A Spark Unseen

28

Lights danced behind my eyes, the gas jets above my head sparkling. There was wood beneath my hands, and I heard the grunting, crashing noise of men fighting. I blinked, tasted blood in my mouth, and pushed myself upward in a daze. Beneath the table, I saw a jumble of thrashing legs, then the legs seemed to sort themselves and the bodies stilled.

“Bloody fool!” Ben was screaming.

I heard Lane say my name.

“Shut him up,” Ben yelled.

“Katharine?”

I stood shakily and saw Lane, disheveled but unhurt, his hands up, palms out, and then Henri with rumpled hair and a bloodied nose, tense and still, a pistol pressed to the back of his head. The man at the trigger was Robert, Mary’s Robert from the courtyard. My heart skipped and sank. Not Mrs. DuPont, then, but Mary. No wonder they’d known where to find Uncle Tully. What had she said to Robert, and did she even know she’d done it? I glanced at my uncle, who had evidently never stopped working. His fingers were flying, coiling wire, and he was muttering, repeating the same words over and over, “Not to touch, not to touch …”

“… told them to watch the church!” Ben was still yelling. “No one to come but her!” He swung around to Lane.

“You! Why did you come back here? This has nothing to do with you anymore!”

“I disagree,” Lane said quietly. “This has everything to do with you and me.”

“Shut him up!”

These directions were being yelled at Robert, who had at least some English, because he was trying to do as Ben asked. The gun swung its aim from Henri’s head to Lane’s. Henri let out a breath.

“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch,” Uncle Tully muttered.

I met Lane’s gaze, my head humming. He was dusty and dirty from the tunnel, making his skin even darker, and in contrast his eyes were almost startling, beautiful and possibly dangerous, like the sea. He held me with his look, as if the cavern had narrowed to the size of the tunnel, as if there were no one else in the room, and then his gaze slid once to the side.

“Shut him up!” Ben ordered, only now I realized he was speaking of Uncle Tully. Robert didn’t seem to be sure where he should point the gun. I looked hard at Lane. Where were Joseph and his pistol? The gray eyes made the movement one more time, and I realized with a start that my body, the body of Mary’s young man with the swiveling gun, and the entrance to the cavern all made a straight line. And that there were six barrels of guncotton directly behind me. I gave Lane one almost imperceptible shake of my head.

Henri was staring at my uncle as if transfixed, his nose bleeding freely, but he’d slipped one small step closer to Robert, who seemed to have settled on Lane for his target. I remembered the knife he had somewhere in his clothes.

“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …” Uncle Tully muttered.

Lane had turned back to Ben. “It’s time to settle this.” Ben actually laughed, and the gray eyes caught mine, and again slid to the right. I shook my head.

“Settle what? Do you want a share of the money? A sliver of the glory? You should talk to dear Katharine. Ask her what I’ve offered.” Ben glanced once at me, grinning like a shark. When he did, Henri took another small step toward Robert, whose eyes were trained on Ben, waiting for instruction. “Tell him what I am giving you, love,” he said.

I didn’t answer, my uncle’s voice mixing with the humming in my head and the blood pumping in my ears. I shook my head again at the movement of Lane’s eyes, wondering if he could somehow tell Joseph not to shoot.

“I’m going to give her everything. And what can you give her?”

The gray gaze bore back into Ben. “Nothing much.”

“That’s right. I am going to give her everything that you can’t, and she will take it. … Stay where you are!”

Lane had taken two quick steps forward, risking Robert’s shaking hand. Robert had followed and Ben stepped back, while, unnoticed, Henri moved closer to Robert. It was like watching a mad dance, a dance that had nearly gotten Lane shot. But it had taken me out of what I guessed must be Joseph’s line of fire. I slid back, again aligning myself with Robert and the entrance. If Joseph’s shot hit the guncotton, we were all going to die, perhaps along with the people in the streets above us. I saw Lane’s gaze take in my movement, then lift to the barrels behind me.

“Not to touch, not to touch …” said Uncle Tully.

“If he moves again, shoot him!” Ben said. “Do you understand me? And make him be quiet!”

This last order had been to me. My uncle worked frantically, paying no mind to any of us, deep in his own world. I wiped the blood from my mouth and, keeping my eyes on the scene in front of me, curled the fingers of my other hand around a small wrench. It would not hurt anyone, not much, but it might cause a distraction if needed. Ben was straightening his jacket, adjusting the cloth around his neck to its position before the scuffle.

“I don’t know exactly what either of you think you are going to accomplish down here, Mr. Moreau. You’re not getting them out. In fact, I think it rather likely that Miss Tulman will not go. She might ask you to stay, though. You’ll have to decide what to do with Marchand. Wait and see if she …”

Lane moved forward, two quick, long steps that again had Robert following and me gasping in terror. But Robert did not shoot; I could see the fear all over his face. Who he should have been fearing was Henri. Henri had again moved closer, deliberately staying silent, still out of reach, but now with something gleaming held just below his right shirtsleeve. Lane was going to have to risk that move again to get Robert out of line with the barrels of guncotton.

“… not to touch, not to touch, not to …”

“What I expect to accomplish,” Lane said, deadly calm, “is making certain that bloody machine and nothing like it ever sees the light of day …”

“Not to touch, not to touch …”

“… and to leave this place with all of them. The question is whether you wish to be alive or not when I do it.”

Ben grinned, stretching the arms of his well-cut suit, looking heavenward in mock exasperation. “You realize I’m about to have you shot, don’t you?” I glanced at the gun shaking in Robert’s hand. “You know that I will be the one walking out of here with Mr. Tully and his niece? And that she is going to come willingly?” I gripped the wrench in my hand. “Because she knows I can give her what I promised.”

“You can give her nothing that’s good enough,” Lane said, his voice very low.

“Not good enough? Not good enough!” he yelled. “That, coming from you, to a Bonaparte? You are nothing! What can you do that I cannot? Name one thing I cannot give!”

“Not to touch, not to touch, not to …”

The gray eyes were all for Ben now, and they were stone. Lane put his hands in his pockets. I think he’d forgotten everything else, including the gun pointed at his head. “Give her Davy back,” he said. “And Mr. Babcock.”

“And John George,” I whispered.

“Not to touch, not to touch …”

“Give her back the last eighteen months. Can you do that?”

“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …”

“Shut him up!” Ben screamed.

“Give Mr. Tully back his old workshop, and all the things he made there. Give me back the Lower Village.”

It was as if the world had again narrowed, making it impossible to look away. Lane was furious, and there was something mesmerizing in the evenness of his rage.

“It is you who are nothing,” he said. “You were always trying to make it not so, even when we were children. Only it still was.”

“Stop it,” Ben said.

“Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …”

“Everything you’ve tried to accomplish, every foul thing you ever did, all to fawn over a man who will not even give you his name, and instead of more, you were less.”

“Shut him up!”

“And you are still less.”

“Not to touch, not to …”

“So I ask you, when we leave here, do you wish to be alive, or not?”

“Stop it! And shut him … What is he doing?”

I broke from my trance and looked properly at my uncle. And suddenly I knew exactly what he was doing. The crate beside him, full of his things from the attic workshop, the wires running down to the glass jars in the crate, the hum that was not really in my head. And Uncle Tully, repeating and repeating his odd phrase at the parts that had taken shape on the table beside the fish, the blue-white spark reaching up and between two spindles. And then I saw Ben’s body tilting forward, straining to see over my uncle’s creation, the blue, empty eyes wide as he spotted the strange flame; and I saw Lane’s brows coming down, his hand coming up, and the wires now connected to the fish’s metal frame. I watched Lane’s arm stretch, and Ben leaning, both Ben’s hands coming down toward the fish.

“Stop!” I screamed. And Lane did.

There was a blinding flash and Ben’s body convulsed, crackling, eyes unblinking, staring straight at my uncle as he shook, stuck to the fish as if to a magnet. Smoke went up, a corona of purple fire and light blazing from his hands. A part of me realized that there was screaming, that it was coming from my mouth, and that the word I was screaming was “No!” Robert had dropped the gun and was reaching for Ben, to wrench him away from the fish and, as soon as he touched Ben’s body, he was thrown violently, almost supernaturally across the room, hitting the metal press before he fell to the floor. Ben dropped as Robert did and the crackling stopped, leaving only the smaller hum of the blue flame between the spindles.

Uncle Tully let go of his little switch, and the electricity was gone. “Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …” he chanted.

I sat down hard on a crate, learning the smell of burnt flesh. I saw Henri’s bloody face staring downward, horror-struck, the same expression on Joseph’s as he rose up from behind a workbench near the door. His pistol was still cocked.

“Stay where you are, Katharine,” Lane said, but there was no need. I could see Ben’s dead body from underneath the table. His hands were charred, blackened stumps.

As soon as Lane had picked the lock on Uncle Tully’s shackle, we led my uncle out and a little way down the passage, distracting him from the sound of the hammers inside the cavern, where Joseph and Henri were destroying Ben Aldridge’s fish. It was uncertain whether Robert had died from the electricity or from the blow of the metal press, but either way, my uncle had examined the two bodies curiously and carefully. It was seeing a machine taken apart that we were not sure he could stomach.

We set him in a chair from the workshop and he folded his hands in his lap. “I am ready to go now,” he said. “And I wish to go to the old place, not the new one.” He was supremely confident. I was amazed, stunned, and also horrified, unable to feel anything properly. “This place was not right, was it, little niece?”

“No, Uncle,” I whispered.

“I said not to touch. I told him so, didn’t I, Simon’s baby?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“And now he’s gone away, the forever kind. Isn’t that so?”

I nodded, biting my lip.

“He was not splendid. He touched my things. And he hurt my little niece. You should not hurt. That is not right. He made my niece not happy.”

Lane crouched down, elbows on knees, so my uncle could see his face. “You did well, Mr. Tully. I reckon Marianna is proud of you. She would have said you did just right.”

I was not at all certain how I felt about this logic.

“Lane knows,” Uncle Tully said cheerfully. “Lane always knows what is right. He always knows. And Lane came, didn’t he, little niece? That was not the forever kind.”

“Just like I said I would, Mr. Tully.” But his voice had been very quiet when he said it.

“I want to go to the old place.”

“Yes, Uncle. I know. But first we have to wait for twenty. You know you can wait for twenty.”

He instantly closed his eyes, counting the seconds, a thing he was rather good at as long as he was reminded to stop. Lane stood slowly. I wondered when he’d last slept. He held the candle up to my face, examining my bruising mouth while I tucked my hair back into the red cap, and then he leaned against the wall, breathing in and out, making the light waver in crazed patterns along the wall while the hammers struck metal in the cavern. He glanced once at Uncle Tully, and then let his back slide down until he was sitting. I saw the war being waged beneath his skin. I got onto my knees and sat in front of him.

“You need to tell me something,” I stated, though it was really a question.

Lane wouldn’t fully meet my eyes, and the burning knot in my middle became a cold, lead weight. He might need to tell me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it.

“When Ben took me …” He ran a hand through his hair. “It was … because I let him.”

I waited for him to go on, and the hand in his hair became a fist, pulling.

“Months I’d been at it, Katharine. Months! And with nothing to show for it but a bullet hole in a wall beside my head. And Ben had put himself right in the middle of a fortress with the imperial court. Untouchable. Joseph had heard he’d been buying arsenic, and then there was Mrs. Reynolds in the shop, her address right there in the book, and there’s not a smuggler in France that doesn’t know Mrs. DuPont, or that’s what Jean-Baptiste says, and he is one. So I painted her some things and got myself taken in by the Reynolds family, and Joseph made sure Ben heard that Mrs. DuPont was selling. Only Ben didn’t come himself; he sent his manservant. I don’t know what’s happened to him since. …”

“Mary killed him,” I said. Lane lifted his head to look at me. “In Stranwyne, with a hammer. We buried him on the hill and pretended he was Uncle Tully.” He reached out and put one long finger on the scar on my neck. “Yes,” I said, responding to the question he had not asked. Lane closed his eyes, silent, his jaw working in and out while the hammers rang. He continued.

“I paid Mrs. DuPont to tell Ben Aldridge exactly where I’d be, and let him take me. I just didn’t think they’d hit me quite so hard.”

“But how did it help you, to be locked in a wine cellar?”

“Because I was locked in a wine cellar with my picklocks in my boot. And one of them did at one time happen to be a fork, Katharine, in case you were wondering.” I smiled just a little, but he didn’t see; he still had his eyes closed. “I wasn’t in that room for more than a day, and as soon as I learned the routine I was only there when they came to feed me. I’ve been all over these tunnels. I told Joseph where the trapdoor was. And I knew exactly where I was sending you. I couldn’t believe it when Marchand opened that door. I must have passed it dozens of times without seeing it.”

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.