by M. J. Rose
I wished I’d felt some satisfaction that Margaret was suffering, but her pain didn’t mitigate mine. Just mirrored it and made me all the more aware of the scope of my loss. Of the magnitude of my misery.
Watching Margaret, I suddenly wondered how she had discovered it was Isabeau who’d spied on her. Who had told her? Did it even matter? It was Margaret who had ordered the gloves, who had exacted her revenge.
Except it did matter, and I thought of little else during the next few days as I accompanied Isabeau’s body to Barbizon to the tomb where Catherine had given me permission to inter her. And I continued to think on it as I returned to my laboratory in the Louvre, to resume my work on the formula.
My third night back, close to midnight, the door that connected my lair to the queen’s chambers opened. Of course I expected Catherine. She had been checking on me often, treating me more like one of her sons than one of her servants.
But it wasn’t the queen; it was Cosimo Ruggieri. His sly smile was on his lips, amused, it seemed, by my surprise.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “That is a private entrance.”
“I came to offer my condolences.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I don’t enjoy watching people suffer.”
His eyes said the opposite. All of our adult lives, this man and I had been in competition. Somehow I couldn’t believe that now his heart was breaking for me.
“What do you want, Ruggieri?”
“To help you find the answer to your puzzle.”
Yes, this I could believe. He was a magician. Of course the idea of reanimating dying breaths would appeal to him.
“Catherine has asked me to assist you. Two of us working together are twice as likely to find a solution.”
I didn’t want the help, but I so longed to find the answer, to bring back my Isabeau, I allowed him to assist me.
And so began a series of days when the rancid charlatan worked in my laboratory, trying out various ridiculous ideas. First he tried using the water bowl that Catherine was so adept at, to see if he could see the solution there. Then he sought it through smoke seeing and crystal gazing. He put one of the bottles in the center of a pentagram and went into a trance. He wrote pages of copious notes. He suggested using essences and oils that I had never heard of and believed he was making up. In short he exhausted me and stole time that I might have put to some use.
We had been working together for a full week before I gleaned his motive. I had gone out to get some water, and when I came back, Ruggieri was bent over my book of fragrance formulas, studying them.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just curious about your methods.”
“Since when have you become interested in perfumes?”
“I’m not actually interested in them as perfumes but as possible portals that we can travel through to reach other levels of thought.”
“Stairways to other times?”
“Yes, if you will. I made a relaxing potion for Margaret that enabled her to see into the future. It was no different than all the other relaxing potions I’d made her, so I wondered if it was the combination of my potion and the perfume she was wearing that had affected her so.”
There was something about the way he said the princess’s name that alerted me. Who can say what it was? To this day I don’t know. But my skin prickled, and I felt shivers of cold up and down my arms.
“What was the perfume she was wearing—one of mine?”
“Yes, I believe so,” he answered.
“Can you describe it?”
For all his brilliance Ruggieri didn’t know I had any ulterior motive and described the fragrance, quite well I thought.
“Jasmine and lilac and lily with a bit of pepper, I think.”
Yes, I had made that fragrance for Margaret and given it to her just the day before she’d sent Bernadette de La Longe to me to obtain the poisoned gloves.
And then I remembered something that Isabeau had mentioned that at the time had not seemed important.
When Isabeau had gone to Catherine to tell her about Margaret’s planned assignation with de Guise, there were other people in the room. I hadn’t asked and Isabeau hadn’t told me who they were, except Isabeau had mentioned that the queen had been reading the water bowl when she had arrived. And the queen used it while Isabeau was still there to see if there was anything else she could glean about her daughter and de Guise.
I did not accuse Ruggieri there and then. He would just deny it. Instead, the following day, I went to see the princess, pretending to show fealty.
Margaret was seated at a desk when I was shown in. I presented her with a new scent, which she accepted with pleasure, though she was somewhat subdued. Since the marriage plans of the duke de Guise had been announced, Margaret’s manner had become listless. In time, she would recover to some extent, but never again was she the wickedly beautiful and vibrant girl she had been that summer.
As I watched, Margaret uncorked the bottle, sniffed at it and applied it to her wrists. For a moment I wished again that I’d poisoned this perfume. I’d been dreaming of doing just that. Only my loyalty to my queen had prevented me. One death had been enough. Isabeau was gone, and killing Margaret would not bring her back. Only I could do that by finding the formula. And to do that it seemed I needed something no one could give me: divine intervention.
“This is lovely, Maître René. What is in it?”
Margaret was even more interested in perfume than her mother and in time would bring other perfumers to the court who would create a business in Grasse. I’ve watched it grow these years, from the sidelines here in Barbizon, and it is impressive.
I recited the list of ingredients.
“Well, it’s lovely, and I thank you.”
I bowed. And then asked: “If I may, Your Highness?”
“Yes?”
“I have a bold question.”
“Yes?”
“Since they were my gloves that your lady-in-waiting gave to Isabeau Allard . . .”
Margaret flinched. This was highly inappropriate of me, but the princess had known me for her whole life.
“What is it you are asking?” Her voice was pulled tight. The cords on her neck stood out.
“Can you tell me how you learned that she had spied on you?”
“It was a guess.” Margaret looked down at the bottle I’d brought.
“I know you better than that. You are too intelligent to make a guess and act on it. Please indulge me and tell me how you found out?”
“Why do you want to know, René?”
“Because they were my gloves . . . because she was your mother’s lady-in-waiting . . . because I wish I could have prevented what happened to her and to you.”
She smiled. The princess was far more beautiful than her mother, but only on the outside. She was selfish in ways Catherine had never been and could never be. Or so I believed.
Leaning forward, Margaret put her hand on mine. “I appreciate that, René. It was a terrible day. My life . . .” She broke off. “It was Ruggieri who told me, who exposed the little bitch.”
There it was. I had my answer. The answer I had suspected. As I walked back to my laboratory, I wondered what I could do with the information. The magician was important to Catherine. I couldn’t be the one to tell her of Ruggieri’s deception. But I could expose him in other ways. Take away what he loved and cared about. Do to him what he had done to me.
The one thing that mattered to Ruggieri as much as Isabeau had mattered to me was his position in Catherine’s court. And so the next day I set off to visit the astrologer Nostradamus, who had come to the Louvre before. He’d read the queen’s charts and forecast her husband’s death. She’d told me then how impressed she was with him.
I brought Nostradamus back to t
he Louvre. The queen, delighted to see him, gave him an elaborate suite of rooms and visited with him for hours.
It was torture for Ruggieri. But as it turned out, that wasn’t enough for me.
So I planned. And waited. And finally I made a discovery that enabled me to exact my revenge.
As I write this, six years have passed since Isabeau died. Six years since I left the Louvre and moved here to Barbizon to devote all my time to finish the formula to bring back the dead through their souls.
Last month, finally, I believed I’d solved the puzzle that Serapino had labored over for so long. I mixed it into all the breaths I had collected. And then a strange thing occurred.
I keep a hive to harvest honey, and four bees became trapped in one of the test bottles. I noticed them in time to free them before they suffocated. But the next morning I found four dead bees on the stones. What did that mean? When inhaled by an infant, the elixir was supposed to bring the dead back to life, not do harm.
But what if I was wrong?
I returned to Paris and, without telling Ruggieri, enlisted him to help me learn more about what Serapino began and I had finished. I would expose him to the mixture. If it was harmless, Ruggieri would live to an even riper old age and I would have to devise another method to exact justice.
But if I was right and it wasn’t harmless . . .
I never meant to play God, but that is what I did. Now, as I look back, I don’t regret my actions even if others will deem them wrong. I was an old man who fell in love with the scent of a rose. And the hope of smelling Isabeau’s gardens again was worth all risks. Even if I spend the rest of my days in hell, I do not regret my efforts.
The mixture I’d created had indeed turned out to be the opposite of what Serapino and I expected. The combined breath and elixir, if kept in a tightly closed vessel for a month or more, produced a poison, a lethal weapon.
It took four days for the illness to take hold of the magician and fell him. I watched the demise of my nemesis with satisfaction. Visiting him often. Checking on his progress. And then the night came when the end was near, and Ruggieri knew it as well as I did.
“You have done this to me, René, have you not?” Ruggieri asked, his voice faint, his lips dry and cracked, his body bloated, his skin yellowed.
I did not need to answer. He already knew.
“But you’ve exacted your revenge on the wrong person.” His smile was evil.
I visited his sickroom to take satisfaction in his illness. He had been responsible for me losing all that mattered to me. But now it appeared he was the one taking satisfaction.
“I don’t believe I have. ‘An eye for an eye,’ Ruggieri,” I said, quoting scripture.
“Then it’s your queen whose eye you must go after.”
“You talk nonsense,” I said stridently, even as a shiver traveled down my spine.
“All this time you believe that I acted alone? That I went to Margaret on my own? Did you underestimate our mistress to that degree?” These were the ramblings of a dying man. Ruggieri didn’t know what he was saying.
“What nonsense you speak.” I shook my head.
“Catherine arranged everything, you fool. She could not risk one of her spies leaving the castle and sharing all the secrets she knew. The gossip of Margaret’s affair alone would have destroyed Catherine’s plans to marry the princess to the Protestant. All of Catherine’s efforts and secrets were at stake; the future of France was at stake.”
And then Ruggieri laughed. Despite his sickness and his weakened state, Ruggieri laughed and laughed, taking pleasure in my surprise . . . and . . . my devastation.
Catherine had been responsible? My queen?
Yes, I knew she was a Medici. A determined ruler and a powerful force. Yes, I had seen her connive, spy, destroy and even kill. Had I not aided and abetted her with my poisons? We had spent over four decades together, and I had given her everything she had ever asked of me. But I had never imagined that in the end she would be the one to take from me the only thing I had ever longed for.
Hours later, I watched Catherine’s astronomer and astrologer, her magician, die from inhaling the breath of a long-dead nobleman mixed with a fragrant elixir.
Nothing can bring someone back to life. Nothing can reanimate a breath. The secret, which is not so secret after all, is that the people who we love live on in our hearts, in the beat of our blood. The memory of Isabeau lives in every single breath I take. And on my deathbed, as I take in her last breath, she will be there with me, as alive and vibrant and wonderful as she was on every day that I knew her.
The dead do not have to be reanimated; they live as long as someone who loved them is alive.
Chapter 49
THE PRESENT
MANY MONTHS LATER
PARIS, FRANCE
Something woke Jac. Reaching out, she felt the space beside her. Cold. Empty. She listened. All was quiet. Opening her eyes, she peeked at the digital clock on her bedside table: half past two. Sliding out of the bed, she shrugged into her robe, padded out of the bedroom and walked down the hall toward the nursery.
More than three centuries of children had spent their infancies here in the L’Etoile mansion on the Rue des Saints-Pères. Dozens of them, including her grandfather, her father and her brother.
And now, Jac thought, her son would grow up here. Perhaps, like the generations before him, he too would fall in love with the world of fragrance and choose to devote his life to creating beautiful scents and evocative dreams.
The door was opened. Brahms played on the baby’s music player. The only illumination came from a night-light teddy bear. But it was enough for Jac to see by.
Griffin had fallen asleep in the rocking chair, his ten-week-old son on his chest. The baby wasn’t sleeping, though. His eyes were wide open as he watched Jac approach. On his little face was a peaceful, almost bemused expression. As if he were saying, So much for him putting me back to sleep.
Jac reached down and lifted her son out of her husband’s arms. The baby snuggled into the embrace with a contented murmur. Holding him close to her breast, Jac walked over to the window seat and sat down.
Rocking the baby to the music, she looked out on the moonlit garden. From here she could see the maze and follow the path to its center, where she and her brother used to play hide-and-seek among the fragrant boxwoods. At the maze’s heart sat two stone sphinxes Robbie had named Pain and Chocolat—after their favorite breakfast croissant. This is where she had finally scattered Robbie’s ashes and let his last breath float away in the breeze.
From here, Jac could see the glass doors to the workshop where her grandfather had created so many wonderful perfumes and where her father built the small perfumer’s organ for Jac and Robbie. Where they had played at being perfumers for hours, concocting impossible scents.
All the generations of L’Etoiles had left their mark here. Here, all around Jac, was history, passion and life and death. It was part of her and now it was part of her son.
She rocked the baby in her arms. This tiny baby who she had so much love for already. Across the room, she glanced at his father. Griffin had been right. They’d had a destiny and a choice: to fear the future or learn from the past. To accept that not everything can be understood except this—except what she’d finally learned—that love was real. It hurt and was work and it failed sometimes, but Serge had shown her: it’s the most real thing we can experience and know.
Jac bent her head to her son’s. Her lips touched his fine brown hair that was just like his father’s. The baby had his father’s dark-blue eyes too. And his mouth was the same shape as Griffin’s.
But the baby’s smell . . . she inhaled it again . . .
Her brother’s ghost had not revisited Jac after she’d left the château. She’d waited for his presence to reappear, but after she’d felt that push ou
t the door, she never sensed him again. He seemed to have abandoned her. And so she had been forced to mourn him and feel all the grief and sadness she’d avoided and finally accept that he was gone.
Until that night, in the hospital, the first time the nurse put her baby in her arms. Suddenly a warm golden glow filled the room. Jac knew it was Robbie. And in that embracing light, when she’d bent her head to kiss her infant son, she noticed something extraordinary.
It was impossible for a newborn to smell like anything but baby powder and mother’s milk. But her baby did. He smelled of the scent she and Robbie had made up when they were children, the Scent of Us Forever. Cinnamon, carnation, patchouli, a little pepper and some jasmine. Spicy, dark and mysterious, it was a treasure hunt of a scent full of the mischievousness of childhood.
Jac knew her long quest to understand reincarnation had finally ended. She no longer needed explanations or proof.
We don’t need a magical elixir to reanimate a dying breath and bring someone back to life. We don’t need meditation tools or ancient formulas or hypnosis. The secret, which is not so secret after all, is that the people who we love live on in our hearts, in the beat of our blood. The dead live as long as someone who loves them lives.
Her baby’s soul was alive with Robbie’s soul. Reincarnated with her brother’s love. With her mother’s and her grandparents’ love. Alive with the love of those who were gone and who she missed so very much.
And her baby’s soul was alive with the love of one person who was not gone at all but sat, still sleeping, in the rocking chair.
She looked over at Griffin.
Jac settled back and inhaled her baby’s smell once more. She would tell Griffin soon about the scent . . . wanted to share it with him . . . but for now it was her secret. Hers and Robbie’s.
Author’s Note
As with most of my work, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale.
Officina Profumo–Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, one of the world’s oldest pharmacies, was founded in 1221 in Florence by the Dominican Friars who made herbal remedies and potions. The first “Eau de Cologne” has been attributed to the pharmacy’s 1500s citrus and bergamot scented water created for Catherine de Medici.