by Rose, M. J.
Shouting for Trent, alerting him that I’d found the child, I was suddenly filled with a bone-crushing fear. Anxiety flooded my body and pushed through my veins. I had seen men who had gone mad. Was that my fate?
If it wasn’t, if I wasn’t going mad, then the possibility of what had been offered me would surely make me go mad. How could a man live knowing the creatures of our nightmares were real? That we could be haunted and possessed by devils and demons? What if God was not a heavenly being but only a choice between dark and light, good and evil? What if there was a power but it was man’s own power to choose?
Trent was running toward me now, with a man by his side. The expression on his face needed no interpretation. He was the child’s father, staring at the bundle I carried.
“She’s hurt,” I said to him as he reached for her, “but alive. She has a wound on her head but it has stopped bleeding.”
He didn’t say a word. I didn’t imagine he could have. He simply nodded, and when he raised his head, his eyes were shining with tears.
Twenty-four
When Jac had returned to the hotel the night before, there was a phone message for her from Ash Gaspard asking if she was free for breakfast. She’d telephoned, gotten his voice mail and accepted. She wasn’t quite sure why he wanted to see her, but after the events at the Gaspard house she thought maybe he’d be able to help make sense of the visitation.
The two brothers were the light and dark halves of the same coin, and getting to know Ash might help her understand Theo, whose mysterious brooding had captured Jac’s imagination. In fact the whole family had. The dowager sisters, the rambling ancient house filled with antiquities, the strange ancestors who engaged in séances and studied magic, the tragic death of Theo’s wife, the hidden Hugo treasure . . . she was as caught up in it as in any myth she’d ever studied.
Three tables in the dining room were occupied. Ash Gaspard sat at one by the window. The hostess sat Jac so that she had the view of the rough waves and overcast sky.
“Good morning,” he said. “I heard from my aunt Eva there was quite a scene last night at Wells in Wood.”
“There certainly was.”
“They can be quite a pair, those two. I hope it was at least amusing.”
“It was far more disturbing than amusing.”
“You don’t believe in all that stuff, do you?” He was looking at her earnestly with almost the same eyes as his brother’s. But Ash’s had laughter in them.
“Your aunt Minerva and I had this conversation last night. No, I’m a rationalist. But I will admit there are occurrences that test my ability to reason them out. And last night was up there with the best of them.”
“What are some others?” he asked.
Ash was leaning toward her and she could smell his cologne. As she had the first time they’d met, she ran through the notes, mentally listing them. Lemon, verbena, bergamot, tonka bean, patchouli and something else . . . but what was it?
“I hope you won’t think I’m rude, but can you tell me the name of your cologne? My family is in the perfume business and I’m usually good at identifying scents, but I’ve never smelled whatever it is you’re wearing.”
Ash smiled. “That’s because—”
The waitress arrived and he broke off.
Ash ordered the full English breakfast with tea. Jac asked for coffee and yogurt with fruit.
“Where were we?” he said once the order was taken. “Oh yes, I was going to tell you about my mysterious cologne.” He smiled as if the idea of sharing his secret gave him a great deal of pleasure. “After breakfast, if you have some time, there’s someplace I’d like to show you. I can explain about the cologne then, all right?”
For the rest of the meal they talked about his aunts and the séance.
“I have a favor to ask you,” he said as they were finishing up.
“Yes?”
“My brother hasn’t been himself since his wife died, and we’re all worried about him. He’s letting his work slip. The gallery is closed half the time and he hasn’t hired anyone to replace Naomi. Instead of taking care of his actual responsibilities, he’s become obsessed with this search he’s brought you here to help him with.”
She didn’t feel right talking about Theo behind his back. “What is it you want me to do?”
“Can you just be aware? He won’t let any of us get close to him but he seems to trust you. If he starts acting erratically, or talking about things that don’t make sense—if you feel at all that he’s losing touch, I want you to call me or Minerva. She’s tried to get him to see a therapist but he refuses. She does her best to talk to him, watch him, help him, but he doesn’t believe he needs any help.”
“I haven’t seen him for almost twenty years. I’m not sure I’d know if he wasn’t behaving like himself.”
She was sure there was a subtext beneath Ash’s request, maybe even a warning . . . but she couldn’t be sure.
“You’d know. His wife knew.”
“Of course she did. She was married to him.”
“Yes, but they hadn’t actually been married that long. Theo had become uncomfortably jealous of any time she spent out of his sight. He was accusing her of having affairs in London whenever her work took her back there. He was reading her email and checking her phone records. It all came to a head when he found out she was confiding in me about his behavior.” Ash shook his head, pained by the memory.
“What did he do?”
“He tried to lock her up.”
“Theo did?” Jac remembered how he had taken his aunt’s hands the night before. How gentle he’d been.
“I know. It was hard for me to believe too. But something in him snapped. She climbed out the window and drove off. I think she was on her way to see me.”
“The night she died?”
Ash nodded. “Theo blamed me. He thought I was the one she was having an affair with and said it was my fault. That she was distracted and upset because of me and that’s why she wasn’t paying proper attention on the road. The police have made it clear that she swerved to avoid another car and the accident was the other driver’s fault, but Theo wants to believe what Theo wants to believe. We haven’t had a civil conversation since. He won’t listen to reason. We’ve always had a difficult relationship but it’s never been like this before. And now he’s obsessed with finding the Hugo papers. As if they hold some secret that is going to make things better.”
Jac now understood a little better why Theo had been so angry to find her talking to Ash the other night.
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with all this, though. It’s as if you’re asking me to be a psychic spy.”
“I am sorry. But Minerva and I did think you should know and at least be aware. She wanted to talk to you herself. I think she would have done a better job of it too, but it was difficult for her to figure out a way to get to you without Theo around.” He put down his napkin and signed the check. “Shall we go? I promise, I won’t make any more uncomfortable requests for the rest of the morning, just show you something I think will fascinate you.”
• • •
He drove down the same country roads she’d traveled twice with Theo. Ash didn’t talk much on the ride. Some silences can be uncomfortable, especially between people who don’t know each other well, but this wasn’t. Their quiet was oddly companionable. Once he turned and smiled at her and she returned the gesture. It was a lovely, sunny morning and she found herself excited about the prospect of seeing something intriguing.
They’d reached the end of the long twisting road that signaled the beginning of the Gaspard land. Ash took a right, drove past the silver birch forest and then through the woods. It was darker under the canopy of trees and turned darker still as they wound their way through it. Suddenly the wind picked up, whipping the tree branches so the silvery undersides of the leaves showed and warned of rain. Right before they reached the hooded sculptures leading up to the main house, Ash made a sharp left
onto an even narrower road that twisted and turned and then came to a stop.
“My home,” Ash said.
For a moment all Jac saw was more woods. Then she saw a Victorian building made of red brick, peeking out through a curtain of ancient ilex, oak and hazel trees. Some were so close to the building, it seemed as if the architect had designed the structure to accommodate the trees.
Ivy climbed the brick, covering several windows. A wisteria vine, its trunk as thick as a man’s arm, wound its way around and around the porch railing, up onto the roof and down the other side. It seemed as if, long ago, nature had claimed the house for its own and no one had ever fought back. Jac thought it was enchanting.
“When was this built? Was it part of the main house?”
As he opened the door and ushered her inside, Ash explained, “One of my ancestors was a jeweler. Pierre Gaspard.”
She nodded. “I’ve heard of him.”
“Well, this was his studio. Like many artisans of the time, in addition to jewelry he became fascinated with stained glass, added it to his repertoire and became quite well known for it. I imagine you saw some of his work at the main house?”
“Yes, but this is like living inside the colors. It’s amazing.”
Starting at the stained glass set into the front door and moving around the room, looking from one window to the next, Jac saw that the entire spectrum of the four seasons was on display. Each depicted the same idyllic forest scene of a Japanese bridge spanning a pond surrounded by trees, but rendered in a different palette. From beds of early-spring crocus, to summer water lilies, to amber and rust leaves floating on the water’s surface, and then snowcapped pines, each elaborate landscape was beautifully painted not in pigment but in jewel-toned glass.
“After he married he used the main house as a home and this became his showroom. He had a shop in town too, but that was mostly for the jewelry, lamps and other small objects. For his bigger projects, he had clients come here. It looked very much the way it does now. His idea was to make the showroom resemble the rooms in a house so customers wouldn’t have to imagine what a stained-glass door would look like in their entryway, or windows in the library. Come, let me show you the rest.”
Ash walked Jac deeper into the house, through the dining room with its colored glass fireplace, done in Moroccan blues that shimmered like a lake in the moonlight, and the library with its elegant daffodil-designed stained-glass standing lamps that showered soft light over each chair.
“You wanted to know about my cologne,” Ash said as he led Jac down a long hallway illuminated with lovely green iridescent glass wall sconces. “First you have to know about this place. No one ever lived here until I moved in ten years ago. Pierre and then his son kept the glass business here until well after the First World War. But in the thirties styles changed and stained glass fell out of fashion. Then came the war. Our estate is very large and this structure is far from the main house. No one needed it and no one seemed to know what to do with it, so it became a sort of large storage bin. When I decided to take it on, it took months to sift though everything. Like peeling decades of wallpaper. Finally underneath all the crap, I found the original rooms with all their contents completely intact. It wasn’t so much that the house needed rebuilding or restoration, it just needed to be emptied out.”
He stopped in front of a dark mahogany door, quite elaborately carved with garlands of flowers bordering two panels. As Ash opened it, Jac smelled what was inside before she could see it. He flicked on the light and she stepped in.
“This was where his wife, Fantine, worked.”
She knew the name from Hugo’s letter. So this was her laboratory. Jac looked at the perfumer’s work area, pristine and perfect. Very similar to the one at the Maison L’Etoile in Paris where she grew up. In the center of the room was a perfumer’s organ. This complex, tiered workspace, surrounded by ascending rows of shelves laid out like an amphitheater, was more elaborate than the L’Etoile’s. Jac imagined that Fantine’s husband, a jeweler, with a heightened sense of design, had had a hand in the piece’s articulated ornamentation.
Jac sniffed the air. Each organ had a unique scent, since each perfumer favored certain notes. Faded vanilla and rose, lemon and verbena hung on the air, faint but discernible.
Jac pulled out Fantine’s chair and then turned to Ash.
“May I?”
“Of course.”
Jac sat down and scanned the rows and rows of small brown bottles of oils and absolutes. Each had a rectangular paper label, old and yellowed, with the name of the essence written in ink in a feminine hand.
Reaching for the verbena, one of the strongest scents in the room, Jac imagined Fantine sitting here, composing the fragrance Ash was wearing.
The bottle top was stuck and she couldn’t twist it off. She put it back, then tried the lemon essence. The stopper yielded and she bowed her head.
“It still smells so fresh. It’s always amazing how long a scent can last. So much longer than anyone realizes. So much longer than people last.” Tombs in Egypt had yielded oil residues that still offered up a bouquet of aroma. “Exactly how old is this laboratory?”
“Pierre built it for his wife in 1856 and Fantine made perfume here for almost seventy years. When she died in 1924 she was ninety-four and still mixing up concoctions. According to her ledgers my cologne was first created in 1912 and contained bergamot, verbena—”
“You have her formulas?” Jac interrupted.
“Books of them. Would you like to see them?”
She nodded, excited. “Yes. Very much.”
He brought her over to a small desk tucked into the corner away from the more elaborate workstation. It was an old-fashioned piece of furniture with glass-enclosed shelves above it and drawers below. In the cabinet she could see more than a dozen black leather notebooks. Ash opened the glass door. Jac could smell the slightly sweet scent of decaying glue, of leather bindings and the woodsy odor of aging paper . . . all suggesting long-forgotten treasures waiting to be discovered.
Jac lifted one of the books off the shelf and opened it. The handwriting was the same as on the bottle labels. Each page was for a different perfume formula. The names of the perfumes were evocative and suggested that Fantine and her husband had collaborated.
Emerald Evening Shivers.
Sapphire Starbursts Lasting.
Morning Pearls Alone.
Jac read down the list of the ingredients of each scent, constructing it in her mind as she went.
“These are really lovely. Sophisticated and unusual at the same time, like their names.”
“How can you tell?”
“I have scent memory, so when I read what’s in a fragrance, I can create it in my mind.”
“Is that unusual?”
“In my family, not so unusual. My grandfather and father had it, but my brother doesn’t.”
“Does that mean you can compose fragrances without sniffing as you go?”
She nodded. “But I don’t.”
“You don’t make fragrances?”
“Not since I was a child, no.”
“Can you make up the fragrances in the journal from the ingredients here?”
“Some might have lost their power, but if the room has been sealed up and kept dark for all this time, a lot of them might be as fresh as the lemon essence is.”
“Would you like to mix one?”
Jac surprised herself by saying yes. She hadn’t done this since before her mother died . . . since she was fourteen years old. As she pulled bottle after bottle off the shelf, following the formula written out in the journal, she thought about how for Fantine and for her too, fragrance and family were intertwined. Jac’s grandfather’s and father’s workshop was part of their home. It was where she and her brother had played at being perfumers when they were small and where they were each taught the basics of the “eighth art,” as it was called among the L’Etoiles. And now Jac was seated again at a perfumer’s wor
ktable.
Jac read the list of ingredients for Morning Pearls Alone. Jasmine. Orange blossom. Pepper. Gardenia. Ambergris. And something called amber.
“This is so strange. There’s an ingredient listed here that doesn’t exist as far as I know. I wonder if it’s a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fantine lists amber, but that’s not an essence. I thought she might have meant ambergris, which is a very popular ingredient, but that’s listed also.”
“What is ambergris? The resin that insects get trapped in?”
“No, that’s amber, but it’s not a perfume ingredient. Amber and ambergris are totally different, and to make it all the more confusing, in perfume we use the word amber to denote a class of perfumes. Ambers are Orientals: warm, woody and spicy scents usually made with vanilla, tonka bean, labdanum and ambergris.”
“After living with this workshop, it’s fascinating to have a perfumer here,” Ash said.
Jac had never referred to herself as a perfumer. She wasn’t one. Not really. But she didn’t correct him.
“What is ambergris then, some other kind of resin?” he asked.
“No, it’s a solid gray and dull waxy substance that’s secreted by sperm whales and washes up on the beach. It smells awful when it’s first harvested, but eventually it gives off a pleasant, very fresh smell that reminds me of rubbing alcohol. Like oakmoss, ambergris is far more important for how it works with the other ingredients than how it smells on its own.”
“Whatever made someone take something like that and even try to use it in a perfume?”
Jac laughed. “I used to ask my grandfather that same question all the time. Not just about ambergris but other ingredients, like the secretions taken from poor civets’ glands.”
She scanned the shelves, then found and pulled out two bottles: one marked ambergris and one marked civet, and handed them to Ash.
And then she noticed something else. “This is very odd.”
“What?”
Jac reached up and picked up another bottle. She showed it to Ash. The label, very clearly, read amber. There was almost no liquid left, only a residue of oil on the bottom. Jac opened it and sniffed. It was familiar and for a moment she couldn’t place it. Then she realized it was similar to the smell of the fire she and Theo had lit at the witches’ site the day before.