Orfeo
Authors: M. J. Lawless
© M. J. Lawless 2013
The right of M. J. Lawless to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copying of this manuscript, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the author and her publisher is strictly prohibited.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Black Orion Press, 2013.
Cover design by Arkangel Media.
All rights reserved.
For Simon, who made Orfeo sing for me.
Part II: Orfeo in the Underworld
: Les fleurs de la nuit
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,
O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,
Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin
.
Do you come from heaven or rise from the abyss,
O Beauty? your gaze, infernal and divine,
Confusedly shows the benefit and the crime,
And so for that one can compare you to wine.
(Charles Baudelaire,
Les Fleurs du Mal
)
They called him the black Orpheus, the man with the golden voice. They said that he could tempt angels themselves to fall, that he could calm the wildest souls of the inferno.
They called him the king of souls and the lord of the night. There were those who said that simply hearing him could drive a man—or woman—to madness, that to listen to his voice was to enter a pact with
le diable
. As he came onto the stage he smiled at all the names they called him: soul stealer, heart’s thief, love’s criminal. He preferred the name he had been born with. Orfeo.
Where he came from was the origin of nearly as much speculation as the source of his talent, though his birth was a secret at once more mysterious and more mundane. He revealed nothing of his past. All that mattered now was that he was here in New Orleans.
As he turned into the light, for a few seconds he could see nothing but the narcotic smoke that drifted in soft, white clouds across the tables of Apollo’s, the club which—for the time being—he chose to inhabit. The reason why he had chosen to remain there was hidden from him momentarily, blinded by the spotlight that shone across his dark face which caused the beads of perspiration on his black skin to glitter like diamonds. No matter: she was here. He could feel it. His songs would dispel the light and allow him to find her at last, dark blossoms from his voice that would comfort and seduce her.
Behind him the band took in a collective breath, a single, expectant pause as they waited for the time to be right. Judging it to be so the saxophonist was first to break the collective waiting with a long, slow and mournful note that eased itself into the hubbub of Apollo’s and summoned hushed reverence from the gathered crowd. Soon afterwards, the smooth slide of drums set up the familiar rhythm, joined almost immediately by the deep thrum of the bass.
For a few seconds, precious moments, Orfeo closed his eyes and let the music rise up through his bones and into his lungs which swelled and expanded beneath his thin, white shirt, the muscles of his chest powerful with contained melody. Breath itself transformed into music until, at last, he could contain it no more, opening his mouth before his eyes and letting the sounds sigh forth from his lips. The late July air was hot around him, clinging to his body like a spoiled lover, thick with desire.
“Mother of heaven,” he sang, “star of the sea.” The voice that slowly climbed above the soft and subtle notes was deeper than would have been expected in one apparently so young, a baritone darker than his skin, a velvet that caressed the ears of all who heard it. “Guide to the sailor, star of the sea.” He let the words float in the air, taking their form in the
spaces between himself and the crowd, shadows resolving as the light that had blinded him faded into vision. “Queen of the floodtide, star of the sea—Ocean moon’s guardian, fair star of the sea.”
The words were becoming bolder now, louder, and his shoulders lifted with the exertion of his passions as his breath flooded out of him, a sea that was turning from the murmur of the distant shore into the pounding waves of a storm from his heart. And at last he saw her, her hair as brazen and as bright as copper, her skin shining softly in the darkness of Apollo’s, and he caught his breath once more before letting it soar between him and her.
“Lady of sorrows,
star of the sea,
merciful mistress—
star of the sea.
Herald of morning,
evensong’s mistress,
good hope in darkness -
bright star of the sea.”
For a few moments he held her gaze, her bright, green eyes fixed upon him, before letting his head dip to the floor as the final notes of the saxophone dwindled away behind him. For a brief eternity there was silence once more before the crowd began to whoop and holler their appreciation. When he lifted his head again he could see her smiling at him, her eyes glistening as she clapped and clapped and clapped as though her very life depended on it.
And
depend it did. He had foreseen it all.
Unlike Orfeo, the history of Ardyce Dubois was well known to all who cared to look for it. Her ancestor had come to La Nouvelle Orléans in the 1730s, not long after the city had been founded as a French colony and before it was ceded to the Spanish in the middle of the eighteenth century. Though the Dubois clan traced themselves back to an ancient aristocratic line, the patriarch who had traveled to Louisiana belonged to a branch much decayed. Through trapping, trading, marrying and, later, slave plantations across the state and throughout their Haitian dominions, the Dubois family became immensely rich. Her grandfather had built his own pleasure palace on the edge of the city, appropriately naming it Xanadu, and here Ardyce had lived her own dissolute youth following the untimely death of her parents.
Not that any of this mattered at all to her now as she sat in the darkness at the edge of a pool of light in Apollo’s and watched the young man, so beautiful and black, ascend the
stage. Although not yet thirty herself she had experienced too many things already so that her tastes had become jaded and impoverished before their time. In recent years nothing had appeared to reach past her numbness and touch her: her soul had been burnt up in a relentless southern sun, and though her skin retained the delicate freshness of youth she felt inside as though her heart formed a reflection of that damned and doomed picture of Dorian Gray, shriveled up with her former sins.
And so it had been with some astonishment that she realized none of this mattered when she first heard him, barely a month before, here in this very night club. He was an itinerant, they said, wandering from place to place so that it was impossible to know where he would appear next, where that rich, somber voice would thrill and inspire all who heard it. For many it was a surprise, then, that he remained at Apollo’s, his aficionados able to come again and again to hear him sing. For Ardyce, however, it was no surprise at all.
On that first night she had seen him, his face, so proud and strong, lifted up to the light in the solemn clouds of the nightclub when he had closed his eyes as his voice welled up inside him. And as he opened them, by chance—or fate, for in the end it was the same—his gaze had alighted upon her and the room gasped as his voice stumbled and faltered for the merest moment. It was the only time, they said, that he had shown less than perfection.
And yet that flaw was fatal not for him but for Ardyce. She had felt herself pierced by his dark eyes, by the wound on his lips as the words hesitated for but a second. When the melody of his voice found its natural harmony again, that dead, dried up muscle inside her chest began to flower once more, and she felt the blood move through it with a surge of fire she thought impossible.
She was addicted. For Ardyce Dubois, addiction was a serious thing and the sound of Orfeo’s voice meant that every other obsession paled into nothing.
“So, this is your singer,” murmured Baptiste, leaning into her ear. She could smell her friend’s cologne and, though she did not divert her attention at all from the stage where Orfeo, his body carved out of ebony wood, gathered himself in preparation she could almost see the thin moustache on Baptiste’s lips curling in admiration.
“Yes,” she said, not moving her eyes, barely opening her lips. “
Mine
, so keep your hands off him, you filthy queer bastard.”
“Naughty, naughty,” Baptiste sniggered. “All’s fair in love and war,
chérie
. You know that better than most.” Now her eyes did flicker sideways, taking in the aging roué’s face as he stared at the young singer with barely concealed lust. She slapped her hand against his leg, making him jump and he stifled a laugh. “Oh, if only you could see your face now. I don’t think your look so much kills as cuts off my head and drives a stake through my heart.”
“He’s mine,” she repeated. “You’ll see, you degenerate old vampire.”
And Baptiste did indeed see. As the young singer on the stage opened his mouth and let such a liquid passion the likes of which the older man had never heard before flood across the room, so the dark eyes of Orfeo hunted for Ardyce—and when they found her they never left her face.
“My, that voice,” Baptiste drawled when the first song had finished and his companion was applauding wildly. “It can do things to a man.”
“Just imagine what it can do to a woman,” Ardyce replied, not taking her own eyes away from Orfeo’s.
The music started again, the drums more syncopated and this time the saxophone replaced by the lilting reed of a clarinet that haunted the fog-bound atmosphere of Apollo’s. For a few brief seconds, Orfeo closed his eyes, searching inside himself in as he sought a power to complement the spell of Ardyce’s gaze: when at last his eyes flashed open, fire seemed to blaze from them toward the object of his desire.
“
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme
,” the deep, bold voice purred across the hushed crowd. “
Ton regard, infernal et divin, verse confusément le bienfait et le crime
.”
“So do you come from heaven or hell, beauty?” Baptiste half-translated. “He’s hit the mark with your gaze, though: I think you do confuse benevolence and crime.”