TITLE: La Belle Dame Sans Merci
*From battle, murder, and sudden death, oh Lord deliver us ...* The old words, learned by rote, echoed wildly in my brain as I fought for a better grip on the chain. No salvation there. I never meant that prayer, even in my teens. The high-altitude wind below the League of Darkness airship _Prometheus_ tossed me like a cork on a pond. My strength of arm wouldn't hold for many minutes of this. I could see, not hear, poor Jules in the cabin above me shouting encouragement. Then his eyes fixed on something at his own level. That League slattern, no doubt, telling him to let me fall or die with me. Probably what they intended all along. If he killed a friend they'd own him, mind and soul.
They judged him too lightly. I saw Jules' shoulders square and knew he would not send me to my death alone. But I also saw what he couldn't, from the enclosed gondola; the _Aurora_ barreling toward us like a freight train. I met his eyes, trying to communicate that. Whether it was trust or unalloyed courage, he fell with me.
It was a short fall, not even twenty feet, and _Aurora's_ gasbag was gloriously soft landing. I remembered my dignity just in time to suppress a shriek of delight. *Papa, I want to go again!* Jules Verne was a yard or two further aft, clutching the balloon surface as if he didn't quite trust it. I couldn't tell if his own red face was exhilaration or terror. We took a moment to catch our breaths. _Aurora_ was opening the distance between the two airships; things seemed momentarily safe. "I'm an idiot," Jules shouted over the wind.
Embarrassment, then, at being duped. I knew that one. But with the joy of survival singing through my veins, it was hard not to grin at him. "Yes, you are. That's probably why we love you so much."
He turned as white as if I'd struck him. "You sound like my ..." Jules bit back _mother_ in time. "My sister."
The "we" gave him considerably more pain than the "love" did pleasure, I could see. No; the word love hurt as well, to the thin skin of twenty-odd. He must have felt like the family pet. Real seriousness this time. "I am sorry, Jules. You are a very good, and a very attractive, man." Not young man; no reason to flay him alive.
He looked away. I waited, giving him whatever privacy was possible on top of a moving airship. Finally he had command of his voice. "You and Fogg have been good friends to me." When he turned back his face was closed, the raw emotions hidden. He looked around for a change of subject, and waved one hand at the dizzy full-horizon view surrounding us. "It seems a lot taller out here than it does inside."
"Inside is where we belong. Don't think your adventures are over for the afternoon. This will be fairly tricky all by itself." Phileas would be dying the death of a thousand cuts until we were in the relative safety of the cabin. Dangerous heights, or other people endangered on heights, were his particular horror. "Down the starboard side, I think. Work your way down the curve feet-first, and never have less than three hand and foot-holds at a time."
"One of my uncle's friends has a fishing boat, in Marseilles. I was up and down the rigging all one summer." Jules, bless him, was as sensible as anyone could wish for once a practical problem was defined. He did insist on going down ahead of me -- as if he could catch me if I slipped -- but the salve to his pride seemed worth the concession. Once we were moving he climbed competently and quickly, little wasted motion. The airship's outer skin offered a grand choice of handholds, as the cabin was suspended below the balloon by a net of ropes. The slow curve down the side of the bag itself, the fabric pushing against our hands and feet as we climbed, was the worst. Once the lower half of the balloon curved away from us, we were able to slide through the ropes to climb the inside net with something besides air between us and terra firma.
Jules drew alongside me on the more forgiving terrain. "Rebecca." He hesitated; he wasn't sure he should be using my Christian name. But we'd come too far for "miss." I nodded, encouraging him to go on. "What I said before. I'm not asking ... I mean, I understand why not. About me." His knuckles were white on the ropes. "I just wanted to say ... I'm not the only one who feels that way."
These silver-tongued playwrights. But it would be worse than cruelty to pretend not to understand him. "Phileas is my other self. I've loved him since I was seven years old -- and I have no intention of involving myself with him or anyone else."
He stared at me. Clearly, this made absolutely no sense. But it didn't have to. I started climbing down again. After a few seconds, Jules followed.
Grip, change, release; I put myself into the rhythm of the climb. Anything but thinking. I was bitterly, irrationally angry with Verne. What right did he have to nobly rearrange my private life for me? Very selfless, speaking up for Phileas -- but not too selfless to get his own bid in first. Barely half the distance left from the base of the balloon to the suspended cabin. I glanced down the swaying ropes, less to guide myself than to prove that I could. The trap door in the roof of the cabin was open now. I could see Phileas' outline, head and shoulders through the door, waiting for us. Seeing him, even at a distance, lifted a weight on my heart. It was the same for him too, seeing us relatively safe. I saw the tension leave his shoulders. *Damn you, Jules, do you think I don't care enough to NOTICE he loves me?*
Starting an affair with Phileas would be simplicity itself. I could begin by putting my hand on his arm, at the right time and place, and be entwined in his bed before nightfall. I've no worries about whether it would be a pleasant place, either. Several ladies have kindly made a point of assuring me so. One of them was a bona fide enemy agent, which allowed me to break two of her ribs and hand her over to the constabulary with a clear conscience.
It's not maidenly shyness, and certainly not a lack of trust, that stops me time and again from the small gestures that would launch us into that avalanche of emotion. God knows I trust Phileas with my life, my soul. He'd die -- sometimes seems all too eager to die -- rather than cause me a moment's pain. And it's that fear, rather than any other, that holds me back. While we remain unattached, except for the ties of blood and a shared childhood, we're free to console each other for the slings and arrows of the outside world. He can lose an affair of the moment, or I can, and be little affected. But if we turn to each other and fail, then neither of us has anywhere else in the wide world to go for comfort. I know myself; I can take that loss and survive. Some of the whispers Chatsworth doesn't hear, ice queen and less polite terms, have their roots in truth. I know, just as surely, that Phileas could not. As much good as Passepartout has done him, as devoted a friend as young Verne has become, those ties wouldn't be enough to hold him. Each of us is the only home the other has. I cannot risk his losing that, no matter what the benefits to myself might be.
Three feet. I restrained myself from leaping to the roof of the car -- the wind at this altitude was no one's friend. Instead I worked my way around to the trap door, still maintaining a full set of handholds. Phileas was still waiting. "You took long enough." His hand enclosed mine in a firm grip, not to steady but to support my whole weight if it were suddenly necessary. If his voice trembled, we could both blame the wind.
He backed down the ladder inside, still clasping my hand. "Jules may need help too," I said. But Verne was clinging close to the hatch like a spider, apparently perfectly comfortable. We Foggs cleared ourselves downstairs, out of his path. "The airship's League of Darkness," I remarked as my feet finally touched stable decking. Neither of us had believed anything else from the moment we caught sight of her.
"With Count Gregory in charge," Phileas agreed. "He's ... not human, by any measure you or I would use. I think a pooling of information is in order. And I'd rather do it a bit further from that airship."
Jules hopped down to the deck, letting the hatch slam shut above him. "They have cannon."
"All the more reason." Phileas led the way back to the main salon. He still hadn't stopped touching me. It was a gentle supporting pressure under the elbow now, suitable for a gentleman walking with a lady, but I think he'd have rather faced fire than release it.
I forced my breathing to stay slow and even. The trouble with virtuous resolutions, of course, is the amount of work needed to keep them resolved. It doesn't help that Phileas is easily the most beautiful male creature in my experience. It's not just a question of cheekbones and bright eyes. I could be properly unmoved by a vapid exterior. He has wit, and energy, and something beyond courage; the ability to become so focused, so steadfast in the pursuit of a goal that the causes for fear become only calculations, not emotional events. He told me once, on a bad day, that there was no light when I was away from him. He was wrong. There is light, a blazing beacon; his curse is that he alone is unable to see by it.
He did ask me to marry him once, long ago. I don't think even his brother ever knew that. He hadn't been long in the service, two or three missions at most. I was seventeen. He may have been, even then, trying to find a way out of Uncle Boniface's iron rule without giving up his honor. A way out for me, certainly. His little speech had much in it about safety and security and a home of my own. He'd badly mistaken his audience. What he was already seeing as a dirty business, with many compromises and few honest victories, was a great adventure for me. I was full of the spirit that sends boys of the same age running off to sea or to join the gypsies. My uncle had begun to hint that the path of service -- and Oxford -- need not be closed to me, that I'd been given the same training as my cousins for a reason. The prospect seemed not a danger, but a glorious reward. I not only refused Phileas; I lectured him, with the self-righteousness of seventeen, very much in the authentic Boniface style. The combination, from a proper little miss in white muslin, must have been as bizarre as it was upsetting.
Phileas, ever the gentleman, swallowed my unintended insults. I think he understood me better afterward. Certainly he never placed any obstacles in my path in the service, even when I launched myself into the most dangerous assignments. It was much later, after Erasmus died, before I understood him. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if that knowledge had come to us sooner. If he had broken far enough out of the gentleman's code to offer me a partnership, shared challenge and risk instead of flight from it. If I had seen his worry as something other than an offense to my independence. If he'd forgotten propriety long enough to let the word "love" slip into his carefully prepared speech. If I'd had the insight to hear it was there all the same.
Time changes us all. We've both seen too much and done too much for any such easy answers now. Our profession -- still very much ours, for all Phileas' show of being a civilian -- offers great rewards for people of our peculiar character. My thirst for adventure, his protective instincts. The thrill of the hunt. The intellectual satisfaction of seeing the inner workings of world politics in a way that's invisible to society at large. The professional pride convincing us that we alone can forestall the rising darkness. The costs have been high and likely to get higher. The chances are that one of us will see the other die. But not quite yet, and not alone. If complete unity between us is too reckless to contemplate, at least we have the comfort of guarding one another's back.
The main gallery of the _Aurora_ opened out before us, Passepartout at the controls. I saw the _Prometheus_ in the distance, pulling away from us to the west. "They're heading for America as planned," I said. "They know _Aurora's_ unarmed. They've written us off as a threat."
I didn't have to glance at Phileas to see his grim smile; let them make that mistake. He didn't have to glance at me for my vote on our next move. "Then we follow," he said, almost mildly. His fingers were warm on my arm. No, I could never pray for peace and quiet. Danger is our shared element. War suits us very well.
*From battle, murder, and sudden death, oh Lord deliver us ...* The old words, learned by rote, echoed wildly in my brain as I fought for a better grip on the chain. No salvation there. I never meant that prayer, even in my teens. The high-altitude wind below the League of Darkness airship _Prometheus_ tossed me like a cork on a pond. My strength of arm wouldn't hold for many minutes of this. I could see, not hear, poor Jules in the cabin above me shouting encouragement. Then his eyes fixed on something at his own level. That League slattern, no doubt, telling him to let me fall or die with me. Probably what they intended all along. If he killed a friend they'd own him, mind and soul.
They judged him too lightly. I saw Jules' shoulders square and knew he would not send me to my death alone. But I also saw what he couldn't, from the enclosed gondola; the _Aurora_ barreling toward us like a freight train. I met his eyes, trying to communicate that. Whether it was trust or unalloyed courage, he fell with me.
It was a short fall, not even twenty feet, and _Aurora's_ gasbag was gloriously soft landing. I remembered my dignity just in time to suppress a shriek of delight. *Papa, I want to go again!* Jules Verne was a yard or two further aft, clutching the balloon surface as if he didn't quite trust it. I couldn't tell if his own red face was exhilaration or terror. We took a moment to catch our breaths. _Aurora_ was opening the distance between the two airships; things seemed momentarily safe. "I'm an idiot," Jules shouted over the wind.
Embarrassment, then, at being duped. I knew that one. But with the joy of survival singing through my veins, it was hard not to grin at him. "Yes, you are. That's probably why we love you so much."
He turned as white as if I'd struck him. "You sound like my ..." Jules bit back _mother_ in time. "My sister."
The "we" gave him considerably more pain than the "love" did pleasure, I could see. No; the word love hurt as well, to the thin skin of twenty-odd. He must have felt like the family pet. Real seriousness this time. "I am sorry, Jules. You are a very good, and a very attractive, man." Not young man; no reason to flay him alive.
He looked away. I waited, giving him whatever privacy was possible on top of a moving airship. Finally he had command of his voice. "You and Fogg have been good friends to me." When he turned back his face was closed, the raw emotions hidden. He looked around for a change of subject, and waved one hand at the dizzy full-horizon view surrounding us. "It seems a lot taller out here than it does inside."
"Inside is where we belong. Don't think your adventures are over for the afternoon. This will be fairly tricky all by itself." Phileas would be dying the death of a thousand cuts until we were in the relative safety of the cabin. Dangerous heights, or other people endangered on heights, were his particular horror. "Down the starboard side, I think. Work your way down the curve feet-first, and never have less than three hand and foot-holds at a time."
"One of my uncle's friends has a fishing boat, in Marseilles. I was up and down the rigging all one summer." Jules, bless him, was as sensible as anyone could wish for once a practical problem was defined. He did insist on going down ahead of me -- as if he could catch me if I slipped -- but the salve to his pride seemed worth the concession. Once we were moving he climbed competently and quickly, little wasted motion. The airship's outer skin offered a grand choice of handholds, as the cabin was suspended below the balloon by a net of ropes. The slow curve down the side of the bag itself, the fabric pushing against our hands and feet as we climbed, was the worst. Once the lower half of the balloon curved away from us, we were able to slide through the ropes to climb the inside net with something besides air between us and terra firma.
Jules drew alongside me on the more forgiving terrain. "Rebecca." He hesitated; he wasn't sure he should be using my Christian name. But we'd come too far for "miss." I nodded, encouraging him to go on. "What I said before. I'm not asking ... I mean, I understand why not. About me." His knuckles were white on the ropes. "I just wanted to say ... I'm not the only one who feels that way."
These silver-tongued playwrights. But it would be worse than cruelty to pretend not to understand him. "Phileas is my other self. I've loved him since I was seven years old -- and I have no intention of involving myself with him or anyone else."
He stared at me. Clearly, this made absolutely no sense. But it didn't have to. I started climbing down again. After a few seconds, Jules followed.
Grip, change, release; I put myself into the rhythm of the climb. Anything but thinking. I was bitterly, irrationally angry with Verne. What right did he have to nobly rearrange my private life for me? Very selfless, speaking up for Phileas -- but not too selfless to get his own bid in first. Barely half the distance left from the base of the balloon to the suspended cabin. I glanced down the swaying ropes, less to guide myself than to prove that I could. The trap door in the roof of the cabin was open now. I could see Phileas' outline, head and shoulders through the door, waiting for us. Seeing him, even at a distance, lifted a weight on my heart. It was the same for him too, seeing us relatively safe. I saw the tension leave his shoulders. *Damn you, Jules, do you think I don't care enough to NOTICE he loves me?*
Starting an affair with Phileas would be simplicity itself. I could begin by putting my hand on his arm, at the right time and place, and be entwined in his bed before nightfall. I've no worries about whether it would be a pleasant place, either. Several ladies have kindly made a point of assuring me so. One of them was a bona fide enemy agent, which allowed me to break two of her ribs and hand her over to the constabulary with a clear conscience.
It's not maidenly shyness, and certainly not a lack of trust, that stops me time and again from the small gestures that would launch us into that avalanche of emotion. God knows I trust Phileas with my life, my soul. He'd die -- sometimes seems all too eager to die -- rather than cause me a moment's pain. And it's that fear, rather than any other, that holds me back. While we remain unattached, except for the ties of blood and a shared childhood, we're free to console each other for the slings and arrows of the outside world. He can lose an affair of the moment, or I can, and be little affected. But if we turn to each other and fail, then neither of us has anywhere else in the wide world to go for comfort. I know myself; I can take that loss and survive. Some of the whispers Chatsworth doesn't hear, ice queen and less polite terms, have their roots in truth. I know, just as surely, that Phileas could not. As much good as Passepartout has done him, as devoted a friend as young Verne has become, those ties wouldn't be enough to hold him. Each of us is the only home the other has. I cannot risk his losing that, no matter what the benefits to myself might be.
Three feet. I restrained myself from leaping to the roof of the car -- the wind at this altitude was no one's friend. Instead I worked my way around to the trap door, still maintaining a full set of handholds. Phileas was still waiting. "You took long enough." His hand enclosed mine in a firm grip, not to steady but to support my whole weight if it were suddenly necessary. If his voice trembled, we could both blame the wind.
He backed down the ladder inside, still clasping my hand. "Jules may need help too," I said. But Verne was clinging close to the hatch like a spider, apparently perfectly comfortable. We Foggs cleared ourselves downstairs, out of his path. "The airship's League of Darkness," I remarked as my feet finally touched stable decking. Neither of us had believed anything else from the moment we caught sight of her.
"With Count Gregory in charge," Phileas agreed. "He's ... not human, by any measure you or I would use. I think a pooling of information is in order. And I'd rather do it a bit further from that airship."
Jules hopped down to the deck, letting the hatch slam shut above him. "They have cannon."
"All the more reason." Phileas led the way back to the main salon. He still hadn't stopped touching me. It was a gentle supporting pressure under the elbow now, suitable for a gentleman walking with a lady, but I think he'd have rather faced fire than release it.
I forced my breathing to stay slow and even. The trouble with virtuous resolutions, of course, is the amount of work needed to keep them resolved. It doesn't help that Phileas is easily the most beautiful male creature in my experience. It's not just a question of cheekbones and bright eyes. I could be properly unmoved by a vapid exterior. He has wit, and energy, and something beyond courage; the ability to become so focused, so steadfast in the pursuit of a goal that the causes for fear become only calculations, not emotional events. He told me once, on a bad day, that there was no light when I was away from him. He was wrong. There is light, a blazing beacon; his curse is that he alone is unable to see by it.
He did ask me to marry him once, long ago. I don't think even his brother ever knew that. He hadn't been long in the service, two or three missions at most. I was seventeen. He may have been, even then, trying to find a way out of Uncle Boniface's iron rule without giving up his honor. A way out for me, certainly. His little speech had much in it about safety and security and a home of my own. He'd badly mistaken his audience. What he was already seeing as a dirty business, with many compromises and few honest victories, was a great adventure for me. I was full of the spirit that sends boys of the same age running off to sea or to join the gypsies. My uncle had begun to hint that the path of service -- and Oxford -- need not be closed to me, that I'd been given the same training as my cousins for a reason. The prospect seemed not a danger, but a glorious reward. I not only refused Phileas; I lectured him, with the self-righteousness of seventeen, very much in the authentic Boniface style. The combination, from a proper little miss in white muslin, must have been as bizarre as it was upsetting.
Phileas, ever the gentleman, swallowed my unintended insults. I think he understood me better afterward. Certainly he never placed any obstacles in my path in the service, even when I launched myself into the most dangerous assignments. It was much later, after Erasmus died, before I understood him. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if that knowledge had come to us sooner. If he had broken far enough out of the gentleman's code to offer me a partnership, shared challenge and risk instead of flight from it. If I had seen his worry as something other than an offense to my independence. If he'd forgotten propriety long enough to let the word "love" slip into his carefully prepared speech. If I'd had the insight to hear it was there all the same.
Time changes us all. We've both seen too much and done too much for any such easy answers now. Our profession -- still very much ours, for all Phileas' show of being a civilian -- offers great rewards for people of our peculiar character. My thirst for adventure, his protective instincts. The thrill of the hunt. The intellectual satisfaction of seeing the inner workings of world politics in a way that's invisible to society at large. The professional pride convincing us that we alone can forestall the rising darkness. The costs have been high and likely to get higher. The chances are that one of us will see the other die. But not quite yet, and not alone. If complete unity between us is too reckless to contemplate, at least we have the comfort of guarding one another's back.
The main gallery of the _Aurora_ opened out before us, Passepartout at the controls. I saw the _Prometheus_ in the distance, pulling away from us to the west. "They're heading for America as planned," I said. "They know _Aurora's_ unarmed. They've written us off as a threat."
I didn't have to glance at Phileas to see his grim smile; let them make that mistake. He didn't have to glance at me for my vote on our next move. "Then we follow," he said, almost mildly. His fingers were warm on my arm. No, I could never pray for peace and quiet. Danger is our shared element. War suits us very well.