The Chemickal Marriage

The door opened wide. Beyond an iron grating, the vestibule car was empty. Phelps shoved the grate aside and stepped in.

‘I will go where it takes me, and if all is safe return to collect you.’

Chang shook his head. ‘All of us together may be able to overcome resistance – if you are taken alone, it will expose everyone.’

‘And there is no time,’ added Svenson. ‘Vandaariff is in the Palace now.’

Svenson entered the car and turned, averting his gaze from the figure of the trussed, wriggling constable. Overruled, Phelps slammed the iron gate home and the car rumbled into life. Cunsher took Chang’s arm, looking up. ‘Count the floors …’

They waited, listening. Cunsher nodded at a particularly loud clank.

‘Do you hear? We have passed the cellars.’

Svenson gripped his revolver. Another clank.

‘The ground floor,’ whispered Phelps. ‘Which offers passage to the Ministries.’

‘We’re still climbing,’ said Cunsher. They waited. The cables above them groaned. Another clank.

‘The first floor.’ Phelps nodded to Miss Temple. ‘The Duke’s chambers.’ Another loud clank. ‘We will reach the second, with passage to the Palace. Of course the corridor leads not to the Palace proper – first to suites of older apartments, where no royal has lived these fifty years – but technically speaking –’

‘Who will be there?’ hissed Chang.

‘I have told you!’ replied Phelps. ‘Absolutely anyone!’

The vestibule came to a shuddering halt. The iron gate slid into the wall and a wooden door was before them. Its lock snapped clear. Before the door could be opened from the other side Chang kicked it wide. An elderly man in black livery took the door across his chest and sprawled on the carpet. In a second Chang was above him like a ghoul, his razor against the servant’s throat.

‘Do not! Do not!’ Phelps spoke quickly to the stunned old man. ‘Do not cry out – it is your life!’

The servant merely gaped, his webbed old mouth working. ‘Mr Phelps … you were pronounced a traitor.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Phelps. ‘The Duke is dead and the Queen in danger. The Queen, I say, and there is little time …’

Svenson inhaled, tasting the dank air of a sickroom. Staelmaere House had been the glass woman’s lair, staining all who came there with decay. The Duke’s old serving man showed dark circled eyes, pasty flesh, livid gums – and this after weeks of recovery. Phelps interrogated the servant. Svenson walked to a curtained window at the corridor’s end.

‘Where are you going?’ called Chang.

Svenson did not reply. The corridor was lined with portraits, intolerant beaks above a progression of steadily weaker chins, watery eyes peering out between ridiculous wigs and lace collars as stiff and wide as serving platters – an archive of the Duke’s relations, whose exile to the upper floor reflected the degree to which they’d been forgotten. Was there a plainer emblem of mortal doom than the extravagant portrait of an unremembered peer?

The Ministry of War blocked his view of St Isobel’s Square, but beyond its slate rooftops echoed regular spatters of musketry. That gunfire continued after the lancers and the column of infantry only confirmed the extent of the uprising, and the savagery employed to put it down.

To his left was a small wooden door. Svenson put an ear against it. Miss Temple motioned to return. Instead, the Doctor carefully turned the knob and eased the door open: a bare landing with a staircase leading down and, unexpectedly, continuing up. Was there a higher floor Phelps had not mentioned? He walked back to the others.

‘What did you see?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘There is more gunfire in the square.’

‘Even better for a distraction,’ said Chang, stepping behind Svenson and Miss Temple and herding them along. Chang leant close to Svenson’s ear. ‘What did you see?’

Svenson shook his head. ‘Nothing – truly –’

‘Then what is wrong with you?’

By then they had reached Phelps, who laid a hand on the door behind him and spoke in a nervous rush. ‘Staelmaere House is all but abandoned, under quarantine. The lower floors are a sick ward. The Privy Council has shifted to the Palace, and Axewith and Vandaariff will meet in the Marble Gallery, only a minute’s walk from the Queen herself. Axewith must be desperate, practically begging Vandaariff for the money to solve the crisis –’

‘But is money the issue?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘No, which Axewith does not understand. Without sound strategy, Vandaariff’s entire treasure is but a bandage on an unstitched wound. The crisis will continue, and Vandaariff has to know it.’

‘Then why appear?’ asked Chang. ‘Why associate himself with Axewith’s failure?’

‘Perhaps he only seeks an excuse to enter the Palace,’ said Cunsher.

At this Phelps opened the door and hurried them through. ‘We are now in the Palace. We will quietly descend and proceed east – east, I repeat – until the decor changes first to lemon, and then to a darker yellow, like the yolk of a freshly poached egg. It is a question of concentric layers – ah … here is the balcony.’

Svenson forced a yawn in hopes it might end the nagging whine in his ears. He looked at the faded and splitting blue wallpaper. Why had this wing of the Palace been allowed to go to seed? When had its last royal resident died – and was its lack of care an expression of poverty or grief? Svenson found the squalor a comfort.

Phelps started down the staircase and Svenson followed, last in line, the revolver heavy in his hand. His eyes darted along the opposite balconies, recalling a mission to Vienna long ago, a search for documents that had brought him to an abandoned brothel … bedsheets spread across a barrelhead, upon which a consumptive whore played cards with a one-legged pensioner –

Phelps hissed from the foot of the stairs and pointed to a heavy door. ‘Remember the walls: blue, then lemon –’

‘Then a poultry yard, yes,’ Chang sighed. ‘We have grasped the sequence.’

‘It is a precaution if we become separated.’

‘We will only become separated if we are seen – and in that case we all know enough to run for our lives.’

It was an ill-timed remark, for as the sour words left the Cardinal’s mouth Mr Phelps opened the door. Directly before them stood a detachment of the Palace guard in helmets, doublets and hose – holding halberds of all things – and a group of men in black topcoats. One of these, with pale hair and a waxed moustache, yelped in shock, staring at Phelps.

‘You!’

‘Harcourt!’ cried Phelps, but Cunsher lunged at the door and slammed it closed. The door leapt in his hands as the soldiers pushed from the opposite side.

‘Run!’ shouted Chang, seizing Miss Temple’s arm. ‘Run!’

The door was flung wide and an axelike blade shot through, nearly severing Cunsher’s arm. The others fled, but Svenson raised the revolver with an unfamiliar coolness and fired into the mass of men. The two in front sprawled, but a guard behind came on, his long weapon aimed at Svenson’s chest. A third bullet and this man toppled into the guards behind him.

The fire drew their pursuers, and Svenson retreated up the stairs, hopping like a hare as a halberd stabbed through the railing. He fired again, splintering the rail, and scrambled upwards. His companions had vanished. His boot slipped on the carpet. The last of the halberdsmen charged up the staircase. Svenson deliberately squeezed the trigger. The man flew back in a windmill of limbs. No one took his place.

At the top of the staircase Svenson dropped into cover, just ahead of a hail of bullets tearing at the wall – halberds finally succeeded by modern weaponry. Svenson charged back to Staelmaere House, racing for the pneumatic vestibule.

It had been called to another floor. He pelted down the corridor to the little door by the window. To go down