The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) (25 page)

I smiled, and let the remnants of river mud wash away as I waited while he cleared his throat and bit at his bottom lip in contemplation. “Violet, how old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-eight?”

“Ah, how you flatter me. Now, be truthful: how old do you think I am?”

I pursed my lips, then gave in to his request. “Thirty.”

He smiled. “Not one and thirty?”

“You could pass for thirty-one, yes. Are you thirty-one?”

“
Non
.”

I wanted to growl at him, but said, “Are you going to tell me how old you are then?”

“
Oui
, but I already have. Plenty of times.” He kept his small smile but then scooted closer to me. His nose slightly flared as he watched my face, my eyes, studying me, my reaction to what he would say. “I love it how you get frustrated and your eyes glow like emeralds. Ah, it was my mother’s favorite stone. Now, it is mine as well. I have a man back in my province making me a ring with a gem the color of your eyes. I need the reminder of you. Are you ready for me to tell you my age?”

I blinked, feeling the whirlwind of what he had said pass through the blue diamond that shielded my numb heart, piercing it with freezing sunshine. Ah, the ever paradoxical feelings of being in Jacque’s company.

“I was born in the Lord’s year of fifteen hundred eighty-four.”

I arched my brow again.

“
Oui
, I am one hundred ninety-one years of age.”

I shook my head and thought about rolling my eyes like Hannah would have.

“You think I am jesting?”

I grinned.

“Because, hopefully, I do not look almost two centuries years of age?”

“You look nowhere near a hundred years of age. You appear youthful and virile.”

“Ah, thank you,
chére
.”

“You’re welcome, man who fishes for compliments at the oddest of times.”

He snickered and untied his cravat and pulled the black silk from his black shirt, then unbuttoned his high collar. A couple more buttons undone, and he revealed his left collarbone and a small portion of his male chest. “There. I was shot there.”

I looked at his perfect skin, then to where he pointed, noting how there was the most minute yellowish circle, like an old bruise.

He pointed to his left side. “And there,” then to his right leg, “here,” his left knee, “and here,” then his right cheek, “and here.” He smiled and folded his hands on his lap as he said nonchalantly, “Those Brits wasted five bullets on me. They do like to fire their muskets though.”

My smile slowly dimmed as I studied Jacque’s face with his tiny grin and the way his one black brow arched just so. He was serious. Or seriously mocking me. I shook my head. “Colonel Devlin said the man who attacked Kimball wouldn’t have survived. There was too much blood.”

“Ah,
oui
, I was bleeding horribly. Then . . . I wasn’t. As far as I know, I don’t have any bullets in my body any longer either. It wasn’t my first time being shot. Once I was shot ten and four times. I’ve been run through a dozen times, ten times with a bayonet, twice with sword, though not a sword as big as yours. My, what a big weapon you have. Ah, but I was saying, admitting to you that I’m not that good of a mercenary. I just live through it all somehow. I’ve gotten better in these last twenty years though, at being a mercenary, I mean, as well as not getting myself shot or stabbed. It does hurt me so when I do.”

I just stared at him.

“Bewildering, isn’t it?”

I snorted. “You have no idea. I’m not saying I believe you, but how . . . how did this happen?”

He sighed and shrugged. “It is a long story.”

“We have all day.”

He bit his bottom lip for a moment, then smiled. “I wish I could kiss you. I wish I could kiss you for the next century, centuries. Now, if you believe me even a little, about being close to two centuries years old, then imagine finally finding the love of my life and not being able to have her. I’ve searched for you for decades, and now that I’ve found you . . . ah, but life is bitter and sweet—ironic.” His voice skirted close to a warble, but he cleared his throat and smiled at me. “But I must tell you why I don’t die.
Oui
. I told you of watching as both my brother and father were run through, and Josephine protected me from her brothers. Thanks to her I lived, so I didn’t marry her as she wished. But what was I to do then? My mother, while she lived, had been employed by King Henry IV, and when he was assassinated I felt a duty to try to work for his son, King Louis XIII. It was actually his mother, the Italian, Marie de Medici, that convinced me to try to navigate to India, to find a place to settle a colony or a factory for my queen and her son king. The year was sixteen hundred fifteen when we set sail for India, for king and country as you Brits would say, hmm?
Oui
.”

I knew so little about the far away country of India, but had heard of exotic spices that made a man’s tongue burn and his heart to be impassioned. It was a nation of jungles and tigers, beautiful people and sensual dances, and myths of men levitating and of a state of bliss that lasts forever more. England had colonized India before France, but I vaguely was aware that France had had some problems with colonization there.

I looked at Jacque whose lids were heavy and his eyes were far away as he stared at the gem outside my bedding, covering my chest.

“I bought you this,” he gingerly fingered the blue diamond, “because . . . you were the first soul I encountered in so long that gave me hope. Hope that I may not be alone. But alas—this rock you wear reminds me of the oceans as we traveled to India. So blue, so dark and yet so blue. I was sick for many days before I got my sea legs. As soon as I did, land was spotted. We’d lost the other ship that escorted us, and knew that we were landing much farther north than intended. Such a great distance away.”

His voice faded and he wore a bleak frown. “We moored off shore, paddled our way inland in dinghies, all of us. That was my idiotic order. I killed all those men by never thinking about the threat of what lay for us at that beach.”

I knew not what he was talking about, but understood he was lost somewhere in the past. A dark, aching past. I wrapped my hand around his and laid it on my chest, on the stone, over my heart.

“All my men died when we were ambushed by the natives,” he said, his voice thick. “Now, with so many years behind me, I sympathize with the men that killed my crew. What were we thinking to sail across the oceans and plant a flag on their land and call it our own? What do any of us think when we usurp land? I—I don’t blame them, now, for their violence. They were protecting their families, their land. I escaped, but was the lone survivor. I ran through the jungles. I ran through the villages. I ran for days. I ran from hooded snakes. I ran from frightened children. I ran and ran and ran. I stole food as I ran, drank from muddy puddles, and kept running for my life. It wasn’t until I was standing amongst strange, arid yet freezing mountains that I stopped running.

“I thought I would die then from my thirst.” He let out a bitter laugh. “I found a spring in a valley between mountains. I was just so thirsty; I never thought about the strange location for a spring of water. It was a tiny clear puddle, really. Not more than a few inches in diameter. I dipped my canteen, then let my face fall in the water, drinking until it ran dry.”

His eyes glowed darkly. “It was then that I died.”

I must have given him an incredulous look, because he snorted and shook his head. “I did die. I felt my heart stop. It was excruciating. I was sad to not be buried in my France, near my mother as I hoped. I thought about Marseille, and how much I loved my province. I thought about the fact that I’d never been to America, and how I had wanted to come, to face more adventure, how I hadn’t read more books, learned more languages, learned to paint horribly, and how I had never had fallen in love. So much yet to do, but there I was dying. Before I died a man in just a little swap of cloth came out, and pointed his finger at me, laughing hysterically. And then I died.

“I woke up—I don’t know, a few minutes later—inside a cave with the little man burning a sweet smelling fire beside me. My heart was beating again, achingly so. The little man laughed at me and spoke Hindi, but being the glorified Frenchman that I was, I had never bothered to learn his language before I arrived on his soil. He bade me to stay with him, that much I understood, when I tried to leave, and he shoved me back in his cave. It took a few weeks, but slowly I grasped that I’d drunk from a sacred pool. That the water was gone now because I was going to live indefinitely.”

He smiled down at me. “I didn’t believe it either. But I’ve been killed so many times, and mother forgive me for I know it to be a sin, but I’ve tried to commit suicide a time or two. I wake up again and again, my heart still beating.”

I cocked my head to the side, and reached up for his said heart, feeling it patter against my hand.

“’Tis a good heart beat.”

He nodded. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

I wasn’t sure if he was trying to tell me the story to distract me from my suffering or if he was even in the least a little serious.

He shrugged. “I’ve since learned Hindi and have gone back to find the man, but I couldn’t find him. I don’t know if I’ll ever die. I’ve been so lonely, Violet. Until I met you.”

He looked down at me then with something dark passing through his eyes. His forehead wrinkled with a thought, but then he inhaled and asked me again. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes . . . I don’t know. Everything about you–it all seems not to be reality. I’ve often wondered if I just imagined you.”

“That I am nothing but a figment of your imagination? I am the opposite of Descartes’ thesis: You think me; therefore, I am.”

“Yes.” I smiled.

“I assure you, I’m real. You are real. I am here and you are too.” His forehead again lined in some kind of worry as he repeated himself, “You are real. I’ve dreamed of you before you were born, a raven-haired beauty with the spirit of my mother’s, and you are so much more than I imaged. I wish . . .”

But he never allowed himself to finish his thought. He lay down over my chest and held me in his arms, and I could not fight my weariness any longer. I loved his lulling story about immortality. What a lovely tale.

In between cat naps, Jacque bathed me until the water was clear from all pink reddish remains. Jacque washed my hair in silence. When he cleansed my body, his nose flared and his eyelids became heavy and drooped from time to time. I teased him and asked if he was bored.

“It is not boredom,
chér
. I’m praying.”

“Praying?”

He smiled at my breasts and nodded. “Thanking God for all the glories of the world.”

“You don’t think that some glories are too small? Too thin and bony?”

He softly chuckled and shook his head. “
Non
.” His fingertips ran across my ribs, making me giggle and squirm from his touch. He let a shock of leering smile appear as he whispered, “
Parfait
.”

Another time when I’d been awake, Jacque had fed me and had me drink the champagne. He’d also given me water with mint steeped in it. It was his mother’s remedy for any ailment, the champagne and minty water. With the evening half spent, slightly drunk, and I couldn’t seem to stop smiling, I had to agree with his mother about this cure-all.

As day turned into night I believed in fairy tales. In the hours of darkness I curved my finger along Jacque’s long nose, while he closed his eyes and smiled. Jacque played devil’s advocate to my devil’s advocate, both of us arguing just for the sake of arguing, and chuckling about inductive versus deductive thought and reasoning and rationality versus empiricism. We laughed until we both agreed to be utter skeptics, except regarding Voltaire and poetry. “Ah, we must never be cynical about poetry,” Jacque said while he swept his nose against my shoulder as we lay in my bed.

All of the day had been spent in conversation laying on the bed, the chaise, or sitting on Jacque’s lap on a chair. The night turned into lazy poetic murmurs with shy touches to each other’s shoulders, necks, arms, hands, and each other’s faces. It was past the witching hour when I fought sleep with every ounce within my body, but after Jacque’s voice took on a deep, musical melody, reciting Shakespeare’s love Sonnets, number eighteen, in French—“
Te comparerai-je à un jour d'été ? Tu es plus aimable et plus tempéré. Les vents violents font tomber les tendres bourgeons de mai, et le bail de l'été est de trop courte durée . . . Mais ton éternel été ne se flétrira pas et ne sera pas dépossédé de tes graces . . . Tant que les hommes respireront et que les yeux pourront voir, ceci vivra et te donnera la vie.
”–
I let slumber embrace me.

Upon awaking in the early morning, I despised the fact that I’d let sleep win me over. I felt robbed from hours I could have spent adoring Jacque. I saw the dark blue sky, so like Jacque’s now opening eyes. Yet the heavens cracked with golden rays that bit the sky, bleeding it with crimson and tender pink. For a moment, while in Jacque’s strong arms that currently tightened in their hold of me, I thought about running away with him. I fantasized about leaving, never to see the Joneses or Mathew again. I would never see the farm either. I would run with him, and have my nights filled with his body, my days filled with his tender dark blue eyes. I didn’t think of honor or respect or circumstances. My only thought was of him. Until my mind skipped over a memory of Hannah–her smiling face.