In memory of my father, Somdeb DasGupta

Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossroads, its squares, its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of slime, minus the human form…

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favour, that it is not a liar… All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth… All which was formerly rouged, is washed free. The last veil is torn away.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything…

Extracted from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

In the moonlight under the Eiffel Tower sat a sewer rat. Crowds of people milled about the tower. They had come to see this exciting landmark, only a few years old. But the rat was not interested in it or them. It slipped with the moonlight through a grating in the pavement and disappeared from sight.

The rat scurried into a drain and down, down, down into the bowels of the city. It ran along the channels where the Romans had collected urine to use as mouthwash. It ran through the old, disused private latrine of the guillotined king. It ran under the toilets of the Opera House. It ran and it ran until it reached a spot in the north of the city, where a man and a boy were busy working underground, trying to unblock a sewer.

The rat plopped into the river of black water rushing through the sewer. Through its beady eyes it spotted a small gold object winking and glistening on the riverbank. Waves of vibration flowed from the object through the water. The rat paddled hard to get away, sensing something deep and slow and older than the city or the earth upon which it was built.

The boy spotted the glistening gold object too. He picked it up curiously. It resembled two halves of a walnut shell, opening on a hinge and shutting with a small clasp. Some sort of locket perhaps. Carved into the surface were letters in a strange spidery script. The boy bit the metal expertly. It was solid gold. As he held the thing in his hand, it seemed to heat up and vibrate, throbbing in his palm with a powerful energy. The boy was used to finding strange things at work in the sewers: snakes, watches, wallets, guns, a baby, an alligator, a twenty-carat diamond (which the Paris authorities had confiscated). Once even a human torso. But this thing seemed to have a life of its own. It twitched in his palm like a living organ, giving off a halo of sickly greenish-yellow light.

The boy looked at the blue metal plaque on the sewer wall that identified the name of the street above. Rue Morgue. One of those streets with swanky houses, some even equipped with the latest flushing toilets. The object must have come from one of those. He slipped it into his pocket. It might be valuable. Perhaps he would get some money for returning it. He decided to try to find the house the next day.

Far above the boy’s head, in one of the tall houses on Rue Morgue, a toilet finished flushing. A figure shut the door of the marble-tiled water closet and crept stealthily away. Only the old night owl that slept in the rafters of the Sacré-Coeur heard and saw.

On flew the night owl, skimming over the rooftops of Rue Morgue, swooping over a skylight to a small attic room where a girl tossed in uneasy sleep. The wind whined through a crack in the skylight and the girl’s bed was crooked, hard and unyielding. But it was not for that reason she tossed and turned.

The owl flew back to its perch in the eaves of the cathedral. And the girl slept on fitfully, fretting and muttering, until dawn broke, and the city awoke.

Zélie prodded the dead canary. The bird lay stiff on its back in the morning light, legs in the air, eyes open and staring, unseeing.

Standing on tiptoe, Zélie stretched her hand further through the door of the gilded cage. She stroked the bird’s tummy, as soft and fluffy as a baby chick’s. She wondered if they would bury it or throw it on the rubbish heap.

“The Lord have mercy on us…” Blanche, the maid, had appeared in the hall and began to back away, crossing herself. Picking up her long skirts, she rushed back down the corridor. “The witch! The witch has done it again! Cook, Pierre, come quickly!”

Zélie tossed the fringe of thick curly black hair out of her eyes, which were still puffy from her sleepless night. She caught a glimpse of the cat’s tail whisking out of sight behind the door and braced herself for what was to come. Soon she heard Pierre the butler’s fast footsteps approaching, followed by the shuffling tread of Cook. As they entered the room, their jaws dropped open in unison. Cook fanned herself while Pierre rushed to the birdcage.

Zélie pointed to the muddy paw prints on the floor below the cage. “The cat. The bird must have died of fright…” She faltered. She knew it was useless. Whatever she said, she would be blamed for the bird’s death.

Cook and Pierre crossed themselves.

“Come on, witch.” Pierre seized Zélie by her frilly maid’s collar and dragged her through the hall to the kitchen. He dumped her on a chair by the stove.

“Sizzling saucisses! That’s three incidents this week, Zélie Dutta.” Cook folded her sweaty arms and glared at Zélie. “First Madame’s earrings disappear, then the milk goes sour. Now this. And it’s only Tuesday!”

“It’s Wednesday, not Tuesday.” Zélie corrected her. Cook’s brain was getting foggier by the day. It must be all that absinthe she kept drinking.

Cook’s face turned as puce as a lobster. “I said Wednesday. Are you deaf?”

Zélie rolled her eyes. She got off the chair and went to the kitchen door, marched through it and pulled it shut behind her, sticking her tongue out when it was closed. Through the keyhole she could just about make out Cook’s muffled voice.

“It isn’t natural, is it? That girl’s peepers. One eye the colour of an angel, the other that of the devil himself. And coming from foreign parts. She must be a witch! There’s no other explanation. There’s more devil than angel in that ferret, I’ll bet.”

“Hush, it’s not up to you to question Madame’s judgement,” Blanche retorted. “The mistress must have reasons for keeping the girl here. Madame will be back later. I’ll make sure she knows about this. Just mind your own business and keep your head down.” Through the keyhole Zélie saw the maid making for the kitchen door, so she beat a hasty retreat upstairs.

The attic room was hot and stuffy. Zélie stood on tiptoe and opened the skylight, then sat down at the rickety table pushed to the wall with a cracked mirror propped against it. She glared at the reflection in the mirror. Brown skin, freckles, black hair popping untidily like champagne corks out of her maid’s cap. Nothing to look twice at. Except for one thing, only noticeable on close scrutiny: the left eye was sea grey, the right was obsidian black. Sighing, she pulled open a drawer in the table and brought out a sheet of paper and pen. A few hours before Madame was due back from her visit to the country. Plenty of time to write a letter. She sat down at the desk and wrote in a clear, fluid hand.

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Wednesday morning, 16th October 1895

Dear Baba,

Please can I come home? I hate it here. Madame Malaise is a monster and everybody blames me for everything because they say I am a witch. They also accuse me of stealing.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Wednesday morning, 16th October 1895

Dear Baba,

Everything is fine. Paris is a very nice city and I am getting lots of exercise polishing the stairs. I am also eating lots of vegetables, mainly turnip gruel, and I have made friends with a pigeon. Today the canary died.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

Zélie knew her letters were read before they were sent. She looked up at the clouds drifting past behind the iron bars of the skylight. Even after a year and a half here in Paris the memories remained, dull and nagging like toothache. The clatter of rickshaws on bustling dirt roads. Baba, with his twinkling eyes and strong arms, swinging her on to his shoulders as if she were as light as a leaf. The squeak of her grandmother’s wicker chair during a rainy monsoon night as she paused thoughtfully in telling a story.

Groping with her hand to the very back of the drawer, Zélie pulled out a bundle of papers tied with a piece of ribbon. She opened it and leafed through the letters. They were full of news from back home, jokes and riddles. Especially riddles, which she and her dad both loved. Such as:

Smooth, ripe, mellow,

Luscious, creamy, yellow.

One thing that’s my trait,

I am never straight.

What am I?

The answer would always be tucked away somewhere else in the letter for Zélie to find – hidden in another word, or upside down, or on a slip of paper, or a word that could only be read in a mirror:

But for two whole months now, there had been no letter from Baba. Just an eerie, deafening silence. A slow dread began to creep stealthily into Zélie’s brain. What if—

A soft cooing from the skylight woke her from her reverie. She looked up. Two beady orange eyes stared down at her. Zélie jumped on the chair and pushed open the grating. She dug in her apron pocket and brought out a crust of baguette. The pigeon hopped about on the slate tiles of the roof expectantly.

“Coucou, Rodolphe.” Zélie broke up the crust and tossed the pieces on the roof, watching the pigeon hopping after them as they bounced down the tiles. One of Rodolphe’s clawed feet was missing, but he did a pro’s job of hopping on the other. He came every day, and Zélie was always sure to save a bit of baguette for him, even though she was usually quite hungry herself. “You’ve only got one foot,” she told him. “But you’ve got two beautiful orange eyes.”

The breeze coming through the skylight was thick with the smell of roasting chicken, leather harnesses and horse dung from the street below. Cautiously Zélie pushed the grating aside and climbed out through the skylight. She perched on the grey slate roof next to Rodolphe. The slope was very steep, but that didn’t bother Zélie. She’d climbed the palm trees back home many times, racing against the neighbour’s boys to get coconuts. Below her the chequered roofs of the city lay spread out in the morning haze like a giant’s chessboard.

Zélie leaned against the warm chimney stack. From the pocket of her apron she pulled a large book with the title The Parisian Lady’s Maid’s Handbook printed on its cover. She flipped it open to reveal a second cover beneath: The Mysteries of Paris, a book she had stolen from the house library when she was supposed to be dusting. It told the story of the adventures in Paris of a certain Count Rodolphe, an expert in kick-boxing. Zélie had eagerly absorbed the kick-boxing techniques, which were described in detail in the book, and considered herself something of an expert in this art. She had named the pigeon Rodolphe in honour of the hero.

Soon Zélie was lost in a sword fight on the banks of the Seine. Beside her, Rodolphe hopped on his single foot, beady orange eyes blinking. The city murmured to itself far below, like an old lady mumbling in her sleep. Bliss.

CRASH!

An ear-splitting noise ripped the air. Rodolphe dropped the piece of bread he had been pecking and flapped noisily away. Zélie jumped to her feet and swung back down through the skylight, landing with a smack on her bottom on the hard wooden floor. She ran to the door of the attic and opened it, crossing the landing and peering over the bannister.

The spiral attic staircase twisted down to the floor below, which was strewn with chunks of gold and pink and blue. There was a low sobbing sound. Bending over the sea of colour was Blanche’s red head. A cloth and open tin of polish were scattered on the carpet.

The sound of scuffling feet rose from below. Pierre’s glistening bald head came into view. The bald head stopped beside Blanche and the sea of broken china. “In God’s name, what’s going on?” The butler seized Blanche and shook her roughly by the shoulders. “The Ormolu porcelain vase from the Palace of Versailles! You’ve smashed it! Are you mad, girl? That vase is priceless! Do you want us all to be sent to the guillotine when Madame gets back?”

The maidservant’s sobbing had risen to a wail. Zélie took a tiny step back towards the attic door. She had to get away.

A floorboard creaked. The two heads below lifted and became upturned faces.

“It was her!” Blanche shrieked, pointing a trembling finger. “I was polishing the vase and she came out on to the landing. She stared at me and made the sign of the devil. The vase smashed that very minute!”

Pierre lunged up the stairs to the attic four steps at a time. When he reached the landing, he stopped and circled Zélie, crossing himself and shielding his face with his hands. “Mon Dieu, protect me from this witch… St Thomas, St Pierre, St François, defend me!” He dug about in his pocket and whipped out a string of garlic, which all the servants had taken to carrying since Zélie arrived. He thrust it under her nose.

It felt as if her face had been shoved into a sailor’s armpit. She began to retch.

“The charm’s working! Garlic always works on your kind.” Pierre grinned triumphantly, although beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead and his false teeth were chattering like a cage of monkeys. He stretched out a trembling hand.

Still gagging on the garlic smell, Zélie felt herself seized by his grip, which was surprisingly strong, and thrust back into the attic.

The door slammed shut. Pierre’s falsetto voice hissed through the keyhole like an angry wasp. “You can stay in there, witch. The mistress will be back later this morning; you’ll have to face the music then.” The key turned in the lock.

A heavy silence descended on the house. As if in a dream, Zélie walked to the table with the cracked mirror. The notepaper and letter still lay on the table skew-whiff as she had left them. A dribble from the pen was spreading on the paper in an inky pool. Zélie peered out of the window to see if Rodolphe had come back, but the sky was empty. The cracked mirror scowled back at her. She turned it to the wall. Clenching her fists so tight that she left eight red half-moon marks in her palms, she kicked the iron bed frame.

There has to be an escape.

There is no escape.

There has to be.

There isn’t.

Yes there is.

No there isn’t.

Her brain turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail. And then, suddenly, it dawned on her like an exploding camera flash. She didn’t need to find an escape. She had simply to escape.

Hurriedly Zélie crossed the floor to the smaller of the two iron beds, the one that was hers. The other belonged to her fellow maidservant Blanche. She pulled a knapsack from under it and opened a drawer. She threw some things into the bag. Not too many: nobody must notice anything missing. Just one change of clothes, the precious letters from her dad, the few francs she had managed to save. She would stow away on a ship and return to India. Baba might be disappointed that she had not made a go of things, but when he knew the truth about her misery, he would surely understand.

Her brain seethed with resentment, tears stabbing her eyes. It was all so unfair. She had never understood why she had been shipped to Paris from her home in Calcutta in the first place. Supposedly she’d been sent over as a housemaid because the Malaise family had lent her father some money, and offering her services was the only way to pay them back. But there had been something cloak-and-dagger about the whole affair. She couldn’t see why Baba had played along with a plan that meant taking her out of school and the home she shared with him and her beloved grandma Tami. Even though he owed the Malaises money, surely he could have found some way to pay back the loan other than sending her out here to work for them? It must have torn his heart. There had been something so sad, so resigned in the slow wave he had given her as the ship left the dock. Then there was the worrying fact that he hadn’t written to her for two months. The sooner she got home to make sure everything was all right, the better.

Zélie went to the locked door and shook it. It rattled but remained closed. She was not fazed. Pulling a hairgrip from her pocket, she jiggled it in the lock. There was a soft click. She opened the door and peered out cautiously. There was nobody in sight. Taking one step forward and several deep breaths, she shut her eyes and counted to ten.

Zélie Dutta, she reminded herself, you have beaten Vikram Sen, thrice champion of Bowbazar Street, at climbing for coconuts, and your own father five times at chess (the last time he cheated). You do a better roundhouse kick than Count Rodolphe. You have crushed the head of a poisonous cobra with your naked heel and you can twist your tongue. You can fart with your armpit and curse in three languages. You deserve better than this and you can escape.

She opened her eyes. All was quiet and deserted. It was just a matter of a hop down the sweeping staircase, a skip across the marble hall and a jump out on to the porch steps. Then she would be on the road to freedom.

Within a moment she had reached the bottom of the sweeping staircase. She looked left, then right down the marble hallway. A murmur of voices floated down from the salon upstairs. Pierre and Blanche were getting the room ready for guests later that day. The coast was clear.

Picking up her long skirts, she ran across the hall. She stretched out her hand to the front door and turned the big brass doorknob. It twisted, the door swung open and she ran out, smack into the mistress of the house.

“Zélie Dutta!” Madame Malaise’s eyebrows shot up and her thin painted lips parted in an “o”. Behind her, a large black carriage was parked on Rue Morgue. Madame had returned to Paris from the country earlier than expected.

“What on earth is going on?” Madame glared at Zélie and the three other servants, who at that moment appeared on the staircase. “Blanche, explain.”

The maid dropped her gaze and her usually pale face flamed up to match her red hair. “I was cleaning the Ormolu vase from Versailles. I looked up and saw Zélie on the landing. She made the sign of the devil and the vase broke.”

“I did not!” Zélie stamped her foot and glared at Blanche. “Dammit, you’re a lying snake! You broke the vase yourself.”

Madame Malaise’s eyes narrowed. She grasped Blanche by her frilly maid’s collar and yanked her up so that she hung limply like an unstrung marionette. “Do you take me for a fool? The girl’s a foreigner, but she’s not a witch. You broke the vase yourself, didn’t you?”

Blanche remained silent.

Madame Malaise gave a throaty chuckle, like a hyena swooping on its kill. “Just as well the vase isn’t genuine. Do you think I’d be stupid enough to have a treasure from Versailles in this house full of clumsy oafs? Oh no, the real Versailles vase is safely locked up in a bank vault on the Champs-Élysées. That was a copy. But I’ll dock your wages next month anyway for breaking it. And the next month’s too for lying.”

“Yes, Madame.” Blanche’s body slumped in Madame’s grasp and her head drooped. But her eyes spat green venom in Zélie’s direction.

“And now for you.” Madame turned to Zélie. “You can have your mouth rinsed in soap for swearing. Cook, do it now.” Madame snapped her fingers at the coachman to bring her trunk inside and swept up the stairs in a rustle of silk and furs.

“Come on, you little weasel.” Fleshy, greasy fingers grasped Zélie by the shoulders. She found herself being picked up and tucked under Cook’s sweaty armpit and carried down the hall to the kitchen. Rough hands pushed her down. A blast of freezing water struck her head. Zélie coughed and spluttered as a waxy brick was thrust into her mouth, melting into vinegary foam that frothed over her tongue and up her nostrils.

Cook’s voice thundered in her ear. “That’ll rinse out your foul mouth, you witch.”

SQUAWK!

There was a flutter of wings and a loud caw. Peering up from the sink, Zélie glimpsed Rodolphe hopping on his single foot on the windowsill. He must have spotted her through the kitchen window and flown down in the hope of a snack.

“Rodolphe, go away!” She tried to shout the warning, but all that came out was a wet gurgle. A cascade of soapy suds flew from the sink on to the pigeon and he shot up from the windowsill into the air, a flurry of feathers and angry squawks. A massive splurge of yellow liquid shot from his bottom and splattered over Cook’s head.

She screamed. “Mon Dieu! Wretched bird. Wait till I get hold of you. You’ll be pigeon pie before I’m done!”

The iron grip on Zélie’s neck loosened. Retching and spitting, she raised her head out of the sink. Her knees shook and her vision swam.

Cook’s face floated before her, blotched red and white, mixed with the mustard-coloured goo that had been Rodolphe’s parting shot. She shook her fist at Zélie. “Witch! I heard you summon that bird to fly down and dump on me—”

One of the bells by the kitchen dresser jangled. Cook’s face turned the colour of mouldy cheese. Then she pulled herself together and boomed like a foghorn. “Boudoir Number One! Madame will want help getting ready for her morning promenade. Get to it!” She wiped her face with her apron.

Zélie didn’t need to be told twice. Shooting like a bullet from the sink, she stumbled through the kitchen door and across the hall, tucking her hair under her maid’s cap as she tottered up the stairs.

Madame was in her boudoir with Blanche, who was holding an open glove box for her to select the gloves for her promenade.

The vinegary tang of soap lingered on Zélie’s tongue with the taste of Cook’s garlicky fingers. She took a deep breath and handed the letter she had written to Madame. “A letter for my father, Madame. If you would be so kind as to send it?”

Madame took the letter silently and put it on the escritoire. Her face was in shadow, so Zélie could not make out her expression.

“Madame, shouldn’t I go to the pharmacy and get that mercury for your face cream?” Zélie held her breath and crossed her toes, waiting for the answer. She just needed one excuse to get out of the house, and she’d be off.

“No, not yet.” Madame smoothed her black gown with long bony fingers. “Pin my hat on first. Mon Dieu, these mourning clothes are dreary. My dear late husband, mon cheri le Docteur Malaise, would not have approved. He liked bright colours.”

Zélie bit her lip. Madame’s hat was an extraordinary affair concocted by her personal hatmaker Monsieur de Plume, an oily little man with a limp moustache. It was half as tall as Madame herself and took the form of an enormous bird with a sweeping tail of ostrich and peacock feathers. Monsieur de Plume had fabricated the bird’s body from pigskin filled with air to lighten the load of the hat, which otherwise would have crushed Madame’s skull with the force of a sledgehammer on a nut.

Zélie picked up a jewelled hatpin from the piles on the table beside Madame’s chair, where Blanche had been sorting them into colours – unnecessarily, because Zélie had already put them in order. She began to stab the huge hat into place. Blanche’s reflection scowled at her in the mirror, pincering her with a steely gaze. A particularly valuable pearl hatpin from Madame’s collection had vanished recently, apparently stolen, along with some other items of jewellery, and Blanche’s expression conveyed deep suspicion. From the very moment Zélie had arrived at the house Blanche had resented her, as if she feared a rival who might usurp her position. Now Blanche was losing two months’ wages. Zélie knew Blanche would blame her for this, and that the other maid would neither forget nor forgive.

Zélie looked longingly through the window at the bustle of life in the street below. The warm scent of leather wafted on the breeze: the bootboy must be polishing Madame’s riding boots downstairs. The smell was soft and oily, just like Baba’s worn shoes when he pulled them on at dawn. Every morning she’d wave from the window at his disappearing figure as he trudged in his shabby formal suit from their crooked apartment to his job as a clerk’s assistant at the Calcutta Botanical Society. When he got home in the evening his shoes would be grey and his mood black, but he would soon cheer up after he’d swapped the suit for a loose kurta, settling down in the veranda to read a favourite book in the shade of the shisham trees.

Zélie jabbed the last pin crossly in Madame’s hat. A little too hard – the pin slipped in her hand and pierced something rubbery. There was a soft smothered exhalation of air, like a fart in church. Zélie froze. The pin had punctured Monsieur de Plume’s enormous pigskin bird. She took a sharp intake of breath and looked at her mistress. Had she seen? She breathed out in relief. Madame hadn’t noticed a thing.

“May I get the mercury for your face cream now? The shop will be closing soon.”

Madame glanced up absently from her preening. “I suppose so. Run along then.”

Zélie picked up her long skirts and left the boudoir. She shut the door behind her and paused on the landing. Her heart pounded against her ribcage and her knees wobbled beneath her weight. Surely, this time, she must strike lucky in her plan to escape. She gripped the bannister with sweaty fingers, shut her eyes, and counted to ten.

Zélie Dutta, she told herself, you can hold your breath underwater for three minutes, thirteen and three-quarter seconds. You can peel a banana with your toes. You can recite the preface of Les Misérables by heart and you can lick your elbow. You are more than a match for the rubbish Malaises.

She opened her eyes. Grabbing the polished handrail, she raced down the sweeping staircase and across the marble floor of the entrance hall, then stopped. Something, or rather someone, was blocking her path.

“Good morning, Mademoiselle Dutta!”

Zélie stared at the tubby little man standing before her. He had fuzzy ginger hair and a tall top hat from which a thin cloud of smoke was curling into the air. Tucked under one arm was an enormous portrait. He was huffing and puffing from the effort of carrying it.

“Professor Lestrange!” Zélie exclaimed, dipping as brief a curtsey as possible. The Professor was a friend of Madame’s late husband Docteur Malaise. He was one of the doctor’s scientist cronies who also lived on Rue Morgue. Both men were members of the Brotherhood of Blood, a scientific society whose headquarters were on the grand avenue near the Opera House, only twenty minutes’ walk away.

Zélie knew very little about the Brotherhood, but she’d heard plenty, and most of it was creepy. On the face of it the members studied anatomy and cures for disease, but the servants were full of stories about secret moonlit rituals and bizarre initiation ceremonies. The name, the Brotherhood of Blood, derived from one of the society’s more sinister practices: every time a new member was initiated into the Brotherhood, they and all current members would prick their fingers and join hands so that their blood commingled, swearing brotherhood for life.

Zélie frowned. “How do you know my name?” The Professor had never paid her the slightest attention before, let alone addressed her personally. She noticed that on the little finger of his right hand he wore a ring with a five-pointed star within a circle, or pentacle, carved on it. A peculiar smell hung around him, somewhere between a graveyard and a drain.

Professor Lestrange smiled politely. “I met your father Robi Dutta only a couple of months ago, on a visit to Calcutta in search of –” he broke off, hesitated, then continued – “er … something. A fine job he’s doing, slaving as a clerk’s assistant at the Botanical Society and bringing you up all alone. He told me all about you.”

At the reference to her father, Zélie’s gut twisted. She glared at the Professor.

“I say, what unusual eyes!” Lestrange leaned forward, his breath tickling her eyelashes. “A very interesting case of complete heterochromia iridum. A rare genetic condition. I’ve only seen it once before in a rabbit, which had one red eye and one black. But never have I seen it in a human being.”

Zélie ignored these remarks, as she always did any comments from strangers about her eyes. The Professor was blocking her way, but it would be impossible to push past him without being rude. She changed the subject. “Why is there smoke coming out of your hat?”

Professor Lestrange smiled and coughed. “Ahem, well, this is just a little invention of mine. A bona fide air conditioning hat. There’s a clockwork condensing mechanism that whirrs inside the top of the hat to cool me down. Very effective but I agree the evacuation of the warm air does make me look rather like a walking chimney stack.”

“Oh.” Zélie wondered why the Professor needed cooling down on a rainy autumn day. She pointed to the picture. “Is that a delivery for Madame?”

“Indeed it is.” The little man leaned the portrait against the wall with great care.

Zélie stared at it. It was a face she recognised all too well: a middle-aged man with fiercely bushy eyebrows, his mouth shut as tight as a trap. Beneath the portrait was an inscription:

Docteur Malaise, T.w.E.r.p., t.W.I.t., c.R.a.P.s.,

Famed Inventor of a Cure for Blisterpox

Portrait Commissioned by his Fellow Members at the Brotherhood of Blood

Zélie remembered all too well the joyous celebrations when Docteur Malaise had discovered a cure for the dreaded disease of blisterpox. The cure was derived from the crushed root of a plant that grew in the jungles of Bengal, which he had collected on one of his field trips. It was a discovery that had made the doctor famous, but the fame and fortune had been short-lived; he’d died just over a year later.

“This portrait was commissioned by the Brotherhood of Blood as a gift for the Malaise family in acknowledgement of the doctor’s great work.” The Professor puffed out his chest like a self-important sparrow, then paused and wiped his forehead. “Although I have to admit, it’s incredibly heavy and it’s been exhausting carrying it here, even though I live only a few doors down.”

Zélie took a deep breath and stepped forward to wiggle through the narrow space between the portrait and the front door. “This is all very interesting, Professor, but I’m sorry, I have to rush. I have an errand to run—”

She was cut short by an ear-piercing shriek from upstairs. Madame came running out of her boudoir. Her magnificent hat had collapsed, and where Monsieur de Plume’s proud bird had perched was a miserable mess of damp pigskin and trailing ostrich feathers.

“Mon Dieu! Get me that wretch Monsieur de Plume! I’ve never been so humiliated!”

Zélie didn’t wait to hear more. She opened the front door, grabbed her knapsack and hat, and ran. The sky was lead grey and swollen with rain, so she crammed the hat on her head and picked up her skirt to avoid slipping, jumping down the marble steps two at a time. At long last she was off! She swung round the black iron railings, ran out on to the pavement – and skidded to a halt in shock.

Zélie clutched the front railings to steady herself from falling and stared, mesmerised. A small glinting golden object danced before her eyes, suspended in mid-air.

Zélie recognised the object. She knew it as well as her own face in the mirror. It belonged to her dad, and he’d told her that he’d never be parted from it. It was in the hand of a boy her age, twelve or so: ginger-haired with freckles, stunted-looking and as pale as sour milk, as if he had never been out in the sun. He was also impossibly dirty, with a grimy face that peered out from under his peaked cap, looking as if it had never been washed. He must be a chimney sweep or something, Zélie thought. He smelled musty, like a slice of mouldy Roquefort cheese. She wrinkled her nose and pulled a face.

“Where did you get that?” She tried to grab the thing in his hand.

“None of your business.” The boy snatched his hand away. But he did it clumsily, letting the object tinkle to the pavement, where it lay gleaming, radiating a sickly greenish-yellow light.

Zélie pounced on it and clasped it tightly in her fist. She scowled at him. “This locket belongs to my father. How did you get hold of it? He never takes it off his neck and he’s five thousand miles away in India.”

The boy’s face snapped shut like a clam. “I’m not telling you anything. Not until you give it back to me. Finders keepers.” She noticed that he was nursing his right hand, as if the locket had burned it.

Zélie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a thief! If you don’t tell me where you found this, I’ll report you to the police. By the way, you stink! You can have a cold bath in the Seine for only four sous, you know.”

The boy folded his arms and stared back at her coldly. “You can insult me all you like; it won’t work. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. So sucks to you.”

Zélie opened her mouth to say something rude but swallowed it back. Her shoulders drooped. She’d never be able to run away now, not until she knew how Baba’s locket had turned up here. Because if it was here, it was not round her father’s neck, and if it was not round his neck, something was wrong. The unease that had been ticking in the back of her mind after two months without a letter exploded in the certainty of disaster. A huge guttural sob burst from the pit of her stomach. She clutched it in pain as another followed, heaving her insides like a ship at sea.

The boy’s pale face flushed with anger. His eyes flashed sparks. “Zut alors, stop howling!” he hissed. “Everybody’s staring at us.”

She looked around and realised that people were indeed staring at them. The boy dug about in his coat pockets. After a while, he produced a bit of greasy rag and held it out to her. She wrinkled her nose but took it and wiped her eyes. It smelled of unwashed socks.

“Look.” The boy spoke to her slowly and distinctly, as if to a small child. “You have the locket; I have the information you want. I’ll tell you what I know if we agree to split the proceeds between us.” He broke off, staring at her intently. “Jeez, what’s going on with your eyes? They’re different colours! Were you in a fight or something?”

Zélie’s face slammed shut. “None of your business.” She changed the subject. “What do you mean ‘proceeds’?”

“I mean that we’ll sell the thing and split the money between us, of course.”

Zélie clutched the locket to her chest, where it nestled throbbing like a cricket in a paddy field. She clenched her teeth. “Over my dead body. There’s no way I’m selling this. Forget it.” Another guttural sob heaved up in her chest.

“Please stop creating a scene. All right, whatever you want. Just stop making that noise.” The boy looked anxiously towards a gendarme who was walking along the street in their direction. He lowered his head as the police officer passed them by. “Look, why don’t we find some place and discuss this quietly. In a civilised fashion. Maybe we could cut a deal.” His eyes raked the busy street.

Zélie sniffed and wiped her nose again with the rag, before she remembered how disgusting it was. She slipped the locket into her apron pocket. She had to find out how this strange boy had got hold of her dad’s most precious possession. Had he stolen it off him? If so, what was her dad doing here in Paris? The dream of escaping melted away like ice cream in the sun.

She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Look, I tell you what we’ll do. I have to order some stuff for my mistress at the pharmacy, and then I know a place we can go to talk where nobody will bother us. I’m Zélie Dutta. I’m a maid at the house here. Who are you?”

“Jules Dubois.” The boy proffered a grubby hand which Zélie took gingerly, grabbing hers back and wiping it on her apron as quickly as possible. “I work with my dad. He’s a sewer sweeper. Come on then, let’s get out of the path of this gendarme. Which way?”

Zélie led the way to the pharmacy. She went in to make the order for the mercury while Jules waited outside. When she came out, she looked around fearfully, expecting him to have run away. But no, surprisingly, he hadn’t. He was still there, looking at his hobnailed boots, squinting in the grey light and twisting his peaked cap in his hands.

They walked together up the hill, leaving the grander avenues behind and threading through increasingly narrow streets lined with crooked houses. People passed by wielding black umbrellas, and stray dogs picked their way over the damp, slippery cobbles.

The boy frowned. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” Zélie replied.

After about twenty minutes they came to a small park, the rough grass carpeted orange with autumn leaves. In the middle of the park was a giant green-and-white-striped tent.

“What’s that?” Jules goggled at the tent as if it were an exotic animal.

Zélie stared at him. “It’s a circus tent. Have you never been to the circus before?”

“No. I’ve heard stories of the circus, but I’ve never seen one in real life.”

Zélie wondered if the boy knew anything about the city, other than the sewers. Paris seemed more of a foreign country to him than to her. “This is the Cirque Fantastique, one of the most famous circuses in the world. We can talk here without being bothered. The folks know me. They won’t go telling tales. We’ll be safe.” She led the way to the entrance of the big top. A large sign in curly writing proclaimed to the world that this was, indeed, the Cirque Fantastique. Above it crouched a wooden gargoyle in the form of a horned bat with a single angry eye that glared down on all those entering the tent.

The circus was the only place in the city where Zélie felt safe, almost at home. Many years ago, when her dad was a student, he’d won a science prize to travel around Europe and had spent several months in Paris, where he’d stayed at a cheap hotel in Montmartre and hung out with the circus people. “If you ever feel lonely, go to the Cirque Fantastique,” he’d told Zélie when she departed. “They’ll remember me there. They’re a rainbow tribe, the circus folk, and nobody’s the odd one out with them.”

Zélie had been to the Cirque Fantastique dozens of times – she visited whenever she had a moment’s respite from the drudgery at the house on Rue Morgue – but the skin on the back of her neck never failed to tingle when she walked into the tent. It was lit by clusters of candles sparkling like fireflies in the darkness. A clown on a unicycle whirled round the ring, bowing to an imaginary crowd. A man in a spangly suit led a dappled horse with a feather plume on its hind legs, its forelegs pawing at a big hoop. The air was thick with the scent of roasted chestnuts, horse dung, sawdust and leather. In the middle of the ring a big burly man with a patch over one eye and wearing nothing but a red loincloth was flexing his muscles, blowing blasts of flame from his mouth. The heat made Zélie’s hair sizzle and Jules’s pale cheeks flush flamingo pink.

“That’s Chi-Chi Kahn, the clown on the unicycle. She’s one of the most famous clowns in the world.” Zélie waved at the clown – a tall woman with a moustache wearing baggy trousers – who grinned and tipped her hat in their direction. “The man with the plumed horse is Señor Zemganno, the circus manager and horse trainer extraordinaire.”

“And the geezer blowing fire?” Jules’s eyes were fixed on the man in the red loincloth. A sweet frail-looking little boy with blond hair, dressed in a sailor suit, was watching the fire-eater too, gasping with delight and clapping his hands.

“That’s the Incombustible Ivan and his son David,” said Zélie. “Ivan almost died of burns a few years ago. That’s how he lost an eye. But he’s made an amazing recovery since then and he’s now the best fire-eater on the planet. He’s a headline act here; people come flocking to see him from all over the world.”

“He’s incredible!” For once Jules’s pale, pinched face was pink with excitement. Ivan nodded his head in their direction, blowing sporadic bursts of flame that billowed out and singed their eyebrows.

Zélie led Jules to the wooden benches round the ring. “Sit here, we can talk. Nobody will take any notice. They’re busy rehearsing for the show tonight—Ouch!”

A knife whizzed past her so closely that it brushed the side of her face. The blade flew straight at the little boy in the sailor suit, who dropped like a stone to the floor.

“David!” Zélie ran up to the crumpled little body of the boy. He sat up, bewildered, rubbing his eyes. The knife had sliced clean through his sailor cap, which now hung spiked on the blade, wedged in the bench in front of them.

“Ha ha! Oh dear, oh dear, that was FUNNY!”

Zélie looked up to see Ivan the fire-eater towering over them, hands on hips. He was crying with laughter. “Ha ha HA! I must add that knife trick to my fire-eating act. It’s so good! Come on, David my lad, stop being a crybaby.” He hauled the little boy to his feet and dragged him off.

“That wasn’t funny.” Zélie scowled after the retreating fire-eater. Out of all the circus folk, Ivan was the person she liked least. She’d once seen him beat a puppy for trying to steal one of the steaks that he cooked with flames from his mouth as part of his circus act.

Jules had by now run up, panting, to see what the fuss was about. Zélie shook him by the shoulders. “Come on, we’ve wasted enough time already. Spit out the story.”

But Jules stood as still as a stone, his mouth hanging open. A short stocky woman with tawny skin and closely cropped curly black hair had stepped into the ring. She wore a glittering white leotard studded with gold spangles and feathers like a bird. As she walked into the ring there descended from the roof of the tent a swing with a metal bar attached.

“Who’s that?” asked Jules.

“It’s Miss La-La, the iron jaw performer. She’s rehearsing for the show tonight.” Even Zélie couldn’t help staring in fascination.

Miss La-La stalked to the swing and caught the bar with a powerful arm. In her other hand, she was holding a strip of leather with a large hook attached. She hung the hook on the bar of the swing and closed her mouth over the leather strip. Slowly the trapeze rose in the air, pulling Miss La-La up with it, her arms locked behind her back, hanging on the swing by the force of her teeth.

Jules gaped. “Mon Dieu! She’ll break her jaw.”

“No, she won’t.” Zélie lifted her gaze to the tiny speck of gold spangles and feathers disappearing into the high black roof of the tent. “I’ve seen her do it many times.”

When the swing reached the ceiling of the tent, it stopped. With a slow deliberate movement, gradually gathering speed, Miss La-La began to spin. Still hanging on to the trapeze with only her teeth, she whirled round and round, faster and faster, until she became just a white and gold blur, and the children’s heads spun with her. They continued to goggle as the whirling, glittering human spinning top gradually slowed down and the trapeze was lowered back to the ground.

Jules’s face flamed with a new fire. He clapped and clapped, jumping up and down and stamping his feet. Zélie stared at him. The sulky, sullen boy of that morning had suddenly transformed into a fizzing, crackling firebrand. She frowned and tugged at his sleeve. Then she bent over and thundered in his ear, so loud that he almost tumbled over the bench.

“WHERE DID YOU FIND THE LOCKET?”

“The locket was in the sewer,” said Jules. “I found it late last night when my dad and I were unblocking a drain. Someone must have flushed it down the toilet in one of the houses on Rue Morgue. That’s why I was hanging around outside your front door. I was trying to figure out which house it came from, whether to hand it in or not, and if so, what price to ask for it.”

“Someone flushed my dad’s locket down the toilet?” Zélie began to feel dizzy. She couldn’t believe it. She slumped down on to a bench and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t understand. My dad’s in India. How could his most precious possession turn up here in Paris, in the sewer of all places?”

Jules shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t a clue. Do they have a flushing toilet at the house you work for?”

Zélie nodded. “Docteur Malaise and his scientist friends always have the latest fancy gadgets.”

“Well then, the locket could have come from your house. But not necessarily. There’s lots of grand houses on that street. What’s the inscription on it? It’s all funny squiggles.”

“It’s in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. My dad told me it means Serpent Stone. But he doesn’t like to talk about it.” Zélie sighed as she recalled the closed, secret expression on her dad’s face whenever she tried to quiz him about the locket. She took it out of her apron pocket and cradled it in the palm of her hand, where it twinkled like a star in the night sky.

“Why does it burn me when I touch it? It really hurt me.” Jules showed her his palm, which was branded with a small red circle.

Zélie shook her head. This was something that puzzled her too. Grandma Tami believed the locket had magical powers and refused to touch it. Baba, ever the scientist, made light of Grandma Tami’s superstitions and said the locket’s metal was unusual but nothing to worry about. But his laugh had been uneasy.

Baba was a scientist at heart and lived for evidence and logic. But one warm evening he had taken Zélie out to the veranda and pointed out to her the complicated flight patterns of the mynah birds, how they wheeled and circled in the sky with their partners in perfect, intuitive synchronisation. “Behind the science there is always a mystery,” he had told her. After that, Zélie wasn’t sure what she believed.

Zélie shrugged her shoulders, pulling herself out of her reverie. She couldn’t expect this simple sewer boy to understand such sophisticated ideas. “It’s burning because it senses something important about you. I can’t imagine why, but it’s chosen you for some reason.” She laughed, wrinkling her nose at the whiff emanating from the boy’s ragged clothes.

Jules’s body stiffened. He scowled. “Don’t judge a book by its cover. Anyway, I don’t want to be chosen. You can take the thing. Just give me my share of the proceeds.”

“No!” Zélie clutched the locket tightly in her balled fist. “I am not selling it. The locket belongs to my dad. I know something bad has happened to him; it’s the only explanation for it turning up here, thousands of miles from home.” Her brain buzzed like a fly trapped in a bottle. What had happened to her father? Perhaps he had been kidnapped. A loud sob rose in her throat.

Jules groaned. “Zut alors! Don’t get your knickers in a twist again. All right, we won’t sell the dratted thing. Look here, I give up. Just take it. I don’t care about the money.” He stood up, twisting his peaked cap in his hands. “I need to be getting home. My dad will be wondering what’s happened if I’m not back soon.”

Zélie’s stomach flipped quicker than a crêpe in a pan. Whoever this strange boy was, she needed him on her side. She had to find out what was going on, which meant going down the sewers to the spot where he had found the locket. There was no way she could do that without him. He had to be persuaded to help her.

“You mean you’re not going to help me?”

Jules frowned. “Help you do what?”

“Investigate,” said Zélie. “I told you, something bad must have happened. I need to get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

Jules made a face. “I’m not in the business of looking for lockets or missing fathers. I told you: I clean sewers for a living. You should go to the police if you’re worried about your dad. Or a private detective or something.”

Zélie laughed through clenched teeth. “You know I can’t afford a private detective. I’m just a servant. You found the locket and brought it to me.”

Jules shook his head. “I didn’t find the locket. I stumbled upon it. There’s a difference. And I didn’t bring it to you; you actually took it off me.”

Zélie bit her tongue in frustration. The pain shot through her mouth and she sucked in her cheeks, drumming the seat in front of her with clenched fists.

“Look –” Jules’s face hardened – “it won’t do any good. You won’t get your way by making a scene. Someone should have told you that you don’t get what you want by throwing a fit.” He turned to go.

Zélie raked her memory to find something the boy might have said that she could use to persuade him to stay. She recalled that each time he had mentioned his father, his tight, pinched face had smoothed into a smile like a creased shirt under a hot iron. “Look, it’s my father I’m worried about. What if it were your dad?”

Jules’s face blanched. He sat back down on the bench heavily. His shoulders slumped. “Oh, all right. I can try to help a little. But I don’t see what I can do. What am I supposed to—”

But Zélie had already grabbed him by the hand and was dragging him out of the tent before he could change his mind, a grin of relief spreading over her face. “Come on. Let’s go down the sewers now!”

They left the big top and pounded across the circus field, Jules struggling to keep up with Zélie tearing ahead.

“Hey, you over there! Stop, girl!”

A commanding cry from behind stopped them in their tracks. Zélie looked round. In a corner of the circus field stood a small round tent like a tepee, which she hadn’t seen before. A short stocky woman was standing outside it, watering some violets in pots. Silver wind chimes fluttered and tinkled by the open tent flap.

The woman strode up to them and grabbed Zélie’s wrist. “Where did you get that locket from, girl?”

Zélie snatched her arm away and pinned it behind her back, glaring. “None of your business.” She squinted curiously at the woman. She had dark skin, a tangle of black hair and a large curved pipe hanging from her lips. Her neck was strung with several dozen strings of brightly coloured beads that jangled when she turned her head, and she had an assortment of fox furs tied round her waist, some with faces and legs still on them. On her right arm was a tattoo of a snake eating itself. Behind her was a dog-eared metal sign reading:

Madame Drusilla Weyrd

Fortune-Teller and Psychic Extraordinaire

Your fate lies in your hands

“Who are you?” Zélie asked. “I’ve been here many times. I’ve never seen you before.”

The woman laughed a booming belly laugh that seemed to come from the bottom of the sea and set the wind chimes jangling. “Oh, the Cirque Fantastique and I go back to before you were born, young lady. I’ve only just got back from a sabbatical with druids in the forests of Brittany, learning about their rites and customs. No doubt that’s why you haven’t seen me around.” Her eyes fixed on the locket in Zélie’s hand. “Don’t worry, girl,” she grinned, flashing a row of white teeth glinting with gold. “I won’t take that cursed thing. More than my life’s worth.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I was thinking I should tell you the story belonging to it. But since you’re not interested…” She turned to go into the tent.

“Wait!” Zélie cried.

Madame Drusilla turned, eyebrows raised.

“All right, please tell me.”

The woman smiled – a curious, secret smile. “Come then.” She swept away the bead curtain at the entrance to her tent and beckoned them in.

Inside, the tepee was filled with wreaths of tobacco smoke. The walls were lined with shelves cluttered with leather tomes, assorted seashells, a narwhal tusk, a skull and a curious contraption that Zélie recognised as a Phantasmagoria lantern – a magic lantern for projecting images. Grandma Tami had one at home; Ma had helped Zélie paint pictures on slides to slot into it and cast magical shadowy images on the walls. Zélie pushed the thought of Ma from her mind and turned her attention from the shelves to the carpet.

On the floor in the middle of the tent, a skinny little lady in a black leotard with round spectacles and a halo of bright pink hair like a mass of candyfloss was standing on her head. She was reading a book called Balducci’s Guide to Levitation, Escapology and Spoon Bending.

“This,” said Madame Drusilla gravely, “is the contortionist Miss DeeDee. And who are you two, may I ask?”

“I’m Zélie Dutta, and this is Jules Dubois,” said Zélie.

Miss DeeDee flipped upright and came forward, smiling. “I have a cousin called Zélie. What a suspicious coincidence!”

Jules looked confused. “Suspicious coincidence?”

“She means ‘auspicious’, don’t you, darling?” Madame Drusilla smiled and patted the contortionist’s arm affectionately. “Miss DeeDee’s mind is as flexible as her body; it jumps around and lands in funny places sometimes.”

Madame Drusilla sank down heavily on a wooden bench inside the tent and patted the seat next to her, all smiles and gold teeth. “Come and sit beside me, Zeelie. Victorina, perhaps you could make the children some tea.”

Miss DeeDee did three handsprings to the stove and busied herself with the kettle. Jules followed Zélie hesitantly and sat down on the edge of the bench, twisting his cap in his hands. His eyes slid after Miss DeeDee as she sprang around the room, as wide as saucers.

Zélie handed the locket to Madame Drusilla cautiously, ready to snatch it back and make a run for it if necessary. The fortune-teller picked up the locket and looked at it intently, turning it in the lamplight with chubby fingers that flashed with rings. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

“It belongs to my father,” said Zélie.

“Veery interesting.” Madame Drusilla put down the locket and puffed on her pipe, eyebrows furrowed in thought. “This locket is a veery special and magical thing, Zélie. It is, in fact, a ‘cage pendant’, that is, a pendant made to hold a stone or jewel. In this case a veery valuable stone. You know, don’t you, that this locket was made to hold the legendary Snakestone?”

“I don’t know anything about the locket, except that it once belonged to my maternal grandfather. He was a French soldier, but he died some time ago. My dad wears the locket all the time. It should be round his neck in Calcutta, not here.”

At the word “Calcutta” Madame Drusilla gave a start. “Dutta … Calcutta…” she mused. “There was a Robi Dutta from Calcutta who was a science student on a scholarship. Came here to Paris many moons ago. We met him at the Folies Bergère with Miss La-La one night, when the moon was in the sign of Gemini. A great admirer of Miss La-La’s, he was. But I suppose he was no connection to you, Dutta being quite a common name?”

“Yes, that’s my dad!” cried Zélie. “He came on a science scholarship to Paris years ago and hung out at the Cirque Fantastique. He told me to come here if I needed a refuge, that’s why I came here today.”

“Fancy, Robi Dutta’s daughter!” Miss DeeDee, who had been busy pouring tea into some cracked teacups, paused and clapped her elbows. “That boy was always hanging around at the circus; we became quite fondant of him. Come to think of it, you look just like him!”

Zélie frowned. “My dad never mentioned the Snakestone to me, though.”

Madame Drusilla puffed on her pipe. “Your father is veery wise not to talk about the Snakestone, because it is deadly. It’s a magical stone that has the power to heal any injury, however serious, and make its owner impervious to pain.”

She held up a warning finger. “But there is a catch. The Snakestone brings great power to those who possess it, but it is jealous and will not stand rivalry for its owner’s affections. Therefore it brings death and misfortune to anybody whom its owner holds dear. It is a dangerous thing, not to be handled by any except the wise and virtuous. The locket was made as a warning to anybody who finds it about the true nature of the stone it contained. Which is why it has carved on it Serpent Stone.”

“The Snakestone, well, I never, how incredulous!” Miss DeeDee cartwheeled over to take a look. “I’ve heard so many tales about that stone, but I thought they were just colourful stories. Is this really the locket that contained it?”

Zélie stared at the locket. “So if the locket once held the Snakestone, where is it now?”

Madame Drusilla shook her head. “Nobody knows. Legend has it that the stone, the size of a large marble, was originally a jewel in the crown of a statue in an ancient palace near the Indian city of Jaipur. Many years ago, a French sea captain, Baron Henri Le Vandale, crept into the palace one night and stole the stone. He kept it sealed in a locket and wore it round his neck. Le Vandale amassed a huge fortune, but his wife and children died mysteriously from unknown causes. So the legend grew up that the Snakestone, while it brings its owners great fortune, destroys those dear to them. Years after Henri Le Vandale died, the locket containing the stone was given by his family to a soldier in the French army in exchange for some land. After that, nobody knows what happened to it. It completely vanished.”

Zélie frowned. “But what’s all this got to do with me?”

“Don’t you see?” Madame Drusilla rolled her eyes. “Your maternal grandfather must have been the French soldier to whom Le Vandale’s family gave the stone.” Madame Drusilla puffed on her pipe and stared into space. Her eyes had a faraway look. “Much has been written by scholars of magic about the legendary Snakestone. But I was never fully convinced it existed. Until now that I’ve seen the locket with my own eyes. I thought it was just a legend.”

Zélie shivered. Memories stirred in her mind like cobwebs in a cupboard. Sideways glances, nudging elbows. Strange looks, hints about a dark family heritage. At home there were portraits of every family member, hung with garlands of orange marigold flowers, but not one of her maternal grandfather. Even so much as the mention of his name would turn Grandma Tami’s face the colour of a storm-tossed sea. Zélie’s grandfather, Tami told her, was a selfish man, who had deserted his wife and child, Zélie’s mother, to pursue a successful career in the French army. But was the real reason for Tami’s fear and loathing because he had brought a curse with him into the family, a stone of ill omen? Secrets, lies, cobwebs. No wonder Baba never wanted to talk about it.

She swept the memories briskly aside and tapped her foot. “This is all very interesting, but, to be honest, I don’t give a fig about the Snakestone. If it harms other people, it’s probably better lost than causing mischief. The real question is, where is my father?”

“Why, Drusilla, look into your crispy ball!” exclaimed Miss DeeDee. “The answer is sure to be there.”

Madame Drusilla gave a strange, secret smile. “Do you want me to look into my crystal ball, Zélie?”

“I can’t imagine there’ll be anything to see—” Zélie broke off. Behind the science there is always a mystery, Zélie. “Oh, all right.” She sighed. What was there to lose?

Madame Drusilla coughed and stubbed her pipe out on her boot. She went to a cupboard and pulled out a large glass ball on a brass stand and set it on the table with great solemnity. Miss DeeDee and the children crowded round to look.

Madame Drusilla placed her hands on the ball, and her eyes rolled up. She began muttering to herself as the ball filled with swirling smoke.

Madame Drusilla’s head lolled to one side and she lifted her hands from the ball. The smoke began to clear. Miss DeeDee, Jules and Zélie gasped in unison.

Inside the ball, a tall grey building appeared. It looked familiar to Zélie. She stared at it, trying to figure out what it was, until she realised that it was the headquarters of that shady society to which Docteur Malaise and Professor Lestrange belonged – the Brotherhood of Blood. On the pavement in front of the porch was what appeared to be a man’s body, a dagger sticking out of its back. A trail of blood trickled from it into the gutter.

“AAAAAARGHHHHH!”

The bloodcurdling shriek echoed around the dark interior of the tent.

CRAAAASH!

The fortune-teller had toppled off the bench and was lying sprawled on the floor in a tangle of jewellery and furs. She had fainted.

Miss DeeDee rushed to the spreadeagled Madame Drusilla. Jules and Zélie grabbed an arm each. Together all three of them managed to drag the fortune-teller across the floor to the bed in the tent, heaving her on to it.

Miss DeeDee pulled some smelling salts out of a drawer and held them under her nose. “My dearest Drusilla,” she wept. “Please come back, my darling. What happened?”

After several minutes of smelling salts and weeping, Madame Drusilla finally stirred and jerked back to life. Her face was pouring with sweat and the whites of her eyes were rolling under her heavily eyeshadowed lids.

Zélie grasped her plump hand, which lay limp on the patchwork quilt. Her earlier scepticism had vanished like a thief on the run. This was not hocus-pocus. It was real. She had to find out what the visions meant. “Please, Madame Drusilla, who was the dead man outside the Brotherhood of Blood? How is my dad mixed up in this?”

But Madame Drusilla would only shake her head and call for her pipe. When Miss DeeDee brought it for her, she sat sullenly back on the pillows, puffing in silence, wrapped tightly in her furs, staring ahead of her.

Miss DeeDee sighed and settled herself at the foot of the bed with her feet wrapped round her neck. “It’s no good, Zélie. Maybe she’ll tell us more when she’s recovered.”

Tears of frustration pricked Zélie’s eyes. What use were cryptic visions without an explanation? But there was nothing to be done about it. “All right.” Reluctantly she turned to the door.

Jules and Zélie walked across the circus field to the street in silence. A large drop of rain fell from the grey sky and splashed on Zélie’s nose.

“Please can we go to the place in the sewers where you found the locket?” Zélie asked Jules. “We can look for clues.”

Jules shook his head. He was even paler than usual and his hands were trembling. “I can’t go now. I’m already going to be late home. My dad will be wondering what’s happened.”

“Can we go tomorrow then? Please.”

“I don’t know,” sighed Jules. “It’s against the rules to take people down the sewers, and this is all beginning to sound like funny business. The pictures in that crystal ball were downright creepy.” Jules looked down at the ground, avoiding Zélie’s gaze, kicking a pebble before him on the pavement. He poked his tongue in his cheek so it stuck out weirdly.

Zélie clenched her fists in despair. If she couldn’t convince Jules to help her, what could she do? “Please. Just the one trip to show me where you found the locket.”

Jules shook his head. Then he sighed. “Oh, all right. I’ll help you just this once, then that’s it. I’ll show you the place I found the thing, then we’re quits.”

Zélie’s face broke into a broad grin. She would have hugged him but the faint whiff of drains checked her enthusiasm. “Thank you, Jules. We can meet tomorrow at ten o’clock if that suits you. It’s my day off.”

“All right.” Jules pulled on his peaked cap. He rolled his eyes. “There’s a manhole cover by the Opera House that’s got a shorter ladder than most. See you there tomorrow.” He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered off down the road, whistling.

Zélie sighed and set off back to the house on Rue Morgue. The discovery of the locket had killed off any dreams of an escape from the Malaise house. It had been flushed, Jules said, down a toilet in Rue Morgue. Suppose it had come from No. 36? Suspicions clustered in her brain, dark and ugly. Was Madame Malaise mixed up in this? Had she done something to her dad? The mystery thickened. She would not be able to leave the house until she had got to the bottom of it.

A tingling at her hip made her wince. The locket burned in her apron pocket, ticking like a tiny bomb. She thought again about Jules. She didn’t really believe he would be there to meet her the next morning, but she didn’t have much of a choice. She would just have to hope that he kept his word.

Back in the attic room at Rue Morgue Zélie slumped on the iron bed, burying her face in the worn patchwork quilt. Instinctively her fingers slipped under the mattress and pulled something out from under it. It was a small box, no bigger than a pillbox, with a miniature enamel portrait set in the lid. A young man with a goatee beard, clutching the hand of a young woman with pale olive skin and curly jet-black hair, her face draped in a heavy red veil, her arms sparkling with gold bangles. A woman with one eye a sea grey, the other obsidian black.

Zélie turned the box over in her fingers. Robi and Roma. Baba and Ma. Screwing up her eyes tightly, she focused on the woman’s face, smooth and shiny and threaded with fine cracks. A tangle of rain-damp black hair, the jangle of bangles. Herself, aged four, crouching next to Ma under a dripping wet banyan tree in the jungles south of the city, watching the fine tracery of the leaves take shape beneath Ma’s deft pencil strokes. Ma mashing herbs in a mortar to make one of her medicinal potions for the neighbours. Neem for skin disease, guava for diarrhoea, marigold for headaches. Months later, Ma transformed. Pale, sick, wasting away. Ma gone. Could it have been because of a family curse that Ma had died? The curse of the Snakestone? Zélie pushed the thought from her mind, sliding the box back under the mattress.

The loud clamouring of the church bells in the city brought Zélie back to earth. It was time to lay out Madame’s dress for dinner. Dragging her feet, she made her way from the attic to the boudoir. She laid the dress on the bed. Then she found the pearl necklace that matched the dress and laid that out too, making sure she spat on every pearl first.

On her way out of the boudoir she passed the escritoire. She stopped short. Her heart thumped in her chest. She gripped the back of the chair to steady herself. In the wastepaper basket beside the escritoire was her last letter to her father. It had been ripped into tiny pieces.

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Wednesday evening, 16th October 1895

Dear Baba,

I don’t know why I’m writing to you because Madame Malaise destroys my letters. I guess I have no choice because if I stop she’ll get suspicious. Don’t worry, Baba, I’m going to get to the bottom of the mystery of why your locket turned up in the sewers. I’ve met a sewer boy called Jules who is really keen to help, and tomorrow he’s going to take me down to where the locket was found.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Wednesday evening, 16th October 1895

Dear Baba,

Life is wonderful here at the Malaises. I am kept scrubbed very clean and I get to go out and order things from the pharmacy. The other servants give me lots of attention and I get plenty of exercise running up and down stairs and cleaning the fireplaces.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

Zélie crouched beside a lamp-post on the busy street in front of the Opera House. The first drop of rain from the blue sky stung her nose. It was five minutes past ten. Her heart sank. Jules wasn’t coming.

Head drooping, she turned to go back to the house on Rue Morgue. The people were all the same in this city. Two-faced, like the weather. A stab of panic shot through her. How was she going to solve this mystery alone without Jules’s help? The discovery of her dad’s locket was worrying enough, but now there was the ripped-up letter. She gritted her teeth and took a deep breath, then shut her eyes and counted to ten.

Zélie Dutta, she told herself, you have a pigeon called Rodolphe who dumps on your enemies and you can touch the tip of your nose with your tongue. You have saved five francs in a sock under your mattress and you beat Padma Roy at arm-wrestling, even though she’s twice your size. You don’t need help. You can do this alone.

She was crossing the street when she heard shuffling footsteps behind her. She turned round. She recognised the grubby face and sooty cap immediately. Jules was hunched over, carrying a knapsack and what looked like a piece of folded fencing.

“Hello! You’re late! I thought you weren’t coming.” A huge grin spread across her face. She wiped it off. He shouldn’t get the impression she was too relieved to see him.

“Oh. You’re here.” He hung his head, shoulders drooping. He’d obviously been hoping she wouldn’t show up. “Look, I’m keeping my promise because I’m nice, but I’m taking you underground on one condition. We take one look at the place and leave. All right? I don’t want to get mixed up in any funny business. I’ve plenty of other fish to fry. I don’t know what I’m doing here as it is.”

“Yes, of course. It’s really kind of you to show me the place. I promise we’ll take one look and leave and I’ll never bother you again. I’ll vanish quicker than the monthly wages; honest I will.”

Jules raised an eyebrow sceptically. “Hmm, we’ll see. Anyway, I brought these for you.” He opened the knapsack and pulled out some clothes. He held out to her a peaked cap like his own, a jacket, a tattered shirt that had once been white but was now grey, and breeches. She looked at them in surprise.

“What are they for?”

“To change into, of course. You’re not going into the sewers in that lady’s maid outfit, are you? You’ll get home smelling of… Well, you won’t be smelling of roses, put it that way. I don’t think your mistress would be impressed.”

For a moment Zélie was taken aback. Then she grabbed the clothes quickly.

“All right. Where can I change into them?”

Jules pointed to a clump of bushes beside the broad steps leading up to the Opera House. “In there. Be quick. You can give me your fancy uniform, I’ll put it in my knapsack for later.”

Zélie disappeared into the bushes without a word. Scrambling out of her maid’s outfit, she pulled on the shirt and stared at the unfamiliar fastenings. Buttons up the front! Fancy that. She could do them up without anybody’s help. Why did they put women’s fastenings on the back, exactly where it was hardest to reach? And pockets! Girls’ clothes never had pockets, only her maid’s apron. How handy. The breeches were just as easy to do up as the shirt but felt really weird. They were like her drawers, except instead of being white and lacy, they were made of heavy brown tweed. Still, it felt indecent somehow, as if she were going out in her underwear.

Finally she was done. She came out of the bushes trying not to feel self-conscious.

Jules grinned. “Suits you. Better than that stupid maid’s outfit, anyway.”

She had tucked her long frizzy hair under the peaked cap. The shirt and breeches were a couple of sizes too big, but Jules fixed that by tying some string he had brought with him round her waist. She gave him her maid’s uniform to pack in his knapsack, slipping the locket in the pocket of the jacket. It was far too precious to hand over.

Zélie looked at her reflection in the polished windows of the Opera House. There was nothing she could do about the frizzy hair – even Grandma Tami could never make that straight, however much coconut oil she slathered disapprovingly on it – but apart from that it was quite convincing as a disguise. And so much more comfortable than either the stiff maid’s outfit she had to wear here in Paris or the formal saris back home. She could do the splits if she wanted to, without having to hitch up her skirt. Her limbs spread and found new channels to flow in the loose cloth. Her clenched fists relaxed.

“You make quite a good boy actually.” Jules folded his arms and looked her up and down critically. “But you should stand with your feet further apart and your hands in your pockets, not all bashful like a shrinking violet. And whistle. But I suppose you can’t whistle, being a girl.”

PHeeeeEEEEEEEE!

The screech was so piercing that the shop windows rattled. The door to the café opposite swung open and a waitress peered out at them.

“UrrGHHHH!” Jules stuffed his fingers in his ears. “All right, all right, you can whistle. I give in. Just don’t do that again.”

Zélie grinned. “You know, it feels quite nice being a boy.” Then she spotted, across the road, a tall house with windows staring blankly on to the street, inscribed with the insignia “BB”. Her face darkened.

“What are you staring at?” asked Jules.

“That building. It’s the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Blood, a creepy scientific society. Docteur Malaise was a member. It’s the house we saw in Madame Drusilla’s vision.” She shuddered and turned away as a cold finger of fear crept up her spine. She shook it off. “Anyway, what now?”

Jules pointed at her feet.

Zélie looked down. There was a manhole cover in the pavement where they were standing. Her stomach flipped. “What? Down there?”

“Yep. I have the key. I took it off my dad’s belt this morning.”

Jules pulled the key out of his pocket and plugged it into the manhole cover. “I hope I’ve got the right one. They all looked similar.” The key turned rustily in the lock. Jules gave a big heave and rolled the lid off the manhole cover. He pulled an oil lamp out of his knapsack, lit it carefully and held it over the hole. Zélie peered down. A vertiginous ladder led into darkness.

“It seems a long way down.” For once her voice faltered.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Jules smirked, his eyes twinkling.

Zélie flinched. Then she flushed and stuck her chin in the air. “No, I’m not scared. Lead the way.”

“All right. You need to hook this lamp on your cap here, see where the loop is? It’s dark down there.” He hooked the miner’s lamp to her cap and unfolded the fence he was carrying, arranging it in a triangle around the open manhole. It looked just like a regular maintenance site.

Jules went first down the ladder, moving quickly with light steps. Zélie followed hesitantly. She looked up with mixed emotions as the last chink of blue sky disappeared. They went down wordlessly, the oil lamps fixed to their caps bouncing light off the tunnel walls at crazy angles. The air became dense and hot, thicker and heavier than a mangrove swamp.

After a few minutes, they reached the bottom of the ladder. They were now in an underground passageway with a black river flowing in the middle. Zélie jumped down from the ladder, landing with a soft thud beside Jules.

It was the smell that hit her first. “Ugh!” She retched. It was overwhelming – an explosion of dead rat, sweaty armpits, rotten cheese, boiled cabbage and foot fungus, all rolled up together, along with other smells she couldn’t even have begun to put a name to.

Jules gave a sweeping mock bow. “Welcome to my world.” He looked like he’d slipped into a pair of comfortable shoes.

Zélie pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s like being wrapped in a wet dishcloth down here. What’s that water?”

“What do you think? It’s sump water collected from the drains. What do you suppose happens when you go to the toilet? The stuff evaporates like holy incense into the clouds?”

“You mean that’s—”

“Of course. All the stuff that goes down the toilets and drains of this fine city, flowing to the sea.”

“Ugh. I shall never swim in the sea again.”

“Very wise.”

“What’s over there?” Zélie pointed to an archway in the tunnel, where a twisty corridor snaked out of sight.

“That’s the way to the Catacombs. We don’t want to go there.”

“Why?”

“The Catacombs are the burial grounds of the city. They’re old quarries piled up with bones. They lie beneath the sewers, miles upon miles of them. I don’t know those parts. They’re downright creepy.”

A spider scuttled down Zélie’s spine. She changed the subject. “Where’s the place you found the locket?”

Jules pointed. “Over there.” He led the way. After a few minutes, he stopped at a blue plaque tacked on the sewer wall, reading Rue Morgue. An exact replica of the smart shiny street sign above, except this one was rusty and covered in slime. A squiggle of graffiti was scrawled on the wall, reading Valjean Woz Here.

“Rue Morgue?” Zélie’s eyes popped.

“Of course. All the streets of Paris have their equivalent down here. How else do you think we sewer workers are supposed to navigate our way, without getting lost?”

“Fancy, a dark, sludgy, slushy, mouldy mirror image of the city above our heads,” Zélie mused. What secrets were there buried in this dark, dank world?

“The locket was just there.” Jules pointed.

“Let me see!” Zélie fell on her knees eagerly. Her fingernails scrabbled in the sludge, careless as to what it was. But there was nothing there other than … sludge.

“Believe me now? I said there would be nothing there.” Jules’s hands were on his hips, and he had an I-told-you-so expression on his face.

For once Zélie couldn’t think of a reply. Tears clotted her vision. She hung her head, shoulders slumped. Her sludgy hands hung loosely at her sides, drawing snail trails down Jules’s breeches.

“Look.” Jules put a hand on her shoulder gently. “Let’s go to the coppers, all right? They will look into it.”

Zélie shook her head. “Why would they? We’re nobodies, my dad and me. I’ll never find him. Poor Baba.” Her eyes welled up again. She sniffed and wiped them angrily with the back of her hand. “Hay fever. I must be allergic to the air down here.”

Jules looked at her, scratching his head. Then he opened his mouth and shut it again. Finally he fumbled around in his pocket and brought out a lemon bonbon. It was covered in fluff, and she would normally have said no thanks, but now she wiped clean her muddy hand, took it without a word and sucked on it mournfully. Jules picked up his knapsack. “Let’s get out of here. We can decide what to do in the park.” He took her sludgy hand and led her, docile and unprotesting for once, back towards the ladder.

They walked together in silence towards the pale shaft of daylight spilling into the tunnel from the manhole cover. On the way, they passed the archway with the corridor leading to the Catacombs.

“Shhh! Get back!” Jules pulled her back and slammed her against the wall. A ball of flame was bobbing along the dark passage ahead of them, in the direction of the Catacombs. Someone was walking down the corridor with a torch. There was the sound of quick footsteps receding into the distance.

At that moment the locket tucked in Zélie’s jacket pocket began to hum and vibrate.

Zélie pulled out the locket and stared at it thrumming in her hand. “Come on!” She darted forward. “The locket’s vibrating. It’s a sign for us to follow.”

Jules pulled her back. “No, we are not following them. Whoever it is, they’re up to no good. We shouldn’t get mixed up in it. Let’s get out of here and call the coppers.” He turned and stomped back down the passageway towards the shaft of light.

Zélie glared at Jules’s retreating back. He really was the most stubborn, annoying person on the planet. “I told you, reporting this to the police is like talking to the wind. I have to see what’s going on. If you’re too scared, I’ll go by myself.” She marched down the corridor and walked smack into a piece of rock jutting from the floor, falling flat on her face and extinguishing her lamp. Stars jumped before her eyes. She pulled herself on to her elbows, coughing and spitting blood and bits of grit.

A pair of knobbly hands gripped her shoulders from behind and pulled her back up. She lashed out in panic.

“Hold your horses!”

It was Jules. His face had turned a perfect shade of puce, and his hot breath hit her face like a slap. “Idiot,” he hissed. “Of course you can’t go wandering off in the tunnels on your own. You don’t have a clue where you are. You’ll end up getting lost in the maze and being an apéritif for the rats.” He peered down the corridor. “Come on, if we’re going to follow them, we have to hurry up.”

“So you’re coming with me after all?”

Jules scowled at her. “What choice have you given me? Just watch your feet and shut up, all right?”

He doused his lamp and they crept along the dark corridor in silence, following the bobbing light, the locket thrumming madly in Zélie’s jacket pocket. The going was difficult. The passage sloped down sharply and was slippery and strewn with loose stones. They slipped and slithered for an hour, though it felt a lot longer. Eventually the walls of the tunnel opened out and Zélie sensed they were in a vast cavernous space. The light ahead of them had vanished and it was pitch-black. Jules relit the miner’s lamp on his cap. The flame flared up blue and yellow.

Zélie gasped. “Mon Dieu!”

They were in a vast underground chamber with several passageways leading off it. In the middle of the room was a massive circular pillar. The pillar and walls of the chamber were lined from floor to ceiling with human skulls. Hundreds of pairs of black eyeless sockets gaped at them in the yellow light of the torch. Above the pillar was a stone tablet reading:

stop! this is the empire of the dead

“I told you this corridor led to the Catacombs.” Jules shook his head and sighed. “I don’t know these parts very well. The Catacombs are way below the sewers. Not my stomping ground.”

Zélie walked over to the pillar of bones. She sat down on a heap of crumbling femurs and tibias, her head in her hands. “What do we do now? We’ve lost them.” The sense of overwhelming hopelessness rushed over her again like a black tide.

“Shh!” Jules put a finger to his lips. She strained to listen. There was the faint ring of footsteps retreating into the distance, but she couldn’t tell where the sound came from. He pointed to one of the passageways spiralling out of the chamber. “They went that way.”

“Are you sure?” Zélie frowned. “I couldn’t tell where the sound came from.”

Jules’s voice crackled in the dark like a whip. “Can’t you just trust me for once, and stop being so superior all the time? I know what I’m doing underground.”

“All right, sorry.” Zélie jumped up and ran to the tunnel to which Jules was pointing. It was low and rough-hewn, a mere hole in the sandstone unfinished by paving stones. The roof was below head height. “Come on!” She ducked her head and clambered in. They had to find that person with the torch.

Jules paused. Then he groaned and followed, cursing and muttering under his breath.

The floor of the tunnel was littered with lumps of earth and rock. Stalactites like knobbly witches’ fingers hung down from the roof, scratching their faces. Zélie crashed into one and yelped in pain, feeling the sharp metallic taste of blood mixed with gritty pieces of rock. The twists and turns seemed endless. It struck her that they must be a long way from the manhole. They might never figure out how to get back outside. A stab of fear tingled in her spine.

“I hope we’re going to be able to get out of here,” she said hesitantly. “We should have brought a ball of string with us, like Theseus in the Labyrinth.”

Jules frowned. “Who’s Theseus?”

She rolled her eyes. “Nobody you know.”

A few yards ahead of them, the tunnel suddenly ended with an archway. There was a rusty portcullis pulled up over the arch and flaming torches in brackets on the walls. Through the archway Zélie could just about make out a dim room.

The pair of them pressed themselves against the sides of the archway and peered in. It was large and cavernous and the walls were lined with bookcases. In the centre of the room was a big oval table set with a heavy wrought-iron candlestick. Seated at the table, flickering in the candlelight, were about a dozen figures wearing black robes with the hoods pulled up. One of them stood up and threw back his cowl, as though about to speak.

Zélie stiffened and took a step forward. “What the—”

Jules only just managed to hold her back. He clapped his hand over her mouth. “Shut up! Do you want to get us caught?” he spat in her ear, shaking with rage.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hoarsely. “That man … I know him.”

Professor Lestrange was draped in a black robe and cowl, his shadow casting a long finger against the wall in the flickering torchlight. He looked nothing like the jolly dumpy little man whom she had bumped into the previous day at Madame Malaise’s house. But the ring with the pentacle on his right hand gave his identity away.

The Professor cleared his throat and began to speak. “I have returned from my voyage to the Amazon, my friends.” He turned solemnly to one of the hooded figures seated next to him. “Brother Ombre, as you requested, I have brought back the traditional gift to be added to the Brotherhood’s collection.”

The person whom the Professor had addressed rose and threw back his cowl, which was different from the others, being lined with a rich fur that looked like ermine. The hood fell back to reveal a thin face, sharp and ravaged with barely suppressed venom that glowed from his sunken eyes. “That is good news, Brother Wolfmoon.” Brother Ombre’s voice was reedy, scraping Zélie’s ears like a scratchy violin. He paused and panted, as though short of breath. “What gift did you bring for us from your travels?”

Professor Lestrange – or Brother Wolfmoon as he appeared to be called here – stooped and brought out from under the table a large metal cage, which he set upon the polished tabletop. There was a collective intake of breath. The hooded figures round the table craned forward to look.

Inside the cage was a tiny fluffy white creature with a large pink snout and beady eyes, glowing violet in the dim light. It was hanging from a branch propped up in a corner of the cage, with a small piece of what looked like limp lettuce dangling from its mouth.

The Professor opened the cage, lifted the creature out and held it dangling by its forearms. It whimpered, its little legs punching the air.

“This, Brothers, is an infant male specimen of an extremely rare species of Folivora, otherwise known as the Amazonian sloth, from the region near Lake Titicaca in Peru.” He paused as if for emphasis. “But this sloth is the rarest of the rare. You’ll note its white fur and pink eyes. It is albino, exhibiting a congenital absence of any pigmentation or coloration. I can think of no more worthy specimen to grace the Brotherhood’s collection of stuffed exotica.”

“Did you hear that?” Zélie hissed in Jules’s ear. “Stuffed exotica! They’re going to kill and stuff that poor baby sloth!” Her face flushed with rage.

“Shh. I don’t care what they do,” whispered Jules. “We should beat it quick, before we get caught.” He poked her in the ribs and started to walk back down the tunnel, but she gripped his arm. She knew that he knew he couldn’t escape without creating a disturbance and alerting the Brothers. He stayed put, grimacing.

“A very suitable gift for the Brotherhood’s collection.” Brother Ombre nodded approvingly. His eyes glowed like dying embers in the candlelight, and he gripped the baby sloth with a pincer grip so that the little creature whimpered and squirmed. “I can think of few things more exotic than an albino sloth. And now, what about the second leg of your journey, to Bengal? Is there news of the Snakestone?”

For a moment the world stopped turning. Zélie’s vision blurred. Her legs gave way and her body sagged.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jules gripped her shoulder. “If you faint, you’ll clatter to the ground like a cooking pot. We’ll be busted!”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hoarsely. Her throat felt like sandpaper.

Professor Lestrange had mentioned to her that he’d been to Bengal. Now it transpired that he’d been sent there by Brother Ombre to find the Snakestone! Zélie was certain her dad would have told the Professor nothing, even if he knew where the stone was hidden. What had they done to Baba, these hooded men?

“Unfortunately I did not find any clues as to the location of the Snakestone on my trip to Bengal.” Professor Lestrange shook his head. But a shifty look came into his eyes. “I searched the beaches, the jungle, the remote villages, the sea ports and the towns. Nothing. Nobody knew anything about it.”

That’s a lie, thought Zélie. You met my dad. You told me so. Why aren’t you telling them?

Brother Ombre’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What a pity you found nothing on your visit, Brother Wolfmoon.” He raised a gloved hand, as if giving a signal. One of the hooded figures rose from the table and glided towards the Professor. Zélie couldn’t see his face, but a chill wind seemed to follow him. From under the black robe came the glint of metal.

The Professor turned pale, gripping the table for support. But he stood firm. Brother Ombre’s voice came out in quick pants. “This is urgent, Brother. I need the Snakestone – I need it now. You must not give up, Wolfmoon. The Brotherhood expects you to keep up the search, wherever it takes you, and to report back to us faithfully the results of your investigations. After all, we wouldn’t want an unfortunate incident, would we?”

“Of course, Brother Ombre.” Professor Lestrange bowed his head. Zélie could see beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, the tendons on his neck standing out like twisted ropes.

“And now to other business.” Brother Ombre cleared his throat and turned to the group seated at the table. He began to riffle through a sheaf of papers before him, the others gathering round him, gabbling and jabbing at the papers with their fingers.

“Come on,” Jules hissed. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t.”

“What do you mean?” Jules’s voice rose an octave to a squeak.

“The baby sloth! We can’t abandon it to be stuffed. We have to rescue it.”

Jules stared at her. “You really are crazy. I mean, certifiable.”

“No, I’m not. They’re not paying attention now; they’re busy going through papers. I can creep over to that cage and open the door and—”

“Fine.” Jules hissed through gritted teeth. “Do what you like. But I tell you one thing. When we get out of here – if we ever get out of here – I’m having nothing to do with you EVER AGAIN.”

“All right. I thought we’d already agreed that.”

Zélie took a deep breath and cracked her knuckles. Creeping forward into the chamber, she began to circle the room, pressing her back to the wall. The hooded figures were clustered round Brother Ombre at the table in the candlelight, but the edges of the room were cast in shadow. The cage with the sloth in it was on the floor, on the opposite side of the table to the group surrounding Brother Ombre.

Inching forward, still with her back to the wall, Zélie crept towards the cage. Through the bars she could hear the snuffles of the little sloth. Two huge violet eyes stared out at her, blinking behind the bars. Gingerly she stretched her hand out to the cage door. It was shut with a simple bolt. She slid it aside and opened the door. Reaching her hand into the cage, she grasped the sloth by the scruff of its neck – like her dad had taught her to do with a kitten – and pulled it out. She lifted the creature out of the cage and held it to her chest, surprised to find that it immediately wrapped itself round her neck. She had done it! Count Rodolphe himself could not have done better.

Zélie allowed herself a few seconds to savour the triumph before creeping back along the wall to Jules. Sweat streamed down her face, but the sloth seemed to enjoy the sticky shower. It hugged her tighter and licked the drops of sweat with its scratchy tongue. She could feel its tiny heartbeat as it clung to her.

It thinks I am its mother, she realised. A wave of sadness rushed through her.

The exit was looming closer. In a moment she would reach it. Then one of the figures at the table suddenly looked up and stared at Zélie.

It was Brother Ombre.

For a second, Zélie froze. Then she sprang into action, slithering and sliding along the wall to the archway where Jules was standing. Brother Ombre had risen from the table and was gliding towards her in his black ermine-lined robe. He was looking straight at her. Now he was close, close enough for her to see his eyes flickering over her, as lidless as a gecko’s, his nose sniffing the air like a hound scenting a fox. She could even count the beads of sweat glistening on his forehead.

Shrinking further into the shadows, she shut her eyes tightly and fought to hold down the panic rising in her chest. What would they do to them when they were discovered?

“Brother Ombre, the file isn’t over there; it’s in that bookcase by the clock!” a voice called from the table.

Zélie opened her eyes. Brother Ombre turned abruptly and glided away from her to a bookcase on the other side of the room.

Zélie didn’t wait to see if the bookcase was the right one. Slithering along the last few feet of the room, the children raced away from the chamber, tripping and scrambling on the floor of the rocky passageway.

They did not stop until they reached the underground vault with the skull pillar. Here they paused, panting, to catch their breath.

Jules scowled at her between pants. “I think you’re a cat. You’ve got nine lives. Either that or you’re a witch. How did you get away with that?” Zélie could see, beneath the gruffness, a grudging admiration.

“Brains not witchery. And stealth.” Zélie wiped the damp streaks of hair back from her wet forehead. Round her neck the sloth snoozed peacefully, snuffling to itself. Its body wrapped her in a warm hug.

Jules stared at her. Then he laughed. “That thing looks like a fur collar round your neck.”

Zélie stroked the creature, which purred happily in its sleep. “What can I call him? He needs a name.”

“What was the place that Wolfmoon fellow said he visited?”

“Lake Titicaca in Peru. That’s it! That’s the sloth’s name: Titicaca.”

“It’s a bit of a mouthful but whatever. They’re a nasty piece of work that Brotherhood of Blood, collecting and stuffing exotic animals and whatnot.”

Zélie frowned. “The official meeting place of the Brotherhood is on the grand street near the Opera House. I pointed it out to you, remember? They claim to stand for scientific progress. And yet look at what they’re doing in secret! Meeting underground in black cloaks, searching for the lost Snakestone, collecting and stuffing exotica. I know that man they called Brother Wolfmoon; his real name is Professor Lestrange. He’s a friend of the Malaises. He seems to be some sort of inventor of gadgets. I bumped into him at the house, snooping around. He said he’d met my dad in India. Now I know the real reason why he went there – to find the Snakestone! Perhaps they’ve trapped my dad. That would explain why he hasn’t written to me for two months. They probably think he knows where the Snakestone is. Not that he’d tell those creeps, even if he knew.”

They slipped and stumbled along the maze of corridors for an hour or so, Jules cursing as he took a wrong turning and they had to double back. Finally they reached the passageway with the ladder to the street. Jules jumped on to it nimbly, Zélie following cautiously behind. It wasn’t long before they emerged, panting and grimy, on to the street.

The fencing and sign were exactly as they had left them. A few passers-by hurried past with umbrellas. Zélie would be due back at the house on Rue Morgue shortly. She paused, then held out her hand. “Well, I suppose this is where we say au revoir.”

Jules shuffled from one foot to the other, looking down at his hobnailed boots. “Well, yes, I suppose it is.”

They shook hands.

“Au revoir then,” said Zélie. “Thank you so much for everything. You’ve been wonderful.”

Jules’s face flushed. He looked down at his feet. “I haven’t done anything.” He pulled her maid’s outfit out of his knapsack and handed it to her.

Jules waited while she changed in the bushes, then took back his clothes wordlessly when she held them out to him. For a minute he stood and shuffled from one foot to the other, staring at the ground. Then he turned, head bowed, hands in his pockets, and walked away down the street.

“Thank you,” said Zélie, as much to herself as anyone, since Jules was now too far away to hear. She watched his sturdy figure, stooped with the weight of the fence and signboard, disappear into the crowd. Tears stung the back of her eyelids. She sniffed and brushed them away crossly with the back of her hand. Then she stuck her nose in the air, shut her eyes, and counted to ten.

Zélie Dutta, she told herself, you rescued a baby sloth from an evil secret society using only your stealth and your wits. You can say the alphabet backwards and rotate your arms in different directions. You don’t need anybody’s help, least of all that of a sewer boy. He smells anyway.

She curled her fingers round the locket in her apron. It was cold and still. The maid’s uniform clung to her like pondweed and she dragged herself out of the park gate, the sloth wrapped round her neck, through the maze of cobbled streets to the house on Rue Morgue.

By the time Zélie got back to Rue Morgue it was early afternoon. The rattle of cooking pots drifted through the half-open kitchen door. Servants rushed past with empty lunch platters as she crossed the hall, racking her brains for a solution to the problem of what to do with Titicaca. When she was out and about, she could just about get away with the sloth draped round her neck, looking to the world like a white furry ruff protecting her against the autumn chill. But she couldn’t pull off that trick indoors.

Zélie ransacked her memory for everything she knew about sloths – which was practically zero. Professor Lestrange had found Titicaca in the Amazon rainforest, so presumably sloths liked hot, damp, tropical environments, similar to the monsoon climate she knew so well. She was fairly certain too that they were vegetarian. She paced the hall, twisting her apron between her fingers. Someone had left the door to the laundry room open and it was creaking on its hinges, sending a blast of hot, moist air into the hallway. She walked over to shut it. Then stopped.

Hot moist air. Laundry room. Rainforest!

Racing back to the porch so fast that she skidded on the marble floor, she rummaged in the oak storage chest by the coat stand. Finally she found what she was looking for: the birdcage that had housed the ill-fated canary. She looked around. The hallway was deserted, all the servants busy in the kitchen and dining room or upstairs in the bedrooms getting the rooms ready for the night. She picked up the cage and ran to the laundry room.

A blast of hot air hit her face as she entered. The laundry maid had left for the day and the room was deserted. Clouds of damp sheets billowed in a misty haze above the stove, which had rows of heavy flat irons ranged next to it. The air smelled of soap and vinegar.

Next to the stove was a cupboard that was too hot and damp to house anything except broken laundry equipment. She pulled it open. There was just about space on the shelf for the birdcage. Gently she unhooked the sloth from her neck. Pulling open the metal hatch, she lowered the tiny body in. As soon as he found himself detached from her, Titicaca burst into frantic mewling, his little pink nose snuffling for her scent. Her heart did a hiccup. She had to quieten him down, or all would be lost. On the open shelves of folded laundry were piles of soft fluffy blankets. She took one and thrust it into the cage, placing the sloth on it. Titicaca stopped mewling immediately. His eyelids drooped and he fell asleep again, straddling the rolled blanket like a monkey hanging on to its mother’s back. Zélie looked at him and smiled, then frowned. He must need to eat at some point. But what did sloths eat?

She left the laundry and tiptoed across to the pantry, which was between the laundry room and the kitchen. It was cool and dark and lined from floor to ceiling with racks holding rows of jars, huge cheeses on marble slabs, fat fingers of saucisson dangling from hooks. She found the fruit and vegetable rack in the corner and searched it. Footsteps approached: Pierre returning to the kitchen from the dining room. Grabbing a few stalks of anything green, she ran back into the laundry room and opened the cupboard. Titicaca lay snuggled on the blanket, snoring peacefully. She inched open the door to the cage and dropped inside what she had managed to grab: a few lettuce leaves, a bit of cabbage, some green beans, a couple of grapes, a Brussels sprout. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

Shutting the cupboard door, she raced across the hall and up the stairs. The door to the salon was shut. From under it seeped the murmur of voices and the chink of teacups. She took a deep breath and pushed it open, tucking her hair back into her maid’s cap. Her eyes popped out on stalks.

Professor Lestrange was seated at a roaring fire opposite Madame on the settee. He had transformed from the spooky hooded figure of a couple of hours ago back into his former dumpy, avuncular self. He was sipping from a bone china teacup and looking very much at home. Madame’s face, on the other hand, was pinched and drawn, her mouth pursed as she sat embroidering a black scarf. On the floor before the Professor was a large trunk with metal clasps.

“Ah, the young lady from Bengal!” The Professor set down his teacup and beamed at Zélie.

She glared at him. He didn’t seem to notice.

“You are just in time to see this little surprise I have for Madame.” He raised a ginger eyebrow flirtatiously at Madame, who didn’t smile back. The Professor leaned forward and opened the trunk. He reached inside and pulled out a bulky object wrapped in cloth. “Behold, my very latest gadget!” He flourished the object in the air with pride. “I must confess, although I say it myself, a work of genius.”

Zélie’s insides growled like an angry tiger. She gripped the doorpost to stop herself springing on the Professor. Here he was, acting all innocent, putting on the eccentric inventor act, when only hours before he had lied to a roomful of people about his visit to her dad.

The Professor, oblivious to her thoughts, continued to beam, unwrapping the object and placing it on the table carefully. It was a rectangular block with six holes drilled into it. In each of the holes was a gun. Attached to the triggers of each of the six guns was a fine wire.

“Such a simple idea, yet such brilliance!” The Professor rubbed his hands together gleefully. “This is a tripwire. You thread it across your window and hide the block with the guns beneath the window ledge. Then if a burglar tries to climb through the window, he trips on the wire and sets off all six guns! Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, BOOM – like that! The perfect burglar trap. Your thief ends up splattered over your window, and you haven’t had to lift a finger. You mentioned to me, Madame, that you were worried about theft. This is the perfect deterrent. One hundred francs and this patented Alarm Gun is yours.”

Madame stared stonily at the Professor, stabbing the black cloth with her needle. “Too expensive.”

“Ninety.”

Madame frowned, then sighed. “It’s true we have had some pieces of jewellery go missing recently: my pearl hatpin, earrings and a paper knife. Very well. Ninety francs. Zélie, go and tell Pierre to come and collect this contraption.”

“Yes, Madame.” Zélie curtsied and slipped out of the salon door.

Outside in the corridor she leaned her back to the wall, eyes closed, struggling to keep down the rage seething inside her. The Professor mustn’t get away with this. She couldn’t believe he had the cheek to sit there in the armchair eyeballing her, glib and squat like a smug toad. Something had happened to her dad and the Brotherhood was mixed up in it, she was sure. She had to confront the Professor about the true purpose of his visit to Bengal. About his meeting with her father. About the Snakestone. But how? For a few seconds she heard nothing except her pulse beating like a drum. Then her mind popped like a flashbulb. She opened her eyes and cracked her knuckles. She had a plan.

Minutes later, having told Pierre to collect the Alarm Gun, Zélie was in the front porch, where the new portrait of Docteur Malaise scowled down at her. The lantern swinging from the porch ceiling gave only a low light, with plenty of shadow in the corners for her to hide. She stood against a pillar in darkness. As soon as Professor Lestrange came out, she would confront him and find out the truth.

Five minutes went by, every second of which crept past slower than a snail. Finally Zélie heard the murmur of voices in the hall, an exchange between Madame and the Professor. They were saying goodbye. Soon the Professor would be coming out on to the porch. She took a deep breath to ready herself, trying to steady her shaking hands.

The pale glimmer of moonlight on the polished floor caught her eye.

She blinked. Moonlight? Impossible! It was broad daylight.

She peered to look more closely. It wasn’t moonlight but a pearl-studded hatpin, glinting palely on the marble tiles. One of Madame’s missing jewels. But what was it doing here on the floor? Had it merely fallen from Madame’s hat, or had it indeed been stolen and dropped by the thief? She picked the hatpin up and twisted it wonderingly in her fingers, barely noticing the shadow of someone whisking out of sight, withdrawing into the gloom. Quick, light footsteps hastily retreated down the corridor.

At that moment the Professor strode down the stairs and into the hall. He smiled and raised his hat at her.

She scowled and stretched out an arm to grab him. “Professor Lestrange!”

But he was gone, hopping nimbly down the front steps and along the path, vanishing into his waiting carriage. Three sharp taps from his cane on the carriage ceiling and the coachman cracked his whip, the horses stomping and snorting. The carriage whisked away in a cloud of dust and whirling autumn leaves.

“NO!” Zélie ran down the steps. Too late.

Sobbing with rage, she turned back to the front door, still clutching the hatpin. But her path was blocked.

A stocky shadow loomed in the doorway and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck.

“Mouldy macarons, Zélie Dutta!” Cook’s normally pale potato face was beetroot red. She grabbed the hatpin from Zélie’s hand. “Oho, what have we here! Madame’s missing pearl hatpin!”

There was a patter of hurried footsteps behind Cook. Pierre appeared, huffing and puffing, followed by Blanche looking hot and flustered, pinning up her hair. As soon as Blanche saw the hatpin, she screamed.

“Madame’s hatpin! Look, the thief! The wretch stole it from her dressing table!”

“I did not steal it. I found it on the floor—”

“What is all this commotion?” The salon door swung open. Madame appeared at the top of the stairs. “What is going on?” She glared at Pierre and Blanche.

“Zélie Dutta, Madame. We found her coming in the front door holding your missing hatpin. She – she must have stolen it—” Pierre stammered, but Madame cut him short.

“Mon Dieu, save me from these knaves!” she roared. “Butler, your brain has more holes in it than a block of Emmental. If the girl was stealing the hatpin, would she be coming into the house? Of course not! She would be running away!”

For once the butler was lost for words. He stared at Madame, eyes bulging, gasping like a fish stranded on the banks of the Seine.

Madame’s shoulders slumped. She looked exhausted. “The girl’s not a thief. The hatpin must have come loose and fallen off my head. But she shall be punished for causing all this furore. Lock her in the cellar.”

“No! It’s not fair!” Zélie cried.

But it was no use. Three pairs of hands grabbed her and bundled her down the corridor. Across the marble hall they dragged her, then on through a narrow doorway that led down some twisty stone steps to the vast draughty cellar in the basement.

“I knew you’d land up in trouble again.” Blanche’s eyes glittered. “You were bound to disgrace yourself soon enough. Just as well you weren’t caught by the new Alarm Gun.”

By now they had reached the bottom of the flight of stairs, which ended with a heavy wooden door. Pierre searched through his ring of keys and found the right one, a large rusty key that he twisted in the lock. The door scraped open with a squeak of hinges and Zélie felt herself being thrust into the basement, tripping down the steps as the door clanged shut behind her and landing smack at the bottom with a thud. Cook’s voice floated down through the door from the stairs above. “You can stay there until tomorrow night with nothing to eat or drink! That will teach you to go thieving.”

The footsteps clattered away into the distance.

For a few minutes Zélie lay still, face to the ground. The floor of the basement was bare earth and the hot steam of damp soil mixed with mould almost choked her. Her ears were full of a dull thrumming; she wasn’t sure if it was dizziness from the fall or the whirl of revelations from the past few hours.

Lifting her chin, she saw that the cellar was dark save for a single shaft of light that slanted down from a grating in the pavement above. In the shadows she could vaguely make out the hulking shapes of wine racks, stacked furniture covered in dust sheets and discarded paintings. Her head swam and she rolled on to her back and closed her eyes.

For how long Zélie was asleep she didn’t know. When she woke up, the streaks of sunlight shining through the grating had turned into a burnt orange. It must be early evening. She sat up on the floor. Pulling herself to her feet, she tottered unsteadily to the door of the cellar. She rattled the lock. It was a heavy three-pin bolt and did not budge.

Zélie made her way to the grating and looked up. The soles of the shoes of passers-by tramped above her head and the clatter of horses’ hooves on the road filtered down, along with the cries of newspaper boys calling out the latest headlines. There’d been a demonstration at the Paris Opera, a gas explosion at the Louvre and some murder or other. The usual stuff.

Zélie turned to look at the jumble of objects in the cellar. The red eyes of a moth-eaten hyena glared at her from the darkness. There were heaps of broken spears, painted shields, a stuffed alligator and what looked like a pile of coconuts but might have been shrunken heads. They were artefacts that Docteur Malaise had collected from his travels in various jungles searching for medical cures. Madame had thrown them with a shudder into the cellar as soon as decently possible after her husband’s death.

Zélie wandered over to a dusty zebra-skin-covered armchair and sat down. She felt for the locket in her apron pocket but it was cold and lifeless. Digging about in the pocket, she brought out her father’s last letter to her from two months ago, which she carried with her always. She read it for the hundredth time. It was full of the usual news and jokes, with the usual riddle:

Azure, sapphire, grey,

Foam, froth, spray.

Depending on my mood,

I can be calm or rude.

What am I?

Climbing out of the armchair, she went to the grating, stood on tiptoe, and shook it. It didn’t budge. Her shoulders drooped. You’re no Count Rodolphe, she thought. The Count would have cut through the grating with his Swiss penknife, or his trusty friend Murph would have come to his aid. But she didn’t have a penknife or a trusty friend.

Suddenly her head, still throbbing dully, made out a sound carrying over and above the street noises. Thin and piercing but persistent and distinct. A whistle. A familiar whistle. Her heart missed a beat. By standing on tiptoe she could just about clutch the grating above her head. Gritting her teeth, she pulled herself up so that her face pressed against it. The shoe of a passer-by crunched on her fingers. She yelped in pain. But she managed to hold on.

Someone she recognised was standing, hands in their pockets, in front of the house.

“Jules!” she cried.

The whistling stopped.

“JULES!!!” she hollered.

He stared ahead, then looked around, as if searching for the source of the voice.

“I’m here – DOWN HERE!” she shouted.

Jules frowned and walked towards the grating. A pair of hobnailed boot soles brushed her nose. He was turning his head, still looking for the source of the noise. Summoning all her strength, Zélie thrust her hand through the grating and seized the ankle of the boot. She pulled. There was a loud cry and a clatter. A face came crashing down on to the grating, close to hers.

Jules’s jaw dropped open. “Slippery sewer rats – Zélie! What are you doing down there?”

“They threw me in the cellar. What are you doing up there?”

“Hang on, I’m coming down now.” There was a scuffling and scraping, followed by a sawing sound. She saw the blade of a penknife flashing in and out of the joint of the grating. Suddenly the grating lifted and Jules squeezed through. He dropped through the hole and down to the ground noiselessly on all fours like a cat. Soon he was standing beside her.

Zélie tried hard to wipe off the broad grin spreading over her face. “I thought you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me or this funny business.”

“I didn’t. I mean, I don’t.” Jules’s face turned red. “I came to see you because I’ve got some news. Pretty important news.”

“What news?”

He thrust a newspaper in her hand. “Headline in the evening edition of Paris Gossip.”

She took the newspaper and scanned the front page. There was a big headline splashed across it:

Mysterious Death of Eminent Inventor

Paris police are currently baffled by the mysterious murder early this afternoon of eminent professor and inventor Gilbert Lestrange. The Professor was found with a knife sticking out of his back on the pavement in front of the headquarters of the illustrious association of which he was a member, the Brotherhood of Blood. No evidence has been adduced as to the motive for the murder or the identity of the killer.

The newspaper dropped from Zélie’s hand. She rubbed her eyes. “Professor Lestrange, murdered? Why, he was here taking tea with Madame earlier this afternoon!”

Jules snorted. “Well, that was his last cuppa, I guess.”

Zélie picked up the newspaper from the floor and read the article again. She frowned. “None of this makes any sense. The Professor meets my dad in Calcutta, snooping around for the Snakestone. Then he’s murdered. What’s going on?”

Jules shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. All I know is that every time I try to get out of this business something seems to happen to drag me back into it.”

But Zélie wasn’t listening any more. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. They won’t be coming to get me until tomorrow night. That means I have a whole day to find out what’s going on.” She stood on tiptoe and strained to pull herself out through the grating. Her fingers slipped and she fell back down on to her bottom with a thud.

“Hold your horses.” Jules’s jaw clenched and he spoke through gritted teeth. “Can’t you just let me help you without making a fuss for once?” He grasped her round the waist and lifted her up, thrusting her through the hole where the grating had been. Before she knew it, she had shot from the darkness into the early-evening light, the clatter of horses’ hooves and the stream of passers-by. She scrambled to her feet. By the time she had dusted herself down, Jules had already leapt out of the hole and was busy replacing the grating.

“Now can we go to the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Blood? It’s where the Professor was found murdered. It’s just round the corner from here.” Zélie grabbed Jules’s hand and broke into a fierce trot.

He pulled her back with a grip that was surprisingly strong. “We’re not going anywhere until we’ve got you cleaned up. Have you seen the state you’re in? Everybody’s staring. The police will be arresting us before long.”

Zélie looked around. It was true that passers-by were staring at them. She must look a sight, she supposed, covered in earth, her maid’s cap hanging lopsided off one ear. A passer-by across the street had stopped a gendarme and was whispering in his ear, pointing at them. The gendarme began to walk in their direction.

“All right.” She made a face. “But I’ve nowhere to go to clean myself up. I can’t go back into the house, can I? I’m supposed to be locked up in the cellar until tomorrow night.”

“We’re not going back to the house.” Jules grabbed her hand. “Let’s go. We don’t have much time.”

“Where are we going?” Zélie had to trot to keep up.

Jules smiled and tapped the side of his nose. “It’s a surprise.”

After a good two hours of walking, they had passed beyond the outskirts of the city. Finally Jules stopped.

Zélie looked around, exhausted. The sun was just beginning to set and the steely needle of the Eiffel Tower glittered from very far away. She had never been so far from the city centre before and was surprised to see rolling countryside and hear the soothing chirruping of songbirds in the trees. “Where are we?”

“My home,” said Jules.

“Your home? Where?”

Jules pointed to what looked like a large wooden shipping crate perched behind a clump of bushes. She hadn’t noticed it hidden in the trees.

“You live in a box?”

He nodded, grinning, and led the way. As they approached the crate, Zélie saw that it was bigger than it had at first seemed. A rudimentary window and door were cut into the side. Stamped on its sides were the words “FRAGILE” and “Pondicherry”.

Jules opened the door without knocking and walked in. The inside of the crate was tiny but clean and neat, with an unlit stove and a scrubbed table in the middle of the floor. Across from the stove was a wooden bookcase crammed with volumes of various sizes and thickness, including The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, all battered and well thumbed. The interior of the crate was lit with coloured hurricane lamps, through which the light shone green and red and blue.

Jules went red, following her gaze. “Sorry. I painted the lamps when I was little.”

Zélie suddenly realised that she knew nothing about Jules at all. She had assumed he was an ignorant sewer boy who lived in some filthy hovel somewhere. She had never imagined that he lived in a magical crate lit in different colours, with volumes of Victor Hugo on the shelves. She blushed redder than Jules.

Jules made a face, then sighed and went to the door. “My dad’s busy all night with a sewer job on the Champs-Élysées. You can sleep in his bed tonight. I’ll make a fire outside. It’s a fine night. It will be nicer to sit in the open air this evening than cooped up in here.”

As the sun set, Jules made a small fire beside the crate. They sat in silence, watching the firelight flickering against the city skyline. The sparks spat and crackled, tiny tongues of flame that lit the night sky like fireflies. Grandma Tami would love this fire, thought Zélie. She’d immediately begin spinning tales of the mother goddess Durga with her ten arms, battling against the demon astride her giant lion. The image of Tami’s hunched figure, wrapped in her white widow’s sari, billowed out from the smoke of the campfire, swirling and distorting in the sparks. People would make statues of Durga in the autumn, thousands of them, lighting the city like flames. Then at the end of the festival they would take the clay statues to the great river that flowed past and throw them in to dissolve in the waves and return to the home of the gods in the Himalayas. The River Ganges back home was so old and wide it was impossible to see the other side. Its vastness made the Seine here in Paris look like a dribble of spit on a baby’s chin.

“It’s hard to light a fire with damp autumn twigs.” Jules’s matter-of-fact voice popped her daydream like a punctured balloon.

“I didn’t realise you had read Victor Hugo.” Zélie blushed as she remembered her snootiness the previous day.

“My dad wanted me to learn to read. He was so pleased when they brought in the free schools, although I left school early to help him in the sewers. He got those books cheap from a house clearance so I could read them to him in the evenings. I know most of them by heart; I’ve read them to him so many times.”

Zélie nodded. “I was dragged out of school early to come and work over here too. Supposedly it was because Docteur Malaise had lent my dad some money, so it was to pay him back. But it didn’t make sense. Why ship me over? There are loads of housemaids in Paris.”

Jules glanced at her sideways, poking a stick in the red embers. “So what’s going on with your eyes?”

Zélie’s face slammed shut. “It’s nothing. No big deal. I inherited it from my mother; she had one grey eye and one black, like me. She died when I was five so I never really knew her. My dad’s mother, Grandma Tami, lives with us. She helped bring me up.” She changed the subject, pointing to the fading ink on the crate. “Why does it say ‘Pondicherry’ on your crate? That’s a city in India.”

“Dad says the crate was shipped here from Pondicherry with a cargo of cotton many years ago.” Jules cupped his chin in his hands. “When I was little, I used to lie in bed and imagine the crate was tossing on a ship at sea. What stories it must have to tell! I’ve never seen the sea or a palm tree. I’ve often wondered what India’s like.”

“Hot and sunny most of the time. Except the monsoon, when it’s really wet. Both my parents came from India, except my mother’s father was French. She spoke French fluently; that’s how I learned it.”

“So you’re French-Indian, living in British India. Mon Dieu, that’s complicated.”

Zélie laughed and crossed her eyes. “Yes, I guess I’m a mixture of all those worlds. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m dead boring. French, my parents were born in Paris.” Jules got to his feet and pulled a face. “Come on, enough talking. Let’s get some chestnuts and roast them.”

They scrambled along the trees by the crate, collecting the new-fallen spiky chestnuts. They split the skins and Jules scored the dark brown centres, then they roasted the nuts on a heavy iron pan in the embers of the campfire. Jules tossed the nuts in butter and salt and they wolfed them down, licking the hot salty butter from their fingers. Then they lay on the bank and watched the stars pop out in the night sky, huge and bright, bigger and brighter than Zélie had seen since she came to Paris, for in the city the lights were so bright that the stars never shone.

Zélie had expected to spend the night tossing and turning as usual, but in fact, she slept peacefully and only opened her eyes as the first shafts of sunlight hit the cracked skylight of the wooden crate. She awoke to a great clatter of tin plates, loud cursing and the smell of burning. Jules was standing over the stove, trying to stir something in a smoking saucepan.

“I’m sorry, I’ve burned the soup.” Jules shrugged his shoulders apologetically. “But we’ve got a bit of baguette, so we can eat that.”

Zélie nibbled on the hunk of bread he gave her and huddled on the rug by the stove. The crate felt warm and snug. Everything in it felt old and loved, from the chipped tin plates on the table to the carefully darned woollen blankets in which she was wrapped. It was so different from the big chilly house on Rue Morgue, where everything was new and fashionable and all the gold-embossed books on the shelves were shiny and untouched. She sipped the strong sweet coffee that Jules gave her, and felt the rough warmth of the blanket against her cheek. She opened her mouth and shut it, then took a deep breath because she knew Jules wouldn’t like what she was about to say.

“I think we should go now to the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Blood, where Professor Lestrange was found murdered. There might be clues.”

Jules rolled his eyes. “Here we go again. Rushing off God-knows-where to do God-knows-what. Anyway, won’t the Malaises be expecting you back at the house? You don’t want them to come to the cellar and find you aren’t there.”

“They won’t come to get me before tonight. Cook said I was to stay there a night and day without food or drink.”

“Didn’t the other maid – Blanche or whatever her name is – take your side?”

“Blanche? No chance. She’s the meanest and slyest of them all.”

A frown came between Jules’s eyebrows so deep it might have been cut with a knife. “That lot should be walled up alive in the sewers. All right. We can go to the BB hangout. But I can’t imagine how we’re going to break in. It will be a fortress, I’m sure.”

“We’ll have to figure it out. There’s always a way.”

Jules sighed. “All right.” Then he broke into a grin. “You’d better wear your sewer boy disguise.” He went to a cupboard and fetched the trousers and shirt she had worn before. “Here it is, all ready for you. I’ll take your maid’s uniform in my knapsack. Why don’t I go out and feed my snails while you get changed?”

“Snails?”

“Yes. Here.” Jules went out of the crate and returned carrying a battered shoebox. Zélie peered inside. Nestled in it were two large fat snails. “Meet Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,” Jules smiled fondly. “They’ve laid some eggs. I’m waiting for them to hatch. The thing I like about snails is they’re very down to earth. There’s no snobbishness, no putting on airs and graces. If they don’t like something, they just go into their shell.”

“They’re not the most exciting pets.” Zélie stared at Louis XVI, who was waggling his antennae flirtatiously at Marie Antoinette. Somehow she couldn’t summon up a massive enthusiasm for molluscs.

Jules frowned. “Who wants excitement? Not me. Excitement is for other people. I just want a quiet life.” Grabbing a bunch of dandelion leaves from the doorway, he headed to the door with the box. “Hurry up and change. It’ll take us a couple of hours to get to the BB headquarters.”

When they reached the Brotherhood building, the house with its tall windows gazed blankly on the street as before. But the scene before it was completely different. Barricades had been erected around the front porch and a gendarme in a black cape was dozing on a folding chair before the front door. On the pavement before the front steps, the crude outline of a twisted body had been drawn in chalk. Dribbles of what must have been dried blood splashed from the pavement into the gutter. A large signboard read:

Keep Out. Scene of Crime.

“That must be the position in which the Professor’s body was found.” Jules leaned over the barricade to look more closely at the chalk outline, staring at it in grim fascination.

“Ugh, look at that blood. A knife sticking out of his back, according to the newspaper.” Zélie shuddered. She looked again at the chalk outline and the dribbles of blood. The hairs on the nape of her neck tingled. “Look, Jules, the position of the dead body is exactly like we saw in Madame Drusilla’s crystal ball, with the knife in its back! That’s what the vision foretold, the murder of Professor Lestrange.” She squinted at the tall house before them, with its windows like empty eyes. “There must be a window open somewhere. Yes – look! Over there.”

Sure enough, behind a tall iron fence on one side of the house was a window that was open a crack.

Jules stared incredulously. “You think we can get over that fence and through the window without the gendarme or a passer-by seeing us?”

“Of course. Easy. The gendarme isn’t looking this way.” Zélie looked up and down the street. The gendarme had half woken up but was paying no attention to them. He was busy picking his nose and nodding over his newspaper.

They slunk towards the side of the house with the open window and looked up at the tall fence. Jules turned green.

“I’ll climb the fence first, then you,” said Zélie. “I’m used to heights. Palm trees are three times as tall as this, and they move in the wind.”

They waited until there was nobody in sight. Zélie was very grateful that she was not wearing the cumbersome maid’s uniform. Grasping the railings with her hands, she pulled herself up and sat astride the top, carefully avoiding the big black spikes. Then she closed her eyes and felt herself drop to the ground. Her feet landed on a soft manicured lawn with a gravel path that led straight to the open window. A curtain behind it flapped gently in the breeze. “Come on, quick!” she hissed.

“All right.” Jules took a deep breath. Then, grasping the railings with his hands, he scrambled unsteadily to the top, where he perched on the spikes like a chicken on a spit.

“Come on, jump! It’s just grass. You won’t hurt yourself.” She tried to stop her voice rising to a squeak.

Jules paused for what seemed a very long time, his face the colour of boiled spinach. Then he took a deep breath, shut his eyes and rolled off the railings, landing on the plush lawn heavily.

“Come on, run!” Zélie grabbed his hand and they ran to the open window. “Here, I’ll give you a leg up.” He put his foot in her hands and vaulted over the sill, Zélie following behind.

WHACK! She landed in the room with a thud. She scrambled to her feet and looked around.

They were in what looked like an enormous workshop or laboratory of some sort. The wooden floorboards were bare. Big pipes ran along the walls and ceiling. There were shelves lined with bottles and tubes of brightly coloured liquids that bubbled and fizzed. The room smelled of whisky and Bunsen burners and tobacco.

Jules whistled. “This is some place.” He held up a tube of fizzing purple liquid to the light. It was teeming with tiny creatures that looked like headless tadpoles. He shuddered and put the tube down.

“Where would there be a clue?” Zélie raked the room with her eyes. It had the musty, sour smell of mothballs and mould. As her eyes got used to the gloom, she saw strange shapes looming out of the darkness, crouching and ready to spring. She caught her breath and stifled a scream. A five-legged hyena grinned from a corner. Next to it reared the shaggy outline of a black bear on its hind legs. Except this bear had two mouths, both opened in a snarl. The hairs on the nape of Zélie’s neck tingled as she scanned the shapes in the room. Everything was … an anomaly, somehow different. There was a cat striped half brown and half white. A rabbit with one red eye and one black. She clutched Jules by the arm, trembling. “Do you think this is the Brotherhood’s collection of exotica that they mentioned? The animals they bring back from their travels?”

Jules was staring wide-eyed at the looming shapes surrounding them. He nodded, grimacing. “So it seems. What horrible people they are.”

“Poor creatures,” Zélie stroked the rabbit. It stared back at her mournfully with glassy eyes like a mirror. She sat down on a chaise longue draped with a moth-eaten tiger skin and clenched her fists in frustration. They had got nowhere! How on earth were they going to find out anything about what the Professor had been up to?

There was a clatter of footsteps in the corridor outside. Somebody was coming. The door began to swing open.

“Quick, the couch!” Zélie hissed. The pair of them rolled under the chaise longue.

They were just in time. The door opened. A pair of heavy boots appeared beside the chaise longue. The boots paused a hair’s breadth from Zélie’s face, so close that the laces tickled her nose. She craned her head upwards to try to make out who it was. She expected it to be the gendarme, but it was a heavy-set man with a meaty red face whom she had never seen before. The man strode over to the cabinets lining the walls and began pulling open doors and drawers, shaking out the contents and sending clouds of thick dust flying. He was obviously searching for something.

Zélie felt Jules squirming next to her. She turned, putting her finger to her lips. His face was slowly turning purple. With growing horror, she realised that a big cobweb had caught in his nose. He was about to sneeze. She shook her head furiously but it was too late. Jules’s body gathered itself up as taut as elastic, then exploded with an earth-shattering “ACHOOOOOO!!!”

The sound of rustling paper stopped. There was a deathly silence. Footsteps approached. The two black boots reappeared on the polished wooden floor next to the chaise longue, stopping once again in front of Zélie’s nose. The red meaty face appeared sideways beneath the sofa, peering straight into Zélie’s eyes. A blast of garlicky breath hit her.

“Aha!” The face burst into a grin. “What have we here—”

Instinctively, without pausing to think, Zélie thrust her fist into the face as hard as she could. At the same time Jules heaved the chaise longue and pushed it aside. The stranger gave a mighty roar and staggered back, his hands flying to his face, tripping over the tiger skin, which tangled with his legs. They pulled themselves to their feet and rushed to the open door. Glancing back over her shoulder, Zélie witnessed the bizarre sight of a man wrestling with a gigantic flat tiger. But they didn’t stop to watch the outcome of the fight. The pair of them turned and raced down the hallway.

Through the misted glass of the front door they could see the shadow of the gendarme dozing over his newspaper. There was no escape that way. Turning, they made their way back down the hallway. Passing the open door to the workshop, they could see that the man had almost escaped the clutches of the tiger skin. In minutes he would be free.

“Look.” Zélie pointed to a narrow doorway opposite, through which came a chink of daylight. “That room has a window. We might be able to get out that way. Let’s go and see.”

They scurried like a pair of mice through the door into a gloomy room, a vast oak-panelled salon scattered with red-velvet-covered chairs and sofas.

The heavy tread of footsteps was approaching along the corridor outside. Jules rattled one of the handles on the big windows. It was firmly locked.

Zélie raked the room for an escape. There were three other windows. They tried them. All locked. There was no exit except the door through which they had come, and that led to the corridor where the footsteps were coming from. She shut her eyes and slammed her fist against the wall, racking her brains. Her knuckle grazed something sharp, and she felt a stab of pain. She glanced at her hand in surprise. A trickle of blood was running down it. She looked at the wall. At the spot where she had hit it was a large portrait of Professor Lestrange, splendidly arrayed in a gown of ermine, his pentacle ring sparkling on his little finger.

She stared at the portrait. The ring, she realised, was not paint. It was a real piece of metal, fixed to the painting like a knob. It was on this that she had cut her hand. She reached out and touched it. There was a groan and a shudder. The painting – along with the section of panelled wall upon which it was fixed – rolled back. Jules and Zélie found themselves staring into black emptiness. A hidden passageway behind the portrait!

Zélie’s pulse raced. “Quick, get in!”

She grabbed Jules by the hand and they scuttled behind the painting. The door swung shut behind them, just as their pursuer rushed into the room.

The door behind the painting shut with a clang. They were plunged into darkness.

“Let me get the lamp.” Jules groped around in his knapsack and found one of the miner’s lamps, which he lit by striking a match on his shoe. He lit a second lamp and passed it to Zélie. The two flames flared to reveal long rows of wooden shelves stacked with dusty wine bottles. A sack of potatoes was sprouting quietly in the soft mouldy darkness.

Zélie peered into the gloom. The corridor snaked away into black nothingness. A gust of cold wind blew towards them, as if, far away, the corridor opened out into a bigger space. Zélie spotted two red dots shining in the darkness. She raised the lamp to look. A large black rat stared at her with beady eyes. She shuddered.

“Well, there’s only one way to go – forward.” Jules began to grope his way along the passage, Zélie following behind. They tiptoed down the corridor. The stacks of wine soon gave way to bare walls of rough-hewn stone. The air became damp and chilly. Icy splashes of water dripped from the ceiling. The tunnel began to descend steeply.

“We must be going well below ground level.” Jules ran his hand along the wall of the tunnel with expert fingers. “The wall’s getting wet. The damp level is rising. It’s going down pretty fast.”

They made their way in silence along the steep, slippery passageway, which was becoming narrower and lower, so low that now they had to stoop to continue. Finally the passageway ended with what appeared to be a solid wall. At that moment the locket in Zélie’s jacket pocket began to vibrate.

“The locket’s buzzing! We must go forward. But how are we going to do that? It’s a blind alley.” Tears pricked Zélie’s eyes. Her neck ached from stooping, and the low ceiling and walls were pressing in on her from all sides, cramping her limbs like an outgrown coat.

“No, it isn’t a blind alley.” Jules shone the lamp down towards their feet. At the bottom of the wall was a hole about half a foot in height.

“We can’t possibly go through that! It’s no bigger than a rabbit hole!” Zélie’s pulse began to skitter like a spider. She curled her fingers round the buzzing locket in her pocket, desperately hoping it would stop. But it buzzed harder, burning through the fabric into her palm.

“Of course we can go through it, stupid.” Jules dropped on all fours, putting the knapsack between his legs. “I’ll have to pull my knapsack between my feet. You follow.”

Swallowing hard, Zélie crouched on all fours behind him. The pair began to squeeze through the hole, then crawl along the narrow passageway. Claustrophobia gripped Zélie’s body like a vice, squashing her chest and lungs, blocking her breath, setting black stars exploding in her head. The low ceiling scraped strips of skin off her back and her knees were spliced by jagged pieces of stone. She yelped in pain. She was going to suffocate. She had to get out. She opened her mouth to scream.

Then, as if by a miracle, the pressure above her lifted. The walls and ceiling fell away, and the pair of them popped out like champagne corks into empty blackness. Gratefully Zélie waited while Jules relit their lights, which had guttered out in the airless tunnel. The flames flared up. Blinking like rabbits caught in the glare of carriage lamps, they stared around them.

They were in a small, cramped oak-panelled room that looked like a study. There was a mahogany desk in one corner, piled untidily with papers. In the other was a large, bulky machine, rather like an over-sized camera on a tripod.

Zélie walked up to the desk and looked at the papers. She caught her breath. “These letters are on Professor Lestrange’s headed paper. We must be under his house on Rue Morgue. He lives just a few doors down from Madame Malaise. It’s some sort of secret study connecting to the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Blood!”

She began to riffle through the papers. There were patents and diagrams of bizarre and complicated contraptions. Zélie spotted the Alarm Gun and the Air-Conditioning Hat. But there were others she didn’t recognise, including a dimple-maker for young ladies, which looked like a hole puncher for cheeks, and a mechanical deportment machine, which resembled an enormous thumbscrew. There was also a large cross-sectional diagram of a high-flushing toilet with a fancy gold chain, inscribed with the cryptic words Hearth Magick: Summoning/Flushing Spell, and stamped with a large red pentacle. It was a bizarre and sinister mixture of the scientific and occult. But there was nothing referring to the Snakestone.

Zélie sighed. Once again they’d hit a brick wall.

“What’s that weird thing in the corner over there?” Jules pointed to the strange contraption. They walked up to it. As they drew near it, the locket in Zélie’s pocket began to buzz furiously.

They stared at the machine. It was a black metal box with what looked like several fat brass tubes attached to it. Fixed to the side of the box was a metal crankshaft.

Zélie ran her fingers over the brass fittings. Memories flitted across her brain like moths stirring in a dark cupboard. Memories of flickering images thrown on to walls by a projector. Of her taking a bow as Grandma Tami and Baba clapped their hands. Of Ma helping her paint glass slides in myriad jewel-like colours. “I think,” she said slowly, “that this is a magic lantern. We have one like it at home. It’s a sort of parlour entertainment. It projects images from slides on to the wall. Madame Drusilla has one too. They call it a Phantasmagoria lantern.”

She lifted her hand and grasped the crankshaft and began to turn it. It rolled into action easily, as if well oiled. “See? If there were a slide inside, it would project images on the wall.”

“What’s that?” Jules pointed down.

She followed his gaze. A sheet of paper was fluttering to the floor. It must have fallen from the tripod as she turned the crankshaft.

Zélie stooped to pick it up. “Looks like a letter.” She stared at it and gave a smothered cry. Her hand flew to her mouth. “It is a letter. In my father’s handwriting!”

Sure enough it was a letter written in the spidery, cramped script Zélie knew so well. She held it with trembling fingers to the light and read it out loud.

Alipore Jail, Calcutta

Thursday, 1st August 1895

Dearest Zélie,

I can hardly bring myself to write this letter to you, it so pains my heart. My darling daughter, I have been lying to you ever since you left for Paris. But only for the best of reasons.

The truth about that fraud Docteur Malaise is revealed in the enclosure to this letter. I met this gentleman when he came to the Calcutta Botanical Society for a permit to export a rare orchid to France just over a year ago. Convinced he was an honest and upright man of science, I entrusted him with details of a secret project that your mother and I had been working on and which I completed after her death. But instead of reporting your ma’s discovery to the French Academy of Sciences, as he promised, the evil doctor stole it for himself and, in order to silence me, had me thrown into prison on trumped-up charges of stealing money from the Botanical Society. He made me send you to Paris to be kept out of the way, frog-marching me to the Alipore Jail straight after I waved you goodbye at the dock! I have been in prison all these months since you left Calcutta, permitted to write to you only on condition that I keep you in the dark about everything that has happened.

Today I was visited in prison by a gentleman called Professor Lestrange, the man who gives you this letter. He informed me of the wicked doctor’s death. I believe the Professor to be a fine and trustworthy man. He will use the evidence enclosed with this letter to reveal the truth about Docteur Malaise and clear my name. As a token of my faith in him, and to prove to you that I really did speak with him, I have handed over to him the precious locket that, as you know, I normally would never permit to leave my neck.

As for the fabled Snakestone, which was once housed inside the locket, its location is—

At this point the paper was ripped by a long jagged tear.

The room, the walls, the tripod tipped sideways as though Zélie were on a ship at sea. She caught at one of the chairs to steady herself.

“I’m sorry … I feel dizzy.” She sat down on the chair and stared at the letter again. “My dad in prison? How could that happen?”

“He says he was falsely charged of stealing money by Docteur Malaise. Where’s the rest of the letter, the torn-off bit?” Jules was peering over her shoulder.

“I don’t know.” Zélie looked up from the sheet of paper. “The letter’s dated August, two months ago. About when my dad’s letters to me stopped. There’s no enclosure, just the—Wait a minute, what’s this?”

Where the magic lantern was attached to the tripod was a small cubbyhole. The letter must have fallen from it when she turned the crankshaft. She put her hand inside and groped in the corners. Her fingers closed round something smooth and hard. She pulled it out. A package wrapped in brown paper. In her jacket the buzz of the locket became so intense that the pocket began to heave and judder. She ripped the package open.

A rumbling, roaring, growling sound rolled along the passage towards the chamber.

“What’s that noise?” Zélie’s fingers froze.

The growling grew louder and louder. The walls of the chamber began to vibrate. Small trickles of loose grit and gravel started tumbling down the walls.

“We have to get out.” Jules ran to the far end of the chamber, where there was a door set in the wall. His face was pale. “Lots of these underground chambers are quarries; they aren’t stable. They collapse all the time. There’s a whole department of the Paris municipal authority battling to buttress them up. Come on, quick!”

“Wait! Let me open this package.” Zélie tore through the final layer of wrapping. They peered at the contents. A square of dark polished wood encased several layers of coloured glass, each superimposed on the other.

Jules squinted at the object. “What is it?”

Zélie frowned, turning it over in her hand. “It’s a picture slide for the Phantasmagoria lantern.”

They glanced around the chamber. The rumbling noise had temporarily stopped. Zélie took a deep breath. “The noise has gone. Let’s see if I’m right about what this is.” She picked up the slide and pulled open the door at the side of the magic lantern machine. Carefully she slotted the wooden frame into the machine. It fitted perfectly. She turned the crankshaft.

The Phantasmagoria lantern rolled smoothly into action. A hazy sepiatinted photograph flashed on to the wall. A young woman with pale olive skin and curly black hair standing beneath a large banyan tree. Lianas twisted down from the tree above her head and parakeets wheeled in the sky above. In her hand she was clasping an ugly-looking plant in a clay pot: long and straggly with twisting fern-like tendrils and strange, waxy bulbous flowers. Running under the slide was a neat handwritten caption:

FIRST CULTIVATION OF LESSER-SPOTTED BENGALI
BITTERWEED BY ROMA DUTTA
PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN CALCUTTA, JUNE 1888

“That’s Ma!” Zélie’s jaw dropped. “She’s standing under the old banyan tree in the forest.”

Jules squinted at the picture. “What’s that funny plant she’s holding?”

“It’s the plant that cures blisterpox. Docteur Malaise said he discovered it in the jungles of Bengal last spring on a field trip. That’s what made him rich and famous.”

Zélie stared at the flickering image. Her heart thumped in her chest. “Except … it seems it wasn’t actually Docteur Malaise who discovered it.”

Jules leaned forward, eyes shining. “The slide’s dated seven years ago. See what your dad says in his letter. Is it possible that your mother discovered that bitterweed cures blisterpox?”

Zélie’s forehead wrinkled. “Ma knew a lot about local plants and cures. There’s supposed to have been a distant ancestor on her side who was a medicine man, way back in the family somewhere. She used to joke that she had healing in her blood. She kept journals in which she drew pictures of flowers and insects, with notes about their various properties.”

“Well, there you have it!” Jules hit his palm with his fist. “Photographic proof. Your ma discovered the plant that cures blisterpox almost a decade ago. Your dad worked on it after her death and told Docteur Malaise about it. The doctor stole the idea and claimed it as his own. He made a fortune. He threw your dad in prison. End of story.”

Zélie’s hands trembled as she held the letter. She bit her lower lip. “1888 is the year Ma died. I can’t believe it! My poor father in prison and the odious Malaises making a fortune from her discovery.”

Jules’s brow was furrowed in concentration. “Professor Lestrange visited your dad in prison and promised to help him. That’s why your dad gave him the slide, the letter to you and the locket.”

“The lying toad.” Zélie struggled to swallow the anger boiling in her chest. “He never gave me a thing or said anything about it.”

Jules frowned. “But I still don’t understand how the locket ended up in the sewer.”

“Perhaps this explains it.” Zélie walked back to the mahogany desk and picked up the diagram of the flushing toilet. She reread the caption and handwritten notes, paying more attention than before.

Hearth Magick: Summoning/Flushing Spell

Summon, call, command,

Lost jewel demand.

Flush away the shell,

The stone you shall compel.

“Don’t you see? It’s some bizarre magical ritual. A summoning spell. Professor Lestrange believed that by flushing away the shell or locket, he would summon the stone, the jewel inside. The locket wasn’t flushed down the toilet at No. 36 Rue Morgue. It came from Professor Lestrange’s house in the same road!”

Jules wrinkled his nose. “I wouldn’t summon anything from a toilet myself. Who knows what might come out? There was a snake popped out of one the other day and bit someone on the bottom, so my dad told me.”

Zélie shook her head. “They are a crazy mixture of science and witchcraft, this Brotherhood of Blood. But Professor Lestrange got his comeuppance, didn’t he? Serves him right that he was murdered.”

“Well, yes. But that just adds to the mystery. Who would kill the Professor? And why?”

Zélie shrugged. “Who cares? The important thing is, my dad’s in prison. We have to get him out.”

“But what about the bit of the letter that was ripped off? It looks like your dad was about to reveal where the Snakestone is hidden.” Jules groped around in the cubbyhole with his hand, then stooped and ran his hands carefully over the floor. There was no sign of the missing part of the letter.

Zélie stamped her foot. “Who knows? Professor Lestrange might have ripped off that bit of the letter to stop anybody seeing it. Look, I don’t care where the stupid Snakestone is. I just want my father back.”

“All right, I was just saying. Keep your hair—”

But Jules was cut short mid-sentence. The growling had begun again. The walls of the chamber vibrated. Small pieces of rock and stone began to tumble again from the vaulted ceiling, which was beginning to resonate like a fine glass goblet on the verge of shattering.

Jules grabbed Zélie’s hand and pulled her towards the door he’d spotted earlier. “Come on, let’s get out.”

They went through the door into a dark passage.

“Look, over there.” Jules pointed. Ahead of them, a shaft of light pooled on the ground. “That looks like light from a street grating. And there’s a ladder next to it.”

They ran towards the pool of light. Sure enough, a long, narrow shaft sloped above their heads. At the very top was a circle of grey sky criss-crossed by black bars. A ladder ran up the tunnel wall.

“Come on.” Jules put his foot on the first rung of the ladder. “Let’s get out of here.”

Zélie looked up at the tiny circle of sky with scudding clouds and pigeons wheeling. It seemed a long way above their heads. She gulped. “All right.”

When they emerged on to the street, the light was fading fast and scratches of pink sunset were etched in the inky sky. The weight of the package with the slide pulled down Zélie’s pocket, so that her jacket hung lopsided. She patted it with a smirk.

“We have it! The proof that my ma found the cure for blisterpox. We must go and tell the police. Then my father will be freed from prison. And I’ll be back home with him and Grandma Tami.” Zélie closed her eyes. She could see it all in her head already. Her father out of prison. Opening the door to his smiling face. She would never have to see the loathsome Madame Malaise again.

“We’re on the north side of Rue Morgue. I think the nearest commissariat is about ten minutes’ walk away.” Jules pointed to a crooked street winding up the hill.

They walked on in silence. The street was almost empty now, save for a large black carriage rattling along the cobbles. They paused to cross to the next street. The carriage paused too. They started on again. The carriage started too. Zélie had the impression it was keeping level with them.

“Jules, is that carriage following—”

Before she could finish her sentence, the carriage door flew open.

A man leaned out. “Know the way to the Sacré-Coeur, lad?”

“That way.” Jules pointed. Hardly were the words out of his mouth than Zélie felt herself seized by the scruff of her collar. She was lifted off her feet, for a split-second dangling helplessly in the air. Then she was bundled into darkness and shoved on to a hard horsehair seat.

“What the—”

A hand clapped over her mouth. “Shut up if you don’t want your goose cooked!” A blast of hot breath, stinking of sweaty feet and garlic, washed over her. The door slammed shut and the carriage picked up speed, hurtling along, bouncing and juddering on rusty springs.

It took a while for Zélie’s eyes to get used to the darkness in the carriage. There were two men inside. They were muffled in dark coats, hats pulled down over their faces so she could not make out their features. The one with stinky garlic breath sat next to her, pinning her to the seat with arms like a vice. She was fairly certain that he was the man who had been riffling through the papers at the Brotherhood of Blood, who had chased them and ended up wrestling with the tiger skin. The other man sat opposite. He seemed to have an eye infection. He kept wiping one of his eyes, which was streaming with a thick yellowish liquid.

“How long before the boss arrives?” Garlic Breath asked.

Pus Eye took out a rusty pocket watch, looked at it and grunted. “Pretty soon. We’d better get there in a few minutes or we’ll have our jaws dented and our kidneys crushed.”

“Let’s deliver the girl and get our dough and split double quick.” Garlic Breath leered at Zélie. “Pretty piece of pie, but a bit cut up about the face.”

Pus Eye laughed. “She’s a picture compared to what she will be when the boss is done with her.”

They bounced and rattled on for a while, the silence punctured only by creaking springs and the whoosh of the wind rattling the windowpanes. Zélie tried to peer out, but the carriage blinds were pulled firmly down. Her heart knocked against her chest so loudly that she wondered if the men in the carriage could hear it. She thought of Jules. Where was he now? Had he sounded the alarm? The carriage had raced off at such a speed that it would have been impossible for him to follow on foot.

Finally, with a great whinnying and stamping of hooves, the carriage screeched to a halt. Zélie found herself being bundled out and shoved on to the street.

They were in a dark narrow alleyway in a part of the city that she didn’t know. The single street lamp guttered with a sickly light upon a stream of dirty-looking water running down the cobblestones. A straggle of mud-coloured houses with bare window frames looked blankly on to the street. Opposite was a crumbling house with a lantern swinging above the vaulted alley. On the cracked glass of the lantern, in red letters, were the words “Café Poisson”, with a picture of a fish. Except that the second “s” was hanging loose at an angle, so the sign actually read “Café Poison”.

Rough fingers passed across Zélie’s face and pushed something into her mouth. She tried to scream, before she realised that she’d been gagged. The cloth tasted like an unwashed sock. Her hands still pinioned behind her back, she felt herself being shoved towards the café. In the doorway stood a red-faced woman with meaty arms and a green scarf tied round an enormous wig.

“You’re late!” she said in a husky voice. “The boss is waiting.” Four eyes gleamed from the scarf and two tails waved in the air.

Zélie stared. Two mice were nestling in the wig, peering at her with beady eyes.

Pus Eye pushed Zélie from behind and she stumbled into the café. It was dark inside, lit only by a single oil lamp swinging from the roof beams. But Zélie could just about make out the outline of tables and chairs and a mud-caked floor strewn with straw.

“Give us a drink, Ogress. The six-sous special.” Garlic Breath growled at the woman. In the guttering light of the lamp Zélie could see that he was indeed the man who had wrestled with the tiger skin.

“Not until I see the dough.” The Ogress folded her heavy slabs of arms across her chest. Garlic Breath lunged at her, but she batted him off as if he were a fly, flashing a set of sharp fingernails at him. “Watch it, bully boy, or I’ll put out your lights with my clippers.”

“Here you are then.” Garlic Breath threw some coins on the counter.

The Ogress took one, bit it hard between her teeth, then – apparently satisfied the coin was real – filled a jug from a barrel.

Garlic Breath grabbed the jug and slurped from it noisily.

Zélie was pushed into a corner with her arms pinioned by Pus Eye. The Ogress looked her up and down. “Looks like she’s been through the wars that one. Dressed like a chimney sweep! Hey—” she broke off and her head jerked back, almost sending the two mice in her wig flying into the air. “What’s happening with your peepers? They’re different colours!”

Zélie glared at her.

The Ogress shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll go and get the boss.”

She turned and left the room. Heavy footsteps slapped up the stairs. After a few minutes, the door flew open and a tall man entered.

Zélie almost choked on her gag. Fear seeped through her like ink in water.

It was Brother Ombre. There was no mistaking that thin foxy face, the glowering menace of his gaze. He was wearing a funereal greatcoat buttoned up to his neck, a thick woollen scarf and tall black boots. In Zélie’s pocket the locket began to buzz like an angry wasp.

“Good evening, young lady.” Again the thin, reedy voice. Brother Ombre sat down at a table. The Ogress rushed to him immediately with a jug, setting it in front of him with two glasses.

“Would you like a drink?” Brother Ombre gazed at Zélie, his pale eyelashes virtually transparent against his red-rimmed eyes. She shook her head vehemently, scowling as far as was possible with a mouthful of smelly sock.

“As you wish.” Brother Ombre smiled and poured himself a drink in one of the glasses. Then he gave a sudden start. “I say, what fascinating eyes. A most unusual case of heterochromia iridum. What a desirable artefact to add to our collection—” He broke off and coughed again. “Dear, dear, I’m getting ahead of myself and losing sight of the subject of our little rencontre today. I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

Zélie skewered him with her eyes, sticking her chin in the air as haughtily as the circumstances would allow. She wasn’t afraid of the creep – well, actually, she was terrified, but she wasn’t about to let him know.

“Ah, well, be like that if you wish.” Brother Ombre sighed and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “I’m sorry you are not in a more cooperative mood, but it makes little difference to me in any case. I see that you and your little friend the sewer boy have discovered the slide that reveals the unfortunate truth of Docteur Malaise’s so-called ‘discovery’.”

Zélie’s head instinctively twisted down to the bulge in her coat pocket. It was a fatal mistake.

“It’s there!” Brother Ombre’s skinny finger pointed to the pocket at which she had glanced. Garlic Breath immediately leapt from the counter, lunging towards Zélie, who struggled uselessly against the pincer grasp of Pus Eye. Within seconds the packet with the slide was ripped out of her pocket. Brandishing it in the air with a hoot of triumph, Garlic Breath handed the packet to Brother Ombre.

Brother Ombre pulled the slide out of the brown envelope and set it on the table. “Ah yes, the crucial slide. The photographic proof that your mother discovered the cure for blisterpox, several years before Docteur Malaise.” He walked to the sooty fireplace, where a sullen fire was spluttering on greasy coals. With a movement quick as lightning, he held the slide over the fire. The yellow flames reached hungrily towards it.

“No!” Zélie tried to cry out, but the smelly sock in her mouth absorbed her voice and all that came out was a stifled gurgle. Desperately she writhed in Pus Eye’s vice-like grip.

“Quite a little firebrand, I see.” Brother Ombre smiled, wiping beads of sweat from his waxy forehead. He withdrew his gloved hand from the fire just in time, before the flames devoured the slide. “Your father trusted Professor Lestrange to reveal the truth of the blisterpox discovery. Foolish man. The Professor was a sly fox. He was supposed to get the Snakestone for me, but it turned out that he wanted it for himself. Which is why I had him killed, of course.” He walked up to Zélie and pushed his face so close to hers that his pale lashes tickled her cheek. His voice had sunk to a husky whisper.

“Look, I don’t care a fig about who discovered the cure for blisterpox. I have bigger fish to fry. Your father knows where the Snakestone is hidden. That is what I want. Hear this cough? It’s because I am dying from a fatal wasting disease. The Snakestone is the only thing that will cure me. Unfortunately your father – who without a doubt knows where the stone is – escaped from jail a couple of months ago. Nobody knows where he is. But wherever he is, there’s one thing that’s certain: Robi Dutta will be making his way to come and fetch you, his dear little girl. And once you see him, you can tell him that he has to give me that stone, or otherwise – pouf! – I’ll make sure this precious slide is destroyed.”

A bitter smile played on Brother Ombre’s thin lips. Tucking the slide into his coat pocket, he put on his top hat. “My physician has given me a few days to live before this sickness is certain to destroy me. So you have until tomorrow night to get me that stone. If you do, you can have the slide back, your father’s reputation is saved, and he will be a free man. If you don’t, the slide goes up in smoke, and it will just be a matter of time before your dad is caught and hanged. He can’t be on the run forever.”

Zélie felt Pus Eye’s greasy fingers round her neck tremble. Through the half-open door, a hooded figure was standing in the shadows. The figure beckoned silently. A chill wind blew through the door. Garlic Breath’s meaty face turned the colour of green cheese and a low moan escaped from his throat. Scared as Brother Ombre’s henchmen were of him, something outside frightened them more.

Brother Ombre – oblivious of the tall figure in the shadows behind him – turned back to Zélie. “Au revoir, my plucky little firebrand. Until we meet again.” With a low bow he chucked her under the chin and walked out of the door, the hooded figure gliding noiselessly after him.

The Ogress broke the silence. “Oh, what a story that was!” She looked at Zélie with renewed interest. “The Snakestone, eh? I thought that was something from the fairy stories.”

“You keep your trap shut.” Garlic Breath, whose face had reverted to its usual puce, turned on her. “If you don’t want your skull cracked on the cobblestones, that is.”

“All right, all right, keep your hair on.” The Ogress rattled the glasses on the counter noisily. “Do you think I’m going to snitch on my regulars? What do you take me for?”

“Let’s split and get the money. Job’s done.” Garlic Breath shook his head. “Did you see that geezer in the hood who was hanging around out there? This business is getting too deep for me. As soon as I get my dough tonight, I’m off on the first train out of this city.”

“My arms are killing me.” Pus Eye grumbled. “Any chance of a quick drink before we take this little weasel back to her hole?”

The Ogress brought them a jug and glasses. She poured it at the table where Pus Eye was holding Zélie’s hands behind her back. He reached greedily out for the glass, releasing his hold on Zélie’s wrists for a fraction of a second.

Slippery as an eel, Zélie twisted and slithered from Pus Eye’s grasp. Three backflips and a cartwheel and she was halfway to the entrance of the tavern. A brown thing fluttered in a gust of smoke from the fire as she whizzed past Brother Ombre’s table. It was the envelope that had held the slide. For a split second she paused. It was just an envelope, but it had belonged to her father. Reaching out her hand, she grabbed the envelope as she passed. A hop, skip and jump up the flight of steps and across the alley, and she was out in the street. She had broken free.

Slap, slap, slap. Her booted feet raced along the alley.

Behind her came shouts and curses and heavy footfalls clattering on the cobblestones. Zélie ran faster. The footsteps grew fainter. She ran and ran, down the street and round a lamp-post on the corner, then into an alleyway and up a steep staircase with a rope handrail. She didn’t pause until she got to the very top of the staircase. Here she stopped, panting. She closed her eyes and allowed herself a few moments to savour the triumph. Those were some backflips. Count Rodolphe would have been proud.

It was a few minutes before she had got back enough breath to look around. She had reached the top of a hill overlooking the city. Ahead of her, surprisingly close, was the dark silhouette of the Sacré-Coeur, its half-built dome swathed in scaffolding. It could not be more than a fifteen-minute walk back to Rue Morgue. Tucking her hair under her cap and pulling it forward over her face, she struck out in the direction of the hulking shadow of the basilica.

A familiar voice came from behind her. “There you are! Mon Dieu, you run fast.”

Zélie whirled round. “Jules! How did you get here?”

He was panting from the effort of climbing the steep staircase, the sweat rolling off his forehead in shiny drops, his ginger hair whipped into an exclamation mark on his head. She noticed he was not wearing his peaked cap.

“I hung on to the back of the carriage. What a journey that was! My cap blew off in the wind. I was waiting outside the tavern for you to come out with those ruffians. I thought I could trip them up and rescue you.”

“Rescue me? I don’t need rescuing, thank you. I kick-boxed my way out of it, like Count Rodolphe.”

“Who’s Count Rodolphe—”

But Zélie had already started the story of what had happened in the tavern. She told Jules about Brother Ombre’s confiscation of the slide. “There’s no point going to the police now he’s got the slide; we’ve nothing to show them. The good news is that my dad’s escaped from prison. He’ll be on his way to fetch me.”

“And the bad news?” Jules raised an eyebrow sceptically.

Zélie bit her lip. A worn patch on the sleeve of her jacket suddenly became hugely interesting. She picked at it with a finger. “The bad news is … that Brother Ombre’s been given a couple of days to live by the doctor.”

Jules frowned. “Surely that’s good news?”

“It should be. But he’s desperate to have the Snakestone so that he’ll be cured. He’s given us until tomorrow night to get it to him. Otherwise he says he’ll destroy the slide, which means my dad will forever be on the run and hanged if he’s caught.”

Jules rolled his eyes and groaned. “Oh God, another hare-brained scheme. How are we supposed to find the Snakestone by tomorrow night? It’s been lost for decades!”

“I don’t know.” Zélie frowned. “There’s the ripped-off bit of the letter. Maybe we need to find that. I should start by going through all my dad’s letters in case there are any clues. That’s it! That’s what I need to do. I have to get back to Rue Morgue now. Come on, hurry up.”

When they got back to the house, the basement kitchen was ablaze with lights and the clatter of plates. The servants were clearing up after dinner. There was a loud argument going on between Cook and Pierre the butler. It seemed that Cook had sprinkled pepper on the crème brûlée instead of sugar, with the result that the dinner guests were sneezing, and one had been rushed choking to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

“You drunken idiot!” shrieked Pierre. “You’ve poisoned them and we’ll all be sacked!”

“It was sugar, not pepper!” Cook shrieked back. “Or maybe it was that thieving witch again, Zélie Dutta. Yes, she stole the sugar and swapped it for pepper in the jar.”

“It couldn’t have been Zélie,” retorted Pierre. “She’s locked in the cellar.”

In order to return to the cellar grating, the children had to cross the front lawn of the house with its geometric topiary. But when they reached it, they found their route blocked. A cluster of figures huddled in the shadow of some bushes round a lit torch.

“Now what do we do?” Zélie sighed in exasperation. Then she froze to the spot.

In the middle of the huddled group stood Madame Malaise, wrapped in a velvet dressing gown. Round Madame were two men with coat collars pulled up and hats pulled down over their faces. The group were talking in low whispers. Luckily the wind was in the children’s favour and carried the voices in their direction.

Madame spoke first. “If what you say is true, and Robi Dutta has indeed escaped from the Calcutta jail, there’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to get rid of him. He’s the only person in the world who knows the truth about blisterpox, apart from you two, and I have enough dirt on you to be sure you’ll keep your mouths shut.”

One of the men replied in a low whine. “How do we get rid of Robi Dutta? Nobody knows where he is.”

Madame licked her thin lips, her tongue flicking out of her mouth like an iguana scenting the air. “We’ll get him when he comes for the girl. He’ll come to fetch her, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve read all that man’s letters to his daughter, and it’s obvious he dotes on her. God knows why, freak that she is.”

The man grinned. “Well, when the father comes to get the girl, Fluffy and I can finish him off good and proper, with a jackknife.” He slapped the shoulder of the other man, a huge hulking brute with a twisted scowl on his face. “Right, Fluffy?”

An icy fingernail of fear scraped down Zélie’s spine. Madame Malaise was after Baba. Her father’s life was in danger. The only way to stop Madame would be to expose the blisterpox fraud and get her thrown into jail, where she couldn’t do him harm. But in order to do that she had to have the slide. And to get the slide back from Brother Ombre, she had to find the Snakestone. But how?

“Come on, let’s go,” she whispered to Jules. “I have to get back to the house and look through my dad’s letters. There must be a clue somewhere as to where the stone is.”

“That woman is evil,” growled Jules. “We’ve got to catch her. Suppose we—” But as he spoke, his foot caught on a loose stone in the path. He fell, rolling on to the gravel with a great clatter of hobnailed boots. The figures huddled under the trees fell silent.

“What’s that?” one of the men cried, turning. A beam of light fell on Zélie, dazzling her.

“Intruders! Look, a couple of guttersnipes! Seize them!” Madame Malaise shouted. “They’re burglars, after my jewels! Catch them red-handed!”

“Run after ’em, Fluffy!” cried the henchman who had been speaking to Madame.

“Come on, run!” Zélie pulled Jules to his feet. Madame Malaise had clearly not recognised her in the darkness and boy’s disguise, and she had assumed the pair of them were thieves.

The children rushed through the front gate and on to the pavement. “Let me get my penknife.” Jules fumbled in his pocket. “You’ll have to drop down that grating double quick and get back in the cellar.”

“I can’t!” Zélie stopped in her tracks so suddenly that Jules bumped into her. She pointed. A large empty taxi-carriage was parked over the grating. The driver was nowhere to be seen.

“Oi! Stop, thieves!” The clatter of boots behind them grew louder. Zélie turned to see the silhouette of Fluffy looming round the corner. She looked up. The house was shrouded in darkness and there was no window on this side at ground level for her to get through. But snaking up the wall before her was a single drainpipe.

“Go,” she whispered to Jules. “Run. I’ll be all right.”

“How? What are you going to do?”

She put one foot on the bracket holding the drainpipe to the wall, testing its strength. Then she stood on the bracket and reached for the next one. Jules goggled. “You’re going to climb the drainpipe?”

“It’s all right,” she hissed. “Just go. I know what I’m doing. Look under the potted fig tree outside the front porch tomorrow morning. I’ll leave you a note.”

She swung up the pipe. Below, Jules gaped up at her. She waved him away, and he turned and melted into the shadows.

Looking up, Zélie saw that the pipe twisted up the wall to the gable, where it ended in the mouth of an ugly horned gargoyle with a ring in its nose. If she could get to the gargoyle, she could clamber across the roof to her skylight and into her attic room. Then she would be safe.

There was a muffled shout from below. The pipe gave a great shudder. She looked down. Beneath her feet, a black hat was bobbing. Fluffy was climbing the pipe after her.

Zélie fumbled for the next bracket with renewed urgency. In the street below the matchstick figures of Madame Malaise and the other man were looking up at her, jabbering and pointing with their fingers. She was now passing the tall guillotine window of Madame’s boudoir. The gargoyle was getting closer. She lifted her foot to the next bracket and … a hand grasped her foot. She looked down. There was a crow of triumph. Fluffy had got her.

Zélie shut her eyes. This was it; this was where it ended. The grip on her foot was getting tighter. She could feel a blast of hot breath at her ankle.

BANG!

An explosion ripped through the air. Fluffy froze, his hands gripping the ledge. The sneer on his face had frozen.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

With a long, low moan, like a deflating balloon, Fluffy’s fingers released their hold on the sill. Transfixed, still clinging on to the drainpipe, Zélie saw his white face floating below her like a pale, waxy water lily, the eyes staring fixedly into the starless sky, his mouth twitching as a trickle of dark blood ran out of one side. For a moment his face hung there, suspended. Then, like a black spider, his body fell down, down, down, until it landed, splat, at the feet of the group huddled in the lamplight.

From the window of Madame’s boudoir the six muzzles of the Alarm Gun gazed blankly at Zélie. Professor Lestrange’s contraption had done its job.

Snapping out of her trance, Zélie stretched to the next bracket. There was no time to lose. Above her, the sneering gargoyle was almost within her grasp. Heaving herself upwards, at last she reached it, grasping the ring in its nose to lever herself on to the roof. She had made it.

Half an hour later, Zélie swept serenely across the marble hall, freshly washed and dressed in her crisp spare uniform. The hallway was in a great state of commotion: the front door was wide open and all the lights blazing. In the porch stood Madame, still wrapped in her dressing gown. She was talking to a large gendarme who was making notes. On the street outside, a pair of policemen were putting the outstretched body of Fluffy on a stretcher. The other man who had been with Madame had vanished.

“No, I don’t have any idea who the dead man is.” Madame glared at the gendarme. “He was with a couple of street urchins who were trying to burgle the house. I chased them and the three of them ran away. The two urchins escaped, but this one set off the Alarm Gun. It went bang, and pouf! He was dead.”

“And why were you out in the garden, Madame, instead of being tucked up in bed?” The gendarme’s forehead furrowed suspiciously.

Madame didn’t bat an eyelid. “I was in my boudoir. I saw some figures skulking around in the bushes below my window, some people who looked thoroughly suspicious, so I came down to investigate. We’ve had a couple of burglaries recently, so naturally I was concerned. You need to look for two ragamuffins – a couple of boys. Check the Belleville slums, that sort of place.” She frowned. “It’s funny, I hardly got to see their features, but something about one of those street urchins reminded me of somebody I know. I just can’t think who.”

“Hmm.” The gendarme was still frowning, but he sighed and snapped his notebook shut. “I’ll file a report of death by misadventure in an attempted burglary then. Bonne nuit, Madame. Keep me updated of any new developments.”

“Of course, officer. Bonne nuit.” Madame flashed a mouthful of sharp teeth at the gendarme, slammed the door and swept upstairs.

Zélie’s intestines twisted and rearranged themselves into knots tighter than a brioche. She gritted her teeth as the rage seethed inside her. Madame had got away with it again. Fraud. Deceit. Attempted murder for God’s sake. Crossing the hall, she bumped headlong into Cook and Pierre, running hugger-mugger in the opposite direction. They gaped at her.

“Rotten ratatouille, what in the name of the Lord are you doing here, Zélie Dutta?” cried Cook. “You’re supposed to be locked in the cellar!”

“We were coming to get you out!” Pierre’s jaw had dropped to his chest and his false teeth were bulging out of his mouth. “She’s magicked herself out of a locked room again, the witch!”

Zélie’s eyes widened with innocent amazement. “But Cook came to fetch me an hour ago. Don’t you remember, Cook? Or have you … forgotten?”

Pierre stared at Cook, whose face turned as red as a beetroot. “What did I tell you, blockhead?” She pushed the butler with her arm. “I told you I got the girl out of the cellar an hour ago. Nobody pays any attention to me.”

The butler sighed, shaking his head. “As though there’s not enough chaos here without you and your mix-ups, Cook. Anyways, we’d better get on and make sure all the shutters are battened down. They say there’s a storm coming.” He glared at Zélie. “You’re damn lucky, Mademoiselle, that Madame gave you the benefit of the doubt about stealing her hatpin. She has the patience of a saint.”

“Excuse me, but I have to put Madame’s warming pan in her bed.” Zélie smiled sweetly and sailed serenely upstairs. There she lit the fire and slid the pan between the sheets. Then she raced to her room and pulled the bundle of letters from the rickety table drawer and climbed out the window to read them on the roof in peace.

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Friday evening, 18th October 1895

Dear Baba,

Where are you? I’m tearing my hair out trying to find the Snakestone. Please give me a clue. I really hope you didn’t hurt yourself breaking out of jail. Why didn’t you tell me about Ma’s incredible discovery? Why did you keep it secret all these years, then tell it to, of all people, that crook Docteur Malaise? I have so many questions, so few answers.

Baba, you’re in great danger. Madame Malaise is after you, and she had a horrible man called Fluffy out to put a jack knife into you. But don’t worry. I’m going to save you. I have my friend Jules to help, and a pigeon and a sloth and my brains. We’re going to find the Snakestone so that Brother Ombre will give us the slide and then your name will be cleared and Madame Malaise will be put in jail and we can go back home and see Grandma Tami and everything will be all right.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

The Attic

36 Rue Morgue, Paris

Friday evening, 18th October 1895

Dear Baba,

Everything is going very well here in Paris. I’ve been exploring all parts of the house and recently discovered the basement. It’s quite cosy down there and secluded, although it takes a while to see anything because it’s quite dark.

Respectfully your daughter,

Zélie

“So you see, the key to everything is finding the Snakestone.” Zélie broke off a hunk of stale baguette from the secret store she kept for Rodolphe in a tin under her bed, and threw it on the roof at the pigeon’s single foot. “If I find the stone, Brother Ombre gives me back the slide and I have proof of the blisterpox fraud. Then Madame goes to prison and cannot harm Baba. We will, finally, be free. But how do I find the Snakestone by tomorrow night?”

Zélie had pored over every one of her father’s letters without finding a single clue. She put the letters back in a pile and tied them up with their ribbon.

The city lay spread out in the moonlight like a magician’s cloak. Rue Morgue was dark, except for a pool of light from the single street lamp. A chill wind was picking up, damp with the promise of rain. Zélie remembered that Pierre had mentioned a storm was coming. She put her head in her hands, screwing up her eyes and drumming her heels on the roof. She had to find the Snakestone. But how? She had exhausted all the possibilities she could think of.

She clambered back into the attic to return the letters to their drawer and was just shutting the grille of the skylight when something soft brushed past her face. A raucous cawing ripped the air. There was a flurry of black feathers and a great crow landed on the roof where the bread was scattered. Rodolphe squawked angrily and flapped off back to the safety of his chimney pot.

“Go away! Nasty crow, pinching Rodolphe’s supper.” Zélie scrambled back on the roof, flapping her arms. The crow flew away, screeching.

It was then that she spotted it. Something bright shining on the roof where the crow had landed. She crawled on all fours over the tiles to take a look. It was a pearl-drop earring. One of Madame’s missing jewels.

Zélie turned the earring over in her fingers. The crow must have been carrying it in its claws and dropped it when it came for the bread. She knew that crows, like magpies, loved shiny things. Where could it have got the earring? She looked to see where the crow had gone. On the corner of the gable, by the horned gargoyle that she had used as a grip when climbing the drainpipe, was a large untidy nest.

Zélie crawled on all fours towards the nest. The crow was hopping beside it, but it flapped off screeching when she approached. The nest was old, containing a few broken eggshells, a ticket to the Louvre Museum and some shiny foil sweet wrappers. Her heart sank. The bird could have picked up the earring anywhere. Then something caught her attention. At the back of the head of the gargoyle, at the point where it was attached to the gable, was a small hollow. Something was stashed inside it, glinting in the moonlight. She put her hand in the hollow and groped. Her fingers closed round a smooth, hard object. She pulled it out.

It was an old chocolate box made of rusty tin, the loose-fitting lid half hanging off. Zélie peered inside. In the tin were the matching pearl earring and a mother-of-pearl paper knife. The crow must have got the earring from the half-open tin.

Zélie looked around. So this was the jewel-thief ’s hiding place. But who was it? A shuffling noise on the roof tiles alerted her. Footsteps. Noiselessly she slipped through the shadows and crouched behind a chimney stack. A figure was scuttling along the edge of the roof, towards the spot where the tin was hidden. The figure bent over the gargoyle, hunched beside the hollow next to the empty crow’s nest. Zélie crept towards it as softly as possible, treading the roof tiles in her bare feet like a cat. Whoever it was had their head wrapped in a scarf or shawl, obscuring their face. A hand stretched into the hollow and took the box.

Zélie had almost reached the crouched form when it lifted its head. The face stared directly at her, shrouded in darkness. For a moment the figure froze, as though paralysed with shock. Then it scuttled towards the nearest skylight, clutching the box. Zélie raced towards it. It had almost reached the skylight. It was clambering into the room below. Zélie jumped on it and the two of them fell through, crashing on to the wooden floor. The figure let out a high-pitched shriek of pain and the scarf slipped away. A pinched white face was staring at her, eyes glazed, hair flying loose. Zélie gave a squeal of recognition.

“Blanche!” Zélie cried. “You’re the thief!”

In the back of her mind a memory stirred. The shadow, the light footsteps that had flitted away as she stooped to pick up the pearl hatpin after failing to accost Professor Lestrange. The hatpin that had got her accused of thieving and thrown into the cellar. Blanche running up behind Cook and Pierre, hastily pinning up her hair. Blanche, accusing her of theft.

Blanche’s eyes were locked on Zélie. She licked her lips and her eyes slid over to the half-open door of the attic, as if sizing up the distance and the time it would take to run to it. Zélie backed to the door and shut it, barring it with her body.

“Don’t even think about it. I’ve got you. You’ve been quite happy for everybody to blame me for these thefts. Now you’ll have to fess up, won’t you?”

Blanche’s voice shook. Her face was as pale and waxy as a magnolia flower, and beads of sweat rolled down her forehead. “Please don’t tell. Please, if I’m dismissed as a thief, then my little sister has no chance at all.” Her voice choked and her eyes filled with tears.

Zélie stared at her. “Your sister?”

Blanche’s face had turned scarlet. She hung her head and nodded. “Yes, Christine. She’s two years old. I pay an old lady to look after her, but it’s not enough for food as well, so I have to get a bit … extra. Especially now I’m losing two months’ pay because of the broken vase.”

Zélie bit her lip. The unfairness of it all raged inside her. The many unjust punishments, miseries she had borne. But she couldn’t let an innocent child starve. She’d never forgive herself. “All right, I won’t say a word. As long as you promise to put the stuff back in Madame’s room. Everyone will think the things were lost and just turned up.”

“Thank you!” Blanche fell to her knees, wringing her hands. But then she stiffened and her face clouded. She shrank back from Zélie. “How did you know that stuff was hidden on the roof? You must have second sight. Perhaps you are a witch!” For the first time she actually looked scared, as if she finally, truly believed the superstitions of Pierre and Cook.

Zélie groaned. “Look, for goodness’ sake, I am NOT a witch. It’s all a load of rubbish. I go to the roof sometimes to feed the pigeons, to clear my head and get some fresh air. That’s how I spotted the tin.”

But Blanche was backing away from her warily. She crossed herself and started knocking the wooden doorframe. “Please, please don’t curse my little sister!” She crouched beside her bed, which since Zélie’s arrival had been festooned with several iron crosses, an evil eye, a bunch of garlic and two horseshoes.

“Look.” Zélie spoke through gritted teeth. “If I had second sight, I would have known it was you who’s the thief. I could have rumbled you straight away! I wouldn’t have had to lie in wait to catch you, would I? I could have snapped my fingers and cast a spell!”

Blanche said nothing, biting her thumb. Clutched in her sweaty fingers, Zélie saw a lucky rabbit’s foot.

Zélie rolled her eyes. “Look. I’ll tell you what. You can take my savings to buy food for your sister, then you won’t need to steal any more. I don’t need all the money. There’s just me and I don’t spend much. Would a witch do that?”

Blanche shook her head. “What’s in it for you? What do you want?”

Zélie sighed in exasperation. “I don’t want anything. I never did.”

She picked up the bunch of garlic hanging on Blanche’s bedpost. “And you don’t need all this stuff to protect yourself from me. How about having something useful by your bed, like a book?” She clapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late.

Blanche turned scarlet and hung her head.

Zélie bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I’m very lucky that I went to school. You see, if you can read, you can have the most rubbish life on the planet, and it doesn’t matter.”

Blanche wiped her nose on her sleeve and frowned. “How?”

Zélie picked up her copy of The Parisian Lady’s Maid’s Handbook.

Blanche made a face. “I know that book. It’s dead boring. Madame lectures me from it all the time.”

“You don’t know this version.” Zélie showed her the open book. On the flyleaf was a picture of a man drinking blood from a skull, and another of two men fighting with glass bottles on the banks of the Seine.

Blanche’s eyes opened like saucers. “I haven’t seen that picture before. What’s it about?”

“Sorry, I can’t read it now.” Zélie slammed the book shut. “I’ve got … other important things to worry about.” Her mind raced to the Snakestone and the clock ticking on the mantlepiece.

Blanche’s face fell. “Oh, all right then… It doesn’t matter.”

Zélie paused. She felt mean. Just a couple of paragraphs wouldn’t hurt after all. Blanche led such a joyless existence, a bit of adventure would be a wonderful gift. She opened the book. “The words are even better than the pictures.” She turned the cover page and read.

“On the night in question, the wind howled fiercely in the dark and dirty gullies of the city. The blinking and uncertain light of the lamps that swung to and fro in the sudden gusts were dimly reflected in pools of black slush, which flowed abundantly in the midst of the filthy pavement. Count Rodolphe stepped forth, pistol in hand…”

Zélie looked sidelong at Blanche. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

Blanche’s head nodded very slightly. So Zélie read another paragraph. Which somehow led to another. Blanche savoured every word. Each time Zélie stopped and tried to shut the book, she cried, “No! Just one more chapter. Please! I want to know what happens next.”

Zélie, tired to the bone, could not help losing herself in the well-thumbed stories of Count Rodolphe kick-boxing his way to glory; and while she was so distracted, the night slipped away like a thief on the run. When dawn streaked the sky, and Rodolphe peered hopefully through the skylight, two figures were hunched on the threadbare carpet of the attic room, fast asleep. Blanche was leaning against the bed, Zélie’s head on her shoulder and an open book in her lap. A tear trickled down the older girl’s cheek, and Zélie on her shoulder dreamed of monsoon rain.

The jangling of the breakfast bell downstairs woke Zélie with a start. She shook herself awake and ran to the cracked mirror to wash, cursing herself. What had she been thinking of, playing fanciful games with Blanche? She’d lost precious time. She only had until the evening now to find the Snakestone.

The attic room was empty. Blanche must already be up to lay the fire in Madame’s boudoir. Zélie pulled the pile of letters out of the drawer in her desk and tore off the ribbon. Yet again she pored over every single one, looking closely at each joke, riddle and drawing for a clue. She read the letters forwards, backwards, upside down. She held each one to the light in case a secret message had been written on it in invisible ink (she knew that was what you’re supposed to do with invisible ink. Light or lemon juice, and she didn’t have any lemon juice). Something, anything, that might reveal the location of the Snakestone. Nothing. She scrabbled with her fingers in the back of the drawer. Perhaps there was a letter stuck in there. No, only bills, old receipts. A few faded photographs. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes. Time was running out.

She was pushing the drawer shut when something fell out and fluttered to the floor. She picked it up. The brown envelope that she had grabbed when escaping from Café Poison, the envelope that had originally contained the slide confiscated by Brother Ombre. She folded the envelope to squeeze it back in the drawer. It crackled stiffly, as if there was something caught in it. She peered inside. Something was indeed stuck inside the flap of the envelope. A piece of paper. She pulled it out. A torn sheet. She went to her bed and pulled out from under the mattress the torn letter that she and Jules had found the previous day. She placed the pieces of paper together. They fitted like a jigsaw, perfectly.

Zélie raced through the letter, holding the pieces together with trembling fingers.

As for the fabled Snakestone, which was once housed inside the locket, its location is—

—not in my power to divulge. Zélie, I trust that you will do everything possible to clear my name. Remember always, life is a riddle and a picture speaks more than a thousand words.

With fondest love,

Your father, Robi

P.S. Something to amuse you:

Twirl, flash, blaze,

Whirl, twist, amaze.

Spangle, sparkle, star,

All on a metal bar.

Where am I?

Zélie’s knees gave way beneath her. She sat down on the bed. Her heart was jumping like a frog in her throat. Remember always, life is a riddle. Could it be that the riddle here held a clue to the location of the Snakestone?

There was a soft cooing. She looked up. Above her, Rodolphe’s head appeared against the drifting clouds, orange eyes gleaming hopefully. She ignored him. A riddle. A secret riddle, with a clue for her eyes only. A message in a riddle. What could it mean?

She read it again and racked her brains. Rodolphe squawked in rage. She glanced up at the noise. He was twirling up into the air, feathers gleaming in the morning sun, blinding flashes of reflected light hitting her eyeballs. A face appeared, a dark disc against the sun. A face with one eye sea grey, the other obsidian black. A face encircled by a river of long black hair.

“Ma…” She stretched out a hand. The face smiled and looked up to where the pigeon was soaring into the sky in a shower of golden feathers.

Feathers twirling. Metal bar.

She had it!

The key to the riddle.

How had she not guessed it at once?

Zélie’s pulse throbbed in her head. She folded the two fragments of the letter carefully and put them in her apron pocket. Then she went to the desk and scrawled on a scrap of paper:

Important development. Meet me at the park at six o’clock. Be careful.

She went downstairs, all but tripping over Cook coming up the other way. The front porch was empty. She lifted the edge of the potted fig tree gingerly. The pot had two slugs nestled beneath it, and some wriggling worms. She shuddered and dropped the folded piece of paper under it. The clang of the gong ringing out luncheon reminded her that time was slipping away. She only had a few hours to complete her household tasks before sunset, when she would be free to join Jules. Turning from the pale rays of the winter sun, she picked up her skirts and ran back inside the house.

Madame was in an unusually good mood that evening, perhaps because she was going out to a ball the next night and had finally managed to shed her pretence of mourning like a snake shedding an outgrown skin. The silver clock in the boudoir had barely struck five notes when she beckoned to Zélie, who had been tidying the myriad of pots on her dressing table.

“You can finish sewing the sequins on my new evening gown tonight. I shall be wearing it for the first time tomorrow, and I intend to be a sensation.”

“But, Madame—” Zélie looked in dismay at the clock. In only an hour Jules would be waiting for her in the street below.

“I know it’s your evening off.” Madame shrugged dismissively, pulling on her long black gloves and generously spraying herself from one of the large glass bottles on the dressing table, as she admired herself in the mirror. “But I need my dress to be ready for tomorrow night. And I don’t want you leaving the house for the moment. You’re to stay put as much as possible. I’ve asked Pierre to check my room this evening, to make sure the dress is laid out on the bed with every sequin sewn on.” And she swept out of the room in a cloud of musk and ambergris.

Zélie pinched her nose between finger and thumb to stop herself retching. Who in their right minds would spray themselves with whale vomit? Her face heated up, hot tears welling in her eyes. She went to the armoire and pulled out Madame’s new evening gown. She counted the sequins. Two hundred and three! Every single one to be sewn on to the dress by the next day. She closed her eyes and clenched her fingers, fighting the urge to rip the gown into pieces. Opening the sewing box, she sat on the chaise longue and threaded a needle. She stabbed it through the fabric.

A soft tapping at the boudoir door made her look up. The door opened. It was Blanche, her face blushing furiously.

“Would you like me to help with that?” She looked down, shifting from one foot to the other, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve.

“Would you? Thank you so much!” Zélie’s face broke into a broad grin. She held out the dress.

Blanche smiled and sat down beside her. “I may not be able to read, but I can sew.” She looked at Zélie’s effort and smothered a snort of laughter. “You are truly rubbish. Let me do it. It will take me no time at all.” She threaded a needle and began stitching a sequin, the needle flashing in and out like lightning. It was done in seconds.

“That’s incredible.” Zélie couldn’t take her eyes off Blanche’s deft fingers, filled with admiration and envy. Sewing had never been a strong point of hers. She had usually managed to wriggle out of sewing classes at school, with absence notes such as:

For the attention of: Mrs Bose, Sewing Mistress

Bowbazar Street College for Young Ladies

Dear Mrs Bose,

Zélie Dutta is unfortunately allergic to needles and thread, the sight of which are liable to provoke palpitations and panic attacks of a most distressing nature. Please could she therefore attend woodwork classes at the boys’ school next door, or alternatively practise her kick-boxing skills with their punchball?

Yours sincerely,

Robi Dutta

Not that her father had exactly written the letters – but Zélie knew he would have sympathised with the spirit.

Blanche laughed at Zélie’s amazement. “Didn’t your mother teach you to sew?”

“My mother—” Zélie broke off. She swallowed, then changed the subject. “Look, it’s my usual evening off tonight, and I … had plans to go to the circus.” It was obvious that Blanche, with her far superior expertise with the needle, would finish the task in no time.

“Of course.” Blanche smiled, her pale thin face lighting up with a warmth Zélie had not seen on it before. “That was why I knocked on the door. I knew it was your evening off, so I thought I’d take over this job for you. One good turn deserves another after all.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” Zélie beamed in relief. She coughed awkwardly. She wasn’t sure how much information to trust Blanche with yet. “Look, there are some shady people who might come looking for me. If anybody comes snooping around, just say you have no idea where I am, all right?”

Blanche’s eyes widened, but she nodded. “Of course. Enjoy your night off! I wish I could join you. But I have to fold Madame’s laundered clothes after this. It’ll take me all evening, I expect.”

Zélie squeezed the maidservant’s hand and turned to the door. “I really, truly appreciate this. Thank you.”

She shut the boudoir door behind her and frowned. Blanche would be in the laundry later, folding Madame’s dresses all evening. If Titicaca made any noise, she would be bound to hear her. She went quickly to the laundry room and opened the cupboard.

The baby sloth was snoring away in the birdcage, gripping the rolled blanket tightly in his paws. He had eaten everything except the Brussels sprout, and a dribble of grape juice trickled from his mouth. Zélie opened the cage and carefully wrapped the sloth round her neck. He whimpered slightly, hugging her so tight that she had to loosen his grip to stop him strangling her. She peered at her reflection in the gilt mirror and smiled. He looked just like a warm furry scarf.

By the time Zélie reached the park the light was already fading and the lamplighters were lighting the streetlights. She looked at the white face of the clock on the lamp-post opposite. It was quarter past six. She wondered if Jules had got her message. Hurry up, Jules, she thought. Time was running out.

She decided that if he did not show up in five minutes, she would go by herself. There was a distant rumble of thunder. She looked up at the sky. Dark clouds scudded across the moon. The predicted storm was approaching.

“Sorry I’m late!” A familiar figure in a peaked cap appeared, huffing and puffing. “I had to finish a drain job with Dad. So what’s this new development?” Jules cocked his head sceptically, but she could see that his eyes were shining with curiosity.

Breathlessly Zélie told him about finding the missing piece of the letter. “It’s a riddle, something to do with the circus, with Miss La-La. I’m sure of it. There’s a clue to be found. Dad didn’t say it directly because he didn’t want Professor Lestrange to know. See here—” She showed the torn sheet to him.

Jules read the riddle aloud.

Twirl, flash, blaze,

Whirl, twist, amaze.

Spangle, sparkle, star,

All on a metal bar.

Where am I?

He shook his head doubtfully. “So what? Could mean anything.”

“Don’t you see?” Zélie waved the paper in the air. “Twirl, flash, blaze… All on a metal bar. It’s got to have something to do with Miss La-La. We have to go back to the circus. We’ve got to find that stone tonight. Time is running out.”

Jules shrugged his shoulders. “All right, if you want. But I’m not convinced. Look out! You’re going to get run over by that taxi carriage!” He grabbed her arm and pulled her back just as a black carriage whisked past, narrowly missing flattening her like a crêpe.

She pulled away from Jules and hurried on.

“Hang on, that carriage, I thought it had some initials painted on the door—” Jules frowned. But Zélie had already run ahead of him.

Jules rolled his eyes and followed. “Are you being careful to cover your tracks? You know Brother Ombre has spies. And Madame Malaise as well.”

Zélie shook her head dismissively. “Only Blanche knows where we are, and she’s promised that if anyone comes round the house snooping, she’ll send them in the wrong direction.”

Jules stopped in his tracks and stared. “Blanche? You trust her? I thought you said she was mean and sly with you.”

“She had reasons. And I think she’s got a good heart underneath it all.” Zélie smiled as she remembered their night of reading the adventures of Count Rodolphe.

“What? So she’s your friend now?” Jules’s mouth hung open.

“Oh, never mind, it’s a long story. I’ll explain later.” Zélie tugged at his sleeve and pulled him along.

“Well, there’s a sudden change of heart. You trusted her a lot quicker than me. Just because she washes and smells of roses, I suppose. You complain about others judging you but you’re just as bad.” Jules scowled.

“Of course you’re my friend. It’s just—” Zélie bit her lip. Jules was all very well, but there were things that she couldn’t talk to him about, well, at least, not like she could with a girlfriend. She poked him in the ribs. “Don’t be silly. Can’t I have more than one friend?”

“I suppose so.” Jules nodded grudgingly. But he didn’t hold them up further and followed, muttering and grumbling to himself.

Night had fallen and the city was a blaze of lights. As they climbed the hill to the circus site, the first drops of rain began to fall, as large as marbles. Zélie noticed that new posters had appeared on the pavements:

LE CIRQUE FANTASTIQUE
OCTOBER EXTRAVAGANZA
featuring
the gravity-defying MISS LA-LA
and the INCOMBUSTIBLE IVAN
Every evening at 8 p.m.

The posters showed Miss La-La in a cascade of golden feathers, whirling into the roof of the circus tent. Below her the Incombustible Ivan breathed a blast of fire on to a flaming hoop, through which a tiger was racing full tilt.

When they arrived at the Cirque Fantastique, the green-and-white-striped tent was surrounded by twinkling lights like fireflies. A long queue of people waiting for a ticket snaked its way down the street. Hawkers wandered along the queue, carrying trays of barley sugar, flasks of steaming chocolat chaud and bunches of roses.

Zélie tugged Jules’s arm and they ducked away from the lights and the crowd, round to the quiet shadows at the side of the big top.

Miss La-La’s dressing room was a caravan pulled up next to the circus tent. The door was slightly ajar. The interior was in darkness, except for a paraffin lamp sputtering on a dressing table scattered with pots and brushes. There was a long mirror propped against the wall and spangly outfits draped on the chairs. The caravan reeked of sandalwood and patchouli.

Outside, the rain was now falling in torrents, drumming on the roof of the caravan.

“This place is a right mess.” Jules waved his arms around the piles of costumes, make-up jars, magazine articles and half-empty bottles of champagne. “I can’t see how we’re going to find anything here. Especially since we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

“Let’s look at the riddle again.” Zélie pulled the fragment of paper out of her pocket and squinted at it in the dim light of the lamp. “All on a metal bar. I’m sure that’s the key. The answer to a riddle is always in the last line. Miss La-La hangs from a metal bar using only her mouth. That’s why she’s called the ‘iron jaw’. We need to find the apparatus she uses to do that.”

“But what are we looking for? Are you saying the Snakestone’s hidden in her hanging apparatus?” Jules scratched his head.

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that it’s where we’ll find a clue.”

Jules groaned. “Well, I don’t know. We seem to find clues that lead to more clues. When do the clues end with an actual solution?”

Zélie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not an Oracle. I just know we need to find her hanging apparatus. I have a hunch.”

“You’ll be telling me you have second sight next, then I’ll start believing all this stuff about you being a witch.” Jules sighed. He began to search half-heartedly through a cupboard crammed with folded costumes.

Zélie said nothing. The vision of her mother’s face in the sky that had led to her flash of inspiration disturbed her and haunted her with a weird sense of dread. Was she really a witch after all? The world was supposed to make sense, to add up like the carefully counted coins under her mattress. Except sometimes it didn’t. Behind the science there is always a mystery, Zélie.

Silently she began to search, working her way through the cupboards. One was stacked with hundreds of pairs of shoes. The next had racks of spangly costumes and feather headdresses. Next were a jumble of newspaper clippings and piles of faded magazines, with centre spreads featuring the circus and pictures of Miss La-La. Trophies and awards. Letters from admirers. Signed photographs of Miss La-La and dozens of other star circus acts. One of her with a morose, dark-haired man standing beside an easel, brandishing a paintbrush. But no hanging apparatus. She sighed. “Any luck?”

Jules shook his head. “Nope. Just masses of costumes. How many clothes does the woman need? Oh, there’s a collection of china pigs here. But I don’t think that helps.”

“Perhaps she keeps the hanging apparatus somewhere else.” Zélie’s insides twisted into a knot of panic. Beads of sweat trickled down her forehead. They only had a few hours left before Brother Ombre’s deadline ran out and all of this would be over.

“Wait a minute, what’s this?” Jules had just opened the door to the last cupboard.

“What’s what?” Zélie ran over.

She joined him. They stared inside.

The cupboard was empty save for a single shelf lined with velvet. Laid out carefully on the velvet, glinting in the lamplight, were half a dozen metal contraptions resembling large horses’ bits.

“That’s it! We’ve found them at last!” Zélie bounced on her toes with excitement. Each of the bit-like things was attached to a thick leather strap. They were polished and winked in the yellow light of the lamp like monster eyes.

Zélie ran her fingers wonderingly over the gleaming mouthpieces, feeling the cold metal and the warmth of the leather. One of the leather straps seemed thicker than the others. She picked it up. There was a bump in it, with something hard inside. She turned it over and saw that there was a small slit in the leather, a sort of pocket. She squeezed two fingers inside. They hit something hard and smooth. Gripping with her fingers and thumb, she pulled it out. It was a small wooden frame with a square of painted glass in the middle, hardly bigger than a postage stamp.

“What’s that?” Jules stared, his eyes flicking from her face to the object in her upturned palm.

“I think –” Zélie frowned, turning it over in her hand – “I think it’s another magic lantern slide. A very small one.”

“Can you see the picture on it?”

Zélie shook her head. “No, it’s too small. We’ll have to put it in a magic lantern to magnify it.” She thought for a moment. “Madame Drusilla’s got a magic lantern. I saw it in her tent. Come on, let’s go and ask her.” She took Jules by the hand and dragged him out of the caravan. Her heart thumped in her chest.

Remember, Zélie … a picture speaks more than a thousand words.

Outside the caravan, the rain was lashing down. The guy ropes of the big top creaked and groaned as the tent flapped and strained against them. Through the entrance Zélie could see that the show had started. The Incombustible Ivan was juggling with two flaming torches, while blowing a torrent of fire as big as a house from his open mouth.

Madame Drusilla and Miss DeeDee’s small tepee was flapping like a bird about to take flight. They ran inside, clothes soaking wet and clinging to their bodies like pondweed. Inside the tent was dark, save for a small circle of light round the bed. Madame Drusilla stood beside the bed holding a large medicine bottle. A shivering figure was lying hunched under the sheets. On the other side of the bed stood Miss DeeDee, holding a lamp clamped under her chin between her elbows. The room smelled of camphor and sickness.

“Zeelie!” Madame Drusilla looked up when they entered.

Zélie stopped short at the bedhead. Huddled in the bed was a small skinny boy. His face was pale and he was coughing with a horrible, hollow cough. Zélie recognised him with a shock. It was David, Ivan the fire-eater’s son, looking even paler and more frail than when they had last seen him in the circus tent with his father.

Miss DeeDee shook her head sadly. “David is very poorly, has been for a long while, although we can’t seem to find the oranges of the malady. We’re looking after him tonight while his father does the show. I fear he may not live to see tomorrow.”

“Oh no.” Zélie caught her breath and swallowed. “Look, I’m really sorry to pester you. It’s just that I have a magic lantern slide that I need to see now. Can we borrow your Phantasmagoria lantern, Madame Drusilla? It’s really, really urgent. Please don’t ask questions. I can explain it all properly later.”

Madame Drusilla stared, but she nodded and pointed to the shelf. “Of course, Zeelie. My magic lantern’s there.” She and Miss DeeDee exchanged raised eyebrows.

“Thank you!” Zélie ran to fetch it.

Madame Drusilla’s magic lantern was smaller than the one in the underground study. It was made of green stone that might have been jade and had a pair of carved silver birds with ruby eyes perched on the top. Zélie set the Phantasmagoria lantern carefully on the table in the middle of the tent. Taking a deep breath, she slipped the slide into the machine and pressed the lever. Beside her, she could feel Jules tense up. Madame Drusilla and Miss DeeDee also had their eyes fixed on the lantern.

There was a burst of light. An image flickered on to the wall of the tent. The entrance of the Cirque Fantastique, with the bat gargoyle above it. The single eye of the gargoyle glared at them, a flaming red. Then the shutter closed and the image vanished. They were plunged into darkness.

“What?” Jules groaned. “Another red herring. Another lead going … nowhere. Just a silly old picture of the entrance to the circus. It’s nothing, probably just some old souvenir of Miss La-La’s that she’s hidden—”

“Shut up!” Zélie grabbed his arm. “It’s not nothing. Don’t you see? It’s the answer. It’s what we’ve been looking for. The eye of that gargoyle! It’s some sort of stone, isn’t it…?”

Jules’s jaw dropped. “You mean it’s the—”

“Yes!” Zélie hopped from one foot to the other with excitement. “It’s the Snakestone! It’s the eye of the gargoyle over the entrance to the circus tent. I can’t believe it – it’s been right there above our heads the whole time.”

She pulled Jules by the arm and the pair ran out of the tent, leaving behind the astonished circus ladies. The rain was hammering their heads, the sky cracking with great forks of lightning. Zélie turned up the collar of her coat to cover Titicaca as best she could from the rain. The little sloth grumbled a little, but otherwise seemed content to sleep on, snuggled in tweedy darkness.

The pair of them floundered in the muddy ground of the circus field, which was swiftly turning into a seething bog. When they reached the entrance of the big top, Zélie looked up at the silhouette of the gargoyle, black against the racing clouds. Twisted wooden pillars rose on either side like sticks of barley sugar. She grasped one of the pillars with her hands, barely able to stop them shaking with excitement. This was it, the moment she had waited for all this time. The Snakestone was almost within her grasp. From within the tent came gasps of ooh and ahh from the crowd, as Miss La-La strode into the ring wrapped in a cloak of white feathers. Nobody paid any attention to them. She put her foot in the lowest groove of the pillar and hoisted herself up.

Gripping the slippery column with her knees, she reached for the gargoyle above her head. The single flaming red eye glared at her in the darkness. The stone eye was fixed to the wooden head with a single metal clasp. It would be easy to prise open. Pulling a grip from her hair, Zélie twisted it flat and looped it round the clasp. It bent open. The eye popped out loose in her hand.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got the Snakestone!”

When they got back to the tepee, Madame Drusilla was busy hammering a tent peg through a flapping guy rope. The wind had whipped her hair into a bird’s nest round her red face, and the foxes draped round her waist waved their paws, grinning in the half-light.

“The stone! The stone! We’ve found the Snakestone!” Zélie screamed into the wind, waving her arms wildly.

Madame Drusilla stared. The mallet dropped from her hand. “Come, come in out of the rain, children.”

Inside, the tent was now in semi-darkness. David was still asleep in the bed, tossing and turning on the pillows, muttering to himself. Beads of sweat rolled down his face. Beside him stood Miss DeeDee, wringing her hands while tears poured down her apple cheeks.

“The poor boy hasn’t got long left on this earth, I’m afraid,” she sobbed. “I think we may have to call Ivan soon, and the priest as well, to give him the last rites.”

Madame Drusilla smeared some ointment that smelled of cat pee on the boy’s forehead. “Now, Zeelie, what’s all this talk about finding the Snakestone?” she demanded.

Miss DeeDee gaped. “What?”

“We’ve found the Snakestone.” Zélie grinned triumphantly. A wave of relief washed over her. They had done it! They had found the stone. Now all they had to do was find Brother Ombre and give the stone to him, then he would return the slide and her dad would be safe. Uncurling her fingers somewhat reluctantly, she set it on the table, keeping her hand hovering over it as if it might grow a pair of wings and flutter off. They all stared at the stone. It was about the size of a large marble, ruby red and glittering in the lamplight.

Madame Drusilla set down the jar of cat-pee ointment. She picked up the stone, turning it in her hand.

“Be careful.” Zélie tensed. “That stone is powerful. You yourself told me it brings misfortune to those close to the person who has it.”

Madame Drusilla put it down carefully on the table and went to the cupboard, rummaging around and returning with a large magnifying glass and a pair of long black gloves. She pulled on the gloves, picked up the stone gingerly and held it to the light, one green eye magnified to the size of a golf ball through the lens. She put the stone back on the table.

“Well?” Zélie held her breath.

Madame Drusilla shook her head. “I’m afraid, Zeelie, this is not the Snakestone.”

Zélie shook her head in disbelief. “It MUST be the Snakestone!” Her eyes were wide and wet. “My dad left a slide that shows the stone was the eye of the gargoyle.” She glared at Jules, Madame Drusilla and Miss DeeDee.

There was a long pause.

Madame Drusilla put down the magnifying glass and began to peel off the gloves. “I’m sorry, Zeelie, but it’s not the reeeal Snakestone. It’s a fake. See how lightweight it is – here, hold it yourself. It’s not even a stone. It’s some sort of resin.”

Zélie took the stone back and, for the first time, registered its weight. Despite being the size of an egg, it was as light as a peanut. Madame Drusilla was right. It couldn’t even be a stone, let alone the Snakestone. How could she not have noticed before? Her knees began to give way.

“Have a cup of tea.” Miss DeeDee adroitly pushed a chair under Zélie’s bottom just as her legs began to buckle. She bustled over to the stove, setting down on it the large copper kettle.

“Perhaps…” Jules coughed. “Perhaps … your dad made a mistake? You know, easy thing to do under stress and all that. Understandable…”

“No!” Zélie stamped her foot. She leaned back in the chair and pushed her hair back from her face. Her cheeks flushed with rage. “He did not make a mistake! My dad never makes mistakes.” But a growing sense of dread was beginning to spread in her like a drop of blood in water.

Dad never makes mistakes.

This is not the Snakestone.

It has to be the Snakestone.

It isn’t.

It is.

Hell, it’s not even a stone.

And then, a new realisation hit her like a slap. The locket in her apron was not vibrating.

Zélie saw the other three exchange quick glances between themselves. She glared at them. They looked down at the floor. Miss DeeDee gave a light cough and took a handful of dried herbs from a large jar, which she put in a cracked teacup. She poured steaming water into the cup and brought it to the table. “Drink this, dear. Valerian, hops, tulsi to calm you down. A pinch of mugwort to slow the heart rate. You’ve been through an incredulous amount today.”

“Stop patronising me!” Zélie banged her fist down on the table so hard that the cup tipped over. Bright green liquid spilled on to the floor. “Oh, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” The whirlpool raging inside her welled up and tears trickled from her eyes. She began to mop the spilt tea with the corner of her apron.

“Never mind, never mind.” Miss DeeDee flipped to the kitchen cupboard and whisked out a dishcloth while Madame Drusilla picked up the tipped-over cup. “We’ll get this cleared up in a jiffy.”

“Mon Dieu!”

They all three looked at Madame Drusilla in surprise. Her mouth had fallen open and she was staring into the teacup, which now shook in her hand.

“The leaves… The tea leaves…”

“Ooh, what do they say?” Miss DeeDee flipped back and peered through her spectacles into the teacup. Her eyes popped and her mouth tightened like a cat’s bottom. “Oh dear.”

“What do the tea leaves say?” asked Zélie. Tasseography wasn’t one of Count Rodolphe’s skills.

Madame Drusilla’s eyes rolled up to the whites. She began muttering to herself, as if in a trance. “The line, the wavy line… A journey… Beware the train, the tunnel… Beware the coffin…”

“Coffin?” Zélie grimaced. That didn’t sound good.

“Let me see.” Miss DeeDee grabbed the teacup and stuck her nose in it, frowning. “Hmm, it does look like a coffin.” She tipped her head and smiled brightly. “But on the other hand, if you look at it this way, it looks more like an elephant.”

“What difference does it make if it’s a coffin or an elephant?” Jules folded his arms and tapped his foot. “It’s all a load of rubbish and a waste of time. What we need to do is—”

He was cut short by a weak, tremulous voice piping up from the bed in the corner of the tent. “Papa… Papa… Where’s my papa?” It was the little boy David.

Miss DeeDee somersaulted over to the bed and put her hand on the boy’s forehead. His face was grey and his breath came in short, shallow pants with a rasping noise. She shook her head. “The child’s as hot as a live coal. I think he’s about to inspire. You’d better call Ivan. Has he finished his act?”

Madame Drusilla squinted at the cuckoo clock on the wall. “Yes, he should have finished by now. I’ll go and fetch him. Oh deary dear, what a night of catastrophes.” She whisked out of the tent in a whirl of furs and clinking jewellery.

Jules and Zélie went to the boy’s bedside. David’s eyes stared ahead glassily, unseeing. The bed smelled faintly of disinfectant and rotting feet. Miss DeeDee plumped up the pillows and soaked a cloth in a basin of water, laying it on the boy’s sweating forehead. His eyes closed. “Such a fine bonny baby he was when Ivan arrived at the circus,” she whispered, stroking David’s cheek. “A picture of health. Then suddenly he falls sick, just like that, out of the blue. Gets worse and worse every year. Sicker and sicker. And now this.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Zélie.

Miss DeeDee shook her head. “Nobody knows. The doctors can’t say. Some sort of mysterious wasting disease. He suddenly took a turn for the worse, and now there’s no curing him. It’s very hard on Ivan. His wife, Rosie the sword-swallower, died a few months ago. He’s had to cope alone.”

Jules’s eyes popped. “Did Rosie die swallowing a sword?”

“Nobody knows. She died after one of her acts. After her death they looked inside her and there were dozens of razors, two pairs of scissors and a small dagger, so it was impossible to know which one killed her. The things we artistes do to keep the public entertained.” Miss DeeDee shook her head sadly, sniffed and wiped her nose with her elbow.

They were interrupted by a sudden commotion at the door of the tent. A big burly man came hurtling in with Madame Drusilla close on his heels. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak streaming with rain, but underneath Zélie could make out the ripple of muscles and the flash of a red loincloth. The Incombustible Ivan.

“David! My darling son.” Ivan rushed to the bedside and fell on his knees. He grasped David’s thin limp hand in his own, gnarled and scarred with burn marks and calluses. He was sobbing uncontrollably. “Is there no hope?” He looked up at Miss DeeDee imploringly. She shook her head, dabbing her eyes.

“My son… Please, please, forgive me…” Tears were streaming down Ivan’s cheeks, and his shaggy mane of black hair tumbled wildly over his face.

David’s eyes fluttered open and rested on his father. He smiled. “Papa, I love you. Please don’t worry about me, I’ll be going back to Maman.” He closed his eyes, his small fingers squeezing the great hairy hand that grasped his.

“My son!” Ivan’s face twisted in grief. He opened his mouth and howled, pushing his long hair back, his eyepatch slipping to reveal a flash of red.

Red. Zélie did a double take. She swallowed hard and looked again, screwing up her eyes and squinting in the flickering lamplight. No, she had not imagined it. Behind the slipped eyepatch was something that glinted with a strange, reddish light.

Zélie took a step forward. Her hands were trembling. A dry whirring noise like beating wings rushed in her ears. She tried to speak but her voice stuck in her throat. All that came out was a choked gurgling.

“Zélie, what’s the matter?” Jules was staring at her.

“I-I—” Again Zélie willed her mouth into action, but her tongue seemed glued down. She stopped and swallowed. Finally she blurted it out. “Ivan’s got the Snakestone hidden behind his eyepatch!”

There was a deathly silence inside the tent. Outside, the rain drummed on the roof while the wind chimes clashed wildly in the gale and the guy ropes flapped as if the tent would fly away. Lightning flashed, lighting up the tableau of figures round the bed. All eyes were fixed on the crouched form of the fire-eater kneeling beside his son.

“Z-Zeelie, what are you talking about?” Madame Drusilla’s voice trembled. She reached out a plump bejewelled hand and clutched the bedpost, as if she were about to faint.

“Well, knock me over with a fencer.” Miss DeeDee’s ears wiggled furiously back and forth, almost sending her spectacles flying off her nose.

Zélie’s eyes remained fixed on the fire-eater, who had hastily pulled the patch back in place. “That’s the real reason why you’re able to do those amazing tricks with fire without getting hurt. It’s because of the Snakestone. Your face heals itself as soon as it’s burned. It’s true, isn’t it, Ivan?”

The fire-eater was silent.

“All right.” Zélie stepped forward and clutched the fire-eater’s brawny arm. He didn’t budge, but she could feel his pulse banging like a drum. “If what I say is a load of rubbish, prove it. Take off the eyepatch and show us. Prove that it’s a figment of my imagination.”

Ivan pulled away from her grasp and staggered backwards, panting heavily.

Inside Zélie’s apron, the locket was buzzing. “See?” Zélie looked round at the others triumphantly. “He won’t take off the patch because he knows I’m speaking the truth. You’re despicable, you know that?” Her voice trembled. “My dad knew that stone was dangerous. That’s why he hid it in the gargoyle. Did you know that the Snakestone makes the person who owns it invincible, but also destroys everyone they hold dear? You have to make a choice about who you care about – yourself or those who love and need you most in the world.”

The fire-eater remained silent. The others stood motionless as statues. Only the boy David tossed and turned, muttering in his fever. Zélie grasped David’s wrist and felt the boy’s pulse. It was very, very faint but still beating, a tiny throbbing like the heartbeat of a butterfly. She fell on her knees before Ivan.

“Please, please, give me the Snakestone,” she whispered. “I need it to rescue my dad. There’s still hope for David. If you give me the stone, your son will recover, I’m sure of it. My dad will be saved. I’ll give the stone to Brother Ombre. He doesn’t seem to have any friends who would be injured by the stone, so it won’t matter giving it to him. Two people will live, who would otherwise die. You’re still a great fire-eater; you don’t need magic to help you. Please!”

Ivan’s mouth remained shut in a grim line. He shook his head slowly, hissing through gritted teeth. “No, you just want the stone for yourself. How did you know it was behind my eyepatch anyway? Nobody has spotted it, not one single person in the years I’ve had it there. Your stupid father didn’t take enough care to make sure nobody was watching when he hid the stone in the gargoyle. I saw him do it! Lucky for me that I did, because I was on the brink of dying from burns. But you must be a witch to have known where it was. A foreigner with those mismatched peepers, I always thought you were, and I was right.”

Zélie rolled her eyes. “For goodness’ sake, I’m not a witch. Please, think about my dad. Think about David. Nothing is as precious or irreplaceable as a human life—”

“Enough!” Ivan wrestled free of Zélie’s grasp. He pulled his cloak round him and strode to the door of the tent. “I’m not listening to any more of this snivelling, sentimental drivel. I have taken the road I have taken. There’s no going back now. Adieu, David. Please forgive me.” He threw one last glance at his dying son, pulled the tent flap open and disappeared into the night.

“No!” Zélie jumped up from the bed. “NO! Stop him – he mustn’t get away.” She raced after him.

Jules ran after her. For once he didn’t pause, groan or try to hold her back. “Wait! You can’t go on your own.”

“Children! At least take an umbilical with you. You’ll be drenched.” Miss DeeDee cartwheeled to the door of the tent and peered through her misty spectacles into the storm. But they had already gone, and all she could see were three blurred figures racing away into the distance, disappearing into the wind and rain.

Nor did Miss DeeDee, with her weak and rheumy eyes, see a large black carriage parked in the shadows of the circus ground. The carriage juddered into motion and sped silently along the road after the children.

The rain lashed the trees and the children’s faces. Ahead of them, the figure of Ivan ran across the little park. They ran after him. When Ivan reached the end of the circus grounds he crossed the street, threading through the crowds and up the hill.

“Come on!” cried Zélie, and the pair of them raced after him. On they ran, chasing the elusive figure of the fire-eater, pounding through the rain and dodging passers-by.

After half an hour, the road ended in a steep bank with iron railings. Ivan vaulted over them and disappeared from sight. Zélie and Jules reached the railings and peered over. Zélie stared down for a few seconds before it dawned on her that this was the railway circling the city. Below was a sunken track and to the right a tunnel, where trains would disappear into the side of the hill.

She pointed to it. “He’s gone into the tunnel. There’s no other way he could have run without us seeing him. We’ll have to follow him.”

They followed the path of the railway line, crunching through the gravel and keeping close to the walls of the tunnel in case of a passing train. Within a few minutes the tracks forked into two. On the far track was a disused train carriage covered in rust.

Zélie sighed. “Ivan must have escaped by now.”

“Shhh!” Jules put a finger to his lips.

Zélie listened. From further ahead of them came a low groan. She strained her ears to hear. Sure enough, after a few seconds, there it was again. Definitely a groan. Not of pain but of frustration. As though somebody were trapped. They turned a corner and stopped short.

Ahead of them was Ivan. He was lying on the ground, flailing and struggling, his foot entangled in a piece of wire that snaked along the track. But although the wire was wound so tight round his ankle that it had turned blue with great gashes of ripped skin, he seemed otherwise unharmed and not in the least in pain. He was cursing and shouting furiously, trying to pull himself free, the knot of wires out of his reach.

Jules whistled. “Zut alors! He’s stuck like a pig on a spit. But he doesn’t seem to be hurt!”

“It’s the Snakestone behind his eyepatch,” whispered Zélie. “It’s protecting him.”

The pair of them walked up to where the fire-eater was wriggling like a trapped insect.

“Hello.” Zélie looked down at him, arms folded. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“In a spot of bother, are we?” Jules stared at the trapped fire-eater.

Ivan’s mouth opened in a snarl, revealing sharp white teeth. “Damn the pair of you,” he growled. Then he fell silent. His eye gleamed. He stopped kicking, his feet still, his head drooping. “Please, please help me.” His voice had changed. It was no longer snarling, but a wheedling whine. “Please, I can’t get myself out of this tangle without help.”

“If we help you get free, will you give us the Snakestone?” Zélie glared at him.

Jules hissed in her ear. “Make him give you the Snakestone first, before we disentangle him.”

“We can’t,” Zélie whispered back. “If he gives us the Snakestone before we cut the wire off him, he might get hurt without its protection. We’ll have to extricate him, but on the condition that he gives us the stone as soon as he’s free.”

“Of course I’ll give you the stone.” Ivan looked doleful. Tears were running down his cheeks. He sniffed. “I can’t believe I risked the lives of my own wife and child to become a famous fire-eater. It was a despicable thing to do. I feel so ashamed of myself.” Deep sobs wracked his body. “How will I ever make it up to my dear son? Oh, to think that if you don’t set me free, poor David will grow up a penniless orphan with nobody to look after him—”

“All right.” Zélie cut him short. “Since you’ve given your word, we’ll get you out.”

“Are you sure?” Jules whispered.

“I don’t think we have much choice.” Zélie hissed back. “He says he’s sorry. You have to trust people sometimes.” That was half the trouble with Jules, she thought. He was far too suspicious of people. He wouldn’t give them a chance. Like Blanche for instance.

Ivan wiped his streaming eye and blew his nose loudly on his cloak. “I shall be forever indebted to both of you. I can’t believe it took me so long to see the error of my ways.”

“All right, let’s get on with it then.” Jules sighed and pulled a penknife from his pocket, shaking his head. In three strokes he had sliced through the wire. As soon as the wire fell from his leg, Ivan sprang up. He was free.

“We did it!” Zélie grinned in triumph. Ivan stood tall before them. The children looked at him and gaped. Even as they watched, the blue marks round his leg were beginning to fade. Soon all that remained were a few raw, red streaks.

“Now give us the Snakestone.” Zélie stretched out her upturned hand.

Silence. Ivan seemed to become very focused on picking the fibres of his red loincloth clean of coal dust. Then he tossed his long hair back from his forehead and picked up his cloak, which had tumbled to the ground. “I should be getting back to the circus; there’ll be a crowd of people waiting for my autograph.”

Zélie’s face flushed hot. She took a step forward. “I said, give us the Snakestone. That was the deal.”

Ivan shook his head, smirking. He began to walk back down the railway track towards the mouth of the tunnel.

Red-hot hammers of rage beat in Zélie’s head. “Liar!” She raced after him and tried to grab him by the shoulder, but he swatted her away with his huge muscly arm as if she were a fly. She screamed. “You promised! That was the deal. How could you—”

But her words were drowned by a loud screech. The tunnel was full of blinding light. The crank of wheels turning, the roar of an engine, a rush of steam. A train was hurtling down the track towards them.

“Quick, out of the way!” Jules grabbed her by the hand and pulled her with him off the track and on to the platform. Ivan saw the train approaching. He too tried to jump on to the platform, but he stumbled and fell back on to the track into the path of the approaching train.

There was a screech of grinding metal, clouds of steam and sparks flying. The great engine roared through the tunnel with its carriages rattling behind like drunken revellers at a party. Then silence.

The tunnel was empty save for clouds of dust and steam. To one side of the track was a crumpled heap.

The children jumped off the platform and ran towards the body of the fire-eater. Ivan’s muscular limbs were tangled like a puppet tossed to the ground. His eyepatch had slipped to reveal both eyes rolled up, showing just the whites.

“He never needed the patch all along! What a fraud,” Jules exclaimed in disgust.

On the track next to the fire-eater’s lifeless body was a glowing ball of light. Zélie picked it up. She sighed. At last.

Now that she finally held the genuine Snakestone, Zélie could see that it wasn’t really red but a rainbow of colours. It sparkled in the yellow torchlight in a thousand iridescent shades, like the wings of a dragonfly in the sun. The skin of her palm began to tingle with heat. The locket in her apron was buzzing like a wasp, jumping as though trying to reach the stone in her hand.

“No one should hold this much power. Especially not someone who would sacrifice their own family for the sake of fame.”

Zélie dropped the stone into the locket and snapped it shut. It fitted perfectly. She looked at her palm. A small red circle was burned into the skin.

The children walked back to the platform, leaving the crumpled heap of Ivan’s body to the side of the tracks. It was not long before they had left the fire-eater far behind and were approaching the rusty disused railway carriage they had passed earlier.

“Look!” Zélie pointed.

The old carriage wasn’t empty any more. A light was shining from one of the windows. Silhouetted against it was the outline of a tall, thin person. Someone whom Zélie recognised immediately.

“Blanche!” Zélie cried.

The children craned their necks. In the flickering lamplight the maid’s gaunt figure looked like a waxwork in a museum. Next to her head was the barrel of a gun. Zélie started forward.

“She’s being held at gunpoint! Come on, we have to help her.” She tugged Jules by the sleeve.

“Be careful! How do you know it’s not a trap?” Jules tried to pull Zélie back, but she had already torn ahead to the carriage door, which was open and swinging jerkily on rusty hinges.

The steps into the railway carriage were high, but Zélie hopped up two at a time. Inside the carriage Blanche was standing stiffly, her arms pinned behind her back. Gripping her by the waist and holding a gun to the side of her head was Pus Eye. Zélie looked at Blanche but she did not look back, gazing fixedly ahead of her.

“Let her go.” Zélie glared at Pus Eye. “Leave her out of this. It’s nothing to do with her.” Pus Eye grinned and blew her a wet, smelly raspberry.

“Aha, I see we have a visitor!” A thin wheezy voice piped through the open door of the compartment. Ignoring Pus Eye, Zélie stepped forward. Behind her she could hear the shuffling footsteps of Jules.

Inside the train compartment two faded, threadbare velvet seats faced each other. The net luggage racks were broken and hung down like giant spiders’ webs, the oak-panelled walls peeling and covered in mildew. Seated in a corner, leaning back against the seat and tapping the sooty window with the tip of his cane, was Brother Ombre.

“Well, my dear, we meet again.” Brother Ombre raised his top hat with a gloved hand and parted his thin lips in a smile that crinkled his mouth but not his eyes. “I trust you have brought me the Snakestone, as promised? We had a little bargain, didn’t we, you and I.” His voice cracked and became a wheezy whisper.

Pinpricks of fear crawled over Zélie’s skin like an army of ants. She clenched her jaw. “I don’t want the stupid Snakestone. I’m not selfish like you.” Rage seethed inside her. “It’s revolting what you and your disgusting private club do, picking on poor helpless animals. I hope you’re hanged.”

Brother Ombre’s pleasant smile drained away like water down a plughole. He scowled, wiping his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. “That’s enough of the pleasantries. To business.” He licked his thin lips hungrily and his breath began to come in short pants, like a fox scrabbling at a rabbit hole. “Where’s the Snakestone?”

“Where’s the slide? I’m not telling you where the stone is until I see my dad’s slide.”

A sly smile spread over Brother Ombre’s face. “I’m afraid I don’t have the slide on me here. It would be far too risky to carry it around. It’s in a safe place.”

“Where?” Zélie had to ball up her fists to stop herself from punching him.

“Well, as it happens, the slide is round the corner from here.” Brother Ombre got up and pushed open the door on the far side of the carriage. It swung outwards, groaning.

Zélie peered out of the open door. Hewn into the tunnel wall opposite was a rough archway leading into inky blackness.

Brother Ombre rose and stepped unsteadily down from the carriage, beckoning to them from the entrance. “Come, I’ll show you where the slide is.”

Jules tugged at Zélie’s sleeve. “I don’t think we should follow him. He’s obviously insane. Who knows what’s down there? Let’s just run away with the Snakestone. He’ll have to come after us if he wants it.”

“We’ve got no choice,” Zélie hissed back. “We have to follow him to get the slide. Otherwise he might destroy it. And he’s got Blanche captive too.”

They got down from the carriage and followed Brother Ombre into the dingy tunnel. Clasped tightly round Zélie’s neck, Titicaca mumbled uneasily in his sleep. She pulled her collar up to keep him warm. From behind them came a shuffling and cursing. She turned round to see Pus Eye shoving Blanche along the tunnel.

A few yards ahead, Brother Ombre and Jules stopped. A large door blocked the path.

“We have arrived.” Brother Ombre unlocked the door, which swung open squeakily on rusty hinges. He stepped aside to wave them through. “After you.”

“In there?” Jules said doubtfully.

“Of course.” Brother Ombre smiled. “I have to keep the slide very safe, you know. Sunlight would make it fade.”

They took a few tentative steps forward, crossing the threshold into darkness. A blast of icy air punched Zélie as the door slammed shut behind them.

It was the smell that hit her first. A strong disinfectant smell like a hospital, but with an undertone of something rotting, like the kind of hospital you didn’t leave. Zélie held her nose and peered around in the gloom. Running round the cellar walls were narrow shelves with gleaming implements hanging from them on hooks: hacksaws with saw-toothed edges, pliers, giant scissor-like things with sharp points.

In the middle of the room was an enormous chair set on cast iron wheels, with big black metal clamps. Above it hung a circular contraption like a large wheel, with flaring lights in glass bulbs attached to it. In the wall of the far corner of the cellar was what looked like a giant rubbish chute, its trap door open to reveal a steep shaft plunging into darkness.

“What is this place?” Zélie glared at Brother Ombre.

“Oh, just somewhere I carry out a few experiments, nothing special.” Brother Ombre smiled, sweeping his arm around the shelves. “You could call it my workshop. So convenient that it’s in exactly the spot Ivan brought you to. The Snakestone must have impelled him to come here, fulfilling its destiny to end up in my custody.”

Zélie shivered. She stuck her chin in the air. Brother Ombre mustn’t think she was afraid. “Where’s the slide?”

Brother Ombre went over to one of the shelves and picked up a small oilskin packet. He tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket and patted it. “Here it is. Where’s the Snakestone?” His eyes bored into Zélie’s hungrily, his breath wheezing in short, eager pants.

Zélie put her hand in her apron pocket. Her fingers curled over the stone in its cage, buzzing in the folds of fabric. It tingled and stung her as if she were pinching a wasp. “It’s here—”

“Zélie! Don’t give it to him!”

Zélie’s hand froze in her pocket. It was Blanche.

“Zélie, don’t give him the Snakestone!”

Blanche was writhing, struggling to free herself from the grasp of Pus Eye. Her eyes were wild and staring, her forehead glistening with sweat. “Don’t give it to him. It’s a trick! I don’t know what he’s going to do to you, but he won’t keep his promise to give you the slide; he’s got some other plan. I don’t know what it is—Help!” Pus Eye’s strong hand had clapped over her mouth. Swiftly he tied a rope round her waist, pinning her to one of the vaulted pillars.

“Blanche!” Zélie ran to where the maid crouched by the pillar, tears streaming down her face.

“Zélie…” Blanche whispered. “Zélie … I’m so sorry, I betrayed you. That Ombre man, he came this afternoon to the house with his henchman, asking where you were. He told me that if I didn’t tell him he’d take my sister. His spies had found out about her. So I told him you’d gone to the circus. They bundled me into a carriage and brought me here.”

“Shhhh…” Zélie put a finger to her lips. She laid a hand on Blanche’s shoulder. “You didn’t betray me. You didn’t have a choice. You had to tell him where I was to save Christine.” She wrapped her arm round Blanche and gave her a gentle squeeze.

The lights went out.

“What’s going on?” Zélie stood up. She took a few hesitant steps forward. There was an eerie silence. The darkness was thick and suffocating. “Jules? Blanche?” She flailed around wildly, trying to find them but meeting only empty air.

A strange metallic whirring sound started up, high and shrill, like the wheel of a knife grinder sharpening a knife. There was a low chuckle.

“Jules?”

“Zélie, where are you?” His voice was close by and sounded small and panicked. She took a few steps forward and pushed her hands through the darkness, groping, fear thudding in her chest. Her hand found his and clasped it like a drowning sailor clutching a lifebuoy. He led her along gently. Thank goodness he was so expert at seeing in the dark.

“What’s happening, Jules?” She strained her ears, trying to make out what the whirring noise was. A long sigh, like the wind rippling through bamboo canes. Again the low chuckle. She bit her lip and clutched Jules’s hand tighter. Her pulse was skittering like a spider. She gulped, trying to push down the rising panic. She shut her eyes and counted to ten.

Zélie Dutta, she reminded herself, you once rescued a deathstalker scorpion from a trap and set it free, even though it tried to sting you. You extracted the Snakestone from the eyepatch of Ivan the Imposter, and you can wiggle your ears without touching them. You will not panic like a chickenhearted cur. You will see this thing through.

BANG!

There was an explosion of light. Zélie looked around. The panic seethed out of her throat and flooded from her mouth in a loud scream.

It wasn’t Jules’s hand that she had been holding.

She was standing beside the giant chair. Brother Ombre was standing next to her. On the other side of the cellar was Jules, tied up and gagged and struggling furiously next to Blanche. Pus Eye stood next to them, leering.

“Sorry about that. Unpredictable, the lights here.” Brother Ombre’s voice was soft and silky. But then it rose to a thin high whine, a whine that sounded more animal than human. “Now WHERE’S THE STONE? Remember, no stone, no slide! Give it to me now, and don’t try any funny business. We’ve got your two little friends over there cornered, remember.”

Zélie spat in his face. “You’re despicable.”

Brother Ombre pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his chin. “That’s not very nice. All right, if you must be obstinate.” He turned to Pus Eye. “Take the serving girl and the sewer boy—”

“Stop!” Zélie’s hand reached for her apron pocket. She dug around in it until her fingers found the stone in the locket. Releasing the clasp, she took out the stone and proffered it to him silently. The Snakestone glowed red in the dim light, pulsing like a heart in her palm. Brother Ombre’s eyes locked on to it. His breathing became fast and rasping. He held out trembling fingers towards the stone and took it from her hand. It must have burned him because he immediately yelped and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

“Now give me the slide. You promised.” Zélie glared at him.

“Ah yes. Here you are.” Brother Ombre handed her the oilskin packet.

She grabbed it and stuffed it into her coat. “You got what you wanted. Now let my friends go—”

She was cut short mid-sentence. A pair of powerful arms seized her round the waist and lifted her into the air. Struggling frantically, she felt herself being shoved on to the chair. Metal clamps enclosed her arms and legs, leaving her pinioned like a butterfly on a display board. She was trapped. A blast of stinking air hit her nostrils as Pus Eye’s red meaty face loomed over her and fastened the clamps.

At that moment the wheel-like contraption with the lamps descended from the ceiling, until it was skimming above Zélie’s head. The light and heat from the bulbs seared her eyeballs and made her forehead throb. Dimly she became aware that Pus Eye had gone and that Brother Ombre was standing over her. His face had changed: already it looked less wasted and grey, a flush of colour heating up his pale complexion. He had changed out of his jacket into a white lab coat and was holding something that looked like a pair of pincers. Through the thin cotton pocket of the lab coat glowed the Snakestone.

She closed her eyes against the bright light as the whirring sound grew louder. A clamour of shouting arose. Blanche screaming; Jules’s voice thundering, “Zélie, no! No! He’s after your eyes!” The sound of scuffles, blows being exchanged. Jules groaning in pain. Pus Eye’s loud laugh. Silence.

The buzzing noise was very close now. Round Zélie’s neck Titicaca muttered and shifted uncomfortably in the rising heat. The lamps came closer and closer, until one brushed against the sloth’s neck. There was the sharp smell of singed fur.

“GRRRRRRR!!”

Awakening with a tremendous roar Titicaca lashed out with sharp claws. There was a shriek of surprise, followed by a clatter and loud cursing. The whirring stopped. Zélie opened her eyes to see Brother Ombre staggering backwards, hands across his face. On each cheek were three red stripes.

A faint buzzing sound came from somewhere below the chair. Zélie looked down. The Snakestone was throbbing on the bare earth floor, gleaming in a halo of red light. In all the furore it had tumbled out of the pocket of Brother Ombre’s lab coat.

There was a loud snore and the smell of a large vegetable fart. Wrapped snugly round Zélie’s neck, his single act of rescue and revenge accomplished, Titicaca snoozed peacefully.

“The stone! The Snakestone! WHERE’S THE STONE?!” Brother Ombre groped around madly, scrabbling frantically with his hands on the floor. Already he looked paler, more frail, and the hollow cough had returned. The stone lay just outside his grasp, but his skinny hand stretched out and his fingers were closing upon it.

Zélie struggled against the bands on her wrists and ankles. But it was useless. They held fast. The stone winked like a red eye on the cellar floor. In seconds it would be within Brother Ombre’s grasp.

SWISH! A hobnailed boot swung into the path of Brother Ombre’s outstretched hand, sending the stone skittering. Somehow, Jules had managed to extricate himself from the ropes binding him and had kicked the stone out of Ombre’s reach. He crouched with fists clenched before the older man, grimacing, his ginger hair sticking up like an angry scribble.

Brother Ombre staggered to his feet. He swung a feeble fist at Jules, but it was too late. Jules was ready, and one well-aimed punch sent him reeling.

Ombre’s grey face turned white. “The Snakestone!” he bellowed, backing away from Jules, the empty shaft of the rubbish chute looming behind him.

But it was too late. Brother Ombre’s last step on earth was into empty air. With a loud cry he dropped out of sight and disappeared down the chute. The cry became fainter and fainter, until it stopped. There was a dull thud.

“Boss?” Pus Eye shuffled over to the chute and peered over the edge, holding the Snakestone, which he had retrieved from the floor. No answer. After a moment’s hesitation he threw the stone down the shaft. There was the pinging sound of the stone bouncing against the wall of the shaft. Then silence.

An expression of panic spread over Pus Eye’s face. He began to push the buttons and levers at the side of the chute. As he pulled one, the door of the chute fell shut with a loud clang. He cursed loudly. Bang, bang, press, more buttons and levers. He rattled the door of the chute desperately, trying to prise it open. But it was no good. The chute was now fast closed. He had managed to wall up his master, dead or alive.

Wildly Pus Eye looked around the room, biting his fingernails. The sight of Jules thundering towards him, a cannonball of ginger fury, made up his mind. Cramming his cap on his head he ran to the exit. There was the sound of footsteps hastily retreating. A door slammed. The children were alone.

A flood of relief washed over Zélie, forcing tears down her cheeks. Jules, who had untied Blanche from the pillar, padded to one of the shelves lining the room and picked up a hacksaw. “I think I can cut through the clamps with this.”

Zélie’s face went pale when she saw the gleaming blade, but she bit her lip and nodded.

A sudden bang above their heads made all three of them look up. One of the storm drains above the cellar must have ruptured in the deluge. Rainwater gushed out and began to pool about their feet.

“Hurry! It’s going to flood.” Zélie’s heart missed a beat as she watched the water cascading from the burst pipe. Already it was swirling around Blanche and Jules’s ankles.

Jules splashed over to the chair and slid the saw under the clamp holding one of Zélie’s wrists. He began to saw up and down. It screeched like fingernails on a blackboard. But the clamp buckled. He sawed through the rest of the clamp then paused, sweating, before starting the next. With Blanche’s help the four sets of clamps were quickly sawn through.

At last, Zélie was free. She pulled herself off the chair and rubbed her wrists and ankles. They were stinging and covered in purple welts. “Let’s get out of here.”

They ran out of the chamber and waded through the rising floodwater to the cellar exit. Jules pushed against the door, but it was shut fast. There was the rattle of something placed across it.

Zélie’s heart hammered in her chest. “That wretch Pus Eye, he’s locked us in!”

Jules shoved the door with his shoulder and the others joined in the effort. They pushed with all their strength, but the door did not budge. The rainwater was now round their knees. Soft, squishy, furry things bumped against their legs. Blanche screamed. Glancing down, Zélie saw they were rats that the rising water was forcing out of their holes. Prising Titicaca from her neck, she laid the sloth gently on a high shelf above the doorframe. At least he would be safe there for the moment. Titicaca’s eyes opened for a sleepy minute, then shut. A contented smile played on his lips. The dampness suited him, she thought. He was probably dreaming of munching leaves in the Amazon jungle.

“It’s no use.” Jules pounded the door with his fist. He had been feeling with his fingers round the edges. “The humidity has made the wood swell. It’s stuck in the frame like a cork in a bottle.”

“HEEEEEEEELP!” Zélie cried out at the top of her voice.

They stopped to listen. Silence. Nothing but the soft, muted lapping of the water that continued to climb higher and higher.

Zélie pressed her hands to her face and groaned. This was all her fault. She had got them into this. She should never have told Blanche she had gone to the circus; she should have guessed that she would fall easy prey to Ombre. But she had blindly trusted her over Jules. Why? Because he was just a sewer boy?

Zélie Dutta, she began to remind herself. But all she could think of to add was: you’ve made a real mess of this business.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sensation of hard, cold little bites on her legs. She looked down and froze. The rats, trying to escape the rising waters, were now swarming up her skirt in an attempt to keep dry. Nipping furry little bodies with icy claws were crawling up her legs. She screamed and prised them off, flinging them away, but they kept coming back. Next to her, Jules cursed loudly as he tore from his neck an enormous grey rat which squealed loudly as he threw it off him. Blanche’s head was bobbing away, floating out of sight down the tunnel. She called out to her, but the words were swept away in the churning foam.

The water had by now reached Zélie’s neck. In a matter of minutes it would reach her mouth. The tight space left in the tunnel made it hard to breathe. Her forehead throbbed and she began to feel dizzy. Soon she knew she wouldn’t be able to cry for help any more.

She stretched out her hand towards Jules, who was thrashing helplessly next to her. Their fingers brushed each other briefly before he bobbed away, gasping. She tried to shout “I’m sorry” but her voice was drowned in the vortex of churning water.

A whirring, buzzing noise filled Zélie’s head, like a swarm of angry bees. She closed her eyes. There flashed before her that face again … the face of the woman with the mismatched eyes, the eyes that mirrored her own, the eye of the day and the eye of the night.

“M-ma…”

She just about managed to stutter the word before her head sank beneath the surface of the water. From somewhere across the flooded passageway a tall, hooded figure was striking out powerfully through the waves towards her. Long, strong fingers seized her with a pincer-like grasp. The figure dragged her down and she lashed out and kicked feebly with the little strength she had left, before her lungs opened to the incoming flood and she choked.

Bang, crash, whirr. Voices. Curses. Shouting. Hammer blows.

“Dammit, the door’s stuck fast!”

“Mon Dieu, I’m not sure it’s going to give.”

“Saints and sinners, we’ve not had a storm like this since the days of the Revolution.”

“Something fishy’s going on. There was banging on that door. Shouts for help.”

Bang, thump, crack. Splinters of wood flying. Then, whoosh, the door of the cellar burst open and a massive wall of water rushed out, sweeping three children and one sloth with it like bits of wreckage and flinging them with a crash on to the railway track.

Zélie felt herself being lifted. Shouts rang out, followed by buzzing and a dull thud. With a huge effort she lifted her heavy eyelids. Black stars danced before her vision. She tried to speak, but instead of words she spat out a pool of green puke.

After a few minutes, the stars began to settle. The noises began to separate into words and voices. Voices she knew. The high trill of Miss DeeDee. The gravelly rumble of Madame Drusilla.

Then another voice, better known than all of them, rolling in like a sea wind from a far shore. A voice that was woven into the fibre of her being along with the river and coconut palms. A well-known scent washed over her, the scent of fingers stained with rolling tobacco and citrus cologne. The hood was thrown back and two eyes smiled down at her. Dark eyes in a familiar, warm face.

“Baba,” said Zélie.

Zélie leaned back luxuriously on the red-velvet banquette at the Bistro Victoire. She sniffed the rich aroma of roast chicken that wafted from the kitchen, weaving through the clatter of plates and the hubbub of voices.

The booths at the bistro were like cosy rooms with high wood-panelled walls, just big enough to squeeze everybody in: herself, Jules, Blanche, Miss DeeDee, Madame Drusilla, David and, of course, the most important person of all. Zélie wrapped herself round her father like a liana round an old forest tree, breathing in his warm breath, feeling the sap surge in her veins, the chill that had numbed her for months slipping away in the sun. Snuggling her cheek against Robi’s coat, she feasted on his black eyes and wicked lopsided grin and the huge pile of lamb chops in front of her.

Outside, the rain drummed against the bistro windows, misted up with steam behind the red-velvet curtains. The sleeves of Miss DeeDee’s too-long blouse dipped into the gravy so Zélie rolled them up. On her lap, Titicaca was tucking into a large plate of salad. At her side, Jules and Blanche were working through generous bowls of mussels, struggling like she was with eating in clothes several sizes too big for them. Their own clothes being thoroughly drenched, there hadn’t been any option for dinner dress other than to change into things belonging to the circus folk. Which meant that they presented an odd spectacle, Zélie draped in a purple-velvet cloak of Madame Drusilla’s, Blanche in a spangly leotard of Miss DeeDee’s and Jules in a baggy yellow clown suit.

Opposite Zélie, Miss DeeDee and Madame Drusilla picked at a salade niçoise between them. David, a picture of glowing health, had just demolished a large croque-monsieur and demanded seconds.

“I can’t believe Ivan was such a villain. This poor boy, an orphan now!” Miss DeeDee shook her head. “But at least thanks to you, Zélie, the mystery has been dissolved. And David! What an extraordinary transportation.” She scratched her head with her elbow and stared at the boy. “Just an hour or so after you two left, he completely recovered from death’s door and sat up in bed, demanding a chocolate éclair! Of course Drusilla and I will be happy to take care of the little soul.”

“But he’s not having an éclair until he’s feeneeshed his dinner.” Madame Drusilla pursed her lips and frowned. “David, eeet your greens.”

“Are you sure he should be eating such a lot after being so sick?” Miss DeeDee wiggled her ears anxiously, making her spectacles move back and forth on her nose. “I’m not sure it’s wise. We should perhaps seek advice from a nutritionist.”

“Rubbeesh, it’s common sense.” Madame Drusilla snorted and puffed on her pipe. “If we’re going to parent this child, Victorina, you mustn’t be so hysterical.”

“David recovered an hour after we left? That would have been around the time I got the Snakestone off Ivan.” Zélie stopped munching and stared at the rosy-cheeked little boy. “That proves the legend of the stone is true. It might bring enormous power, but it destroys those closest to you. Thank goodness it’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Miss DeeDee and Madame Drusilla chorused together, eyebrows shooting up in unison.

“Where?” asked Madame Drusilla.

“I dunno, and I don’t care.” Zélie scowled at her plate. “It disappeared in the cellar. Good riddance to it.”

“But it will turn up again.” Robi said the words so softly that they were barely audible.

Jules’s ears pricked up. “Turn up again? How?”

“Who knows?” Robi’s voice was as deep and sonorous as the wind on the sea. He smiled but his eyes were sad as he stroked his goatee beard thoughtfully. “As long as there’s evil in the world, the stone will show up at some point. It’s just biding its time, that’s all. The Le Vandale family traded that stone with your French grandfather for some land. He was a selfish man, who as you know deserted his family to pursue a hugely successful army career. But perhaps it was best that he did, because he took the stone with its evil influence out of our household. When he died, I was sent to collect his possessions, and in a locked casket in his barracks I found the stone. I should have cast it away immediately! But I had no idea of its power, and even if I had known, as a man of science I doubt I’d have believed it. For a year the stone remained in its casket in my office, forgotten. All went well, and my career prospered. But then your mother died. Only after her death did I hear, from a friend of your grandfather’s, the story of the stone. While I could not be sure of it, I was haunted by a dread that your mother was a victim of its curse. That’s why I took the stone from its locket and hid it in the eye of the gargoyle. I thought that by hiding it there it would be safe from falling into bad hands. How wrong I was. That wily Ivan saw me hiding it and stole it for himself.”

A cloud of patchouli perfume descended on them as a short stocky woman in a gold-spangled cloak appeared at the café door and strode towards them.

“Robi!” the woman boomed, as Zélie’s dad jumped up and gave her a hug.

Robi beamed, making space for her on the banquette. “Meet Miss La-La, the keeper of the secret of the Snakestone. I wanted to leave a clue for Zélie as to the stone’s hiding place just in case something happened to me. What better clue than a slide for a Phantasmagoria lantern, one of our favourite family games, and what better hiding place than the harness of one of my dearest friends? I thought my plans were so clever, so foolproof. How wrong I was.”

“There’s no point regretting the past,” said Miss La-La softly. “What’s done is done.” Her voice was rich and treacly, and her black curls shone in the candlelight.

Zélie tugged at the loose robe that her father was wearing. “Baba, were you the hooded figure I saw lurking at the door of the Café Poison? You gave those villains such a fright!” She laughed at the memory of Garlic Breath and Pus Eye cowering at the sight of the spooky figure outside the café the day before.

Robi smiled. “Yes, that was me all right. After I broke out of prison, I came straight to the circus to check the stone was still in the eye of the gargoyle. Of course I realised immediately that it had been replaced by a fake. Having heard of Professor Lestrange’s death, I guessed that the Brotherhood would be after the Snakestone for its own evil purposes, and I was sure Brother Ombre had taken it, so I tailed him night and day. Unfortunately I didn’t see you in that stinking dark hole of a café. I thought you were, if not exactly happy, at least safe at the house in Rue Morgue. But it all worked out in the end!”

Zélie shuddered. “Ugh, that sinister Brotherhood of Blood. Thank goodness they didn’t get their hands on the Snakestone. Imagine, Professor Lestrange tried to conjure it from the toilet by flushing the locket into the sewers using some horrible black magic!”

Madame Drusilla frowned disapprovingly. “Magic is a force of nature and neither good nor bad of itself, Zélie. It’s the people who use it that make it so.”

Zélie nodded. “I suppose you’re right.” Her thoughts went back to the vision of her mother, the vision that had led her to the answer to her dad’s riddle. Magic or intuition? She would never know. The world, she was fast realising, was a more mysterious place than she had ever imagined. More mysterious than she liked. She changed the subject. “Baba, you haven’t yet told us your plan of how to deal with those deceitful Malaises who stole Ma’s invention.”

Robi smiled. “Well, now we have the slide, we can present it to the police and Madame will soon be on trial for fraud. And the prize money awarded to Docteur Malaise for the discovery of the bitterweed cure should revert to us, as the heirs of your mother, the person who really discovered it. Your mother died the year she discovered the cure, and what I ought to have done was immediately make her discovery public. But I just wanted to make sure she was right – foolishly, perhaps – by doing some research myself first, and only revealing it when I was sure. And then, of course, I very stupidly told Docteur Malaise about it when he came to the Botanical Society for that permit. But he seemed so enthusiastic and genuine. Of course he just wanted to steal the glory of the discovery for himself. I’m a blockhead.”

He turned to Jules and ruffled his hair affectionately. “Anyway, enough of all that. As Miss La-La says, the past is the past. What do you intend to do with yourself, young man, now this escapade is over?”

Jules looked glum. His face turned red and he stared down at his plate. “I dunno. Go back to cleaning sewers with my dad, I guess.”

“That seems a bit of a waste, after such an adventure. Why don’t you come back with Zélie and me to India for a few months at least? It would do you good to travel and see the world a little.” Robi’s eyes suddenly shone, his face glowed in the lamplight and his voice lit up with a new fire. “There’s a revolution coming in India, you know. Like there was in France. It may be decades away as yet, but it will come. And it will start in old Bengal.”

“Oh, please, Jules, say yes!” Zélie put a hand on his shoulder. “That would be perfect.”

“I dunno. No, thanks for the offer, Monsieur Dutta, but I think not.” Jules’s voice had sunk to a barely audible mumble. “I’ve got my own dad to think about. I’m all he’s got. I don’t think I’m suited to adventures. I’ve been only too happy to help Zélie and all that, but really all I want is a quiet life.”

“All right.” Robi’s gaze fixed on Jules thoughtfully.

“What about you, Blanche?” Zélie turned to the older girl. “What are you going to do? You can’t go back to working on Rue Morgue if Madame is sent to prison.”

There was a long pause. Blanche turned bright red, while Jules fiddled nervously with his spoon. Madame Drusilla coughed. Miss DeeDee began twisting her fingers into reef knots.

“Well,” said Blanche at last, “I suppose I’ll have to find another job. I’ve got to pay for Christine, after all.”

“No!” Zélie threw down her cutlery with such a clatter that everybody jumped. “You can’t go back to being a slave for some cruel gentlewoman. It’s not fair—”

“We’ll take them both!” Miss DeeDee piped up. “Er … won’t we, Drusilla? If we’re taking David on, we might as well take Blanche and her sister too.”

“What?” Madame Drusilla’s eyes bulged like a bullfrog. She began to choke on the olive she had popped into her mouth. “Victorina, your emotions are taking you over! Three children – it’s too much, especially at our age. We’re not spring chickens any more, darling.”

“Oh please, Drusilla!” Miss DeeDee’s face had gone flamingo pink, and her nose quivered with excitement.

“Of course!” cried Zélie. “Blanche isn’t a baby. She can work as a seamstress at the circus, making the costumes. She’s brilliant at sewing.”

“Yes, and I’ll look after Christine when Blanche is working. I can train her to be a contortionist; she’s young enough to learn. Christine the Convoluted Contortionist, the wonder of the Cirque Fantastique! Ooh, I’ve always wanted a little girl…” Miss DeeDee clapped her elbows in excitement.

“Oh please, Madame Drusilla…” Zélie grasped the fortune-teller’s plump hand.

Blanche said nothing, but her eyes glowed like green sparks.

Madame Drusilla thought for a moment. Then she grunted and nodded her head. “Well, all right, I suppose, if you inseest.” She drew a long breath from her pipe. “It would be nice for David to have siblings.”

“Exactly! You’re absolutely spot on, Drusilla.” Miss DeeDee jumped up and did a gleeful cartwheel, almost tripping up a passing waiter.

“It’s the perfect solution!” Zélie’s clouded face burst into sunshine. “I can’t imagine better parents than the pair of you for David, Blanche and Christine.”

“That’s enough talking for now.” Madame Drusilla knocked out her pipe on her boot, bangles jangling and flashing in the lamplight. “We’ve come to the most important part of the evening. Dessert.”

David squealed and clapped his hands, and everybody else joined in, as a penguin-coated waiter staggered towards them, balancing an enormous bottle of champagne on a tray piled with chocolate éclairs.

The horn of the steamship honked loud and hollow across the bay. Zélie jumped up and down, waving furiously at the five diminutive figures standing on the quayside, just visible through the smoke. The slim forms of Blanche and Miss DeeDee, the squat outline of Madame Drusilla, and two small children. Madame Drusilla clutched David’s hand, and in her arms Miss DeeDee held a small tempestuous little girl with a shock of bright red hair, who was pummelling the wind blowing across the docks with pugnacious little fists. Mademoiselle Christine had her big sister’s hair and a temper to match, Zélie thought. But she could already stand on her head and cross her eyes, feats of which Miss DeeDee was extremely proud, and about which she would boast to anybody who would listen.

Zélie smiled and leaned over the ship’s railings. She barely recognised the face that gazed back at her from the calm blue water. A slender girl in a heavily beaded tunic, billowy scarf and a tiny sparkly dot on her forehead. Gold bangles on her wrists, bought with the bitterweed prize money, tinkled in the breeze. Even Titicaca – who had by now grown a little large to wrap round Zélie’s neck and was hanging off the ship’s railing instead – looked slightly dazzled. Robi was lounging in a chair on deck, puffing on his pipe and idly reading the newspaper. Every so often his fingers would reach up and squeeze the locket that now sparkled from a chain round his neck.

Zélie looked at the seagulls wheeling overhead and thought of the bright mynah birds that would soon be replacing them. Of the crooked apartment building in Bowbazar Street, and of Grandma Tami in her wicker rocking chair.

“I bet Titicaca will love India.” Zélie stroked the sloth gently on the forehead.

Robi frowned sceptically. “Hmm. We shall see. We may have to take him back to his true home on the Amazon if he doesn’t settle.”

“No! I want Titicaca to stay with me forever.” Zélie stamped her foot. She’d been gutted to leave Rodolphe behind, even though Miss DeeDee promised to leave crumbs for him daily on the corner of Rue Morgue. She wasn’t losing the sloth too. “How could you even think of it, Baba? Titicaca saved my life—”

She was cut off by Robi abruptly jumping from the deckchair, scattering his pipe and its contents over the floor. “Look here! There’s a turn-up for the book. Madame Malaise’s gone missing!”

“Missing?” Zélie’s mouth hung open.

“Yes, see – here’s the headline. ‘Society Lady Jumps Jail.’ She was due to be tried for fraud this week, but she vanished from prison last night, according to this article.”

“Oh, that’s awful.” Zélie made a face. Secretly her heart gave a sigh of relief. She was no fan of Madame but didn’t wish the Paris jail on anybody. She changed the subject. “Let’s give one last wave to DeeDee and Drusilla.” She waved her handkerchief frantically. Tears began to stream down her face, whether from sadness at leaving her circus friends or happiness at finally returning home she was not sure. And Jules. Leaving him behind was the saddest thing of all. She understood that he hadn’t wanted to come and say goodbye. But she still felt a little hurt about it.

The ship’s horn gave one last honk and the sailors jumped on the quay to loosen the anchor. Soon they would be chugging through the blue sea, back to the place she loved most in the world. Home.

“What’s that commotion on the quay?” Robi was frowning. “Late passenger by the looks of it. Hope it doesn’t hold us up too much. The wind is lifting this evening, so we need to set sail as soon as possible.” He settled contentedly back in his chair and was soon engrossed in his paper again.

Zélie squinted at the figures below, trying to see what was going on.

A short wiry figure was approaching the ship. It was a boy in a peaked cap. Beside him was a stocky man in a cloth cap and overalls. The older man seemed to be arguing with the sailors. There were raised voices. The man showed the sailors some papers. Whatever the argument was, it seemed to be resolved, because the sailors finally let the boy on. The man remained on the quay, waving.

Zélie glanced at the boy. Then she looked again. Her chin dropped and hit the boards of the deck. “Mon Dieu. It’s Jules! He’s on the ship!” She waved frantically at the boy.

He didn’t see her, so she raced down the deck to the gangway where the landing board was being pulled up by the crew.

Jules was standing on deck, hanging on to the ship’s railings for dear life and looking green. He had on a newish-looking suit she hadn’t seen him wear before and a scrubbed look on his face, which looked uncomfortably soapy. A small, battered suitcase was at his feet.

“Jules!” Zélie rushed to him in a jangle of bracelets and bliss. She threw her arms round him and gave him such a tight hug that he groaned and pulled away. “I’m so glad you changed your mind. Why did you?” She grinned at him.

“Keep your hair on. It was my dad who persuaded me to come and join you. He said I should. That I shouldn’t miss the opportunity.” Jules blushed, turning from green to bright red, then gaped. “What’s happened to you?”

“It’s a fancy new outfit that Baba bought for me.” It was Zélie’s turn to blush. “Do you think I look silly?”

“No.” Jules shook his head. “You look … beautiful. Like a princess.”

Zélie smiled. Then she frowned. “But, you know, the thing I liked wearing best in the world was your clothes. Is that weird?”

“No.” Jules shrugged his shoulders. “What does it matter what you wear? You’re the same person inside, whether you’re dressed like a princess or a sewer boy. Never judge a book by its cover, remember.”

“Yes,” said Zélie. “That reminds me.” She grinned, picking up the battered copy of The Parisian Lady’s Maid’s Handbook, which lay on the table beside her now dozing father. She ripped the cover off the book, walked to the railings and tossed it into the waves. “I don’t need that any more.” She looked down and fiddled with a bangle. “Look, I’m sorry for not listening to you, really I am. You were right about so many things. About Blanche, about loads of stuff. Can you forgive me?”

Jules grinned. “I guess so. As long as you promise not to do it again. And please don’t be too polite to me. I’ll worry that something’s wrong with you.”

Zélie grinned and stuck out her tongue. “Let’s wave to them all on shore one more time.” She turned and waved frantically at her circus friends. Not far from them, near the ship’s old mooring spot, the short swarthy figure – Jules’s dad surely – waved slowly back. She smiled at Jules. “You’ll see a palm tree for the first time. Actually lots of palm trees. I’ll teach you to climb them.” She paused. Something had caught her eye on the quayside. Or rather, someone. A tall, skinny person in a maid’s outfit, struggling with a suitcase behind a grand sulky-looking lady in a fur coat. The pair were running along the quay towards a steamboat bound for Marseille. “Jules, Jules, look! That woman there! It’s Madame Malaise! I recognise her. She’s in the uniform of a lady’s maid!”

“What?” Jules screwed up his eyes in the autumn sun. “It can’t be her. You must be mistaken. She’s in prison.”

“No, she’s not.” Zélie shook her head. “She’s escaped; it was in the newspaper. She must have gone into hiding as a maid. Ha! That will teach her a thing or two, being on the other side of it all.”

“Who cares about the rubbish Malaises anyway?” Jules sat down on his suitcase and gazed out to sea, his hands propping up his chin. “Fancy, I’m going to see a palm tree at last!”

Zélie smiled. “What happened to your snails, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette?”

Jules grinned. “I set them free. As you said, they’re not the most exciting pets. I guess I don’t need them any more now I’ve decided to have an adventurous life.”

Zélie laughed. “Shall I get us a drink? There’s a man selling chocolat chaud on the deck below.”

“Yes please.” Jules turned to where Robi had been dozing in the deckchair. He had just woken up and was staring open-mouthed at Jules. “Good morning, Monsieur Dutta. I changed my mind, as you can see!”

Zélie left her father chatting to Jules and made her way to the lower deck and the hot chocolate man. On her way down the steps, she almost bumped into a kindly-looking old gentleman in a Panama hat.

“Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry,” the man said. “Please excuse me—What ho, what bizarre eyes you have, girl!” He stared at her, not unkindly but with great wonder.

Zélie scowled. The hairs bristled on the nape of her neck. She started to stalk past. And then she stopped. She turned on her heel and walked back to the stranger. She lifted her chin in the air.

“Actually it’s not bizarre. It’s called heterochromia iridum. I inherited it from my mother. It’s incredibly rare but is quite harmless and does not impact my vision.”

The elderly man’s eyes twinkled. “Is that so? Well, I guess that means you are a rather special young lady, aren’t you?”

Zélie drew in her breath. “Yes.” She smiled back. “Yes, I think it does.”

She turned and continued to descend the steps to the lower deck.

Zélie Dutta, she told herself, you have heterochromia iridum and a friend called Jules and a pet sloth called Titicaca. You have vanquished a bad man and saved the planet, well, at least for the time being, and you are a princess. You are magnificent inside and out.

When she reached the hot chocolate stand, she smiled at the attendant. She smiled at the blue sky and the big beautiful blue sea. Because she knew now that whatever the world threw at her, she, Zélie Dutta of Bowbazar Street, would be able to take it on.

In the sunlight under the Eiffel Tower sat a sewer rat. Crowds of people milled about the tower. They had come from all over the world to see this iconic monument, but the rat was not interested in it or them.

The rat scurried into a drain and down, down, down into the bowels of the city. It ran through the tunnels of the disused railway that had once skirted the old city. It ran along the gleaming tracks of the Métro lines that had replaced the railway. The rat ran and it ran until it reached a spot in the north of the city, in the shadow of the aged hulk of the Sacré-Coeur, where some children were playing in an old abandoned coal cellar with a rubbish chute.

The rat hopped on to the heap of ancient rubble on the chute. Through its beady eyes it spotted a skeleton. The skeleton’s bony hand seemed to be clawing for an object just out of reach: an egg-shaped red stone that glistened in the dim light. Waves of vibration flowed from the stone. The rat scrabbled hard to get away, sensing something deep and slow and older than the city or the earth upon which it was built.

One of the children spotted the skeleton. His mouth dropped open. “Hey, what’s this!” He turned to call the others. But then he caught sight of the gleaming red thing. He picked it up curiously. A funny red stone. It stung his hand like a wasp. He yelped, dropping it back on the ground. Behind him he could hear the footsteps of the other children coming.

The boy glanced around furtively, then quickly picked up the stone with his sleeve to stop it burning him. He slipped it into his pocket. Then he ran to meet his friends, clambering with them out of the cellar into the street, and vanished into the crowds.

Author’s Note

While Secrets of the Snakestone is very firmly a work of fiction, the roots of the story are grounded in fact. The action takes place in Paris in the 1890s, during the period known as the Belle Époque – a rollicking time famous for the swinging cabaret of the Moulin Rouge, the art of the Impressionists and the cancan. But life in late-nineteenth-century France, as in Victorian England, was no bed of roses, especially for poorer children. There were children who slipped through the net like Blanche, who from poverty and the necessity of working to support a family, missed out on the Jules Ferry educational reforms. Servants in wealthy European houses, although not technically slaves, were widely mistreated and abused.

The story of the Snakestone is based on the legends attached to some famous real-life diamonds originating in India, including the allegedly cursed Hope diamond in the Smithsonian Institute, USA, the Orlov diamond currently housed in Moscow, the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the British Crown Jewels, and the Régent diamond in the Paris Louvre. The Calcutta Botanical Society is fictional, and Bowbazar Street, although a real street in Calcutta (now Kolkata), is now known as Bepin Behari Ganguly Street.

Some of the characters in the story are inspired by actual people. Miss La-La was a flesh-and-blood Paris circus performer, famed for her “iron jaw” act. She was even painted by the artist Edgar Degas, a painting that hangs in London’s National Gallery today. Some of the “steampunk contraptions” that feature in the story are real: the Air Conditioning Hat and the Alarm Gun are based on patents filed in the nineteenth century. The magic lantern/Phantasmagoria was a popular entertainment at this time, which was just prior to the introduction of the first moving picture films by the Lumière Brothers in Paris in December 1895, only two months after the events recounted in this book.

Zélie’s favourite book, The Mysteries of Paris, is an actual book by the French novelist Eugène Sue, published in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Featuring the heroic Count Rodolphe and his trusty assistant Murph, it was sensationally popular and also inspired some of the scenes in this book. The extract from the book read to Blanche by Zélie is taken from the public domain English translation of the book on Project Gutenberg, and I am indebted to Sue for inspiring the Café Poison and cellar flooding scenes. Zélie’s favourite sport, kickboxing, was an early French form of the sport that contributed to modern kickboxing, which was finally recognised as an Olympic sport in 2021.

The old railway that circled Paris before the arrival of the Métro at the turn of the century really existed, and its ruins are still visible in parts of Paris today. There have been various famous circuses at different points in time at Montmartre, some in the same location as that marked on the map for the Cirque Fantastique. Rue Morgue and (thankfully) the Brotherhood of Blood are fictional, although the latter draws inspiration from legendary pseudoscientific secret societies, such as the Illuminati. While the Paris sewers and Catacombs are very real, and parts of them can still be visited (strongly recommended for a creepy experience!), the layouts, underground passages, sewer networks and chambers described in this book are entirely the product of my imagination.

Piu DasGupta
Paris, 2024

Acknowledgements

To bring a book to publication requires a veritable army of people behind it. I should begin my acknowledgements with a thank you to my agent Kate Shaw, who appreciated Zélie from the very beginning. A huge thank you also to my original commissioning editor Tom Bonnick, amazing subsequent editor Fiona Scoble, assistant editor Halimah Manan, and all at my publisher Nosy Crow, especially Kate Wilson, Kirsty Stansfield, Elisabetta Barbazza for the book design, Jennie Roman for the careful copyedit, and Hannah Prutton for the publicity. Thank you also to Helen Crawford-White for the superb cover design and Hannah Kettle in Nosy Crow marketing.

I am grateful to my first team of child readers at the Ecole Jeannine Manuel in Paris, whose insights and suggestions helped steer Zélie in the right direction: Smayan, Marie, Lena, Ximi, Leo, Maxine, Clément and Gabriel, you will doubtless be too old to read this book when it finally comes out, but I hope you will have fond memories of our discussion! And of course a big thank you to your teacher who organised our feedback sessions, the amazing Mrs Laura May Nequest!

Thanks are also due to my adult readers, who checked the manuscript carefully and gave insightful feedback on a whole range of questions: Chloe Beaudouin, Arunava Sinha and Rebecca Perkin. An especial thank you to Besjana Gorreja (“Besy”), founder and head of the organisation Heterochromatics, a mine of wisdom and learning on heterochromia. Anybody wanting to know more about this fascinating and little-understood phenomenon should check out the Heterochromatics website at www.heterochromatics.org and/or follow them on Instagram: @heterochromatics.

A heartfelt thank you to the many people who provided critical feedback and support on this book’s long journey to publication: Faber Academy and Curtis Brown Creative; my first critique group the Dead Pets Society; the wise Catherine Johnson, Lindsay Galvin and Carolyn Ward; and Stuart White and Florianne Humphrey at WriteMentor.

A final thanks to Nikolai, Alek, Oscar and Noah, without whose patience and support this book would never have been written.

Copyright

First published in the UK in 2024 by Nosy Crow Ltd
Wheat Wharf, 27a Shad Thames,
London, SE1 2XZ, UK

Nosy Crow Eireann Ltd
44 Orchard Grove, Kenmare,
Co Kerry, V93 FY22, Ireland

Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered
trademarks of Nosy Crow Ltd

Text copyright © Piu DasGupta, 2024
Cover illustration copyright © Helen Crawford-White, 2024

The right of Piu DasGupta to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978 1 83994 631 8
eISBN: 978 1 83994 63 2 5

A CIP catalogue record for this book will be available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of Nosy Crow Ltd.

The publisher and copyright holders prohibit the use of either text or illustrations to develop any generative machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) models or related technologies.

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