The Chemickal Marriage

One Antagonist

Miss Temple eyed the clock with a characteristic impatience, for she much despised lateness in others. She pulled the green clutch bag onto her lap, aware that sorting its contents had become a ritual, as if she were some old woman with a set of clacking beads.

A purse of money. A notebook and an all-weather pencil. Matches. A beeswax-candle stub. Two handkerchiefs. A sewn cloth pouch of orange metal rings. Opera glasses. A small black revolver whose recoil did not spoil her aim (she had practised on empty bottles in the hotel cellar and could nearly hit them). Ammunition. Gold.

She had paid Pfaff well. If he did not come, she was betrayed. Or – Miss Temple pursed her lips – Mr Pfaff was dead.

Miss Temple cinched the green bag shut. The clock’s silver bell chimed the half-hour. She called to her maid: ‘Marie, my travelling jacket.’

Five weeks had passed since her return, five weeks spent wholly on revenge.

It had taken Miss Temple two days to regain the city from the wilds of Parchfeldt Park. The Contessa’s metal-bound case had not cracked her skull, and the wound on her forehead had eased its throbbing by the time she reached the canal and slept a few hours in the cover of its reeds. Tentative fingers told her the gash had gummed to a tolerable scab, and she walked for hours, dizzied but no longer sickened, to the Parchfeldt railway head, where she finally boarded a coach to Stropping Station, into the heart of the city.

She had gone back to the Hotel Boniface, for her enemies would find her no matter where she hid – she must visit her banker, she must have clothes, she must hire violent men, all of which would draw the notice of any diligent foe. When she arrived at the hotel’s doors, filthy, bloodied and after a fortnight’s absence, the staff said nothing apart from a single polite inquiry as to whether she required a doctor before a bath was drawn or whether, preparatory to either, she might prefer a meal.

She huddled naked in the copper tub until the water went tepid. A maid stood deferentially in the dressing-room doorway with fresh towels, nervously glancing between the dull face of the soaking woman and the sharp knife Miss Temple had insisted stay within reach, atop a wooden stool. Dressed enough to have a doctor examine her, Miss Temple had kept the weapon in her lap. The white-whiskered man applied a salve and bandage to her forehead, frowned at the fading weal of a bullet above her ear and left a powder to aid her sleep. Miss Temple ate two slices of buttered bread, stopping at the first flicker of nausea. She dismissed the maid, locked the corridor door and wedged it with a chair, did the same for the door of her chamber and curled into bed, the blade under her pillow like a snake in wait beneath a stone.

She slept for three hours before her fears rose up to wake her. She lay in the dark. Chang. Svenson. Elöise. Their deaths could not be undone.

Her survival felt like a betrayal, and every small comfort arrived with a sting. Yet Miss Temple had withstood such stings all her life. The next morning she made her first list of everything she ought to do and found herself filling two diligent pages. She set down the pen and wiped her nose. In truth it was simpler to keep one’s heart a stone. She rang for breakfast and a maid to curl her hair.

She sent to her aunt in Cap-Rouge, requesting the return of Marie (of her own two maids, the one who could read), and then spent the day – making a point to be accompanied by footmen from the Boniface – attending to her most basic needs: bank, clothes, weapons and, most important of all, news.

She did not fear for her immediate safety. When her train had arrived, the platforms of Stropping Station were no longer thick with dragoons. Brown-coated constables had been posted to manage the openly hostile crowds of travellers, but their only charge was to maintain order, not search for potential fugitives. Nowhere had she seen posters offering a reward for her capture, or for that of any of her former companions.

She scoured the newspapers, but found only a standard refrain of imminent crises: the Ministries paralysed, the Privy Council in disarray, business at a standstill. For Miss Temple, this was excellent: the more the world was hampered, the freer she would be to act. She sallied out, a hotel footman to either side, gratified by the frayed tempers that seemed to catch at every inconsequential jostle.

Her journey that first morning did not stretch to any destination she might deem provocative – that is, she did not venture near the St Royale Hotel, the Foreign Ministry, Stäelmaere House, the Macklenburg diplomatic compound or the Hadrian Square residence of Colonel and Mrs Trapping. All these places might have become bolt-holes for enemies that still lived. When the Contessa’s spies found her at the Boniface, all well and good. She would not be so vulnerable.

And if her other great enemy had survived the destruction at the Parchfeldt factory? Miss Temple had last glimpsed Lord Robert Vandaariff face down in a pool of black slime, about to be swarmed by an angry mob … yet had he lived? It would be a fool who assumed otherwise.

Miss Temple paused (the scarlet-coated footmen halted obligingly with her) at the cobbled road’s sudden descent, gazing at a district of the city she had never visited. One footman cleared his throat.

‘Shall we turn along the avenue, miss?’

Miss Temple strode ahead, down to the river.

Cardinal Chang had mentioned it once, and the detail – a proper name from his secret life – had taken Miss Temple’s mind with the attractive force of a silver buckle to a magpie. When she stood in the street outside the Raton Marine, she was unprepared for the surge of tenderness that filled her heart. The tavern lay in a nest of filthy streets, with the buildings to either side tipping like old drunkards. The people in the street, openly staring at the finely dressed young woman with two liveried servants, seemed to Miss Temple like humanity’s bilge, beings who could scarcely take two steps without leaving a stain. Yet in this place Cardinal Chang had been known – these ruins were his world.

Again the footman cleared his throat.

‘Wait here,’ said Miss Temple.

A scattering of men sat outside the tavern at small tables – sailors, by the look of them – and Miss Temple passed through to the door without a glance. Inside, she saw the Raton Marine had been fitted out to serve a broad clientele – tables near the windows with light enough to read, and tables in shadows even the brightest morning would not pierce. A staircase led to a balcony lined with rooms for rent, their open doors draped with an oilcloth curtain. Her nostrils flared in imagining the reek.

Perhaps five men looked up from their drinks as she entered. Miss Temple ignored them and approached the barman, who was polishing a bowlful of silver buttons with a rag, depositing each finished button with a clink into another bowl.

‘Good morning,’ said Miss Temple.

The barman did not reply, but met her eyes.

‘I have been directed here by Cardinal Chang,’ she said. ‘I require a competent man not averse to violence – in fact perhaps several – but one to start, as soon as is convenient.’

‘Cardinal Chang?’

‘Cardinal Chang is dead. If he were not, I should not be here.’

The barman looked past her shoulders at the other men, who had obviously overheard.

‘That’s hard news.’

Miss Temple shrugged. The barman’s gaze flicked at the bandage above her eye.

‘You have money, little miss?’

‘And I will not be cheated. This is for your own time and attention.’ Miss Temple set a gold coin on the polished wood. The barman did not touch it. Miss Temple set down a second coin. ‘And this is for the man you would recommend for my business, taking into account that it is Cardinal Chang’s business as well. If you knew him –’

‘I knew him.’

‘Then perhaps you will be happy to see his killer paid in kind. I assure you I am most serious. Have your candidate present this coin at the Hotel Boniface, and ask for Miss Isobel Hastings. If he knows his work, there will be more in its place.’

Miss Temple turned to the door. At one of the tables a man had stood, unshaven, with fingerless gloves.

‘How’d he get it, then? The old Cardinal?’

‘He was stabbed in the back,’ said Miss Temple coldly. ‘Good day to you all.’

Two restive days went by before the coin was returned. In that time Miss Temple’s headaches had gone, her maid had arrived (bearing a querulous letter from her aunt, thrown away unanswered), and she had begun regular practice with a newly purchased pistol.

The newspapers said nothing of the Duke of Stäelmaere’s death, and thus no official appointment of a new head for the Privy Council, though the Council Deputy, a Lord Axewith, had assumed a prominence simply through his regular denials of irregularity. No word of Robert Vandaariff. No word of the Parchfeldt battle. No mention of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza. No one called round at the Boniface to arrest Miss Temple. It was as if the Cabal’s machinations had never taken place.

Miss Temple had taken another room on a lower floor for business dealings, ignoring the attendant overtones of impropriety. She knew that to the staff of the Hotel Boniface she had become an eccentric, tolerated as long as each breach of decorum was plastered over by cash. Miss Temple did not care. She installed herself on a sofa, the clutch bag on her lap, one hand inside the bag holding her pistol.

A footman knocked to announce a Mr Pfaff. Miss Temple studied the man who entered, and did not offer him a chair.

‘Your name is Pfaff?’

‘Jack Pfaff. Nicholas suggested I call.’

‘Nicholas?’

‘At the Rat.’

‘Ah.’

Jack Pfaff was at most a year older than Miss Temple herself (a ripe, unmarried twenty-five). His clothing had at one time been near to fashion – chequered trousers and an orange woollen coat with square buttons – as if he were a young fop fallen to poor times. Miss Temple knew from his voice that this was not the case, and that the clothes represented an impoverished man’s desire to climb.

‘You can read? Write?’

‘Both, miss, quite tolerably.’

‘What weapons do you possess – what skills?’

Pfaff reached behind his back and brought out a slim blade. His other hand slipped to an inner pocket and emerged with a set of brass rings across his fingers.

‘Those are nothing against a sabre or musket.’

‘Am I to fight soldiers, miss?’

‘I should hope not, for your sake. Are you averse to killing?’

‘The law does prohibit the practice, miss.’

‘And if a man spat in your face?’

‘O goodness, I would step away like a Christian.’ Pfaff raised his eyebrows affably. ‘Then again, most incidents of face-spitting can be laid to drink. Perhaps it would be more proper to cut a spitting man’s throat, to spite the devil inside.’

Miss Temple did not appreciate trifling. ‘Why does this Nicholas consider you fit for my employ?’

‘I am skilled in opening doors.’

‘I requested no thief.’

‘I speak broadly, miss. I am a man who finds ways.’

Miss Temple bit back a tart remark. A man like Pfaff, now unavoidable, must be met with intelligence and a smile.

‘Did you know Cardinal Chang?’

‘Everyone knew him – he cut a rare figure.’

‘You were his friend?’

‘He would on occasion allow a fellow to stand him a drink.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘You knew him, miss – why would I not?’ Pfaff smiled evenly, watching her bag and the hand within it. ‘Perhaps you’ll enlighten me as to the present business.’

‘Sit down, Mr Pfaff. Put those things away.’

Pfaff restored the weapons to their places and stepped to an armchair, flipping out his coat-tails before settling. Miss Temple indicated the silver service on a table.

‘There is tea, if you would have some. I will explain what I require. And then you – with your doors – will suggest how best it can be done.’

Miss Temple soaked again that night in the copper tub, auburn hair dragging like dead weeds across the water. Her thoughts were stalled by fatigue, and the sorrow she strove to avoid loomed near.

She had told Mr Pfaff only enough to start his work, but his mercenary trespass of the roles formerly occupied by Chang and Svenson left Miss Temple feeling their absence. Even more troubling, close conversation with Pfaff had awakened, for the first time since leaving Parchfeldt Park, the spark of Miss Temple’s blue glass memories. It was not that Pfaff himself was attractive – on the contrary, she found him repellent, with brown teeth and coarse hair the colour of dung-muddled straw – but the longer he had remained in her physical proximity, the more she felt that dreaded bodily stirring, like a stretch of invisible limbs too long asleep.

In the copper tub, Miss Temple took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, inching herself towards the brink of her fears. In her struggle against the Cabal, she had exposed herself to the contents of two blue glass books. The first had been deliberately compiled by the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza as an opium den of pleasure and violence. Staring into its swirling depths, Miss Temple had experienced the bright, hot memories of innumerable lives – in her thoughts and in her limbs – and Miss Temple’s literal virtue became a mere scrap of protest before the debauchery she had known. Ever since, this book’s contents had lurked beneath her thoughts, and a glimpse of skin or smell of hair, a mere rustle of cloth, could call forth pleasures sharp enough to drop Miss Temple to her knees.

The second book had contained the memories of but a single man, the Comte d’Orkancz, preserved in blue glass by Francis Xonck aboard the sinking airship in the very moment the Comte’s life bled away. The great man’s mind had been captured, but the contaminating touch of death had corrupted its character, twisting the aesthete’s discrimination into a bitter disdain for life. Miss Temple’s glimpse of this second book had left her gasping, as if her throat had been coated with rancid tar. Ignorant of the tainted nature of these memories, the remaining factions of the Cabal had convened at the Xonck Armaments works at Parchfeldt and agreed between them to infuse the book’s contents into the emptied mind of Robert Vandaariff – hoping at a stroke to regain the Comte’s alchemical knowledge for their use as well as take control of Vandaariff’s fortune, the largest in the land. Resurrected in Vandaariff’s body, the Comte, despite his unbalanced soul, had quickly triumphed over his former servants: Mrs Marchmoor, Francis Xonck, Charlotte Trapping and Alfred Leveret were all dead. Only the Contessa had survived to stand against him … only the Contessa and Miss Temple.

At Parchfeldt Miss Temple had received her own revelation. As she walked through the factory, she had suddenly known the task of each machine. However poisonous, her touch of the Comte’s memories had provided insights into his science. If Robert Vandaariff did still live, it was possible that Miss Temple – throughout her life indifferent to any study – could anticipate the Comte’s dire imagination.

Stunned by grief, both books had lain dormant in Miss Temple’s mind, just long enough for her to hope they might remain so. But now, prompted by the unsightly yet provocative vision of Pfaff’s tongue dabbing at his cup rim for a drop of tea, they had returned. Naked and alone, Miss Temple knew she must make herself mistress of these wells within her, or forever be their slave.

She sank deeper, until the water touched her chin, and extended one leg so her pale foot dangled, dripping. She listened for Marie, heard nothing and settled her hips with a squirm. The fingers of her right hand grazed the hair between her legs, teasing the skin beneath. Miss Temple shut her eyes, willing her thoughts to a place she had never allowed herself, apart from the one impulsive moment in the darkness of Parchfeldt, the rash action she was sure had been the ruin of them all. She had kissed Cardinal Chang. She had felt his lips on hers, had pressed her tongue into his mouth, had thrilled at his firm grip upon her body. Miss Temple’s left hand traced circles across her inner thigh as the fingers of her right slipped further down, stroking her arousal to a glow. She frowned against the press of blue glass memories, pursuing her own private need, the slicking quickness beneath her dipping fingers. A flick of bile from the Comte’s memories – she swallowed it back and bit her lip, concentrating. Chang had pushed her away, arching his back as the Contessa’s blade struck home – she opened her legs to imagine him between them, pulling his sweet weight onto her body. Her thumb swirled a tight circle and she gasped, ignoring another chorus of lurid incident inside her, cleaving again to Cardinal Chang. He had carried her shivering body from the sea after the sunken airship – she sank two fingers deeper still – he had cradled her, nearly naked, white with cold. She pushed her foot against the tub, holding her desire firm, cutting through the noise in her mind like a ship through the foam on the sea. She knew he was dead, even as the remembered strength of his legs drove her deliciously near the breaking of an almost painful wave. She knew she was alone, even as the crest of pleasure finally spilt, flushing her breast like a bird’s – opening her heart as it had never been in life, and thrusting it beyond the living world.

She slept more deeply that night, waking after five hours instead of three. With a determined grunt Miss Temple rolled onto her front, face deep in her pillow, her fingers digging beneath her body. This time it was easier to keep the foreign memories away – perfumed seraglio, church confessional, the back of a jouncing wagon – each banished by a fierce deployment of her memories of Chang. When she again lay spent, the pillow moist with her hot breath, Miss Temple began to sob. She wiped her nose on the edge of her pillowcase. Another hour of fitful dozing and she rose, pushing the hair back from her puffy eyes.

She was still at her writing table in her shift when Marie entered hours later, a box tied with ribbon in her arms.

‘Sent from downstairs, miss – and just in time for your day …’

At Miss Temple’s curt nod, the maid set the box on the bed, pulling apart the paper inside to reveal a new pair of ankle boots, the leather dyed dark green. Her old pair had been placed in the wardrobe, split and scuffed by too many perils to name. She hiked up her shift as Marie fitted both feet in turn. Miss Temple flexed each arch and felt the bite of hard, new leather. She crossed to her pillow and flipped it up, revealing the knife. With a satisfying ease the blade slid into the lean sheath the shoemaker had – under protest – stitched inside her right boot. She dropped the shift and caught Marie’s troubled expression.

‘Stand up, Marie,’ she snapped. ‘Tea first, then ask what fruit is fresh.’

Mr Pfaff sent four more men to the Boniface for her scrutiny – ex-soldiers, discharged from colonial duty – jobless men inured to following orders and unafraid to fight. As the men stood towering above her in a line, Miss Temple imagined how the Contessa would serve each a special smile, applying a delicate adhesive of desire to their purchased loyalty. Miss Temple was not ugly – if her face was too round, her limbs were well formed and she bore a complete set of bright teeth – but she wanted no piece of these men’s desire. She gave them money, her grey eyes coldly fixing theirs as the coins were taken.

With a pang she remembered her pact with the Doctor and the Cardinal. But she did not want to be encumbered – her heart could bear employees, but no longer allies. To Pfaff and his men she was a source of money. They could have no great opinion of her character – and with no ready way to prove herself otherwise, she did her best not to despise them in return.

Three of the new men were sent out of the city to gather news: Mr Ramper to the factory at Parchfeldt, Mr Jaxon to Tarr Manor (whose quarry had provided the Cabal with raw indigo clay) and Mr Ropp to Harschmort House. The fourth and most presentable, Mr Brine – late Corporal Brine, 11th Territorial Fusiliers – Miss Temple kept near her at the Boniface, with the firm provisos that he never enter her private rooms unless requested, nor on any occasion – requested or no – insinuate himself with Marie.

Mr Pfaff himself brought a steady stream of information. The Contessa had not returned to the St Royale. Harald Crabbé’s widow still occupied their home, as Roger Bascombe’s mother remained sole resident of her son’s. The homes of Leveret and Aspiche were quite empty apart from servants. Xonck’s rooms had not been touched. Of all the addresses on Miss Temple’s list, only one had received any sort of return. Confirmed by several witnesses, Charles and Ronald Trapping had been delivered home by two uniformed dragoons.

As Pfaff helped himself to a seat, Miss Temple passed him another page from her stack of papers. ‘The Comte’s house in Plum Court – it appears derelict, but the rear garden held a greenhouse where he worked. Also the art dealer that exhibited the Comte’s paintings. And then the Royal Institute. If Vandaariff is alive –’ She sighed. ‘How can there be no word whether the richest man on three continents has died?’

‘Soon now,’ Pfaff chuckled indulgently. ‘Once Mr Ropp returns from Harschmort –’

‘The Royal Institute,’ continued Miss Temple. ‘Since every one of the Comte’s laboratories was destroyed, he may have sought other facilities. Also, he will need particular supplies to rebuild – and in such quantities that must reveal the effort.’

‘An excellent stratagem.’

‘It is, actually,’ said Miss Temple.

Pfaff stood with a smile, and called to Mr Brine, who sat impassively on an upholstered stool. ‘Keeping the mistress safe, then, Briney?’

To Miss Temple’s disgust, both of Mr Brine’s cheeks flushed pink.

Cramming her hours with tasks brought welcome exhaustion that served to insulate her grief. In the night she cleaved to Chang, but through her days, passed in a world that so assailed Miss Temple’s senses, he was gone. It was a widening divide she fought to ignore.

Mr Ropp did not return. Pfaff speculated the man had received better work elsewhere, or given himself over to drink with his advance wages. When Mr Jaxon delivered his report from Tarr Manor (the house occupied by Roger Bascombe’s cousin and her young son, the quarry empty and unguarded), Pfaff sent him – at Miss Temple’s insistence – after Ropp to Harschmort, this time with instructions to approach Robert Vandaariff’s mansion cautiously on foot, through the dunes.

The longer she waited the more the Boniface felt like a prison. Without revenge to shape her character, doubt gnawed at Miss Temple’s mind. Her efforts had been directed against Robert Vandaariff – since, as master of the blue glass, he represented the greatest threat. Yet the Contessa was Miss Temple’s primary enemy – her nemesis – and had eluded her altogether. The woman had fled Parchfeldt with the glass book that held the Comte’s memories. She had also captured young Francesca Trapping. Heiress to the Xonck Armaments fortune, the child offered the Contessa brutal leverage over Vandaariff.

Miss Temple had promised Francesca safety. Would her present efforts prove any less bankrupt?

Miss Temple emerged from the cellar of the Boniface, her gloved hand smelling of gunpowder, and returned to her rooms by way of a rear staircase, ascending just in time to see Mr Pfaff and Mr Ramper, returned from Parchfeldt, proceed rapidly past.

‘Tell me exactly,’ whispered Pfaff. ‘And are you sure he was there, not just some mucker from the train?’

Ramper, taller than Pfaff by a good five inches, stopped where he was and leant very close to Pfaff. Pfaff did not flinch.

‘He was in a brown coat,’ snarled Ramper, ‘looked like he’d been living rough – but no poacher, no woodsman and no farmer. He was watching the gate.’

‘How do you know he wasn’t some gypsy, sniffing out salvage?’

‘Why would a gypsy follow me through the woods? Or take the same train?’

‘Then why didn’t you damn well take him?’

‘I thought if I followed him I could find out who he was.’

‘And?’

‘I told you – once I got past the constables –’

‘He was gone. Superb.’

‘No one would go to that ruin without a reason – the same damned reason I had.’

Ramper raised a hand to knock on Miss Temple’s door, but Pfaff caught it mid-air.

‘Not a word,’ Pfaff hissed. ‘The factory, yes, but not this … figment. We don’t scare the mistress.’

Miss Temple emerged from the stairwell, grinning broadly.

‘There you are, Mr Pfaff,’ she called. ‘And Mr Ramper – how good to see you safely returned.’

Pfaff spun round, his hand darting instinctively behind his coat. He smiled in greeting and stepped aside so Miss Temple might reach her door.

Mr Ramper had not entered the Parchfeldt factory itself. The gate was barred and strongly guarded. The grounds outside were pitted with artillery craters, but he saw no bodies. The white walls were blackened by flame. The machines inside – if they remained – were silent, and the smokestacks on the roof were cold.

Miss Temple asked if he had examined the canal. He had: there was no traffic to be seen. She asked if he entered the woods to the east. Mr Ramper described the shell holes and fallen trees amongst the stone ruins. Without noticeable tightness in her voice, Miss Temple asked if he had found any bodies there. Mr Ramper had not.

She poured more tea before turning to Pfaff.

‘After a reasonable period of refreshment, of course – I will have Marie fetch brandy – Mr Ramper will direct his efforts to these machines. If they have been moved, then surely someone with knowledge of the canals can confirm it. If they have been repaired, then an inquiry to the Xonck Armaments works at Raaxfall may help us, for it is there the Comte’s devices were made.’

‘The works at Raaxfall are shut down,’ said Pfaff. ‘Hundreds of men without a wage.’

‘Mr Ramper – the men guarding the factory, did they wear green uniforms?’

Ramper looked at Pfaff before responding. ‘No, miss. Local men for hire, it seemed.’

‘The Xonck factory had its own small army,’ Miss Temple explained. ‘Perhaps they have accompanied the machines.’

Pfaff considered this, then nodded to Ramper, who stood.

‘Do wait for your brandy, Mr Ramper. Mr Pfaff, what of the Royal Institute?’

Pfaff smiled, and rubbed his hands in a gesture Miss Temple was sure he’d copied from the stage. ‘No one’s let it spill, but there’s money in the air. I’ve found a glassworks by the river, apparently turning away work – I’m off tonight to see why.’

‘Then let us speak this evening, when you have returned.’

‘I will not return until quite late.’

‘No matter.’

‘The hotel staff will not admit me.’

‘Mr Brine will wait in the lobby – it is the simplest thing.’ She turned brightly. ‘Mr Ramper, perhaps you will finish this plate of biscuits – one dislikes their persistence in a room. And, Mr Brine, if you would come with me – I believe Marie has explained there is a fault with the lock on my window.’

Mr Brine obligingly followed Miss Temple to her chamber, pointedly averting his eyes from her bed as he advanced to the window. He turned, his face quite wilfully blank, at the sound of her closing the door behind them.

‘There is little time, Mr Brine,’ she whispered. ‘When Mr Ramper leaves the hotel, I want you to follow him.’ Brine opened his mouth to speak, but Miss Temple waved him to silence. ‘I am not interested in Mr Ramper. My fear is that his brown-coated man did not lose him at all, but has followed him here, and will follow him away. Say nothing to anyone. Exit through the rear of the hotel – I will send you on an errand. If Mr Ramper is under scrutiny, follow this brown-coated person as best you can. Is that clear?’

Brine hesitated.

‘Silence is a provocation, Mr Brine.’

‘Yes, miss. But what if the fellow wants you? If I’m gone, you’ll be alone.’

‘Not to worry.’ Miss Temple patted her clutch bag with a smile. ‘I have only to imagine the man a brown glass bottle and I will pot him square!’

She did not have to fashion an excuse for Mr Brine to leave after all, for when they reappeared Pfaff himself sent Ramper and Brine on their way, expressing a desire to speak to ‘the mistress’ alone. Once the door closed, Pfaff reached into an inner pocket and removed a green cheroot, wrapped tight as a pencil. He bit off the tip and spat it into his teacup.

‘I trust you do not object?’

‘As long as you do not foul the floor.’

Pfaff lit the cheroot, puffing until the tip glowed red.

‘We have not spoken of Cardinal Chang.’

‘Nor will we,’ replied Miss Temple.

‘If I do not know what he did in your employ, I cannot succeed where he failed –’

‘He did not fail in my employ.’

‘However you paint it. The Cardinal’s dead. I do not care to join him. If my questions intrude on delicate matters –’

‘You overreach yourself, Mr Pfaff.’

‘Do I? The Cardinal, this doctor – how many others? You are perilous company, miss, and the less you make it plain, the more I am inclined to nerves.’

‘You have spent your time investigating me,’ said Miss Temple with a start, knowing it was true.

‘And learnt enough to wonder why a sugar-rich spinster took up with foreigners and killers and disappeared for a fortnight.’

‘Spinster?’

Pfaff rolled ash onto a white saucer. ‘If a woman can look past the Cardinal’s scars, what business is that of mine? We all shut our eyes in the dark.’

Miss Temple’s voice dropped to an icy snarl. ‘I will tell you your business, Mr Pfaff – and if I choose to straddle twenty sailors in succession in St Isobel’s Square at noon, it is nothing you need note. I have paid you good money. If you think to defy me, or if you think I care a whit about your leers or the threat of scandal, you have made a very grave mistake.’

Only then did Pfaff realize that Miss Temple’s hand was in her bag and the bag now tight against his abdomen. Very slowly, he raised both hands and met her eyes. He grinned.

‘It seems you’ve answered me after all, miss. Forgive my presumption – a fellow acquires worries. I understand you now quite well.’

Miss Temple did not shift her bag. ‘Then you are for the glassworks?’

‘And will send word, however late the hour.’

‘I am obliged to you, Mr Pfaff.’

In a show of bravado she dropped her bag onto the side table and snatched the last tea biscuit, snapping it between her teeth. Pfaff took his leave. When she heard the door close, Miss Temple sighed heavily. Her mouth was dry. She spat the biscuit back onto the plate.

Miss Temple looked up at the clock. She still had time. She found Marie in the maid’s little room, mending buttons, and explained what to tell Mr Pfaff on the unlikely chance that Miss Temple did not return. When Marie protested this idea, Miss Temple observed that the thread Marie was using did not exactly match the garment. After Marie had promised for the third time to relock and bar the door behind her, Miss Temple tersely allowed that the girl might avail herself of a glass of wine with supper.

The corridor was empty, and Miss Temple met no other guest on her way to the kitchen. Ignoring the looks of the slop boys and tradesmen, she walked to the corner, peered into the street, saw no obvious spy and hurried from the hotel, keeping her head low. At the avenue Miss Temple hailed a carriage. The driver hopped down to help her to her seat and asked her destination.

‘The Library.’

Miss Temple had never been in the grand Library before – it held no more natural attraction than a barrelworks – and in its stiff majesty she saw a monument to a high-minded struggle interminably waged by others. She approached a wide wooden counter, behind which stood waxy, bespectacled men whose dark coats were dappled with grey finger-swipes of dust.

‘Excuse me,’ Miss Temple said. ‘I require information.’

A younger archivist stepped to serve her, eyes dipping down the front of her dress. The counter drew a line just below her breasts, making it appear, to Miss Temple’s chagrin, that she had jutted herself forward.

‘What information is that, my dear?’

‘I am searching for a piece of property.’

‘Property?’ The archivist chuckled. ‘You’ll want a house agent.’

On his upper lip swelled a pale-tipped pimple. Miss Temple wondered if he would pop it before next shaving, or leave the work to his razor.

‘Do you keep property records?’

‘By law we collect all manner of records.’

‘Including property?’

‘Well, depending on what exactly you want to learn –’

‘Ownership. Of property.’

The archivist grazed her bosom one last time with his eyes and sniffed diffidently.

‘Third floor.’

The third-floor clerk was on a ladder when Miss Temple found him, and she pitched her question loud enough to hurry him down in haste to lower her voice. He marched her to a wide case of black leather volumes.

‘Here you are. Property registers.’ He turned at once to go.

‘What am I to do with these?’ Miss Temple gave the bookcase an indignant wave. ‘There must be hundreds.’

The soft dome of the clerk’s head was bare, black hair dense around each ear in vain compensation. His fingers shook – did she smell gin?

‘There does happen to be a great deal of property, miss. In the world.’

‘I do not care for the world.’

The clerk bit back a reply. ‘Every time property changes hands, there must be a record. They are arranged by district …’ He looked over his shoulder, longingly, to the ladder.

‘Why don’t you have properties arranged by the owner’s name?’

‘You didn’t ask for that.’

‘I’m asking now.’

‘Those records are organized for taxation and inheritance.’

She raised an eyebrow. He led the way to another case of black-bound books.

‘The letter p,’ she said, before he could leave.

‘The letter p encompasses five volumes.’ He pointed to the top shelf, high above them both.

‘You’ll need a ladder,’ observed Miss Temple.

It had been the Doctor that spurred her thought. Her last vision of Svenson had been in Parchfeldt forest with Mr Phelps, corrupt attaché of the Privy Council, peeling back the Doctor’s gashed tunic and attempting to staunch the blood with his own coat. Like everyone else at the Ministry, Phelps had been under the sway of Mrs Marchmoor, her mental predations eroding his health and sanity. At the end he had been set free by Svenson’s suicidal duel with Captain Tackham. Phelps had not returned to the Ministry, yet who knew what secrets he possessed? She opened the first of the five volumes and sniffed at the dust. Phelps could also tell her about the Doctor’s final moments, when she herself had fled. She thrust the image from her mind and licked her finger. The fragile page caught, leaving a damp mark, and Miss Temple began to work.

After twenty minutes she sat back, noting with displeasure the grime on her fingertips. The sole address for any ‘Phelps’ was a tannery on the south side of the river. This could not be where a Ministry official lived. It had been a fool’s errand anyway – how many in the city took rooms, like she herself, at some hotel or block of flats, without leaving any record of ownership? She would delegate the task of finding Phelps to Pfaff. She stood and looked at the scatter of black books, wondering if she was expected to reshelve them, before deciding that was ridiculous.

But then Miss Temple hurried to the ladder and shoved it loudly to the volumes marked r. It took her two trips to get them to the table, but only five minutes to find what she wanted. Andrew Rawsbarthe had been Roger Bascombe’s direct assistant. Another drone sacrificed by Mrs Marchmoor, Rawsbarthe had perished in Harschmort House. Through Roger, Miss Temple knew that Rawsbarthe was the last of his family, living alone in an inherited house. If Phelps sought a place to hide, there would be few better than the abandoned home of an unmissed subordinate. Miss Temple scribbled the address in her notebook.

The pleasure of her discovery bled easily into confidence and Miss Temple decided to return on foot. Her path kept to avenues lined with banks, trading houses and insurance firms, yet Miss Temple was not large, and the crowded walkways became a gauntlet of bumps and jostles, with never an apology and often an oath. This was the discontent she had seen in the Circus Garden, but further inflamed. She turned at a knot of men storming out of the Grain Trust, shouting insults over their shoulders, and was nearly flattened by two constables swerving towards them, cudgels ready. Chastened, Miss Temple veered to the tea shops of St Vincent’s Lane, where one could always find a carriage. The city felt unmoored, a reactive writhing that brought to mind only unpleasant visions of beheaded poultry.

As she crossed the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye and raised an envelope of whorled red paper.

‘Not ten minutes ago,’ he said.

‘Who is it from?’ The envelope bore no writing she could see. ‘Who brought it?’

The clerk smiled. ‘A little girl. “This is for Miss Celeste Temple,” she said, and so directly! Her hair was near your colour – brighter, though, quite nearly crimson, and such fair skin. Is she a niece?’

Miss Temple spun behind her, the sudden movement attracting the attention of other guests.

‘She is gone.’ The clerk was now hesitant. ‘Climbed into a handsome black brougham. Do you not know her?’

‘Yes – of course – I did not expect her to arrive so soon. Thank you.’

It had to have been Francesca Trapping. But how could the Contessa be so confident as to send the child in by herself – was she not afraid the girl would run? What had been done to her?

Miss Temple walked calmly to the rear stairs, beyond any eyes. She took out her revolver and began to climb.

The door to her rooms swung silently open at her push before stopping against the broken leg of the chair Marie had propped against the knob. Miss Temple glanced at the extra bolt: sheared away.

She eased into the foyer, not daring to breathe, her eyes – and the pistol barrel – darting at every piece of furniture. The maid’s room door was open. Marie was not there.

To her own bedchamber door a second red envelope had been affixed with a knife. Miss Temple tugged it free. At the sound, a cry of fear echoed from within.

‘Marie?’ Miss Temple called. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Mistress? O my heavens! Mistress –’

‘Are you hurt, Marie?’

‘No, mistress – but the noise –’

‘Marie, you may come out now. They are gone. You will be safe.’

Miss Temple pushed the front door closed, no longer bothering with the chair. She turned to the sound of her own bolt sliding back and Marie’s pale face peeking out.

‘We will call for supper,’ Miss Temple said. ‘And a man to repair our lock. Corporal Brine will be back directly, and I promise, Marie, you will not be left alone again.’

Marie nodded, still not prepared to step into the parlour. Miss Temple followed her maid’s gaze to the two red envelopes in her hand.

‘What are those?’ Marie whispered.

‘Someone’s mistake.’

The lock had been replaced and Miss Temple’s inevitably frank talk with the manager, Mr Stamp, concluded. Stamp’s mortification that his hotel had been so effortlessly penetrated by criminals was exactly balanced by his resentment of Miss Temple for having attracted said criminals in the first place, and it had taken all of her tact – never amply on supply – to settle the matter, for she knew his truest wish, finance notwithstanding, was to turn her out. Mr Brine appeared in the door some minutes later, out of breath, for the tale of the attack had reached him in the lobby and he had run all the way up the stairs. After Brine had asked to see for himself that Marie was well – which Miss Temple allowed only on the hope that such attention might persuade the maid that much sooner to effective service – she received his own report, a tale that eased her mind not at all.

He had indeed found the brown-coated man, who had not only eluded Ramper at Stropping, but had looped around and followed Ramper to the Boniface. Upon Ramper’s departure, the man had trailed him to Worthing Circle, where Ramper had hired a carriage. The brown-coated man hired a carriage of his own, but Mr Brine had not been able to engage a third carriage in time and had lost his quarry. With a shake of his head – the square nature of which made the gesture more like the swivelling of a wooden block – he described the man as ‘weedy and queer’, with a large moustache. The brown coat was out of fashion and too large for its wearer.

At this point Mr Brine burst into another apology, but Miss Temple abruptly stood, forcing Brine to stop speaking and rise with her.

‘The fault is mine alone, Mr Brine. You warned me. If you would let me know when Mr Pfaff sends word.’

She sat on her bed with the two red squares upon her lap, turning each in her hands for any hint of what they might contain. That the envelopes came from the Contessa seemed clear: the first to trumpet her command of Francesca Trapping, the second to make plain Miss Temple’s mortal weakness. Neither fact could be gainsaid. She plucked the knife from her boot and sliced open the first envelope. The red paper was stiffer than it appeared. Inside was only a snip of newsprint, by the typeface recognizably from the Herald.

–grettable Canvases from Paris, whose Rococo Opulence languishes in a mire of degenerate Imagination. The largest, abstrusely entitled The Chemickal Marriage, happily eschews the odious, irreligious Satire of Mr Veilandt’s recent Annunciation, but the only Union on display is that of Arrogance and Debauchery. The Composition’s Bride, if one can bear to thus describe a Figure so painstakingly degraded

Miss Temple had seen the artist’s work and did not dispute the assessment, though she did not know this particular piece. That the decadent artist Oskar Veilandt and the Comte d’Orkancz were one and the same was not widely known, for Veilandt was supposed to have died in Paris some years before. If she could acquire the entire article from the Herald, she would certainly learn more.

Miss Temple took up the second envelope, heavier than the first, and cut along its seam. She peeked inside and felt her breath catch. With delicate care she drew the blade around the next two sides, peeling it open as fearfully as if it were a box that held a beating heart.

The envelope had been pinned to the door quite deliberately to avoid damaging the small square of glass it held – no thicker than a wasp’s wing, and the colour of indigo ink pooled across white porcelain. She glanced at the door. This had come from the Contessa. The glass might hold anything – degrading, deranging, unthinkable – and to look inside would be as irrevocable as leaping from a rooftop. Her parched throat tasted of black ash … the Comte’s memories told her that the thinness of the glass allowed only the simplest inscription, that the memory must be brief.

The skin on the back of her neck tingled. Miss Temple forced her eyes around the room, as if cataloguing its reality might give her strength. She looked into the glass.

Two minutes later – she glanced at once to the clock – Miss Temple had pulled her eyes free. Her face was flushed, yet her transit of the glass fragment had not been difficult: the captured memory was but the viewing of a roll of parchment … the architectural plan of a building she did not know.

The Contessa had wasted her strategic advantage to acquaint Miss Temple, an enemy, with an unhelpful newspaper clipping and an equally pointless map. Obviously each might be useful, if she knew what they meant … but why would the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza desire Miss Temple to become even more entangled in her business?

Taking into account the curiosity of maids, Miss Temple hid the clipping and glass square beneath a feathered hat she never wore. The red envelopes were left in plain sight on her desktop, each now containing arbitrary swatches of newsprint.

The night brought only a terse note from Mr Pfaff: ‘Glassworks engaged, following on.’ Because Ramper and Jaxon passed messages through Pfaff, she heard nothing from either man, and Pfaff himself sent no further word that morning nor the next entire day. Miss Temple strode through the hotel, to her meals, to the cellar, even once on a whim to the rooftop in hopes of spying the brown-coated man in the street. She saw nothing, and clumped back to the red-flocked corridor of the topmost floor, where Mr Brine stood waiting.

At her chambers the evening editions had arrived and lay on the sideboard. Miss Temple took the pile in both hands and retreated to her writing desk, holding the papers on her lap without looking at them.

The journey to Harschmort House was a matter of hours by train, somewhat more by coach, and perhaps as much as an entire day on foot. Mr Jaxon had been gone five days, and Mr Ropp above a fortnight. That both had vanished into the mystery of Harschmort confirmed that Robert Vandaariff had survived. If the brown-coated man served Vandaariff, did it not mean, upon his trailing Ramper, that Ramper would disappear as well?

The Contessa had found her. She was wasting time. Her enemies were moving.

Miss Temple shoved the papers onto the floor. The sun was setting. She sorted through her bag. She could wait no more.

‘Marie, my travelling jacket.’

The maid had been safely installed in the room Miss Temple kept for business, the hotel’s footmen within earshot of the door. Miss Temple again left through the kitchens, Mr Brine at her side. With no idea whether they were being watched, she had to assume they were.

The art salon where the Comte’s paintings had been shown was locked and its windows dark.

‘I don’t suppose you can open the door?’

‘Not without breaking the glass, miss.’

Miss Temple cupped both hands around her face and pressed her forehead to the cold surface. The gallery walls were bare. She sighed. From her previous visit she knew there was no room for a very large canvas in any case. The Chemickal Marriage must be at Harschmort.

She whispered for Brine to look as well. When his face was nearer she spoke evenly and low. ‘Behind the gallery agent’s desk is a mirror. In that mirror – do not turn, Mr Brine – is a figure crouching in the shadow of that dray-cart. Would that be your brown-coated man?’

Brine sucked breath through his teeth in a hiss.

‘Excellent,’ said Miss Temple. ‘We will walk away without a care. I doubt the man’s alone, and until we locate his confederates, we cannot act.’

They kept to well-lit avenues. At the next intersection Mr Brine leant close to whisper: ‘If he’s got fellows, they haven’t shown. If you’ll allow me, miss, perhaps we can trap him.’

Brine took her elbow in his massive hand and guided her to a smaller lane of darkened markets, the cobbles strewn with broken boxes, paper and straw. Once around the corner, Brine skilfully folded his own bulk behind three empty barrels. She walked ahead, pulling the pistol from her bag and then making a show of waving into the glass door of a shop, hoping it would appear as if Mr Brine had gone inside and left her waiting.

Silhouetted against the brighter avenue, a figure crept into view … head darting to either side like a snake. Miss Temple continued her performance with impatience. The shadow came closer, straight past the barrels …

Mr Brine rose, but the brown-coated man was warned by his shadow and avoided the swinging cudgel, fleeing back into the crowds. Miss Temple dashed towards them both, pistol raised, but it was no use. Their quarry had been flushed, and they would not trap him so easily again.

Mr Brine blamed himself bitterly, well past Miss Temple’s patience, and she was driven to change the subject, making conversation when she would have preferred to think. They had engaged a carriage and every time the man peered out of the window he was reminded of his failure and began to mutter.

‘I say again, Mr Brine, it does not signify – indeed, I am happy to be rid of the man, for now we may engage in our true business of the evening.’

Brine kept looking out, his large head mocked by the lace curtains bunched against each ear. Miss Temple cleared her throat. ‘Our true business, Mr Brine. Do attend.’

‘Beg pardon, miss.’

‘There will be ample opportunity to demonstrate your skills. Albermap Crescent, No. 32. As its occupant has died, I shall rely on you to make our entry – preferably nothing to attract the neighbours.’

They left the coach and waited for the sound of hoof beats to fade. No. 32 lay in the centre of the Crescent’s arch, and entirely dark.

‘I expect there is a servant’s entrance,’ Miss Temple whispered. ‘Less on view.’

Mr Brine clutched her arm. The topmost windows had been covered with bare planks, but from one of No. 32’s three brick chimneys rose a wisp of curling smoke.

They hurried to the side door. The stones around it were smeared with a grainy paste, like mortar, and Miss Temple looked to see if the house next door was being repaired.

Mr Brine squared one shoulder near the lock and drove the whole of his weight against the door with a resounding crack. Miss Temple shut her eyes and sighed. She followed Mr Brine in and shoved the broken door shut. In the silence of Andrew Rawsbarthe’s pantry they waited … but no answer came.

She slipped the wax stub from her bag, struck a match and led them to the kitchen proper, the grit on her shoes rasping against the floorboards.

‘Do you smell … cabbage?’ she whispered.

Brine shook his head. Perhaps the ghostly trace lingered from Rawsbarthe’s final meal. She motioned Brine on with a nod. They must find the third chimney.

The hearth in the main room was cold, and Mr Brine’s index finger drew a line of dust across the sideboard. The front door was locked and barred. The staircase was steep, the wood reflecting the candle like a dark mirror. The old steps creaked, thin complaints at their intrusion. When Miss Temple reached the empty landing, she pointed to the ceiling with her revolver. Brine nodded, his cudgel ready. But the staircase did not continue up. If Mr Phelps was using the house to hide, it must be in an attic …

Far below them, quite unmistakably, came the creak of the pantry door. Miss Temple blew out the candle. At once her heart sank. Behind them shone a double line of smeared footprints, glowing palely with the moon. She looked down at her boots and saw them rimed with the mortar from the doorstep – some phosphorescent paste? It had been a snare. Their location would be plotted for the man downstairs as neatly as a map. She desperately scuffed her boots across Rawsbarthe’s carpet, then pulled Brine’s head to her ear.

‘Guard the stairs,’ she hissed. ‘Surprise him. I will find the way up!’

In Rawsbarthe’s wardrobe she pawed through hanging clothes, hoping a ladder might be tucked behind them. Her foot caught on an open trunk and she stumbled full upon it, wrinkling her nose at the iron tang of blood. The trunk held jumbled clothing – impossible to see more without light – but her fingers confirmed, by the amount of stiffened fabric, how very much blood there had been.

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.

‘I heard you rise. Are you well?’

She nodded.

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘I had a dream.’ Miss Temple exhaled with more emotion than she cared for. ‘Of Elöise. She was dead.’

Svenson sighed and sat near her in a chair, his hair across his eyes.

‘In mine she lives. Small consolation, for I wake to sorrow. Yet my memory retains Elöise Dujong in this world – her smile, her scent, her care. She is that much preserved.’

‘Did you love her?’ Her back was to the stove, her dress bundled forward so it would not singe.

‘Perhaps. The thought is a torment. She did not love me, I know that.’

Miss Temple shook her head. ‘But … she told me …’

‘Celeste, I beg you. She made her feelings clear.’

Miss Temple said nothing. The thick stone walls cloaked them in silence.

‘You were with Chang?’ the Doctor asked. ‘At the end?’

Miss Temple nodded.

‘The night was chaos. I remember very little after the ridiculous duel –’

‘It was not ridiculous,’ said Miss Temple. ‘It was very brave.’

‘I heard you call and guessed something had happened to Chang. I did not know until this night it was the Contessa. Nor that she killed Elöise.’

Svenson had changed, as if the blue of his eyes had been run through a sieve. Again she wondered at his wound – how raw the scar, how long, imagining the blade slicing across the Doctor’s nipple –

She whimpered under her breath. Svenson half rose from his seat but she kept him back with a shake of her head and a half-hearted smile. The Doctor watched her with concern.

‘I have been quite out of the world,’ he said softly. ‘You had best tell me what you can.’

Her story poured out, everything that had taken place from the clearing where Elöise had died to Albermap Crescent – Pfaff, the vanishing of Ropp and Jaxon, the red envelopes, the Comte’s painting, the scrap of inscribed glass. She said nothing of her own distress, the books roiling inside, her deracinating hunger. She said nothing of Chang. Yet, as she spoke, she found her attention catching on the Doctor’s features, the efficient movement of his hands as he smoked, even the new rasp to his voice. She found herself guessing his age – a decade older than she, surely no more than that – his German manners aged him next to a man like Chang, but if one only looked at his face –

Miss Temple started, deep in her own mind. Svenson had stepped closer to the stove and rubbed his hands.

‘I am growing cold after all.’

‘It is cold,’ replied Miss Temple, holding out her hands as well. ‘Winter is the guest who never leaves – who one finds lurking behind the beer barrel in the kitchen.’

Svenson chuckled, and shook his head. ‘To keep your humour, Celeste, after all you’ve seen.’

‘I’m sure I have no humour at all. Speaking one’s mind is not wit.’

‘My dear, that is wit exactly.’

Miss Temple reddened. When it was clear she had no intention of replying, the Doctor knelt and scooped more coal into the stove.

‘Mr Cunsher has not come. He may be hiding, or in pursuit – or taken, in which case we cannot remain here.’

‘How will we know which? If we leave, how will we find him?’

‘He will find us, do not fear …’

‘I do not like Mr Cunsher.’

‘Upon such men we must rely. How long did it take until you trusted Chang?’

‘No time at all. I saw him on the train. I knew.’

Svenson met her determined expression, then shrugged. ‘Harschmort is too perilous until we know more. Our struggle has become a chess match. We cannot strike at king or queen, but must fence with pawns and hope to force a path. Your Mr Pfaff –’

‘Went to a glassworks by the river, which led him somewhere else.’

‘And Mr Ramper went to Raaxfall. Phelps and I have hopes to waylay Mr Harcourt as he leaves the Ministry –’

‘We should go back to the Boniface,’ Miss Temple said. ‘As it is watched, my arrival may provoke one of these pawns to action – which you and Mr Phelps can observe. I will be safe with Brine, and with any luck Mr Pfaff will have returned.’

‘Spelt out like that, I cannot disagree.’

She smiled. ‘Why should you want to?’

Breakfast was quick and cold, well before dawn. Fog clung to the stones. The streets on the far side of the tower were of a piece with the tents on the common they had passed in the night – even at this hour crowded with faces from other lands, tiny shops, carts, mere squares of carpet piled with copper, beadwork, spices, embroidery. Miss Temple found herself next to Mr Phelps. Unable to shed her distrust, yet feeling obliged because of the Doctor’s alliance, she did her best to strike up a conversation.

‘How strange it must be, Mr Phelps, to be so uprooted from your life.’

The pale man’s expression remained wary. ‘In truth, I scarcely note it.’

‘But your family, your home – are you not missed?’

‘The only ones to miss me are already dead.’

Miss Temple felt an impulse to apologize, but repressed it. Behind them Svenson listened to Mr Brine describe his service abroad, apparently spurred on by the dark faces around them.

‘When you say “dead”, Mr Phelps, do you refer to your former allies – Mrs Marchmoor, Colonel Aspiche and the others?’

Phelps’s lips were a thin, whitened line. He gestured at the market stalls. ‘Have you spent all your hours in that hotel? Do you not see how we are stared at?’

‘I am not unaccustomed to dark faces, Mr Phelps, nor their attention.’

‘Have you not perceived the disorder in the streets?’

‘Of course I have perceived it,’ said Miss Temple. ‘But disorder and unrest have always been the lot of the unfortunate.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Phelps replied under his breath, angry but not wanting to draw attention. ‘Everything you see – the fear amongst these colonials, the anger of the displaced workers, the outrage with the banks, our paralysed industry – all of this comes directly from my misguided efforts. And your virtuous ones.’

‘I do not understand.’

Phelps exhaled, a chuff of clouded air. She saw the strain in his eyes, a vibration of guilt. He did not like her, she knew, but, more, Phelps did not like himself. She gave the man credit for his awareness of the latter dislike colouring the former – thus the sigh, and an attempt at explanation.

‘Those you name as “the Cabal” insinuated themselves into the highest levels of every ministry, the Palace, Admiralty, Army and Privy Council. Even more importantly, through the subversion of men of industry like Robert Vandaariff and Henry Xonck, they influenced mills, banks, shipping lines, railways, a gridwork of influence and power – all of it suborned through their Process, and all, on their departure in that dirigible, left awaiting instructions, free will expunged.’

‘And I have worked against them –’

‘Yes, and unintentionally, through your success, delivered the nation from one dilemma to another. When the Cabal’s mission to Macklenburg failed and its leaders were undone, this gridwork I describe was left without command, even without sense. Various minions attempted to take the reins – out of ambition, I make no bones, for I was of their number – Mrs Marchmoor and the Colonel, but there were others too with a scrambling knowledge of what plans had been in place. This second crop was defeated at Parchfeldt, as we deserved – but that victory has only allowed the nation’s sickness to deepen.’

‘What sickness?’

Phelps shook his head. ‘The sickness of rule. The Cabal has hollowed out the rule of this land like a melon – and what remains? What remains of the nation? In governance there is ever but a narrow margin between acceptance and revolt. Quite simply, Miss Temple, that margin is gone.’

‘But why should you care?’

Phelps stammered, aghast. ‘Because I am guilty. Because others have died without the chance to repent.’

Miss Temple sniffed. ‘What does repentance do, save ease a villain’s conscience?’

Phelps turned down a lane of smithies, where the air rang with hammers and the breeze was warm. He spoke abruptly, his voice unpleasantly crisp.‘We went back to Parchfeldt. While Cunsher spied out the factory. Did the Doctor tell you? No. It had been weeks – cold, rain – the wild. We went back for her. We took the body to her uncle’s on a cart. Dug a grave in the garden.’ He twisted his mouth to a grimace. ‘Who’ll do that for you or me?’

When Miss Temple spoke her voice was small.

‘Did you look for Chang?’

‘We did.’ Mr Phelps took her hand to cross the busy road. ‘Without success.’

Mr Spanning, the assistant manager, was just unlocking the hotel’s front door as Miss Temple and Mr Brine arrived. Mr Phelps and the Doctor had gone to secure a carriage and would meet them outside.

‘Early morning?’ Spanning offered, eyes flitting across their rumpled clothes.

Miss Temple had not forgotten Spanning’s willingness to accept the Cabal’s money, nor her own threat to set his over-oiled hair aflame. He smoothly preceded them to the desk.

‘No messages. So sorry.’

Mr Brine leant over the lip of the desk to look for himself, but Miss Temple was already walking to the stairs.

‘Will you want tea?’ called Spanning with arch solicitude. ‘Brandy?’

By the time Miss Temple reached her own floor the revolver was in her hand. Mr Brine pressed ahead of her with his cudgel. The door was locked as they had left it.

Inside, nothing had been touched. Miss Temple sent Mr Brine downstairs to wake Marie. While he was gone, she retrieved the two red envelopes and their original contents, tucking them carefully into one of her aunt’s serial novels (Susannah, White Ranee of Kaipoor) to protect the glass. Her eyes caught her old ankle boots. The bold green leather had been chosen out of spite, of course, at the disapproval of Roger Bascombe’s cousin. She disliked the memory.

Miss Temple waited for Mr Brine in her parlour, a growing tension in her hips. Why was she alone? Why was she always alone?

She shifted and felt the seam of her silk pants pull between her legs. How long before Mr Brine came back? With one hand she bunched up her dress and petticoats so she might slip the other beneath. How close had she come to depravity in the barracks bunk, pleasuring herself in plain view of the Doctor, the noise waking every man in the room? Did she not risk the exact same mortification now, if Brine were to enter with Marie and find her red-faced and gasping? She worked her thumb through the gap in her silk pants and grunted at the spark of contact. And if it was not them entering, but Svenson? She imagined his shock at her brazen need. Was the rest of his skin so pale? She grunted again and shut her eyes, then with a sudden stab of anger pulled her damp hand free.

Was she such an animal?

Anything was possible – it was a lesson her blue glass memories made clear – but because a thing was possible did not mean she ought to want it. She had opened her heart to Chang. It did not signify that he was dead (or that she had only been able to do so because he was dead). She exhaled through her nose and rose to wash her hand.

They met the carriage in front of the hotel.

‘No word from Mr Pfaff,’ Miss Temple said, and handed her aunt’s novel to Doctor Svenson, who opened it to reveal the red envelopes. ‘You all ought to look into the glass, in case you recognize the building it shows.’

Phelps studied the newspaper clipping. ‘Is it worth a stop at the Herald? The complete text might tell us where to find the painting, and thus the man.’ He saw the glass in Svenson’s lap and swallowed with discomfort. ‘I will never see that shade of blue without a headache. Are you sure it is safe?’

‘Of course I am.’

Svenson looked up from the glass and blinked. ‘I have no idea what this is.’ He offered the envelope to Mr Brine. ‘Just look into it; do not let the experience surprise you.’

‘You seemed so sure they are watching us,’ said Miss Temple. ‘Still, we remain unmolested. Can it be they do not care?’

‘Perhaps they know where we will go,’ offered Svenson.

‘But how?’ asked Phelps. ‘Do we?’

‘If they have captured Cunsher or Mr Pfaff, they may know enough. Or’ – Svenson flicked a fingernail against the red envelope in his hand – ‘they have laid an irresistible path for us to follow.’

Phelps sighed. ‘Like visiting the Herald.’

Miss Temple turned to Mr Brine, lost in the blue card, and gently tapped his shoulder. Brine started and the envelope slipped off his knees, deftly caught by Doctor Svenson. Brine at once began to apologize.

‘There is no harm,’ Miss Temple said quickly. ‘The blue glass is immersive. Did you recognize anything?’

Brine shook his head. Miss Temple wished he might say something clever, feeling that his dull presence reflected on her. Mr Phelps steadied himself to enter the glass. He came out of it moments later with a sneeze – again the Doctor saving the glass from breakage – eyes watering and his nose gone red. Phelps dug for a handkerchief and mopped his face.

‘My constitution has been spoilt. Dreadful stuff.’ He blew his nose. ‘But, no, I’ve no idea of the place, save to say it looks large.’

‘Could it be a portion of Harschmort?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘It could be anything.’

‘Anything can be anything.’ Miss Temple slumped back in her seat, taking in the passing street. ‘Why are we riding to the Ministries?’

‘We’re not,’ Phelps protested, ‘not strictly – yet I had thought, perhaps, if we did waylay Harcourt –’

‘Ridiculous,’ said Miss Temple. ‘I did not spend a miserable night in hiding to deliver myself to Ministry guards. By your own logic, we are in this coach – at liberty – because our enemies allow it. The Contessa has sent these envelopes to spur us to action. That means she must be desperate.’

‘If it were so pressing, her hints would be clearer.’

‘Perhaps they are clearer than we know,’ said Svenson. ‘A clipping about the Comte’s painting and an architectural plan – in glass, which links it too with the Comte. May we suppose the structure is the home of the painting?’

‘Then must we visit the Herald after all?’

‘Possibly,’ continued Svenson, ‘yet if the Contessa possessed the entire clipping, why send only this part?’

‘To force us to visit the newspaper.’

‘Or the opposite,’ replied Svenson. ‘She could have given the whole page. Do you see – in reducing the text she also omits extraneous facts that might distract us.’

‘You speak as if she can be trusted!’ cried Phelps.

‘Never in life, but her actions can be deduced from her appetites, like any predator’s.’

Miss Temple plucked the clipping from Mr Brine, who currently held it. She reread the text and then turned it over. At once she snorted with disgust.

‘I am an outright ass.’ She held the scrap of paper out for them to see. ‘Our destination is Raaxfall.’

Phelps gave an exasperated sigh and looked to the Doctor for support. ‘That is an advertisement for scalp tonic.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Temple, ‘look at the words.’

‘Scalp? Tonic?’

‘No, no –’

Phelps read aloud. ‘New guaranteed formula for medical relief! From Monsieur Henri’s Parisian factory! A recipe for healing, restored vitality and new growth!’

Miss Temple stabbed her finger at the paper. ‘Factory – medical – formula – healing – new growth! Those words – in reference to the Comte d’Orkancz –’

‘But they aren’t in reference –’

‘He is on the other side of the paper! Put them together! It is the Contessa’s way!’

Phelps shook his head. ‘Even if that is so – which I doubt – how do you possibly reach the conclusion of Raaxfall? If anything “new growth” would point us to a repaired Harschmort, or even back to Parchfeldt!’

Miss Temple swatted the paper again. ‘It is obvious! “Monsieur Henri”!’

‘ “Monsieur Henri”?’

‘Henry Xonck!’

‘O surely not –’

‘Doctor Svenson!’

She shifted to face him, willing her expression to blankness, as if she would accept his impartial verdict. He pursed his lips.

‘I would not perceive the interpretation myself –’

‘Ha!’ cried Phelps.

Svenson was not finished. ‘However, the puzzle was not sent for me to solve, but to Celeste … and the Contessa is one to know her target.’

Miss Temple smiled, but her victory was tempered. Her cleverness had been fitted like a jigsaw piece into her enemy’s plan.

Raaxfall emerged as a sooty smear of workers’ huts clustered on the river’s curl. The banks bristled with an unsavoury dockfront, the wood as black with tar as the water was with filth. Everything in the town seemed blasted and cracked, even the ashen sky. The carriage took them to an inn where the driver might wait as they partook of a meal, it being by then near noon.

‘I have entered the Xonck works but once, for a demonstration of a new model carbine for territorial service – there were disagreements on the size of projectile required to stop native militia.’ Phelps cleared his throat and went on. ‘The point being, the works are outside Raaxfall proper, and less a standard mill than a military camp, with discrete workhouses built to protect against inadvertent explosion. At the inn we may find men put out of work who will know more about the present occupation and can show us a less visible approach than the main road.’

Miss Temple felt the grit beneath her boots as she climbed down, aware in this drab town of the colour in her clothes – green boots, dress of pale lavender, violet travelling jacket – and her chestnut hair hanging in curls to either side of her face. Mr Brine’s stout wool coat was the colour of dark porter, while Mr Phelps still availed himself of Ministry black. Doctor Svenson was last to appear, once again in the steel-grey greatcoat of the Macklenburg Navy. He stood tall next to Miss Temple, tapping a cigarette on his silver case.

‘I thought your coat had been lost,’ she said.

‘Mr Cunsher was able to liberate a spare from the diplomatic compound – along with my medical bag and my cigarettes.’

‘How resourceful.’

‘Extremely so. I wonder if we will see him again.’

They were the only patrons at the inn. The luncheon came as bleached of colour as the town – everything boiled to the near edge of paste. The men drank beer, while Miss Temple made do with barley water, impatient at how much time they seemed to be wasting. She stood well before the others had finished.

‘I will be outside,’ she announced. ‘Do take your time.’

‘What if you are seen?’ asked Mr Brine, a white potato spitted on the tip of his knife like an eye.

‘Seen?’ she replied waspishly. ‘We have been here half an hour. That cheroot has been smoked.’

Their blunt entry to the town was Mr Phelps’s way of disputing her leadership, and the insistence on a meal – though they had not eaten since dawn, and did not know when they might eat again – another way to curb her personal momentum. She stood outside and scanned the dark huts, all scalded brick and planks tarred with paper. The air was crisp in a way she might have enjoyed, save for the metal tang in which all of Raaxfall seemed steeped. She saw where the road stopped at a towered gate, like a castle made of iron instead of stone.

They had asked at the inn after Mr Ramper, but he was not remembered. Who was at the Xonck works? The townspeople did not know. Was anyone there at all? O yes, they saw lights, but could say nothing more.

She looked up and saw doorways around the battered village square now dotted with pale faces. Had they never seen a violet jacket before? Miss Temple walked towards the river. Here too she passed faces, young and old and those aged too soon by work, peering at her and then stepping forward to follow. As the citizens of Raaxfall crept into view, they reminded Miss Temple of rats on a ship, emerging from every possible crevice. She picked her way to an especially long wooden dock, to its very end, ignoring the people behind her – none yet bold enough to follow onto the pier – and gazed over the water.

Just beyond the river’s bend was her first glimpse of the Xonck works proper: high loading docks and a canal leading deeper inside. She looked directly below her. Several small oared skiffs had been roped to the pilings.

A skittering clomp caused her to spin. The townspeople now formed a wall across the pier. Another clomp. A stone had been thrown from the crowd. Miss Temple looked with shock into the blanched faces and perceived that she was hated – hated. The fact stung like a swinging fist. Her first impulse was to pull out the revolver – but there were a hundred souls before her if there were five, and any such step would justify their rage.

A ripple of bodies burst through the centre of the mob: Doctor Svenson, harried and out of breath, Brine and Phelps close behind.

‘Celeste – we did not see you –’

The three men dropped their pace to a rapid walk, aware that the mob was slowly following them onto the planking. Svenson reached her and spoke low.

‘Celeste – what has happened? The townspeople –’

‘Pish tush,’ she managed. ‘There are boats below: I suggest we secure one.’

Quite belying his bulky gait on land, Mr Brine swung himself over the pier like an ape, seized a rope and slid into an open skiff. Mr Phelps and Doctor Svenson took out their pistols and at this the mob halted, perhaps thirty yards away.

‘Citizens of Raaxfall,’ called Phelps, ‘we have come to discover why you have been put out of work – why the Xonck factory has barred its doors. We are here in your own interests –’

With his city accent Phelps might as well have been Chinese; nor did the presence of Miss Temple – and a foreign soldier – help to make any credible show. Another rock whipped past Phelps and splashed into the water. Svenson seized Miss Temple with both arms and held her over the edge – she squawked with surprise – where she was caught about the waist and hustled to a seat in the bow.

‘The rope, miss.’ Brine returned his attention to the pier.

Miss Temple tore at the knot linking the skiff to the pilings. Another rock struck the water, and then three more. Phelps’s pistol cracked out as Doctor Svenson dropped into the skiff, the entire craft tipping as his weight came home.

A cry came from above, and Mr Phelps’s black hat struck the water, floating like an upturned funereal basket. The man himself lurched into view, blood pouring from his cheek, and stepped into the air. He plunged into the river and came up gasping. Mr Brine extended an oar to his flailing hands, and Svenson snapped off six deliberate shots above them, emptying his revolver, but keeping the mob back from the edge long enough for Brine to gather Phelps and push off.

Brine stroked at the oars to propel them away from the teeming mass that lined the dock. The stones came in a hail, but, barring two that bounced dangerously off the wood, they were only splashed. Phelps slumped between the thwarts, water streaming from his clothes, a handkerchief held against his face. The natives of Raaxfall hooted at their ungainly retreat as if they’d chased a gang of armoured Spaniards off a palm-strewn strand. Phelps shrugged off Svenson’s attempt to see the wound and took up an oar, pulling with Brine. The Doctor shifted to the tiller and when enough distance had been gained turned the small skiff east.

No challenge came from the Xonck docks as they neared, fully visible in the afternoon light. The main canal into the works was blocked with a gate of rusted metal bars, like a portcullis sunk into the water. They bobbed before it, unable to see into the shadows beyond. At Svenson’s nod the other men pulled to the nearest floating dock. Miss Temple scrambled out with the rope. She looped it around an iron cleat and held it tight until the Doctor could tie a proper knot.

‘Here we are,’ sighed Mr Phelps. ‘Though I confess it seems a wasted journey.’ He peered at the lifeless canal.

‘How is your face?’ Miss Temple did not feel responsible for what had happened at the pier, but nevertheless appreciated Mr Phelps’s bravery.

‘It will do,’ he replied, dabbing with the handkerchief. ‘Stoned by an old woman – can you believe it?’

‘Can all that truly be a response to no work?’ Svenson had opened the cylinder of his revolver, and from a pocket he retrieved a fistful of brass.

‘No work in the city anywhere,’ offered Mr Brine.

Svenson nodded, slotting in the new shells. ‘But when exactly did the Xonck works close?’

‘After we returned, some three weeks now.’ Phelps patted his coat and looked behind them. ‘My weapon is in the river.’

‘It cannot be helped,’ said Svenson. ‘But before this recent stoppage, did not the people of Raaxfall enjoy near total employment? The marriage between a crocodile and the birds that pick its teeth?’

‘You can imagine the wages Henry Xonck would pay – they will have no savings to last out one bare week, let alone three.’

The Doctor sighed. ‘You are right, of course … yet I cannot credit poverty with such an unprovoked attack. On strangers, no less – on a woman!’

‘Why should you think it unprovoked?’ asked Miss Temple. The three men turned to her in silence. At once she flushed. ‘Do not be absurd. I did nothing but stand in the air!’

‘Then what do you imply?’ asked Phelps.

‘I do not know – but perhaps there is more to their discontent than we understand.’

‘Perhaps. And perhaps this same mob tore your Mr Ramper to pieces in the street.’

They climbed rusted stairs and met another wall of iron bars. The Xonck works were a honeycomb of huts and roads, bristling with towers and catwalks. It was divided by earthen redoubts and moats of sickly green liquid and caged blast tunnels, the earth around each entrance black as coal.

‘The lock is on the other side,’ Svenson said, slapping a wide metal plate. ‘Nothing to pick or even to shoot open. We need a field gun.’

‘There must be someone within,’ observed Phelps.

‘No one especially mindful,’ said Miss Temple. ‘We are veritable tradesmen at the door.’

‘We might climb,’ offered Mr Brine, pointing up. The fence was ten feet high, topped with sharp spikes.

‘Surely not,’ said Phelps.

Miss Temple went onto her toes to peer through the bars. ‘Do you see that barge?’

Svenson screwed his monocle in place. ‘What about it?’

‘Was it not at the Parchfeldt Canal?’ she asked. ‘I recognize the rings of red paint around the mast.’

‘Perhaps it came from Parchfeldt with the machines.’

Miss Temple turned to Phelps. ‘From the river here, could one reach the Orange Canal – and Harschmort?’

Phelps nodded. His hair was plastered to his skull, and Miss Temple saw that the man was shivering. ‘But if they have gone to so much trouble, where is everyone? What is more, if the people of Raaxfall are so exercised against the factory, what has stopped them from storming it? Not their own reticence, I am sure, yet – no, no! What is this?’

His last words were petulantly addressed to Mr Brine, who had nimbly clambered halfway up the fence.

‘Mr Brine,’ Miss Temple called. ‘There are spikes.’

‘Not to worry, miss.’ Brine gathered himself just beneath the spikes, curling his legs, then recklessly sprung over them, slamming into the other side of the fence with a clang. Miss Temple gasped, for a spike had gouged through his sleeve.

‘Not to worry,’ he repeated, and lifted the arm free. Brine landed with a solid thump on the other side.

‘Well done!’ cried Miss Temple.

‘Is there a lock?’ called Svenson. ‘Can you –’

Before Mr Brine could reply, he was surrounded by a dozen sudden lines of jetting smoke, each lancing towards him with a serpentine hiss. Brine staggered, eyes wide with shock, then toppled off the platform and out of sight.

Miss Temple had the sense not to scream, and instead found that she – like both men – had dropped to her knees.

‘What happened?’ she whispered. ‘Where is he?’

‘Is he killed?’ asked Phelps.

She quite quickly began to climb, fitting her feet like a ladder.

‘Good God!’ cried Phelps.

Both men reached for her legs but Miss Temple kicked at their hands.

‘He will die if I do not help him.’

‘He is dead already!’ called Phelps.

‘Celeste,’ whispered Svenson. She was too high to pull down without causing her harm. ‘It is a trap. Think – you render Brine’s sacrifice without purpose –’

‘But we cannot go back!’ she hissed.

‘Celeste –’

‘No.’

‘You are being stubborn.’

The fence seemed higher from the top than it had from below. Brine’s strategy to reach the other side would not work for her – she’d not the strength, nor would her dress clear. She grasped the base of two spikes and called down.

‘You must support my foot.’

‘We will not,’ answered Phelps.

‘It is the simplest thing – one of you climb beneath and let me rest a foot on your shoulder – and then I will step over as if the spikes were daisies.’

‘Celeste –’

‘Or I shall fling myself like a savage.’

She felt the fence shake and then Svenson was below her, gritting his teeth.

‘I will shut my eyes,’ he said, then looked up directly beneath her legs and began to stammer. ‘For the height, you see – the height –’

‘The danger is on the other side,’ called Phelps. ‘You will set off the trap!’

‘A moment,’ she said to Svenson. ‘Let me gather my dress …’

Somehow his shyness gave her a confidence she had not had. She raised one knee and slowly settled it on the other side, digging her toes between the bars. The line of spikes ran straight between her legs, but she did not hurry, shifting her grip and gathering the dress to swing her second leg.

The small platform behind the gate floated in a sea of dark space. The only way off it was a ramp – Brine had clearly missed it in his fall – descending into shadow.

‘The shooting smoke,’ said Svenson. ‘It may have been bullets, or darts … can you see where they came from?’

Miss Temple eased her body lower. The metal plate that covered the platform … it sparkled.

‘There is glass …’

To either side of the gate stood tall, thin posts, each with a vertical line of dark holes, as if they were bird houses, all facing the platform and anyone trying to break in. Miss Temple measured the distance to the ground and the width of the metal plate. She gathered her nerve, quivering like a cat. She flung herself towards the darkness.

‘Celeste!’

She landed on the ramp and rolled, scrabbling with her hands to stop herself sailing off the edge. She rose with a sudden urgency and scuttled to the top of the ramp.

‘Celeste – that was incredibly foolish –’

‘Be quiet! You must either climb over after me or hide.’

‘Is there no lock?’ asked Phelps.

‘I cannot reach it without being killed – the metal plate, when one treads upon it, the trap is sprung – you will see for yourself. You must leap past it. The task is nothing, a girl has done it before you. But you must hurry – someone is coming from below!’

Phelps reached her first – spraggling and damp at Miss Temple’s feet. He motioned Svenson on with both hands. The Doctor had cleared the spikes with only a minor catch on his greatcoat, but clung uncertainly.

‘I do dislike high places,’ he muttered.

Beams of light stabbed up at them. Svenson jumped, clearing the metal plate by an inch, and lurched into their arms. Miss Temple put two fingers over his mouth. A voice rose in the darkness, harsh with amusement.

‘Look at this one! Right in the chops. You lot see if he’s alone …’

Their only exit was the ramp, exactly where a gang of men was approaching behind a raised lantern. Miss Temple took hold of her companions, pulling them down.

‘Lie flat – do not move,’ she whispered. ‘Follow when you can!’

She pressed her green bag into Phelps’s hand and then started down at a trot. She reached a landing and turned into bright lantern light.

‘Where is Mr Brine!’ she cried shrilly. ‘What has happened? Is he alive?’

The man with the lantern caught her arm with a grip like steel, the light near enough to burn her face.

‘What are you doing here?’ he snarled. ‘How did you pass the gate?’

‘I am Miss Isobel Hastings,’ she whined. ‘What has happened to Mr Brine?’

‘He’s had a bit of a fall.’ The man wore an unbuttoned green tunic, the uniform of the Xonck militia. The others with him were similarly dressed – all sloppy and unshaven.

‘My goodness,’ cried Miss Temple. ‘There are five of you, all come to rescue me!’

‘Rescue?’ scoffed the leader. ‘Take her arms.’

Miss Temple cried out as she was seized, doing her best to shove forward. ‘I am looking for my – my fiancé – his name is Ramper. He came here, for his work – Mr Brine told me – I paid him to help me –’

‘No one comes here, Isobel Hastings.’

‘He did! Ned Ramper – a great strapping fellow! What have you done with him?’

The leader looked past Miss Temple, and made to aim the lantern at the ramp above. She kicked his shin.

‘Where is he, I say – I insist that you answer –’

The man’s backhand struck her face like a whip, and she only kept her feet for being held. The leader marched down the ramp and barked for the others to follow. She could not place her steps. After the first few yards they simply dragged her.

She was dropped to the floor in a cold room fitted with gas lamps.

‘That one on the table.’

Men crossed in front of her and carried the deadweight of Mr Brine to a table of stained planks. Brine’s eyes were shut and his jaw was mottled and crusted with blue, like a French cheese from a cave.

‘And the sweetmeat on the throne.’

Miss Temple rose to her knees. ‘I can seat myself –’

The men exchanged a laugh and shoved her into a high-backed seat, made from welded iron pipes and bolted to the floor. A chain was cinched below her breasts and another pulled across her throat. Behind her came the creak of a door.

‘Who did you find, Benton?’

The voice was thin, as unhurried as swirling smoke. The lantern man – Benton – immediately dipped his head and backed away, ceding any claim.

‘Miss Isobel Hastings, sir. Says Ned Ramper’s her fiancé. Came with this great lump to find him.’

‘Can she speak?’

‘Course she can! I wouldn’t – not without your order –’

‘No.’

Miss Temple sensed the thin-voiced man behind her, though the chain stopped her from turning. ‘Tell me, Isobel. If you will forgive the impropriety.’ A finger insinuated itself into a curl of her hair and gave a gentle tug. ‘Who is your friend on the table?’

‘Mr Brine. Corporal Brine. He is a friend of Ned Ramper.’

‘And he led you here? Did you pay him money?’

Miss Temple nodded dumbly.

‘Benton?’

‘Six silver shillings in his pocket, sir. No one touched it.’

‘Does six shillings pay a man to die, I wonder? Would it be enough for you, Benton?’

‘Way things are now, sir … I’d call it a decent wage.’

‘And who paid Ned Ramper, Isobel?’

‘Is that important?’

He pulled her hair sharply enough to make her wince.

‘Leave what’s important to me.’

‘A woman. She lives in a hotel. I don’t like her.’

‘What hotel?’

‘Ned would not tell me. He thought I would follow him.’

She felt his breath in her ear. ‘But you did follow him, didn’t you, Isobel? What hotel?’

‘She lives at the … the St Royale.’

Benton glanced suddenly at the man behind her, but when Miss Temple’s captor spoke his voice betrayed no care.

‘Did you see this woman yourself?’

Miss Temple nodded again, sniffing. ‘She had b-black hair, and a red dress –’

‘And this fellow here – Brine – she’d hired him as well?’

Miss Temple nodded vigorously. Her captor called softly to Benton.

‘Empty his pockets. Show me.’

Benton leapt to the table. Miss Temple quickly counted – there had been five on the ramp … here she saw Benton and three more, digging at Brine’s clothing like vultures. The fifth man must have gone to collect their master. Was he standing guard at the door behind her? The hand tugged at her hair.

‘And what of your pockets? Have you no purse or bag?’

‘I lost it, climbing over the gate. When Mr Brine fell, I was so frightened –’

‘Not so frightened that you died.’ He called behind him. ‘See if it’s there.’

Footsteps signalled the fifth man running for the ramp. Miss Temple’s blood froze. If he discovered Svenson and Phelps –

‘He had this.’ Benton held the clipping from the Herald. ‘ “-grettable Canvases from Paris”. Don’t know what “-grettable” is, not speaking French.’

The paper was snatched from his hand as Miss Temple’s captor stepped forward. She glimpsed only a shining black coat before he was off without a word.

Benton watched him go, his posture lapsing back into feral comfort. He turned to Miss Temple with a satisfied smile.

‘Maybe I should search your pockets too … every little pocket you possess.’

A footfall in the darkness did not shift his hungry gaze. ‘Find her bag, then?’ Benton drawled.

‘Step away from the woman.’

Doctor Svenson strode into the light, the long Navy revolver in his hand. Benton swore aloud and reached in his tunic. The pistol roared in the echoing room like a cannon and Benton flew back, shirt-front spraying gore. Another shot shattered the leg of a man near the table. Two more, rapidly snapped from Miss Temple’s smaller weapon, drilled the back of a fellow dashing for the door. Mr Phelps came forward with Svenson, their guns extended towards the fourth man, his hands in the air.

‘Down on the floor,’ growled the Doctor. The man hurried to comply, and Mr Phelps bound his limbs. Doctor Svenson looked to the open door, then to Miss Temple.

‘Are you hurt?’

Miss Temple shook her head. Her voice was hoarse.

‘Is he – is Mr Brine –’

‘A moment, Celeste …’

Svenson knelt over the man with the shattered leg, then stood and tucked the gun away, stepping clear of the blood.

‘It is the artery,’ he muttered. ‘I meant to wound …’

Even as he spoke the heavy breathing fell to silence. Had it been even one minute? The Doctor crossed to the table, saying nothing. Miss Temple cleared her throat to get his attention. She nodded at Benton.

‘The key to these chains is in his waistcoat.’

Phelps returned Miss Temple’s revolver, with her bag, and helped himself to the unlamented Benton’s.

‘They will have heard our shots.’

‘They may assume their own men did the shooting,’ replied Svenson. He turned to Miss Temple. ‘We heard some of your interrogation.’

Phelps frowned. ‘Their leader’s voice – I’m sure I ought to place it, but the circumstances escape me.’

‘Whoever he is,’ said Svenson, ‘they have taken Mr Ramper – and who knows what he told them.’

‘It cannot have been much.’ Miss Temple straightened her jacket. ‘Not if they believed the Contessa to have hired him. But I must look at Mr Brine.’

Svenson stood with her. ‘His neck was broken in the fall. It is perhaps –’

‘A blessing,’ she said. ‘I know.’

Blue glass had been driven into Brine’s jaw, each spike sending out veins of crystallized destruction, like the limbs of embedded blue spiders. Svenson indicated a spot on Brine’s chest, then others on his abdomen and arms. In every case, peeling away his clothing revealed the hard, mottled skein of penetration.

‘Glass bullets?’ whispered Phelps.

Svenson nodded. ‘I cannot see the purpose. I doubt they alone would have killed him.’

Miss Temple dug in her bag for a handkerchief and walked to the door. ‘We cannot get back over the wall. We must go on.’

‘I am sorry for your man, Celeste,’ said Svenson. ‘He was a brave fellow.’

Miss Temple shrugged, but did not yet face them.

‘Brave fellows arrive by the dozen,’ she said, ‘and fate mows them flat. My own poor crop did not last at all.’

At the end of an echoing tunnel they met a metal door.

‘This explains why no one came,’ said Svenson, tugging on it. ‘Thick steel and entirely locked. We will have to return to see if one of those villains kept a key.’

‘Already done,’ said Phelps with a smile. ‘Courtesy of the late Mr Benton.’

He spread the ring of keys on his palm, selected one and slipped it in. The lock turned. Phelps stepped back and readied his pistol.

‘Do we have a plan, as such?’

‘Quite,’ offered Svenson. ‘Discover what Vandaariff has done here – find Mr Ramper – glean what we can about the Contessa – then manage our own escape.’

Miss Temple simply pulled open the door.

If the works above ground were a broken honeycomb, spread before them now was the hive itself: cages of iron, walls of blistered concrete, great furnaces gone cold, assembly tables, dusty vats, and staircases near and far, extending to the shadows.

‘Ought we to divide our efforts?’ whispered Phelps. ‘The ground is so large …’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘Even separated we could not search it in a week. We have to think: where would they locate themselves – why would they? In a foundry? With the ammunition stores? What serves them best?’

Phelps abruptly sneezed. ‘I beg your pardons –’

‘You have a chill,’ muttered Svenson. ‘We must find a fire.’

‘We must find that man. Perhaps if we climb the stairs we may see more.’ Phelps sighed and finished his own sentence. ‘Or be seen and get a bullet. Miss Temple, you have not spoken –’

She was not listening to either man. She had clearly never seen this place before … and yet …

She opened her bag and removed the glass square. Selecting a row of high columns as a touch point, she looked into the glass. For a moment, as always, her senses swam … but then the same columns were there … and wide circles that must be the chemical vats … and a furnace whose slag she smelt from the door. Still, recognizing the map did not tell her where they ought to go …

The Contessa had sent it to her. Just as Miss Temple had deciphered the clipping, so she ought to decipher this. The message had been sent some days ago – before Ramper had been taken – it was nothing to do with now. The key lay in the past. In the Comte’s past …

Her throat seized at a rancid nugget of insight from the Comte’s memories. She spat onto the ground and shut her eyes, finally managing to swallow.

‘The map!’ whispered Phelps.

The square of glass lay shattered. Miss Temple wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

‘We do not need it. There is a room, fitted for the Comte’s research, from when they built his machines. We would have walked right past …’

They crouched behind crates stencilled with the Xonck crest. Twice they had heard steps nearby – more fellows in unkempt green – but avoided discovery. Ahead lay a well-lit door that echoed with activity, a guardhouse. Miss Temple pointed to a smaller door half the distance on.

‘But it has no guard,’ whispered Phelps. ‘It seems a disused storeroom.’

She darted out, forcing them to follow. The final yards had her heart in her throat, waiting for the thin-voiced man to appear … but then her hand was on the cool brass handle. They slipped inside.

Phelps carefully shut the door and turned the lock, one hand tight across his mouth and nose. Miss Temple crept forward, face pinched against the pungent reek of indigo clay.

Mr Ramper lay on a table, naked and white as chalk. Across his body were craters – each as large and deep as an apple – where both flesh and bone had been scooped away: abdomen, right thigh, left wrist (the hand severed), near the heart, left shoulder, right ear – each cavity offering its own appalling anatomical cross-section.

‘The glass bullets,’ whispered Svenson. ‘All transformed flesh has been removed … and, good heavens, preserved.’

She followed his gaze to a row of meticulously labelled jars, each dark with thick liquid in which floated a fist-sized, jagged blue mass. Svenson delicately peeled back one of Ramper’s eyelids. The pupil had rolled into his skull, leaving a dead white egg whose veins were shot with blue. Svenson put two fingers to the carotid and stepped away.

‘I do not think he died at once.’

‘Interrogated?’ asked Phelps.

Svenson indicated two of Ramper’s open wounds and against her wishes Miss Temple leant forward to look. ‘The variance in the clotted blood – the colour. I would hazard that during some of these excavations the poor man still lived.’

‘And there are more,’ said Phelps. ‘My God … they must be from the town … no wonder their rage …’

Beyond Ramper lay five men and one woman, naked and despoiled, their discoloured flesh indicating a longer tenure in the room. Miss Temple’s eyes drifted to their hands – callused, with broken, dirty nails – and then, despite herself, to their genitals, exposed and mournful. The lone woman’s breasts hung flat to either side of her ribs, framing a bloody cave at the base of her sternum.

A rustle of papers startled her. The Doctor stood at a long table piled with bound journals and surgical tools, his face an impassive mask.

‘He has documented every step,’ said Svenson quietly. ‘For weeks. Keeping records … every one of these people – each step scrupulously observed.’

Phelps nodded towards Ramper’s corpse. ‘God forgive me – but does he note anything the poor man might have revealed?’

The Doctor thumbed the notebooks quickly. Phelps glanced to the door. Miss Temple stared at a body whose eye socket was a coagulated well.

‘Whatever the Comte’s insanity,’ muttered Phelps, ‘this room cannot explain Vandaariff’s occupation of the entire works.’

Svenson turned to Miss Temple, his eyes wide. An open journal lay in his hands.

‘What is it? What have you found?’

Instead of answering he marched past her, past the tables, to the cluttered shelves, the journal dropped, both hands pawing the wall.

‘Doctor Svenson?’ she asked, suddenly afraid.

‘What has happened?’ hissed Phelps.

The Doctor found the hidden door and pulled it wide. On another table lay a man secured with chains, naked, pale and still. Miss Temple screamed. Cardinal Chang’s eyes snapped open.