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L’Allumeuse
Fremont knew we had to leave France the day Étienne d’Auberge was arrested in front of Madame de Lespinasse’s salon.
He’d been a frequent visitor before this incident, and had known d’Auberge rather well. In fact, he’d warned him to moderate the strongly anti-clerical slant of his editorials. But d’Auberge was a principled man, meaning that he wouldn’t feel he’d been successful until he’d gotten arrested. Fremont hadn’t thought it would actually happen.
When it did, he suggested, very quietly, that he leave the country and go find a less tumultuous locale for finishing his first novel.
“I don’t want it poisoned with politics, Eleni” he’d told me, and I was surprised by the venom of his tone. “I don’t want to be writing with an ulterior motive I want it to be a story. And written with my ideas—not other men’s.”
An acquaintance of his from the salon had mentioned a Scottish castle that his uncle had inherited when the previous occupant died suddenly—heart attack, I believe it was. Apparently it’s located around Glasgow and called Blackloch, after the large lake it borders. There’s all sorts of local stories about kelpsies and brownies and malevolent spirits that delight Fremont and unsettle me a little. I’m certainly not superstitious, but I prefer to avoid anything labeled “malevolent” or even “mischievous”.
Fremont and his friend drew up an agreement—that he would spend six months in Blackloch, with no obligation except that he keep the castle mostly free of damage. I told him it was an excellent idea, and to watch out for the various otherworldly things, as they could hinder his progress on his novel.
He promised he would.
And for the first few weeks, everything seemed fine.
The wind skips gently over the moors, unfettered by rock or tree or any earthly thing, endlessly ruffling the grey-green grasses against the eggshell sky—
There is a warm place for me. Here—
--and her face shone like starlight in the warmth of his smile, and all—
Blood! Blood was all he could see, staining the earth, his hands, his soul, pooling blood and empty eyes gazing at spider webs on the ceiling—
The world is cold. But it pales in comparison to us, love—
His letters had become less like letters and more like collages of his writings as the weeks passed. Before I decided to go see him, I received a letter that was nothing but fragments that formed no coherent whole and had no explanation.
And there were parts that sounded as though they had been written by someone else.
When I came to visit him he’d been living there a little over three weeks. My father and his parents came as well, expecting to get acquainted with each other and perhaps have Fremont read some of his writing aloud to them. I mentioned the strange letters to my father, but he dismissed it, saying that he was probably “experimenting with his style.” I quickly realized that he would be of little help to me and I would have to handle this myself.
My father knocked on the monolithic front door. I found my gaze drawn irresistibly upward, over the towering castle and its stone ramparts, wasted and worn but still impenetrable. The whole structure spread into the soft dome of white sky—mysterious and otherworldly until I touched the weathered stone framing the door. Its rugged texture reminded me that this was created long ago by man, of materials formed in this world, and there was nothing supernatural about it.
Fremont did not answer the knock. But when my father tried the ornate silver knob, he found it unlocked and chuckled slightly as he opened it and gallantly offered his elbow to me.
“You should twist his ear, darling—that’s certainly not a good habit.”
I didn’t mention that it wasn’t a habit at all—usually Fremont was scrupulous about those kinds of things. Returning his smile with charm rivaling his own, I stepped inside.
“I’m sure he didn’t hear us knocking—he’s probably been taken captive by the muse and can’t tear himself away from his artistic endeavors.” His tone was ironic. But I had a terrible feeling that hindered my ability to join him in his amusement.
“Yes. I’m sure,” I said, smiling faintly. Fremont’s parents slipped through the door and closed it behind them. I could hear his mother pleasantly murmuring in German to his father, who, despite his attempts to speak quietly, had a booming voice that echoed through the cavern-like hallway.
Father straightened his coat and patted my shoulder. “Well, it would distress me endlessly to delay discussing that incident Mr. Herder was telling me about on the way here. Fremont can join us when he is free of the muse.”
Before I could respond, he was striding over to them, hailing Mr. Herder with a hearty “Josef!”
I sighed deeply. I had the distinct feeling that Fremont would not come down of his own accord.
The former inhabitant of this castle was a writer, and he had a cornucopia of ideas—political ideas, ideas for novels, philosophy, science. I found some of his writings, actually. But a lot of them are unfinished.
I have to wonder what happens to these ideas, if the writer dies before he can get them down on paper. Do they die with him? Or—I know this is strange, Eleni, but I also know you’ll listen—can they be reincarnated, somehow? As though they have souls of their own?
Perhaps the solitude is playing tricks with my mind.
I had thought so, too, which is why I’d been so anxious to see him and quell those fears.
But when I climbed the stone stairs to his room to fetch him later that evening, I discovered that I was wrong. And so was he.
The huge oaken door scraped sickeningly against the stone floor as a splinter of darkness appeared—my only glimpse into the room in which Fremont seem to have barricaded himself most of the evening. Not a hint of candlelight illuminated that black slit. I couldn’t help drawing my hand back—the darkness seemed to yawn hungrily for my exposed skin.
Ridiculous. I shook my head, almost angry with myself, as the dark slit opened to reveal Fremont’s disheveled black hair and emaciated frame, wrapped in a grey coat that hadn’t fit him so loosely when I saw him last.
“Fre—” I stopped short, watching the candlelight flickering over his pale skin. My questions died in my throat. “May I come in?” I murmured instead.
He didn’t smile, but his blue eyes flickered briefly with something. Hope? Joy? It was gone too quickly for me to tell.
“I’ve wanted to see you, Eleni,” he said with his back to me. His voice was the same as I remembered—cultured and intelligent, but with a faint German accent and a slight hesitation on his w’s. He’d always had trouble pronouncing them the English way.
I waited for him to say more, but was met with silence.
A brief glance around the room revealed several unlit torches scattered across the walls. “You should be lighting these,” I said, dipping the flame of my candle into one of them.
He turned around to watch me, expressionlessly following my movements around the room as I lit every torch in sight. When I’d finished, I noticed that he was holding something. He ran his fingers idly over it as he stared across the room.
“And the window!” I strode over to the window and, with strange fury, yanked open the deep purple drapes obscuring the pale morning sunlight. The room was illuminated in ethereal grey.
I was acting from an instinct, almost—one that I didn’t understand. I knew only that the darkness needed to be destroyed, and the day needed to break through and wrap its arms around him in the way that I knew I couldn’t, right now.
Daybreak. I imagined day struggling frantically against the enveloping night, and, in rage, shattering it, sending it skittering into the heavens to be dissolved by the sun’s radiance.
I found my hands shaking. Bemused, I crossed my arms over my chest in an attempt to steady them. It was as though my body were feeling something that my mind had yet to catch up to.
When I moved closer to him, I saw that he was holding a tiny silver music box. He continued to run his fingers over the grooves and patterns etched into the sides and top. That I had illuminated the room seemed to have escaped his attention. It was as though it didn’t matter one way or another to him—darkness and light played equally minor roles in the strange play he’d been forced to perform in.
I reached for the music box. His grip on it hadn’t been firm enough, and he gaped, startled, as I slid it out of his hands and, without thinking, opened it.
Inside was a dancing couple made of porcelain. The woman wore an airy, soft green ball gown, and the man’s coat contrasted with its solid blackness. Her tiny red lips smiled coquettishly at him, and he gazed at her with little adoring eyes.
The tinny, bell-like strains of a strangely familiar tune drifted out of the box as they twirled on their tiny pedestal, slowly, endlessly, their expressions never changing, frozen in a moment of time.
I recognized the song, upon reflection. Absentmindedly I began to sing quietly with the music.
“Alas my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off so discourteously—”
The last word choked in my throat as Fremont suddenly grabbed my arm, yanking the music box out of my hand and slamming it shut. Then he seized my shoulders. My chest constricted in fear as I stared at his deep-set blue eyes, so angry and strange, glittering in his wasted face.
“Don’t sing that,” he said quietly.
Their lighthearted conversation nauseated me. I stood by Fremont and avoided speaking to them as much as possible. After a while they were so absorbed in Mr. Herder’s story about his cousin’s rabbit farm that they didn’t realize that Fremont had not joined them.
He remained mostly silent and turned his gaze to the floor. His overgrown black locks curled moodily over his forehead, almost obscuring his eyes. The silence was only broken when he occasionally hummed a bar of Greensleeves, which made me feel cold all over.
When he did speak, it was not from my prompting. “It’s a story about King Henry VII and a courtier he pursued while married to Catherine of Aragon. The idea is that she inspired him to write Greensleeves.”
I touched his arm, but he drew away slightly. “It’s not a love story. It’s about lust and power and woman’s cold manipulation in order to get what she wants. Look.” He tugged a crumpled piece of parchment out of his pocket.
Cautiously I took it and smoothed it out as best I could. There were smudges from where it seemed teardrops had hit the paper. I felt sick, but I read anyway:
“Lady Brianne, sometimes you seem to me a very cold woman.”
“I am cold, your highness. None could say otherwise.”
“But love has warmed you.”
Her amber eyes glittered with amusement. “You would have me believe that you do not love as I do.”
“Explain, my dear one.”
“We love as all do in our societal rank. Coldly, and for our own greed, because we need nothing.”
“Perhaps,” Henry murmured thoughtfully. “But for now I don’t desire guilt. I desire a lover, for Catherine is cold comfort, however warm her love may be.”
“I am willing to serve, my king,” she answered, “If that is all that you desire.”
I looked up at him. “This isn’t you.”
He took back the parchment with shaking hands. “I can write nothing else.”
“That’s rather unseemly, Eleni,” he said coyly. “You aren’t married yet.”
Mr. Herder suppressed a smile, and his wife shook her head at him.
“I suppose I could be persuaded to stay a few more nights,” he said, glancing at Fremont’s parents. “If the Herders would like to stay as well, we could explore this castle here a bit. You mentioned that you were interested in medieval architecture, didn’t you, Mr. Herder?”
“Why, yes.” His wife seemed briefly miffed, but quickly settled back into her usual demure state.
“Thank you,” I said with little feeling. But at least Fremont would not be left alone.
One day something snapped in me. It was the same instinct that had led me to open the curtains and light the torches when I saw him for the first time.
He had closed the curtains and doused the torches and was writing something with torturous intensity. I saw a tear gliding down his face as he wrote, and occasionally he would stop to tap his quill against his thumb.
When I got close enough to see what he was writing, I inhaled sharply.
“Fremont—you’re writing in blood.”
“I ran out of ink,” he said quietly. Now I could see his thumb bleeding profusely from a slit across the fingertip. He tapped his quill into it again. “I cannot stop writing, or the idea will be lost.”
“Let it be lost then!”
Another tear skipped down onto the paper. “I want nothing more.”
That was the moment where something stronger than I am took hold of me—that instinct, or whatever it was. I yanked the parchment out of his hands and swept his other writings off his desk. After crumbling them furiously in my hands, I threw them to the floor briefly while I tore the drapes off their rings, letting the light stream in again.
I threw the papers out into the cool wind, which carried them into the deep black lake with its abundance of kelpies and water faeries. Fremont watched mutely with a somewhat lost expression, nervously scratching his quill into the heavy wooden desk. After a few moments of this he pulled the music box out of his pocket and began running his fingers over it again.
For a moment I was deeply, horribly afraid that nothing I did would free him from his invisible captors. But my fury was too strong to be dampened now. I was tired of watching him slowly waste away in the darkness of this castle, held captive by fragments of memories—not even a proper ghost, just his bloody ideas.
“STOP!” I almost felt that I was watching myself from a distance. I was a bit surprised at what I was seeing. “Put itdown. Stop holding that music box.”
“YOU!” Now I found myself shouting at the ceiling. “You either write your own ideas or accept that they are LOST because you are DEAD. Greater men than you have died and had their potential buried with them. What makes you so exceptional that yours would survive?” I gritted my teeth. “Get OUT!”
Fremont stared at me mutely. His blue eyes had widened to such a degree that I would have laughed had I not been so angry.
I would let nothing stand against me.
Fremont Herder’s first novel, L’Allumeuse, is widely thought to be his finest, and a masterpiece of French literature.
There is a warm place for me. Here, in your arms.
You were my candle. But more importantly, you were the arms around me when the world collapsed.
I have searched a cold and dark place for an inspiration that would be like that of no other man, and I have found it in you—my light-bringer, my torch.
Mon allumeuse.
Popular theory holds that it was written primarily to his wife, Eleni Chandler Herder, but in the academic community it is generally thought that the subject is humanity in general, and “L’Allumeuse” refers to Reason.
Herder denies neither, but refuses to clarify.