Lilith had set off this storm of inanity. All those years she had huddled in her boarding school bed, plotting her revenge of the Maryle family. Never in her most cruel fantasy had she desired this horror.
She had always been able to rally herself after a disappointment, raise her sails and catch a fresh wind. For the first time in her life, she felt truly broken. She had hurt the man she loved most in the world. She wasn’t going to recover for years, if not a lifetime. Memories of George throbbed, physically aching the way Lilith imagined the leftover stump of an amputated arm or leg would.
All she could do was mercifully end Colette and the story. Colette deserved to die for being a blind, self-righteous fool. Lilith had tried to explain this to her muse, but her muse remained silent. Lilith suspected that her muse never made the switch to the Brighton train at the Euston station.
So that morning, Lilith decided to forge on without the help of her muse or toffee. She began from where she had left off the day Frances and Edgar abandoned her, forgetting about the tantalizing love scenes in the tent, the magnificent palace, and the gentle kisses in the garden.
Colette fled deeper into the forest, a knife clutched in her hand. The briars and brambles cut her legs. The footfalls of soldiers thundered behind her.
She ran and ran, until her lungs burned. At last, she came into a clearing amid the trees. From all turns, the sultan’s men, holding swords, materialized from the dark wood.
“Surrender, Colette,” she heard the sultan say. He strode forward, his blood staining the silk robe where she had stabbed his shoulder. “You have nowhere to go. The lands are filled with other men who want your secret. You cannot win. Come with me and I shall show mercy upon your misguided soul.”
Her will to fight was gone. Her spirit destroyed. Her fingers trembled as she aimed the knife to her own heart and—
“There you are!” A young actress barged into the room. “I’m going to read the lines again. I’ve spent the entire morning walking along the beach, trying to feel the anguish of Lady Macbeth. Now listen: ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to—’”
“It is as wonderful as the last dozen times you’ve performed it for me.” Lilith concealed her ire at finally making literary headway, only to be interrupted.
“But this time was different. A different inflection, a different angst in my heart. Could you not hear it? ”
“Yes, of course. A little.”
“A little!” The actress’s face fell. “You don’t understand,” she wailed and fled the room as Benjamin, a soul-ailing poet, stumbled in. He threw himself down on the other sofa and tossed an arm over his eyes. “I’ve been rejected again! I’m in hell. I ought to quit and go back to the farm.” He flung the letter at her.
She swallowed a sigh and picked the missive from the floor. When did her tolerance for drama so sharply decrease? She could easily see why George limited everyone to fifteen-minute appointments.
“Ahh, the publisher says you show promise,” she said, skimming the correspondence. “And asks you to submit more poems in the future. This is all very good.”
“Promise, merely promise? I spent two years working on that. I’m horrible, and no one has the gumption to tell me.”
“We’ve already talked about what a great poet you are.” Ad nauseam. “There, there, I’ll just go get us some toffee. That will make it all better.” In truth, she was down to her last shillings and would have to kill off Colette in the next week or so to have enough money to pay for her keep. But for now, she had to get out of this raucous house with its uncared-for ceilings and insane, needy inhabitants.
After going down the stairs, Lilith came upon the resident composer playing the piano for some lovesick village ladies.
“Hello, Lilith, luv.” He winked at her. “Come sing for me and be my inspiration.”
He hadn’t heard her sing or he wouldn’t utter anything so foolish. “You are beautiful, you speak the poetry of angels, and you are the all-knowing goddess of etiquette, but, dear God, you can’t sing,” George had said that lovely evening in London when they had enjoyed their musical murder.
“You have enough inspiration.” Lilith nodded to his audience of spoony ladies and continued through the great hall painted with murals, and out the door. Upon the lawn, a semi-nude man stood, draped in a cloth and with laurel leaves in his hair. Artists with canvasses on easels formed a loose circle around him. None were as talented as George. And his beautiful body put to shame the model’s.
George. Everything reminded her of George. When would come a time when he wasn’t in her every other thought? When suddenly she might realize she hadn’t thought of him or felt the dull throb of her unrequited love for ten full minutes?
That time seemed far, far away as she walked down the road, remembering making love to George in the garden. The contours of his muscles under her fingertips, the power of his thighs thrusting against hers, the hard set of his jaw as he shuddered in climax. And his eyes afterwards, lit by the brilliant sunlight, glowing with tenderness.
She had held truth and beauty for a fragile moment. Nothing would be as amazing again.
Outside the confectionary shop she told herself to buy just two toffees. No more. One for Benjamin and one for her. Of course, once inside, the tiny pieces of heaven behind the glass only made her pine again for the lovely day with Penelope and Beatrice and the vows of sisterhood they had made over toffee. She wondered what her sisters were doing now. If they were angry with her. Could she ever make them understand why she had to leave?
She took her two meager pieces of toffee and ventured further into the town, desiring not to return quite yet to the asylum for the obnoxious and insane. Against a public house rested a little boy in rags with matted hair and red, raw, bare feet. She tried to walk past the human misery, but her conscience badgered her until she turned back, giving him a toffee and her last half-sovereign.
Now she had to finish Colette or she might be huddled barefoot on the street too.
She continued toward the booksellers, where she could easily hide for several hours, perhaps even find a book that would relieve George from her mind for just a while. Yet she couldn’t reach for the door for the women crowding around a magazine vendor outside.
“The sultan!” cried a girl who looked about fifteen. “The sultan!” She released a long squeal of ecstasy that shook her bonnet and her red spiral curls. Her acquaintance performed an amazing feat, reading McAllister’s Magazine while jumping up and down and crying, “I love him! I love him! I love him!”
What was this? McAllister’s didn’t publish today and she hadn’t turned in any pages.
Another woman used her edition as a fan to cool her perspiring face. “I always loved the sultan. Always. I didn’t care what anyone said. I knew him.” She waved her magazine faster. “Oh, oh, I must get home. Oooh.”
Lilith edged through the women until she reached the crusty-faced magazine seller.
“What are you selling?” Lilith shouted over the crowd.
“A special edition of McAllister’s Magazine and Colette and the Sultan. Aye, but it’s gone now.”
“What!” Lilith grabbed the man’s filthy brown coat sleeve. “I must have a copy. You can’t be out. You simply can’t.”
“I ain’t a magician, miss.”
“But…but…that story is about me! That’s my story.”
“It’s my story too!” cried the squealing redhead.
“No, it’s my story!” shouted her jumping friend. “I loved the story from the first installment. I told you about it. Remember? So it’s my story.”
“No, it really is my story,” said Lilith. “May I see your copy? Please. I beg you.”
The girls shot her a nasty possessive look and hugged their treasured magazines to their chests.
“I’ll give you my last toffee for a peek,” Lilith beseeched. “A tiny peek. Please. What must I do? This means the world to me.”
The redhead reluctantly relented and snatched up the offered toffee. Lilith opened to the first page. The Redemption of the Sultan by Lilith Dahlgren. Illustrated by the Marquess of Marylewick.
What!
Her heart thundered. Her head was so light she could scarcely hold on to her flying thoughts. She flipped the pages, reading the words she had written, yet drawn through George’s amazing mind.
The illustrations were intricate and detailed. He saw Colette’s world with more depth than she could ever have imagined it. Tears blurred her vision. She wiped them away and continued to a stunning full page illustration of Colette and the sultan in the garden. The sultan and Colette kissed against a background of lovely intertwining flowering vines. The image could have been mistaken for a romantic sketch by Rossetti or Millais. The caption beneath it read, “This can be your home, full of beauty, for the rest of your days. I love you. Consent to be my wife. Marry me.”
Lilith gasped. She was certain she didn’t write those last sentences. They weren’t in the story. Why had he added them? Was he telling her that he loved her? “I must…I must go to him.”
She blindly thrust the magazine at its owner and ran to the train station. Clothes, toiletries, her Keats book—she didn’t need such trivial things. She scrambled into the great hall where the news of the sultan echoed in the high ceilings. “Lord Marylewick, the sultan, illustrated the story!” “I always knew he wasn’t the villain!”