A Spark Unseen

26

I met Mary as I was hurrying down the stairs, she having just rid us of two thoroughly confused policemen. Mary and Lane had already renewed their acquaintance while fighting flames in the kitchen, but I watched her large eyes go a bit larger when he came stepping down behind me. I had not realized just how dead she’d thought he was. After a quick explanation of where we were going and the request that she find Lane something to eat, I dashed back up to Marianna’s room to wash the blood off my face, stuff my hair into the red cap, and put on Mr. Babcock’s pants.

When I came down again, Henri had surrounded himself with a new cloud of cigarette smoke in the already sooty foyer, watched carefully by a slouching Joseph, who had his jacket on, his pants tucked into his boots, apparently coming with us. Lane was silently finishing two pieces of bread with some sort of meat in between, his hair dripping. He must have dunked his head in a bucket. He caught sight of me on the stairs, and his expression so mimicked Mary’s first reaction to seeing me in my ridiculous clothing that the comparison might have been comic had the whole situation not been my worst nightmare. I saw Henri’s eyes sparkle.

“Miss Tulman has her own sense of fashion, mon ami. Were you not aware?”

I ignored him. I had watched Lane’s face change from incredulous to dubious, and now I was observing the stubborn line of his mouth. That he would think I wasn’t coming had never crossed my mind. I hastened across the foyer to set him straight.

“I’ve no time to argue with you,” I said. “If they’ve given Uncle Tully the contents of that bottle, he is going to wake badly.”

Lane’s scowl deepened. “How badly?”

“The worst I’ve seen. He hurt himself and, Lane, he hasn’t had a glimpse of you in eighteen months.” I could have told him it had been five hundred and sixty-three days. “Uncle Tully is going to need me. You’re going to need me if you want to get him out, and if we’re going to crawl about underground I’ll be of no use to you in petticoats.”

An expression I couldn’t quite fathom passed over his face, and I thought we were about to quarrel the point when a key rattled in the front door. The latch clicked, and then Mrs. DuPont stood looking in at us, swathed in an enormous cloak that was blacker than the paling night behind her. But before I could move or react, both Lane and Mrs. DuPont erupted into a storm of angry French.

I looked to Henri and Joseph, who both seemed as confused as I was, but at one of Lane’s last words, something about money, I suddenly understood. I couldn’t believe the answer had not come to me sooner. I took a step toward Mrs. DuPont. “You sold him! Didn’t you?”

The room went quiet, Mrs. DuPont glancing over the soot stains on the wall before deigning to land her gaze on me. I was so livid I was shaking. How else could Ben have known about the attic room?

“How much did they pay you?” I yelled. “How much?”

Lane took my arm. “That’s not what she’s selling, Katharine,” he said. “Come on.”

Mrs. DuPont’s bone-white mask looked just a bit aggrieved as she nodded once at Lane, carefully closed the front door, and began to move, bat-like, through the smoky foyer, the two of us following close behind. Lane paused to look over his shoulder.

“Not you,” he said, the low voice forceful.

Henri stopped mid-stride, throwing up both hands as if in self-defense, Joseph right behind him with the gun in his hand. We chased after the billowing cloak of Mrs. DuPont, walking fast down the back corridor, the smell of burnt plaster going deep into my nose.

Mrs. DuPont slowed before the door to the kitchen, running her eyes over the charred, wet mess around the stove, then put a key to her door and disappeared inside, leaving it open behind her. I followed Lane into Mrs. DuPont’s lair.

It was a plain room, unadorned, two comfortable chairs and a smaller stool arranged around an iron stove, an open door showing a bed neatly spread in the chamber beyond. But the room was also full of crates and boxes in perfect stacks, some reaching to the ceiling, piles of gunnysacks, and a table that was completely covered in exacting rows of brown and white paper parcels. The place looked like an apothecary, or the storeroom of a dry-goods shop. Lane put out a hand, stilling my questions, his gray gaze on Mrs. DuPont.

“Our agreement?” he said.

Mrs. DuPont turned from the table with the packages and silently held out two folded white parcels. He took them, gingerly prying open one corner to peer inside.

“I would not get that on your hands, Monsieur,” she said.

I leaned closer to look, but he was already folding up the paper. “And how many did he purchase?”

“Deux.”

“This is the rest of it?”

Mrs. DuPont nodded. “And my payment? You are late with my payment.”

Lane looked up. “I told you that I could not come sooner. But why don’t you tell me, Madame, how much Miss Tulman has paid you already?”

I thought this an extremely good question. But Mrs. DuPont merely returned Lane’s gaze and kept a stony silence.

“Well, I reckon you’ve gotten plenty, then,” Lane said. “Close up shop, Mrs. DuPont. Get rid of it all and get your family out.”

I looked about the room again, at the crates and boxes, this time reminded less of a shop than of the boat that had carried us across the Channel. And then, finally, the varied cogs in my mind meshed, clicking in rhythm. The mysterious comings and goings at the back door, and Mrs. DuPont’s stubborn need to stay. All these goods were illegal, one way or another. Smuggled or stolen or who knew what. And the woman had been selling her wares out of my house. Lane took my arm again. “Come on. …”

“No. Not yet. I want Mrs. DuPont to explain to me why I shouldn’t send for the police.”

Mrs. DuPont clasped her hands together, her bony mask well in place. “You know best, I am sure, Mademoiselle. The police and I would have such a nice talk. About so many things.”

I almost laughed, but the feeling in my chest was too bitter. “It’s rather late for that, Mrs. DuPont. I’m afraid that game is over.” I began to turn away.

“Wait, Mademoiselle!” Mrs. DuPont stepped forward, suddenly animated. “You must believe me! I have sold things, yes, many things, but it is for Marguerite!” She waved her hand about the room. “All for Marguerite, for her school! She shall be a lady! A proper French lady! Please, Mademoiselle! She is …” She lowered her voice, as if there might be eavesdroppers behind the sacks. “She is my grandchild. But I do not tell about lunatics, Mademoiselle. Even if they are English ones. I would not do that for money. I would not!”

“And why should I believe a lunatic is something you would not sell?”

She took a step back. “Are you simple? Are you slow? Because I am married to one, you fool!”

I opened my mouth, but then Lane had me by the arm and we were leaving, hurrying down the hallway. I looked back at Mrs. DuPont, standing in her room of contraband, thinking of lovely little Marguerite reading fairy tales in Marianna’s room, not one whit afraid of her corpse-like grandmother, or her grandfather. What it said about my own mental state, that I had never even thought to consider Mr. DuPont as officially insane, that I’d seen him as just part of the strangeness of the Parisian landscape, I could not speculate. Normal, evidently, was completely unfamiliar to me.

At the end of the hall, Lane stopped, hand on the door latch to the foyer. The gray gaze was hard, fixed at nothing. “I don’t understand. All this time, and I don’t understand it.”

There were hundreds of things I didn’t understand at the moment. I was still amazed by the fact that he was here, in a white shirt gone gray and with his hair uncut, present and by my side.

“I tracked him all over Paris,” he said. “Made lists, mapped the places he’d been, where he might go. I know where he bought his base metal, and sulfur and acid, and a host of other things. I know who his father is, and I know why he goes to Charenton. What I don’t understand is why Ben Aldridge has been buying arsenic, arsenic that he doesn’t have to sign his name for.”

He held up the two little white packages, his body coiled up, unnaturally still.

“But whatever he is doing, I will end it this time. Like I should have at Stranwyne. I swear that to you.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s end it, then, and go get Uncle Tully.”

When Jean-Baptiste said he could find no one watching the house, we left him with Mary, who gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stuffed a bun into Mr. Babcock’s shirt pocket, and I slipped into the streets with Lane and Joseph, again following the lead of Henri Marchand.

Henri took us through the back alleys, avoiding the main boulevards, snaking our way through the city as we had on our trip to Rue Tisserand. We moved fast, Lane at Henri’s left elbow, Joseph on his right, as if they were escorting a criminal or a dignitary. I trotted a few steps behind, watching Lane. He was shadowy in the predawn light, but a shadow that seemed natural, to belong, turning corners he knew, muttering the occasional word to Joseph in French. He seemed a man in his place, not a man in a place he has carved for himself, as he’d been at Stranwyne. It made me wonder what he saw now when he thought of home. The notion made me uneasy.

Despite our speed, the light grew, and even with a thin, early fog my anonymity was coming to an end. I received a long, penetrating look from a flower seller setting up her wares before Henri led us sliding down a short, steep embankment that ended in a stone wall.

My feet squelched when I landed at the bottom of the wall, the smell of the river wafting up foul from the fog. We were at the edge of the Seine. The water was lower here, or the banks higher; a thin strip of muddy land was just navigable between the river and the wall. We made our way beneath a stone bridge, and Lane hung back, speaking to me for the first time since our conversation in the corridor.

“Marchand thinks that we can’t have you on the streets anymore, that we need to go underground a little sooner than he’d planned.” A carriage rattled by on the street over our heads, the clop of the hooves reverberating against the stone. “He may be right, but until we get to the church, this is where he has his advantage. Stay close to Joseph or to me. Agreed?”

I hesitated. Cold-blooded murder or leaving us lost underground was not Henri’s style, I thought. But then again, how could I be certain? It was not as if he’d ever been truthful with me.

“Do you agree, Katharine?”

I nodded. Joseph was bending down, following Henri into a round, bricked, stinking opening in the embankment. Lane stepped toward the tunnel, then quickly detoured to the edge of the river, mud sucking at his feet. He emptied the two white parcels of arsenic into the gray water, careful to not let a breeze catch the powder.

I watched him straighten, saw the tension in his back as he looked at the thin paper dissolving in the slight current, and suddenly I wondered exactly what Lane was not telling me. There was something about this that was more than Wickersham and Ben Aldridge and my uncle; I could almost see the thing, coiled up and waiting, biding its time inside him. “I only came to get my things,” he’d said in the dark of the courtyard. And just where had he been planning on going next, when he came upon me beside that fountain? And he had been dodging my gaze ever since we left my grandmother’s house, as he’d done once before, just before he left Stranwyne. I felt my own determination set, like silver cooling in a mold. Lane and I would not be going down that particular road again, not if I could help it. He ducked into the tunnel, avoiding both my eyes and the stream of thick brownish water running out the tunnel’s center. I climbed in after him.

One step inside and I gagged, triggering an almost instantaneous heave in my middle. The stench in the tunnel was so overpowering I staggered, using my free hand to pull Mr. Babcock’s collar over my nose. Lane was bent almost double in front of me, nose cradled in the crook of his elbow. The light from the entrance grew fainter as the air grew warmer. I heard the squeaks and scrabblings of rats, and just ahead of Lane, the sound of Joseph rooting through his pockets. Henri must have heard Joseph as well because he looked back at us over his hunched shoulders, dark eyes wide over the sleeve he held over his face.

“Pas de lumière!” Henri shouted.

Joseph looked at Lane, Lane nodded, and only then did Joseph put the candle and matches back into his pocket. “Explosion,” Lane whispered back at me. I eyed the passing murky water, for a moment unsure if a tunnel of fire could be more of a torture than this sewer of stink. But before the light from the outside world was quite gone, Henri turned right and squeezed himself into the wall. There was a crack there, I saw, a vertical fissure where the bricks of the tunnel had fallen away. I slipped in after Lane, feeling raw, cut stone beneath my hands. The fallen bricks had revealed a passageway, and one that was much older than the sewers.

The passage widened with height enough for me to straighten. I scooted my way in the dark, stone beneath each of my upraised palms, guiding me forward, the ground below angling down. And then the shuffling of feet ahead of me quieted, and I found myself in the open again, though where I did not know. The air was cool, smelling of stone and musty damp, except for the foulness wafting out from the way we’d come.

“Joseph,” I heard Lane say, somewhere close to my right, and I listened to him once again fumble with the candles. A match struck, blazing like a star in the dark, blinding until my eyes adjusted to the soft, flickering light. We were in a stone passage, deep beneath the city, the candlelight dancing on dust motes and tan limestone walls. Beyond the light was utter blackness.

“Stay together,” Henri whispered, voice enhanced by the stone, “and do not walk ahead of the light. There are sometimes holes, old wells that it would take a very long time to find the bottom of.”

We walked slowly, gathered around Joseph’s candle, Lane on one side, myself on the other, Henri a little ahead, just at the edge of the light circle, the only noise the occasional drip that echoed in the caverns. The pace was trying my patience. I wanted to run, to find my uncle instantly, and it felt as if we were getting nowhere. The walls were unvarying in their irregularity, endlessly carved shapes of the same-hued stone, sometimes with passages going off to the right and left. Some of these we passed, and some of these we took, but always with the same slow, steady footfalls, and often with a gradual descent.

Lane was evading my eyes, looking away if he caught my glance. Whatever he was hiding from me was still there. I could see it in the way he held his head and his back. I could feel it in the air, too; it was a wonder to me that everyone did not feel it. Perhaps Joseph did, being stuck between the two of us. He had frown wrinkles in his forehead, leaving white lines in the dust that was now covering us. For no reason at all I had an image of his quite pretty and very healthy sister. The knot in my middle was now a living, flaming thing, but it still found room for a little burst of heat directed at Lane.

After he looked away from me yet again, I asked Henri suddenly, “Are these the catacombs, Henri?” My words bounced back and forth above my head.

“No,” he replied, “not like what the people used to pay their sous and francs to see. Those are full of bones, put together in patterns, like decoration. They are dangerous and are closed now. You must write a letter for permission to see them. But that is all on the other side of the Seine. We are in places where they extraire, they cut the stone.” He turned to Lane. “What is the English?”

“Quarry,” said Lane. “We’re in stone quarries.”

“Yes. Where they took the stone away. Maybe it was so with the catacombs as well. But these tunnels are long before France.”

“Then how do you know of them?”

Henri grinned back at me, a smile of actual pleasure, with no teasing in it. “I played here, Miss Tulman, with my brother, many, many times. We found a way through our cellar, and it was like another world. We were explorers, we made maps. And all without leaving the house. Or that is how we explained it to our mother, rest in peace. Our explanations were not always so successful.”

“And the church?”

“There is a crypt, but it is an old one, below the crypt of Saint-Merri. From the church that was there before, I think, and in there is a door to the tunnels. Very old. I am sad to say that my brother and I were sometimes guilty of using it to steal the priest’s wine, which my mother told us was a very large sin. She made us go to confession, but, being a good mother, she took us to a different priest. But twice I have followed the man you call Aldridge to Saint-Merri from the Tuileries, and twice he has not come out again. I do not think he is confessing that many sins, do you, Miss Tulman? He is getting into the tunnels, I think. But I have not been here for many years now, so we shall … ah.”

We all stopped. The tunnel was blocked by a long, cascading tumble of fallen stone.

“Donnez-moi la chandelle, s’il vous plaît,” Henri said softly, and I saw the quick look of permission Joseph got from Lane before he handed Henri the candle. I wondered if Henri knew he was on a leash, and probably a rather short one, if I had to guess. I’d been bumping against Joseph’s jacket, and had felt the pistol in his pocket. But I had accomplished what I wished. Lane had met my eyes before we stopped.

Henri put a foot experimentally on the leading edge of the stones. “There is a way,” he said, peering up at the pile. “It is not a hard climb. I will hold the candle.”

When we had all scrambled through — the climb, in my opinion, not being difficult if you were the height of a grown man — the candle went back to Joseph. Joseph’s hand was covered in pale, running drips of hardened wax, and I tied a handkerchief around it before we started off again. He smiled his thanks to me, showing the wrinkles around his eyes.

Twice more we climbed a rockfall, though none as difficult as the first, and then Henri held up his hand.

“What is it?” Lane asked. The stub of the candle showed me all of his suspicion.

Henri was looking about, as if he might be lost, but then his expression lightened, and he motioned for Joseph to bring the candle. There was a wooden door, with no handle or latch, covered in stone-colored dust and therefore barely distinguishable from the walls, not much different than we were. And then, all at once, a long, thin knife had appeared in Henri’s hand.

Joseph jumped back, hand to his pocket, and Lane had me instantly behind him, but Henri merely grinned as he knelt down and slid the knife into the crack between the door and the jamb. I waited behind Lane, feeling his tension increase while Henri worked the blade, jiggling it against something on the other side. Henri stood and used all his weight to jerk upward on the knife handle. Wood rattled and metal grunted on the other side, and Henri, triumphant, let the door swing open into the space beyond it. The knife was already gone, secreted to who knew where on his person.

“Shall I go first?” Henri offered. He stepped into the darkness, and Joseph went next, candle held aloft, hand in his pocket, watching Henri’s every step. I followed Lane cautiously.

“This is the crypt you described, is it not?” Henri said, voice echoing. “Where the man Aldridge held you?”

I walked a little way down the flagged floor of a barrel-shaped room, narrow and chill, rough arches forming the ceiling. Long rows of stone shelves ran down each side, as far as I could see in the candlelight, empty of bodies, though a few still contained the ancient webbing of long-dead spiders. I shuddered, crossing my arms over my chest. Lane was talking softly near the tunnel door, Joseph listening intently as he lit Lane a new candle with his stub. The door, I saw, had a very dusty and unused wine rack tacked to it, concealing it from view; I vowed to someday examine every bookcase in Stranwyne.

Lane came down the center of the crypt with his light, then stepped to the side and pushed open a wooden door. He held up the candle and I saw a plain, windowless room of the same stone as everything we’d seen, a dilapidated wine shelf sagging in one corner.

“This was where he held you?” I asked. He did not answer.

“The way to the church is here,” I heard Henri saying somewhere farther down, “up this ladder to open the floor of the crypt of Saint-Merri above, where they stored the brooms when I was a boy. I do not know if the priest even knew it was …”

Lane had still not answered. “Did he give you a light?” I asked abruptly. Lane shrugged, and I pressed my lips together. And in what sort of place was Ben keeping Uncle Tully? He would have almost certainly woken up by now. I moved my crossed arms to my stomach. “How did you get out?”

Lane waited a moment before he said, very low, “Picked the lock.” He looked at me sidelong. “With a sharpened fork.” I caught a hint of the wicked smile, and all at once, there was the Lane I knew, so much more than this new one whom Joseph obeyed so carefully and who walked the streets of Paris like a Frenchman. I took a step closer, basking in the cool gray of a gaze that was now examining me with minute attention. I wondered if he could find anything beneath the dirt and dust. He was still grinning.

“Katharine,” he said, voice almost at a whisper. I had to lean even closer to hear. “Is that my hat you’re wearing?”

I had the sudden urge to laugh, and then his brows came down, face darkening as if a storm wind had blown through the bright place inside him.

“What is that cut on your neck?”

I touched the scar, trying to think of what to say, but then Lane turned. Henri was standing behind us.

“Twice I followed the man Aldridge to this church,” Henri said, “and yet he was not inside. I searched, and stayed until the priest unlocked the gates. And yet the dust would say that the door to the tunnels has not been opened in some time. Do you not agree?” This last was directed at Lane.

“You let your man slip past you, I think,” Lane said.

“I think not,” Henri replied. “I …”

Joseph called softly from the other end of the crypt. He was near the tunnel door, and a bit to one side, meticulously dripping molten wax into a soft pile on the stone flags. He lit a new candle and stuck it in the hardening wax as we approached. Lane squatted down beside him, and then all four of us were staring at the same thing: a pool of bright new light showing a small, half circle of iron set into the flag seams, only just sticking out above the level of the stones. The crypt had a trapdoor.

“This, I did not know about,” Henri said.

I looked to Lane. “If he wasn’t coming out again, and he wasn’t using the tunnels, then it must be here.”

Lane nodded at Joseph, and Joseph got one finger through the ring and stood, jerking hard on the flagstone. He must have been expecting something heavier or more difficult to open, because the piece of floor sprang upward, much thinner than the other stones. I looked down into a dark, dank hole, where I could just make out the first rung of an iron ladder. But it was what I heard, not what I saw, that made me draw a sharp breath. Distant yelling, putting me immediately in mind of Charenton, echoing up from somewhere far below. The noise formed into words as I listened.

“No, no, no, no, NO!”

It was the sound of a grown man having a tantrum, and that could only be my uncle Tully.