Seduction (19 page)

I sat down beside her and took one of her hands in my own. “What . . . exactly . . . is going to happen?” I asked as gently as I could.

She shrugged. “There will be a big party at which Sophie
and the other women will pretend to be saddened by my departure, after which I will be taken to a house in the country, where I shall live out my life in pampered luxury.” She waved the thought away. “At least, that’s what I was told when my so-called ‘friends’ decided that this birthday would be my last spent in this house.” She walked over to her bureau and took out a brochure titled
The Poplars
.

“Is this it?” I asked, reading through it. She nodded. “Actually, this place doesn’t sound bad,” I said. “I mean, fireplaces in every room? Ongoing maid service? I could think of a lot worse places to live.” My mind flashed back to my room in the Rue Cujas, with its falling ceiling and perennial stink. “A lot.”

“I suppose,” she said resignedly.

“Plus, you wouldn’t have to live with
them
.” I inclined my head toward the door and the Evil Queens who lived on the other side of it.

Marie-Therèse laughed halfheartedly.

“Do you know anyone at the Poplars?” I asked.

“Not anymore. There used to be three elderly women—we called them the three blind mice, because they were always misplacing things—who all left this house within a few weeks of one another. They were looking forward to it.”

“See?” I said encouragingly. “That worked out.”

“Not really. When I called to see about visiting them, I was told that visitors weren’t permitted for three months. By that time, they were all dead.” She shook her head.

I knew that a lot of old people died suddenly, but I didn’t think that was the best thing to say to an eighty-year-old woman. “So you’ve never been to this place?” I asked instead, waving the pamphlet.

“No, but there’s a map.”
She pointed to a page in the brochure. “It’s in Vincennes, a suburb east of here.” Suddenly she looked up at me with a glint of hope in her eyes. “Would you consider seeing it with me?”

“Sure,” I said. “We could go this Saturday, if you’re free.”

She laughed. “Of course I’m free,” she said. “I haven’t been invited outside this house in years.” She looked around the room. “I just hate to leave it.”

“They say that change is good for the soul,” I said stupidly. Actually, I had no idea what “they” said about anything. And as for change, I was starting to regret being here instead of back in Whitfield. If I’d stayed home, I might have gone to Japan with Gram and Aunt Agnes (and with Agnes’s teleporting capabilities, the travel would have been free!). Or gotten a cool job in a movie theater or something, and hung out with my friends. Or just worked full-time at Hattie’s Kitchen, the way I’d planned, where I’d have learned the same things I was learning at the Clef d’Or, except without the fancy names.

But I realized those thoughts were just me being scared of everything I didn’t know, and that the same kinds of thoughts were probably going through Marie-Therèse’s head right now. If there was one thing I’d learned from doing magic with adults like Gram and Agnes and Hattie, it was that nobody, no matter what their age, knew everything. And that everybody was scared of something.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

Her eyes darted around the room, as if she were afraid to answer the question. “A very long time,” she said finally. “Perhaps too long. A change in my living circumstances might be good for me after all.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Not that I can do anything about it, anyway.”

“Sometimes that’s a good thing,” I said, remembering that I’d come to Whitfield kicking and screaming before finding that it was the one place on earth where I really belonged. “Sometimes what you think will be horrible turns out to be the best thing that ever happened.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said, clasping my hands. “You are quite wise for your years, Katy.” She smiled. “No wonder your young man loves you so.”

I felt myself blushing as I stood up to leave. “Do you really think so? I mean about Peter.”

“Peter?” She laughed. “I was talking about Belmondo, dear.”

“What?”

“Such a nice young man. He’s our landlord, you know.”

“Er . . . yes, I think someone told me.”

“The two of you make such a lovely pair.”

It took me a minute to get over that. To tell the truth, I don’t know if I really did get over it, but I left Marie-Therèse’s room at that point and shot into my own like a bullet.

There was a note from Peter on the floor that I must have missed when I’d first come in. It said,
Sorry, had to go. Back by nine, I think. P.

I took the towel off my head and shook out my wet hair. Then, clasping my bathrobe tightly around me, I got into bed with Azrael’s manuscript and found chapter four.

Belmondo,
I thought. That was ridiculous. How could Marie-Therèse even think such a thing? He wasn’t interested in me. He couldn’t be.

Absently, I folded Peter’s note into a tiny triangle.
And even if he were—interested, that is—I wasn’t. Not in Belmondo. Not at all.

A.D. 1154

The Abbey

Veronique did as her husband had asked, and spent the next twenty years at the abbey at Auvergne, watching the other nuns and guests there grow old while she herself remained relatively unchanged. When her situation became too uncomfortable and her fellow residents too curious, she moved on to another convent, and another, for the next 341 years.

Occasionally during her travels, she would encounter some young girl or other who possessed a special gift as strange as her own, though different in its nature. The families of these girls were generally more than happy to be rid of their freakish daughters, and allowed them to go with the mysterious noblewoman on her way to some holy place or other. In time, though, her collection of acolytes had grown too large to pass unnoticed, and the older ones among them had been around Veronique long enough to know her secret.

“To everyone who sees us, we appear to be nuns,” Veronique’s friend Béatrice told her. “And so, as nuns, we must establish our own abbey.”

Béatrice had been with Veronique for twenty-seven years. She had joined the strange band of supernaturally gifted women when she was a child of six, after her family had abandoned her in a forest to die from hunger or wolves. To Béatrice, Veronique was mother, queen, and goddess, and Veronique had come to trust her absolutely.

“I have been asking questions of people we’ve passed in our travels,” she said. “Paris is nearby.”

“Yes?”

“We should live there,” Béatrice said baldly. “We need a permanent home, and Paris is a big enough city that we will not be scrutinized overmuch.”

Veronique was nonplussed. “Live in Paris?” she asked, alarmed. “But the Church has a great stronghold there. If they find that we are not really nuns, the officials will seek to harm us.”

“Not if they believe we are aligned with them,” Béatrice said. “New abbeys and monasteries are springing up all the time. If we do not ask the archbishop for money, I do not believe we will be prevented from establishing ourselves as a new order. There is an old building just outside the city.”

“But an
abbey
—”

“I shall cast a glamour around it so that we remain virtually unnoticed,” Béatrice said with a wink. “We’ll call it the Abbey of Lost Souls. We’ll help the lost souls of the city, the poor and sick, and therefore will be of no interest to those in power. We’ll be safe there, trust me.”

Veronique thought about it. “I understand something of the ways of the nobility,” she said. “A glamour may be a good defense, but I think a bribe might also be in order.”

Bit by bit, she’d been selling off the treasure Charlemagne had given her, until not much was left.
I can spare the gold torque,
she thought,
but not the necklace
. That she would keep until there was nothing else.

That day came some thirty years later, when the “abbey” Veronique had bought was in such disrepair that it would soon be uninhabitable.

Through underground channels, it had become known among witches throughout Gaul—now called France—that there was one place where women of extraordinary abilities could live without fear of persecution for their differences. The Abbey of Lost Souls in Paris and its wise abbess had welcomed these odd women, most of whom were afraid to show their faces outside the building where they lived. As their number grew and the cost of food and other goods increased, money became a problem. First Veronique sold the abbey’s land as the city sprang up around them, merging the building into the crowded mélange of shops and homes that made up the “new” Paris of the twelfth century.

The women did what they could to raise funds—wove shawls and blankets for sale at local fairs, provided nursing services for rich merchants—but their efforts were never enough. The “nuns” cared for the poor, and the poor could not pay. The women fed the hungry, sheltered the homeless, and, of course, continued to send “gifts” to the archbishop and any other high-ranking Church officials who might otherwise become overly curious about the unusual nature of the women in the abbey on the alleyway that had come to be called the Street of Lost Souls.

And so, on that day in March of 1184, Mother Veronique of the Abbaye des Âmes Perdues paid a visit to Jean-Loup de Villeneuve, master goldsmith and alchemist, and began a love affair that would last more than eight hundred years.

• • •

After they married, Jean-Loup built a house in the countryside west of the city. It was a beautiful place with lakes and orchards, livestock, and acres of rolling farmland. Jean-Loup named the estate “Toujours.”
Always.

On their first night in their new home, as he held Veronique in his arms, he knew he was a happy man. “I have a gift for you,” he said.

“Oh, Jean!” She laughed as she curled herself more closely against him. “You have already given me so many treasures that I hardly know where to put them all.”

“Just one more,” he teased, producing a magnificent box of carved rosewood that he pressed into her hand. “Please accept it.”

Inside was a pendant of a gold heart, so round it was nearly spherical, on which the words “
Mon amour toujours
”—my love forever—were carved in Jean-Loup’s own elegant hand.

“My darling,” Veronique sighed, her eyes bright with happy tears. “I would rather have your love than ‘forever.’ ”

As it turned out, although she did not know it then, she would eventually get her wish.

• • •

In gratitude for restoring Veronique to health, Jean-Loup sent the abbey a chest full of gold every month. The money was sorely needed and the women were so thankful that they reciprocated the favor by instituting a ritual similar to the one Béatrice had invented when she cast the spell to bring back Veronique’s lost youth. The ritual took place at every full moon, and Jean-Loup was invited to participate.

This new spell was less difficult than the complex magic Béatrice had woven to give Veronique back the years she had sacrificed in order to heal Jean-Loup. In the full-moon ritual, the process of aging was slowed down for everyone involved. But it was not without sacrifice. For ten days prior to the full moon, all the women of the abbey had to cease using whatever magic they possessed in order to strengthen the spell.

“What it amounts to is that each of our individual talents is transformed,” Béatrice explained to Jean-Loup. “The participants still grow older, but at a much slower rate than normal. You would not be asked to sacrifice any part of your own gift, of course, but you would benefit from the magic the rest of us contribute to the spell. In other words, if you continue to participate in our ritual, you may live almost as long as Veronique.”

“I am grateful for the extra time I will have with her,” Jean-Loup said. “More than I can say.”

“But be vigilant,” Béatrice said. “You must attend the ritual every month, or you will begin to age normally.”

“I understand,” he said.

“You see, we always have a choice to use our gifts to this end or not. The more magic we can put into the spell, the more effective it is. But not all of us can afford to give up our magic in order to lengthen our lives.”

She was talking about herself. Her talents are a djinn who could discern and influence the thoughts of others, Béatrice found that her talents were constantly required to keep the abbey safe, not only from thieves and murderers, but also from greedy public officials and churchmen. It was through Béatrice’s efforts that the abbey had remained virtually ignored in the midst of what was becoming a major world capital.

“So I cannot participate in the spell,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Jean-Loup sympathized, but Béatrice only shrugged with Gallic indifference.

“One lifetime is enough for me,” she said.

He did not understand her then. Nor would he have understood that in time, he would envy Sister Béatrice her short, purposeful life.

CHAPTER

•

TWENTY-THREE