a lost history, first in Egypt and the Holy Land, and now here in Paris and central Europe. We’re seeking not for Bonaparte but for ourselves, and not for treasure but for wisdom.” She took my arms. “I’ve felt directionless since we returned to France, Ethan. Now I realize we’ve been put here to participate in great things.”
She was as balmy as Thilorier. I gave her a kiss.
CHAPTER 15
Catherine and Harry had warmed to each other, since she had maternal instincts and enjoyed the chance to lecture anybody, even a four-year-old, while he regarded her care as a novel break from his parents. Still, the comtesse was suspicious when we left our son in her care after supper, since that wasn’t our habit. We told her to put him to bed at the usual hour and that we’d be back before dawn after urgent business.
“What urgent business?”
“For your safety and that of our son, it’s better that you don’t know. Tell him about the coronation, tuck him in, and enjoy this new romance Astiza bought.”
“Don’t do anything to jeopardize the way I’m infiltrating the Bonapartes!” she begged. “They’re beginning to trust me.”
“We’re doing this for Bonaparte,” I said, which was slightly the truth.
Not wanting the police to know where we were going, we slipped out through our rear yard into an adjacent alley, crept along in the dark, and came out on rue de Bac two blocks from our residence. Rather than risk the chance that a cabriolet driver would talk, we decided to walk the gloomy streets, my opening my coat to display my tomahawk to discourage thieves or pickpockets.
“People will think you’re a savage,” my wife said.
“You don’t hear of the Iroquois being robbed, do you?”
Palatine had directed us to a catacomb entrance just outside the city’s southern walls, in the sprawl of housing that had leapfrogged those fortifications once the economy recovered under Bonaparte. Half a dozen black wagons used for delivery of excavated bones were parked near a worker’s enclosure at the mouth of the Port Mahon Quarry, guarded by two sentries we marked by the glow of their pipes. Our secret way was several hundred yards farther, through a utility hatch and down stone stairs to sewers awash with two feet of filthy water. I used a tinderbox to light the lanterns I’d carried in a bundle on my shoulder. Their glow chased rats into the shadows.
“So romantic to have an evening together without our boy,” Astiza remarked.
“I’ll speak to Napoleon about the accommodations.”
“Palatine advised us to wade quickly to avoid vermin. There’s a tunnel to the quarries not far downstream.”
Cities are built of stone, and Paris has ninety miles of limestone quarries mined for monuments above. I feared we’d be lost in a maze, but my wife had a map provided by our wizard. So we entered the mines, wove this way and that, and eventually saw another glow like a welcoming window in a snowstorm. We came to a chamber of bone.
The ceiling was barely six feet, meaning my hair scraped. Candles flickered on a stone altar. To either side, femur and humerus had been stacked like cord wood with courses of skulls between. This made a retaining wall that held a jumble of ribs behind. The result was a pattern of balls, sockets, craniums, and mandibles.
Waiting for us was a living gnome: a bent, short, wrinkled specimen of a scholar in a dark robe and sewer-spattered boots who’d beckoned us to this spooky chamber. He had a wild mat of gray hair, ragged beard, and scholar’s stoop. Wise men often seem stumpy and homely, in my experience, and perhaps they became scholars because no one would pick them for team sports.
“So you brought the great Ethan Gage,” the fellow greeted with a voice coarsened to a rasp.
“You recognize my husband?”
“I recognized you in the apothecary, madame, or rather was told who you were by compatriots after your visit. You have a certain exoticism, as fascinating as a Negress, so you’re not anonymous, even in a city as big as Paris. Your husband has his own reputation, though whether wastrel or warrior seems in dispute.”
“I’m an electrician,” I said. “Military consultant, explorer, diplomat, and confidant of the emperor himself.”
“Gambler, spy, treasure hunter, fugitive, and Barbary slave,” Palatine completed. This fellow knew his history.
“And you’re named for a hill in Rome?”
“For an alchemist in the employ of Rudolf II. ‘Palatine’ is a title from Roman through medieval times, for experts in law and history.