Seduction (15 page)

“Goat! Scoundrel!” Anselm picked up his walking stick and brandished it overhead as he strode toward Jean-Loup. “Get out, I say! Get out!”

Jean-Loup rose from his place in the straw and headed for the door.

“I do not know why I bother to attempt instruction to such cretins,” Professor Anselm decreed as the young student exited. With a sigh, he went on. “Now, what is the result of melting copper with zinc?”

“Brass,” Jean-Loup said softly from the other side of the classroom door—a door he would never again be permitted to enter.
Because of this
, he thought, holding the golden coin up to the light.

Thus began Jean-Loup de Villeneuve’s long, long journey toward discovering the truth about magic and the unfortunate creatures who are blessed with it.

CHAPTER

•

EIGHTEEN

KT—

Can you meet me after work today? The Dome Café, 5 PM. Please! I miss you.

Peter

Madame Rossine, Chef Durant’s secretary, handed me the note with an air of barely restrained rage. “This came via messenger,” she said huffily. “We do not appreciate personal messages here, mademoiselle.”

“Er . . . okay.”

“I brought it to you only because the person who delivered it said that it was an emergency.” She waited while I read the sealed card. “Is there a response?”

I tried to conceal the joy I felt. “Please tell . . . er, the messenger . . . that I’ll take care of it.”

She nodded crisply and walked away.

Peter! He wanted to see me! We hadn’t really spoken since the night I’d been with Belmondo. Maybe he’d forgotten about that. Maybe everything could go back to the way things used to be before the dinner party.

I attacked my
coquilles Saint Jacques
with so much gusto that Chef Durant actually complimented me on how neatly I cleaned my scallops.
Score!
I checked my watch. 3:27. I cleaned my station, packed up my scallops, took off my apron, and said good-bye to the chef. I could barely keep from running out the door.

• • •

I was early, but that was okay. Spending an hour at an outdoor café in Paris on a beautiful July day was no hardship. Besides, I’d brought along chapter two. The book had been slowgoing at first, but I was gradually getting better at reading Old French. Also, it was beyond weird that Jean-Loup had been an alchemist. I mean, I’d never given alchemy a moment’s thought until I’d found out about Peter. I hadn’t been sure it even existed. And now here was a whole book about someone just like my boyfriend, except that he’d lived almost nine hundred years ago.

Sometimes life is just too strange,
non
?

1181

The Goldsmith

With his expulsion from the university, Jean-Loup was disinherited by his family, who considered his “prank” to be a gross show of disrespect.

For a time he wandered, getting work wherever he could—as a private tutor for the children of the nobility, or as a scribe, writing letters and drawing up legal documents for the illiterate. He did not exercise the strange ability that he had discovered in Professor Anselm’s classroom. If that talent were discovered, he knew, he would be executed as a sorcerer.

But times were lean, and when there was no money for food and no work available, he quietly took a handful of nails or some foreign coins and guiltily turned these objects into gold, traveling widely to spend them. For this reason, Jean-Loup had no permanent home, living in rented rooms in the city when he did not have to travel, and in flea-infested inns when he did.

He was nearing his twenty-sixth birthday when he was robbed and beaten in one of these inns by a band of thieves. When he came to, bruised and bleeding, he knew he could not continue to live this way, ignoring his inborn power and living like an animal when he could possess the luxuries of a king.

He decided to become a goldsmith. Normally, mastery of this craft took many years of study and apprenticeship, but that was partly because gold was such a precious commodity that beginners had to practice with other metals. Jean-Loup did not have this problem. He sought out an aged, retired goldsmith whose eyes were no longer keen enough for the delicate work required, and paid him a fortune.

“Teach me your craft using the gold I give you,” he told the old smith. “Spend what you like, and when my apprenticeship is done, keep the rest.”

The smith blinked wordlessly in astonishment.

“All I ask is that you tell no one about the gold or where it came from.”

“Rest easy, my lord,” the old man said, chuckling. “I would not like to end my days at the end of a cutthroat’s knife. I will say nothing.”

• • •

Jean-Loup learned quickly. He had always had leanings toward making art. From an early age he had been able to capture a person’s likeness with no more than a piece of charcoal, but his family had considered art to be an unworthy pursuit for a member of the nobility. Now that he was no longer restrained by the class he had been born into, he was able to let his imagination fly.

He began by learning to file, solder, polish, saw, forge, and cast the beautiful metal. From there he learned how to produce plates, spoons, and goblets.

“Even a king could not eat his meals on something so fine,” the old smith said as he examined one of Jean-Loup’s bowls. “I think I should make it known to the guild that I have an apprentice.”

The guilds were strict about their rules for membership, and the goldsmiths’ guild was one of the most particular. “Tell them I’ve been here for years, working as your servant,” Jean-Loup said. Because he was older than most apprentices, he anticipated problems in joining the guild when the time came, but he needn’t have worried. Once he was permitted to make jewelry, Jean-Loup’s artistic genius flowered. By the time he applied to the guild for membership, noblewomen from as far away as England were already sending emissaries begging to purchase his magnificent pieces. And although he gave all the credit for his work to the old smith who had trained him, the shop he bought on the Pont au Change, the bridge where all the city’s goldsmiths kept their businesses, was bustling with activity as soon as it opened.

Thus did Jean-Loup de Villeneuve, former aristocrat, become a tradesman and a new addition to Paris’s growing middle class. He lived in rooms above the shop on the busy bridge, ate well, enjoyed the company of his fellow guild members, and employed several assistants, although he took on no apprentices for fear that one of them would discover his secret.

Indeed, he almost never had to make gold anymore. He was successful as a merchant and an artist. But sometimes when business was slow, he would rub his thumb along a lead slug and watch it come to life as it transformed into a gleaming, glowing nugget of gold. This is what he was doing when the bell above the door to his shop opened and the most beautiful woman he had ever seen walked in.

Her eyes were violet. She was tall and slender, with a smattering of black curls peeking from beneath the hood of her cloak. The cloak itself was of plain undyed wool, but its coarseness could not disguise the nobility of her bearing or the stunning vibrancy of those extraordinary eyes.

“Are you the goldsmith?” she asked.

He stood mutely, all thought having flown out of his head the moment he’d set eyes on her.

“Sir?”

“What? Oh.” Jean-Loup felt himself blush. “Yes. May I help you?” The words dropped out of his mouth mechanically, while his mind only registered that something very unusual was behind her exotic gaze—a wisdom, perhaps, or a sadness so deep that he could not even imagine its depths.

“I brought something for you to appraise,” she said as she drew a silk-wrapped parcel out of her sleeve and laid it on the counter between them. Jean-Loup could barely bring himself to tear his gaze away from her, but he reminded himself that he was a master craftsman with obligations to his profession.

The object on the silk cloth was a long necklace of heavy gold links that held a pendant that bore a crude likeness of a man’s face. Studded around the edges of the pendant were eighteen uncut diamonds. Jean-Loup gaped at the necklace in astonishment. He had seen drawings of Carolingian goldwork forged from the time of the early Franks, hundreds of years earlier, but he had never seen any actual examples. Until now.

“May I?” he asked diffidently before lifting it. The piece was enormously heavy. He examined the portrait on the pendant with a magnifying glass.

“It’s Charlemagne,” the woman said.

Jean-Loup’s head snapped up.

“It belonged to him.” She swallowed nervously and looked down at her hands. “He gave it to his last wife before he died.”

“How do you know?” he asked stupidly. She didn’t answer.
But of course she doesn’t know
, he thought. She was just telling him a story in an attempt to increase its value.

As it turned out, the story wasn’t necessary. Even if it were a forgery, the sheer weight of the gold in the necklace was staggering. And if it really did belong to Charlemagne, well, then the piece would be beyond price.

“How did you acquire this?” he asked.

The woman ignored him. “I’d like you to melt it down and cast it into pennyweights. As payment, you may keep one of the stones.”

“Ah. A forgery, then.”

“No. It is genuine.”

“Then why would you have me melt it down?”

The woman sighed. “We need the money,” she said, her eyes downcast.

“Perhaps you could sell it—”

“No one could pay what it is worth, and a pawnbroker would only cheat me. I came to you because of your reputation for honesty.” She picked up the necklace and handed it to him. “Please weigh it,” she said.

He did. “Three pounds, eight and three-quarter ounces.”

“It must weigh at least three and a half pounds when I pick up the gold,” she said. “And you must return seventeen of the stones to me.”

He bristled. She had expected him to cheat her! “If I were to melt down the gold, I would return three pounds, eight and three-quarter ounces to you,” he said with dignity. “And eighteen stones. The payment for my work would be twenty francs.”

“I apologize,” the woman said. “I was only trying to control how badly I would be mistreated.”

Jean-Loup inhaled sharply. He was aware of the ways merchants took advantage of women. “At any rate, however, I cannot do as you ask.”

She looked up, alarmed.

“If this piece is genuine—as I suspect it may be—I also cannot pay you what it is worth. But neither can I destroy it. Instead, I will give you an equal measure of gold for it, and polished diamonds that you will be able to sell.”

Confused, the woman nodded her agreement. Jean-Loup went to the back of the store and returned with the exact measure of gold and a handful of good, if small, diamonds. The woman accepted them with thanks, and he wrote her a receipt. “Your name?” he asked, feeling his heart pounding as he dipped the quill into the ink.

“Veronique de Caroligne,” she said.

A drop of ink fell onto the receipt. “Caroligne? From the House of Charlemagne?”

“Yes,” she said, collecting her things. But before she reached the shop door, she turned around to face Jean-Loup again. “Forgive me, but what will you do with the necklace?”

Jean-Loup smiled shyly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Look at it, I suppose.”

She smiled. As she left, Jean-Loup’s chief assistant, Thibault, entered the shop, his mouth agape as he watched the beautiful woman walk away.

“Well, we’re surely the top shop in the guild now,” Thibault said.

“Oh?”

Thibault jerked his head toward the north end of the bridge. “That was the abbess, wasn’t it?”

“Abbess?” His heart sank. “She’s a nun?”

“I think so. You know the Abbey of Lost Souls?”

Jean-Loup nodded glumly. Everyone knew the place. It had been in existence since before Paris had been chartered.

“Well, that lady’s the head of it,” Thibault explained, glancing over at the necklace. “Looks like the sisters are doing pretty well.”

CHAPTER

•

NINETEEN