The Chemickal Marriage

Miss Temple swallowed. ‘But why did you bring me?’

‘The Comte’s memory, of course. You had seen those rooms. You spied on me.’

‘But – but it was the Comte with the Duke, watching Vandaariff – I had to change everything –’

‘Which you did.’

‘But if the story had to be made up and changed, what did it matter that I knew it at all? Why didn’t you tell it yourself?’

‘O I could have, but never so feelingly. The Queen is highly suspicious of anyone seeking favour – by claiming no favour for myself, and by producing a witness without hope of advancement, the odds she would believe the tale were much increased. And besides, you did know the story. Even with the necessary embroidery, it did not sound a lie. And if the Queen did declare it a lie – always possible, she is as contrary as a mule – it was not me who’d done the lying.’

‘But Lord Axewith is gone –’

‘Axewith left his papers with Bronque. By now Her Majesty has flung those papers in the Colonel’s face and the main goal of our visit is achieved. That Axewith is called to some entirely unrelated crisis only benefits us further. It keeps him from the tragic news at Axewith House, and also from Vandaariff. Now, will you stand?’

Miss Temple nodded and rose. ‘Colonel Bronque is your lover.’

‘Celeste Temple, how did you ever escape strangling?’ The Contessa slipped the paper-knife into her bag and came out with a handkerchief. ‘Yours to destroy.’

Miss Temple wiped her nose and eyes and then dabbed at her fingers, for the lace was too thin for its task. ‘Why do all the Queen’s ladies dislike you?’

‘Why does everyone dislike you?’

‘But – but I am not –’ Miss Temple flushed. ‘I am not beautiful.’

The Contessa’s voice was flat. ‘No. Beauty is more a danger than intelligence or wit. One becomes a living mirror for the inadequacies of others. Without the whip hand, which as a foreigner in the court is denied me, one proceeds in secret. Such constraints are exactly why unexpected encounters, such as Lady Hopton, such as yourself, are so gratifying.’

‘But you have not killed me.’

The Contessa sighed wistfully. ‘O Celeste …’

When she had stepped off the ship into the incomparably more complicated world of the city – a hailstorm of sounds and smells and people – Miss Temple’s reaction, true to her nature, had been to retreat and, from behind a barrier of sceptical politeness, observe. The vectors of her relations were antagonistic, this new home defined by its otherness. When elements of her transplanted life did in time penetrate her reserve – a grudging familiarity with her maids, an appreciation for certain tea shops – the result was an expansion of her private enclosure to include these new pleasures, not a shift from her essential detachment. Now that enclosure, her castle’s keep, housed only mortifying betrayal. Even her hate for the Contessa was blunted, first by the indiscriminate desire that ran in her blood like an infection, and, worse to admit, by Miss Temple’s fear that the Contessa alone understood, however contemptuously, the truth of her polluted soul.

She wondered how many people the Contessa had murdered, and why she had been so many times spared? Certainly the Contessa had tried once or twice in earnest, but on so many other occasions the woman had refrained. Miss Temple believed that once a person was an enemy – horrible Cynthia Hobart, for example, whose plantation lay across the river – one worked against them without end. Moral sophistication – that one would not merely dissemble, biding time for a master stroke, but actually allow one’s feelings to change – laid a chill in the pit of her stomach.

She shook off her thoughts. They had retraced their steps to the hall of mirrors, where they had first entered with Colonel Bronque.

‘At last,’ sighed the Contessa. ‘If we can just find a coach – che cavolo!’

Blocking the way stood four soldiers and an unimpressive man with wire spectacles and a little beard, the tip of which he twirled between two grey-gloved fingers.

‘Mr Schoepfil.’ The Contessa released Miss Temple’s hand. ‘I had wondered if I would have the pleasure.’

‘The pleasure is mine,’ Mr Schoepfil replied. ‘I insist.’

Miss Temple turned and ran, but another line of soldiers barred her way. She was taken to an empty room and left inside without a word.

Miss Temple disliked waiting at the best of times, and to do so without knowing where she was only made her feel more powerless, more like a child. She looked out of the window of the little room, wondering if she might simply smash the glass and climb through, but, while she did not remember having climbed so many stairs, the drop was at least thirty feet to an ugly gravelled courtyard.

She wondered if the Contessa would set the blame for Lady Hopton’s death on her. And who was this Mr Schoepfil – another lover, along with Bronque? She thought of the indifference that ringed her own existence at the Boniface, where she was tolerated but hardly loved. And what of those people she had met in her romance with Roger Bascombe? Not all had been Roger’s direct friends or family; there had been some who might have, had they desired, maintained relations with Miss Temple. Scarcely a single call had come.

Her handbag containing Roger’s notebook had been taken by the soldiers without her ever having read it. Miss Temple wished she’d never seen the thing, hating her curiosity. She put her head in her hands and sighed.

She looked up with a dawning revulsion and walked to a knobbed wall panel. The back of her mouth burnt. Miss Temple pulled the panel wide. In the centre of a bare room stood a table covered with an oilskin sheet. A second, stained square of oilskin protected the floor beneath.

In the Comte’s memories the horrid odour echoed necrotic tissue first encountered in a Parisian atelier, but Miss Temple’s main recognition came from the pollution in her own body, from the tainted book.

She lifted the oilskin sheet. Her stomach seized. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. Saliva filled her mouth and she wheeled, willing herself to vomit, but nothing came. With a punitive determination Miss Temple reached again for the oilskin and, so as not to lose her nerve, flipped it wide. Francesca Trapping lay on the table like a forgotten doll, broken and tattered. The dress had been cut away and so had parts of the corpse, dark cavities opened with an unstinting cruelty. Miss Temple put her fist to her mouth and forced herself to look. She had abandoned the girl. She had triggered the explosion at the Customs House. This was her doing.

She felt her throat catch, aware of a stupidity she could not see past. The gaping holes … missing portions of the child’s body. This was like the victims at Raaxfall, from whose corpses the knots of transformed flesh had been removed … but … but no, it was not the same. Those cavities had been ragged and irregular, formed by blue glass blooming into flesh. These incisions were precise and clean … surgical.

She stared down at the bloodless small hands, the feet turned in to touch at the toes – and realized the clothes had been cut away. The fabric was not torn or burnt, nor was it stained with blood – there was no sign of death by explosion or violence. What was more – she choked as the thought came home – the excavations in Francesca’s body were not from any random blast. Through the Comte’s knowledge of anatomy she saw what had been removed: kidney, spleen, lung, heart, thyroid, even the roof of the girl’s open mouth … Francesca had been dissected as deliberately as a hanged man sold for science. She had not been killed in the Customs House. Francesca had been poisoned by the Comte’s book, her organs wholly consumed with rot.

How soon before Miss Temple succumbed as well?

It was not a generous thought, and she was ashamed. The murdered child lay before her. The small mouth yawned, slate-coloured lips gore-smeared from the extracted palate. How in the world had Francesca Trapping ended up here? Knowledge of the Comte’s alchemy had been confined to an extremely small circle, and most of them lay in the grave. Francesca’s dissection cast this Mr Schoepfil, who held both Miss Temple and Francesca’s body in his custody, in an entirely more terrifying light.

Francesca’s dress hung off the table like discarded wrapping paper. Miss Temple wondered when the dress