The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “Can you see her?” I whispered to Miss Coburn.

  “No.” She looked up at me. “You lead.”

  My spine was being replaced, vertebra by vertebra, with cubes of ice, but I followed Madeline Stanhope into the Contemporary Art gallery.

  Halfway down the gallery, Miss Coburn whispered to me, “Where do you think she’s going?”

  “ . . . I’m afraid she wants to show me something.”

  There was a pause. “Oh,” said Miss Coburn, “I see what you mean.”

  Madeline Stanhope turned from Contemporary Art into Medieval, walked through Medieval into Renaissance, and from there into Decorative Arts. She came to a halt in front of the case containing the Venebretti Necklace.

  I heard Miss Coburn’s breath hiss in. Then she whispered, “I can see her now.”

  The revenant of Madeline Stanhope walked slowly around the case, as if inspecting the necklace from all angles. Then she turned to us, placed her hand on top of the case, and stared at us with the dark conflagration of her eyes.

  Miss Coburn caught at my elbow. “Look!”

  I could not help my flinch, but I followed the direction of her pointing finger. Clearly visible on Madeline Stanhope’s wrist, dark and ugly against the glass case, was a shackle. I felt faint and queasy and cold. Together, Miss Coburn and I backed away until we could sit down on the nearest bench. Madeline Stanhope’s burning eyes marked our progress, but she made no movement either to stop us or to follow us.

  “Booth,” said Miss Coburn, very quietly and calmly, “I think perhaps now would be a good time for you to tell me what Havilland DeWitt did.”

  “I, er . . . yes, I suppose so.” I glanced uneasily at Madeline Stanhope.

  “She’ll wait,” Miss Coburn said. “She’ll wait until the end of time if she has to. Talk.”

  “It was the curse,” I said, because everything was fitting into place in my head, all the pieces lining up as I had known they would as soon as I let myself think about it. “At least, part of it was the curse.”

  “Go on.”

  “He wanted the necklace. You could see it, couldn’t you? In his memorandum book? It’s no very large step from wanting the necklace kept safe from museum patrons to . . . to wanting the necklace kept safe from everyone.”

  “No, but you haven’t proved he took that step.”

  “That’s the books. That list of books.”

  “Wasn’t he trying to break the curse?”

  “No. Not with those books. Maybe he started there, but the books in Latin—those were all necromantic texts, and the necromancers of that time had some—”

  “Booth. Spare me the lecture on Renaissance necromancy, and tell me what he did.”

  “Havilland DeWitt had a plan, and . . . and I think I know what it was. He wanted the necklace for himself, because that’s how the curse works. But he was the museum director—important man, important friends, reputation to maintain. He needed a . . . he needed someone else to take the blame.”

  “All right,” Miss Coburn said, although she still looked dubious.

  Madeline Stanhope stood by the case, watching us, her eyes full of hunger and rage. I was grateful that she was not coming any closer.

  I went on: “And I believe he was quite sincere about wanting to keep the necklace safe. After all, he was planning to keep it in his own house—”

  “How—”

  “Wait. Let me finish. It was going to be vulnerable to burglars, inquisitive servants, prying house-guests. I guess that what happened . . . that he asked himself how Maria Vittoria Venebretti would have solved his, er, problem—”

  “And thus the works on her and on Renaissance magic.”

  “Yes. He found his answer in the Imperium Orbis of Carolus Albinus. Albinus talks about how to command all sorts of things: Hebrew golems, spirits of fire and air—”

  “Booth.”

  “Sorry. Right. Albinus also talks about how to command the dead.”

  “Merde,” said Miss Coburn.

  “ . . . Yes. Mr. DeWitt found that the two halves of his problem solved each other. He needed a . . . a suspect who would never show up to prove his—or in this case her—guilt, and he needed . . . ” I realized I was staring at Madeline Stanhope and looked away. “He needed a dead body.”

  “But chaining her to the wall?”

  “I haven’t read a great deal . . . that is, I don’t like this kind of spell. But this sort of . . . of guardian needs to be . . . it’s an avatar of fury, is how I understand it.”

  We were both looking at Madeline Stanhope now. She was staring back at us, her lips pulled away from her sharp teeth. One hand was resting on the glass case, and I could see the tension of the fingers, yearning to reach through the glass to touch the necklace itself.

  “And it worked,” I said, distantly amazed at how level my voice was when most of my mind was screaming. “She was bound to the necklace just as he desired, and the hue and cry went up after her—all the way to San Francisco according to your aunt.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then Mr. DeWitt was hoist by his own petard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He waited a year. Then he offered a perfectly innocent explanation for wandering around in the basements at all hours and went down to take the necklace back. But he was a stupid man, and he didn’t understand . . . that is, he forgot to tell her not to guard it from him.”

  “So the heart attack . . . ”

  “I don’t think it was coincidence.”

  “But why—nothing happened to us!”

  “Philip Burney—who is also on Mr. DeWitt’s list—says that the dead see only by moonlight. And I think she must be limited . . . she must have a radius of influence, with the necklace as its focus. Or else why wouldn’t she . . . that is, I’m often in the museum after moonrise. But people just aren’t in the galleries at this time of night.”

  “The watchman’s supposed to be,” Miss Coburn muttered.

  “Yes, well . . . ”

  The revenant was still standing, still staring.

  “Miss Coburn,” I said, “what happened to Madeline Stanhope’s bones?”

  “I don’t know. Why does it matter? Shouldn’t we be figuring out what she wants?”

  “Oh, I know what she wants. I’m just afraid to give it to her.”

  I felt Miss Coburn’s swift glance, but I could not take my eyes off Madeline Stanhope; I was too frightened.

  “She wants the necklace,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Quite sure.”

  “We can’t give it to her. Starkweather will slay us.”

  “She wants it,” I said, looking at the predatory teeth, the strong angry hands. “It’s hers now. And I can’t help thinking Maria Vittoria Venebretti would be pleased.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “What choice do you think we have?”

  “Oh,” said Miss Coburn in a very small voice.

  As a senior archivist, I had the master key for the display cases. I took out my key ring and got to my feet. I could feel my hands shaking, but I advanced to the case. Madeline Stanhope watched me come, her eyes like the pits of Gehenna. I unlocked the case, opened the door. I could not bring myself to touch the necklace. Madeline Stanhope’s white hand snaked in past me, seizing the necklace in a grip like a vulture’s claw. As she pulled it out, her arm brushed mine; even through my coat and shirt, I could feel the burning cold of her flesh, like dry ice. She smiled at me, a terrible smile, full of teeth, and fastened the necklace around her throat. As I watched, sick and petrified, her eyes slowly filled with an unearthly green light, the same color as the emeralds that now gleamed on her chest and shoulders. I lurched back a step, unable to stay near her, consumed with terror that she might touch me again.

  Then my eyes clouded, or the room darkened, for she was gone, and I did not see which way she went. Mechanically, I reached into the case and flipped over the placard, so that
the side reading, REMOVED FOR CLEANING, was uppermost. I closed the case again and locked it.

  I turned back to Miss Coburn as I returned my keys to my pocket and found her sitting with a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the bench. “My God, Booth,” she said faintly. “Did you see her leave?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “No.” She shuddered convulsively, ending with a shake of her head as if it were something she wished to dislodge from her spine. “I understand now why you didn’t want to open this particular Pandora’s box.”

  “Come on. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “No,” she agreed, getting to her feet. “We’d better sneak back and look normal.”

  “Normal?” The reality of the Museum Ball crashed back in on me. “How can we . . . we . . . the staircase . . . ”

  Miss Coburn grinned at me. “They’ll just think we’ve been necking.”

  “Oh, God, no.”

  “If we go back right now, they won’t think we’ve done anything worse.”

  I stared at her for a moment before I realized that she was not joking. “Then, please, let’s go.”

  We went, hastily, furtively, both of us glancing back nervously over our shoulders.

  “Where do you think she went?” Miss Coburn asked.

  “Where have they put her bones?”

  “Oh. Oh dear. Do you think . . . ”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “God help me, I do, too.”

  “She has the necklace,” I said, trying to comfort us both.

  “Yes,” said Miss Coburn, “but what worries me is what she may do to keep it.”

  And to that I had no reply.

  The loss of the Venebretti necklace was not realized until nearly six months later. Neither Miss Coburn nor I fell under suspicion, since the two persons with the legitimate authority to remove the necklace—Dr. Starkweather and Mr. Browne, the head of Restoration and Repairs—hated each other with a passion that would have made the daughters of King Lear proud. Each assumed that the other had taken it, and when it came out that no one in the museum knew where the necklace was, Dr. Starkweather insisted furiously that Mr. Browne had squirreled it away, and Mr. Browne maintained, apoplectically, that Dr. Starkweather must have damaged it—Dr. Starkweather’s rough and clumsy hands were the bane of Restoration and Repairs—and then hidden it rather than confessing to his crime like an honorable man. In the miasma of their mutual venom, no one thought to ask any of the simple questions, such as when the necklace had last been seen and who had the keys to its case, and the idea that the necklace might be genuinely lost never arose. The new inventory pleased Dr. Starkweather, but it did not change the fact that many things lost in the Parrington are never found again.

  And so all was serene, although I confess that to this day, when my mind turns to Madeline Stanhope and the Venebretti Necklace, I cannot help imagining her, somewhere in the darkness of the museum basements, stroking the emeralds with her cold white fingers and smiling, smiling.

  THE BONE KEY

  I had been in the paper when the Parrington opened its new fossil exhibit, an ugly, gawky presence half-hidden behind a diplodocus skull. That was why the letter came to me at work; the envelope, hand-written in a spidery copperplate with velvet-black ink, was addressed to Mr. Kyle Murchison Booth, c/o the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum. The return address was the Belfontaine Hotel.

  The letter was from someone who signed himself L. M. Ogilvy, Esq. He was a semi-retired lawyer, he said, and he was writing on behalf of a client who had been dead for twenty years. His client, Regina Murchison, had wished to leave a legacy to her granddaughter, Thekla Murchison, and Mr. Ogilvy had been instructed to institute a search, armed with only the knowledge that Thekla had married a man named Grimbold Booth and moved to this part of the country; being in the city on another client’s business, he had observed my picture in the newspaper and noted the unusual conjunction of my names. Therefore (he wrote), he wondered if I might be the son of the woman he sought. If I was, and could produce proof of my identity, he thought we might have a very profitable little chat. As well, there was a daguerreotype of Thekla Murchison which I might be interested in seeing.

  The names were right; difficult though it was for me to believe, this lawyer seemed truly to be a representative of my mother’s family. I had only been twelve when my parents died, and they had never talked to me about their pasts. I knew my father had no family and had always assumed the same was true of my mother. By the time I was old enough that I might have found better answers among their effects, their belongings had all been sold, stolen, or destroyed by my guardians, the Siddonses. Even my memories of my parents were faded, crumpled, stained. A picture of my mother, a chance to rebuild her face around the wide dark eyes that were all I remembered . . .

  I wrote to Mr. Ogilvy. My letter was stiff and cautious; I knew that as I was writing it, but I could not help it. I wrote merely that I had been orphaned young and knew nothing of my parents, further that I would be pleased to meet with Mr. Ogilvy, if a mutually convenient time could be found, and signed myself, sincerely, Kyle Murchison Booth. It was a dreadful letter, and posting it felt like the worst mistake I had ever made.

  Mr. Ogilvy wrote back promptly, suggesting that I should come to his room in the Belfontaine that Friday evening. And since I could not find any excuse not to, I wrote back to say that would be convenient.

  The great edifice of the Belfontaine Hotel loomed up out of the darkness and spitting snow and swallowed me whole, like a giant in a fairytale swallowing a fool. The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city’s cold gloom. Inside, it was warm, red velvet and brass, an echoing clamor of the elite and the demimonde. I asked at the desk for Mr. Ogilvy and was directed to Room 334. I took the stairs.

  The third floor was the same red velvet and brass as the lobby, the numbers gleaming on the dark-paneled doors. I found 334 and knocked. After a pause that seemed interminable but lasted probably no more than five seconds, I heard the chain being released and the bolt drawn back.

  The door swung open, and I was confronting L. M. Ogilvy. I am generally very slow in forming impressions of people, but I disliked Mr. Ogilvy from the moment I laid eyes on him. He was probably seventy or so, a small, shriveled, dried-up man with a sour, twisted mouth. He wore an ugly brown suit with an even uglier burgundy bow-tie, and his sparse white hair was neatly combed. His eyes were brown, the same mud-brown as his suit, and slightly pop, giving him a strong resemblance to a desiccated toad. I had ample time to remark the likeness, for he stared at me in silence for some moments before saying, “You must be Kyle Booth.” His voice was bull-frog deep, but as dry as the rest of him.

  “Yes.”

  “Come in, please,” he said and stood aside.

  The desire to refuse wrenched at me like an undertow, but since I had admitted to my identity, I could not commit the atrocious rudeness of running away. It was beyond my capacity. I entered the hotel room.

  “Sit down,” said Mr. Ogilvy. I sat, in an uncomfortable armchair; he took the other, so close that we were almost knee to knee. He smelled overwhelmingly of pipe tobacco, a scent I have always found unpleasant.

  “Make yourself comfortable. Do you smoke?”

  “No, er, thank you,” I said.

  “Well, I do,” he said, with a croaking noise that he probably meant to be a laugh. He pulled out a meerschaum pipe and a tobacco pouch. I watched, repelled and fascinated, as he stuffed the bowl of the pipe with tobacco and then expended an amazing quantity of matches in getting it lit. Finally, though, he said, “So then, you’re Thekla Murchison’s son.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Did you bring any proof of your identity?”

  I did, in fact, have my birth certificate in the inside pocket of my suit coat, but my dislike of Mr. Ogilvy had been growing steadily, and his tobacco smoke was making me light-headed. I said, “Is my hair not proof enough?”

  My answer see
med to please him, for he croaked out another laugh and said, “So you know about the Murchison hair, do you?”

  “My mother told me before she died.”

  “Ah, yes. And that was when?”

  “Twenty-three years ago. I was twelve.”

  “I see. Why did the executors not get in touch with your mother’s family?”

  “I don’t know. I was only a child.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He waved that away in a cloud of pipe smoke. “Well, you certainly look like a Murchison, but I’m afraid we lawyers can’t proceed by appearances alone.” He laughed again.

  “Of course not,” I said. My birth certificate sat like a dead mouse in my pocket, but I did not want, for no reason that I could explain, to give it to Mr. Ogilvy. “What sort of proof would satisfy you?”

  I fully expected him to ask for documents—at which point my foolishness would be rebuked and I would produce my birth certificate like any normal person—but instead, he asked, “How did your mother die?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “If she died twenty-three years ago, she must have been what? About thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-four,” I said.

  “Then how did she die?”

  “How will this constitute proof of my identity?”

  “Just answer the question, Mr. Booth,” Mr. Ogilvy said. For a moment, he looked to me less like a toad than like a crocodile.

  “She committed suicide the night of my father’s death.” I remembered sitting on the stairs, alone and unregarded, listening to the harsh, terrible sound of her crying. She had come out of my father’s room and looked at me without seeing me. She had gone up the stairs, leaving me there on the landing, half-formed words dying in my mouth. Less than a minute later, I had heard the crash as she threw herself out the attic window.

  “I see, I see. And your father? What did he die of?”’

  “I . . . I don’t know exactly. He had been ill for months, but the doctors couldn’t agree on a diagnosis.”