Free The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott Page B

see certain things as if for the first time. The evidence they used to support their transformist ideas—fossils, strata, intermediate species, extinctions—was persuasive. The edges of time had stretched in that atelier in Saint-Germain—not my time, not this little life of mine, but the time that, in my mind, until now, had stretched back through history books, in straight lines, through kings and queens and wars and tribes, Romans and Britons, and then back through the fragments of Herodotus I remembered, to a garden where God made a woman from the rib of a man. It’s not that I hadn’t wondered about origins before, just that I had known only this one with the rib and the apple and the snake, and the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. And that version was still unassailable. It was in the Bible.
    In Derbyshire I had been taught that questioning the truth of the Bible had eternal consequences. At the age of seven, sitting in the familypew in my Sunday clothes in the chapel in Ashbourne, my father on one side, my brothers on the other, I had listened to the preacher deliver a lurid sermon about the various tortures of damnation. During the silent prayer that followed, I had seen Satan, or thought I had seen him, out of the corner of my eye, at the door of the vestry. He was a thing of scales, a malevolent creature; his hooves made a scuttling sound on the stone flags of the church. He had grinned at me. I did not sleep for days.
    When Céleste asked what I’d been taught about God and I told her about seeing Satan at the vestry door and that as a child I had worried about eternity and how long it might be, she’d said that’s how the priests worked—through fear and trembling. It’s enough to send a child mad. You don’t have to believe it, she said. Just because they tell you there’s a hell, you don’t have to believe it. But then, I reminded myself later that night, my brother would say that Céleste was on Satan’s side. She was a heretic, after all. So she
would
say that.
    When I saw Lucienne Bernard for the third time, actually saw her, in flesh and blood, not in my dreams, it was the night of August 10, in the crypt of a former Capuchin convent near the place Vendôme. Fin and Céleste had taken me to the Fantasmagorie—a distraction, Céleste said, for
le garçon perdu
, the lost boy, as she called me. A Belgian illusionist named Étienne-Gaspard Robertson had built a theater inside the crypt as a tourist attraction. They called it the theater of the dead.
    I protested but I went. I was curious, of course.
    It was seven o’clock. Dusk. The first dimly lit rooms of the convent, beyond the craggy door studded with metal, were arranged like a museum of scientific curiosities and optical illusions, small in scale and rather tawdry in the stony dank caverns of the convent. Beyond, in the curtained darkness of the refectory, a woman called
la Femme invisible
addressed us in English, her voice as loud as if she was standingright next to us but she was invisible, a voice without a body, a mechanized ghost. I looked for an auditory apparatus in the walls, some kind of speaking tube, but could find nothing. She challenged us to ask her questions.
    “And where will my friend find the woman who stole from him?” Fin asked.
    “In the Palais Royal,” she said, “for if he has enough livres to pay, he can have the woman steal anything he likes, from wherever he likes.”
    Each room became darker as we descended, following a single candle flame down stone steps through more curtains into the dampness of the crypt itself—the Salle de la Fantasmagorie. Here, once we had taken our seats, the assistant extinguished the guttering candle. I could hear muffled cries and laughter from Céleste and Fin, gasps and whispers from other members of the audience, but could see nothing, not even my hand in front of my face. Then the sound of wind and thunder came at us from all directions and on top of that the