Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (42 page)

“Because if you could take care of me and lessen my pain, it would lessen your own?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure.” She looked away from Theo. At the stones. She reached out and touched one. It was warm from the sun. “I think I’ve had dreams about a place that looks like this,” she said quietly. Almost not wanting it to be true. “I always call them my stone dreams.”

“Maybe because of my drawings that you saw at Blixer Rath? I drew this place all the time too. I drew all these monuments.”

“We all dream in mythology,” she said, echoing something Malachai had told her so many times. “I’ve never been able to attach a myth to my stone dreams the way I have to other dreams.”

They’d started walking, and Theo had led her away over a stream
and beyond it to another ruin—an archway built of stone. Ivy climbed the walls.

“What have you dreamed about since you’ve been here?” he asked.

“The last few nights I’ve dreamed about threads. I saw someone from the episode I had, tied up in threads. And another dream of Moira, the goddess of fate with her beautiful silks in shimmering colors—gold, silver, aqua, cobalt, purple, rose. All of them thin—too thin to be so strong. She sat cutting the threads, weeping, singing. I even remember the words to her song.
We are the keeper of the threads
.”

“And what do you think it means?”

“I think I was thrown by the incident in the cave. All I want is to have control over what I see. Over my hallucinations. That and being influenced by your aunt’s loom.”

He nodded.

“Tell me about your dreams?” Jac asked.

“I used to have dreams about being sacrificed to the Minotaur when I was at Blixer Rath. I was one of the teenagers brought into the labyrinth to feed him.” Theo actually shuddered, and it made the hair on the back of Jac’s neck tingle. “I stopped having them,” he continued, “and then . . . when my wife died they came back. More lurid and frightening than ever.”

For a few moments neither of them said anything.

“Are you still having them?”

He nodded. “I never sleep a night through.”

She touched his hand. Felt how cold his skin was.

“It’s because I feel guilty. I’m responsible for what happened to her,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep breath. “I killed her.”

Ash sat in the library of the house where he grew up and opened the journal that his brother had found in a cave by the sea. It still seemed impossible that this fragile document had survived all these years despite the damp, but here it was.

Every story begins with a tremble of anticipation. At the start we may have an idea of our point of arrival, but what lies before us and makes us shudder is the journey, for that is all discovery. This strange and curious story begins for me at the sea. Its sound and scent are my punctuation. Its movements are my verbs. As I write this, angry waves break upon the rocks, and when the water recedes, the rocks seem to be weeping. As if nature is expressing what is in my soul. Expressing what I cannot speak of out loud but can only write, here, in secret . . .

His French was rusty and a few times he had to stop and look up a word, but the story carried him from its somber beginning to the place where it ended without conclusion, telling of a second volume.

Ash found his aunts in the great room of the house, Minerva editing an article she’d written for a psychiatric journal, Eva weaving.

“Have you both read this?”

“Not yet, no,” Minerva answered. “I asked Theo for it. Where did you find it?”

“In the vault. I suppose it didn’t occur to Theo that I’d go looking for it, or he might have found a better hiding place.”

“He’s too preoccupied,” Eva said.

“What do you make of it?” Minerva had gotten up and walked over to Ash so she could get a better look at the book.

In broad strokes, Ash described what he’d read. It took the better part of fifty minutes, and both his aunts remained riveted to the end.

“I don’t know what to think,” Ash said. “Victor Hugo really believed he was talking to ghosts of long-dead men and spirits from another realm. I’ve read about Hugo. He was one of the most respected authors of the nineteenth century and a proponent of reason. How could he have written this?”

“He was also a massive narcissist and a hashish smoker. He had an imagination as big as all of France. I think he believed what he wrote, but that doesn’t make it true. We all know how easy it is on windy, dark nights to believe in ghosts.” Minerva glanced over at Eva for a moment and then back at her nephew. “Perhaps it’s a novel written in the form of a journal. An experiment.”

“Just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That it’s not real,” Eva said. “I’m worried about Theo,” she said. “And what he thinks it means.”

“And what the second half of the journal says,” Ash added. “There’s a powerful synchronicity between what Hugo was going through when he wrote it and what Theo is suffering.”

“You’re talking about the power of suggestion,” said Minerva.

“This journal was written by a man who had endured the greatest loss of his life and who met a devil who offered to bring his daughter back from the dead,” Ash said. “Theo has lost his wife.”

“It’s a very dangerous connection,” Eva said. “Your brother is in the grip of something that’s greater than he is. And he’s susceptible.”

Minerva looked at her sister as if she was going to argue. Instead she shook her head. “I’ve tried to help him. Have found him dozens
of doctors over the years. I’ve exhausted every avenue. I don’t know anymore. Maybe Eva is right.”

Ash was surprised. “I’ve never heard you admitting defeat. Never thought I would.”

Eva came to her sister’s side and took her hand. She patted it the way one would a child’s. For the first time in his life, Ash watched the two of them switch roles, Minerva clinging to her sister, Eva taking charge.

“I know you want to understand everything and find a way to process it that makes sense to you. But there are mysteries that defy even you, Minerva. Even you.”

“Oh, the things you aren’t saying!” Minerva’s laugh was self-deprecating.

“They don’t need to be said.” Eva kept her arm around her sister but turned to Ash. “We need to find Theo before he finds the next part of that book. There’s no telling what he might do. What kind of crazy plan he might try to follow.”

“How are we going to do that? We don’t even know where the cave is,” Minerva said. “He didn’t tell us.”

“He didn’t have to,” Eva said. She pointed to the picture. “Jac noticed it in that photograph.”

“But those rocks could be anywhere.”

“They could, but they aren’t. I know where the cave is.”

Minerva looked at her sister incredulously. “You? How?”

“Our grandfather took me there once.” Eva bit her bottom lip. “He told me that the Shadow showed him the way.”

“You were inside?” Ash asked.

“I wouldn’t go inside. I ran off. I was scared.”

“I don’t believe this—” Minerva started and then stopped herself. “It doesn’t matter what I believe, does it? Eva, can you tell Ash where it is?”

“I can’t climb down there with these old bones, but I can show him the way.”

As Jac and Theo journeyed away from the monument, he explained that before her death, his wife had been seeing a therapist and talking about a separation. “It was my fault our marriage was in bad shape. She said I was jealous and overly protective. She hated living in Jersey. Said it was like being in a fishbowl. She wanted to go back to London. I should have just said yes. Moved there. Taken her back to London. Anything to get her away from Ash.”

“Ash? What did your brother have to do with it?”

“My brother was pursuing her. Trying to seduce her. He was in love with her, Jac. He was attempting to steal her from me. He was making all kinds of promises to her. He even was helping her get a flat in London—”

Theo broke off and looked down at his watch.

“We can go to the beach. It should be low tide by now,” he said.

She wanted to know more, but he certainly had changed the subject.

 • • • 

Jac and Theo walked down the slipway and reached the shore.

“We must have been lucky yesterday to get here when we did,” Jac said. “The sea must completely hide the entrance during high tide.”

“Which had to be why Hugo chose it and how the journals remained undiscovered for so long. But I’m surprised he didn’t just destroy it. It would have been so much easier.”

“He was already a famous writer and so well aware of his own celebrity. I don’t think it would have been easy for him to do that.” Jac peered over the edge of the rocks. She felt the familiar jolt of fear from being on a ledge but fought it.

They made their way down to the entrance. There was still an inch of water on the ground from the recent flooding. They sloshed through the first tunnel to the innermost cave where they’d found the stone hiding place. The floor here was dry.

Together she and Theo removed the amber totems from the front of each cubbyhole and searched each niche.

“There’s nothing else here. Just these little statues and bones,” he said, his voice dejected. “Maybe Hugo didn’t leave the other volume in the same place after all.” Theo shone the strong lantern around the cave, swinging it almost wildly. “Where else could he have put it? This place is filled with cracks and crevices. It could be anywhere.” He sounded panicked.

Jac was systematically going through the cubbyholes again, reaching deeper into each one. It didn’t make sense that Hugo would have hid the two volumes separately.

And sure enough, in the fourth from the top on the left, her fingers felt something. She pulled out an identical package to the one they had already found and unwrapped. It was another journal. The same material and type as the one they had found yesterday.

“Theo, look. I found it.”

Jac opened it. Breathed in the centuries-old fragrance of ink and mold and Fantine’s perfume and began to read.

A week had passed since the incident with Robert and Pauline, and true to my word to my wife, we had not engaged in another séance. Already my daughter seemed less nervous and said she was sleeping better. Neither of my sons complained that our nighttime activities had been abandoned. Charles was still obsessed with the new art of photography and François-Victor with translating Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre into French. They had no trouble keeping themselves busy. Only I felt lost.

There was unfinished business with me and the spirits. To distract myself I took it upon myself to try and help you, Fantine.

I met on Monday and then again on Wednesday and Thursday with the town’s most accomplished jeweler, Pierre Gaspard, from whom I’d purchased several lovely gifts since moving to Jersey. He was much taken with the idea of creating fine silver and gold perfume bottles and jeweled chatelaines. And equally taken by your fragrances, which I’d borrowed from Juliette’s vanity. He even escorted me out to his studio to show me where you might have a laboratory to concoct your elixirs. Gaspard was like a man on fire and had dozens of ideas for how the two of you might collaborate, and he asked me if I would bring you round to meet him.

I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t yet even broached the subject to you, but after seeing his enthusiasm and his interest in meeting you, on Thursday night I went down to the beach to find you so I could tell you.

When I came upon you, you were looking out to sea, hands pressed together, fingers pointing toward the heavens. The aura of sadness around you was so palpable it was almost visible. By then I’d come to see us as partners in grief, and I think I believed that if I could rescue you from your misery, I would finally find relief as well.

“Were you praying?” I asked.

You nodded, and I was surprised. I had not thought you religious.

“For what do you pray?”

“Deliverance.”

“From?”

“From the pain of my grief. I pray for the courage to walk into that water and just keep walking so I might join my child’s soul. Maybe if Antoine had not deserted me . . . perhaps if he had come as he had promised and we’d married, then together we could have faced this loss. But I can’t do it alone. I’ve been humiliated and betrayed, first by my uncle, then by my lover, then by my own body. To love and then have it gone . . . to feel life and then feel only emptiness . . . to have this part of me die and yet the rest of me live . . . What kind of game are the fates playing with me? How much longer can I stand to mourn? I watch for his ship every night, knowing it will not come, and yet I keep walking the beach. I have had enough.”

To hear you wish for the end of your life was an affront to everything I believed, and yet how I understood it. I knew the level of your pain and the intensity of your desire to die.

“You don’t have to give your heart away again, but you can find someone to marry. You can have more children. It would honor the child you lost to have another.”

You turned now, finally faced me for the first time. I saw the tracks of tears on your cheeks. “Does having three other children lessen your pain over the one who is lost?”

“Not lessen the pain, no. But it keeps me wanting to draw breath. It
keeps me alive. In nurturing and caring for another child, you can love the child you lost. You are still young, Fantine. You can raise strong sons and daughters in the other’s memory.”

“And in your novel, Monsieur Hugo, who marries this ruined servant girl?”

“In my novel, the question is who marries the perfumer.”

“I am not a perfumer.”

“Ah, but you are. And I have a proposition for you. I’ve spoken to the jeweler Gaspard, who is very interested in showcasing your perfumes and selling them in his establishment. He’s even come up with ideas for special flacons for them.”

“He wants to sell perfume?”

“Your perfume.”

“How does he know about my perfume?”