When I opened the door to my studio, I found Sebastian looking through my sketches. “I was hoping I might assist in decoding your drawing,” he explained.
“How? Even Madame doesn’t recognize the markers. I went outside to try to find something but still have absolutely no idea of where it might be.”
My brother held up one of the sketches. “Why is the background so dark in these drawings?”
“No one has turned on the lights? It’s not electrified? There are no windows? It was built five or six centuries ago? I have no idea.”
Sebastian looked at me. “Something’s changed. What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure. I saw Gaspard just now when I was out walking, and he got me thinking. All along, we’ve assumed we’re aiding in an innocent search for an ancient book, but we really don’t know what the book contains. Only what Madame Calvé believes it contains.”
Now it was my turn to read my brother’s face. His light expression turned dark and concerned. “What do you mean?”
“Madame said the book contains Nicolas Flamel’s secret to immortality.”
He nodded.
“Which you and I and our sisters and mother and father know is at least partly possible. Our mother and great-grandmother may not be immortal, but there’s no doubt their chemistry has been altered. Grand-mère is almost ninety, and everyone thinks she’s sixty. And Maman? She’s past fifty. Do you ever think about that when you look at her? She and I look like sisters. Papa, too. Once people become adults, no one in our family ages in real time.”
“We all know about the spell she found in the ancient grimoire that belonged to the original La Lune. Maman can slow down time. It’s amazing, but what does it have to do with Flamel’s book?” Sebastian asked.
“Maman’s spell only performs for her. None of us, not one of the La Lune family of daughters, can activate it. We can only activate our own spells.”
“Your point?”
“The spell to slow aging has a limited value. Only Maman can use it. But what if the formula in the Nicolas Flamel book could be mobilized by anyone?”
Sebastian’s eyes flashed with a reaction I couldn’t read.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
“Nothing. Why?”
“When I was talking just now, about the Flamel formula, you looked—I don’t know . . .”
He cocked his head and changed his voice, affecting a deep, accented baritone. “Did I turn into the creature from the hills?”
When we were children, Sebastian and I often had the same nightmares. A curiosity that both delighted and scared us at different times. To chase them away, our mother had us imagine a monster made of tree bark, worms, bats, ants, spiders, dead leaves, and mushrooms. Together we invented a story that he came from a cave we’d visited in the Fontainebleau forest and made up rules for when and how he traveled to us. Sometimes Sebastian would even pretend to be the creature, squinting his eyes into slits, disguising his voice. Almost scaring me but not quite.
There was a clap of thunder right over our heads and a flash of lightning. The lights flickered and went out.
“Don’t worry,” Sebastian said, his voice soothing me. He had, of course, anticipated and understood my reaction to the dark.
After a few moments, I heard the scrape of a match and smelled sulfur, and Sebastian’s face emerged in candlelight.
“The storm must have blown out the electricity,” he said, holding the silver candlestick out to me. I took it, and he lit the second one for himself.
Given my fear of the dark, I was grateful that Madame had candles at the ready. Thunderstorms were frequent in the summer in this part of the country and were no friends to modern conveniences.
“There’s a candelabra here on the mantel,” I said, as I walked toward it.
I struck a match and lit the first candle, and then, as I’d seen my great-grandmother do during the Jewish holidays, lit each of the other candles using that first one. I’d never performed the ritual, and as the flames illuminated the room, I wondered what the ceremony meant to her.
The wicks burned brightly, casting odd shadows on the wall. Sebastian’s was long and thin and strangely ominous.
For the second time that afternoon, I looked at my brother with concern. What did I know about my twin? Was I really sure of his heart’s desire? We had spent almost five years apart, and we acted as if nothing had changed. But it had. He was twenty-six years old now, far too handsome and wealthy to want for much, but he was heavily in debt and desperate to keep that from my parents. Since childhood, he’d always burned to be a success, but now that ambition seemed to be exaggerated and colored by frustration. And anger. I’d noticed it before but not really focused on it. Sebastian was as unhappy as I was, wasn’t he? The gambling was just an outward manifestation of an internal crisis. I knew what had happened to me in the last five years to make me cynical and lovelorn. But what had happened to him?
I wasn’t sure what to ask. Where to start. But it seemed imperative that I do something. A long time ago, he’d saved me from a turbulent sea. He’d come to New York to pull me out of that morass, too. Now it was my turn. My brother was going to drown unless I figured out how to help him.
Chapter 44
Sheets of water continued to fall from the heavens at a steady, frightening pace. We had a lunch of thinly pounded veal with a vegetable terrine and drank more rosé than usual. At the table, we all tried our best to entertain one another, but we were nervous and distracted. The rain was too heavy. The storm was continuing for too long. Other than Sebastian and me, no one had planned on staying over Sunday night, and everyone was restless to get home. Only Mathieu seemed unperturbed at being marooned. Did I dare think it was because of me? More likely, it was because he’d been spending his time in Madame’s library sorting through her collection of arcane books about the dark arts. I’d overheard her ask him to make an inventory of what important works he thought she was missing so he could look for them when he returned to Paris.
Around two o’clock, I went up to my room to try, for what I hoped was the last time, to solve the puzzle that eluded me.
I had settled myself in the studio and spread the drawings out all around me when there was a knock on the door, and I called out, “Entrée.”
It was Mathieu.
“Oh,” I said, startled. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I don’t imagine you were. I’m sorry for surprising you.”
“No, I meant that I expected one of the servants. Madame always sends up a pot of tea when I come up here to work.”
“Yes, she sent me up with libations. Right here.” He went back out into the hall and returned holding a fully loaded tray. “I put the tray down to knock.”
As he settled it on a low coffee table by the couch, I saw it held two glasses and a bottle of wine, deep red, the same color as my blindfold.
“Now, that’s not tea.”
“No, I switched it. I thought wine would be a better idea.”
“Why is that?”