The Chemickal Marriage

They scuttled like crabs before a looming wave. Chang heard Phelps’s cry, though by then the water’s rush echoed all around them.

‘I am to it! O – the cold – O damnation!’

The icy black water swallowed them all. Chang used the riveted ridges as ladder rungs, hauling himself forward against the current. Again he struck Svenson’s boots, and shoved the Doctor to go faster. The pressure in Chang’s lungs flowered into pain. He felt a tightness in his ears but pressed on, the idea of drowning like a rat in a drainpipe still worse to bear.

Then Svenson’s feet were no longer there, and Chang’s fingers found the pipe rim itself. He wriggled his way through and shot for the surface of the canal, breaking into the air with a gasp. The others were bobbing near him, pale and heaving, hair plastered to their heads. Chang spun round, searching the banks for men with carbines.

‘We have to go on,’ he gasped. ‘They will be here.’

‘Go where?’ called Phelps, teeth chattering. ‘Where are we? We shall catch our deaths!’

‘This way, sir! There is a rope!’

A crouching man in a long brown coat had appeared on the canal bank, a hat pulled low over his eyes.

‘O Mr Cunsher!’ exclaimed Phelps. ‘Thank God you have found us!’

The small hut felt like a room at the Slavic baths. Their clothing hung on lines and steamed in the heat of a squat metal stove so stuffed with coal that one could not approach within a yard. A separate line had been draped with a sheet from the cabin’s cot, and behind lurked Miss Temple, unseen.

Chang wrapped a blanket around himself and cleared his throat, as if the sound might clear his mind. Svenson sat with a mouldy blanket of his own. Phelps had taken the other bedsheet and now stood like a dismal Roman, his bare feet in a pan of hot water.

The strange foreigner had pulled them from the canal and led them pitilessly through brown scrub woodland to a scattering of squat shacks – stonecutters he said – one of which he unlocked with a hook-ended metal pin. Cunsher spoke only to Phelps, gave an occasional respectful nod to Svenson, and ignored Chang and Miss Temple altogether. He had found their carriage in Raaxfall, heard the explosion and observed the movements of guards at the gate, finally deducing that the canal was the only possible exit within his reach. Cunsher then left them, muttering something to his master that Chang had not heard. To Chang, the drainpipe was no sensible option to occur to anyone. He was glad for this second rescue, but trusted the fellow no more than he trusted Phelps.

It was not suspicion that now gnawed his peace of mind. Whatever their danger, Chang found his thoughts quite irresistibly settled on the proximate nudity of the young woman, not ten feet away behind a single pane of threadbare cloth. He could hear her bare feet on the floorboards, the creak of her body on the wooden stool. Were her arms huddled for warmth or modesty – or were they raised to recurl her hair, breasts exposed and high on her slim ribcage? Chang shifted on his own seat, willing his thoughts elsewhere against tumescence. How long had it been since he’d had a woman?

‘Are you warm enough, Celeste?’ Doctor Svenson called.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she replied from behind her curtain. ‘I trust you will recover?’

‘Indeed.’ Svenson selected a cigarette from his silver case, a civilized veneer already returned to his voice. ‘Though I must admit – when the water rose, my heart was in my throat. You did very well to drive on,’ he said to Phelps. ‘The slightest hesitation would have done for us all.’

Phelps shuddered. ‘It does not bear thinking. Though one begins to understand why men of adventure are so grim.’ He made a point of looking at Chang. Chang said nothing, his own gaze taken by the long, livid scar across the Doctor’s chest. Svenson inhaled deeply, then thought to offer his silver case to the others.

‘Were they not drenched?’ asked Chang.

‘Ah – it is the case, you see.’ Svenson snapped the silver case closed so they all might hear the catch of its clasp, then popped it open again. ‘Tight as a clam. Will you partake? Tobacco is highly restorative.’

‘It hurts my eyes,’ said Chang.

‘Truly? How strange.’

Chang turned the subject before Svenson recalled his earlier keenness to examine him. ‘As soon as our clothes are dry, we must move on.’

‘We need food,’ croaked Phelps, who had accepted Svenson’s offer. His words were broken by coughing. ‘And rest. And information.’

‘But we have learnt much,’ said Svenson. ‘The new explosive, the glass spurs – that they are inscribed with an emotion instead of a memory.’

‘We’ve no idea what that means.’

‘Not yet, but have you ever eaten hashish?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Phelps.

‘I am thinking of the glass – the anger, a state of pure emotion –’

‘You think the glass contains hashish?’

‘Not at all. Consider Hassan i-Sabbah and his guild of assassins, who entered a state of deadly single- mindedness under the combined influences of religion and narcotics. Think of the Thuggee cult of India – incense, incantations, soma – the principle is the same.’

‘Not unlike the Process,’ observed Chang.

Phelps managed to exhale without coughing. ‘The glass may answer for the narcotic, yet if the spurs hold no memory, where is the instruction? Without thought, how can Vandaariff direct those stricken?’

‘Perhaps he cannot.’ Svenson sighed ruefully. ‘Do not forget, the man believes his alchemical religion. We mistake him if we seek only reason.’

Chang knew Svenson was right – he had seen the unsettling glow behind Vandaariff’s eyes – yet he said nothing about the ‘elemental’ glass cards, or the too-rapid restoration of his own strength. He ought to have described the whole thing then and there – if there was any man to make sense of things, it was the Doctor – but such disclosure would have led to a public scrutiny of his wound. Chang waited until Svenson put more coal in the stove before carefully stretching the muscles of his lower back. He felt no pain or inhibition of movement. Was it possible that Vandaariff had merely healed him, and that the others had stared only at the vicious nature of the scar?

A faint but high-pitched gasp came from behind Miss Temple’s curtain. The three men looked at each other.

‘Celeste?’ asked Svenson.

‘Do go on,’ she replied quickly. ‘It was but a splinter on my chair.’

Svenson waited, but she said nothing more. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Goodness, yes. Do not mind me in the least.’

The trousers were not completely dry, but Chang reasoned that wearing them slightly damp would settle the leather more comfortably around his body. To hide his wound from Svenson he made a point of shucking off his blanket with his back to the wall. Tucking in the silk shirt, stained by its time in the canal, he caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the curtain. Had she been peeking? Disliking the entire drift of his thoughts, Chang strode past the others and slipped into the cold afternoon sun.

The hut was surrounded by squat pine trees. Chang did not relish another bare-footed tramp through twigs and stones, but saw no alternative, and so set off, keeping to the mud and dry leaves. As he reached the other huts, he saw one whose door hung open several inches. Smoke rose from the chimney – indeed it now came from several huts, none of which had seemed occupied before – and from inside he could hear footsteps.

Chang snapped his head back from the door at the wheeling movement of a pistol being drawn and the click of its hammer.

‘Do not shoot me, Mr Cunsher.’

If Cunsher was in the service of their enemies, this was the perfect opportunity to blow Chang’s head off and explain it away as an accident. But the man had already lowered the gun. Chang stepped inside and nodded to the stove.

‘Our company does not suit you?’

Cunsher shrugged. His accented speech slipped from his mouth as if each ill-fitting word had been oiled. ‘One smoking stove reveals our refuge. Four stoves make a party of stonecutters. Here – for