A Spark Unseen (39 page)

I closed my eyes for a moment. It had not occurred to me until that moment that Pisces was the sign of the fish.

“Until Louis produces an heir with his name, the throne is insecure.”

“Monsieur de Morny, Ben … I mean to say, Charles, was obsessed with being of the Bonaparte bloodline, to the point of madness. Whatever he was doing, he did not try to assassinate the emperor.” I shook my head at the irony of defending Ben’s innocence.

“And in the tunnel, in the big room, what was Charles doing there?”

I held on to my bonnet, willing my voice to sound calm. If the emperor was ignorant of the happenings in the cavern, then surely he was ignorant of Uncle Tully. “I don’t know what Charles was doing, exactly. Experimenting, I believe.”

“And how he died?”

I had an unbidden vision of purple-tinged fire, and the smoke coming from Ben Aldridge’s skin. “Electricity,” I said. “That is what killed him. But …” I bit my lip. “The contents of the barrels, sir, that is dangerous if exposed to flame, and would be best left where it is.” I lifted my chin and looked away. “I don’t know anything else.”

Morny shook his head. “But I think you do, Mademoiselle.” He waited, making me look at him before he went on. “Charles was not the only Bonaparte running about beneath the Tuileries, was he?”

“Please,” I said, “he knows nothing of this. He knows only the father who raised him. This news, it would be … most unwelcome.”

The boat smacked hard into a choppy wave. “Moreau is a name known to us,” Morny said. “There was a soldier captured in the war, very loyal, taken to a prison in the south of England — that is where your estate is, is it not? He escaped, but he did not return to France. After Louis’s time in London, this man Moreau, was honored, I think, to raise a son of the house of Bonaparte, a boy with the blood of the Emperor Napoléon the First running through his veins. He could not have known that the father of this child would also become the second emperor of France, Napoléon the Third. A double honor. And yet while he accepted the first, a baby still in its blankets, he did not accept the second that was brought to him, an older child, also a boy, whose mother was going mad.”

I took a deep breath. Part of me was longing to know more of this, and part of me was longing for him to stop giving me so many things to conceal.

“Will Thérèse Arceneaux … will she be taken care of?”

“The emperor pays for her care. This is a thing we also do not tell the empress.” He sighed. “I have watched the young man, on the boat and on the dock. He has a strong look of his father.” Morny straightened from the rail. “It is a strange thing,” he said, “being an illegitimate son. On the streets, you are of the lowest form, while in the court, you become a duke. Our Louis is many things, but his heart, it is soft for his children. We agree with you, Miss Tulman, that it is best for the young man to return to England. The throne of France must be secure. We …”

At that moment, Lane came around the deck, jacket collar turned up against the wind. He checked his walk when he saw me with the uniformed Frenchman, and approached warily, like a cat. “Have you been in the wind all this time, Katharine?” he said. His use of my name had been just the slightest bit possessive.

“Mr. Moreau, this is —”

“Monsieur de Morny,” the Frenchman interjected.
“Je suis heureux de faire votre connaissance.”

“Moi de même,”
Lane replied, wrinkling his forehead at the switch to French.
“J’espère que vous allez apprécier votre voyage.”

Morny positively beamed at this reply. It was possible, I supposed, that Lane spoke better French than the emperor. Morny stopped looking Lane up and down like a prize horse and turned back to me.

“It was most pleasant to speak with you, Mademoiselle. I am glad we are of like mind.”

“Thank you,” I replied with perhaps too much relief, because I got a sharp gray look from my side.

Morny bowed and went belowdecks, and then it was Lane’s turn to lean on the rail.

“Mr. Tully’s got his cloth hung, and he’s playing about with that box. Mary’s with him.”

I glanced back at the door Charles de Morny had gone through. “Is he locked in?”

Lane looked at me sidelong. “Yes, but the boat’s almost empty. You don’t have to mother him too much, Katharine.”

As Lane’s tone showed this to be a point of pride rather than admonishment, I let it go. The sea spat foam in a fine spray. Lane loved the sea. I could see it in his face. I looked at his hand on the rail, the color like creamed tea, such a contrast to mine. That trait had not come from his father.
Could Lane be Spanish?
I wondered suddenly.

“What?” he said, grinning. I snapped awake.

“I was just wondering if you liked the smell,” I said.

“You mean the sea? I do. I do like it. Now that we’re out of the harbor.”

He took my hand that had been on the rail, and held it between both of his. It was so much warmer there.

“So, are you ready to discuss money?” I watched his brows come down.

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

I proceeded with caution. This whole thing was silly, in my opinion. But if these were the terms he could live with, then so be it. I also knew Lane well enough to guess that the sums in his head were very likely ridiculous. “Did you know that Uncle Tully can make a bell ring with his box?”

He was playing with my fingers now, stretching them out one by one, examining. I tried to concentrate.

“And by ringing a bell with his box, I mean a bell that is in no way connected to his box.”

I had his attention now. “How can that be?”

“No idea, of course. But while we were in Paris, Uncle Tully could push his little lever on the box in the attic and make the bells ring downstairs. Without a string, or even a wire.”

I’d given a good deal of thought to this, last night in my bed, with the silver swan gleaming in the light of the candle I’d left burning, letting Marianna watch over me from where she sat by the wall, waiting to be packed. I’d imagined bells to summon a policeman, to wake a house in the case of fire, even to call a maid. Putting my uncle’s invention to such uses would not only be practical — a welcome change from destructive — but it would also be, I hoped, rather lucrative. Especially with someone who could carve the moldings to make beautiful designs for them. But I would let Lane come to most of these conclusions on his own; probably he could come to better ones. I thought Marianna might be rather pleased with me. The wind blew another cold salt spray, and I shivered.

“Come here, then,” Lane said, pulling me into his open jacket. I reached up and untied my bonnet, letting my head tuck beneath his chin, preferring the warmth of him to my hat. He watched the sea from over my head.

“Lane.” I hesitated. “You seemed so at home in Paris. Will you be sorry, do you think?”

“I don’t say things I don’t mean, Katharine Tulman. And my answer was yes, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. It had been.

“And what about you? Can you live with what you’ve chosen?”

“Oh, yes. I just won’t take tea in London. Or Paris either. I’ll just have to go to America for it.” I’d made him smile, I could feel it from the way his chin moved on my head. “I’ll be the young woman who always takes her steamer trunk to tea. But I’ll need a bigger trunk, I think. Uncle Tully only just fits now.”

“That’s so. If you’d get room for a workbench in there, you might make a world traveler of him yet.”

“We could go to Rome, to see the ruins.”

“Or the pyramids,” Lane suggested.

“India.”

“Boating down the Amazon.”

“With my trunk in one end of the canoe.”

He laughed, a low rumble in his chest; I felt it vibrating through my own. I wanted to tell him that it was a mess at home, that there had been so much to rebuild and repair, that we were overextended, and that without Mr. Babcock I was afraid I would mishandle all of it. That I would not go to Mr. Babcock’s funeral, to avoid causing a spectacle. That I didn’t know exactly how we were going to hide Uncle Tully, that we might need to hide him for the rest of his years, and that we couldn’t continue to deceive Mrs. Cooper. She was going to be so angry, deservedly so, and would Mr. Cooper really keep our secret? I wanted to tell him that I could not stop thinking of that child in the asylum with his silent play, and that I was afraid Aunt Alice’s legal advice might accidentally be too good. I wanted to tell him that he was descended from the bloodline of two different emperors.

But then Lane said, “Katharine, tell me more about Mr. Tully’s electricity.”

I loved the way he said my name. I said, “It really is the most amazing thing. He makes the electricity fly right through the air. You can’t see it, but you know it must be there, because … well, because the bell rings.”

Like everything we’d done,
I thought,
throwing unseen sparks into the future, sometimes with spectacular results.
I wondered what spark was flying now.

“Katharine,” Lane said, “I think I’ll just go belowdecks and talk to Mr. Tully about his box.”

He kissed the top of my head, and I immediately missed his warmth as he moved away, disappearing through the door to the cabins below. The wind whipped the ribbons of my hat, overwhelming the noise of the engines. I was alone on the deck, but I wasn’t alone at all. I turned my face to the sea and looked toward home.

Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the man who became Napoléon III, was born in 1808 to Louis Bonaparte, brother of Napoléon I, and Hortense de Beauharnais Bonaparte, who was Napoléon I’s stepdaughter. After two attempts in his early life to recapture the rule of France, one of which resulted in exile to London and the other in life imprisonment (from which he escaped), Charles-Louis was rumored to have left at least two sons behind him in England when he was elected president of France in 1848. By December 1852, Charles-Louis had dissolved the French Parliament and proclaimed himself Napoléon III, emperor of France, just as Napoléon I had crowned himself emperor forty-eight years earlier.

The uncertainty created by Napoléon III’s coronation fueled a French and British race to naval supremacy, even as the two countries allied themselves against Russia in the Crimean War. The war began as a dispute over influence in the declining Ottoman Empire, quickly becoming a full-scale conflict known for its gross tactical miscalculations, one of the most famous being chronicled in Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But it was also the first “modern” war, with the use of steam-powered ships, floating ironclad batteries, railways, and also daily documentation for the public newspapers by telegraph and photography. Florence Nightingale began using modern nursing techniques on the Crimean battlefields, where more men died of disease than of their wounds. The British-French alliance declared victory in 1856. In 1859, the French launched the first steam-powered, ironclad ship,
La Gloire
, after the close of the Crimean War. Britian’s first ironclad, the HMS
Warrior
, made its appearance the following year. During the reign of Napoléon III, naval supremacy meant European dominance.

With the advent of steam-powered ironclads also came the race for the ability to destroy them. British engineer Robert Whitehead was the first to design a swimming, clockwork torpedo “fish,” the earliest plans of which show a section marked “secret chamber,” where the gyroscope was housed. But it wasn’t until the addition of a pendulum in 1868 that the fish became a reliable weapon. Filled with the new and volatile nitrocellulose, or “guncotton,” Whitehead’s torpedo could swim a straight line, holding its depth beneath the water to stealthily blow a hole in an ironclad ship. The first torpedoes were purchased by Britain’s Royal Navy in 1870, filling the vacuum of power created by the invincible ironclads. The way the balance of power was maintained and naval battles were fought changed forever, not only for Britain and France, but for the world.

When I considered the acknowledgments for my debut novel it was very clear to me that no author writes a book alone. Now that I’ve completed my second novel, I realize just as clearly that no one publishes a book alone. Thank you, Scholastic Press. What an incredible team I’ve had behind me! Not only have you come together to make an amazing book, you’ve done your very best to turn this writer into an author and make me a part of your publishing family. Seriously, why are you people so nice?

For Lisa Sandell, my lovely, encouraging, gracious, and so very patient editor and friend: You’ve opened your office, your heart, and your home. Thank you for believing that I could do this!

For Sheila Marie Everett, my publicist: Everything’s better where you are!

For Elizabeth Starr Baer, Bess Braswell, Emma Brockaway, Jody Corbett, Antonio Gonzalez, Candace Greene, Emily Heddleson, Stacy Lellos, David Levithan, John Mason, Emily Morrow, Elizabeth Parisi, Lizette Serrano, Tracy van Straaten, Jennifer Ung, the fabulous Scholastic sales team, and all the people that have had a hand in getting both the book and myself where we’re going: many thanks. And also everyone in Book Clubs, Book Fairs, and the Foreign Rights department: I know you guys do a lot more than I will ever know. Thank you for being my champions.