Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (47 page)

She took a breath and began to tell their story.

Jac and Robbie had decided to remain in Jersey for a few days until she had all her strength back. And Eva and Minerva had insisted they stay at the house.

In the morning, after breakfast, Jac made a phone call and then asked Robbie if he’d take a walk with her. She had something she wanted to show him.

As they strolled on the path that led away from the main house into the woods, Jac asked her brother how he thought Theo and Ash were going to fare. The night before, after she’d told everyone the story she’d pieced together from all her different hallucinations, there’d been dead silence in the room.

First Minerva and then Eva asked her some questions. But neither brother said a word. Finally, Theo had left, mumbling good night to no one in particular. Ash, who hadn’t made eye contact with Jac since he’d come back from the hospital, had gone a few minutes later, limping as he walked out.

Neither brother had been at breakfast.

“The two of them need time to digest what you told them,” Robbie said.

“Do you think they believe it?”

“I think Theo does. At least a little. Ash will, in time. He’s too distraught now about how close he came to harming you. But the metal star you found, telling them about Gwenore’s birthmark, the same as Naomi’s—even a cynic would have a hard time claiming those were all coincidences.”

The path twisted through a grove of blue-green pines. Jac took deep breaths of the sharp evergreen scent. “I hope they’re going to be all right.”

“So do I.” Robbie paused. “I know you will be,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulder.

They walked on together like that until, a few minutes later, Jac told Robbie they’d arrived.

“Here?” Robbie looked around. He didn’t see anything at first and seemed confused. Then he noticed the Victorian building partially hidden by the curtain of ancient ilex, elm and hazel trees. “What is this place?” he asked.

Jac looked at the graceful ivy climbing up the brick walls, covering several windows. She wondered if Fantine had planted the ivy, if she’d planted the wisteria vine too. Had it wound its way around the porch railing during her lifetime, had she seen it begin to reach for the roof?

“Come, I’ll show you,” she said.

 • • • 

When she’d phoned Ash after breakfast, he’d said he was going to see the doctor at ten, but of course she could bring Robbie by. He’d be sure to leave the door open. Maybe it had been an excuse so Ash wouldn’t have to see her too soon. If it was, Jac thought, that was fine. He was going to need time to accept what had happened.

Jac walked up the stone steps to the front door. “Pierre Gaspard built this to be his showroom,” she told Robbie. “He was a jeweler who worked in glass too. Then when he married, his wife, Fantine, worked here too.” As Jac touched the knob and felt the cool metal under her skin, she had the strange sensation of coming home.

“Fantine, the woman in Hugo’s journals?” Robbie asked.

Jac nodded. He’d told her he’d read the journals over the two days while she’d slept.

As she led Robbie into the house, Jac told him the story Ash had told her. How it had been abandoned for decades until he renovated it ten years before and found all the contents intact.

Even though she’d only seen these rooms once before, she knew her way without hesitating. She almost felt as if the house had been waiting for her and now was content. The dining room’s Moroccan blue glass fireplace sparkled like the sea. The stained-glass standing lamps in the living room shone in welcome.

At last they reached the hallway illuminated with green glass wall sconces. As she stood outside the dark mahogany door, elaborately carved with garlands of flowers, Jac could smell a hint of what awaited them.

“This was where Fantine worked,” she said, and opened the door.

The odor reached out and pulled her in.

Ash had left the light on for her. The hundreds of small bottles glinted in the lamplight. The sun coming through the windows sent shimmering liquid reflections on the ceiling and walls.

“Ash told me Fantine made perfume here for almost seventy years,” Jac said, “until she died in 1924 when she was ninety-four.”

“It’s so similar to our laboratory at home,” he said.

“Strange, I thought so too.”

Robbie walked over to the perfumer’s organ and sat down at the bench. Jac joined him.

“This is fancier than ours at home, though,” he said touching the desk’s carvings.

“I’d imagine Fantine’s husband had a hand in the design. It fits the style of the rest of the house.”

Robbie was sniffing the air just as she had the first time she’d come here. Today the scent of faded vanilla and rose, lemon and verbena seemed even more pronounced than it had before.

“It’s lovely,” he said.

“Yes, a beautiful signature.” She nodded. “It’s haunting. Like she is. I asked the Gaspards about her. What her maiden name was. Who the family of perfumers were who threw her out. None of them know.”

Robbie was inspecting the rows of small brown bottles of oils and absolutes. Each had a rectangular paper label, yellowed and faded, with the name of the essence written on it in once black ink in a feminine hand.

“Amazing so many of the labels are still intact,” he said. “After so long.”

“She must have sat right here to compose her fragrances.” Jac reached out for one of the bottles, twisted off the top and bowed her head to inhale.

“Ash has all Fantine’s notebooks.” She put down the bottle, opened one of the desk drawers and withdrew a green suede-covered journal with the initials FG stamped in gold on the front. She handed it to Robbie.

“Her formulas are wonderful. I mixed one. It’s so rounded and rich. Ash said he would back us if we wanted to work on them.”

“Us?”

“I want to go home, to Paris, with you,” she said. “I’d like to bring Fantine’s strange amber essence with me, the one that causes the hallucinations, and her formulas. The ones for
Morning Pearls Alone
and
Emerald Evening Shivers
. All of them.”

Robbie was smiling.

“I want to rebuild these long-forgotten scents, and I want to do it with you.”

And maybe, she thought, while she worked on the perfume, she could figure out what it meant that she could enter someone else’s past and relive it for them.

Malachai was right when he said coming here might be dangerous. But in that danger she’d also found a gift. Minerva had called it that, hadn’t she? And Eva had honored it with her finest silk. Jac knew she was going to need Robbie to help her learn how to use it properly, respect it, and most of all, not fear it.

Absentmindedly she noticed that the bottle she’d picked up to smell didn’t have a label. Hadn’t there been some blank ones in the drawer where she’d found the ribbons the first time she’d been here? Jac opened it and looked. Yes, there they were along with a pot of glue, a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. Everything she needed.

Robbie was still examining the book of formulas. “You’re right, these are fantastic,” he said.

Jac dipped the pen in the nib and wrote out the name of the essence she’d been smelling. She unscrewed the glue pot and found it too was fresh enough to use. Was that possible? No. At some point Ash must have replenished these items. Over the years surely he’d reattached some of the labels.

“I love the names she’s given her scents,” Robbie said.

“I know.”

Jac brushed the glue on the back of the parchment and affixed the label to the bottle. She kept her fingertips pressed to its edges to give it a chance to dry.

“Jac, did you see this?” Robbie was holding the notebook open to the back inside cover.

Still holding the label down, Jac looked to where he was pointing.

It was signed and dated in faded black ink.

Fantine Gaspard, May 16, 1886
.

And underneath her name was a small drawing. An insignia of an
L
and an
E
inside a crescent moon. It was the family crest of the House of L’Etoile. The same emblem that was on every bottle of perfume that Jac’s family had made since before the French Revolution. They both looked at each other with astonishment.

The glue was dry. Jac put the bottle down. Robbie pointed to its label. “Jac, did you just write that?”

She nodded. “Yes, of course. Why?”

“It’s amazing.”

It was just the one word.
Jacinthe
. The French word for what she’d smelled in the bottle—essence of hyacinth.

“You mean the coincidence that it’s my name?”

Jac thought of her wonderful grandfather, who’d brought his daughter-in-law a bunch of deep-purple
jacinthes
the day his first grandchild was born. And how Audrey had so loved their sent she’d named her daughter after the flowers.

“No, not so much that it’s your name. That could be a coincidence. Every perfumer uses flower essences.”

“What then?”

He pointed to the label again. “Look at your handwriting.”

She did.

“Now look at the handwriting on the other bottles.” He pointed to one small brown bottle. And then a second and then a third.

Jac scanned the row of them. There was nothing unusual about them except that they were very old. “What is it?” she asked.

“Your handwriting, Jac. It’s the same as hers. Exactly.”

And it was.

In the curls of the letters, Jac could finally imagine Fantine. In the ascenders and descenders could suddenly see her. An earlier L’Etoile sitting at this organ mixing perfume.

Making scent was in Jac’s blood. More than her heritage, it was her inheritance. What she was meant to do. What Fantine L’Etoile Gaspard had been meant to do.

Feeling she had nothing to live for, Fantine had almost died in the sea. But she’d come back from that precipice to create all these glorious scents.

As Jac traced the L’Etoile insignia in the notebook with her fingertip, she thought of the words of the man who had led her here. Who had, like her, and like Fantine, lost something so precious, he wasn’t sure he could survive. But who had, in the end, chosen life.

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.

To Sarah Durand: I am so lucky to have you as my editor. You are amazing and smart and know how to push me onward without ever making me feel like I’m being pushed. Thank you for your help and confidence and enthusiasm.

To the wonderful marketing and PR group, especially Hillary Tisman, Lisa Sciambra, Cristina Suarez and Paul Olsewski.

With heartfelt appreciation to Judith Curr for her vision and guidance and Carolyn Reidy for her wisdom and support.

And to everyone else at Atria Books—from the art department (who does such beautiful covers) to the sales folks who get my books in stores—this novel is so much a team effort and I’m so lucky to have you all on my dream team.

To Dan Conaway for being my agent/knight-in-shining-armor. You have never let me down and always know just how to shore me up. To Simon Lipskar, Amy Berkow, Maja Nikolic, Steven Barr, Katie Zanecchia and the rest of Writers House—simply the best agency in the world.

To Douglas Clegg, Lisa Tucker and Steve Berry for always being there when I think I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about writing—to remind me that it’s always this hard! Randy Susan Meyers,
Jenn Risko and Linda Francis Lee—my non-girly girlfriends who are not only fun but wise, wonderful and generous almost to a fault.

To Amy Bruno, Emily Faust, Sunil Kumar and Vicki VanValkenburgh who help so much and so creatively with so many things that go on—some behind the scenes—some in front. To Megan Mitzel and everyone at Blogads who are kind supporters and all the bloggers who help so much. To all the wonderful people on Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads and Pinterest who spread the word—it makes a difference, it matters and it does not go unnoticed.

To my family of course: my father and Ellie (my special cheerleader), the Kulicks, Mara Gleckle (even if there aren’t blood ties, you are family) and to Doug Scofield who makes every day worthwhile.

And to every single bookseller and every single librarian and every single reader for stocking, selling and buying my books and making it possible for me to travel the exciting road of being an author.

Pablo Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” Whenever possible in this novel, I’ve told the truth in order to tell my lie.

I am indebted to the truths I learned in Graham Robb’s
Victor Hugo: A Biography
as well as
Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo
by Victor Hugo, John Chambers, and Martin Ebon.

So much about Victor Hugo’s life is as it appears in this book. His beloved daughter did drown, and he did discover the news of her death as I’ve described. He belonged to a hashish club with Dumas and Baudelaire. He exiled himself to the Isle of Jersey and lived at Marine Terrace. Descriptions of his daily regimes, his wife, his mistress, how he wrote, his family life, his pets, his beliefs in reincarnation and his engagement in more than one hundred séances are all based on his letters and conversations he himself transcribed. The séances began because he desperately wanted to know his daughter was at peace. They continued because, as he said, he became obsessed with the spirit world.

Victor Hugo claimed to have “spoken” with all the entities I mention in the book—including Jesus, Napoleon, Dante, Shakespeare and especially the spirit he called the Shadow of the Sepulcher. Hugo
maintained that the Shadow asked him to write a poem to restore his reputation as an enlightened creature instead of an evil force, and indeed in 1859, Hugo wrote “La Fin de Satan” (The End of Satan).

And that’s where the facts end and my fiction picks up. The particular bargain that my Shadow offered Hugo is not recorded anywhere. Fantine Gaspard is also my invention. Hugo’s mistress was indeed installed in a house within walking distance of his family home, and Juliette did have servants, but who they were is unknown.