The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  “How dare I ? How dare you bring your black magic here and put our princess in danger!” I shouted. “Are you trying to help her? What of the potential ramifications of your actions? If Henry or the king finds out she is wearing the blood of an infant in a vial on her neck—”

  “The blood of what?”

  Catherine turned to Ruggieri. For a moment the perfume was forgotten.

  “The ways of magic are complicated, my lady,” he said.

  Her voice was low. “Are you telling me that you . . . Ruggieri, how did you get the blood of an infant?”

  His face was hard. His eyes glittered at me with hatred. I had brought truth into the room, and he didn’t appreciate it.

  “I demand you tell me now,” she said when Ruggieri still hadn’t responded. Her words flew out with such force, the votives on the table flickered.

  “I found a whore,” he said. Then stopped. Even he did not know how to tell a princess this tale.

  “Tell me!” She’d blown one of the candles out with that last shout.

  “She had four brats already and the poor woman was in desperate need of money for food.”

  “You bought a baby and killed it for this—to make this amulet for me—you murdered an innocent child?” She slipped back into her chair, overcome with the idea of what her astrologer had done.

  He rose, knelt beside her, took her hand. She wrested it away.

  “Your life here demands it. It is in the stars that you will be queen. It is your destiny, and it is mine to help you achieve it. I would kill a dozen infants if it would bring you the glory and the power you deserve.”

  Catherine lowered her head into her hands. I could not see if she was crying or not. Her back was still. Her countenance hidden. I was nauseated by the idea of what Ruggieri had done. When she lifted her head, I could see that there were indeed tears in her eyes. As she spoke she looked from Ruggieri to me.

  “That I have been reduced to this . . .” She pointed to the vials of blood and then the bottles of scent. “I pray that what one of you have done achieves its goal . . . I do not wish to dwell on what will happen to us, to all of us, if it doesn’t.”

  Chapter 18

  THE PRESENT

  “I brought Melinoe,” Serge said. “To show her.”

  Jac heard the words and used them to pull herself out of where she’d been—lost in another reality, watching a story unfold like a movie playing on a private screen in her own mind.

  “I can’t believe what you’ve found. How amazing,” Melinoe said.

  The woman’s voice dragged Jac the rest of the way back through the time spill, and she returned from the memory lurch.

  “Jac, this is quite miraculous.” Melinoe was inspecting the shelf of essences. “How did you know it was here? Serge said you just reached through the bottles. What made you do that?” she asked.

  “I smelled something different,” Jac said. She was speaking slowly, trying to remember exactly what had happened. “It wasn’t a scent associated with anything you’d expect to find in a wine cellar. From there . . .” She hesitated . . . She didn’t want to tell them she’d actually seen an illusion from another time showing her the way. She lied. “From there it was just a good guess. I’ve gone on so many digs, searched through so many ancient places . . . It’s not unusual for there to be hidden doors and staircases or secret rooms and hiding places.”

  Melinoe held up an amber bottle. “Do you think what’s in these bottles is still viable?”

  “I haven’t inspected them. But since there’s no light source in here, they might be better preserved than normal. Archaeologists have found far more ancient perfumes in digs in Egypt that have retained their scent and not been corrupted.”

  “Do you think it’s wise for me to open one and smell it?” she asked.

  “It might not be,” Serge said before Jac could answer.

  “Let me look.” Jac took the bottle from Melinoe. It was labeled Melisse in the same ornate handwriting as the notes in the book. “It’s lemon balm,” Jac said. “At home our laboratory has some oils that date back to the French Revolution and are still wonderful. But I’ve only smelled one scent that goes back earlier than that. It was only a figment of scent—but I could still identify some of its properties.”

  Carefully Jac uncorked it and held it up to her nose.

  “It’s faint but smells absolutely fine. Exactly the way it should. When ancient perfumers prepared their ingredients, they didn’t cut corners the way we do now. And René le Florentin was an excellent chemist.”

  She offered it to Melinoe.

  “Amazing,” she said after sniffing.

  Serge took the bottle that his stepsister was holding and smelled it. “So this was made during the reign of Catherine de Medici?”

  “If no one used this laboratory after René, then yes,” Jac said. “And no one has a date for when he died—that’s what you said the other day, right?”

  “Right. We did the research, but there’s so little we found. René was a figure in the shadows of history—important for what he created for his queen,” Serge said, and then looked at Melinoe with an expression that Jac couldn’t quite read.

  Jac felt the electricity between them again, as palpable and confusing as it had been before. Jac didn’t understand what it was she was seeing. There was nothing overtly telling about the way they responded to each other, but she was certain there were complicated emotions running like deep underground springs.

  Melinoe reached for another bottle. “I want to smell more of them.” She sounded like a child in a toy store.

  “I think it would be better not to open any more of them until I can take an inventory and we read this notebook and know what René intended. They will evaporate more quickly if we expose them to air, and there’s very little oil left in most of the bottles,” Jac said.

  “Read what notebook?” Melinoe said.

  Jac realized she hadn’t shown her the book. “It appears to be René’s records. Most perfumers kept copious notes. There may be clues here as to what René was working on. I can’t read most of it because it’s in Latin, but I believe there are formulas in here and lists of ingredients.”

  “Let me see,” Melinoe said.

  Jac opened the book to a list. She pointed and read. “He’s used their Latin names, which are still the names we use for them. Several are very rare. Others can still be bought, but the modern equivalents would be very different than they were in the 1500s.”

  Melinoe and Serge bent over the book. Their shoulders were touching.

  “What do you mean?” Melinoe asked. “Wouldn’t a rose be a rose, to quote Gertrude Stein?”

  “There were different strains of flowers then. The air and the water weren’t polluted. There was no acid rain. On the other hand there were germs and bacteria we don’t have now. So how things smelled and how ingredients interacted with one another would be unique to that time.”

  Jac pointed to a word on the list. “Here’s ambergris. A lovely word for aged whale vomit that is a major ingredient in many wonderful perfumes. Everything the mammal ate affected it. Ancient ambergris would have totally different properties than what is washed up onshore today.”

  “So if you can figure out the formula for the elixir to mix with the breaths to get them to work, we will have to get ancient essences and ingredients,” Melinoe said with resolve. “And if we can’t get ingredients from the mid-1500s, then we need at least the oldest we can find.”

  “Yes, if we want to exactly re-create his experiment, we would need our ingredients to be as pure and authentic as possible. But I don’t think it’s likely we’ll be able to find them,” Jac said.

  “We will find them.”

  Jac noted the resolve in the delicate-looking woman’s voice.

  Serge looked at his stepsister. “I though
t we’d discussed this.”

  Jac didn’t understand. She must have missed something.

  As she fixed her dark eyes on him, Melinoe said, “You worry too much. I know what I am doing at all times.”

  “I worry too much precisely because you know what you are doing at all times.”

  Families have shortcuts and codes when they speak. She and Robbie had them. But this one was making Jac uncomfortable.

  Robbie hadn’t said anything about the psychological dynamics of these two stepsiblings. But then again Robbie hadn’t planned on slipping into a coma as quickly as he had. He hadn’t finished telling her a hundred things. A thousand things.

  Thinking about her brother’s death and the ashes she still hadn’t decided what to do with made her wonder: “Do you know where René was buried?” Jac asked.

  “Nothing was recorded. But I came across a mention in Catherine de Medici’s daughter’s diary that suggested it was here on the château grounds,” Melinoe said.

  “Is there a cemetery here?” Jac asked.

  “There has to be,” Serge said. “But we haven’t found one yet.”

  Jac shivered. They were talking about another perfumer’s death. Not Robbie’s but a Renaissance perfumer’s. Chills ran up her arms and her back. It couldn’t be a coincidence, and Jac had discovered that for her, coincidences had a way of preceding portentous and often dangerous events.

  Chapter 19

  That night, Jac fell asleep easily, cosseted by the down pillows and comforter. Her dreams were full of the perfumer who had lived here so many centuries ago. In his secret laboratory, she saw him mixing up potions and recipes, stirring, shaking and sniffing. At one point he picked up his head and looked right at her, as if she were in the room with him, as if he could actually see her. And then he spoke to her.

  All this I do for you. To see you again. To be with you again. Please God, it will work. Because without you I am lost to the world.

  In her sleep, Jac felt the power of his words like a perfumed wind, blowing around her, embracing her. The most profound sense of longing overwhelmed her. Jac tried to go to him. Tried to move toward him. Wanted him to take her in his arms. Wanted to bury her face in his chest and have him stroke her hair. Wanted to feel his rough lips bruising hers. Oh, how she wanted him. But she was half a millennium away. And they were forever separated by time.

  She woke up suddenly. Soaked with sweat.

  The perfumer had seemed so familiar to her. Her feelings for him were the same as her feelings for Griffin. Was it possible that— No. She would not entertain the thought.

  But she couldn’t escape it, could she? Jac could almost hear Malachai asking her how she could even question what the dream revealed: that in a previous incarnation Griffin had most likely lived a life as the perfumer. Time was coming full circle again.

  Suddenly, the still vivid images from the dream were replaced by images from past memory lurches. Her lover on the floor, dark ruby blood pooling beneath his body, his life force seeping out of him. He was dying because of her. Because he had loved her and not been able to let her go.

  She had to stop the pictures bombarding her. There was no way out of the vortex of guilt and grief that would envelop her if she gave in to the memories.

  Brushing her hair out of her eyes, she glanced at the digital bedside clock. In this medieval castle it was incongruous, but so was so much about this journey. It was only 2:35. Whenever she woke up in the middle of the night, she had trouble falling back asleep and was usually up for hours. Because of the dream and the panic that had ensued, she knew tonight would be worse.

  Jac pulled on her robe and headed for the kitchen. A hot cup of tea laced with brandy was always a perfect antidote for late-night unease.

  As she made her way down the hall toward the staircase, she heard the wind howling outside. A few more steps and she realized it wasn’t the wind at all. It was a human cry. Alerted, worried, she moved in the direction of the sound. Someone was in pain.

  She passed the staircase and continued on past one door . . . and then the next. The cries were more distinct now.

  “You have me . . . you have all of me . . .” A man’s muffled voice.

  “I want more,” the woman insisted.

  “You have all of me.”

  “I need more.”

  Another cry. Then silence. Jac knew she should walk away.

  “Make me feel more . . .” The woman was demanding, but it sounded as if she was also crying.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I need to feel more.” The woman emitted a cry of pain. Then: “Yes, please. More. I want more.”

  There was the sound of a slap. Flesh against flesh.

  “Don’t make me do this to you.”

  “Again, please again.”

  Flesh against flesh.

  Another cry. “Yes, more.”

  “No more, Melinoe.”

  Her voice became strident, no longer a needy child but a demanding woman. “You want it too. You need it. More. Now. More.”

  Was that his hand slapping her skin? Or was he using an instrument? Where on her body was he hitting her? How hard?

  “I can’t do it anymore.” Now he sounded tortured.

  The moans were making the words hard to understand.

  “You have to . . . Look how hard you are . . . how wet I am.”

  Smack. Smack.

  “Yes, hurt me.”

  “I can’t.”

  Jac had never eavesdropped on anyone having sex before. And as much as she knew she shouldn’t be listening, she was riveted. These two souls were caught up in some elemental dance of psychological angst and desire. A ritualistic, fetishized version of lovemaking.

  It sounded like they were whipped up in some kind of religious fervor. Like pagans worshipping at an altar. It sounded like torture. Like ancient passions bubbling up from deep in the earth, rising to the surface, exploding through these two damaged creatures. It sounded like a hell on earth and heaven at the same time. It sounded like exquisite pain and horrible beauty.

  Jac knew she should leave, walk away and mind her own business. Serge and Melinoe were not related by blood. They had met when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. There wasn’t anything wrong with them being lovers. But this way? Jac thought about the dark woman whose eyes always looked haunted, who moved with the grace of an angel across a room, whose haughty bearing spoke of a burden carried forever with determination. For noble Serge to be in her thrall like this, tied to her in some deep-blooded way, obeying her despite how strong he was, Melinoe must not be all human but part witch, part vampire, part Rasputin.

  There was regret in the sounds coming from inside that bedroom now. And longing. Desperation, guilt and defiance. Did they enact this ritual over and over? How could they endure it?

  She rested her head on the doorjamb. Felt literally weak with her own arousal. Confused by her own body betraying her, refusing to obey her determination to leave, to walk away. She was certain she would never forget these sounds; the sadness, the power, the ecstasy, it was like a perfume of awful desire, of illicit passion. An impossible possibility.

  There was quiet now on the other side of the door. None of the rough ragged sounds of their lovemaking were audible. They’d finished. For a crazy second Jac even wondered if they had died. She wouldn’t have been surprised to open the door and find them naked in each other’s arms, expired. It was a strange thought—one she didn’t understand—but she was obsessed suddenly with the idea that they were dead, had died in that last moment, that they would be happier freed from their terrible attraction, the unhealthy needs that bound them to each other.

  She sighed without meaning to. Then, worried they might hear her and find her standing by the door, she hurried away, running back to her room. The tea forgotten.

&nb
sp; Chapter 20

  MARCH 20, 1573

  BARBIZON, FRANCE

  I had been creating fragrances, pomades and lotions for the royal family for nine years and was well known to the Dauphin. He often visited me in my laboratory, breaking my heart as he asked me to create perfumes for his mistress. I could not disobey. I had included some of the scents that Henry favored for his paramour, Diane de Poitiers, in the fragrance I’d created to help Catherine conceive.

  To that end, I also made a second scent and used it in a cream—something of an experiment on my part. Something I hadn’t explained to Catherine. If she did conceive, then I would tell her what I had done.

  Getting an audience with the Dauphin could be a difficult task, but I’d sent word I’d created a fragrant gift for His Highness to give his mistress.

  “What a surprise. I didn’t order a new scent,” Henry said when I was ushered into his bedroom. He was in the midst of being dressed by his courtiers, and there were clothes and shoes everywhere. The velvets and silks and laces were as opulent as his quarters. Everything here was spectacular. All that could be was gilded with gold and shimmered in the candlelight. I touched the back of a chair covered in thick velvet mohair, luxuriating in the sensation of the fabric on my flesh.

  “No, sire, you didn’t, but I was working on a new lotion for the skin and happened upon a formula that I felt sure you would want to give to Madame de Poitiers.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be delighted you were thinking of her, Maître René. What are its properties?”

  “I’ve used rose oil in a new formula that imparts a moisture and suppleness I haven’t seen before,” I said. Conveniently I left out the other ingredients I’d included, which would induce sleep when absorbed by the skin.

  Despite the Dauphin being consumed with the affairs of state and the health of his father, he opened the jar and sniffed at it.

  He looked older to me on this night. The growing, ever increasing conflicts between the Catholics and the Protestants were a constant anxiety for the Crown.