“I tracked him all over Paris,” he said. “Made lists, mapped the places he’d been, where he might go. I know where he bought his base metal, and sulfur and acid, and a host of other things. I know who his father is, and I know why he goes to Charenton. What I don’t understand is why Ben Aldridge has been buying arsenic, arsenic that he doesn’t have to sign his name for.”
He held up the two little white packages, his body coiled up, unnaturally still.
“But whatever he is doing, I will end it this time. Like I should have at Stranwyne. I swear that to you.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s end it, then, and go get Uncle Tully.”
When Jean-Baptiste said he could find no one watching the house, we left him with Mary, who gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stuffed a bun into Mr. Babcock’s shirt pocket, and I slipped into the streets with Lane and Joseph, again following the lead of Henri Marchand.
Henri took us through the back alleys, avoiding the main boulevards, snaking our way through the city as we had on our trip to Rue Tisserand. We moved fast, Lane at Henri’s left elbow, Joseph on his right, as if they were escorting a criminal or a dignitary. I trotted a few steps behind, watching Lane. He was shadowy in the predawn light, but a shadow that seemed natural, to belong, turning corners he knew, muttering the occasional word to Joseph in French. He seemed a man in his place, not a man in a place he has carved for himself, as he’d been at Stranwyne. It made me wonder what he saw now when he thought of home. The notion made me uneasy.
Despite our speed, the light grew, and even with a thin, early fog my anonymity was coming to an end. I received a long, penetrating look from a flower seller setting up her wares before Henri led us sliding down a short, steep embankment that ended in a stone wall.
My feet squelched when I landed at the bottom of the wall, the smell of the river wafting up foul from the fog. We were at the edge of the Seine. The water was lower here, or the banks higher; a thin strip of muddy land was just navigable between the river and the wall. We made our way beneath a stone bridge, and Lane hung back, speaking to me for the first time since our conversation in the corridor.
“Marchand thinks that we can’t have you on the streets anymore, that we need to go underground a little sooner than he’d planned.” A carriage rattled by on the street over our heads, the clop of the hooves reverberating against the stone. “He may be right, but until we get to the church, this is where he has his advantage. Stay close to Joseph or to me. Agreed?”
I hesitated. Cold-blooded murder or leaving us lost underground was not Henri’s style, I thought. But then again, how could I be certain? It was not as if he’d ever been truthful with me.
“Do you agree, Katharine?”
I nodded. Joseph was bending down, following Henri into a round, bricked, stinking opening in the embankment. Lane stepped toward the tunnel, then quickly detoured to the edge of the river, mud sucking at his feet. He emptied the two white parcels of arsenic into the gray water, careful to not let a breeze catch the powder.
I watched him straighten, saw the tension in his back as he looked at the thin paper dissolving in the slight current, and suddenly I wondered exactly what Lane was not telling me. There was something about this that was more than Wickersham and Ben Aldridge and my uncle; I could almost see the thing, coiled up and waiting, biding its time inside him. “I only came to get my things,” he’d said in the dark of the courtyard. And just where had he been planning on going next, when he came upon me beside that fountain? And he had been dodging my gaze ever since we left my grandmother’s house, as he’d done once before, just before he left Stranwyne. I felt my own determination set, like silver cooling in a mold. Lane and I would not be going down that particular road again, not if I could help it. He ducked into the tunnel, avoiding both my eyes and the stream of thick brownish water running out the tunnel’s center. I climbed in after him.
One step inside and I gagged, triggering an almost instantaneous heave in my middle. The stench in the tunnel was so overpowering I staggered, using my free hand to pull Mr. Babcock’s collar over my nose. Lane was bent almost double in front of me, nose cradled in the crook of his elbow. The light from the entrance grew fainter as the air grew warmer. I heard the squeaks and scrabblings of rats, and just ahead of Lane, the sound of Joseph rooting through his pockets. Henri must have heard Joseph as well because he looked back at us over his hunched shoulders, dark eyes wide over the sleeve he held over his face.
“Pas de lumière!” Henri shouted.
Joseph looked at Lane, Lane nodded, and only then did Joseph put the candle and matches back into his pocket. “Explosion,” Lane whispered back at me. I eyed the passing murky water, for a moment unsure if a tunnel of fire could be more of a torture than this sewer of stink. But before the light from the outside world was quite gone, Henri turned right and squeezed himself into the wall. There was a crack there, I saw, a vertical fissure where the bricks of the tunnel had fallen away. I slipped in after Lane, feeling raw, cut stone beneath my hands. The fallen bricks had revealed a passageway, and one that was much older than the sewers.
The passage widened with height enough for me to straighten. I scooted my way in the dark, stone beneath each of my upraised palms, guiding me forward, the ground below angling down. And then the shuffling of feet ahead of me quieted, and I found myself in the open again, though where I did not know. The air was cool, smelling of stone and musty damp, except for the foulness wafting out from the way we’d come.
“Joseph,” I heard Lane say, somewhere close to my right, and I listened to him once again fumble with the candles. A match struck, blazing like a star in the dark, blinding until my eyes adjusted to the soft, flickering light. We were in a stone passage, deep beneath the city, the candlelight dancing on dust motes and tan limestone walls. Beyond the light was utter blackness.
“Stay together,” Henri whispered, voice enhanced by the stone, “and do not walk ahead of the light. There are sometimes holes, old wells that it would take a very long time to find the bottom of.”
We walked slowly, gathered around Joseph’s candle, Lane on one side, myself on the other, Henri a little ahead, just at the edge of the light circle, the only noise the occasional drip that echoed in the caverns. The pace was trying my patience. I wanted to run, to find my uncle instantly, and it felt as if we were getting nowhere. The walls were unvarying in their irregularity, endlessly carved shapes of the same-hued stone, sometimes with passages going off to the right and left. Some of these we passed, and some of these we took, but always with the same slow, steady footfalls, and often with a gradual descent.
Lane was evading my eyes, looking away if he caught my glance. Whatever he was hiding from me was still there. I could see it in the way he held his head and his back. I could feel it in the air, too; it was a wonder to me that everyone did not feel it. Perhaps Joseph did, being stuck between the two of us. He had frown wrinkles in his forehead, leaving white lines in the dust that was now covering us. For no reason at all I had an image of his quite pretty and very healthy sister. The knot in my middle was now a living, flaming thing, but it still found room for a little burst of heat directed at Lane.
After he looked away from me yet again, I asked Henri suddenly, “Are these the catacombs, Henri?” My words bounced back and forth above my head.
“No,” he replied, “not like what the people used to pay their sous and francs to see. Those are full of bones, put together in patterns, like decoration. They are dangerous and are closed now. You must write a letter for permission to see them. But that is all on the other side of the Seine. We are in places where they extraire, they cut the stone.” He turned to Lane. “What is the English?”