I follow her down the stairs without prompting, the duke bringing up the rear with his pistol at my back. The stairs are built in a tight spiral, so round and narrow we have to go single file with our hands on the wall for balance. The air gets hotter the deeper we go, which seems to be the opposite of what’s natural.
At the base of the stairs, Helena raises her lantern so we can all see the corridor ahead. The sallow light doesn’t reach far, but in its glow I can see the walls are pocked, their surface raised and rippled like they’re made from paper that has been soaked, then dried in waves. We’ve gone a few meters in silence when the lantern light glances off a bend, and I suddenly realize what it is that’s forming those swollen patterns upon the walls.
Bones.
The whole corridor is fashioned from bones, rows and rows of them stacked as high as the ceiling, browning and polished by the drafts of hot air billowing over them. Skulls are hung at intervals between them like sconces, brittle spiderwebs threading them together. Where the corridor bends again, there’s a whole skeleton assembled, dressed in dusty Capuchin robes and wired upright with a sign hung around its neck.
Helena leans forward so her lantern illuminates the inscription.
Eramus quod estis. Sumus quod eritis.
I haven’t used Latin since my Eton days, and I wasn’t what could be called attentive in my study of it, but she translates. “What we once were, that you are now. What we are now, soon you shall be.”
Another gust of the hot air breathes over us.
We go on, down the gallery of bones, quiet but for the occasional rumbling, like a great giant shifting in his sleep. The ground beneath our feet is a mosaic, grooves worn into the glossy tesserae by funeral processions bringing down their bodies. I imagine Mateu Robles here, carrying down his dead-but-not wife, his conscience heavy as her alchemical heart.
The hall ends in a vaulted ceiling and three columns of skulls, a doorway behind them framed in what seem to be femurs—I try not to look too closely for fear it might send me into a dead faint if I do. Helena doesn’t move any farther. Bourbon tips his pistol at me, so I reach for the latch, only to find that it’s not a latch at all but a skeletal hand, reconstructed and sitting in its place so that it has to be held for the door to open. A shudder goes through me, head to toe, and I give a fast tug. The door creaks open with a shower of dust. The tunnel gives a moan.
I step into the tomb.
29
The tomb is small and dusty, one wall lined with rows of vaults built into the stone. The highest one is just above my eye level. Each drawer is made of polished black stone with a mother-of-pearl inlay, a family name inscribed upon each beneath the handle. Robles is carved upon the center drawer, a prominent keyhole built into a slick silver frame just beneath the b. On either side of the vaults, two iron bowls are suspended upon crossed legs, and when Helena touches her lantern to them, the dry kindling inside writhes to life, smoky fingers scratching the darkness in chorus with the hot air that seems to gasp from the walls.
Bourbon does a quick sweep around the room, his cloak tossing up dust from the corners. Helena hangs her lantern on a hook beside the door, then walks up to the drawers, fingers tracing her family name before she presses her palm flat to the polished stone, head bowed.
His lap finished, Bourbon leans back against the vaults, heel scuffing the black stone. “Now,” he says, one finger fiddling with his pistol, “we wait for your friends to bring me my key, Montague.”
“It isn’t yours,” Helena says, so quiet I almost don’t hear her.
“Then whose is it, Condesa?” Bourbon barks, but she doesn’t say anything. Her forehead is nearly touching the stone vaults. “Yours? Your brother’s? Mr. Montague’s? Your mother will have died for naught if none of us use it.” He knocks on the drawers. The ceiling groans, a geyser of dust misting down upon us. “Your father is a cowardly, wasteful fool for hiding her this way.”
“He isn’t,” I say, my voice breaking on the last word, but I feel suddenly obliged to stand up for Helena, or perhaps not so much her as her father, the man whose coat I wore to the opera and who spoke about his daughter when she was small enough to tie a string from her finger to his. Perhaps that means I’m defending her as well. She used to be that small girl, after all. Perhaps she still is, the girl who loved her father so much she’d give anything to again be close enough to have that string between them.
Bourbon shifts his gaze from Helena to me. “Would you like to discuss cowardly fathers, Mr. Montague? You’d school us all.”
“What?”
“I assumed you robbed me on his instructions, or in some sort of desperate play to aid him. He’s been looking to knock me out of favor for years.”
“My father wouldn’t instruct me to steal from any man.” As much as I might loathe him, I’m certain of that—he’s far too stiff-collared. “He may not care for you, but he’s a gentleman.”
“Your father’s a rake.” Bourbon spits the word. “About as filthy a man as I’ve ever had occasion to meet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know?” A slow smile stretches over his lips. “Since we’re waiting, let me ask you this, Montague: Do you know what your father likes?” A pause. I’m not certain if this is a rhetorical question and I should keep silent, or if he’s using my father’s favorite strategy of a rhetorical question I’m still meant to answer so I’ll look stupid. But before I can work it out, Bourbon supplies, “Your father loves nothing so much in this world as slow ponies and other men’s wives.”
A jolt goes through me, like a missed stair. “You’re lying.”
He flicks his thumb at the handle built into the Robleses’ tomb. Helena’s shoulders rise. “I knew him, when he was young and living in the French court. He was a bastard even then, squandering his father’s money on horses and cards and always screwing someone else’s woman. The wives and intendeds of his friends, those were always his favorites. And then he got himself a wife of his own.” I have a brief moment of wondering if, all these years, my father’s been unfaithful and if Mother knows, but then he goes on, “Some French girl in the country. He ruined her and then tried to run, but her father badgered him into marriage.”
A ripple of that hot air nearly knocks me off my feet. I almost grab Helena. “He had it . . . He must have annulled it.”