The Chemickal Marriage

by Gordon Dahlquist

  Like a wine stain seeping through thick linen, the skin in contact flushed pink, then red, then went purple, like a deepening bruise. Miss Temple shrieked.

  ‘What is happening? Take it away!’

  Svenson dropped the pouch. A pattern had been scorched onto Chang’s face, the colour of cherry flesh. The Doctor looked hurriedly around him.

  ‘The mattress! We must set him down –’

  Miss Temple leapt to the mattress, dragging it close. Svenson lugged Chang off the worktop and they laid him down. Already the scorched ring had faded again to the pink of health. How had the effects reversed so quickly? Svenson seized Chang’s shoulder and belt. With a heave he rolled the man over, face down on the mattress.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Celeste, when you saw Chang’s wound, at Raaxfall, did you query your own memories of the Comte?’

  She nodded, then choked in the back of her throat. ‘I found nothing.’

  ‘As I thought. You see, he is attempting something new. Our friend will not be another Lydia Vandaariff.’

  The Doctor lifted Chang’s coat. The brief glimpse at Raaxfall had been in poor light.

  ‘Celeste, please look away –’

  She shook her head. Svenson raised the silk shirt.

  The wound lay to the right of the lumbar vertebra. The original puncture had been enlarged through what looked like at least three different surgeries, expanding the scar to the shape and size of a child’s splayed, thumbless hand. The scar tissue was an unsettling vein-blue, with a rough, thickened surface like the hide of a starfish. But it was the flesh around the wound that had made them gasp in the wicked room at Raaxfall, and the Doctor winced to see it again. Like dye dropped into a milky basin, virulent streaks of red radiated from the centre, as if signifying a flowering of infection.

  ‘The same colour as the ring against his face,’ Miss Temple whispered.

  Svenson delicately palpated the discoloured area. The flesh was cold, and beneath it his fingertips met an unnatural resistance.

  ‘Something has been placed inside.’

  Her voice was small. ‘Will he die?’

  ‘If the Comte had wanted to kill him, he would be dead. We saw the other bodies –’

  ‘Then what has happened? Can you remove it? Why has he collapsed when he was perfectly fine?’

  Svenson caught her flailing hand. ‘Clearly he was not fine. I cannot hope to remove it, even had I the tools. Whatever is implanted lies too near the spine. The slightest mistake and he is a cripple.’

  ‘That isn’t true!’

  ‘Please, Celeste – you must let me think –’

  ‘But he will die!’

  Svenson looked helplessly around him, searching for any idea. The orange metal had always been effective in reversing the predations of the blue glass, but its application here had worsened Chang’s condition … could it be as simple as that, a matter of opposites? Svenson crawled to the china platter and pawed through the jumble of glass … was all of it so discoloured? He shouted to Miss Temple.

  ‘The card – the blue glass card!’

  She dug in her bag and he snatched the card from her grasp, protecting his fingers with his coatsleeve. He rolled Chang onto his back. The man’s eyes remained disturbingly open. Svenson dropped to his knees and thrust the card before them.

  At first he saw no reaction, his close observation echoed by Miss Temple’s silence as she held her breath. But then the pink colour began to drain away. Had that happened when Chang looked into the card, to view the painting? Svenson had no clear memory. Chang’s breathing thickened. His skin went paper-white. The blue card made things worse as well. Svenson yanked the card away and heaved a sigh of relief as these latest symptoms too reversed themselves.

  ‘It is not science,’ Svenson said helplessly. ‘It is not medicine, playing with a life as if it were a cooking pot, adding this and subtracting that. I am sorry, Celeste – desperately sorry –’

  He turned, expecting to find a face in tears. But Miss Temple stood at the platter. He saw her hand close around the reddish ball, but he was on his knees, and Chang lay between them. Svenson’s reaching arm fell short.

  Miss Temple’s shoulders heaved with convulsions. He spun her round, tearing the ball from her grasp and hurling it against the wall, where it shattered. Miss Temple’s eyes were dead. Black fluid rimmed her mouth.

  ‘Celeste! Celeste – you idiot girl! Celeste!’

  She did not hear. He eased her down, but her eyes refused to clear. Oily bubbles bloomed between her lips, but he could not make out the words, if words they even were. She arched her back against a bout of choking. Doctor Svenson knelt between his fallen comrades, ridiculous victims, and groaned aloud.

  A cupboard door below the worktop popped open, driven by the heel of a diminutive black boot.

  He blinked. The cupboards. They had not looked in the cupboards.

  She wriggled out legs first, stockings stretched around a colt’s knobbed knees, then little hands pulled her body into view. Francesca Trapping stood and brushed at her very rumpled dress in an automatic gesture that had no effect whatsoever. Her red hair was all tangles and snarls, her face unclean.

  ‘You are alive,’ Svenson whispered.

  Francesca took in Miss Temple and Chang, nodding as if their conditions were steps in a recipe she had memorized.

  ‘There is little time.’ Her shrill voice was raw. ‘By tomorrow Oskar will have had his way.’

  With a shudder Svenson saw the teeth in her mouth had gone grey.

  ‘Francesca … what has she done?’

  ‘What was required. What she has done to you.’

  Four

  Catacomb

  It had not been her intention to act rashly. But the impulse to snatch up the red ball was a spark of clarity within the riot she had felt since Chang had been recovered. Her delight at his survival, an unexpected flood of joy, had been immediately displaced by a host of clamouring thoughts and images – and none of that turmoil touched the man himself. In the tunnels, on the train, even when Chang held her hand, the distance between them was agony. A sea of feeling lay within his heart, she knew, as she knew it held her only hope of peace – yet he remained, as ever, untouchable and withheld.

  And so she had entered the red sphere. A frightening energy suffused Miss Temple’s mind, as if the glass were reacting to her – measuring … examining. This was not the brutal plunder of a blue glass book, with a victim’s mind drained whole. In the red sphere Miss Temple felt her mind being explored like a stretch of uncharted coastline. Unfortunately, the Comte’s knowledge provided no more detail beyond another glimpse of the painting, the apple in the Groom’s black hand. She was sure this examination was but a first step of its function, a preface to some larger task, like a wall being scrubbed before receiving new paint.

  And then, quite suddenly, the spell was broken, its work unravelled. This was the flaw in the glass. At once the foul tide in her rose, and her mouth formed words, a last memory. The Comte had whispered in her ear … no, not to her, but to Lydia Vandaariff, as his alchemical poisons remade her body. The young woman had been terrified – that had given him pleasure – such fear had seemed appropriate …

  ‘I do not like her,’ said a small rasping voice. ‘I should prefer to let her die. She let Elöise die. Elöise loved me. She did nothing. The Contessa did not say she would come, or him. Just you. We ought to leave them here.’

  ‘You must let me work …’ muttered Doctor Svenson.

  ‘Why is her mouth black? Has she drunk ink? What is she trying to say?’

  A damp cloth cooled Miss Temple’s face. She rolled her head to the side. The red mist dimmed. Three words congealed inside her mind.

  ‘Flesh of dreams,’ Miss Temple croaked. The Doctor wiped her mouth and then held her hair away as she coughed. She saw the mattress, Svenson on his knees, and, behind him, legs dangling from the worktop, an unkempt little girl. Francesca Trapping bore
the bitter expression a hungry cat might bestow upon a duck too large to acknowledge its authority.

  ‘Where is Chang?’ Miss Temple managed.

  ‘Just behind you,’ said Svenson. ‘He came to his senses two hours ago – now he sleeps.’

  ‘Two hours? Is he safe? Is he whole?’

  ‘He is – we have been more worried by you.’

  ‘I am perfectly fine.’

  ‘You are not. Celeste, my lord, between Chang’s wound and your own reckless –’

  ‘What did he see? What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. We did not speak. He did not want to speak. Once the danger passed –’

  ‘It was cracked,’ said the girl, as if this fact was proof of their collective stupidity. ‘Of course he woke up.’

  Svenson helped Miss Temple to sit. ‘I will not chide you. You live, and that is all that matters.’

  She looked past him. Chang lay stretched on the floor, hands folded like a statue on an old king’s sarcophagus.

  ‘You said something as you woke,’ said Svenson.

  ‘The red glass ball was nothing the Comte had made before.’ Miss Temple hiccupped wetly. ‘But “flesh of dreams” was something he said to Lydia – it came to me now for a reason.’

  Svenson sighed. His face was haggard. ‘Alchemy is about equivalents – balancing one element with another, transformation through incremental change. The nearest analogy would be symbolic mathematics. The Comte of course transposes chemical compounds with living bodies. But the language operates like a code – and so a phrase like “flesh of dreams” will have an equivalent, opposite concept –’

  ‘The flesh of life,’ said Francesca, chewing a thumbnail with her teeth.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Svenson. ‘And that tells us how he thinks – that the opposite of life is not, as most would have it, death, but dream.’

  Miss Temple frowned with distaste. ‘Lydia’s pregnancy. The flesh of dreams is born from the ashes of the flesh of life.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Paradise.’

  Svenson snorted. ‘And what can that word mean to that man?’

  Miss Temple was aware of Francesca watching her. How many hours had she been left alone? Francesca’s arms were marked with smears of soot … or were they bruises? Miss Temple felt a pinch in her throat.

  ‘Is there someplace I might … spit?’

  ‘A chamberpot, here – and somewhere is a bit of food, and water –’ The Doctor’s voice dropped off, in sympathy, as she bent over the chamberpot and let fly.

  ‘There isn’t time.’ The child’s voice was a whine. ‘We were waiting for her. Now we have to go.’

  Miss Temple met Francesca’s disapproving gaze and held it until the girl turned away. She waited for the girl to look back. When Francesca did so, pressing her lips together at being caught, Miss Temple stared even harder.

  ‘I did not let Elöise die.’

  ‘Celeste – the child is hardly responsible –’

  ‘She needs to know what is right.’

  Francesca Trapping muttered to herself. ‘I know perfectly well.’

  The chamberpot prompted Miss Temple to notice the fullness of her bladder. The single room offered no privacy beyond a meagre half-barrier of cupboards, behind which she would have to crouch, with Svenson only a few feet away hearing all. Instead, she picked up the chamberpot and crossed to the door. On her way, she impulsively took Francesca Trapping’s arm in hers. The child squawked in protest.

  ‘We will return directly,’ Miss Temple called to Svenson. ‘Girls together, don’t you know.’

  Svenson opened his mouth, coughed instead, and pointed vaguely to Chang.

  ‘Yes – while you – right –’

  Miss Temple hauled the squirming girl into the corridor. She dropped the chamberpot with a clang. ‘Will you go first or me?’

  ‘I will not go at all.’

  Feeling she must make an example, Miss Temple resentfully hiked up her dress and sat, daring the girl to say one mocking thing. But Francesca only stared. Disliking a silence broken only by the rattle of her own urine, Miss Temple cleared her throat.

  ‘We have been searching for you. You should know that the Doctor was very much in love with Elöise and grieves for her particularly. As do I. We also grieve for your mother, and your father, and your uncle – yes, even him, for his death no doubt has given you pain. Your brothers are safe at home.’

  ‘I know how my brothers are.’

  ‘Have you visited them?’

  The girl looked away.

  ‘No. Do you see? You don’t know – you have been told. What else have you trusted that woman to say?’ Miss Temple stood, rearranging her petticoats, and indicated the chamberpot. Again the girl shook her head. ‘It will be a long journey,’ said Miss Temple, annoyed that she had come to parrot every exasperating aunt or guardian she had ever known. With a shrug the girl took her place on the chamberpot, gazing sullenly at a point between her shoes.

  ‘The Contessa sent you to my hotel,’ said Miss Temple. ‘You did not try to go home.’

  ‘Why should I have done that?’

  ‘Because she is extremely wicked.’

  ‘I think you’re wicked.’

  The retort flung, Francesca squirmed on her seat and said nothing. Francesca’s face was naturally pale, but now it was pinched and drawn. Had the girl been eating? Miss Temple imagined the woman flinging scraps at Francesca’s feet with an imperious sneer – but then recalled her own experience in the railway car, the Contessa breaking a pie in two, passing bites of a green apple with an insidious amity.

  ‘So the Contessa is your friend,’ she said.

  Francesca sniffed.

  ‘She is very beautiful.’

  ‘More beautiful than you.’

  ‘Of course she is. She is a black-haired angel.’

  Francesca looked up warily, as if ‘angel’ had a meaning she did not expect Miss Temple to know. Miss Temple put one gloved finger beneath Francesca’s chin and held her gaze.

  ‘I know it is frightening to be alone, and lonely to be strong. But you are heir to the Trappings, and heir to the Xoncks. You must make up your own mind.’

  She stepped back and allowed the girl to stand. Francesca did so, the dress still gathered at her spindled thighs. ‘There is no water,’ she said plaintively.

  ‘I did without water perfectly well,’ muttered Miss Temple, but she opened her clutch bag and dug for a handkerchief. With a grunt she tore it in half, then in half again, and held the scrap to Francesca, who snatched it away and hunched to wipe.

  ‘A soldier does not need someone’s handkerchief,’ observed Miss Temple.

  ‘I am not a soldier.’

  Miss Temple took the girl’s arm and steered her to the door. ‘But you are, Francesca. Whether you want to be or not.’

  ‘You are returned, excellent.’ Doctor Svenson rose to his feet, working both arms into his greatcoat, a lit cigarette in his mouth. Chang stood across the room. Miss Temple perceived the shift in each man’s posture at her entrance. They had been speaking of her. Her sting of resentment was then followed by an inflaming counter-notion, that they had not been speaking of her. Instead, at her entrance, they had ceased their discussion of strategies and danger, matters to which she could neither contribute nor need be troubled by.

  Despite his crisis Chang seemed every bit as able as before – and far more so than anyone imprisoned for weeks ought to be. One look at Svenson showed the man’s exhaustion. That he had been unable to kill the Contessa, of all people, was proof enough. Miss Temple resolved to help him as she could, just as a colder part of her mind marked him down as unreliable.

  ‘How best to return?’ asked Svenson. ‘The vestibule key allows us some choice –’

  ‘You don’t go that way.’ Francesca marched to the cupboard doors and pulled them wide. Inside was a metal hatch. ‘You need a lantern. There are rats.’

  Svenson peered down the shaft
. ‘And where does that – I mean, how far down –’

  ‘To the bridge,’ Chang answered. ‘The turbines.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Miss Temple called to Chang. ‘Are you fully recovered?’

  Chang spread his arms with a sardonic smile. ‘As you find me.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘I looked into something I should not have, like a fool.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘What did you see? The Doctor described your ludicrous imitation.’

  ‘I looked in the glass ball to provoke the Comte’s memories – to learn how to help you.’

  ‘And in doing so only endangered yourself.’

  ‘But I discovered –’

  ‘What we already know. Vandaariff has made glass with different metals. The red ball figures prominently in his great painting, and thus no doubt is highly charged within his personal cosmology. An alchemical apple of Eden.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘Yes, I have a foreign object near my spine. Apparently.’

  ‘It could kill you!’

  ‘It has not yet.’

  ‘It was the Comte’s alchemy that killed Lydia Vandaariff.’

  ‘She was killed by the Contessa.’

  ‘But she would have died – you well know it! He only cared about the thing inside her – his blue abomination –’

  ‘Do you suggest I am with child?’

  ‘Why will you not tell me what you saw?’

  Her voice had become too loud, but, instead of matching her, Chang answered softly, ‘I do not know, Celeste. Not a memory, not a place, not a person.’

  ‘An ingredient,’ said Svenson. ‘Neither one of you has described the experience as concerning memory – and you have both retained your minds. Logic thus suggests the red glass is not a mechanism for capture but for change. Is that right, Francesca? You did see the Contessa make the ball of red glass, didn’t you?’

  ‘She was very angry. The man made a mistake.’

  ‘Mr Sullivar,’ said Chang. ‘At the glassworks.’

  ‘He stoked the oven too much. The ball cracked and wouldn’t work properly.’