The Collector of Dying Breaths

Chapter 18

THE PRESENT

“I brought Melinoe,” Serge said. “To show her.”

Jac heard the words and used them to pull herself out of where she’d been-lost in another reality, watching a story unfold like a movie playing on a private screen in her own mind.

“I can’t believe what you’ve found. How amazing,” Melinoe said.

The woman’s voice dragged Jac the rest of the way back through the time spill, and she returned from the memory lurch.

“Jac, this is quite miraculous.” Melinoe was inspecting the shelf of essences. “How did you know it was here? Serge said you just reached through the bottles. What made you do that?” she asked.

“I smelled something different,” Jac said. She was speaking slowly, trying to remember exactly what had happened. “It wasn’t a scent associated with anything you’d expect to find in a wine cellar. From there…” She hesitated… She didn’t want to tell them she’d actually seen an illusion from another time showing her the way. She lied. “From there it was just a good guess. I’ve gone on so many digs, searched through so many ancient places… It’s not unusual for there to be hidden doors and staircases or secret rooms and hiding places.”

Melinoe held up an amber bottle. “Do you think what’s in these bottles is still viable?”

“I haven’t inspected them. But since there’s no light source in here, they might be better preserved than normal. Archaeologists have found far more ancient perfumes in digs in Egypt that have retained their scent and not been corrupted.”

“Do you think it’s wise for me to open one and smell it?” she asked.

“It might not be,” Serge said before Jac could answer.

“Let me look.” Jac took the bottle from Melinoe. It was labeled Melisse in the same ornate handwriting as the notes in the book. “It’s lemon balm,” Jac said. “At home our laboratory has some oils that date back to the French Revolution and are still wonderful. But I’ve only smelled one scent that goes back earlier than that. It was only a figment of scent-but I could still identify some of its properties.”

Carefully Jac uncorked it and held it up to her nose.

“It’s faint but smells absolutely fine. Exactly the way it should. When ancient perfumers prepared their ingredients, they didn’t cut corners the way we do now. And René le Florentin was an excellent chemist.”

She offered it to Melinoe.

“Amazing,” she said after sniffing.

Serge took the bottle that his stepsister was holding and smelled it. “So this was made during the reign of Catherine de Medici?”

“If no one used this laboratory after René, then yes,” Jac said. “And no one has a date for when he died-that’s what you said the other day, right?”

“Right. We did the research, but there’s so little we found. René was a figure in the shadows of history-important for what he created for his queen,” Serge said, and then looked at Melinoe with an expression that Jac couldn’t quite read.

Jac felt the electricity between them again, as palpable and confusing as it had been before. Jac didn’t understand what it was she was seeing. There was nothing overtly telling about the way they responded to each other, but she was certain there were complicated emotions running like deep underground springs.

Melinoe reached for another bottle. “I want to smell more of them.” She sounded like a child in a toy store.

“I think it would be better not to open any more of them until I can take an inventory and we read this notebook and know what René intended. They will evaporate more quickly if we expose them to air, and there’s very little oil left in most of the bottles,” Jac said.

“Read what notebook?” Melinoe said.

Jac realized she hadn’t shown her the book. “It appears to be René’s records. Most perfumers kept copious notes. There may be clues here as to what René was working on. I can’t read most of it because it’s in Latin, but I believe there are formulas in here and lists of ingredients.”

“Let me see,” Melinoe said.

Jac opened the book to a list. She pointed and read. “He’s used their Latin names, which are still the names we use for them. Several are very rare. Others can still be bought, but the modern equivalents would be very different than they were in the 1500s.”

Melinoe and Serge bent over the book. Their shoulders were touching.

“What do you mean?” Melinoe asked. “Wouldn’t a rose be a rose, to quote Gertrude Stein?”

“There were different strains of flowers then. The air and the water weren’t polluted. There was no acid rain. On the other hand there were germs and bacteria we don’t have now. So how things smelled and how ingredients interacted with one another would be unique to that time.”

Jac pointed to a word on the list. “Here’s ambergris. A lovely word for aged whale vomit that is a major ingredient in many wonderful perfumes. Everything the mammal ate affected it. Ancient ambergris would have totally different properties than what is washed up onshore today.”

“So if you can figure out the formula for the elixir to mix with the breaths to get them to work, we will have to get ancient essences and ingredients,” Melinoe said with resolve. “And if we can’t get ingredients from the mid-1500s, then we need at least the oldest we can find.”

“Yes, if we want to exactly re-create his experiment, we would need our ingredients to be as pure and authentic as possible. But I don’t think it’s likely we’ll be able to find them,” Jac said.

“We will find them.”

Jac noted the resolve in the delicate-looking woman’s voice.

Serge looked at his stepsister. “I thought we’d discussed this.”

Jac didn’t understand. She must have missed something.

As she fixed her dark eyes on him, Melinoe said, “You worry too much. I know what I am doing at all times.”

“I worry too much precisely because you know what you are doing at all times.”

Families have shortcuts and codes when they speak. She and Robbie had them. But this one was making Jac uncomfortable.

Robbie hadn’t said anything about the psychological dynamics of these two stepsiblings. But then again Robbie hadn’t planned on slipping into a coma as quickly as he had. He hadn’t finished telling her a hundred things. A thousand things.

Thinking about her brother’s death and the ashes she still hadn’t decided what to do with made her wonder: “Do you know where René was buried?” Jac asked.

“Nothing was recorded. But I came across a mention in Catherine de Medici’s daughter’s diary that suggested it was here on the château grounds,” Melinoe said.

“Is there a cemetery here?” Jac asked.

“There has to be,” Serge said. “But we haven’t found one yet.”

Jac shivered. They were talking about another perfumer’s death. Not Robbie’s but a Renaissance perfumer’s. Chills ran up her arms and her back. It couldn’t be a coincidence, and Jac had discovered that for her, coincidences had a way of preceding portentous and often dangerous events.