“Not at all,” Damien assured her, his voice sincere. “That’s why I moved the desk in. I look forward to spending the day with you. I have a manuscript that I need to start reading, but I’m entirely at your disposal otherwise.”
Polite society pretended shock as polite society must, but it was only a thin veneer of morality that cloaked their own unwholesome deeds.
Brice looked up from her book sometime later, and seeing Damien’s dark eyes on her she said: “You know, I feel as though I have lived with Byron for so long that we’re married.”
“So you are frustrated, affectionate and overly familiar with his irritating habits?” Damien’s eyes twinkled.
Brice laughed. “Exactly.”
“And how do you think Byron feels about you after this long association?” As always, Damien’s odd questions seemed somehow important.
“I don’t know,” she answered, playing the let’s pretend game fairly seriously. “If he is somehow aware of what I am doing, I hope he is pleased that I am putting much of the record straight. He’s also maybe annoyed at the bits I’ve gotten wrong.”
“Do you know, I think you are right. About him being pleased. So much of his life as known today is a collection of malicious tall tales.”
“Still, it must irritate his shade that this matter has been left to me when he so clearly intended that his own words be published.” Brice frowned. “It adds pressure. And there is the eternal frustration of making the thing on the page match the thing in my mind. And that presupposes that the version of truth I have in my head is one that he would recognize. Perhaps I’ve reordered the facts of his life to suit my own desires and expectations. I am, after all, female and a child of the late twentieth century. This has to have influenced my perceptions of his words and deeds.”
Damien nodded, his expression oddly sympathetic. His next words were also revealing. “That is the plight of writers everywhere. If one is fortunate, the outlines of truth do eventually appear, and something inside tells us we finally have it right. Where many go wrong is in backing down from the truth too soon—taking the first easy answer that presents itself and not waiting for that inner confirmation. I suppose it’s understandable. It is always frightening to look history in the face, because if you stare long enough, history looks back and the gaze is not always kind. Some of our ancestors were evil people.”
So, there was something there—a hidden side to her host.
Carefully Brice asked: “Do you write? I mean prose? Or poetry?”
“Every once in a while,” Damien admitted, but didn’t specify which. He also didn’t offer to share any of his writing with her.
Brice didn’t ask again, but she was betting he wrote poetry. It was so intensely personal an undertaking that most poets never talked about their work. Certainly not with strangers.
The thought was intriguing. She added it to the list of possible explanations for the mysteries that she sensed made up the very complicated Damien Ruthven.
It was Damien who next interrupted the office quiet. He looked up from the manuscript he was reading and sighed heavily.
“Sometimes I fear for the English language,” he said to Brice. “I suspect that many of these would-be writers use their dictionaries—supposing they actually possess them—as doorstops. Or maybe as stepstools to reach the stash of marijuana hidden in their bedroom closet, which they smoke in preference to attending classes or reading books.”
“That bad, huh?” she asked understandingly, looking up from her notes. They were annotated photocopies of old journals, badly faded and written with very creative French spelling. “I don’t think French is in any better shape—and it never was. The spelling in these old journals is absolutely villainous. I consider it an ancient conspiracy to keep me from understanding them.”
“No, the French are probably not in any better shape. No one in the Western world is. And yet…” Damien shook his head and dropped the manuscript on the table. “I cannot believe that all this purposeless literary evil was brought about through nothing but educational laziness. Perhaps the freedom from grammatical tyranny will lead to the free expression of great ideas. I admit it hasn’t happened yet, but perhaps some day.”
“Perhaps.”
“I always hated it when someone told me I must think a certain way because great men before me had thought in a particular mode, or used some accepted literary device. I refuse to approach my writing that way. I’d be bored to tears.”
It took an effort to find something nice to say, because Brice was not in the habit of having charitable thoughts toward those who arrogantly presumed to tell the world what was literature and what was not, but she found that she could be approving when she thought about Damien’s job from the viewpoint of a beleaguered reader in a superstore trying to decide what to buy rather than as a writer being flayed in print.
“There are readers who refuse to approach
reading
that way, too. That’s why they look to you for guidance when sorting the wheat from the chaff,” she pointed out, surprised and then ashamed that she had never considered that he might take pride in his work as a critic. But, of course, that was writing too, if of a different nature. “You would not be as popular as you are if you were just one more among the many, a voice no different from all the others. I don’t want you to think I’m flattering you, but there are moments when you almost sound like Byron—supposing he was alive and writing literary criticism.”
She didn’t add that Byron had been a real opinionated bastard.
Damien colored at this praise and then nodded once. The gesture lacked his usual grace, and she sensed his deep perturbation, though she couldn’t imagine why he would be upset by what she had said.
Perhaps he hadn’t been talking about his reviews. Maybe he meant his other writing. Before she could correct herself, he spoke again.
“Thank you,” he said. Then, changing the subject quickly: “Your own writing is rather brave. I suspect that you must bring your editor to elation. Or despair. His emotion is likely dependent upon whether he likes interfering with his writers’ thoughts or not.”
“He wouldn’t dare.” Then, against her better judgment and the unwritten rule about asking a critic why they like your work, she joked, “Why do you say I’m brave? Because I dare to use semicolons?”
“No. Because you dare to ask uncommon questions, dare to challenge history’s hasty and often self-interested conclusions. Because you dare to tell the truth about the people you examine, regardless of entrenched dogma or the literary sainthood conferred on a subject. You dare to say that the emperor has no clothes.” Damien’s dark eyes burned with the same intensity as his voice, and she didn’t doubt his sincerity. He added with a sudden smile, “Do you know how many people will be enraged by this biography?”
It was Brice’s turn to blush. She’d often been told that she was beautiful, often told she was clever, often told she had a nice turn of phrase for a historian. No one had ever thought to compliment her courage in telling the unpopular truths that sometimes came to light when she investigated historic personages. It was thrilling to hear it now.
“Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “I do know, actually. That’s why I always try to be thorough. And fair. It wouldn’t do to gore someone’s ox unless they truly deserved it. Or to canonize them if they are really villains. And, those lofty considerations aside, I have to be able to face my critics too.”
He nodded.
“Of course, I’m not so judgmental about people in everyday life,” she assured him.
“But I’m certain you are,” Damien answered. “We all are. It is just that you choose to accept many of society’s standards as your own and therefore forgive what might otherwise annoy you. It is also probable that you don’t bother to examine the people about you too closely. There are, after all, so many of them. And so many are boring.”
Brice thought about that and then nodded slowly. “Anyway, who wants to know all the flaws in our loved one?” she said. “Relationships are difficult enough. It’s best to keep a few illusions.”
“You are working on a biography of Ninon de Lenclos?” Damien asked, again switching topics abruptly. She had the feeling that his agile mind had raced ahead without her. If she stayed here long, she’d have to find some sort of yoga for the brain so she could be more flexible in their conversations. “That is a bold move indeed—to attempt to explain one of the world’s first feminists, who is also one of the world’s great enigmas.”
He leaned close, and Brice reflexively started to cover her notes, but then she decided she was being silly. He might be a critic, but he wouldn’t judge her rough drafts—assuming he could even read her messy comments, scrawled in shorthand.
“Yes. I’m afraid that she is my other pet obsession, and I am finally writing about her.”
“A worthy choice for an obsession.” Perhaps sensing her discomfort, Damien leaned back a few inches. “And what do you find most fascinating about
la belle dame?
”
“Everything,” Brice answered promptly. “She’s a mystery. I know what she did, but not why or how she did it.”
“For instance?” Now he sounded like a professor. Damien even steepled his fingers as leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked softly.
Brice’s eyes narrowed, but once again she chose to follow his conversational lead and see where it might take them. She had never really had the luxury of having someone with whom to discuss her thoughts.
“How could this woman have managed to retain her place as the great beauty and lover—and thinker—of seventeenth-century Parisian society for all those decades without being burned at the stake? Especially when the queen and the church were both after her. Why, she even admitted she sold her soul to a ‘dark man’ so that she could enjoy eternal beauty. And in spite of this heresy, Molière, reluctant Voltaire—even the great Cardinal Richelieu wanted to know her and were influenced by her views. Horace Walpole called her
Notre-Dame des Amours
. Queen Christina of Sweden befriended her, even though Ninon ran a scandalous school for lovemaking. The highest members of society were honored to sleep with her, or at least receive training at her hands. Hell’s bells! The last young man she refused as a lover, when she was
sixty-five
, killed himself!”
“That is probably because the Chevalier de Villiers was her natural son,” Damien pointed out apologetically. “It may not have been her charms that made him choose suicide. Finding out that the object of your desire is your own mother has had that ill effect before—as the Greeks will attest.”
“So the rumors say. But even if it’s true, it doesn’t contradict my point. She was still beautiful and desirable at sixty-five. And in spite of this very odd life, was she not thought to be
the happiest creature who ever was
? How did she manage it? She wasn’t sociopathic. Ninon had morals. She lived in an era of repression and yet thrived. And the legends of her beauty into old age! They didn’t do plastic surgery back then. There was no Botox, no dermabrasion. I’ve heard talk of her skin potions, but no recipes were ever found. I don’t buy this story of a dark man bringing her a magic elixir. Yet there must be some secret that everyone has overlooked. Certainly it wasn’t clean living—though she did bathe every day, which was a novelty at that time.”
Frustration colored Brice’s voice, and she forgot not to lecture on her favorite subject. “The trouble is that the further I get from her, the more difficulty I have backtracking to the truth. It’s like you said—history has built up a self-interested myth around her, and so far this cult of personality has pretty well defied direct investigation.”
“I understand,” Damien said slowly. “There have been biographies, of course—Dangeau’s memoirs, for one—but they were written too soon after Ninon’s death and by interested parties who were selective in reporting the hearsay. Even the well-intentioned works were saturated by the feelings of those who knew her, and were filled with secondhand reports of letters, events and so forth.”
“They drip with feeling,” Brice agreed. “Her students loved her—that is obvious. They wanted her memory to live on in gilded splendor. But women apparently loved her too. That’s baffling and flies in the face of everything I know about my sex. And again and again you hear that she was a creature completely at ease with herself and the world. That she was honest—always. How could that have been, given the time and place in which she lived?”
“Her lovers’ wives and mistresses appreciated her, one assumes, since they benefited indirectly from her teachings.”
“One would think. Especially if the instruction came before marriage,” Brice added. “After all, in those days, far too many men were raised by the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye method of foreplay.”
Damien laughed, his dark eye crinkling at the corners.
“Or ‘
look, mum, no hands
.’ The English were often accused of being bad lovers—cold ones,” he said.
“But I don’t agree that the trouble is climatic so much as cultural and literary,” Brice said fairly. “The isle has produced more than its fair share of romantics—and look at the Scots! They have even worse weather, so we can’t use that as an excuse.”
Damien smiled. “I agree. If the French aren’t thought of just as unpolished, but as lovers, I think we can thank the lovely Ninon for giving them such a splendid reputation. That is one part of her legacy that lives on.”
“Probably. But how can we know? There is no direct evidence, no firsthand testimony that I can find. Not even a curriculum from her school. Of course, I should be used to it by now. The same thing happened with Byron when I began. All those early biographies are useless, concoctions of lies by people trying to profit from their association with him—sycophants, glory-stealers, would-be poets, women scorned.”
When she paused long enough to indicate that he should speak, Damien answered, “I agree.” Again, as had happened once or twice last night, she sensed part of him was far away, looking at something related to the topic under discussion but not quite ready to share the insight with her. It was frustrating. She could eavesdrop on the dead through their artifacts, but not on Damien Ruthven.