Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

“She was… your wife?”

Svenson shrugged. “Never so much—or still more ridiculous. She was my cousin. Corinna. Fever, years ago. Useless regret. And I only say this, any of this, my dear, as a way of explaining my sympathy for your own difficulty—your life, to wonder what that life is , with so much disrupted… memory and time, all you have lost… and within that missing time, all that you feel you may have done.”

Elöise said nothing, absently stroking Miss Temple's arm. He took a deep breath.

“I say all of this so you will understand, when I speak of remaining here, when I see your own tears, so you will know… I am determined—”

Elöise looked up and he stopped speaking. The silence widened and became unbearable.

“It is not that I do not possess feelings for you,” she said softly. “Of course I do, and most tenderly. It is the most awkward thing, and you must think me a terrible person. It would give me no greater pleasure than to offer myself to you, to kiss you right this moment. If I were free. But I am not. And my mind … it cannot be wholly present.”

“Of course not, we are in a wilderness—”

“No—no, please—it is what I recall , and what I feel within those recollections … even if I do not know fully why, or know… who.”

Svenson's throat was at once horribly dry. “Who?”

“There is a locked room in my mind. But there are paths to the room, and from it—there are words I remember being spoken, there are clues about what I cannot recall. As I brood upon them… they imply everything, inescapably, even if—”

“But… you do not know? You mean… there is someone , but—”

“You must think very poorly of me. I think poorly of myself. Not to remember such a thing—though I know the thing to be true. I cannot describe it. I have no faith in who I am.”

She was silent, looking into his eyes. Her own were rimmed with tears, and impossibly sad. He struggled to catch up with her words. She was a widow —with a suitor. Of course she had a suitor, she was beautiful, intelligent, well placed…

But that was not the thing at all.

Svenson recalled her words on the beach. It was all to do with the book, with the memories having been taken , which meant for a reason. No memories of a simple suitor—no lover —would have been added to the glass book and thus expunged from her mind. For the memories to be worth taking, Elöise's lover could only have been someone of value to the Cabal. The number of men this could describe was unpleasantly small.

“Elöise—”

“The tea has cooled. I have been enough of a burden.”

Elöise stood, wiping her eyes. In an instant she was out the door.

The Doctor sat alone, his head pounding, the room a roar of silence. Without a hope in the world he picked up the teacup and eased his other hand behind Miss Temple's head, tilting it so she might drink.

THE NEXT morning, having passed most of the night on Miss Temple's floor, the Doctor rose early, shaved, and threw on his coat, finding Sorge with the chickens. A brief conversation pointed Svenson to the most likely fisherman to accommodate his errand. He left word for Chang to join him at the village piers.

The walk did nothing for his mood—the woods were thick with fog, the ground soft beneath his boots, the entire landscape only reminded him of home, and thus of misery. What else had he expected? And why—just because they had survived when they ought to have died ten times? Had luck in one instance ever trumped his unhappiness in another? He had only to remember first entering the halls of Macklenburg Palace—uniform crisp, boots gleaming, a far cry from the ice-rimed cabin of a ship—while the palace of his mind housed only despair. If being the protégé of Baron von Hoern had not assuaged Corinna's death, why should the heroic pleasure of shooting Francis Xonck on the airship grant him happiness with Elöise?

It was an easy enough matter, once money was offered, to arrange for the journey. A few minutes poring over a map of the local sandbars with the fisherman quickly isolated the likely spots where the dirigible must lay. This settled, Svenson inspected the boat's supply of canvas. If they were to bring out the bodies—assuming the storm had not cracked the ship open and scattered the corpses with the tides—he would need enough to hold them.

Chang was not yet there—Svenson was not frankly sure where Chang slept, much less when he woke—and so the Doctor tracked down another fisherman, the one Sorge suggested might have cigarettes. After a minute or two of evasive haggling, the man showed Svenson a brick of waxed paper sealed with a dab of red wax marked with a two-headed bird.

“Danish,” the man explained.

“My habitual brand is Russian,” countered Svenson, doing his best to sound skeptical, when he was so hungry. “One can only acquire them through an agent in Riga—Latvia—as St. Petersburg is barred to Macklenburg merchants.”

The man nodded, as if this was of no interest but he was willing to assume some point lay beyond it.

“The tobacco is quite strong,” said Svenson. “Have you smoked a Russian cigarette?”

“I prefer to chew.” In proof of his claim the fisherman spat into a pewter cup Svenson had assumed to contain an especially bitter-looking coffee.

“Understandable—a sailing man can never depend on a flame. No matter. I will be happy to take them off your hands.”

He gathered up the parcel and placed the price they had agreed to on the table—outrageous by the village's standards, but nothing compared to what he might pay in town… or what the vile sticks were worth to his clear mind.

PUFFING AWAY with the intensity of a fox tearing into a slaughtered hare, Svenson returned to the fishing boat—waiting any longer for Chang's sullen appearance would cost the tide. It took half an hour to pass through the surf into the sea. The Doctor, while no real practical sailor, knew enough to pull on the proper ropes when the fisherman called them out. As they approached the most likely sandbar, Svenson lit up another smoke and did his best to relax in the fresh cold air. But even with the familiar nicotine spur in his lungs, he wondered that he could have surrendered to optimism—from such an unlikely and unlooked-for corner—so very easily.

The airship was not at that sandbar, nor any other, nor anyplace they could spy as they ran the length of the coastline. The fisherman explained the depth of the sea away from the bars, the action of the tide, the force of the storm. The craft must have been pulled from its fortunate perch and then rolled down—keeping together or tearing apart, depending on the strength of its construction and whether it smashed into any outcroppings of rock on its way—to the very deep bottom of the sea.

MISS TEMPLE'S condition did not change. Doctor Svenson had again been dragooned by Sorge, to give his precious medical opinion on a neighbor's afflicted swine, and once back had pounded willow bark at the table for a plaster. It was a task he had hoped to share with Elöise, but instead young (and well intentioned, and fat) Bette had expressed an interest, committing the Doctor to an hour of the girl's belabored enthusiasm. By the time Svenson finally left the table he could hear Elöise helping Lina with the laundry. One could no more speak around Lina than exchange pleasantries with a Jesuit. When he returned from administering the plaster to Miss Temple, none of the women were in the house. He stepped onto the porch and fumbled a cigarette from his restocked silver case. At the other end of the rail, like a statue in its customary spot, stood Chang.