thirty-six

“Fire,” I whispered, chastising myself for never seeing it before. “That’s why Perenelle chose the surname Hayden. Flamel means flame in Old French, and Hayden means fire in Welsh. Philippe Hayden isn’t working with Perenelle. He is Perenelle Flamel.”

Tobias let out a whistle, raising the ire of the librarian who’d suspended my card. I couldn’t check out the book, so I snapped a quick photo on my phone. We left the books and fled to my truck. The sky above had turned gray and oppressive. I pulled my silver coat around me as we walked through the parking lot.

“You’re driving,” I said, tossing Tobias the keys.

“Your ankle acting up again?”

I shook my head. “My memories are.” I stole a glance at the image on my phone. Brother and Sister, artist unknown, France, circa 1700.

The painting, now in a small museum in France, was accompanied by a one-paragraph description. The curator speculated that the young woman might have been from a bourgeois family who had fallen on hard times because her green dress would have been unusual for a peasant girl of the time. I smiled to myself. Green had always befitted me. Perenelle had dyed the fabric so we could have the dress made for me. And I was neither peasant nor nobility. We had existed in a strange realm of society, creating health and wealth to help others but never enjoying Nicolas’s gold ourselves. The description also noted the flattering way the faces of the brother and sister were featured, bathed in the light of the window in an otherwise dark room. It was true. Thomas’s angelic face held a hint of mischief, as it always did, and his kind eyes were captured exactly as I remembered them. This painting was, the curator concluded, most likely painted by an artist who had familial ties to the young brother and sister.

“Why didn’t the Flamels tell me she was Philippe Hayden?” I said once we were inside the truck. “I didn’t even know she was a painter.” Perenelle was the one who’d been especially drawn to the more colorful alchemical ingredients, though, and most appreciated the paintings in their home. She made no secret of the fact that she loved art, and I’d seen her sketch me and Thomas, but I hadn’t known she’d also painted our portrait in secrecy. I should have suspected she would do such a thing, but I’d been too absorbed in my own foolish life at the time.

“I can imagine her reasons,” Tobias said. “A woman in the late medieval era? You know what that’s like.”

“I’m from the Enlightenment, thank you very much.” I forced a laugh, but it didn’t take.

“This explains for sure how there are so many paintings attributed to Hayden over a longer period of time than one artist could have lived. They aren’t forgeries. They’re alchemy.”

Tobias started the engine, and we drove home. We found Dorian in the kitchen, whisking lemon curd in a double-boiler on the gas stove.

“You missed lunch,” he said petulantly. “And I am out of several ingredients. You left before I could give you my list.”

“We found something more important,” Tobias said as I held up my phone so Dorian could see the image.

“I have seen this meme,” Dorian said, never missing a beat with his whisking. “It is very old now, but I appreciate the effort. You look very much like the woman in this old portrait. If the game were a contest, you would win.”

“It is her,” Tobias said.

“Pardon?”

“This woman in the dress—it’s Zoe.”

In silence, Dorian turned off the burner, jumped down from his kitchen stool, and wiped his hands thoroughly on the apron. He proceeded to take the phone from my hand, his liquidy black eyes looking from me to the screen and back again. “It is true. But how? I thought you did not sit for any portraits.”

“Perenelle Flamel is Philippe Hayden.”

“Alors, she is truly the one who has imprisoned her husband!” Dorian cried. “Perenelle Flamel and Philippe Hayden, one in the same, have trapped Nicolas.”

“No,” I said, shocked by how emphatically the word burst from my mouth.

“But you were the one who theorized—”

“Not this. Now that we know Perenelle Flamel and Philippe Hayden are the same person, we know there’s more going on than we realized.”

“I fear Zoe is hysterical again,” Dorian said.

“Women throughout history have been called far worse,” I said. “This is exactly my point. Perenelle had to disguise the fact that she was a painter.”

Although Perenelle had been distant with me, I couldn’t imagine her turning against Nicolas. Especially not after seeing this loving portrait she’d painted of me and Thomas.

“Zoe, it’ll be okay,” Tobias said. He said it in what I imagined was his bedside manner when he treated patients in his ambulance. “But you have to face the facts. She’s been creating and selling Hayden’s work for centuries—and stopping anyone who got in her way. Everything points to Perenelle.”

“She imprisoned Nicolas because he wished to stop her nefarious deeds,” Dorian said. “She is a bad woman, Zoe. Trapping someone in a work of art for eternity is a special kind of evil.” He shuddered and folded his wings around himself.

“No,” I said again. “You’re both wrong. Look at this painting of Thomas and me. Look at the love she put into it. She couldn’t have imprisoned Nicolas.”

Tobias put a hand on my shoulder. “Max would tell you to follow the evidence where it led, wouldn’t he?”

“The evidence only tells us she was Philippe Hayden, a brilliant and infamously reclusive painter. People believe Hayden’s artwork was forged on a large scale for another hundred years, but now we know it was Perenelle the whole time.”

“Why didn’t Nick mention her in the note?” Tobias asked. “He didn’t say he was imprisoned with her.”

“He didn’t say she had done it to him, either.”

“Because you wouldn’t have believed him. Just like you’re not believing it now.”

“Excusez-moi,” Dorian said, tapping his gray forehead. “My little gray cells have told me something both of you are forgetting. We are missing many words in the letter. This is why we failed to understand that Monsieur Flamel was trapped inside the painting, and believed instead that the work of art contained a clue.” Dorian clasped his clawed hands behind his back and paced as he spoke. “There is most likely additional relevant information we will never be able to learn from the worn piece of paper. We must glean what we can from external facts in conjunction with the letter. First, we know Perenelle to be Philippe Hayden. We agree on this point.”

Tobias and I nodded.

“Bon. Second, she is a woman of high intelligence. We know this from her clever paintings that are both visually pleasing and clever with optical illusions. It was also astute for her to take a similar name, so she would sign her signature properly and respond to the name.” Dorian paused and clasped his clawed hands together. “Third, she is an alchemist who discovered the Elixir of Life long before Zoe was born. I have seen her faux grave in Paris. Now, what is always a lurking danger to alchemists when they live too long? Tobias, why don’t you educate us?”

“Okay, Socrates. But Zoe already knows the answer as well.”

I walked to the spot in the kitchen where light from the window was falling. Sunlight poured into the kitchen from a break in the clouds. Philippe Hayden paintings commonly captured morning or evening light coming through a window in an alchemist’s rooms. “You both think Perenelle lost her humanity. You believe that’s why Nicolas needed to stop her, so she turned on him and trapped him in the painting.”

“Pretty much,” Tobias said.

“Regardless of what we think she has done,” Dorian said, “we must seek for her to get answers. She, and whatever it is she is hiding. For she is certainly hiding something.”

“Of course she is,” I snapped. “She was an intelligent woman trying to be an alchemist and a painter in a time when women were property. Of course she used deception.”

“The question,” Tobias said, “is how far she went.”

“Yes, Monsieur Freeman. Has Perenelle Flamel been living her long life as a murderess? Is it she who has been in search of the painting containing her husband? Did she murder Logan Magnus when she found it in his possession and then abscond with his phoenix pendant, which I discovered while f … while … um … ”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Of course. Why would I not be?”

“You stumbled over your words.”

Dorian smiled. “You are worried the Elixir of Life is fading for me, as a gargoyle who is an untested subject for alchemical science. Non. I can assure you I am perfectly healthy. Even a gargoyle has a slip of the tongue now and again.”

“We’re getting off track,” Tobias said. “Why would Perenelle kill Logan Magnus?”

“She wouldn’t,” I said. Unless she’d lost her humanity …

“So … ” Tobias said. “What do we do now?”

We looked at each other in silence.

“Bon,” Dorian said quietly. “Zoe has had a breakthrough. You can see it on our benefactor’s porcelain, heart-shaped face.”

“She has?” Tobias whispered as he studied my face.

“It’s not really a breakthrough,” I said. “Dorian has been telling me about all the books he’s been reading. The Gothic novels are without value—”

“Bite your tongue,” Dorian said.

“—but the detective novels suggest that when stuck, it’s helpful to compile a list of what we know. Poisonous pigments, an artist in disguise, an imprisoned alchemist, and an art forger. Logan Magnus and Perenelle Flamel, two artists centuries apart, are the two threads connecting everything. Only I don’t see how they’re intertwined.”

“Logan Magnus is no more,” Dorian said. “Alors, we must find Perenelle.”

“I wish I’d taken the time to get to know her better,” I said softly. “I was so young at the time. I didn’t make the effort to find out why Perenelle acted as she did.”