The Collector of Dying Breaths

Chapter 48

MAY 16, 1573

BARBIZON, FRANCE

As was befitting a lady-in-waiting, the funeral Mass for Isabeau was held in Sainte-Chapelle. The very place where we had trysted. Where we were to be married. I thought she would have enjoyed that. Her sense of irony was as keen as mine. It had been five days since her death, and I had barely slept for working on my formula. More than ever, I had to solve the puzzle of Serapino’s notations. I had to bring Isabeau back to me.

I was not grieving as I thought I would. Not in mourning, for I was not really alive. I too had died that night. Now, I was a ghost who needed to accomplish one thing and one thing only: to figure out the elixir.

Catherine herself came and got me when it was time to go to the Mass. And then sat beside me, her arm linked through mine-abandoning protocol to be with me and shore me up.

I knew that she was doing this for me, but she was also conniving and clever, and she knew that now I had an ever greater incentive to work out the formula, which she wanted as much as I did.

I had given the priest the incense for the Mass. I’d taken myrrh and frankincense and added rose oil. A last bouquet for my Isabeau so that she would leave the world on the wings of a perfume that she loved. Now, as the priest swung the censer, the church filled with the holy scent, and the chanting sounded like tears falling, steady and constant.

The Mass was long and the church was hot. The fragrance I’d made mingled with the odor of the men and women in the court who were not as careful to bathe as Catherine and her ladies-in-waiting. The stench was vile and grew more disgusting as the Mass continued until it seemed some kind of monster, there to haunt me. I brought my scented handkerchief up to my face and buried my nose in it, and as I did, I caught sight of Princess Margaret sitting across the aisle.

Her skin was pale, and she looked ill herself. Weeping, she appeared bereft. I was not so foolish as to think it was about Isabeau. The court was rife with the rumor that the princess had lost her prince. Henry de Guise had been betrothed that morning. He was soon to wed another.

I wished I’d felt some satisfaction that Margaret was suffering, but her pain didn’t mitigate mine. Just mirrored it and made me all the more aware of the scope of my loss. Of the magnitude of my misery.

Watching Margaret, I suddenly wondered how she had discovered it was Isabeau who’d spied on her. Who had told her? Did it even matter? It was Margaret who had ordered the gloves, who had exacted her revenge.

Except it did matter, and I thought of little else during the next few days as I accompanied Isabeau’s body to Barbizon to the tomb where Catherine had given me permission to inter her. And I continued to think on it as I returned to my laboratory in the Louvre, to resume my work on the formula.

My third night back, close to midnight, the door that connected my lair to the queen’s chambers opened. Of course I expected Catherine. She had been checking on me often, treating me more like one of her sons than one of her servants.

But it wasn’t the queen; it was Cosimo Ruggieri. His sly smile was on his lips, amused, it seemed, by my surprise.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “That is a private entrance.”

“I came to offer my condolences.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I don’t enjoy watching people suffer.”

His eyes said the opposite. All of our adult lives, this man and I had been in competition. Somehow I couldn’t believe that now his heart was breaking for me.

“What do you want, Ruggieri?”

“To help you find the answer to your puzzle.”

Yes, this I could believe. He was a magician. Of course the idea of reanimating dying breaths would appeal to him.

“Catherine has asked me to assist you. Two of us working together are twice as likely to find a solution.”

I didn’t want the help, but I so longed to find the answer, to bring back my Isabeau, I allowed him to assist me.

And so began a series of days when the rancid charlatan worked in my laboratory, trying out various ridiculous ideas. First he tried using the water bowl that Catherine was so adept at, to see if he could see the solution there. Then he sought it through smoke seeing and crystal gazing. He put one of the bottles in the center of a pentagram and went into a trance. He wrote pages of copious notes. He suggested using essences and oils that I had never heard of and believed he was making up. In short he exhausted me and stole time that I might have put to some use.

We had been working together for a full week before I gleaned his motive. I had gone out to get some water, and when I came back, Ruggieri was bent over my book of fragrance formulas, studying them.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just curious about your methods.”

“Since when have you become interested in perfumes?”

“I’m not actually interested in them as perfumes but as possible portals that we can travel through to reach other levels of thought.”

“Stairways to other times?”

“Yes, if you will. I made a relaxing potion for Margaret that enabled her to see into the future. It was no different than all the other relaxing potions I’d made her, so I wondered if it was the combination of my potion and the perfume she was wearing that had affected her so.”

There was something about the way he said the princess’s name that alerted me. Who can say what it was? To this day I don’t know. But my skin prickled, and I felt shivers of cold up and down my arms.

“What was the perfume she was wearing-one of mine?”

“Yes, I believe so,” he answered.

“Can you describe it?”

For all his brilliance Ruggieri didn’t know I had any ulterior motive and described the fragrance, quite well I thought.

“Jasmine and lilac and lily with a bit of pepper, I think.”

Yes, I had made that fragrance for Margaret and given it to her just the day before she’d sent Bernadette de La Longe to me to obtain the poisoned gloves.

And then I remembered something that Isabeau had mentioned that at the time had not seemed important.

When Isabeau had gone to Catherine to tell her about Margaret’s planned assignation with de Guise, there were other people in the room. I hadn’t asked and Isabeau hadn’t told me who they were, except Isabeau had mentioned that the queen had been reading the water bowl when she had arrived. And the queen used it while Isabeau was still there to see if there was anything else she could glean about her daughter and de Guise.

I did not accuse Ruggieri there and then. He would just deny it. Instead, the following day, I went to see the princess, pretending to show fealty.

Margaret was seated at a desk when I was shown in. I presented her with a new scent, which she accepted with pleasure, though she was somewhat subdued. Since the marriage plans of the duke de Guise had been announced, Margaret’s manner had become listless. In time, she would recover to some extent, but never again was she the wickedly beautiful and vibrant girl she had been that summer.

As I watched, Margaret uncorked the bottle, sniffed at it and applied it to her wrists. For a moment I wished again that I’d poisoned this perfume. I’d been dreaming of doing just that. Only my loyalty to my queen had prevented me. One death had been enough. Isabeau was gone, and killing Margaret would not bring her back. Only I could do that by finding the formula. And to do that it seemed I needed something no one could give me: divine intervention.

“This is lovely, Maître René. What is in it?”

Margaret was even more interested in perfume than her mother and in time would bring other perfumers to the court who would create a business in Grasse. I’ve watched it grow these years, from the sidelines here in Barbizon, and it is impressive.

I recited the list of ingredients.

“Well, it’s lovely, and I thank you.”

I bowed. And then asked: “If I may, Your Highness?”

“Yes?”

“I have a bold question.”

“Yes?”

“Since they were my gloves that your lady-in-waiting gave to Isabeau Allard…”

Margaret flinched. This was highly inappropriate of me, but the princess had known me for her whole life.

“What is it you are asking?” Her voice was pulled tight. The cords on her neck stood out.

“Can you tell me how you learned that she had spied on you?”

“It was a guess.” Margaret looked down at the bottle I’d brought.

“I know you better than that. You are too intelligent to make a guess and act on it. Please indulge me and tell me how you found out?”

“Why do you want to know, René?”

“Because they were my gloves… because she was your mother’s lady-in-waiting… because I wish I could have prevented what happened to her and to you.”

She smiled. The princess was far more beautiful than her mother, but only on the outside. She was selfish in ways Catherine had never been and could never be. Or so I believed.

Leaning forward, Margaret put her hand on mine. “I appreciate that, René. It was a terrible day. My life…” She broke off. “It was Ruggieri who told me, who exposed the little bitch.”

There it was. I had my answer. The answer I had suspected. As I walked back to my laboratory, I wondered what I could do with the information. The magician was important to Catherine. I couldn’t be the one to tell her of Ruggieri’s deception. But I could expose him in other ways. Take away what he loved and cared about. Do to him what he had done to me.

The one thing that mattered to Ruggieri as much as Isabeau had mattered to me was his position in Catherine’s court. And so the next day I set off to visit the astrologer Nostradamus, who had come to the Louvre before. He’d read the queen’s charts and forecast her husband’s death. She’d told me then how impressed she was with him.

I brought Nostradamus back to the Louvre. The queen, delighted to see him, gave him an elaborate suite of rooms and visited with him for hours.

It was torture for Ruggieri. But as it turned out, that wasn’t enough for me.

So I planned. And waited. And finally I made a discovery that enabled me to exact my revenge.

As I write this, six years have passed since Isabeau died. Six years since I left the Louvre and moved here to Barbizon to devote all my time to finish the formula to bring back the dead through their souls.

Last month, finally, I believed I’d solved the puzzle that Serapino had labored over for so long. I mixed it into all the breaths I had collected. And then a strange thing occurred.

I keep a hive to harvest honey, and four bees became trapped in one of the test bottles. I noticed them in time to free them before they suffocated. But the next morning I found four dead bees on the stones. What did that mean? When inhaled by an infant, the elixir was supposed to bring the dead back to life, not do harm.

But what if I was wrong?

I returned to Paris and, without telling Ruggieri, enlisted him to help me learn more about what Serapino began and I had finished. I would expose him to the mixture. If it was harmless, Ruggieri would live to an even riper old age and I would have to devise another method to exact justice.

But if I was right and it wasn’t harmless…

I never meant to play God, but that is what I did. Now, as I look back, I don’t regret my actions even if others will deem them wrong. I was an old man who fell in love with the scent of a rose. And the hope of smelling Isabeau’s gardens again was worth all risks. Even if I spend the rest of my days in hell, I do not regret my efforts.

The mixture I’d created had indeed turned out to be the opposite of what Serapino and I expected. The combined breath and elixir, if kept in a tightly closed vessel for a month or more, produced a poison, a lethal weapon.

It took four days for the illness to take hold of the magician and fell him. I watched the demise of my nemesis with satisfaction. Visiting him often. Checking on his progress. And then the night came when the end was near, and Ruggieri knew it as well as I did.

“You have done this to me, René, have you not?” Ruggieri asked, his voice faint, his lips dry and cracked, his body bloated, his skin yellowed.

I did not need to answer. He already knew.

“But you’ve exacted your revenge on the wrong person.” His smile was evil.

I visited his sickroom to take satisfaction in his illness. He had been responsible for me losing all that mattered to me. But now it appeared he was the one taking satisfaction.

“I don’t believe I have. ‘An eye for an eye,’ Ruggieri,” I said, quoting scripture.

“Then it’s your queen whose eye you must go after.”

“You talk nonsense,” I said stridently, even as a shiver traveled down my spine.

“All this time you believe that I acted alone? That I went to Margaret on my own? Did you underestimate our mistress to that degree?” These were the ramblings of a dying man. Ruggieri didn’t know what he was saying.

“What nonsense you speak.” I shook my head.

“Catherine arranged everything, you fool. She could not risk one of her spies leaving the castle and sharing all the secrets she knew. The gossip of Margaret’s affair alone would have destroyed Catherine’s plans to marry the princess to the Protestant. All of Catherine’s efforts and secrets were at stake; the future of France was at stake.”

And then Ruggieri laughed. Despite his sickness and his weakened state, Ruggieri laughed and laughed, taking pleasure in my surprise… and… my devastation.

Catherine had been responsible? My queen?

Yes, I knew she was a Medici. A determined ruler and a powerful force. Yes, I had seen her connive, spy, destroy and even kill. Had I not aided and abetted her with my poisons? We had spent over four decades together, and I had given her everything she had ever asked of me. But I had never imagined that in the end she would be the one to take from me the only thing I had ever longed for.

Hours later, I watched Catherine’s astronomer and astrologer, her magician, die from inhaling the breath of a long-dead nobleman mixed with a fragrant elixir.

Nothing can bring someone back to life. Nothing can reanimate a breath. The secret, which is not so secret after all, is that the people who we love live on in our hearts, in the beat of our blood. The memory of Isabeau lives in every single breath I take. And on my deathbed, as I take in her last breath, she will be there with me, as alive and vibrant and wonderful as she was on every day that I knew her.

The dead do not have to be reanimated; they live as long as someone who loved them is alive.