Chapter 14: Modern Day Nashville

I had finally chased Gary out just before 10:00 AM. Maria had left earlier to return to her apartment. After Gary reappeared that morning, I fed him a hearty breakfast; the loss of blood added to satisfying Maria’s lusts would have left him depleted. He gave me an update on the illegal hacking that he was performing for me to allow my ultimate transformation into another new identity.

He actually asked me for permission to pursue Maria! I gave him my blessings, although I warned him that she might not be inclined towards monogamy. I didn’t know that for sure, because it had never been important to me, but I warned him, nevertheless. I had never spoken to Maria about such matters, because it didn’t make a difference to me so long as she was always available for my needs.

After he left, there I sat looking at my phone and the number for Aurora, wondering what the protocol was for calling a woman who you wanted to pursue. No, who I needed to pursue. I thought that I’d heard something about waiting three days from some of the young residents at the hospital. Could I possibly wait so long?

At that moment, my ring tone for my new love began to play, my homage to my long-lost Aurora — the opening bars of Debussy’s ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ — ‘The girl with the flaxen hair.’ I answered.

“Christian?” she asked and my heart skipped a beat.

I was too tongue-tied to answer immediately.

“Christian, it’s Steph ... no, I mean it’s Aurora. Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” I replied at last, “You just took me by surprise. I had my phone in my hand and I was going to call YOU.”

There was that musical laugh on the other end of the line.

“Your ears must have been burning because I was thinking of you,” she teased, “But I was wondering if we could get together for lunch someplace?”

Man plans, the gods laugh — in this case, to my advantage.

“Of course, I’d love that. But I just finished eating. Could I join you and have coffee instead?”

We arranged to meet at a local coffee shop that also had a choice of little things to eat.

In a moment or an eternity, depending on one’s feeling of urgency, we were sitting across from each other, me drinking my coffee (black; cream or sugar both could upset my system) and Aurora drinking tea and with her delicate mouth nibbling at a pastry.

When she had entered into the shop our eyes met and we both had a shiver simultaneously run through us. I could see it in her body and I could see it in her face. This was the third time that had happened.

We started with the kind of light conversation that two virtual strangers might. Although I mostly let Aurora tell me about herself, her family, her education, her likes and dislikes. I lied and told her I was alone and without family. Well, the last of my family had died about 650 years before, so it wasn’t stretching the truth that much. My most recent foray into education I could discuss with her. I could throw out the names of any of an half-dozen undergraduate colleges that I had attended at one time or another as well as my most recent medical school, residency and those sorts of details.

Then we switched to the subject that was so dear to Aurora’s heart; the life and times of Louis XIV and his court, especially life at Versailles.

We shared our knowledge of the period (she from studying it, I from living it) and she revealed, after swearing me to secrecy, even more about the actual extent of her family’s archives that she had inherited. The family Molyneux had kept voluminous records.

They even had a Chopin Waltz that he had written for them after he had stayed with them for a summer — by that time they had repurchased a portion of the old estate, including the Chateau. They refused to share it outside the family, something I regarded as an excess of family pride over sharing an intellectual gem with the world.

I had never known at the time that her grand-mère had kept a diary, although I should have suspected it. It was very common among the wealthy and the aristocracy to have a daily journal.

Then she came to a point where she hesitated before speaking and when she did speak it was barely above a whisper. A bit melodramatic and one would think unnecessary.

“There is a very mysterious man who she writes about in her diary. I think that she may have had an affair with him. Not as if affairs weren’t common enough at Louis’ court.

“But I thought that you would be amused by the fact that his name was ‘Christian’, just like yours. I’m not sure about much yet, because she was being very cagey about what she said, almost like she was worried if anyone were to read her diary.”

“Well,” I asked, very interested now for the obvious reasons, “What do you know about him?” She couldn’t see my clenched fists below the table as I prayed that Aurora had been circumspect in her memoirs.

“I guess it’s easier to tell you some of the things that I don’t know. His first name was ‘Christian’, but I don’t know his surname. My grand-mère once made a joke about him being her ‘little/big’ man in such a way that I think that she was hinting about his surname, because she otherwise said that he was tall.

“I’m also not sure about what he did at the court. Sometimes she calls him an astronomer, other times she says he is an astrologer — something that confuses a lot of people even today, so I don’t know what to think. Then at other times she implies that he was a physician, because he is curing people of illnesses by bleeding them; something else that was very common for a physician to do at the time.”

Then she blushed.

“I know I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know so I apologize if I seem like I’m lecturing an undergraduate in class!”

I laughed, and then picked up her hand from the table and began to kiss the tips of her fingers one after the other.

“You,” kiss, “don’t,” kiss, “bother me,” kiss, “in,” kiss, “the least!” one last kiss. I looked up at her face to see if she was disturbed or offended by my rather forward actions.