The Chemickal Marriage

Vandaariff stretched out a shaking hand. ‘Come to me, Francesca. I know your sacred origins. I know your destiny. You are a princess of heaven. An angel.’

He sketched a shape in the air with stiff fingers. Francesca bit her lip. Her reply was faint, but everything the Comte d’Orkancz could have desired.

‘An angel.’

Miss Temple seized a handful of Francesca’s hair with enough force to make the girl gasp, and pressed the pistol to her skull. ‘I’ll kill her first. And then I’ll kill you.’

Francesca squirmed. A glint of metal in Foison’s hand showed a palmed throwing knife, but he did not act. The Customs House must have been full of soldiers, like the bridge. But Vandaariff did not summon them.

Keeping hold of the child’s hair, Miss Temple suddenly shifted her aim to Vandaariff. The spell was broken. Foison’s arm whipped forward. With a sharp ringing the knife was knocked wide by Chang’s own flung blade. Doctor Svenson’s revolver roared in her ear. Miss Temple squeezed the trigger of her own pistol, aiming at Vandaariff’s head, but only plucking his high collar. Before she could fire again, Chang shoved her roughly back and met the charge of Foison’s three men with a knife in one hand and his razor in the other.

She collided with Francesca, who fell, causing Miss Temple to sprawl in turn and lose the pistol. Francesca scuttled away. Miss Temple got to her knees, intending to crawl after, but instead tripped one of Foison’s soldiers – careening from Chang with a spurting wrist. She whipped the knife from her boot. As the soldier groped for her throat she slashed at his fingers. He rose before her, then arched his back with a scream. Another of Foison’s knives had buried itself in the man’s body, clearly intended for Miss Temple.

A gunshot made her turn. Doctor Svenson lay on his side, the last cloaked soldier tottering above him with a smoking revolver. Between them crouched Francesca, somehow tangled in a corpse’s cover sheet. Miss Temple flung her knife at the cloaked man’s face. It struck harmlessly on the shoulder, but caused him to spin, whipping his pistol towards her. The Doctor fired, punching a hole under the man’s clean-shaven jaw. Francesca clapped both hands over her ears. Svenson slumped back, clutching his chest.

Two more soldiers lay at Chang’s feet, a knife-hilt sticking from one’s throat. Chang flicked the blood from his razor and stepped deliberately between Foison and Miss Temple. He snatched up a cloak, twirling it around his wrist. Foison drew two more knives from his silk coat.

The two men advanced with feral precision. It was the first time Miss Temple had seen Chang treat an enemy like an equal, and it frightened her more than anything.

Vandaariff had withdrawn from the melee, back to the columns, and now stood waving. Behind him, at last, came the calls of soldiers. She blinked. Vandaariff was waving them away.

Because their meeting had been a surprise, she realized, an interruption. Vandaariff’s true business in the Customs House could not stand scrutiny – the soldiers would take matters in hand, clear the area, scour the premises for confederates …

What if Vandaariff had not come to the trading hall for bodies at all? Had his artist’s indulgence delayed his departure, after his true errand?

The square. The cathedral. Why not the Customs House too? Vandaariff would know when it would be released for normal work and filled with men – would know to the minute. The doubled ticking –

More voices filled the portico, the soldiers calling out at the sight of the battle. Any moment they must burst forward. Miss Temple saw her own pistol. She snatched it up.

Her shot splintered the wood of the clock case.

‘Celeste, what are you doing?’

It was Svenson. Behind her Vandaariff’s voice rose to a shriek. She marched closer, for a better shot. Her second bullet missed entirely.

An officer loudly ordered everyone to drop their weapons. Miss Temple extended her arm, imagining the clock a brown glass bottle, and fired.

Blue smoke spat out at the bullet’s impact, an instant ahead of the blast, a deafening wall of smoke and debris that choked her breath and blotted out all sight. Miss Temple was lifted off her feet and landed hard. Her last thoughts boiled with unreasoning fury. She wanted nothing more than to blind Robert Vandaariff with her own two thumbs.

She came to her senses at a blaze of agony in her left arm.

‘Pauvre petite,’ said an unpleasant voice. ‘You will regret your waking. Hold her, please … she may still be subject to the infusion.’

Firm hands clamped Miss Temple’s shoulders, and above her face loomed Mr Foison, white hair hanging down. Robert Vandaariff stood near in his shirtsleeves, an apron over his clothes. He held a pair of forceps and, as she watched, insinuated their tip into a gash running perhaps four inches along her forearm. She protested, but he only thrust deeper, beneath a crust of blue that sealed one end of the wound. With a wrench that made Miss Temple cry, Vandaariff prised up the crystallized flesh. He tore the patch free with his fingers and dropped it on a plate. Despite the pain, Miss Temple felt her thoughts clear. Vandaariff set the forceps next to a porcelain basin and washed his hands. Next to the basin she saw a lock of auburn hair, quite obviously her own.

‘Not a serious wound,’ he said. ‘Mr Foison is perfectly capable of dressing it. I have done enough for you. That you live at all, that I have not melted your soft body for candle fat …’ He sniffed and reached for a towel. ‘It goes against tradition.’

Vandaariff tucked the lock of hair into a pocket, collected his cane and hobbled to a cabinet lined with bottles – but not, she realized, bottles of liquor. He poured out an ugly mixture, like milky weak tea, swirled the glass and drank it off. ‘You were only touched the once.’ He wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘Your luck persists.’

‘You do not have Francesca.’ Her voice quavered, for Foison had begun to wrap her arm. Her wool jacket was gone, her dress ash-blackened and tattered.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘My survival.’

‘I suppose you do not care – being so brave – that your friends were blown to rags. Only that you managed to vex me.’

Miss Temple’s body went cold. ‘I do not believe you.’

‘By all means, Miss Temple. Believe your heart.’

She gasped again as Foison knotted the bandage. He stepped away, and Miss Temple pushed herself up. She lay on a wooden work table in a strange room panelled with polished steel. Had there been time to reach Harschmort?

‘But this is your own natural advantage,’ Vandaariff went on. ‘Celeste Temple acts without the impediment of remorse. Though it was clever to realize a device had been set for tomorrow’s trading. And decent shooting to strike it.’

‘Are you always so generous when you’ve been bested?’

‘Bested? Miss Temple, the bee is but part of the hive, the single pirana one of its school. In the world of men, such multiplication of effort is accomplished by wealth. This is my advantage. And when such a device is set off by my enemies in the presence of officers of the 8th Fusiliers? At a stroke it is proved that I have nothing to do with such destruction – I was there only to search for a missing old friend, don’t you know, arranged as a favour from Lord Axewith. And the blame is laid fully upon the three individuals who have continually thwarted my plans. I could not have asked for more.’

Her throat closed against any reply. Foison coughed into his hand.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Vandaariff. ‘Off with you. But indulge my frailty – you’ve seen the animal.’

With a cold efficiency, Foison looped her limbs into leather restraints and pulled tight. Then he was gone.

The precaution was hardly necessary. Miss Temple could barely breathe. She saw Svenson clutching his chest and Chang, his back to the blast, unprepared … she looked down at her bandaged arm and wilfully clenched her fist. Pain shot up her arm and tears stung her eyes. Vandaariff was lying. She had been kept alive to be ransomed, and only Svenson and Chang would so preserve her. They had escaped with Francesca, Vandaariff’s desired prize.

Vandaariff shuffled beyond her view, making a menacing clatter of metal and glass. But, instead of the stink of chemicals or indigo clay, the room was suddenly suffused with the pleasing odour of cooked eggs and melted butter. He returned to his seat with a lacquered tray.

‘You have not eaten, I know.’ He plucked up a fresh white roll and tore it at the seam, fingers stiff as the