Beast (38 page)

Yet no amount of resolve or anger washed away her feeling of youthful foolishness. How she hated being young today; she wished she could skip right now to middle age.

She had no footing in her two-day marriage, could find no place beside her new French husband. She couldn't see, even vaguely, a productive role for herself here. She felt like what she was: catered to, spoiled. As they rode in forced silence—hard and swift upon the plain—she nagged herself for doing nothing that anyone, including she, expected of her. Then railed inside, like the wind in her ears, for not knowing even what to expect.

Just not this. Not sleeping late and being cross and crying in the bathtub. Not this, please, God, not this.

She didn't recognize what they had come to when Charles first pulled his horse up. The land was merely green and even, the earth faintly brown where it showed in strips.

"Jasmine," he said, a little breathless, a little awed at his own huge field of bushes. There was no end to them except at the horses' feet, where the planted field began. "I own more jasmine than anything, more land planted with them, more blossoms produced, more than twice over than any other flowers.'" He owned seven enormous fields of jasmine by which he pieced together the largest jasmine holding in France, making him a prince of sorts, of jasmine oil. Louise's husband began to speak of an enterprise he clearly adored.

He grew and harvested other flowers for his perfumes—lavender for one, roses, as well as orange blossoms from the sour Seville orange, and acacia and mimosa. He grew six or seven of the ingredients of perfumes, while he used hundreds of different extracts in his attempts to make his own blends, including ambergris, one of the most expensive, now supplied by her father, who would retire at the end of the summer, giving the prince control over this important ingredient too. A few of Charles Harcourt's perfumes sold well enough, though he himself didn't consider any first-rate. His extracts, on the other hand, were used by the biggest perfume houses in Paris; they were premium. As far as his perfumer's enterprise went, he made his money here.

Jasmine was the most expensive essence to extract, though the fact that it grew "better between Cannes and Grasse than it grew anywhere else in the world" was of enormous help. There were too many kilometers of jasmine over too vast an area for him to take Louise down into them, to walk through them; too much to survey today. So they rode. And rode and rode. From horseback, jasmine looked dull compared with the lavender. It seemed scraggily. As with the lavender, the jasmine fields were planted in rows, but these dark, leafy bushes grew more helter-skelter. The plants were shorter than expected. I he tail of Charles's horse in front of her brushed over tops of plants when he turned at the end of a row.

The roses were even more disappointing—droopy, short-stemmed, tangled, without a single open flower. What new blooms were on them were nice enough, but most every bush, roses and jasmine alike, was picked clean.

At the next jasmine field, as Charles rode through inspecting for disease, water, nutrition, he explained.

"We take the flowers in the morning, when they are most fragrant. The lavender is harvested once a year: right now. You saw it at its finest. The roses bloom in cycles eight months out of the year; the jasmine only from July to October. Now, though, in August and September they are the most profuse and fragrant. These fields are full of flowers. Look." He pointed out unopen buds. "If you saw this field first thing in the morning, it would be more impressive…" He grew animated and broad-gesturing as he spoke of his work, sweeping his arm out in one direction, standing up in the stirrups to point off in another.

Louise envied him the absorption he found.

He told her, "This time of the year, we get very aggressive, hire extra help, come out and scour the fields daily. We have every last flower by nine or ten in the morning." His speech branched off into Latin,
Jasminum grandiflorum… Jasminum officiale… Jasminum nocturnum
… the Wedding Night Jasmine.

"Where is this jasmine?" Louise asked.

"Which?"

"The new one, the Wedding Night Jasmine."

"In the greenhouses. We are trying to nurse and graft it back to life again."

"Could you buy more from, um, this same fellow?"

"I imagine."

"What's his name?"

"Who?"

"The fellow from whom you bought the
Jasminum nocturnum
. Where's he from?"

Charles stared out over his field of flowerless. dark green foliage as if he hadn't heard. When she repeated the question, he turned on his horse toward her. "Why, sweet thing?"
Mon sucre d'orge
. My barley sugar. Again, the soupçon of irony. He asked, "Is it that you want to buy your own plants and go into competition with me?"

"No, I was just—" She looked down, warm, feeling discovered, though this was patently impossible.

Discovered in what? She'd only asked out of curiosity for a man to whom she wouldn't have deigned to speak on the street. The more she thought about him, the more angry she got. If she ever
did
see him, well, she had a few choice words.

The thought, if she ever did see him, dug up an insidious piece of information from this conversation: Her husband knew her pasha. He knew him well enough to do business with him, almost surely by face and name and place of contact.

As her husband led the way to his greenhouses, Louise behind him turned this knowledge over and over in her mind, testing and measuring its worth. Then, as they dismounted, dropped it.

She said instead. "Do you believe in love?"

Charles Harcourt offered his hands up to her and answered. "Yes, I think I do." His odd half-blank regard covered her for a moment. Then he smiled, as if this were a different sort of exchange than she'd intended. He asked. "Do you?"

"No." Only fools fell in love. She had always known this. From all the idiots who had made fools of themselves over her.

Her husband set her onto the ground, then cast his eves—they moved together, his beautiful one and his strange one—down.

Louise added, "Though I believe in something. A close connection perhaps." For his sake, she added,

"Mutual kindness and consideration." For her own, she couldn't resist, "Or on rare occasion: a person who lights you up, shows you something about yourself that you are eager to know."

The prince pulled his cane out of the saddle, nodding as if he were trying to figure out what she was saying to him. Then he walked off toward the glass houses in the distance, tapping the ground with the cane more than using it, playing with it. He called over his shoulder, "Are you coming?"

She caught up. They walked out toward an acre or more of small glass houses, twenty maybe thirty, each with an abundance of sashes at varying degrees of openness. Each greenhouse was attuned to particular experimental or delicate plants, held at controlled temperatures and humidities. The farthest was the propagation house, where they budded and grafted to rootstock. Here was a special project that he wanted her to see.

And here Louise stopped. As they entered, she faced tables and tables, trays and trays of something far too familiar. A whole greenhouse full of tiny Wedding Night Jasmine. A few here and there beginning to pop out from their sticks of understock. The shape of the opposing leaves, the touch of them, the color…

exactly as she had pulled from her waste-basket on a ship. The sight made her faintly giddy.

A thousand questions sprouted, fecund, to mind. Had Charles bought other plants and cuttings from the man who had sold him these? Did the man live far? How did her husband know him? How did they contact each other? Where was this man now? Could her husband get hold of him?

Instead of answers to these unvoiced questions, though, she got a treatise on horticulture: the process of

"inarching," the best ways to bud via detached leafbuds… the stages and frames of a greenhouse, the flow and return pipes, the ventilators, the automated misters, and the importance of bottom heat on occasion. Louise didn't know where to break in, how to ask what she wanted to.

Charles continued. "You have come right at the most interesting time of the year. I will show you at the factory tomorrow, but back here. I have a little experiment that is going particularly well." There was an experimental laboratory attached, a little room at the back toward which he led her as he spoke of something called
enfleurage
. "We are trying several processes, two with olive oil. It's plentiful and as cheap as it gets right here among the olive trees, but still more expensive than purified lard." She had no idea what he was talking about. "Nonetheless, we are seeing if we can get more extract with olive oil or if the quality is better. We have been experimenting with this a few months."

They entered the room. Louise halted then pulled back.

The odor.

Charles smiled. "Isn't it something?"

Something? It was horrific. The air was heavy with the exact same smell she had stuck into her hair in sprigs, the odor that had followed her through dark corridors, then lingered in her hair the next day, drawing her toward catastrophe again night after night…
Such a fool
she kept thinking.
You were
played for a fool
.

"How—What—" was all she could say.

Louise began to understand that her husband had salvaged withering blooms off the plants he'd bought, that she was smelling experimentation with an essence that Charles Harcourt was keen to work with.

While the small laboratory was filled with essence of
him
. The dark. The other. Her lover from the ship lay on glass trays framed with wood. His and her nights together lay half an inch deep in a pomade of purified fat spread in ridges. They lay on cotton cloth in wire frames. In vials. They floated—as if they were large white petals tinged red at their base—in bottles of oil.

As Louise's husband explained and explained and lovingly explained each process, her head grew light.

She and her lover had been scraped off glass, melted at as low a temperature as possible, strained, and macerated…

A bottle was opened and offered under her nose, and Louise's skin went icy. It didn't matter if she'd killed him off. If she was angry. If she hated him for leaving her. He could rise from the dead to entwine around her. He was here. The phantom of the tilting dark—who offered a quick pretense of intimacy then left; a man who looked at her, closely, then found her wanting.

Her husband was saying, "It blooms only at night—"

Louise grabbed a table edge and blurted, "I want to go back to Nice."

He looked at her. "What?"

"Please, can we go back to Nice?"

The man before her said reasonably, "But I have just been explaining, I have work here."

"Please." How to implore, petition? She entreated, "I want to see my parents, my family, my friends."

She listened to herself, her tone desperate—surely compelling. She wanted out, away. No more flowers or perfume.

"Are you all right?"

"Homesick." She bit her lip. The smell… dear God, the smell.
Get me out of here
. "Nice," she murmured. "I want to return to Nice as soon as possible."

Her husband frowned deeply at her, then never had she been so glad for his uxorious attitude. He said.

"All right. For the day. Then we return the day after. Will that do?"

She nodded, one quick, curt shake of her head. Oh, yes. "I want to go to the house now and pack."

Charles took Louise home, where she packed up everything she owned as if she were taking the next steamship back to America, then—without dinner, without her usual romp with her dog—she went to bed. Before dark. He'd never met a woman who slept so much.

After dinner, he packed his own satchel less dramatically—a brush, the odds and ends of shaving, a pair of trousers he liked. His house in Nice was stocked with more clothes, more of everything, so he needn't plan overmuch. He opened a drawer and came across a flat, velvet box. The pearls, the necklace he had meant to give Louise on their wedding night. He took the box out. It was large, square, as long and wide as his forearm. He opened it. Black pearls, big ones, small ones. It was a fine piece. More than a fine piece: It had cost an obscene amount—worth more than the damned house he was standing in. He'd sneaked off to Paris for it, then gotten carried away.

The biggest pearls made up a fashionable dog collar, six strands that would plate Louise's throat. Every