Immortal Muse (11 page)

Even her daughter, Verdette, was gone—four years ago now, of a flux. Perenelle had thought that the grief would kill her; when the letter came from Perenelle's grandson, the pain had been so intense that she thought her heart would burst inside her chest. Parents were not supposed to outlive their children—that wasn't right. Verdette had left behind six grandchildren and several great-grandchildren, all living far away from Paris. Perenelle still wrote them letters; occasionally, they would write back—usually when they wished to borrow money.

“Wife, have you seen the ground unicorn horn?” Nicolas interrupted her reverie. “I've looked everywhere and I can't find it.”

The years had treated Nicolas just as meanly, even if he was the younger of them, in the last years of his seventh decade. His beard was now long and white though his head was bare, his flesh spotted. His hands shook with an eternal palsy, and though he didn't yet use a cane as she did, his steps were now slow and careful. He glared at her, his mouth half open to reveal the gaps of his missing teeth.

She quickly covered up the manuscript on her desk, placing a piece of blank parchment over it. “In the cabinet to the right of the table,” she told him. “On the middle shelf in the small brown jar.”

Nicolas grunted and left her. She heard him shuffling down the hall back to his laboratory. “Old bastard,” she muttered, grimacing. “I should have left you long ago, as Verdette told me I should.” Her hand started to go to the sardonyx cameo under her tunic and housecoat, as if by habit, but her arm ached and she never completed the motion.

The two of them were bound together. She knew neither she nor Nicolas would have been as successful without the other, despite the fact that their relationship was so often loveless, rancorous, and bitter. Worse, she was far the better of the two at alchemical work, and that made Nicolas jealous. It wasn't enough that Nicolas surpassed her with incantation and spells; no, he made certain that everyone thought he was the alchemical genius as well. He told the customers for the expensive curative potions the Flamels sold that he had made them himself, when that was
her
skill.

Perenelle would have been comfortable with simply being known as Nicolas' companion and assistant, if she had felt that he appreciated her presence at all, if he—even privately—had acknowledged how important she was to the mutual research they were doing and the accomplishments they'd achieved. After all, Perenelle had been satisfied when she saw how her pushing of Marlon, her first husband, had made him a far better musician. As her father had said, she'd been Marlon's genius, his muse; she would have been content to fill the same role with Nicolas. But he never allowed that; all the credit had to go to Nicolas alone, and he treated her as a possession, a tool he could use and discard as he pleased.

They remained together, bound in long habit, enmity, and spite as well as their conjoined magical and alchemical quests.

When she could no longer hear him, she slid the blank parchment aside, staring down with rheumy eyes at the faint lettering on the ancient paper—one of the pages from the Book of Abraham that she'd purchased from the Jewish man. Nicolas no longer kept his manuscript shop; Telo had died the year after Verdette, and Nicolas had sold off most of the shop's inventory. Perenelle still maintained her own small laboratory in their estate—they lived on the rue des Saints Innocents now, close to the Île de la Cité. The Flamel compound consisted of what had once been four houses but were now interconnected, set on an intersection with a courtyard behind, enclosed by the houses and a stone wall across the back of the property. The courtyard was a garden, private and cool. They had an entire corps of servants, and a household manager—Marianne, who had remained with the Flamels over the years—to watch after them.

Perenelle's laboratory was in the smallest of the houses, as far from the bustle of the estate as she could manage, where Nicolas rarely went himself. She rolled up the manuscript, and grimaced as her knees protested her rising from her seat. Her ivory-handled cane was within easy reach; she tapped her way to the door, where a maidservant looked surprised at her appearance and curtsied. “Are you hungry, Madame? I was just coming to summon you. Cook is ready to put luncheon on the table.”

Perenelle waved away the servant. “I'll be working this afternoon,” she said. Her voice quavered now; she hated the sound of it. “Tell Cook to have one of the kitchen servants bring me something; she can leave it outside the door of the laboratory.”

“Oui, Madame.” The maid curtsied again and fled. Perenelle continued on her slow way. Everything seemed to take three times as long as it had when she'd been young. When she'd purchased the papers from the Jewish family, she'd thought that she would quickly solve the riddle of the Philosopher's Stone, that she would soon discover the elixir of immortality. Almost a decade later, she was closer, but the secret still eluded her. She often wondered whether she would be permitted to live long enough to see her experiments through, but thus far God seemed to want her to continue working. Sometimes, on the worst days, she thought that might actually be God's punishment for her arrogance; that, and the fact that Nicolas, in his 70s, seemed destined to remain with her as well.

Nicolas had a half dozen apprentices and helpers working with him. Because of her increasing lack of mobility, Perenelle had in the last few years taken on a single apprentice, a young girl named Musetta. She was a scrawny, homely child, an orphan who had been taken in by one of the charity houses that Flamel money had established. The girl could follow directions—usually with a rather frightened intensity—but otherwise showed little native talent for alchemy and no imagination at all. That was fine with Perenelle; the less Musetta knew, the less she could tell anyone. Perenelle had given her a little room in the same wing as the laboratory; she tapped on the door with her cane as she passed, and the girl emerged in a fluster. “Bonjour, Madame,” she said, ducking her head and curtsying as she tucked stray strands of dry, light brown hair under her cap. Her plain, wide country face attempted a smile. “I hope you're feeling well today.”

“I'm no worse than usual,” Perenelle grumbled. “Here . . .” She fumbled in the pocket of her robe, pulling out a large, ornate key and handing it to Musetta. “Open the doors for me, girl.” As Perenelle shuffled down the corridor, Musetta ran ahead a few steps to the stout oaken doors at the end and thrust the key into the keyhole set there. She turned the key; they heard the
snick
of the lock and Musetta pushed the doors open, stepping aside to allow Perenelle to enter before scurrying quickly to light the candles in the room.

The smell always struck Perenelle first: a rich mixture of scents that was nearly overwhelming, everything from the stench of sulfur to the flowery odor of citrus to the metallic tang of the various powders arrayed in their stands near the workbenches. She remembered Verdette remarking on the smell that clung to Perenelle from her hours in the laboratory, and the memory made her smile. Musetta opened the shutters to the two small and high windows in the room, allowing cold winter sunlight to bathe the wooden tables and glisten on the glass jars. A sunbeam pinned two cages, each of which held perhaps a half dozen mice. Perenelle placed the manuscript down at the desk in the corner of the room while Musetta poked at the coals in the hearth. As Musetta coaxed the fire back into grudging life, Perenelle went to the cages, peering in myopically at the animals. The mice in the first cage were gray-haired and elderly, moving slowly and with difficulty as she looked in on them.

The second cage was different. There, the mice peered back at her with eyes like polished black buttons, their snouts wriggling as if they found her aroma as strange as that of the lab. They all looked active, young, and sleek except one: that one appeared to be nearly dead, thin and emaciated, its body trembling, the rib cage visible under patchy skin. The mouse panted as it lay on its side; even as Perenelle watched, its breathing stopped and it went still.

Yesterday, it had appeared no different than any of the others. Perenelle frowned—she would need to make a note of this. “So close . . .” she muttered.
So close
, but the formula was still flawed, the secret still hidden from her.

“Madame?”

“Nothing,” she told Musetta. Musetta shrugged and began straightening up the workbenches. Perenelle wondered how much the girl actually understood. The elderly mice in the first cage were actually younger than any of the “young” ones in the second cage. The mice in the second cage had once been near death from old age, yet now they seemed to be young and vital. In that second cage, Perenelle had taken the most recent version of the elixir she had deciphered from the secret Book of Abraham and dribbled it over their food. The mice had regressed in age as the elixir worked on them, returning to their vital youth—except that, one by one over the next few days, they would age dramatically in the course of a few hours and die, as if their longevity had finally caught up to them and run its course in a matter of moments. She could make them young again, but they would die even sooner than the untouched ones, as if their lifespan suddenly accelerated, with months passing by in moments. Their sudden collapse puzzled Perenelle; nothing in any of the manuscripts suggested what might be the cause, and nothing she added to the mixture seemed to stop it.

So near to success, yet . . .

“Musetta, dispose of the dead one and bring one of the others over to the bench,” Perenelle said, tapping the cage. She hobbled over to the bench, settling herself in the chair there, and unwrapping a towel that held a barber-surgeon's tools. Musetta, looking uncomfortable, carried one of the mice over to Perenelle. Perenelle looked at the girl's hands as Musetta handed her the creature: young hands, the skin smooth and elastic. Her own hands, by contrast, were stiff-jointed and wrinkled, the skin liver-spotted, rough, slack, and dry. It was difficult to remember her own hands once being like the girl's.

The mouse wriggled in Perenelle's grasp, and she caught its neck in her fingers, twisting hard. The
crack
was audible; Musetta gasped, her hands going to her mouth as the mouse went still and limp. “Gracious, girl,” Perenelle said, “it's no different than what Cook does with the chickens. Really, you must get over this squeamishness.” Perenelle flipped the mouse on its back, using pins to tack it down spread-eagled to the surface of the table. She slid a board over to her; there, another mouse was pinned, one from the first cage that she had dissected yesterday, its skin sliced down the belly and pulled back to reveal the internal organs. “I want to see if this one differs inside. Is that so difficult for you to understand? Bring me the
Canon Medicinae
; place it there, on the reading stand . . .”

The candles had burned well down before Perenelle rubbed at her eyes and pushed away the lens through which she'd been peering. There was no significant difference that she could discern between the two dissected mice. She sighed and pushed away from the table. “Musetta,” she said. “Clean up the mess here. Unpin the bodies and burn them before they begin to stink. I need to write up my notes.” Groaning as she forced stiff joints into motion, Perenelle went to her desk. She took down the large journal bound in red Moroccan leather and unlocked it, opening the stiff parchment leaves to the bookmark where she'd left off. She sharpened a quill with the small penknife in the drawer, uncapped the inkwell at the top of the desk, and began writing, blotting when the pen spattered. She'd been writing for some time, enough to fill the page, when she heard Musetta scream.

“Madame!”

“What
now
, child?” Perenelle asked querulously. Setting down the pen, she blotted and sanded the paper, turning in her chair. “Did you—”

Perenelle stopped. Her breath caught in her throat. Grasping her cane, she pushed herself up and went over to the workbench. She stared down to where Musetta's finger was pointing. The apprentice had taken out the pins from the mouse from the experimental cage, and the creature was writhing and twisting on the table. Even more strangely, the great, bloody cut that Perenelle had opened from throat to tail was beginning to close and heal, as if she were watching the work of weeks in a few breaths. The neck, lying at its strange angle, was moving as well. As they watched, the cut closed completely and the head straightened. The mouse's chest heaved, as if it were gulping air, and it flipped over. Its eyes were open; it panted, and the tail wriggled as it took a step. “Madame, it's a miracle,” Musetta breathed. She made the sign of the cross. “Or the devil's work.”

“It's neither,” Perenelle snapped. She put her hand palm up on the table; the mouse climbed into it, sniffing. She stroked the soft fur, feeling the animal's heartbeat under her fingertips. “Here, put him back in the cage,” she said to Musetta, but the girl only shook her head, her eyes wide, refusing to touch the animal. Perenelle gave a huff of exasperation and put the mouse back in the cage herself.

“Finish your cleaning,” she told Musetta, “then lock the laboratory and bring the key to me in my rooms. And speak of this to no one, do you understand. No one.”
Especially not to Nicolas . . .
She glared at the girl, who nodded furiously.

With a sniff, Perenelle looked again at the mouse, happily nuzzling its fellows in the cage, and left the laboratory.

 * * * 

Tw
o days later, the mouse she had killed remained stubbornly alive, though one of its companions had undergone the sudden rapid aging and died. Then, a fortnight later, that mouse also followed the path of the others, becoming ancient in a matter of minutes and expiring. Another failure.

Perenelle pored over the manuscript, checking her laborious translations and the notes in her book. Perhaps the essential oils she'd distilled hadn't been pure enough? But no, she'd been careful and was certain that there'd been no contamination. Yes, she'd needed to make an educated guess toward what some of the ingredients were, and there were the annoying lacunae in the manuscript—she could have missed something vital there. She had consulted astrology to be certain that she was performing her experiments during the most propitious times; she had crafted intricate spells from the most ancient texts and performed them to speed her work; she had read the Tarot to see if the cards could hint at her mistake.