I glanced at my uncle’s silently counting lips. “But why not just tell me, then? And if you were here, then … why didn’t you just destroy the fish when you had the chance?”
“You’re asking the wrong question.” He was coming to it now. I could see whatever it was building to a crisis. “What good would it have done to tear the thing to pieces? He would just build another. It’s the idea, Katharine, that’s what’s so hard to stop. It was the idea that had to die.”
His eyes were open now, his gaze on the candle flame. “Three times I was in there with him, under the bench with the canvas. Three times I could have done it. Twice with a knife, once with his own gun. Not a soul down here to stop me. If he had found me, fought me, I think maybe I could’ve. But he didn’t. He just whistled and went about his business, and … I didn’t. Couldn’t. It’s what I came here for, all those months ago, and I couldn’t, not for Davy, and not for you. If I had, he wouldn’t have gone to Stranwyne and you wouldn’t be here with a scar on your neck. Maybe Mr. Babcock would be alive. Mr. Tully was the better man, in the end.”
I stared at Lane, at this wretched bitterness I did not understand. He sighed.
“I was never going to tell you this. Any of it. I didn’t want you to know. But now … I think maybe it’s best that you do.” He was completely avoiding my gaze now.
“So when you saw me in the courtyard …”
“Leaving. Getting out of Paris. I wasn’t doing any good here.”
“And where were you going?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I felt my eyes narrow. It mattered to me. The hammers had slowed in the cavern, and I could hear Henri and Joseph talking. Uncle Tully would be done counting soon. “Lane, where does the tunnel go?”
“Beneath the Tuileries. A straight passage, with little branches coming off, all the way through. We should probably go that way. I think we’ll be risking morning mass if we go through the church, and the passage is stairs rather than ladders, easier for Mr. Tully. Ben spent most of his day socializing with the court, and the boy Robert …”
I had a pang for Mary.
“… and the manservant were the only other ones I ever saw down here. We shouldn’t have any other company.”
I watched the tension inside him coiling as he talked, tightening, closing him to me, and it had nothing to do with our way out of the tunnel. There was still something else, a deeper layer that he had not told me, and I could not yet see.
“I’ll get Marchand and Joseph to come back with me tomorrow,” Lane was saying. “We’ll take care of the bodies and see if the place can’t be sealed off. I doubt the emperor knows about these tunnels, since they’re here, and I don’t know how long it will take for him to notice who’s missing, or even how much he knows about what Ben was up to. But I’m thinking Mr. Tully needs to be on a boat no later than day after tomorrow. To be safe. Can it be managed?”
“I think so.” He was right; we would have to get out of Paris as soon as possible. But I dreaded sending Uncle Tully back into that horrid sleep.
The gaslights went off in the cavern then, leaving us only with the candle flame, and Joseph and Henri came out, both a little sweaty, Joseph carrying the crate that now contained my uncle’s lightning box. Lane was suddenly on his feet, and Uncle Tully’s eyes snapped open. He put his intense gaze directly on Lane, making sure not to notice the other two men. “Fourteen, and fifty-two,” he announced. “Take me to the old place now.”
Lane took the crate from Joseph, quickly, before my uncle could notice who had been holding his things, and I saw Joseph look over at Lane and frown, then glance uneasily at me. Lane did not look at me as he said, “The new place first, Mr. Tully, just for a bit. Then the old place next.”
I could not tell if that meant Lane was or was not coming with me.
29
T
wo hundred twenty-two, two hundred twenty-three, two hundred twenty-four, two hundred twenty …”
I helped my uncle count the steps while we crept quickly beneath the Tuileries. The passage had already climbed several times, filthy with cobwebs and dust rather than the dirt and the grit of stone, though only about its edges; the frequent travel this passage had gotten recently had kept the center reasonably clear. Again we were walking in the circle of light from one candle, our last candle, and the closeness was difficult for my uncle, but as merely “difficult” was so remarkably better than the “impossible” it would have been even two days ago, I felt a rush of pride. He was careful not to look at either Joseph or Henri, and to keep his mind on his counting.
“New place first, Uncle Tully, then the old place next. That will make it right.”
Whatever had happened in my absence from the crypt beneath the crypt of the Saint-Merri, rather than shooting one another, it seemed, the three men had instead found common ground in their distaste for the emperor. They were having a conversation about him now, in whispered English and animated French, all about elected officials that crowned themselves and seizure of property and unfair laws and how giving the merchant class the vote while taking away any power that vote might have had was meaningless. Every now and again, Lane stopped the soft conversation to listen to footsteps or the murmuring of voices above us. Then as soon as the noise had died away, they would start right up again.
I was not particularly focused on their political views. What Lane had said outside the cavern bothered me deeply. He had things the wrong way around, in my opinion, and this avoidance was exactly the way he’d worked himself up to leaving Stranwyne the last time.
“I didn’t want you to know. But now … I think maybe it’s best that you do.”
He hadn’t asked me what I thought was best, and he hadn’t told me everything, either. Of that I was certain. I wished I could ask my mother, or Marianna, or even Mrs. DuPont, someone at least partially successful in the management of a man. The more I dwelled on it, the more infuriated I became. The name
Eugénie
from the conversation in front of me broke into my thoughts.
“What did you just say?” I asked. Uncle Tully kept on counting.
Lane whispered his reply without looking at me. “I was talking about the stairs up ahead. They go to the Empress Eugénie’s apartments.”
Henri’s little mustache spread wide in the candlelight. “And I said that if more of the kings and queens of France had known what was down here, then perhaps we would have some of them left, yes?”
Joseph added something in French, and we kept moving, but again my mind was not on the conversation just ahead of me. I was thinking of dead queens, and the imperial ball, and how charming the empress had thought Ben Aldridge, so considerate with his gifts, and how he had secretly despised her.
“There will only be him and me.”
How could Ben have been so certain the emperor would have no need to look beyond him for an heir?
I looked up the stairs to Eugénie’s rooms, the center of the worn stones without dust or cobwebs, and suddenly instead of stairs I was seeing those little white packages of arsenic in Lane’s hands, and pale, ivory skin beneath a glittering diadem, and a bottle of claret, pouring purple into the glass in my hand. My feet stopped moving, and Uncle Tully paused in his count. The other three had gotten a little ahead of us.
“Uncle Tully,” I whispered, “wait for ten. Can you do it?”
He instantly sat himself on the first step and closed his eyes. I flew up the narrow stone stairs.
At the top of the stairs was a wooden door, the slightest bit of sunshine leaking in from a crack along its bottom edge. I ran my hands over it, the planks of wood wide, hard with age, the iron fittings thick and much more roughly made than the modern ones. I touched the hinges, and my fingers came back slick with oil. I knew, just as certainly as if I’d read Ben Aldridge’s confession.
My mind began racing. Uncle Tully could not stay in Paris, and after what had just happened in the cavern below, my being seen again at the palace was unthinkable. And how to even get in without an invitation? And if I could get in, who to talk to? Who would begin to believe me? How would I even explain such a fantastic tale?
I glanced back down to the tunnel. Uncle Tully was exactly where I had left him, and Lane had exchanged the crate for the candle, one foot on the first step. Henri and Joseph looked over his shoulder.
“Katharine!” he whispered.
I thought of the empress’s pale skin. Ben had bought the first of those little white packages weeks ago. I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. If it was morning mass, surely an empress would need to be seen there?
I looked again down the stairs. Lane was shaking his head back and forth, the word
no
forming silently on his lips. I had not come this far to root out the plans of Ben Aldridge, only to leave some of the seeds to grow. I turned the latch, and the door cracked open.
My head was behind a tapestry. I pushed it aside, saw a small but empty room done in bright yellows and gilt, slipped through the door, and shut it soundlessly behind me. I was in a parlor or sitting room of some sort, a little tumble of needlework lying discarded on a silken settee, a large, impressive-looking portrait of the emperor staring down at me from over the chimneypiece. I tiptoed to an ornate cabinet, quickly and quietly opening one door and then the other, glancing through the contents. I was looking for wine.
In the third cabinet, I found it, three bottles of claret, only one of them unsealed. It was clever of Ben, I thought, waiting for her to break the seal herself. I wondered why he’d always chosen claret. A personal preference, or did it just obscure the taste? I grabbed the bottle, shut the cabinet door without noise, straightened, and then jumped at a burst of feminine giggling coming from behind the door of the next room.
My heart leapt irregularly in my chest, my body tingling as I hurried back to the tapestry and pushed it aside. But there was nothing. No doorknob or latch visible. The door had disappeared, perfectly disguised by the wainscoting.
I set down the bottle and felt all over the cream-and-yellow-papered wall, searching for some type of spring or latch, appalled to see that I was leaving dirty handprints on everything I touched. I wondered if Lane had come up the stairs and was on the other side of the door, if I dared knock or make a noise. More giggling from the other room. I shot a glance over my shoulder, and found not only the portrait of the emperor staring at me, but the emperor himself.
I spun about, flattening against the wall, wrinkling his tapestry. We stared at each other, mutually stunned. He had been in the act of knotting the belt of a satin smoking jacket around his bare chest and legs, his hair an unruly mess, and just as in the ballroom before, I was struck by the ringing of distant bells, even stronger this time. It was something in his gaze, which at this moment looked as if he might like to shoot a hole right through my head. Napoléon saw the bottle of wine at my feet, and took a step toward the bellpull.
“Wait!” I said softly.
He paused, then his dark brows contracted, and he pointed. “You are that woman. Charles’s woman. Are you not?”
There was no time to correct this or explain. He was moving again toward the bellpull. “Your Majesty,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, but the wine …”
He put his hand on the rope.
“It belongs to the empress,” I said desperately. I picked up the bottle and held it toward him. “It’s poisoned!”
“Ridiculous,” he said after a moment, hand still on the rope. But he was holding his voice low.
“Please, listen. Ben … I mean, Charles, he has …” I took a breath. “He has been poisoning the wine.” The emperor’s piercing gaze held me a moment longer, and then, instead of pulling the rope, he went back to the door he’d just come through, calling out something cheerful in German before he shut it. “How have you gotten in here, and what have you been doing to yourself?”
“There is a door, just behind me. I came through …”
“Quiet,” he commanded, whispering. I waited until he came closer to where I was standing.
“A door,” I said, my voice only just audible. “Ben has … I mean Charles, he has been coming through it to …” The empress, or I assumed it was the empress, called out something in French.
“Dans un instant!”
he replied, then whispered, “Tell me what you are speaking of, you little wench. Now, before I am calling the guard.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to think how to quickly explain what I knew to be true. I said, “Is the empress well? Has she been sick?” He did not answer. “Has she always been so pale?”
“She is only a little tired, like a woman, but the doctor, he says …” The high voice trailed away.
“Arsenic,” I said. “In the claret. You do not drink it, do you, Your Majesty?”
Napoléon shook his head, eyes on the bottle in my hand. “And why …”
“He was afraid she would give you an heir.” The emperor glanced back at the closed door. “I know he was your son.”
“But … no. He could not think that. That I could …”
“He did think it.”
I could see the doubt in the emperor’s brows, in the way his head was still slowly shaking. He glanced toward the bellpull. I blurted, “And, Your Majesty, he was afraid to tell you, but … secretly, he was a Pisces.”
Napoléon stiffened.
“Replace the wine. I was trying to take this one away because it was unsealed, but I would pour all of it out. And anything that touches her skin: powders, lotions, face paint. I think you will find that she feels better. But … I really must go. Will you let me go?”
“Where is Charles?” he said slowly.
“He’s … he is dead. I’m sorry.”
I watched the play of emotions on the emperor’s face. “How …” he began, but he looked me over again and seemed to change his mind. I’d almost forgotten the soreness at the corner of my mouth, and wondered if he could see the bruising. And then he said inexplicably, “His … mother … she was an actress.”