A Spark Unseen

by Cameron, Sharon

  “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 enem
ies 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.

  When the carriage stopped at the red doors, Mary burst through them, her tongue running faster than my overly occupied mind could comprehend. But I did note that she was brushed, pressed, and had her hair done differently, with curls in the front. Together we hustled Uncle Tully through the door, coat on head, and I sent him straight up the stairs with Mary for tea and toast and probably his bed. My head was aching and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten or slept. I thought I might be surviving on my temper.

  Lane, Henri, and Joseph came into the foyer having some sort of heated discussion in French, Henri and Joseph with the crate between them, and then I saw one of the things that Mary had undoubtedly been trying to tell me a few moments before. The salon door opened and Mrs. Hardcastle came out, the two Miss Mortimers and Mrs. Reynolds taking tea behind her. The pince-nez bounced on Mrs. Hardcastle’s bosom.

  “Good Heavens, child,” she said. “Whatever has happened …” Her eyes went round. “Jean-Michel!”

  Lane froze in the foyer, and I heard the sudden rattling of china and scraping of chairs and squeals from the salon. Joseph left the crate with Henri and scooted to the library, where I saw Jean-Baptiste’s head poking out, and then there were four faces in the salon door.

  “Oh, Jean-Michel, you have a beard!” exclaimed the blonde Miss Mortimer.

  Lane wiped his hands on his pants, smiled, and went first to Mrs. Reynolds, who had come out to greet him. He took her wrinkled hands in his, kissing both her cheeks even though he was filthy, burbling away like a Frenchman. When I saw the eager expressions of the two frilly girls waiting in line just behind her, I’d had enough. I didn’t care who he was, or what he thought he wasn’t.

  “Mrs. Reynolds is perfectly aware that you speak very good English, Mr. Moreau.”

  Lane’s back stiffened just a bit. He straightened, then turned around to face me. “My apologies, Mrs. Reynolds, but that is true,” the low voice said. He had spoken to her, but he was looking at me.

  The brown-headed Miss Mortimer smiled in delight, not thinking beyond the English, while her blonde cousin stared at me with round, slightly frightened eyes. Probably because of the dirt. Or the pants. Mrs. Reynolds pretended I wasn’t there.

  “Jean-Michel,” she said, her face softening pleasantly, “we are so happy to have you back. Do we have you to thank for this, Mr. Marchand?” Her gaze went straight past my face to where Henri must be standing somewhere behind me. “Do come next door and have some refreshment, Jean-Michel. Your room is waiting for you. Almost as you left it.” I caught the edge of her sharp glance. “I will have Hawkins get you settled immediately. Are you in need of a doctor, perhaps, or a glass a wine?”

  This little speech was followed by all sorts of agreeable and sympathetic chirping from the girls, though Mrs. Hardcastle was quiet and intent, watching through the pince-nez. I straightened my back and cut through the chatter.

  “So, Mr. Moreau, will you go to Mrs. Reynolds’s? Will you ‘pursue your art’? Is that your choice?”

  Lane’s gray gaze had never yet left me. His hands came up slowly and slid into his pockets. I heard Henri light a cigarette. “No,” he said finally. “No, that is not my choice. I thought I might try America for a time.”

  “America,” I repeated.

  He closed his eyes for just a moment. Noble, I thought. He believed he was being noble.

  “So is that what you want, Mr. Moreau?”

  “No,” he said. “But don’t you think it’s best?”

  I was so angry I wanted to hit him with another brick. “Eighteen months,” I said. “You leave without warning — and yes, I know why you went — but you allow eighteen months to go by without a line or a note. And do not tell me you didn’t trust the post. You could have done something to tell me you were alive, drawing breath, and capable of holding a pen. Couldn’t you, Mr. Moreau?”

  “Yes.”

  The four ladies’ faces swung back to me. “Only you chose to be silent. Is that correct, Mr. Moreau?”

  “Yes.”

  “And for more than two months I held the belief that you were alive despite every obstacle, against the word of my closest friend.” I saw Mary sit down on the landing above me. “The word of my solicitor, and what was supposed to be the British government. And then I came to Paris, inconveniencing the livelihoods of eight hundred and forty-nine people, distressing my most dear and beloved relative, traipsing across sea and the continent to find you, and all because you chose not to write. Is that correct, Mr. Moreau?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then explain yourself.” I lifted my chin, and the four sets of eyes in the salon door went as one to Lane. I watched him coiling like a spring.

  “All right. You want to hear an explanation? I’ll give it to you. Do you have any idea, Miss Tulman,” he was as deliberate on my name as I had been on his, “do you have any notion at all, what they are saying about you in London?”

  I felt myself tense.

  “Well, I do. Aunt Bit told me, she showed me letters. Filthy, nasty gossip, and it wasn’t just London, it was in the village, too. Tattling ladies at their kitchen windows and men a
t the docks, the ones that didn’t know you, that liked to listen to rumors. And do you know why they were saying those things, dragging your name through the muck? It wasn’t because of you, Miss Tulman. It was because of me!” This last had been almost a shout, one finger slamming into the center of his chest. “Me! Not you! Because when I was born, your grandmother paid my father a wage!”

  I felt one hot tear slide down my cheek. My grandmother had certainly never paid his father a wage, but Lane would never know that. He was mesmerizing, just as he’d been in the cavern, but this pain was very real, and it hurt me.

  “Do you have any idea what it was like to walk down the village lane and hear those things? To have your house pointed out to me in Paris?” He flung out a hand at the women beside him. “Do you know what those ladies said you were … in front of me?” One of the Miss Mortimers put a gloved hand to her mouth. “I did not write, Miss Tulman, so you could be free of all that.”

  “And I suppose,” I said quietly, “that you thought the loss of my good name would be too much for me. Would have me flying to pieces and make my life unlivable. Well, thank you so much for making that decision for me, Mr. Moreau. It was obviously my good name I was searching every hospital in Paris for!”

  “She has you on that one, mon ami,” said Henri.

  “Mr. Moreau, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself and continuing on at Stranwyne on my own.” And I could, I realized. I had been. “But I believe it is a question of more, rather than less.”

  He looked up sharply, and I saw that the significance of these words had not been lost on him.

  “Whatever you think you should have done and didn’t over the past few days … I believe that you made a choice, and that it was correct.” I would never tell him he’d been contemplating the murder of his half brother. “I know it to have been correct. Someone very wise once told me that you always know what is right, and I believe him. I think to have done differently would have made you … less. I do not think you could have lived with less. I, personally, prefer to live with more, and don’t care a whit what those ladies over there think of it.”