“Sebastian, we can get the money another way. I can pawn some of my jewelry. Please, can we just leave?”
Despite my newfound friendship with Madame Calvé, whom I did wish I could help, I couldn’t deny my increasingly urgent need to leave. Besides, I hadn’t been able to find the book. I felt certain the house didn’t want me to find it.
He took my hand. “If we could, I’d say yes. But it’s still raining, and there have been mudslides, and all the roads are blocked. No one can leave.”
I sighed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well, the flooding certainly isn’t your fault.”
“No, but bringing you here was. You told me you didn’t want to do any more blindfold drawings. I shouldn’t have insisted.”
“But you did.” My sympathy for Sebastian was waning. As much as I wanted to protect him, there was no denying I was trapped in this castle because of his greed and bad judgment.
“I think I want to go back to sleep,” I told him.
He kissed me good night on the top of my head, took the tray, and went out.
I tried to pick up with my Agatha Christie novel where I’d left off, but I could no longer concentrate. My neck ached. And I was still under the same roof as Mathieu. My attempted escape had failed. Gaspard was a mystery I hadn’t even begun to solve. And the unrelenting rain on the window panes had a foreboding tenor.
I pulled on my robe and wandered into the studio. Inspecting the drawing table, I made sure everything was where I needed it to be and then sat down. After removing my blindfold from its velvet-lined leather box, I placed it over my eyes. Feeling for the pencil, I picked it up. I waited for the images to appear, and when they did, I began to sketch the castle once more.
From the very beginning, my ability to draw a scene without consciously knowing what it was going to turn out to be frightened me. I sensed it had frightened my mother, too. Several times, at my request, she had tried to reverse the gift she’d unintentionally given me but never found a spell to expunge my ability to see secrets. Despite my protests, after a few tries, she curtailed her efforts, fearful that if she meddled too much, I might once again go blind.
She’d also warned me not to try to draw my own shadow portrait, especially once I’d turned fourteen and my menses arrived. For that was when daughters of La Lune came into their full power. The flow of blood somehow opened a door to the arcane and preternatural universe.
After drawing for more than an hour, I grew tired and put my head down on my arms for a moment to rest.
When I raised my head, I took off the blindfold and looked at the clock. Several hours had passed, and it was the middle of the night. I crawled into bed and slept until morning.
When I woke, I first looked out the window, hoping the rain had stopped so the roads might clear, but it was still teeming. I rang for coffee and, while waiting, walked into the studio, sat down at the desk, and looked at the pile of drawings.
I had never fallen asleep with the silken mask on before. I had never drawn in my sleep. But I’d done exactly that the night before. And it was those illustrations, the sleep-induced sketches, that I was staring at.
One by one, I examined the graphite vignettes. Each a secret of the chateau. Some were connected to the drawings I’d done during the last few days, others brand-new. There was a bedroom scene of a couple copulating. An addict smoking in the opium room. A maid pocketing silverware in the kitchen at least a hundred years before, judging by her clothes. A roguish-looking man shoving another man out of the turret window. A nursemaid mixing a poisoned draft in the kitchen. A chest full of iridescent pearls hidden in a rusty trunk in an attic.
There were more. More than a dozen drawings of secrets. Some criminal, others illicit or just sad. But nothing connected to Madame Calvé’s thirty-year search for Flamel’s alchemical masterpiece.
I finally reached the last of the sleep sketches in the pile. At first, I couldn’t understand it at all. And then I realized it was drawn from the perspective of someone standing at the top of a spiral staircase, looking down into a room. It was the same room I’d drawn before. Stone walls. Shelves carved from rock. But in this drawing, I saw beakers, alembics, jars, and bottles of elixirs on some of the shelves. The particulars surprised me. Usually, these sketches were rougher. Well enough rendered to understand, certainly well enough for me to use as blueprints to create the finished portraits. But this was different. The details were completely clear. Even the smallest articles were readable.
In the corner, a compass showed the east-west orientation. A series of vignettes in the upper corner illustrated particular vistas. As if looking through windows outside. Clues to where this area of the castle was in relation to the landscape. I’d drawn an actual map. There were also numbers in the margins, as if I had been working out mathematical equations. And symbols, too—the same ones I’d included before and some new ones—all unintelligible to me. And then I noticed the most peculiar aspect of my sleep sketch.
Neither the drawing style nor the hand that had written the notes and numbers was mine.
All artists had a signature—not the way they signed their names but the way they drew a line. It had to do with the pressure they put on the pencil or crayon or brush, how steady their hands were, how careful their eyes were, how well they were able to render what they saw or imagined and the sensitivity of their fingers to translate them into action.
I knew my own signature. And I knew I hadn’t done this drawing. If I thought it was possible, I would have claimed someone else had come into the studio while I slept and planted this sketch in front of me. But my windows and door were locked from the inside. I’d locked them myself. And if someone had broken in, I would have heard it.
I continued to study the picture. Madame would be happy that I’d found more clues about her treasure. I’d given her a staircase, a detailed tunnel, a compass. She had the egress to the treasure. Now, as soon as the rain abated, Sebastian and I really could leave.
Chapter 42
Dressing quickly, I grabbed the illustration and went downstairs to find my hostess and deliver her treasure map.
The scent of coffee and freshly baked bread wafted in the air. I rushed into the breakfast room, calling out, “Madame, Madame,” before I realized how many people were seated around the table. As soon as I saw them, I quickly folded the drawing and shoved it into my trouser pocket.
Picasso, Cocteau, and Anna all said how relieved they were to see me and asked how I was. Mathieu wasn’t there, which actually relieved me.
“Sit down, and have something to eat,” Madame Calvé said, as she fussed over me.
Once breakfast was over and everyone but Sebastian had gone off to play cards or to read and the three of us were alone, I told Madame I had something to show her.