“If your Bible is written by Henry Montague.” He’s grinning at me, and I open my mouth to reply, but realize suddenly that beneath the table he’s still got his foot on my leg—it’s such a light touch I don’t notice it until he shifts, toe hooking around the back of my calf, which knocks me straight off course, thoughts dashed to pieces against his touch.
“Ah, it’s something like that.” His foot slides down my leg, pulling my sock out of place and dear God it is stirring in me every sinful desire that I’m rather sure the Bible frowns upon. “It’s ‘Take away the stone’ or something like that, but my version is a bit better.”
“Did you say your version is a bit better than the Bible?”
“Well, the Bible’s stale.”
“Not sure what God’s going to make of that assessment.”
I swallow as his foot shifts against my leg again. I’m starting to sweat from the effort of keeping still. “I think I’m going to have worse than revising scripture to answer for when He and I meet.”
He laughs, closemouthed and breathy. “So Lazarus comes back from the dead? Is that how it ends?”
“Walks out of the tomb as though nothing was ever wrong.”
We look at each other across the table. Our faces feel closer than they did when I first sat down, both of us with our hands clasped before us like we’re praying over supper. Percy’s got such fine hands—larger than mine, with thin, graceful fingers and round knuckles a bit too big for him, like a puppy still growing into its paws. For a delirious moment, I am possessed by the insanity the poets hath called love, and it makes me want to reach forward and take both those hands in mine—he has got his foot making its torturous ascent upward, after all, which feels like an invitation—but before I can, he frowns suddenly and peers under the table. “Has that been your leg all this while?”
“What?”
He unhooks his foot from around my calf. “I thought it was the chair. Sorry about that. Dear Lord, why didn’t you say something?”
Before I can reply, there’s a flump at the end of the table and we both start. Felicity has slammed her alchemy book down between us and is standing over it with her palms flat on the cover and her elbows straight.
“Did you finish already?” Percy asks her. In the second I looked away from him, he’s gone and tucked those fine hands out of sight.
“I skimmed,” she replies. “And I knew some from the lecture. It’s scientifically sound, as far as I can tell, though I’d always heard alchemy was being disproved. Mostly his book is a summary of the principles—the purification of objects and returning them to their most perfect state. But then there’s a chapter at the end—hardly even a real chapter, it’s a practically a footnote—about artificial panaceas.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“One of the pillars of alchemy is creating a single item or compound that heals all ailments and restores the body to its perfect state,” she explains. “There’s no universal one in existence—mostly they’re plants and things that work as antidotes to a wide range of poisons.”
“Like the chemicals in the study,” Percy offers.
“Right. But it seems that when Mateu Robles died, his work was primarily focused upon the creation of a universal panacea that synthesized inside a human heart.”
“How would that work?” I ask.
“Well, his theory is that the component missing from previous attempts to create a panacea was life. He believed that were the correct alchemical reaction to occur within it, a beating heart could be turned into a sort of philosopher’s stone, and then the blood pumped from that heart would take on the same healing properties.”
I scrub my hands through my hair, tearing a few strands from its queue. A beating heart and open veins is an altogether different thing than the chemicals in a vial I was expecting.
“What if he succeeded?” Percy asks. “Maybe whatever’s in the box has something to do with finding the person with that heart—or making it. Perhaps that’s what the duke is after.”
“It seems ill-advised for one man to have access to something like that—particularly one with his hands in so many political pies.” Felicity looks over at me and scowls. “What’s that face for?”
“What face?”
“You look put out.”
“Just thinking about all that blood.” I nearly shudder. “Doesn’t it make you a bit squeamish?”
“Ladies haven’t the luxury of being squeamish about blood,” she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.
18
The opera is Friday evening—Helena reminds us over breakfast that morning. Dante nearly faints. I have a strong sense both that this is his first time out of the house in a long while, and that he’s not going willingly.
We haven’t clothes fit for the outing, so Dante lends Percy a wine-colored suit—noticeably too short in the sleeves, but they’re built similar enough that it’s passable. I get black silk breeches and an emerald coat that swallows me, but it’s the only thing that fits in the tails and the cuffs, after I roll them. Twice. “It’s my father’s,” Dante says, with seemingly no understanding of how disconcerting it is to be wearing a dead man’s clothes.
When I come into the bedroom, all attempts to convince my shoulders to fill out a smidge abandoned, Percy’s perched upon the bed, still not dressed. He’s got one leg pulled under him and his violin clenched between his chin and his shoulder. A set of weathered sheet music is spread before him.
“Is that the music Dante picked?” I ask.
He nods, the violin bobbing. “It doesn’t translate as well as I hoped—it’s all written for the glasses. Well old-fashioned, too.”
“Let me hear.”
He twists the end of his bow, arranges his fingers, then plays the first line of the song. It’s got a formal sound to it, swallowed and courtly, until Percy confuses his fingering and the strings squeak. He whips the violin out from beneath his chin with a frown, then tries the measure again, plucking out the strings instead of bowing them, with no real mind for the timing.
“That was beautiful,” I say.
Percy jabs me with his bow, right to the stomach, and I flinch with a laugh. “You are a menace.”
“What’s that one called?”
He squints at the title. “The ‘Vanitas Vanitatum.’ Oh.” His brow creases. “This is the song.”
“What song?”
“The one Dante mentioned. The summoning song, for the spirits of the dead.”
“Trying to call the soul of Mateu Robles? He might be the only one in this damn house willing to tell us about his work.”
Percy sets his violin on the bed, then reaches for the clean shirt laid over the headboard, already pulling his arm through his own sleeve. “How soon are we leaving?”
“Ah, not sure,” I reply, forcing myself to avert my eyes as he pulls the shirt over his head. “I’ll meet you below, shall I?” I snatch up my shoes from beside the door and flee. I’ll not torment myself with a half-naked Percy any more than is absolutely necessary. Entirely clothed Percy is almost more than I can bear.