“Come for breakfast,” she says.
“Oh. Yes.” I’m not certain what to do with the letter, but that question is answered when she steps forward and snatches it from me, so hard that it rips and I’m left with a scrap pinched between my thumb and forefinger. As we pass into the kitchen, she tosses the letter into the fire.
I slide down to my spot at the table beside Percy, my hand on my lap still fisted around the scrap of the letter. As Helena turns her attention to breakfast, I smooth the paper out against my knee and glance down at the moniker upon it in blotted ink.
Louis Henri de Bourbon, Duke of Bourbon,
Prince de Condé
Percy and I leave the breakfast table together, nearly colliding with Felicity at the top of the stairs as she comes down from her room, her hair mussed and her eyes still drooping.
Before she can offer a good-morning, I pull her into our bedroom, Percy on our heels, and shut the door. “Look here, I found something.” I unfold the torn scrap of the letter, kept tucked tight in my fist all through breakfast—which was quite a feat—and hold it for them to see. My sweating palm has smeared the ink, but the words are still legible. “I tore it from a letter in their study.”
Felicity rubs at her eyes with her fists, like she’s still trying to wake. “The Duke of Bourbon.”
“The one I stole the box from.”
“He’s . . . writing to them?”
“Looks to be.”
“Did you read the rest of the letter?” Percy asks.
“Just the first line, then Helena barged in. It was something about a Lazarus Key. He said it belonged to their father.”
“Why’s he writing to them if he’s the one who stole the box?” Percy asks.
“Well, if he wanted it, perhaps he was trying to make a bargain first?” Felicity offers. “And they wouldn’t comply, so he stole it?”
“We should find out what’s in it,” I say. “I think they’re lying when they say they don’t know.”
“But it’s theirs,” Percy says. “What they do with it is their business, not ours.”
“But we nearly died for it, and—in case you forgot—it might be something to help you. It’s clearly some carefully guarded secret of Mateu Robles’s, and his whole work was alchemical cures. It makes sense. We should stay here—just for a few days—and see what we can find.”
“But if they’re in contact with the duke—” Percy starts.
“I think Monty’s right,” Felicity interrupts him. “We have no money. And we’re going to wear ourselves out if we travel again so soon. You especially”—she looks to Percy—“should take care of yourself.”
Percy blows a sigh from his nose. The single errant curl about his ear flutters. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go courting trouble, is all.”
“We’re not courting trouble,” I say. “Flirting with it, at most.”
“I’m going to write to Lockwood,” Felicity says, “through the bank in Marseilles. Tell him where we are and ask if he’ll send funds to help restore us. Until then, if the Robleses will have us, we should stay here. And you”—and here she looks to me—“can do whatever sort of investigative work in that time that you’d like to, so long as you don’t sour our hosts on us. Are we in agreement?”
“Yes,” I say. It seems that, for the first time, my sister is enthusiastically on my side. Percy looks far dourer about it, but he nods.
“Until then,” Felicity says, “perhaps we can learn about this Lazarus Key.”
17
It’s three days before we manage to set aside some time for quality snooping, a disoriented three days of being intensely aware that we are strangers in a stranger’s home, but with nowhere else to go. The first two we spend mostly sleeping, as our last few weeks suddenly seem to fall upon us all like a sack of bricks dumped from above. The third, Helena insists on accompanying us out of doors to see the city.
Dante stays behind. He seems to live in the study—he takes up his post there every morning directly after breakfast and is still there when we turn in—which makes poking about for further correspondence with the duke or anything about Mateu Robles’s work difficult. We’ve all looted our respective rooms and found nothing—though Percy was almost entirely unhelpful to me once he discovered the stack of the father’s music and decided his time was better spent riffling through that. The study seems the place for answers, and Dante seems disinclined to leave it, preferring the safety of the stuffy mausoleum his father left behind for him to populate.
Investigative efforts foiled thoroughly by our exhaustion and his social anxiety.
To my great surprise, it is Felicity who first pounces upon Dante. She’s taken to this investigation with considerably more enthusiasm than anticipated, considering how tight she usually keeps her corsets laced. Since we arrived, the pair of them have been keeping up an ongoing conversation about chemistry and phrenology and electricism and other words I don’t know the meanings of, and he’s quite a bit more keen on her than our initial interaction would have led me to believe was possible. Far more so than he seems to be toward Percy or me, though each time she attempts to nose anywhere near the subject of alchemy, he takes the conversational cul-de-sac back to safer ground. My initial hope that he might be inclined to spill secrets begins to slip.
We find Dante in the study, not so much tidying as shifting the mess about, but he stops to listen as Felicity asks if there’s a university nearby with a library we might visit. “There’s a bookshop,” he says. “Down the corner. I mean around the corner. Down the street and around the corner.” He flaps his hand for direction. “You may—might—might try that. Or we have books here. If you care to . . . stay in.” His gaze scampers over Felicity, then he goes red from his neck to his hairline.
“Oh, that’s kind, but I wanted to”—Felicity snatches a lie out of thin air with a speed that is frankly impressive—“I wanted to buy your father’s book.”
“We have copies around, I think.”
“Yes, but I’d like my own, to take with me when we go.” It’s not an airtight lie by any means, considering we have almost no money and she first asked after a library. But before Dante can start to pick at the holes in it, she offers him a sweet smile. Not knee-weakening, per se, but perhaps charm is a bit more of a family attribute than I previously thought. “You can come with us, if you like.”
The flush that had begun to fade from his cheeks flares again like a stoked fire. “No, no . . . I think I’ll stay. Oh,” he calls us back as we reach the door and says to Percy, “I heard you yesterday, practicing. My father’s music. If you’d play some for me . . . I’d—I’d very much like that.”
“When we return,” Percy says, “I’d love to.”