Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

She glanced back to see Doctor Svenson standing in the greenhouse doorway, watching.

“Cardinal Chang?” she asked. He did not answer. Miss Temple did not know if there was anything so tiresome as a person ignoring a perfectly polite, indeed sympathetic, question. She took a breath, exhaled slowly, and gently spoke again. “Do you know the woman?”

Chang turned to her, his voice quite cold. “Her name is Angelique. You would not know her. She is—she was—a whore.”

“I see,” said Miss Temple.

“Do you?” snapped Chang.

Miss Temple ignored the challenge and again held up the scrap of burnt silk. “And you recognize this as hers?”

“She wore such a dress yesterday evening, in the company of the Comte—he took her to the Institute.” Chang turned to call over her shoulder to Svenson. “She was with him there, with his machines—she is obviously the woman you saw—and she is obviously dead.”

“Is she?” asked Miss Temple.

Chang snorted. “You said it yourself—he has burnt the dress—”

“I did,” she agreed, “but it really makes little sense. I do not see any freshly turned earth here in this garden, do you?”

Chang looked at her suspiciously, and then glanced around him. Before he could answer her, Svenson called out from the doorway, “I don’t.”

“Nor did—forgive the indelicacy—I find any bones in the stove. And I do believe that if one were to burn such a thing as a body—for I have seen the bodies of animals in such a fire—that at least some bones would remain. Doctor?”

“I would expect so, yes—the femur alone—”

“So my question, Cardinal Chang,” continued Miss Temple, “is why—if she is dead and he is abandoning this garden—does he not bury or burn her remains right here? It truly is the sensible thing—and yet I do not see that he’s done it.”

“Then why burn the dress?” asked Chang.

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps because it was ruined—the bloodstains the Doctor described. Perhaps it was contaminated.” She turned to Svenson. “Was she wearing the dress when you saw her, Doctor?”

Svenson cleared his throat. “I saw no such dress,” he said.

“So we do not know,” announced Miss Temple, returning to Chang. “You may hate the Comte d’Orkancz, but you may also yet hope to find this woman alive—and who can say, even recovered.”

Chang did not reply, but she sensed something change in his body, a palpable shifting in his bones to accommodate some small admission of hope. Miss Temple allowed herself a moment of satisfaction, but instead of that pleasure she found herself quite unexpectedly beset by a painful welling of sadness, of isolation, as if she had taken for granted a certain solidarity with Chang, that they were alike in being alone, only to learn that this was not true. The fact of his feelings—that he had feelings, much less that they were of such fervor, and for this particular sort of woman—threw her into distress. She did not desire to be the object of such a man’s emotions—of course she didn’t—but she was nevertheless unprepared to face the depth of her loneliness so abruptly—nor by way of consoling someone else—which seemed especially unjust and was hardly Miss Temple’s forte to begin with. She could not help it. She was pierced by solitude, and found herself suddenly sniffing. Mortified, she forced her eyes brightly open and tried to smile, making her voice as brisk and amiable as she could.

“It seems that we have each lost someone. You this woman, Angelique, the Doctor his Prince, and my own…my cruel and foolish Roger. While there is the difference that the two of you have some hope—and indeed the desire—to recover the one you have lost…for me I am content to assist how I can, and to achieve my share of understanding…and revenge.”

Her voice broke, and she sniffed, angry with her weakness but powerless to fight it. Was this her life? Again she felt the gagging absence in her heart—how could she have been such a fool as to allow Roger Bascombe to fill it? How could she have allowed such feelings to begin with—when they had only left her with this unanswerable ache? How could she be still beset by them, still want to be somehow simply misunderstood by him and taken by the hand—her own weakness was unbearable. For the first time in her twenty-five years Miss Temple did not know where she was going to sleep. She saw Doctor Svenson stepping toward her and forced a smile, waving him away.

“Your aunt,” he began, “surely, Miss Temple, her concern for you—”

“Pffft!” scoffed Miss Temple, unable to bear his sympathy. She walked to her bag and hefted it with one hand, doing her best to conceal the weight but stumbling as she made her way to the garden gate. “I will wait in the street,” she called over her shoulder, not wanting them to see the emotion on her face. “When you are finished, I’m sure there is much for us to do…”

She dropped the bag and leaned against the wall, her hands over her eyes, her shoulders now heaving with sobs. Only moments ago she had been so proud to find the scrap of silk in the stove and now—and why? Because Chang had feelings for some whore?—the full weight of all she had suffered and sacrificed and stuffed aside had reappeared to rest on her small frame and tender heart. How did anyone bear this isolation, this desolated hope? In the midst of this tempest, Miss Temple, for her mind was restless and quick, did not forget the sharp fear inspired by her enemies, nor did she refrain from berating herself for the girlish indulgence of crying in the first place. She dug for a handkerchief in her green bag, her hand searching for it around the revolver, another sign of what she had become—what she had embraced with, if she was honest, typically ridiculous results. She blew her nose. She was difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent. She sniffed, bitterly resenting this sort of introspection, despising the need for it nearly as much as she despised introspection itself. In that moment she did not know which she wanted more, to curl up in the sun room of her island house, or to shoot one of these blue-glass villains in the heart…yet were either of these the answer to her present state?

She sniffed loudly. Neither Chang, for all his hidden moods, nor Svenson, for all his fussy hesitance, were standing in the open street in tears. How could she face them as any kind of equal? Again, and relentlessly, she asked herself what she thought she was doing. She’d told Chang that she was willing to pursue her investigations alone, though in her heart she had not believed it. Now she knew that this was exactly what she must do—for at the moment doing seemed crucial—if she was ever going to scour this awful sense of being subject from her body. She looked back at the garden door—neither man had appeared. She snatched up the bag with both hands and walked back the way they had come, away from the Boniface. With each step she felt as if she were in a ship leaving its port to cross an unknown ocean—and the farther down Plum Court she went, the more determined she became.

At the avenue, she hailed a coach. She looked back. Her heart caught in her throat. Chang and Svenson stood in the garden doorway. Svenson called to her. Chang was running. She climbed into the coach and threw the bag to the floor.

“Drive on,” she called. The coach pulled away and with an almost brutal swiftness she was beyond the lane and any vision of her two companions. The driver looked back at her, his face an unspoken inquiry for their destination.

“The St. Royale Hotel,” said Miss Temple.

FIVE Ministry

By the time Chang reached the end of the lane, the coach was out of sight and he could not tell in which direction it had vanished. He spat with frustration, his chest heaving with the wasted effort. He looked back to see Svenson catch up, the Doctor’s face a mask of concern.

“She is gone?” he asked.