The Secret Tomb

Dorothy

Dorothy commands a traveling troupe of four orphaned boys while secretly pursuing the word 'Roborey' her dying father repeated, a thread that leads her to estranged aristocratic cousins and a buried family fortune. Her gaiety masks a fierce grief and a willingness to risk everything, even as she dreads that her father was murdered rather than lost to fever. She is the engine of the hunt: her daring, her instinct for the theatrical, and her refusal to be excluded from the inheritance make her both the story's heart and its most unpredictable force.

Baron Saint-Quentin

Saint-Quentin travels with Dorothy's caravan as her right-hand man, a stickler for propriety who nonetheless thrives on the road and in her company. When she promises him fine clothes and a princess's future once the Golden Fleece is won, his pleasure curdles, since wealth means the end of their close companionship. His quiet attachment and his unease about what awaits them give the treasure hunt a human cost beyond gold, and his steadiness anchors Dorothy's wilder schemes.

Raoul Davernoie

Raoul moves between Hillocks Manor and Dorothy's orbit as both kin and threat, the relative whose presence unsettles the four boys who guard her. He rows her across the lake where sunken stones spell out the family motto, and he joins her schemes with a laughing willingness that may conceal his own claim. His ambiguous loyalty keeps the early mystery taut: is he ally, rival, or the very danger the children sense in the thickets?

D'Estreicher

D'Estreicher orchestrates a long con built on a dress rehearsal, a bribed confederate, and a forged identity, all to seize the codicil at the reading of the will. When his accomplice wavers, he kills him without hesitation and vanishes into a Russian soldier's disguise, his shaved skull and slung arm rendering him unrecognizable. His cold methodical violence transforms the treasure hunt from a family puzzle into a manhunt, and his whistle in the dark signals that the real enemy is already inside the walls.

Maître Delarue

Delarue arrives at the clock tower clutching the gold medal and the instructions of a client long dead, the legal hinge on which the whole inheritance turns. He is pompous about his office yet craven in a crisis, cowering in corners and sniveling when shots are fired, and Dorothy must drag him by the hand like a child. His comic cowardice sharpens the stakes: the man who represents the dead is the least equipped to face what the dead have arranged.

Archibald Webster

Webster answers Dorothy's summons as one of the four scattered heirs, producing the medal passed down through his mother's line and speaking excellent French with quiet formality. He is a decorated veteran, and his calm competence contrasts with Delarue's panic and Dario's heat. His presence widens the family circle beyond France and makes the inheritance a matter of international cousins bound by a two-hundred-year-old promise, giving the hunt its sense of a scattered clan finally converging.