بخش 5 فصل 7

Venice, Italy

July 29, 1806

VII

Addie wakes to sunlight and silk sheets.

Her limbs feel leaden, her head full of muslin. The kind of heaviness that comes with too much sun, and too much sleep.

It is ungodly hot in Venice, hotter than it ever was in Paris.

The window is open, but neither the faint breeze nor the silk bedding are enough to dissipate the stifling heat. It is only morning, and sweat already beads on her bare skin. She is dreading the thought of midday as she drags herself awake, and sees Matteo perched at the foot of the bed.

He is just as beautiful in daylight, sun-kissed and strong, but she is struck less by his lovely features, and more by the strange calm of the moment.

Mornings are usually muddled with apologies, confusion, the aftermath of forgetting. They are sometimes painful, and always awkward.

But Matteo seems utterly unfazed.

He doesn’t remember her, of course, that much is obvious—but her presence there, this stranger in his bed, seems neither to startle nor to bother him. His attention is focused solely on the sketchpad balanced on his knee, the charcoal skating gracefully across the paper. It is only when his gaze flicks up to her, and then down again, that she realizes he is drawing her.

She makes no move to cover herself, to reach for the slip cast off on the chair, or the thin robe at the foot of the bed. Addie hasn’t been shy about her body in a long time. Indeed, she has come to enjoy being admired. Perhaps it is the natural abandon that comes with time, or perhaps it is the constancy of her shape, or perhaps it is the liberation that comes with knowing her spectators won’t remember.

There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.

And yet, Matteo is still drawing, the motions swift and easy.

“What are you doing?” she asks gently, and he tears his gaze from the parchment.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “The way you looked. I had to capture it.”

Addie frowns, begins to rise, but he lets out a stifled sound and says, “Not yet,” and it takes all her strength to stay there, on the bed, hands tangled in the sheets until he sighs and sets the work aside, eyes glazed with the afterglow unique to artists.

“Can I see?” she asks in the melodic Italian she has learned.

“It is not finished,” he says, even as he offers her the pad.

Addie stares at the drawing. The marks are easy, imprecise, a quick study by a talented hand. Her face is barely drawn, almost abstract in the gestures of light and shadow.

It is her—and it is not her.

An image, distorted by the filter of someone else’s style. But she can see herself in it. From the curve of her cheek to the shape of her shoulders, the sleep-mussed hair and the charcoal dots scattered across her face. Seven freckles charted out like stars.

She brushes the charcoal toward the bottom edge of the page, where her limbs dissolve into the linens of the bed, feels it smudge against her skin.

But when she lifts her hand away, her thumb is stained, and the line is clean. She has not left a mark. And yet, she has. She has impressed herself upon Matteo, and he has impressed her upon the page.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“Yes,” she murmurs, resisting the urge to tear the drawing from the pad, to take it with her. Every inch of her wants to have it, to keep it, to stare at the image like Narcissus in the pond. But if she takes it now, then it will find a way to disappear, or it will belong to her, and her alone, and then it will be as good as lost, forgotten.

If Matteo keeps the picture, he will forget the source, but not the sketch itself. Perhaps he will turn to it when she is gone, and wonder at the woman sprawled across his sheets, and even if he thinks it the product of some drunken revel, some fever dream, her image will still be there, charcoal on parchment, a palimpsest beneath a finished work.

It will be real, and so will she.

So Addie studies the drawing, grateful for the prism of her memory, and hands it back to her artist. She rises, reaching for her clothes.

“Did we have a good time?” Matteo asks. “I confess, I cannot remember.” “Neither can I,” she lies.

“Well then,” he says with a rakish grin. “It must have been a very good time.” He kisses her bare shoulder, and her pulse flutters, body warming with the memory of the night before. She is a stranger to him now, but Matteo has the easy passion of an artist enamored with his newest subject. It would be simple enough to stay, to start again, enjoy his company another day—but her thoughts are still on the drawing, the meaning of those lines, the weight of them.

“I must go,” she says, leaning in to kiss him one last time. “Try to remember me.” He laughs, the sound breezy and light as he pulls her close, leaves ghosts of charcoal fingers on her skin. “How could I possibly forget?” That night, the sunset turns the canals to gold.

Addie stands on a bridge over the water, and rubs at the charcoal still on her thumb, and thinks of the drawing, an artist’s rendition, like an echo of the truth, thinks of Luc’s own words so long ago, when he cast her from Geoffrin’s salon.

Ideas are wilder than memories.

He meant it as a barb, no doubt, but she should have seen it as a clue, a key.

Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.

Because two blocks away, in that small studio over the café, there is an artist, and on one of his pages, there is a drawing, and it is of her. And now Addie closes her eyes, and tips her head back, and smiles, hope swelling in her chest. A crack in the walls of this unyielding curse. She thought she’d studied every inch, but here, a door, ajar onto a new and undiscovered room.

The air changes at her back, the crisp scent of trees, impossible and out of place in the rank Venetian heat.

Her eyes drift open. “Good evening, Luc.”

“Adeline.”

She turns to face him, this man she made real, this darkness, this devil brought to life. And when he asks if she has had enough, if she is tired yet, if she will yield to him tonight, she smiles, and says, “Not tonight.” Rubs her finger anew against her thumb, and feels the charcoal there, and thinks of telling him about her discovery, just to savor his surprise.

I have found a way to leave a mark, she wants to say to him. You thought you could erase me from this world, but you cannot. I am still here. I will always be here.

The taste of the words—that triumph—is sweet as sugar on her tongue. But there is a warning tint to his gaze tonight, and knowing Luc, he would find a way to turn it against her, to take this small solace from her before she’s found a way to use it.

So she says nothing.