A Spark Unseen

29

Two 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.”

I think my mouth made the shape of an O, though the sound did not come out. The emperor stared at the thick golden rug, where I had left some horrible footprints, thinking. Was there someone trustworthy he could have escort me out, or would he give me time to find the latch I knew must be there?

And at that moment, almost helpfully, the door behind me opened. The tapestry was pushed aside and Lane Moreau had a hand on my arm, ready to yank me to the safety of the stairs. And then he saw the emperor.

If something in Napoléon’s expression had rung familiar to me before, now it was as if the bells of Notre-Dame were chiming in my head. How had I not seen? The beard, and the rumpled hair heightened the similarity, but it was the eyes, that same gray, unpredictable stare that could bottle up a moment and somehow keep it twice as long. I gasped, as if I’d been struck. The bodies were different, but I saw the same nose, the same mouth, the same shape of the brows. It couldn’t be, and yet it was.

The emperor had taken half a step back, his expression confused, dazed, and then stricken. His own gray eyes sought mine for explanation, and I shook my head, my face possibly more shocked than his. But by the end of this look if we had not reached an exact understanding, we had at least exchanged significant information. I had not known, the emperor had not known, and the man in the doorway still knew nothing. Lane seemed to be vacillating between starting a conversation or a fistfight, or just yanking me straight into the passage and slamming the door. A querulous voice called from the other room.

“Your Majesty,” I whispered, “we must go. Please. Board up the door.”

He nodded. I moved, glancing again at Lane to mouth, “Go!” He began backing slowly down the stairs, out of the emperor’s sight.

“Wait!” the emperor said. I was already down a stair, my hand on the door latch. “Tell me your name. I do not remember. Please!”

I opened my mouth, then shook my head. “Go!” I mouthed again at Lane. Joseph had come up behind him, pulling on his arm.

“Please,” the emperor said, lowering his voice even further, “what is his name? Where does he live?”

I hesitated, looking down the stairs. Lane was fighting Joseph’s pull, beckoning to me.

“Is it England?” the emperor begged. “Please!”

I turned back to Napoléon and shook my head. The empress’s voice was now calling from just behind the other door.

“Here, Fräulein! Miss!” He grabbed a polished box from the table beside him and dumped out the contents, pressing something hard and cold into my hand. “Tell me, please! How old? How many years?”

“Katharine!” Lane whispered.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and shut the door fast, making the emperor leap out of the way. I knew he would not be able to find the latch.

“What is happening?” Henri asked. We’d come scurrying down the stairs with no explanation other than Lane’s order to run. And so we were, stumbling in the light of one candle down the passage as fast as Uncle Tully could go.

“Oh, nothing much,” Lane replied. “Katharine just decided to run up the stairs and have a little chat with the half-naked bloody tyrant of France!”

Henri’s dark eyes slid to me, as surprised as I’d ever seen them, and Joseph frowned while my uncle panted happily. “I waited for eleven, little niece. Almost twelve!”

I couldn’t answer any of them, for the moment I couldn’t even explain. My mind was still reeling.

“Can we get out?” Henri asked Lane.

“If they get into the tunnel before we get to the end, they will see the light,” he panted, struggling with his grip on the crate. They were carrying it between them. “The passage is a straight line. But if we can get to the end and through, then they might turn the wrong way. I would send men both ways, so I would reckon it depends on whether the emperor bothers to dress himself first.”

I comforted myself with the difficulty of finding that latch. But if we were caught and arrested, the result was going to be very different from what Lane expected. Disastrously so. This would be a blow to him, a blow to his very core. I willed Uncle Tully’s feet to go a little faster. We needed to disappear. All of us.

A distant bang echoed down the tunnel, and then another, and another. Never mind about the latch, I thought; the emperor was bashing in his wife’s sitting-room wall. Soft French bounced off the stone-lined walls around me, words I guessed would not have been uttered in my presence in English, and then Lane slowed.

The tunnel ended abruptly in a wall of dirt with reinforcing stone, but near the floor there was a low arch that one could slide through. “Where does it come out?” I panted.

I thought Lane might not answer. He was furious with me, of course, but I was in no mood for his temper. I glared at him. “It’s a drain,” he said, already on the other side, pulling through the wooden box, “just a small jump down. It goes to the Seine. We can climb out from there.”

Another, softer boom came down the tunnel.

“Keep counting your steps, Uncle Tully,” I said, “and when you jump, that’s a step, too.”

Lane helped him bend down and through, Henri holding up the candle, and then I remembered that I was still clutching the thing the emperor had pressed into my hand. I glanced down, and in my palm was a ring, a ring with a ruby the size of a dove’s egg. I closed my fist again, turned my back, and stuffed the ring down Mr. Babcock’s shirt and deep into my underclothes. Uncle Tully carefully jumped through the arch, still counting, pretending there was no one present but myself and Lane. He was doing so remarkably well.

“Eight hundred and ninety-seven!” Uncle Tully yelled. Another crash came down the tunnel.

I followed Joseph and Henri through the arch and said, “Uncle Tully, how would you like to ride in a carriage?”

Henri had money, to our collective relief, and slipped out of the drain to bribe a hired carriage to not only wait while we scrambled up the embankment, but to also not notice our strange and shabby condition. At my request, he also bought the coat off the driver’s back, and I put it over the head of my uncle Tully, so he could pretend to be elsewhere during our brief sojourn across a public street. It was a bright Sunday, the market packed, a park fluttering with autumn finery, both on the trees and the people. We ignored the stares and quickly shut the door of the carriage.

Uncle Tully sat on the floor at my feet, out of sight under the coat, his crate beside him. I could feel him shaking. I had him doing multiples of seven while Lane’s gray eyes stared at the passing streets, one hand running through his hair. Even after I had explained about the arsenic, he couldn’t quite get over his temper. Joseph slouched in his seat with his forehead wrinkled, watching Lane. I was doing the same, trying not to see the telltale traces of an emperor.

“Ah!” said Henri, tossing a newspaper he’d found on the seat into Lane’s lap. “The Russians have scuttled their own ships in Sebastopol. Perhaps our navies will not need this weapon after all, if their enemies will do the job for them, yes?” He leaned back in his seat when no one answered, grinning, somehow still managing to look sleek when he was covered in muck and stone dust. “Well, well, my friends, the emperor will now know what is in the tunnel, and also who is dead in the tunnel.”

Lane kept his eyes on the window when he said, “Napoléon may be a fool …” I winced inside. “… but he is not so great a fool that it will take him long to find out who Katharine is and where she lives.”

Henri nodded. “You will all three have to leave Paris. Very soon. Is that not so?”

My uncle was up to seven times one hundred and thirty-nine before Lane answered, and then he only said, “There is also the problem of Wickersham.”

“Ah!”

“I think it must have been Ben who had the grave opened,” I said. I wished I had asked him when I had the chance. “How could he have been so sure otherwise? Or do you think Mr. Wickersham’s reach was that long?”

Henri shrugged. “It is probable that it is not, or he would have done more than that, yes?”

“So it is possible Mr. Wickersham will still believe my uncle is dead.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore what he thinks,” Lane said, “because I posted a letter to Ambassador Cowley just as soon as I left the tunnels.”

“Did you?” said Henri. “Your ‘farewell stroke,’ as they say? Well, I think I can be of help to you in that. I am long overdue in paying my respects to the ambassador.”

Lane turned his gaze to him, still deliberately not looking at me. I pressed my lips together. Joseph slouched down farther in his seat while my uncle said seven times one hundred and eighty-seven.

“Cowley will want to stay in a good standing with my family. I think with this visit and your letter that Wickersham’s work here will be over. What is your opinion, mon ami?”

Lane nodded, his gaze back to the window.

“Shall you take Mr. Tulman to his home? Can you continue to keep his life a secret?”

When Lane was silent, I said, “That is exactly what I must do. Thank you, Henri. Truly.”

His dark eyes glanced once at Lane and then he smiled at me, but he did not tease.

“Noble,” said Joseph, out of nowhere, his tone almost sad. We all looked at him, but it was my gaze he was returning, his one word addressed to me. I remembered our first meeting, when he’d told me that Lane, or Jean-Michel, was noble. I felt my back stiffen. What did he know of Lane’s background? Or was he referring to something about Lane’s behavior now?

I looked at Lane, his dark and dirty skin betraying no expression, his eyes like two chips of stone on the passing streets beyond the window. I adjusted Uncle Tully’s coat and clasped my hands in my lap, my irritation combusting into flame. Lane had come to Paris to settle something, and now I did not intend to leave it without doing the same.