Chapter 5: Madame Vesper

Ivy

"If that bottle reaches the princess smelling like wet cardboard, Henri, we're finished in Europe. Finished! Do you hear me?"

Felix was pacing the workroom in his shirtsleeves, phone to his ear, glasses shoved up into his gray hair. It was six in the morning. He hadn't heard me come up the stairs.

"I don't care what the lab says, I can smell it from here, and I have a cold..." He turned around and saw me in the doorway with my suitcase. He stopped. "Henri. I'll call you back."

He hung up.

Neither of us said anything for a second.

The long oak bench down the middle of the room was a mess. Paper strips, beakers, three cold coffees. Shelves from floor to ceiling, about eight hundred little brown bottles, every label written by my dad or me.

It smelled like home.

Felix looked at my face. Then the suitcase. Then my left hand. No ring.

"I'll.. I’ll put the kettle on," he said.

From the street, this place is nothing. A bookbinder's shop run by an old man named Aurelio who has never asked me a single question. Next to his window, a green door with no sign and no bell. Up two floors of narrow stairs, and then this.

Atelier Vesper.

The most exclusive perfume house in the world. You can’t walk in and buy anything here. You get invited, and the waiting list is often four years long. Three royal families wear our scents. So do the best hotels on four continents. Half the bestselling perfumes in department stores are made from formulas we license out under other names.

And that’s only the top of it. Under Vesper there are five smaller brands, sold in every major city from Paris to Tokyo. There are the Vesper schools in Grasse, Milan and Kyoto, where the best young perfumers in the world fight for a place. There are the flower farms, the labs, the patents.

On paper, it’s all worth nineteen billion dollars. Probably more by now. Every cent of it is mine.

But nobody knows that, because nobody knows who Madame Vesper is. She doesn’t give interviews. She doesn’t go to parties. There isn’t a single photo of her anywhere. The magazines love to guess. Some say she’s a seventy-year-old recluse hiding in a villa in the south of France. One said she was the secret daughter of a Swiss banker.

Nobody ever guessed she was the quiet Wolcott wife who arranged the flowers for the foundation.

It started with my dad. He was a small-town perfumer in Marrow Bay. When he died, I was twenty-one, and he left me three things: his notebooks, his debts and Felix, his lab partner of twenty years. Felix and I paid off the debts in eighteen months. Then we kept going.

By the time I married Adrian, Atelier Vesper was already worth more than his whole family. I tried to tell him once. I said I wanted to make perfume, like my dad. He laughed and said his wife didn’t need a hobby.

So I never told him again.

"Tell me about the princess," I said.

Felix handed me a mug of tea and a paper strip. "Smell that and tell me I'm wrong."

I closed my eyes and breathed in.

Snowdrops, birch, white musk, a little black tea. It was supposed to smell like a winter morning. It smelled like a winter morning in a basement.

"The orris," I said. "They switched suppliers. This batch was stored wrong, it's gone flat. Then they dumped musk on top to hide it." I opened my eyes. "Go back to Bertrand in Florence for the orris. Cut the musk by a third. One drop of the frozen pear from the March trials. And tell Henri if he argues, I'm flying to Geneva."

Felix let out a long breath then stared at me in bewilderment. "You are a.. sorceress! Six whole days the team's been on that."

"The team's good. They just need sleep." I giggled softly and put the strip down. My hands were shaking. I wrapped them around the mug so he wouldn't see. "Felix. I left him."

"I gathered."

“He’s marrying someone else. Celeste. She’s dying, apparently.” I laughed, and it came out wrong. “And he asked me to plan the wedding.”

Felix took off his glasses and folded them very slowly. He doesn’t swear. Ever. But he said something in Portuguese then that I’m pretty sure would’ve gotten him thrown out of a church.

“There’s something else,” I said. I made myself look at him. “I’m pregnant, Felix. Nine weeks.”

He stared at me. The glasses slipped out of his hand and hit the bench. “Does Kemi know?”

“She’s the one who confirmed it.”

He was already reaching for his phone. “Then she’s coming over. Right now.”

Kemi got there at noon.

She burst through the workroom door with her big canvas bag on one shoulder and a box of honey cakes in her hand, already talking. “Okay, I came as fast as I could, what’s so urgent that...”

She saw me and stopped.

I was sitting on the old velvet chaise in my coat, my suitcase next to me. No ring. Eyes swollen almost shut.

Kemi dropped the bag on the floor. The cakes too. “Let me guess,” she said. “He kicked you out.”

“Not exactly.”

“He found another bitch.”

“Worse. His ‘dead’ ex came back.”

Kemi opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Felix. Felix nodded grimly.

“Oh, I’m going to need the whole story,” she said. “But first, lie down. I want to check on the baby. And don’t argue with your midwife.”

Kemi has been my best friend since we were eighteen. She’s also a midwife, and she’d been checking on me in secret since the day I found out. She pulled a small machine out of her bag. A portable ultrasound, the kind that lets you see inside the womb without going to a hospital.

I lay back on the chaise, the one my dad used to nap on, and pulled up my sweater. Felix turned to the bench and pretended to sort bottles.

Kemi squeezed clear gel onto my stomach. It was freezing. The gel helps the scanner slide over your skin and pick up a clear picture. She pressed the scanner down and moved it slowly, frowning at the little screen. For a few seconds there was only a rushing, watery sound.

Then it came. Fast. Tiny. Stubborn. A heartbeat.

“There,” Kemi said softly. “There’s your troublemaker.”

I’d held it together for two long nights. The bathroom floor at Seacliff. Celeste’s wide grin as she hugged me. The lilies. The lawyers. Signing away my marriage. The cab at three in the morning when i finally left Adrian behind.

But when I heard that heartbeat, I lost it. Hand over my mouth, ugly crying.

Then Felix was crying too, his back to us, shoulders shaking over his bottles. Kemi looked from him to me. “Oh, for God’s sake. Both of you. Pull yourselves together, the baby can hear you.”

That made me laugh. Laughing and crying flat on your back with cold gel on your stomach is a mess.

After, Kemi wiped my stomach with a paper towel, sat on the end of the chaise and listened while I told her everything. When I finished, she put on her serious face.

“Does he know about the baby?”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

I thought about that night. The gift box with the scan inside, going into his coat pocket. ‘I’ll open it later. he had said.

“No.”

“Good.” She nodded hard. “He doesn’t get a photo. He doesn’t get a name. A man who brings his dead girlfriend home on your anniversary gets nothing, Ivy. Nothing.”

Felix cleared his throat. “Speaking of the Wolcotts. We got an email from them yesterday. They want Madame Vesper to make a custom perfume for the bride to wear at the wedding. Money is no object.” He put his glasses back on. “I was going to say no. Like always.”

I sat up and pulled my sweater down. I thought of Celeste on the steps of Seacliff with her arms around my neck. ‘Thank you for keeping him safe for me.’ 

“No,” I said. “Say yes. If Adrian wants Madame Vesper at his wedding, she’ll be there.”

Felix frowned. “Ivy. We have a four-year waiting list. A queen waited three years for her wedding scent. If we take this one now, people will talk.”

“Let them talk.” I pulled my sweater down. “The Wolcotts are partners. Partners get favors.”

“You’ve never once given them a favor before.”

“Then this is the first.”

Felix looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled for the first time all day.

“There she is,” he said.

Kemi left around four, after making me eat two honey cakes and promising to come back tomorrow. I went up to the little bedroom above the workroom and fell asleep before I even took my shoes off.

When I woke up, the window was dark. Felix was standing over my bed, holding an envelope by one corner like it might burn him.

“Someone left this on the step downstairs,” he said.

It was cream in color. No stamp. No return address. Someone had left it on the step outside the green door downstairs.

On the front, in handwriting I’d never seen before: ‘Madame Vesper.’

My stomach dropped. Only three people in the world knew Madame Vesper worked in this building. Felix. Me. And Aurelio, the old bookbinder downstairs, who has never asked a single question.

So who sent this?

I tore it open.

Inside was one photograph, the kind they take at fancy charity parties. Chandeliers, a crowd in bright evening gowns, a Red Cross banner in French. 

It was a gala in Monte Carlo. And right in the middle, laughing with her head thrown back, was Celeste. She had a glass of champagne in one hand. On the other, on her ring finger, was a diamond ring with a stone the size of a quail’s egg.

She didn’t look sick. She didn’t look thin. She was in fact glowing, in a silver dress with no sleeves.

The date was printed in the corner. Three years ago.

Three years ago, Celeste was supposed to be dying in a clinic in Geneva. Too sick to even let Adrian see her face.

And there was something else.

Seven years ago, she supposedly burned her arm pulling Adrian out of that fire. That scar was the whole reason he believed he owed her his life. Everyone at Seacliff had been warned not to stare at it.

But in this photo, both her arms were bare.

And there was no scar on either one.