Page 61 of Immortal Rose

But no, that was ridiculous. The darkness and cold air were by design. As I leaned out over the last curve of the spiraling steps, the reason became plain: shelves of perfume flacons lined the walls of the small chamber below.

I slowed as I came off the last step, lifting the candle to better illuminate both the bottles and their shelves’ labels. Many were empty, having finally evaporated or been used to the last drop. Even then, their bottles arrested me. An artisan had blown the glass into unusual, willowy shapes and into flowers I both did and didn’t recognize. Their glass turned pearlescent under the caress of the candlelight.

For there you’ll find a treasure below of legends past and truths you’ve yet to know.

Their scents murmured faintly, dimmed by time and the wax sealing their stoppers. Each was a whisper, a glimpse of a life I hadn’t lived: secrets in the shadows, eternal days in the sun, the memories of trees. I could scarcely wrap my mind around it.

This was my inheritance. Not the palace above us or the tens of thousands of pounds hidden away in bank vaults. This. I would spend hours—days—down here as soon as I was able.

Foxcourt tapped one empty space we passed. I doubled back, standing on my toes to read the inscription pinned to the wood. Immortal Rose.

“That would have been too easy,” I muttered.

There was a small table and a single chair positioned at the center of the chamber. And there, spread open like an invitation, was an immense leather-bound volume.

I stopped before it, carefully setting the candle down.

“This is it, I presume?” came Foxcourt’s distant voice.

The pages breathed out warm magic, illuminating every part of my soul as it melded with the scent of ink and old blood. Exactly how Mama had described, but somehow, inconceivable.

I leaned forward, daring to stroke a light finger down the purple flower that had been painted onto the open pages in vibrant metallic inks. Its long stem was woven through lines of elegant, spidery penmanship. A flutter low in my stomach, of some unknowing recognition between myself and that writing, made the hair on my arms rise.

This was the hand of the fairy who had brought the magic of perfume into our world. Into the Rosebourne bloodline.

To capture the scent of the violet flower, I read, gather the following . . .

Of course—of course. Setting aside magic, the allure of the Rosebourne perfumes for today’s society came principally from William Rosebourne’s vision of layered scents, the balance and interplay of musk and flowers and fruit achieved by no other perfumery. He’d understood, long before his peers, the experience of perfume also included the aesthetic of its vessel—that he could convey a story through it, make it desirable and collectible, rather than force his customers to buy their perfume in simple apothecary bottles and transfer them to flasks at home.

But what the House of Rosebourne had originally been known for was its ability to capture the scent of mute flowers. Those delicate lovelies like violets, lilacs, and lilies of the valley that either refused to give up their natural scents or were too delicate to go through the extraction process necessary to distill them into oil.

I’d always thought that, perhaps, the Rosebournes had used magic to extract those fragrances, but no—if this precise formulation was any indication, they did what other perfumers attempted to do: re-create the scent of one flower using a precise blend of others. Fascinating.

“Lockwood?” Foxcourt began, rudely shattering my trance. The magic dancing along my skin quelled, as if sensing we were not alone in each other’s company. “Are you quite all right?”

“More than all right, I’d say.”

The pages were so very delicate, yellowed and brittle by the centuries. Hesitating, I turned to a random page, voraciously poring over the entry for a perfume to soothe nightmares. A drop of lavender oil best drawn at morning. Another, different hand—who?—had carefully added beneath it, years later, Lavandula x heterophylla is sweetest. A night’s sleep in exchange.

Never one for maudlin moods, I was surprised at how deeply the sight of it touched me. It often took hundreds of flowers to create a mere ounce of oil. And here, the knowledge of hundreds of years, distilled into a single volume.

It’s ours now, Mama, I thought. At last. A day hadn’t gone by where she hadn’t thought of or mentioned the Treasury, wishing she had spent more time with it.

Some unacknowledged tension deep within my chest diminished, because I knew for certain now that none of this was a dream. That the next hand to write a notation within these pages would be mine and mine alone. I was a Rosebourne.

His patience stretched to its limit, Foxcourt leaned over my shoulder to see for himself. I smiled at his noise of disbelief.

“But . . . it’s blank,” he said, sounding dumbfounded.

He reached for the book, only to draw his hand back. Foxcourt was no fool, I’d give him that. One never knew what might happen when you touched a fairy relic not meant for your taking.

“No,” I said, my eyes drinking in the midnight ink. “It’s most definitely not.”

“There’s nothing there,” he insisted. It came to him then; realization lit his eyes. “Unless . . .”

“It’s written with fairy ink,” I finished, heaving the heavy book shut. And our family’s blood, so that only we may read it, Mama’s voice whispered in my mind. And that begged another question, one that sent a shiver of unease through me.

Whoever had tried to steal it, whether it was the DeForests or some other enterprising thief, knew of the Treasury’s existence but hadn’t known that secret.