33. Lily
LILY
She found it when she was least expecting to, curled up under her softest throw, leaning against Martin, her stuffed turtle, currently squashed into the space between the mattress and the wall. The shade on her lamp washed the room in pink shadows.
The letters, a mixture of facsimiles and typed transcriptions, were dusted across her bedspread in loose piles.
Their sorting spell had worked eventually, but they’d made the instructions too vague, so the task remained enormous.
The stack of letters specifically mentioning the “Argent Lune” was disappointingly shallow and hadn’t let on to their identity at all, so now she was sorting through all the letters addressed to women.
The ring glinted dully on her finger. If she’d doubted its origin in magic, the fact that it fit her as snugly as it fit Sebastian dispelled it.
She wondered if he was in Québec by now, and if he was, what he was doing.
Sunday still smarted, a hollow ache of embarrassment, but his gesture had dulled the cramp.
It was probably better, anyway, that he wasn’t interested.
Relationships seemed complicated, possibly more complicated than they could be worth, especially when one party had less than eight months to live.
They could be friends, complication-free, and she could just enjoy it.
She focused back on the letters, actually almost believing herself, and picked up the next facsimile. Cornelius Windermere had atrocious handwriting, worse even than Seb’s calligraphic scrawl.
My Selene,
Lily straightened. This was the first letter to any Selene. Most of his letters to women were to his daughter Thèresa in France. Only his letters to the Argent Lune had a passing shred of emotion or sentimentality.
My Selene,
I think of you often; of the art that created the curve of your brow, the sweep of your hair against your white neck.
If it were possible to distill the light that you emanate, my fortune would put Midas to jealousy.
I have always wanted to create something lasting, something that would weather the storms and shames of time, but always I come up short.
As you have oft said, I possess a ‘surfeit of practicality and a dearth of imagination.’
Yet somehow Fate, that slow-weaving, merciless and merciful mistress, has thrown us together, like twin opposites, into the alembic.
How many empires had to fall, how many threads to be plucked ‘just so,’ to bring you to me?
For you have what I lack—imagination and warmth, grace and conviction.
Is it not as though we were created solely to complete, to complement the other?
‘As above, so below,’ our founder decrees, and surely I must be ‘that which is below,’ for you were born of heaven and walk in starlight.
Together, if we are strong and persevere, from our work may come a sort of Mercurius.
I can only hope you may see beyond the base impropriety of this insinuation—I shall content myself with your spirit, for I would rather possess that which is intangible, and AEtheric of you, than none of you.
Yours,
Cornelius
Somewhere in the reading, Lily’s heart had stopped, and it reawakened in a jolt, leaving her gasping. The letter trembled in her hand, sending a current up her arm and through her skin, igniting something urgent in her. She reread the letter once, twice, feeling like a trespasser at its intimacy.
Selene had been the Greek goddess of the moon.
Selene, if that was her real name, had to be the Argent Lune—the tone matched, and the alchemy, oh the alchemy, that matched too.
Windermere referenced, sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely, the chemical wedding: the Conjunctio, the great alchemical uniting of opposites in balance, to create a “third which is not given.”
The Conjunctio was often the final stage of the alchemical process, the goal of the Opus.
It was frequently depicted as Sol and Luna uniting in naked bliss, or as a red king wedding a white queen.
The sun represented gold, fire, the body.
The moon was silver, water, the unconscious—together alchemists believed they encompassed all; together they created all.
“I shall content myself with your spirit, for I would rather possess that which is intangible, and AEtheric of you, than none of you.”
The lines etched themselves into her core.
They were almost exactly what she’d told herself over and over the last few days.
She’d rather have what was AEtheric of Sebastian than nothing at all.
Maybe old Cornelius Windermere knew more than she had given him credit for.
He was certainly turning out to be more interesting.
Selene—who was she? A female alchemist, the object of Windermere’s affection, a silver ghost. Certainly, Lily knew who she was not—his estranged French wife who’d taken their daughter to her home country.
The lack of an AEtheric educational system in what would become the United States had been what had driven Windermere to found his school.
She laid the letter on the bedspread, smoothed it, and took a photo. Heart racing, she sent it to Sebastian, accompanied by only two words:
Found her.