Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (12 page)

But Jac preferred sleek and modern over antique and charming. White towels, not pink ones with lace edging. Her work was all about history. The dust of the centuries was always in her hair. She craved clean and simple when she was aboveground.

As Jac unpacked she thought about the ferry ride. Traveling through fog, without being able to see in any direction had been peculiar. The feel of the mist on her face was like moving through spiderwebs. And the odd woman who had guessed too much about her was curious.

It was as if the ferry had done more than cross the channel but had crossed some invisible barrier and deposited her somewhere out of time. She couldn’t even get a sense of what Jersey looked like because the island too was shrouded in fog. There hadn’t been anything exotic about the few glimpses of streets and buildings, cars or people she passed during the twenty-minute taxi ride here.

She knew from studying maps how remote this island was. How cut off they were. She couldn’t just leave if she wanted to. She’d need to wait for a boat to get away—one way to England, the other to France.

Jac put the last of her clothes in the closet, stowed the suitcase and sat down at the desk, where a jug overflowed with old-fashioned damask roses. These were perfumers’ favorites, grown since ancient times for their fragrance. Lowering her head, burying her nose in their velvet petals, Jac inhaled their sweet perfume.

Few modern scents captured the true intoxicating beauty of the flower the way her family’s
Rouge
did. It was the only rose-based perfume Jac ever wore. But even
Rouge
didn’t compare to the flower itself.

When she lifted her head, she noticed that outside the window it appeared the fog was lifting. It was only six o’clock and would be light out for another two hours at least, and she wasn’t expected at Wells in Wood till seven thirty. Theo Gaspard had emailed earlier that week inviting her to dinner her first night in Jersey.

As long as you’re not too tired,
he’d written. And asked her to please feel free to call and cancel if she was.
Don’t feel pressured,
he’d added.
We have to dine with you or without you. So other than picking up one place setting, Claire won’t be too put out.

Who was Claire? Housekeeper? Sister?

The only thing Jac knew for sure was that she wasn’t Theo’s wife, since he’d written he was a widower.

Jac wasn’t tired. After the last few days in London, her jet lag was gone. But even if she had been feeling any effects from the journey, she was too anxious to meet Theo again to wait. She was also intrigued to see the house he’d described as an ancient monastery built on what were believed to be Celtic ruins. Other than saying there was a funeral mound on the grounds as well as several other ancient ruins, he had kept his description vague.

I don’t want to spoil it for you,
Theo had written.
You’ll have plenty of time to explore. I’d rather be vague and let you be surprised.

Even though the scent of the roses was lovely, Jac reached for the travel candle she’d brought with her and lit it. This was her ritual whenever she arrived at a new place. Infusing hotel rooms with the
scent of
Noir
settled her. As the fragrance filled the corners and seeped into the fabrics, it transformed a strange room into a familiar one. With so few constants in her life, and so much of her family gone, scent was how she remembered and kept herself sane.

Jac showered and changed. She’d learned the art of dressing from her grandmother who was French to the core. As much as Grand-mère loved her daughter-in-law, she never appreciated the insouciance of Audrey’s blue jeans and boots, worn leather jackets, T-shirts and Indian beads, and neither did Jac. She admired her grandmother’s style and adopted it as her own. The principle was simple. You buy the best there is, even if it means only one good piece a year.

Jac stepped into a pair of black gabardine slacks. Then pulled a round-necked, cream-colored cashmere sweater over her head. She didn’t like wearing colors. Her mother had been wearing a bright green blouse when Jac had found her. Like an abstract canvas, it had been spattered with perfume oils that stained the fabric.

Jac slipped her feet into ankle-high black suede boots and zipped them up. She shrugged on a black and cream tweed jacket. Vintage Chanel that had belonged to her grandmother. The last touch was a matching cream cardigan sweater, tied around her neck like a scarf.

In her ears, Jac wore the small but brilliant diamond studs her grandparents had given her on her twentieth birthday. Her only other accessory was her mother’s Cartier watch. White gold, it hung loose around Jac’s wrist like a bracelet. The tiny diamonds on the 12, 3, 6 and 9 were so small you only knew they were there if you looked for them. There was more jewelry in the vault in Paris, but Jac had never claimed it. Generations of pieces that had passed down from mother to daughter, daughter to son stayed locked away. Jac felt encumbered by those jewels. As if the stories and dreams attached to them weighed too heavily on her when she wore any of them.

But her mother’s watch was different. Sometimes she imagined the ticking was her mother’s heart, still going, still beating. Even more than Jac mourned and missed her, she hurt for her. Audrey hadn’t been able to fight her demons.

It was a failure that had profound effects on the twelve-year-old
son and fourteen-year-old daughter she left behind, the full scope of which Jac would never really know. Who would she have been if not for the tragedy that sculpted so much of her personality?

Jac grabbed her bag, another vintage piece that had belonged to her grandmother, and left her room.

“Forty-five minutes, as long as the fog doesn’t creep back again,” Noreen O’Neil said as she unfolded a map to show Jac the way to Wells in Wood on foot. “And you can’t be sure it won’t.” The proprietress had stylish auburn hair cut to frame an oval face. In her sixties, her skin was creamy and she carried her age well. Wearing navy slacks with a white sweater and simple strand of pearls, she was dressed to impart graciousness but not outshine any of her guests.

“You start here and follow this path, which will give you a lovely view of the sea. But then it’s uphill for quite a ways,” Mrs. O’Neil said as she pointed to a pathway with a gnawed wooden pencil. “And here you’ll have to go through some woods. I don’t recommend it this late in the day. It’s not lit for nighttime strolls and some of the paths border the cliffs. If you dawdle and it gets dark, you could seriously hurt yourself.”

But Jac had hiked and trekked all over the world. She’d gone underground in Egypt and above the clouds in Peru and had never gotten lost. She had a compass on her cell phone, the phone itself and the hotel’s number as well as the number of the Gaspard house.

“Thank you. I won’t dawdle, so I should be all right.” She reached out and took the map.

“But mind you, you can’t come back that way. Not at night. Not under any circumstances. The house is up there on the rocks. It’s a lonely place. The old man made sure of that. Nothing could be built on it that wasn’t already there. He wanted it left rough the way he’d found it.”

“Made sure?”

“One of the grandsons wanted to develop some of the estate. But Alexander Gaspard had protected it in a trust. No one can build a stick of a structure on it for the next hundred years. No matter how good his intentions, he’s controlling that family from the grave.” She shook her
head. “It’s wonderful the land is protected, but wills that cause strife among the living aren’t good things.”

Jac wanted to find out more about the Gaspards, but being too nosy her first day there wasn’t smart. Jersey was obviously a small island. A few too many questions before Jac knew all the players and where they stood could backfire. She was, after all, a guest of the Gaspards.

“We can come and get you after your dinner,” Mrs. O’Neil said as she handed Jac a card. “We have a service, my son is the driver. And a very good one,” she added, and smiled.

Jac thanked her and pocketed the card.

Outside, the breeze ruffled the map as Jac consulted it. Four routes were marked in different colors. In her room she had a more complicated topographical map downloaded to her tablet, but for the walk she was glad to have a simple printed foldout.

The path Mrs. O’Neil had pointed out was easily marked and led her around the back of the hotel and along a cliff walk with an unobstructed view. Patches of fog still clung to rocks and hovered over the water, but there was more than enough visibility to see the shoreline, and the distant lighthouse. The horizon was out of focus, and the sky seemed to just melt into the sea. In the mist the vista looked like an impressionist painting, both atmospheric and suggestive.

As she stood and stared, Jac breathed in and sniffed. The salty air reminded her of summers with her brother and her grandmother in the south of France. No matter how often she talked to Robbie on the phone, it wasn’t the same as spending time with him. When this excursion was over, she planned to go to Paris for a few days to be with him before returning to New York. Robbie was her stanchest protector and champion. And the only other person in their family who loved the water as much as she did.

Malachai had once joked that Jac must have been a mermaid in another life. She wasn’t sure which point to argue—that there were no mermaids or that there was no such thing as reincarnation. She’d done neither. Issues and conflicts, strong likes and dislikes could be manifestations of a myriad of things. Not necessarily ever, as Malachai suggested, residual leftovers of previous life traumas.

“If you could just grasp one thread of who you’ve been—of what you’ve lived—you’d be able to reel that past in and learn from all your different souls,” he’d said to her. “Your career is all about learning from the past. Why are you so resistant to this?”

Stubborn, her mother had called her. Robbie often teased her about that aspect of her personality too and told her that objects that were too rigid had a greater propensity to break than those that could bend. He was an artist with scent and a practicing Buddhist who brought his Zen sensibilities to the family perfume business.

The path curved around a clump of trees and then brought Jac back to a different view of the island’s coast. She could see a wide stretch of beach where the shore met the rock. In the shadows of the cliffs were openings to caves. There were over two hundred of them, she’d read. More than had ever been counted or could be, since fallen rocks and land shifts over the years obscured openings.

While most of the caves had already been explored, Theo had written there were still some undiscovered. But what were the chances that the one he’d alluded to hadn’t already been found and stripped? What clues did he have? He hadn’t really revealed anything.

Jac climbed as the path rose up an incline, and then after hugging the edge of the cliff for a few hundred feet, she followed its turn, heading inland.

The woods here were thick with ash, oak and silver birch trees. Now Jac smelled resins and earth with only a whisper of the salty sea. The combination reminded her of a fragrance she had created when she was younger. She sniffed again. It was almost exact. How curious. As she walked deeper into the forest, she thought about how long ago she’d mixed that particular juice and how proud she had been of it.

When Jac was ten and Robbie eight, their father had built them a child-size perfumer’s organ modeled after the giant multitiered desk where every generation of L’Etoiles had practiced their art.

The full-size organ housed over five hundred bottles of precious essences and absolutes—the perfumer’s tools. The miniature contained almost a hundred. A treasure to the children. Enchanted with their gift, they’d invented a game: building scents evocative of emotions
and actions.
The Fragrance of Loyalty. The Perfume of Shame. The Perfume of Liars
.

Jac had used the same scents she smelled now—forest and sea smells—to create what she’d named the
Scent of Memory
. At the time she hadn’t been able to tell her father why she thought those smells went together and why she thought they related to memory. But now, walking through this ancient forest that her research had suggested might be eight thousand years old, she realized how right she’d been to choose just those essences.

The ground beneath her feet was packed down with the detritus of the ages. Twigs, leaves, seeds, nuts all crushed and trampled on, turning to compost, becoming soil, nurturing more trees and plants that fell and started the process all over again. The water in the sea evaporated and rained back down into the sea. An endless process that Jac had always believed moved ahead in one direction. Just like time.

But in the last few months she’d been presented with the possibility that time was not a straightforward stream. Robbie and Malachai believed it was a continuum that the soul traveled in no one direction, but in all directions, returning to where it began and then jumping across ponds of centuries to find other selves living other lives.

Entering a grove of hazels, Jac walked down a narrow center aisle, noting how the ancient trees’ arthritic branches twisted and turned. Nature was a fine sculptress as well as perfumer. A leafy canopy shaded the allée and the air smelled sweet. Hazels were rich with symbolism, and the air around them was said to be laced with magically charged energy that helped those who breathed it to gain wisdom and poetic inspiration. Witches practicing white magic used wands made of hazel. Forked sticks of hazel wood were used like divining rods to find buried treasure.

At the far end of the passageway was a large stone slab sitting on six stone pillars. In Jac’s research she’d seen pictures of Jersey’s dolmens, but she hadn’t expected to stumble on one her first day here. Something about how the monument fit the site made it look as if, like the hazel trees, the dolmen had grown in this spot from stone seeds.

Jac approached the small pagan temple and stood before it. Felt the wonder of the history that shrouded it. In awe of fragments of ancient times, she marveled at it. The men who built this were long gone. And with them the meaning of the stone arrangement. But proof of them remained. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. It was a lot.