by Jill Jones
He gripped the steering wheel tighter and drove on to the twin stone pillars that marked the entrance to the country house. The road leading to the house was lined on either side by tall trees that canopied so thickly overhead they turned the last of twilight to darkness. He envisioned Simone coming down this drive, escorted roughly by Clyde Covington and his ugly dog, with the wind whipping wildly with the ensuing storm. Had she been afraid? She’d shown no fear when she’d lashed out at him. And no mercy in her assault.
Nick parked the car and unloaded his baggage. He’d brought the old trunk with him, with the intent of leaving it at Brierley Hall. The latent romantic in him had convinced him that his great-great-great uncle John Rutledge might have started out on his ill-fated journey from here, that very trunk in hand. It seemed fitting that it should come full circle. He had replaced the diary, the letters and the cameo brooch in it. All that was missing was the perfume in its ancient vial. Which he doubted he would see again.
After settling in, Nick wandered into the gardens behind Brierley Hall just in time to see an orange glow light up the eastern sky. As if performing just for him, a huge golden moon inched its way into the night sky, cresting the tops of the trees at the far side of the meadow in such a stunning display that it looked surreal. As if it belonged in another world. Perhaps rising over a white marble temple, reflecting in the three stair step pools, washing two lovers in its glow…
Oh, damn it all to hell.
Nick fought the imagery, but he was under the spell of the moonlight now. It drew him like an enchantress across the meadow and into the woods, then led him down a silvery, leaf-quilted path directly to the back of the cottage. Was this how John Rutledge had come to visit his “lady love,” as he’d referred to her many times in the diary?
Moonlight illuminated the whitewash of the house, turning it to a silvery-blue, and Nick wondered suddenly why that estate agent—what was her name?—hadn’t been able to let it out again but a couple of times during the summer. Maybe his price was too steep. Or he’d gotten it on the market too late for the tourist season. He made a mental note to check on that tomorrow.
Nick knew he ought to avoid going into the garden, and knew just as surely there would be no way he could not go there. The memory of the magical, tender embrace he’d shared there with Simone wrapped around his heart and squeezed it until he thought the pain might kill him.
That embrace had not been orchestrated by Antoine Dupuis.
He pushed open the iron gate and glanced around, half expecting to find her waiting there for him. Of course, that was foolish, but this did seem to be something of a magical place. Instead, he was greeted with a space that was still relatively free of the brambly growth he’d cut out. In the center, the rocks outlining the mandala garden gleamed in the moonlight. Fireflies flitted everywhere, like fairies with lighted lamps. His eye followed one particularly bright bug until it lit on a bush next to the south wall. Four other identical bushes were lined in a row next to it.
Nick frowned. His crew had cut those bushes down, he was certain of it. He remembered wondering if the five stumps had been some kind of miniature orchard. Obviously, these were not trees, more like leggy bushes, probably some kind of weed to have grown so fast. For they had all sprouted new growth, branches that were now almost two feet long. He went closer to examine them, and then he saw the flowers.
His heart stopped. His eyes widened. His mind exploded with the impossibility of what he thought he saw. There, growing in profusion on the weed, were delicate rose-colored trumpets, identical to the bloom of the plant Mary Rose had pressed between the pages of her diary and marked “mahja.”
The light of the full moon outlined the paths that wound throughout Esther’s garden, and the old woman led Simone easily toward the plant they had nourished with the ashes charmed with Simone’s wish.
I wish to know the secret of Mary Rose’s perfume. Would she ever know? Simone wondered.
“Just as I thought,” Esther wheezed excitedly, “they’re in full bloom. There’s even more tonight than last night.”
Simone stared at the plant in shock. She plucked a bloom and held it to her nose. “Don’t you recognize this?” she asked the witch.
Esther picked off a bloom and smelled it as well. “My gracious, it smells like our perfume…”
Simone placed the small red trumpet-shaped flower on the palm of her hand. “It looks like it, too,” she whispered, barely daring to breathe. Could Shamir’s seeds have been from the mahja plant? The whole thing was getting weirder and weirder. Without a word of explanation, she turned and hurried back toward the lights of the house. She raced upstairs to her room and dug in the duffel for the Book of Shadows. When she turned around, she jumped a mile when she saw Esther standing in the doorway.
“What is it, child?”
Simone held the book toward her with trembling hands. “It’s…it’s Mary Rose’s Book of Shadows.”
Esther’s eyes became the size of the China blue saucers that nested in her kitchen cupboard. “Where did you get this?” she said, taking the book in hand.
“Uh…from Nick Rutledge. Never mind that. Look, turn to that page marked with the paper there.” Simone had folded the photocopy of the image of the mahja plant and slipped it between the pages where Mary Rose had written down her process for extracting the flower’s essence.
With fingers wrinkled with age, Esther unfolded the paper, and her eyes grew even wider. “It’s th’ plant down there in th’ garden.”
Simone had carried the blossom she’d just picked upstairs with her, and she now laid it alongside the photocopied image. They were identical. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I believe it is.” Then her subdued astonishment turned to jubilation, and she gave Esther a hug. “We’ve got it, Esther! We have the secret to Mary Rose’s perfume. The charm worked.”
The old woman nodded knowingly. “Was that your fondest wish?”
Simone stared at her, realizing that for an instant, she had unquestioningly accepted that it was the charm that had brought about this miracle. Intellectually, she knew better. It had been Shamir that had brought it about. But where in the hell did he get the seeds?
“Quick,” she said, “we need to move quickly to harvest the flowers. In there,” she pointed to the book, “Mary Rose wrote that they only lasted a brief time. We must hurry and gather those that bloomed tonight. And,” she paused a moment, “we must use enfleurage to extract their scent.”
“What is enfleurage?”
Simone took the book and ran her finger over the notation Mary Rose had made, holding it so Esther could read the instructions. “Can you take this and prepare the glass plate? I feel strongly we must do this exactly as she did. Do you have any suet?”
“I have canned lard. Will that do?”
Simone nodded, her heart pounding wildly. Canned lard should be clean enough. She grabbed Esther’s arms with both hands. “It will have to do. We must start tonight. We must use the flowers while we have them. I don’t know how long those bushes will produce, or how much of the essential oil we can extract. We’ll use the lard.”
The two women hurried back down the stairs, Esther with the Book of Shadows tucked under her arm. She produced the lard from her cupboard. “What shall we do for a glass plate?” she wanted to know, looking at the directions given by her craft ancestor.
Simone opened the refrigerator door. “Perhaps these glass shelves,” she said with a thoughtful frown. “Take them out and wash and dry them completely. Then coat both sides of them with the lard and put them back in place.” She shook her head, feeling almost gleeful. She had everything she needed right here in Esther’s kitchen. The glass shelves were very close to what the early perfumers in Grasse had called their chassis. It wasn’t state-of-the-art technique, but then neither had been Mary Rose’s, and it had been successful.
Esther then gave Simone a large basket and a lantern and sent her into the garden. Fireflies flickered in the shadows, and
a golden moon paled to brilliant silver as it rose in the sky. Simone’s thoughts tumbled over one another as she carefully but rapidly picked the small rosy trumpets from the newly sprouted bushes. Where had Shamir come up with these seeds? It was too coincidental that the missing ingredient in his master’s perfume was the very one she needed to create Mary Rose’s perfume oil. Somehow, the two had to be connected for any of it to make sense.
But that concept made no sense at all. Shamir in the twenty-first century and Mary Rose in the nineteenth? Simone tried to calm down by inhaling several deep breaths, and with each, the sweet fragrance of the mahja filled her olfactory sense with more than a just a lovely aroma. She was filled as well with peace and joy and a sense of inner contentment the likes of which she’d never known. It was as if she was becoming intoxicated…on love. She thought of Nick and could not suppress a smile. She loved Nick. Why was there such strife between them? It could be healed. She was certain of it. She wanted it to be healed. She wanted their separation to end. And she knew somehow, with the blessing of these flowers, it could be. She held a blossom to her nose and inhaled slowly and deeply.
Nick.
Yes.
Somehow.
She filled the basket almost to the brim, picking only the blossoms that were fully opened, leaving the rest for the next night. The seven plants were all producing flowers, although she had to admit, the one that had received the “charm” was outperforming the others. Probably because it got the right amount of sun, she told herself as she made her way back to Esther’s kitchen.
Esther had covered the glass shelves with just the right amount of lard, and they rested at the ready in the small, antiquated refrigerator. “We must dry the blossoms completely,” Simone instructed her assistant. “Do you have extra toilet tissue?” It was the softest, most absorbent material she could think of, and these delicate blooms must not be damaged.
At last the harvest was prepared to her satisfaction, and Simone picked up a blossom and stuck it nose-down into the fat. It seemed an unappetizing way to extract the perfume oil, but it had worked for perfumers for eons before anyone knew about distillation. To Simone’s mind, there was a certain propriety in extracting Mary Rose’s oil using this ancient method. She and Esther worked in silence until all the flowers were immersed in the fat. Then she asked for plastic wrap, which Esther brought from beneath her sink. Simone gently wrapped the shelves, protecting both sides where the blossoms clung precariously to the fat. The lard would shortly assimilate the scent, much like butter absorbs the smell of a neighboring onion in a refrigerator. “This will keep the fragrance enclosed so the fat will take on more of it,” she explained. Then she carefully slid each shelf back into its place in the fridge.
“By tomorrow night, these flowers will likely have rendered most of their scent. We’ll remove them and replace them with fresh ones,” Simone said. “We keep repeating the process until we have no more flowers to work with. Hopefully by that time, the fat will have soaked up sufficient scent that we can then extract it with alcohol. Then,” she added with a satisfied smile, “you will have the oil that you need for your healing, and I’ll have it to use…” She halted in midsentence, but Esther was swift on the uptake.
“What will you use it for?” the old woman asked, eyeing Simone shrewdly.
Simone sank heavily into one of the wooden kitchen chairs and ran her hands through her hair. Good question. Of course, she’d make Shamir’s perfume. It couldn’t be too dangerous, she reasoned, since according to the formula, the strength of the oil of the mahja was diluted by several other ingredients. Besides, it was only for his “master’s” use anyway.
But knowing what she did about the dangers of the mahja, the avarice of Antoine Dupuis, and his perverse nature, she could longer even consider using it in a marketable perfume.
“Private use,” she murmured, thinking of Nick, wanting him.
As if she’d read Simone’s mind, Esther said, “You don’t need the perfume to be with the one you love. That’d be Nick Rutledge, wouldn’t it?”
Simone straightened upright in the chair, her cheeks flaming. “What are you talking about? I hate Nicholas Rutledge.”
“Hate is just the other side of love,” Esther replied gently. “You hate what he did to you, but I sense that you still love him. Deeply.”
Simone felt a cold sweat break onto her skin. How did this woman know what she felt? If she even felt that. “How can I love someone who hurt me, and my family, so terribly?” she argued.
“What made him do that?”
Simone crossed her arms on the tabletop and laid her head on them. “I’ve asked myself that same thing a hundred thousand times over the past ten years. He started to tell me once, but we didn’t get very far. Something about his family heritage.”
“We all have our problems. Maybe if you understood what his were at that time, you could forgive him.”
Simone’s head jerked up. “Forgive him? Are you kidding?”
“Do you love him?”
To her amazement, Simone began to cry. All the anger and resentment she’d stored against Nick, all the urge for revenge, seemed to well up within her into a wave of tears that needed to break on the sands of her emotions. They came gently at first, a shower she tried unsuccessfully to repress. “I…I loved him, once,” she choked. “I gave him my heart…everything.”
“It must have hurt terribly when he left.”
Simone felt Esther’s hands touch her shoulders, a gentle, soothing gesture, such as Maman used to make when Simone cried as a small child, and it made her cry harder. “Oh, Esther, you can’t begin to know…”
Simone sobbed for a long, long while, allowing Esther’s unspoken empathy to support and comfort her. Her tears brought back the face of her father, her mother, her Tantie Camille. They brought back her longing for Grasse, and times gone by. And then they brought back Nick, and the love she still held in her heart for him.
“I’m drawn to him like a moth to the flame,” she whispered at last, blowing her nose ungraciously into a piece of toilet tissue. “I should not love him. He was a bastard. But I do…still…love him.”
“Is that what you’ve been using the perfume for? To be with Nick?”
Simone looked at Esther, feeling as if her face and nose and eyeballs must be swollen like balloons. She started to deny it, but she sensed there was no lying to this wise woman. Esther seemed to be able to see right through her. Simone nodded.
“With the perfume, I meet him in dreams. It’s safe there. And all the…old stuff between us goes away.”
“It is not safe there, child,” Esther said, beginning to rub her hand across Simone’s tight shoulder muscles. “It appears safe, but it is only an illusion. A very dangerous illusion.”
“Well,” Simone snorted, “it’s a darn sight safer than meeting him for real.”
“Why?”
Simone’s face turned crimson. How could she tell this grandmotherly type that when she was with Nick, all she wanted was to make love to him? She evaded it by replying, “He…he’ll hurt me again if I let him know how I feel.”
“How can you be so certain? What has he done lately to make you believe that?”
Simone started to reply in indignation, but nothing came to mind that Nick had done lately to hurt her. Nothing! She sniffed again. “Well, he hasn’t done anything, I suppose. But we haven’t been together…” She felt the lie harden in her throat. “Yes, yes, we have been together,” she confessed miserably. “He took me to dinner, and we danced, and then…I went to his place.”
“You don’t have to tell me all this,” Esther said, relieving Simone’s acute discomfort. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is for you to sort out your feelings for him in the here and now, and not resort to using the perfume for escape, or for false answers. Look at what happened to John and Mary Rose.”
“That’s nonsense,” Simone retorted. “I’m sorry, but I can’t believe your story about them. There is bou
nd to be some other explanation for their disappearances.”
Esther stood up and went to the sideboard upon which rested Mary’s Rose’s Book of Shadows. “I have seen a lot in my many years,” she said, picking up the volume and opening it, looking for a specific page. “I am convinced that what happens in our lives is a direct result of what we intend and what we believe,” she said. “Mary Rose tells us right in here what her intent was in creating the potion in the first place.”
“I pray to obtain not only a sweet perfume oil, but a sublime one as well, which will allow us to transcend all that keeps us apart here on Earth.”
“That’s nothing more than a lover’s wish,” Simone replied, unconvinced.
“Mary Rose was no normal lover,” Esther continued undaunted. “She had…certain powers.”
Simone bit her lip to prevent a reply that Esther, the modern day witch, might find insulting. Esther read on: “The very essence of my desire is that the union of his seeds and my soil will produce for us a natural child, a potion that will have the power to unite us in love for all time.”
“What’s a natural child?” Simone asked.
Esther laughed softly. “In our time, we’d call it a love child. She meant a flower, born from the womb of the earth, the child of their desire, that would bring them together. You see, what Mary Rose intended was a physical union with John, and I think she strongly believed that the mahja oil would bring this about, if not on earth, then perhaps in the land of dreams…”
“But that’s impossible.”
Esther glanced at her slyly. “Is it?
Chapter Twenty-Four
The moon had reached its apex hours before and was sliding down the western sky toward morning. The motorway was nearly deserted as Nick raced back toward London. Beside him in the passenger seat was a ceramic crock, filled with the aromatic blossoms of the mahja that he had harvested in a frenzy from the five bushes in Mary Rose’s garden. There was no way he could fail now. At last he had the genuine source of the perfume. But he must start the distillation process immediately, before the blossoms began to decay and lose their fragrant potency. He prayed he wasn’t too late already.
