The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  Miss Temple smiled icily, wanting to strike him. “One does not simply send servants to Harschmort House. We had been celebrating Lydia's engagement—”

  “My mother has a case just like that,” said Francesca. “For her silver bracelets.”

  “Is that full of silver bracelets?” the officer asked Miss Temple. His gaze gently ranged across her body. He negligently met her eyes and smiled, but the smile seemed unconnected to his thoughts.

  “What I forgot,” Miss Temple replied with a winning smile, “was a set of combs and brushes. As a treat, Lydia's closest friends all prepared her for the gala evening. But now I need them back again.”

  “Haven't you a maid?” asked Charles.

  “I have as many maids as I like,” snapped Miss Temple. “But one is accustomed to a particular degree of bristle. I'm sure your sister understands.” She smiled at Francesca, but the girl was rubbing her eye.

  “When Maria brushes Ronald's hair it makes him cry,” announced Charles.

  Ronald said nothing, but looked at Miss Temple with hopeless little eyes.

  “And what brings all of you to Harschmort?” Miss Temple asked brightly.

  “I don't believe I heard your name,” stated the officer.

  “I am Miss Stearne.” Miss Temple raised her eyebrow to let him know she held it to be an impertinent question. “Miss Isobel Stearne.”

  “David Tackham, Captain of Dragoons.” The officer clicked his heels with another wry smile. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Stearne. Are you related to Caroline Stearne?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Caroline Stearne. Also an intimate of Miss Vandaariff, I believe.”

  “We are cousins,” said Miss Temple tartly. “Caroline is presently traveling with Miss Vandaariff, as they are especially close to one another. Do you know her? She did not mention you.”

  “I know of her only. A handsome woman, I am told.”

  Tackham's blue eyes were both lovely and absent. Miss Temple looked at them for just a touch too long and they began to appear inhuman—blue eyes so often did that, Miss Temple felt.

  “Were you off to anywhere in particular, Miss Stearne?” he asked.

  Miss Temple did not reply, bending forward to Francesca with a smile.

  “Where is your mother, darling?”

  “I do not know,” answered the girl, her lip quivering.

  MISS TEMPLE turned at a sound on the main stairs. A young man in a black coat with a yellow waxed moustache and blue eyes approached them, a sheaf of papers under one arm. In his Ministry topcoat, he could have been a lesser cousin of Roger Bascombe, but as he came nearer Miss Temple saw the pallor of his skin, and the bloodied nails on the hand that held the white papers.

  “There you are.” He noted Miss Temple's presence with an irritated frown. “Who is this?”

  “I am Miss Stearne.”

  “What is she doing here?” the man asked Tackham.

  “I am a friend of Lydia Vandaariff,” Miss Temple answered him. “What are you doing so freely in my friend's house?”

  “This is Miss Stearne.” Captain Tackham smiled.

  The Ministry man ignored her. “You are well behind schedule, Captain. There is no time—”

  “If there's so little time, where in hell have you been?” Tackham snapped.

  The other man's eyes shot wide at such language in front of the children, but he erupted in a wicked sneeze, and then two more in rapid succession, even as he shifted the papers to his other arm and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He finally wiped his nose but not before they had all seen the first smear of blood on the yellow waxed hair on his upper lip.

  “I'll not have this impertinence. Mr. Phelps is waiting with the Duke.”

  “Will you join us?” Captain Tackham asked Miss Temple.

  “Yes, please,” said Francesca in a small voice.

  “Of course she will not,” snapped the man from the Ministry.

  “She has a case of hairbrushes,” announced Charles, as if this were especially significant. The Ministry man ignored him and folded his handkerchief away.

  “Captain Tackham! The Duke!”

  “What is your name?” Miss Temple asked the man.

  “He is Mr. Harcourt,” replied Tackham.

  “Mr. Harcourt has not answered my question about what he is doing with another man's children in my good friend's house.”

  Harcourt fixed her with an unpleasant glare.

  “Perhaps you'd like to come with us after all? Perhaps you'd care to explain—” He sniffed again, for the dark pearl of blood had reappeared “—to the Duke just where your good friend's father has gone off to!”

  Harcourt wheeled toward the stairs. Tackham snapped his fingers for Francesca's hand without shifting his gaze from Miss Temple, who was shocked to see, as the girl extended her arm to the officer, the sleeve of the child's dress slide up to reveal a blot of cotton wool stuck to the hollow of her elbow with blood. As the unlikely party disappeared behind the balcony rail, all three children looked back to her, like lambs on a leash to market.

  IT HAD been gratifying how easily her being disagreeable to Harcourt had resulted in his leaving her behind—but unless the Captain was a fool, there would be immediate inquiries about one Isobel Stearne, and soldiers sent to find her. That the children were being brought to the Duke—that the Duke was still in play—meant Mrs. Marchmoor had survived, and that the children were being brought to her. Yet the shock Miss Temple had felt in her mind as she fled the garden had been real. Something had hurt the glass woman dearly, but not dearly enough.

  She smiled at Harcourt's slip revealing that they'd still no idea how Robert Vandaariff had disappeared, pleased with an opportunity to puzzle something out for herself—such puzzling being an excellent distraction from the distressing urges of her body (had it been necessary to so notice the delicate curve of Captain Tackham's throat?) and the foul taste that would not leave the back of her throat. Vandaariff's absence must be related to the fires at Harschmort—but had he been taken, or murdered?

  Miss Temple paused on the landing, wondering why a Dragoon officer had been guarding children—and then what the Trapping children were doing here to begin with. Had they been taken hostage against their mother's cooperation? Why waste time kidnapping the children of a powerless woman? Thus, Charlotte Trapping was not powerless, but a person Mrs. Marchmoor needed to control… could she be the new adversary? With the death of her husband she surely had a motive.

  On the carpet lay a crumble of chocolate biscuit, directly outside a door. Miss Temple walked to the door and opened it. On a spindle-legged side table next to a mirror-fronted cabinet sat an unfinished snifter of brandy and a half-smoked cheroot in a ceramic dish. Clearly Captain Tackham had found his own distractions. Farther into the room were two uncomfortable-looking armchairs with yellow cushions, and across from these (beneath a strange painting of an old man glaring oddly at two half-dressed young women) was a fancily carved camp bed, with a long, blue-striped bolster. Beneath it lay more chocolate crumbs.

  Beyond the camp bed was another doorway. Through it came the sound of the scuffling of papers, and then a dry voice croaking with impatience.

  “Are you back again, Tackham? What have you cocked up this time?”

  Miss Temple clapped a hand across her mouth to stifle a gasp. In the mirrored cabinet, she could see, reflected from the far side of the doorway—disheveled, sickly, but still without question—of all people, Andrew Rawsbarthe, Roger Bascombe's aide. On his desk top lay an open leather case lined with orange felt and containing inset depressions for small glass-stoppered vials. Three of these spaces were empty. These vials, their ruby contents glowing darkly, lay before Rawsbarthe, who was in the midst of gluing to each, with shaking fingers (each ending in a ragged and split purpled nail) small labels. To the side lay jumbled wads of cotton wool, streaked with still-bright blood. He finished the last label, slipped the vials into the case, and snap
ped it closed.

  “Captain Tackham! I am in no state for teasing.”

  The chair scraped as Mr. Rawsbarthe stood. He would know her—they had been in each other's company a score of times. Had Roger taken him into his confidence? Or was he another of Mrs. Marchmoor's minions, to be occupied and consumed? Did he know of Miss Temple's actions against the Cabal? Ought she snatch up the brandy bottle and crack him on the head?

  Rawsbarthe called, less certain, “Mr. Fochtmann?”

  He appeared in the doorway, the leather case tucked under one arm. Miss Temple had not moved. They stared at one another.

  “Hello, Mr. Rawsbarthe. I'm sure I did not expect to find you here.”

  “Miss Temple! Nor I—of all people—you!”

  Andrew Rawsbarthe had always been the servile functionary hovering at Roger's right arm, and as a young woman inured to servantry from an early age—and servantry of an especially abject status—Miss Temple had regarded him as merely a more animated, speaking species of footstool.

  “Permit me to observe you do not look at all well.”

  “A smithereen of fatigue,” offered Rawsbarthe, plucking at his shirt collar. “Extra duties with this recent unrest. It will pass.”

  “You have lost a tooth.”

  “But I have found you,” the man replied, his tongue reflexively sliding over the gap. “In Harschmort House.”

  “I believe it is I have done the finding.”

  Miss Temple noticed Mr. Rawsbarthe's eyes upon her bosom… and was shocked that instead of sparking her bitter ire, she sensed with a mocking pleasure what power his covetous desire granted her, and what she might now be able to do.

  His eyes flicked to the open door behind her.

  Sensing that Rawsbarthe sought to prevent her exit, she reached for the door herself and swung it closed, the clasp catching with a well-greased click to shut them in together.

  “That is a new coat you wear,” said Miss Temple. “And of a finer cut. Do you know where Mr. Bascombe—your superior—is?”

  Mr. Rawsbarthe cleared his throat and swallowed. “Do you?”

  “Do you know why you molt to pieces like a dying parrot?”

  “Roger Bascombe is dead!” blurted Rawsbarthe, openly gauging her reaction to this news.

  “Is he?”

  “Do you deny it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because Bascombe was murdered! He accompanied Deputy Foreign Minister Crabbé to Macklenburg, but they never arrived— cables from Warnemünde have confirmed it!”

  “Not arriving does not make him dead, much less murdered.”

  Rawsbarthe stepped closer, shaking his head with a cloying tolerance. “Do you imagine the Queen's Privy Council and her Ministries remain idle when so much hangs in the balance? I know you were this very morning found at Stropping Station and taken to the Palace. I know your disfigured criminal accomplice—yes, yes, we are aware of your activities—has re-emerged from the gutters where he fled. And the German spy? His own government has issued papers for his arrest—by now he's been dragged home in chains, or had his throat cut by his countrymen! You know about Roger Bascombe! You know about Arthur Trapping!”

  “Ah, well then, it is impossible to dissemble.” Miss Temple found herself smiling enigmatically and batting her eyes. “I put a bullet through Roger Bascombe's heart myself.”

  RAWSBARTHE WAS silent. Miss Temple deliberately inhaled, the small swell of her breasts momentarily confounding the man's attention, and then let out a poor little sigh.

  “You will undoubtedly want to arrest me—it is natural. And yet… have we not made enough amiable conversation between us— at the Ministry, at Mr. Bascombe's home, at so many very dull receptions—to possess between us some understanding?”

  “You… shot him?”

  “Dear Mr. Rawsbarthe…what I mean to say—and I may be wrong, and if that is so, we must proceed to unfortunate outcomes—”

  “The murder of Roger Bascombe—”

  “Enough about Bascombe.”

  “Miss Temple, as much as I might prefer—”

  “Mr. Rawsbarthe, I do not believe you are a fool.”

  “I am gratified by the sentiment, I'm sure.”

  “Indeed, so—please—if you could just step… here.”

  She took his arm—causing him to nervously lick his lips—and guided him two steps to the mirrored cabinet. Rawsbarthe flinched.

  “Look at my skin.” Miss Temple nodded to her mirrored image. “Below the eyes.”

  “You are a perfectly attractive young woman—”

  “O Andrew, normally I should blushingly agree with you, but the two of us must be honest… I look ill.”

  “People often do.”

  “Not me.”

  “No doubt the toll of your recent immorality—”

  “Andrew… look at yourself.”

  At once he pulled away. “I—I am a representative of the Foreign Ministry, and I insist that you accompany me downstairs. You must see the Duke—”

  “How do you think I arrived?”

  Rawsbarthe put a hand to his mouth. “You saw the Duke? You spoke with him? Impossible, he speaks to no one.”

  “Of course he doesn't—”

  “But how are you free? Did they not know you?”

  “Of course they did!”

  “How can that be?”

  “Have you seen the Duke? Andrew, listen to me, for your own sake…”

  Rawsbarthe's eyes shirked away from hers and he squeezed the leather case.

  “Andrew, answer me! Have you seen the Duke?”

  Rawsbarthe waved at the mirror without looking at it. “If you refer to his Grace's illness—most definitely not the blood fever that has been rumored—rumored to infect all Harschmort, and yet here we are!—it is but an ague that will pass! If in the meantime others of us shake under his Grace's chills, it is another sort of loyalty, of service…”

  Rawsbarthe took another step away, staring at the carpet like a shamed dog, his voice colored by an unpersuasive chuckle.

  “Whatever you have assumed—well, trust you are not the first to make the error! Indeed, the inner workings of a modern government must appear a veritable spider's web of influence and compulsion to the humble citizen, and so the commonplace—an ague!—turns into mystery, crisis, plague! I do not know what Mr. Bascombe ever explained to you—very little, I should think, you being, indeed, a w-w-woman—”

  “Mr. Rawsbarthe—”

  “Now I must take you downstairs with all dispatch. Mr. Bascombe spoke at all times with discretion—I have heeded no insinuations about what compromised your engagement, even now, despite those questionable men who have become your companions.”

  Miss Temple stepped nearer and he began to stammer. She could smell the frangipani perfume on her skin and wondered if he could as well. Rawsbarthe took a breath with a quivering determination, as if he had been abruptly pushed to some inner precipice.

  “A great deal has changed, Miss Temple. I do not promise I am in a position to help you—but yet it may be that I am not wholly without influence. I have been summoned to Stäelmaere House… on several occasions… a sign of favor I should not have dreamed of one week ago.”

  “I have just been there myself,” observed Miss Temple.

  “Then you know!” he said quickly, and then caught himself. “Or perhaps not, perhaps you did not—cannot—truly appreciate—”

  “Appreciate what exactly?” She came closer, despite the unclean odor of his mouth.

  “How bold you are, I see that—even if you try to influence me— toward, ah, leniency—but—but nevertheless, because you know— knew—Mr. Bascombe, you can at least appreciate my good fortune, even to be invited—”

  “O I do appreciate it,” she whispered.

  “Do you truly?”

  “I should like every detail! Once you entered Stäelmaere House— the seat of the Privy Council itself… the corridor with the glass cases and those awfu
l old paintings—were you ushered to a room? Come, Andrew… what do you remember?”

  “Naturally, I was not alone—”

  “Were you with Mr. Soames?”

  “How do you know Soames?” Rawsbarthe's voice was pinched. “Soames is new! He didn't see the Duke? Soames is hardly worthy of—”

  “Soames does not matter,” she assured him. “The room. It was dark?”

  “His Grace is notoriously particular.”

  “So you did see the Duke?”

  “Of course! And we heard him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I… I… the words themselves…”

  She waited. Rawsbarthe clutched his hands.

  “Andrew… surely you remember?”

  “Ah… well—”

  “How can you not remember what the Duke of Stäelmaere said to you personally? The highest achievement of your career?”

  Rawsbarthe was silent. Her lips almost touched his blood-scabbed ear.

  “I will tell you why, Andrew. You fell asleep. Every one of you. You had dreams. A pain in your head… the taste of copper in your throat. You knew exactly what you must do, though you cannot recall receiving any instruction. And afterward none of you said a word—”

  “Silence b-bespeaks the high respect—”

  “Listen to yourself! It is Mrs. Marchmoor!”

  “I beg your pardon? I am unacquainted with any M-M-Mrs.—”

  “The glass woman.”

  Rawsbarthe attempted a blanched smile. “I must assure you again there are no women in Stäelmaere House—the Duke's, ah, martial proclivities—”

  She took his shoulder and thrust him again toward the mirror. Mr. Rawsbarthe bleated his protest and squeezed shut his eyes.

  “Andrew! Mrs. Marchmoor has rummaged in your thinking like it was a bag!”

  “Miss Temple—”

  “Look at yourself!”

  He did, but at once burst free with a stricken cry, shoving past and knocking Miss Temple across one of the chairs. By the time she pulled herself upright, there was no sign or sound of Andrew Rawsbarthe at all.

  MISS TEMPLE found her side staircase. The walls were lined with painted niches aping the shadowed passageways of a cathedral, each holding allegorical figures that Miss Temple—whose biblical education had been attended to with a gratifying indifference—nevertheless recognized as the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Despite her hurry she could not help but stare as she went down, the toads, blood, lice, and fire presaging her own descent into the stinking mire that had already swallowed poor Rawsbarthe. But the final landing stopped her cold, for the wider section of wall allowed for a more elaborate tableau, and she stood there, Francesca Trapping's bandaged arm fresh in her mind, facing the death of the Egyptian firstborn, where pitiless angels dangled lifeless children from both hands, hovering above a crowd of keening women.