“I do not like him.”
“Do you like me?”
“No. No, I don’t,” she muttered peevishly.
“Of course not. And yet we are able to get along perfectly well.” Mrs. Marchmoor threw a smug smile back to Miss Temple, and indicated a branching hallway. “It is this way.”
The Contessa was not in the suite. Mrs. Marchmoor had opened it with her key, and ushered them inside. Miss Temple had removed her revolver in the hallway, once they were off the staircase and out of view, and she followed them carefully, her eyes darting about in fear of possible ambush. She stepped on a shoe in the foyer and stumbled. A shoe? Where were the maids? It was a very good question, for the Contessa’s rooms were a ruin. No matter where Miss Temple cast her gaze it fell across uncollected plates and glasses, bottles and ashtrays, and ladies’ garments of all kinds, from dresses and shoes to the most intimate of items, petticoats, stockings, and corsets—draped over a divan in the main receiving room!
“Sit down,” Mrs. Marchmoor told the others, and they did, next to each other on the divan. Miss Temple looked around her and listened. She heard no sound from any other room, though the gaslight lamps were lit and glowing.
“The Contessa is not here,” Mrs. Marchmoor informed her.
“Has the place been pillaged in her absence?” Miss Temple meant it as a serious question, but Mrs. Marchmoor only laughed.
“The Lady is not one for particular order, it is true!”
“Does she not have servants?”
“She prefers that they occupy themselves with other tasks.”
“But what of the smell? The smoke—the drink—the plates—does she desire rats?”
Mrs. Marchmoor shrugged, smiling. Miss Temple scuffed at a corset on the carpet near her foot.
“I’m afraid that is mine,” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor, with a chuckle.
“Why would you remove your corset in the front parlor of a noble lady?” Miss Temple asked, little short of appalled, but already wondering at the answer, the possibilities disorientingly lurid. She looked away from Mrs. Marchmoor to compose her face and saw herself in the large mirror above her on the wall, a determined figure in green, her chestnut curls, pulled to the back and each side of her head, a darker shade in the warm gaslight, and all around her the tattered litter of decadent riot. But behind her head in the reflection, a flash of vivid blue caught her eye and she turned to see a framed canvas that could only be the work of Oskar Veilandt.
“Another Annunciation …” she whispered aloud.
“It is,” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor in reply, her voice hesitant and cautious behind her. Hearing it, Miss Temple had the feeling of being watched carefully, like a bird stalked by a slow-moving cat. “You’ve seen it elsewhere?”
“I have.”
“Which fragment? What did it portray?”
She did not want to answer, to acknowledge the woman’s interrogation, but the power of the image drove her to speak. “Her head …”
“Of course—at Mr. Shanck’s exhibition. The head is beautiful … such a heavenly expression of peace and pleasure lives in her face—would you not say? And here … see how the fingers hold into her hips … you see, in the artist’s interpretation, how she has been mounted by the Angel …”
Behind them, Miss Vandaariff whimpered. Miss Temple wanted to turn to her but could not shift her gaze from the near-seething image. Instead, she walked slowly to it … the brushstrokes immaculate and smooth, as if the surface more porcelain than pigment and canvas. The flesh was exquisitely rendered, though the fragment itself—so out of context of the whole, with neither face seen, just their hips and the two blue hands—struck her as at once compelling and somehow dreadful to imagine. She wrenched her eyes away. Both women watched her. Miss Temple forced her voice to a normal tone, away from the sinister intimacy of the painting.
“It is an allegory,” she announced. “It tells the story of your intrigue. The Angel stands for your work with the blue glass, the lady for all those you would work upon. It is the Annunciation, for you believe that the birth—what your plans conceive—will—will—”
“Redeem us all,” finished Mrs. Marchmoor.
“I’ve never seen such blasphemy!” Miss Temple announced with confidence.
“You have not seen the rest of the painting,” said Miss Vandaariff.
“Hush, Lydia.”
Miss Vandaariff did not answer, but then suddenly placed both hands over her abdomen and groaned with what seemed to be sincere discomfort … then doubled over and groaned again, rocking back and forth, a rising note of fear in her moaning, as if this feeling were something she knew.
“Miss Vandaariff?” cried Miss Temple. “What is wrong?”
“She will be fine,” said Mrs. Marchmoor mildly, her hand reaching up to gently pat the stricken woman’s rocking back. “Did you perchance drink any of the port?” she asked Miss Temple.
“No.”
“I did note a second glass …”
“A taste to wet my lips, nothing more—”
“That was very prudent.”
“What was in it?” Miss Temple asked.
Miss Vandaariff groaned again, and Mrs. Marchmoor leaned forward to take her arm. “Come, Lydia, you must come with me—you will feel better—”
Miss Vandaariff groaned more pitifully still.
“Come, Lydia …”
“What is wrong with her?” asked Miss Temple.
“Nothing—she has merely consumed too much of the preparatory philtre. How many glasses did you see her drink?”
“Six?” answered Miss Temple.
“My goodness, Lydia! It is a good thing I am here to help you void the excess.” Mrs. Marchmoor helped Miss Vandaariff to her feet, smiling indulgently. She ushered the young blonde woman in an unsteady shuffle toward an open doorway and paused there to turn back to Miss Temple. “We will return in a moment, do not worry—it is merely to the suite’s convenience. It was known she would drink the port—so the preparatory philtre was added to it in secret. The mixture is necessary for her—but not to such excess.”
“Necessary for what?” asked Miss Temple, her voice rising. “Preparatory for what?”
Mrs. Marchmoor did not seem to have heard her and reached up to smooth Miss Vandaariff’s hair.
“It will do her good to marry, I daresay, and be past such independent revels. She has no head for them at all.”
Miss Vandaariff groaned again, perhaps in protest to this unfair assessment, and Miss Temple watched with annoyance and curiosity as the pair disappeared into the next room—as if she had no revolver and they were no sort of prisoner or hostage! She stood where she was, utterly affronted, listening to the clanging lid of a chamber pot and the determined rustling of petticoats, and then decided it was an excellent opportunity to investigate the other rooms without being watched. There were three doors off of the main parlor she was in—one to the chamber pot, which seemed a maid’s room, and two others. Through one open archway she could see a second parlor. In it was set a small card table bearing the half-eaten remains of an uncleared meal, and against the far wall a high sideboard quite crowded with bottles. As she stared in, trying to piece together some sense of the display—how many people had been at the table, how much had they been drinking—as she presumed a real investigating adventurer ought to do, Miss Temple worried she’d had at least one complete mouthful of the port—had it been enough to inflict the insidious purpose of their horrid philtre onto her body? What fate was Miss Vandaariff being prepared for? Marriage? But it could hardly be that—or not in any normal sense of the word. Miss Temple was reminded of livestock being readied for slaughter and felt a terrible chill.
With a hand against her brow she stepped back into the main room and quickly to the third door, which was ajar, the sounds of groans and scuffling feet still insistent behind her. This was the Contessa’s bedroom. Before her was an enormous four-poster bed shrouded in purple curtains, and across the floor was strewn more cloth
ing—but these objects, large and small, seemed to float in a room where the walls were far away and, like the floor, dark with shadow like the surface of a black, dead-placid pool, the discarded garments floating like clumps of leaves. She pulled aside the bed curtains. With a primitive immediacy Miss Temple’s nostrils flared … a delicate scent the Contessa’s body had left in the bedclothes. Part of it was frangipani perfume, but underneath that flowered sweetness lay something else, steeped gently between the sheets, close to the odor of freshly baked bread, of rosemary, of salted meat, even of lime. The scent rose to Miss Temple and brought to her mind the human quality of the woman, that however fearsome or composed, she was a creature of appetite and frailties after all … and Miss Temple had penetrated her lair.
She breathed in again and licked her lips.
Miss Temple quickly wondered if, in such ruinous disorder, the Contessa might have hidden anything of value, some journal or plan or artifact that might explain the Cabal’s secret aims. Behind, the complaining groans of Miss Vandaariff persisted. What had been done to the woman—it was practically as if she was giving birth! Anxiety gnawed at Miss Temple anew, and she felt a glow of perspiration rise upon her brow and between her shoulder blades. Her truest adversaries—the Contessa and the Comte d’Orkancz—must eventually arrive at these rooms. Was she prepared to meet them? She had brazened out her tea with the Comte well enough, but was much less satisfied by her extended interaction with the two ladies, by any estimation less formidable opponents (if opponent was even the proper word for the distressingly unmoored Miss Vandaariff). Somehow a confrontation that ought to have been taut, antagonistic, and thrilling had become mysterious, distracted, sensual, and lax. Miss Temple resolved to find what she could and leave as quickly as possible.
She first swept her hand beneath the voluminous feather pillows at the head of the bed. Nothing. This was to be expected—a quick lift of the mattress and a look under the bed frame revealed the same result—and it was only with the smallest increase of hope that Miss Temple marched to the Contessa’s armoire in search of the drawer containing her intimates. A foolish sort of woman might hide things there, with an idea that somehow the personal nature of the drawer’s contents would ward off inquiry. Ever an enemy to the inquisitive, Miss Temple knew the opposite was true—that such silks and stays and hose and whalebone inspired a feral curiosity in almost anyone—who wouldn’t want to paw through them?—and so the idea of stashing, for example, a tender diary in such a place was tantamount to leaving it in the foyer like a newspaper or, still worse, on the servants’ dining table at mealtime. As she expected, no such items of worth were to be found amongst the Contessa’s undergarments—though she perhaps dallied a moment running her fingers through the quantities of silk and may have also, with a furtive blush, pressed a luscious delicacy or two to her nose—and she shut the drawer. The best hiding places were the most banal—cunningly in plain sight, or cluttered amongst, say, one’s jumbled shoes. But she found nothing save a truly astonishing and expensive range of footwear. Miss Temple turned—did she have time to ransack the entire armoire? Was Miss Vandaariff still groaning?—looking for some ostensibly clever hiding place she could see. What she saw was discarded clothing everywhere … and Miss Temple smiled. There to the side of the armoire, against the dark wall in shadow, was a pile of blouses and shawls that struck her as quite deliberately set aside from any possible foot traffic. She knelt before it and rapidly sorted apart the layers. In no time at all, its glow nested in a yellow Italian damask wrap like an infant in straw, she had uncovered a large book crafted entirely of blue glass.
It was the size of a middling volume from an encyclopedia—“N” or “F,” perhaps—over a foot in height and slightly under that in width, and perhaps three inches thick. The cover was heavy, as if the glass-maker had emulated the embossed Tuscan leather Miss Temple had seen in the market near St. Isobel’s, and opaque, for even though it seemed as if she ought to have been able to see clearly into it, the layers were in fact quite dense. Similarly, at first glance the book appeared to be one color, a deep vivid indigo blue, but upon staring Miss Temple perceived it was riven with rippling streaks where the color fluctuated through an enticing palette, from cerulean to cobalt to aquamarine, every twisting shade delivering a disturbingly palpable impact to her inner eye, as if each bore an emotional as well as a visual signature. She could see no words on the cover, nor, when she looked—placing a hand on the book to shift it—on the spine.
At its touch Miss Temple nearly swooned. If the blue card had exerted a seductive enticement upon a person, the book provoked a maelstrom of raw sensation set to swallow her whole. Miss Temple yanked her hand free with a gasp.
She looked to the open door—beyond it the other women were silent. She really ought to return to them—she ought to leave—for they would no doubt enter the room after her any second, and on their heels must soon be the Comte or the Contessa. She dug her hand under the damask shawl, so to touch the book with impunity, and prepared to wrap it up and take it with her—for surely here was a prize to amaze the Doctor and Chang. Miss Temple looked down and bit her lip. If she opened the book without touching the glass … surely that would protect her … surely then she should have even more understanding to share with the others. With another glance behind her—had Miss Vandaariff fallen into a faint?—she carefully lifted up the cover.
The pages—for she could see down through them, each thin layer overlapping the next with its unique formless pattern of swirling blues—seemed as delicate as wasp wings—square wasp wings the size of a dish plate—and were strangely hinged into the spine so that she could indeed turn them like a normal book. She could not tell at once, but there seemed to be hundreds of pages, all of them imbued, like the cover, with a pulsing blue glow that cast the whole of the room in an unnatural spectral light. She was frightened to turn the page for fear of snapping the glass (just as she was frightened to stare at it too closely), but when she gathered her nerves to do so she found the glass was actually quite strong—it felt more like the thick pane of a window than the paper-thin sheet it was. Miss Temple turned one brilliant page and then another. She stared into the book, blinked, and then squeezed her eyes—could the formless swirls be moving? The worry in her head had transformed into a heaviness, an urge toward sleep, or if not sleep outright, a relaxation of intention and control. She blinked again. She should close the book at once and leave. The room had become so hot. A drop of sweat fell from her forehead onto the glass, the surface clouding darkly where it landed, then swirling, the dark blot expanding across the page. Miss Temple gazed into it with sudden dread—an indigo knot opening like an orchid or blood blossoming from a wound … it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, though she was filled with fear at what would happen when the dark unfurling had covered the entirety of the page. But then it was done, the last bit of shimmering blue blotted out and she could no longer see through to the lower pages … only into the depths of the indigo stain. Miss Temple heard a gasping sound—dimly aware that it came from her own mouth—and was swallowed.
The images writhed around her mind and then with a rush passed through it, the singular point, both terrifying and delicious, being that she did not seem to be present at all, for just as with Mrs. Marchmoor and the card, her awareness was subsumed within the immediacies of whichever sensation had entrapped her. It felt to Miss Temple that she had plunged into the experience of several lifetimes piled up in delirious succession, so wholly persuasive and in such number that they threatened the very idea of Celeste Temple as any stable entity … she was at a masked ball in Venice drinking spiced wine in winter, the smell of the canal water and the dank stone and the hot tallow candles, the hands groping her from behind in the dark and her own delighted poise while she somehow maintained a conversation with the masked churchman in front of her, as if nothing untoward was happening … creeping slowly through a narrow brick passage, lined with tiny alcoves, holding a shuttere
d lantern, counting the alcoves to either side and then at the seventh on her right stepping to the far wall and slipping aside a small iron disk on a nail and pressing her eye to the hole beneath it, looking into the great bedchamber as two figures strained against each other, a young muscular man, his naked thighs pale as milk, bent over a side table and an older man behind him, face reddened, frothing like a bull … she was riding a horse, her legs gripping the animal with strength and skill, one hand on the reins and another waving a wickedly curved saber, charging across an arid African plain at a flying wedge of horsemen in white turbans, faces dark, she was screaming with fear and pleasure, the red-coated men to either side of her screaming as well, the two lines racing at each other fast as a cracking whip, lowering her body over the neck of her surging mount, saber extended, squeezing the horse between her knees and then one split second of slamming impact—the Arab’s blade lancing past her shoulder and her tip digging into his neck, a quick jet of blood and the hideous wrench on her arm as the horses pulled past, the saber yanked free, another Arab in front of her, screaming with exhilaration at the kill … an ecstatic waterfall the size of two cathedrals, she stood among squat red-skinned Indians with their bows and arrows, black hair cut like a medieval king’s … mountains of floating ice, the smell of fish and salt, a fur collar tickling her face, behind her voices speaking of skins and ivory and buried metals, in her large gloved hand an unsettling carved figure, squat with a leering mouth and one great eye … a dark marble chamber gleaming with gold, small pots and jars and combs and weapons, all golden, and then the casket itself, little more than the body of the boy-king close-shrouded in a thick hammered sheet of gold and knotted with jewels, then her own hand snapping open a clasp knife and bending down to pry out a singularly fetching emerald … an artist’s studio, naked on a divan, reclining shamelessly, looking up into an open skylight, the pearl-grey clouds above her, a man with his skin painted blue between her legs, playfully holding her bare feet in his hands, raising one to his shoulders and then turning, as she also turned, to ask the artist himself about the pose, a figure behind an enormous canvas she could not see as she could not see his face, just his strong hands holding the palette and brush, but before she could hear his answer her attention was drawn pleasantly back to her posing partner who had reached down to luxuriously drag two fingers, just barely making contact, across the length of her shaven labia … a stinking sweltering room crowded with dark, slick bodies in clanking chains, striding back and forth, her boots against the planking of a ship, making notes in a ledger … a banquet amongst tall, pale, bearded uniformed men and their elegant ladies, dripping with jewels, the great silver trays of tiny glasses rimmed with gold leaf, each one with a clear, fiery, licorice-tinged cordial, tossing down glass after glass, a curtain of violins behind the polite conversation, crystal dishes of black roe in ice, platters of black bread and orange fish, a nod to a functionary wearing a blue sash who casually passed her a black leather volume with one page folded down, she would read it later and smiled, wondering which of the assembled guests it would instruct her to betray … crouched before a campfire ringed with stones, the black shadow of a castle dark against the moonlit sky, its high walls rising up from sheer red stone cliffs, feeding piece after piece of parchment to the flames, watching the pages blacken and curl and the red wax seals bubble into nothing … a stone courtyard in the hot evening, surrounded by fragrant blooming jasmine and the sounds of birds, on her back on a silken pallet, others around her unconcerned, drinking and speaking and glancing mockingly at the muscled shirtless turbaned guards, her legs apart and her fingers entwined in the long braided hair of the adolescent girl bent over her pelvis, lips and tongue flicking with a measured dreamy insistence, the rise of sensation gathering across her body, an exquisite wave preparing to break, rising, rising, her fingers gripping harder, the knowing chuckle of the girl who chose at that moment to pull back, the tip of her tongue alone slipping across the fervid, yearning flesh and then plunging forward again, the wave that had dipped surging up, higher, fuller, promising to break like the bloom of a thousand blue orchids over and within every inch of her body …
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Volume Two Page 5