“This is the story of this place,” she said. “When quarry workmen find wells, they back away. They leave the stone untouched all around the well. They make it one of these pillars. Or they build around the well shaft with cut stone and mortar. Our well, the well of the convent, lies within one of these thick walls or these columns of stone.”
No one spoke. There was nothing to say. She finished, most simply, “We will find it.”
Adrian dropped his pack at her feet. Like Jean-Paul, like Justine and Poulet, he began to light candles and secure them to the floor with drippings of their own wax. Five candles. A dozen. Two dozen. A circle of light grew around their supplies, small and stubborn as stars in the sky. They invaded the darkness, and made camp, and these were their sentinels.
Adrian came to her when he was done. “So I’m looking for a patched-up hole in one of these big pillars, or a bit of wall that doesn’t make sense. Right?”
“Just so.” They might spend a week looking. Guillaume had one day. Perhaps two. Did everyone here know how small the chances were?
“What kind of idiots build a city on eggshells? Somebody sneezes and the whole place is going to fall in.” Adrian went off, shaking his head. “Paris.”
Poulet drank wine from his flask, corked it, and stowed it in the leather pack he carried. He raised his voice. “Don’t go where you can’t see somebody’s light. If you get lost, sit down and wait. I might even come looking for you.
The first hour was spent searching every pillar and wall of that gallery, minutely, for any sign. They moved beyond, then, and lit their way into the next gallery and searched that.
In the fifth hour, they stopped to eat in a domed niche cut within the rocks. They ate on the circles of steps that led down to where water lived within the rocks. Eight feet below them lay a round pool, the drinking water, and perhaps the footbath, of the old quarrymen. It was water of such complete clarity it almost did not exist, except that it reflected back the flame of their candles. They ate the excellent tarts and cheeses served in the whorehouse and drank wine and spoke very little to one another.
Papa was tiring. She had made him bring a warm coat, but he was chilled. It would be late afternoon in the outside world.
Their tenth hour under the earth, six o’clock in the evening, they had traced and retraced and circled the center of their search and were in a new gallery. Bats spiraled upward and escaped through some vent in the arched ceiling. A weak shaft of light infiltrated from far above and struck all the way down to the cavern floor, fresh and beautiful as a spring in the desert.
It was a ventilation shaft, drilled in the rock. She went to it as if pulled by strings and stood in the light and looked up. She had been in darkness for a century.
“I’ll track this, up top, and find it,” Poulet said. “It’ll show exactly where we are. But that’s going to take a day or two. It probably comes up in somebody’s garden.”
They stood, all of them, looking up.
“It’ll be big enough for a man to go through, lowered by a rope. Always good to have one more entrance,” Poulet said.
They were close. She knew it. If she could tear these rock walls and rock stanchions apart, she’d find it.
Jean-Paul came up beside her. “We can do the ploy with a prison transfer, just after dawn. We have time to forge the papers if we head back now. We’ll use Harrier’s carriage and he’ll go as driver. I still play a convincing guard.”
“Marguerite . . .”
“I have decided, Jean-Paul. It is this or nothing. We are committed.”
They did not discuss it, but none of them moved from the spot. They would look further, but they all knew it was pointless.
A wind exhaled from the quarries, beginning who knew where, and leaving through that hole far above. The thin flowing of air would have been imperceptible anywhere else. Here, she could hear it whisper past her ears.
And she knew.
She said, “A well is not merely a hole in the ground. It is for bringing up water. The chain clinks of metal. The bucket splashes at the bottom. The load squeals going up again. We’ve been wrong. We do not look for the well. We listen for it.”
Perhaps they were not cautious. Perhaps they raced too quickly from one chamber to another, to listen, with ears to the rock. But no harm came of it.
Justine was the one who heard. Less than thirty feet from where they had dropped their packs she heard the faint, sharp creaking of the chain behind a wall of mortared stone blocks.
Adrian ran for the picks and crowbars. It took five minutes to break the mortar and pry a stone loose. Carefully. Quietly.
Jean-Paul whispered, “If this is the well, they can hear us down here. I don’t want them wondering why the frogs are talking.”
He took the block out and stepped back. In that hand-width of opening, they saw the void behind. There was the most fragile and imaginary suggestion of light.
“We’ve done it,” she said.
Forty-three
WHEN THE OPENING WAS LARGE ENOUGH, SHE leaned into the well and twisted around to look upward to the coin-sized circle of light above. Only a sou-sized coin, but it dazzled. Contrast is everything.
They spoke in whispers. Every few minutes, the bucket came down the shaft and went up again, full.
She chose a spot away from the opening of the well so her candles would not spill light into the well shaft, in case someone should look down. There was a corner where a block wall met another wall. This was where she would wait.
“I want to say you can’t stay here.” Jean-Paul sighed. “But you’ll do exactly what you want.”
“There is nothing useful for me to accomplish above ground. Victor is on the hunt for me. I’m in danger from him every step I take on the street. I endanger anyone with me.” That wasn’t why she had to stay. Jean-Paul would know that.
“In La Flèche, we don’t make grand gestures, Marguerite.”
“This one, I will make.”
He knew the futility of arguing with her.
She settled in to wait. Poulet came and kissed her on both cheeks and left his coat behind for her to wrap herself in and sit upon. He unpacked candles and flint and tinder and set them next to her. Also his flask of wine and all the food they had not eaten.
Jean-Paul left his gold watch, his father’s watch, putting it into her hand as if it were a casual nothing. He unrolled a ball of twine, beginning at her feet, that would lead all the way out. “In case,” he said. He left his coat also and would not be talked into keeping it.
Papa gave her the sticky dates he had found in the bottom of his pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. He had been struck by several interesting observations of the magnetic waves beneath the ground. He began to describe them to her.
But he proved perfectly willing to talk about his list of geniuses. The very one he gave Robespierre. Yes. There was a copy in the library at home. Not in his desk. He had left it in a book . . . He would find it for her.
She pointed out that Victor had tried to poison her. Victor was very likely the man who had set assassins on
