Helena leads us down the hallway, past a pair of armless classical statues, bodies wound into the twist of a swan’s neck, then stops before a door at the end, another death’s-head etched into the baseboard. She reaches for the latch, then stops and turns back to us. She’s eyeing the box in my hand rather intently, fingers coiling at her side like she’d like to get hold of it. “My brother does not do well with strangers.”
I’m not sure what we’re supposed to say in reply. It’s not as though we’re an imposition—we’ve brought the damn box back to them, after all, and at great personal risk, I’d like to add. They should be throwing gratitude and kindness and cream puffs at us, though I’d settle for just the cream puffs.
“Is there something you’d like us to do about that?” I ask flatly. Felicity kicks the back of my foot.
Helena puts a hand to her brow, then shakes her head. “I’m sorry. You simply . . . You’ve startled me.”
“We’re sorry to intrude,” Felicity offers.
“No, you’ve done us a favor. We didn’t think we’d see it again, once it was . . . stolen. But don’t be put off by Dante.”
She cracks the handle, and we file through the door after her. My foot catches on a loose floorcloth near the threshold and I nearly pitch forward into her backside, which would make for a rather ungentlemanly impression upon our gracious hosts. Percy clearly doesn’t learn from my error, for three seconds after I right myself, I hear him stumble.
Beyond the door, we are enveloped by a thick incense smell that makes me want to bat at the air. The maroon-papered walls are almost entirely blotted out by things—there’s no other word for it. Three walls are shelves stuffed with books, interrupted by bell jars sheltering funguses, canopic urns and gold-leafed death masks, and a stone trefoil knot that looks like it was recently dug up from some ancient ruins, red clay still clinging to its crevices. On one wall is a papyrus scroll bearing an etching of a dragon coiled in a circle, swallowing its own tail. Someone’s scribbled Eastern-looking characters in paint along a panel of the wainscoting, and an actual tombstone is resting against the desk. A heart-shaped locket hanging from its curlicues at first glance appears carved from obsidian but upon closer inspection proves to be transparent glass filled with blood.
Wedged into one corner of the room behind a crystallophone so large it nearly obstructs him is a man—a young man, I realize when he looks up, probably younger than Percy and me. He’s thin, with a library pallor and a bookish stoop; spectacles are jammed onto his forehead and his arms are full of what appear to be scrolls covered in pictorial glyphs. He nearly drops them all when he sees us.
“I’m so—I didn’t—so sorry.” He speaks French as well, with a bad stammer that bottlenecks his words.
“Dante, greet our guests,” Helena says. She’s behind us, one hand still on the doorknob, and the sensation of being trapped creeps up on me.
“You should have—I could have—Why’d you bring them here?” He thrusts the papyrus into an open desk drawer, like he’s trying to tidy up before we can get a good view of the mess. Which seems a bit futile.
“They’ve brought Father’s Baseggio Box,” Helena says.
“What?” Dante knocks his spectacles down onto his nose—only partly on purpose, I suspect—and clambers around the desk, tripping over the headstone in his haste. “You—you got it back? I mean, you—you found it? You have it?”
I extend it to him, and he accepts, careful not to brush his fingers against mine, then holds it very close to his face.
“Dante,” Helena says, sounding like a stern governess. He looks meekly to her. “I told them it’s yours, as our father is dead.”
His eyes go wide at her, then back at the box. Then he looks up again and seems to see us for the first time. “My—my God.” He doesn’t look entirely happy about his reunion with the box any longer—a bit more shocked, with a shade of panic I can’t fathom, though that might be more due to our presence than to the delivery itself. “Thank you, I didn’t think we’d—we’d see it . . . Thank you. Would you . . . ? Thank you! Can you sit down? Would you like to?” He kicks at a chair before the desk, and a stack of books topples off. They land with their spines cracked upward and pages spread, like birds shot from the sky.
There are two chairs, and I take one, Percy the other. Felicity has become distracted by a cabinet near the door; it contains seven ampoules in varying shades from basalt black to a pearled pink like the inside of an oyster shell.
“Don’t touch those,” Helena snaps, and Felicity drags her hand back.
“Sorry. I was interested in the compounds. Are they medicinal?”
“They’re cure-alls,” Dante says, then goes fantastically red. He can’t seem to keep his eyes on Felicity, even when she looks at him. “Panaceas being the most—the scientific term, though they’re not—not entirely—”
My heart leaps—it couldn’t possibly be this easy, could it, to be shown into the exact room and seated beside the substances we’re looking for?—but then Helena adds, “They’re antidotes that work for most poisons. Activated charcoal, magnesium oxide, tannic acid, elephant tree sap, ginseng, tar water, and Atropa belladonna.”
Dante clambers over a stack of crates and swings himself into the chair behind the desk. It’s so low and the desk so large it looks as though he could rather comfortably rest his chin upon the tabletop. He pushes his glasses up his forehead and they immediately slip back down and knock him on the nose. “They’re our father’s. He is—he was. He was an alchemist.”
“Was he the author Mateu Robles?” Felicity asks. “I went to a lecture on one of his books.”
“The same. He has—quite a following.” Dante keeps his eyes on the floor and the box between his hands as we talk, all the while twisting the dials in an absent way that suggests it’s a familiar habit. “Very sorry about the . . .” He waves his hand vaguely at the room. “It’s all his.”
Helena has edged around to stand behind her brother. Her eyes keep flitting down to the dials of the box as he turns them. “Did you come from far to bring this?”
“From England,” Percy says. “By way of France. We were on our Tour, but we diverted to return the box to you.”
“And how did you come to be in possession of it?” she asks.
Felicity and Percy both look to me, like they’re giving me the choice of how honest I’d like to be. “I stole it,” I say, which comes out a bit blunter than it sounded in my head. “I didn’t know it had any value,” I add quickly when the Robles siblings both look strangely at me. “I was just looking for something to steal.”
Which certainly makes me sound benevolent.
Then, to truly buttress the image I have painted of myself as gallant swain, I finish, “And we were coerced into returning it.”
Percy—bless—comes to my rescue. “There are dangerous people looking for it. They were ready to kill us for its possession.”
Neither Dante nor Helena looks particularly surprised by this news. “Likely the same men who stole it from us,” Helena says.
“What’s inside?” Felicity asks. “If you don’t mind. We were told about its make, but that’s all.”