His visit to see the aging Claire Clairmont had not been happy either. She did not know him anymore, and had become tiresomely religious. He tried not to judge—would he not have felt the same if the grave had yawned before him and his imagination began tormenting him with visions of hellfire?
Still, he had seen then not just mortal death, but the death of his and his comrades’ ideals. He had returned to the States afterward, going south to New Orleans where he’d begun yet another life in a clime warmer and friendlier than the one he had known.
And he was about to do it again. Only this time, he wouldn’t die in battle. Like the phoenix, Adrian Ruthven was about to die and George Ruthven would be born from the ashes. In a decade or two, George’s “nephew” would come to claim his great-uncle’s inheritance.
Until then, these apartments in New York would sit empty—except for the ghosts and the memories. And good riddance. Hadn’t he already learned that the past was dead? It should stay decently buried.
Sensing that his last hard thought had chased his friends away, and that he was again alone, Byron turned at the top of the stairs to look back down into the library. There was nothing there but the boisterous fire, and the drapes stirred uneasily with a passing draft. It was as quiet as any tomb he’d ever been in.
Then the eerie peace was broken by a soft sneeze, and his two terriers crept out from under the divan. They began playing with the sofa cushions, worrying them like rats and tossing them back and forth. The ghosts had truly departed. All was normal.
Except, there should be a monkey to supervise the boisterous play. He had always had a monkey for the dogs to befriend. Wolf and Mutz had especially liked the small primates.
Byron smiled sadly. Perhaps, if he lived to see the dawn, he would get another. He’d always loved monkeys. And maybe a monkey would help him forget the war that raged again in Europe. A war that would have to be ended without him. He’d done his part for the cause, had his fill of the holocausts and the man-made hellfire that killed so indiscriminately. He’d done all he could before the epilepsy returned, had wept for the horrible, seemingly endless losses around him—wept scalding tears of rage and helplessness—and he hated that he still had, after all this time, tears in him to give. It made his departure from the field more bitter and left another shadow over his heart.
But that was the price he’d paid—and paid, and paid, and continued to pay—for his long life. There was no point in quibbling. He’d made his bargain long ago.
Your heart needs occupation.
—Letter from Ninon de Lenclos to Marquis Sévigné
There is no instinct like that of the heart.
—Byron
December 20, 2005
“Good God!” Damien Ruthven began to laugh. It wasn’t often that the books he was sent to review provoked this reaction. In fact, none ever had. His personal secretary, Karen Andersen, stuck her head in his door. She looked alarmed.
“It can’t be that bad,” she said, ready to defend the author. She was always ready to defend the author. Karen was sweet and intelligent, but she’d soon realized that she hadn’t chosen well in her career as secretary to a book critic. If she hadn’t grown so fond of him, she would have quit only months after starting. Damien knew this and was careful to stay on her good side. “I only just gave you the manuscript,” she said.
“I don’t know if it’s bad. It’s certainly long. You do realize that she has written three volumes, each six hundred pages in length? This is only the first installment.”
“What? There’s more coming?” Even Karen looked taken aback.
Damien chuckled again.
“Apparently, Book Two is devoted to Byron’s letters and accounting ledgers. I’m not sure what Book Three is—perhaps his laundry lists.” Seeing Karen’s consternation, Damien added, “Don’t worry. I shall enjoy this. I always enjoy the pompous, long-winded ones.”
“Don’t be too mean,” Karen pleaded. “Obviously, this woman has spent a lot of time researching these books. You might actually learn something about Byron.”
“I doubt it,” Damien murmured, waving her away with an impatient hand.
What was the author thinking? Eighteen hundred pages! All about one man? Even he didn’t find himself
that
fascinating.
Prepared to tear the dry dissertation to shreds, four hours later Damien found himself reluctantly intrigued by the woman’s insights into his life and her unusual method of presentation. She had taken a collection of scattered facts and knitted them into a fairly complete portrait. One so complete that it might almost have come from a psychiatrist’s couch. It was arranged almost as a stream-of-consciousness story, spinning out the history of Byron’s life by theme rather than strictly by chronology. A reader could choose to focus on various aspects of the subject’s life—the child, the lover, the poet, the warrior. Within those categories, the author told the story in correct order, but the narrative retained the intimacy of a dinner conversation in which one subject naturally led to another.
The only place she’d erred so far was in some slight details of his love affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, and by misquoting the love poem he’d written to her.
And how he’d died, of course.
Still chuckling, Damien read the last section again.
There were many reasons for Byron’s self-imposed exile to Switzerland, Italy and Greece: unpopular politics, his unloving wife, rapacious creditors, and the rumors of an incestuous affair with his half-sister. Yet, the most vexing of his many irritants was Caroline Lamb, the wife of the future prime minister of England. In adultery’s hall of fame, there is surely no mistress as annoying—and few so crazed.
Lord Byron wrote first to her, telling her that the affair must end because it made “fools talk, friends grieve, and the wise pity.”
When this failed to have any effect on Caroline’s outrageous behavior, he wrote next to Lady Melbourne, her mother-in-law, asking for assistance and saying: “I would sooner, much sooner, be with the dead in purgatory than with her—Caroline—upon earth…I am already almost a prisoner; she has no shame, no feeling, not one estimable or redeemable quality…If there is one human being whom I do utterly detest and abhor it is she, and, all things considered, I feel myself justified in thinking so.”
One would think that such a comprehensive excoriation would deter even the most determined of lovers, but the lady apparently could not face rejection. One has to wonder what ever attracted him to her. His usual good sense must have somehow become suspended.
He had been accused of many things during the course of his affairs—wickedness, promiscuity and licentiousness mainly. This was one of the few times anyone had said he was stupid.
Damien flipped ahead to the poem he had dashed off in a moment of anger.
Remember thee! Remember thee! Till Lethe quench life’s burning streams
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee And haunt thee like a feverish dream
.
Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not, Thy husband too shall think of thee
,
By neither shall thee be forgot! Thou false to him, thou fiend to me
.
Well, the author of this book, one Miss Brice Ashton, was mistaken in a small detail. He’d never sent the verse to Caroline, knowing that though it was deserved, it was too cruel and might unhinge her already rather unstable mind. It had only appeared in print after his
death
. And then it had been printed incorrectly. Though he had written the lines as a question—
Remember thee?—
it had appeared in print in different form, the lines changed to a more emphatic
Remember thee!
Tom Medwin always had been inclined to meddle with other people’s work. Editors! They were an annoying breed.
As for why he had been attracted to Caroline—it certainly wasn’t her body. She’d been stick-thin, like a dried butterfly. Nor was it her public antics and theatrical fits. Those had been supremely distasteful for all involved. But she had possessed a certain kind of sexuality, one fed by stretched nerves and endless reservoirs of turbulent emotion. For a time it had been intriguing, like being near something elemental. It was only after their affair had begun that he realized that all the deep, unrestrained emotion would eventually drown them both. He’d had one devil of a time fighting free.
Intrigued, Damien broke a rule about reading a book through and skipped ahead, intending to read about his affair with the voluptuous Teresa Guiccioli. However, he got distracted on the way by an account of the deadly battle at Missolonghi in chapter seventeen. His biographer got most of the details right, somehow even managing to describe the delta slime that outsiders had called
mud
—an innocuous name for the unpleasant, malodorous and gritty muck that worked its way inside one’s boots and chafed the feet. To this day, the smell of the swamp near his home outside New Orleans reminded him of wading through the shattered bones and blood in the aftermath of that tragic battle.
But though meticulously clear about the details of combat, Miss Ashton skipped over the contributions of Teresa’s brother to the cause, and over the boy’s efforts to help the Greeks against the Turks. The young man had died in Greece six months after helping Byron disappear. He was a true patriot, a hero. This should also be corrected, credit given where credit was due.
Making an impulsive decision, Damien decided that before writing a formal review, he would contact Brice Ashton about her few errors and give her a chance to correct them. What he had was an advanced reading copy; there might still be time for alterations before the book went to print.
The tomes—three massive and grossly overpriced volumes—wouldn’t attract the attention that his autobiography would have done, but somehow it pleased him to think of the record being set straight after all those many years of scholarly regurgitation of the same old Byron myths. It meant breaking one of his hard and fast rules, but he was going to see to it that Brice Ashton knew at least part of the undiscovered truth about her hero.
The fair sex should always be fair, and no man Till thirty should perceive there’s a plain woman.
—Lord Byron
Mad, bad, dangerous to know. That beautiful face is my fate.
—From the journal of Lady Caroline Lamb
Letter-writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.
—Lord Byron
Brice Ashton took up her pen in a firm grip and scribbled quickly:
Ninon was born into the era of the bon vivant and embraced it immediately
. Then, just as quickly, she ran a line through the text, grumbling about hating beginnings of books. Brice was a bit of a magpie, gathering up shiny facts about dead people’s lives, hoarding them until there was enough to work with. And, like a real magpie, her hoards were inherently disorderly. She never knew quite where to begin her books. And, frankly, she didn’t actually enjoy the writing of them all that much. Research was her love, her refuge, the only place where she knew the peace of total absorption. And, even in the vast landscape of history, the only place she’d found complete contentment was with the late Lord Byron. With him, her insights had seemed magical, directed by some form of divinity—probably not a Christian one.
Brice frowned. Her friends had always said she was a bit of a witch. Sometimes, like when she had been interrupted too often, she was also that other
-itch
word, but witches were rarer and more mysterious, so she didn’t mind the label as much. It wasn’t that she actually practiced any sort of magic—not really. She had a few rituals that helped with her craft—burning gardenia candles and keeping an open pouch of Persian Slipper pipe tobacco on her desk—but all writers did things like that. Still, usually those rites led her to places of insight undiscovered by anyone else and brought fascinating and, too often, controversial results.
Nothing was helping today though. And she had to find a starting place for this biography. Brice turned another page in her notebook and began again:
Freedom was a grand thing for the children, but night was falling. Suddenly a creature of white crossed before them in the gloom of the wood. Young Marsillac was at once dismayed and fell back with a cry, but not Ninon. Armed with her father’s rapier, she drew steel on the snarling hound that advanced upon them. Drawing back her sword, Ninon—
The doorbell rang, a klaxon of a bell that her husband Mark had installed many years ago. It shook the walls of her office and made her coffee ripple with tiny waves, but she managed to ignore it.
Ninon called out in a commanding voice—
The bell rang gain, imperiously summoning her from her work.
“Go away,” Brice muttered, scribbling even more frantically.
But the bell was not silenced. It whined, it roared, just as it was intended to do. When the strident ringing persisted for a second minute, Brice knew it was the mailman with a special-delivery letter. Aaron Perkins was the quintessential mailman, and he had learned to be relentless with his deliveries here, going so far as to carry them to the door instead of leaving them in the mailbox by the side of the road because he knew she rarely checked it.
Disgusted at the interruption—the third that morning, Brice threw down her pen and stalked to the door. She was going to change that bell, she really was! What had Mark been thinking?
Brice didn’t answer that last question, for she knew Mark had been thinking of her and her inclination to get lost in her work. He had constantly scolded her about keeping balance in her life—something she’d been bad about lately.
It took an effort to recall how to be cordial, but Brice forced her mouth into a smile of welcome before she opened the top half of her Dutch door. Hazy and unwelcome light shone in her squinting eyes.
“Here ya go, Miz Ashton. Must be somethin’ important, so I didn’t want to make ya come down to the post office to get it—not so close to the big day and all. Things are kinda crazy downtown right now.” He handed her a large envelope with a gust of cold air.
“Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate it,” she lied, wondering what he was talking about. Big day? Had there been another anthrax scare? She really needed to watch the news occasionally.
Then she remembered. It was almost Christmas. The last-minute shoppers would be out in droves trying to get their delayed holiday purchases to parties around the world—a feat not accomplishable at this date unless one booked the Concord, but they would make the attempt anyway.
Brice was further annoyed at being reminded about the season of cheer. She did her best to ignore it. When it caught at the edges of her attention it was quite irritating. And when it really grabbed her notice, every string of lights and every Christmas tree was enough to re-break her heart. This was the season of love and family—but what did that matter when your love was senselessly dead and buried in the cold, wintry ground?
Brice’s smile turned bitter and her face began to ache. Her love had died, and she had not. Her family had died, too, but she still lived. That made her lucky, her friends said. But lucky didn’t mean happy. Especially not at Christmas.
“Have a good day, ya hear?” Aaron called, retreating down the leaf-choked path, listing to one side because of the seasonal heaviness of his satchel.
“I will, thank you. And you too. Don’t let Jack Frost bite you on the…
nose
,” Brice answered, swapping nouns at the last minute, as she pulled hard on the tab of cardboard envelope she didn’t want. She bumped the top half of the door shut with her shoulder and followed that up with a body slam. The door was surly. The wood had warped and needed to be planed. And she would get to it. Soon. Right after the doorbell. In the meantime, she had to be firm about latching the thing or it would spring back open. It was kind of like memory that way.
“I don’t believe it,” she said a moment later into the propane-heated air. She stared fixedly at the letterhead that topped the expensive stationery, wondering if it was a hoax. Or a mistake. Maybe it was a hallucination brought on by hunger and overwork.
Muttering, Brice began reading the body of the letter, finding her way back to her desk by memory and not by sight. She sat for a while reading and then rereading to the soft hum of the furnace. She always ran the furnace after the first of October. Though the climate here was mild by most standards, she felt any cold deep in her once-broken bones.
“I don’t believe it,” she said again when she’d perused the letter a second time. But neither her abandoned coffee cup nor her dusty computer answered.
Brice Ashton stared, bemused by the paper in her hands. Normally, she would have been enraged at receiving such a presumptuous missive from a reviewer—especially in her own home. Reviewers were impossible! So many of them thought they knew more about the subjects of her research than she did, and were almost invariably wrong. It couldn’t be her agent who had betrayed her. Or her publisher. There was etiquette to these things, after all—but how the hell had he gotten her home address if not from them?
Her building wrath died suddenly. In spite of the invasion of privacy, this note was an entirely exceptional thing. She viewed most critics the way she did dandruff: annoying but easily ignored—at least while at home. But this letter couldn’t be disregarded. The tone was one of a scholar speaking respectfully to a peer, albeit in slightly arrogant and archaic prose that might be mistaken for mockery if one weren’t reading with a sensitive eye. And the kinds of detail that Damien Ruthven was describing could only be known to someone who had access to the Byron family archive of personal correspondence and who had spent a lot of time sorting through the material.
Or to someone who had a copy of Byron’s lost memoirs.
A shot of heat went through her body, a bolt of hope and anticipation thrown at her heart by an overdose of sudden adrenaline.
Could it be? Had this man somehow found a copy of the memoirs? Scholars had always believed that there were only three copies—all burned by Hobhouse and Murray in a misguided effort to whitewash Byron’s reputation after his death. But scholars were sometimes wrong. Often wrong, in fact, though she’d never admit it in public. Could the literary find of the century actually be within her reach at last? Was vindication of her beliefs nigh?
Conviction stirred, and the thought was dizzying in a rare but familiar way. Brice had never quite forgotten the first terrifying thrill of actually striking out from conventional wisdom and thinking on her own, of drawing a conclusion that no one else had drawn—and putting it in writing. That day, she had seen the path of her life open up before her and known her true calling. She had always known that she was a writer, but at last she knew just what kind. That day, Brice had put all thoughts of fiction behind her and turned her heart to the task of unveiling the mysterious people of the past.
In the intervening years her heart and hope had somewhat hardened. Investigation was difficult, sometimes nearly impossible. She was often glad that she had met up with Byron and formed her passionate fascination with him before frustration and disillusionment with the veracity of
eyewitnesses
set in. She might never have gone the distance otherwise, never have known him well enough to want to write his biography—and then he wouldn’t have been there to save her when her world collapsed and she needed something solid to cling to.
As it was, in the aftermath of her tragedy, all those bits of fertile flotsam that was Byron’s life settled by the banks of the stream where her subconscious flowed, and there it had taken root. It remained, blossoming and bearing fruit, waiting to be harvested by the starving woman stranded in an emotional winterland where she had no other meat or drink.
Byron had saved her—if not her life, then her sanity.
Brice brought the letter to her nose and inhaled slowly, drawing in the scent that clung to the fine paper. There was something about the smell of Damien Ruthven’s stationery—it called to her in an odd way, whispering blandishments that only certain people would be aware of. Or respond to. It sounded crazy, but she had learned to listen when intuition or other senses spoke to her. A biographer who wrote about the long dead was as much a detective and psychic as anything else, and one learned to trust one’s inner guidance systems when questing for the truth. Right now it was saying that she should go to New York.
On the other hand…
Brice looked over at the newspaper. It was open to the book section where, in a weird coincidence and against her better judgment, she had been reading one of Damien Ruthven’s more scathing reviews with breakfast.
I am old-fashioned. Like most people, I’ve always thought that a book should be about something—if not a plot, then characters or an idea. I’ve even been known to settle for coherent sentences that conveyed emotion in some form or other.
But, once again, Torrance P. Broccoli has set out to prove that a book doesn’t have to be about anything. Since it isn’t about anything, I can’t give you a plot summation, and since it has no characters, I can’t acquaint you with their names. As it conveys no ideas—well, you catch the drift. Read tea leaves—it will be more rewarding.
Broccoli Stew
is part of the small print run, experimental book series being put out by Back Bench Press and therefore is hard to find. Unfortunately, this manuscript found me, and it proves my long-held conviction that Broccoli is great with cheese, but bad with books.
He was an opinionated bastard. Funny, accessible to his readers, but ruthless when he disliked a book—which was often. Rumor had it that he used to do lots of male Hemingway-type activities—mountain climbing, spelunking, sky-diving. Dangerous, stupid things that Brice didn’t like even thinking about. And he was a book critic who could attack writers with reviews that served as blunt instruments, bludgeoning them nearly to death with their published missteps. That he was even more brutal with editors’ and publishers’ errors was beside the point. The writer always got blamed in the end. This wasn’t someone she would normally want to know.
She held up the stationery and inhaled again. It still smelled like destiny.
“Damn.”
She pushed back from her desk. Normally, she didn’t do impulsive things. Not anymore. She had a routine. It made life predictable and controllable, and that was what she liked. Nothing bad could happen if you planned carefully and listened to the voice of common sense. That made what she was thinking of doing doubly insane—unwise, unproductive as well, since she had a deadline to finish this biography of Ninon de Lenclos. But she was going to New York anyway, as soon as she could get a flight. This weird erotic tingling in her brain said she must do it, and right that very minute. She was going to meet with Damien Ruthven, chat with him face-to-face. She wanted to see his expression, to look into his eyes when she asked about the missing memoirs. Only then would she know if he lied about having them.
And what would she do if he did?
“One bridge at a time,” she muttered.
Brice reached for the phone and dialed her friend and travel agent. As she waited, she pulled the band from her braid and started unraveling her hair. She needed to get it cut, she really did, but there was never any time. Maybe whoever came to plane the door and rip out the doorbell could saw off her hair at the same time.
“You’re nuts,” she whispered as she combed out her mane and waited for Susan to pick up.
Of course she was nuts; she was a writer. And therefore it didn’t matter if she was insane and pushy—if she got what she wanted. And she wanted. Oh, how she wanted! The longing was almost like an itch, a poison ivy of the brain. She wanted those memoirs.
Brice laughed silently. She had always been more than a little in love with George Gordon, Lord Byron, poet, humanist and hero. He had entertained her when she was young and romantic, and then had saved her reason at a time when grief threatened to drown her and her only anodyne was work. She would do anything for him—for his memory and his words. She’d even face down the world’s fiercest critic.