The Chemickal Marriage

Svenson sighed with relief. Her mind could make new memories, the harvesting process had not robbed her of that – she was no vegetable. Yet through her illness she had not spoken – why did only indigo clay etch its mark into her mind?

He patted Madelaine Kraft’s hand. ‘What do you think of that, Francesca?’

The girl had no answer, both arms wrapped across her middle. Was she that delicate, that susceptible? Suppressing the urge to comfort her, fearing it would only make things worse, Svenson turned to the others. ‘I assume Colonel Bronque has gone?’

Gorine consulted his pocket watch. ‘He has. But why?’

‘Because we are going to need your tunnel.’

The bundle of chemicals lay at Svenson’s feet. Francesca Trapping stood yawning and blinking. The girl had recovered, and though she showed a clumsiness descending the stairs, he ascribed this to exhaustion. At the end of the basement corridor lay an old iron door. Two uniformed soldiers crouched against the wall, bound and, though not cruelly, gagged. Gorine watched them with an unhappy expression and a pistol in each hand. Mahmoud sorted through a ring of keys. Behind, two servants gently held Madelaine Kraft upright between them.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ muttered Gorine. ‘Bronque will summon his soldiers, the doors will be stormed –’

‘You could take him hostage,’ observed Mahmoud. From his tone, and Gorine’s reply, it was no new suggestion. ‘Allow him inside the house, have our men ready –’

‘The Colonel will defend himself, and if he is injured or killed it is our lives – if he doesn’t kill us outright to begin with –’

Sensing a tirade, Svenson broke in. ‘If there was time to ask the Colonel to join us, I would. There is not. Mrs Kraft’s only hope to recover her mind lies in defiance. Moreover, it is not the Colonel who controls your survival, but the man who comes with him.’

‘We don’t even know who he is!’

‘I suggest you find out. Now which of you stays and which comes along?’

‘Mahmoud knows the tunnel.’ Gorine squeezed the pistols in his hands. ‘If anything happens to Mrs Kraft you will answer. As we will answer to Her Majesty’s displeasure.’

‘I would expect no less,’ said Svenson, noting Gorine’s naive conflation of the Colonel with the Queen. ‘Now who has a lantern?’

As a boy, Doctor Svenson had prided himself on his knowledge of the forest bordering his family’s fields. In an adolescence of discontent, he made a practice of stalking at random into the trees, stopping only when the light had gone and darkness had instilled the place with shapeless dread. He made it his task to return by instinct. With each twig that popped beneath his feet or dragged across his night-chilled face, the stale misery of his days gave way to a deeper engagement, where his sacrificial determination echoed that of a knight sitting vigil in a cold stone church. In time he had seen the pride behind the romance, and the fear behind the pride, and these memories made him wince.

‘Where have you been?’ his mother would ask.

‘Walking,’ went his invariable reply.

He had always gone home – to light, to warmth – and his relief at being so recovered was a way of infusing his quotidian life, taken for granted, with value. But after so many years, was it not the dark wood that had held constant? What home was there to walk to now? In his rambles he had misplaced the life around him, but perhaps he had truly seen the world.

Mahmoud’s lantern settled on stone steps beneath an angled doorway. ‘This opens to the courtyard – the simplest entrance, but hardly concealed, given it is full morning.’

‘Is there another way?’

‘Do you have a specific destination?’

‘I do. Across the courtyard is a brick roundhouse – rather like an iceberg, it extends a hundred steps below ground. The main chamber was fitted for the Comte d’Orkancz. Enough machines may remain to restore Mrs Kraft.’

‘How?’

‘That hardly matters if we cannot reach it.’

‘As Lord Vandaariff once sponsored the Comte, so he now sponsors others, even offering his own men to guard the gates … still, there are other, older ways.’ Mahmoud’s teeth were bright in the shadows.

They followed the glow of the lantern to what seemed a dead end. Mahmoud pushed with both hands, and the entire panel of brickwork swung inward.

‘It is an actual hidden panel!’ enthused Svenson.

‘Thus the King reached his mistress,’ called Mahmoud, stepping through. ‘Take care where you put your feet …’

The process by which a king’s bedchamber became a dusty storeroom for scientific specimens – Svenson could see cephalopods in murky jars, geologic samples, piles of bound notebooks – struck the Doctor as emblematic of some larger entropic theory, one requiring a metaphor beyond his immediate wit. As he lifted Francesca over a row of bell jars, the lantern illuminated the ceiling: a peeling fresco of a nude man in the sea surrounded by women. Then the light was gone, Mahmoud playing it around the room, leaving Svenson to wonder what grand tale had graced a king’s most intimate hours. The rescue of Jonah? Poseidon and his nymphs? Or a final crisis of the flood – death in ecstasy?

‘I do not like the spiders,’ whispered Francesca, staring at a shockingly large specimen under glass. Svenson picked her up again, to let the servants pass with Mrs Kraft.

‘No one likes them, sweetheart.’

‘He does.’ Her voice had thickened. ‘He thinks they are beautiful … he makes me look, when I don’t want to.’

‘Look at Mrs Kraft instead.’

‘Looking at her makes me sick.’ Francesca belched. Svenson grimaced at the foul smell.

‘She did not make you sick before.’

‘She does now.’

‘Then we must drive the sickness from you.’

‘How?’

‘By following the Contessa’s plan. You trust the Contessa, don’t you?’

Francesca nodded.

‘Well, then,’ Svenson assured her. ‘We will do nothing she did not intend.’

He sent off the servants with detailed instructions. It might not work – the men might be seen, or his formula mistaken (was he sure of the treated paraffin?). Nevertheless, they crouched in silence, peering from a ground-floor window, Francesca hunched next to Svenson, Mrs Kraft leaning with a glazed expression against Mahmoud.

Directly across the courtyard stood the massive gate with its medieval portcullis. A score of men in green uniforms lounged around it, bantering with the Institute personnel. As Svenson watched, one black-robed figure was pulled to the side and questioned by the guards before being allowed to pass.

Mahmoud used the disturbance as an opportunity to ease the window open. The brick roundhouse lay directly between their window and the gate. A single guard stood at its door.

‘Stay as low as you can,’ Svenson whispered. ‘And run. Can Mrs Kraft do this?’

‘A bit late for that question, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, of course – I only –’

Having made his point, Mahmoud cut Svenson off: ‘It hardly matters.’

Across the courtyard, an iron door set into the ground was flung open – the courtyard entrance to the tunnel – and then a cloud of black smoke billowed up into the air.

‘Where is the sound?’ asked Mahmoud. ‘There is no explosion – something has gone wrong.’

‘Wait for it!’ hissed Svenson. ‘Listen!’

But something had gone wrong. The thunderclap he had hoped to achieve was absent, and in its place came only a roiling cloud. Slowly, painfully they watched, but not one of the guards took notice.

A voice cried out – finally! – but not from the guards. The shout came again, from the rooftop: sentries