The Secrets of a Fire King (31 page)

Andrew smiled. The night air was as warm as breath. “Yes,” he said. “It’s the most recent vintage from the same vineyard in France where the first wine was made.” He turned the modern bottle, keeping his eyes on her face. “Of course, in another two
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hundred years, when this bottle is opened, almost everything that is living now will be dead.”

“You puzzle me,” she said, and looked away, and he remembered that despite her youth she was sensitive to death; she had lost her only brother to infl uenza.

“Yes,” he said, “it is most depressing, I agree. But Beatrice, what if you could live to drink this wine?” He put the bottle down and took her hands. “What if, in two hundred years, we could sit in this garden again, just as we are now, and open this bottle together?”

She laughed, and her laughter struck his silence like waves and fell away.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

He stood then, and pulled her up. He showed her the orchid that had been so withered, now profuse with life. The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe had been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. In drugstores everywhere were special toothpastes, hand creams, bath salts, lini-ments, chocolates, all laced with radium, promising miracles. In factories across the country, women painted luminous faces onto clocks, licking the tips of their brushes to keep a fine point, tasting a bitter metal from the heart of the dark universe. The era was af-fluent, and most people could afford to have a little radium, but only a man as rich as Andrew Byar could have all he wanted.
Radi
Os.
He whispered the name of his elixir, running his fi ngertips over the vial in his pocket. When he told Beatrice what the bottle had cost, she gasped. And when he poured the drops into her second glass of wine and his, this wine from grapes vanished for two hundred summers, she drank.

Paradise lost
, he thought leaning back in his chair. Pale fl owers opened in the darkness, amid the rising sounds of insects, and the wine warmed his throat, hers.

Paradise lost, now found.

Andrew had called the car, it was waiting when Beatrice fi -

nally left the house, sitting quietly as a shadow by the gate. She
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walked, listening to the night sounds of crickets and wind in the leaves and the harsh crunch of the stones beneath her pale satin shoes. Her eyes would not stay down, she looked up into the night sky with its endless wheeling, scattering stars. Her father had a telescope and had tried to teach her the constellations, taking her to the roof of their own great house and pointing out, with infinite patience, the belts and flames and streaming hair, the cups of stars brimming over with night-darkened sky. She had studied it to please him, but she could never see what he was so intent on showing her. Celestial navigation, he explained, a science of the air: whole fleets had traveled with only these stars for guides. Beatrice stared until her eyes ached and stars burned phosphorescent against her closed lids, but even then the patterns eluded her. Often, just as she felt on the verge of seeing the stars coalesce into a shape, they seemed to swell, spilling over into rivers, shattering like a handful of rice strewn across blacktop.

Her father sighed and put the telescope away. He could not imagine that his only living child would not share his love and aptitude for science.

The driver had the window rolled down. His cigarette ember made a bright arc as he reached to start the engine. Beatrice paused to tell him she would walk—the night air was so lovely—

then passed through the gate into the street. Her footsteps were solid and lonely on the city sidewalks. The vast grounds of the estate rose wild and tangled beside her; a soft breeze stirred the diaphanous wrap she wore across her shoulders. The night was so dark that the random stars seemed nearly within her reach.

Beatrice flung her head back to gaze at them, joy cascading through her flesh. She felt like a star herself, pale and radiant, as if every one of her cells were burning bright, as if she gave off her own particular light into the universe.

This feeling was something new: perhaps, though not certainly, it was the consequence of Andrew’s elixir. When he put the drops into her wine, she had stopped laughing out of respect, though privately she had remained amused. She had drunk out of curiosity and politeness, repeating the formal, nearly silent exchanges that held their passion like a vessel, but also being true to
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a vow she had made to herself. For Beatrice was involved in an experiment of her own, one that had only tangentially to do with Andrew Byar. The wine had tasted old, of worn oak with a trace of mold. She let it linger on her tongue, imagining those vanished grapes, but she had tasted nothing out of the ordinary, not even the tinge of salt from all those decades beneath the sea.

It was not until later, after they had finished the wine and were walking along the rock path through the white garden, that it began. Moths, luna and sphinx, skimmed through the shadows and lit on the moonflowers, lifting their slow wings.

Near the house, a bed of white nasturtiums seemed to fl icker and spark. Beatrice slipped off her shoes and waded into the pool, a natural spring shaped by stones.
You look like a water lily,
Andrew said, and she glanced down at her dress, its hem soaked now and darkening. She smiled and pressed her palm to his cheek. He caught her hand and kissed it, his lips against the shallow concave below her fingers, his breath in the palm of her hand. She felt it then for the first time, how her flesh, where it had been touched by his, seemed to pulse with light, transformed, but she blamed this sensation on the wine, the starry light, the strangeness of the moonstruck garden. They walked across the grass. She stumbled, and he caught her arm, and she felt it again: the splay of his fi ngers like rays of sun on her skin. Inside the house, it was so different.

Light trailed from his fingertips and marked her flesh, light soared through her like a comet in his bed.

Now she turned onto the avenue of stately homes, the white wrap slipping from her shoulders, her hair falling loose down her back. It was an extraordinary night, the air soft and warm, a caress. She heard the car following her in the near distance, and as she passed through the familiar gates of her father’s estate, less grand than Byar’s but magnificent all the same, she turned and waved to the driver, who looked straight ahead at the empty road and pretended not to see her. Then, still smiling, she followed the tree-lined path to the back garden, where she sat on a bench by the pond. On the rooftop her father’s telescopes stood in a line, and beyond them, the stars.

Beatrice was twenty years old and beautiful, and she had made
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herself this promise: she would never be used, she would always be free. She would follow her heart wherever it might take her, and in this way she would discover her own true understanding of the world. It was an experiment as daring as Andrew’s, as full of uncertain hope, though to those who knew her she was merely wild, spoiled, a girl whose family had never recovered from the death of her older brother, that young man of great promise who had survived the war only to die of influenza eight months later in the room where he’d been born. Three years ago, this was. Beatrice had been seventeen, and when the doctor emerged from her brother’s room to break the news, she had felt her world splinter, like glass cracked and held only tenuously in its former shape. Her mother had collapsed, weeping, and her father had bent his graying head, revealing a vulnerable place at the back of his neck, reddened by his collar. Beatrice, however, had not moved. She had not dared. What had been held together, logical and orderly, was suddenly unbound. Her brother, whom she had loved, who had taught her to ride a horse and sneak to the train tracks to fl atten pennies when the engines roared past, this brother with his pale hair and paler blue eyes, was suddenly, mysteriously gone from the world.

Why? she demanded, turning her fierce anger on the friends and relatives and clergy who came to visit in the days and weeks that followed, but they shook their heads and could offer no answer more complete than the natural order of the world, a pattern fi xed in place, preordained, divine.

Beatrice had been a dutiful girl, receiving the world and the rules of her society as true and inevitable, just as one accepted the moon rising or the servant girl bringing clean clothes into her room at dawn. However, she could not accept this. Walking the paths of the estate at all hours of the day and night, remembering her brother’s laughter and the touch of his hand and the way sunlight made his pale hair look white, she began to question everything.

She began to push the limits of her world, too, tentatively at first, then more urgently. She was steadfast against the hue and cry that resulted, utterly determined to step beyond the strictures she had known. But she was not cynical. More than ever, the world seemed full of mysteries she could hardly comprehend, and the
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visible fell like a veil between herself and something else, something glimpsed at unexpected moments—a white curtain rising from an open window, or leaf shadows playing on the tiled fl oor of her room—images that layered and gathered, inexplicable but powerful. Yet her intuitions could no longer be contained by the structures she had accepted all her life, and this discovery made her feel breathless, as if she stood on the edge of an abyss, even while the world around her went on much as it always had, knit back together by the ordinary day-to-day.
Don’t you see,
she wanted to shout, at her father bent over endless figures of steel sales and her mother arranging flowers and the cook cutting a hundred biscuits out for tea.
Don’t you see that everything has changed?

Had they looked up, she would have explained that the rules were like a net: they could not hold the fleeting thing they sought to capture. But no one did look up, and Beatrice slowly understood that she must discover the truth of the world on her own. And so, she decided, she would. She would embrace every experience; she would discard all preconceptions; she would see every moment as an open door, and she would step through each one wide-eyed, without fear.

Thus, when she emerged from the pool, water glistening cool on her pale limbs, and saw Andrew Byar watching her, transfi xed, she had smiled.

And thus on this night, when the leaves stirred behind the hy-drangea bushes by her father’s house and a figure emerged, tall, dressed in black, invisible except for his hands and face shining out to her like beacons, she smiled once more.

“I thought you were never coming,” she said, tranquil.

“I waited here for hours,” the young man complained, sitting down beside her, taking her hand. Light shot through her; she thought of Andrew Byar and his garden.

“Poor Roberto,” she said.

He was a distant relative of her mother’s, come from Italy for the summer. Ostensibly to study, but she knew her father was seeking someone suitable to take over the business when he died.

He had never considered asking Beatrice to do so, something which had not troubled her until she perceived that the rules of the
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world were light and hollow, easily knocked aside. Idly, she wondered if her father’s decision might change if he knew that she was going to live forever, and she laughed.

“It is not funny,” Roberto said, speaking in a formal, lilting English that she loved. “All day I have been dreaming of this time with you, and then you do not come. It is insulting.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she was, though she was not regretful.

“I was called away unexpectedly. There was no way to inform you.”

“Called away to where?”

“It’s not discussible,” she said lightly. “It is my own affair entirely.”

He did not answer. She felt his presence beside her, dark and churning. The old Beatrice would have hastened to soothe away his anger, but now she sat quietly, waiting with interest to see what would happen next.

“I am in love with you,” he said, angry at having been forced into this admission, or perhaps at the feeling itself. “I don’t want to lose even a moment of our time.”

She put her hand to his cheek, as she had earlier with Andrew.

Offended still, Roberto turned his face away. Beatrice let her hand fall to her lap, wondering for the first time if what Andrew had claimed might be true. She had not really considered it, what it might mean to be ageless, to live outside of time. To explore every facet of the world, to follow every passion to its depths, because she would not have to choose one over another.

“What do you think?” she asked Roberto. “Would you like to live forever?”

“I have done so already,” he replied at once. “Each moment you are gone is an eternity to me.”

Beatrice laughed then, delighted by the way all doors opened to new places. Impulsively she kissed Roberto, sliding her hand behind his neck and her tongue into his mouth, where it bloomed like a flower struck by light.

Summer grew rich and dense, and then, subtly, it began to wane.

A few leaves drifted to the ground, and overnight the dogwoods turned flame red. In his garden the orchid still fl owered profuse
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and opulent, and elsewhere, in his car, Andrew Byar splayed his long, hard fingers on the custom-built walnut desk. The city was a rush of lights beyond his open windows, and from a distance came the roar from the steel plants, humming night and day. Recently, he had ordered a new furnace, determined to best his com-petitors, richer and more famous than he. They were old men now, men whose time of building and creating would soon end.

His, he believed, would not.

For two months and five days he and Beatrice had been drinking the Radi Os. It had become a ritual, and as with any ritual there were rules, intricate ceremonies that had taken on their own life, and which must not be broken. Each week they met in the garden, even though his family had returned and sometimes moved, visible, beyond the panes of glass. The alyssum had grown brittle, and the moonflowers had wilted, and the magnifi cent orchid would soon be moved into the greenhouse in anticipation of an early frost. Capricious still, as beautiful and willful as ever, Beatrice nonetheless joined him at the table each week, watching seriously and silently as he placed the drops into her glass. Any wine would do by now, any sort of dress, but they each assumed the same position at the table as they had on that first night, and they knew without speaking that they must finish their drinks in a single swallow. Dusk, it must be, though dusk came earlier now.