The Chemickal Marriage

ill-effects from viewing the glass map, he wanted to be sure that this more potent card did not provoke any. She gasped softly as the cycle completed, but he detected no sudden pallor, no chill upon her skin. Chang watched with a sour expression.

‘How long should we allow her to look?’

‘Another minute.’ Svenson spoke quietly, as if Miss Temple were asleep. ‘The level of detail is prodigious, almost impossible to comprehend.’

‘What is it? You have not said.’

‘The Comte’s great painting. The one mentioned in the cutting from the Herald.’

‘That cannot be coincidence. Did Phelps find where it is, where it had been shown?’

‘I do not know.’

‘He did not tell you?’

‘We were distracted by the crowd –’

‘But that fact is extremely important! I assume you told him about your errands. Was he hiding the information deliberately?’

‘No – yes, we did ask him, but he was not – excuse me …’ Svenson rubbed his eyes.

‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’

‘In a manner of speaking. It is the glass card – the bodily perspective. One inhabits the Contessa herself.’

Chang took this in, then snorted with a wolfish appreciation.

‘Indeed,’ said Doctor Svenson drily. ‘One is taken aback in unexpected ways.’

Both men turned to Miss Temple. Svenson realized he was staring and cleared his throat. ‘The Contessa made a deliberate examination of that man’s masterwork – again, one assumes she had a reason.’

‘Where is the memory from? Or when? Does she tell us where to find the painting?’

Svenson shook his head. ‘The very scale places the execution in the past. The Comte simply wouldn’t have had time in these last months. What’s more, as the clipping cites Oskar Veilandt, it more likely dates to before the artist remade himself as the Comte. As to location, that would have to be someplace large.’

‘Harschmort?’

‘I have to think we would have seen it already – we have walked miles through those halls.’ Svenson was painfully aware that only one of Chang’s questions had been answered: the Contessa had spared the Doctor’s life, for her own reasons … but why had Svenson spared hers?

‘I assume she cannot hear us,’ said Chang.

‘I should not think so.’

‘You say the Contessa makes her own glass. I agree. She may have made Miss Temple’s man Pfaff as much her creature as that Princess.’

‘Does Celeste know this?’

‘She knows not to trust him. What about you?’

‘Me? I should not even recognize the fellow –’

‘No. You are continually distracted. Yes, you were injured – and certainly your losses weigh upon you –’

‘No, no – I am perfectly able –’

‘Able? You left this monstrous woman alive!’

‘And my presence of mind with a pistol kept both of you from being taken.’

‘Perhaps, but if we cannot rely upon –’

‘Perhaps? Rely?’

‘Do not become agitated –’

‘Do not presume to be my master!’

Svenson’s words were sharper than he intended, the venting of too many worries, and they echoed off the stone walls. Chang’s hands balled into fists – in the silence Svenson could hear the stretching of his leather gloves.

‘Cardinal Chang –’

‘There is no time for any of this,’ Chang announced coldly. ‘It must be half nine o’clock. Wake her up.’

Distracted by her experience, Miss Temple did not notice their anger. She insisted that Chang too must look, promising to pull the card away after two minutes. Once he was installed on the divan with the card before his livid eyes, she turned to Doctor Svenson with a shrug.

‘Five minutes will do just as well. You are right to say one cannot get one’s mind around the painting, if one can even term it that. Beastly thing.’

Svenson studied her face for a toxic reaction. This painting went straight to the Comte’s alchemical cosmology, to his heart.

‘One does not appreciate being stared at,’ she told him hoarsely.

‘My apologies, my dear – I am worried about you.’

‘Do not be.’

‘I’m afraid I must. Did you – well, from the Comte, did you recognize the painting?’

‘In fact I did not,’ she replied, ‘or, I did, but not in the detail I should have expected – I should have expected to lose my last meal – but it struck me like the memories of a distant summer. The awareness of being there, but no longer the knowledge.’

‘Because the memory comes through the Contessa?’

‘Possibly, though I couldn’t say why. Perhaps the Comte wasn’t himself at the time.’

‘You mean opium?’

‘I don’t mean anything. But I’m sure we will puzzle the matter out. I have a great fondness for reading maps, you know, and you must have experience with codes and ciphers – we are halfway home.’

‘It is more than that, Celeste. Think of the thirteen paintings of the Comte’s Annunciation, and the alchemical recipe they contained for physical transformation. Think of Lydia Vandaariff.’

Svenson recalled the hellish scene in the laboratory at Harschmort: the Comte in a leather apron, cradling a snouted device of polished steel, Karl-Horst von Maasmarck lolling in an armchair, stupid with brandy, and Robert Vandaariff’s daughter tied to a bed, a pool of bright blue fluid between her legs. Whether she had been impregnated by the Prince or by the Comte himself barely mattered. Sailing to her wedding in Macklenburg, oblivious to all that had been done, the young woman had grown rapidly more ill, as poisons strove to remake her issue for a madman’s dream.

Miss Temple shuddered. ‘But it cannot have worked. Lydia would not have given birth to … to any living … I mean – transformed –’

‘No,’ said Svenson. ‘I am sure she would have died. But what is death to the Comte’s – now Vandaariff’s – madness? And this new painting is more than three times the size of the Annunciation. We know it is a recipe for something. We must not delude ourselves at how terrible it may be.’

‘That is the snap of it,’ said Miss Temple. ‘Now he has the money.’

‘Exactly. His plot with Lydia was done in the shadows, indulged by the others in exchange for what they saw as his true work with the blue glass.’ Svenson sighed. ‘But now, what he only imagined before, he can make real.’

‘Or so he believes.’ Miss Temple shook her head. Her voice was ragged but firm. ‘And where is Francesca Trapping? Has she been harmed?’

Svenson was surprised by the leap in Miss Temple’s thought. ‘The Contessa would not say. My guess is that the child has been hidden in the Palace, yet with the Contessa’s flight I think she must have been moved.’

‘Have they enslaved her too?’

‘Children are resilient,’ said the Doctor, without confidence.

‘But she will remember.’

The words carried a quiet gravity. Svenson waited for her to say more. Chang inhaled through his teeth – the cycle of the card coming full circle. The Doctor nearly pulled the card away. He dreaded to receive Miss Temple’s confidence, despite his curiosity as to what she might say.