Inamorata by Megan Chance

am?” she asked, and there was a wariness in her voice, a stillness I had not heard before.
    “These men you’ve inspired will never forget you. You’ve made your mark upon them. They say you are unforgettable.” People knew her name ; they wanted to be with her. Since she’d left the artist, there had been letters, pleas, visits from other artists: poets and painters and musicians, all begging for a moment with her, all hoping for more. Madeleine did something I had never before seen in a woman alone: she chose whom she liked without regard for money or prestige, and her choice transformed. She whipped her lovers into an artistic frenzy. She moved them and inspired them, and I wanted to know how she did it. No one ever looked past her. No one ever looked away. They remembered her. I wanted what she had with an intensity that sometimes frightened me.
    I never wondered about the strange things I saw in her, though I should have. I never wondered at how quickly she went through her lovers—sometimes only in days. Now and again I came to her rooms in the morning to see them staggering away as if they’d been weakened by a fever. I found one or two of them collapsed on her carpet. She would say only that it was nothing—he was ill, he’d forgotten to eat, the night had been exhausting—and the servants carried them away. In those first months, two killed themselves over her, one jumping from a balcony and another hanging himself. I didn’t wonder at it—why would I? I understood it. I would have been devastated had she cast me aside.
    I put off the few lovers I had, not caring when they grew so impatient with my lack of attention that they left me for others. I cared only for her. Her influence was astonishing; she told me stories of the men she’d inspired, and I was stunned at how much she’d done in her life, how many works of art owed their existence to her. The realization only increased my own sense that she held the answer to my every dissatisfaction. I believed she alone knew how to make me stop wanting.
    Tell me how to be you. I must have said such words, or variations of them, several times, and she always put me off. You don’t know what you’re asking, cherie, or, Be happy with your own life.
    But I was not, and over the next six months, it became more and more evident. She took up with a composer, and I watched in envy as she cajoled him into writing his best opera—a stunning enough piece, but nothing to thrill the ages. I began to realize that what she’d said before was true, that she had an eye for talent, but not for brilliance. I began to think that she was not utilizing her abilities to their utmost.
    “Do you never wonder what the world could be if you chose to inspire the best?” I asked her one day.
    She frowned. “What do you mean?”
    I shrugged. “This composer has talent, but he is like your artist. He will be famous for a time, but he will be forgotten. Do you not wish for more? You could be known as the muse to genius, Madeleine. You could change the world. Choose the best, instead of the middling talents you take up.”
    She turned a critical eye to me. “Do you think you could do better?”
    “Yes. Let me find someone worthy of you.”
    She went thoughtful. I felt the magic of her dark eyes as I always did; there was something truly astounding within them. She said slowly, as if she were trying to decide something, “Very well, find him. Bring him to me and we will see if you are right.”
    It was the only thing she had ever asked of me, and I was determined not to fail her. I still had some cachet, and I used what was left of it to attend the suppers and balls that had once been, for me, de rigueur. I went to the theater, to the gambling halls where artists gathered looking to change their luck.
    When I found him, I knew. He was not pretty. His hair was dark and wild, and he had been crippled in childhood, a bad hip that required the constant use of a cane. He was also