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The ancient Egyptians used ambergris as incense; the Turks carry it to Mecca.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Just before dawn, Charles, now fully dressed in his nightshirt and robe, walked out onto the terrace of his suite. The weather had drawn him out. The wind was high. The storm was nigh on top of them. The distant sound of rain on the ocean could be heard, a roaring hiss that seemed to advance from all sides.

Charles stood there, the bracing, wet wind in his face, his robe—a huge Arabian gallibiya actually—flapping at him, billowing up and to the side like the colorful sails of some exotic ship. Oddly enough, in this atmosphere, he felt almost peaceful. Pia had called him twice already on the ship's telephone, each time whispering over Roland's snoring.
I'm breaking it off
, she'd said.
I just want you
to know that I'm breaking it off. You are a cad and a traitor. I hate you
. Charles knew, though, that one didn't call twice to break off an affair: One didn't call at all. He felt surer of Pia than he had in a long time; at last the upper hand.

He closed his eyes, letting the wind lick his face. He was feeling quite in harmony with the elements—the night lifting onto a livid, purple-gray dawn, the air shimmering with the promise of rain, alive with a sense of expectancy.

He had put last night, he assured himself, completely behind him. Pia was in hand. And as to the eavesdropped conversation on a companionway over his head, well, why make more of it than it was?

Louise Vandermeer, like countless young girls before her, was no doubt experiencing the predictable panic that any girl might as she embarked on the solemn and life-changing decision of marriage. She was, he would grant, a little superficial to be so concerned about looks. But she was young and, lovely creature that she was. perhaps just a tiny bit inclined to place too much store in her own youthful beauty.

What of it? She was forgivably inexperienced of the world. So she might indulge a bit more improvidently than most, but in what was only a tiny dalliance really, that she had, after all, aborted almost immediately.

Yes, all forgotten. All forgiven. Never mind that, sight unseen, she had been appalled by him, appalled enough that she had wandered off into the dark to cavort with an inane young man. When she
did
in fact set eyes on Charles, well…

He was an agreeable enough man to look upon, he assured himself, and he was more than agreeable with respect to charm and a winning manner. He had many friends; he was well-liked. And—he prided himself on this—he had had many lovers, among them the most beautiful, most sophisticated women on the Cote d'Azur. Moreover, he was classically educated, successful. There was no substantial reason why a woman should be anything other than pleased to be his wife—a dozen or so women in Provence would have been, in fact, delighted to oblige, women of taste who valued uniqueness, substance, and style.

So why, he complained to himself, were all his wonderful boatloads of precious ambergris, so painstakingly negotiated back and forth to America, dependent on his connection to a frivolous creature in love with her own beauty? On a girl whose imagination was so easily engaged in a game of imaginable horribles based on her fear of what might be a little bit different?

Damn all pretty young girls
, he thought,
with their incessant primping and posing and naive
understanding of life
. He didn't like them; he never had. (He couldn't afford to, since it took a certain amount of experience with the world to appreciate such an elegant piece of work as himself.) At this point, his temper and vanity drove him inside. With a single, wide, backward swipe of his arms, he marched between the open doors, through the wall-to-wall draperies of his sitting room.

"And, worse," he said to the grand piano (he didn't play; it was for parties, should he choose to have any), "this child, this
naughty
child, is clearly willing and capable of prowling the dark recesses of the ship—looking as baby-fresh as a debutante while on her jaded mission, out to defile herself as quickly as possible." For here was the sharpest burr: All Charles's worst fears came together in the possibility that, though she wouldn't have the lieutenant, Louise Vandermeer intended to experiment further. She would find someone else, some regular-featured fellow, up to her banal standards.

She would make a fool of Charles.

You are leaping to conclusions
, he told himself,
leaping to offense. You must let this go. You must
not feast on this grievance
.

Still, he walked forcefully, slightly favoring one leg, across a plush carpet, past a working fireplace, a moire settee and chairs, a genuine Singer Sargent oil painting, around a large canape table beside the piano (a fairly large party would have been possible; sixty or more people could have fit easily into the front sitting room, side vestibule, and dining room), to the wall of French doors, two of which opened into the master bedroom. Inside this bedroom, on the dresser beside the huge walnut-canopied bed. he found his medicine chest. He dug through this, looking for his emulsion of cod-liver oil and malt extract, a concoction made palatable only by the addition of ether and a drop of peppermint; his arthritis medication. Sometimes this headed off an attack; sometimes it didn't. His knee was aching like the blazes.

He took the cod-liver oil, then took his lapinin too, for good measure, another supposed cure (though nothing worked with any consistency). Then he found his cane and hobbled back through the sitting room to the side vestibule, where he dropped himself into one chair, propped up his leg on another, then pulled open his notebook into his lap.

The truth was, he had very little work. He had already worked like a madman, anticipating the convenience of Roland's seasickness that should have allowed Charles to plug away at Pia uninterruptedly all the way back across the Atlantic.

With a deep sigh, he reviewed his notes, looking for something to do, mentally fondling his favorite project.

Charles was about to embark on a lifelong goal: to create, blend, then sell his own special perfume.

Normally his perfume factory in Grasse manufactured only extractions, attars of rose, jasmine, lavender, mimosa, other flowers. He supplied a number of the perfume houses in Paris with their essential oils. He also sold small quantities of imitations of these houses' products. With a little sniffing, Charles could recognize and separate the components of almost any perfume; he could smell the pieces, distinguish the differences. With a little mixing and measuring, he could duplicate any perfume to near perfection. But Charles had no real interest in imitations, not of perfume nor of anything else, no matter how perfect.

Charles wanted to create a peerlessly beautiful—unmatchable, unparalleled—scent, which, with an adequate supply of ambergris and one other ingredient, he was ready to do. Magically, both the ambergris and the ingredient had come together this trip.

Of course. Vandermeer would be supplying the ambergris. But it was the promise of the other more elusive ingredient that had brought Charles across an ocean.

Charles had been searching for several years for a beautiful—and relatively unidentifiable—component for his own perfume, something that any other perfumer would have difficulty identifying exactly, for there were other experts, or "noses" as they were called, such as himself, others who could imitate. Until now.

Charles had found a way to confuse them. He had come to Miami to see. smell, and possible obtain a rare jasmine, one he had thought only existed in legend, the
Jasminum nocturnum
or Wedding Night Jasmine. Letters back and forth between him and a Miami botanist had yielded the clues that, to Charles's surprise, left him now traveling home with the legend in hand and in good supply. Wedding Night Jasmine existed. Plants and clippings of it were at this moment sitting in the florist's cold hold for him.

Charles now knew the real plant to be a New World indigene, bred through a South American species.

And, better still, he knew it to be one of the sweetest, most fragrant jasmines he had ever smelled (though something of a curiosity in that it was the only jasmine he knew that by day was a scraggily, tight little shrub to become by night a wide-open bouquet of sweet-smelling blossoms; its flowers only opened at night). Charles intended to quietly graft it onto his standard root stock in his most remote fields around Grasse and Cannes. By day it would look like a poor harvest, a bad year. By night he would gather the petals, then extract their scent to blend. He would make a new perfume based on this jasmine and fixed with ambergris, a carefully complex perfume that would smell divine while being a perfumer's conundrum to dissect or decipher.

The idea thrilled Charles—to make something of singular beauty. Scents, in general, thrilled him; perhaps because his vision was one-sided, his sense of smell had become fuller, more three-dimensional. His nose was certainly more discerning than most. He experienced the world a great deal through his olfactory organ. Smell overlaid everything. It intensified the moment; it could vividly trigger the past. He could call up memories by odor, like a scrapbook of sensory recollections. He could, for instance, close his eyes and be in Provence by just recalling the fragrance of his
Jasminum grandiflorum
, fields of lovely, floral-sweet clouds that sat above him on a stairway—

He opened his eyes with a start. That damn girl with the jasmine woven into her hair. Louise Vandermeer had smelled very much like his fields, a variation with seawater and rain mingled in. Damn girl. Silly creature. Somehow this line of thought left Charles staring at the telephone at his elbow.

It occurred to him suddenly that he could test his fears regarding the lovely Miss Louise Amelda-May Vandermeer. He picked up the earpiece and gave the phone's crank a few turns.

The ship's operator answered. "Yes? May I have your name and room number, please."

"This is the Rosemont suite." Charles had, as was the privilege of those traveling in the grand luxury apartments, kept his name off the register. (He had recognized the son of a deposed emir stepping out of the apartment next door; also not officially on the ship.) "Is Miss Louise Vandermeer in her own stateroom or does she share her parents'?"

There was a delay, a silent marker of how inappropriate this question was. Except the operator was dealing with the occupant of a suite who was theoretically beyond reproach, to whom she was to offer every courtesy. "She is in her own stateroom, sir," came the twangy reply.

"Can you tell me what number that would be?"

With no hesitation at all, she said, "No, sir, I can't. Under no circumstances do we give out ladies'

stateroom numbers. May I suggest that you ask the lady herself."

Charles thought for a split second then said, "All right. Connect me with her room."

After a moment of clicking, a whirring came over the line. The line opened, and a staticky voice said,

"Hello?"

Even with the tinny overlay of wiring, he knew the voice. Low-pitched, smooth. She had a distinctive tonality, deep-voiced for a woman, resonant; contradictorily not at all young.

He had not planned on saying anything, yet he heard the operator disconnect, then found himself speaking. "What you're doing is a little dangerous." he said.

"Who is this?"

"That young lieutenant was an idiot, every bit the clod you told him he was."

"What?" A small but discernable note of panic edged her sweet-low, melodious voice.

"Do you want to take your game a step farther?"

"What game?"

"If you do, I have something that might interest you." He hesitated, but the temptation was too great.

He risked offering this sweet-smelling creature something he knew would entice. "Some jasmine." he said.

"Jasmine?"

"You like jasmine, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, this is unusual jasmine. A bit like you." He found himself swimming for a moment in the magical, jasmine-scented vision of this child-woman to whom he was so strangely connected. He remembered the ship's lights shooting up the side of her dress, lighting up her face at angles. He knew again for a moment the white jasmine flowers, when she turned to go. tucked into the sauntering, gilded shadows of her hair.

"Then listen to me," he said. "I am going to send you a rather unimpressive branch of jasmine. When you get it, put it in water, then after dinner tonight, say, about nine o'clock, go to where you have put it. The blossoms only open in the dark: They smell like heaven. If you like them and want to know-more about them, meet me at midnight"—he paused; why not?—"at the starboard companionway, the first as you walk from midship to the forward part of the promenade deck."

"You're mad. I won't—"

"Good," he said. "Then you are beginning to understand why this game of yours is a dangerous notion.