The Chemickal Marriage

his burden and winced at the pain from his injured rib, sure he could hear the click of bone against cartilage. He mumbled soothingly and caressed Francesca’s hair, and soon enough she settled into sleep, a heavy but tractable weight.

Celeste Temple was dead. Chang was determined to kill himself. Phelps and Cunsher were taken. Doctor Svenson was alone.

Or was that true? He could make no sense – no moral sense – of the encounter in the Palace. The woman had cut Eloise’s throat … still he shuddered to recall the teasing caress of her breath.

The Contessa would be his task.

He kept on, beyond the Citadel, past the University, through the ugly brick of Lime Fields. At the corner of Aachen Street he set Francesca down and as she yawned – and his arms throbbed with relief – did his best to improve their appearance, sponging soot from their faces and brushing ash from their clothes.

Aachen Street was lined with old mansions that had been subdivided into smaller townhouses, and then – fashion and fortune shifting across the town – purchased anew and grandly recombined. In the centre of the block stood one such, with a tall iron fence that had been painted green and a guardhouse next to the gate. He had not recognized the address when Francesca had said where they must go, and it took a moment even now to interpret his sense of familiarity. It was the light – he had never seen the place during the day – but how many times had he been here to collect his Prince? The Old Palace had no sign advertising itself, but, as an exclusive brothel catering to the city’s most powerful, he did not suppose one was required.

The man in the guard box waved them away, but Francesca called out shrilly, ‘We have come to see Mrs Madelaine Kraft.’

The guard directed his gruff answer to Svenson. ‘We are not open to visitors –’

‘Mrs Kraft,’ Francesca insisted.

‘Mrs Kraft is not here.’

‘She is so.’

‘She is not well.’

‘Mrs Kraft not being well is why we must see her. We were sent.’

Svenson saw a twitch at the front window’s curtain. Before the child could speak again, he squeezed her shoulder. Francesca turned impatiently – with her pasty complexion and protuberant eyes it was the reproachful gaze of a piglet in a butcher’s window – but Svenson held his grip for silence.

‘The fact is, sir, we have walked far, through terrible disarray, with instructions to call on Mrs Kraft. If it is a mystery to you, it is also to me. I do not know who she is.’

The guard turned back to his box. ‘Then I must say good day to you –’

Svenson spoke quickly. ‘You say she is not well, good sir, but I will hazard more than that. I will hazard she has been stricken insensible.’ The guard paused. ‘Further, I will surmise that no surgeon has been able to penetrate the cause. What is more – and if I am wrong, do drive us from your door – I say that Mrs Kraft was first taken ill during a visit to Harschmort House some two months ago – and so she remains.’

The guard’s mouth had fallen open. ‘You said you did not know her.’

‘I do not. And you have kept her condition secret, yes?’

The guard nodded warily. ‘Then how – who –’

‘Permit me to introduce myself. Captain-Surgeon Abelard Svenson –’

Francesca threatened to spoil everything with an eager, dead-toothed smile. Svenson leant forward, blocking the guard’s view. ‘As the child said, we were referred. It may be I can do nothing … yet, if I can …’

A muffled thud came from the guard box, recalling the guard to his hut like a dog on its master’s lead. Francesca squeezed Svenson’s hand. The guard hurried out and unlocked the gate.

‘Quickly,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing grows in the daylight but shadows.’

Standing in the lavish parlour holding the hand of a seven-year-old girl only complicated the Doctor’s usual reaction to such establishments: disapproval of the architecture of prostitution – its tyranny, dispassion, degradation – and jealousy at his own exclusion – for his class, his poverty – from such rarified delights. Hypocrisy made both sources of discontent sting the more, but hypocrisy in matters of the heart was to Svenson no fresh wound.

The previous night’s flowers were being replaced with fresh bouquets – orange-streaked peonies and purple lilies – by a serving girl scarcely older than Francesca. Svenson wondered if she was an apprentice to the brothel, and how soon she might expect to join the ranks of the Old Palace’s wares. The little housemaid wrapped the dead flowers in her apron and gathered the bundle to her chest, but then she saw Francesca and stopped. The children stared at one another, but Francesca’s haughty gaze held firm. The housemaid dropped her eyes to the carpet, dipped once in Svenson’s direction and scurried out.

A rustle to their left revealed an alcove for coats and hats and sticks, and a pretty young woman waxing the counter-top. Before she could ask for their coats, Svenson shook his head.

‘We are here for Mrs Kraft.’

The young woman nodded across the parlour, where another guard – despite his lack of uniform, there could be no other term – stood at a wooden rostrum. This second guard did not stir. After a lingering moment (during which, stupid from lack of sleep, Svenson could not recall if the twitching curtain had been from this level or the floor above), a thump echoed behind the rostrum, the exact sound that had come from the guard box. Svenson saw a pair of brass pipes bolted to the wall: pneumatic message tubes, allowing swift communication throughout the house. The shocking expense of such a system spoke to the brothel’s prodigious backing.

The guard fished a scrap of green paper from a leather-wrapped tube.

‘You’re to be taken to Mr Mahmoud.’

‘I’ll do it, Henry.’ The pretty coat clerk had already slipped from her alcove. ‘You’re not to leave the front, and I can be back in five minutes.’

‘Make sure it is five minutes, Alice. No roaming off.’

‘And why should I do that?’

‘Mr Gorine’s instructions –’

‘Are exactly why you need to stay in the front. Now come with me, pet.’

She looked kindly at Francesca, her expression catching only briefly at the sight of the girl’s sickly features, and led them out. Alice’s hair had been pinned, but along her nape Svenson noticed a row of dense curls. She glanced back and nearly caught his stare.

‘I’ve never been in the office myself. No one goes in the office, except Mr Gorine and Mr Mahmoud.’

‘And who are they, pray?’

‘Well, who are you, if you don’t know that?’

They passed into an oval room. Come the night, it would be filled with exquisitely painted women – and painted boys – from which a visitor might choose. Now the only occupants were two women in their shifts, playing cards on a cushion between them, with a third, distressingly young, perched on an ottoman with a box of sweets.

Alice peered at Svenson, waiting for an answer. He stammered, too struck by the contrast between the gaily painted faces and, in flat daylight, the too-pale bodies.

‘I’m sorry – I – I am no one at all.’

‘Then who is she?’ Alice winked at Francesca. Before Svenson could intervene, the child piped up, her voice disagreeably hoarse.

‘I am Francesca Trapping. I am the oldest surviving Xonck. I will inherit the entire Xonck empire because my brothers are fools.’

Svenson squeezed her hand. ‘I am sure Mrs Kraft must not be kept waiting –’

One of the card-playing women stifled a laugh. ‘Mrs Kraft?’

‘We have been sent,’ said Francesca.

The girl on the ottoman spoke around the nougat in her teeth. ‘Well, no reason to hurry on