Page 15 of A Most Improper Duchess
Arleyflexedhishandagainst the stone wall. Taking a slow breath, he descended a few feet more, before recalibrating in the darkness. A soft glow extended up the narrow, spiral stairs, but the candle, and Vivianne who had hold of it, were already on the lower level and out of his sight.
‘Plus vite, Arley. Faster.’
‘How on earth,’ he said as he inched his way down the last few stairs, ‘Can you manage that descent in all those skirts?’
‘I am a ballerina. I have excellent balance.’ She pushed herself to her toes in demonstration and swept an elegant hand before her. ‘Take a moment and let your eyesight fully accept the darkness. You will need your senses for this.’
How far underground had she taken him? The air, tight and stagnant, lacked the freshness of the city above.
‘This isn’t a ruse to rob me, is it?’
Her laughter lit the blackness, while her smile, the first clear thing he could focus on in the flickering candlelight, loomed macabre. ‘You only have one thing I want, and you have left it at your hotel. Don’t think I hadn’t noticed. And if I was going to rob you, I could lead you into any number of alleys across the city that are easier to make an escape from. Maybe, when we are done, I might lure you into one of them with the promise of my kiss.’ She pouted and tipped her head to one side. ‘Except you don’t want it. You want my Paris instead.’
He very much did want her kiss. The day before at the café, as they watched the man paint, and drank wine and ate bread dipped in oil, she had relaxed a little. She spoke of the changes she had seen in the skyline, hinted at the war, gushed about the stage. Bright, animated, every word from her full, rose-pink lips was a revelation. That night, alone in his four poster, with no thought or care of what had become of Algernon, he had obsessed over her lips. Their taste. Their eloquence. If he grasped her chin and pressed his mouth to them, would she respond? Or would she push him away, demand her payment, and never speak with him again? Tantalisingly out of reach, the only way he could have a kiss or anything from Vivianne was if she gave it. Because if he had to place a price on her now, he would be unable too. She was irrevocably, completely priceless.
‘How is your vision? Can you see anything beyond me?’ Vivianne asked.
Arley blinked away the last of the shadows. The surrounding walls glowed, but they weren’t flat and even, like the stone in the stairwell. White, uneven curves, bumps and lines reflected the light, while gaping sockets and cavities drew in the darkness. Bones. The walls were made of bones.
‘What the hell?’ Arley took a step back. They’d passed beneath a marble sign suspended above the entry, proclaimingArrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort. (Stop! This is the empire of Death). He’d thought it the prelude to something poetic. His heels bumped the arched entry and he half slumped awkwardly into the recess. Vivianne laughed. She grasped his hand and tugged him to his feet.
‘My Paris is not always light and pretty pictures. Fear not, the dead cannot hurt you. Welcome toles Catacombes.’
The ceiling just above his head, so close that if he reached he’d be able to press his palm against it, was stone scraped and gouged by tools, as was the floor. The two earthly extremes were linked by the most macabre walls imaginable. Bones: femurs, fibula, humerus and tibias, but mostly skulls, dozens and dozens of them, were stacked in a tight, interlocking pattern. The walls seemed to stretch on forever.
Vivianne interleaved her fingers with his. She wore kid gloves, soft with age, and the leather felt warm against his skin. She kept a tight hold and led him forward through a winding alley as her candle cast a haphazard circle around them.
‘Before the first revolution,’ she said, her voice taking on the tone of a confiding storyteller, ‘the cemeteries around the churches became too full. The people were always sick. The king, Louis XVI, who later lost his head, ordered that the cemeteries be emptied, and the remains brought here, to the old quarries. At first, the bones were just tipped in, but later, the workers stacked them, to make some order. And they made them beautiful. Millions of Parisians.’ She trailed a gloved finger along the wall. ‘The poor of Saints-Innocents. The aristocrats that fell to the guillotine. The tyrants of the Terror. All of them are here, all together. Invisible, yet exposed.’ She tapped at a femur. ‘This could have been le Duc d’Orléans. Or a humble peasant. We will never know.’
From the day he had become duke, Arley had felt the pressure of self-preservation. Like himself, his father had been the only legitimate son, and while there were enough branches extending backwards throughout the family tree to ensure there would be a presumptive heir out there somewhere, the weight of the line had always been on his shoulders. Like his death would create some catastrophe.
‘Doesn’t it scare you?’
‘The bones?Non. There are no ghosts inles Catacombes.’
‘Not that.’ He stared hard into the vacant cavities of nose and sockets that once would have been a face. A man or a woman? If they were alive, what colour eyes would look back at him? ‘Dying. Before your time.’
Vivianne huffed. ‘There are worse things than death. Hold this.’ She held out the candle, and he grasped the brass holder. She hesitated, took a half breath and, bending back her wrist, unfastened her buttons. ‘I was sixteen when I arrived in Paris, determined to find a place on the stage. I had danced my way from my home to here, but when I got an audition, I was not good enough. The petits rats, the young girls of the ballet, they train from when they are five or six. I had no form, or technique. But I had passion. But I cannot eat passion. I had to work.’
She loosened each glove finger, before tugging it free, then rested her naked hand against his cheek. She trailed her fingertips across his skin. He inhaled soft roses and powder, but her skin rubbed as hard as stone.
‘They call them thegrisettes. The grey. That is the uniform they wear. Grey skirt, grey shirt, grey skin… They work long hours beneath the floors of the fashion houses, only seeing the sun through dirty windows, yet all the beauty of Paris rests on them. So many young girls, like me, come to the city with dreams, but they cannot grasp them fast enough to fill their stomachs. So many are lost. Disease. Absinthe. Despair. Their families cannot take them back, and even if they could, they are too ashamed to go home. And the city of light, she is a loving mother and a cruel madame all at once. The lucky ones find comfort and warmth in the rich silks of her skirts, but for most, after Paris has amused herself, she discards them like ash from a cigarette. Burnt. Useless.’
He went to place his hand over hers, but she snatched it away.
‘My skin is so coarse, I do not need a thimble when I sew. But I am lucky. I met Nicole, and with her help, I learnt the technique I needed. I practiced every day during the siege, and when Garnier opened, I got my audition, and now, I have my stage.’ Her voice cracked a little, and he waited as she waded through her sadness. ‘But the girls who are still there, hoping for a man to free them, for an opportunity that never comes… That is a fate worse than death.’
‘They dream of marriage?’ he asked.
Vivianne laughed. ‘You speak like a man holds his greatest affections for his wife.’ She slipped her hand back into her glove and fastened the button. ‘They dream of setting their own price. Of having a choice in who they take to their bed. Of security.’
All her elegance and strength, her delightful wit and her pragmatism seemed to leech from her as she spoke. The candle flame cast dark pockets under her eyes, and just out of the reach of its glow, her skin paled. A tight fear gripped him that she might melt and disappear against the backdrop of bones and skulls, like they might claim her for their own. What would become of her after he left? What man would take his place in providing for her?
Shame, rich and gluttonous, coursed in him. He had carried the burden of the dukedom from a time before his memories were solid things but had also been sheltered from so much. When death sent jolts of fear through him, he really meant his own. His self-indulgence at his own fate suddenly made him ill. Why would he be worried about the loss of another? He’d long ago accepted that one day his mother would go, but that was borne of the reality of having already experienced his father’s loss. But who else in his life did he hold so close that the idea of their erasure send as profound a fear through him as his own? No one. He held no one close.
His knees buckled, and he went to steady himself against the wall, then pulled back when he found a skull from a long-ago lost person. People had likely wept for them. Who would weep for him? His chest tightened, his gut clenched, sweat heated and cooled his skin, and he turned hot as he shivered.
‘Arley?’ Vivianne took a step toward him.
