Another Woman's Grave

Chapter One: The Branch Line

The branch line from the coast climbed for fifty minutes through hills the colour of dry bread, and Florence Norton spent every one of them with her window down, taking the country apart by smell.

Hot iron and coal smoke first, of course, and the sour tar of the sleepers. Then, as the train left the last of the sea behind, something green and bitter that she decided was wild fig. Then thyme, baked on stone. Then, at the fourth curve, so suddenly that she sat forward and gripped the sill, roses.

Not the roses of a London flower barrow, wilting in their paper. Whole fields of them, acres, roses gone slightly rotten with their own sweetness, and under that a soft powdery honey she knew from bottles that had cost her employer eleven pounds an ounce.

"Rose de mai," said the only other passenger, a farmer with a crate of live hens between his boots. He seemed pleased that a foreigner had noticed. "Two weeks more, and then it is finished for the year."

"And then?"

"Then orange flower. Then, in August, the jasmine." He said the last word the way other men said the name of a horse they had money on.

Florence sat back. Her trunk was in the van, containing three dresses, a white laboratory coat with a mended cuff, ninety-one small bottles packed in sawdust, and a letter of reference which she had written herself, on paper bought in Dover, in a hand she had practised for two evenings in a temperance hotel.

She was twenty-four years old. Eleven weeks ago she had been the best nose in the Ingleby and Crewe soap works in Lambeth, which was a smaller distinction than it sounded but had been hers, and hers alone, since she was nineteen. Six weeks ago she had been dismissed for selling the firm's formula for Almond Bloom to a rival house in Bermondsey. She had not sold it. She had not sold anything. Mr. Sedgeley, the works manager, whose son kept a motor-car on a clerk's wages, had produced two letters in a hand that resembled hers, and the directors had looked at her the way men look at a dog that has bitten once, and that had been the end of eleven years' work — her father's trade, her father's nose, her father's small pride in her, all of it folded up like a shopfront shutter.

Nobody in England would have her. She had written to forty-one addresses. One had answered.

*Mademoiselle,* the answer began, in an educated, unsteady French she had needed a dictionary for, *I do not care what they say you did. I care what you can smell.*

Saint-Aubin was a platform, a plane tree, and a stationmaster with a wooden leg who lifted her trunk down as though it had insulted him. Beyond the plane tree the village went up the hill in narrow tiers of ochre and rust, and above the village the land opened into terraces — long, low, dark green, netted with irrigation channels — and above the terraces the mountain stood with its back to the sea.

A man was waiting by a motor-car so old that its brass had gone the green of a church roof.

"Miss Norton."

"Monsieur Vidal."

Julien Vidal was perhaps forty-four, tall, with a fine long head and grey at the temples and the kind of good linen suit that has been good for a decade too long. He took her hand. He smelled, at half past four in the afternoon, of cologne, of cigarettes, and — faintly, under the cologne, the way a stain shows under fresh paint — of marc brandy.

She filed it and said nothing. She had a nose the way other people had an ear for a wrong note in a hymn; it had never once made her popular.

"You are younger than I hoped," he said, cranking the car, "and you came, which is more than the other three did. Get in."

The road out of the village was one and a half carts wide. On the left the hillside fell away into a slot of shadow, and Florence heard water somewhere far down.

"The gorge," Julien said, without turning his head. "You will hear a great deal about the gorge."

Le Clos d'Ambre announced itself first as a smell and only afterwards as a house.

They came around a shoulder of rock and it arrived all at once: orange flower, hot stone, and underneath, coming from a long tiled building with its shutters open, a great slow breath of something warm and animal and sweet — beeswax, fat, and flowers going over. Florence's eyes watered. It was the smell of a working still-house, and she had not known until that second how much she had missed it, and how badly she wanted to be let inside one again.

The house itself was long and low and the colour of weak tea, with a terrace, a wisteria eating the west end, and eleven windows of which four were shuttered. Two of the shutters had lost slats. In the yard, three copper stills stood under a tin roof, and one of them was cracked and green and had a bird's nest in its swan-neck.

"You see the condition of us," Julien said. He said it lightly, which was worse than bitterly.

"I see roses coming in and nobody bringing them to the still."

He glanced at her then, properly, for the first time.

"We send the rose out to Vence to be distilled. It costs me money I do not have. Two years ago we processed everything here, we had eleven people in that yard, and our jasmine absolute went to three of the six great houses in Paris." He switched off the engine and the silence came down like a lid. "Now I have four permanent hands, a buyer who visits in order to enjoy my humiliation, and a scent that does not exist."

"Nocturne."

"Nocturne." He got out. "My wife made it. My wife nearly made it. Do you know what she was?"

"Everyone in the trade knows what Madeleine Vidal was."

It was true. Even in Lambeth, among men who thought a perfumer was a chemist with pretensions, they knew the name. Madeleine Vidal had composed *Cendre de Rose* at twenty-six and *Sillage* at thirty-one, and when a great house in Paris put out something clever, the trade papers still asked whether the woman in the hills had done it better first. Florence had once been permitted, in the office of a broker in Mincing Lane, to smell *Sillage* from a sample vial. She had thought about it for a week afterwards, the way one thinks about a person.

"She died in October of nineteen twenty-one," Julien said. "She went walking above the gorge and she did not come back, and she was found five weeks later in the water. Nocturne was to be her monument. Nine notes. Eight of them are written in her notebooks — the materials, the ratios, the order of building. The ninth she kept in her head, because she kept everything important in her head, and it is not a decoration, Miss Norton, it is the hinge. Without it the other eight fall apart in an hour. Wood and jasmine and a hole in the middle where the soul should be."

He took her trunk out of the car himself, which she had not expected.

"Monsieur Delaunay of Delaunay et Fils has kept this house alive for two years on the promise of that perfume. He will come in the summer with a contract. If I can put Nocturne in his hand before the end of the jasmine harvest, he signs for ten years and I keep my terraces, my name, and my father's house. If I cannot, he walks, and Le Clos d'Ambre is sold in parcels to men who will grub up the jasmine and plant carnations for the Nice market."

"That is four months."

"Yes."

"To reconstruct an accord from another perfumer's fragments, with no sample, no trace, no bottle of the finished thing to smell."

"Yes." He set the trunk on the step. "Three men have refused it. One came, stayed nine days, and left in the night without asking for his fee. You are, I am aware, my last idea."

Florence looked at the cracked still and the broken shutters and the terraces going up the hill in the yellow late light, ten thousand jasmine plants pruned back hard and waiting for August. She thought about her room in Dover and the forty-one letters.

"Then I had better see the notebooks tonight," she said.

Something moved in her that she was careful not to let onto her face. It was not hope, exactly. It was appetite.

That was when the front door opened and a woman came out onto the step, drying her hands on a cloth, and stopped, and looked at Florence for slightly too long.

She was perhaps fifty-seven, small, very neat, in grey, with her hair scraped back so tightly that it lifted her eyebrows and gave her a permanent expression of mild surprise. Her hands were a working woman's hands, stained yellow-brown at the fingertips from years of handling flowers.

"Miss Norton," Julien said, "this is Marthe Lemoine. Marthe was my wife's assistant for twenty-two years. She has been in this house since she was eighteen. Nothing happens here that she does not permit."

"Madame," said Florence, and put out her hand.

Marthe Lemoine looked at the hand.

"You are very young," she said, "to be doing Madame's work," and went back inside, leaving the door open behind her, which was not the same as an invitation.

And as she turned, Florence caught it: lavender water, old-fashioned, over-applied, the sort a woman buys in a chemist's shop and wears for thirty years. Under it, ironed cotton. Under that, so faint that she was not certain she had it at all, a thread of woodsmoke.

There was no fire lit anywhere in the house. It was the eleventh of May and the evening was warm.