The Chemickal Marriage

to parrot every exasperating aunt or guardian she had ever known. With a shrug the girl took her place on the chamberpot, gazing sullenly at a point between her shoes.

‘The Contessa sent you to my hotel,’ said Miss Temple. ‘You did not try to go home.’

‘Why should I have done that?’

‘Because she is extremely wicked.’

‘I think you’re wicked.’

The retort flung, Francesca squirmed on her seat and said nothing. Francesca’s face was naturally pale, but now it was pinched and drawn. Had the girl been eating? Miss Temple imagined the woman flinging scraps at Francesca’s feet with an imperious sneer – but then recalled her own experience in the railway car, the Contessa breaking a pie in two, passing bites of a green apple with an insidious amity.

‘So the Contessa is your friend,’ she said.

Francesca sniffed.

‘She is very beautiful.’

‘More beautiful than you.’

‘Of course she is. She is a black-haired angel.’

Francesca looked up warily, as if ‘angel’ had a meaning she did not expect Miss Temple to know. Miss Temple put one gloved finger beneath Francesca’s chin and held her gaze.

‘I know it is frightening to be alone, and lonely to be strong. But you are heir to the Trappings, and heir to the Xoncks. You must make up your own mind.’

She stepped back and allowed the girl to stand. Francesca did so, the dress still gathered at her spindled thighs. ‘There is no water,’ she said plaintively.

‘I did without water perfectly well,’ muttered Miss Temple, but she opened her clutch bag and dug for a handkerchief. With a grunt she tore it in half, then in half again, and held the scrap to Francesca, who snatched it away and hunched to wipe.

‘A soldier does not need someone’s handkerchief,’ observed Miss Temple.

‘I am not a soldier.’

Miss Temple took the girl’s arm and steered her to the door. ‘But you are, Francesca. Whether you want to be or not.’

‘You are returned, excellent.’ Doctor Svenson rose to his feet, working both arms into his greatcoat, a lit cigarette in his mouth. Chang stood across the room. Miss Temple perceived the shift in each man’s posture at her entrance. They had been speaking of her. Her sting of resentment was then followed by an inflaming counter- notion, that they had not been speaking of her. Instead, at her entrance, they had ceased their discussion of strategies and danger, matters to which she could neither contribute nor need be troubled by.

Despite his crisis Chang seemed every bit as able as before – and far more so than anyone imprisoned for weeks ought to be. One look at Svenson showed the man’s exhaustion. That he had been unable to kill the Contessa, of all people, was proof enough. Miss Temple resolved to help him as she could, just as a colder part of her mind marked him down as unreliable.

‘How best to return?’ asked Svenson. ‘The vestibule key allows us some choice –’

‘You don’t go that way.’ Francesca marched to the cupboard doors and pulled them wide. Inside was a metal hatch. ‘You need a lantern. There are rats.’

Svenson peered down the shaft. ‘And where does that – I mean, how far down –’

‘To the bridge,’ Chang answered. ‘The turbines.’

‘Ah.’

Miss Temple called to Chang. ‘Are you fully recovered?’

Chang spread his arms with a sardonic smile. ‘As you find me.’

‘Is that all you can say?’

‘I looked into something I should not have, like a fool.’

‘What did you see?’

‘What did you see? The Doctor described your ludicrous imitation.’

‘I looked in the glass ball to provoke the Comte’s memories – to learn how to help you.’

‘And in doing so only endangered yourself.’

‘But I discovered –’

‘What we already know. Vandaariff has made glass with different metals. The red ball figures prominently in his great painting, and thus no doubt is highly charged within his personal cosmology. An alchemical apple of Eden.’

‘But you –’

‘Yes, I have a foreign object near my spine. Apparently.’

‘It could kill you!’

‘It has not yet.’

‘It was the Comte’s alchemy that killed Lydia Vandaariff.’

‘She was killed by the Contessa.’

‘But she would have died – you well know it! He only cared about the thing inside her – his blue abomination –’

‘Do you suggest I am with child?’

‘Why will you not tell me what you saw?’

Her voice had become too loud, but, instead of matching her, Chang answered softly, ‘I do not know, Celeste. Not a memory, not a place, not a person.’

‘An ingredient,’ said Svenson. ‘Neither one of you has described the experience as concerning memory – and you have both retained your minds. Logic thus suggests the red glass is not a mechanism for capture but for change. Is that right, Francesca? You did see the Contessa make the ball of red glass, didn’t you?’

‘She was very angry. The man made a mistake.’

‘Mr Sullivar,’ said Chang. ‘At the glassworks.’

‘He stoked the oven too much. The ball cracked and wouldn’t work properly.’

‘Did she make another?’ asked Svenson.

‘Didn’t need to.’ Miss Temple flinched, both at the child’s deadened teeth and at the bright gleam in her eyes.

Chang insisted on going first, with the lantern. Once down, he held the light high to guide their descent. Miss Temple bundled her dress and wriggled through the hatchway, aware that Chang’s lantern showed him her stockinged calves – and more, depending on the exact gather of her petticoats. She paused in her climb, ostensibly to make sure of her clutch bag, but in truth to indulge a tremor at prolonging her exposure. She imagined Chang’s gaze rising from her legs to her face as she reached the ground, each studying the other for a sign of intent. But her nerve failed and she finished facing the brickwork, turning only at Chang’s brusque offer to take her hand. She held it out to him and hopped to the tunnel floor. Chang called for Svenson to send the child.

The tunnel was new brick, more secret construction on the part of Harald Crabbe and Roger Bascombe. Miss Temple walked behind Chang, happy to let Svenson hold Francesca’s hand, and wondered when her fiance, Bascombe, had last walked these halls. Had he still loved her then? Had he ever come from here to her arms, all the more thrilled at keeping his secret?

Brooding on Roger Bascombe made Miss Temple feel foolish. She shifted her attention to Chang, fighting the impulse to reach out and run a finger down his back. She started at a touch on her own shoulder. Svenson indicated a growing rumble in the walls.

‘The turbines. We are under the bridge.’

Miss Temple nodded without interest. She had imagined the sound was the river itself, flowing past in the dark, an enormous serpent dragging its scales across the earth.

The iron stairs echoed with their footfalls, and the sound launched flurries of motion above their heads.

‘Bats.’ Chang aimed the lantern at a niche of cross-braced girders. The little beasts hung in rows, wide-eared, small teeth polished white by darting tongues. Miss Temple had seen bats often, whipping across the veranda at twilight, and these did not disturb her. She enjoyed their little fox faces, and smiled to see such awkward things