Pascal finds Felicity and me for breakfast—a blissfully full and not-thieved meal, satisfying in spite of the fact that it contains a fair amount more rice and beans than I’m generally inclined to. We eat crouched on the deck of the canal boat around a smoking iron stove, tin plates cupped between our hands and no utensils but bread.
The fair, Pascal tells us, is a traveling one. The merchants load their tents into boats and float up and down the Rh?ne, stopping in towns they come to and mixing with the local tradesmen until they’ve recruited enough to set up stalls.
As the dawn breaks, muddy and pink across the water, women spread laundry along the rails and jump between the decks to speak to each other. Children run along the banks. Men play cards and smoke pipes, the gauzy threads that rise from their lips mingling with the early-morning mist off the water. They seem complete unto themselves, a small, floating kingdom along the fringes of the sea and, remarkably, ordinary to themselves. Perhaps this is what the Grand Tour is meant to do—show me the way other people live, in lives that are not like my own. It’s a strange feeling, realizing that other people you don’t know have their own full lives that don’t touch yours.
I try to watch without staring, until Felicity kicks me. “You needn’t look at them like they’re on display.”
“I’m interested.”
“You’re gawking. Monty, we’re guests.”
Pascal slides a piece of bread around the rim of his plate, two fingers propping the crust. “You should take some food to Mr. Newton.”
“I don’t think he’ll eat,” Felicity replies. “I tried earlier but he couldn’t keep anything down.”
Pascal chews for a moment, looking to the cabin where Percy’s lying, then says, “Where is it you come from?”
“England,” I reply. “We’re touring.”
“You seem to be running.”
“Well, that’s what we’re currently doing, but we were once touring.”
“The men you were running from—are they traveling with you?”
“No, they attacked us on the road from Paris. We think they’re looking for . . .” I glance at Felicity. She gives me a little shrug, as if to say, Why not? I pull the puzzle box out of my pocket and hand it to Pascal. “We think they’re after this.”
He turns it over in his hands, spinning the dials a few times. “A box.”
“That’s the extent of what we know about it.”
“Why do they want it?”
“We don’t know,” Felicity says. “And we’re afraid if we hand it over, we’ll be killed for taking it.”
“Ah, so you stole it?”
“Yes, but not from them.” Then I remember the highwayman was the duke from Versailles, in whose apartments I was caught with a bare-breasted French girl. “Perhaps sort of from them.”
“It looks quite old.” He hands the puzzle box back to me and I stash it in my coat. “There are two women who travel in our company who made their living in antiques. They deal mostly in trinkets now—little things that sell at carnivals. But they may know something about it, if you let me show them.”
I look over at Felicity, like we might consult on this, but she says, “Yes, absolutely. If they could tell us anything, that would be so appreciated.”
“They may be at the fair already. I’ll see if I can fetch them. Stay here.”
As Pascal picks his way across the deck, I murmur to Felicity, “You think this is a good idea?”
“I think I’d like to know why we’re being hunted,” she says. “And what we can do to stop it.” She pokes at the pocket of my coat harboring the puzzle box. “This is your fault, Henry. At least try to fix things.”
I would like very much to punch her in the nose for saying that, even though she’s right.
Pascal returns half an hour later with a woman on each arm, both old and bent and dressed head-to-toe in black, complete with thick veils like they’re in mourning. He climbs onto the boat first, then helps them each across. Felicity and I both stand.
“Senyoretes Ernesta Herrera”—he inclines toward the taller of the two—“i Eva Davila. They are the grandmothers to our company—les nostres àvies.” He smiles fondly at the two when he says it. “I told them about your situation and they believe they might be able to help.”
I start to pull the puzzle box out of my pocket, but the taller woman’s hand—Ernesta’s—shoots out much faster than her pace led me to believe it was capable of and closes around my wrist. “Not here,” she hisses in accented French.
“Why not here?”
“If people are after it,” she says, “do not wave it around.”
We follow the grandmothers into the cabin of the boat. Ernesta laughs softly when she sees Percy in bed and says over her shoulder to Pascal, “You have a menagerie of these unfortunates, mijo.”
As we shuffle in, I try to look anywhere but at Percy, but that’s a bit of a trick in a room that’s barely eight foot square. I do manage to only do it out of the corner of my eye, not straight on, which is a bit coyer and conveys that I’m still mad as hell at him. He looks well pathetic, curled up on his side, face turned to the pillow as pale sunlight wafts through the cabin door. His hair is matted on one side where he’s been lying on it, and his skin looks slick and waxy.
But I refuse to be moved.
Pascal stays out on deck, while Ernesta and Eva settle themselves on cushions tossed across the floor. Felicity perches on the end of the box bed and says something to Percy, too quietly for me to hear. He shakes his head, face turned away from hers.
There’s nowhere else to sit unless I want to cuddle up with Percy, so I stand sort of awkwardly in the center of it all, trying to get my sea legs and not knock my head on the hanging lamps.
“Could we perhaps speak elsewhere?” Felicity says, but Percy opens his eyes and pushes himself up on an elbow. The neck of his shirt slips down over his shoulder, revealing the sharp course of his collarbone.
“No, I want to hear this.”
Ernesta holds out a hand to me. “Let us see.”
I surrender the puzzle box. She turns it over in her hands, then passes it to Eva. “You have stolen this.”
Felicity and Percy both look at me, and there’s no point denying it, so I nod.
“You must return it.”
“The men I took it from are trying to kill us,” I say.
“Not to them.” She waves a hand. “It does not belong to them.”
“How do you know?”
“This is a Baseggio puzzle box. They are expensive and rare. And they are not used to hold things of worldly value, like money or jewelry or the wants of common thieves.” She spins one of the dials with the tip of her finger. It makes a soft ticking sound, like a clock winding. “These boxes were designed to carry alchemical compounds over long distances and keep them safe if stolen.”
Eva taps the end of the box and says something in a language I don’t understand. Ernesta translates. “The name of the owner is carved here, on the rim.” She holds it up and points to the thin band of enameling along the hinge, inscribed with gold letters that I hadn’t noticed before. “Professor Mateu Robles.”
“I know him,” Felicity says. Then she adds, when we all look to her, “Not personally. I attended a lecture on his work in Paris. He studies panaceas.”
“What’s a panacea?” Percy asks.