“Sorry!” He pulls his sleeve up over his thumb and tries to wipe it off and instead ends up smearing it into the silk. I bat him away and he covers his face with his hands, laughing. He doesn’t seem quite himself yet—I’m still braced for the fit to come on—but he looks less flimsy than he did in the gambling hall, and when we climb out of the cab his step is steady.
The house is stifling, but a window is open in the parlor and the lamps are still lit, so it’s there that I leave Percy curled up on the sofa, while I muck about in the kitchen—nearly lose a chunk of my hair and the skin off my palms trying to get water boiling and spill at least ten shillings’ worth of leaves from the jar.
When I return to the parlor, I am victory personified with kettle and teacup in hand. Percy raises his head as I approach and regards my offering with a peery eye. “What’s this?”
“Tea. I made you tea. I could get something else, if you want. There’s wine around somewhere.”
“What are you doing?”
“I dunno. Helping? Sorry, you don’t have to drink it.”
“No, that’s . . . Thank you.” He takes the cup from me and has a cautious sip, then coughs once and claps a fist sharply to his chest. “This is . . . tea?”
“Did I ruin it?”
“No, no, it’s—” He coughs again, which turns into a laugh, and then he’s laughing with his head tipped back. I kick the sofa leg and he’s nearly unseated. A bit of the vile tea sloshes onto the upholstery. I set the kettle on the side table and sink down on the other end of the sofa, mirroring his body so we are face-to-face, curled up like question marks with our feet off the floor and our knees together.
“You’re hopeless,” he says, and it is so strange and horrible and utterly lovely how the way that he’s looking at me makes me want to both back away and throw myself upon him. It hurts like a sudden light striking your eyes in the dead of night.
He wraps his hands around his teacup again, his shoulders hunched. “I’m all right now.”
“Oh.” My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “Good.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You stayed.”
“That wasn’t much.”
“Monty, I have never once woken from a fit and found the people who were there when it began still with me. My aunt has quite literally run from the room when I said I was feeling unwell. And I know it didn’t happen now, but . . . no one stays.” He reaches out, almost as though he can’t help himself, and puts his thumb to my jawline. The tips of his fingers brush the hollow of my throat, and I feel the touch so deep I half expect that when he moves, I’ll be left with an imprint there, as though I am a thing fashioned from clay in a potter’s hands.
Percy drops his arm suddenly and lifts his chin, nose wrinkling. “Something’s burning.”
“I set a fire in the kitchen grate.”
“No, I think it’s here. Oh, Monty—the kettle.”
I look over at the side table. A thin strand of smoke is rising from where I set the kettle. I snatch it up, though the damage is done—a perfect circle in charred black on the wood. “Damnation.”
“Let’s not burn their father’s house down while they’re out,” Percy remarks.
“Is there a way to hide—” Their father’s house. I nearly drop the kettle. “Percy, their father isn’t dead.”
Percy looks up from fishing some floating thing out of his tea. “What?”
“Mateu Robles—their father. He isn’t dead, he’s a prisoner. The man Dante was talking to—he’s the warden at the city prison and he told me Robles is locked up.”
“He’s jailed? Did he say why?”
“Something about politics. I think he was on the wrong side of the war that the Bourbon family won.”
“Maybe that’s something to do with the duke’s letter—”
“The letters!” I leap to my feet and fly out of the parlor, still clutching the kettle. The study door is as we left it—propped and unlocked. I push it open, half expecting some trap to fall upon me from above.
“What are you doing?” Percy calls.
“The letters from the duke. There might be more.” I dash to the desk, nearly tripping on Percy’s fiddle case, which is still just inside the door, and begin to paw through the letters in the box, searching for any more with the Bourbon crest on the seal. Near the bottom, another fleur-de-lis winks up at me from green wax, and I snatch it up. “Here.”
Percy joins me at the desk, sifting through the papers strewn atop it. “Lucky they don’t seem to throw anything out.”
With Percy going through the drawers that aren’t locked and me working across the surface, we come up with almost a dozen letters with the Bourbon family crest set into the seal. “He’s not just writing to them, they’re corresponding,” I say, picking one at random and confirming the duke’s signature at the bottom before I scan the page.
On the other side of the desk, Percy holds up another. “This one’s dated nearly a year ago.”
“They’re all to Helena.”
“Not all.” He flaps one of the pages at me. “This one’s for Mateu.”
“‘Upon the execution of our arrangement,’” I read, a phrase picked at random from the middle of one. “What arrangement have they got?”
When I look up at Percy, his face is grave. The shadows from the firelight mottle his skin. “Monty, I think we should leave here. Tonight. Or as soon as we can.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere. Back to Marseilles. Find Lockwood. At least find somewhere else to stay until he sends funds.”
“But . . .” But what about Holland and the asylum? I want to say. We came here to help you and instead we’d be leaving with nothing.
Before I can reply, the front latch clacks from the hallway, followed by a bang as the door hits the wall and bounces back. Percy and I both freeze, eyes locked, then in unison begin shoving the letters back where we found them. Percy shuts one of the drawers too forcefully, and a glass beaker rolls to the floor and shatters. We both go still again, listening hard. There are the sounds of a scuffle outside the door, and a clatter, like something’s been struck.
Then a voice that sounds distinctly like Felicity’s gives a smothered cry.
Which is enough to kick into motion a strange mechanism inside of me that has never before been triggered. I snatch up the closest thing to a weapon I can find—the kettle of hot tea, which I imagine will do a fair bit of damage if tossed in someone’s face. Percy, clearly of a similar mind, hefts a sword he finds wedged between two of the bookshelves, though it’s too firmly attached to its plaque to be convinced to part, so the plaque goes with him. Together, we inch toward the door, weapons raised.
Something strikes the wall from the other side. The canopic jars on the shelf jump. I fling open the study door and fly into the hallway, Percy on my heels.