Dante sets the box on the desk, then immediately picks it up again. He looks to his sister, and they seem to conduct a silent conversation using only their eyebrows. Then Dante says, “We don’t know.”
Which is rather disappointing.
“His work was panaceas, wasn’t it?” I ask. “Is it anything to do with—”
“Our father had many theories,” Helena interrupts.
“Could we ask you—” I start, and Dante looks ready to answer but Helena parries before he can.
“His work died with him,” she says. “If you’ve read his book, you know as much as we do. We can’t help you if you’re looking for information.”
My heart sinks, though her words are a bit too rehearsed for me to swallow them as sincere. And Dante’s doing a shifty-eyed dance that would do him no favors at a card table.
“Can you open it?” Felicity asks. “There’s a cipher—a word that unlocks it.”
Dante shakes his head. “He never told us. But thank you—thank you for returning it—for bringing it back to us. It is—was—sorry, it’s so . . .” He pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers, and I’m afraid he might start to cry. Then he looks up and finishes, dry-eyed, “Important to our father. So it’s important to us. He told us to protect it and we . . . But now you’ve brought it back.” He looks at Felicity, and she smiles at him. He goes positively vermillion.
An uncomfortable silence falls between us. Dante kicks his legs against the chair like a boy, then says, “Well, it was very nice to meet you all.”
“Oh, yes, we should leave you be.” Felicity stands from her perch on the arm of my chair, and Percy picks up his fiddle case, and for a moment it seems that our arduous journey is going to end in a single afternoon and a dead end. I can hardly bear to look at Percy for fear I’ll crumple up at the thought of failing him.
But then Helena says, “Don’t be absurd. If you came all the way from France, you’ll stay here, at least for tonight.”
“Oh, they don’t—” Dante looks up at her, but she ignores him.
“You’ve done us a great service.” She taps a finger toward the box, of which Dante still hasn’t let go. “It’s the least we can do in return.”
“I don’t think—” he says at the same time Felicity protests, “We don’t want to impose!”
“Just for the night,” Helena interrupts, sort of to both of them. “We can feed you and get you into some clean things and at least give you a proper bed. Do stay, please.”
Felicity still looks ready to refuse, so I make a verbal hurdle between them. “Yes, thank you, we’d love to stay.”
Felicity deals me a murderous look from the corner of her eye, just as Dante does the same to his sister. Helena and I both ignore our siblings. I’m not certain Helena’s intentions toward us are entirely innocent, but I am certain mine aren’t. I’m not convinced there’s nothing in this house that might be of use to Percy, and if the sister won’t tell us, the brother looks ready to collapse like poorly made furniture if pressed. And I’m keen to press.
Helena gives Dante a little encouragement with the tips of her fingers on his shoulder. “Dante, could you show them abovestairs?”
“Right. Yes.” He clambers to his feet, trips over the drawer he opened earlier, and catches himself on the edge of the crystallophone. The glasses clink together. It’s an eerie, haunted sound.
“Do you play?” Percy asks him.
Dante goes red again. “Oh, um, no. It was—”
“Your father’s?” Percy fills in for him.
“Part of his collection,” Dante mumbles.
“What’s a crystallophone have to do with alchemy?” I ask.
“Not alchemy—death, and burial practices. Before he . . . died, he became . . . quite obsessed.”
“Dante,” Helena says quietly, her tone a bowstring drawing back a poison-tipped arrow.
Dante dips his hand into the bowl of water and runs his finger along the top of one of the glasses. It releases a wobbling note, more vibration than sound. “There’s a song . . . If played on the crystallophone,” he says, “it is believed to summon back the spirits of the dead.”
15
The house is small in spite of its height, and with the three of us added, there aren’t enough beds. Felicity takes the only spare, while Dante gives Percy and me his apartments to share, a second-floor chamber with meager furnishings and walls that may have once been red, but have faded to the coppery brown of blood dried into linen. He lends us each a set of nightclothes and a change for the morning so we can let the garments we’ve been living in for a fortnight have a good soak—they seem likely to stand on their own when we shuck them.
In spite of all the beds Percy and I have been sharing along the road, this is the first time we’ve slept alone together since we were home, and the first time I haven’t had an excuse to not disrobe entirely for bed. I’ve never been shy about undressing in front of Percy, but suddenly the idea of it makes the entirety of my being blush, so I wait until he’s occupied with the razor and the mirror before I strip quickly and put on my nightclothes. Dante’s an average-sized fellow, so the sleeves of the dressing gown pool over my arms. I have to keep tossing them back, like I’m raising my hands to conduct an orchestra.
When Percy’s finished, I take his place before the dressing table and tuck into my first proper wash in weeks, which is sincerely the most marvelous thing that’s happened since those two ecstatic minutes of our kiss in Paris.
“Did you think that was strange?” he asks as I stand at the mirror with my back to him, shaving. I can hear him shuffling about the room, making ready for bed.
The light is very poor and the glass very spotted, and it’s taking all my concentration not to accidentally slit my own throat with the razor, but I manage to reply, “What was strange?”
“I don’t know. Helena and Dante. All of it.”
“Think they’ve asked us to stay so they can smother us in our sleep because we know too much?” I scrape a rim of soap off the blade and onto the edge of the basin. “I think they’re holding out.”
“How are they holding out? They don’t owe us anything.”
“I think they know what’s in the box. Or at least have an inkling. They both got shifty when I asked about the cure-alls. Whatever’s inside it must have to do with their father’s work.”
“Perhaps he was trying to turn rocks into gold. That’s alchemy too.”
“But that’s not what we came for.”
“Perhaps that box is full of rock-gold.” Behind me, there’s a flump as Percy drops his clothes to the floor. I catch the edge of my chin with the blade, and a glassy bead of blood rises to the surface of my skin. I press my thumb to it.
“I’m going to ask Dante tomorrow, before we depart,” I say.
“About what?”
“About the cure-alls. He seems like an agreeable-enough chap, if you get him on his own.” I tip my head for a better view of my jawline, checking for patches I missed. “Can’t decide about the sister, though. She’s a bit . . .”
“Intense?”
“Well, yes, but she’s gorgeous, which makes that intensity less repellent.”
Behind me, Percy gives a laugh that’s mostly a groan. “Henry Montague.”