The Chemickal Marriage

‘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.