“They do say to be careful what you wish for,” she says darkly, setting her teeth. “Especially when spurning a divineress. She certainly made a fool of me in the end. Because when I said I wished to wed a wealthy man like the maître, rest assured I did not actually mean Prudhomme himself.”
“Maître Prudhomme,” I whisper through numb lips, suddenly struggling to breathe. “That is whom you wed?”
“Trust me, I did not become the royal candler’s wife of my own choosing.” Her eyes burn, dancing with the candle’s reflected flame. “He took, shall we say, a special shine to me.”
I shake my head, jittery with panic, a terrible weakness seeping into my limbs. Like the remembered feeling of being helpless beneath a pinning weight, the burn of a bullwhip scored across my back. “What … what do you mean?”
“Catherine, please.” She pins me in place with an unwontedly tender look, a dreadful sort of gentleness that leaves me with nowhere to hide. Where could I even hope to conceal myself, from a girl who once dwelled alongside me in hell? “You may not have met with such a fate yourself, but you must have known—or at the very least suspected—what happened to those of us he summoned away from the floor.”
I bite down on the insides of my cheeks until I taste the iron tang of blood, fighting a tide of tears so inexorable I fear it might sweep me away.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper through trembling lips, though I can feel the stirring of some great and vicious fury beating inside me like bat wings, both leathery and clawed.
Eugenie leans forward, propping her elbows on the table and fixing me with an unflinching stare.
“You are not the one who should be sorry, Catherine,” she whispers, her face setting in a bright mask of rage. Crimson splotches burn high on her cheeks, visible even through the thickly obscuring powder. “We were all damned in that fabrique, one way or another. Either tormented by the overseers, or doomed to become my foul husband’s playthings.”
“But it must have been terrible for you. So … so much worse.”
“Worse is that he chose to keep me,” she spits out. “Why, I could not say; perhaps Agnesot would know. But I do know that he is a monster who does not deserve to live. And that is why I ask that you help me kill him.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Recipe and the Alchemist
Once Eugenie leaves, I retire to bed with my snakes. Usually it gives me comfort to have them coiled around me, but tonight I cannot even conceive of sleep.
I feel as if I burn from within with stifled memories, swept up in a flood of scorching tallow that ravages all the defenses I have so fastidiously built. Over the years I have surrounded myself with instruments of darkness, from the pet Furies slung around my neck to the occult curiosities I collected. I enjoyed them for their own sake, too, but there was always more to it than that. A secret hope that it would all amount to some protection, a shielding rampart to guard me from the remembered horrors of the past.
An effort to convince myself that I would never again be so trapped, nor so vulnerable. That I would never live through such a misery again.
But now that I know others suffered even worse evils there than befell me, none of my efforts matter so much as a whit. The monster Prudhomme still walks the earth, more demon than any I could pretend to conjure. And though I have never been a murderer, I know what I must do. His death would not be true murder but rightful justice; the kind no one else will ever grant us.
The kind no one ever grants unwanted and forsaken girls.
Sometime past three, my bed comes to resemble less a place of respite and more an instrument of torture. Abandoning the thought of sleep, I rise and drape my dressing gown over my shoulders. By the leaping light of a candle clutched in my unsteady hand, I drift to my study to pore over a section of the grimoire that, before tonight, I have left untouched.
Agnesot’s recipes for poisons.
I flip through them, shuddering a little at their repellent ingredients, rejecting one poison as too obvious, another as too painless. Finally, my finger stills halfway down the fifth page.
“ ‘Aqua Tofana,’ ” I read to myself. “ ‘A fearsome and fleet poison, bringing about a quick yet agonizing death without leaving any trace. Take two buds from the nightshade flower, an executed convict’s powdered finger bones, a handful of a virgin’s locks, three feathers from a black albatross …’ ”
The rest of the entry reads as if it were half recipe, half spell. There is a lengthy incantation to be spoken over the brewing potions, runes to be drawn into its bubbling surfaces. The entire process is risky and time-consuming, unforgiving of missteps and taking well over a week to complete. But it is nothing I cannot handle with the grimoire’s careful instruction and my own steely temperament.
However, the ingredients themselves are both grotesque and arcane, and I will require help procuring them. What I need, I decide just before the sun comes crawling over the horizon like some fat-bellied yellow spider, is a proper alchemist.
The kind one finds in the cité.
I crept out of the house in the freezing hours just after first light and made my furtive way to the cité.
At such an early hour, I doubted I would be spotted by anyone in the marquise’s employ. But still I took every precaution, including taking a hired coach and swathing myself in a heavy cloak with the hood drawn over my face. Should my patroness hear of my foray here anyway, my pretense will cleave close to the truth: that I required rare ingredients for the love philters I still regularly brew for her,
