The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  The marvel that was the cabinet was difficult to take in. There was so much to look at and examine at once. The insides of the doors were inlaid with semiprecious stones: agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, bronze reliefs, paintings, gold, more silver, all meticulously designed.

  Jac was riveted to a glowing bowl filled with perfectly replicated ceramic fruit, all made of jewels.

  Opening yet another door, Ebsen showed them what he called a virginal and explained it was a keyboard with a mechanism, which could be set to a clock to play automatically at a certain time, and a diorama with small wax-and-fabric men set up in a scene. There were several automatons—scenes from history and mythology—that especially interested Jac. One box displayed Apollo and Cyparissus, showing the latter’s transformation into a cypress tree that rotated, one side showing the grotesque boy, the other the fully formed tree.

  “There are mathematical instruments and relics here. And what surprises many is that there are also games. It’s important to remember that this was a pastime and not just a treasure.”

  Ebsen pulled out a board, which opened to reveal two halves.

  “This is the game of Goose, where the player advanced based on a throw of the dice.” He withdrew another board game. “And this is roulette.”

  It was numbered from I to XII, with markers in between. Fruits and scrollwork decorated each corner.

  “We have four decks of playing cards.” He withdrew one to show them.

  Jac thought of Malachai and how much he would have enjoyed seeing those late fifteenth-century cards. He collected them and had more than forty antique decks, but none this old.

  “At the time memento mori was quite popular.” He showed them a seemingly ordinary portrait that upon closer inspection revealed a grinning skull. “Quite a curious preoccupation of the era. Art to remind you that you must die. Perhaps they believed that collecting itself staved off death.”

  “Yes,” Melinoe said, her voice laced with determination and sadness. “Amassing beauty that outlives you keeps you immortal,” she said.

  “Do you know what items are missing from the cabinet?” Serge asked.

  “Not all of them, no. But we do have several receipts for things that were removed. King Gustav’s widow took out a sculpted wax image, an ivory perspective, a step counter, a book of birds, a small ring and two opals.”

  At the mention of the stones, Melinoe’s eyes narrowed.

  “That’s what I’d really like to focus on. The natural objects that are in the cabinet.”

  “Ah yes, so you said on the phone. Let’s all have a seat back here. It will be easier to examine the items.”

  He showed them to a small wooden table with four folding chairs that clearly had been placed there for their visit alone.

  The three of them took their seats. Ebsen opened a green felt coverlet and placed it over the tabletop.

  One by one he brought over precious stones, pearls, shells, nuts and small unrecognizable rocks and told them as much as he knew about each. He pointed to an uneven gray-black rock the size of a child’s fist. “Ambergris,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”

  Jac started to speak but under the table felt Melinoe’s hand touch her lightly on the upper thigh.

  “No, I don’t think I do,” Melinoe said.

  Ebsen explained: “This substance consists of mostly cholesterol secreted by the intestinal tract of the sperm whale. It’s usually found floating in the sea or washed up onshore. It has a foul odor at first but, after aging, is one of the most precious ingredients in fine perfumes—and has been since the sixteenth century. It’s outlawed from being traded now in many countries, I believe.”

  Jac stared at the large lump of hardened wax. She’d worked with ambergris but never seen this large a chunk of it. A piece this size was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. There was no finer ingredient to fix a scent and add richness and roundness to a perfume. In America, where it was banned, niche perfumers who didn’t sell their creations in bulk bought it on the black market and used it anyway. A piece this old would have its own wondrous odors. The longer ambergris aged, the more unique its properties. Jac’s hand itched to reach out and touch it, but it was Melinoe who picked it up and felt its heft.

  “Is it all right if I hold it?” she asked Ebsen, too late for him to object.

  “I think it will be all right.” He smiled.

  Serge chose that moment to stand. “Can you show me how the drawers that held these objects were made? I’m an architect, and while the inventory is fascinating, the construction is even more so.”

  Ebsen nodded, and the two men walked back to the cabinet.

  Melinoe looked at Jac. “The ambergris appears right to you?”

  “Absolutely, it—”

  Melinoe interrupted her. “Perfect. Let’s see what Ebsen is showing Serge.”

  Jac stood up, and so did Melinoe. As she did, her handbag fell and spilled its contents; she bent to pick them up.

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” Melinoe said.

  Jac joined Serge and the curator who, with delight, was in the process of pointing out and explaining the different joints and closures, hinges and other aspects of the cabinet that they hadn’t yet discussed. After a few seconds Melinoe joined them.

  “Well, this has been an amazing treat,” Melinoe said when Ebsen finished. “And now we have another appointment. I can’t thank you enough, Dr. Ebsen.” She took the curator’s hand and held it in her own for longer than seemed normal. The pale man blushed and became flustered and told her that the pleasure had been all his.

  “The pleasure,” Melinoe said as she smiled at him intimately, “is truly all mine.”

  Chapter 27

  Upon returning to the château in Barbizon, Melinoe invited Jac to meet them in the library for drinks to discuss their journey.

  Jac was impatient to learn the purpose of the trip they’d just taken. She still didn’t know why they’d flown to Sweden and back just to examine an ancient piece of ambergris. She had thought Melinoe was going to try to buy the ancient material housed in the Gustavianum Museum—but she hadn’t even broached the subject.

  Masculine brown leather armchairs were arranged around a glass slab coffee table that rested on stacks of books. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with dark mahogany shelving and molding. The ceiling was a dark blue and painted like a night sky, with tiny pin lights illuminating the constellations.

  Once they were seated and everyone had one of the martinis that Serge made, Melinoe nodded to her stepbrother, who spread out a sheaf of papers on the coffee table.

  “So far we have been able to obtain the following ingredients.” He read out loud those that had been fairly easy to find. “Although they aren’t old, they are pure, and depending on what you think”—he looked at Jac and waited for her to comment.

  “Every scent will be affected by the time from which the ingredients came,” Jac said. “So it’s more an issue of which are stable over a long period. Five-hundred-year-old lemons, nutmeg, vanilla beans or cloves or their essences wouldn’t be viable anyway. The ambergris would—”

  “The ambergris isn’t an issue anymore,” Melinoe said and smiled. For a moment it reminded Jac of Malachai’s smile. Enigmatic. Secretive. But Melinoe’s was more suggestive.

  “Why?” Jac asked. “Do you think that you have a chance of buying it from Dr. Ebsen?”

  With a flourish and a flash of her diamond rings and bracelets, Melinoe placed a chunk of a gray-black waxy substance on the table.

  Jac recognized it immediately.

  “But that’s from the cabinet we saw today,” she said. “How did you get it? I didn’t hear you and Ebsen negotiate for it.”

  Melinoe looked at Jac as if she were a young child, not yet used to the ways of the world.

  “We switched the ambergris for
a more recent piece that Serge bought on the black market,” Melinoe said.

  “Switched?” Jac was astonished. “When?”

  “When Dr. Ebsen showed me the mechanics of the cabinet,” Serge said.

  “You stole it. I don’t understand . . . How could you do that? What will happen when they find out?”

  “We made sure the two pieces were almost identically shaped—we had a photo of the ambergris in the cabinet, and we chiseled the new one till it resembled the old,” Melinoe said without a hint of remorse or worry. “It makes no difference to the people in the museum which hunk of whale vomit they have. They aren’t going to make a perfume with it. To them it’s just a dusty relic. To us . . . it is an internal component of the miracle we are going to perform.” As she spoke, Melinoe caressed the ambergris, and her face took on an almost beatific expression.

  Jac had seen a gorgeous statue by Bernini in a church in Rome, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. On the saint’s face was an otherworldly look of intense orgiastic pleasure. Melinoe had that same expression on her face now.

  Jac had more questions, concerns and outrage, but Serge didn’t give her a chance to express any of them.

  “We’ve found some tutty,” Serge continued. “There is a perfumer in Grasse who has been collecting archaic ingredients for years. He was willing to sell us half of his bottle. He says it has a particularly ashy scent and that he’d tried to use it in a few fragrances, but it’s never added anything that was to his liking. He’s sending it to us—we should have it in a few days. The only problem is it’s only a hundred years old. Not quite old enough, but it might have to do.”

  Jac was still trying to process the fact that Melinoe and Serge had stolen ambergris right out from under the nose of the Gustavianum curator. It had to be a felony. They could be arrested. She would be an accessory.

  “I’m concerned about the ramifications of stealing the ambergris. I’m not comfortable working with it knowing—” Jac started, but Melinoe interrupted her.

  “Darling girl, you need to relax a bit. This isn’t the crime of the century. We simply exchanged one lump for another. Same item. Same value. I paid over sixty thousand euros for what I left in Uppsala.”

  Jac looked from Melinoe to Serge, who appeared as unconcerned as his stepsister. These people were worth more money than some small nations. In so many ways they believed rules did not apply to them. How many of the antiques Melinoe owned had suspicious sales histories? Jac hadn’t thought about that before, but now she looked around, wanting to know. More importantly, how could she stay here and continue to work on this project knowing what she did?

  As soon as she’d completed the thought, she felt Robbie behind her. Actually sensed his hands on her shoulders. Robbie wasn’t really gone; he was with her right there in that room. And was waiting for her . . . expecting her to find a solution so his soul could return and they could be together again. But how? she wished she could ask him. Reborn in an infant? Transferred into a comatose patient about to be revived? Or added to her own? It didn’t matter. Jac knew, despite all her misgivings, she couldn’t leave here until she knew that it was possible to reanimate a breath . . . or that it was impossible.

  “How soon can we take the next trip?” Melinoe was asking Serge.

  “I’m waiting for a phone call.”

  Jac was almost afraid to ask. “The next trip?”

  Serge nodded. “There is an eccentric collector who lives in England. In Bath. He’s a self-professed alchemist who has spent a small fortune assembling an authentic sixteenth-century laboratory. A working laboratory he has been using to discover the methodology to turn lead into gold . . . which he believes will lead to the secret to immortality.”

  “And he has momie?” Jac asked.

  “And more tutty if we don’t get enough from Grasse. And some ancient dragon’s blood,” Serge said. “And musk pods that are more than four hundred years old.”

  “He has everything we need,” Melinoe said.

  • • •

  Up in her room, Jac looked out the windows at the deepening dusk. Melinoe had said dinner was going be served in half an hour, but Jac didn’t want to eat with Serge and Melinoe. She needed some time by herself. She could go down later and get something to bring up. What she wanted to do was call Griffin.

  When he didn’t answer, Jac left a message and, while she waited for him to call back, opened the book she’d been reading about Catherine de Medici and her reign in France. Every reference to René le Florentin was chilling. She felt as if she were reading about someone she knew. Of particular interest was the description of a room at the Château de Blois where two hundred and thirty-seven cabinets were concealed behind wood paneling. The author noted that it was the queen’s private chamber of horrors, her own apothecary where she kept not only papers and jewels but also her perfumes and possibly poisons.

  Jac found herself nodding. She could picture the room so clearly. There were poisons in those cabinets.

  But how did she know?

  The author was painting Catherine, a descendant of the villainous and unscrupulous de Medici family, as a ruthless matriarch. A woman who was wife to one king and mother to three more, who believed her job was to protect her adopted country, France, at all costs, no matter what it took and no matter who stood in her way.

  But Jac sensed another woman behind the legend. One who loved a man who kept a mistress. Who was ignored by her husband for years of their marriage. Who made do with the crumbs of emotion he doled out to her. A woman who threw her heart into her children and fought to keep peace in France using whatever tools and weapons she had. Who, when she did the wrong thing, believed with all her soul it was for the right reason.

  As Jac read, she could envision the castles and the countryside, the courtiers and processions. She could even smell the scenes. The fresh air in the countryside and the stench on the streets. The always present scent of paraffin, of perfumes, of the unwashed, of the unclean. She could smell the fragrances that René le Florentin made for his queen so well that Jac thought that if she was put into a laboratory right then, she could re-create them on the spot.

  Her phone rang. Jac answered and started in right away to tell Griffin about what had happened, but he stopped her.

  “I need to call you back. Just five minutes. In the meantime can you go outside? There’s something I want you to look at for me at the ruin near the vineyard Serge showed us.”

  “Why would . . .”

  “Jac, can you? Please?”

  She heard the insistence in his voice, and so, without understanding why he was asking her to do something so strange, she did as he requested.

  Outside she made her way toward the folly. The structure was a stone edifice without a roof. Most of a marble floor, a dozen columns, partial walls, the remnants of a marble basin—all overgrown with ivy.

  No one had been sure, Serge said, if it was a real structure or if it had been built in the eighteenth century when it was in vogue to erect faux antiques on one’s property, romantic trysting places built to resemble old ruins.

  As Jac stood in its shadow, twilight descended around her.

  Her cell rang.

  “I’m here,” she told Griffin. “I think that . . .” She paused.

  She was looking into a charming structure but seeing something quite different. For a moment it was a complete building. A medieval chapel with a stained glass window and an altar and pews and . . . and then the mirage disappeared and the ruin was back.

  “Jac?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you there? Are you all right?”

  “It’s just the light playing tricks on me.”

  “What kind of tricks?”

  “For a moment I thought I could see what this once was. A chapel that belonged to the house. It had a baptismal font and an altar and an opening in the floor th
at led to a crypt.”

  “You just saw all that?” He sounded worried.

  “No. The way the sunlight was hitting the ruins, I could see the layout and was just guessing about the rest.” Over the years, Jac had become adept at telling quick lies to hide the truth of her hallucinations when they proved too difficult to explain. Now she was falling back into the old pattern.

  “Why did you want me to come here?” she asked Griffin.

  “I needed you to call me from out of the house. I didn’t want anyone listening to our conversation.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “It might be. I’ve done some research on Melinoe. She has a reputation as a ruthless collector. Over the years she’s resorted to some questionable practices in getting what she wants.”

  “Illegal practices?”

  “Not exactly, no. But not reputable either. You can’t trust her, Jac. And I’m not sure her stepbrother is any better. There are so many rumors swirling about them. Their odd relationship with each other is just the beginning. I think you should give this up and go back to Paris.”

  Instead of this reinforcing her fears, it had the opposite effect. It made her more determined not to give up. If anyone could finance and make it possible to discover René’s secrets, it would be Melinoe. Robbie had thought so. Robbie had been so sure of it he’d had his last breath captured.

  “I need to see this through.”

  “But it could be dangerous.”

  Jac had been going to tell him about the ambergris switch, but now she refrained. It would only give him more reason to insist she return to Paris.

  “I don’t need to trust them, Griffin. I just need to create the formula and find out if it’s real—or just another fantasy.”

  “And you have to do that with them?”