A Spark Unseen

27

The yelling faded, then immediately rose up again, the cries more intense. I turned to Lane.

“How many men came to feed you? Here, in the wine cellar. How many different men?”

Lane’s brows came together. “No way to know.”

“There were four last night, plus the two in the garden,” I said.

“There will be more of them than us,” said Henri, “of that we can be certain. Is he not expecting you, mon ami?”

That quieted everyone, because it was so obviously the truth. It was almost more than I could stand to sit there, hearing my uncle’s distress and being able to do nothing about it. I looked up.

“Then let me go. No,” I said, cutting off Lane’s protest, “listen to me. I’m the one who can calm Uncle Tully, and get him out if he can be convinced to go. Maybe he’s alone down there, and if so, two strangers and someone he hasn’t laid eyes on in a year and a half are only going to hinder me. I will see what can be seen and come back, either with my uncle or without. If I do not come back, then you will know what the situation is, or at least better than you do now, and there will be somebody left to do something about it. If we are expected and outnumbered, then to have all of us walk in and offer ourselves up is stupidity.”

On the surface my words had been for everyone, but my real conversation was happening with Lane. He was silent, elbows on his knees, considering while Henri muttered in French, my uncle rambled on below, and Joseph kept a sharp eye on all of us. I watched Lane thinking. We had often disagreed, fought even, but he had never yet dismissed me.

“I can do it,” I said.

“I know,” he replied. “I’ve always known that.” The gray eyes met mine, not looking away. “One hour, and we come after you both.”

I nodded while Henri leapt up, hands going to the back of his head, gesticulating wildly as he protested in French. But he did not try to do anything about it, I noticed. So far, he had teased and he had been insolent, but he had also not crossed Lane. I swung my legs into the hole as he ranted, my feet finding a firm hold, testing the first rung of the ladder.

“Not right, NOT RIGHT!” My uncle’s voice drifted up to join in with Henri’s. Lane handed me his candle.

“Be careful,” he said. His voice was very low.

“He won’t hurt me, not when he needs to control Uncle Tully.”

“I know.”

“But you will come?” I’d not wanted to ask that.

We both looked up at the metallic double click, and saw that Joseph had the pistol pointed at Henri, who in his rambling objections had gotten too close to Lane from behind. Henri threw up his hands in frustration.

“In one hour,” Lane said.

I looked down, readying my feet to find the next rung, and then there was a hand on the back of my head and Lane’s mouth had found the corner of mine. He held me only for a moment before letting me go.

I gave him a small smile. “Try not to shoot each other.” And I lowered myself down one rung.

It was awkward, climbing down a ladder with a candle, and this candle was fitful, unable to illuminate more than a small space around me. I couldn’t see how far down I had to go. But either way, this was a deep hole and I schooled myself not to think about the tons of rock and earth that must be over my head. Lane’s face and the square of light above grew smaller, as did the sounds of Henri’s protests. I was concentrating so completely on feeling for the next thin rung beneath my foot that I was a long way down before I looked to the side. When I did I held in a gasp, or perhaps, had I not clamped my mouth closed, it would have come out as a shriek. I hooked one arm securely around the iron rung, and stretched out the other, holding the candle at arm’s length.

The ladder was descending through bones. Legs, ribs, arms, skulls, and spines, some intact, some just chunks and parts. The faint light showed rusted metal, and a bit of cloth with a tarnished button, but mostly they were pieces, human beings gone yellow-brown and shiny with age, piled as far as I could see on both sides of the ladder. Something glittered at me from an eye socket and then scuttled away, making the bones rattle. I measured my breaths.

“Katharine?” Lane’s voice came down from above.

He must have seen that the candle wasn’t moving. I tilted up my head. “It’s only bones,” I hissed, though the words left out much that could have been said. These people had been tossed down a hole to rot by the hundreds.

“What?” he called.

“Bones,” I said slightly louder, and held out the candle again, hoping he could see what I did. The words echoed more than I’d wanted, probably more than either of us wanted, because we both chose not to speak again. And then I realized that all around me was silence; Uncle Tully had gone quiet.

I stepped down eleven more times, faster now, the bone piles growing closer and closer on each side, and then I was at the bottom, trying to let nothing touch me. The candle glow showed a few feet of narrow path between the disarticulated bodies, extending only in one direction. I walked as quickly as I was able, feet crunching on a fine, gravelly surface that I chose not to contemplate, instead wondering if my uncle Tully had seen this. Would it have frightened him, or would he think of the bones as merely parts, cogs and wheels broken loose from their machines?

The bone piles tapered down and then away, ending in scattered bits, and the tunnel turned left into a dark, much narrower passage. Uncle Tully had been silent for some time now. I prayed he had not wound down, as I thought of it, as he’d been known to do before, like a clock that has not had its key turned. He would need to be carried out if that had happened, and I was not going to be capable of that.

I wanted to hurry but I remembered Henri’s warnings and moved quietly down the passage, watching where each foot hit the ground. Surely Uncle Tully had to be close, but the underground of Paris seemed to be a maze, not only side to side, but up, down, and in depth as well; the proximity of noise might be deceptive.

The candle dripped wax on my hand, a brief, intense burn that faded almost instantly as the molten liquid hardened, and then I discovered a glow that was not my dripping candle, an unnatural shining in the tunnel far ahead of me. It was gaslight, coming from a passageway on my right. I became aware of a tink, tink, as I drew closer, a noise I knew to be a hammer hitting metal. I approached the lit passage, the tunnel beyond it noiseless and dark, and slowly craned my neck into the opening.

It was a cavern, huge, with a round, domed ceiling soaring at least thirty feet in the air, where the limestone had been quarried out, but it was also a workshop, the likes of which I had not seen since I first went to Stranwyne, blazingly lit with hanging gas lamps. Cut shafts shot upward through the ceiling, gas pipes running down from the surface and across the walls, tacked straight into the rough stone, both rock and pipes dripping with condensation. I blinked, disbelieving, at the steam engine, quiet at the moment, its brass gleaming with polish, and the many tall conglomerations of greased pulleys and iron wheels that I knew were machines for shaping metal. How many people walked above us, not knowing what was beneath their feet?

My eyes gathered all this in a few precious seconds, just before they became riveted to the very center of the room. There, propped up on a stand and stretching the length of what must have been a ten-foot table, was a fish. It had almost none of its metallic skin, was mostly cogs and guts, but I knew exactly what I was seeing, just as I knew the white head bent over the table it sat on. I flitted into the room, threading my way around worktables and a stack of brass bars and little piles of metal shavings and scrap.

“Uncle?” I whispered.

He did not look up. He was on a stool, and to my surprise he was working feverishly, assembling a mass of incongruous parts on the table, working as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did.

“No, no, NOT!” he shouted suddenly. “That is not right!” His voice bounded off the walls, but there was no movement in the room besides the two of us. Now that I was inside the cavern, there was a faint whiff of something chemical, something putrid. I knew the smell; I could never forget it: guncotton.

“Uncle Tully?” I said, hunching down next to him, sheltering from the sight line of the entrance behind the metal fish. I was relieved to see that he hadn’t bloodied himself. His face was deep red, veins popping out in his temples, frightening if you did not know him, but that was not what had my breath coming hard, my pulse skipping madly in my veins. Uncle Tully was in a tantrum, a full-blown tantrum, and he was working. Never had I seen him do both those things at once. But if Uncle Tully was working, that meant I was expendable. It was time for us to go.

I avoided touching anything near him and whispered, very calmly, “Uncle Tully, would you like me to take you away from this place? If we go right now, I can take you.”

“Go away, Simon’s baby. It is not the right day.”

He was using his hot pen, a curl of smoke twisting up as tiny bits of lead melted beneath it, and his hands were a little shaky, probably from the contents of the green bottle. My internal clock said that maybe half my time had gone. “Uncle, do you know who is waiting for us right now? It’s Lane. He’s come back, just as he said he —”

“NO!”

I paused, unsure whether he had been responding to his work or to me. “He came back, just as he said he would, Uncle. He’d like for you to come and see him.”

“Go away. This is not right, little niece. It is never the right day. Never the right place. You said it would be right and it wasn’t.”

I agreed with him there. “No, Uncle, it isn’t right,” I replied, darting a glance at the empty entrance to the cavern. “But I’m trying very hard to fix it. Do you remember how some days it is right to wind all the toys, and see what is needed? It is a time like that right now. Time to fix things, just like when one of your toys isn’t working properly. Let’s go back and fix things, and get Lane, and some tea, and find all your toys. Marianna says —”

“The fish wasn’t working.”

I looked up at the smudged, oil-spattered monstrosity on the table, and saw with relief that the chamber for the guncotton was empty. Something this large would not just blow a hole in an ironclad ship; it would obliterate it. “This fish doesn’t need to work, Uncle Tully.”

“NO!” he shouted, his fingers never slowing. “It must! It should! Toys should work!”

“But this toy could hurt someone, Uncle.” I tried to hold my voice low. “Marianna says we shouldn’t make this one work.”

“Clocks should be wound and people should be splendid! Go away, little niece. It is not the right day.”

I could feel desperation creeping around the edges of my words. “I would be splendid if you could come with me now, Uncle. It would make me very happy. You like to —”

“And yet it would not make me happy, Miss Tulman, to be deprived so soon of your company.”

I straightened. Ben Aldridge was coming across the cavern, almost to the other side of the table that held the fish. He was elegantly dressed, as if he’d come from a party, his blond hair combed back, the side whiskers neat. I searched again but I could see no other entrance. Had he come from the crypt, or from the other direction, farther down the passage? Uncle Tully’s fingers did not slow, and he did not acknowledge Ben’s presence.

“I thought it must be you,” Ben was saying, sounding pleased, as if I’d happened to drop in for tea just when he wanted me for business. “But where is your entourage? Don’t you keep a string of suitors about you these days? Or have you discouraged them all by running about in caps and trousers?”

I did not answer, just watched him warily as he came around the fish to my side of the table. I had no idea what to do, other than stay alive until my hour was up. At least Ben seemed to be alone. The room was deeply quiet beneath the hiss of gas and my uncle’s distracted muttering. I backed into the table as Ben reached around my neck and pulled off Lane’s cap, clucking in disapproval as he tossed it to the table.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, reminding me weirdly of Uncle Tully. “Never braids, Miss Tulman. I liked you better as a wood nymph, like the last time, when you came to my cottage all dirty and wild and with leaves in your hair.”

Thankfully he did not touch my hair.

“You quite impressed my father the other night. The emperor was rather taken with you, I think.”

“Do you have guncotton in here?”

“Oh, I do apologize. Such a shame about the smell. But I’m finished with the production process, at least for now. The barrels behind you there are full of the stuff. Quite watered down,” he said, “so not to worry. Unless you fire a rifle into it, of course. But you demonstrated the danger of that rather well, didn’t you, Miss Tulman?”

I saw the six large barrels behind me. If the tiny amount from before had blown Ben’s boat to smithereens, and if the empty chamber before me held enough to destroy a ship, then what would six barrels do to the shops, streets, and houses above us? Ben smiled as he ran his hand along the spine of the enormous fish. “She’s a beauty, don’t you think?”

I had no response. My uncle moved, reaching for a spool of wire, and then a clank near his feet drew my eyes downward. Uncle Tully had a shackle around his left ankle, linked to a ring driven into the stone wall by a length of heavy chain. A trickle of rage ran down my spine, the cold kind. I lifted my eyes to Ben Aldridge.

“I think my father will be more than pleased with his surprise. How shall he honor the son that hands him victory in the Crimea? And that should make you happy, too, Miss Tulman. You’d like to see Britain win this war, wouldn’t you? But it will be the Bonapartes that dominate the seas, in the end. And who will stand against them then?” He patted the fish. “Your Uncle Tully really is a marvel. Aren’t you, Mr. Tulman?” His voice rose on this last question, as if my uncle were hard of hearing. “Thank goodness I didn’t let you lock him away. All the trouble I’ve gone to, more than a year of work in the strictest of secrecy, all without making any headway at all, and Mr. Tully had the dashed thing fixed in less than five minutes.”

My eyes darted to the fish, and then back to my obliviously working uncle, the burning, flaming knot inside of me growing heavy with dread. Oh, no, Uncle Tully. No. Ben chuckled, reaching one finger inside the fish to swing a little strip of dangling metal back and forth.

“A pendulum, Miss Tulman. A pendulum! Of all things. Creating perfect balance. Just like a clock. So simple, childlike simplicity, and yet sheer, unadulterated brilliance. Yes, I think my father is going to be very pleased indeed.”

I was breathing, trying to stay calm, trying not to think of ironclad ships exploding into ragged bits and the thousands of bodies that would be the result, like the bones I’d just walked through. Trying not to think of the disgusting shackle around my uncle’s ankle. But the most immediate danger was that my uncle was working, and I was not needed, and Ben was telling me everything. I needed to live for at least fifteen more minutes, until Lane came.

“Miss Tulman,” said Ben, smiling hugely, “you’ve had a trying time in Paris, and you seem … rather distressed. Do sit with me a moment. I’ve some things I’d like to discuss.”

He indicated a wooden box behind me as if it were a brocaded chair, waiting politely for me to sit first. My uncle chattered on, incoherent. I stayed where I was.

“I desire that you would sit,” Ben said, his voice gone cold. I sat, and when he had done the same, he said, “Miss Tulman, this enmity between us accomplishes little, don’t you think? Have you ever considered that there is much to be gained with our understanding?”

My lips parted in disbelief.

“Katharine,” he said gently. It made me shudder. “Have you ever considered that I can give you everything you have ever wanted?”

“You know nothing of what I want.”

“Don’t I? What if I told you that your uncle could have a workshop like this, a much better one than this, better than anything he’s ever had, that he could live out his days making every brilliant thing that pops into his head?” He leaned forward, boyish face serious. “What if I told you that I could make sure that Mr. Tully never sees the inside of an asylum?”

I stared.

“I can make that happen, Miss Tulman. And you can be with him, no thought of separation. I can set you up in Paris, in luxury you’ve never known. Infamy is of no concern when there is power behind it, and the emperor likes you. You would be perfectly independent, doing exactly as you wished. Bring Lane Moreau with you, if you can find him. I care not. Or if Paris is truly not to your taste, then by all means take your uncle to Stranwyne and we will build his workshop there. Have you thought of a proper hospital for the village, with the newest treatments, or teachers that are not the outcasts of society? The place would be the model of England, and how life would be improved for those who live there! Perhaps you would like to repair the house, to bring it back to its glory days in the time of your grandmother? A steward to run it for you?”

I sat on my crate, hair in braids and wearing absurd trousers, my uncle murmuring nonsense behind me, a man spewing nonsense in front of me, and a weapon of incredible destruction to my side, all in an underground cavern that would defy common belief. And for one moment, sitting there, I tasted the sweetness of what was offered me. Respect, independence, the freedom to do and even marry as I pleased. A complete and lifelong protection of my uncle, who would live in a world of unblemished happiness. It was utterly charming. Ben smiled.

“I would do it all, Miss Tulman, every bit. Happily, and all I would need is the result of your uncle’s work. Can you imagine what other wonders reside in his head? He has already won a war for two countries. What might he do next for mankind?”

My uncle muttered on about clocks and their turnings, the chain on his ankle clinked, and I was back in my reality. These lies were mirrors and bright light, honey and ambrosia, pretty words whispered in a glittering, gilded, velvet cage. I rejected them. I would not live like Mrs. Hardcastle. And then, just on the edge of hearing, I thought I heard an echo from the tunnel. “Did I tell you that I met your mother the other day?” I said quickly.

The smile on Ben’s face froze. “Then I’m sure you heard many interesting things.”

“Oh, yes. She told me all about her Louis. She said he never came to see you, though you were such a handsome child.”

“He sees me now, Miss Tulman. Do we have an agreement?”

“But what about the empress? I am still rather concerned about what she will —”

“That woman has nothing to do with me. Nothing!”

He was getting agitated now, but words were the only weapons of distraction at my disposal. “But will she stand aside, do you think, while Napoléon makes another woman’s child his heir to —”

“You think he will not?” Ben yelled, leaping to his feet. I felt my uncle jump a bit behind me, but he kept on working. “You think the emperor will ignore me? He will have no need to look further than me! There will only be him and me!”

He went still, breathing hard, and I thought for a moment he was calming until he hit me hard across the face with the back of his hand, spinning me around and down behind the wooden crates that surrounded my uncle.

And that was when a shot rang out in the tunnel.