Frannie marveled at the walls of the Red City. Minutes before landing the plane banked over and despite her seat over the wing she saw it. It wasn’t for the first time, but she had never seen the city from this angle. The red of the old sandstone walls was starker that at the same distance on the ground. anytime she flew. The view from the air called out more modern building. The stark white of the Menara airport with the top five or six feet of a glass geodesic dome peeking through the white roof was the most obvious. Yet the city had grown enough since she was last here that another such dome, filling the courtyard of a large building, probably apartments or government offices, stood out miles away.
But Frannie always marveled when she flew. Despite watching over a hundred years of aviation history, seeing her first flight within a year of Kitty Hawk, she still remained convinced it was not mere mechanical engineering that made powered flight possible. No, she knew her own field of alchemy had to provide some part of the flight.
Thus she sat above the sinister wing of the plane in a window seat as she landed at Marrakesh as she did on every flight. On the rare occasion she couldn’t sit above the sinister seat she sat above the dexter, but she was convinced flight was sinister, a left handed art. The silvered or white skin of the planes was another reason she knew it was alchemy.
She’d never flown to Marrakesh, although she reflected the stopping points were the same now as a century ago, between the wars. In both cases she left Atlanta for New York then continued to France where she landed in the north, Breast then and Paris now, only to head south to the city, stopping both time in Marseilles. The big difference was before the trips from Atlanta to New York has been by train and the trips from New York to France and Marseilles to Morocco had been by boat. Now those were all by plane.
She smiled when she though that Paris to Marseilles might as well have been. That train had been faster than her first flights before the Great War.
The smile quickly faded as the flight taxied to the gate. Cleas would not be at the end of the ramp to meet her despite this trip being undertaken solely to see him, just as the last one had been. Between the wars he’d come down from the mountains to meet her ship in Casablanca. They’d ridden in a truck on a track that didn’t qualify as a road fit for wagons much less a motor vehicle, but it had been his newest toy. Like her conviction flight was an act of alchemy he had held the same position about the internal combustion engine as well.
And back then she couldn’t dispute her logic. Steam engines required no alchemy as one could watch the fire boil the water, but sightless gases confined in a sealed metal cylinder burning in smooth but rapid fire. What alchemist could deny such works a place in their realms.
Eventually she did and she suspected Cleas did as well. As she stood to leave the plane she could not help but think it was the admission that the engineers, the soulless benders, had devised machines no alchemist could dream of much less make function that had put him on the path he’d written about in his most recent letter.
The letter that put her on a plane not three days later.
She prayed with an intensity she had not done in the memories she’d kept that she had arrived before it was too late to change that course.
If she failed at that she at least wanted to understand why Cleas had quit using The Stone and quit using The Elixir. She’d heard tales of alchemist who, centuries after completing the Great Works, grew tired of living this life, but never one so young.
And never one of her acquaintance.
She’d sent Cleas a telegram she was coming. Normally she’d have sent a fine letter as was her tradition but there had been no time. She knew no means of transmitting her magical papers faster than normal post or messenger services. Her more traditional method, bird and animals, would be even slower. So she’d gone somewhat modern only eschewing email because if Cleas had email she’d never learned the address.
She hadn’t wanted to. She’d never thought she’d need such urgent communications. In that she was caught of the pace of London during Queen Anne’s reign, when they’d first meant. It was one of the memories she not only didn’t release, but gave the reverse treatments of those you chose to lose. That was an art she’d learned on her own and found no one else wanted.
But she had sent the telegram and as Frannie left the jet bridge she scanned about for any kind of reception. Cleas had admitted he’d reached the point of occasionally needing a wheelchair so she didn’t expect him, but she did expect a driver. She saw a printed sign, Francine Oglethorpe.
That could only be someone sent by Cleas. She looked up from the sign to see who was holding it.
The bearer was a man not far in age from her, at least not far from her apparent age. Like her, his hair was gray but unlike the full head she’d maintained his was thinning on top as though his hair of its own accord was forming a tonsure. He was a bit taller than here, standing just under six feet but the stoop of his shoulders indicated it was a product of shrinking as he aged. His white linen suit, a cut almost exactly a century out of fashion was a bit baggy at the shoulders and tight at the waist as though he’d had it since his mid-forties and the inevitable stooping she’d noticed and the older man’s pot belly that was starting to form were rebelling against the cut.
It was the same suit he had met her in at Casablanca in 1926. As she looked at his face his sparkling green eyes were the same eyes that had met her in the city back then. He’d looked younger then, of course. He’d looked like that man his mid-forties who the suit was cut for.
That wasn’t an inaccurate age if you’d put a two in front of it.
“Francine,” he said as he walked up to her, take her right hand and kissing it before grasping her shoulders lightly and kissing each cheek.
Frannie flushed like one of the late teen girls at the Georgia State campus whose copy shop back in Atlanta drew as customers. Cleas had always had that effect on her.
She’d have broken the Second Edict for him then.
As she thought that she’d do it now, this visit, if he wished.
The thought brought shudders of both fear and pleasure. It would mean a longer stay as she reset to a younger woman who could bear children. And a rearranging of her life in Atlanta. No, she corrected herself, an abandonment of her life in Atlanta. It would mean staying here.
Of course, she’d reinvented herself at least four times she could remember, although her memories had no gaps indicating a forgotten transformation nor did her meticulous records. Memories of the transitions were fuzzy as she thought they’d be worth sacrificing, but her records had extensive notes on setting them up and she’d kept memories of the more complicated parts.
“What rearranging of memories are you trying to do Frannie?”
He’d let go and taken a step back. He was on the edge of her space but scrupulously outside of it.
“I know that expression. You always were the master of what to remember and what not.” After she did not reply, he gracefully turned on his left foot to stand to her right and offered her his right arm. “Come, let’s see what you remember of my humble mansion.”
Frannie took his arm and they stepped forward. Two men in their late twenties, fit in a way uncommon today or at least in the States, with tight, smooth musculature that didn’t budge or advertise fell in behind his right and her left shoulder. Another tiny smile escaped Frannie. His current man servants looked the same as the last ones she’d seen and had that same relaxed yet precise sense of motion.
“I don’t remember looks exactly, but in form they could be the men who were with you a century ago.”
It was Cleas’s turn to smile. “Irem and Ghalib were born in the nineties. The nineteen nineties to be exact, but their great grandfather was one of the men you met that trip.” Frannie knew that Cleas took care to see to the families of his man servants and while he never directly hired sons it would not be the first time a third or later generation was brought into his service.
“Irem, will you retrieve the car and bring it up to the entrance. Ghalib, will you retrieve Miss Oglethorpe’s luggage. Unless something has changed the suitcases will be a brilliant blue like the harbor at Casablanca more than the sky.” He looked at Frannie as he said it, a wispy grin that was only missing a bright yellow canary feather.
“He’s right Ghalib. Here is the luggage tickets.” She handed him her bordering pass folder with the three small cardboard chits stapled to it. Ghalib left to retrieve her bags and they continued towards the exit.
“Three bags, Frannie. Have you turned into a silly young lady in your dotage?” The grin had grown enough that Frannie wished for the first time in years she’d learned the rudiments of conjuring to see him spitting those feathers out.
“Modern luggage is so much smaller than a steamer trunk. Besides, perhaps I’m planning to stay and this is just the beginning. I seem to remember you lamenting my leaving last visit.”
“Of course, young and foolish men often let a pretty girl overcome good sense.”
“So, here in your third century you’re finally wising up to the ways of women.” She was not prepared for the shadow that passed over his face like a swiftly moving cloud.
The came to a stop in front of the large glass wall facing the parking turn around. Even though the building faced to the south west the bright sun on the edge of the desert beat down. The glass had been polarized giving the arrival and departure pick-up areas as silver undertone through the windows. They stood watching cars go by and waited.
“Why did you come, Frannie?” She’d settled into the silence so well that his words startled her. She took in a deep breath to stifle tears as a winds of sadness created a dune over the previous arousal and longing her first sight of him had created.
“Because I wanted to see you before you died.”
If you’d asked her to give the ten, no hundred, most likely reactions he’d have to that admission the one she got, a gale of laughter, would not have made the list.
“Francine Oglethorpe, you have been an alchemist over three centuries now. I wrote you the day I stopped the protocols, a day not even a month ago, and yet here you are ready to attend my funeral.”
She unhooked herself from his arm and turned. Her round face looked as if she’d been standing in front of the desert sun for a week. Without even thinking about it she shook a finger in his face.
“Sometimes the years catch up like days when people stop.”
He reached up and took the chastising hand and unrolled the fist the other fingers had formed. Gently kissing back of her hand he drew it down, only releasing it when she had relaxed and let it fall.
“Those are old wives tales used to frighten apprentices. I should expect to live out my normal lifespan which will be a bit longer than average. The protocols kept my health finely tuned. My doctor says plenty of men twenty years younger than me…” He noticed that she smiled at his statement of relative age. “Twenty years younger than he thinks I am would be doing well to be in my health.”
Beneath her anger Frannie felt a rush of relief but she wasn’t ready to let him know that. She’d admitted her fear of his death. That was enough for the day.
“I see. Then why do you look like you’re gaining an old man’s pot belly and stoop.”
His smile crept to his eyes with a bit of twinkle.
“For the same reason you look like an old grandmother from Georgia has looked for four generations. Because I set my age here just as you did. Plus, I’ll admit to enjoying good food, especially when I travel or have guests.”
“When did you reset it? Last time I saw you you were a dashing adventurer in his thirties, the same you’d been since the revolution in Greece. If I remember correctly, Byron was quite taken with you.”
He cocked his head.
“Of all the things to choose to remember you kept that dalliance, why--”
“Sir, Irem is here.” Neither had noticed Ghalib returning with Frannie’s bags and for a moment she worried about what he might have heard.
When they had arrived at Cleas’s mansion she begged off an immediate tour saying she needed to use the powder room. He had smiled in a knowing way and allowed Irem to guide her to her rooms while he also brought her luggage. He gave her a slight bow, something she’d have expected from a man servant two centuries earlier. It was clear Cleas had trained his men as he had when she’d know him best, during the English regency.
The rooms, as well, comported with his two centuries plus out of date tastes. Through the doors to the bed chamber stood a large four poster bed made, if she knew her woods, of rosewood. The feet were fine carved imitations of lion paws. She was willing to believe they’d be modeled after a specific member of the few Barbary lions that remained when he first moved to Morocco after the Great War.
She knew she’d never seen it before unlike the furniture in the sitting room. They had been the same celestial blue and white striped wall paper which he’d hung specifically for her. The same small round table sat between two overstuffed chairs in a pale violet at the edge of a Persian rung. The chair legs were the paws of more tame house cats while the table stood on a single leg in the form of a tree trunk with a vine spiraling up its length. The wood for both was paler than the bed, something like beech she guess.
Under the broad windows facing due north was a writing desk of rosewood with two lines of brass edging surrounding it except for the two draws which had matching handles of the same polished brass. On the table was a white vase of fresh lilies, blue shading to purple in color, indicating Cleas probably had his own green house.
Frannie sat in a chair and eyed the flowers and the corner of the bed. They had not been here. She had let not a single memory of time with Cleas go. In fact, her ability to select what to forget, part of the necessary training of any alchemist who set out to finish the Great Work, meant she probably retained them better than a normal person would.
Yet the bed and the flowers were new. And both were things, like the wall paper and chair colors, done to her exact tastes.
The tears she’d choked back earlier at the airport came and came liberally as she realized these had always been meant to be her rooms. That she’d been meant to stay one hundred years ago.
She had just been too foolish to notice.
Frannie indulged the tears for a good time and passed into the bedroom, noticing the new wardrobe and chest made to be a piece with the four poster and to up what to most observers would be an older makeup bag. She sat it on the dressing table and opened it. Open it revealed the expected toiletries and make-up, but once she lifted the tray. Beneath the tray were a few jars of ointments and a black volcanic stone whose pores were filled with a silvery substance that seemed to flow like mercury but never spilled out of the stone.
She drew out a jar labeled sustentationem and set it on the dressing table. The volcanic stone was sat next to it. She unbuttoned her blouse and removed her bra. After laying them on the edge of the bed she moved to sit on the dressing table’s stool. Halfway down she arose and drew a second jar from the bag and set it next to the other.
The new jar was labeled recreantur.
She thought one day couldn’t hurt.
“It won’t help either,” she said to the reflection in the mirror. “You need to either commit to it or you need to just maintain your body’s effective age as it is.”
Commitment meant a lot of things. Aging or even just staying even was easy enough. Do your routine every few days to age slowly or daily to hold steady. But rejuvenation, that was rough on the body. It could take days or weeks to really take hold and in the process you had behavior changes.
Mostly eating like a pig and having strange cravings. It wasn’t that different from what Frannie had seen in pregnant women for centuries. That wasn’t a surprise as she would be inducing her body to make new life just not for a child but for her own body, to turn back the clock. Even then about the best you’d do is one day younger every day without risks. She knew from the few times she’d de-aged, twice to beat cancer and once on a reset, she could sustain three days back per day for a few months, but just the sheer need to eat was hard to sustain, even if you excluded the social issues.
Even if you could sustain a faster rate you often couldn’t rearrange your life fast enough. With cancer it had mostly looked like a miraculous cure. On the life reset, well, she had already planned to rearrange her life and she was doing it on the American frontier, a much more private time and place.
“It would be at least a three year commitment to get your body back to when you went through menopause and that’s if you run like you’re healing cancer. You want to break Edict Two you’d best plan on ten years minimum to even get to the age for it Forget how your body will handle it or your life. Can you make enough ointment.”
She looked at her reflection, which was trying to speak the wisdom of a very long life.
“Love finds a way,” she said to the reflection and opening the recreantur jar began to anoint her head and breasts.
The table was long and formal in Cleas’s dining room. Frannie was glad he’d instead decided to have them served on the card table in his sitting room. In contrast to the Regency style that marked the rooms Cleas had decorated for her this room was modern.
No, she though, it was contemporary. That was the style from the middle of last century with the bright primary colors, light stains, and machine made furniture often using plywood. The chairs at the card table were brightly upholstered and none in the same colors. There were seven, two along each side and one at each end using the classic colors of the rainbow.
The orange chair was exiled next to a yellow plywood cube open to the front and back with a variety of books, old cloth bound tomes with gold lettered titles to a paperback potboiler from last year. Between them and to the back of both sat a torchiere with a smaller spot lamp off the side. The effect was a nook for reading.
Heavy silverware and thick china plates looked those she’d seen her few times eating in a Navy wardroom or Army Officers Club. Such traditional styles were very much a product of the nineteenth century although Frannie would not be surprised if their mates were still in service with modern British and American forces. In the same vein, the service was not that different from the few experiences she’d had. The brothers were not present nor did they serve dinner. A young woman, a local Berber by her looks and name, Kahina, but dressed very much in a traditional English style from the Victorian era, had brought them dinner in a Victorian style. It was not the full formal dinner one had with guests but a more informal and intimate style she associated with friends and family.
Or with lovers. She’d looked across from him as they were served and wondered if he knew her thoughts or, worse, her actions from earlier. She’d set her intention to wind back her clock, but if she did not tell him what would be the point. And if she did, would he think she was trying to manipulation into staying in this world.
Was she doing it to manipulate him into staying in this world?
The talk through dinner was the kind of catching up people who only meet on a decades schedule but who live long enough for than to be the rough analog to annual meetings. It was full of “have you seen” or “what ever happened to”. Cleas asked about her patent medicine partner from her days of barnstorming towns and fairs in the American South as though she’d done it only the last few years.
Her partner, Margaret O’Sullivan had disappeared from Frannie’s life, not long into the Great War. It was the rare occurrence when someone disappeared from her life not by her moving on. When Frannie had last seen Cleas she had intended to finally learn what had happened to her. The fact was Frannie current age set was allowed to occur so she would have aged enough to not shock her friend, but it had been futile. Frannie had never found her.
For just a moment as she told the tale she reflected that now was the second time she’d reset her body’s apparent age for another. She also wondered why she’d aged for a woman while using a fountain of youth for a man. Was it just the circumstances or was there something deeper.
It was not until Kahina had cleared the entree and brought a wonderful trifle and strong Italian coffee that the talk turned serious.
“Francine, why did you come?” He had asked at the airport but she could sense he wasn’t satisfied with her answer.
“I was afraid you’d be dead before I could see you again.” There was no trembling on the verge of tears this time, but her affect was still one of concern and loss. He sat and watched her. She hadn’t realized his face had hardened in the asking of the question but she did notice it relaxing.
“And I told you that such things are old wives tales, but I suspect you know that. We’ve both known people who choose to go into the light after a few centuries. Either that or they were called to the Council of the Wise.”
Frannie stifled a laugh.
“Now who is telling old wives tales,” she said as she tilted her head and smiled.
“Be that as it may, I won’t be the first alchemist either of us have know to pass because they’d come to the end of their work and all we’ve known have had years to tidy up old friendships and their estate.”
A quick hot jolt flooded Frannie’s veins. Did she think she wanted his estate? That he was just a trove of new artifacts to her, especially after what she’d done for him today?
Wait, for him. If she’d done it for him why hadn’t she told him?
“And you haven’t visited at all since those glorious months after the Great War when we believed there would be no sequel. So, I’m curious as to why now and not after you reset your identity during the sixties or after the Wall fell and we both traveled in Eastern Europe catching up with old friends we’d been separated from by the Cold War.”
He fell silent and looked down at his plate. She looked at it as well and except from some whipped cream spooned off he hadn’t eaten any of the marvelous desert before him.
“I tried to run into you. I was in Budapest when I heard you were with Yuri in Kiev. I rushed there only to find you’d left for Budapest. We both were in Lodz but we seemed to keep missing each other.” He finished and Frannie could hear it was now him who was holding back a tear. “You wanted to avoid him, it was obvious.”
There it was. That was why he thought she was only here to scavenge magic after his death. He didn’t know. She’d assumed he’d known. He was an alchemist, born in what was now Germany as the Thirty Wars war wound down. Even with ceasing the protocols of immortality he might live to see his four hundredth birthday.
How could he not know why she was avoiding him. Frannie could not understand.
Until she remembered her second most common client at her book and copy shop for the off menu items. The most common were still term paper requests who thought she was just a ghost writer of extreme talent, not an alchemist who created potions of inspiration she used to write fresh papers. But the second were aware, at least a little, of her true skills although based on their statements they thought her more a kitchen witch than a long lived student of the Great Arts.
These were women who wanted love potions or thought they did. What they wanted was what she called attraction potions or even just “notice me” drinks. They wanted a magical way to drop hints to the boys around them who were too dense to see all the hints being dropped. They were typical men.
Typical. Men.
In the end Cleas was a typical man.
Unable to look him in the eye she stared down at her trifle, not more eaten than his, and said, “I have been avoiding you, Cleas. Last time I was here I thought I’d made clear my feelings about you, but you didn’t respond at all.” She flushed as she finished, the heat flooding her face stronger than the heat of desire for him had been that morning.
“Made clear? Your feelings? You said nothing I can remember?”
And with that the heat of shame flashed over like flames crossing from one house to another into white hot anger. Frannie pushed her chair back and stood.
“You fool. I love you. I’ve loved you for two hundred years and after the pain and loss of The Great War I came here ready to break the Second Edict for you.” With the last words, the surrendering the hidden knowledge that she so desired to bear his child that she’d break the vows they’d sworn to be admitted into the final mysteries and begin the Great Work her anger and her composure crumbled into ash under battering flames of anger, shame, and desire. The tears she’d mostly fought in front of him at the airport fell even faster than they had in her rooms.
“I wanted you. I wanted you child,” she said and fled from him.
Frannie was unsure how long she’d cried. She was unsure where she was. She was unsure how she’d gotten here. The only thing she was sure of was the source of the fresh flowers in her rooms this morning. She was in a vast hothouse attached to Cleas’s mansion. The exact path from the sitting room to it, or more importantly to her own rooms was unknown to her.
When she’d run away from him after dinner she’d run without conscious thought down the hallways, taking turns at random. She stopped and forced to collect herself when she was blocked by a glass door beyond which appeared to be a glass hallway. The curiosity that had led her into the mystical arts surfaced long enough to compel her to open it and walk down the glass corridor. While a few plants in pots against the wall, narrowing the path through it to the point a group could only walk single file, it was not a proper green house. For one thing, while it had more moisture than the desert air surrounding the mansion it was not enough for a true greenhouse.
She jogged twenty feet to another glass door. Through it she saw a vast explosion of plants. Through the glass walls of the corridor she saw the sides of a glass doom made up of hundreds of triangles and it continued further up as she looked through the glass roof. She realized it was the other geodesic dome she’d seen from the air echoing the modern air terminal.
Opening the door into the dome the heat and moisture of true green house rolled over her like a wave. The feeling gave her a moment of homesickness. It felt almost the same as if she’d walked out in an Atlanta day in July from her coffee shop. She had not been quite as cool as she would have been in her shop, having been warmed by her run and the glass corridor. And instead of the bustle of GSU’s urban campus filled with students even in the summer there was the stillness of the finest gardens, but she continued her jog at first until the calmness of the moist air saturated into her soul and she stopped.
She’d come to rest on a bench near the center of dome, a logical place for a park. Six radial pathways wide enough for a couple to walk side by side led towards the dome’s edges. She had certainly run down one of them. Frannie gave it a moment’s thought and suspected it the one behind and to her left. Her bench almost exactly occupied the width of the wedge formed by two paths on either side of it as did five others. The exact center was occupied with a circular pond filled with water lilies and lotuses. She recognized the two Egyptian species, the Egyptian Blue Waterlilies that graced her room and had long been a favorite, and the White Egyptian Lotus which was a signature plant in some of her healing tinctures.
The latter were crucial to her variety of recreantur. They were the main reason she was unsure if she could maintain a sufficient supply to return to a childbearing body age.
She stood and walked to the central pond and cupped a white lotus flower. Inhaling deeply her head cleared then emptied at the scent. She’d first learned it in Egypt during her middle studies, when she was just a mystic, more than an apprentice but not yet committed formally to her one art, alchemy. That love had stayed with her and during her great work she’d chosen to embody the memories and sensations of youth in her recreantur with it, the greatest plant love of the days when she could have chosen all the things she had sworn off with the Edicts.
“If the Mistress would prefer the lotus I will see to it they constitute tomorrow’s flowers.”
Frannie started and released the flower, turning to see Ghalib. Had she been so lost in the flower’s scent and the memories, some of her earliest remaining, that she had not heard him.
“Please, allow whoever chose the flowers to cut what he will. The lilies were beautiful.”
The tall man nodded and gave a slight bow.
“One of the girls who works for the housekeeper is tasked with it. I believe the Master instructed her today to take the Blue Lilies because they were a favorite of yours.”
He remembered her love of blue water lilies but not the white lotus. Had she told him of the lotus and her affection for it? Did he avoid one used in her arts as she did not use any water lilies.
“And when visitors other than me use those rooms?” she asked.
“No other visitors use those room, Mistress.”
Frannie cocked her head in surprised.
“You’ve never seen any?”
“No, none ever do. My grandfather remarked to me that in his time the rooms were laid out for your first visit and continually improved to what the Master believed you would find the most desirable. It is the same with the girl who works for the housekeeper. She has no formal place but each has been interviewed for the position of lady’s maid should the Master ever take a wife.” As he talked his eyes glistened.
“If I may be bold,” he said and paused. Frannie gave a tiny nod of ascent. “I do not know what has changed,” he continued, “but I know the Master did something drastic. I also know he is not like most men. Allah has blessed him with the knowledge of immortality but he seems to have given it up. Given my grandfather described you so well I recognized you were the woman of the rooms, not that I had any doubt when the girl was told to have them readied, I believe he has given you the same blessing.”
Frannie felt herself flush in a mixture of embarrassment and fear. Every alchemist who completed the great work feared being discovered. The exact source of the fear varied by age. The late twentieth century had in many ways been the least fearful, at least of a mob, but one of the most for discovery by a crazed individual. Yet, Ghalib had phrased their immortality as a blessing from Allah. Religion cut both ways and either meant deference as someone blessed from on high or hater as a corrupter of God’s will.
“I am loathe to reveal confidences the Master has not made, but for myself I do have the ability to control aging and thus choose when I die barring accident or assassination.”
Ghalib nodded.
“The blessed of Allah should be together. He has waited for you and I think he has given up.” Ghalib fell quiet. Neither of them spoke for the space of several heartbeats.
“And I have spoken beyond my place. The Master sent me to find you to ensure you were both unharmed and help you find your way back to him or your rooms as you preferred.”
Frannie shook her head.
“You have done nothing a good valet would not do for his master. Would you please take me to my rooms.”
Ghalib turned and gestured down the spoke path two to the right of the one she though she had come down. Following it she entered a glass corridor identical to the one she’d entered through. The path from it to her rooms was simple, turning right at the first major hallway it intersected and arriving at the door to her rooms in only a hundred or so steps.
Frannie turned the knob and cracked the door open. She stopped and turned to Ghalib, a tiny suspicion having grown since their conversation.
“Have I met the girl?”
Ghalib frowned and then understood.
“You have. Kahina, having few formal duties, often serves dinner.”
Frannie nodded and smiled. The girl had seemed focused on her during dinner, more than normal for serving. Frannie had noticed but chalked it up to “exotic American”. In the walk to her rooms she’d begun to realize a very different reason was at play.
“In the morning, the assistance of a lady’s maid would be useful.”
Ghalib bowed.
“I will see it is arranged.” As her turned to walk away Frannie swore he face relaxed in relief and a brief smile flashed across his face.
Frannie had arisen at her normal time but for the most part resisted her morning routine. She did shower and wrap in a towel then brush and floss. Such things had never been the responsibility of a lady’s maid, well at least the oral hygiene hadn’t to Frannie’s knowledge. Maids had helped ladies bath but Frannie decided baby steps were appropriate, especially for an American woman introducing English habits to an Islamic girl in a former French colony.
Mix ups were to be expected so best to minimize how much disruption they would cause. She considered the towel then removed it, hanging it back in the bathroom. She put on panties and had her bra over her shoulders and was reaching it to fasten it before she remembered a new part of her routine. Walking back to the dressing table she leaned forward and allowed the bra to slide down her arms onto it. The bra removed she took up the recreantur jar and anointed her breast but skipped her face. She had ensured both her ointments worked as moisturizers. Since the great work was keyed to her she could allow Kahina to apply it and all the girl would suffer is moisturized hands.
This last bit of private toilet completed she wrapped in a dry towel. She’d want to get a bathing suit cover or a light bathroom if this became a regular occurrence.
Once she was ready she rang the service bell in the sitting room and took her place at the dressing table in the bedroom.
Not even two minutes passed before there was a knock and the door opened then closed. A voice from the sitting room asked, “Is Madam ready to dress?”
Frannie breathed out and tried to return to a form of behavior she’d last know two hundred years earlier, in Italy and Greece become democracy and equality bleed out of France across Europe. The household had not been this formal in the 20s to her memory, perhaps because both she and Cleas were portraying themselves at a younger age or maybe just because Cleas was not established in Marrakesh and know to be blessed with long years. They certainly had never been part of America any time she’d lived there.
“Yes, Kahina, I’m ready.”
The long girl came into the bedroom. Unlike the traditional maid’s attire she’d worn for dinner the best description Frannie could muster for Kahina’s appearance was demure high end department store cosmetics counter attendant. She wore a simple black dress that reached just above the ankles. While not as short or contour fitting as it would have been back in Atlanta it was not a shapeless bag like a burka. The sleeves were long and buttoned closed as was the high neck, but the sleeves and bodice were not excessively tailored allowing the girl the freedom of movement she would need to help Frannie dress.
“Have you ever dressed a lady before, Kahina?”
The girl hesitated then nodded slightly. Frannie cocked her head a tiny bit to the left.
“I have helped my mother dress and a few times I asked her to let me dress her in more western clothes so I’d have some experience if the need arose.” Her voice stayed even for the most part with only a tiny quiver.
Frannie nodded.
“Today I’d like to wear the white blouse with the high neck and buttoned sleeves and the lilac skirt you’ll find in the wardrobe.” As the girl walked to the wardrobe and opened it it, Frannie stood. She reflected on the strong similarity of the blouse in question and the bodice of the girl’s dress. The biggest difference, beyond the color, was the sleeves were of a different fabric than the bodice, one more sheer while the other a light but opaque weave.
The girl returned and gently laid the clothing across the near end of the dressing table. She reached for the towel and Frannie raised her arms to allow it to easily come away.
“If Madam would like I could see about having my brothers procure a dressing gown. I am sure we can get one embroidered with your favorite flowers in a couple of days.” She said this as she folded the dry towel and sat it on the bench to the side of the dressing table. She took up the blouse and slid the right sleeve over Frannie’s right arm and walked behind her clockwise bringing the other sleeve to her left arm.
“I would like that very much, if it can be arranged.”
The girl nodded and lifted knelt to allow Frannie to step into the skirt.
Frannie felt like a very different woman. She know that the recreantur had yet to work any noticeable changes in her body. One doesn’t notice oneself aging day to day, she thought, although she figured perhaps major surgeries or injuries as you aged might change that. She’d been spared such experiences. Regardless, feeling younger today than yesterday by a day was no more noticeable than feeling a day older.
Yet she walked down the halls of Cleas’s mansion feeling like one of those giggling girls who came to her shop for “love potions”. Or at least how she thought they felt. The freedom to indulge the fancies of youth those girls displayed were not part of Frannie’s teenage years and were alien to her. In fact, when she was their ages Frannie had been getting side eyed over her lack of a serious suitor or three much less a husband.
Cleas was seated at the same table she’d fled yesterday. He was dressed in the twin of his white linen suit from the prior day, or perhaps it was the same suit. The only change was the shirt. Yesterday’s had been a cream that both set it off from and matched the suit. Today he wore a blue shirt she would swear was died with the flowers of the water lilies from yesterday.
He stood when she entered the room.
“Excuse me young lady, but I’m expecting an old friend for breakfast.”
Frannie’s eyes flew wide as she looked at him. Had she missed the effect? Was her winding back the years already noticeable? She flushed in panic.
Cleas broke into a broad smile and chuckled.
Frannie felt the panic subside yet the flush deepened. She tried to smile and while she succeeded she also tittered.
Just like a college girl buying a love potion.
“You just seem so much lighter today. It takes a decade off you, at least in spirit,” he said as she sat and he pushed her seat in. Breakfast was clearly less formal than dinner had been. Dishes were on the table for family style service and none of the staff was in sight.
“Perhaps I should work on being younger physically to match,” she said. Her eyes were down and she make sure her tone was light, a struggle as her voice teetered on the edge of catching in her throat.
He smiled but did not laugh. Focusing on drawing eggs and what appeared to be lamb onto his plate he said, “I am on the edge of scandal with my blessings from Allah as the staff calls it. Others are not so sure it is a blessing from Allah but from a djinn or worse. Appearing to have transformed an old woman into a young trophy wife would only give them evidence as it were.”
Frannie allowed her face to look down instead of just down casting her eyes. She was afraid she’d cry and didn’t want him to notice.
Fleeing the room in tears again was not her plan, not at all.
Cleas leaned across the table and lifted her chin gently. Her control had mostly held, but while no tears fell she knew both eyes glistened.
“You were serious?,” he said. His voice was soft. “I’m sorry. You are welcome on my arm at any apparent age. Besides, unless you risked injury or sickness it would take years for you to be scandalously young. Your normal methods for your non-aging going unnoticed would sufficient to save both of us from accusations of consorting with demons.”
Frannie nodded, feeling the pressure of his finger on her chin with each down stroke. She took in a deep breath through her nose.
“I already have. I started yesterday.”
Cleas pulled his hand away, not so quick as if he’d been bit but in surprised and sat back in the chair. He took a moment before he spoke. The tone was even betraying no more emotions than his passive face did.
“Is this about what you said last night?”
Frannie look straight at him. She caught his eyes and held them before looking away.
“Yes. Or no. Or I don’t know. You, at the airport. My last visit came rushing back and how much I loved you and wanted you. When I got my bags and started to get ready for dinner, I just…” She didn’t trail off so much as stop, allowing him to fill in.
“Instead of your normal daily decided to wind back the day,” he said. She nodded. “Just the day or, I guess, two days? You didn’t do anything drastic or dangerous?”
“No, just the normal start, prepping my body. I don’t have things to do something more drastic than back an extra day at a time with me.”
He nodded.
“Good, after worrying about me stopping, you’d look foolish pushing hard.” He stopped. She saw in his face his mind was working on something he didn’t want to say. A cold finger of accusation wandering up from her lizard brain recognized its twin in his face.
“You want to ask, Cleas. Just ask.”
“Was this to manipulate me into going back on my decision?”
There it was, something even part of her was accusing her of doing. Was she trying to manipulate him? She searched her thoughts and her conscious. Pursing her lips she looked at her own mental finger of accusation.
She shook her head.
“Not consciously. Certainly not with planning or malice. The most I can accuse myself of is impulsiveness.”
He sighed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to think but…” Now it was his turn to let silence speak while Frannie filled in. She did, letting the voice of accusation have its say or at least repeating what it asked her.
“After so long without seeing you I suddenly show up when you decide to abandon the fruit of the Great Work and reveal I wanted your child while rolling back my age?” she said. He nodded. “It’s not unreasonable and, well, there are things I never said that explain my absence and my rush.”
At that she paused and quirked her head.
“And there are things you never told me that fueled both.”
He looked up, he face showing more shock than her confession about the restoring of her youth had. He opened his mouth to speak but Frannie preempted him.
“Those room were designed for me and, I gather, have been kept, including the maintenance of a lady’s maid on your staff for nearly a century.” A brief pause to allow him to deny before she continued, “Your gardens have the main reagents I used in my version of the Great Work that are harder to find. When Ghalib came to find me he said a few things indicating you’d be waiting and Kahina made it clear I was Mistress of the House by her questions and offers even though she didn’t speak the words.”
Cleas sat and nodded.
“Cleas, have you been waiting all these years and finally given up?”
Cleas narrowed his eyes and watched Frannie for a moment then stood.
“If you will excuse me for a moment.”
Frannie sat and waited. She tried to put some food on her plate and eat, but her appetite was as deflated as her mood. She was about to stand up and go searching for him when Ghalib entered the room. His face was pinched and it was clear he was assigned a task he did not want to undertake.
“If Madam would excuse the Master’s lack of manners he finds himself called out of town and will not return before Madam is scheduled to leave. He says you are welcome to stay the remainder of your scheduled visit. Please use the bells if you need our assistance.
With that Ghalib left Frannie alone in the dining room. She sat and stared at her plate until she started eating, focusing on the food on her plate and in the serving dishes. It was a localized version of a full English breakfast, substituting the sweat and spicy lamb Cleas had been eating for the bacon and stuffed sardines for the sausage. It took her a moment to put the substitutions in the context of there being no pork in a Muslim nation.
Understanding breakfast was a useless path to wander but better than to accept what had just happened. She’d come to see Cleas, to convince him to return to the side effects of the Great Work or, barring that, to spend a last few wonderful days with him.
Instead she’d behaved in a way even those giggling girls who came to her shop would have been embarrassed by and driven him away. Her appetite more than sated she returned to her rooms for one last time, to pack her bags and accept the past was gone.
Immortality did not mean one could put off everything forever.
She booked a flight as soon as she got to her rooms. Only when complete did she inform Ghalib she’d need Irem to drive her to the airport in a little over an hour. He tried to convince her she was welcome in the house, but realized in only a few words she was immovable.
Kahina came to help her pack, insisting on it as her duty’s as Madam’s maid. She even convinced Frannie to leave instructions on where to send one of the two dressing robes she’d already ordered saying she’d kept the second here for Madam’s return.
It wasn’t until Ghalib closed the door to the car that she let herself whisper, “Madam will not be returning.”
Ghalib had insisted on accompanying her as well as Irem. At the airport he insisted on conveying her bags and ensuring she got her ticket and to security without issue.
“He loves you, Madam. The Master does. Give him time to understand. It is, after all, the one thing you two have without bounds,” he said as she passed up the queue. When she left his arm to go to the security podium he bowed.
She noticed he only return to Irem and the car when she’d passed through to her gate.
While she’d booked tickets back to Paris she had not made connections home. Her assistant managers at the shop were supposed to do without her for two weeks. Frannie decided being in Europe a couple of weeks, dropping in on some old, and a couple not so old, colleagues would not be the worst choice.
Why, the Dananger Twins were already fifty.
She also arranged to receive people in Atlanta over the next six months. She’d been out of mystical circles, being a recluse like most magicians are. She needed to change that.
They all needed to change that.
So, it was two weeks before she returned to her little copy shop by Georgia State on a Wednesday in May, one of those that made you realize you needed the AC on just to dry the air.
Such are the joys of an Atlanta summer.
Annette was the opening manager on the day she returned. “Your package from Morocco beat you here. It arrived yesterday.” Frannie’s confused look prompted her to elaborate. “A package arrived from Morocco so I assumed you sent it. It’s on the desk in your outer office.
In the outer office? Frannie wondered if the assistants had conspired to enter her inner office or, as they called it, the Holy of Holies.
It was where she retreated to open the package. Before she closed the door the weight had triggered the memory of Kahina getting the information to send a dressing gown. The paper cut off and the box, a thick corrugated cardboard version of a garment gift box, did reveal a fine silk dressing gown embroidered with Egyptian Blue Waterlilies.
But the gown barely caught her notice. Nestled on top of it was a square envelope simply labeled “My Dearest” in Cleas’s handwriting.
The note was brief.
My Dearest,
Kahina said she ordered two gowns as a lady should have one to travel and one in her rooms. Your other awaits you when you are ready.
It would appear, as Ghalid quoted to me, much to my surprise, that we alone do have “World enough and time.”
Cleas, Master of the Great Work
For the first time since Ghalid’s car, Frannie felt a tear rising.