The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee
“You’re hopeless,” he says, and it is so strange and horrible and utterly lovely how the way that he’s looking at me makes me want to both back away and throw myself upon him. It hurts like a sudden light striking your eyes in the dead of night.
He wraps his hands around his teacup again, his shoulders hunched. “I’m all right now.”
“Oh.” My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “Good.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You stayed.”
“That wasn’t much.”
“Monty, I have never once woken from a fit and found the people who were there when it began still with me. My aunt has quite literally run from the room when I said I was feeling unwell. And I know it didn’t happen now, but . . . no one stays.” He reaches out, almost as though he can’t help himself, and puts his thumb to my jawline. The tips of his fingers brush the hollow of my throat, and I feel the touch so deep I half expect that when he moves, I’ll be left with an imprint there, as though I am a thing fashioned from clay in a potter’s hands.
Percy drops his arm suddenly and lifts his chin, nose wrinkling. “Something’s burning.”
“I set a fire in the kitchen grate.”
“No, I think it’s here. Oh, Monty—the kettle.”
I look over at the side table. A thin strand of smoke is rising from where I set the kettle. I snatch it up, though the damage is done—a perfect circle in charred black on the wood. “Damnation.”
“Let’s not burn their father’s house down while they’re out,” Percy remarks.
“Is there a way to hide—” Their father’s house. I nearly drop the kettle. “Percy, their father isn’t dead.”
Percy looks up from fishing some floating thing out of his tea. “What?”
“Mateu Robles—their father. He isn’t dead, he’s a prisoner. The man Dante was talking to—he’s the warden at the city prison and he told me Robles is locked up.”
“He’s jailed? Did he say why?”
“Something about politics. I think he was on the wrong side of the war that the Bourbon family won.”
“Maybe that’s something to do with the duke’s letter—”
“The letters!” I leap to my feet and fly out of the parlor, still clutching the kettle. The study door is as we left it—propped and unlocked. I push it open, half expecting some trap to fall upon me from above.
“What are you doing?” Percy calls.
“The letters from the duke. There might be more.” I dash to the desk, nearly tripping on Percy’s fiddle case, which is still just inside the door, and begin to paw through the letters in the box, searching for any more with the Bourbon crest on the seal. Near the bottom, another fleur-de-lis winks up at me from green wax, and I snatch it up. “Here.”
Percy joins me at the desk, sifting through the papers strewn atop it. “Lucky they don’t seem to throw anything out.”
With Percy going through the drawers that aren’t locked and me working across the surface, we come up with almost a dozen letters with the Bourbon family crest set into the seal. “He’s not just writing to them, they’re corresponding,” I say, picking one at random and confirming the duke’s signature at the bottom before I scan the page.
On the other side of the desk, Percy holds up another. “This one’s dated nearly a year ago.”
“They’re all to Helena.”
“Not all.” He flaps one of the pages at me. “This one’s for Mateu.”
“‘Upon the execution of our arrangement,’” I read, a phrase picked at random from the middle of one. “What arrangement have they got?”
When I look up at Percy, his face is grave. The shadows from the firelight mottle his skin. “Monty, I think we should leave here. Tonight. Or as soon as we can.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere. Back to Marseilles. Find Lockwood. At least find somewhere else to stay until he sends funds.”
“But . . .” But what about Holland and the asylum? I want to say. We came here to help you and instead we’d be leaving with nothing.
Before I can reply, the front latch clacks from the hallway, followed by a bang as the door hits the wall and bounces back. Percy and I both freeze, eyes locked, then in unison begin shoving the letters back where we found them. Percy shuts one of the drawers too forcefully, and a glass beaker rolls to the floor and shatters. We both go still again, listening hard. There are the sounds of a scuffle outside the door, and a clatter, like something’s been struck.
Then a voice that sounds distinctly like Felicity’s gives a smothered cry.
Which is enough to kick into motion a strange mechanism inside of me that has never before been triggered. I snatch up the closest thing to a weapon I can find—the kettle of hot tea, which I imagine will do a fair bit of damage if tossed in someone’s face. Percy, clearly of a similar mind, hefts a sword he finds wedged between two of the bookshelves, though it’s too firmly attached to its plaque to be convinced to part, so the plaque goes with him. Together, we inch toward the door, weapons raised.
Something strikes the wall from the other side. The canopic jars on the shelf jump. I fling open the study door and fly into the hallway, Percy on my heels.
It is apparent at once that we have made a grievous mistake. Even in the dim light, I can clearly see Felicity and Dante collapsed into the wall with their arms and hands and mouths and abso-bloody-lutely everything all over each other. Neither of them appears to quite have a handle on what it is they’re doing, but they’re nonetheless enthusiastic about it.
I’m not certain if I want to make a hasty retreat back into the study and pretend we saw nothing or throw the hot tea in his face anyway, but then my foot catches that damned loose floorcloth and I pitch into the wall. The kettle leaves a crater in the wainscoting with a resonant thud. Dante shrieks and flails into one of the armless statues beside the door. It falls with a crash. Felicity whips around, a long strand of her hair that’s collapsed from its arrangement whacking Dante in the face. “What are you doing?” she cries.
“What are we doing?” I return, my voice coming out at a much higher pitch than anticipated. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“We thought you were in danger!” I cry. Dante bolts for the stairs, but I thrust my kettle in his path. A few steaming drops spit onto the carpet. “Don’t you go anywhere. I’ve got very acidic tea and Percy’s got a sword with a stump, so keep your hands where I can see them.”
Felicity throws her head back. “For the love of God.”
“If I may—” Dante starts, but I cut him off.
“Oh no, you don’t get to say a thing. You and Helena are liars and thieves and now you’re trying to take advantage of us in every conceivable way.”
“Monty—” Felicity interrupts, but I’ve got too much momentum to halt. I am Sisyphus’s damned boulder rolling down that damned mountain and I intend to flatten the rogue Dante beneath me.
“You’ve got the duke who wants to kill us writing your sister letters, and your father, turns out, isn’t dead, he’s in prison, so thanks for that lie—”
“Monty—”
“And now you’re, what, keeping us here until it’s convenient to slit our throats? But not before you played a bit of Saint George with my sister.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Henry Montague, for once in your life, be quiet!” Felicity snaps. “This wasn’t Dante’s idea, it was mine.”
Which is a bit of a cold slap to the face. The spout of my kettle droops. “Yours?” I repeat.
“Yes, mine. I thought we’d be alone here.”
“So did we. We came home because Percy was feeling poorly.”
Felicity looks to him. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine.” He’s got the sword hefted in both hands, but the tip is starting to sink. Blades are beastly heavy, with or without a dozen pounds of solid oak attached. “Where’s Helena?”
“Still at the opera, presumably,” Felicity replies. “Since we all four decided to flee without consulting the others.”
“Perhaps we should discuss this in the morning.” Dante has begun to creep again to the stairs, but I step in his path. Even if it was Felicity who dragged him here for a bit of tongue, I’d still like to slam him into the wall for going along with it.
“Stay where you are,” I say. “None of this changes the fact that you’ve been corresponding with the duke who you claimed stole the Baseggio Box from you.”
“You—you went through our things?” he stammers.
“It was right there on the desk!” I say, then remember it is not me on trial here and add, “You lied to us!”
“My—my sister was right, you came here to spy on us.”
“We weren’t spying—” I say at the same time Percy says, “Why did you tell us your father was dead?” And Dante lets out a whimper, hands thrown up in a Don’t shoot! gesture.
“All right, everyone into the study, now!” Felicity barks, in a tone that is essentially verbal castration, and not a one of us protests.
We shuffle in, single file, while she stands at the door like a headmistress, watching us with her arms folded and a glower in place. I set my kettle on the cold fireplace. Percy keeps the sword in hand, but Felicity snaps at him, “Put that down before you hurt yourself,” and he lowers it beneath the desk. Dante lets out a visible sigh of relief. “Sit,” she orders, and we three all sit, Dante and Percy in the matching chairs before the desk, me on the floor because Felicity’s glare is making me afeard for my life if I delay. She shuts the study door with a snap, then whirls to face us. “Now.” She points a finger at Dante. “You owe us some truth.”
Dante seems to wither in his chair. In spite of the fact that I’m still ready to wring his scrawny neck, I can’t help but feel a bit bad for the poor lad. One minute he’s working himself up to put his lily-white hands down a girl’s dress for likely the first time in his life, and the next he’s facing down an inquisition from said girl whose dress he was about to reach down. “Yes. Yes, I suppose.”
“Start with this,” I say. “What’s in the Baseggio Box?”
Dante does not look as though he was prepared to start there. “That’s . . . a very large question.”
“It’s a very small box, so it can’t be that large,” I reply.
“Is it a Lazarus Key?” Percy asks.
Dante’s head snaps up. “How do you know about that?”
“We saw it in”—Percy glances my way, a silent apology for coughing up the truth—“your sister’s correspondence.”
I snatch a letter off the desk and hold it up like evidence presented at trial. Felicity gives me a pronounced eye roll.
“The Lazarus Key is . . . I mean the . . . It’s not . . .” Dante rubs his temples with his fingers, then says, “You read my father’s book, so you know about his theories. Human panaceas—the beating heart as the only place in which a true cure-all can be created.”
“He was trying to make one,” Felicity says.
“Yes.” Dante coughs, then casts an eye at the fireplace. “I’ll take some of that tea, if you’re offering.”
“You don’t want any,” Percy says.
“Did it work?” Felicity asks.
“Um, it didn’t quite . . . He performed the experiment, but it didn’t . . . It went wrong. It was tried upon”—Dante swallows hard, his Adam’s apple making a great hurtle up his neck—“my mother. Our mother. She volunteered,” he adds. “They were both alchemists, and they wrote the book—it was hers, too. But she couldn’t put her name on it, as she’s . . . well, a woman.” He trips on that word, his eyes darting to Felicity, and I wonder if he’s considering whether or not bringing this deception into the light is going to ruin his chances of getting his tongue in her mouth again. I nearly upend the kettle over his head. “But the compound they created . . . it stopped her heart.”
“So she died?” Felicity asks.
“No,” he replies. “But she didn’t—she didn’t not die, either. She’s . . . stuck. Not living, not dead, with an alchemical panacea for a heart.”
Hope leaps like a flame inside me. “It worked?” I interrupt, a bit too keenly, for Felicity gives me a frown that suggests I have rather missed the point.
Dante nods. “The panacea was created, so . . . Well, yes.”
“So, why hasn’t it been used?” I ask. “Why didn’t he make more?”
“Because she had to give her life for it,” Dante replies, looking a bit shocked I had to ask. “It’s—it’s a horrid cost.”
“Where is she now?” Percy asks.
“She’s buried . . . or entombed, rather. My father, before he was arrested—he knew they were coming for him and he wouldn’t be able to protect her any longer. So he had her locked up where no one could get to the heart. The key . . .” He picks up the puzzle box from the desk and shakes it. The sound of something fly-light rattling around inside it whispers through the room. “It opens her vault.”
This is, without question, the spookiest thing I’ve ever heard. It sounds like the sort of scary story Percy and I used to tell each other when we were lads, just to see who could get the other worked up first.
“And where’s the vault?” I ask. I’m ready to leap to my feet and sprint to some cemetery on the other side of the city as soon as he names the place, even though it’s the dead of night and we don’t actually have the key we need to open her tomb. I’d pry the damn thing open with nothing but my bare hands and sheer determination.
“Is it in Venice?” Percy asks. “There’s an island called Mary and Martha. Lazarus’s sisters in the Bible.”
Dante nods. “My father apprenticed with an alchemist there, as a boy. His teacher is long dead, but the men at the sanctuary . . . they still knew him. And they said they would hide her. That’s why he called it the Lazarus Key. It all seemed rather poetical at the time.”
“So his plan is to—what? Leave her there for the rest of time and waste his cure-all?” I ask. Felicity shoots me another think before you say inappropriate things look.
“Well, there’s a complication of late.” Dante reaches for his spectacles, remembers he’s not wearing them, and instead rubs his eyes. “The island is sinking.”
“It’s what?” Felicity and I say in unison.
“The tunnels under the sanctuary are collapsing. It’s all flooding. No one’s allowed there anymore. There isn’t much time left before the whole thing . . . it’s going to be at the bottom of the Lagoon.”
“So the one item on earth that can cure anything will be underwater in a few months if you don’t go fetch it?” I say. I want to smack my head against the hearth in frustration, because of course this couldn’t be as easy as it seemed for a brief, bright moment.
“That’s—that’s why the duke—why he came for us,” Dante says. “Collecting her has . . . it’s become more urgent.”
“So where does the duke come in, exactly?” Felicity asks. She’s taken one of his letters up from the desk and is examining it.
Dante rubs his hands together. “We had . . . When the experiment went wrong, my father destroyed his research before anyone could replicate it. But the duke—he wanted the panacea. He wanted the method more, but my father wouldn’t give it up—not any of it, not my mother or the work—so Bourbon had him locked up for his Hapsburg loyalty and came to Helena and me instead. So many people have come—come calling. Men who read my father’s book. They want the secrets to his work. That’s why—why we began to tell people he was dead and the work gone. Just so we’d be left alone.” He scrapes at his bottom lip with his teeth. “One Duke of Bourbon is—is bad enough.”
“Why didn’t your father destroy the heart, then?” Percy asks. “If he was so desperate to keep people from getting it.”
Dante shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Why does the duke need the panacea?” Felicity asks. “Is he ill?”
“Why would he want to give it to the king if they’ve parted ways?” Felicity asks.
I press at my temples with the tips of my fingers. “Maybe if he brought this cure-all to the king and kept him alive, he could get his position back. He could ask for anything he wanted, really.”
“Which secures the Bourbon family’s control of the French throne,” Percy finishes.
“And the Spanish,” Dante says.
“And Poland,” Felicity adds. “They’re everywhere.”
“So he’s going to blackmail the king in exchange for his health,” I say.
“Or, what if he took the heart and then found a way to duplicate it after a study?” Felicity says. “If the Bourbon family had that sort of knowledge—if anyone did . . .” She trails off, leaving each of us to spin his own end to that sentence.
Dante nods, looking suddenly miserable. “We know Bourbon has alchemists in the French court. They haven’t been able to copy my father’s work, but they’ve been trying, and if they had—had the heart to study . . .” He lapses into silence.
Felicity rounds on him, looking cross again. “So, why did you give him the box?”
“If he gets the heart, he’ll let our father out of prison. But it doesn’t matter.” He makes an attempt to laugh, but he’s so nervous it sounds a bit maniacal. “We don’t know the cipher. The duke took the box with him to Paris in hopes cryptographers in the court could crack it, but our father’s the only one who knows. And if he knew what we’d done . . .” He looks around at all of us, like he doesn’t quite know what the right course of action is and is hoping someone will offer it up for him. “He told us not to. Made us swear we wouldn’t hand her over.”
“And he won’t tell you the cipher?” I ask.
Dante shakes his head. “No, not Helena or me since she—she gave up the location of the tomb. To the duke. Father knows Helena would trade it for his freedom—I think that’s why he put the key in the box to begin with, to protect—to keep it from her. She’s devoted to—she and Mother fought, constantly, for . . . But Father was always her defender. And I think . . . now she wants to be his.” He rubs the back of his neck, then knits his fingers behind it, mouth pulling into a frown. “After our mother died, Father became obsessed—obsessed with trying to bring her back . . . or let her die. For good. Hence . . .” He waves a hand at the museum of funerary rites that decorates the walls. “Helena said . . . it was like losing both our parents to his obsession. And she—she blamed our mother for that . . . that too.”