“No, Uncle,” I whispered.
“I said not to touch. I told him so, didn’t I, Simon’s baby?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“And now he’s gone away, the forever kind. Isn’t that so?”
I nodded, biting my lip.
“He was not splendid. He touched my things. And he hurt my little niece. You should not hurt. That is not right. He made my niece not happy.”
Lane crouched down, elbows on knees, so my uncle could see his face. “You did well, Mr. Tully. I reckon Marianna is proud of you. She would have said you did just right.”
I was not at all certain how I felt about this logic.
“Lane knows,” Uncle Tully said cheerfully. “Lane always knows what is right. He always knows. And Lane came, didn’t he, little niece? That was not the forever kind.”
“Just like I said I would, Mr. Tully.” But his voice had been very quiet when he said it.
“I want to go to the old place.”
“Yes, Uncle. I know. But first we have to wait for twenty. You know you can wait for twenty.”
He instantly closed his eyes, counting the seconds, a thing he was rather good at as long as he was reminded to stop. Lane stood slowly. I wondered when he’d last slept. He held the candle up to my face, examining my bruising mouth while I tucked my hair back into the red cap, and then he leaned against the wall, breathing in and out, making the light waver in crazed patterns along the wall while the hammers struck metal in the cavern. He glanced once at Uncle Tully, and then let his back slide down until he was sitting. I saw the war being waged beneath his skin. I got onto my knees and sat in front of him.
“You need to tell me something,” I stated, though it was really a question.
Lane wouldn’t fully meet my eyes, and the burning knot in my middle became a cold, lead weight. He might need to tell me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it.
“When Ben took me …” He ran a hand through his hair. “It was … because I let him.”
I waited for him to go on, and the hand in his hair became a fist, pulling.
“Months I’d been at it, Katharine. Months! And with nothing to show for it but a bullet hole in a wall beside my head. And Ben had put himself right in the middle of a fortress with the imperial court. Untouchable. Joseph had heard he’d been buying arsenic, and then there was Mrs. Reynolds in the shop, her address right there in the book, and there’s not a smuggler in France that doesn’t know Mrs. DuPont, or that’s what Jean-Baptiste says, and he is one. So I painted her some things and got myself taken in by the Reynolds family, and Joseph made sure Ben heard that Mrs. DuPont was selling. Only Ben didn’t come himself; he sent his manservant. I don’t know what’s happened to him since. …”
“Mary killed him,” I said. Lane lifted his head to look at me. “In Stranwyne, with a hammer. We buried him on the hill and pretended he was Uncle Tully.” He reached out and put one long finger on the scar on my neck. “Yes,” I said, responding to the question he had not asked. Lane closed his eyes, silent, his jaw working in and out while the hammers rang. He continued.
“I paid Mrs. DuPont to tell Ben Aldridge exactly where I’d be, and let him take me. I just didn’t think they’d hit me quite so hard.”
“But how did it help you, to be locked in a wine cellar?”
“Because I was locked in a wine cellar with my picklocks in my boot. And one of them did at one time happen to be a fork, Katharine, in case you were wondering.” I smiled just a little, but he didn’t see; he still had his eyes closed. “I wasn’t in that room for more than a day, and as soon as I learned the routine I was only there when they came to feed me. I’ve been all over these tunnels. I told Joseph where the trapdoor was. And I knew exactly where I was sending you. I couldn’t believe it when Marchand opened that door. I must have passed it dozens of times without seeing it.”
I glanced at my uncle’s silently counting lips. “But why not just tell me, then? And if you were here, then … why didn’t you just destroy the fish when you had the chance?”
“You’re asking the wrong question.” He was coming to it now. I could see whatever it was building to a crisis. “What good would it have done to tear the thing to pieces? He would just build another. It’s the idea, Katharine, that’s what’s so hard to stop. It was the idea that had to die.”
His eyes were open now, his gaze on the candle flame. “Three times I was in there with him, under the bench with the canvas. Three times I could have done it. Twice with a knife, once with his own gun. Not a soul down here to stop me. If he had found me, fought me, I think maybe I could’ve. But he didn’t. He just whistled and went about his business, and … I didn’t. Couldn’t. It’s what I came here for, all those months ago, and I couldn’t, not for Davy, and not for you. If I had, he wouldn’t have gone to Stranwyne and you wouldn’t be here with a scar on your neck. Maybe Mr. Babcock would be alive. Mr. Tully was the better man, in the end.”
I stared at Lane, at this wretched bitterness I did not understand. He sighed.
“I was never going to tell you this. Any of it. I didn’t want you to know. But now … I think maybe it’s best that you do.” He was completely avoiding my gaze now.
“So when you saw me in the courtyard …”
“Leaving. Getting out of Paris. I wasn’t doing any good here.”
“And where were you going?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I felt my eyes narrow. It mattered to me. The hammers had slowed in the cavern, and I could hear Henri and Joseph talking. Uncle Tully would be done counting soon. “Lane, where does the tunnel go?”
“Beneath the Tuileries. A straight passage, with little branches coming off, all the way through. We should probably go that way. I think we’ll be risking morning mass if we go through the church, and the passage is stairs rather than ladders, easier for Mr. Tully. Ben spent most of his day socializing with the court, and the boy Robert …”
I had a pang for Mary.
“… and the manservant were the only other ones I ever saw down here. We shouldn’t have any other company.”
I watched the tension inside him coiling as he talked, tightening, closing him to me, and it had nothing to do with our way out of the tunnel. There was still something else, a deeper layer that he had not told me, and I could not yet see.
“I’ll get Marchand and Joseph to come back with me tomorrow,” Lane was saying. “We’ll take care of the bodies and see if the place can’t be sealed off. I doubt the emperor knows about these tunnels, since they’re here, and I don’t know how long it will take for him to notice who’s missing, or even how much he knows about what Ben was up to. But I’m thinking Mr. Tully needs to be on a boat no later than day after tomorrow. To be safe. Can it be managed?”
“I think so.” He was right; we would have to get out of Paris as soon as possible. But I dreaded sending Uncle Tully back into that horrid sleep.
The gaslights went off in the cavern then, leaving us only with the candle flame, and Joseph and Henri came out, both a little sweaty, Joseph carrying the crate that now contained my uncle’s lightning box. Lane was suddenly on his feet, and Uncle Tully’s eyes snapped open. He put his intense gaze directly on Lane, making sure not to notice the other two men. “Fourteen, and fifty-two,” he announced. “Take me to the old place now.”
Lane took the crate from Joseph, quickly, before my uncle could notice who had been holding his things, and I saw Joseph look over at Lane and frown, then glance uneasily at me. Lane did not look at me as he said, “The new place first, Mr. Tully, just for a bit. Then the old place next.”
I could not tell if that meant Lane was or was not coming with me.