The Alchemist's Illusion

by Gigi Pandian

  Max laughed and started the engine. “Even narrowing it down to three, you’re still pretty magical, Zoe Faust.”

  As we drove away from Astoria and headed closer to real life, I felt less and less magical. The unanswered questions about Philippe Hayden, the Flamels, and the Portland art forger who might have been a murderer began to weigh on me again.

  We rounded a curve in the road and the clouds transformed from leaping rabbits into columns of trees swaying in the wind. But it wasn’t the clouds that had changed. It was my perspective. Just like in a Philippe Hayden painting, this was an optical illusion. Everything was connected to Philippe Hayden. I needed to figure out how.

  Max had a long day ahead of him, so he dropped me at home. I would have been disappointed to part with him if I hadn’t needed to do so much that day.

  I found Dorian and Tobias in the attic playing chess. Tobias was winning.

  “Monsieur Freeman learned very little with Isabella Magnus yesterday,” Dorian said, not looking up from the board.

  “Sorry, Zoe. I didn’t get any closer to finding the stolen painting.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I have a plan,” I said. “You up for a trip to the library?”

  The kids had checked out as many art history books as they could, but there were still more in the library. With all his red yarn, Dorian was looking at present-day connections, but I knew there was more to find out from the past.

  Tobias and I walked under the ivy-covered walkway that led to the library. I needed the help of a librarian, but my heart sank as we stepped into the building. The librarian at the information desk was the one who’d revoked my library card. He looked up with a smile, but his helpful expression turned to a deep frown when he recognized me.

  Before the desk librarian could berate me, another librarian with bright orange hair swooped up to me from where she’d been shelving books. “You’re the chef at Blue Sky Teas, aren’t you?”

  “You recognize me?” I tucked a short lock of hair behind my ear and reminded myself the paper had only come out a few days before. Public attention was fleeting. People would forget about me soon enough. I hoped.

  “Of course.” The librarian beamed. “Your breakfast carrot cake cookies are to die for. It was rad to see you recognized in the weekly. Are you here looking for cookbooks? If so, I’m sorry to tell you that a library patron defaced most of them, so they’re in storage being evaluated for repair.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Tobias said. He steered us away from the other librarian seated at the desk. “There’s something we could use your help with.”

  Tobias and I sat at the most secluded table I could find, looking through the stack of books my librarian fan had brought us.

  I’ve never fully grasped why some artists become famous while others languish in obscurity, but I understand all too well that much of life is the accidents of history. If Nicolas hadn’t found me, what would I have become?

  My stomach gave a loud rumble. I was about to suggest we take a break at the teashop to nourish ourselves, so we’d remain effective, when Tobias’s breath caught. I looked up at him as he began to chuckle.

  “I’ve found your museum doppelgänger,” he said, pushing a book across the table.

  On the center of a page was a painted portrait of two young people, a brother and sister, done in the style of Philippe Hayden. Time stopped. I stared at the portrait and forgot to breathe.

  “Everything okay?” Tobias asked. “It was a silly joke. I’ll get back to work—”

  “It’s not that,” I said with a shaky voice. “I know the subjects of that portrait.”

  How could I not? I was one of them.

  “This,” I said, “is me and my brother, Thomas, in front of the hearth at Nicolas Flamel’s house.”

  I now knew who Philippe Hayden was. And I didn’t know why it had taken me so long to realize it was her.

  thirty-five

  1597, Prague, Bohemia

  The more beautiful a painting, the less likely it was to contain the true secrets of alchemy. That was the way it was—before Philippe Hayden. Alchemy versus art.

  Alchemy had always been handed down through secret codes shared through secret associations. Those coded illustrations resided in woodcuts, not in paintings. Paintings with alchemy as the subject matter existed, but they were painted by artists who had no knowledge of alchemy itself. Those artists had patrons who envisioned alchemy as a romantic pursuit rather than the backbreaking labor it truly was. Therefore the artists painted the pleasing settings their patrons wanted.

  Philippe, meanwhile, wished to hide alchemy’s secrets in artwork that would be displayed, so that more worthy people might discover the science. Men and women, regardless of their stature in life, could have a chance to use alchemy if they so wished. Philippe knew what it was like to be kept outside, unable to obtain delicious knowledge.

  Coming to a royal court was the best way the painter had found to attain the status of a great artist whose work might appear before the public, not only now but in future generations.

  There was one last thing to try. Could such a transformation as had been achieved with the alchemical painting of the gold nuggets possibly work with something living?

  Philippe hesitated, then stepped outside. Night had fallen and the moon had risen. That was a good sign. The moon held power—especially to someone with such gifts. The artist stepped back inside and lit additional candles.

  With the outside world fading away, Philippe used focused intent, this time concentrating on a dying dandelion flower. Using arsenic and dragon’s blood from the alchemy lab, the painter recreated the flower on canvas.

  As had happened with the gold, the flower disappeared from the side table and appeared on the canvas. But at great cost … Philippe collapsed onto the floor from the exertion and did not awaken until first light.

  Stiff joints did not detract from feeling exuberance at what appeared on the canvas that morning The dying flower had not deteriorated further during the night. Its life force had been suspended.

  This was no time to be timid. Confidence was needed for the next stage of transformation to succeed. After several deep breaths, Philippe reached inside the painting. The canvas gave way. The flower and gold now sat in the painter’s hand, exactly as they had been before entering the painting.

  But in great excitement, the painter had failed to look around. Joy turned to horror as the shadow of a man appeared.

  Edward had been watching the alchemist since daybreak. Now that Philippe was working for him, Edward had a key to enter the rooms at his pleasure, yet he still preferred to watch the artist secretly. At first he had considered waking Philippe, who was sleeping not in bed but on the stone floor. As the daylight from the one window woke the man, Edward was kneeling behind a row of canvases. He remained hidden until he understood what the alchemist was doing. This was the secret. Philippe had extracted a living flower and chunk of gold from within the painting.

  “Hello, Philippe,” said Edward, stepping out from behind the canvases. “You and I must speak. It appears I have been underestimating alchemy and you have more to teach me.”

  Philippe nearly dropped the flower, but had the presence of mind to quickly recover. His eyes narrowed and his chin thrust out defiantly.

  That’s when Edward saw it. Philippe had no Adam’s apple. He wouldn’t have noticed it had it not been for other subtle clues that Edward hadn’t thought much of. The artist’s diminutive size wasn’t abnormal; many people had been malnourished in childhood. Philippe’s voice had also not fully matured.

  Edward’s eyes dropped to the painter’s chest. It was impossible to detect its form. The artist wore a loose robe, caked with dirt. Only it wasn’t dirt. Edward realized that the air in this supposedly dirty room had a more pleasant odor than in other houses within the castle walls. The “dirt�
�� was a carefully constructed mixture of paints. And Philippe’s hair. It was not the hairstyle of a woman, yet the short hair revealed a petite head.

  “Who are you?” Edward hissed. “Mademoiselle.”

  He watched in awe as the painter’s eyes grew wide. He’d been right. This was no man.

  “You insult me, sir?” the painter said.

  “If I send for a guard,” Edward said, “he will most certainly have a less pleasant way of proving you are a woman. Tell me, who are you?”

  Philippe’s thin shoulders shook. With rage or with fear, Edward wasn’t sure. He waited for the man—er, woman—to speak.

  “Does it matter?” the masquerading woman asked.

  “No. You’re right. It does not.” Edward took in the painter, seeing him—her—in a new light. “The only thing that matters is that you can trust me with your life. As long as—”

  “There’s always an as long as.”

  Edward arched an eyebrow. “As long as you agree to my plan.”

  The woman nodded. “I have already agreed to teach you the steps to true alchemy.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” Edward said. “You had your chance. Now I desire more. You will show me how to move gold into and out of a painting.”

  She laughed without humor. “You have smuggling in mind?”

  “Such a crass word for enterprising individuals who have faithfully served their king. You and I are going to be Rudolf’s most favored artisans. And very, very rich.”

  There was no use pretending. She wasn’t physically strong enough to resist the men who would tear her robe from her and see she was a woman. “Philippe” nodded.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the scents of the raw minerals she ground and mixed to transform into the pigments that would come alive as images of the natural world. Sulfurous dragon’s blood, earthy ochre, metallic carbon, tinny chalk. Natural minerals she could command. She was not as powerful as Edward, but she was a force of nature with a brilliant mind, with an equally brilliant mind supporting her.

  “If Nicolas Flamel doesn’t hear from me within the week with a message that I’m well,” she said, “there will be trouble. He expects regular letters from me.”

  “He knows you’re a woman?”

  “Of course. I’m his wife. Perenelle Flamel.”

  thirty-six

  “Fire,” I whispered, chastising myself for never seeing it before. “That’s why Perenelle chose the surname Hayden. Flamel means flame in Old French, and Hayden means fire in Welsh. Philippe Hayden isn’t working with Perenelle. He is Perenelle Flamel.”

  Tobias let out a whistle, raising the ire of the librarian who’d suspended my card. I couldn’t check out the book, so I snapped a quick photo on my phone. We left the books and fled to my truck. The sky above had turned gray and oppressive. I pulled my silver coat around me as we walked through the parking lot.

  “You’re driving,” I said, tossing Tobias the keys.

  “Your ankle acting up again?”

  I shook my head. “My memories are.” I stole a glance at the image on my phone. Brother and Sister, artist unknown, France, circa 1700.

  The painting, now in a small museum in France, was accompanied by a one-paragraph description. The curator speculated that the young woman might have been from a bourgeois family who had fallen on hard times because her green dress would have been unusual for a peasant girl of the time. I smiled to myself. Green had always befitted me. Perenelle had dyed the fabric so we could have the dress made for me. And I was neither peasant nor nobility. We had existed in a strange realm of society, creating health and wealth to help others but never enjoying Nicolas’s gold ourselves. The description also noted the flattering way the faces of the brother and sister were featured, bathed in the light of the window in an otherwise dark room. It was true. Thomas’s angelic face held a hint of mischief, as it always did, and his kind eyes were captured exactly as I remembered them. This painting was, the curator concluded, most likely painted by an artist who had familial ties to the young brother and sister.

  “Why didn’t the Flamels tell me she was Philippe Hayden?” I said once we were inside the truck. “I didn’t even know she was a painter.” Perenelle was the one who’d been especially drawn to the more colorful alchemical ingredients, though, and most appreciated the paintings in their home. She made no secret of the fact that she loved art, and I’d seen her sketch me and Thomas, but I hadn’t known she’d also painted our portrait in secrecy. I should have suspected she would do such a thing, but I’d been too absorbed in my own foolish life at the time.

  “I can imagine her reasons,” Tobias said. “A woman in the late medieval era? You know what that’s like.”

  “I’m from the Enlightenment, thank you very much.” I forced a laugh, but it didn’t take.

  “This explains for sure how there are so many paintings attributed to Hayden over a longer period of time than one artist could have lived. They aren’t forgeries. They’re alchemy.”

  Tobias started the engine, and we drove home. We found Dorian in the kitchen, whisking lemon curd in a double-boiler on the gas stove.

  “You missed lunch,” he said petulantly. “And I am out of several ingredients. You left before I could give you my list.”

  “We found something more important,” Tobias said as I held up my phone so Dorian could see the image.

  “I have seen this meme,” Dorian said, never missing a beat with his whisking. “It is very old now, but I appreciate the effort. You look very much like the woman in this old portrait. If the game were a contest, you would win.”

  “It is her,” Tobias said.

  “Pardon?”

  “This woman in the dress—it’s Zoe.”

  In silence, Dorian turned off the burner, jumped down from his kitchen stool, and wiped his hands thoroughly on the apron. He proceeded to take the phone from my hand, his liquidy black eyes looking from me to the screen and back again. “It is true. But how? I thought you did not sit for any portraits.”

  “Perenelle Flamel is Philippe Hayden.”

  “Alors, she is truly the one who has imprisoned her husband!” Dorian cried. “Perenelle Flamel and Philippe Hayden, one in the same, have trapped Nicolas.”

  “No,” I said, shocked by how emphatically the word burst from my mouth.

  “But you were the one who theorized—”

  “Not this. Now that we know Perenelle Flamel and Philippe Hayden are the same person, we know there’s more going on than we realized.”

  “I fear Zoe is hysterical again,” Dorian said.

  “Women throughout history have been called far worse,” I said. “This is exactly my point. Perenelle had to disguise the fact that she was a painter.”

  Although Perenelle had been distant with me, I couldn’t imagine her turning against Nicolas. Especially not after seeing this loving portrait she’d painted of me and Thomas.

  “Zoe, it’ll be okay,” Tobias said. He said it in what I imagined was his bedside manner when he treated patients in his ambulance. “But you have to face the facts. She’s been creating and selling Hayden’s work for centuries—and stopping anyone who got in her way. Everything points to Perenelle.”

  “She imprisoned Nicolas because he wished to stop her nefarious deeds,” Dorian said. “She is a bad woman, Zoe. Trapping someone in a work of art for eternity is a special kind of evil.” He shuddered and folded his wings around himself.

  “No,” I said again. “You’re both wrong. Look at this painting of Thomas and me. Look at the love she put into it. She couldn’t have imprisoned Nicolas.”

  Tobias put a hand on my shoulder. “Max would tell you to follow the evidence where it led, wouldn’t he?”

  “The evidence only tells us she was Philippe Hayden, a brilliant and infamously reclusive painter. People believe Hay
den’s artwork was forged on a large scale for another hundred years, but now we know it was Perenelle the whole time.”

  “Why didn’t Nick mention her in the note?” Tobias asked. “He didn’t say he was imprisoned with her.”

  “He didn’t say she had done it to him, either.”

  “Because you wouldn’t have believed him. Just like you’re not believing it now.”

  “Excusez-moi,” Dorian said, tapping his gray forehead. “My little gray cells have told me something both of you are forgetting. We are missing many words in the letter. This is why we failed to understand that Monsieur Flamel was trapped inside the painting, and believed instead that the work of art contained a clue.” Dorian clasped his clawed hands behind his back and paced as he spoke. “There is most likely additional relevant information we will never be able to learn from the worn piece of paper. We must glean what we can from external facts in conjunction with the letter. First, we know Perenelle to be Philippe Hayden. We agree on this point.”

  Tobias and I nodded.

  “Bon. Second, she is a woman of high intelligence. We know this from her clever paintings that are both visually pleasing and clever with optical illusions. It was also astute for her to take a similar name, so she would sign her signature properly and respond to the name.” Dorian paused and clasped his clawed hands together. “Third, she is an alchemist who discovered the Elixir of Life long before Zoe was born. I have seen her faux grave in Paris. Now, what is always a lurking danger to alchemists when they live too long? Tobias, why don’t you educate us?”

  “Okay, Socrates. But Zoe already knows the answer as well.”

  I walked to the spot in the kitchen where light from the window was falling. Sunlight poured into the kitchen from a break in the clouds. Philippe Hayden paintings commonly captured morning or evening light coming through a window in an alchemist’s rooms. “You both think Perenelle lost her humanity. You believe that’s why Nicolas needed to stop her, so she turned on him and trapped him in the painting.”