The next morning, Alistair arrived at the Athenaeum at precisely seven-fifteen. It was a ritual, a silent declaration of ownership over his day. The lower levels were empty, the air holding the pre-dawn chill of stone and slumbering knowledge. He expected solitude. He needed it to brace himself for the coming invasion.
He was wrong.
She was already there.
Elara Vance was seated in his carrel, the crimson of her blazer a jarring wound in the sepia landscape. She wasn't reading. She was sketching in a small, leather-bound book, her charcoal pencil moving with a fluid, confident grace across the page. On the table beside her sat a steaming cup of her fragrant jasmine tea and, incongruously, a pain au chocolaty resting on a linen napkin. The scent of butter and chocolate was an act of aggression.
Alistair stopped in the aisle, his briefcase feeling suddenly heavy in his hand. His carefully constructed morning ritual—the brewing of his black, bitter coffee, the precise arrangement of his pens, the five minutes of silent contemplation before engaging with the past—had been dismantled. It was a psychological assault.
"Good morning," she said without looking up, her voice bright and entirely unsuitable for the hour. "I hope you don't mind. I couldn't sleep. The past has a way of… chattering, don't you find?"
Alistair did not find. The past, for him, was a silent, reverent entity. It spoke only when spoken to, and only in hushed, solemn tones. He walked to the carrel, placing his briefcase on the floor with a soft, deliberate thud that he hoped conveyed his profound disapproval.
"I find," he said, his voice clipped, "that a structured approach to the day is essential for productive scholarship."
Elara finally looked up, a smudge of charcoal on her cheek. She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that suggested she found his stiffness amusing rather than intimidating. "Oh, I'm all for structure. My structure is just a bit more… jazz. You know, a little improvisation around the main theme." She tapped her sketchbook. "I was just trying to visualize the Comte de Valerien's study in the Palais-Royal. Based on an inventory I found online. He had a surprising number of botanical texts for a political operative."
Alistair felt a familiar headache brewing behind his eyes. "He was an aristocrat. It was de rigueur. It means nothing."
"Doesn't it?" she countered, her eyes gleaming. "It suggests a mind that appreciated systems and classification. Not just power, but the natural order of things. Maybe that's why he was drawn to the Sylphide. She was a part of nature he couldn't classify. A wildflower in his manicured garden."
Alistair turned away and began the meticulous process of setting up his own workspace. He took out his laptop, his external drive, his specific brand of fountain pen, his blotting paper. Each item was placed with geometric precision. He was building a fortress of order against her chaotic encroachment. He did not reply. To engage was to validate her frivolous line of inquiry.
For the next hour, a cold war simmered in the carrel. The only sounds were the rhythmic click-clack of his keyboard and the soft, scratching whisper of her pencil. He was cross-referencing the names from the royal folio with Parisian guild records from the 1780s. It was painstaking, laborious work, the kind he excelled at. He was building a database, a web of connections, a map of the city's artisans and their patrons. He was looking for the painter Dubois.
She, on the other hand, was flitting through digital archives of the Louvre and the Musée Carnavalet, her screen a riot of color. She was looking at Dubois's paintings. She wasn't building a database; she was absorbing, her expression shifting as she moved from a formal portrait of a stiff-necked merchant to a vibrant, almost impressionistic street scene.
Finally, he could bear it no longer. "Are you actually accomplishing anything," he asked, not turning from his screen, "or are you simply window-shopping?"
"I'm establishing a baseline," she replied, her tone even. "I'm looking at his artistic evolution. An artist's style is a diary, Alistair. It's more honest than any letter. Look at this." She swiveled her laptop towards him.
On the screen was a portrait of a stern-faced woman in a silk gown, painted around 1785. The background was a dark, indistinct interior. "This is his early work. Commissioned. Safe. By the book." She swiped to another image. This one was from 1792, a chaotic scene of a Parisian market. The colors were bold, the brushstrokes energetic. "And this is his later work. The Revolution freed him. Or maybe it terrified him. Either way, it changed him."
Alistair glanced at the paintings, then back at his own screen, which displayed a monochrome spreadsheet of names and dates. "I have found his guild registration," he said, a note of triumph in his voice. "Jean-Pierre Dubois. Admitted as a master in 1782. Listed his address as the Quai de l'Horloge. He was a neighbor of the clockmakers."
"See?" she said, her smile infuriatingly bright. "We're already synergizing. You found his house. Now I can see if he painted the view from his window."
"That is not the point," Alistair said, his frustration mounting. "The point is to trace his movements. To see who he worked for. To find a financial or logistical link to the Comte de Valerien. Not to… admire his use of chiaroscuro."
"But the two are linked!" she insisted, swiveling back to her own screen. "His patrons dictated his style. The Comte was a known patron of the arts, but he was a classicist. He believed in order, in the ideals of ancient Rome and Greece. If Dubois was painting for him, his style from that period should reflect that. If I find a painting that's stylistically at odds with the Comte's known tastes, but was painted during their association, then that's an anomaly. A secret."
Alistair stared at her. Her logic was circular, inferential, and based entirely on subjective interpretation. It was everything he despised. And yet… there was a certain elegance to it. A different kind of logic. A historian's intuition, which he had always dismissed as a fancy term for making things up.
"Fine," he said, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "You follow your… artistic trail. I will pursue the documented facts. We will reconvene at one o'clock. Do not be late."
"Wouldn't dream of it," she murmured, already lost again in the world of 18th-century art.
The morning dissolved into a blur of focused intensity. Alistair descended deeper into his bell. He found Dubois's tax records, his marriage certificate, the birth records of his two children. He was building a life, brick by brick, from the dust of the archives. The man was respectable, middle-class, and utterly… dull. There was nothing to suggest a connection to a world of political intrigue and royalist secrets. He hit wall after wall. Dubois was a ghost in the machine of official history, visible only in the most mundane of transactions.
Frustrated, he took a different tack. He began searching for supply orders. Painters, especially master painters, had to purchase their materials. Pigments, canvases, brushes. These were often expensive and required special licenses, especially for certain colors. He combed through the ledgers of the major Parisian color merchants, his eyes scanning the elegant, spidery script.
And then he found it.
Buried in the ledger of a merchant named Bonnet, a supplier to the royal court, was an entry from the spring of 1791. 'Pour M. Jean-Pierre Dubois, peintre: dix livres de poussière de lapis-lazuli.'
Ten pounds of lapis lazuli dust.
Alistair sat back, his breath catching in his throat. Lapis lazuli. The pigment was more valuable than gold. In the 18th century, it was imported from Afghanistan, ground by hand, and used almost exclusively for the most sacred of purposes: the robes of the Virgin Mary in religious paintings. It was a color of immense cost and profound symbolism. Why would a painter of Parisian scenes and bourgeois portraits need such a vast quantity of it? It was an anomaly. A screaming, fire-alarm of an anomaly in the quiet hum of Dubois's mundane life. He made a note, his heart pounding with the thrill of the diver who has just spotted a glint of gold on the ocean floor.
At one o'clock, they reconvened. Alistair was tense, vibrating with the quiet excitement of his discovery. Elara looked tired, but her eyes were alight with a different kind of fire.
"You first," she said, gesturing to him. "Any luck with the master ledgers?"
Alistair cleared his throat, savoring the moment. "I found a supply order. From March 1791. Jean-Pierre Dubois purchased ten pounds of lapis lazuli pigment from a royal supplier."
Elara's eyebrows shot up. "Ten pounds? That's… that's a king's ransom. What on earth would he need that for? He wasn't painting religious scenes. Not then."
"Precisely," Alistair said, a surge of vindication washing over him. "It is an unexplained, massive expense. It suggests a secret commission of the highest order. A commission for which money was no object. A commission, I would posit, from a man like the Comte de Valerien, who was planning his flight and would need to liquidate his assets into portable, valuable objects. A painting using that much lapis lazuli would be a hidden treasure."
He sat back, satisfied. It was a solid, fact-based deduction. Irrefutable.
Elara was silent for a long moment, staring at his note on the screen. Then she slowly swiveled her own laptop towards him. "Okay," she said softly. "That's the bassline. Now listen to the melody."
On her screen was a painting. It was a portrait of a woman, half-length, set against a simple, dark background. It was unsigned, but Elara had cross-referenced the brushwork and the distinctive way the artist painted hands with Dubois's other known works. It was undoubtedly his. The woman was breathtaking. She had a cascade of dark, unruly hair and eyes that seemed to hold a secret smile. She was not an aristocrat. She wore a simple, white chemise dress, the very epitome of revolutionary style, but there was an innate nobility in her posture.
But it was the background that made Alistair's breath catch. Behind the woman, painted in the most brilliant, radiant, impossibly blue he had ever seen, was a drapery. It was a cascade of pure lapis lazuli, so rich and deep it seemed to have its own light source. It was a lavish, decadent, almost blasphemous use of the pigment in a portrait of a common woman.
"Who is she?" Alistair whispered, his historian's detachment momentarily shattered.
"We don't know," Elara said, her voice hushed with reverence. "The painting is in a private collection, listed in the catalog as 'Portrait of an Unknown Woman, c. 1791, School of Paris.' It's been attributed to half a dozen people. But I'm sure it's Dubois. Look at the hands. And look closer."
She zoomed in on the painting, on the corner of the canvas, tucked in the shadow of the blue drapery. There, almost invisible, was a tiny, almost insignificant detail. A bird. A small bird, perched on the edge of the painted frame, its head cocked as if singing. It was rendered with a few deft strokes of the brush.
"A mockingbird," Elara said. "It was his secret signature. He started putting it in his paintings around 1790. It's in the market scene, too, if you look closely. But it's never so prominent. It's a message."
Alistair stared from the screen to her, his mind racing. The lapis lazuli. The unknown woman. The mockingbird. The secret commission. The extravagant expense. The timing.
"The Sylphide," he breathed, the word feeling foreign and yet utterly right on his tongue. The myth, the footnote, the romantic embellishment. She was real. And she was staring out at him from a canvas painted with a fortune in blue pigment.
"'She was a part of nature he couldn't classify,'" he quoted her own words back to her, a grudging respect warring with his disbelief. "'A wildflower in his manicured garden.'"
Elara's smile was gentle, without a trace of triumph. "The painting is the proof of your theory. The expense is the proof of mine. We needed both, Alistair."
He looked at the radiant blue of the dress, at the woman's enigmatic smile, at the tiny, defiant bird in the corner. He had been diving in the silent deep, searching for a sunken ship. She had been flying in the open sky, listening for a lost song. And in this moment, in the quiet of the carrel, the sea and the sky had met. The discordant duet had, for a single, breathtaking note, become a harmony.
"The painting is in a private collection," he said, his voice all business again, but the edge had gone from it. "We need a name. We need an inventory. We need to trace its provenance from Dubois's studio to the present day."
"Agreed," she said, her eyes shining. "And I think I know where to start. In one of those botanical texts the Comte owned, there was a pressed flower. A small, blue wildflower. A sylphium. The book's marginalia had a little sketch of a mockingbird next to it."
Alistair felt a chill that had nothing to do with the library's temperature. It wasn't a coincidence. It was a pattern. A web of clues laid down over two centuries ago, waiting for a diver and a mockingbird to find them. The hunt was no longer a solitary pursuit. It was a partnership. And for the first time, the thought didn't feel like a life sentence. It felt like the beginning of an adventure.