CHAPTER 9
Ada
The ringed hands did not let me fall.
They caught me under the arms with a strength that had no business belonging to a woman that small, and the world tipped back into place: cobblestones, the shuttered green door, the smell of orange blossom and old stone.
I was sitting on a low step in a courtyard I hadn’t seen, and a face was close to mine.
Sharp cheekbones. Silver hair scraped into a knot.
Eyes the flat clever grey of a magpie, missing nothing.
“There,” she said. “Breathe first. Explain later. In that order, always.”
She put a glass of water in my hand and a heel of bread in the other and watched me until I obeyed.
The bread was still warm. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days: money, and the nausea, and a stubbornness that had curdled past pride.
The water tasted of nothing, which meant it was clean, which meant a tension I’d held for weeks finally, treacherously, let go.
“You caught me,” I said stupidly.
“I catch a great many things.” She lowered herself onto the step beside me, unhurried, a woman who had never once in her life been late because a thing could not begin without her.
“Falling women. Bad accords. Thieves.” A pause, delicate as a blotter drawn under the nose.
“You smelled my atelier from the street. I watched you do it. You stopped on the corner and turned your whole head like a hound. People walk past that door for years and never smell it.” She tilted her head.
“You have the hands of a perfumer and the eyes of someone who’s been robbed. I said that already. You didn’t argue.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
She rose. “Come inside before you frighten my neighbors. Estelle,” she added, as if it were an afterthought and not the whole of French perfumery in one word. “You will have heard of me. Everyone with your nose has.”
I had. God, I had. I followed her in.
The atelier was a cave of scent. Two hundred bottles at least, ranked on a curved organ darkened by a century of hands, and the air above them was a chord I could have read blindfolded.
She poured tea from a battered pot and set it in front of me and then, because she was who she was, she began to test me before I had swallowed.
“Tell me what you smell,” she said. “Not what you see. My shop. Go.”
I closed my eyes.
“Bergamot, over the door: old, gone a little bitter, you keep it too long.” Her mouth twitched.
“Iris butter, a great deal of it, you love it more than it loves you. Ambergris, real, not the synthetic. Beeswax on the bench. Civet in the far cupboard, which you don’t use anymore but can’t throw out.
” I breathed again. “And under all of it, something green and cold. Galbanum. You wear it yourself. It’s the only thing in here that’s afraid of nothing. ”
When I opened my eyes she had gone completely still. The teapot hung forgotten in her hand. It was not the stillness of offense. It was the stillness of a woman who has heard a note she stopped believing existed.
“Say your name,” she said softly.
And there it was: the last thing I owned, the only thing left to give or keep.
“Adeline,” I said. “Adeline Rousseau.”
It was not all of my name. Rousseau was my mother’s maiden name: the last thing of hers I still carried, from before Vale, before all of it. She heard the seam in it (of course she did, she heard everything), and she did not pull at it.
“And the man,” she said. “There’s always a man. Who put that in your face?”
“There’s no man.”
“And the perfume they took from you.” Gentle, relentless. “The one you can still smell when you close your eyes. Who wears its name now?”
“No one who made it.”
She set the teapot down. For a long moment she only looked at me, and I braced for the questions to sharpen: for her to reach in and take the truth by force the way Sebastian never once had.
She didn’t.
“There’s a cot above the atelier,” she said instead.
“Cold in winter. You’ll smell the workshop through the floor all night, which most people cannot bear and you will find you cannot sleep without.
The organ is yours in the mornings before I wake.
I rise at six.” She refilled my tea. “You’ll give me no name I can trust and no story I can check, and I find I don’t care.
A nose like yours doesn’t come out of nowhere.
It comes out of somewhere it had to leave. ”
My throat closed.
“Only tell me one true thing,” Estelle said, “so I know what I’m sheltering.” She leaned in, and the magpie eyes were kind now, terribly kind, which was worse than sharp. “Who are you running from, child?”
And my hand (my traitor hand, that had known him before I did, that had betrayed me in a Vale Group bathroom weeks and one lifetime ago) drifted flat to my stomach before I could stop it.
Estelle’s gaze tracked the movement. Down, and held, and understood.
Something in her face broke open and went soft as crushed jasmine.
“Ah,” she said.
“Two of you.”