Sat, May 19 2012
| ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S NOTES: | SPOILER WARNING This scene contains significant spoilers for "The Island of Monte Cristo," in "No Time for Landings." To get the best effect out of this scene you must have read "The Island of Monte Cristo" first, and to get the best effect out of "The Island of Monte Cristo" you mustn't read this scene until after you've read the source story. Okay? Okay. |
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Rebecca Fogg paused on the threshold of the drawing-room at Shillingworth Magna with one hand upraised to the door-panel, composing herself before she went in. It was evening, after dinner; they had been home from Italy for almost long enough to have recovered from the psychic strain of the adventure, but Jules Verne was going to have to leave them soon for his own life in Paris and there were things that had not been said.
Nerving herself up to the challenge that faced her Rebecca opened the door. She'd known that she'd find Jules alone; Phileas had gone off to the library – more to prove to himself that he could than for any other reason, she suspected. There was no telling whether Jules had a true appreciation for how peculiarly horrible it had been for Phileas to believe Jules dead. Whether Jules and Phileas had talked she didn't know, and it didn't matter, because what she had to say to him was for her and no one else to communicate.
Jules as alone, as she'd expected. Sitting at the card-table writing in his everlasting journal; he rose to his feet politely as she entered the room. "Rebecca. Good-evening." His gentle smile was as loving as ever it was, even if it had gotten a little wistful over the period they'd known each other. Jules was a perfect jewel of a man: and not for her.
No small part of Jules Verne's real genius was that he himself had realized that fact fairly early on, and dealt with it accordingly.
"And you, Jules. A very good evening." There was a coffee service on the sideboard; Rebecca helped herself to a cup of coffee once she'd closed the door again behind her. What she had to say to Jules was for his ears only. "Is it an adventure novel, then?"
His look of mild confusion was of such short duration that she almost might have believed she'd imagined it, had she not known Jules Verne. "Oh. This. Yes. No. Not this time. Thoughts. Nothing more."
If she sat down in the armchair by the fire she could speak to Jules easily enough. It was Phileas' favorite armchair. He wasn't comfortable on a couch, he'd never quite known what to do with all the leg he'd grown when he'd been younger.
"Penny for your thoughts, then," Rebecca suggested, settling herself. Once she was well seated Jules sat back down at the table, moving the chair out a bit so that he almost faced her. The table in front of him was to her left, and there was more than his coffee and his book on it; there seemed to be a rolled-up sheaf of papers there as well. That was right. He'd brought some sketches with him from the island.
Jules made a bow and shook his head, looking uncomfortable and reluctant. "Not really all that interesting, Rebecca. But forgive me, my bad manners, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company? Because I thought you were going out on the roof tonight. Not that I object, believe me."
Yes, she knew. "Well." Taking a sip of coffee to cover her uncertainty Rebecca wondered how best to find her way into this. How would Jules write it, if it was a play? She'd learned one of Jules' plays, once. Some of the lines had been rather fine, and all the more impressive an accomplishment on his part for being in a language not his own. "You see, it's like this, Jules. You =are= going to have to leave us, shortly. And I very much need for you to do a thing for me."
She was being unfair, perhaps, because she left him no real choice in how he could reply to her. It didn't matter. She needed the advantage to make him accept what she had to say, because it was likely to cause him some distress, even though it was to the best for the long term.
"Well, yes, of course, Rebecca." Jules managed the polite response so courteously, too, with almost no stray hint of plaintive and forlorn longing in his voice. "If it's at-all possible."
"You mustn't agree too readily, Jules, you don't know what I mean to ask. It's complex. Very diffy."
"Oh, God, Rebecca, you haven't been talking to that horrible horrible woman again, have you?"
She'd made him laugh. That was good; it would relax him. Luciana's peculiar dialect could get altogether too precious sometimes, but that was not the point. "Sorry. Very difficult. Here it is, then, Jules, for me. I'd like you, please, to accept my heartfelt and eternal gratitude. Phileas could have died in that warehouse. You saved his life, Jules, and I don't know what life without my cousin Phileas would be like but I am very deeply obliged to you for the fact that I needn't find out just yet."
He was frowning; and leaned back in his chair, his pen loose in the fingers of his right hand. And an ink-stain on the side of his finger, but that was by the way. "They wouldn't have shot him in the first place if it hadn't been for me, Rebecca. I did nothing. Except place him in jeopardy, through no choice of his own."
Her snort of amusement was genuine and spontaneous, even with the serious nature of the conversation. "Oh, as though anyone ever could keep between Phileas and harm's way, Jules, he is a trouble magnet." But she had a serious issue on her mind, and seriously meant to have it out. "He's told me. Not a great deal, no, he only ever talks about trivial things, you know Phil. You, you gave him water to drink, Jules, and he was very thirsty, he remembers that. Perhaps you've not yet encountered in your studies the peculiar swiftness with which a simple lack of water can kill a man. Particularly one with a fever, and a bullet in his leg."
Phileas had actually told her a little more than that, Jules standing up to the guards when they tried to threaten him. =Count Gregory wants me alive. You're going to leave him alone, you're going to bring enough food and water for both of us, or I'll have something to say to your leader about it, and you won't like what will happen then.= But Jules was already embarrassed enough by what Rebecca had said; she knew it for the best to keep all of what Phileas had told her to herself.
"I felt so utterly helpless." He was staring down at his book, his mind clearly in the past. "And Fogg, you could see him failing. He fought it, yes, but he'd been wounded. Fever. I was terrified that he would die before we could escape."
And then they'd burned the warehouse down around her cousin's wounded helpless body, for all Jules Verne had been able to tell. Rebecca nodded. Yes, She did know how it felt, at least well enough to extrapolate. "Nevertheless, Jules, I know how difficult Phileas can get when he's ill, and if you'd let him he almost certainly would have died. Thank you, Jules. Phileas owes his life to you."
She let the bald assertion hang in the air between them, to see what Jules would do. After a moment of clearly keen reluctance he dropped his eyes and looked away. Good. Phileas and Jules had already had that small but very important conversation, then. She was glad to see it. She went on. "I am in your debt for that."
Now Jules nodded, and met her eyes for a moment of honest agreement from the heart before he focussed his gaze on his book. "I never want to be in a such a position again, Rebecca. Ever. I knew that he was sick, it was so unfair that a bullet in the leg could be the end of him."
"Well, Jules. It might well have been, but fortunately for Phileas – and, I might add, quite irrationally so, Phileas being the kind of sweet-tempered lovely gentleman he is – he had a friend with him. Fortunately for me, and therefore you have the naming of my first- born child if I ever get around to having one, a place at the table in perpetuity and call on the third toast in my house at Christmas, after the good-will of the season and her Majesty's very good health. There."
She'd tickled his fancy, and she was glad; because she had said only the absolute truth, Phileas could very well have died without Jules' care, and the idea was still close enough to panic her. She needed Jules' brilliant open-hearted grin to drive the away fear that still lived in her heart, and let her sleep.
It was a shame to see that beautiful smile fade, but fade it did. "Well. Rebecca. I do wonder, though, about toasts and children and all of those things. I mean. If Phileas, now this is only hypothetical, if Phileas had died. Whether it would be more painful to keep to reminding yourself of the loss. Or maybe it would be better to put a man's memory away and let something be over, once it was over."
Jules was turning the conversation into a different stream for reasons of his own. So much was clear. "Have you in your life lost someone you were very close to, Jules?" Phileas didn't say much about Saratoga Brown, that was perfectly true. But they had not had enough time for there to be an artifact from their life together that might have given him comfort. They had not even had enough time to begin a life together. She was going to concentrate on what Jules was saying, or she would become morose.
He shook his head. "A pet, an aunt, an uncle. People like that. I loved my grandfather, but I don't think of him very often any more. Oh, I have a pen-knife that was his."
"Well, in a place like this house of Shillingworth Magna, the dead are always with us. There's hardly a stone in the entire structure that doesn't speak of Sir Boniface, and Phileas' brother, and our childhood." Phileas' mother she couldn't speak to. She'd never met the woman, after all, and Sir Boniface had never had much to say on the subject. "Phileas is beyond being annoyed with it, it is his house now, but he hasn't made a sweep of Erasmus' things that survived Sir Boniface's efforts. Having things that remind you of people you love can be a sort of comfort, I find. Even when they're gone."
She'd always wished she had more of her own parents to remember them by, but the fire had destroyed everything. Everything. She had started with nothing as Sir Boniface's ward; even the clothes on her back had been borrowed.
Jules nodded. "Yes, I can see that, Rebecca. But it isn't always as clear a relationship as that with a beloved guardian or a brother, is it? Sometimes perhaps one might just as soon not be reminded. Of a suitor who had to be rejected, for instance. Or a lover from whom one parted on an unhappy note."
She wasn't sure what was on his mind. But his naivete made her smile. "I would guess that it is exactly of such a suitor that one would most wish for a token, Jules. To be kept in a special place and brought out from time to time. Love affairs that didn't quite go still occupy a very important place in one's heart, you know."
He didn't look entirely convinced. "Well, I suppose, if people really like to be reminded of things that hurt them. I'm not sure, you'll have to let me know." Closing his book, Jules wiped his pen; noticed the smudge on his finger and, frowning, tried to wipe that too. It didn't work. The ink smudge on his finger had long since dried. Rebecca wondered whether it might not be permanently engraved on Jules' skin, by now; a sort of an occupational tattoo of some sort. "Though perhaps I can agree. When I was Aladdin's guest I made a sketch that reminded me of Phileas. It hurt, but I wanted to do it more than I minded it hurting, or something like that – I haven't quite figured it out yet, exactly. But I have the sketch still, here, have a look."
Interesting, Rebecca noted to herself. He didn't ask her if she would like to have a look, and Jules was almost always relatively shy about showing what he was doing. She stood up, because Jules seemed clear on what he wanted her to do; joined him at the card-table, Jules ceding his seat to her not so much out of his native courtesy this time but for his own purpose. Whatever that was.
Jules took up his sheaf of sketches and unfurled them across the table's surface, using his journal to flatten out one side. But it wasn't a picture of Phileas he had there; it was a picture of her, in her working-leathers, sitting by the side of a little fire with a scrap of something in her hand. The style of the sketch was very pronounced, very sure and confident, but unfamiliar. Jules started back by a fraction, then shook his head, apparently at his own absent- mindedness.
"Oh. That's right. Wrong. I'm sorry, Rebecca. It isn't what I thought it was, Aladdin asked to keep the sketches I had made. He had a collection of antique marbles in his solarium, they were wonderful pieces, Rebecca, but one of them looked a lot like Phileas to me. Then Aladdin teased me about the side-burns. Quintus Valerius never wore any such English side-burns in his life, Aladdin said."
Smoothing the papers out, caressing the margins, Jules was clearly remembering something that was both wonderful and nourishing for him. Rebecca kept shut. He had something on his mind. He'd tell her. Whatever it was, it was taking him a while to work `round to saying it to her; and she had time.
"The day you came to the island I'd been drawing to distract myself from my troubles, and Aladdin came in. He thought that you were the League of Darkness, you remember, I told you."
She nodded. Yes. She remembered. "This is me, from the island, then? But who drew it?" Once Jules put things into context she could recognize the general lay of the land as the place on the island where they'd moored the Aurora and made camp; that would have been the fragments of Jules' clothing she'd been holding in her hand as the sailor Edmond had made his appearance. She wasn't sure she was comfortable with Jules having that sketch; her expression was entirely too forlorn and weary for her self-image. Having recognized the site and connected the moment with Edmond's appearance, however, the answer presented itself to her; and Jules nodded, in response to what he clearly saw as comprehension in her face.
"Yes, Aladdin himself. He brought these sketches back to verify your identities, and it was torture seeing them, Rebecca, because – look here – do you see what he did with the background? As though he knew very well, and was trying to break the news to me gently. Glad news can be as difficult as terrible news to bear. I never understood that until that moment."
It was rather wonderful. There was Phileas' nurse, Margerie Tremartin, preparing to torment Phileas with quinine or perhaps simply her prophylactic potion of lightly salted sugar-water, and the Aurora in the background, and the hint of Phileas lying in the roll- chair. Passepartout, and again just there in the background . . . till finally Jules lifted the sheet away and showed her Phileas, unspeaking. There was clearly a great deal of emotion still involved with the memory of having seen those sketches for the first time. Jules looked rather pale, and very somber; Rebecca had to agree that Edmond had done Phileas rather well – too well, in fact, for her own comfort. And there were more sketches beneath the one of Phileas.
"Remarkable facility for characterization, I'd say," she said, as lightly as possible, and turned the sheet on which Edmond had drawn her cousin's pain over onto the stack of drawings that had been viewed already. "Wonderful talent, but now – knowing what we know about the man – I should not be surprised. Oh. Jules. But this is quite a different hand."
The next sheet was a picture of Jules himself, but in charcoal rather than the robust pencil strokes of Edmond's sketches. As strong as Edmond's sketches had been, this one was almost unnervingly well done, but showed signs of having been done more carefully – less quickly – perhaps by someone with more time to spare. Jules, caught at the moment at which someone had turned the last page over and shown him Phileas. There was no mistaking the precise instant, from the expression on Jules' face; Rebecca almost wondered at Jules' willingness to share the evidence of his emotional state of mind – yet Jules Verne was a profoundly honest man; who honored her by trusting her as a friend.
"Aladdin's Haydee. She'd come to keep me company that afternoon, fussing over me to distract me. She brought a model back, a marble I hadn't seen. I knew I needed to make a record of it, but I'm still not sure that I did the right thing, Rebecca."
Jules turned the page as he spoke, with grave reluctance; Rebecca caught her breath, and stared.
It was Angelo Rimini. The Duke of Carpathia; vampire.
No, a marble bust of Angelo Rimini; the texture of the sculpted stone was too carefully delineated to be mistaken for one taken from the life. Forcing herself to breathe naturally with an effort of will Rebecca relaxed into the chair again; with luck Jules had not even noticed her involuntary start.
"Tell me the story, Jules," she said, devouring the image with her eyes. A beautiful marble, Angelo to the life – if that was something one could really say of vampires. There was no mistaking the peculiar poignance of his expression, but why had it been necessary for Jules to sketch the bust as though the man it represented was looking straight at her?
"Haydee has a wonderful touch, you can see it, Rebecca, here. Here. She thought herself weak on the technical drafting side, but I don't think she had any reason to fault herself at all. I worked the sketch and she helped, corrected me, really. And she talked while we worked. She said that there was a question about the identify of the man whose bust it was."
When Jules talked about Edmond's Haydee his expression softened and he smiled gently, as if at the memory of something wonderful. She hadn't spoken to Haydee; she'd only barely noticed the woman, caught up as she had been in wonder to see Jules alive. She had noticed that Haydee was beautiful: but for Haydee to have left that impact in Jules' heart she must have been much more than merely physically attractive. It was interesting to hear the warmth in Jules' language when he spoke of her.
"Where Aladdin had purchased the bust, Haydee said, the old people had told him that it was taken from life; and yet the other sources of provenance Aladdin had developed for the piece – and I don't know what those might have been – had established his identity as a Roman legionnaire. She laughed when I said he was a theater impresario, because Aladdin had been told he was a duke. And she couldn't figure out quite what she wanted to do with the man's eyes."
So that was what he had been on about, talking about rejected suitors, absent lovers. People one had loved and who were gone from one. "And you wanted me to have this as a memento, Jules." It was very forward of him to have made any such suggestion, really; and yet she was the one who had defended Angelo when Jules had called him a beast, and responded with considerable warmth that he was in fact a very attractive man.
Oh, yes, Rimini was that, without question. Or at least he had been. The whole thing had been impossible from the beginning, she hadn't meant to become in the least involved, it wasn't professional and it was dangerous; but Angelo . . .
Jules nodded. "I wanted at least to show it to you, Rebecca. Remembering that it was a very quiet trip from Gradowicz to London, once upon a time. For you to keep, if perhaps you'd want it. I know Chatsworth had all of the busts destroyed."
Yes, all of those bronzes, cast from a single mold; each one of them with a homing device in it, to call Rimini's rocket-powered vampires to the capitals of Europe to put his plan forward. He'd wanted her to be his queen: Queen of the world. She hadn't known what earthly use she'd have for world dominion at the time he had suggested it; she would have at that moment found the prospect of a cottage on the moors not disagreeable, if only Angelo were there to share it with her – sheer insanity on her part, really. It had been weeks before she'd thought to ask that theater-manager about the bust of Duke Angelo Rimini he had had in his foyer, and found out that Chatsworth had had them destroyed across the continent. Too late.
"It's quite true, one sometimes lacks for a souvenir of one's adventures." Her own voice sounded a bit too bright, a little strained, but Jules would handle her gently. Jules was her friend. "If it's all right with you, Jules. I'd be very glad to have it, really. A memento. That was quite the unusual adventure, wasn't it?"
She'd have Passepartout make her a frame with a false front so that the secret would be hidden from the world. And she could look at it from time to time, and know that it was there, but not be always having to actually look at it, and thinking about lost times and chances that had never really been. Jules nodded.
"And Phileas would keep on reminding me that my opening was a put-up job. And I didn't care. I'm hoping =that= part of the adventure doesn't turn out to be all that unusual." Jules was rolling up his papers as he spoke, the sketch of Rimini left on the table's surface as if it had been by the way. Glossing over the awkwardness of the situation. Treating it as though it was just a curiosity, rather than the only thing she had to remind her of a man who had not been her lover – but whom she come so close to loving regardless of the threat he represented, against all reason and common sense and an entire lifetime's dedication to her duty. "Which reminds me. Would you excuse me, Rebecca? I have to go explain to Phileas how wrong he is about tariffs and trade. Again. You'd think a man of his intellect would have grasped his basic error, before now."
There were depths of tact and compassion to Jules Verne that astounded her, from time to time, and reminded her that as experienced as she was in many things there was still a great deal to be learned from him. She felt it now, as Jules picked up his journal and his papers, and made ready to leave.
"Ah, but Jules, there you have it, in a nutshell. A man of Phileas' intellect. Phileas hasn't got any intellect, it's all horses and fascinating women, and whist. A very great deal of whist. I'm afraid your careful tutelage is lost on him, but never let it be said that I would give up on my own cousin, go thou forth and do battle bravely, noble knight."
She'd made him smile as softly and as fondly as when he spoke of Edmond's Haydee; or perhaps even more so. He leaned over her where she sat at the card-table and helped himself to an affectionate and familial kiss. She tilted her cheek in his direction to facilitate it, smiling for her own part.
Then he left, and she was alone in the drawing-room. Her smile slowly faded, looking at the picture of a marble bust that had been a Roman legionnaire, a Duke, perhaps a theater impresario. Angelo Rimini.
Now she had treasure from the island of Monte Cristo that was hers alone, and if it gave her pain that was often the way of it with things that were very precious to her heart. It was not much. But it was so much more than nothing.
Ringing the bell, Rebecca waited for one of the girls. "Yes. Mary. Would you see if Passepartout is available, I'd like to see him. But in the morning will do, if he's preoccupied."
She'd speak to Passepartout about a trick wall-hanging, to frame this ambiguous reminder of a man she'd almost loved.
And then she would go to find Phileas in the library, and see what she could do to support their friend Jules Verne's valiant attempts to liberalize his philosophy of trade.
The End
Companion Piece | Afterword