The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  “Incredible. You just discovered a fully functional door!” Serge said.

  As she opened it, the faint scent that she’d smelled came pouring out. Light from the cellar illuminated what lay beyond. What appeared to be a Renaissance perfumer’s laboratory came into view. As Jac took in the alembics and infusion devices, bottles of essences and measuring tools, she felt a surge of excitement.

  The room was perhaps seven feet long and about five feet wide. A narrow closet tucked hidden and locked away from prying eyes.

  Behind her Serge exclaimed, “How amazing. Jac, how did you know it was there?”

  She shrugged. How to explain? She couldn’t. Not really.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Can you tell from the tools how old all this is?”

  Jac walked into the room, careful not to touch anything. Layers of dust covered everything. She’d seen pristine finds before, and this appeared to be one of them. It had been hundreds of years since anyone had been in here.

  “I’d guess sixteenth century. Partially from the tools, but also because it’s hidden away. Alchemy and perfume and the poisoner’s arts were dangerous occupations in the 1500s,” she said. “In the Louvre, René le Florentin had a laboratory that connected to the queen’s chambers via a secret staircase. It’s well documented. But it’s curious he’d have one in his own house. Why would he have to be so cautious here?”

  She sat down at the perfumer’s organ, with its scarred and worn wood, and felt a presence all around her. Not Robbie, not this time. It was the stranger she’d seen opening the door a few minutes ago. Her guide to this place. A wave of sadness and loss overwhelmed her. Then, just as quickly, scents rose up and soothed her as they engulfed her in their familiarity.

  “I’ve seen drawings of alchemical laboratories like this in a book my grandfather had. Alchemy was at the very crossroads of where magic and science met, the main effort of learned men—and some women—who believed if they could come up with a formula to turn base metals to gold, they could also find the formula for the secret of life . . . for immortality. Many other major discoveries were made while they searched for their holy grail. They found formulas for lifesaving and healthful waters, lotions, elixirs.”

  Jac examined the floor-to-ceiling shelves at one end of the room. The man who had worked in this laboratory had been a highly evolved perfumer and student of alchemical arts. All the accoutrements were here, alembics in marvelous amoebic shapes, burners, funnels, plates, bottles, tools. Everything in its place as if René le Florentin had just left moments ago.

  Jac leaned forward, inspecting a row of bottles, their ingredients written in Latin in a very florid hand.

  “How did I not notice this place?” Serge was examining the doorway. “When we were doing the renovation, we inspected the foundations and found them in such good condition we didn’t have to do any shoring up. We verified the shelves’ reliability by removing wine bottles from random sections. There wasn’t any rot at all. Everything checked, and so we went on. So much of the château required work, why create more where none was needed? There was nothing to suggest that there was a false wall on this side.”

  Jac was only half aware of what he was saying. She’d found a leather-bound book. Worn, cracked and covered with a thick layer of dust. On the cover, in gold leaf, was a complex insignia with flourishes and curlicues, but as she stared at it, the initials “RB” revealed themselves among the decorative coils.

  Very carefully, she lifted the cover. Jac was staring at notes written by René Bianco, also know as René le Florentin. She was looking down at words, numbers and symbols that no one had gazed upon for almost five hundred years.

  Chapter 17

  MARCH 19, 1573

  BARBIZON, FRANCE

  Nine years after Catherine rescued me from prison and brought me to France, I was climbing the secret staircase cut into the rock walls of the Louvre palace. I trod each step carefully. It was difficult to navigate those narrow steps even when I was empty-handed. They were slivers of footholds carved in ancient times. How long ago? It was hard to know, but the palace had housed royalty since the year 1055.

  From my laboratory on the ground floor, there were thirty-three steps circling up, with a stone handrail also carved out of rock. The angle of the spiral had made me dizzy at first, but I’d learned not to look up or down when I traversed it. Just to keep moving.

  The upper landing was no more than an outcropping of rock facing a thick door—rough-hewn on the staircase side, beautifully finished on the other. With the tray that I held, it was impossible to open. Its huge handle was a wrought-iron circle. You needed to pull it out a bit and then twist, and it took both hands. There was barely enough room on the landing for the tray and my feet, but I put my burden down gingerly, opened the door, retrieved the tray and then entered.

  The chamber was lit with sweet-smelling candles, Her Highness’s favorite. The hearth was lit and flames danced in welcome. I sniffed wine and cakes.

  “How good of you to come, René,” Catherine said.

  I forced a smile. Merde! I thought the princess would be alone except for the lady-in-waiting who accompanied her always, but she wasn’t. Cosimo Ruggieri sat beside her at a round table in the center of the room. From the expression on Ruggieri’s face, the astrologer was no more pleased to see me than I was to see him.

  Ruggieri was an unhealthy companion for the princess. A man to be feared. A man who sought power in underhanded ways. And the one man at court who I wanted to destroy.

  Catherine smiled back at me, but her expression didn’t convey any joy. She looked tired and worn out. Lately there was always sadness in her eyes, but today it even seemed to have fully displaced the determination that usually shone there too.

  Nine years ago, I had accompanied Catherine on her magnificent monthlong wedding journey. We made our way from Italy to Marseilles, where she married the second son of Francis, King of France. For the occasion I had created a special perfume from essence of lily of the valley and roses from Turkey. It was a lovely, heady and fresh scent. The lily symbolized her past, the rose her future. Catherine had given me a wedding gift too: the amethyst ring that I wear still. It is a heavy silver piece with a large rectangular cabochon held in place by fleurs-de-lis.

  Like my mistress, the ring is not as simple as it appears. Catherine is as wily as she is intelligent. Her book is not the Bible but The Prince by Machiavelli. She chose me as her perfumer knowing I was under suspicion of murdering my mentor by administering poison. In fact that day in the cell when she came to save my life so I could accompany her to France, she told me that it was my knowledge of poison as well as my skill as perfumer that she wanted from me: “There might be dangers in France that you can save me from, René.”

  Catherine was a Medici. She was an Italian. She told me there were people in France who would say she was too dark and evil to marry their prince. She’d understood, even as a young woman, that sometimes you need to seize power. She was already planning how to fight. How to win.

  As a Medici, Catherine had cunning flowing in her veins, and during those first nine years in Paris, her astuteness had served her well. But what troubled and pained the princess now could not be solved with cleverness. She was barren. And afraid that if she did not conceive soon the king would annul her marriage and find his son and heir another bride. Since Henry had indeed sired a daughter out of wedlock with a maidservant, the court was rife with rumors that the problem lay with Catherine, not her husband.

  My princess had tried every cure at her disposal. She’d had doctors come from all over France. Had tried remedies suggested by midwives and mystics. She’d drunk mule urine and placed cow dung on her private parts. It was a wonder that the Dauphin could even get close to her during those experiments. She’d even had a carpenter drill tiny holes in the floor of a room in the Château de Blois so she
could spy on her husband and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and watch them copulate to see if there was something that she was not doing correctly.

  “Maybe,” she had told me, “I don’t excite the Dauphin enough. What I saw when I spied upon him was passion he has never showed me. Do you think that could be it?”

  I was a man. I had appetites. I knew what excitement she spoke of. I looked at Catherine and her slightly bulging eyes and wondered what she was like when a man lay on top of her. I knew she loved her husband and longed for just half of the affection he showered on his whore, Diane. My heart ached for Catherine. She was my savior, and rather than lord it over me, she had done the opposite by treating me like her equal. She was always the first to talk of our bonds—we were orphans and exiles from Italy; we shared a love of scent and all things beautiful. “When I miss Florence, René, being with you is like being home.”

  Catherine was good to me. Not only did she have me ensconced in the palace in an esteemed position, but she’d also bought a shop for me on Pont Saint-Michel. There, when she was out of Paris and not in need of my services, I could concoct scents for the nobility and sell my wares. After almost a decade in Paris, I was growing rich.

  Of late she had been in constant need of my services. She begged me to come up with ways to entice the prince to her bed, and we had been working for weeks on an aphrodisiac scent. A perfume she would wear that Henry would find irresistible. It was a complicated task. There were potions people talked of that engaged the senses, but I knew it was not flowers that made men hard.

  It was the swell of a breast. The pout of a lip. It was looking in someone’s eyes and seeing desire reflected back. It was the softness of a woman’s body, the silkiness of her flesh. And I knew no perfume alone could excite a man. It was the real scent of a woman that inflamed him. The underneath, between-her-legs scent. That was what I needed to concoct for my lady.

  “Come, sit by me,” Catherine said.

  She patted a chair to her left. Ruggieri was on her right. I took a seat and examined the assortment of objects on the table. What were these oddities?

  A milky crystal about the size of my thumb with red occlusions gleamed in the light. Beside it was a series of small glass bottles, each no bigger than my pinkie finger, all filled with a thick viscous red liquid. I could smell it well enough to know that it was blood. On a gold plate lay four curls of hair, each tied and knotted with gold silk thread. Also on the plate were four large iridescent blue-and-green feathers—from what bird I was not certain. I noticed a mother-of-pearl shell holding a small pile of crescent-moon-shaped smaller shells. Or so I thought at first. Upon close inspection I realized I was looking at fingernail clippings. But the sight that made me the most angry and afraid at the same time was the pentagram painted with gold dust in the center of the table. This was the symbol of the black magic Ruggieri practiced. That the court whispered about. That one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting had told me the princess was turning to in an effort to solve her fertility problems.

  And mocking the whole assortment of evil accoutrements were fat votive candles, the same kind as were lit in church. The scent of prayer perfuming this evil air.

  “Princess, this is dangerous business,” I said, gesturing to the collection.

  She shrugged. “I have no choice. I am in trouble now.”

  What could I say to that? She was right. Nine years without issue. The king, the Dauphin and the court were restless with worry.

  “Have you brought your scents?” she asked.

  I placed my offerings on the table.

  Ignoring me, Ruggieri continued collecting the various objects and stringing them on a piece of silk. In the flickering candlelight, the unpleasant-looking Florentine appeared to be very much what he was—a creature, not a man. Someone connected with other realms. A sorcerer, not a scientist. No matter what he said about the astronomy and astrology that he studied, trying to predict a man’s future and saying Black Masses and creating foul-smelling amulets with hair and fingernails was not forward-thinking. He was stuck in the mire of the witches and sorcerers who lived in the world of black magic. And my princess was falling deeper and deeper into his orbit.

  If my scents worked, I would be able to woo her away from Ruggieri. If they didn’t, I would have to devise another plan to get rid of my rival. For that’s what he was. The two of us had been engaged in our struggle since we’d all left Italy together. I appealed to the esoteric and sensual side of Catherine, Ruggieri to the occult and secret side.

  At Santa Maria Novella, a visit by Catherine to buy perfumes or pomades would be followed by the monks whispering about the duchessina’s ability to see into the future and whether it was a sign of a saint or a heretic. Rumors circulated that since early childhood she’d had portentous dreams. Because she kept the visions to herself and remained a devout Catholic, no one had ever come out and accused her of witchcraft. But she wasn’t a foreigner in Italy as she was here in France. Now, one misstep might prove her ruin if she was accused like so many before her had been.

  I was determined not to let Ruggieri push her to take that step. I knew he was her oldest friend, her confidant. That he wanted to usurp my place was understandable. How he wanted to do it was demonic.

  “This is what I have made for you,” I said to Catherine as I picked up a bottle of scent.

  “Let me smell it,” she said with a first hint of excitement in her voice.

  “First let me say that they won’t be appealing to you. The purpose of these perfumes is not to make you smile or think of a garden. They are created to inflame the Dauphin.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, greedy to smell the first one.

  “In fact”—I was not finished explaining—“they might actually smell ugly to you.”

  “That’s not possible. You’ve never created an ugly scent for me, René.”

  “But this isn’t a scent for you, Your Highness. This is a potion. It’s a tool.”

  She didn’t want to hear any more, and reaching out she took the first of my three glass bottles, twisted out the stopper, tipped the bottle to her finger and wet it.

  Having grown up in Florence, Catherine knew the art of perfume. How to apply it and how to appreciate it. She knew you never smell a scent directly from the bottle. You must put it on and let it interact with your skin, let the oils from the scent soak into your flesh and only then, after a few moments of letting the air modify it, can you sniff.

  After waiting the prerequisite minute, she lifted her wrist to her nose.

  Immediately, she recoiled. “It’s foul!”

  “I told you.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Princess, you asked me to create an aphrodisiac, and that’s what I’ve created.”

  “But it smells sour and wicked.” She sniffed again. “Strange and unclean. What is in this?”

  “A combination of things, Your Highness.”

  “Specifically?”

  I had been dreading this question. My mistress was known for her intelligence. She was well schooled in Latin, Greek and French. She was a scholar of antiquities and mathematics. Politically astute, she understood the art of war and of politics. She had been raised Catholic and been a virgin when she married. Did she lust? Did she have passions? I imagined she did. I could see flashes of a warm-blooded woman in her eyes. But to explain to her what this perfume contained and what I had created was something I’d hoped to avoid.

  “Tell me, René.”

  I listed all the ingredients but one. Hoping that I could avoid the one that was sure to upset her.

  “Civet. Ambergris. Musk. Heliotrope. Bergamot.”

  “But that can’t be all. I know those scents. I have other perfumes, René. You have used all those ingredients before. This . . .” She lifted her wrist to her hand again. “There is something else in this one.”

&n
bsp; I nodded.

  “Tell me.”

  Ruggieri had stopped building the talisman and had turned to Catherine as if he might need to protect her from whatever I was going to say.

  “There is an essence that should arouse the prince, for it will be familiar to him.”

  She was angered. “René, you are holding back. What is this?”

  “The vapors I was able to remove from Diane de Poitiers’s underclothing. It is the scent of her skin . . . her essences and her oils, Princess.”

  Catherine did not speak. Her dark eyes did not reveal anything she was thinking. Beside her Ruggieri too was silent, but I could guess what he was thinking—that this might be his chance to discredit and finally get rid of me and have her to himself.

  “How did you get such a thing?” she asked without giving away what she was feeling. Was she angry? Horrified? Insulted? Had I, in my eagerness to help her, made a fatal mistake that would get me thrown out of court?

  “I bribed one of Diane’s ladies to give me several weeks’ worth of underclothes. Once I had enough, I pressed half as if they were flowers. The others I boiled and captured the steam they gave off.”

  “And you added those two essences to your flowers, herbs and oils.”

  “I did.”

  “And you think that her stink on my skin will inflame my husband and make his passion grow?”

  “I do.”

  “This is outrageous!” Ruggieri shouted. “How dare you insult Her Highness by suggesting she put on the cloak of a woman who is nothing but a consort?”

  Ruggieri was an ungainly man with a large nose, a high forehead and small, startlingly green eyes that seemed to see through things. His voice was gruff, but his manner was one of superiority. His attitude angered me that day more than usual. I had not expected him there. It was my time with Catherine, and I did not appreciate his presence. Even more so I was horrified that he was seducing her into his world of black magic and heretical thinking. He was putting her in danger—didn’t he see that?