said it was part of a wider quest for physical and spiritual alchemy. Wizards of the time didn’t just want to make lead into gold, they wanted to lift the soul into heaven. As such they were trespassing on church prerogative and were hunted down as heretics. But
curiously pressed on that page, as if left as a message, was this.” She held up a dried rose, stem and thorns squashed flat. It was brown as paper.
Rose, the name of the redheaded spy and the symbol she’d said to use to signal her. Odd coincidence. “What does a flower have to do with the catacombs?”
“Why would it be left in a book of ancient wisdom? No lover would be likely to find it there. No, it was a message for someone seeking knowledge. I took the stem with hope and foreboding.”
“You stole this from the library?” She was so virtuous that this act of thievery surprised me.
“This was left as a sign. For a week or more I pondered what it might mean, and then one day I acted on the name of the scriptorium and walked the length of the rue Saint-Denis.”
“Known for its ladies of the evening.”
“So was it coincidence to happen upon an apothecary that had a red rose on the swinging sign above its door?”
“A common enough decoration, surely.”
“I went inside, not at all certain what I was looking for, and then saw a wizened chemist with a bent back and shuffling gait. He reminded me of Enoch in Egypt, and he wore a most unusual symbol in revolutionary France: a wooden crucifix.”
“Religion is making a comeback, apparently.”
“The juxtaposition came to me instantly: Rosicrucians.”
She’d intrigued me. The Rosicrucians are a secret society seeking ancient wisdom that is tied into any number of others, including my own Freemasons, Cagliostro’s nefarious Egyptian Rite with which I’d tangled, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Scottish Rite, and so on. There’s a lunatic lacework of all these groups, and I’ve been tangled in their nets in my travels. “The rosy cross, symbol of their order,” I said. “It stands for knowledge, sacrifice, and redemption.”
“Exactly.” My familiarity with such things made me suitable as her husband. “So on a hunch I took out the pressed flower and said I’d been told that with the right alchemy, the petals could bring great power. His old eyes glimmered, and he studied my face carefully. ‘You’re not French,’ the chemist said. ‘Egyptian,’ I replied, ‘but a member of all nations, and all races.’ After
consideration he beckoned me to a back room with shelves of chemicals and asked where I’d found the blossom. I said in an old book. And he said, ‘A rose can prick and a rose can seduce, and sometimes a rose can also lead to foresight and immortality.’”
“The promise of the Rosicrucians, and the Brazen Head.” I felt a chill, as if once more we were being led on paths winding and perilous. We’re all puppets, Réal had said, and not just of each other but some higher power. Napoleon had told me several times he felt driven by unseen forces, and my own life had become nearly as strange as his.
“I said yes,” Astiza recounted, “and he said that we must meet to discuss possibilities further. He invited us to the catacombs.”
“Like being invited for dinner in a dungeon, by a dragon.”
“He wants to learn what we’re about and decide whether to help us.”
“What’s this chemist’s name?”
“He gave it as Palatine, the noble title given to the famed alchemist Michael Maier by the Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia, two centuries ago. Maier was a German doctor who studied the teachings of the rosy cross.”
Yes, I’d certainly married a pretty bookworm. “And this Palatine left his flower in a dusty book and then waited for someone to bring it by years later? That’s more patience than a fisherman throwing a line into the polluted Seine.”
“Perhaps it was left by others. Perhaps the Brazen Head prophesized when it would be found, and Palatine set up shop accordingly.”
“To wait for us.”
“To wait for whoever found it. We’re to find something more, I believe, which disappeared in Germany or Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War.”
“Good heavens. So instead of toppling Napoleon we’re on his errand, instead of quietly retiring we’re spying for all sides, and instead of setting up a home like a normal married couple we’re lusting after a lost object of supernatural power. Just to be clear about the mess we’ve mixed for ourselves.”