The Chemickal Marriage

of odd-shaped glass, most of them so dark Svenson had taken them for coal. But now he saw what had caught Chang’s eye: in the centre of the platter lay a round ball of glass, the size and colour of a blood orange.

‘The painting,’ Svenson said. ‘The black Groom – in his left hand …’

Chang picked up the reddish sphere and held it to the guttering lantern above them.

‘It is cracked,’ he said, and pushed up his dark glasses.

‘Chang, wait –’

Doctor Svenson reached out a warning hand, but Chang had already shut one eye and put the other to the glass.

‘Do you see anything?’ asked Miss Temple.

Chang did not answer.

‘I wonder if it is infused with a memory,’ she whispered to Svenson. ‘And what could make it red?’

‘Iron ore, perhaps, though I couldn’t speculate why.’ Svenson sorted through the remaining pieces on the platter – several were obviously the remnants of other spheres that had broken, but none were of the same deep shade.

‘If this is indigo clay … the refining is not what we have seen. I would guess each piece has been mixed with different compounds – no doubt to alter its alchemical efficacy –’

‘Doctor Svenson?’

Miss Temple stared at Chang, who remained gazing into the glass ball, as still as a stone.

Svenson swore in German and rushed to Chang’s side. He wrenched the ball from Chang’s grip. A warm vibration touched his hand, but nothing that stopped him from setting it back on the platter.

‘Is he poisoned?’ Miss Temple squeaked. ‘Save him!’

Chang’s naked eyes stared at nothing. Svenson felt his forehead and his pulse. He tapped Chang’s cheek sharply, twice. Nothing. ‘His breathing is not strained. It is not a fit … Celeste, do you have your rings – the rings of orange metal?’

She rummaged in her clutch bag and came out with a canvas pouch. The Doctor extracted a single ring and – feeling something of a fool – held it close to Chang’s eye. Chang did not react. Svenson pressed the whole pouch against Chang’s cheek.

Like a wine stain seeping through thick linen, the skin in contact flushed pink, then red, then went purple, like a deepening bruise. Miss Temple shrieked.

‘What is happening? Take it away!’

Svenson dropped the pouch. A pattern had been scorched onto Chang’s face, the colour of cherry flesh. The Doctor looked hurriedly around him.

‘The mattress! We must set him down –’

Miss Temple leapt to the mattress, dragging it close. Svenson lugged Chang off the worktop and they laid him down. Already the scorched ring had faded again to the pink of health. How had the effects reversed so quickly? Svenson seized Chang’s shoulder and belt. With a heave he rolled the man over, face down on the mattress.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Celeste, when you saw Chang’s wound, at Raaxfall, did you query your own memories of the Comte?’

She nodded, then choked in the back of her throat. ‘I found nothing.’

‘As I thought. You see, he is attempting something new. Our friend will not be another Lydia Vandaariff.’

The Doctor lifted Chang’s coat. The brief glimpse at Raaxfall had been in poor light.

‘Celeste, please look away –’

She shook her head. Svenson raised the silk shirt.

The wound lay to the right of the lumbar vertebra. The original puncture had been enlarged through what looked like at least three different surgeries, expanding the scar to the shape and size of a child’s splayed, thumbless hand. The scar tissue was an unsettling vein-blue, with a rough, thickened surface like the hide of a starfish. But it was the flesh around the wound that had made them gasp in the wicked room at Raaxfall, and the Doctor winced to see it again. Like dye dropped into a milky basin, virulent streaks of red radiated from the centre, as if signifying a flowering of infection.

‘The same colour as the ring against his face,’ Miss Temple whispered.

Svenson delicately palpated the discoloured area. The flesh was cold, and beneath it his fingertips met an unnatural resistance.

‘Something has been placed inside.’

Her voice was small. ‘Will he die?’

‘If the Comte had wanted to kill him, he would be dead. We saw the other bodies –’

‘Then what has happened? Can you remove it? Why has he collapsed when he was perfectly fine?’

Svenson caught her flailing hand. ‘Clearly he was not fine. I cannot hope to remove it, even had I the tools. Whatever is implanted lies too near the spine. The slightest mistake and he is a cripple.’

‘That isn’t true!’

‘Please, Celeste – you must let me think –’

‘But he will die!’

Svenson looked helplessly around him, searching for any idea. The orange metal had always been effective in reversing the predations of the blue glass, but its application here had worsened Chang’s condition … could it be as simple as that, a matter of opposites? Svenson crawled to the china platter and pawed through the jumble of glass … was all of it so discoloured? He shouted to Miss Temple.

‘The card – the blue glass card!’

She dug in her bag and he snatched the card from her grasp, protecting his fingers with his coatsleeve. He rolled Chang onto his back. The man’s eyes remained disturbingly open. Svenson dropped to his knees and thrust the card before them.

At first he saw no reaction, his close observation echoed by Miss Temple’s silence as she held her breath. But then the pink colour began to drain away. Had that happened when Chang looked into the card, to view the painting? Svenson had no clear memory. Chang’s breathing thickened. His skin went paper-white. The blue card made things worse as well. Svenson yanked the card away and heaved a sigh of relief as these latest symptoms too reversed themselves.

‘It is not science,’ Svenson said helplessly. ‘It is not medicine, playing with a life as if it were a cooking pot, adding this and subtracting that. I am sorry, Celeste – desperately sorry –’

He turned, expecting to find a face in tears. But Miss Temple stood at the platter. He saw her hand close around the reddish ball, but he was on his knees, and Chang lay between them. Svenson’s reaching arm fell short.

Miss Temple’s shoulders heaved with convulsions. He spun her round, tearing the ball from her grasp and hurling it against the wall, where it shattered. Miss Temple’s eyes were dead. Black fluid rimmed her mouth.

‘Celeste! Celeste – you idiot girl! Celeste!’

She did not hear. He eased her down, but her eyes refused to clear. Oily bubbles bloomed between her lips, but he could not make out the words, if words they even were. She arched her back against a bout of choking. Doctor Svenson knelt between his fallen comrades, ridiculous victims, and groaned aloud.

A cupboard door below the worktop popped open, driven by the heel of a diminutive black boot.

He blinked. The cupboards. They had not looked in the cupboards.

She wriggled out legs first, stockings stretched around a colt’s knobbed knees, then little hands pulled her body into view. Francesca Trapping stood and brushed at her very rumpled dress in an automatic gesture that had no effect whatsoever. Her red hair was all tangles and snarls, her face unclean.

‘You are alive,’ Svenson whispered.

Francesca took in Miss Temple and Chang, nodding as if their conditions were steps in a recipe she had memorized.

‘There is little time.’ Her shrill voice was raw. ‘By tomorrow Oskar will have had his way.’

With a shudder Svenson saw the teeth in her mouth had gone grey.

‘Francesca … what has she done?’

‘What was required. What she has done to you.’