The opera, the casinos, the gaming clubs, the salons … These were the places, thought Mireille, that Talleyrand would frequent. The places to which she must gain access in order to ferret him out in London.
But as she returned to her inn, she saw the leaflet pinned to the wall that revised all her decisions before they were made:
GREATER THAN MESMER!
An Astounding Feat of Memory!
Lauded by the French Philosophes!
Undefeated by Frederick the Great,
Phillip Stamma, or the Sire Legal!
Tonight!
BLINDFOLD EXHIBITION
by the Famous Chess Master
ANDRÉ PHILIDOR
Parsloe’s Coffee House
St. James Street
Parsloe’s on St. James Street was a coffee house and pub where chess was the principal activity. Within these walls one found the cream not only of the London chess world, but of European society. And the biggest attraction was André Philidor, the French chess player whose fame had spread through all of Europe.
As Mireille entered the heavy doors of Parsloe’s that evening, she stepped into another world—a silent world of wealth. Before her spread an array of richly polished wood, dark green watered silk, and thick Indian carpets, lit by mellow oil lamps in smoky glass bowls.
The room was still nearly empty except for a few porters setting out the bar glasses and a solitary man, perhaps in his late fifties, who sat on an upholstered chair near the door. He was well upholstered himself, with broad midriff, heavy jowls, and a second chin that covered half his gold lace cravat. He was dressed in a velvet coat of such deep red that it nearly matched the broken veins of his nose. His beady eyes, from the depths of puffy folds, regarded Mireille with interest—and with even more interest the strange blue-faced giant who entered in purple silk robes behind her, bearing in his arms a tiny red-haired child!
Tossing down the last of his liquor, he set the glass on the table with a bang, calling to the barkeep for more. Then he fumbled to his feet and lurched toward Mireille as if crossing the unsteady deck of a ship.
“A red-haired wench, and prettier I’ve never seen,” he said, slurring his words. “The red-gold tresses that break a man’s heart, the kind that wars are started over—like Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He pulled off his own foolish-looking peruke, sweeping it below his midriff in a mock bow and reviewing her figure on the way down and up. Then, in his drunken stupor, he shoved the powdered wig in his pocket, seized Mireille’s hand, and kissed it gallantly.
“A woman of mystery, complete with exotic factotum! I introduce myself: I am James Boswell of Affleck, lawyer by vocation, historian by avocation, and descendant of the bonny Stuart kings.” He nodded to her, suppressing a hiccup, and crooked out his arm. Mireille glanced at Shahin, whose face, as he understood no English, remained an impartial mask.
“Not the Monsieur Boswell who wrote the famous History of Corsica?” said Mireille in her charmingly accented English. This seemed too great a coincidence. First Philidor, then Boswell, of whom Letizia Buonaparte had had so much to say—both here at the same club. Perhaps not a coincidence after all.
“The same,” said the swaying drunk, leaning against Mireille’s arm as if she were to support him. “I suppose by your accent that you are French, and do not approve of the liberal views that I, as a young man, expressed against your government?”
“To the contrary, monsieur,” Mireille assured him, “I find your views fascinating. And we in France have a new government now—more along the lines that you and Monsieur Rousseau proposed so long ago. You were acquainted with the gentleman, were you not?”
“I knew them all,” he said carelessly. “Rousseau, Paoli, Garrick, Sheridan, Johnson—all the great ones, in whatever walk of life. Like a camp follower, I make my bed in the mud of history.…” He chucked her beneath the chin. “And other places as well,” he said with a ribald laugh.
They’d reached his table, where a fresh drink was already waiting. Picking up the glass, he took another healthy swig. Mireille sized him up boldly. Though drunk, he was no fool. And it was surely no accident that two men connected with the Montglane Service were here tonight. She should be on her guard, for there might be others.
“And Monsieur Philidor, who is performing here tonight—do you know him as well?” she asked with careful innocence. But beneath the calm, her heart was pounding.
“Everyone interested in chess is interested in your famous countryman,” replied Boswell, the glass halfway to his lips. “This is his first public appearance in some time. He’s not been well. But perhaps you know that? As you’re here tonight—shall I take it you play the game?” His beady eyes were now alert despite his intoxication, the double entendre too apparent.
“That is what I’ve come for, monsieur,” said Mireille, dropping her schoolgirl charm and fixing him with an obtuse smile. “As you seem to know the gentleman, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to introduce us when he arrives?”
“Only too charmed, I’m sure,” said Boswell, though he didn’t sound it. “In fact, he’s here already. They’re setting things up in the back room.” Offering his arm, he led her to the wood-paneled chamber with brass chandeliers. Shahin followed silently.
There, several men had gathered. A tall, gangly man not much older than Mireille, with pale skin and a beaklike nose, was setting forth pieces on one of the chessboards at the center of the room. Beside these tables stood a short, sturdy fellow in his late thirties, with a luxurious head of sand-colored hair falling in loose curls about his face. He was speaking to an older man whose stooped back was turned to her.
She and Boswell approached the tables.
“My dear Philidor,” he cried, slapping the older man on the shoulder with strength, “I interrupt only to introduce this ravishing young beauty from your homeland.” He ignored Shahin, who watched with the black eyes of a falcon while remaining beside the door.
The older man turned and looked into Mireille’s eyes. Clothed in the old-fashioned style of Louis XV—though his velvets and stockings seemed rather the worse for wear—Philidor was a man of dignity and aristocratic bearing. Though tall, he seemed as fragile as a dried flower petal, his translucent skin nearly as white as his powdered wig.
“It’s rare to find such radiant beauty beside a chessboard, madame.”
“Rarer yet to find it dangling on the arm of an old degenerate like Boswell here,” interjected the sandy-haired man, turning his dark, intense eyes upon Mireille. As he too bowed to kiss her hand, the tall young fellow with the hawklike nose pressed closer to be next in line.
“I have never had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur Boswell before entering this club,” Mireille told her entourage. “It is Monsieur Philidor I’ve come to see. I am a great admirer of his.”
“No more than we!” agreed the first young man. “My name is William Blake, and this young goat pawing at the earth beside me is William Wordsworth. Two Williams for the price of one.”
“A houseful of writers,” added Philidor. “That is to say, a houseful of paupers—for these Williams both profess to be poets.”
Blake returned with Mireille’s drink and sat beside her. The last of the guests were taking their seats when Wordsworth came back to join them. A man in front was explaining the rules of play as Philidor sat blindfolded at the board. The two poets leaned toward Mireille as Blake began in low voice.
“There’s a well-known tale in England,” he said, “regarding the famous French philosopher François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire. Around Christmas of 1725—over thirty years before I was born—Voltaire one night escorted the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur to the Comédie-Française in Paris. During the entr’acte, Voltaire was publicly insulted by the Chevalier de Rohan Chabot, who shouted across the lobby, ‘Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet—why don’t you decide what your name is?’ Voltaire, never at a loss for retorts, called back, ‘My name begins with me—yours ends with you.’ Not long after, the chevalier had Voltaire beaten by six rogues for this retort.
“Despite the injunction against dueling,” Blake continued, “the poet went to Versailles and openly demanded satisfaction from the chevalier. He was tossed into the Bastille for his pains. While pining there in his cell, he got an idea. Appealing to the authorities not to let him languish yet another stay in prison, he proposed to go into voluntary exile instead—in England.”
“They say,” Wordsworth chimed in, “that during his first stay in the Bastille Voltaire had deciphered a secret manuscript related to the Montglane Service. Now he conceived the notion of journeying here to present this as a sort of puzzle to our famous mathematician and scientist Sir Isaac Newton, whose works he’d read with admiration. Newton was old and weary, and had lost interest in his work, which no longer presented a challenge. Voltaire proposed to provide the required spark—a challenge not only to decipher what he himself had done, but to unravel the deeper problem of its true meaning. For they say, madame, this manuscript described a great secret buried in the Montglane Service—a formula of enormous power.”
“I know,” Mireille hissed irritably as she removed Charlot’s fingers, which were entangled in her hair. The rest of the audience watched with eyes riveted upon the board at center, where the blindfolded Philidor listened to his opponent’s moves read out as, his back to the board, he called out his replies.
“And did Sir Isaac succeed in resolving the puzzle?” she asked impatiently, feeling Shahin’s tension to depart, though she could not see his face.
“Indeed,” replied Blake. “That is just what we wish to tell you. It was the last thing he ever did—for the following year he was dead.…”
THE TALE OF THE TWO POETS
Voltaire was in his early thirties—Newton eighty-three—when the two men met at London in May of 1726. Newton had suffered a breakdown some thirty years before. He’d published little of scientific importance since.
When they met, the slender, cynical Voltaire with his rapier wit must at first have been disconcerted by Newton, fat and pink with a mane of snowy hair and a languid, almost docile manner. Though lionized by society, Newton was in fact a solitary man who spoke little and kept his deepest thoughts jealously guarded—quite the opposite of the young French admirer who’d already been twice incarcerated in the Bastille for tactlessness and rash temper.
But Newton was always tempted by a problem, whether mathematical or mystical in nature. When Voltaire arrived with his mystical manuscript, Sir Isaac eagerly took it to his chambers and disappeared for several days, leaving the poet in suspense. At last he invited Voltaire back to his study, a place filled with optical equipment and lined with walls of musty books.
“I have published only a fragment of my work,” the scientist told the philosopher. “And that, only by the insistence of the Royal Society. Now I am old and rich, and may do as I like—but I still refuse to publish. Your fellow Cardinal Richelieu understood such reservations, or he’d not have written his journal in code.”
“You’ve deciphered it, then?” said Voltaire.
“That, and more,” said the mathematician with a smile, taking Voltaire to the corner of his study where sat a very large metal box that was locked. He extracted a key from his pocket and looked at the Frenchman carefully. “Pandora’s box. Shall we open it?” he said. When Voltaire eagerly agreed, they turned the key in the rusty lock.
Here were manuscripts hundreds of years old, some nearly crumbling to dust through the neglect of many years. But most were well worn and Voltaire suspected by the hand of Newton himself. As Newton lifted them lovingly from the metal trunk, Voltaire glimpsed the titles in surprise: De Occulta Philosophia, The Musaeum Hermeticum, Transmutatione Metallorum … heretical books by al-Jabir, Paracelsus, Villanova, Agrippa, Lully. Works of dark magic forbidden by every Christian church. Works of alchemy—dozens of them—and beneath them, bound neatly in paper covers, thousands of pages of experimental notes and analyses in Newton’s own hand.
“But you are the greatest proponent of reason in our century!” said Voltaire, staring at the books and papers in disbelief. “How can you wade in this morass of mysticism and magic?”
“Not magic,” Newton corrected him, “but science. The most dangerous of all sciences, whose purpose is to alter the course of nature. Reason was invented by man only to help decipher the formulas created by God. In everything natural there is a code—and to each code a key. I’ve re-created many experiments of the ancient alchemists, but this document you give me says the final key is contained in the Montglane Service. If this were true, I would give everything I’ve discovered—everything I’ve invented—for one hour alone with those pieces.”
“What would this ‘final key’ reveal that you are unable to discover yourself through research and experimentation?” asked Voltaire.
“The stone,” Newton replied. “The key to all secrets.
When the poets paused breathlessly, Mireille turned at once to Blake. The murmurs of the audience at the progress of the blindfold play had successfully masked their voices from all.
“What did he mean—the stone?” she asked, gripping the poet’s arm forcefully.
“Of course, I forget.” Blake laughed. “I’ve studied these things myself, so I assume everyone knows. The aim of all alchemical experiments is to arrive at a solution that reduces to a cake of dry reddish powder—at least, that’s how it’s described. I’ve read Newton’s papers. Though they were suppressed from publication due to embarrassment—no one really believed he’d spent so much time on such nonsense—they were fortunately never destroyed.”
“And what is this cake of reddish powder?” pressed Mireille, so anxious she could nearly scream. Charlot was tugging on her from behind. She didn’t require a prophet to tell her she’d idled here too long.
“Why, that’s it,” Wordsworth said, leaning forward, his eyes bright with excitement. “This cake is the stone. A piece of it combined with base metal turns it to gold. When dissolved and swallowed, it’s supposed to heal all your ills. They call it the philosophers’ stone.…”
Mireille’s mind churned through all she knew. The sacred stones worshiped by the Phoenicians, the white stone described by Rousseau, embedded in the wall of Venice: “If a man could say and do as he thinks,” read the inscription, “he’d see how he might be transformed.” The White Queen floated on the wall before her eyes, transforming a man into a god.…
Suddenly Mireille stood up. Wordsworth and Blake jumped to their feet in surprise.
“What is it?” whispered the young Wordsworth quickly. Several people had glanced around in irritation at the disturbance.
“I must go,” Mireille said, planting a kiss on his cheek as he blushed beet red. She turned to Blake and took his hand. “I am in danger—I cannot remain. But you shall not be forgotten.” She turned, followed by Shahin, who rose and moved like a shadow behind her as she swept from the room.
“Perhaps we should go after her,” said Blake. “But somehow I think we’ll hear from her again. A remarkable woman, you agree?”
“Yes,” Wordsworth said. “I see her in a poem already.” Then he laughed as he saw Blake’s worried expression. “Oh, not one of mine! One of yours.…”
Mireille and Shahin moved swiftly through the outer room, their feet sinking into the soft carpeting. The porters lounging about the bar hardly noticed as they passed like wraiths. As they went outside into the street, Shahin caught Mireille by the arm and pulled her against the darkened wall. Charlot, in Shahin’s arms, gazed into the wet darkness with the eyes of a cat.
“What is it?” whispered Mireille, but Shahin put his finger to her lips. She strained her eyes in the darkness, and then she heard the sound of soft footsteps crossing the wet pavement. She saw two shadowy forms outlined in the mist.
The shadows approached stealthily to the very door of Parsloe’s, only a few feet from where Shahin and Mireille waited, not breathing. Even Charlot was as silent as a mouse. The door of the club opened, emitting a crack of light —illuminating the shapes on the wet street. One was the heavy, drunken Boswell, draped in a long dark cape. The other … Mireille gaped with open mouth as she watched Boswell turn and offer his hand.
It was a woman, slender and beautiful, who threw back the hood of her cape. Out spilled the long blond hair of Valentine! It was Valentine! Mireille let out a muffled sob and started to step forward into the light, but Shahin restrained her with iron hand. She wheeled to him in anger, but he bent swiftly to her ear.
“The White Queen,” he whispered. Mireille turned back in horror as the door of the club swung shut, leaving them once again in darkness.
†******"""*********""""""
THE BLACK QUEEN’S TALE
The chestnut trees were blooming in Paris when I, Mireille, left Charles Maurice Talleyrand that spring of 1799, to return to England. It pained me to go, for I was again with child. A new life was beginning inside me, and with it the same seed of single-minded purpose—to finish the Game once and for all.
It would be four more years before I saw Maurice again. Four years in which the world was shaken and altered by many events. In France, Napoleon would return to overthrow the Directory and be named first consul—then consul for life. In Russia, Paul the First would be assassinated by a cadre of his own generals—and his mother’s favorite lover, Platon Zubov. The mystical and mysterious Alexander—who’d stood with me in the forest beside the dying abbess—would now have access to that piece of the Montglane Service known as the Black Queen. The world I knew—England and France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—would again go to war. And Talleyrand, the father of my children, would at last receive the papal dispensation I’d requested of him, to marry Catherine Noel Worlée Grand—the White Queen.
atherine Noel Worlée Grand—the White Queen.
But I had in my possession the cloth, the drawing of the board, and the certain knowledge that seventeen pieces were nearly within my grasp. Not only the nine buried in Vermont—whose location I now knew—but also the eight: those seven of Madame Grand’s and one belonging to Alexander. With this knowledge, I went to England—to Cambridge—where William Blake had told me the papers of Sir Isaac Newton were sequestered. Blake himself, who found almost morbid fascination in such things, secured me permission to study these works.
Boswell had died in May of 1795—and Philidor, that great chess master, had survived him by only three months. The old guard were dead—the White Queen’s reluctant team dismantled by death. Before she had time to assemble a new one, I had to make my move.
It was just before Shahin and Chariot returned with Napoleon from Egypt—on October 4 of 1799, exactly six months after my own birthday—that I gave birth in London to a little girl. I christened her Elisa, after Elissa the Red, that great woman who’d founded Carthage—and for whom Napoleon’s own sister had been named. But I took to calling her Charlotte, not only for her father, Charles Maurice, and her brother, Charlot—but in memory of that other Charlotte who’d given her life in place of mine.
It was now, when Shahin and Charlot joined me in London, that the real work began. We labored by night over the ancient manuscripts of Newton, studying his many notes and experiments by candlelight. But all seemed in vain. After many months, I’d come to believe that even this great scientist had not discovered the secret. But then it occurred to me—perhaps I did not know what the secret really was.
“The Eight,” I said aloud one night as we sat in the Cambridge rooms overlooking the kitchen gardens, the place where Newton himself had labored nearly a century ago. “What does the Eight really mean?”
“In Egypt,” said Shahin, “they believed there were eight gods that preceded all the rest. In China they believe in the Eight Immortals. In India they think Krishna the Black—the eighth son—became an Immortal, too. An instrument of man’s salvation. And the Buddhists believe in the Eightfold Path to Nirvana. There are many eights in the world’s mythologies.…”
“But all mean the same thing,” chimed in Charlot, my little son who was older than his years. “The alchemists were seeking more than just to change one metal into another. They wanted the same thing the Egyptians did when they built the pyramids—the same as the Mesopotamians who sacrificed children to their pagan gods. These alchemists always begin with a prayer to Hermes, who was not only the messenger who took dead souls to Hades, but was the god of healing as well.…”
“Shahin has fed you too much mysticism,” I said. “What we’re seeking here is a scientific formula.”
“But Mother, that’s it—don’t you see?” replied Charlot. “That’s why they invoke the god Hermes. In the first phase of the experiment—sixteen steps—they produce a reddish-black powder, a residue. They form it into a cake, which is called the philosophers’ stone. In the second phase, they use this as a catalyst to transmute metals. In the third and final phase, they mix this powder with a special water, a water gathered from dew at a certain time of year—when the Sun is between the Taureau and the Bélier, Taurus and Aries, the Bull and the Ram. All the pictures in the books show this—it’s just on your birthday—when the water that falls from the moon is very heavy. This is the time when the final phase begins.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, confused. “What is this special water mixed with the powder of the philosophers’ stone?”
“They call it al-Iksir,” Shahin said softly. “When consumed, it brings health, long life, and heals all wounds.”
“Mother,” said Chariot, looking at me gravely, “it’s the secret of immortality. The elixir of life.”
Four years it took us to come to this juncture in the Game. But though we knew the formula’s purpose, we still did not know how it was made.
It was August of 1803 when I arrived with Shahin and my two children at the spa of Bourbon-l’Archambault in central France, the town for which the Bourbon kings were named. The town where Maurice Talleyrand went to take the thermal waters on this same month each summer.
The spa was surrounded by ancient oaks, its long walks bordered in peonies heavy with bloom. As I stood that first morning on the path in the long linen robes one wore to take the waters, I waited there amidst the butterflies and flowers—and saw Maurice coming along down the path.
In the four years since I’d last seen him, he had changed. Though I was not yet thirty, he would soon be fifty—his handsome face webbed with fine lines, the curls of his unpowdered hair shot with silver in the morning sun. He saw me and stopped cold upon the path, his eyes never leaving my face. Those eyes that were still the intense, sparkling blue I remembered from that first morning I’d seen him in David’s studio—with Valentine.
He came to me as if expecting to find me there, and put his hand in my hair as he gazed down at me.
“I shall never forgive you,” were his first words, “for teaching me what love is, then leaving me to contend with it myself. Why have you never answered my letters? Why do you vanish, then reappear only long enough to break my heart again, just as it’s nearly mended? Sometimes I find myself thinking of you—and wishing I’d never known you.”
Then, in defiance of his words, he grasped me and pulled me to him in a passionate embrace, his lips moving from my mouth to my throat, my breast. As before, I felt the blinding force of his love sweep over me. Struggling against the desire I felt myself, I pulled away.
“I have come to collect on your promise,” I told him in faint voice.
“I’ve done everything I promised—more than I promised,” he told me bitterly. “I’ve sacrificed everything for you—my life, my freedom, perhaps my immortal soul. In the eyes of the LORD, I’m still a priest. For you, I’ve married a woman I don’t love, who can never bear me the children I want. While you, who’ve borne me two, have never let me glimpse them.”
“They are here with me now,” I told him. He watched me half in disbelief. “But first, where are the pieces of the White Queen?”
“The pieces,” he said harshly. “Never fear, I have them. Extracted by trickery from a woman who loves me more than you ever have or will. Now you hold my children as hostage to get them from me. My God, that I should want you at all astounds me.” He paused. The bitterness he felt could not be concealed, but it was mingled with a dark passion. “That I cannot live without you,” he whispered, “suddenly seems the height of impossibility.”
He trembled with the force of his emotion. His hands were on my face, my hair, his lips pressed to mine as we stood there on the public path, where people could come along at any moment. As always, the strength of his love was beyond bearing. My lips returned his kisses, my hands moved over the places where his robes had fallen open.
“This time,” he whispered, “we shall not make a child—but I shall make you love me if it’s the last thing I do.”
Maurice’s expression was more beatific than that of the holiest saint when—for the first time—he saw our children. We’d gone to the bathhouse at midnight, with Shahin guarding the door.
Charlot was now ten and already looked like the prophet Shahin had predicted he’d be, with his mass of red hair to his shoulders and the sparkling blue eyes of his father that seemed to see through time and space. At four, little Charlotte resembled Valentine at that age. It was she who captivated Talleyrand as we sat in the baths of Bourbon-l’Archambault in the steamy mineral waters.
“I want to take these children away with me,” Talleyrand said at last, stroking Charlotte’s fair hair as if he could not bear to let her go. “The life you insist upon leading is no life for a child. No one need know our relationship. I’ve acquired the estate of Valençay. I can give them their own titles and land. Let their origins remain a mystery. Only if you agree to this will I give you the pieces.”
I knew he was right. What sort of mother could I be to them, when my life’s direction had already been chosen by powers beyond my control? I could see in his eyes that Maurice loved them both even beyond my natural bond with them as the one who’d given them life. But there was another problem.
hat sort of mother could I be to them, when my life’s direction had already been chosen by powers beyond my control? I could see in his eyes that Maurice loved them both even beyond my natural bond with them as the one who’d given them life. But there was another problem.
“Charlot must remain,” I told him. “He was born in the eyes of the goddess—it is he who shall resolve the riddle. It was foretold.” Charlot moved through the hot waters to Talleyrand and put his hand on his father’s arm.
“You will be a great man,” he told him, “a prince with many powers. You will live long, but you’ll have no other children after us. You must take my sister, Charlotte—marry her into your family so her children will bond again with our blood. But I must return to the desert. My destiny is there.…”
Talleyrand looked at the little boy in amazement, but Charlot had not yet finished.
“You must cut your ties with Napoleon, for he is doomed to fall. If you do so, your own power will remain through many changes in the world. And you must do something else—for the Game. Get the Black Queen from Alexander of Russia. Tell him you come from me. With the seven you have already, that will make eight.”
“Alexander?” said Talleyrand, looking at me through the thick steam. “Has he a piece as well? But why should he give it to me?”
“You’ll give him Napoleon in return,” Chariot replied.
Talleyrand did meet Alexander at the Conference of Erfurt. Whatever pact they made, everything Chariot had predicted came to pass. Napoleon fell, returned, and fell for good. In the end, he saw it was Talleyrand who had betrayed him. “Monsieur,” he told him over breakfast one morning, in the eyes of all the court, “you are nothing but shit in a silk stocking.” But Talleyrand had already secured the Russian piece—the Black Queen. With this, he gave me also something of value: a Knight’s Tour done by Benjamin Franklin, which purported to portray the formula.
I went with Shahin and Chariot to Grenoble with the eight pieces, the cloth, and the drawing the abbess had made of the board. There, in the south of France not far from where the Game had first begun, we found the famous physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, whom Chariot and Shahin had met in Egypt. Though we had many pieces, we did not have the whole. It was thirty years before we deciphered the formula. But we did it at last.
There at night in the darkness of Fourier’s laboratory, the four of us stood and watched the philosophers’ stone forming in the crucible. Through thirty years and many failed attempts, at last we’d moved through all the sixteen phases as they were meant to be. The marriage of the Red King and the White Queen, it was called—the secret that had been lost for a thousand years. Calcination, oxidation, congelation, fixation, solucion, digestion, distillation, evaporation, sublimation, separation, extraction, ceration, fermentation, putrefaction, propagation—and now projection. We watched the volatile gases rise from the crystals in the glass that shone like the constellations in the universe. The gases formed colors as they rose: midnight blue, purple, pink, magenta, red, orange, yellow, gold … The peacock’s tail, they called it—the spectrum of visible wave lengths. And lower, the waves that could only be heard, not seen.
When it had dissolved and vanished, we saw the thick residue of reddish black coating the base of the glass. Scraping it away, we wrapped it in a bit of beeswax to drop it into the aqua philosophia—the heavy water.
Now only one question remained: Who would drink?
Now only one question remained: Who would drink?
It was the year 1830 when we completed the formula. We knew from our books that such a drink could be lethal as well as life giving, if we’d done it wrong. There was another problem. If what we had was in fact the elixir, we must hide the pieces at once. To this end, I decided to return to the desert.
I crossed the sea again for what I feared might be the last time. At Algiers, I went with Shahin and Chariot to the Casbah. There was someone there I thought would be of use to me in my mission. I found him at last in a harem—a large canvas before him, and many women, veiled, reclining about him on divans. He turned to me, his blue eyes flashing, his dark hair disheveled, just as David had looked so many years before when we’d posed for him in his studio, Valentine and I. But this young painter resembled someone else far more than David—he was the very image of Charles Maurice Talleyrand.
“Your father has sent me to you,” I told the young man, who was only a few years younger than Chariot.
The painter looked at me strangely. “You must be a medium.” He smiled at me. “My father, Monsieur Delacroix, has been dead for many years.” He twirled the paintbrush in his hand, anxious to get on with his work.
“I mean your natural father,” I said as his face darkened into a glower. “I refer to Prince Talleyrand.”
“Those rumors are quite unfounded,” he told me curtly.
“I know differently,” I said. “My name is Mireille, and I’ve come from France on a mission I need you for. This is my son, Chari
Lot—your half brother. And Shahin, our guide. I want you to come with me to the desert, where I plan to restore something of great value and power to its native soil. I want to commission you to do a painting marking the spot—and warning all those who come near that it is protected by the gods.”
Then I told him the tale.
It was weeks before we reached the Tassili. At last, in the secret cave, we found the place to hide the pieces. Eugène Delacroix scaled the wall as Charlot directed him where to draw the caduceus—and outside, the labrys form of the White Queen, which he added to the existing hunt scene.
When we’d completed our work, Shahin withdrew the vial of aqua philosophia and the pellet of powder we’d wrapped in beeswax so it would dissolve more slowly, as prescribed. We dissolved the pellet, and I looked at the vial I now held in my hand, as Shahin and Talleyrand’s two sons looked on.
I remembered the words of Paracelsus, that great alchemist who once believed he had discovered the formula: “We shall be as gods,” he said. I put the vial to my lips—and I drank.
