It is apparent at once that we have made a grievous mistake. Even in the dim light, I can clearly see Felicity and Dante collapsed into the wall with their arms and hands and mouths and abso-bloody-lutely everything all over each other. Neither of them appears to quite have a handle on what it is they’re doing, but they’re nonetheless enthusiastic about it.
I’m not certain if I want to make a hasty retreat back into the study and pretend we saw nothing or throw the hot tea in his face anyway, but then my foot catches that damned loose floorcloth and I pitch into the wall. The kettle leaves a crater in the wainscoting with a resonant thud. Dante shrieks and flails into one of the armless statues beside the door. It falls with a crash. Felicity whips around, a long strand of her hair that’s collapsed from its arrangement whacking Dante in the face. “What are you doing?” she cries.
“What are we doing?” I return, my voice coming out at a much higher pitch than anticipated. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“We thought you were in danger!” I cry. Dante bolts for the stairs, but I thrust my kettle in his path. A few steaming drops spit onto the carpet. “Don’t you go anywhere. I’ve got very acidic tea and Percy’s got a sword with a stump, so keep your hands where I can see them.”
Felicity throws her head back. “For the love of God.”
“If I may—” Dante starts, but I cut him off.
“Oh no, you don’t get to say a thing. You and Helena are liars and thieves and now you’re trying to take advantage of us in every conceivable way.”
“Monty—” Felicity interrupts, but I’ve got too much momentum to halt. I am Sisyphus’s damned boulder rolling down that damned mountain and I intend to flatten the rogue Dante beneath me.
“You’ve got the duke who wants to kill us writing your sister letters, and your father, turns out, isn’t dead, he’s in prison, so thanks for that lie—”
“Monty—”
“And now you’re, what, keeping us here until it’s convenient to slit our throats? But not before you played a bit of Saint George with my sister.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Henry Montague, for once in your life, be quiet!” Felicity snaps. “This wasn’t Dante’s idea, it was mine.”
Which is a bit of a cold slap to the face. The spout of my kettle droops. “Yours?” I repeat.
“Yes, mine. I thought we’d be alone here.”
“So did we. We came home because Percy was feeling poorly.”
Felicity looks to him. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine.” He’s got the sword hefted in both hands, but the tip is starting to sink. Blades are beastly heavy, with or without a dozen pounds of solid oak attached. “Where’s Helena?”
“Still at the opera, presumably,” Felicity replies. “Since we all four decided to flee without consulting the others.”
“Perhaps we should discuss this in the morning.” Dante has begun to creep again to the stairs, but I step in his path. Even if it was Felicity who dragged him here for a bit of tongue, I’d still like to slam him into the wall for going along with it.
“Stay where you are,” I say. “None of this changes the fact that you’ve been corresponding with the duke who you claimed stole the Baseggio Box from you.”
“You—you went through our things?” he stammers.
“It was right there on the desk!” I say, then remember it is not me on trial here and add, “You lied to us!”
“My—my sister was right, you came here to spy on us.”
“We weren’t spying—” I say at the same time Percy says, “Why did you tell us your father was dead?” And Dante lets out a whimper, hands thrown up in a Don’t shoot! gesture.
“All right, everyone into the study, now!” Felicity barks, in a tone that is essentially verbal castration, and not a one of us protests.
We shuffle in, single file, while she stands at the door like a headmistress, watching us with her arms folded and a glower in place. I set my kettle on the cold fireplace. Percy keeps the sword in hand, but Felicity snaps at him, “Put that down before you hurt yourself,” and he lowers it beneath the desk. Dante lets out a visible sigh of relief. “Sit,” she orders, and we three all sit, Dante and Percy in the matching chairs before the desk, me on the floor because Felicity’s glare is making me afeard for my life if I delay. She shuts the study door with a snap, then whirls to face us. “Now.” She points a finger at Dante. “You owe us some truth.”
Dante seems to wither in his chair. In spite of the fact that I’m still ready to wring his scrawny neck, I can’t help but feel a bit bad for the poor lad. One minute he’s working himself up to put his lily-white hands down a girl’s dress for likely the first time in his life, and the next he’s facing down an inquisition from said girl whose dress he was about to reach down. “Yes. Yes, I suppose.”
“Start with this,” I say. “What’s in the Baseggio Box?”
Dante does not look as though he was prepared to start there. “That’s . . . a very large question.”
“It’s a very small box, so it can’t be that large,” I reply.
“Is it a Lazarus Key?” Percy asks.
Dante’s head snaps up. “How do you know about that?”
“We saw it in”—Percy glances my way, a silent apology for coughing up the truth—“your sister’s correspondence.”
I snatch a letter off the desk and hold it up like evidence presented at trial. Felicity gives me a pronounced eye roll.
“The Lazarus Key is . . . I mean the . . . It’s not . . .” Dante rubs his temples with his fingers, then says, “You read my father’s book, so you know about his theories. Human panaceas—the beating heart as the only place in which a true cure-all can be created.”
“He was trying to make one,” Felicity says.
“Yes.” Dante coughs, then casts an eye at the fireplace. “I’ll take some of that tea, if you’re offering.”
“You don’t want any,” Percy says.
“Did it work?” Felicity asks.
“Um, it didn’t quite . . . He performed the experiment, but it didn’t . . . It went wrong. It was tried upon”—Dante swallows hard, his Adam’s apple making a great hurtle up his neck—“my mother. Our mother. She volunteered,” he adds. “They were both alchemists, and they wrote the book—it was hers, too. But she couldn’t put her name on it, as she’s . . . well, a woman.” He trips on that word, his eyes darting to Felicity, and I wonder if he’s considering whether or not bringing this deception into the light is going to ruin his chances of getting his tongue in her mouth again. I nearly upend the kettle over his head. “But the compound they created . . . it stopped her heart.”
“So she died?” Felicity asks.
“No,” he replies. “But she didn’t—she didn’t not die, either. She’s . . . stuck. Not living, not dead, with an alchemical panacea for a heart.”
Hope leaps like a flame inside me. “It worked?” I interrupt, a bit too keenly, for Felicity gives me a frown that suggests I have rather missed the point.
Dante nods. “The panacea was created, so . . . Well, yes.”
“So, why hasn’t it been used?” I ask. “Why didn’t he make more?”
“Because she had to give her life for it,” Dante replies, looking a bit shocked I had to ask. “It’s—it’s a horrid cost.”