's hand on her shoulder. “Come away,” he said. “I'll deal with this.”

She shook her head, steeling herself. She crouched down to the canvas sack and untied the twine holding it together. She forced herself to take Antoine's head in her hands, grateful that someone had closed the eyes. Rising, holding the gory mess away from herself, she placed his head against the body, where it rightfully belonged.

She heard Lagrange's hissing intake of breath as she became aware that someone else had approached the tumbril. She looked up to see Robespierre watching from the other side of the tumbril. She glared at him; he looked blandly back at her. “You have no idea what you've done, Monsieur,” Lagrange spat out angrily.

Robespierre glanced at him. “I believe I know exactly what I've done,” he answered. “And I would be careful, Monsieur Lagrange, lest you say too much.”

Marie-Anne ignored Nicolas. She stared at the body, not certain what she was expecting to see: strands of muscles reaching out from body to neck, pulling it back together, bones and sinew and flesh knitting together, the heart starting to beat once more, the lungs to breathe, Antoine's eyes opening to gaze at her once more . . .

There was nothing. No response at all. The head remained stubbornly severed, the body unmoving. “He looks so strangely young,” Lagrange said, then sighed. “Madame, we should leave.” She didn't respond. She stared at Antoine, willing him to come back to life. She'd snapped the spines of mice in the laboratory before. They'd come back; surely the elixir could do that with Antoine.

But she'd never entirely severed the heads. She'd never removed the head from the body until all life was gone,
then
tried to restore them.

“Antoine . . .” she whispered. There was no answer.

“It would seem that the guillotine renders anyone mortal,” Robespierre said. Marie-Anne glanced up to find his amused regard on her. “I'm sure we'll both remember that,” he said.

“Monsieur,” Lagrange interrupted. “I must ask you to leave. Allow Madame Lavoisier to grieve in peace.”

“Grief is such a rich emotion,” Robespierre answered. “It possesses such an exquisite taste.” He shivered then, as if with a sudden chill, and took a step back. He bowed to Lagrange, to Marie-Anne. “We will meet each other again,” he told her.

“The man is drunk with his power, and he'll come to a terrible end soon enough,” Lagrange said as Robespierre left them, though he half-whispered the words so that none of the people milling around them could hear him. Marie-Anne nodded, but her gaze was still on Antoine.
Now
, she thought,
now it's safe, Antoine. Come back to me. Please come back, my love . . .

But Antoine remained obstinately dead.

It would be two full days before she allowed him to be buried. When the body began to show irrevocable signs of corruption, she finally permitted the lid to be nailed on the coffin. As she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave, she thought of Nicolas.

I know how to kill you now. I know.

A
S THE FALLING sun painted ragged clouds with purple and red, they strolled over the Pont au Double toward Île de la Cité and Notre Dame, stopping to watch a puppeteer performing on the bridge.

“Mexico's beautiful this time of year, don't you think?” David laughed, though Camille managed only a smile at his jest.

At Camille's insistence, she and David had told their friends in New York that they were going to Mexico City and Acapulco. She'd dropped Verdette off with Mercedes with strict instructions to let her roam the house but not to try to pick her up or pet her.

But rather than going to Mexico City, they instead flew to Paris. She told David that the lie was “so no one can interrupt us, no one can find us, and we can surprise everyone when we come back,” though that, too, was a lie. After Helen's murder, she was afraid that Nicolas would come after David next. She intended to spend a few days with him in Paris to make certain he was settled and comfortable, then fly back to New York alone on some pretext or another. She would deal with Nicolas; she would end the hunt.

Then, if she could, she'd come back for David. When it was safe for him.

“I'll pay for the trip from my trust fund,” she told him. “It's rather flush right now. You don't need to worry; just make sure your passport's in order. Bring your camera—think of what you can shoot there: a whole new country.”

Camille had thought that David might protest the subterfuge, especially given the continuing investigation into Helen's murder, but he'd given only a token protest, which told her just how stressed he was also. “It'd be nice to be alone,” he'd said, “just the two of us. I've always wanted to see Paris, and that detective woman told me that I wasn't a suspect, so sure. Why not?”

Why not?
That had been enough; Camille had booked them the flight the next day, not caring what it cost.
Time to go home. Time to think. Time to decide what I'm going to do.

Camille tossed a euro into the puppeteer's hat as they walked on a few more paces. She leaned on the stone railing of the bridge, looking down into a Seine whose ripples glittered with the sunset's colors. Just downstream, another couple was sitting on a ledge near the water, arms around each other and basking in the remaining light. The towers of Notre Dame appeared golden in the late afternoon. A tour boat passed underneath them with a snatch of French from the guide. “. . . one of the most famous Gothic cathedrals, begun in 1160 and completed nearly two centuries later. Notre Dame was one of the first buildings in the world to use the flying buttress . . .”

She heard the click of a camera behind her, and glanced over her shoulder to see David taking pictures of her on the bridge with Notre Dame as the backdrop. “You know, there have been a few million pictures taken right here,” she told him. “All of them are currently moldering forgotten in a few million albums.”

He grinned lopsidedly at her. Since they'd come to Paris, much of the grief that surrounded him following Helen's murder had been overpowered by the scenery. He could manage to laugh and smile again, though the shadows still crept over his face at odd times. “Yeah, but none of them have
you
in them, and they weren't taken by me.”

“Egotist,” she told him. For a moment, she forgot her own quandary in the innocent, honest awe in his face as he gazed around at the scene in front of them, and she laughed. “Put the camera down and come here.”

David had never been to Paris before, never been to Europe at all, and she could feel his eagerness and wonder at the sights, sending his emerald radiance to pulsing as he tried to absorb everything around them. “There's nothing like this in America,” he told her. “Nothing. There's such a sense of
age
here. New York . . . Well, as wonderful as it is, it's so
new
and blandly modern compared to this.”

She smiled and didn't contradict him, though she had little romanticism about the Paris she remembered from centuries ago. That Paris had been smaller, malodorous, and filthy, the air thick and dark, the houses smaller, more closely-set and poorly-built.
This
Paris had space and was far cleaner, yet the memory of the violent, periodic spasms Paris had experienced still lingered, sanitized like the rest of the inner city—pockets of ancient memories hidden in the midst of more modern structures. She could still see underneath the facade to a past that, sometimes, felt more real to her than the present. She stood arm-in-arm with David, basking like a cat in sunshine to the radiance of his green heart.

Only she could feel that. That pleasure was hers alone.

They strolled across the bridge to the Île. David marveled at the elaborate stone figures above the massive doors of the cathedral, gazing up at the gargoyles that leered down at them from the roof. “Can we go up to the top of the tower?” he asked her.

“Not tonight,” she told him. “Leave something for another day. We've plenty of time to see everything, as much time as we want.” She hoped that was true. “This evening, let's just walk around the city and pretend we're not tourists, just two lovers out for a stroll.”

They did exactly that, walking across the Île to the Right Bank, past the grand facade of the Hôtel de Ville, turning west along the rue de Rivoli, with Camille giving him a running commentary on the sights. They came to the rue Saint-Denis and Camille stopped, overcome again with memories. The rue Saint-Denis had been called rue des Saints Innocents when she and Nicolas had lived there, close by. Nothing remained from that time, all of it obliterated by the glacial but inexorable march of centuries and decay. She could recall where their little estate had stood, but there were newer buildings there now, already a few centuries old themselves.

She'd been back to Paris several times over her long lifetime, but while she loved the city and felt that it was more “home” than any other place, each time she returned, the city saddened her as well. All these people around them: all of them felt so
temporary
, given such a fleeting existence that, to them, the city seemed solid, permanent, and largely unchanging in a way it could never be for her. To her, the city was ephemeral and constantly in a state of slow alteration.

And David, on her arm, was no different than any of them: to her, his life would be just as ephemeral and fleeting, unless she did with him what she'd done to Verdette, and that was something she wouldn't do without his understanding of all the implications the potion represented.

Nicolas would not have her hesitation.

It was as if his name generated the vision. She saw a man, dressed in dark clothes, approaching them from farther up the rue Saint-Denis. He was short, and the bulk of his body and the way he carried himself . . . For a moment, Camille's vision blurred and she saw the street as it once had been, with the cobbles and central gutter and their house set on the corner, with the neighbors she remembered moving around them.

He had found them, impossibly.
She wasn't prepared for this; she'd intended to buy a small handgun here in Paris, but had not yet had the opportunity. There were a few vials of chemicals in her purse, ready to be set off with a small spell, but that was all. But
he
would be ready. Camille's arm tightened around David's; as she reached into her purse; he misinterpreted the gesture and smiled, leaning down to kiss the top of her head.

“I can see why you love this city,” he said to her. She barely heard him, watching the man approach. He was within a dozen strides of them now, and she waited for him to take a few more steps, so she could fling the vial at his feet and shout the spell—if she was lucky, if Nicolas didn't stop her first, if he didn't send the black fire rushing toward her and David. A shielding spell—could she cast it quickly enough? She wondered how she could communicate her urgency to David, to convince him to run while he could, while she tried to deal with the threat. “Paris has the energy of New York,” he was saying, “yet there's so much
history
here also. I can't wait to see more of it. How many times have you been here before, Camille?”

With the invocation of her current name, her vision cleared. The short man was but a few strides away, but now she saw his features and realized that he was not Nicolas. He was not anyone she recognized. Her fingers released the glass tube they were holding. The man felt her gaze on him, though. He nodded to her as he passed, smiling as he regarded the two of them, her arm still holding him tightly.
“Bon soir,”
he said.
“Appréciez votre soirée.”

“Bon soir,”
Camille answered. Then, to David, she said: “I've been here too many times. The city is inhabited by ghosts.”

 * * * 

The next day, they left the
Hotel de Notré Dame on rue de Maítre-Albert, leaving their key with Dominique, the owner who also worked at the desk. Camille expected to do the normal tourist things, and they did: not for her, of course, but because David wanted to see them and it gave her pleasure to watch the delight in his face as he gazed at the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the Jardin du Luxembourg and Jardin des Tuileries. David, never without his camera, took a massive number of pictures, though he complained that too many of them looked exactly like tourist shots.

David wanted to tour the Louvre as well, but she convinced him to leave it for another day, shepherding him instead to the Musée d'Orsay, with its incredible collection of mid-19th to early 20th century paintings, all in what Camille still remembered as the Gare d'Orsay, a train station built at the turn of the century.

She'd been there the day the train station had opened, during the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The current building overlaid her memories, dimmed.

Later that afternoon, they wandered the Musée de Cluny, close to their hotel. Originally built to house the abbots of Cluny, the building itself dated from the late 15th century and was constructed over the remnants of Roman-era baths, some of which had been excavated and were now visible again in the basement of the museum as well as in a rear court. David seemed most impressed by a room hung with the six tapestries of the
Lady and the Unicorn
, but Camille herself stopped near the top of the stairs leading to the tapestry room. There, on the wall, was a rectangular square stone, much weathered, with images of the sun and three men, two of them depicted as saints with a key and a book, the figures carved above a section of writing.

Her breath caught, looking at the stone—she'd forgotten that it was there. She remembered it; she'd last seen it in 1418, above an empty grave. “What's that?” David asked her, his touch on her shoulder startling her. He bent down, reading the card for the exhibit, printed in English and German as well as French. “Nicolas Flamel's tombstone? Isn't he that alchemist guy?”

“Yeah,” she answered, surprised at the trembling in her voice. “That alchemist guy.”

David chuckled. “It figures you'd be interested in that, given the laboratory you have in our apartment.”

That evening, David came grinning into the room. “I was just talking with Dominique at the desk,” he said. “I know where we're going for dinner.”

“I do, too. We're going to the Petit Saint Benoit.”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “We're going somewhere else. I've already made the reservations.”

“Where?”

His grin widened. “Not telling you,” he said. “It's a surprise.”

That evening, they took a taxi from the hotel. He still refused to tell her where they were going. The taxi moved across the Île and up the Boulevard de Sébastopol, finally turning right, then left again, then right once more before stopping. Well before then, she realized where they were heading, knew with a knot in her stomach. The street sign on the building proclaimed this to be the rue de Montmorency, though she remembered other names for the street. It was close to where she and Nicolas had first lived. As David paid the taxi driver, she peered at the small building sandwiched between two larger ones:
Auberge Nicolas Flamel
, it proclaimed, and a sign placed on the house itself proclaimed this to be the “House of Nicolas Flamel and his wife Perenelle,” built in 1407.

She knew the truth: that “Perenelle” had vanished from Nicolas' life five years before, that Nicolas had never actually lived here. She managed to smile as David came up to her. “Look,” he said. “Nicolas Flamel's house. Dominique said it's one of the oldest buildings in Paris, maybe even
the
oldest, and that the restaurant here is excellent.” He stopped, looking at her suspiciously. “You already knew about this place, didn't you?”

“Yes,” she told him, and the visible disappointment in his face made her sorry for the admission. “But . . . I've never eaten here before. And I think it's lovely that you would put this together.” On her toes, she reached up to put her arms around his shoulders and kiss him: a long, lingering embrace that surprised even her with its intensity. She was surrounded by him, by his radiance; she felt complete, as she had not felt in more than half a century. “It's still a wonderful surprise, and I love you for the thought. Let's go in.”

For a time, inside the restaurant, she could almost believe that she had dropped back in time: the exposed timbers, the carvings, the candles alight everywhere, the decor; all brought her back to another century despite the modern conveniences. She managed to put aside the fact that she was inside a house that Nicolas had built—though the waiter informed them, as she already knew, that this hadn't been his home. This was designed as a house for the indigent, who were given a drink and food in the tavern on the ground floor, then were taken upstairs to sleep, paid for with their prayers for the souls of Nicolas and Perenelle.