thirty-seven

1597, Prague, Bohemia

There had always been fire in her. For her necessary male alias, Perenelle had chosen the given name Philippe so she could sign her name with the P flourish she’d always loved. And Hayden because, like Flamel, it meant fire.

When she’d married Nicolas more than two hundred years before, it had felt like the most natural thing in the world, in every way. Her whole life had clicked and fallen into place. Even when he told her about alchemy, it was as if she’d known it all along and was simply waiting for someone to teach her this particular language.

Before their marriage, her language had been paint. But she’d never been respected as much as her male contemporaries even though she was far more talented than most, and her paintings had been relegated to the farthest reaches of the ancestral home of her first husband. She was lucky he’d cared for her and indulged her interests, from books to art. He gave her the means to obtain the minerals to create her paints. She ground and added an egg base to the pigments herself, and contentedly settled into a studio on his estate, transforming raw materials into paints and performing what to her at the time was the greatest magic she knew: giving new life to a dying world by documenting it with pigments. She painted a portrait of her first husband before he died, and he told her she had a true gift. She made him look as he did, but at the same time more vibrant, less sickly. She’d captured his essence.

Grieving her first husband, Perenelle hung his portrait in the main hall. His sister immediately ordered it taken down, unwilling to have the ancestral home defiled by an amateur painting done by a woman.

That was the day Philippe was born. Perenelle packed her art supplies and took her substantial inheritance to Paris, where she sold her “invalid brother Philippe’s” paintings through an intermediary, signed with an ornate P.

It was Paris where she met Nicolas, while sketching Notre Dame. Nicolas later told her that as soon as he saw the stains on her hands, he knew she was destined to be an alchemist.

“Why me?” she had asked.

“The minerals you chose to work with,” he’d answered. “You sense the essences that represent life. That’s why you’re drawn to these substances. And why they respond to your touch.”

He smiled so warmly and with such understanding that Perenelle knew that from that day forward she would do anything in the world for this man. She proposed marriage the following week. She feared if she didn’t do it herself, Nicolas would be too proper to cross their differences in class.

Working with Nicolas, she found the Elixir of Life more quickly than most, because her own experiments with color had prepared her for the concentration, intent, and stages required in alchemy. She used mineral extracts and salts from stones milled from the village where she was born to form the Philosopher’s Stone, and she was superb at creating gold from graphite.

The two lived happily in Paris for many years, giving generously to charity with the true gold they both created. Nicolas wasn’t close to the few alchemists they knew because the others weren’t as accepting of Perenelle. She didn’t mind. It gave her more time to paint.

After leaving Paris for the countryside, Nicolas built an alchemy lab and took on worthy apprentices who would go on to do good for the world, and Perenelle’s painting flourished. “Philippe” began to gain recognition.

But Perenelle was restless. She wished not only to live up to her full potential but also to bring alchemy to a broader worthy audience through her art, reaching more people than Nicolas could through the pupils he found. And she had a wild theory of alchemical painting, which had never worked in her solitary laboratory workshop, but perhaps with the energy of more alchemists and artists it might be possible.

Nicolas brought word that Rudolf II’s court was offering patronages to both alchemists and painters, and he encouraged her to go. They were already good at hiding, so he wasn’t worried that his wife would be recognized as a woman, or as Perenelle Flamel. He cut her beautiful orange curls short himself.

If only she hadn’t been restless … Nicolas never would have suggested it otherwise. And she wouldn’t be in this mess now. It was as if fate were taunting her. Showing her what might have been, but making the achievement of it impossible. She knew she would never let another woman repeat her mistakes if she had any power to prevent it.