Julien was sitting in a chair by the table, drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling a croissant while staring at the portrait I had painted in my heated frenzy.
As I stretched and fully came awake, I remembered I’d never gone home the night before. What had my grandmother thought? Did I care? She had slapped me and thrown water at me. Did I even have to go back? I could just move in here, into this bell tower. Keep selling jewels at the pawnshop until I ran out and then move on to selling the antiques. There was enough silver and china and artwork to last years.
“Good morning, Sandrine.” Julien’s luxe voice and penetrating eyes made my skin tingle. “You look quite fetching.”
I glanced down. I’d forgotten how naked I was with my see-through lace skirt and tiny vest. Trying to be demure, I covered myself with my shawl, got up, and visited the small lavatory inside the tower. I would have preferred to go into the main part of the house for the convenience of the modern plumbing, but it was a long walk in the cold, and if La Lune had been able to live like this for years, certainly I could manage one morning.
When I returned to Julien, he was inspecting the still-wet painting.
“Did you do this yesterday?”
“Last night.”
“All night?”
“Until very late, yes. I don’t actually know what time I finished.”
“It’s marvelous. And brave.” He turned to me now. “Thinking of you painting it makes me want to—” He broke off, took two steps to where I was standing. He pulled me toward him and kissed me full on the lips.
I had read enough books to know what to call it, but I’d never experienced a swoon before. I truly did not think I was going to be able to remain on my feet. I became that kiss. Became its emotion, its sensation. Everything around me disappeared: the tower room, the painting. There was only the wave of euphoria and the weakness that made me hold on to Julien all the tighter.
Pulling him with me onto the daybed, I undressed him, unashamed in my desire to see him naked. To feel him. There on the rumpled blanket, I took him with a hungry mouth and active hands. And he watched me in wonder until he succumbed to my ministrations, and together we went into the dark purple and red and magenta and orange world of colors and scents and feelings that was inside my mind and behind my eyes and deep in my womb where the explosions caused ripples that left me breathless and panting.
And then I heard it, that faint chiming I’d heard before when we’d made love, the hum of those glorious, ancient bells.
After we had recovered, we set to putting the room back in order, and I told him what had happened with my grandmother and the fight we’d had.
Julien was planning to remain at La Lune that day; he had work to do in the main part of the house. I wanted to stay with him, but he encouraged me to go home to my grandmother’s and make peace with her.
“She’s a strong, stubborn woman, but she’ll get used to the idea of you becoming a painter. Why wouldn’t she? She’s worked her whole life. Surely she will understand your desire for your own kind of independence. She can’t be that superstitious. I’ve met her.”
“I know, but she becomes irrational when it comes to La Lune and me painting, or even me staying here in Paris.”
After folding up the clothes I’d worn the night before into neat piles of fabrics, I opened the cabinet to put everything back where I’d found it. Rays of sunlight coming through the oblong windows illuminated the interior, and I noticed that one of the panels was a slightly different color wood.
Reaching out, I touched it. It wobbled.
“Julien, come look. There’s something here.”
Beside me, he peered into the semidarkness.
“It’s empty.”
“There.” I put his hand on the edge of the hidden panel—-surprised I’d been so bold to take his hand. And then I laughed at myself. I had taken so much more in the bed only minutes ago.
“Do you think it might be a hidden compartment?” I asked.
He knocked on it, and we heard a hollow echo. “It appears to be one.”
“Do you know how it opens? You’re an architect. You must know things like that.”
He laughed. “I must? Well, let’s see . . .”
Julien pressed on one corner and then the next. Nothing happened. But well-versed in secrets and how to reveal them, he tried another way, and then another. Finally he pressed the panel in the right combination, and it sprang open.
“I can’t see much—this goes fairly deep,” he said.
I lit a candle, brought it over, and he thrust it inside the cabinet.
We both peered in.
“There’s something in there, isn’t there?” I said.
Using both hands, Julien reached inside and then, struggling, pulled out a well-wrapped and very large package.
The burgundy silk wrapping appeared expensive, ancient, and musty. It gave off the same odor I’d smelled the first time we’d visited the tower: a lush fragrance that combined ancient air, frankincense, cedar, myrrh, and roses.
Gingerly I pulled the fabric away to reveal a thick book, bound in creamy brown leather. There was no writing on the back cover, so I turned it around to see if there was anything on the front.
Where there had been a title, only tiny fragments of gold were left, as if someone had traced the word’s outline with a finger over and over. Nothing was legible any longer.
I opened it to the frontispiece and found the page had been ripped out, and only a ragged edge of it was left near the spine.
What remained was the part of a name, two Roman numerals, and the words Paris, France.
The first two complete pages contained three columns of small medieval type in what appeared to be archaic French, for some of the words were foreign to me. There was foxing on the edges, and the thick paper had a landscape to it, little hills and valleys, the way very old manuscripts do.
As I turned to the next set of pages, more of the same mystical, spicy fragrance escaped, almost drugging me. The heady scent added to the mystery of what this ancient volume might be.
“Look,” Julien said, pointing to the margin, where tiny handwriting filled the white spaces. Inky scratches faded to a pale brown.
I bent lower and tried to read the inscriptions, but the words were too faint and too small.
“We’ll need a magnifier,” he said.
“There must be one downstairs.”
“If not, I can bring one tomorrow from my office.” He turned the page. And I gasped.
Painted over the writing was an illustration of a woman drowning in a pond. The expression on her face was sheer terror. In the margins onlookers watched with horror, except for one creature jumping into the air, wild with enjoyment, his brilliant verdant-green eyes shining with delight. Horns broke thought his reddish-brown hair, and he sported a long tail.
Next to the drawing was another notation in the same minute handwriting and same pale ochre ink, but this one was slightly more legible. I read it out loud.
“ ‘To call upon a ghost, stand in the front of a tomb and call out loud the names of the angels of the first camp, holding in your hand a glass bowl of pure honey mixed with the oil of almond and say: I command you, O Spirit, Ram-bearer dweller of the graves, who sleeps upon the bones of the dead . . .’ ”
Beside me, Julien Duplessi did not take even one breath until I stopped.
“What kind of book is this?” I asked.
“Have you ever heard of a grimoire?” He answered with another question and with what I thought was a touch of dread in his voice.
Chapter 18