A Spark Unseen

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 lumiere!” 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?”

“Quarry,” said Lane. “We’re in stone quarries.”

“Yes. Where they took the stone away. Maybe it was so with the catacombs as well. But these tunnels are long before France.”

“Then how do you know of them?”

Henri grinned back at me, a smile of actual pleasure, with no teasing in it. “I played here, Miss Tulman, with my brother, many, many times. We found a way through our cellar, and it was like another world. We were explorers, we made maps. And all without leaving the house. Or that is how we explained it to our mother, rest in peace. Our explanations were not always so successful.”

“And the church?”

“There is a crypt, but it is an old one, below the crypt of Saint-Merri. From the church that was there before, I think, and in there is a door to the tunnels. Very old. I am sad to say that my brother and I were sometimes guilty of using it to steal the priest’s wine, which my mother told us was a very large sin. She made us go to confession, but, being a good mother, she took us to a different priest. But twice I have followed the man you call Aldridge to Saint-Merri from the Tuileries, and twice he has not come out again. I do not think he is confessing that many sins, do you, Miss Tulman? He is getting into the tunnels, I think. But I have not been here for many years now, so we shall … ah.”

We all stopped. The tunnel was blocked by a long, cascading tumble of fallen stone.

“Donnez-moi la chandelle, s’il vous plait,” Henri said softly, and I saw the quick look of permission Joseph got from Lane before he handed Henri the candle. I wondered if Henri knew he was on a leash, and probably a rather short one, if I had to guess. I’d been bumping against Joseph’s jacket, and had felt the pistol in his pocket. But I had accomplished what I wished. Lane had met my eyes before we stopped.

Henri put a foot experimentally on the leading edge of the stones. “There is a way,” he said, peering up at the pile. “It is not a hard climb. I will hold the candle.”

When we had all scrambled through — the climb, in my opinion, not being difficult if you were the height of a grown man — the candle went back to Joseph. Joseph’s hand was covered in pale, running drips of hardened wax, and I tied a handkerchief around it before we started off again. He smiled his thanks to me, showing the wrinkles around his eyes.

Twice more we climbed a rockfall, though none as difficult as the first, and then Henri held up his hand.

“What is it?” Lane asked. The stub of the candle showed me all of his suspicion.

Henri was looking about, as if he might be lost, but then his expression lightened, and he motioned for Joseph to bring the candle. There was a wooden door, with no handle or latch, covered in stone-colored dust and therefore barely distinguishable from the walls, not much different than we were. And then, all at once, a long, thin knife had appeared in Henri’s hand.

Joseph jumped back, hand to his pocket, and Lane had me instantly behind him, but Henri merely grinned as he knelt down and slid the knife into the crack between the door and the jamb. I waited behind Lane, feeling his tension increase while Henri worked the blade, jiggling it against something on the other side. Henri stood and used all his weight to jerk upward on the knife handle. Wood rattled and metal grunted on the other side, and Henri, triumphant, let the door swing open into the space beyond it. The knife was already gone, secreted to who knew where on his person.

“Shall I go first?” Henri offered. He stepped into the darkness, and Joseph went next, candle held aloft, hand in his pocket, watching Henri’s every step. I followed Lane cautiously.

“This is the crypt you described, is it not?” Henri said, voice echoing. “Where the man Aldridge held you?”

I walked a little way down the flagged floor of a barrel-shaped room, narrow and chill, rough arches