Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,87
gut feeling. It’s not exactly sound science.
“It’s like a nun’s room,” I whisper.
Alexandre shakes his head. “No. It’s a prisoner’s room. It’s like the room in The Man in the Iron Mask.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dumas wrote about him in the last Musketeers novel—the king’s twin, imprisoned for his whole life, so he wouldn’t challenge him for the throne. He was forced to wear a mask to hide his true identity. When we first meet him in Dumas’s story, the prisoner is in a sparse room in the Bastille, and there’s a wooden desk tucked up under the only window.” Alexandre points to the desk under the small, dirty window.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “When was it written?”
“1847? 1850? It was a serial based on a true story from the 1600s, except that, even now, we don’t know the true identity of the man in the iron mask.” He runs his hand through his wavy hair.
“I know,” I say, my pulse starting to pound in my ears. “The timing. He would’ve been writing it when he knew Leila. He could have seen this place. This could be her room.”
I walk the length of this tiny cell of a room in about ten paces. There’s not a lot to look at: bare floor, bare window, bare walls. I’m caught by a stitch of sadness. If this was Leila’s room—and I want to believe that—it’s almost painful to imagine her living like this. How did she survive? Money from tarot readings and séances? That could hardly have been enough. There are too many dots that we can’t connect and maybe never will.
I sigh loudly.
“What’s wrong?” Alexandre asks. “Aren’t you happy we found this place? It matches Gautier’s description.”
“I’m thrilled. Amazed.” I take a second to collect my thoughts. “But it’s infuriating that no matter what we find out about her, we’ll never know the whole story, or even half of it.”
“It’s the cruel irony of being human.” Alexandre inches closer to me, so we’re almost touching. “We spend so much of our life trying to be known, only to be forgotten.”
Alexandre’s assessment may be bleak, but it’s also true. One thing he’s forgetting, though? It’s not just the human condition because the histories that do remain, the people we remember? They’re almost all men. I watch as he crosses the room to the narrow bed and takes a seat, sending more dust into the air.
I move to the window and trace the grooves in what could be Leila’s desk. Maybe she was a writer; maybe these marks are from the metal nibs of her fountain pens that bore the weight of her loneliness and rage and passion. You must’ve had stories to tell, Leila. I wish I could’ve heard them.
I hear a soft thud behind me. When I turn, I see Alexandre on his knees reaching under the bed. “I kicked something with the back of my heel,” he says, then pulls out what looks like an extra-large cigar box—thin, rectangular, wooden. I sit down next to him, resting my hand on his shoulder. The box opens with a little creak of its hinges.
The first thing I see is a dagger.
Alexandre delicately pulls it out from its sheath. The metal shines, luminescent, almost like moonlight under the beams from our phones. It has a sharp point and a sort of curved edge that backs into the handle that looks like it’s made of bone. Ivory, perhaps? There’s a word carved into the handle that I can’t decipher, written in what looks like Arabic or Persian or maybe even Urdu script.
Beneath the dagger are papers. I leaf through a few—receipts, tickets of some sort. Some of them were probably written in pencil because they’re not even legible. I hand Alexandre half the pile. He gasps. “It’s an invitation to a housewarming party—the opening of the Chateau de Monte-Cristo.”
As I look at the invitation over Alexandre’s shoulder, I stop short. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy a letter written in black ink at the bottom of the box.
My gaze falls on the signature line: Ever yours, L.