The Chemickal Marriage

suppose you know what I have?’

‘Why should I?’ replied Miss Temple. ‘I am a puppet nobody.’

‘O buck up.’

To her surprise Miss Temple bit back a retort that was palpably obscene. Was that next for her disintegrating character, the manners of a fish-wife? She nipped the inside of one cheek between her teeth. Heedless of her silence, Schoepfil again pecked at the contents of the box. Now his counting grew ever more complex, as if Schoepfil were attempting to solve a larger mathematical question. Miss Temple cast a wary eye at the iron tools.

‘Who are you to have the free possession of so many rooms in the Queen’s Palace?’

‘Queer, isn’t it?’

‘Does the Queen even know?’

Schoepfil laughed and rapped the table with his fist, a gesture Miss Temple already found affected and odious. ‘Why should she?’

‘I don’t suppose you slipped in with the tradesmen.’

‘I did not. Those who do not belong here are noticed.’

‘I was not.’

‘Au contraire! Every bit as much as your dynamic companion.’

‘Why would anyone notice me?’

Schoepfil nodded in agreement, a condescending dismissal. ‘The true question was how so disreputable a figure as the Contessa managed an audience? It had to be you, her companion, however unimpressive, who bore some vital news. And then you mentioned Roger Bascombe, which changes everything.’

‘You said I was of no genuine interest.’

‘Was I wrong? You have killed, you say, four men – one of whom, unless I am a fool, was Bascombe himself.’ He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her contradiction. When it did not come, Mr Schoepfil barked with satisfaction. ‘To the business! What say you to these?’

Schoepfil spun the oblong box to her view. It was lined with orange felt, with eight indented slots made to hold glass cards. Seven had been filled, but the glass cards were swirled with different colours, only one of them properly blue. The last slot was empty.

What came to Miss Temple’s mind, for the second time that day, was her former neighbour and rival, Miss Cynthia Hobart, the identification suggested by Schoepfil’s fingers, flitting from square to square like indecisive bees, an exact mirror of Cynthia’s hand above a tray of tea cakes. For years Miss Temple had been daunted by Cynthia in social matters, by the other girl’s ability – no matter what opinion Miss Temple might express – to adopt a contrary and, it was disdainfully implied, superior point of view. Again and again the young Miss Temple had returned from teas or suppers or dances stinging with the hidden weals of Cynthia’s condescension, victories well noted by everyone else in attendance.

But a day had come – brilliant, precious, a pearl. The matter was trivial: a pot of marmalade from the Hobarts’ cook. The fruit had been coarsely cut and stood out by the spoonful in sweet gleaming chunks. At Miss Temple’s demurral Cynthia had loudly announced a preference for firm, palpable fruit in her marmalade, an opinion shared by no less a personage than the Vice-Roy of Jamaica – who, it was implied, ought well to know. But Miss Temple, whose care for pastries and jams ran deep, knew that the finer the cut of the fruit, the more suffused the syrup became with juice. While she allowed, in the abstract, for a variance of taste, she did not consider variety a worthy excuse – and if the Vice-Roy of Jamaica felt otherwise, then he was a leather-tongued scrub. More to the purpose, she knew that Cynthia was wrong, and more – since her positions were only adopted to contradict Miss Temple’s own – that Cynthia had no idea, and never, ever had.

When, at the pronouncement of vice-regal opinion, Cynthia turned with her customary sneer, Miss Temple, instead of retreating to cold silence, laughed outright. It was hollow, mocking, more fit for a bragging jay than a lady. The audacity stopped the table dead – and that silence provoked another triumphant and damning bray from Miss Temple. Never again had Miss Hobart given her trouble, though the poor thing had tried. Miss Temple had seen into her rival’s heart and, to her great satisfaction, found it weak.

She was not fool enough to think that mere contempt would break Mr Schoepfil’s control, but Miss Temple was sure of an essential similarity. Despite the impression Schoepfil projected of balancing a hundred facts at once, she marked his persistent reluctance to spell out exactly what he wanted to know. Hers was not a logical opinion, yet, even as Schoepfil studied the glass cards, it struck her as a performance – that, far from possessing a host of questions about the Comte’s alchemy, Mr Schoepfil, who was unquestionably clever, sought to goad Miss Temple into asking questions of him, questions that would divulge her own knowledge – in this case, perhaps, the whereabouts of the missing card.

‘Such colour,’ observed Schoepfil. ‘Brilliance. I suppose you’ve never seen the like.’

He extracted a card for Miss Temple to see.

‘Why is it green?’ she asked.

‘You may well wonder.’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘I expect it’s ground-up emeralds.’

‘Rather costly, don’t you think? Besides …’ He held it higher, so the light shone through. ‘The actual colour cast is more yellow –’

‘Then I expect it’s dried lemon peel, lemons being less expensive than emeralds.’

‘Do you tweak my nose?’

His voice betrayed a hint of steel – not exactly like Cynthia Hobart – but she kept on.

‘How could a mere puppet do that?’

‘You cannot. So you will tell me what you know of these glass cards.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘I think you do.’

‘Perhaps you should ask the Contessa.’

‘Perhaps I already have.’

The menace of his last words, that he had forced the Contessa to his will, hung in the air. But Miss Temple did not take well to threats – that is, she took them to heart, and whenever a thing touched Miss Temple’s heart, she answered resentfully in kind.

‘All right, then, I’ll tell you this.’ She paused, allowing him to grin in anticipation. ‘If you are the man who cut up Francesca Trapping, I’m going to make you number five.’

Schoepfil jerked his head back at the bluntness of her threat. He snapped shut the box. ‘Mr Kelling!’

Kelling’s head poked in. Schoepfil’s smile was gone, and without it his face seemed a lifeless mask. ‘This woman wastes my time. Get rid of her.’

Mr Kelling’s grip fell painfully across Miss Temple’s injured arm. She was pulled from the room and dragged into the open air to a wooden outbuilding. Kelling opened the bolt using one hand, levered the double door open with his foot – was it a stable? – and shoved her in. A moment later the bolt was shot and his footsteps were fading away. She held her arm, glad that the cut had not reopened, strode back to the door and kicked it. It was only then that Miss Temple realized that not once during all the time gazing at the oblong box and its glass cards had she felt ill. No echo of such a box came from the Comte’s memories, nor of glass in those swirling colours. Schoepfil may have acquired his prize without understanding its function, but her own ignorance meant the cards, and the science behind them, had only come into existence since the Comte’s demise, in these last months. But then Miss Temple frowned, for there was something … she tasted the bile on her tongue … an echo from the vast painting, The Chemickal Marriage. The different colours of paint were connected to the different colours of glass. The Comte had not realized the alchemical potential at the time, but – in the body of Robert Vandaariff – he must have done so since.

‘Are you just going to stand there?’

She turned with a start. In the dying light she had not seen the figure slumped in the corner: a thin man in a