Viridian (The Hundred-Days Series Book 2)

by Baird Wells

  She nodded, slowly at first and then faster, as though working her mind back into her body. “I am. I'm done.” Practically dragging the sack behind, she made her way to the mausoleum steps, not looking him in the eye.

  He stared at her back as she walked away from him, a thousand words on his tongue, none of them spoken. He shook his head and started after her.

  Though it was cold outside under the canopy of clouds, on the cusp between winter and spring, inside the mausoleum was even more chilled. The granite was damp, giving off a dank odor. Not even sun that fighting through narrow stained glass windows high above could chase away the gloom. The interior was much simpler and more beautiful than he would have expected for a marquis and his lady. Pale gray stone formed walls and was angled seamlessly into wide benches that sat below the windows, dotted with the jewel tone spots of light by a sun that was finally above the horizon. Even the sarcophagus was tasteful and plain, like an ancient altar. Scrollwork adorned its head and foot, and white marble carved into garlands draped along its face. Even the marquis himself, lying still in effigy, was dressed eternally as a Renaissance chevalier rather than a modern nobleman.

  Bracing his hands on one corner of the lid, he looked to Olivia who, despite her low spirits, was gazing at him with curiosity. He nodded to the opposite corner. “On my count, push as hard as you can. One, two...three!”

  At first there was nothing. Ty heaved his shoulder and stone scraped over stone until they had managed a few-inch gap. A gust of air, cold and a little stale, whipped his cheeks. Panting a moment, he met Olivia's eyes and nodded. With two more good shoves, they had the dense lid halfway off.

  He had doubted what they would find, at least a little, until this moment. By Olivia's unblinking stare, it was plain she still hadn't quite wrapped her head around the empty space inside the casket.

  Palming one of the torches off of the wall, he held out a hand to her. He shivered at the warmth of her fingers, the trust when they grasped his. Despite everything that’d happened, the unquestioning faith she gave him in that moment was like the sun rising after a stormy night. “Climb in?”

  Olivia laughed, a hollow sound that made him think she was closer to tears than anything. “Days. For days I've been in a nightmare. I can't wake up.” She stared down into the blackness inside the tomb. “This feels ominous.”

  “It's nothing more than a door, Olivia. It has no special power.”

  She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist, smudging dust into a trail of tears across her cheeks. “I nearly hacked d'Oettlinger's head off with a bayonet. Seeing my mother's painting, I wish I had. Do you know what's worse than having wanted to do it?” She met his eyes in earnest for the first time in days. “I have no idea what stopped me.”

  There was a heartbreaking tremor to her words, long-buried agony bubbling through the cracks. “Just a door,” he repeated, wiping the dampness from between the cuts on her face. “You'll climb in, and we’ll be somewhere else.”

  Her body relaxed, as though his words had cut her free from some invisible tension. She squeezed his hand tighter, swung a leg over the stone lip, and disappeared inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Olivia landed with a soft thud, but it was still enough that an ache across her forehead spread wider until it reached her temples. Days with little food, water, or proper rest and the strain of dim light conspired into a headache the likes of which she could barely recall. If not for the pain, she would wonder at being truly awake.

  Ty hopped down behind her, and using the small shaft of weak sun from above, struck a match to their torch. Olivia blinked at the blaze of orange light, letting her eyes adjust, and looked around.

  They were not in a rough hole, as she had expected, but a proper chamber. Not much wider than the span of her arms, the high walls were built from smooth limestone blocks. There were still no bones in sight, no sign that the space had ever been used as a crypt. She glanced above through the hole they’d just come through, staring at the rectangle of the mausoleum showing through the open casket, then at Ty who was rearranging his pack. “Where are we?”

  He glanced up, wide-eyed, looking surprised she had spoken. “The mausoleum?”

  “Mmhm.”

  Ty held the torch forward, waving it vaguely down the tunnel ahead of them. “It’s a lot of dusty, boring history. Short bit is, Marie d'Medici wanted a tunnel from the marquis' estate to the Luxembourg palace. For reasons as numerous as her conspiracies, one assumes.”

  “That's nearly three miles!”

  “Limestone caves under the city gave the poor architect a leg up.”

  She couldn’t believe that she didn’t know this. Paris was her city. Apparently, it still held some secrets. How had Ty discovered the information, and where had he learned to get in? “So there was never a tomb here? Where is the marquis?”

  “If the rumors are true, he staged his death to avoid being executed and fled to Sweden. When King Louis grew tired of his mother's intrigues, none of her supporters were safe. Especially not the marquis.”

  She shivered against a damp breeze rushing up from farther down the passage. “Sounds familiar.”

  Silent, Ty hefted up his pack and started down the passage's light slope.

  He was still angry, she realized. And probably just as exhausted and battered as she was. He had certainly deserved better than the way she had treated him, and it wasn’t really his fault. She couldn’t be alone, or back in England, soon enough.

  The slope tilted more as they descended, its limestone floor growing slippery with water and moss beneath her feet. Dampness permeated every thread of her pants and shirt, and the chill was nearly as sharp as her regret at declining Ty's coat.

  Olivia had no idea how long they traveled down the passageway. Without daylight or any landmarks for measuring distance, it was impossible to judge the passage of time. However far they had gone, it felt longer in a silence punctuated only by their breathing and the tread of their boots.

  Finally, the space ahead of their torchlight became a high wall of shadows. A musical trickle of water ran into the cave from the world above, pooling at the end of the passage, flowing away under a high brass gate weathered to a beautiful blue-green.

  Reaching back, Ty grasped her fingers with his free hand, pressure warm against her clammy flesh, and guided her around the rippling puddle. His touch was welcome, and she drank it in. He passed her the torch. “Hold this. I can get us through.”

  While he knelt before the gate, she lowered the torch for him, giving them both a better look at a heavy iron padlock. Ty inspected both sides, scraped the metal with something he'd taken from his haversack, then sighed. “Far too corroded. There's no picking it.”

  He stood, grasped the gate rails and shook. The gate's bars were set deep into the stone; its mortar crumbled a bit as he yanked on it, but the whole framework stood fast.” Ty frowned, stepping back and eyeing their obstacle. “If we can't go through, we'll have to go over. Ready?”

  Based on the height of the gate and the small gap between its top and the cave above, Olivia wasn't certain of being ready, but she nodded anyway. They didn't exactly have another option. As Ty had pointed out, they couldn't stroll into Paris by the main gate with all of Thalia's agents on guard for their arrival.

  Following his lead, she stuffed the second pack between the bars, shoving it as clear of their path as her arm's reach would allow.

  Ty went over first, scaling the slick metal with an athletic grace. When he reached the narrow, arched opening above the gate, however, things got tricky. There wasn’t enough space to work his legs in, and if he went through head first...

  She was about to ask him what he was going to do when he surprised her by going through head first, after all. He caught himself by the boots, hooked over the top rail, and dangled upside down. Swinging the rest of his body into the bars, he grabbed on and with something like a somersault and landed easily on his feet.

  Olivia wa
s so impressed that she forgot the awkward silence between them and clapped a hand against the torch stem. “Bravo.”

  He bowed with something like a smile. “Pass me the torch.”

  After she handed it off, he propped it in a small alcove beside the gate where it cast deeper shadows around them. Slipping his arms between the bars, he interlaced his fingers and nodded at her feet. “I'll boost you up. Come in head first and I'll catch you on the other side.”

  She rested her sole against his palms and counted. “One, two, three!” Ty lifted while she pushed off with her other foot and she easily gained the top of the gate. Hands worked for purchase between slick metal and damp rock, but finally she got her body through the opening. As promised, Ty's hands caught her under the arms as she came through.

  She'd been ready for him to pull, tensing her legs and bracing to land. Instead, Ty held her half-in, half out above him, face to face. In the darkness it was hard to distinguish his expression, something between deep concentration and a scowl. His mouth worked, and Olivia would have paid a fortune to know his thoughts. Then his lips twitched, arms relaxed, and her feet hit the uneven floor with a soft thud. His back was already to her, gathering his pack and the torch.

  Her chest squeezed tighter, heart aching with every beat, and she sank a little deeper into self-loathing.

  They wriggled through a baffle cut into the cave wall that was so narrow Olivia feared they’d become stuck. Her nose pressed into the stone, and her nostrils filled with a mineral odor, the faint tang of salt, earthy moss, and something else she couldn’t put her finger on. The scent increased as they passed into the cave proper, and she beheld why.

  Bones. Thousands of them. Walls and mountains of them.

  Their torch cast an amber glow over piles that stretched as far as she could see. They were set into the walls in patterns, as if the angel of death himself had been an artist. Walls of femurs, columns of skulls spread out around them in a grotesque tableau.

  She gasped, turning to get a look at the whole chamber. “This is the catacombs.”

  “Mm.” He raised, lowered, and extended the torch, illuminating each corner and looking as overwhelmed as she felt.

  The Paris catacombs, the empire of the dead. It held the bones of millions of residents, a necessity that arose when plague and war overflowed the cemeteries at the city's heart. The caves were fed in great batches, the most recent a gluttonous meal brought on by the revolution. Men had worked for two years to empty medieval graveyards, nearly as long as it had taken arranging just the victims of Madame Guillotine. She had never seen the place with her own eyes, but the entrance was pointed out often, in a whisper, by those passing into the city: Le Gate de Enfer, the gate of hell.

  Taking it all in now, she wondered at the complaints leveled in the papers, protests originated by the church. They’d painted a picture of great sacrilege, of bones being desecrated for nefarious reasons. She couldn’t agree. A great deal of care had been taken to honor the remains of those no one had a hope of identifying. Instead of being heaped in some ditch, they were stacked lovingly, even boasting one high wall of long bones that framed skulls arranged into a heart. On the forehead of one, in an antique script, was carved the phrase 'Anna. A death among many; and yet the one which breaks my heart'. Olivia ran her thumb along the words, familiar hurt a fist in her chest.

  A few chambers farther, she saw the first true piles of bones, stacked haphazardly in one corner like left-over building stones. They were newer, without much yellowing from the moisture and cave mold. The wall of dead to which they belonged filled its nook from floor to ceiling, and clearly someone hadn't known quite where to put the rest. A limestone cross, nearly as tall as Ty, guarded the arrangement. In the flickering torchlight there was no making out the Latin carved into its face, only the boldly etched year: 1804. The information stopped her mid-step, and she stared at the empty sockets, the pearly ends of femurs and tibias, wondering if her mother and father were woven into the human wicker.

  Ty's arm wrapping her own broke her thoughts. He tugged her gently. “Come along. Don't think about that. Not now.”

  A few tears spilled free before she could gather herself, more at his concern than her old wounds. On the next tug, she allowed him to draw her along, putting the sight but not the memories from her mind.

  “Do you remember the chateau?” he asked, voice barely audible, swallowed in the shadows of the cave. His words were short and nervous, and she guessed he’d been working up his nerve to ask.

  “Yes, and no.” She tried to remember as a spectator, without letting the feelings overwhelm her. “I don't think we went there when I was a little child. At least, not very often. We lived in town. Mostly, I remember my father's apartments at the Tuilieries or my mother's house along the Pont Neuf.”

  She thought for a long time, sorting memories from the blur of her past. “I only remember staying at the chateau once. Fouche's police came for Papa. I think he knew times were growing serious. He sent me and my mother to the chateau, and his wife and sons...” Olivia shrugged, realizing she didn't know. “Elsewhere.”

  “I just recall having no idea why we were there. All my thoughts, all of Mama's thoughts from waking to sleeping were of my father. We had no news from him, just gossip. Then a letter came from Mama's friend, whose husband was an ambassador. She'd been told papa was being held for the guillotine.”

  She swallowed several times to open her throat and took a deep breath. “Hysterical is hardly the word. My mother would sob until she was sick. The fainting spells were a sort of blessing. At least for a few moments she was oblivious.”

  Ty kept silent, and just the scrape of their feet punctuated her recollection for a moment.

  “Mother's lady, Madame Toulon, kept warning her to calm herself, that she'd do herself harm, but there was no forcing Mama to be rational. On the third day, she went into labor. She struggled for four days. Sometimes I thought she had fainted, and sometimes I thought the last of the life was draining away from her. At the tender age of thirteen, I vowed to never have babies.” She spared a hollow laugh for the memory. “Some of my father's household, who preferred his wife, whispered in front of me that the labor was a punishment for infidelity.

  “On the fourth day, Madame Toulon lost her temper with the physician and forcibly chased him from the house.” She laughed again. “I remember her smacking a straw hat over her bun, tugging up the knot in her kerchief. She looked like a knight, readying herself to do battle. And so she did, with me in tow. On foot, down into the town. Banging on each door, shouting. One of her bony fingers would prod my ribs and she would push my shoulder toward some person or another while she questioned folks somewhere else.

  “Finally, we rooted out a midwife. She was an old potato of a woman with the thinnest amount of wispy white hair I had ever beheld on a female scalp.” Thinking for a moment, she pictured the woman's face, wide lips, and kind eyes. The name followed a moment later. “Marthe. Marthe claimed there was no complication she had not seen and few she could not address.” She smiled, adding to the tears pricking her eyes. “But she would not be pushed by Toulon, gathering her things and coming along at her own pace. Theirs was a contest of wills for the ages.”

  They skirted another pile of bones, and she absently noted that even the unused pieces were stacked with care. For some reason, it was comforting.

  “At the house, Marthe hardly gave my mother a look. The baby was incline, at a bad angle she said, and would have to be turned. She claimed that it was something she could do, but it was going to hurt. Her claim was an understatement. My poor mother screamed until her mouth was frozen open, and not enough air would fill her lungs to make more sound. For a moment I thought she might die from want of air, but only a few moments later, the baby slipped out into the world.

  “It was a boy, premature. Marthe handed me his spindly little body. I kept waiting for something to happen. For him to cry.” She stopped and held out her arms, rememberin
g his weight, the heat of his papery, newborn skin through her sleeves.

  Ty's fingers slipped around her wrist and squeezed. “I'm sorry, Olivia. So sorry.”

  She tried to ignore his comfort, and even her own feelings about the memory, pretending she was doing nothing more than telling a story. “The labor had been too long. Marthe did not think he had survived the second day. She wasn't convinced mama would last long, either. So Madame Toulon and I took him out into the family plot and buried him under that headstone at the foot of the mausoleum, the one with a worn inscription. I have no idea who was buried there first.”

  “I'm sorry,” he whispered again.

  “It was for the best. Papa sent word a few days later; some very powerful friends had bought his release, but he felt we were not safe. He wanted us ready to flee for Austria the moment he arrived.”

  Now Ty snapped his face to her, shaking his head. “Your mother could not have been equal to the journey, not so soon after…”

  She pressed on. “No. She had a fever, an infection, and was too sick and weak to eat. She improved after a fortnight, but it was too late. I remember the look on my father's face when he arrived and nothing was prepared, my mother nearly on her deathbed. I’d never seen him like that. Anguish, and a terrible resignation on his face. They were both in such peril, but he refused to leave her behind.”

  “Even though it meant his death,” whispered Ty.

  “Even though.” If only mama had been well, if they had fled Paris that very afternoon. Olivia scrubbed an arm across tired eyes. “The soldiers came in the middle of the night, so many of them that it was almost comical. Who would stand against them, the gardener and the housekeeper? My father? He had been beaten and tortured, and his arm was nearly broken.”