I remembered the name of the alchemist Marie preferred to deal with, from whom she purchased the tinctures she peddled to her own clients. Once I arrived in the cité, it only took a few well-placed questions at several of my former haunts to find my way to the alchemist Blessis’s workshop, tucked into an alleyway off the Rue de Glatigny. I rapped lightly on his weathered door, and when it swung open with a wheezing creak, I presented myself to the man within as a colleague of Mademoiselle Bosse.
Aside from his gaudy alchemist’s robes, richly embroidered with the discipline’s traditional white, black, and vermillion, Blessis is a small and innocuous man with a reedy voice.
“Do come in, the air has such a snapping bite to it today,” he says with a curt half bow, waving me over his threshold. “A friend of Mademoiselle Bosse is always welcome here.”
I incline my head, my throat tightening with the knowledge that at this moment, Marie likely does not consider me any sort of friend.
As he bolts the heavy door behind us, I wrinkle my nose against the odd assault of odors that mingle within the workshop. The room smells both heavenly and rank, of fragrant herbs like meadowsweet and some acrid musk like a tomcat’s stench. Though he is arguably more dangerous than the alleged charlatans the Sun King means to stamp out, as a practitioner of science Blessis appears to have no need to hide the trappings of his trade.
Or perhaps he poses as a simple apothecary to the uninitiated—and though trading in medicinal herbs does form part of his trade, even the most naive might balk at the contents of his shelves.
They are stacked with bell jars of wildly varying sizes, bright liquids glimmering in some, others holding dried sprigs of plants or greasy powders. A few contain such oddities as live and crawling beetles, the pearls of tiny teeth, and iridescent feathers tied together at the shaft like unlikely bouquets. The trestle worktable in the center supports a collection of beakers, flasks, and some finicky contraption that I assume is used to measure weight. An armillary sphere sits beside it, golden and elaborate, winking in the light like a complex jewel.
“And what can I help you with, madame?” Blessis asks, standing decorously by the hearth with his hands clasped behind his back. A cast-iron kettle burbles behind him, emitting a greenish smoke I pinpoint as the source of that offensive smell. “Arcane ingredients for spellwork? Herbs for a physick? I assume your interest does not lie with the transmutation of base metals.”
“No, indeed,” I say, wandering over to the table to flick the armillary sphere into motion with a fingertip. It spins beautifully, the celestial rings whirling around the earth in a shimmering golden blur. “Here, I’ve brought a list of what I need.”
“So you are attempting Aqua Tofana, then,” he says, his sparse gray eyebrows shooting up as he peruses my list. “One of the rarest and deadliest of the occult poisons—and devilishly difficult to make. I have never known anyone to try their hand at it. Unless I am mistaking your intentions?”
I hesitate for a moment, leery of admitting to planning something so lethal.
He flicks me a mildly exasperated look. “Come, now. What else might you mean to do with this particular assortment of magically endowed items and herbs? Do forgive my bluntness, but it is a necessary part of my profession’s creed. We value discretion, but cannot afford to court confusion.”
“You are not mistaken,” I finally admit. His matter-of-fact tone sends a flush of misgiving rolling through me like a thunderclap, from the pit of my stomach up to my tingling scalp. Now that I am actually here, what I aim to accomplish suddenly feels all too gruesomely real. No hazily vengeful fever dream, but a cold reality only inches beyond my grasp.
And now that I am here, can I truly go through with it?
Can I make myself into a murderess?
He scrutinizes me for a long moment, perhaps appraising my commitment. When I meet his stare as steadily as I can, he cedes a nod and leads me to the back of the room, where a whole section of the shelved wall hinges inward at his touch. A hidden door so seamlessly concealed that I would never have spotted it.
So the mantle of science does not fully protect him, then, I think. Even an alchemist must practice certain things concealed.
The door swings into a long and narrow room that smells even more forbidding than the antechamber, metallic and sharp as recently spilled blood, with an incongruously pretty note of almond. There are no armillary spheres here, nothing so whimsical behind the counter that Blessis skirts around. Only the milky gleam of jars and green stop-pered bottles stacked on shorter shelves, peering like blind eyes from the low ceiling to the floor.
“Why Aqua Tofana?” he muses, his eyes roaming the shelves. “When there are so many easier poisons to choose from? Arsenic, for instance, is ready in a snap, and mimics the progression of naturally debilitating disease. One need not even be a divineress to brew it.”
“But arsenic leaves a telltale trace, if one knows to look for it. Whereas Aqua Tofana leaves the corpse entirely unscathed.”
I do not add that Aqua Tofana causes terrible pain, as well as paralysis of the body without any clouding of the mind. I want Prudhomme to feel not just agony but utter helplessness in the hour of his death, just as we all felt powerless in his cruel thrall.
Though it is true that a lengthier poisoning might be somewhat safer, I know from Eugenie that Prudhomme has become prone to gout and fits; sudden death would not seem so remarkable in his case. And I do not want her to suffer her marriage for any longer than she must.
“I see,” Blessis mutters abstractedly, skittering his fingers up and down the shelves.
