The Book of Lost Fragrances

Sixty

PARIS, FRANCE, 1810

Marie-Genevieve had agreed to accompany her husband because she couldn’t think of any reason to say no. But she didn’t want to make the trip from Nantes to the place where she’d been young. Memories weren’t always her friends. Often they woke her at night and held her hostage. The brutal revolution that had begun in that city had robbed her of all her family. Her mother and father, two sisters. All imprisoned. Then killed.

In Paris, all the ghosts would be there to greet her. She’d have to walk down streets she’d traversed as a girl. She’d have to see the specter of her past. Of Giles.

But her husband wanted her to go. And she had no excuse to refuse him. He was a kind man. He’d saved her life when he found her-mostly dead, half drowned-on the shore of the Loire River. The priest she’d been bound to had used his last bit of strength to untie them and to give her a chance to survive.

Without his dead weight, Marie-Genevieve had risen to the surface. Sputtering, choking, she gulped in air. Took in water. If not for the current, she wouldn’t have lived. But the river had pushed her onto the shore.

The first two days in Paris were not as emotionally trying as she’d expected. There had been so many changes in the past fifteen years that Marie-Genevieve’s memories were mitigated by the shock of the new.

On the third morning, she was so relaxed that when their carriage crossed the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, she was watching a young woman trying to control her three little children and didn’t focus on where they were. Or ask where they were headed.

Then the carriage turned onto Rue des Saints-Pères and pulled up in front of the building.

Marie-Genevieve turned to her husband. “Where are we?”

“A surprise.”

Except she’d never told him anything about L’Etoile.

“I don’t understand!”

Couldn’t he hear her panic? Why was he smiling?

“I’ve heard they make the finest fragrance in all of Paris here. I wanted to buy you something to remember the trip by.”

“It’s too dear. We’ve spent enough money.” She was looking at her husband. But over his shoulder, through the window, she could see the door to the perfume shop that she used to go in and out of a hundred times a week. The door opened. Someone was coming out. At first Marie-Genevieve thought it was Jean-Louis L’Etoile. Tall. Gray hair. Eyes so blue she could see them from here.

He noticed the carriage. Glanced in. Right at her.

There were ghosts here after all. Giles had died in Egypt when she was still a girl. He was long dead.

Except the man who was looking in at her, staring at her as if she were a ghost too, was very much alive.

Their gazes met. For a few seconds, Marie-Genevieve forgot she was married with two children and sitting in a rented carriage with her husband. The sound that escaped from her lips was a sob blended with a laugh.

“Are you all right, ma chérie?” her husband asked.

“I don’t feel well…”

That night, once her husband was asleep, Marie-Genevieve stole out of the hotel room. It was only ten blocks to Rue des Saints-Pères. The streets weren’t dark and dangerous. She wasn’t a forty-two-year-old woman with streaks of gray in her hair anymore but seventeen again. She didn’t lumber, she flew.

The door to the store was unlocked despite the hour. Even though they hadn’t made contact, hadn’t arranged for the rendezvous, he was there. Sitting in the darkened boutique. Waiting.

“How did you know I would come?” she asked.

“Where have you been all these years?”

They both started talking at the same time, but before either of them finished, he reached out for her. They were in each other’s arms until the first rays of the sun set the bottles of perfume alight.

Marie-Genevieve managed to return to her hotel before her husband awoke. While she dressed, she tried to behave like herself. But it seemed as if she’d lost twenty years of her life. She didn’t recognize the man she’d married. She had forgotten the life she’d been living.

They had four more days in the City of Lights. Each night, she pretended to fall asleep quickly and then lay beside this stranger and waited for his breathing to slow. Then she’d get out of bed, dress and steal away.

The dark was her ally. Assignations of the night were so common in Paris she was invisible. She disappeared into the shadows and ran into her lover’s arms.

Her last night, after they’d made love, as she was still lying in his arms on the settee in the workshop, Giles told her he wanted her to leave her husband and stay in Paris.

“You and I are both married, we have children!” she cried.

“You can bring your babies. I will buy you a house. I’ll live with you there and work here.”

She shook her head. “Ce n’est pas possible.”

He got up and went to a cabinet. Opened it and extracted something. Marie-Genevieve’s eyes were so full of tears, she couldn’t tell what it was.

“You don’t have a choice,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“The Egyptians believed in destiny. In fate. We are each other’s fate.” He held out a leather pouch and emptied its contents into his palm. “Smell.”

She looked down at the pottery that he held in his hand, and the world began to swim. At first she was terrified. It was the way she felt in the Loire so long ago. Black. Cold. The stink of mud and slime. And then small, gentle hands of scent pulled her away from Nantes. Back, back to someplace she’d been before. These scents were purples, deep maroons, velvet navy, and starlight. A man with dark skin sat beside a woman with raven-wing hair, holding out a jar to her.

Like seeing her reflection in the Palace of Versailles Hall of Mirrors, Marie-Genevieve was looking at herself-except she was seeing Iset, head bent over her lover’s hand, smelling the unguent he held.

The man, Thoth, was speaking in a language Marie-Genevieve had never heard before and yet understood. He was speaking the same words that Giles had just uttered.

“We are each other’s fate.”

Then she heard her name cried in a voice that was of the present. It yanked her out of her dream. Her husband’s voice. The kind, gentle vintner who had saved her life was standing in front of her, his eyes wild with anger. He held a pistol. His hand shook.

The dawn light shone through the windows and glinted on the hilt of the weapon. If Marie-Genevieve thought her gentle, God-fearing husband was capable of using the gun, she would have thrown herself in front of Giles. But it was inconceivable.

“I won’t let you take the only thing I ever wanted!” he shouted at Giles and then, without any hesitation, pulled the trigger.

A fortnight later, at home in Nantes, Marie-Genevieve read in the newspaper that Giles L’Etoile had died of a gunshot wound. She couldn’t eat or sleep. Didn’t speak to the man she was married to. She took care of her children in a fog. She was focused only on the bedside of the man she’d loved since she was a very little girl. Who’d held his hand? Who’d whispered words of comfort as he slipped away from this world into the next?

If only she had not gone to Paris, Giles would still be alive. He had died because of her. But Giles had said they belonged together. Two children who had been inseparable since childhood-almost, Marie-Genevieve’s mother used to say, as if one was the right glove and one was the left.