The Chemickal Marriage (5 page)

She groped across the bedchamber. Her luminous footprints muddled the floor. Between the basin and the bookcase lay three feet of open wall. Miss Temple felt along it until one blind finger found a hole ringed with painted iron. She hooked the ring and pulled. The wall panel popped free on newly oiled hinges.

She dashed back, skidding to a stop in the doorway. Mr Brine lay flat on his face, a pistol barrel hard against the base of his skull. Glaring at Miss Temple was a man whose brown coat was buttoned tight up to his neck.

She heard a breath to her left, in the shadows. She dodged back, just ahead of hands attempting to seize her, and bolted through the opened panel, fumbling for a latch to hold it shut. The first kicks were already cracking the wood as she flung herself up a ladder, climbing with both hands and feet. At the top she bulled through a hanging flap of canvas and sprawled into the sudden brightness of an attic room. By its iron stove stood a tall, thin figure in his stockinged feet, wearing steel-blue uniform trousers and a seaman’s woollen jumper. He had not shaved. His right hand gripped a long-barrelled Navy pistol and his left – fingers shaking and skeletal – held an unlit cigarette. Miss Temple screamed.

Doctor Svenson sank to his knees, setting the pistol to the floor and extending both pale hands, speaking gently.

‘Celeste … my goodness – O my dear girl –’

At the final splintering of the panel below Svenson sharply pitched his voice to her pursuers: ‘Stay where you are! It is Celeste Temple! There is no
concern, I say – wait there!’ He nodded to her, his blue eyes bright. ‘Celeste, how have you come here?’

Miss Temple’s voice was harsh, her throat choked equally with surprise and rage.

‘How have
I
come here?
I
? How are you
alive
? How – without a single
word
– without –’ She jabbed her pistol at his own. ‘We might have shot one another! I
ought
to have shot you!’ Her eyes brimmed hot. ‘And just imagine how I would have wept to find you dead
again
!’

Mr Phelps had given her cocoa in a metal mug, but Miss Temple did not intend to drink it. She sat on a wooden chair next to the stove, Svenson – having put on his boots – near her with his own mug. The abashed Mr Brine perched on what was obviously the Doctor’s bed, the frame sagging with his weight. On either side of Brine stood Mr Phelps – balding, his watery eyes haunted, yet no longer so openly ill-looking – and a sallow-eyed man introduced as Mr Cunsher, whose voluminous brown coat had been hung on a hook. Without it Cunsher looked like a trim woodland creature, with a woollen waistcoat and patched trousers, all – in contrast to the Doctor – scrupulously clean.

‘Celeste,’ offered Svenson, after yet another full minute of silence, ‘you must believe I wanted nothing more than to speak with you.’

‘The Doctor’s wounds should have killed him,’ explained Phelps. ‘He was confined to bed for weeks –’

‘I was fortunate in that the sabre cut across the ribs without passing beneath,’ said Svenson. ‘A prodigious amount of blood lost, but what is blood? Mr Phelps saved my life. He has seen the error of his ways, and we have thrown in together.’

‘So I see.’

Svenson sighed hopelessly. ‘My dear –’

‘If they were followed, we must leave,’ muttered Cunsher. He spoke with an accent Miss Temple could not place.

‘We were not followed,’ Brine protested gruffly.

‘Cunsher has been our eyes,’ said Phelps.

Miss Temple sniffed. ‘He went to Parchfeldt.’

‘And he has watched your hotel. Your movements have been observed by our enemies. And your fellows –’

‘Have been taken,’ said Miss Temple. ‘When they went to Harschmort, I know.’

‘Celeste,’ Svenson’s voice was too gentle, ‘you have been very brave –’

Miss Temple resisted the urge to fling the cocoa in his face. ‘Chang is dead. Elöise is dead. You tell me I am watched, that my efforts have been undermined. If I could find you, are
your
efforts any better? I should not be surprised if the Contessa herself has taken the house next door just to laugh at your useless sneakery.’

No one spoke. Miss Temple saw doubt on Cunsher’s face, and disdain on Phelps’s. Mr Brine looked at the floor. Doctor Svenson reached towards her, gently pulled away the mug and set it on the floor. Then he took Miss Temple’s hands in his own, the fingers long and cold.

‘I say you are brave, Celeste, because you
are
– far braver than I. Despair gives a hero’s strength to anyone. To be a heroine in
life
is altogether different.’

Miss Temple grudgingly tossed one shoulder. Doctor Svenson looked to the others.

‘And I expect she is correct. We should depart at once.’

They walked single file through the houses behind Albermap Crescent, Phelps in the lead, then the Doctor and Miss Temple, Mr Brine at the rear. Mr Cunsher had stayed to feed all evidence of their inhabitation to the stove. He would join them further on.

‘Why can we not simply return to the Boniface?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘Because I do not care to deliver myself into my enemy’s hand,’ Phelps whispered without turning. He waved them through a battered wrought-iron gate. ‘Keep low … do not speak … with any luck no one will see …’

Beyond the gate lay shuttered houses, riven walkways choked with weeds and an open common. Through the darkness Miss Temple perceived a host of canvas tents and winking lanterns, and snatches of talk in other tongues. Svenson took her hand. She wondered if she ought to take Mr Brine’s, so no one would be lost, but did not. A dog barked near one of the tents, and a
chorus of yaps rose all around. The party broke into a run, outpacing the human calls that followed the dogs, challenges sent out to passing ghosts.

Their way ended at a high stone wall. Phelps began patting at it like a blind man. Miss Temple looked back. The dog had again provoked the chorus of its fellows.

‘I expect that’s Mr Cunsher,’ whispered Brine.

‘Who
is
Mr Cunsher?’ Miss Temple asked.

‘A man known to the Ministry,’ said Svenson. ‘You would call him a spy.’

‘But not from
here
.’

‘No more than you or I, which recommends him, this city being a snakepit … ’

Miss Temple realized the Doctor had quietly drawn the Naval revolver.

‘At last … at
last
,’ muttered Phelps, and she heard the turn of a key. ‘Quickly, inside and up the stairs.’

‘A relic of an older time.’ Phelps’s whisper rebounded off a brick ceiling. He tamped the lamp wick to a lower flame and slid a fluted glass over it. ‘A portion of ancient city wall – a tower left to secure river traffic, and then left again as a useful hole for stuffing things and people one’s government ought not to have. I learnt of it from the late Colonel Aspiche, who stumbled across it as a subaltern. Once assigned to Palace duties, he sought out the key … a key which I took it upon myself to, ah, take.’

‘Colonel Aspiche was horrid,’ said Miss Temple.

Phelps sighed. ‘I am sure you must have found him so – as you must find me. Ambition has made apes of better men, and far worse.’

‘How do you
feel
?’ asked Miss Temple, not interested in another apology. ‘The sickness from the blue glass – has it passed? Are its effects reversed?’

‘In the main, though not without cost – I do not think I shall ever sleep the night through without some dream of
her
staining my mind. If Doctor Svenson owes his life to my efforts, I owe my sanity to his.’

Svenson smiled tightly, snapping open his silver case for a cigarette. ‘You ask what I have done these weeks, Celeste, apart from tending my own wounds. Do you still have the orange metal rings? Cardinal Chang stuffed a quantity into my pocket – I assume he did the same to you.’

Miss Temple flushed at the memory of Chang’s fingers thrusting into the bosom of her dress, for it had become a fixture of her intimate relief. Svenson hesitated at her silence, but then went on. ‘The qualities of this orange mineral counter those of the blue glass; thus the rings enabled each of us to resist the powers of Mrs Marchmoor. You will remember the liquid we used to cure Chang’s wounds in the airship. I was able to distil a kind of tincture from my supply of rings. Crude, to be sure, yet it minimized the poison in Mr Phelps. With time and proper tools I could do more – if I knew what the alloy
was
, I could do more still.’

He knelt and studied her face. ‘The glass woman rummaged in your thoughts too. At the factory, you appeared nearly consumptive …’

She turned from his gaze. ‘I have made a point since to eat fresh fruit.’

Svenson smiled, and it seemed he might touch her cheek, but instead he stood. His unshaven beard was darker than his hair and gave a masculine cast to his sharp chin that she had not previously discerned. Indeed, standing above her in his boots and rough clothing, the Doctor exuded an altogether disturbing maleness.

He was staring at her. Of course he was – he quite naturally wanted to know everything – but Miss Temple found herself unable to speak. Her cheeks burnt. How could she tell him about Chang? How could she speak about her secret needs? How could she explain the derangement she risked from even his kind hand?

The silence was broken by Mr Brine offering a match for Svenson’s unlit cigarette. Mr Phelps shifted the conversation to food, removing from a satchel several meat pies and a green bottle of sweet wine.

Over the meal, Mr Phelps related their own experiences since the Parchfeldt wood. They had joined a ragged party of fleeing men – minions of Mrs Marchmoor who did not question their presence – finally reaching St Porte and a surgeon for Svenson’s wounds. Two days by dray-cart had seen them to the city and the refuge of Rawsbarthe’s home, where the Doctor fell into a fever. Phelps had risked returning to the Foreign Ministry only once, to find his offices ransacked and abandoned – indeed, like the offices of all senior staff.

‘Who is in charge?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘The Foreign Minister, Lord Mazeby, still lives, but has ever battled dementia – thus Deputy Minister Crabbé’s untoward authority. Junior attachés, such as my own aide, Mr Harcourt, have been promoted, but true policy must lie with the Privy Council, or the Crown. The Queen is old, however, and the Duke who ruled the Privy Council dead. A non-entity like Lord Axewith may take his place, but what does that serve? The entire government, and industry as well –’

Miss Temple interrupted to suggest he speak to what she did
not
know already.

In the ensuing pause Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and more fully described Cunsher as an
agent
provocateur
, personally loyal to Phelps, who had employed his services abroad. At this, Phelps resumed the tale: while he had seen to the Doctor’s recovery – and then the Doctor to his own – Mr Cunsher had set to investigating their enemies. A recitation of Cunsher’s discoveries was again interrupted by Miss Temple – she
knew
about the St Royale, and the factory, and the Institute, and –

‘But you were unaware of your own danger!’ barked Phelps. ‘Villains watching your hotel and attacking the men in your employ!’

‘
Whose
villains?’ asked Miss Temple. ‘From the Contessa, or Vandaariff?’

‘We suspect the latter,’ said Svenson. ‘Not even Cunsher can get near Harschmort. It is a rearmed camp. The Cabal spread a story of blood fever to justify Vandaariff’s confinement at their hands, and one would expect at least an announcement of recovery, to allow him back into public life – but none has come.’

‘What of the Contessa?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘Nothing,’ spat Mr Phelps. ‘Not one sign.’

The tower had a primitive barracks, six musty bunks, now echoing with Mr Brine’s snores. Miss Temple peered across the room, unable to see whether Svenson and Phelps were asleep, though she assumed they were.

A dream had awoken her. She had been in Harschmort, standing before the Dutch mirror, naked but for a green silk bodice. Someone was watching from behind the glass and she felt a keen pleasure in imagining their hungry eyes as her hands traced the sweep of her white hips. She wondered who it
was and turned her buttocks to the glass. Someone she knew? Chang? In delicious provocation, Miss Temple bent forward and reached between her legs … and in answer, like delight’s inevitable consequence, the room changed. The mirror was gone, revealing the niche behind it and her observer. Stretched upon the velvet chaise was the dead-eyed, grey-skinned corpse of Elöise Dujong.

The threads of sleep slipped away and with them the chill of horror. But, as she stared at the bunk slats above her, bowed against the weight of Mr Brine, Miss Temple felt the dream’s hunger remain. Her mouth tasted sour – the wine, along with her own spoilt essence – and she ran her tongue along her teeth in hopes of subduing her desire through disgust. But the urge would not subside. She sucked the inside of one cheek between her teeth and bit hard. The others were too near. They would hear – they would smell –

In an abrupt rustle of petticoats Miss Temple rolled from the bunk and padded to the other room, hugging herself tight at the stove and rocking on cold bare feet. She forced her mind to the dream. What did it mean to bare her lust to Elöise, of all people? Miss Temple was not at heart shamed by her desire, only that so much of what informed it derived from other minds. Was her feeling of debasement more truly a matter of pride?

Elöise had been married. She had loved men – perhaps even the Doctor, in some bare-planked room at the fishing village. At this thought Miss Temple’s imagination flared: Svenson’s unshaven face kissing the pale skin above Elöise’s breasts, her dress pushed up her thighs, his knees bent with effort. Miss Temple whimpered aloud, and in sorrow. In her dream, desire had been grotesque. But that was wrong, and the truth came cruelly in the gaze of care her imagination placed between Elöise and the Doctor, her liquid brown eyes up to his clear blue. Miss Temple wiped her nose with a sniff. What made desire unbearable was love.

She turned at a sound. Doctor Svenson stood in the doorway.