The Collector of Dying Breaths

Chapter 32

MARCH 24, 1573

BARBIZON, FRANCE

The note was delivered by a page, and there was nothing unusual about its appearance or delivery to alert me that it was portentous. The seal was dark red and appeared, with a cursory glance, to belong to the queen, so at first I was confused by the unsigned message.

I am going to evening matins at Sainte-Chapelle. If it is possible for you to meet me there, we might have some time afterward.

As I was noting that it was not the queen’s hand, a particular scent wafted up toward me. No signature had been required after all. I recognized the perfume and knew without a doubt and with a quickened heart who had sent the letter.

Of all the churches in Paris, I preferred Sainte-Chapelle. Smaller than Notre Dame, it is one of the most beautiful and intimate, and if you want to talk to God, it’s best to do it where you don’t have to shout to have yourself heard. Yes, I am a cynic when it comes to religion. Having been raised by monks, I am all too aware of how the rules of the church benefit the church and not the common man. But we fragile humans need to believe in something. Need to have someone give us answers and rationales for the terrible things that happen at random and without recourse. Saying the almighty has his reasons, even if they are not visible to us at the time, enables many poor souls to accept the suffering of their lives here on earth. And that is, in the end, if not a good thing, at least a reassuring one.

If you had asked me what I believed in as I prepared to leave for Sainte-Chapelle, I am not sure what I would have said. The marvelous events assigned to the saints were just as fantastical and absurd to me as Ruggieri’s magic. But that night in the small church, a miracle did occur. I am sure of it. And if there is a God, I thank him for it.

When I arrived, the church was awash in glowing colors as the setting sun illuminated the west wall of stained glass windows. A marvel of architecture and design, the apse is almost all windows on three sides so that at every time of day you feel as if you are enclosed inside a jewel box. No queen or king ever had such riches. Rubies and sapphires and citrines and emeralds at your feet, on your hands, your face, painted across the lighter-colored garments of the parishioners.

I took a seat and tried to find Isabeau in the congregation without being obvious. She would be with other ladies-in-waiting, and I didn’t want to arouse suspicion among them. When I didn’t see her, I planned to tarry afterward, assuming her plan was to break away and find me.

Soon after I was seated, the chants began. The monk’s songs, the heady incense, the intensity of the colors, all began to work on me. I felt as if I were slipping deeper inside my mind, leaving my surroundings and entering a profound state of peace. So preoccupied with Ruggieri and the jobs Catherine had been giving me of late, I had been unable to settle my mind for quite a while. But that evening I was lulled into a state of calm by my surroundings. I didn’t fall asleep, I’m sure of it. But I was in a half dream state, floating on the scents and the sounds.

As the Mass continued, I held my rosary and automatically moved my fingers on the beads as I had been taught so long ago. All habit. I was no more praying than I was sleeping. But the movements of my fingers were as mesmerizing as the sounds and the smells.

It was in this state that the work I had been doing since I’d left Florence came to mind. The souls of so many people were trapped in bottles and locked up in a cellar room in my store. By this point in my life, I had collected over twenty dying breaths. From Serapino’s to King Henry’s and Catherine’s sons’ and well as those of others not as famous. Despite all my work and labor with Serapino’s unfinished formula, the solution still eluded me all these years later.

I’m no longer quite sure how my thoughts progressed the way they did or where my inspiration came from. I recall there were massive amounts of roses in the church. It being summer, they were in bloom in all the gardens of Paris. The nuns had picked huge bouquets and placed them not just on the altar but in front of the statues as well.

The scent of roses has always been a talisman for me. My mother smelled of roses-it was one of the few memories of her that I had. The very first fragrance I’d created for Catherine had a rose base. Isabeau’s husband had bought her a rose-infused water from me.

The roses that filled Sainte-Chapelle that evening were deep blood red and fully opened. The very next day they would begin to die, but during that Mass they were at the apex of their beauty, offering up their most exquisite scent.

I suppose it was because I was thinking about the roses that the sonorous hum of the priest’s voice intoning the Latin liturgy reminded me of buzzing bees. That, coupled with my previous ruminations about Serapino and the dying breaths, jolted my memory, and I suddenly remembered something long forgotten. My mentor had talked about bees just before he died.

At the time I had been so scared. Serapino was expiring before my eyes-and I was trying to capture his breath so I could keep him with me forever. His last words had seemed incoherent mumblings brought on by the potions I’d administered.

There in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, in the jewel-toned light, inhaling the myrrh and frankincense and the roses and listening to the chants I’d heard since I was a babe, I wondered… What if the last thing that Serapino had uttered had meant something? Could he have been giving me a message? Were bees or their nectar part of the formula for the elixir that might animate the breaths?

I spent the entire Mass lost in my ruminations. In fact so deep was my meditation I didn’t realize the service was even over until I felt a coolness on my skin, opened my eyes and saw the church was empty.

The scent of extinguished candles and paraffin now mixed in with the perfume of lingering incense and flowers. Rising, I walked toward the back of the church.

The sun had dropped lower in the sky, and the great rose window on the south wall was barely illuminated. With almost no light in the chapel, I couldn’t be sure if anyone lingered in the shadows.

“Isabeau?” I whispered.

There was no response.

I walked the perimeter of the apse, peering into the shadows.

My heart fell. Isabeau was not there. Had something happened to prevent her from coming? Hesitant to give up, I walked from the rear of the church back to the altar and then down the opposite side. I had just accepted that she wasn’t there when, as I passed the confessionals, I heard my name whispered.

I stopped. Turned. The heavily carved wooden door opened just enough for me to glimpse inside and see Isabeau.

Quickly, I entered the small space.

In Santa Maria Novella, I had been dutiful, confessing my sins weekly and doing my penance. But it had been almost forty years since those days when I acknowledged my petty jealousies and desires to my confessor. And since then, my list of sins had grown long. No one but Isabeau could have enticed me into a confessional that night.

The interior of the confessional at Sainte-Chapelle might have been as elaborate as the one at Santa Maria Novella, but I don’t know. I can remember the walls were painted the same royal blue with gold fleurs-de-lis as the rest of the church, but I only saw them as backdrop for Isabeau.

As soon as I shut the door behind me, she pulled me to her and pressed her lips on mine. Oh, the sensations! And the smell! I had wondered if I’d imagined her scent all those weeks. Could she really have smelled the way I remembered? Had I been drunk? Could any woman really smell of a blooming garden?

But she did, and it was even more intoxicating now in the small space. Without room for us to lie down, we knelt upon the prie-dieu, facing each other, embracing as if we might never see each other again.

Neither of us was thinking that anyone would come back to the confessional now that the Mass was over. We felt safe in our blasphemy.

Isabeau’s fingers worked the buttons on my doublet and then my shirt, and within minutes she was touching my bare flesh and I was shaking with desire.

My being was centered on the rising pressure in my groin. Everything pushing, pulsing. At once I yearned to relieve and also to prolong its exquisite pain.

I buried my face in Isabeau’s neck. Smelled her hair… her skin. There was no longer a world outside of this cramped enclosure.

I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. Was she all right? What had she endured with the duke? How were her actions resting with her? Was she afraid? Was Catherine demanding too much?

But I didn’t speak any of them. I couldn’t. My mouth was too busy making a trail of bruising kisses from her lips down her neck, down across her chest, until I found the swell of her breasts and then one of her erect nipples waiting for me.

With both hands I lifted her skirts and found her naked flesh beneath all the layers of silks and lace. How hot her skin was. Burning. Fevered. And the place between her legs was so wet with juices that they dripped down her thighs. I moaned at this tactile proof that her desire matched mine and forced myself to not dwell on what she had been doing in the weeks since I had seen her. But I could not resist the torture of asking.

“Do you come to the duke like this? All wet and wanting?” The whisper escaped my lips.

“How can you ask?”

“How can I not? Are you ripe like this for every man?”

She laughed. It came from deep in her throat, and the sound almost brought me to climax.

“I don’t open my legs for him, René. I never have for any of them. There are other ways to take care of men. I may be a widow and so not a virgin, but I am one of the queen’s ladies. It is a privilege for these men to be with me. An honor that the queen bestows on them. They accept what I offer, the way I offer it.”

Her hand had worked its way to my pants, and she had released my cock and was stroking it with her long, lithe fingers. I knew then that the men she seduced probably never even realized they were not getting the prize.

“Be careful,” I whispered. “You are too good at what you do.”

“Yes, that I am,” she said and squeezed me in a certain way that stopped my feeling of imminent release.

Beneath my hand she was writhing. Her thrusting, an invitation I found impossible to resist.

Sensing how close I was, and she was, I maneuvered so I could enter her.

As much as both of us yearned to let go, we also knew it might be a long time before we saw each other again and so we lingered, went slowly, savored every stroke, every clench.

Kneeling on a velvet cushion embroidered with the king’s fleur-de-lis, we consummated our mutual confession. I no more took her than she took me. Never before had I been with someone so expert, and while I resented it, I also found it exciting that this woman who knew so much was choosing to be with me.

Deep inside the church, deep inside the confessional, deep inside of Isabeau, no sound penetrated our hideaway. It wasn’t until we had both exhausted ourselves and slumped to the floor that I heard the dull roar.

Recovered, my breathing returning to normal, I pushed the confessional door open and leaned out and listened; the sound was much louder.

“What is that?” Isabeau asked.

It wasn’t a roar now that it was clearer, but instead screaming and shouting rising up to meet us.

I stood. Quickly I redressed, fastening my clothes with racing fingers. Isabeau did the same. Once we were properly attired, we made our way down the nave and out onto the stone terrace that overlooked the inner courtyard. There before us was a scene out of hell similar to the one carved into that first confessional I’d visited at Santa Maria Novella.

“Get down,” I said, and as I dropped to the stone floor, I pulled her with me. The spaces between the stone columns were more than wide enough for us to see the melee and madness going on below.

“Is it the heretics?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes, the Huguenots.” These were the men who had broken away from our church and its rituals and sacraments. Who stole into our churches to defile our statues and saints. Who claimed Catholics were obsessed with dying and the dead. That our pilgrimages did nothing to help people find redemption. Who wanted a simpler religion based on faith in God as the righteous path. The Protestants, one in every twenty Frenchmen by then, wanted freedom to worship and have churches of their own.

Their heresy was not only a threat to our souls; many Catholics believed it was the very reason that plague, famine and disease were visited upon us. God was angry, the Catholics said. And only when all men and women once again worshipped and prayed the right way would God grant peace.

But the battle was not all about God. Is it ever? It was about power, rivalry and wealth. A struggle between the Crown and a faction of the nobility: Louis de Bourbon, Gaspard de Coligny and Henry of Navarre on one side; the House of Guise on the other. And my queen trying to juggle them all and keep the peace.

To date there had been two civil wars, and recently there had been several uprisings instigated by the Huguenots. And from my perch on the terrace, it appeared this skirmish below was their doing. They had lain in wait till the service was over and attacked as the congregation exited the church.

There were bloodied and broken bodies everywhere. The clash of sword fights rang out as individual battles erupted. Knights and ladies who moments before had been praying now lay on the cobblestones, many of them past help.

While Isabeau and I had made love, men and women had been ambushed. By staying in the church, we had been protected. Our coming together had been a miracle and had saved our lives for a fate that was yet to be determined. One that might be far better… or far worse.