by Sarah Smith
“It’s hooligans,” old Roselle says firmly, recovering herself. “Nothing but vandals! We’ll tell the police to watch the house. We’ll report this to Monsieur Cyron, that’s what we’ll do. In Paris. Don’t be frightened. Get my handbag, girl.”
But Roselle’s niece has already fled outside and nothing will persuade her back; Roselle must get her bag herself. The two cut through the fields, sliding down the hill and stumbling among the little stones, taking the road to Arras. Roselle is still carrying the gun.
The coach and horses are gone, too; there’s nothing in the stables or the garage but Reisden’s car. André has never driven a car, never even started one, but he wrote a car crash once for the Necro. He cranks, he fiddles; the car hiccups and grinds and eventually moves; and André gets it nearly to the Auclart farm until the headlights show him Reisden and Jules, at the side of the road, waving him down.
“Could you possibly make more noise?” Reisden hisses.
“No one’s there. Not anymore,” André summarizes. “We were right. They think I killed her.”
“Someone was there?”
“I frightened them away.”
“You—how?”
André explains.
“And when Cyron hears about floating lights and moving furniture,” Reisden says, “he will send men to Montfort with guns and nets to catch you. Don’t you realize they’re hunting you for murder, and the only reason you’re not under arrest is because they think you’re dead?”
It’s true. The euphoria of giving the women a good scare has made André forget.
“We can’t go to Montfort,” Reisden says.
“He has been building a tunnel from my house,” André says. “He didn’t tell me. He didn’t trust me. He married me to a witch. I want to see the tunnel. You want to see it too, don’t you?” André asks.
“I don’t want to spy.”
“Oh, Hamlet. They’ll think you know anyway.”
Reisden thinks and nods curtly. “Then we’re all leaving and I’m calling my wife.”
They have already explored the first and second levels of the cellar during the Ball of the Dead party; the tunnel has to be on the third level. “Jules, find us all some clothes,” Reisden says. “And if we don’t come back in an hour— Don’t worry, that’s a joke.” It isn’t. André notices that Reisden takes all the flashlights and candles too, checks the batteries, makes sure he has matches, two boxes of matches, and his beloved brass compass. André himself takes all the balls of string from the pantry and a lantern.
The third cellar still stinks of death. The stink has a name now. Thomas Jefferson Blantire.
“Do you want to see the Holy Well first?” André asks. No, Reisden says, but André wants to. “It’s for my mental health,” he says, and Reisden smiles tightly.
André stares at the bars of the Holy Well for a long time, remembering the shadow of the body and everything he thought of: Papa, Papa dead, the bodies of the old man and the boy, the fly walking into the boy’s mouth. Never leave a deathbed. Then he thinks of Ruthie; the button; witches; rabbits.
“Sabine killed him,” André says.
“I don’t know.”
“We can prove what she did. The button.”
“The button proves nothing.”
André shines his lantern on the lock of the cage. It’s unlocked now; he sees all the scratches of long use, locking and unlocking, and a set of frantic fresh scratches. A man in the dark, trying to pick the lock.
She didn’t feed him rabbit. She just locked him in.
He thinks of her coming down here in her new summer dress, bought after he was dead, maybe because she was happy he was dead; unlocking the door; yes, look, there are faint key-marks over the scratches. She came downstairs in her new dress with the loose button she didn’t notice, and she looked at the dead man. (André can see her, her determined little mouth, her shrug. I didn’t do anything wrong. He was going to die anyway.) She looked, and perhaps she smelled him; did she like it even though it gagged her, did it feel like triumph? And she unlocked the door so it would look as though he’d died from the fumes, instead of having been left down there to starve or die of thirst in the dark, the way he and Jules and Reisden almost had died.
And then she went off to kill Françoise Auclart too. Because when someone found Blantire dead by the Holy Well, Mademoiselle Françoise would know who had brought him there.
“You and Cyron were going to make me happy?” André says. “With her?”
“I’m sorry. Come on, let’s find this grand scheme of Cyron’s.”
Reisden shines his light up at the ceiling, and there it is, easy: tubes for wiring stretch off into the darkness. “The generator runs the Holy Well, but what else does it do?” The ceiling is marked with smudges from lanterns and candles.
They follow the smudges, which darken, become more frequent; they come to a smooth path worn on the floor in the bone-white chalk. André thinks of all Papa Cyron’s friends, being brought down here to see—what?
The tunnel opens out into a big cavern. The ceiling is heavily braced, the stone pillars have been cut away; a narrow track leads across it into the darkness. There is a heavy iron wagon on the track, its sides battered, every inch of it ingrained with chalk dust. In the lantern light, metal gleams on the chalk walls: it is the tubing for newly installed electric lights.
Reisden finds the switch and turns them on. Light underground. It is luxurious.
All around the walls of the cavern are barred doors. Behind the bars they can see a barracks-room with sleeping bunks, a room filled with miners’ lanterns and pickaxes, a roomful of wooden boxes stamped 1893 M.1896: French army rifles. Storerooms with boxes of dynamite, thick rolls of fuse, blue boxes of ammunition.
Behind more barred doors, three tunnels, each with a track, lead off into the dark. André looks through the bars, squinting his eyes against the light in the cavern, and can see in the distance faint electric lights illuminating heavy bracing beams, low dim passages painfully carved out by hand. In two of the tunnels the lights curve away to a tiny dim horizon of stars, a crossing tunnel. In the third there are no lights, but he can see close to the bars another rail wagon half-full of broken chalk.
The Secret of Montfort.
“He did it,” Reisden says.
For a moment André is simply proud of Cyron. He understands completely why Cyron wanted the Count of Montfort’s support and Sabine’s money. “It must be enormous.”
“Extraordinary. One wants to tell someone. No wonder Pétiot wanted to have the Germans know about it.”
“I wonder how far it goes?”
They go up close to the bars and look through them. Reisden tries the doors, but they are securely locked.
“Helloooo,” André calls down the tunnel.
The well-worn path leads through another tunnel, very dark, to a carefully camouflaged exit in one of the sheds, the same heavy concrete shed where Boomer O’Connelly stored his black powder. No wonder no one found the exit, with barrels of black powder stacked against it.
They go out into the day, closing the entrance to the tunnels be-hind them. André looks up at the white towers, the spill of white rock down the hill. It’s early morning. Montfort was a nightmare to him, his mother’s house and his father’s. Now it is a new story, an extraordinary thing.
Reisden is frowning. “What’s wrong?” André says.
“We need to get away from here,” Reisden says. “Before someone comes.”
“Go see your family. Then see Papa Cyron,” he tells Reisden. “Tell him I didn’t kill Sabine. Jules and I will go back to the Auclart farm. Maybe through the tunnels. I want to see more.”
“Not through the tunnels, you might run into soldiers.”
“I wonder where they are.” It’s quiet. André has been in barracks; they’re never quiet like this.
“Staying away from the filming,” Reisden says.
“The filming’s done.”
&nb
sp; André looks back at the worn path into the cavern, where the Friends of Montfort view the tunnels. From the dark shed into the darker tunnel, and then suddenly into the cavern, brightly lit, dazzling. Making it hard to see down the tunnels. And there are the rooms all round the cavern, like displays. Dynamite, fuses, mine cars. A display of military mining, like the Necro, with its mummy and skeleton cherubs and cobwebbed lovers, is a display of death.
All it needs is a few blinking red eyes, a sound machine or two for the moans, and Necrosar—
There’s a sound behind him. André turns and sees Reisden.
“There’d be soldiers here when the Friends of Montfort come,” André says. “Soldiers and miners . . . If they weren’t really there? There’d be a sound machine.”
“André, let’s leave--”
But André is hunting for the switch to the sound machine. On the other side of the barred doors, of course. He finds it and turns it on. In the distance, mine cars rumble, lights flicker.
André digs in his pocket, finds nothing. “Give me your penknife.” No, he needs something stronger. There’s a pickax by the mine car, part of the stage dressing. “Leave it!” Reisden says, but André raises the pickax and attacks the lock to the nearest barred door, seeing how neat and scratchless the lock is. He would have done a better job. “Nothing to be afraid of,” André says, and throws open the broken-locked door, wades forward into the tunnel that narrows and tapers until he is crouching by a miniature mine car no higher than his knee, looking at the ingenious gears and belts and hammers that mimic the sounds of mining. “It’s only a play!”
“And don’t you see, you ass?” Reisden says. “Now they know we know it isn’t real.”
Reisden goes to Paris
WHAT DOES HE MEAN by it, Leo would have said. For thirty-five years, Maurice Cyron builds up the mystique of Montfort. There are fortifications. Selected Friends of Montfort are taken to see them. First, perhaps, they’re real, or try to be real: the tunnel at the Citadel, the ones beneath the Auclart farm. But then there’s the new plan of 1876, the plan that involves Montfort and André; and by now it’s clear that the chalk tunnels don’t last well enough.
So instead Cyron builds rumors of tunnels.
Reisden took his Renault and drove toward Paris. He did not see a paper or know what day it was until he got to Amiens. They had speculated how long they’d been in the boves. It had felt like most of their lives, but based on how long their light had lasted, Reisden thought two days, three at most. A day at the Auclart farm, a day at Montfort. He had left Montfort in the early morning and reached Amiens in the afternoon. He thought it might be Saturday, July 29, possibly Sunday.
Amiens was in the middle of its Thursday farmers’ market. It was the second of August.
He hadn’t telephoned Perdita from Montfort. He didn’t know what to say. I tried to save Jouvet and I’ve failed.
Sabine had known something about the tunnels from the other witches. She and Mademoiselle Françoise had used the ones under the Auclart farm.
Then she had slept with a man who might be a German spy, and had taken him down to the third level of the Montfort basements, where even the witches were forbidden to go. Blantire was interested in the tunnels.
Now they were both dead.
Anyone who went into the cavern would know someone had been there. André was known to be alive. Reisden was alive too, because he’d taken his Renault.
Just outside Amiens the Renault hit a pothole in the road and the front axle broke. It would take a day to re-weld the part. He went to the post office then and negotiated the call to Paris. But when Aline answered, he broke the connection.
Cyron builds rumors of tunnels, and it’s hugely profitable. The Friends of Montfort raise money to rebuild Montfort castle, to set up the Fortifications. Selected Friends are told there’s a higher purpose to Montfort, and some are let through the secret entrance and shown the cavern itself, with the lights dazzling them, soldiers and miners manning the play, miners’ hammers thudding from down the tunnel.
What does he mean by it?
Where, for instance, does the money go?
He might have called Ruthie, but he wasn’t going to call Ruthie before he talked with Perdita. He might have left the car in Amiens and taken the train. He should never have taken the car at all.
And he shouldn’t be going home.
Whoever had killed Sabine, if it was because she had taken a German spy into the tunnels, would be more than willing to kill André and Jules and Reisden.
He drove all night Friday and arrived back in Paris on Saturday, in the early afternoon.
He left the car two blocks away and reconnoitered Jouvet from across the street. On the front door hung a mourning wreath and a black-bordered death announcement. Baron the Dr. Alexandre de Reisden, beloved husband, father, and employer: Perdita had signed first, but all the employees of Jouvet had also signed, even Katzmann, who was only a consultant. All those mourners.
They would despise you, Sir, they would abhor you if they knew your true nature. Ah, William. True enough. I know the wrong secret of Montfort, and Cyron never trusted me because I’m not sufficiently French.
Who had killed Sabine?
He let himself in by the back door and went up the private stairs to the apartment.
“Perdita? Toby?” he whispered. No one was there. It was as deserted as if they had gone to America.
In their bedroom, Perdita’s closet was half empty. She had laid out on their bed all her light summer clothing, her whites and pastels, her Worth concert dress and the other dresses. She was packing, he thought. She was going back to America.
He went into Toby’s room, expecting the same disarray of packing. But she had laid out only some light outer clothes, a couple of flannel baby frocks. In the piano room, she had not packed her music. There were no tickets tacked onto the message board where they kept everything important, no trunks in the hall.
On her reading desk, with the strong light and the magnifying glass, she had left an unusual litter of papers and books. Perdita hardly read; her sight wasn’t good enough. He looked through the papers. Simple versions of Jouvet’s accounts, written very large in Madame Herschner’s hand. A Beethoven score. Under the others was hidden a thin maroon book.
He picked it up: what would Perdita read?
Little Lessons in French History. A child’s primer of France from the Gauls to the Third Republic. It was in English; the paragraphs were short, numbered, and factual; the print was large. There was a table of the French heads of government from Hugues Capet to Felix Faure, with the corner of the page carefully folded down for reference. She had got about halfway through the book so far; he knew because if he tilted the page so that the light raked across it, he could see the mark of her fingernail carefully keeping her place under each line. Her sight was bad; she read so slowly.
She had never shown this book to him, never asked him to read it to her.
She was not trying to leave. She was studying to be a French citizen.
She could have run. He had run. He had expected her to go home (and it was only beginning to come to him how difficult that expectation might have been for her). People do run, or declare themselves mad and unfit, or wait paralyzed between choices, doing too little. And then there are those who don’t, who attempt something difficult, for the sake of something they barely understand and have never experienced.
Downstairs the door slammed. He heard her voice in his office.
The other voice was Gilbert’s.
They didn’t come upstairs. They were meeting in the office. Step by step, spying, he came down the stairs behind the secret door and listened.
He never trusted us enough, he heard. He sat and listened to them, with Little Lessons in French History still in his hand, his finger keeping the page. Be our American, Perdita asked Gilbert, and he heard Gilbert: Yes.
They were saying he could depend on them, and he hadn’t. He would not want me
to say he was alive, Gilbert said. It was him quarreling with himself, Perdita said.
He could leave. Draw the hunt away from Perdita and Toby, and Gilbert now too. Kill himself before someone had him killed.
He could try to be immensely clever, the way a murderer is clever, because he has to be.
He could tell them what had happened.
Perdita and Gilbert stood up, and he backed up the stairs into the upstairs library and melted behind the curtains. Aline brought Toby back from the park. Perdita and Gilbert ate with Toby in the dining room while Reisden listened to Toby pound on his tray and crow, and thought about coming from behind the curtains, and didn’t do it.
And then, in the dining room, Perdita told Toby what Reisden hoped Toby would never have to hear. “Your father killed someone,” she said. And he had to listen to it, all of it, his wife’s obituary on him. All his life he was sorry and angry at himself ... He wanted you to know he was bad.
Yes. You are not worthy of anyone’s love, he heard from his own personal old man of the boves.
He had to listen to it. And it could have been William speaking until he realized that, although he had listened, he had heard only half of it. He was a good man. He loved you. You can be proud of him.
You are vile, the cellars whispered, but that wasn’t what she had said. He loved you. What would he teach Toby if he believed William? To loathe himself and distrust himself?
Through the curtain he could see a shadow of Toby. I will try to teach you, he told his son silently, that one can be wrong without being vile and right without being God.
I won’t abandon you if I can help it. I will try to be the father you should have.
He moved and looked through the curtain at Perdita, not knowing what vows to make to her.
Gilbert left. Perdita played with Toby; Aline took him off to put him to bed. It was Saturday night; Aline left for her Sunday off. Perdita walked away slowly toward their room. She closed the door behind her. He moved silently after her, through the corridors of his empty house.
She was crying.