A Scent of Magic Read online

  “I see.” Esther’s smile faded. “I thought that might be the reason for your visit.”

  Simone reached out and touched the papery skin on the back of Esther’s aging hand. “I came because I was lonely, and I wanted to see you again.” When she saw the other woman brighten, she added, “and I have some seeds I want to know if we could plant in your garden.”

  “Seeds?”

  Simone told Esther about Shamir, leaving out the part about his ability to disappear. “He gave me these,” she said, digging into her handbag and showing her the seeds. “He said they might produce a plant that would give me the missing ingredient to a perfume my father promised to make for his ‘master.’” She laughed. “Who in this day and time has a master?”

  “We all have our masters,” Esther replied more soberly than Simone would have expected. “Some are in human form, but more often, they are our obsessions.”

  Simone considered that a moment. “Yes, I suppose so,” she said, wondering if her obsession with taking revenge on Nick had become her master. She did not like the idea.

  Late the next morning, after a more restful sleep than she’d had since arriving in England, Simone spent a pleasant hour walking the extensive garden Esther had cultivated for many years in the gently sloping terrain surrounding her house. The older woman pointed out the many varieties of herbs and medicinal plants that were interspersed with those that produced a riot of colorful flowers. Simone was enchanted and hoped aloud that someday she would have such a magnificent garden.

  “Someday.” Esther said, plucking a weed. “Sometimes, someday never gets here, you know, unless you make it happen.”

  Simone remained silent. What did someday hold for her? What did she want to make happen in her life? She’d thought it was to be a master perfumer, to create her own grands parfums, like her father before her. But that dream had come true, only to prove to be a rather empty ambition. She had found no joy in the work, no raison d’être, other than revenge. Of course, she’d only given it a few weeks, and those weeks had proven highly frustrating. She shared this with Esther.

  “It’s a short time,” her friend agreed. “Maybe you ought t’ work on something else for a while. You mustn’t let our little perfume become your master.” She winked.

  But Esther did not know the real reason Simone was obsessed with uncovering the secret of “their” perfume, or that she would not, could not, rest until she was successful.

  Esther took up a shovel and helped Simone plant the seven seeds, each in a different part of the garden, so that some would receive full sunlight, others partial shade. “I’ll keep an eye on them for you,” she assured Simone. “I’ve never seen seeds like these, so I don’t know whether they will grow quickly or slowly, or at all.”

  “Thank you for planting them,” Simone replied with a smile. “I don’t know if they will give me what that Shamir person thinks I need for the perfume, but if they do, I will be glad to honor my father’s promise to the man, especially if it will get him off my back,” she added with a laugh, feeling lighter hearted than she had in weeks. She was glad she’d come to see Esther.

  Then her companion startled her. “Oh, I forgot,” the old woman said, touching her hands to her cheeks. “We must cast our spell.”

  “Spell? What spell?” Simone vaguely recalled Esther mentioning something about a spell at their first meeting.

  Esther laughed. “I have told you I am a sister in the craft,” she said. “I never plant anything, a seed, an idea, a plan, unless I send it off with an appropriate spell.”

  The craft. Witchcraft. Simone knew there were those who practiced black magic in New Orleans, and she shivered. But she took in the loveliness of the garden around her, smelled the bouquet of all the flowers that bloomed here, and decided that she would humor the old woman. She could sense nothing dangerous in her craft, and if her belief in such superstitious nonsense made her happy, Simone was willing to indulge her.

  Esther led her back to the house, where they entered the small but charming kitchen that overlooked the back gardens. Herbs of all kinds dangled in bundles upside down from the ceiling, scenting the room in a bouquet of aromas as they dried. Copper cooking vessels hung on hooks along the walls, decorating the space with their warm glow. A tea kettle squatted on the stove top, and dishes gleamed from behind immaculate glass panes in the cabinet doors. Simone was enchanted. This kitchen was filled with life, and warmth, a pleasurable sense of well-being, the antithesis in every way of the cold, lonely kitchenette she’d left behind in her flat in London. This cozy place reminded her of Maman and the aromas of her childhood that had filled the air in their home in Grasse.

  Suddenly, she missed her mother, whose grief had cut short her life after they’d arrived in the United States. She longed for France and her childhood home again. The home and the security that had so suddenly vanished from beneath her when…

  Not now! She forced her attention to Esther’s activities. The old woman was digging through a jumble of small items in a drawer and at last came up with a stub of a pencil and a small pad of paper.

  “I knew it had to be in there,” she muttered, handing the items to Simone. “Now, write on this paper your dearest wish.”

  Simone stared blankly at Esther. Her dearest wish? Several wishes came to mind. But which one was dearest? To create her grands parfums? To revenge her father’s death? To destroy Nicholas Rutledge? It occurred to her suddenly that one wish could accomplish all. She wrote, “I wish to learn what flower Mary Rose used to make her perfume.”

  She had no idea what this spell-making was all about, and she had to squelch a giggle at the thought that she was even doing this. But she handed the paper and pencil back to Esther, who did not look at what Simone had written, but rather took the paper to the table upon which sat a round black iron pot filled with sand. It looked to Simone like a miniature witch’s cauldron, a small version of the kind she’d seen on the Halloween cards in the United States, where a witch in a pointed hat hunched over a steaming vessel with a black cat arching at her ankles.

  As Simone watched, Esther took out a long wooden match, and without any explanation, set the paper on fire. She placed the flaming note on a small metal tray that nestled on the sand inside the pot, then began to chant in repetition:

  “Smoke and fire, smoke and fire,

  Bring to us our heart’s desire,

  Ash and seed, ash and seed,

  Bestow upon us all we need.”

  In an instant, the paper had turned to ashes, which Esther then briskly scooped up into her hand. “Come,” she said, indicating for Simone to follow her back outside. She went to where they had planted one of the seeds. “Take the shovel and turn back the soil.”

  “But…”

  “See if you can find the seed,” she instructed. “We’re going to give this one a little extra nourishment. Should have done this first,” she added under her breath. “Must be getting old.”

  As if by magic, the seed was unearthed with the shovel full of dirt and rested on the soil in plain sight. “Good, good,” Esther chuckled. Then she emptied the ashes into the hole. “Now, just slip that back into place. When this seed blooms, your fondest wish will come true.”

  Behind the woman’s back Simone could not resist a roll of the eyes. Esther was such a dear, but her spells were a bit too much.

  Back in the house, Simone went upstairs to wash up, then rejoined Esther for lunch. They sat at the table in the snug kitchen and watched as a gentle rain began to fall.

  “It’s a good omen,” Esther murmured. “The seeds will get just what they need.” She turned a beaming face to Simone. “And so will you.”

  “Let’s hope,” was the most enthusiasm Simone could summon in reply.

  A silence fell between them, broken only by the clink of their spoons in the tea cups, but at last Esther cleared her throat and spoke. “There’s something I’d like t’ ask you,” she said, and Simone looked up, surprised at the change
in her tone of voice.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you…have you mentioned…our perfume to Nicholas Rutledge?”

  Simone’s face grew instantly hot. “Of course not! I’ve only run into him twice, quite by accident…” She remembered his intrusion in Dupuis’s office, and amended, “well, actually, three times. But he and I are not exactly friends. I would never mention it to the likes of him. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just curious,” Esther returned, a questioning look on her face. “Some of my friends here in the village were hired this morning to do some landscape cleanup work on the grounds at Brierley Hall.”

  “I don’t understand. What does that have to do with the perfume?”

  “Mr. Rutledge has hired them to clean up the garden behind the cottage. Mary Rose’s garden,” she added with emphasis. “I know he’s in the perfume business, and I just wondered if he might be looking for information about our little perfume.”

  “How could he know about ‘our’ perfume?” Simone asked, alarm shooting through her body.

  “I don’t know that he does. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  The teaspoons clinked again against the china as each woman became lost in thought. Simone’s thoughts traveled swiftly back over her brief encounters with Nick. Had she inadvertently said something to him about the perfume? She thought not. If he knew about it, he had come up with it from some other source. “If that essence was originally made there in Mary Rose’s house, and since I discovered it in a set of antique bottles from there, I suppose it’s possible that Nick found some of it when he sold the antiques from the carriage house,” she said, sorting her thoughts out loud. An uncomfortable suspicion began to form in her mind.

  “That is possible,” Esther agreed with a sigh. “I am sure Mr. Rutledge is above reproach,” she added, “but I am in earnest when I say that the potion must not fall into the wrong hands.”

  Simone thought about her own intent for the use of the perfume oil once she found out what it was, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What…what would happen if someone, uh, like Mr. Rutledge, for instance, discovered the perfume and…reproduced it for sale to the public.”

  Esther looked at her gravely and shook her head from side to side. “It was never meant for such purposes,” she said dolefully. “I don’t want to even imagine what might happen.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It had taken until almost noon for his hastily recruited landscape crew to remove enough of the thick nest of vine-like weeds from the garden behind the carriage house for Nick to get an idea of its shape and form. It was less than a quarter of a hectare in size, enclosed behind a crumbling stone wall. But apparently at one time it had been a gardener’s pride. Meticulously outlined in white stones, the main bed was in the form of a circle. It was divided into wedge-shaped beds by the same kind of stones, and a small circular bed was outlined in the center. The rocks forming this smaller circle were charred, as if it had been used as a fireplace. Nick frowned, finding the idea of a fire in a flower bed curious.

  Along the south and east walls he came across another puzzle. Stubs of small trunks stood like dwarf soldiers cut down in a row. A miniature orchard of some kind? He wished his men hadn’t been so hasty in chopping them down. But then, he’d given orders for them to clear everything to the ground.

  The west wall backed up to the house, with a small portal giving access to the resident. Nick had had that door sealed, however, when he renovated the property to be a rental cottage. He had not considered renovating these gardens as well. Maintenance was too costly, so he had simply decided to leave them in their wild state, guessing that no guest would dare venture among the prickly vines.

  Which was precisely what his first tenant had done. He set his jaw at the thought of Simone prowling these grounds. What had possessed her to do such a thing, and on a stormy night, he recalled…unless she was looking for something she wanted very badly?

  Something like…the secret to a very unusual perfume? He scratched his head. How on earth could she know about Mary Rose’s perfume oil? What would make her think that information about it might be hidden here in this garden?

  The north wall of the garden was finally illumined by the early afternoon sun, and Nick caught a glint of sunlight reflecting on a shard of glass. Frowning, he made his way through the piles of beheaded weeds that rested in prickly disarray ready to be hauled away, until he came to the place where he’d spied the glass. Upon the ground at his feet, the remains of a shattered window pane lay half-buried in the rich earth, along with the outline of a wooden frame, long since weathered and worm-eaten into a spongy pulp. Pulling away the remaining vines that clung to the wall, Nick saw that it had apparently been used to support a crude structure of some sort. A primitive greenhouse? he wondered, glancing again at the glass at his feet. He remembered some mention of a greenhouse in one of Mary Rose’s letters.

  His gloved fingers brushed at the wall, which sent a crumble of pebbly rock to the ground. Odd, he thought. This wall had stood for centuries. It shouldn’t crumble so easily beneath his touch. He brushed it again several times, and with each swipe of his hand, more of what appeared to be loose mortar showered away from the wall. It tore away in roughly a square pattern, as if it at one time had been a patch of some sort.

  A patch. Or a seal…

  Nick’s curiosity clicked into high gear. He borrowed a heavy ax from one of the workers and chopped at the mortar, which fell away freely. Carefully, he began removing the rocks it had held in place, and to his amazement discovered they had indeed sealed over a niche in the wall. His heartbeat quickened as he tore away the rest of the rocks, exposing a dark, dank compartment about three feet wide and half that deep. At the back of the hole in the wall sat a square object.

  Nick laid the ax aside and reached for whatever had been sealed inside this odd hiding place, obviously for quite a long time. His fingers encountered a small, heavy box. Bringing it into the light of day, he saw it was made of metal, like a rustic safe of sorts, except that it bore no lock.

  The latch squeaked and the hinges rained rust when he raised the lid. Inside lay a single item…a moldering book, or what might at one time have been a book. The cover was rotting away, and the pages were yellow and soft with age. But clearly discernible on the first page, in a handwriting he recognized, were the words:

  The Spells and Enchantments of Mary Rose Hatcher.

  Simone was uneasy with the plan, but Esther had been adamant. Even though Simone had told her about Nick’s betrayal years ago and about the enmity between them, Esther insisted that Simone must pay a call on him to find out if he knew about the magical perfume oil, and if he intended to mass produce it as a commercial fragrance. “He must understand th’ danger of putting that essence into th’ hands of th’ whole world,” the old woman had warned.

  Simone, who had not told Esther that creating a marketable perfume was her intent for the fragrant oil as well, believed the white witch was being overly dramatic in her insistence that the potion was dangerous.

  However, Simone herself wanted to know if indeed her arch enemy had somehow obtained the mysterious substance. If so, and if his intent was the same as hers, it would make her first attempt at creating a grand parfum that much more difficult, for time would no longer be on her side. If Nick had discovered the sensuous effects of the scented oil, and if he had already learned its secret ingredient, she had no doubt he was working diligently toward launching his first fragrance made from it. With the connections and friends in manufacturing and retailing she’d learned he had, she believed he just might pull it off.

  Simone needed to know where she stood in the race with Nick, if indeed there was such a race, and so she’d agreed to pay a visit to Nick at Brierley Hall.

  The sun cast shades of late afternoon through the trees, although daylight would linger far into the night on this midsummer’s eve. Simone was not accustomed to such long hours of daylight, for at home, even
the longest day of the year began to darken by nine o’clock. Carefully, she steered Esther’s borrowed car along the left-hand side of the road. It was her first driving experience in England, and she was terrified she’d forget and cross into the wrong lane.

  In spite of her attempts to concentrate on arriving in one piece, Simone’s thoughts wandered back to Esther’s admonition. Why was she so insistent that the lushly fragrant oil was dangerous? She’d offered no proof, only her homespun theory that somehow it had caused the deaths of Mary Rose Hatcher and her lover, John Rutledge. What was Nick’s take on that whole episode?

  Nick.

  Her face grew warm at the thought of Nick’s visitations to her in dreams, and the unabashed pleasure she’d taken in his arms disturbed her greatly. Only last night she’d once again experienced an incredible dream in which she and Nick had made passionate love beneath a waterfall in an exotic jungle-like forest. In this dream, she was no longer afraid of him, no longer his prisoner. In fact, she had invited him to enter the pool, and her body, and had relished the delicious comfort of being in the arms of a man who truly loved her.

  Truly loved her?

  Who was she kidding? Nicholas Rutledge did not truly love her. Never had. Never would.

  So why was she obsessing about him? That was the danger of the perfume, she thought darkly. It created dreams that made you believe in the impossible. Become delusional. Perhaps some time, some way, there would be a man who loved her like that. But she was certain his name would not be Nicholas Rutledge.

  Lost in thought, Simone drove past the front entrance to Brierley Hall and had to turn around and retrace her course. But when she again approached the gray stone pillars that marked the entrance to the estate, she lost her nerve. This was insane. She didn’t want to talk to Nick Rutledge. She loathed the man. And except in dreams, where it seemed impossible to avoid him, she had no desire whatsoever to encounter him again. Ever.