The Chemickal Marriage (24 page)

‘She was killed by the Contessa.’

‘But she would have died – you well know it! He only cared about the thing inside her – his blue abomination –’

‘Do you suggest I am with child?’

‘Why will you not tell me what you saw?’

Her voice had become too loud, but, instead of matching her, Chang answered softly, ‘I do not know, Celeste. Not a memory, not a place, not a person.’

‘An
ingredient
,’ said Svenson. ‘Neither one of you has described the experience as concerning memory – and you have both retained your minds. Logic thus suggests the red glass is not a mechanism for capture but for change. Is that right, Francesca? You did see the Contessa make the ball of red glass, didn’t you?’

‘She was very angry. The man made a mistake.’

‘Mr Sullivar,’ said Chang. ‘At the glassworks.’

‘He stoked the oven too much. The ball cracked and wouldn’t work properly.’

‘Did she make another?’ asked Svenson.

‘Didn’t need to.’ Miss Temple flinched, both at the child’s deadened teeth and at the bright gleam in her eyes.

Chang insisted on going first, with the lantern. Once down, he held the light high to guide their descent. Miss Temple bundled her dress and wriggled through the hatchway, aware that Chang’s lantern showed him her stockinged calves – and more, depending on the exact gather of her petticoats. She paused in her climb, ostensibly to make sure of her clutch bag, but in truth to indulge a tremor at prolonging her exposure. She imagined Chang’s gaze rising from her legs to her face as she reached the ground, each studying the other for a sign of intent. But her nerve failed and she finished facing the brickwork, turning only at Chang’s brusque offer to take her hand. She held it out to him and hopped to the tunnel floor. Chang called for Svenson to send the child.

The tunnel was new brick, more secret construction on the part of Harald
Crabbé and Roger Bascombe. Miss Temple walked behind Chang, happy to let Svenson hold Francesca’s hand, and wondered when her fiancé, Bascombe, had last walked these halls. Had he still loved her then? Had he ever come from here to her arms, all the more thrilled at keeping his secret?

Brooding on Roger Bascombe made Miss Temple feel foolish. She shifted her attention to Chang, fighting the impulse to reach out and run a finger down his back. She started at a touch on her own shoulder. Svenson indicated a growing rumble in the walls.

‘The turbines. We are under the bridge.’

Miss Temple nodded without interest. She had imagined the sound was the river itself, flowing past in the dark, an enormous serpent dragging its scales across the earth.

The iron stairs echoed with their footfalls, and the sound launched flurries of motion above their heads.

‘Bats.’ Chang aimed the lantern at a niche of cross-braced girders. The little beasts hung in rows, wide-eared, small teeth polished white by darting tongues. Miss Temple had seen bats often, whipping across the veranda at twilight, and these did not disturb her. She enjoyed their little fox faces, and smiled to see such awkward things wheel about so fast.

Francesca stared down through the gaps in the iron staircase. Miss Temple forced herself to remember their first meeting in the corridors of Harschmort. She had tried to be kind, and when she had seen Francesca again at Parchfeldt, had there not been
some
sympathy between them? The child’s tangled hair made plain she’d not been cared for. But the Contessa’s habitual thoughtlessness hardly explained Francesca’s deadened teeth.

Miss Temple did not remember herself at seven years of age with any clarity. Her mother was well dead, of course, but who had been her father’s housemistress? There had been nine in turn, and Miss Temple ordered her youth through the prism of their reigns, consorts to a relentless, unfeeling king. At seven the housemistress was most likely Mrs Kallack, a harsh lady whose Alsatian husband had died of fever soon after bringing her to the tropics. Mrs Kallack’s success in the house was due to her ability to meet Miss Temple’s father with utter subservience, and then, like a two-headed
idol, wreak his brutality on the rest of the household. Miss Temple had hated her, and recalled with grim satisfaction when Mrs Kallack was found dead in the fields from heatstroke. She had stood over the body with a gang of housegirls, everyone wondering what could have taken the woman so far from the great house. Mrs Kallack’s fingers were red with the clay of the sugar fields, as if she had clawed in the dirt before death, and her false front teeth had come loose in her mouth. One of the housegirls had laughed aloud, and Miss Temple – understanding for perhaps the first time the responsibilities of her station – had kicked the housegirl’s shin. Before the young woman could do anything in return – and, luckily, for if she had, it would have meant the skin off her back – her father’s overseer arrived with the wagon.

She wondered how Francesca Trapping carried the indigestible knot of her parents’ murders. Miss Temple knew she ought to take her hand – especially since Doctor Svenson had all but shut his eyes as they climbed, gripping the rail – but she did not. The child made her angry.

At the top of the staircase they found another metal door, fastened with heavy chain looped round an iron hasp. As they passed through, Chang plucked a tuft of fabric snagged on the hasp’s ragged edge: a scrap of wool the colour of an overripened peach. He showed it to Francesca.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen this before?’

She shook her head. Chang flipped the fabric to Miss Temple.

‘What is it?’ asked Svenson.

‘Ask
them
.’ Chang stood and walked on.

‘It belongs to Jack Pfaff,’ Miss Temple said, and then called at Chang’s receding back, ‘He was charged to investigate the glass – this only suggests he was successful. You are determined to mistrust him!’ She held up the scrap of cloth. ‘Here is welcome news! Jack Pfaff – in
my
employ – may even now have her at bay!’

Chang turned to face her. ‘And where would that be?’

‘How should I know? I do not even know where we are!’

‘We are on the Contessa’s errand,’ said Doctor Svenson flatly. ‘The Contessa charged Francesca to lead me to a certain place –’

‘Then why won’t she tell us where?’ asked Chang.

‘Because I would guess she doesn’t know the name. Do you, child?’ Francesca shook her head. ‘No,’ continued Svenson, ‘the only way is to get there. The Contessa is nothing if not mercurial – yet perhaps Mr Pfaff has managed to best her after all.’

‘Did you
see
Mr Pfaff?’ Miss Temple asked the girl. ‘What did he do?’

‘I can’t say,’ Francesca replied. ‘When he was there she put me in the cupboard.’

The brick passage echoed with a gust of cold wind. Chang crept ahead to an open arch, then waved them forward.

‘We’ve reached the bridge from the northern piling,’ he whispered.

Miss Temple clapped a hand across her mouth. ‘The entire bridge is swarming with soldiers!’

‘Not only the bridge.’ At Chang’s silent indication she saw the dockside was ringed by soldiers in torchlight. On the river lay ships moored out in the channel, and on their decks stood more men in uniform.

‘Then it has begun,’ said Svenson. ‘Harcourt authorized property seizures across the land, for the public good.’

‘Are the people taken as well?’ asked Chang. ‘Earlier this evening the riverside was thronged with the dispossessed.’

‘Perhaps they went to the square,’ suggested Svenson.

‘Not so many – every damned street was crawling.’

Whatever Chang had seen before, the cobbled riverfront was as well ordered as a military parade ground. Miss Temple picked out officers on horseback, troops mustered into line. The bridge itself bore a cordon at each end, limiting traffic – those few allowed to cross did so between uniformed escorts. Chang spoke to Francesca.

‘If we are seen by the soldiers, we will be captured, and
he
’ – Chang nodded to Svenson – ‘for he has made havoc in the Palace, will be shot. Which direction do we go?’

Francesca pointed to the nearer end of the bridge, back at the heart of the city.

Chang stood. ‘Doctor, if you would pass me the lantern.’

‘Will it not be seen?’

‘Indeed, but there is seen and
seen
, you know.’

They crept after Chang onto the bridge proper. He pointed to a railing ten feet away.

‘Go now – as quick as you can, over the side – Celeste, you first.’

Miss Temple did not like to baulk – she knew Chang had chosen her to lead only because he could not ask the height-stricken Doctor or a seven-year-old-girl – but neither did she relish hanging over the edge of such a wicked drop. Nevertheless, she ran as instructed and was rewarded by an iron ladder on the far side of the rail. She climbed down, the dizzying abyss of dark water answered by a small platform five steps below, and smiled at Chang’s cunning. A narrow catwalk extended under the bridge all the way to the river wall – to aid repairs, she assumed – which would allow them to pass unseen beneath the sentries. At a tremulous whisper from Francesca, Miss Temple rescaled the ladder and brought the girl down, then helped Svenson, whose passage was every bit as tentative. She heard the crash of breaking glass above them – and then a piercing shout.

‘Fire! Fire on the bridge!

The alarm spread in a roar through the soldiers. Chang vaulted the railing and landed beside them like a cat.

‘Go! Go!’ he hissed, and drove them on, bent low.

‘You
threw
the lantern!’ whispered Svenson.

‘No drawing moths without a flame, Doctor. Quiet now …’

The catwalk dead-ended at the bridge wall, high above the riverfront. The cordon lay right over their heads. The citizens demanding passage had been shouted to silence by the officer in charge.

‘A lantern, by God. Get men searching! Enough of this nonsense!’

The officer broke off, railing at someone in the crowd hoping to slip past, and his sergeants began to detail the men to search. Soldiers would appear at the ladder, and on their catwalk, and soon.

‘We appear to be trapped,’ Svenson whispered, readying his pistol.

Miss Temple hurried to the inner rail. They were no longer above the water, but this meant they faced a prodigious drop to the stone bankside.
What had Chang said about the old Norwalk? That the bridge and the buildings around it had been raised on the foundation of the old fortress … she leant over the rail. A firm hand caught her shoulder.

‘What are you playing at?’ snarled Chang.

‘I am looking at the wall. It is your fortress – look for yourself.’

Chang peered over the rail, then whipped off his glasses. ‘I can’t see a damned thing.’

‘There are old windows,’ said Miss Temple. ‘Or not windows but whatsits – slitty bits of stonework, for arrows – your old fortifications –’

‘She’s right.’ Svenson had taken Chang’s place with an uncomfortable swallow. ‘But it’s yards away – we’ve no rope, we cannot reach it.’

‘Of course we can’t reach
that
one,’ said Miss Temple.

‘Celeste –’

‘There is a
line
of them. If they extend away from us, then there must
also
be one directly beneath our feet!’

Miss Temple began to hike up her dress, but Chang thrust her aside and quickly dropped from view, hanging by his arms. At once he came back.

‘It is no more than climbing down from a coach. Hand me the child first …’

The far end of the catwalk echoed as soldiers landed on the planking. Miss Temple and the others sank to their knees.

‘The girl!’ hissed Chang, invisible below them. Svenson lifted Francesca over the rail so her legs dangled. The child said nothing, face pinched and white, when Chang’s hands shot out and seized her waist. Miss Temple pushed Svenson to the rail and he flung himself over, knobbed fingers squeezed tight. Chang’s arms reached for the Doctor’s kicking legs.

The soldiers came nearer, playing their lanterns along the girded undercarriage of the bridge. Miss Temple slipped over in silence, sliding down until her hands were out of view, grasping the lowest edge of the catwalk. She hung in place.

Above her lantern light danced across where she’d stood. Sentries patrolled the bankside below. If even one soldier noticed the lights and looked up, she would be found. A gloved hand caught Miss Temple’s foot and another her waist, and then both hands squeezed, a sign she should let
go. Soldiers stood directly above her. She opened her hands. For an instant it did not seem as if Chang could bear her weight, but then his hands were joined by the Doctor’s and she felt herself pulled through a crusted opening of stone.

‘It stinks of birds.’ Miss Temple rapped her boot against the wall, knocking away the clotted grime. The soldiers had moved on after finding the catwalk empty, and they were able to talk.

‘Better birds than vagrant beggers,’ replied Chang.

‘I would not think a soul has been here since the bridge was built.’ Svenson held Miss Temple’s beeswax stub above his head and studied the walls. Beyond the windowed crevice lay a wider passage, once used to house sentries. ‘Another corpse, architecturally speaking. Do we simply wait here for the bridge to be opened?’

‘We could wait eight years,’ said Chang. ‘They control the entire river.’

‘I wonder if Mr Pfaff escaped them,’ said Miss Temple. ‘Though who knows when he was there. Perhaps he has been captured.’

No one answered her, which Miss Temple found irksome. Francesca Trapping peeked out of the narrow window.

‘Come away from there,’ Miss Temple said.

Francesca did so, but then walked past Miss Temple to Doctor Svenson and pulled at his arm. ‘I am supposed to take you somewhere else.’

Svenson dredged up a smile. ‘Then let us see what we can find. The work here was hastily done …’

He led her further into the alcove, tapping at the wall, a mixture of old stone and new brick, until the impact of his boot echoed hollowly. He looked to Chang and Miss Temple with a raised eyebrow.

‘Perhaps it’s a colony of rats,’ offered Chang. ‘Burrowing out their home.’