For this tale, I must write in my own words, for there is no one else to tell it. I recreate it for you from a series of journals found together in a trunk– each bearing a piece of the story that doesn’t come clear until you lay all four series of writings side by side.
In this volume so far, you may have noticed that fae and human definitions of love can create off bedfellows, sometimes very literally. Some of the following is my own conjecture, and guessing at the voices of the past, so I do hope you’ll forgive me my small trespasses. It is merely that I am a student of the natures of our peoples, and wish to share my insights.
Once upon a time, in the warm embrace of Italy, there was a scholar of no small renown who followed the genetic theories by the classicals and developed a life’s work around it.
What the good doctor did not know (because his human mother could not bring herself to tell him) was that he was half fae. His experiments were heralded as miraculous– likely his passion for the work along with his own unusual genetic makeup allowed him to bridge the gap between possible and impossible with relative ease.
Had he been told of his heritage, the doctor would have scoffed that there were no such thing as faeries, and gone about his business.
Of all the things in the world, the doctor loved but two. His work (which centered around breeding plants with stronger extracts to be used in medicines by the apothecary), and his daughter. His wife had died in childbirth, and as the child grew, they formed a little society of two so exclusively that outsiders frequently required translation of their private language.
Most of their days, when the doctor was not engaged in teaching at the university, were spent in the garden beds. As the doctor’s experiments because more prosperous, a small jewel of a hot house was added. Endlessly they toiled at all the tasks necessary to caretake a tiny harvest. Ever patient, the health of each leaf was noted upon weekly, the moisture levels checked thrice daily, and soil analyzed continually. The appearance of a slug was a catastrophe of the highest order, necessitating agonization over what the scientifically correct next step would be.
The daughter and the plants simply grew.
Under such careful, tender loving care, and due to the unexpected and unknown extra encouragement, the plants thrived, meeting and surpassing all expectations.
The same could be said of the doctor’s daughter.
“Oh, my dear,” the doctor said one night as they reviewed their notebooks at the dinner table. “I dread that day that you will go from me into an establishment of your own.”
For Beatrice had just turned seventeen, and was surpassingly lovely. Like a maid in a tale (which, come to think of it, she is), she had soft golden skin, enormous dark doe eyes, and dark hair that fell in ringlets the envy of every woman in the city. “Now Papa,” she replied carelessly, “I have yet to meet anyone that could take me away from all that we do here.”
The doctor turned his attention back to the work, smugly satisfied.
But thoughts, once they have been transmuted into words, have a way of festering in the mind. So it was for the doctor, as he wished over and over that his beautiful child was more like his plants. That she should be forever a part of his world, meticulously cultivated and appreciated in the appropriate environment.
He became leery of leaving Beatrice, his mind inventing any number of morbid fantasies of what could become of her to the point where he installed locks on the gates of the manor as well as the hot house.
Beatrice, by nature a creature of unusual serenity, made no mention of the additions to the doors and gates. She merely went about her business, to the point that she seemed to have far more interest in the society of the plants than in people. As the scope of her activities became more limited, the doctor engaged a number of maids, that the house remain comfortable.
The maids began by turning the manor house inside out and putting the rooms to air. While the doctor and his daughter had not been slovenly, one tends to take the whole business of homemaking more seriously as an engaged professional, and what may have been shrugged off as a bit of dust in the corners was no longer acceptable.
And so things went for a time, with the doctor, Beatrice, and the maids quite content with their lots in life. The plants grew stronger in essences pressed from them, the doctor grew more concerned with the future of his lovely daughter, and Beatrice grew lovelier and more engrossed in leaf, vine, and bud.
One day, the doctor brought home an especially promising student to see his gardens. And perhaps, in some well meaning part of his mind, Beatrice as well. They visited the hot house after a tour of the rest of the manor, with the student marking the lock upon the door.
“Of course,” he thought to himself, “the doctor must have extremely valuable, exotic, and rare specimens to protect.” Which was a sentiment the doctor would absolutely have agreed with, for Beatrice was at that moment seated in her favorite spot.
The sunlight shone through the windows in a moment of perfection, gilding Beatrice’s golden skin as she crooned softly to a vine that almost, almost appeared to sway toward her in adoration.
“Ah! And now I have found you out, Doctor!” He bowed reverently to Beatrice, who blushed most becomingly. “You have a lovely sprite tending your precious plants, coaxing them into their extraordinary growth with her song.”
The doctor chuckled appreciatively. “Ah, Giovanni, it is true. I sometimes think my Beatrice could charm any plant into bloom with a smile.”
Beatrice shushed him, her cheeks aflame. “You flatter me, gentlemen, there are no charms here. Merely careful, scientifically proven methods developed over many years hard work.” The doctor continued to chuckle as he dropped a careless kiss to her forehead.
“You will find my daughter a most ardent student of the methods of reason, my boy, I daresay she would surpass most of the students at the university, were she permitted to attend.”
Rebuked, Giovanni quickly altered his tactics to discussion of the quality of the soils and herbs under Beatrice’s care. It was refreshing to find a girl who seemingly had no ability to engage in coyness and flirtation, but instead had a serious mind devoted to the passion of her life’s work. Though his own interest in botany had been one of the many fields in which his facile mind excelled, from that hour onward, Giovanni mirrored his mentor in caring only for the plants and his daughter.
It was a difficult courtship from the beginning. The doctor was of two minds on the matter– he could not expect to live forever (though, by the standards of even a half fae, he was barely an adult in lifespan), and if he had to leave care of the two most treasured things in his life to someone, who could be more suited than the best student he had ever taught?
Beatrice herself, after the initial shock of a young man introduced into her carefully plotted and controlled world, felt the siren’s call of the world beyond the walls and the desire to turn the keys on all the locks herself, that she may be safe in the world she loved best.
Truly, the only one of the unusual triangle without a single doubt or reservation was Giovanni himself. Experienced in such matters, he began by sending small gifts with his compliments. He was quite careful– knowing that bonbons and ribbons and poetry would find no favor with the serious Beatrice, he instead sent his own volume on genetic theory that had piqued his interest in the doctor’s lectures in the first place. This was followed some days later by a new chemical meant to fertilize the soil. With inhuman restraint, he let two weeks pass by before paying a call, but that did not mean that he did not linger casually in the square across from the gates, hoping for a glimpse of the beauteous Beatrice.
Each gift was received with rapture; for each Beatrice penned a very proper thank you note, dispatched by the maid on her way to market.
When finally Giovanni did pay a call, it was of a more scholarly variety than he could have imagined in his moonlit fancies. Upon arrival, he was pressed into service with the wheelbarrow, assisting in the spreading of mulch in the larger garden as he received an encyclopedic history of each specimen.
Better off if he’d been put off by such treatment and turned his fancies to another, but Giovanni’s heart was tucked into the pocket of Beatrice’s leather apron.
Spring moved into summer and then into fall and the hapless student had not so much as stolen a kiss from his fair maiden. Feeling out of his depth and as though this romance was going nowhere, he attempted to move things along by presenting Beatrice with a mass of deepest red roses.
“Oh! How lovely they are,” Beatrice exclaimed as Giovanni presented them to her. Roses were not medicinal in nature in the doctor’s view, so he had never troubled to keep them. She buried her nose into their velvety embrace, arrested by the sensuality that had captivated so many before and after. Once she consented to release them to the maid, she grasped Giovanni’s forearm through his jacket, her dark eyes turned to him in thanks.
They sat in the hot house that day, but Beatrice seemed so infected by the scent of the roses still lingering on her face that she could not settle to work on any task. It was a magical afternoon in which the lovers simply sat and gazed upon on another in harmonious daydreams.
It wasn’t until Giovanni was leaving that he noticed the roses the maid had put into a vase and placed on the sideboard.
A far cry from the fresh blooms he’d brought, they were dead and decayed. No lover’s token, these, but a gift of a spurned, forgotten suitor. Dismayed, he resolved to call upon the usurer of a florist and demand compensation before his next visit.
And then, his mind and heart full of the wonders of the day, he thought on it no more.
It was perhaps a week later that Giovanni, after a lecture on the perils and plight of insects, noted aloud to the doctor that he’d never seen an insect in the hot house, of any kind.
“You are quite right, my boy,” the doctor said, his mood expansive and jocular. “Beatrice is constantly fretting that she must bring air to the roots herself as no lowly worm will consent to do it for her. I believe over the years that the concentrations of the essential essence of the plants may have become so strong that it seeps into the very air, discouraging the depredations of maggot, worm, slug, or snail alike. Even as the marigold discourages all manner of wildlife with its natural odors, so it is, I think, within my hot house.
“Remarkable!” exclaimed Giovanni. “Never before have I heard of such a thing, and yet, it is the only logical explanation.”
It was a few days later that he mentioned the theory to Beatrice herself, only for her to burst into tears. When he would have reached out to comfort her, she warded him with a gloved hand.
In fits and starts, she laid out her woes with her gaze fixed upon the floor.
For she had also noticed the fate of the roses. Being of a methodical mind, she arrayed the evidence of what she knew to be true, and then raised her sights to pure conjecture.
The roses had been fresh cut, and should have remained in their blooming state for a week, if not two. They were dead in hours.
Insects could not survive in the hot house. Frequently she had to sweep away a suicidal line of them who tried to cross the threshold in the night. Insects also did not trouble her. In a time where lice of all varieties flourished in the warm climate of Southern Italy, she hadn’t seen one on her person in years.
Troubled by her thoughts, she’d contrived to take the maid’s bare hand in hers. The girl had fallen down quite insensible and remained that way for two days.
She’d gone to her father and laid out her hypothesis.
And he had smiled. The doctor was delighted with her sharp mind as well as what his daughter had become. “Tell no one, especially not Giovanni, there is a purpose at work here, and I must think upon what that is.”
It was that moment, that sense of covetousness in his eyes, that had shown Beatrice everything that she’d taken care not to see. If to touch her was death, the doctor never had to worry that a suitor might steal her away; his greatest treasure was forever safe without a single lock needed.
“He did this to me! Willfully, knowingly, he has done this thing to me without my consent! I cannot live like this, my Giovanni, but neither can I die!” She wept, not with any great passion, but a soft, forlorn sound.
Giovanni put his gloves on and took her gently by the shoulders. “What do you mean you cannot die, my dear?”
Shamefacedly, she dashed the tears from her face. “I didn’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to know I’ll live my whole life without being able to touch a living soul. I will not live in this cage with my father’s smugly satisfied face knowing he has me snared.”
“Beatrice, you always loved it here before!”
She looked up at him, her gentle lips twisted to one side. “When you choose your circumstances, to be content is easy. When you see the bars of your cell and know that this is what will be for all time, everything changes.”
It was not a statement he could argue with. “What did you do?”
Beatrice gave a choked laugh. “Can you not guess? I took poison.”
Not satisfied with a single cup of hemlock, the doctor’s daughter had taken a draught of every poison known to her to be available to her hands, recording her reaction to each one. First, she’d gone through the very gardens she tended. Then she’d gone to the apothecary. Finally, desperate, she had borrowed the strongest substance she could find, the substances the maids put down to ward off rats and vermin.
There had been no adverse effects at all.
“In fact, when I woke up the day after, I felt an entirely unusual level of refreshed. My father remarked upon how my eyes shone and my skin glowed with health at breakfast.” Purged of her tears, Beatrice’s voice was now flat, as though she was reciting the lineage of one of the specimens she tended.
Through her recital, Giovanni’s mind raced. When she was finished speaking, he stood up and paced the room, letting action assist in his cogitations.
“Beatrice, my own heart, if I told you I could cure you, but that you would have to leave this place to remain cured, would you be willing to go?”
While iron bars do not a prison make, the same can not be said of selfish fathers, yet Beatrice bowed to the habits of years when she slowly, methodically plotted out how she felt about the proposal. That Giovanni could do as he promised, she had no doubts. Her extensive education had taken place within a single branch, his had covered many.
“Yes, I would go. I never want to see this place again, and if I did not know how much it would set back the science of what I’ve done, I’d burn every damned plant here before I left, to ensure that such a thing could never happen again.”
And so the plan was set. It took a week for Giovanni to acquire everything that he needed, as well as find an amenable priest and conveyance to leave the city as quickly as possible, per Beatrice’s wishes.
The lovers chose their time wisely; the doctor was out for the evening at a symposium. After a stilted dinner with the only conversation being for the benefit of the servants, Giovanni drew Beatrice into the garden for a stroll.
As soon as they were out of earshot, he gave her the antidote to every known poison he had painstakingly brewed. With a sweet, trusting smile, her gloved hand on his face, Beatrice drank it down.
And fell down dead before she could say a word.
That was where the doctor found them, for Giovanni put his lips to hers in bittersweet farewell, and unlike Juliet, found that haply some poison did yet hang on them.
Proving that there does exist some justice in the world, the doctor was convicted of the murder of both his daughter and his putative son in law. Scandal bred scandal for the months leading to the trial, and the most careless utterances became damning proof of the blackness of the doctor’s soul.
Through it all, he said not a word in his own defense, nor at all. His guilt had rendered him mute for all of the rest of the long years of his life.
But that’s another story.
Curiouser and Curiouser 