“Only one person,” said Elöise.
Miss Temple nodded. “Lord Robert Vandaariff.”
“I believe I have an idea,” Miss Temple announced, and hopped off the armchair. Taking care to step over the darkened smear on the carpet—it had been difficult enough to shift the body, they agreed not to concern themselves with stains—she made her way to the cluttered sideboard. Working with a certain pleasurable industry, she found an unopened bottle of a decent age and a small sharp knife to dig past the wax seal and into the crumbling cork beneath, at least enough to pour through—for she did not mind if the cork dust crept into the liquid, for it was not the liquid that she cared for. Selecting a largely empty decanter, Miss Temple began, tongue poking from her mouth in concentration, to pour out the deep ruby port, doing her best to empty the bottle. When at last she saw the first bits of muddy sediment, she left off the decanter and reached for a wineglass, emptying the rest of the port bottle, sediment and all, into this. She then took another wineglass and, using the little knife as a dam, poured off the liquid until all that remained in her first glass were the ruddy, softened dregs. She looked up with a smile at Elöise, whose expression was tolerant but baffled.
“We cannot proceed with our investigations trapped within this room, nor can we rejoin the Doctor, nor can we escape, nor can we gain revenge—for even carrying sacrificial daggers we must be taken captive or killed once we attempt to leave.”
Elöise nodded, and Miss Temple smiled at her own cunning.
“Unless, of course, we are clever in our disguise. The fire in the operating theatre was a site of great confusion and, I am willing to wager, one that prevented any clear account of exactly what occurred—too much smoke, too many shots and screams, too little light. My point being”—and here she waved her hand across the maroon dregs in the wineglass—“no one quite knows whether we underwent the Process or not.”
They walked down the corridor in their bare feet, backs straight, unhurried, doing their level best to appear placid of character while paying attention to the growing turmoil around them. Miss Temple held the serpentine dagger in her hand. Elöise held the bottle of orange fluid and had tucked the cigarette case, the blue glass card and the glass key into her shift, as it had thoughtfully been made with pockets. They had pulled their masks around their necks to give everything a bit more time to dry, for meticulously applied and patted and smeared and dabbed around their eyes and across their noses, in as exact an imitation of the looping scars of the Process as they could manage, were the reddish-ruddy dregs of port. Miss Temple had been quite satisfied looking into the sideboard mirror, and only hoped that no one leaned so near as to smell the vintage.
During their time in the trophy room the traffic of guests and servants had increased dramatically. At once they found themselves amongst men and women in cloaks and topcoats and formal gowns, masked and gloved, all nodding to the white-robed pair with the calculated deference one might show to a tomahawk-bearing red Indian. They answered these greetings not at all, imitating the post-Process stupor that Miss Temple had seen in the theatre. The fact that they were armed only served to make room around them, and she realized the guests accorded them a higher status—acolytes of the inner circle, so to speak. It was all she could do not to shake the dagger in each obsequious set of faces and growl.
The traffic drove them toward the ballroom, but Miss Temple was not convinced it was where they ought to go. It seemed more likely that what they really needed—clothing, shoes, their comrades—would be found elsewhere, in some back room like the one where she’d met Farquhar and Spragg, the furniture covered with white sheets, the table littered with bottles and food. She reached for Elöise’s hand and had just found it when a noise behind caused them both to turn and break the grip. Marching toward them, driving the hurrying guests to either side of the corridor, an action marooning Miss Temple even more obviously in its middle, was a double line of red-jacketed Dragoons in tall black boots, a scowling officer at their head. She nodded Elöise urgently into the crowd but was herself jostled back into the soldiers’ path, ridiculously in their way. The officer did his best to stare her down, and she looked again to Elöise—vanished behind a pair of waspish gentlemen in oyster grey riding cloaks. The guests around them stopped to watch the impending collision. The officer snapped his hand up and his men immediately stamped themselves to a concise, orderly halt. The corridor was suddenly silent…a silence that allowed Miss Temple to hear what would have been a previously inaudible chuckle, somewhere behind her. She slowly turned to see Francis Xonck, smoking a cheroot, head cocked in an utterly contemptuous bow.
“What pearls are found,” he drawled, “unexpected and unlooked-for, in the wilds of Harschmort House…”
He stopped speaking as he took in the markings on her face. Miss Temple did not reply, merely inclining her head to acknowledge his authority.
“Miss Temple?” he asked, curious and warily skeptical. She dropped into a simple, bobbing curtsey, and rose again.
He glanced once at the officer, and reached out to take hold of her jaw. She passively allowed him to move her head around however he liked, never making a sound. He stepped away, staring at her evenly.
“Where have you come from?” he said. “You will answer me.”
“The theatre,” she said, as thickly as she could. “There was a fire—”
He did not let her finish, sticking the cheroot into his mouth and reaching forward with his one unbandaged hand to fondle her breast. The crowd around them gasped at the cold determination of his face as much as his brazen action. With the sternest resolve Miss Temple’s voice did not shift in the slightest, nor did she pause as he continued to forcefully grope across her body.
“—from the lamps, there was smoke, and shooting…it was Doctor Svenson. I did not see him…I was on the table. Miss Poole—”
Francis Xonck slapped Miss Temple hard across the face.
“—disappeared. The soldiers took me off the table.”
As she spoke, just as she had seen in the theatre, and with pleasure, her hand shot out toward Francis Xonck, doing her level best to stab him in the face with the serpentine dagger. Unfortunately, he had seen the blow coming. He parried the blow with his arm against her wrist, then took hold of her wrist and squeezed. As it would give her away to struggle, Miss Temple released the dagger, which hit the floor with a clang. Francis Xonck lowered her hand to her side, and stepped away. She did not move. He looked past her at the officer, flared his nostrils in a sneer—which she was sure meant the officer had shown his disapproval of what he’d just witnessed—and picked up the dagger. He stuck it in his belt and turned on his heels, calling airily over his shoulder.
“Bring the lady with you, Captain Smythe—and quickly. You’re late.”
Miss Temple could only risk the barest glance for Elöise as she walked away, but Elöise was gone. Captain Smythe had taken her by the arm, not roughly but with insistence, enforcing her compliance with their speed. She allowed herself a look at the officer, masking herself with an expression of bovine disinterest, and saw a face that reminded her of Cardinal Chang, or of the Cardinal beset with the burdens of command, hated superiors, fatigue, self-disgust, and of course without the disfigurement of his eyes. The Captain’s eyes were dark and warmer than the bitter lines around them seemed to merit. He glanced down at her with brisk suspicion and she returned her attention to the receding, well-tailored back of Francis Xonck, parting the crowds ahead of them with the imperious ease of a surgeon’s scalpel.
He led them through the thickest knots of the gathering crowd, their passage a spectacle for whispers and gawking—Xonck reaching to either side for handshakes and hearty back-slaps to particular men and brief kisses to similarly high-placed or beautiful women—and then beyond them, skirting the ballroom proper to an open space at the meeting of several corridors. Xonck gave Miss Temple one more searching stare, crossed to a pair of wooden doors, opened them, and leaned his head f
rom view, whispering. In a moment he had pulled his head back and shut the door, ambling again to Miss Temple. He pulled the cheroot from his mouth and looked at it with distaste, for he was nearing the stub. He dropped it to the marble floor and ground it beneath his shoe.
“Captain, you will position your men along this corridor in either direction, specifically guarding access to these”—he pointed to two doors farther down the hall away from the ballroom—“inner rooms. Colonel Aspiche will provide further instructions upon his arrival. For now, your task is one of waiting, and making sure of this woman’s continued presence.”
The Captain nodded crisply and turned to his men, detailing them along the length of the corridor and at each inner door. The Captain himself remained within saber’s reach of Miss Temple, and, for that matter, Francis Xonck. Once he had spoken however, Xonck paid the officer no further mind, his voice dropping to a whisper as coiled with menace as the hiss of a snake preparing to strike.
“You will answer me quickly, Celeste Temple, and I will know if you lie—and if you do lie, do know it means your head.”
Miss Temple nodded blankly, as if this meant nothing to her either way.
“What did Bascombe tell you on the train?”
This was not what she’d expected. “That we should be allies,” she replied. “That the Contessa desired it.”
“And what did the Contessa say?”
“I did not speak to her aboard the train—”
“Before that—before! At the hotel—in the coach!”
“She said I must pay for the deaths of her men. And she put her hands upon me, quite indecently—”
“Yes, yes,” snapped Xonck, impatiently waving her on, “about Bascombe—what did she say about him?”
“That he would be Lord Tarr.”
Xonck was muttering to himself, glancing over his shoulder at the wooden doors. “Too many others must have been there…what else, what else—”
Miss Temple tried to recall what the Contessa had said to her, or anything provocative that might inflame Xonck’s obvious suspicions…
“The Comte was there too—”
“I am aware of that—”
“Because she did ask him a question.”
“What question?”
“I do not think I was supposed to hear it—for I’m sure it made no sense to me—”
“Tell me what she said!”
“The Contessa asked the Comte d’Orkancz how he thought Lord Robert Vandaariff had discovered their plan to alchemically impregnate his daughter—that is, who did he think had betrayed them?”
Francis Xonck did not reply, his eyes boring into hers with a palpably dangerous intent, doing his best to measure the true degree of her compliance. Miss Temple somehow kept the fear from her face, concentrating upon the patterns of shadow on the ceiling beyond his shoulder, but she could tell that Xonck was so provoked by these last words that he was about to slap her again, or launch into an even more debasing physical assault—when behind them, topping his rising agitation as an erupting whistle announces the boiling of a kettle, the wooden doors opened and the Macklenburg Envoy’s freshly scarred and deferential face poked through.
“They are ready, Mr. Xonck,” the man whispered.
Xonck snarled and stepped away from Miss Temple, his fingers tapping the handle of the dagger in his belt. With one more searching stare at her face he spun on his heels to follow the Envoy into the ballroom.
It was perhaps the length of two minutes before Miss Temple concluded, with the rise of different voices piercing murkily through the doors, that the members of the Cabal were holding forth to their assembled guests. She was aware of the silent Captain Smythe behind her and the general presence of his soldiers, within direct call however distant their posts might be. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She could only hope that eagerness for information had blinded Xonck to her disguise—which was more designed to fool ignorant guests in the hall than seasoned members of the Cabal. With a sudden urge toward self-preservation, Miss Temple restored her feathered mask into position. She sighed again. She could not go anywhere…but perhaps she could measure the strength of her cage. She turned to Captain Smythe and smiled.
“Captain,…as you have seen me interrogated…may I ask you a question?”
“Miss?”
“You seem unhappy.”
“Miss?”
“Everyone else at Harschmort House seems…well, eminently pleased with themselves.”
Captain Smythe did not answer, his eyes flicking back and forth between his nearest men. Accordingly, Miss Temple dropped her voice to a demure whisper.
“One merely wonders why.”
The Captain studied her closely. When he spoke it was near to a whisper.
“Did I hear Mr. Xonck correctly…that your name is…Temple?”
“That is so.”
He licked his lips and nodded to her robes, the slight gaping around her bosom that allowed a glimpse of her own silk bodice showing through the layers of translucent white.
“I was informed…you did favor the color green…”
Before Miss Temple could respond to this truly astonishing comment, the doors behind her opened again. She turned, composing her face to a suitable blandness, and met the equally distracted Caroline Stearne, so preoccupied and so surprised to see Miss Temple in the first place as to pay no attention whatsoever to the officer behind her.
“Celeste,” she whispered quickly, “you must come with me at once.”
Miss Temple was led by the hand through a silent crowd that parted for them impatiently, each person begrudging the distraction from what held their attention in the center of the room. She steeled herself to be calm, expecting that at the words of Francis Xonck she must now submit to public examination by the entire Cabal in front of hundreds of masked strangers, and it was only this preparation that forestalled her gasp of shock at the sight, as she was pulled so briskly onto the open floor by Caroline Stearne, of Cardinal Chang, on his knees, spitting blood, his every inch the image of a man who had passed through the pits of hell. He looked up at her, and with his gaze, his face pale and bloodied, his movements slow, his eyes blessedly veiled behind smoked glass, came the gazes of those other figures before her—Caroline, Colonel Aspiche, and the Comte d’Orkancz, who stood in his great fur holding a leash that went to the neck of a small figure—a lady of perhaps Miss Temple’s own height and shape—distinguished first by her nakedness and secondly, and more singularly, by the fact that she seemed to be completely fabricated of blue glass. It was when this statue turned its head to look at Miss Temple, its expression unreadable and its eyes as depthless as a Roman statue’s, slick, gleaming, and swirled indigo marbles, that Miss Temple understood the woman—or creature—was alive. She was fully rooted to the ground with amazement, and could not have cried out to Chang if she had wanted.
Caroline Stearne pulled Miss Temple’s white mask down around her neck. She waited through agonizing seconds of silence, sure that someone would denounce her…but no one spoke.
Chang’s mouth opened haltingly, as if he could not form words or gather breath to speak.
Then, as if everything was happening too quickly to see, Colonel Aspiche was swinging his arm and whatever he held in it smashed down onto Cardinal Chang’s head, knocking him flat in a stroke. With a brusque nod from their Colonel, two Dragoons detached themselves from the ring of men keeping back the crowd and took hold of Chang’s arms. They dragged him past her, his body utterly lifeless. She did not turn to follow his passage, but made herself look up, despite her racing heart and the pressing nearness of her tears, into the intelligent, searching face of Caroline Stearne.
Behind, the voice of the Contessa snapped through the air like the crack of a particularly exultant whip.
“My dear Celeste,” she called, “how fine it is that you have…joined us. Mrs. Stearne, I am obliged for your timely entrance.”
Caroline, who was already facin
g the Contessa, sank into a respectful curtsey.
“Mrs. Stearne!” called the rasping voice of the Comte d’Orkancz. “Do you not wish to see your transformed companions?”
Caroline turned along with everyone else in the ballroom, for the Comte’s gesture was one of grand showmanship, to see two more glass women stalking into the open circle with their deliberate, clicking gait, arms strangely floating, their uncovered bodies an arrogant assertion of ripe, ghastly, unsettling allure. It took Miss Temple a moment—what had the Comte said to Caroline, “companions”?—to recognize with shock Mrs. Marchmoor and, some new disfiguring scorch across her head, Miss Poole. What did it mean that her enemies had—willingly?—been transformed, transfigured, into such…such things?
The Comte gathered up Miss Poole’s leash and flicked her toward Mrs. Stearne. Miss Poole’s lips parted ever so slightly with a chilling smile and then Caroline staggered where she stood, her head lolling to the side. An instant later, as the effect spread to the first rank of the crowd like a rippling pool, Miss Temple felt herself swallowed up and thrust into a scene so enticingly real that she could scarcely remember the ballroom at all.
She was on a plush settee in a dark, candlelit parlor and her hand was occupied with stroking Caroline Stearne’s lovely, soft unbound hair. Mrs. Stearne wore—as Miss Temple saw that she (that is, Miss Poole) wore as well—the white robes of initiation. On the other side of Mrs. Stearne sat a man in a black cloak and a tight mask of red leather, leaning over to kiss her mouth, a kiss to which Mrs. Stearne responded with a passionate moan. It was like Mrs. Marchmoor’s story of the two men in the coach, only here it was a man and two women. Mrs. Stearne’s hunger caused Miss Poole to condescendingly chuckle as she turned to reach for a glass of wine…and with this action her shifting gaze took in an open door and a lurking figure half-visible in the light beyond…a figure whose shape Miss Temple knew at once as that of Roger Bascombe.
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Page 79