Her next words confirmed that she understood part of what had occurred, that she understood the lightning that had swept through them.
“My soul, and anything else you messed up with your lustfulness,” Brice said, taking his hand and towing him toward the guest bathroom. She added thoughtfully: “I hope we don’t end up brain damaged from making love in water. Do you think that could happen?”
The corpse was dismembered and the dissevered limbs cast into the pit where they continued to move about for an entire day, only gradually losing mobility. My assistant called it an abomination—and perhaps it was. But all I could think of were the applications in battle. Imagine an army where the soldiers could be killed, have limbs struck off, and yet continue to battle. What would such a warrior be worth?
—From the medical journal of Johann Conrad Dippel
I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law. And even then, I might have carried it through if I could have been sure of becoming a ghost and haunting her.
—Lord Byron in a letter to Thomas Moore
Not quite adultery, but adulteration.
—Byron,
Don Juan
A while later, when they were curled up by the fire in the library, sipping at some horrendously expensive brandy, Brice finally got around to the subject of their unusual lovemaking. But even then, her methods were indirect and delicate, guiding the conversation yet giving Damien room to answer or not as he chose.
“That’s some physiognomy you’ve got. It seems to work like a dynamo. Still, if it always has that effect…?”
“Nearly always,” Damien confirmed.
She smiled a little. “I guess you like winter a lot, then.”
“This winter,” he answered, his hand running down the curve of her waist, wanting her skin but settling for the soft flannel of her nightgown. He liked the way her hair looked when it was slightly damp. It fell into messy ringlets that glowed in the firelight.
“Does it ever get embarrassing?” Brice asked curiously. “I’m thinking especially when you were a teenager.”
“I’ve learned to control it,” he said and then frowned. “Except during very particular kinds of storms. But I remain home for those special events. When the raging outside is no match for the one within, it’s best to stay indoors and away from temptation.”
“I would think so.”
“Anyway, I didn’t have this…
condition
when I was a teenager.”
She nodded calmly. After a moment, obviously coming to some decision, she said in her most reasonable way, “Many people don’t know it, but intuition is really the most sophisticated sort of reasoning that humans have. It comes from both the conscious and unconscious, putting together many clues buried in both sides of the brain. I think everyone has it, but few choose to listen when it speaks. Perhaps that is because the same process causes imagination—which is usually embarrassingly wrong about what it conceives.”
“Your intuition is speaking?” Damien asked. His body tensed slightly but he didn’t turn away. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it—someone to finally understand?
“Yes. Or else my imagination.” She rolled over to face him, then draped an arm over his waist. She kissed the part of his chest that peeped through the V of his shirt. “Whichever it is, my gut is telling me something that should be impossible. But I don’t think it is. Which presents me with an intriguing problem.”
“And what is that? The impossibility, I mean.”
“Do you really want to know? To have it out in the open?” she asked gently.
“Yes. I think so.” Then Damien frowned. “Hell! I don’t know. Tell me anyway.”
Brice looked at him for a long moment, then sat up. She went to the desk. First she selected and opened a book that contained a copy of one of his handwritten letters, back from when he’d been George Gordon, Lord Byron. Then she leaned down and slid open the second desk drawer where the sherry had been. She pulled out a piece of folded paper. She closed the desk carefully and brought both to Damien, who had risen and was adding wood to the fire.
She compared the signatures before she handed the book and paper over.
“Are you a forger?” Her voice was slightly unsteady. “You could tell me that, and I would make myself believe you because my imagination is vivid and I have been wrong before. Once or twice.”
His heart stumbled. Of course she’d had indications of the truth—provocative ones. Yet nothing individually, or even collectively, should have been enough to lead her to this conclusion. Not so quickly. Yet, somehow, she had made this leap of intuition and faith, and arrived at the correct answer.
That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? he asked himself again. It was why he had kept her here, revealed Ninon’s letters, seduced her during a storm. He could have stayed quiet about these things, could have locked himself away for the night. But he hadn’t.
“No, I’m not a forger. Just careless, apparently.” Damien turned back from the fireplace and put up the tongs. He took the proffered tome and paper, but barely glanced at them. Instead he watched her face.
“Are you…well,
are you?”
she asked.
“Yes. I am.” He waited for her reaction.
“But how?” she asked, believing and yet clearly baffled. “How can this be? Is it connected to the…the lightning?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. Then, looking at the window where the wind still screamed, he added: “But, then, it seems that we shall have a long while for me to tell it. The city will be closed down by morning. I can’t recall the last time that happened. It rather reminds of another storm long, long ago.”
“Never mind the weather.” Brice knelt on the rug and reached for his hand, tugging him down beside her. There was still some current, some inner heat that made his skin tingle, but it was mild now, safe. For a while at least.
“I had epilepsy caused by a lesion in the brain,” Damien began, gaze and voice remote as he visited a past that he would have preferred to forget. “And every year it grew worse until I was certain that I would die or be made an idiot from the increasingly violent seizures. I worked feverishly at my poems, but…Fate slung ever shorter years at me like a volley of arrows, shooting them by too quickly for me to see, and yet leaving great damage in my body and brain. I needed more time for my work. For my life.”
Brice murmured encouragingly as he began his tale. His voice had changed, had become more…British. Her heart was beating a bit wildly. But then, these last few days her heart had beat faster and harder than ever before, pumping not just blood but expectation, desire, even hope into every fiber of her being. And it was all because of him—George Gordon. Lord Byron.
Damien
. It was confusing, because she thought of him now as both men. It was because of him that she felt alive. He’d done this for her—given her back the pulse of a living, vital person, reminded her that she could have a life that wasn’t as plain—as boring—as the stale soda crackers she crumbled into her canned soup every day at lunch.
And now she was taking a journey with him back in time, and she was about to learn something no other living person knew. Talk about getting off the tour bus! She wasn’t just seeing—she was
finding
. She was thrilled and terrified, and her heart jittered as it bounced between the two extremes of rare emotion.
“My wife was alarmed and repelled by my seizures, and she feared that the condition was hereditary and that we would have idiot children. She shunned my bed, and eventually her fear grew into hate. Few know this, but her increasing revulsion was one of the real reasons I left England.”
Brice strove to keep all traces of pity from her face, to not speak ill of his wife. She knew that not everyone was brave when it came to challenging Fate, which was so much bigger and meaner than mortal man or woman. And back then they hadn’t understood about epilepsy, nor had they known effective treatments for it. When the bully of illness had sneaked up on Byron’s wife, it was understandable that the woman had quailed and fled.
Yet Brice despised her anyway. It was just one more way in which the woman had been a coward. And that fear had made her into a liar who maligned her husband, hurting him even after his death.
“On my journey to Lake Geneva, I happened by a castle where I took shelter from an especially terrible storm—a notorious castle later visited by the Shelleys.” Brice couldn’t help but stiffen, and her movement made Damien smile slightly. “Yes, that’s the one. Understand, it was not a place I would have sought out voluntarily. It was an inhospitable and lonely situation, but night had fallen early. A cold white cloak of stinging mist that carried a strange clinging snow had settled on my hair and shoulders. It was periodically torn away by a raging wind when we emerged from the tract of woods, but always it returned, colder, deeper, more tenacious and smothering. I realize now that it stank of formaldehyde because we neared the castle and Dippel was hard at work.
“You have to imagine it. The air in the open was merciless and battered everything. Even the clouds were ragged and bruised, unable to hold their shape. I feared for my mount and also for the coachman and those horses that hauled the carriage.” Damien exhaled slowly. “Anyhow, we took shelter at the castle, and it was there that I met Johann Conrad Dippel. And it was in his presence that I had my most violent seizure. It was also that night that he made me an intriguing—but what I then took to be insane—proposition.”
Damien looked out into the night.
“You don’t mean…?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Of course, I did not accept his offer right away. And as soon as the storm passed, I continued on to Villa Diodoti—in the carriage, for I was very ill. I got on with life as well as I could. It was only later when the Shelleys visited and I again had a terrible seizure which nearly ended my life that I finally gave in to their entreaties and sent for Dippel. The seizures were coming hourly by then. I consented to his treatment.”
“And thus a legend was born,” Brice whispered. Her eyes felt enormous and probably were. “It involved some form of electroshock therapy?”
“A form of it, yes.”
Logs crashed in the grate, and the sound broke the worst of the spell of Damien’s strange tale.
“I don’t know why I’ve told you this now,” he said at last, focusing his dark eyes on her face, his voice returning to its present day intonation and accent. “Perhaps it is because I see in you many of the traits that existed in me when I was young—first and foremost, a hunger beyond the understanding of most men, a thirst for knowledge that reaches beyond the present and into the past where history was born. You also have a logical mind. This makes me believe that you can perhaps understand why I did what I did.”
Brice nodded—not in agreement, but simply in acknowledgment of his words. She was not certain that she did understand or agree. Perhaps she had been conditioned by too many horror films, but she found his story as appalling as it was fascinating.
As though guessing her conflicting thoughts, he added: “That intellectual hunger is an odd thing. At first it was satisfied with investigation, with the exploration of other great minds, with expressing my inner thoughts through poetry. Then one day I looked up and truly understood that the river of time only runs one way, and that it is always flowing, carrying us farther from our goals and closer to death. Every year we lose precious brain cells. Every year we grow weaker. Yet even then, armed with this knowledge, I probably would not have considered this sort of life had not my own been in danger of ending prematurely.” Damien got up and began to pace, his thoughts clearly causing some sort of agitation that required physical expression.
It was probably at least three parts regret for having confided his greatest secret in her. Brice remained still, not bothering to attempt reassurance. Not yet. He would know if she lied or spoke out of ignorance, or pity, or any heated emotion.
“I had very nearly made my peace with my early demise when this extraordinary coincidence happened. It was a gift, a dare from the gods! A chance to heal my brain, to extend my life—indefinitely, I suppose, though at the time I thought I was only reclaiming what would have been mine if disease had not plagued me.” Damien paused in front of his desk and touched the manuscripts piled there. “There are those who said—and perhaps will say if they ever know the truth—that I was wrong to accept the challenge Fate threw at me. That I am unnatural because of what I’ve done.”
“Mary Shelley?” Brice asked softly, speaking for the first time in a long while. “Was she one of those who did not accept?”
“Among others. Polidori left me soon after, you know. Dippel horrified him. He should have horrified me too. He knew what he was doing, after all. He
knew
.” Damien’s head turned in her direction and his dark eyes burned. “But I still count it as a gift. A dark one, to be sure. But it is not a bargain I too often regret.”
“A bargain? Then there is a price attached to this”—she hunted for a word as she tried to snuff out an image of Daniel Webster dealing with a devil in a lab coat—“this immortality? What did you have to pay Dippel? Your firstborn son?” The attempted joke came out flat.
“In a way, yes. There is always a price, you know. Can you possibly doubt that? Especially when one is purchasing his life?” He pushed up his sleeves, showing the fine network of scars. But they both knew there were higher costs than the marks on his body.
“And that sometimes-regretted cost is…?” she asked softly.
He spread his hands wide. “Where do I begin? Never writing poetry again for fear that someone would discover it and ferret out my identity.” Brice made a small involuntary sound of pain, but Damien went on relentlessly. “Re-creating myself every two or three decades because, even in this age of plastic surgery, people do notice when you fail to age. Living a life that has at its core a secret that leads to vast deception of the people around you. Never being able to have true, lifelong intimacy with another human—not with a friend, not a lover, not a wife. And certainly not children. For almost two hundred years, my best friends have been dogs.” He shook his head, for a moment his face lined with pain.
“But surely if you wanted—”