Viridian (The Hundred-Days Series Book 2) (31 page)

Bracing his hands on one corner of
the lid, he looked to Olivia who, despite her low spirits, was gazing at him
with curiosity. He nodded to the opposite corner. “On my count, push as hard as
you can. One, two...three!”

At first there was nothing. Ty
heaved his shoulder and stone scraped over stone until they had managed a
few-inch gap. A gust of air, cold and a little stale, whipped his cheeks.
Panting a moment, he met Olivia's eyes and nodded. With two more good shoves,
they had the dense lid halfway off.

He had doubted what they would
find, at least a little, until this moment. By Olivia's unblinking stare, it
was plain she still hadn't quite wrapped her head around the empty space inside
the casket.

Palming one of the torches off of
the wall, he held out a hand to her. He shivered at the warmth of her fingers,
the trust when they grasped his. Despite everything that’d happened, the
unquestioning faith she gave him in that moment was like the sun rising after a
stormy night. “Climb in?”

Olivia laughed, a hollow sound that
made him think she was closer to tears than anything. “Days. For days I've been
in a nightmare. I can't wake up.” She stared down into the blackness inside the
tomb. “This feels ominous.”

“It's nothing more than a door,
Olivia. It has no special power.”

She scrubbed her eyes with the back
of her wrist, smudging dust into a trail of tears across her cheeks. “I nearly
hacked d'Oettlinger's head off with a bayonet. Seeing my mother's painting, I
wish I had. Do you know what's worse than having wanted to do it?” She met his
eyes in earnest for the first time in days. “I have no idea what stopped me.”

There was a heartbreaking tremor to
her words, long-buried agony bubbling through the cracks. “Just a door,” he
repeated, wiping the dampness from between the cuts on her face. “You'll climb
in, and we’ll be somewhere else.”

Her body relaxed, as though his
words had cut her free from some invisible tension. She squeezed his hand
tighter, swung a leg over the stone lip, and disappeared inside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Olivia landed with a soft thud, but
it was still enough that an ache across her forehead spread wider until it
reached her temples. Days with little food, water, or proper rest and the
strain of dim light conspired into a headache the likes of which she could
barely recall. If not for the pain, she would wonder at being truly awake.

Ty hopped down behind her, and
using the small shaft of weak sun from above, struck a match to their torch.
Olivia blinked at the blaze of orange light, letting her eyes adjust, and
looked around.

They were not in a rough hole, as
she had expected, but a proper chamber. Not much wider than the span of her
arms, the high walls were built from smooth limestone blocks. There were still
no bones in sight, no sign that the space had ever been used as a crypt. She
glanced above through the hole they’d just come through, staring at the
rectangle of the mausoleum showing through the open casket, then at Ty who was
rearranging his pack. “Where are we?”

He glanced up, wide-eyed, looking
surprised she had spoken. “The mausoleum?”

“Mmhm.”

Ty held the torch forward, waving
it vaguely down the tunnel ahead of them. “It’s a lot of dusty, boring history.
Short bit is, Marie d'Medici wanted a tunnel from the marquis' estate to the
Luxembourg palace. For reasons as numerous as her conspiracies, one assumes.”

“That's nearly three miles!”
            “Limestone caves under the city gave the poor architect a leg up.”

She couldn’t believe that she
didn’t know this. Paris was
her
city. Apparently, it still held some
secrets. How had Ty discovered the information, and where had he learned to get
in? “So there was never a tomb here? Where is the marquis?”

“If the rumors are true, he staged
his death to avoid being executed and fled to Sweden. When King Louis grew
tired of his mother's intrigues, none of her supporters were safe. Especially
not the marquis.”

She shivered against a damp breeze
rushing up from farther down the passage. “Sounds familiar.”

Silent, Ty hefted up his pack and
started down the passage's light slope.

He was still angry, she realized.
And probably just as exhausted and battered as she was. He had certainly
deserved better than the way she had treated him, and it wasn’t really his
fault. She couldn’t be alone, or back in England, soon enough.

The slope tilted more as they
descended, its limestone floor growing slippery with water and moss beneath her
feet. Dampness permeated every thread of her pants and shirt, and the chill was
nearly as sharp as her regret at declining Ty's coat.

Olivia had no idea how long they
traveled down the passageway. Without daylight or any landmarks for measuring
distance, it was impossible to judge the passage of time. However far they had
gone, it felt longer in a silence punctuated only by their breathing and the
tread of their boots.

Finally, the space ahead of their
torchlight became a high wall of shadows. A musical trickle of water ran into
the cave from the world above, pooling at the end of the passage, flowing away
under a high brass gate weathered to a beautiful blue-green.

Reaching back, Ty grasped her
fingers with his free hand, pressure warm against her clammy flesh, and guided
her around the rippling puddle. His touch was welcome, and she drank it in. He
passed her the torch. “Hold this. I can get us through.”

While he knelt before the gate, she
lowered the torch for him, giving them both a better look at a heavy iron
padlock. Ty inspected both sides, scraped the metal with something he'd taken
from his haversack, then sighed. “Far too corroded. There's no picking it.”

He stood, grasped the gate rails
and shook. The gate's bars were set deep into the stone; its mortar crumbled a
bit as he yanked on it, but the whole framework stood fast.” Ty frowned,
stepping back and eyeing their obstacle. “If we can't go through, we'll have to
go over. Ready?”

Based on the height of the gate and
the small gap between its top and the cave above, Olivia wasn't certain of
being ready, but she nodded anyway. They didn't exactly have another option. As
Ty had pointed out, they couldn't stroll into Paris by the main gate with all
of Thalia's agents on guard for their arrival.

Following his lead, she stuffed the
second pack between the bars, shoving it as clear of their path as her arm's
reach would allow.

Ty went over first, scaling the
slick metal with an athletic grace. When he reached the narrow, arched opening
above the gate, however, things got tricky. There wasn’t enough space to work
his legs in, and if he went through head first...

She was about to ask him what he
was going to do when he surprised her by going through head first, after all.
He caught himself by the boots, hooked over the top rail, and dangled upside
down. Swinging the rest of his body into the bars, he grabbed on and with
something like a somersault and landed easily on his feet.

Olivia was so impressed that she
forgot the awkward silence between them and clapped a hand against the torch
stem. “Bravo.”

He bowed with something like a
smile. “Pass me the torch.”

After she handed it off, he propped
it in a small alcove beside the gate where it cast deeper shadows around them.
Slipping his arms between the bars, he interlaced his fingers and nodded at her
feet. “I'll boost you up. Come in head first and I'll catch you on the other
side.”

She rested her sole against his
palms and counted. “One, two, three!” Ty lifted while she pushed off with her
other foot and she easily gained the top of the gate. Hands worked for purchase
between slick metal and damp rock, but finally she got her body through the
opening. As promised, Ty's hands caught her under the arms as she came through.

She'd been ready for him to pull,
tensing her legs and bracing to land. Instead, Ty held her half-in, half out
above him, face to face. In the darkness it was hard to distinguish his
expression, something between deep concentration and a scowl. His mouth worked,
and Olivia would have paid a fortune to know his thoughts. Then his lips
twitched, arms relaxed, and her feet hit the uneven floor with a soft thud. His
back was already to her, gathering his pack and the torch.

Her chest squeezed tighter, heart
aching with every beat, and she sank a little deeper into self-loathing.

They wriggled through a baffle cut
into the cave wall that was so narrow Olivia feared they’d become stuck. Her
nose pressed into the stone, and her nostrils filled with a mineral odor, the
faint tang of salt, earthy moss, and something else she couldn’t put her finger
on. The scent increased as they passed into the cave proper, and she beheld
why.

Bones. Thousands of them. Walls and
mountains of them.

Their torch cast an amber glow over
piles that stretched as far as she could see. They were set into the walls in
patterns, as if the angel of death himself had been an artist. Walls of femurs,
columns of skulls spread out around them in a grotesque tableau.

She gasped, turning to get a look
at the whole chamber. “This is the catacombs.”

“Mm.” He raised, lowered, and
extended the torch, illuminating each corner and looking as overwhelmed as she
felt.

The Paris catacombs, the empire of
the dead. It held the bones of millions of residents, a necessity that arose
when plague and war overflowed the cemeteries at the city's heart. The caves
were fed in great batches, the most recent a gluttonous meal brought on by the
revolution. Men had worked for two years to empty medieval graveyards, nearly
as long as it had taken arranging just the victims of Madame Guillotine. She
had never seen the place with her own eyes, but the entrance was pointed out
often, in a whisper, by those passing into the city:
Le Gate de Enfer
,
the gate of hell.

Taking it all in now, she wondered
at the complaints leveled in the papers, protests originated by the church.
They’d painted a picture of great sacrilege, of bones being desecrated for
nefarious reasons. She couldn’t agree. A great deal of care had been taken to
honor the remains of those no one had a hope of identifying. Instead of being
heaped in some ditch, they were stacked lovingly, even boasting one high wall
of long bones that framed skulls arranged into a heart. On the forehead of one,
in an antique script, was carved the phrase
'Anna. A death among many; and
yet the one which breaks my heart'
. Olivia ran her thumb along the words,
familiar hurt a fist in her chest.

A few chambers farther, she saw the
first true piles of bones, stacked haphazardly in one corner like left-over
building stones. They were newer, without much yellowing from the moisture and
cave mold. The wall of dead to which they belonged filled its nook from floor
to ceiling, and clearly someone hadn't known quite where to put the rest. A
limestone cross, nearly as tall as Ty, guarded the arrangement. In the
flickering torchlight there was no making out the Latin carved into its face,
only the boldly etched year:
1804
. The information stopped her mid-step,
and she stared at the empty sockets, the pearly ends of femurs and tibias,
wondering if her mother and father were woven into the human wicker.

Ty's arm wrapping her own broke her
thoughts. He tugged her gently. “Come along. Don't think about that. Not now.”

A few tears spilled free before she
could gather herself, more at his concern than her old wounds. On the next tug,
she allowed him to draw her along, putting the sight but not the memories from
her mind.

“Do you remember the chateau?” he
asked, voice barely audible, swallowed in the shadows of the cave. His words
were short and nervous, and she guessed he’d been working up his nerve to ask.

“Yes, and no.” She tried to
remember as a spectator, without letting the feelings overwhelm her. “I don't
think we went there when I was a little child. At least, not very often. We
lived in town. Mostly, I remember my father's apartments at the Tuilieries or
my mother's house along the Pont Neuf.”

She thought for a long time,
sorting memories from the blur of her past. “I only remember staying at the
chateau once. Fouche's police came for Papa. I think he knew times were growing
serious. He sent me and my mother to the chateau, and his wife and sons...”
Olivia shrugged, realizing she didn't know. “Elsewhere.”

“I just recall having no idea why
we were there. All my thoughts, all of Mama's thoughts from waking to sleeping
were of my father. We had no news from him, just gossip. Then a letter came
from Mama's friend, whose husband was an ambassador. She'd been told papa was
being held for the guillotine.”

She swallowed several times to open
her throat and took a deep breath. “Hysterical is hardly the word. My mother
would sob until she was sick. The fainting spells were a sort of blessing. At
least for a few moments she was oblivious.”

Ty kept silent, and just the scrape
of their feet punctuated her recollection for a moment.

“Mother's lady, Madame Toulon, kept
warning her to calm herself, that she'd do herself harm, but there was no
forcing Mama to be rational. On the third day, she went into labor. She
struggled for four days. Sometimes I thought she had fainted, and sometimes I
thought the last of the life was draining away from her. At the tender age of
thirteen, I vowed to never have babies.” She spared a hollow laugh for the
memory. “Some of my father's household, who preferred his wife, whispered in
front of me that the labor was a punishment for infidelity.

“On the fourth day, Madame Toulon
lost her temper with the physician and forcibly chased him from the house.” She
laughed again. “I remember her smacking a straw hat over her bun, tugging up the
knot in her kerchief. She looked like a knight, readying herself to do battle.
And so she did, with me in tow. On foot, down into the town. Banging on each
door, shouting. One of her bony fingers would prod my ribs and she would push
my shoulder toward some person or another while she questioned folks somewhere
else.

“Finally, we rooted out a midwife.
She was an old potato of a woman with the thinnest amount of wispy white hair I
had ever beheld on a female scalp.” Thinking for a moment, she pictured the
woman's face, wide lips, and kind eyes. The name followed a moment later. “
Marthe
.
Marthe claimed there was no complication she had not seen and few she could not
address.” She smiled, adding to the tears pricking her eyes. “But she would not
be pushed by Toulon, gathering her things and coming along at her own pace.
Theirs was a contest of wills for the ages.”

They skirted another pile of bones,
and she absently noted that even the unused pieces were stacked with care. For
some reason, it was comforting.

“At the house, Marthe hardly gave
my mother a look. The baby was
incline
, at a bad angle she said, and
would have to be turned. She claimed that it was something she could do, but it
was going to hurt. Her claim was an understatement. My poor mother screamed
until her mouth was frozen open, and not enough air would fill her lungs to
make more sound. For a moment I thought she might die from want of air, but
only a few moments later, the baby slipped out into the world.
            “It was a boy, premature. Marthe handed me his spindly little body.
I kept waiting for something to happen. For him to cry.” She stopped and held
out her arms, remembering his weight, the heat of his papery, newborn skin
through her sleeves.

Ty's fingers slipped around her
wrist and squeezed. “I'm sorry, Olivia. So sorry.”

She tried to ignore his comfort,
and even her own feelings about the memory, pretending she was doing nothing
more than telling a story. “The labor had been too long. Marthe did not think
he had survived the second day. She wasn't convinced mama would last long,
either. So Madame Toulon and I took him out into the family plot and buried him
under that headstone at the foot of the mausoleum, the one with a worn
inscription. I have no idea who was buried there first.”