The Perfumer's Secret (21 page)

‘Well, that’s the same for any stitched wound, I suppose,’ I said, trying to pull us back on track.

Sébastien mercifully followed suit for the benefit of any listeners, especially Jeanne, if she had chosen to remain paused behind the door. While I knew every other board in my wing of the villa, I couldn’t rely on the floorboards at this end of the house to squeak and communicate, so I had no idea whether my maid had left us.

‘Thank you for coming. Your special ministrations have done me a world of good.’

I gave him a look of soft despair and he rewarded me with a crooked smile to accept the admonishment.

‘It was just easier and quicker for me to do it myself than wait for anyone else to help you.’ I spluttered behind my hand again, struggling to keep the amusement silent. I would need to practise my innuendo if I was to play this game with him again.

We were in the Delacroix laboratory, pulling off dustsheets as Sébastien surveyed the equipment, nodding, making sounds of approval, and all the while his glance – if not his hand or body – making contact with me. Frankly, we couldn’t keep our gazes off one another.

It was as though a vault had opened into a new world. I was like Alice on my own adventure in Wonderland, except there were only two characters – Sébastien and me, because I couldn’t bear for anyone else to trespass into our story. Only making perfume had consumed me in the same way that Sébastien consumed my thoughts. Since yesterday afternoon I didn't believe I’d thought of anything or anyone else but him . . . the smell of him, the feel of him, his kiss, his confidence especially. That last sent trills of delighted anticipation through me. When would I feel his bare skin against me? I refused to permit the reality of my marital status to creep into my daydreaming. For now, the wistful joy of Sébastien’s affection was my sanity.

‘Why is no one here?’

‘There are some of the older fellows in and around the factory and there are plenty of women around, just no one in the lab,’ I said, squirming away from his encircling arm. ‘This is off limits. My father was always particular about keeping the lab as free from cross-contamination as he could, so he set up a strict regime that we all adhered to.’

‘Oh,’ he said dryly, a new tone of mischief entering his voice. ‘So we’re all alone?’

I grinned. ‘I wouldn’t count on that, but —’

I didn’t get to say more because in the next heartbeat he was kissing me and I was melting beneath him. I came up breathless from the deliciousness of the awakening of such passion but also the novelty of affection. ‘Sébastien, we can’t . . .’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s . . .’ I laughed. ‘The ghost of my father still walks around here.’

He faked a shiver and pulled a face of horror. ‘Do we have any Erlenmeyer flasks?’

I nodded. ‘Oh, plenty of them. How many do you need?’ I moved to reach up to some boxes on a higher shelf and with no shame at all Sébastien limped up behind me and cupped my breast. I should have been incensed. Instead I burst into helpless laughter. I was in an impossible position, balancing a heavy box.

‘Oh, just the one for me,’ he said, gently squeezing and setting off an explosion of sparkling tendrils of arousal.

I gave a soft groan. ‘Don’t,’ I said weakly and he took his hand away.

‘I won’t. That really was most ungentlemanly of me.’

‘It was,’ I agreed, wishing he’d do it again, wishing in fact that we could walk into the Delacroix villa this moment, go upstairs to my old beloved suite and make love all afternoon.

‘Then why don’t we?’ he said, and I startled with the realisation I’d shared my thoughts aloud.

Our playfulness was chased away by a new tension that suddenly held us in its maw. I could hear the tick of the clock on the lab’s wall matching time with my heartbeat, both normally inaudible but now they sounded like a thundersome duet. No one inhabited the villa other than our old housekeeper, and she was presently away with her family in Nice; the potential for adultery was now disconcertingly real.

I knew I was blinking with consternation.

‘May I tell you something?’ he said, interlocking our fingers and kissing the pulse point at my wrist, a move so sensual that I closed my eyes and swallowed the powerful yearning it prompted.

‘Yes,’ I replied, making sure my voice was reliable before I answered, but then I held my breath, knowing I was now no longer on dangerous ground but about to tread into a landscape that had a huge sign posted nearby that warned me to
Beware of quicksand
.

Sébastien continued, his voice raspy with apprehension. ‘I mentioned to you that I have been with many women in my time.’ He paused but I gave him nothing back; we were both now emotionally naked and I needed him to feel as raw and vulnerable as I was. I was glad to see his Adam’s apple bob. He too was swallowing hesitation. ‘I have not truly loved a single one of those women.’

I held my nerve, made him finish his thought.

‘Until a couple of days ago I might have allowed that I had very strong feelings for Alice; I could even have been pressed to admitting that losing Catherine to Jeremy Padstow two years back hurt me far more than I realised. But I’ve never felt like this. It’s sudden. It’s filled with anguish. I could almost wish it hadn’t happened because there’s some pain ahead for me, for us, for our families . . . but, Fleurette, I believe myself in love with you.’

Now I wanted to speak and took a breath to respond but he shook his head.

‘Nothing you say can persuade me otherwise. If you denied me, asked me to leave, told me it was impossible, you couldn’t brutalise me more if you tried. But I would leave . . . today . . . if you don’t feel the same way about me.’ He pulled me close now and stroked my cheek so very gently. ‘Tell me you don’t love me,’ he defied.

I was trembling. I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t purely from the provocative words – no one had ever spoken to me like this. No one had ever felt this way about me. Or was I trembling from my emotional response to Sébastien?

‘I have no one to compare you to.’ It came out baldly but at least it was pure . . . an entirely honest response.

A twitch of amusement fluttered at the edge of his smile but in his eyes I could see it had disappointed him that I couldn’t gush back with words of love.

‘If I limped out of your life this moment and you could never see me again, never hear from me again . . .’ he encouraged, trailing off to leave the question in his expression of hope.

I searched my heart. It was easy. ‘Anyone else who came after you would suffer.’

I watched the look of hope rearrange into elation.

‘I would compare them to you and I would come up wanting because I don’t want there to be anyone else.’

‘Even if there could be?’

I nodded. ‘I trust my senses. I am at one with Nature’s perfection – her beauty, her colours, her fragrances – and she has allowed me to glimpse it in a man.’

‘I’m not perfect, Fleurette,’ he warned, looking instantly anxious.

‘No, but your love for me is. My senses tell me that. I have no need to look for love elsewhere than in your arms.’

He kissed me and all thoughts of making perfume left me. ‘Shall we go to the house?’ I whispered, privately appalled at my brazen attitude but it was as if an invisible force now was in charge. It was love, desire, awakening – call it what you must – but it had taken away my free will.

He nodded. ‘Is it far?’ he croaked. ‘I may not make it.’

I blushed, laughing, and cooled my cheeks with my hands. ‘I’d race you there if it wasn’t so close.’ I pointed to a door at the back of the laboratory. ‘That leads into a corridor that lets us into my father’s old study.’

‘The villa is connected?’ he said, his tone wondrous.

It was my turn to nod. ‘Shall we?’

__________

We walked through the laboratory door into my father’s study that even Henri had found hard to inhabit as his own. There were times when I could be so critical of Henri and yet at our query as to why he hadn’t beaten a quick path to our father’s desk, chair, private space, an oddly wistful expression had ghosted across our elder brother’s face.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘When I can no longer smell his arthritis liniment, then I’ll know his spirit has finally given permission. For now, he’s still in here.’

‘Does that comfort you, Henri?’ I recall Felix asking.

‘Curiously, it does. I know you both think I wanted to take over the business promptly, almost wishing our father to an early death, but you’ve always had me wrong in this respect. I am daunted, to tell you the truth.’ I remember how surprised we were by this reveal. It was a moment of fragile honesty we were not used to.

‘Trust your instincts. You know what you’re doing, Henri,’ Felix had assured in his ever-generous way. ‘Father trained you for this. He has groomed you for a decade for this very moment.’

I had watched my older brother nod, fighting back his emotion. ‘Thank you for the faith.’

‘You run the business, brother; let me and our sister worry about the product.’

Neither of us could be heartless enough to tell him that for us twins the pungent smell of our father’s tumerol liniment, made from the curcumin rhizome that he imported from India, might never leave this room. Father had met an old Indian spiritualist man who spoke to him of the medicine of Ayurveda and had stared at my father’s crooked fingers and recommended a paste made from the dried turmeric root. Father had laughingly told us the original recipe had called for cow’s urine but he had since developed the paste with lime and saltpeter and believed it genuinely did alleviate the inflammation of his aching finger joints. The smell of our father’s ointment was part of the very fabric of this room and obviously for Henri it had now faded sufficiently, but for me I could still taste its pleasant freshness at the back of my throat with a lingering camphorous odour that I recalled from the fresh root. Our heightened sense might always be able to pick up the faintest trace of our father’s medicine. Henri was wrong; our father was still here and likely would never leave, even though we had.

I ran a finger over the dust cover that hid his desk.

‘Memories?’ Sébastien wondered, and I felt embarrassed to have locked him out of my thoughts.

I nodded but must have looked pensive because he reached for my elbow and made me turn towards him. ‘Fleurette . . .?’

‘Don’t ask me again if I’m sure. I am,’ I said, hoping the uncertainty I was indeed hiding would not push through my feigned confidence. ‘Follow me.’ I walked with haste now, not pausing for him as I moved over the elegant parquetry that lit golden when the sunlight cleared the roof and peeped in through the twin floor-to-ceiling arched windows that flanked our front door. I felt the rush of pleasure that this space always brought to me – it was the beauty of our house combining with that wonderful sense of security of being back in the home you grew up in. Father had allowed me to transform it from its sombre colouring of the previous century and bring into the twentieth century. It was now the palest of greys . . . like a summer’s shower of rain that dissipates before it even reaches the dry earth. My all-knowing twin had once told me this liquid-to-vapour effect was called virga. And so we had always referred to this paint colour as virga in our household and it had stolen from the hallway into other rooms as a pastel palette from which to add decoration. I had used it in my bedroom but warmed it up with pinks and scarlets of the centifolia rose I loved so much.

I hurried up the stairs, noticing nothing now, because anxiety, perhaps excited anticipation, had turned everything familiar to a blur. I didn’t look at the paintings that lined those two flights, I didn’t glance out of the windows on the landing, I didn’t register the pinks of the rugs beneath my tread. I passed the pedestals and busts covered in dust sheets and I definitely didn’t linger outside the doors that led to my two brothers’ apartments. No, I skipped up the final stairs to the third level of the house where my chamber resided and pushed open the door to my private space and immediately felt relief wash over me.

I was home.

I was safe.

It was not Aimery behind me. That alone brought me hope and a sense of my future no longer bleak.

Sébastien would take what Aimery felt was his – and could not be – and I had never been more sure about anything in my life than wanting this most private and precious of my possessions to be gifted to a man I loved. I wanted it gone now, though, before it could become a point of argument. I turned self-consciously to welcome him into my room and he stood at the threshold, waiting for the final invitation. I liked his hesitation – whether it was just good manners or his own nervousness, I didn’t care. I was reassured by his politeness.

‘May I?’

‘You may,’ I whispered.

He stepped inside and closed the door. Now everything in our lives – past and present – was excluded. Sébastien looked around, being careful, I thought, in not advancing immediately; maybe I did look like a deer being stalked who could startle at any moment and flee.

‘You have good taste,’ he murmured, angling away from me in the limping gait I now found helplessly attractive. I could see he was taking in the richer colours of my bedroom’s palette. ‘My, my . . . you actually do sleep on a quilt of roses,’ he noted, glancing at the bed that was semi-enclosed by an exquisite timber-panelled alcove, replete with oval windows. ‘You must have always enjoyed good dreams in that splendid niche,’ he remarked in soft awe.

I shrugged, distracted by his tender approach, and smiled, my shoulders relaxing as he guided me past my apprehension. ‘It replicates an eighteenth-century bedroom in the Louis Quinze style to imitate the architecture of the doll’s house I’d played with in my childhood,’ I explained.

‘How spoilt you are!’ he teased in gentle mockery. ‘So, where is it?’ He looked around for the doll’s house of my early years.

‘Er . . . in the attic, I believe.’

‘Awaiting your daughter,’ he said. ‘A special heirloom.’ It was a lovely thought and echoed my love for family and my desire to look forward to its future.

‘I do hope so. My father designed it and helped to build it. I think he worried constantly that I didn’t have a mother and so did everything he could that a mother might bring to a daughter’s life.’

He turned and fixed me with a cool gaze of appraisal. ‘He did a very good job. You are spoilt, clearly,’ he said, waving a hand at the elaborate suite of rooms that I called mine. ‘But it doesn’t show in the slightest.’

I was taken by surprise. Compliments had come my way often but none that meant quite as much to me as this one. I had grown up hating the ‘rich girl’ label that followed me like a loyal servant and, as Felix had pointed out, had kept so many potential friends at a distance. Oh, I knew the town folk loved me because I was a Delacroix, but at a social level it was people’s hesitancy that had served to make me feel something of an island, especially with no sisters or mother to gossip or laugh alongside about girlish things as I knew others did.