Inamorata by Megan Chance

thought I had beaten my fear at last. Surely my name would be remembered now? And for years, I had no reason to think otherwise. I was the best and the most expensive. Everyone knew who I was. But time is no woman’s friend. I began to notice the fine wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, the faint sag at my jaw. Strands of gray began to appear in my dark hair; I could not go to sleep at four a.m. and rise at eight without looking as if I’d done so. I began to lose my favorite lovers to younger women whose eyes sparkled guilelessly, whose breasts were more pert, whose skin was whiter and more fine.
    I began to feel afraid again—and that, too, showed. Men sense desperation; they are like animals, wanting always to be at the top. I was thirty-six. My influence was waning, and they felt that too. I was no longer the prize I’d been, but a fading symbol of another time. I began to notice the way men looked past me when I came into a room, and I realized I had not beaten my fear after all. In a few more years, it would be as if Odilé León had never existed. It was too late to change the path I’d taken—I was destined for my mother’s fate, for the one I’d seen as I lay bleeding on a barren floor.
    But then I met Madeleine Dumas. The great courtesan, Ninette, held a salon to showcase an artist everyone was talking about—his newest canvas was scandalous and brilliant, and it was rumored that he meant to bring with him the woman who’d inspired it. I wanted to meet her. I wanted to know what she had done to win such immortality. But when I arrived, the artist was alone. There was no woman hanging on his arm and none he seemed to adore, and so I did not suspect that his lover and his muse was Madeleine, though I should have known the moment I saw her across the room, sparkling and smiling, jewels bedecking every inch. That night, she’d worn a gown so crusted with tiny rubies and beaded with pearls that I wondered how she could walk in fabric so heavy. Golden combs had glittered in her blond hair, but her eyes . . . her eyes had been dark as obsidian. Eyes I’d been drawn to, unable to look away from. I thought I saw something strange in them, something captivating and exciting. She’d smelled of confidence and lilies. She was my age, and yet she had what I did not—a lack of care or fear.
    I wanted to be her, which was something I had never felt before—why should I have ever felt envious of another woman? The singularity of the emotion brought me up short, the sheer, brutal longing.
    She gestured to me as if she’d seen me staring at her. I went as if compelled. She smiled at me and asked me who I was, and when I told her, her smile broadened. She tilted her head in amusement, though all I’d told her was my name. “I know you, don’t I?”
    “I think we’ve never met,” I said. “I would have remembered.”
    “Perhaps not.” She glanced across the room, to where her artist-lover was engaged in animated conversation with some other man, and she leaned close to whisper to me, “I am the one who made him everything he is. Do you believe me?”
    “Of course.”
    “How he loves to ignore me in public.”
    “But he will not be ignoring you when you are home,” I reassured her.
    “No, not if I am there, which I have not quite decided yet.”
    “You mean to leave him?”
    She shrugged; it was a pretty, elegant gesture. “I leave all of them. It is my life, is it not? Mine to live. Mine to manage. Why give it to them to squander?” She paused. “What do you think of his talent?”
    “I think he will be very famous.”
    “Oh, I mean for him to be famous. That is never in doubt. But I wonder: do you think he will last ? Will men laud him centuries from now?”
    I considered her question. “I don’t know. Perhaps. But while he is very skilled, he is showing nothing truly new, so perhaps not.”
    Madeleine sighed. “So I have thought. I wonder if perhaps it is a flaw in me.”
    “What do you