spindles. And then I saw Ben’s body tilting forward, straining to see over my uncle’s creation, the blue, empty eyes wide as he spotted the strange flame; and I saw Lane’s brows coming down, his hand coming up, and the wires now connected to the fish’s metal frame. I watched Lane’s arm stretch, and Ben leaning, both Ben’s hands coming down toward the fish.
“Stop!” I screamed. And Lane did.
There was a blinding flash and Ben’s body convulsed, crackling, eyes unblinking, staring straight at my uncle as he shook, stuck to the fish as if to a magnet. Smoke went up, a corona of purple fire and light blazing from his hands. A part of me realized that there was screaming, that it was coming from my mouth, and that the word I was screaming was “No!” Robert had dropped the gun and was reaching for Ben, to wrench him away from the fish and, as soon as he touched Ben’s body, he was thrown violently, almost supernaturally across the room, hitting the metal press before he fell to the floor. Ben dropped as Robert did and the crackling stopped, leaving only the smaller hum of the blue flame between the spindles.
Uncle Tully let go of his little switch, and the electricity was gone. “Not to touch, not to touch, not to touch …” he chanted.
I sat down hard on a crate, learning the smell of burnt flesh. I saw Henri’s bloody face staring downward, horror-struck, the same expression on Joseph’s as he rose up from behind a workbench near the door. His pistol was still cocked.
“Stay where you are, Katharine,” Lane said, but there was no need. I could see Ben’s dead body from underneath the table. His hands were charred, blackened stumps.
As soon as Lane had picked the lock on Uncle Tully’s shackle, we led my uncle out and a little way down the passage, distracting him from the sound of the hammers inside the cavern, where Joseph and Henri were destroying Ben Aldridge’s fish. It was uncertain whether Robert had died from the electricity or from the blow of the metal press, but either way, my uncle had examined the two bodies curiously and carefully. It was seeing a machine taken apart that we were not sure he could stomach.
We set him in a chair from the workshop and he folded his hands in his lap. “I am ready to go now,” he said. “And I wish to go to the old place, not the new one.” He was supremely confident. I was amazed, stunned, and also horrified, unable to feel anything properly. “This place was not right, was it, little niece?”
“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 …”
