He reminded himself that it was unseemly to take pride in what, for Proctor, must be the most mortifying experience of a lifetime. But the man was out of the way — inconvenienced but alive. Constance would never have forgiven him had he employed a more drastic solution.
Across the corridor from where he sat was the chamber that, in prior years, had served as Enoch Leng’s operating room. From his vantage point, he could just make out the end of the operating table, fashioned out of an early martensitic-stainless-steel alloy. It was still polished to a brilliant sheen, and his own features looked back at him. They were splendid features, the scar adding a certain frisson to his chiseled face and heterochromic eyes. At least, he hoped that’s what Constance would think.
You mention the feelings I had for your brother. Why, then, should I have any interest in his inferior sibling — especially after the way you abused my innocence?
… Why should these lines of hers, flung at him in anger just the night before, come back now to torment him? But he had always been an expert at tormenting himself, even more than at tormenting others. Self-torture was a skill Aloysius had taught him. Aloysius, who — while not smarter — was sufficiently older to have been always one math problem ahead of him, one novel better read, one inch taller, one blow stronger. With his disapproving sanctimoniousness and condescension, it was Aloysius who had driven his interests and pastimes underground, into more private and perverse avenues. And it was Aloysius who had triggered the Event, which ended all his hopes of a normal—
Diogenes clamped down hard on the inner torrent of words, realizing that his breathing had quickened and his heart was pounding in his chest. He calmed himself. His hatred for his brother was a just and good hatred. It could never be extinguished and now — with Aloysius’s death — it could never be redressed. But a strange thing had happened: with his brother’s demise, Diogenes’s mind had cleared. He had become more certain than ever there was one person in the world who could in fact bring meaning, fulfillment, and joy into his life.
And that person was Constance Greene.
Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I. And that was how, in his first days after barely escaping the fury of the Stromboli volcano and its vomitus of lava… that was how he had looked upon his own budding passion for Constance.
Even now, the moment came back to him with the vividness of yesterday: that struggle on the terrible, forty-five-degree slope of the Sciara del Fuoco. It had not been a lava flow in the liquefied-stone sense of Hawaii, but rather a lava slope, a hellish rent in the earth half a mile across down which house-sized rocks, red-brown with heat, tumbled incessantly. The heat thrown off by the Slope of Fire created a rising hurricane of brimstone and ash: and it was this demonic wind that had saved his life. After Constance had hurled him from the edge of the slope, he had tumbled, not falling but ultimately rising in the heat-generated gusts, until he had been dashed against one side of the scorching chasm, wedged into a crevice, one side of his face sizzling where it touched the wall of superheated rock. In shock, he had managed to extricate himself, scramble over the lip, and — on all fours — make his way farther along the trail Constance had chased him up, skirting the actual cone of the volcano and eventually making his way down the far side to Ginostra. Ginostra, a village of some forty residents, accessible only by boat: a tiny nugget of the Sicilian past. And it was here where, fainting with the pain, he was taken in by a childless widow who lived in a cottage outside of town. She did not ask him how he came about his injuries; she did not seem to mind his request for utter secrecy; she appeared to be content to tend his wounds with what ancient liniments and tinctures were at her disposal. It was not until the day before he left that he found the true reason for her ministrations — she was mortally afraid of his maloccio, the evil bicolored eyes that, local legend held, would bring ruin upon her if she did not do everything in her power to help him.
He was laid up for weeks, his burns — the hardest of all pain to mitigate, even with modern medicines — causing him unendurable agony. And yet, while he was lying there enveloped in a universe of pain, all he could think about was, not hatred for Constance, but the equally unimaginable pleasure he had shared with her… for just one night.
At the time, he could hardly believe it. It seemed inexplicable, as though he was in thrall to the passions of a stranger. But his need for her, he now realized, was not improbable. In fact, it was inevitable — for all the reasons he had explained the night before. Her distaste for the base and servile world. Her unique depth of knowledge. Her remarkable beauty. Her appreciation for the manners, civilities, and courtliness of an earlier time — coupled most agreeably with a temperament purified, like the best steel, by heat and violence. She was a tigress, dressed tastefully in silk.
And she was a tigress in other ways, as well… It tormented him that he was so blinded by hatred of his brother that he’d viewed his successful seduction of her as a triumph over Aloysius. Only later, on his bed of pain, had he realized the night they spent together had been the most remarkable, exciting, raw, sublime, and pleasurable of his life. He sought hedonism like a penitent seeks a cilice — and yet nothing in his life came close to what he’d experienced upon igniting the passions of that woman, pent up for over a hundred years, inflaming that supple and hungry body… What a fool he had been to throw that away.
The rude, ancient medicines of the woman who had tended him had done little to help with the pain, but had done wonders to minimize the scarring. And two months later, he’d left Ginostra — with a new goal in his life…
He realized with a start that Constance stood before him. He had been so distracted that he had not heard her approach.
He rose quickly from the chair before recollecting it had been his intention to remain seated. “Constance,” he breathed.
She was dressed in a simple, yet elegant, ivory dress. A half-moon of lace embroidery below the throat chastely covered, but could not conceal, a most admirable décolletage. The lines of the dress, shimmering like gossamer in the flickering candlelight, ran all the way to the floor, where they hid her feet in a gauzy gathering of fabric. She was looking back at him, regarding his evident discomfiture with an expression he could not quite read: a complex mixture of interest, circumspection, and — he thought and hoped — guarded tenderness.
“Yes,” she said, in a quiet voice.
Diogenes raised one hand to the knot of his tie, fiddling with it unconsciously, uselessly. His mind was so disordered he couldn’t respond.
“Yes,” she repeated. “I’ll retreat from the world with you. And… I’ll take the arcanum.”
She paused, awaiting a response. The shock of relief and delight that broke over Diogenes was so strong that it was not until this very moment he realized just how terrified he’d been that she would say no.
“Constance,” he said again. It was the one word he could manage.
“But you must assure me of one thing,” she said in her low, silky voice.
He waited.
“I need to know this arcanum truly works, and that its creation didn’t involve harming any human being.”
“It works, and no one has been harmed, I promise,” he said, his voice hoarse.
She looked searchingly into his eyes for a long minute.
Almost without knowing what he was doing, he took her hand in both of his. “Thank you, Constance,” he said. “Thank you. You can have no idea how happy this makes me.” He was shocked to find himself blinking away tears of joy. “And you will soon learn just how happy I can make you, too. Halcyon is everything I’ve promised, and more.”