Seduction

Nine

THE PRESENT

JERSEY, CHANNEL ISLANDS, GREAT BRITAIN

Most people would have found the room in the Webber Inn welcoming. The walls were covered with cabbage rose and ivy vine paper, slightly faded but in the most charming way. The wicker furniture’s cushions were covered in a matching fabric that gave the room a cozy feeling. The Victorian bed offered thick down pillows and a comforter, and the floor was covered with a plush forest-green carpet.

But Jac preferred sleek and modern over antique and charming. White towels, not pink ones with lace edging. Her work was all about history. The dust of the centuries was always in her hair. She craved clean and simple when she was aboveground.

As Jac unpacked she thought about the ferry ride. Traveling through fog, without being able to see in any direction had been peculiar. The feel of the mist on her face was like moving through spiderwebs. And the odd woman who had guessed too much about her was curious.

It was as if the ferry had done more than cross the channel but had crossed some invisible barrier and deposited her somewhere out of time. She couldn’t even get a sense of what Jersey looked like because the island too was shrouded in fog. There hadn’t been anything exotic about the few glimpses of streets and buildings, cars or people she passed during the twenty-minute taxi ride here.

She knew from studying maps how remote this island was. How cut off they were. She couldn’t just leave if she wanted to. She’d need to wait for a boat to get away-one way to England, the other to France.

Jac put the last of her clothes in the closet, stowed the suitcase and sat down at the desk, where a jug overflowed with old-fashioned damask roses. These were perfumers’ favorites, grown since ancient times for their fragrance. Lowering her head, burying her nose in their velvet petals, Jac inhaled their sweet perfume.

Few modern scents captured the true intoxicating beauty of the flower the way her family’s Rouge did. It was the only rose-based perfume Jac ever wore. But even Rouge didn’t compare to the flower itself.

When she lifted her head, she noticed that outside the window it appeared the fog was lifting. It was only six o’clock and would be light out for another two hours at least, and she wasn’t expected at Wells in Wood till seven thirty. Theo Gaspard had emailed earlier that week inviting her to dinner her first night in Jersey.

As long as you’re not too tired, he’d written. And asked her to please feel free to call and cancel if she was. Don’t feel pressured, he’d added. We have to dine with you or without you. So other than picking up one place setting, Claire won’t be too put out.

Who was Claire? Housekeeper? Sister?

The only thing Jac knew for sure was that she wasn’t Theo’s wife, since he’d written he was a widower.

Jac wasn’t tired. After the last few days in London, her jet lag was gone. But even if she had been feeling any effects from the journey, she was too anxious to meet Theo again to wait. She was also intrigued to see the house he’d described as an ancient monastery built on what were believed to be Celtic ruins. Other than saying there was a funeral mound on the grounds as well as several other ancient ruins, he had kept his description vague.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, Theo had written. You’ll have plenty of time to explore. I’d rather be vague and let you be surprised.

Even though the scent of the roses was lovely, Jac reached for the travel candle she’d brought with her and lit it. This was her ritual whenever she arrived at a new place. Infusing hotel rooms with the scent of Noir settled her. As the fragrance filled the corners and seeped into the fabrics, it transformed a strange room into a familiar one. With so few constants in her life, and so much of her family gone, scent was how she remembered and kept herself sane.

Jac showered and changed. She’d learned the art of dressing from her grandmother who was French to the core. As much as Grand-mère loved her daughter-in-law, she never appreciated the insouciance of Audrey’s blue jeans and boots, worn leather jackets, T-shirts and Indian beads, and neither did Jac. She admired her grandmother’s style and adopted it as her own. The principle was simple. You buy the best there is, even if it means only one good piece a year.

Jac stepped into a pair of black gabardine slacks. Then pulled a round-necked, cream-colored cashmere sweater over her head. She didn’t like wearing colors. Her mother had been wearing a bright green blouse when Jac had found her. Like an abstract canvas, it had been spattered with perfume oils that stained the fabric.

Jac slipped her feet into ankle-high black suede boots and zipped them up. She shrugged on a black and cream tweed jacket. Vintage Chanel that had belonged to her grandmother. The last touch was a matching cream cardigan sweater, tied around her neck like a scarf.

In her ears, Jac wore the small but brilliant diamond studs her grandparents had given her on her twentieth birthday. Her only other accessory was her mother’s Cartier watch. White gold, it hung loose around Jac’s wrist like a bracelet. The tiny diamonds on the 12, 3, 6 and 9 were so small you only knew they were there if you looked for them. There was more jewelry in the vault in Paris, but Jac had never claimed it. Generations of pieces that had passed down from mother to daughter, daughter to son stayed locked away. Jac felt encumbered by those jewels. As if the stories and dreams attached to them weighed too heavily on her when she wore any of them.

But her mother’s watch was different. Sometimes she imagined the ticking was her mother’s heart, still going, still beating. Even more than Jac mourned and missed her, she hurt for her. Audrey hadn’t been able to fight her demons.

It was a failure that had profound effects on the twelve-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter she left behind, the full scope of which Jac would never really know. Who would she have been if not for the tragedy that sculpted so much of her personality?

Jac grabbed her bag, another vintage piece that had belonged to her grandmother, and left her room.

“Forty-five minutes, as long as the fog doesn’t creep back again,” Noreen O’Neil said as she unfolded a map to show Jac the way to Wells in Wood on foot. “And you can’t be sure it won’t.” The proprietress had stylish auburn hair cut to frame an oval face. In her sixties, her skin was creamy and she carried her age well. Wearing navy slacks with a white sweater and simple strand of pearls, she was dressed to impart graciousness but not outshine any of her guests.

“You start here and follow this path, which will give you a lovely view of the sea. But then it’s uphill for quite a ways,” Mrs. O’Neil said as she pointed to a pathway with a gnawed wooden pencil. “And here you’ll have to go through some woods. I don’t recommend it this late in the day. It’s not lit for nighttime strolls and some of the paths border the cliffs. If you dawdle and it gets dark, you could seriously hurt yourself.”

But Jac had hiked and trekked all over the world. She’d gone underground in Egypt and above the clouds in Peru and had never gotten lost. She had a compass on her cell phone, the phone itself and the hotel’s number as well as the number of the Gaspard house.

“Thank you. I won’t dawdle, so I should be all right.” She reached out and took the map.

“But mind you, you can’t come back that way. Not at night. Not under any circumstances. The house is up there on the rocks. It’s a lonely place. The old man made sure of that. Nothing could be built on it that wasn’t already there. He wanted it left rough the way he’d found it.”

“Made sure?”

“One of the grandsons wanted to develop some of the estate. But Alexander Gaspard had protected it in a trust. No one can build a stick of a structure on it for the next hundred years. No matter how good his intentions, he’s controlling that family from the grave.” She shook her head. “It’s wonderful the land is protected, but wills that cause strife among the living aren’t good things.”

Jac wanted to find out more about the Gaspards, but being too nosy her first day there wasn’t smart. Jersey was obviously a small island. A few too many questions before Jac knew all the players and where they stood could backfire. She was, after all, a guest of the Gaspards.

“We can come and get you after your dinner,” Mrs. O’Neil said as she handed Jac a card. “We have a service, my son is the driver. And a very good one,” she added, and smiled.

Jac thanked her and pocketed the card.

Outside, the breeze ruffled the map as Jac consulted it. Four routes were marked in different colors. In her room she had a more complicated topographical map downloaded to her tablet, but for the walk she was glad to have a simple printed foldout.

The path Mrs. O’Neil had pointed out was easily marked and led her around the back of the hotel and along a cliff walk with an unobstructed view. Patches of fog still clung to rocks and hovered over the water, but there was more than enough visibility to see the shoreline, and the distant lighthouse. The horizon was out of focus, and the sky seemed to just melt into the sea. In the mist the vista looked like an impressionist painting, both atmospheric and suggestive.

As she stood and stared, Jac breathed in and sniffed. The salty air reminded her of summers with her brother and her grandmother in the south of France. No matter how often she talked to Robbie on the phone, it wasn’t the same as spending time with him. When this excursion was over, she planned to go to Paris for a few days to be with him before returning to New York. Robbie was her stanchest protector and champion. And the only other person in their family who loved the water as much as she did.

Malachai had once joked that Jac must have been a mermaid in another life. She wasn’t sure which point to argue-that there were no mermaids or that there was no such thing as reincarnation. She’d done neither. Issues and conflicts, strong likes and dislikes could be manifestations of a myriad of things. Not necessarily ever, as Malachai suggested, residual leftovers of previous life traumas.

“If you could just grasp one thread of who you’ve been-of what you’ve lived-you’d be able to reel that past in and learn from all your different souls,” he’d said to her. “Your career is all about learning from the past. Why are you so resistant to this?”

Stubborn, her mother had called her. Robbie often teased her about that aspect of her personality too and told her that objects that were too rigid had a greater propensity to break than those that could bend. He was an artist with scent and a practicing Buddhist who brought his Zen sensibilities to the family perfume business.

The path curved around a clump of trees and then brought Jac back to a different view of the island’s coast. She could see a wide stretch of beach where the shore met the rock. In the shadows of the cliffs were openings to caves. There were over two hundred of them, she’d read. More than had ever been counted or could be, since fallen rocks and land shifts over the years obscured openings.

While most of the caves had already been explored, Theo had written there were still some undiscovered. But what were the chances that the one he’d alluded to hadn’t already been found and stripped? What clues did he have? He hadn’t really revealed anything.

Jac climbed as the path rose up an incline, and then after hugging the edge of the cliff for a few hundred feet, she followed its turn, heading inland.

The woods here were thick with ash, oak and silver birch trees. Now Jac smelled resins and earth with only a whisper of the salty sea. The combination reminded her of a fragrance she had created when she was younger. She sniffed again. It was almost exact. How curious. As she walked deeper into the forest, she thought about how long ago she’d mixed that particular juice and how proud she had been of it.

When Jac was ten and Robbie eight, their father had built them a child-size perfumer’s organ modeled after the giant multitiered desk where every generation of L’Etoiles had practiced their art.

The full-size organ housed over five hundred bottles of precious essences and absolutes-the perfumer’s tools. The miniature contained almost a hundred. A treasure to the children. Enchanted with their gift, they’d invented a game: building scents evocative of emotions and actions. The Fragrance of Loyalty. The Perfume of Shame. The Perfume of Liars.

Jac had used the same scents she smelled now-forest and sea smells-to create what she’d named the Scent of Memory. At the time she hadn’t been able to tell her father why she thought those smells went together and why she thought they related to memory. But now, walking through this ancient forest that her research had suggested might be eight thousand years old, she realized how right she’d been to choose just those essences.

The ground beneath her feet was packed down with the detritus of the ages. Twigs, leaves, seeds, nuts all crushed and trampled on, turning to compost, becoming soil, nurturing more trees and plants that fell and started the process all over again. The water in the sea evaporated and rained back down into the sea. An endless process that Jac had always believed moved ahead in one direction. Just like time.

But in the last few months she’d been presented with the possibility that time was not a straightforward stream. Robbie and Malachai believed it was a continuum that the soul traveled in no one direction, but in all directions, returning to where it began and then jumping across ponds of centuries to find other selves living other lives.

Entering a grove of hazels, Jac walked down a narrow center aisle, noting how the ancient trees’ arthritic branches twisted and turned. Nature was a fine sculptress as well as perfumer. A leafy canopy shaded the allée and the air smelled sweet. Hazels were rich with symbolism, and the air around them was said to be laced with magically charged energy that helped those who breathed it to gain wisdom and poetic inspiration. Witches practicing white magic used wands made of hazel. Forked sticks of hazel wood were used like divining rods to find buried treasure.

At the far end of the passageway was a large stone slab sitting on six stone pillars. In Jac’s research she’d seen pictures of Jersey’s dolmens, but she hadn’t expected to stumble on one her first day here. Something about how the monument fit the site made it look as if, like the hazel trees, the dolmen had grown in this spot from stone seeds.

Jac approached the small pagan temple and stood before it. Felt the wonder of the history that shrouded it. In awe of fragments of ancient times, she marveled at it. The men who built this were long gone. And with them the meaning of the stone arrangement. But proof of them remained. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. It was a lot.

She’d been right to come. To get away. To throw herself back into work again. Yes, the monuments on Malachai’s property were intriguing. But there was so much more potential here. It was like comparing a tiny department store perfume sample to a full bottle of juice.

Jac didn’t know how long she stood there before she became aware of the humming. Then the wind blew through the trees and she lost it. When the wind died down she heard other sounds. Crunching leaves. Breaking branches.

Then a pair of dark eyes glittered at her from out of the shadows and a dog barked a sharp warning.

Startled, Jac stepped toward the stones as if they could protect her.

The dog ran out into the clearing. She was a beautiful sleek creature with wavy and silky fur in a mixture of browns, blacks and creams. Sniffing and inspecting Jac, she seemed to be assessing her to see if she was a threat.

“Tasha, come back, girl. Tasha!” a male voice rang out.

The dog turned, looked back, but didn’t take off.

Through the trees, Jac saw a man approaching.

“Tasha!” he called again. The dog didn’t move. “Tasha, come!”

The man was close enough now for Jac to see that he was tall and lean with sandy-colored hair. His jeans were tucked into boots and he was wearing a worn brown hacking jacket.

He reached the clearing, looked at the dog, then followed Tasha’s gaze toward Jac. His face was in shadow.

“I’m sorry. I hope she didn’t frighten you. She’s really very friendly.” His accent was British. His voice was deep and seemed to pour out of him.

“No, she didn’t.”

“Or at least not too much?” he joked.

“No, not too much. She’s beautiful. I’ve seen paintings with dogs like her in them-but never seen one in person. What breed is she?”

“A Russian borzoi. And yes, very popular with artists in the 1920s. Their profile fit the times. Borzois are excellent athletes. She’s my great-aunt’s-but I offered to take her for a run so I could send her out looking for you. Asked her to find the prettiest girl in the forest.”

Jac was taken aback.

He noticed and frowned. “You are Jac L’Etoile, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

He stepped forward out of the shade. “I was pretty sure but then was worried I’d made a mistake. It’s me, Jac. Theo.”

“Theo?” She tried to match this grown-up man to the teenager she’d known. The dirty blond hair that fell into his face was darker than she recalled. He had laugh lines around his eyes now. His two- or three-day stubble made him look even older than he was. The deep hollows in his face aged him too. His eyes showed a raw unrelenting pain that unsettled her. Once, when they had been close, it had been all right for her to see those emotions. But now she felt as if she were intruding.

There was an awkward moment while she waited and wondered if she should shake his hand or if he was going to reach out for her. They’d lain in each other’s arms in the sun on the side of the mountains. Touched. Kissed. She knew the smell of his skin, of his hair. But so little about this man standing in front of her was familiar. When he was at Blixer Rath he’d been a young boy with so much before him. Troubled, yes. But there had still been the aura of possibility around him. Now he was thirty-three and seemed almost ruined. So much of their time at Blixer had been spent together, holding hands, breathing in each other’s breath. She’d forgotten all that physicality till now, and suddenly was shaken by the memory of it. So she didn’t move closer, didn’t respond, just waited awkwardly as if she were fourteen again and meeting him for the first time.

“I didn’t know it was you,” she said.

She half hoped he’d come forward and put his arms around her and fuse their long-ago bond, but he stayed where he was. Only his eyes embraced her.

“I could tell that.” He pushed his hair back off his forehead in a well-remembered gesture and offered a self-deprecating smile, and she could see the boy she’d known.

Finally she smiled back and felt as if she had arrived at her destination. The island suddenly seemed like a welcoming place. She took the step forward, not him, stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. His arms moved around her back. It was familiar and at the same time slightly awkward. They had lived complicated lives since Blixer Rath. So many years had passed. And then there were the recent tragedies. He’d lost his wife. She’d lost her way.

They separated and he started walking, leading her in a different direction from the one she’d thought led to his house.

“When I saw your picture in your book, I recognized you instantly,” he said. “You’re not fourteen anymore, but your face…” He looked at her frankly, assessing her, in a way that might have been rude if they hadn’t known each other so well so long ago. “You haven’t changed as much as most people do. I can still see the girl I knew.”

Jac had been attracted to Theo when she was a teenager, so she knew she shouldn’t be surprised to feel the stirrings of that attraction again. But she was. She knew this wasn’t real and of the moment; it was a memory response. She’d have to be careful to stay aware of that. The last thing she was ready for was a romantic liaison. She’d only said good-bye to Griffin two months ago. And from his letter she knew Theo was still deeply mourning his wife.

“How did you find me? How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, suddenly wanting or needing to fill the silence with banter that didn’t have any subtext.

“I went to the hotel to fetch you, and Mrs. O’Neil told me you’d taken off on foot. She said she’d warned you it can get dangerous out here in the dark; why didn’t you listen to her?”

“It’s not dark yet.”

“But it will be soon. Evening falls early and quickly here. I know these paths well, but it still can get dicey once the sun sets. Bad things can happen in these woods.”

“Dicey? As in ghosts?” she asked, surprised she’d asked such a jejune question and done it with so little panache.

But he wasn’t looking at her as if it were an odd juvenile query at all.

“Well, I meant dicey as in wolves,” he answered. Paused. “But yes, some say ghosts too. Does that frighten you?”

“Which, that there are wolves or that there are ghosts?”

“Either? Both?”

“Well, I’m not scared of ghosts,” she said. “I don’t believe in them.”

“That’s good.”

“But the wolves do give me pause.”

“That’s good too. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of nature’s creatures. They rarely attack humans unless they’re rabid, but then they can be very dangerous and entirely capable of killing. There’s a horrible local legend about a little girl stolen by a wolf from these woods.” His voice ended in a deeper register. He was frowning again. “Be careful; there are some thick roots under this foliage. Don’t trip.”

With the twilight descending, the forest was taking on a more sinister aspect. After a few minutes, they reached a fork in the path. Jac realized that she might have lost her way in these woods after all. The route Mrs. O’Neil had drawn on the map didn’t include this turning point.

“It’s this way,” Theo said. “I’m parked just on the other side of these trees.”

Once they’d reached the road, Theo opened the Range Rover’s back door for Tasha and then the passenger’s door for Jac.

Inside the car she was aware of Theo’s scent: eucalyptus, honey, cinnamon and oakmoss. The same he’d worn at Blixer. She’d asked him about it once and he’d told her the name, but she’d never heard of it.

With the memory, Jac suddenly remembered the feel of Theo’s skin when they lay in the grass, exploring each other. She looked at his hands on the steering wheel. The same long lean fingers that used to touch her.

As the scenery sped past, Jac watched the green turn to black as what was left of the day gave way to night. After a quarter mile on a narrow twisting road, Theo turned into a long driveway that cut through a forest of silver birch trees. The configurations on their white and black slender trunks looked like eyes. Thousands of eyes watching out from the woods. After a few hundred yards they reached tall stone pillars. On one was a simple bronze sign.

Wells in Wood House

Private

“How long has your family lived here?” Jac asked as the road curved through more woods. There was still no structure in sight.

“My grandfather used to say Gaspards have been in Jersey as long as the stones. But if you mean this house, since the mid-eighteen hundreds. It was a monastery first, built in the twelfth century. Then rebuilt in the fifteenth. In the last hundred and fifty years, the family had it renovated and made additions, but the original structure is still intact.”

At the next bend, in the sunset’s last light, a sweeping vista came into view. Tall hazels bordered this road. Many of them looked as if they’d been there for centuries too. Shaped by the constant wind coming off the water, they were slightly bent over like old men.

From a distance, it looked as if there were stones placed in between the trees, but as they passed the first and then the second, Jac realized they were almost life-size sculptures of hooded figures. Simple modernized forms of men in habits, their faces hidden in their cowls. Some faced the driveway. Others turned toward the house. An army of holy men protecting their fortress.

“Are the sculptures old or new?” she asked. “I know some ancient sculpture has a simplicity that makes it seem current. These could be either.”

“Old. We’ve done some research on them and they predate the foundation of the monastery. The stone they were carved from is prehistoric, so it’s difficult to date them precisely, but the experts think they were sculpted around one hundred CE.”

“During the Iron Age, then, when the Celts lived here.”

“Precisely.”

“They’re so evocative,” she said, unable to tear her gaze away from the monks.

“And quite scary when you’re a little kid.” His voice was full of shadows. “Especially when you look in their faces. Each one seems as if he is seeing right through you…”

He’d been alternating between melancholy and rebellion at Blixer Rath, Jac remembered. Either he stayed by himself in the library reading for hours, or he was challenging every rule, as if he needed to prove he could break them all.

Now that she was seeing where he grew up, she realized how much like this place he was. The unyielding monuments. The rugged cliffs. The haunted woods.

“Did you spend your whole childhood here?” she asked. “For some reason I thought you were from London.”

“We lived in London till I was eight and my dad died. Mum brought us back here. My aunts and uncles and cousins all lived on the grounds. It was a big family then, with my grandfather at its helm.”

“You said your mother brought us back?”

“My brother and I.”

His voice had shifted again. Now it was flat and without emotion. Despite not really knowing this adult Theo, Jac could hear his tension and was certain there were problems between the brothers.

“Younger? Older?”

“Younger. He’s followed in the family tradition and become a banker.” He said banker almost as if it were a dirty word. “And here we are,” Theo added as they approached the house, effectively ending conversation about his sibling. Jac realized he hadn’t even used his brother’s name.