The Chemickal Marriage

Chang shook his head. These choked lanes led to the railway station. ‘Stropping will be mobbed. And who’s to say your master hasn’t set off another device in the heart of it?’

Punctuating another grudging concession, Foison sniffed. ‘Then what?’

‘Schoepfil.’

‘He has no army. He is but one clever man.’

‘He may give us Svenson and Madelaine Kraft.’

‘They are gone. More sensible to find Axewith – he can get us horses, escorts.’

‘Schoepfil’s house is on the way.’

A knot of children stared at them, two strangely dressed demons conversing under the lamp light. Foison grunted and reached into his coat. He flung a fistful of coins onto the paving. The children didn’t move. Foison’s flat nostrils flared at his useless gesture and he stalked off. Behind the children stood a fat man in a stained waistcoat with a heavy walking stick. Chang extended one arm and snapped his fingers. With a nervous nod the man offered up the stick – strong ash with a brass grip shaped like a bird. Foison glanced back, saw the weapon in his prisoner’s hand, but continued on.

The cordon of soldiers had withdrawn, and with them the angry crowds, dispersing with the decision of Axewith and his engineers to abandon this district. The orange glow in the sky seemed no closer, but Chang wondered how many houses would survive the dawn. He snorted at the thought – that it had become a refrain – and focused his attention on the dark windows of Drusus Schoepfil’s home.

‘No one,’ whispered Foison from the servant’s lane behind. Chang followed to the rear door. The house had no rear garden or stable.

‘No coach,’ observed Chang.

‘The allowance from Lord Vandaariff is small.’

‘Why?’

‘Schoepfil is Lady Vandaariff’s nephew, no tie of blood.’ Foison slipped a knife from his silk coat. ‘Drusus Schoepfil is a parasite, his every gesture an imitation, of as little merit as a parrot’s speech.’

‘But if he has allied with more powerful –’

‘Allied.’ Foison spat the word. ‘At a word from Lord Vandaariff each man would sprawl on his belly and beg.’

Foison wedged the knife in the lock, but Chang caught his arm. Foison twisted quickly and Chang released his grip, raising an open palm.

‘Before we go in. The Royal Therm?. You said the old stories might be true. What stories?’

‘You’re the native. I’m the monkey.’

‘Don’t be an ass. The Contessa and Miss Temple – where would they be?’

‘With your old Queen, rotting in a pool.’

The discussion of Schoepfil had pricked Foison’s loyalty back to prominence. Chang stepped back. The lock was as cheaply made as the rest of the house.

Having done his share of housebreaking, Chang was accustomed to inferring the character of a man from his furnishings, but the home of Drusus Schoepfil was as devoid of attachment as a hotel parlour. Foison lit a brace of candlesticks and passed one to Chang, who brought his to a mantelpiece topped with a line of identical Chinese jars, glazed with pagodas and bamboo. Likewise a case of silver showed no family pieces, only a tea service of middling value and cutlery purchased by lot.

The house was silent. Chang crossed to the foyer, smiling grimly at a view-hole behind a screen. Bronque’s words – ‘the woman and the black man were seen’ – were spoken as a threat, but had been a warning from one ally to another, placing the decision of what to do next in Schoepfil’s hands. Svenson must have watched from the window, but Chang discovered no sign of the Doctor’s presence.

Deeper in the house they found a padlocked door. Foison passed his candlestick to Chang and drew a knife for each hand. The first kick rocked the bolts holding the padlock. The second sheared them from the frame.

‘Worse than I’d feared,’ Foison said quietly.

If the rest of the house adopted polite decor without feeling for use – for life – this inner room had been dedicated to another more strident imitation. Every inch of the wall was covered with alchemical scrawls, layered to create different shapes – flowers, bodies, planets – almost like one of the Comte’s canvases. But Chang had been to Harschmort, to Parchfeldt, and Schoepfil’s room only made clear the actual art of the Comte’s vision. This was the work of a schoolboy set to copy … markings of paint without passion, nothing insidious or disturbing or mad …

As Chang peered at an open mouth, the curving lips formed by an arching line of tiny glyphs, he thought of his conversation with Father Locarno, and The Chemickal Marriage. An alchemical narrative was less a story than a recipe: sequence, ingredients, actions. For the Comte, the art, the grace was all important – but was that, alchemically speaking, necessary? Granting any of this nonsense in the first place, did Schoepfil’s vulgarity of vision make any difference if he had successfully captured the formula? With a growing chill, Chang wondered if Vandaariff’s parasite nephew was unexpectedly dangerous?

‘Schoepfil means to inherit more than his uncle’s wealth,’ he said. ‘Alliances be damned, here is your enemy. You say he is no intimate of his uncle’s. What of his uncle’s associates – Francis Xonck or Harald Crabbe?’

‘I have been gone these months. Not that I am aware.’

The words were an admission of neglect, and Chang sensed Foison’s mind working, the urge to make up lost ground.

‘What of Colonel Arthur Trapping?’

‘A wholly negligible person.’

‘Whose daughter’s death was worth your sending a messenger.’

‘I had standing orders –’

‘And why was that?’

Foison’s eyes loomed even blacker beyond the flickering candle. ‘The approach of death is taken differently by each man. The actions of the powerful are naturally more … grandiose.’

‘People are being sacrificed on its altar. That child. Lydia.’ Chang rapped his stick against a lewdly painted rose. ‘The girl had scarcely seven years.’

‘Seven or seventy.’ Foison walked from the ruined little room. ‘Death is inevitable.’

They retraced their steps past the front parlour. Chang noticed a coat closet left ajar and looked to Foison before opening the door. He pushed the hanging coats aside with his stick to reveal the curled body of a soldier in green, bloodstained above the heart. The messenger sent to Vandaariff from the stable. Foison said nothing.

At a noise from outside both men blew out their candles. Foison peered through the slats of a wooden shutter. Abruptly Foison stalked to the foyer and wrenched open the door of Schoepfil’s house, leaving it wide. In the shadows across the road loomed a band of tired refugees, who went still at the sound. When no one emerged from the house, a few of the braver souls crept forward. Foison retreated past Chang without a word, towards the rear door. The first of the crowd had reached the steps and begun to climb. Chang hurried after Foison.

‘You’re inviting them to loot the place.’

‘I’m inviting them to do what they will.’

A hundred yards from Schoepfil’s house Chang stopped. ‘Enough of this wandering. Svenson’s note gives us two choices – Schoepfil’s train or the Contessa and Celeste Temple at Bathings.’

Foison glanced about with caution, but their immediate location, a modest, tree-lined lane, was silent. ‘We cannot reach Stropping before Schoepfil leaves. The Contessa is long departed from Bathings. We have a third option –’

‘Axewith?’ Chang pointed with his stick to the west. ‘The cordon has retreated beyond his command post. Given the fire’s speed, we have little hope of finding him on foot before his place is abandoned once again.’

‘We do not need the man,’ countered Foison. ‘If we walk north-east we will strike his troops, at which point Lord Vandaariff’s name will get us transport.’

‘It’s no longer that simple.’

Foison gently shifted his stance. ‘I thought you had agreed to come.’

Chang could not run. Foison would put a knife in his back – or more likely his leg – and drag him to the nearest horse. But Chang had come to his decision. He slipped into a defensive crouch. Foison drew two knives with