Blavatsky’s big black dress wafted the stench of a thousand cigarettes as she led the girls through a second door and into a main room.
Her atelier was drafty, with a low ceiling and black-on-black embossed wallpaper. There was a humidifier in the corner, a vintage hot pot on top of a perilously stuffed bookcase, and a hundred old frowning portraits hanging in slanted frames on the wall. A broad desk held a frozen avalanche of books and papers, an old desktop computer, a vase of rotting purple freesias, and two turtles that were either napping or dead. Elegant gold cages hung in each corner of the room, holding so many birds Eureka stopped counting. They were small birds, the size of an open palm, with slender lime-green bodies and red beaks. They chirped resoundingly, melodically, incessantly.
“Abyssinian lovebirds,” Madame Blavatsky announced. “Exceptionally intelligent.” She slid a finger coated with peanut butter through the bars of one of the cages and giggled like a child as the birds flocked to peck her skin clean. One bird rested on her index finger longer than the others. She leaned close, puckering red lips and making kissing noises at him. He was larger than the others, with a bright red crown and a diamond of gold feathers on his breast. “And the brightest of all, my sweet, sweet Polaris.”
At last Madame Blavatsky sat down and motioned for the girls to join her. They sat quietly on a low black velour couch, rearranging the twenty-odd stained and mismatched pillows to make room. Eureka glanced at Cat.
“Yes, yes?” Madame Blavatsky asked, reaching for a long, hand-rolled cigarette. “I can surmise what you want, but you must ask, children. There is great power in words. The universe flows out of them. Use them now, please. The universe awaits.”
Cat raised one eyebrow at Eureka, tilted her head in the woman’s direction. “Better not piss off the universe.”
“My mother left me this book in her will,” Eureka said. “She died.”
Madame Blavatsky waved her bony hand. “I doubt that very much. There is no death, no life, either. Only congregation and dispersal. But that’s for another conversation. What do you want, child?”
“I want to get her book translated.” Eureka’s palm pressed into the raised circle on the book’s green cover.
“Well, hand it over. I am psychic, but I cannot read a closed book five feet away.”
When Eureka held out the book, Madame Blavatsky jerked it from her hand as if she were reclaiming a stolen purse. She flipped through it, pausing here and there to mutter something to herself, shoving her nose into the pages with the woodcut illustrations, giving no indication of whether she could make sense of it or not. She didn’t look up until she reached the fused section of pages near the back of the book.
Then she put out her cigarette and popped an orange Tic Tac in her mouth. “When did this happen?” She held up the chunk of stuck pages. “You didn’t try to dry it after you spilled—What is this?” She sniffed the book. “Smells like Death in the Afternoon. You’re too young to be drinking wormwood, you know.”
Eureka had no idea what Madame Blavatsky was talking about.
“It’s most unfortunate. I might be able to fix it, but it will require the wood kiln and expensive chemicals.”
“It was like that when I got it,” Eureka said.
Blavatsky slipped on wire-rimmed glasses, slid them down to the end of her nose. She studied the book’s spine, its inside front and back covers. “How long was your mother the proprietor?”
“I don’t know. My dad said she found it at a flea market in France.”
“So many lies.”
“What do you mean?” Cat asked.
Blavatsky looked up over the rims of her glasses. “This is a family tome. Family tomes stay within the family line unless there are tremendously unusual circumstances. Even under such circumstances, it is nearly impossible a book like this would fall into the hands of someone who would sell it at a flea market.” She patted the cover. “This is not the stuff of swap meets.”
Madame Blavatsky closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the birdcage over her left shoulder, almost as if she were listening to the lovebirds’ song. When she opened her eyes, she looked directly into Eureka’s. “You say your mother is dead. But what of your desperate love for her? Is there a faster way to immortality?”
Eureka’s throat burned. “If this book had been in my family, I would have known about it. My grandparents didn’t keep secrets. My mom’s sister and brother were both there when I inherited it.” She thought about Uncle Beau’s story of Diana reading it. “They barely knew anything about it.”
“Perhaps it did not come from your mother’s parents,” Madame Blavatsky said. “Perhaps it found her through a distant cousin, a favorite aunt. Was your mother’s name, by chance, Diana?”
“How did you know that?”
Blavatsky closed her eyes, tilted her head to the right, toward another birdcage. Inside, six lovebirds scampered to the side of the cage nearest Blavatsky. They chirped high, intricate staccatos. She chuckled. “Yes, yes,” she murmured, not to the girls. Then she coughed and looked at the book, pointing to the bottom corner of the inside back cover. Eureka stared at the symbols written in different shades of fade.
“This is a list of names of the book’s previous proprietors. As you can see, there have been many. The most recent one reads Diana.” Madame Blavatsky squinted at the symbols preceding Eureka’s mother’s name. “Your mother inherited this book from someone named Niobe, and Niobe received it from someone named Byblis. Do you know these women?”
While Eureka shook her head, Cat sat up straight. “You can read it.”
Blavatsky ignored Cat. “I can inscribe your name at the end of the list, seeing as the tome is now yours. No extra charge.”
“Yes,” Eureka said softly. “Please. It’s—”
“Eureka.” Madame Blavatsky smiled, picking up a felt-tipped pen and scrawling a few strange symbols onto the page. Eureka stared at her name in the mystifying language. “How did you—”
“This is similar to the old Magdalenian script,” Blavatsky said, “though there are differences. Vowels are absent. The spellings are quite absurd!”
“Magdalenian?” Cat looked at Eureka, who had never heard of it, either.
“Very ancient,” Blavatsky said. “Found in those prehistoric caves in southern France. This is not a sister to Magdalenian, but perhaps it is a second cousin. Languages have complicated family trees, you know—mixed marriages, stepchildren, even bastards. There are countless scandals in the history of languages, many murders, much incest.”
“I’m listening,” Cat said.
“It’s very rare to find such a text.” Madame Blavatsky scratched a thin eyebrow, affecting a weary air. “It will not be easy to translate.”
Heat tingled the back of Eureka’s neck. She didn’t know if she was happy or afraid, only that this woman was the key to something she needed to understand.
“It might be dangerous,” Blavatsky continued. “Knowledge is power; power corrupts. Corruption brings shame and ruin. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it is perhaps preferable to a life lived in shame. Do you agree?”
“I’m not sure.” Eureka sensed Diana would have liked Madame Blavatsky. She would have trusted this translator. “I think I’d rather know the truth, regardless of the consequences.”
“So you shall.” Blavatsky offered a mysterious smile.
Cat leaned forward in her chair, clasped the edge of the woman’s desk. “We want your best price. No funny business.”
“I see you’ve brought your business manager.” Blavatsky cackled, then inhaled and contemplated Cat’s request. “For something of this magnitude and intricacy … It’s going to be very taxing for an old woman.”