The Chemickal Marriage

more precious than Francesca Trapping?

Foison opened the door and leant out to unfold a metal stair-step. Miss Temple drove her bound hands against his back and sent him flying through the door. She hurled herself at Vandaariff, snarling like a dog. Her hands found his throat, the rope between them digging his wattled flesh like a garrotte. He batted weakly at her face. He gaped, eyes wide, tongue protruding … and then let out a horrible stuttering gasp. Laughter. She met his insane, encouraging nod and squeezed as hard as she could –

Foison’s strong hands wrenched Miss Temple away and hauled her out of the door. With a snarl of his own he flung her down with enough force to drive the breath from her body. Wet grass and earth were cold against her cheek. She gulped for air. Foison was tending his master. She heaved herself up – only to drop again secured in place. One of Foison’s knives – thrown from the coach – pinned her dress to the ground. Before she could yank it free her wrists were caught by a hand in a leather gauntlet. Miss Temple looked up to a semicircle of men in green uniforms.

Foison emerged from the coach and called to the driver, who started his team, turning back the way they’d come. Foison retrieved his blade.

‘Make sure of her.’

As they walked Miss Temple’s stomach rose. She shut her eyes against the bile in her throat and sucked air through her nostrils.

Something in the smell … the Comte had been here before …

She took the first statues for more green uniforms, for the stones had been overcome by moss. Soon they appeared in lines between the trees, stained by years of leaf-fall, tipped by sinking earth or knocked headless, even toppled, by falling tree limbs. A cemetery …

Miss Temple’s nausea sapped any notion of escape, and she followed Foison through the woods and down a proper row of tombs. Even here the stones were cracked and crumbled, swathed in green, the names scarcely legible, abandoned … had so many families passed out of time? She turned her attention to the statues: mournful figures, some with wings, some humbly shrouded, facing down in grief or up in supplication. In their hands were open books and closed, torches, laurels, lilies, roses, harps, keys – and on the tombs so many inscriptions, from the Bible or in Greek or Latin.

None of it touched Miss Temple, for she was too near the Comte’s estimation of such piety. To his mind, and thus persuasively to hers, such trappings of grief and hope were akin to a toddler’s scrawl.

The skin of her elbow stung from her awkward fall, and, unable to reach with her hands, she rubbed it against her stomach. She had risked everything in attacking Vandaariff, but Foison had merely pulled her away. At the Customs House, he had twice sought her life with a thrown blade. She had become a valued commodity.

Beyond a spiked iron gate stretched a dim avenue lined with vaults. The gate stood between Egyptian obelisks, but their plaster had crumbled to reveal red brick, the work of an especially unscrupulous builder.

Foison unlocked the gate. The vaults had no names across their lintels, only metal numbers nailed into the stone. At the avenue’s end was a vault with the number 8, deliberately placed sideways. Foison sorted another key, then surveyed the sky above them. Miss Temple was reminded of a snake tasting the air with its tongue.

The vault door scraped open, and from inside the tomb rose a golden light. Someone waited inside.

Foison went first. He’d no weapon ready, nor had he brought a lantern. Miss Temple came next, prodded by a fellow with a cutlass, and then the others in a line. Instead of a horrid vault lined with niches, they entered an anteroom gleaming with blue ceramic tile. The far wall was fashioned like an ancient city gate, with a crenellated top and narrow windows, all aglow.

‘The entrance to Babylon,’ said Foison, removing her gag. ‘The Ishtar Gate.’

‘Ah.’ In Miss Temple, vanished cultures met a sense of justice as to their vanishing.

‘In Ishtar’s temple is eternal life.’

A flicker of recognition came from the Comte’s memories. Miss Temple tried to place the source … was it the light? She saw no candles or lanterns – the golden light came from the other side of the blue wall.

Foison opened the gate with an elaborate key with teeth like a briar’s thorns. His men thrust Miss Temple through and slammed the gate. She cried out, naming Foison a coward and his master a degenerate toad. There was no reply. She heard the vault door close, and the cold lock turn.

The tomb was bright without the aid of a single lantern or candle. The floor was copper, polished near to a mirror. She recalled the metal on the walls of Vandaariff’s room, and the sheets of steel hanging amongst the machines at Parchfeldt. A thread of bile burnt her throat like an incision and she knew: this interior part of the tomb had been a commission to prove the Comte’s abilities – an unknown artist first brought to Vandaariff’s attention by a new and intimate adviser, the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza …

Miss Temple held up a hand and waved, making tiny shadows. The decorated ceiling was honeycombed by dozens of shafts that rose high to the surface and drew the sunlight down, directing the beams with mirrors and colouring their glow with glass.

More grimly, however, the shafts meant Miss Temple’s earlier assumption had been wrong. No one else had entered the tomb – she had been abandoned. She looked for an edge to slice through the cord binding her wrists, but the walls and floor were smooth. The room’s only feature was a slab of white marble, carved to depict silken bedclothes pulled open across it.

Two names were carved: Clothilde Vandaariff and, in fresh-cut letters, Lydia Vandaariff. No dates or epigraphs accompanied the names – nor, in the case of Lydia, could the tomb contain a body. Miss Temple wondered if it was her fate to serve as Lydia’s proxy.

She sank down against the stone. Her forearm throbbed, and it seemed she had not slept in days. She curled on her side, yet, despite her fatigue, the solitude only gave Miss Temple’s mind more opportunity to seethe …

When they had collided with Mr Harcourt and the Palace guard, Chang had seized her hand. They did not speak as they fled, but then a reckless turn left them in a dead-end room, with no time to double back.

‘The wardrobe,’ he hissed, pushing her to it. Chang leapt to a writing desk and dragged it beneath the room’s single high window.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Get in the wardrobe!’

Chang vaulted onto the desk and opened the window. Did he think to draw pursuit away? He hauled himself through to the waist. He held a handful of papers from the desk and flung them out.

‘A trail to follow,’ he said, jumping down. ‘The ledge is wide and the roof is flat – why are you not in the damned closet?’

Chang yanked it open and propelled her into a line of hanging garments.

‘There is no room!’

The back of the wardrobe had hooks from which cloaks had been hung and Chang shoved her beneath them. Then the doors were shut and he was with her, limbs overlapping, bodies crammed together. Chang squeezed her arm, his words faint as a sigh.

‘They are here.’

Miss Temple heard nothing. She had reached to steady herself and taken hold of Chang’s belt in the dark. Chang had shifted, settling his weight, and one knee rolled forward, gently, to press between her legs. The corners of her mind began to crawl.

From outside came a scrape of floorboards – someone climbing on the desk. She tightened her grip. She wanted to lean forward and kiss his mouth. She tipped her body against the hardness of his knee. She bit her lip to keep silent.

With another shudder she heard his breath in her ear. ‘Do not be afraid …’

She almost laughed aloud. He thought she shook with fear. She squeezed his hand. It would be the simplest thing to guide it to her breast.

The door to the wardrobe opened. The hanging clothes were jostled. She went still at the chok of a blade thrust home above her head. Another thrust, near her hand – chok! – and then a third, piercing the cloak directly between them. The blade was pulled free and the wardrobe door slammed shut.

They waited, Miss Temple at the edge of her control. Chang patted her hand. She rocked her body forward in a last sensual grind before he crawled cautiously out.