The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense

by M. J. Rose

  Here in this room, generations of her ancestors had blended elusive essences and absolutes from flowers, spices, wood and minerals. They had mixed elixirs to tempt patrons. Constructed perfumes to delight emperors and empresses, kings and queens. Created magic potions that no one could resist.

  Here she’d discovered she was different from everyone else. Here she had suffered the most. Here her mother had ultimately failed them all. And Robbie, in saving his own life, had ended someone else’s.

  Here in this terrible and wonderful room, secrets had been lost. And found. And lost again.

  Jac stared at the instrument she hated and feared. Maybe it was time to finally welcome the conscious nightmares instead of fighting them and accept that she had an illness she couldn’t always control.

  Jac sat down at the organ. Inhaled the cacophony of smells. Hundreds of threads. A whiff of rose. Jasmine. Orange. Sandalwood. Of myrrh. Vanilla. Orchid. Gardenia. Musk. Could there be so many, many smells in one place anywhere else in the world? A richness of odor. A treasure of it. Each individual scent a story. A tale that went back in time. Instead of interpreting myths, she could spend the rest of her life tracing them.

  The glass bottles were lenses. The liquid in them prisms. Her vision was wavering. In the gold and bronze and amber, pictures were coming to life. Jac could pick out the individual threads that made up her mother’s perfume. Her father’s cologne. She remembered, when she was little and things were still good, she’d sit on her father’s lap, here at the organ, and he’d tell her the story of the book of lost fragrances that their ancestor had found. She’d close her eyes and see the scenes play out. Her own private theater of the mind.

  Sixty

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1810

  Marie-Genevieve had agreed to accompany her husband because she couldn’t think of any reason to say no. But she didn’t want to make the trip from Nantes to the place where she’d been young. Memories weren’t always her friends. Often they woke her at night and held her hostage. The brutal revolution that had begun in that city had robbed her of all her family. Her mother and father, two sisters. All imprisoned. Then killed.

  In Paris, all the ghosts would be there to greet her. She’d have to walk down streets she’d traversed as a girl. She’d have to see the specter of her past. Of Giles.

  But her husband wanted her to go. And she had no excuse to refuse him. He was a kind man. He’d saved her life when he found her—mostly dead, half drowned—on the shore of the Loire River. The priest she’d been bound to had used his last bit of strength to untie them and to give her a chance to survive.

  Without his dead weight, Marie-Genevieve had risen to the surface. Sputtering, choking, she gulped in air. Took in water. If not for the current, she wouldn’t have lived. But the river had pushed her onto the shore.

  The first two days in Paris were not as emotionally trying as she’d expected. There had been so many changes in the past fifteen years that Marie-Genevieve’s memories were mitigated by the shock of the new.

  On the third morning, she was so relaxed that when their carriage crossed the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, she was watching a young woman trying to control her three little children and didn’t focus on where they were. Or ask where they were headed.

  Then the carriage turned onto Rue des Saints-Pères and pulled up in front of the building.

  Marie-Genevieve turned to her husband. “Where are we?”

  “A surprise.”

  Except she’d never told him anything about L’Etoile.

  “I don’t understand!”

  Couldn’t he hear her panic? Why was he smiling?

  “I’ve heard they make the finest fragrance in all of Paris here. I wanted to buy you something to remember the trip by.”

  “It’s too dear. We’ve spent enough money.” She was looking at her husband. But over his shoulder, through the window, she could see the door to the perfume shop that she used to go in and out of a hundred times a week. The door opened. Someone was coming out. At first Marie-Genevieve thought it was Jean-Louis L’Etoile. Tall. Gray hair. Eyes so blue she could see them from here.

  He noticed the carriage. Glanced in. Right at her.

  There were ghosts here after all. Giles had died in Egypt when she was still a girl. He was long dead.

  Except the man who was looking in at her, staring at her as if she were a ghost too, was very much alive.

  Their gazes met. For a few seconds, Marie-Genevieve forgot she was married with two children and sitting in a rented carriage with her husband. The sound that escaped from her lips was a sob blended with a laugh.

  “Are you all right, ma chérie?” her husband asked.

  “I don’t feel well . . .”

  That night, once her husband was asleep, Marie-Genevieve stole out of the hotel room. It was only ten blocks to Rue des Saints-Pères. The streets weren’t dark and dangerous. She wasn’t a forty-two-year-old woman with streaks of gray in her hair anymore but seventeen again. She didn’t lumber, she flew.

  The door to the store was unlocked despite the hour. Even though they hadn’t made contact, hadn’t arranged for the rendezvous, he was there. Sitting in the darkened boutique. Waiting.

  “How did you know I would come?” she asked.

  “Where have you been all these years?”

  They both started talking at the same time, but before either of them finished, he reached out for her. They were in each other’s arms until the first rays of the sun set the bottles of perfume alight.

  Marie-Genevieve managed to return to her hotel before her husband awoke. While she dressed, she tried to behave like herself. But it seemed as if she’d lost twenty years of her life. She didn’t recognize the man she’d married. She had forgotten the life she’d been living.

  They had four more days in the City of Lights. Each night, she pretended to fall asleep quickly and then lay beside this stranger and waited for his breathing to slow. Then she’d get out of bed, dress and steal away.

  The dark was her ally. Assignations of the night were so common in Paris she was invisible. She disappeared into the shadows and ran into her lover’s arms.

  Her last night, after they’d made love, as she was still lying in his arms on the settee in the workshop, Giles told her he wanted her to leave her husband and stay in Paris.

  “You and I are both married, we have children!” she cried.

  “You can bring your babies. I will buy you a house. I’ll live with you there and work here.”

  She shook her head. “Ce n’est pas possible.”

  He got up and went to a cabinet. Opened it and extracted something. Marie-Genevieve’s eyes were so full of tears, she couldn’t tell what it was.

  “You don’t have a choice,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Egyptians believed in destiny. In fate. We are each other’s fate.” He held out a leather pouch and emptied its contents into his palm. “Smell.”

  She looked down at the pottery that he held in his hand, and the world began to swim. At first she was terrified. It was the way she felt in the Loire so long ago. Black. Cold. The stink of mud and slime. And then small, gentle hands of scent pulled her away from Nantes. Back, back to someplace she’d been before. These scents were purples, deep maroons, velvet navy, and starlight. A man with dark skin sat beside a woman with raven-wing hair, holding out a jar to her.

  Like seeing her reflection in the Palace of Versailles Hall of Mirrors, Marie-Genevieve was looking at herself—except she was seeing Iset, head bent over her lover’s hand, smelling the unguent he held.

  The man, Thoth, was speaking in a language Marie-Genevieve had never heard before and yet understood. He was speaking the same words that Giles had just uttered.

  “We are each other’s fate.”

  Then she heard her name cried in a voice that was of the present. It yanked her out of her dream. Her husband’s voice. The kind, gentle vintner who had saved her life was standing in fr
ont of her, his eyes wild with anger. He held a pistol. His hand shook.

  The dawn light shone through the windows and glinted on the hilt of the weapon. If Marie-Genevieve thought her gentle, God-fearing husband was capable of using the gun, she would have thrown herself in front of Giles. But it was inconceivable.

  “I won’t let you take the only thing I ever wanted!” he shouted at Giles and then, without any hesitation, pulled the trigger.

  A fortnight later, at home in Nantes, Marie-Genevieve read in the newspaper that Giles L’Etoile had died of a gunshot wound. She couldn’t eat or sleep. Didn’t speak to the man she was married to. She took care of her children in a fog. She was focused only on the bedside of the man she’d loved since she was a very little girl. Who’d held his hand? Who’d whispered words of comfort as he slipped away from this world into the next?

  If only she had not gone to Paris, Giles would still be alive. He had died because of her. But Giles had said they belonged together. Two children who had been inseparable since childhood—almost, Marie-Genevieve’s mother used to say, as if one was the right glove and one was the left.

  Sixty-one

  PARIS, FRANCE

  SUNDAY, MAY 29, 1:08 P.M.

  Jac tried to force herself to get up and get away from the organ. To break the pull and escape the grip of the memories that weren’t hers yet were as real as if she’d lived them. But she couldn’t. There was more sitting on the edge of her consciousness. Something important she had to understand. The story wasn’t over. It hadn’t even begun.

  Jac inhaled. Found the thread. Of the hundreds of bottles of essence and absolutes, she could read only some of the labels. She was lost in possibilities. Of all these ingredients, which ones combined to create her hallucinatory nightmares?

  One by one, she looked at each label. This one? This?

  Frustrated, she banged on the organ with clenched fists, like a child demanding attention. Bottles rattled, glass tinkled. Banged again. Under the perfume maker’s music she heard another sound that made no sense—an echo.

  The organ was a solid mass of carved wood. How could it be hollow?

  One by one, Jac removed every bottle from the organ. Soon there was no room to walk. Four hundred bottles—some dating back to the seventeen hundreds—covered the floor in a three-dimensional fragrant rug.

  The organ was empty. A coffin. Years of oil stains had left an abstract design on the wooden shelves. Pressing and prodding, Jac knocked against each section until finally she found it.

  A hidden recess.

  Carefully she pried up the wooden square, revealing a fragrant, dark cavity. The fountainhead of the scent. Robbie’s Fragrance of Comfort. Jac’s nightmare.

  Reaching in, she felt for what she couldn’t see. As she lifted it out, dozens of flecks of amber-stained linen cracked off.

  It was a scroll. This was the source of the dangerous, exotic, mesmerizing scent.

  Jac wasn’t sure she should, but she unrolled it. Inside was a pottery jar. White glaze. Turquoise and coral designs. Black hieroglyphics. This was an undamaged version of the shards that Robbie had found. She felt inside with the tip of her forefinger. There were vestiges of wax still lining its walls.

  The air waved. The imagines beckoned. The scent embraced her in a horrific grip, wound around Jac, and pulled her in.

  Sixty-two

  ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 32 BCE

  Censers burned in each corner of the room. A cloud of the finest incense hung over the wooden chests, the finely carved and gilded chairs and chaises. The ceiling was painted with a rich lapis lazuli and a silver astronomical star chart. Cut into the walls were several doors, one larger than the others. Delicate and detailed murals, beautifully rendered in earth tones, decorated the walls. The stylized motif of water lilies that bordered the crypt and framed the paintings illustrated Thoth’s favorite flower, the blue lotus.

  In the center of the chamber was a black granite sarcophagus, five times the size of an ordinary man. Its polished surface was carved with cartouches and inlaid with a turquoise and lapis portrait of a beautiful, catlike man with blue water lilies around his head. He was Nefertum, the god of perfume.

  “You have to be very careful, Iset. If your husband becomes suspicious, you won’t be safe.” Thoth was trying to tell her what he wanted her to do once he was gone, but she could barely listen.

  It was her fault that Thoth had broken his promise to the queen. Iset had begged him to let her smell the fragrances he was creating despite his promise to his sovereign that they were for her nose alone.

  Now his treachery was going to cost him his life. Cleopatra was to have him publicly executed in two days time—a lesson to anyone else who thought about betraying her.

  But Thoth was not going to wait to be humiliated. He was going to take his own life. He was a priest. A perfumer. Had all the herbs and plants needed to mix up a fatal poison.

  “I’ve made two of these jars. This one is for you. Leave instructions that it’s to be buried with you, as mine will be buried with me. As long as we take this perfume with us into the afterlife,” Thoth said, “we’ll always be able to find each other.”

  Iset took the jar from Thoth. Felt its smooth roundness in the palm of her hand. Cupped it. Closed her eyes. Iset breathed in the scent. Thoth had told her what was in it. Frankincense, myrrh. Honey. Blue Lily. Persimmon from the groves Mark Antony had imported and planted for his bride.

  Once she’d found out about the scent of soul mates, Iset was relentless in getting Thoth to let her smell it. Together they shared visions of the past. Of the people they had been before. Long before. When they were together in another life, as Thoth explained.

  Now because of her greed and curiosity, she was going to have to say good-bye to him and live without him.

  It was unthinkable.

  The draught of poison that he’d prepared sat on a small wooden table. The cobalt-blue glass shimmered in the candlelight. Was cold to the touch. On her fingers. And then on her lips.

  “No!” Thoth shouted as he reached for it and grabbed it from her.

  A trickle of poison slid down her chin.

  Thoth examined what was left of the liquid.

  “Did I drink enough?” Her voice was light. She wouldn’t be left behind. She would go with him.

  “More than enough. Do you understand what you did, you fool? There’s no antidote. I can’t save you.” Then, lifting the glass to his mouth, he put his lips where hers had been. And he drank.

  “No one knows where I am. I’ve disappeared from my husband’s home. My death will be a secret. As long as I can be buried with you, that’s all that matters. Leave instructions for your embalmers.”

  “Why did you do this? You could have lived. You weren’t in danger. Your husband didn’t know.”

  “What’s going to happen?” She ignored his remonstrations. “Will it hurt?”

  “No. We’ll just go to sleep. Hold each other and go to sleep in this beautiful place . . .”

  “Kiss me now.”

  He took her in his arms. She tasted the bitter poison on his lips. Happy, she thought, I’m happy here in this man’s arms. Then she felt something wet on her cheeks and pulled away. The tears weren’t hers; they were his, coursing down his face. She didn’t mind leaving this world for the next. He was her world. Without him, she wouldn’t have wanted to live. But not so for Thoth. In his eyes were regrets.

  “What is it?”

  “My work isn’t finished.”

  It was all her fault. She’d caused his misery. What she had done to him was unforgivable. If only she could take it back. If she could do it over. If she could change his fate.

  Iset wanted to kiss away the sadness in his eyes but knew she couldn’t. She put her lips back on his. At least they could kiss their way to death.

  Sixty-three

  PARIS, FRANCE

  SUNDAY, MAY 29, 5:15 P.M.

  The precious artifact was wrapped in a sheet of ordinary bu
bble wrap and secured in Jac’s pocketbook. It was a good one that she’d bought years ago and still used. The more battered the leather, the better it looked. Like Griffin, she thought. He was bruised, wounded, stitched up, and stapled but had never been more special to her.

  He’d been moved from the intensive care unit to a regular room. Was sleeping. Had been since she’d arrived a half hour before. She was waiting for him to wake up. Because she needed him to do something.

  Jac was going to ask Griffin to sniff the residue of pomade in the Egyptian jar. If nothing happened to him, she’d know Malachai had been wrong. Her hallucinations weren’t past life episodes—she was crazy after all.

  But if Griffin had hallucinations and remembered the two of them in the past . . . if the scent provoked his memories and he could recollect them loving each other through time . . . then they had to be âmes soeurs.

  “Once upon a time,” she whispered to Griffin, retelling the story she and Robbie had been told by their father, “in Egypt in 1799, Giles L’Etoile discovered an ancient book of fragrance formulas. One for an elixir that enabled people to find true soul mates. After he’d smelled the scent, he was never the same. The book and the fragrance have been lost, but once upon a time in the future another L’Etoile will find them and—”

  Griffin opened his eyes and smiled at her.

  “What were you saying?”

  “I was telling you a story.”

  “Will you tell me again? I missed most of it.”

  She nodded. “Later.”

  “Did you go home and sleep?” he asked.

  “I tried.”

  “How’s Robbie?”

  Jac reassured Griffin that her brother was fine and would be coming over soon. She’d seen Robbie before she left but hadn’t told him about the jar she’d found. Or the scroll. There’d be time for that. First she needed to find out what was happening to her. What the images meant. Whether she was having memories or was crazy again.