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that. Still, it was enough to cause her to smile; maybe this news would help with Nicolas. Maybe the flower of love could bloom again.
    Nicolas . . .
She’d met him in the winter of 1349 after the death-scythe of the pestilence had passed, at this very shop. Without any source of income except for the rent that came to her from her father’s house, Perenelle had come here looking to sell her father’s old alchemical manuscripts. She was surprised to see how young the owner of the shop was—younger than she was by several years, yet he had the sophistication and the knowledge of a much older man; in that, he reminded her of her father. His fingers were stained with ink, he smelled of old paper, and there was a severity in his thin face. Yet his dark eyes were alight, and the way he swept his hand through the unruly mass of his hair as he leaned over the parchments she’d brought was disarming. It was apparent that he also knew alchemy, claiming to be a student of the art, and that also softened her toward him.
    â€œThis is a copy of the papyrus
Graecus Holmiensis
,” she told him. He only nodded, his lips pressed together. “And this is one of Jabir ibn Hayyan’s manuscripts—an original.”
    â€œYou’re familiar with these?” She could sense doubt in his voice, but he tempered it with a faint smile.
    â€œA little,” she told him. “Like you, I’m a student of the art, though a poor one. I helped my father with his work. I made a copy of his experimental notes also, if you’d be interested in that. He was working on chrysopoeia.”
    â€œWeren’t they all?
You
are the copyist?” The smile broadened. She liked the way his eyes crinkled as he grinned; that, too, was like her father. The somber air about him vanished with the expression. “So you can write, as well.”
    â€œ
Oui, Monsieur
; my father schooled me. I’m keeping the original for myself.”
    â€œTo conduct your own experiments?”
    â€œPerhaps.” She shrugged. “I haven’t yet decided.”
    That was how it began. Nicolas asked for time to look over the manuscripts, and that evening he escorted Perenelle to a tavern, where they ate and talked. She found it wonderful to converse with him: he was full of energy and ambition, doing well enough with his business, and had aspirations of doing more. He was fascinated with alchemy, yes, but he claimed to be even more interested in spells and incantations held within the ancient manuscripts. That first evening, he showed her how he could, with a single word, cause a small flame to appear on a wick. But he didn’t, as so many other men did, try to dominate the conversation. She noticed even then how Nicolas listened intently as she talked about her father and his work, coaxing her with gentle questions to say more. She thought it flattering then.
    This attraction was so very different than what she’d felt with Marlon, whose face and easy manner had managed to capture her, but who didn’t have a serious or ambitious bone in his body. She thought this was the way it was
supposed
to be between man and woman. She was quickly infatuated with Nicolas for his mind and for his passion.
    Six months later, he asked Perenelle for her hand in marriage. He gave her a golden ring as a token. “One day,” he told her, turning the ring in his fingers and placing it in her palm, “you and I will make these by the hundreds from nothing but base metal . . .”
    That was Nicolas’ alchemical quest—the search for transmutation of elements; beyond that, he had little interest in what chemicals and potions could do.
    â€œYou helped me become what I am,”
her father had told her, not long before he had died. Cosme touched her hair as he had when she’d been a child, lifting the red-orange tresses that seemed to flame in the sun. He’d always told her that the