by Mackenzi Lee
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just sorry.”
Before I can reply, the door bangs open and Bourbon sweeps in, the shoulders of his cloak speckled with the rain. Helena flies to her feet, so fast the porcelain basin is almost knocked to the floor. Bourbon tosses his hat upon the chaise. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Did you find a boat?” Helena asks.
“A gondola,” he replies. “We’ll get past the patrols easier in something small. Get up, Montague,” he barks at me, sweeping back the tails of his coat so I can see he’s still keeping company with that pistol the size of his forearm. I stumble to my feet, nearly pitching into one of the bedposts.
“Dawn approaches.” Bourbon scoops up his hat from the chaise, then bows me out the door. “We’re going sailing.”
The Doge’s Palace sits with its back to the canal, thin docks jutting over the waves like limbs. A sharp black gondola is tied off at the end of one, bobbing in the choppy water. The duke shepherds us into the boat, Helena ahead of me. She hangs a lantern at the prow and takes up the pole without consult, leaving Bourbon and me sitting face-to-face, regarding each other, his pistol resting loosely in his lap.
Helena steers us down Saint Mark’s, between the tall ships and the ferries, until we are spat into the Lagoon. We float alone in the water between the city proper and the surrounding islands. As we pass the harbor where we docked the day before, I scan the sails, searching for the Eleftheria among them, but she isn’t there. The gondola strikes a wave, and a gulp of frigid water soaks my knees.
After what must be near an hour, the silhouette of Maria e Marta blots the horizon. It’s a small spit of lonely land—before the water invaded the churchyard, it could likely have been walked end to end in a half of an hour. The only piece still above the waterline is the chapel built upon a hill, its spire a compass to the sky.
“Here they come,” Helena says quietly.
Two catboats are gliding toward us, a few men in uniforms of the Doge’s soldiers standing at their prows. Bourbon raises a hand to them, tucking his pistol under his cloak but careful to keep it pointed at me.
“Good morning,” he calls.
“You’re out early, my lord,” one of them returns.
“We came to see the island. My nephew, here”—he claps me upon the knee and I flinch more than I think a nephew believably would when clapped by his uncle—“is on his Tour, and I promised him a close view before it goes into the Lagoon.”
“It’s quite unstable,” the guard calls.
“We won’t get too near.”
Look at me, I think as the soldier’s gaze drifts across the three of us, though he seems far more occupied by Helena, who’s perched at the back of our gondola like an inverse figurehead. Look at me and sense that something is wrong. Make us turn back. Arrest him before he shoots me. Tell us to have a good look from here and then go home.
“Keep your distance,” the soldier says. “One of the walls collapsed this past week. Wouldn’t want your nephew to be crushed.”
Bourbon gives a good-natured laugh. “We’ll stay far away, sir.”
The catboats go their way, and we ours. My heart sinks to the bottom of the Lagoon as we draw ever nearer to the jagged ruins of the remaining sanctuary walls, their silhouette a gap-toothed smile against the sky.
We approach the chapel from the east, above what used to be the graveyard before it was submerged. Through the sudsy water, the silhouettes of gravestones ripple and distort. The wings of Saint Mark’s Lions jut out of the water like dorsal fins, marking the gateposts every few feet. The chapel facade is ghostly in the corpse-gray light of dawn. Flecks of quartz in the walls sparkle.
We disembark on a submerged dock, ours the only boat in sight. The loneliness of it makes my heart heave. The water hits me above the knee, funneling around my legs as we hike to the chapel, and the rain picks at me from above. The whole damn world seems made of water.
The sanctuary seems more fragile and precarious from the inside, like one good sneeze might topple the whole thing. The doors creak as the water sluices against them, a crusty line of scum marking the level. Beneath the waves, the floor is slick marble set in a chessboard pattern, so every other step feels like a hole I might tumble into. The silence is absolute but for the occasional splash as mortar drops from the ceiling, and the haunted trembling of the waves crawling into corners and scraping against the bottom of the pews.
Bourbon strides up the aisle, lifting his feet high so that each step splashes. “Where are we going, Condesa?” he calls to Helena, and his voice echoes like the sound of the ocean in a shell. A shard of the cracked rose window falls.
“Down,” is all Helena replies. The waves carry her skirts behind her like ink spilled from a pot.
Helena leads us to a chapel off the altar; it’s higher than the rest of the sanctuary, so the flooding is no more than puddles collecting between the tile. A single tomb sits in the center, two figures carved prostrate upon it. They’re both women, one with her hands steepled in prayer, the other with two fingers held to her thumb. Above the tomb, a few lines of scripture are painted.
It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.
Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.
Helena sets her lantern upon the ground, then works her fingers beneath the lid. “Help me,” she says to me.
I don’t move. “I’m not overturning a saint’s tomb.”
“They’re biblical women,” she says, like that’s an explanation. “Their bodies aren’t here—only their relics.”
“So?”
“So this isn’t a real tomb.” She jerks at her end of the lid and it slides out of place with a screech. A gasp of hot air escapes, smelling of earth and bone and a long, deep dive. Beneath the lid, a spiral staircase sinks into the darkness.
“Help me,” she says again, and I take the other end. Together, we heave the lid off the tomb.
With the stone taken away, Bourbon joins us, all three staring downward. That air billowing up feels freakish, both for its temperature and for its steady rhythm, like the thump of a heartbeat. I’m swallowing fear in short, sharp gasps.
Bourbon draws out his pistol, then jerks his chin at Helena. “You first.”
Suddenly I’m not certain which of us is more his prisoner—she or I.
Helena takes up her lantern again and lights a votive candle at the head of the tomb, the glass holder filled with floodwater but the wick dry enough to catch. I think, for a moment, she’s going to pray before we descend, but then I realize she’s leaving a calling card for Percy and Felicity, so they know where to go if they come. As the flaxen light curls across her skin from below, her face looks empty, any emotion wiped away like rain-fog from a windowpane. For a moment I think she must be too far gone for the gravity of this moment to take root inside her, our shared moment earlier no more than a play act. Then I realize it’s the sort of empty that presses out everything else, like if she isn’t vacant it will fill her up and soak in like a stain. I recognize it because I’ve worn it before. Hollow yourself or the fear eats you alive.
Helena is not afraid—she’s terrified.
I follow her down the stairs without prompting, the duke bringing up the rear with his pistol at my back. The stairs are built in a tight spiral, so round and narrow we have to go single file with our hands on the wall for balance. The air gets hotter the deeper we go, which seems to be the opposite of what’s natural.
At the base of the stairs, Helena raises her lantern so we can all see the corridor ahead. The sallow light doesn’t reach far, but in its glow I can see the walls are pocked, their surface raised and rippled like they’re made from paper that has been soaked, then dried in waves. We’ve gone a few meters in silence when the lantern light glances off a bend, and I suddenly realize what it is that’s forming those swollen patterns upon the walls.
Bones.
The whole corridor is fashioned from bones, rows and ro
ws of them stacked as high as the ceiling, browning and polished by the drafts of hot air billowing over them. Skulls are hung at intervals between them like sconces, brittle spiderwebs threading them together. Where the corridor bends again, there’s a whole skeleton assembled, dressed in dusty Capuchin robes and wired upright with a sign hung around its neck.
Helena leans forward so her lantern illuminates the inscription.
Eramus quod estis. Sumus quod eritis.
I haven’t used Latin since my Eton days, and I wasn’t what could be called attentive in my study of it, but she translates. “What we once were, that you are now. What we are now, soon you shall be.”
Another gust of the hot air breathes over us.
We go on, down the gallery of bones, quiet but for the occasional rumbling, like a great giant shifting in his sleep. The ground beneath our feet is a mosaic, grooves worn into the glossy tesserae by funeral processions bringing down their bodies. I imagine Mateu Robles here, carrying down his dead-but-not wife, his conscience heavy as her alchemical heart.
The hall ends in a vaulted ceiling and three columns of skulls, a doorway behind them framed in what seem to be femurs—I try not to look too closely for fear it might send me into a dead faint if I do. Helena doesn’t move any farther. Bourbon tips his pistol at me, so I reach for the latch, only to find that it’s not a latch at all but a skeletal hand, reconstructed and sitting in its place so that it has to be held for the door to open. A shudder goes through me, head to toe, and I give a fast tug. The door creaks open with a shower of dust. The tunnel gives a moan.
I step into the tomb.
29
The tomb is small and dusty, one wall lined with rows of vaults built into the stone. The highest one is just above my eye level. Each drawer is made of polished black stone with a mother-of-pearl inlay, a family name inscribed upon each beneath the handle. Robles is carved upon the center drawer, a prominent keyhole built into a slick silver frame just beneath the b. On either side of the vaults, two iron bowls are suspended upon crossed legs, and when Helena touches her lantern to them, the dry kindling inside writhes to life, smoky fingers scratching the darkness in chorus with the hot air that seems to gasp from the walls.
Bourbon does a quick sweep around the room, his cloak tossing up dust from the corners. Helena hangs her lantern on a hook beside the door, then walks up to the drawers, fingers tracing her family name before she presses her palm flat to the polished stone, head bowed.
His lap finished, Bourbon leans back against the vaults, heel scuffing the black stone. “Now,” he says, one finger fiddling with his pistol, “we wait for your friends to bring me my key, Montague.”
“It isn’t yours,” Helena says, so quiet I almost don’t hear her.
“Then whose is it, Condesa?” Bourbon barks, but she doesn’t say anything. Her forehead is nearly touching the stone vaults. “Yours? Your brother’s? Mr. Montague’s? Your mother will have died for naught if none of us use it.” He knocks on the drawers. The ceiling groans, a geyser of dust misting down upon us. “Your father is a cowardly, wasteful fool for hiding her this way.”
“He isn’t,” I say, my voice breaking on the last word, but I feel suddenly obliged to stand up for Helena, or perhaps not so much her as her father, the man whose coat I wore to the opera and who spoke about his daughter when she was small enough to tie a string from her finger to his. Perhaps that means I’m defending her as well. She used to be that small girl, after all. Perhaps she still is, the girl who loved her father so much she’d give anything to again be close enough to have that string between them.
Bourbon shifts his gaze from Helena to me. “Would you like to discuss cowardly fathers, Mr. Montague? You’d school us all.”
“What?”
“I assumed you robbed me on his instructions, or in some sort of desperate play to aid him. He’s been looking to knock me out of favor for years.”
“My father wouldn’t instruct me to steal from any man.” As much as I might loathe him, I’m certain of that—he’s far too stiff-collared. “He may not care for you, but he’s a gentleman.”
“Your father’s a rake.” Bourbon spits the word. “About as filthy a man as I’ve ever had occasion to meet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know?” A slow smile stretches over his lips. “Since we’re waiting, let me ask you this, Montague: Do you know what your father likes?” A pause. I’m not certain if this is a rhetorical question and I should keep silent, or if he’s using my father’s favorite strategy of a rhetorical question I’m still meant to answer so I’ll look stupid. But before I can work it out, Bourbon supplies, “Your father loves nothing so much in this world as slow ponies and other men’s wives.”
A jolt goes through me, like a missed stair. “You’re lying.”
He flicks his thumb at the handle built into the Robleses’ tomb. Helena’s shoulders rise. “I knew him, when he was young and living in the French court. He was a bastard even then, squandering his father’s money on horses and cards and always screwing someone else’s woman. The wives and intendeds of his friends, those were always his favorites. And then he got himself a wife of his own.” I have a brief moment of wondering if, all these years, my father’s been unfaithful and if Mother knows, but then he goes on, “Some French girl in the country. He ruined her and then tried to run, but her father badgered him into marriage.”
A ripple of that hot air nearly knocks me off my feet. I almost grab Helena. “He had it . . . He must have annulled it.”
“Too late for that,” Bourbon says. “When he refused to stay and accept the consequences, he called for me to rescue him. He couldn’t tell his family—they’d have turned him out—and all his friends hated him by then. I got him back to Paris and helped get him married off the Continent. The country wench probably couldn’t have found him if she’d tried, but better not to take the chance. His family never knew. I suspect your mother doesn’t either, that her union to him is invalid, as he had one already when it was formed. It’s only he and I that know the truth. And you. So tell me, Montague.” He leers at me, a toothy grin that the firelight licks. “What do you think of your father now?”
My head is pitching in a way that has nothing to do with the drinking from the night before. It’s hard to take it all in in this single heaping dose, but what I think at once is that my father—my Reformation of Manners Society father—the man I’ve lost years of my life ducking my head before, racked up debts and ruined women and then ran from it all rather than claim the consequences. I am thinking that my father lies, and maybe the foul things he’s fed me about myself for my whole bleeding life were just as untrue. That my father cheats. That my father has no pedestal from which to hand down judgment on me for my sins.
He’s not a gentleman, any way you might unravel the word.
He’s a scoundrel. And a cowardly one at that.
“Running out of time,” Bourbon says suddenly, as though there’s any way he can gauge the hour in this pit. “Perhaps your friends don’t care for you after all.”
He hefts the pistol from his belt and I flinch, but Helena steps between us. “Don’t you dare shoot him.”
“I’ll shoot him if I goddamn like. This island is sinking around our heads and my key has been taken by pirates and children. If your mother’s bewitched heart isn’t in my hand by the end of this day, Condesa, your father will rot for the rest of his life, I’ll see to it.”
Bourbon lifts his pistol, but Helena doesn’t move. Neither do I, though that’s a far less gallant thing to be noting. There’s something quite ungentlemanly about cowering for your life behind a lady, but if Helena wants to put herself between Bourbon and me, I’ll not refuse that gift.
But the duke freezes suddenly, pistol still leveled, with his head cocked toward the door. I can hear it too—a dry slapping echo coming down the corridor of bones behind us. Footsteps.
Bourbon looks to the door of the tomb, but
Helena looks to me. Our eyes meet—a strange, solemn hush in the middle of a storm.
Then she steps back, leaving nothing between me and Bourbon, but before he can make good on his promise to shoot me, someone shouts, “Stop!”
I’ve only got a second to get a good look at Percy standing in the doorway, Felicity at his side—both of them panting like they’ve been running, and both dripping wet from the floodwater—before Bourbon grabs me from behind and drags me in front of him like a shield. The cold press of his pistol noses my temple. “Where’s my key?” he calls.
Percy fumbles in the pocket of his coat, his other hand raised above his head, until he comes up with the toothy Lazarus Key and holds it up to the light. It casts a frail shadow across the vaults. “It’s here. Take it. Please. Take it and let Monty go.”
“That’s it?” Bourbon says, his head tipped toward Helena for an answer. “That’s all?” Helena nods. “Unlock it for me, then,” Bourbon calls to Percy.
Percy blanches. “What?”
“You heard me, unlock the drawer. I’m sure you can work out which one. Quickly, please.” The pistol jerks against my skin and I let out a soft whimper without meaning to. Percy winces. The duke still has one arm clamped around my chest, so tight it’s hard to breathe. Or maybe that’s just the fear stopping me up.
Percy steps forward slowly, hands still raised, and then slides the key into the hole in the Robleses’ drawer. As he turns it, there’s a series of clicks, like a stick’s being dragged up a stack of vertebrae. The drawer pops open. Percy stumbles backward to where Felicity is frozen, looking as frightened as I’ve ever seen her—raw, naked fear, no battlements to hide it.
Helena and Bourbon both advance, and I’m still wedged before the duke, so when they cozy up to the drawer and peer in, I’m forced to as well.
For one strange moment, I think it’s Helena in the vault. But the woman lying there, pale and naked, is older, her nose thinner and chin rounder. Her hair covers her bare shoulders in shimmering waves, and I can smell the perfume off it. Her skin too looks newly oiled, like the funerary rights were done just before we arrived. Her eyes are open, and the whole of them is black, as though they’ve been filled with nightshade. Stitching runs up the center of her torso from her naval to her collarbone, a scarlet sheen pressing against her skin from the other side, like a lantern tossed beneath a sheet.