“Mon dieu … C’est très froid… .”
“Monsieur, you’re bleeding badly. Let me get you help, s’il vous plaît.”
“Non.” A violent shiver claimed me and held me in its unrelenting throes. Now was not the time for glossing over the truth. Nobody in France or any other portion of this world was going to be able to save me. As if to add a punctuation mark to this truth, I coughed again, but tasted blood run past my lips and onto my face. Breaths were getting hard to come by. “Something happened to her,” I muttered.
The woman crouched beside me, touching my forehead and slicking back my sweat-drenched hair. “À qui, monsieur?”
“Ma Déesse.” The stars were starting to spin again, but I did not dare close my eyes. Heaven only knew how long until I would not be able to open them again. “Shadows,” I whispered.
“Shadows?” my new companion asked.
“Oui, les ombres. I sensed them following us.” A tear slid down my face. “Ma belle déesse, je suis désolé. I couldn’t take her away fast enough and I let her fall into their clutches.”
“Monsieur, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She disappeared. I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t stop them. I don’t know who that man was, but he saw her. They wanted her.” Another cough brought up more blood. My eyes finally settled on the woman, my vision too blurry to behold her as the painter I once was. Everything was losing form. “Maybe it’s not too late,” I whispered. “Maybe you can find ma chérie.”
The stranger’s gaze remained fixed on me – I did not have to see it to feel its weight. She did not speak and I could not stop my eyes from closing. I had to grab for each and every haggard breath I drew while my heartbeat started accelerating. My mind still active, though, I could recall the days that followed our first night inside my room. The dual life I led exploded into vignettes of daylight versus nighttime, with each carrying its own pursuit and its own goal to accomplish.
In the early morning, I traveled to see le Marquis, polishing the finer details of each portrait before starting into the next sitting and the next regal family member. A cavalcade of snobbery paraded past me in all its aristocratic flair, but I smiled at it and watched as each noble was primped and placed before me, each bringing me one step closer to a comfortable sum of money. I could already smell the sea air and feel the warmth of the Mediterranean on my face, the sun beating down on a portrait artist and his bride. I had visions of small children with raven hair and green eyes. I saw them so clearly, I could have made them come to life on a canvas as well.
During the night, my painting took on a much different form.
I had never worked on such a painting before in my life, not even with the prostitutes I hired to model for me when I found myself at a lack for somebody to paint. None of the marketplace buyers wanted anything that risque; the models often wound up with the guise of foreign deities or as studies for the Virgin Mary. Fully clothed in royal robes or dresses for the most part. Never once did one shed a piece of clothing except to fill their normal station once our artistic business with each other was complete.
Everything about ma Déesse’s portrait was unique from the start.
It might have been the sexual attachment that remained a part of us from that point forth. Perhaps it reflected that connection our souls made each time we were together. The intonation of her pose wound up laced with sensuality, as though my hands could not lie about everything happening on the other side of the canvas. The feel of her skin still fresh on the fingers guiding the brush, the strokes reflected truth.
In all of it, my mission was simple and yet, so complex. I wanted to lure her away from Paris, into an uncertain future with a portrait painter. Leaving an angry family in her wake, forsaking the life she had known since birth to be the beauty who laid on my bed to be painted. And to be caressed. There was quite a bit of the latter in the nights that followed.
Before, during, after. Sometimes with fresh paint still on my fingers that got smeared on her body when I touched her. Her on top, me on top, against the wall and on the floor. Both backs arched and both mouths moaning; we became embroiled in a passionate affair that more than rivaled any experience that preceded it. It surpassed them all. I became more and more spellbound and more and more convinced that leaving with her was the right thing to do. Watching her marry another would have been slow suicide.
Nothing underscored the urgency of leaving more than the night the shadows returned.
We were walking back to her estate, taking the long way to glance at the banks of the river. Arms around each other, with sunrise a tense breath away, our nights were getting longer and our painting sessions varied in length depending on whether or not we felt like strolling to our favorite spot. As we turned for her estate, the sound of a shoe scuffing against cobblestone stopped me in place.
Déesse paused as well and looked up at me. “Qu’est-ce qui t’arrive?” she asked.
“Je ne sais pas,” I muttered, looking around at vacant city streets, dark with the final hours of the night. “Did you hear that?”
“Non, amour.” She looked around with me. “Why? What was it?”
I shook my head and sighed, coaxing her to walk again with me. “I think my imagination’s playing tricks on me.” To dissipate the tension, I nudged against her. “I haven’t been sleeping very much these days. It must be the fatigue.”
“Well, nobody’s forcing you to stay up so late,” Déesse replied, her tone of voice playful. She punctuated her statement with a chuckle that I could not help but reciprocate. We walked onward and returned to her estate without incident.
From there, however, things began to get worse. The next night, I caught sight of a man clad in a dark cloak, gazing at us from across the street. The moment I turned to face him, he was gone, as though an apparition and nothing more. Déesse remarked that ghosts followed me in my wake, but this time I did not laugh. I knew I saw him just as plain as the houses we passed.
While working on a portrait the next day, I paused and became lost in thought. Paintbrush in hand with la fille du Marquis sitting before me, I furrowed my brow as the lasting impression of the gentleman surfaced. I saw his dark hair and the bright eyes that beheld us as we walked by, far too much intrigue within that gaze for him to be a casual observer. The corner of his mouth curled upward in a smile. Tempted to claim the man had both of us within his sights, I knew better the more I focused on the look in his eyes. One person in particular held his interest.
The shadow man watched ma Déesse. I tensed and placed my paintbrush down, dashing to my supplies to find a piece of parchment I could draw on. In the background, the daughter called out to me and her father himself strode to my side as strokes of charcoal slashed against the parchment underneath. “Monsieur DeBuchet!” he yelled. “What is the meaning of this? Are you done with la peinture de ma fille?!”
“Non, Monsieur. Je suis désolé. Une minute, s’il vous plaît.”
“I beg your pardon!?” He thundered. I was forced to look up at him. His eyes blazed with wrath. “I am not paying you for recreational sketching, Peintre. I am paying you for portraits of my family. If you do not finish them, there will be your neck to pay. I will not return to my estate without these finished.”
Staring at him, I sighed. Then I followed that with a reluctant nod. “D’accord, Monsieur.” I placed my materials down and took up the paintbrush again, but later on, while sitting beside ma Déesse, I finished the drawing.
She watched me work with her brow knitted in confusion. “Julien, what are you doing?” she asked.
I shook my head and placed the charcoal onto the floor. I moved aside and showed Déesse the portrait. “Does he resemble anyone you know?”
Déesse shook her head. “Non, amour. I’ve never seen him before in my life. Pourquoi?”
I frowned at the picture. “He’s not a noble? Or somebody you’ve seen with your father?”
“Non, nobody like that at all. Where did you see him?”
“On the street, last night. I wondered if he knew you because his sights were set on you.”
She frowned and tensed. “Do you think my father knows about us?”
I looked into her eyes and wanted more than anything to tell her yes, because if this was a matter of her father’s anger, then that was easily escaped. She and I could stay apart until I received the purse from my commissions. Then I would come for her and we would be nothing but ghosts ourselves. As I looked at the sketch, though, and studied the figure, the thought of him watching us – watching her – sent a shiver up my spine. “Non,” I said, although the word drifted past my lips in a soft, subdued manner. “Nevermind, Déesse. You’re right, he’s not a noble.”
“Then what is he?” she asked.
It took a moment for the words to surface. Anything I said short of ‘the harbinger of death’ would have been a lie. His eyes chilled me down to the marrow and his presence filled my consciousness with urgency. If only I would have grabbed her with the little money I had right then and there and kidnapped her. I should have begged, stole, and borrowed for passage to Italy. Thoughts of giving her a proper start someplace else, however, held my attention more than how dire was the presence of these shadows around us.
My mouth spoke the few words it could manage.
“Je ne sais pas, amour. I just hope I never see him again.”
Read from the Beginning…
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