Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (11 page)

“What reputation?” Calvin didn’t like the direction Honoré’s comments were tending. “What do you know about my reputation? I don’t even have a reputation.”

“I have been with you continuously for months, my friend. It is impossible you do not have a reputation with your family and your neighbors. This is the reputation that your brother’s wife would know.”

“My reputation is that I was a cute little kid when anybody bothered to notice that I existed.”

“Oh no, Calvin. I am quite sure your reputation is that you are envious, spiteful, prone to outbursts of rage, and incapable of admitting an error. Your family and neighbors could not have missed these traits.”

After all these months, to discover that Honoré had such an opinion of him was unbearable. Calvin felt fury rise up inside him, and he would have lashed out at Honoré had the little Frenchman not looked so utterly cheerful and open-faced. Was it possible he had not meant to offend?

“You see what I mean?” said Honoré. “You are angry even now, and you resent me. But why? I mean no
harm by these observations. I am a novelist. I study life. You are alive, so I study you. I find you endlessly fascinating. A man with both the ambition and the ability to be great, who is so little in control of his impulses that he pisses away his greatness. You are a tiger studying to be a mouse. This is how the world is kept safe from you. This is why you will never be a Napoleon.”

Calvin roared in fury, but could not bring himself to strike Honoré himself, who was, after all, the only friend he had ever had. So he smashed the flat of his hand against the wall.

“But look,” said Honoré. “It is the wall you hit, and not my face. So I was not entirely right. You do have some self-control. You are able to respect another man’s opinion.”

“I am not a mouse,” said Calvin.

“No no, you did not understand. I said you are studying to be a mouse, not that you have passed your examinations and are now living on cheese. When I hear you go, squeak squeak squeak, I think, What an odd noise to come from a tiger. I have known few tigers in my life. Many mice, but few tigers. So you are precious to me, my friend. I am sad to hear this squeaking. And your sister-in-law, I think all she knows of you is the squeak, that is what I was saying before. That is why I doubt that she will be glad to see you.”

“I can roar if I need to,” said Calvin.

“Look at how angry you are. What would you do, hit me? That, my dear friend, would be a squeak.” Honoré looked at his own naked body. “I am filthy like a wallowing pig. I will order up a bath. You may use the water when I’m done.”

Calvin did not answer. Instead he sent his doodlebug over the surface of his own body, ejecting all the dirt and grime, the dried-on urine and sweat, the dust and ashes in his hair. It took only moments, for once he had shown his doodlebug what to do, it could finish on its own without his directing it, just as his hand could keep
sawing without him thinking of the saw, or his fingers tie a knot without him even looking at the string.

Honoré’s eyes grew wide. “Why have you made your underwear disappear?”

Only then did Calvin realize that every foreign object had been pulverized and ejected from his body. “Who cares? I’m cleaner right now than you’ll ever be.”

“While you are using your powers to beautify yourself, why not change your odor? To a flower, perhaps. Not a nasturtium—those already smell like unwashed feet. What about a lilac? Or a rose?”

“Why don’t I change your nose to a cauliflower? Oops, too late, someone already did.”

“Aha, you are insulting me with cabbages.” Honoré pulled the string that would ring a bell in the servants’ quarters.

Calvin pulled on some clean clothes—cleanish, anyway—and was just leaving the room when a slave arrived in response to Honoré’s summons. Honoré was buck naked now, without even shirttails to conceal nature’s modest endowment, but he seemed utterly unaware; and, for that matter, the slave might not have seen him, for her gaze never seemed to leave the floor. Honoré was still specifying exactly how many kettles of hot water he wanted in his tub when Calvin started down the stairs and could hear the Frenchman’s voice no more.

Lady Ashworth’s door was opened by a wiry old slave in close-fitting livery. “Howdy,” said Calvin. “I heard tell that my sister-in-law Peggy Smith was visiting here and—”

The slave walked away and left him standing at the door. But the door was still open, so Calvin stepped inside onto the porch. By habit he sent his doodlebug through the house. He could see from the heartfires where everybody was; unlike Peggy, though, he couldn’t see a thing
in
the heartfires, and couldn’t recognize anyone in particular. All he knew was a living soul was
there, and by the brightness of it, whether it was human or not.

He could guess, though. The heartfire moving slowly up the back stairs must be the slave who had opened the door for him. The heartfire on the porch above Calvin, toward which the slave was moving, had to be Lady Ashworth. Or Lord Ashworth, perhaps—but no,
he
was likely to be as close as possible to the King.

He set his doodlebug into the floor of the upstairs porch, feeling the vibration caused by their talking. With a little concentration, it turned into sound. The slave sure didn’t say much. “Gentleman at the door.”

“I’m expecting no callers.”

“Say he sister be Peggy Smith.”

“I don’t know anyone by such a... oh, perhaps Margaret Larner—but she isn’t here. Tell him she isn’t here.”

The slave immediately walked away from Lady Ashworth. Stupid woman, thought Calvin. I never thought she’d be here, I need to know where she
is
. Don’t they teach common civility to folks in Camelot? Or maybe she’s so high up in the King’s court that she didn’t need to show decent manners to common folk.

Well, thought Calvin, let’s see what your manners turn into when
I’m
through with you.

He could see the slave’s slow-moving heartfire on the back stairs. Calvin walked into the house and found the front stairs, then bounded lightly up to the next floor. The family entertained on this level and the large ballroom had three large French doors opening onto the gallery, where Lady Ashworth was studying a plant, pruning shears in hand.

“That plant needs no pruning,” said Calvin, putting on the sophisticated English voice he had learned in London.

Lady Ashworth turned toward him in shock. “I beg your pardon. You were not admitted here.”

“The doors were open. I heard you tell your servant
to send me away. But I could not bear to leave without having seen a lady of such legendary grace and beauty.”

“Your compliments disgust me,” she said, her cavalier drawl lengthening with the fervor of her opinion. “I have no patience with dandies, and as for trespassers, I generally have them killed.”

“There’s no need to have me killed. Your contemptuous gaze has already stopped my heart from beating.”

“Oh, I see, you’re not flattering me, you’re mocking me. Don’t you know this house is full of servants? I’ll have you thrown out.”

“Blacks lay hands on a White man?”

“We always use our servants to take out the trash.”

The banter was not engaging even a tiny fraction of Calvin’s attention. Instead he was using his doodlebug to explore Lady Ashworth’s body. In his peregrinations with Honoré de Balzac, Calvin had watched the Frenchman seduce several dozen women of every social class, and because Calvin was a scientist at heart, he had used his doodlebug to note the changes in a woman’s body as her lust was aroused. There were tiny organs where certain juices were made and released into the blood. It was hard to find them, but once found, they could easily be stimulated. In moments, Calvin had three different glands secreting rather strong doses of the juices of desire, and now it was his eyes, not just his doodlebug, that could see the transformation in Lady Ashworth. Her eyes grew heavy-lidded, her manner more aloof, her voice huskier.

“Compared to your grace and beauty I am trash and nothing more,” Calvin said. “But I am
your
trash, my lady, to do with as you will. Discard me and I will cease to exist. Save me and I will become whatever you want me to be. A jewel to wear upon your bosom. A fan behind which your beauty may continue unobserved. Or perhaps the glove in which your hand may stay clean and warm.”

“Who would ever have guessed that such talk could
come from a frontier boy from Wobbish,” she said, suppressing a smile.

“What matters isn’t where a man is from, but where he’s going. I think that all my life was leading to this moment. To this hot day in Camelot, this porch, this jungle of living plants, this magnificent Eve who is tending the garden.”

She looked down at her pruning shears. “But you said I shouldn’t cut this plant.”

“It would be heartless,” said Calvin. “It reaches up, not to the sun, but to you. Do not despise what grows for love of you, my lady.”

She blushed and breathed more rapidly. “The things you say.”

“I came in search of my brother’s wife, because I heard she had visited here,” said Calvin. “I could have left a card with your servant to accomplish that.”

“I suppose you could.”

“But even on the harsh cobbles of the street, I could hear you like music, smell you like roses, see you like the light of the one star breaking through on a cloudy night. I knew that in all the world this is the place I had to be, even if it cost me my life or my honor. My lady, until this moment every day of life was a burden, without purpose or joy. Now all I long for is to stay here, looking at you, wondering at the marvels of perfection concealed by the draperies of your clothing, tied up by the pins in your hair.”

She was trembling. “You shouldn’t talk about such...”

He stood before her now, inches from her. As he had seen with Honoré’s seductions, his closeness would heighten the feelings within her. He reached up and brushed his fingers gently across her cheek, then her neck, her shoulder, touching only bare skin. She gasped but did not speak, did not take her eyes from his.

“My eyes imagine,” he murmured, “my lips imagine,
every part of my body imagines being close to you, holding you, becoming part of you.”

She staggered, barely able to walk as she led him from the porch to her bedroom.

Besides studying the women’s bodies, Calvin had also studied Honoré’s, had seen how the Frenchman tried to maintain himself on the brink of ecstacy for as long as possible without crossing over. What Honoré had to do with self-discipline, Calvin could do mechanically, with his doodlebug. Lady Ashworth was possessed by pleasure many times and in many ways before Calvin finally allowed himself to find release. They lay together on sheets clammy with their sweat. “If this is how the devil rewards wickedness,” murmured Lady Ashworth, “I understand why God seems to be losing ground in this world.” But there was sadness in her voice, for now her conscience was reawakening, ready to punish her for the pleasure she had taken.

“There was no wickedness here today,” said Calvin. “Was not your body made by God? Did not these desires come from that body? What are you but the woman God made you to be? What am I but the man God brought here to worship you?”

“I don’t even know your name,” she said.

“Calvin.”

“Calvin? That’s all?”

“Calvin Maker.”

“A good name, my love,” she said. “For you have made me. Until this hour I did not truly exist.”

Calvin wanted to laugh in her face. This is all that romance and love amounted to. Juices flowing from the glands. Bodies coupling in heat. A lot of pretty talk surrounding it.

He cleaned his body again. Hers also. But not the seed he left inside her. On impulse he followed it, wondering what it might accomplish. The idea rather appealed to him—a child of his, raised in a noble house. If he wanted to have seven sons, did it matter whether they
all had the same mother? Let this be the first.

Was it possible to decide whether it would be a boy or a girl? He didn’t know. Maybe Alvin could comprehend things as small as this, but it was all Calvin could do just to follow what was happening inside Lady Ashworth’s body. And then even that slipped away from him. He just didn’t know what he was looking for. At least she wasn’t already pregnant.

“That was my first time, you know,” he said.

“How could it be?” she said. “You knew everything. You knew how to—my husband knows nothing compared to you.”

“My first time,” he said. “I never had another woman until now. Your body taught me all I needed to know.”

He caused the sweat on the sheets to dry, despite the dampness of the air. He rose from the cool dry bed, clean and fresh as he was when he arrived. He looked at her. Not young, really; sagging just a bit; but not too bad, considering. Honoré would probably approve. If he decided to tell him.

Oh, he would tell him. Without doubt, for Honoré would love the story of it, would love hearing how much Calvin had learned from his constant dalliances.

“Where is my sister-in-law?” Calvin asked matter-of-factly.

“Don’t go,” said Lady Ashworth.

“It wouldn’t do for me to stay,” said Calvin. “The gossipy ladies of Camelot would never understand the perfect beauty of this hour.”

“But you’ll come back.”