I sat down, uninvited.
"Rambeau?" I said, trying to attach the name to a face. Then the mists of memory cleared, revealing a stylishly dressed body and a homely round face, both liberally splashed with snuff.
"Rambeau!" I exclaimed. "Well, yes, I've met the man, but all I did was to smack him across the face with my fan when he bit my toes."
"In some moods, that would be sufficient provocation for la Vicomtesse," Master Raymond observed. "And if so, then I believe you are likely safe from further attacks."
"Thanks," I said dryly. "And if it wasn't the Vicomtesse?"
The little apothecary hesitated for a moment, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the morning sun that shone through the lozenged panes behind me. Then he made up his mind, and turned toward the stone table where his alembics simmered, jerking his head at me to follow.
"Come with me, madonna. I have something for you."
To my surprise, he ducked beneath the table and disappeared. As he didn't come back, I bent down and peered under the table myself. A bed of charcoal was glowing on the hearth, but there was space to either side of it. And in the wall beneath the table, concealed by the shadows, was the darker space of an opening.
With only a little hesitation, I kilted up my skirts and waddled under the table after him.
On the other side of the wall, there was room to stand up, though the room was quite small. The building's outer structure gave no hint of it.
Two walls of the hidden room were taken up by a honeycomb of shelves, each cell dustless and immaculate, each displaying the skull of a beast. The impact of the wall was enough to make me take a step backward; all the empty eyes seemed trained on me, teeth bared in gleaming welcome.
I blinked several times before I was able to locate Raymond, crouched cautiously at the foot of this ossuary like the resident acolyte. He held his arms raised nervously before him, eying me rather as though he expected me either to scream or to throw myself upon him. But I had seen sights a good deal more grisly than a mere rank of polished bone, and walked forward calmly to examine them more closely.
He had everything, it seemed. Tiny skulls, of bat, mouse and shrew, the bones transparent, little teeth spiked in pinpoints of carnivorous ferocity. Horses, from the huge Percherons, with massive scimitar-shaped jaws looking eminently suitable for flattening platoons of Philistines, down to the skulls of donkeys, as stubbornly enduring in their miniature curves as those of the enormous draft horses.
They had a certain appeal, so still and so beautiful, as though each object held still the essence of its owner, as if the lines of bone held the ghost of the flesh and fur that once they had borne.
I reached out and touched one of the skulls, the bone not cold as I would have expected, but strangely inert, as though the vanished warmth, long gone, hovered not far off.
I had seen human remains treated with far less reverence; the skulls of early Christian martyrs jammed cheek by bony jowl together in heaps in the catacombs, thigh bones tossed in a pile like jackstraws underneath.
"A bear?" I said, speaking softly. A big skull, this one, the canine teeth curved for ripping, but the molars oddly flattened.
"Yes, madonna." Seeing that I was not afraid, Raymond relaxed. His hand floated out, barely skimming the curves of the blunt, solid skull. "You see the teeth? An eater of fish, of meat"—a small finger traced the long, wicked curve of the canine, the flat serrations of molar—"but a grinder of berries, of grubs. They seldom starve, because they will eat anything."
I turned slowly from side to side, admiring, touching one here and there.
"They're lovely," I said. We spoke in quiet tones, as though to speak loudly might rouse the silent sleepers.
"Yes." Raymond's fingers touched them as mine did, stroking the long frontal bones, tracing the delicate squamosal arch of the cheek. "They hold the character of the animal, you see. You can tell much about what was, only from what is left."
He turned over one of the smaller skulls, pointing out the swelling bulges on the underside, like small, thin-walled balloons.
"Here—the canal of the ear enters into these, so that the sounds echo within the skull. Hence the sharp ears of the rat, madonna."
"Tympanic bullae," I said, nodding.
"Ah? I have but little Latin. My names for such things are…my own."
"Those…" I gestured upward. "Those are special, aren't they?"
"Ah. Yes, madonna. They are wolves. Very old wolves." He lifted down one of the skulls, handling it with reverent care. The snout was long and canid, with heavy canines and broad carnassial teeth. The sagittal crest rose stark and commanding from the back of the skull, testimony to the heavy muscles of the brawny neck that had once supported it.
Not a soft dull white like the other skulls, these were stained and streaked with brown, and shone glossy with much polishing.
"Such beasts are no more, madonna."
"No more? Extinct, you mean?" I touched it once more, fascinated. "Where on earth did you get them?"
"Not on the earth, madonna. Under it. They came from a peat bog, buried many feet down."
Looking closely, I could see the differences between these skulls and the newer, whiter ones on the opposite wall. These animals had been larger than ordinary wolves, with jaws that might have cracked the leg bones of a running elk or torn the throat from a fallen deer.
I shuddered slightly at the touch, reminded of the wolf I had killed outside Wentworth Prison, and its pack-mates who had stalked me in the icy twilight, barely six months ago.
"You do not care for wolves, madonna?" Raymond asked. "Yet the bears and the foxes do not trouble you? They also are hunters, eaters of flesh."
"Yes, but not mine," I said wryly, handing him back the age-dark skull. "I feel a good deal more sympathy with our friend the elk." I patted the high jutting nose with some affection.
"Sympathy?" The soft black eyes regarded me curiously. "It is an unusual emotion to feel for a bone, madonna."
"Well…yes," I said, slightly embarrassed, "but they don't really seem like just bones, you know. I mean, you can tell something about them, and get a feeling for what the animal was like, looking at these. They aren't just inanimate objects."
Raymond's toothless mouth stretched wide, as though I had inadvertently said something that pleased him, but he said nothing in reply.
"Why do you have all these?" I asked abruptly, suddenly realizing that racks of animal skulls were hardly the usual appurtenances of an apothecary's shop. Stuffed crocodiles, possibly, but not all this lot.
He shrugged good-naturedly.
"Well, they are company, of a sort, while I pursue my work." He gestured toward a cluttered workbench in one corner. "And while they may talk to me of many things, they are not so noisy as to attract the attention of the neighbors. Come here," he said, changing subjects abruptly. "I have something for you."
I followed him toward a tall cabinet at the end of the room, wondering.
He was not a naturalist, certainly not a scientist, as I understood the term. He kept no notes, made no drawings, no records that others might consult and learn from. And yet I had the odd conviction that he wanted very much to teach me the things that he knew—a sympathy for bones, perhaps?
The cabinet was painted with a number of odd signs, tailed and whorled, among what appeared to be pentagons and circles; Cabbalistic symbols. I recognized one or two, from some of Uncle Lamb's historical references.
"Interested in the Cabbala, are you?" I asked, eyeing the symbols with some amusement. That would account for the hidden workroom. While there was a strong interest in occult matters among some of the French literati and the aristocracy, it was an interest kept highly clandestine, for fear of the Church's cleansing wrath.
To my surprise, Raymond laughed. His blunt, short-nailed fingers pressed here and there on the front of the cabinet, touching the center of one symbol, the tail of another.
"Well, no, madonna. Most Cabbalists tend to be rather poor, so I do not seek their company often. But the symbols do keep curious people out of my cabinet. Which, if you think of it, is no small power for a bit of paint to exercise. So perhaps the Cabbalists are right, after all, when they say these signs hold power?"
He smiled mischievously at me, as the cabinet door swung open. I could see that it was in fact a double cabinet; if a nosy person ignored the warning of the symbols and merely opened the door, he or she would no doubt see only the harmless contents of an apothecary's closet. But if the proper sequence of hidden catches was pressed, then the inner shelves swung out as well, revealing a deep cavity behind them.
He pulled out one of the small drawers that lined the cavity, and upended it into his hand. Stirring the contents, he plucked out a single large white crystalline stone and handed it to me.
"For you," he said. "For protection."
"What? Magic?" I asked cynically, tilting the crystal from side to side in my palm.
Raymond laughed. He held his hand over the desk and let a handful of small colored stones trickle through his fingers, to bounce on the stained felt blotting-pad.
"I suppose you can call it so, madonna. Certainly I can charge more for it when I do." One fingertip nudged a pale greenish crystal free from the pile of colored stones.