Pierre Pevel - By The Alchemist in the Shadows Page 0,37
days here, when the heat was bearable, reading and biding her time in an armchair that was brought out from her bedchamber for her. Otherwise she shared the ordinary life of the nuns, punctuated by prayers and meals. She was not obliged to do so, but it suited the character she had invented for herself, that of a rich, pious widow, weary of the world and desiring to pass the last years of her life in retreat from it. Within the convent she was known as madame de Chantegrelle. Only a month earlier, however, she had been the vivacious vicomtesse de Malicorne and, thanks to magic, had looked less than twenty years old. An age which was scarcely more deceptive than the one her present appearance suggested. For her true age was a number of years which stretched far beyond the ordinary span. Ordinary for human kind, that is.
But she was a dragon.
The so-called madame de Chantegrelle lifted her eyes from her book and sighed as she considered both the garden and the life that was hers at present. She had loved being the vicomtesse de Malicorne. She'd possessed youth, beauty, wealth, and power. All of Paris had courted her and vied for her favours. What a shame to have been forced to abandon that role! Officially, the vicomtesse had perished in a fire that had left nothing of her but a charred, unrecognisable corpse — in point of fact, that of some wretched woman taken from the gutter. It was a tragic loss but an almost banal event in Paris, where fire was the cause of many fatal accidents . . .
The truth was, the ritual intended to mark her triumph had instead brought about her ruin. Anyone but her would not have survived the ordeal, no doubt. But that did not assuage her regrets. And it did nothing to diminish the desire for revenge that burned inside her. If not for Cardinal Richelieu, if not for Captain La Fargue and his cursed Blades, today she would have been at the head of the first Black Claw lodge ever founded in France . . .
The sound of a light footstep on the gravel garden path drew madame de Chantegrelle's attention. A nun approached her and, after making sure she wasn't asleep, whispered a few words in her ear. The old woman nodded before turning her head to look at her announced visitor, who stood a short distance away beneath a stone arch covered with climbing roses in flower.
A fleeting expression of surprise and fear passed across her face, but she greeted her visitor with a polite smile and extended a hand to be kissed.
The man was dressed as a gentleman, in grey and black, with a sword at his side. He might have been fifty or fifty-five years of age. He was an intimidating figure: tall, rather thin, and hieratic in bearing. He had an emaciated oval face with strangely smooth skin, as if it had been stretched a little too tight over the ridges of his face, and a morbid, sickly pallor. His icy grey eyes crinkled up whenever he coughed — with a dry, brief, guttural sound - into the handkerchief which he dabbed at his fine, livid lips.
Like the woman he now joined, he was a dragon. He had borne many names, some of which she had learned. But the one he preferred was a nom de guerre: the Alchimiste des Ombres, the Alchemist of the Shadows. Where had it originated, exactly? She didn't know. In any case, it was by this pseudonym — or sometimes merely by a sign featuring an A' and an 'O' intertwined - that the Black Claw designated one of its best independent agents.
A novice having brought him a chair, the Alchemist sat down with a nod — not so much in thanks but rather in acknowledgement of the chair being placed at his disposal, as a matter of course.
'I have known of your setbacks for some time, madame. But I have only now had the opportunity to pay you a visit. Please forgive me.'
'My "setbacks",' noted the old woman. 'How kindly put—'
'I will add, in my defence, that it was hardly easy to find you.'
'What can I say? Madame de Chantegrelle is far more discreet than the vicomtesse de Malicorne.
And who would concern themselves with a dying old lady living out her final days in a convent, surrounded by sisters whose affection for