The Dark Volume Part 34

"Mr. Rawsbarthe-"

"Now I must take you downstairs with all dispatch. Mr. Bas...o...b.. spoke at all times with discretion-I have heeded no insinuations about what compromised your engagement, even now, despite those questionable men who have become your companions."

Miss Temple stepped nearer and he began to stammer. She could smell the frangipani perfume on her skin and wondered if he could as well. Rawsbarthe took a breath with a quivering determination, as if he had been abruptly pushed to some inner precipice.

"A great deal has changed, Miss Temple. I do not promise I am in a position to help you-but yet it may be that I am not wholly without influence. I have been summoned to Staelmaere House... on several occasions... a sign of favor I should not have dreamed of one week ago."

"I have just been there myself," observed Miss Temple.

"Then you know!" he said quickly, and then caught himself. "Or perhaps not, perhaps you did not-cannot-truly appreciate-"

"Appreciate what exactly?" She came closer, despite the unclean odor of his mouth.

"How bold you are, I see that-even if you try to influence me- toward, ah, leniency-but-but nevertheless, because you know- knew-Mr. Bas...o...b.., you can at least appreciate my good fortune, even to be invited-"

"O I do appreciate it," she whispered.

"Do you truly?"

"I should like every detail! Once you entered Staelmaere House- the seat of the Privy Council itself... the corridor with the gla.s.s cases and those awful old paintings-were you ushered to a room? Come, Andrew... what do you remember?"

"Naturally, I was not alone-"

"Were you with Mr. Soames?"

"How do you know Soames?" Rawsbarthe's voice was pinched. "Soames is new! He didn't see the Duke? Soames is hardly worthy of-"

"Soames does not matter," she a.s.sured him. "The room. It was dark?"

"His Grace is notoriously particular."

"So you did see the Duke?"

"Of course! And we heard him."

"What did he say?"

"I... I... the words themselves..."

She waited. Rawsbarthe clutched his hands.

"Andrew... surely you remember?"

"Ah... well-"

"How can you not remember what the Duke of Staelmaere said to you personally? The highest achievement of your career?"

Rawsbarthe was silent. Her lips almost touched his blood-scabbed ear.

"I will tell you why, Andrew. You fell asleep. Every one of you. You had dreams. A pain in your head... the taste of copper in your throat. You knew exactly what you must do, though you cannot recall receiving any instruction. And afterward none of you said a word-"

"Silence b-bespeaks the high respect-"

"Listen to yourself! It is Mrs. Marchmoor!"

"I beg your pardon? I am unacquainted with any M-M-Mrs.-"

"The gla.s.s woman."

Rawsbarthe attempted a blanched smile. "I must a.s.sure you again there are no women in Staelmaere House-the Duke's, ah, martial proclivities-"

She took his shoulder and thrust him again toward the mirror. Mr. Rawsbarthe bleated his protest and squeezed shut his eyes.

"Andrew! Mrs. Marchmoor has rummaged in your thinking like it was a bag!"

"Miss Temple-"

"Look at yourself!"

He did, but at once burst free with a stricken cry, shoving past and knocking Miss Temple across one of the chairs. By the time she pulled herself upright, there was no sign or sound of Andrew Rawsbarthe at all.

MISS TEMPLE found her side staircase. The walls were lined with painted niches aping the shadowed pa.s.sageways of a cathedral, each holding allegorical figures that Miss Temple-whose biblical education had been attended to with a gratifying indifference-nevertheless recognized as the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Despite her hurry she could not help but stare as she went down, the toads, blood, lice, and fire presaging her own descent into the stinking mire that had already swallowed poor Rawsbarthe. But the final landing stopped her cold, for the wider section of wall allowed for a more elaborate tableau, and she stood there, Francesca Trapping's bandaged arm fresh in her mind, facing the death of the Egyptian firstborn, where pitiless angels dangled lifeless children from both hands, hovering above a crowd of keening women.

At the base of the stairs was a door on a swing. She was near the kitchens. The corridor wound past rooms stuffed with barrels and crates and crocks and bottles and baskets and burlap sacks, rooms storing pots and pans both ma.s.sive enough to cook a wild boar whole and comedically small, as if for a Roman banquet of larks. Yet every room she pa.s.sed, in what ought to have been the busiest part of the household, was devoid of servants.

At a larger archway she wrinkled her nose and looked about her for the source of the smell-matted straw thrown onto the mess, the actual cleaning laid aside for some luckless drudge, perhaps a soup-bowl's worth of mustard yellow vomit. Miss Temple had reached the enormous central kitchen hearth, radiating heat from a bed of white flaking coals. The benches and tables that filled the room had all been pushed aside, as if making room for... something. She advanced slowly, and the smells of gastric excrescence gave way to the stench of indigo clay. A pebble crunched beneath her foot-a fleck of blue gla.s.s. The smell was thicker at the hearth itself, the heat against her face. On the brick border of the oven lay a dusting of tiny blue needles...

What had happened in the garden? And where was everybody now?

She staggered and put a hand over her mouth, turning her face and groping for the nearest table to support her. What had just happened?

She had framed the questions in her mind... and then suddenly received a sickening flick of an answer... the gla.s.s woman had been in here, and in such distress that the agony projected from her mind had sickened the minions around her. The knowledge had come from the Comte's memories-Miss Temple's own mind drawing unbidden from that pool, dangerously and without warning...

Miss Temple bent over and did her best to rid herself of the nausea, but nothing came. She felt the blood rus.h.i.+ng to her head and stood, grim and once more consumed with an anger not altogether hers.

THE CORRIDOR ended at another swinging door and she pushed through to an elegant dining room. A crystal chandelier in the shape of a three-masted frigate hung over an enormous long dark table. The gla.s.s craft floated like a ghost s.h.i.+p, bearing a mere half-dozen candles, their glow abetted by a standing candelabrum on the table itself, set next to a man in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves. He sat in the master's own thronelike seat, and busied himself amidst a ma.s.s of papers. One ink-stained hand held an old-fas.h.i.+oned feather pen and the other a metal tool she had seen used on a s.h.i.+p to measure distance. Beyond him lay the doorway out.

The man was not Robert Vandaariff.

Miss Temple cleared her throat. He looked up and showed himself to be younger than she'd first a.s.sumed. His hair had receded to the rear of his skull-but upon seeing his face she doubted he was much older than Chang, and his firm jaw and strong hands bespoke a masculinity that made her twitch. He set down the quill and the metal tool and stood, a politeness that took her by surprise.

"I did not know there were any ladies in the house..."

"I am Miss Stearne, a friend to Lydia Vandaariff. I fear I am interrupting all sorts of things everywhere."

"Not at all, I'm sure."

"There seems to have been a fire."

The man gestured broadly with a wry smile. "And yet the house is of a size that some fifty rooms remain for civilized occupation. Would you care for tea?"

"No thank you." The last thing Miss Temple wanted was to be introduced to a servant as a friend of Lydia's. "I trust I am not disturbing your work."

"Not at all."

A silence hung between them, to her mind fetid with possibility.

"You have not said your name," said Miss Temple, a little appalled for blinking her eyes as she did so.

"My apologies. I am Mr. Fochtmann."

"What a very interesting ma.s.s of papers," she said, pointing. "They look very... goodness, mechanical and scientific."

Still smiling, Mr. Fochtmann turned the top page of each pile facedown, hiding their contents from her eyes. "A woman like yourself cannot be interested in anything so tiresome. Will you sit?"

"No, thank you. I'm sure I will be late for the train-"

"Caroline Stearne I am aware of," he said. "But you said 'Isobel'-"

"We are cousins," said Miss Temple easily. "Caroline has traveled with Lydia to Macklenburg."

Miss Temple wondered if Captain Tackham and his dragoons were searching for her, whether they might appear at any time.

"Apparently there has been no word sent from her party," Fochtmann observed. "Though they are gone now over a week."

"Who writes postcards after getting married?" The skin above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s flushed with memories from the gla.s.s book (... a blindfolded man straining at the touch of two tongues at once... the careful liquid insertion, one at a time, of a string of amber beads...). She blinked to find he had c.o.c.ked his head, watching her.

"But there has been word. From the court at Macklenburg. The party did not arrive."

"Not arrive? That is impossible."

"It is at the least strange."

"Sir, it is difficult to credit at all! Where is the outcry? Where are the journalists-the naval search parties, troops of lancers scouring the coasts? If the heir to Macklenburg is missing-" She stopped, staring at Mr. Fochtmann quite seriously. "Has anyone told Lydia's father?"

"Her father cannot be found."

"But he is Robert Vandaariff!"

"Is he, though?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Will you not take a seat, Miss Stearne?"

"I have told you I cannot."

"And yet I think you should. I would go so far as to recommend it for your health."

FOCHTMANN'S VOICE remained pleasant as ever. "You have been exposed to the gla.s.s. I can see it in your skin. Perhaps the exposure has been minimal-it has not caused you to lose any of your lovely hair. But you do know what I am talking about, and I must insist that you answer my questions."

"What questions?"

Fochtmann glanced to the door, then back to her, staring hard, as if what he found in her countenance would determine his choice- that he was making a choice, right then. Miss Temple smothered another spasm of nausea. A cold shaft of understanding from the Comte's memories pierced her thoughts, the tip of a blade shoving past a cupboard lock and splintering it open.

The hearth. The man was in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves. He had cauterized Mrs. Marchmoor's shattered wrist in the kitchen hearth fire.

Fochtmann indicated the papers before them on the table.

"It is an entire world of the 'mechanical and scientific' These are times when opportunity rides side by side with disaster."

"And you would avoid the disaster."

"For myself, to be sure."

"And your... employers?"

"I only know what I've been told-nothing a man can trust. There are fissures between them-it can be the only reason I am engaged."

Miss Temple nodded slowly. "And perhaps...I am not...exactly... who you take me to be," she said.

Fochtmann rapped the papers sharply, as if some inner gamble had been won.

"So which of them sent you? It is all very well to replace Lorenz, but before anything else I must know whether the blue gla.s.s has killed him. No one will hazard a guess-especially since all of them are sick as well."

"Doctor Lorenz dead? Well, Doctor Lorenz was nothing-the Comte's dogsbody only."

"You know the Comte? You knew him?"

"Knew? You do not mean the Comte is dead?"

Fochtmann squinted at her as if she were a strangely behaving insect.

"I wonder at your indifference. Your own cousin, Caroline Stearne, was part of the same party. She is most likely dead as well."

Miss Temple did her best to gasp aloud.

"Do not pretend!" he scoffed, pleased at catching her out. "You yourself bear signs of this indigo decay-and here by luck you have blundered into the only man who can save you!" He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his pen and searched for clean paper. "Tell me whatever you have heard them say-Lorenz, the Comte, anyone. I will make sense of it myself. Obviously a young woman has not come all this way on her own initiative-who do you serve?"

He looked up suddenly. "No no-I'm a fool! It's Vandaariff!"

He stabbed the quill at her clasped hands. "What is that case?"

Miss Temple raised it with a shrug and waggled the handle between her fingers. "It is empty. I was instructed to collect a particular item from the Comte's laboratory. But it is already gone."

"Do you expect me to believe that? Who else but Vandaariff could marshal the resources to steal so many machines away? But he lacks something and was forced to send you to retrieve it-someone harmless who would attract no suspicion."

"Why would Vandaariff destroy his own house?"