“No, no, no, no, NO!”
It was the sound of a grown man having a tantrum, and that could only be my uncle Tully.
27
The yelling faded, then immediately rose up again, the cries more intense. I turned to Lane.
“How many men came to feed you? Here, in the wine cellar. How many different men?”
Lane’s brows came together. “No way to know.”
“There were four last night, plus the two in the garden,” I said.
“There will be more of them than us,” said Henri, “of that we can be certain. Is he not expecting you, mon ami?”
That quieted everyone, because it was so obviously the truth. It was almost more than I could stand to sit there, hearing my uncle’s distress and being able to do nothing about it. I looked up.
“Then let me go. No,” I said, cutting off Lane’s protest, “listen to me. I’m the one who can calm Uncle Tully, and get him out if he can be convinced to go. Maybe he’s alone down there, and if so, two strangers and someone he hasn’t laid eyes on in a year and a half are only going to hinder me. I will see what can be seen and come back, either with my uncle or without. If I do not come back, then you will know what the situation is, or at least better than you do now, and there will be somebody left to do something about it. If we are expected and outnumbered, then to have all of us walk in and offer ourselves up is stupidity.”
On the surface my words had been for everyone, but my real conversation was happening with Lane. He was silent, elbows on his knees, considering while Henri muttered in French, my uncle rambled on below, and Joseph kept a sharp eye on all of us. I watched Lane thinking. We had often disagreed, fought even, but he had never yet dismissed me.
“I can do it,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. “I’ve always known that.” The gray eyes met mine, not looking away. “One hour, and we come after you both.”
I nodded while Henri leapt up, hands going to the back of his head, gesticulating wildly as he protested in French. But he did not try to do anything about it, I noticed. So far, he had teased and he had been insolent, but he had also not crossed Lane. I swung my legs into the hole as he ranted, my feet finding a firm hold, testing the first rung of the ladder.
“Not right, NOT RIGHT!” My uncle’s voice drifted up to join in with Henri’s. Lane handed me his candle.
“Be careful,” he said. His voice was very low.
“He won’t hurt me, not when he needs to control Uncle Tully.”
“I know.”
“But you will come?” I’d not wanted to ask that.
We both looked up at the metallic double click, and saw that Joseph had the pistol pointed at Henri, who in his rambling objections had gotten too close to Lane from behind. Henri threw up his hands in frustration.
“In one hour,” Lane said.
I looked down, readying my feet to find the next rung, and then there was a hand on the back of my head and Lane’s mouth had found the corner of mine. He held me only for a moment before letting me go.
I gave him a small smile. “Try not to shoot each other.” And I lowered myself down one rung.
It was awkward, climbing down a ladder with a candle, and this candle was fitful, unable to illuminate more than a small space around me. I couldn’t see how far down I had to go. But either way, this was a deep hole and I schooled myself not to think about the tons of rock and earth that must be over my head. Lane’s face and the square of light above grew smaller, as did the sounds of Henri’s protests. I was concentrating so completely on feeling for the next thin rung beneath my foot that I was a long way down before I looked to the side. When I did I held in a gasp, or perhaps, had I not clamped my mouth closed, it would have come out as a shriek. I hooked one arm securely around the iron rung, and stretched out the other, holding the candle at arm’s length.
The ladder was descending through bones. Legs, ribs, arms, skulls, and spines, some intact, some just chunks and parts. The faint light showed rusted metal, and a bit of cloth with a tarnished button, but mostly they were pieces, human beings gone yellow-brown and shiny with age, piled as far as I could see on both sides of the ladder. Something glittered at me from an eye socket and then scuttled away, making the bones rattle. I measured my breaths.
“Katharine?” Lane’s voice came down from above.
He must have seen that the candle wasn’t moving. I tilted up my head. “It’s only bones,” I hissed, though the words left out much that could have been said. These people had been tossed down a hole to rot by the hundreds.
“What?” he called.
“Bones,” I said slightly louder, and held out the candle again, hoping he could see what I did. The words echoed more than I’d wanted, probably more than either of us wanted, because we both chose not to speak again. And then I realized that all around me was silence; Uncle Tully had gone quiet.
I stepped down eleven more times, faster now, the bone piles growing closer and closer on each side, and then I was at the bottom, trying to let nothing touch me. The candle glow showed a few feet of narrow path between the disarticulated bodies, extending only in one direction. I walked as quickly as I was able, feet crunching on a fine, gravelly surface that I chose not to contemplate, instead wondering if my uncle Tully had seen this. Would it have frightened him, or would he think of the bones as merely parts, cogs and wheels broken loose from their machines?
The bone piles tapered down and then away, ending in scattered bits, and the tunnel turned left into a dark, much narrower passage. Uncle Tully had been silent for some time now. I prayed he had not wound down, as I thought of it, as he’d been known to do before, like a clock that has not had its key turned. He would need to be carried out if that had happened, and I was not going to be capable of that.
I wanted to hurry but I remembered Henri’s warnings and moved quietly down the passage, watching where each foot hit the ground. Surely Uncle Tully had to be close, but the underground of Paris seemed to be a maze, not only side to side, but up, down, and in depth as well; the proximity of noise might be deceptive.
The candle dripped wax on my hand, a brief, intense burn that faded almost instantly as the molten liquid hardened, and then I discovered a glow that was not my dripping candle, an unnatural shining in the tunnel far ahead of me. It was gaslight, coming from a passageway on my right. I became aware of a tink, tink, as I drew closer, a noise I knew to be a hammer hitting metal. I approached the lit passage, the tunnel beyond it noiseless and dark, and slowly craned my neck into the opening.
It was a cavern, huge, with a round, domed ceiling soaring at least thirty feet in the air, where the limestone had been quarried out, but it was also a workshop, the likes of which I had not seen since I first went to Stranwyne, blazingly lit with hanging gas lamps. Cut shafts shot upward through the ceiling, gas pipes running down from the surface and across the walls, tacked straight into the rough stone, both rock and pipes dripping with condensation. I blinked, disbelieving, at the steam engine, quiet at the moment, its brass gleaming with polish, and the many tall conglomerations of greased pulleys and iron wheels that I knew were machines for shaping metal. How many people walked above us, not knowing what was beneath their feet?
My eyes gathered all this in a few precious seconds, just before they became riveted to the very center of the room. There, propped up on a stand and stretching the length of what must have been a ten-foot table, was a fish. It had almost none of its metallic skin, was mostly cogs and guts, but I knew exactly what I was seeing, just as I knew the white head bent over the table it sat on. I flitted into the room, threading my way around worktables and a stack of brass bars and little piles of metal shavings and scrap.