The Elusive Elixir Read online

  “I insist. I will wait for you to complete your call. You only bought enough bread for breakfast at the boulangerie this morning, so I know you haven’t already prepared lunch.”

  I’d been right about seeing her at the bakery next to the apartment I was renting. She must have known where I was staying. It wouldn’t be easy to back out of the invitation. And in spite of my discomfort, I didn’t want to leave this woman with so much anger over an old misunderstanding.

  Taking advantage of my hesitation, Madame Leblanc wrapped her bony hand around the crook of my elbow and led me toward the exit. Her cold fingers tightened around my arm like the brittle fingers of a skeleton, making it impossible for me to break away discreetly.

  I didn’t trust that her change of heart was genuine. But if it wasn’t, I could use this opening to convince her I wasn’t over 300 years old. I just had to lie convincingly.

  No question, I was in trouble.

  Three

  We exited the cathedral through a twisting metal gate, a modern affront to the majesty on the façade above. I stole a glance up at the limestone carvings that adorned the front of the iconic cathedral underneath the Rosetta stained glass window. Hidden in the Christian imagery were a few alchemical symbols that had been added over the centuries. As an accidental alchemist, I had taken months to brush up on the more obscure alchemical codes in Dorian’s book, but the symbols on Notre Dame were straightforward—if you knew what you were looking for.

  In a row of saints, a saint was shown defeating a dragon that looked suspiciously like an ouroboros, the serpent who swallows its own tail, thus representing the cyclical nature of alchemy. In a different panel, a salamander was engulfed in flames but not burning, symbolizing how the animal can protect itself from fire, just as Dorian’s alchemy book had done when caught in a fire. As we hurried along to reach the quieter side of the cathedral my eyes flicked to an unassuming carving of a simple man holding a book. If you looked closely, you could make out the chiseled letters NON DEGENERA AL. Non Degenera Alchemia. The alchemy book that had brought me here.

  In the walled park behind Notre Dame, filled with Parisians walking their dogs, Madame Leblanc deposited me on a wooden bench. She strolled along the path, giving me privacy to make my phone call.

  I’d been bluffing that I had a call to make. Yet after being shaken, I had an impulse to call Dorian or Max. I wanted to hear a friendly voice. I scrolled through the photos on my phone of my life in Portland. A hurricane-strength wave of homesickness nearly knocked me from the bench. I hadn’t felt the emotion in so long that it took me a few moments to identify it. Homesick? The bittersweet emotion meant that after all these years, I truly had a home.

  From my small phone screen, the image of my sort-of-boyfriend Max Liu looked up at me from behind a jasmine bush in his backyard garden. Max didn’t yet know everything about me, but we’d come to care deeply for each other since I moved to Portland.

  The photo of my misfit best friend was far less personal, because I didn’t want to risk anyone else seeing the image of a supposed statue cooking up a storm in the kitchen. Therefore my photo of Dorian was of him standing next to the fireplace in the posed form he took when he returned to stone. I liked this particular snapshot for the mischievous gleam in his eye.

  The sun hadn’t yet risen in Portland. Max would be sleeping, but I wouldn’t be stirring Dorian from slumber. The gargoyle didn’t need to sleep, and the predawn hours were his favorites because he could move around most freely. I slipped earbuds into my ears, made sure there was nobody behind me, then hit the button to call him for a video chat.

  “I am so pleased you called,” Dorian said in his thick French accent. The formal voice didn’t match the excited grin on his face. “I have made the most amazing discovery.”

  “You have?” In spite of the shock I’d received from Madame Leblanc, Dorian’s enthusiasm was contagious. “What have you discovered?”

  “Avocado!”

  “You discovered … avocados?”

  “Yes. They are magnifiques! Once you are home, we must share this with the world.”

  I let out a breath and lamented the fact that my dying friend was far more skilled at culinary creations than alchemy. “I’m pretty sure people already know about avocados.”

  A blur of claws flashed across the screen as he waved away my concern. “Oui. But do they know they can use avocado in place of cream to make a perfect chocolate mousse, pudding, or even frosting?” He was sitting so close to the screen that his horns bumped into the monitor.

  “Is something wrong with the video camera?” I asked. It was mildly disconcerting to have such a close-up view of stone pores.

  “Pardon? No, I am simply busy baking. I was skeptical of the skinny women on the Internet at first, but the flavors of cocoa and salt are stronger than the flavor of the avocado. It works perfectly! But I am speaking over you. You have something to tell me as well? Have you seen my brother yet? Yes, this must be why you are calling!”

  “No, I’m sorry, Dorian. I haven’t been granted access to see the stone gargoyle yet.”

  “Oh. C’est regrettable.”

  “But Dorian, I found his empty perch at Notre Dame.”

  “Vraiment? This supports our suspicions that he is a creature like me.”

  “It does. I’ll find a way to see him.”

  He narrowed his liquidy black eyes. “The professors continue to hold him captive?”

  I wouldn’t have described the study of an unmoving statue quite so dramatically, but he wasn’t wrong.

  Shortly after the Gallery of Gargoyles opened in the 1850s, one of the stone gargoyles was stolen. It was thought to be a prank, perhaps perpetrated by drunken artists or writers inspired by Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris who found a stone chimera not properly secured and therefore made off with it. The great cathedral had been defaced many times before in its long history, so Parisians gave a Gallic shrug and moved on. The gargoyle wasn’t seen again for over 150 years—until last month.

  A gargoyle that looked suspiciously like the missing stone gargoyle was found on the Charles Bridge in Prague and repatriated to France from the Czech Republic. My friend and I suspected he was another creature like Dorian, who’d been brought to life but was reverting to stone. The Charles Bridge gargoyle had turned completely back to stone more quickly than Dorian. Was he alone in the world without an alchemist like me to help him?

  “He’s still under lock and key at the university,” I said. Since the statue’s pose was anomalous, architecture scholars at a local university were studying the gargoyle.

  “You will find a way. But … you have other news, no?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Your face. It reads like an open book.”

  Now that I had him on the line, what was I going to tell Dorian? There was nothing he could do to help, so did I really want to worry him by telling him that I’d been recognized by someone who could expose me?

  Furthermore, he would probably try to help, which would only make things worse. I could imagine him suggesting I find an underworld contact in Paris who could “convince” Madame Leblanc to leave well enough alone. In addition to being a food snob and a talented chef, Dorian was an avid reader with a vivid imagination. Since he lived a relatively solitary life out of necessity, Dorian had more interactions with fictional characters than real people, and his ideas about real life needed reining in. Frequently.

  “I was worried about you,” I said. “I wanted to see how you were doing.” It was the truth. His backward transformation had been speeding up. Every day his progression back to stone was happening more quickly.

  “My arm is not troubling me.”

  “Your arm? There’s something wrong with your arm now?”

  “I think we have a bad connection,” he shouted. “Allo? I cannot hear you, mon amie. I will sign off
and return to my new recipe. I seem to have misplaced my cardamom. À bientôt.”

  His face disappeared from the screen and I was left alone.

  I’d left my Portland home a week ago in order to save Dorian’s life. When I moved to Oregon earlier this year I’d been hoping to have a semblance of a normal life for a few years. With its quirky people, respect for nature, and health food culture, the city of Portland spoke to me from the moment I’d rolled into town with my Airstream trailer, thinking I’d stay for a brief time. I’d gotten far more than I’d dreamed. Friends as dear to me as any I’d ever had, a guy I was falling for, and a house that truly felt like a home. I’d put all that on hold to come here. Madame Leblanc had thrown my carefully constructed plan into disarray.

  I looked across the park toward the Seine. Parisians strolled with their heads held high, walking dogs, puffing on cigarettes, meeting lovers. An artist with a hat to collect donations was sketching on the pavement in colorful chalk. Next to the surrealist image of pigeons with musical notes in place of eyes, he’d lettered in bright yellow chalk, Life without art is stupid.

  I wasn’t feeling the pull of the romantic City of Lights. Alone in a city that wasn’t home, across the world from everyone I cared about, the only person in Paris who cared at all about me was a tenacious woman who could very well expose my secret and prevent me from saving Dorian’s life.

  Four

  Ten minutes later, I found myself seated at an impossibly tiny table squeezed into the darkest corner of a café in the Marais neighborhood, walking distance from Notre Dame. The scent of cigarette smoke lingered in the air, seemingly from ghosts but more likely from centuries of smoke-filled conversations the walls had absorbed.

  “There was hunger, fear, and death during the war,” Madame Leblanc said, “but it elevated our senses. That’s why I remember your grandmother so clearly. She was a flame that burned brightly. Too brightly, some said. That’s why they said she was a witch.”

  I shivered. “She never told me that.” I’d been called a witch many times, but until now I hadn’t realized people in Paris had thought the same of me. I’d been careful here. Though I owned my shop for decades, I’d only stayed for a few years at a time, leaving the shop in the capable hands of an alchemy student while my beloved Ambrose and I were living in England or traveling elsewhere.

  Madame Leblanc kept her eyes locked on mine as she raised a glass of wine to her lips. Her makeup was perfect. I didn’t even want to think about what I looked like. I’d been sick in the weeks leading up to my trip to Paris, due to an alchemy experiment gone wrong. I’ve always been good at taking care of myself with healing foods, tinctures, and teas that I make myself, but understanding backward alchemy was taking a huge toll on me. I never would have left my cozy midcentury kitchen and gotten on an airplane had time not been running out for Dorian.

  “Being so young, you would not understand how different things were,” Madame Leblanc said. “The war … It’s not like in the movies. We weren’t living in black and white, or even sepia. It was a more vibrant, heightened state of existence.”

  I knew what she meant. Being an alchemist is both a blessing and a curse. I’ve helped thousands of people, but I’ve also seen many of them die. I’ve seen more of this wondrous world than most, eating and drinking and laughing and crying with people from cultures simultaneously identical and poles apart. In those travels, I’ve seen the best and worst of humanity. This was especially so during traumatic times like plague, famine, and war.

  But I couldn’t say that out loud. I had to check myself before I spoke—it would have been all too easy to reminisce with her. Digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand, I reminded myself that I was twenty-eight-year-old Zoe Faust of Portland, Oregon, who’d been living out of her silver Airstream trailer for the last few years, bumming around the United States after a bad breakup, not my namesake who’d owned a shop in Paris.

  I had closed my shop and returned home to America in 1942. Ambrose had died a few years before, followed a short time later by a fire at Elixir. My collection of herbs, tonics, and elixirs was destroyed, along with the potager back garden where I grew herbs and vegetables. The alchemy student who’d helped me at the store off-and-on, Jasper Dubois, had already left Paris, so there was nothing keeping me there. The side of the shop with alchemical equipment was spared, which allowed me to stay afloat selling paraphernalia at flea markets across the US. I had put the larger items that survived the fire into storage, wondering if they’d survive the war and whether I’d ever return to Paris.

  Instead of answering Madame Leblanc, I took a bite of my arugula salad with roasted chickpeas and potatoes, which I dressed with olive oil and vinegar. Madame Leblanc ate a crème frache and steak tartar tartine. I’d declined sharing a carafe of wine and opted instead for tea. I needed to keep a clear head.

  “You appear to be more lost in your memories than I am, mademoiselle,” Madame Leblanc said.

  “I was thinking of how little I knew of my grandmother’s life here. What were your impressions of her and her shop?”

  She sat back and inhaled deeply. The lines around her mouth grew deeper as she pressed her lips together. Her hands tugged at the starchy cloth napkin in her lap. I wondered if she was nervous that her recollections might upset me. No, she didn’t seem like one to shy away from controversy. I thought it more likely she was craving a cigarette.

  “At first,” she said, “I didn’t know it was your grandmother’s shop, because an elderly man was there when my mother first took me. But a few months later, your grandmother appeared. She was much more pleasant, no?”

  I smiled. Jasper had been a young man when he began minding the shop for me. He was a student of alchemy. Not my student, because that would never do for Jasper. He was a product of the times. Born into a title but no money, he was convinced of the superiority of the French, the bourgeoisie class, and the male sex. I doubt it had ever occurred to Jasper that I could have taught him anything. I discovered alchemy’s secrets accidentally and therefore wasn’t prepared to take on apprentices, but Jasper had never asked how I found

  alchemy so he didn’t know my transformation had been accidental. He simply appreciated the availability of an alchemical laboratory behind the shop, making it a mutually beneficial relationship. Every decade we would switch places as the proprietor, and Jasper continued to age while he sought out a worthy alchemy teacher. The last time I’d arrived in Paris, I found the shop closed and Jasper gone. I was never sure if he’d found the alchemy teacher he was looking for, or if the war had scared him off.

  Madame Leblanc returned my smile. “In spite of what my mother told me that soured my memories, I remember that your grandmother was beautiful, like you. She had gone prematurely gray too. No no, don’t be self-conscious. I can tell you haven’t dyed your hair white to be avant-garde, but the color suits you.”

  “Thank you,” I said simply. It wouldn’t do to elaborate. My hair turning white was what had alerted me to the fact that I had indeed discovered the Elixir of Life. It was the one part of me that aged.

  “My mother told me your grandmother gave remedies even to those who could not pay, and her potager was the envy of the neighborhood. That garden flourished even in winter. It was unnatural. That is what convinced my mother it was witchcraft.”

  I was about to speak when a police officer appeared in the doorway, his eyes methodically scanning the cafe. His stiff stance and uniform suggested he was with the military branch of the police, the National Gendarmerie. Tall, dark-haired, young. Most people look young to me these days, but he was truly a boy, only a year or so out of university, I guessed. His gaze came to rest on my table.

  Madam Leblanc waved him over. “My grand-nephew,” she said to me, beaming. As she turned to the young man, her smile tightened, shifting from pride to a different emotion. Scheming.

  “Gilbert,” she said, “this is Zoe Fa
ust. I trust you had time to look into what I told you?”

  I gripped the table. I was being ambushed.

  While Madam Leblanc had considerately given me “privacy” at the park outside Notre Dame, she’d made her own phone call. She called her gendarme grand-nephew. But surely he couldn’t believe a fanciful tale that his grand-aunt was lunching with a 300-year-old woman, could he? Why was he here? Humoring his auntie?

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said, bowing his head in friendly greeting as he sat down at the table.

  “Is there a problem?” I replied in English. Better to play American tourist Zoe Faust.

  “Could I see your identification sil vous plait?”

  “What’s this about?” Breathe, Zoe.

  He shrugged as if he had not a care in the world. Turning away from his aunt, he gave me a conspiratorial smile. “I expect it is nothing. Your passport please?”

  I handed him my US passport. I wasn’t too worried. It was a real passport. Every decade I received a new birth certificate from a man who’d been a prop-maker in Hollywood in the 1950s before his career was destroyed by the McCarthy hearings. I’d helped him through an illness when he was destitute, and even though he didn’t understand the reason why I needed those birth certificates in my name, he’d always happily supplied them until his recent death.

  The smile evaporated from the police officer’s face as he looked at my passport. “Zoe Faust? You? C’est vrais? This cannot be. Tante Blanche?” He looked to his aunt.

  “I was named after my grandmother,” I explained.

  “Ah.” A chagrined smile appeared on the gendarme’s innocent face. “But of course. Is your grandmother still alive, mademoiselle?”

  Madame Leblanc scowled at the young man as he accepted my statement.

  “Why are you asking about my grandmother?” I asked.

  “It is believed that she has information about a fire in 1942. It killed one … ” He paused and consulted his notes. “Jasper Dubois.”