Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

“The rear of the Kingsway,” observed Phelps, and then, as Miss Temple had no comment, “We are behind the Ministries.”

“A shame you've no more idea than I where we are off to,” replied Miss Temple.

Phelps said nothing.

“What of you, Mr. Soames?” she called, doing her best to smile brightly.

“I'm sure I couldn't say!” he managed, in an earnest sort of yelp.

The coach left the white stone warren of the Ministries and flanked the river itself, for she recognized its stone walls and iron railings and saw beyond them open sky.

For a moment it seemed as if Soames might speak, but he glanced first to his superior and thought better of it. Miss Temple exhaled with a sharp little huff. That she found herself—so quickly upon her return—in the exact sort of situation she had been determined to avoid galled her extremely. So much was happening—the glass woman had forsaken her lair!—and yet here she was cocooned with two utterly bloodless drones. She thought again of Chang standing by the clock, and her anger rose, as if her predicament was entirely his doing.

“If you think I care that she hears us you are mistaken,” Miss Temple said. “And if you think fawning will save your disease-ridden skins, then you are outright fools.”

“She?” asked Mr. Soames.

Miss Temple ignored Soames altogether and leaned to Phelps.

“Deputy Minister Crabbé is dead,” she hissed. “Roger Bascombe is dead. That part of your plot died with them. She is looking for something in that book! Once she finds it, she will rule every soul in Stäelmaere House as easily as you can butter hot toast.”

Phelps looked to Soames, but Soames bore the troubled expression of an ailing man whose physicians have begun to speak across his head in Latin.

“The deprivations of poverty and despair,” Soames offered to Phelps. “Once a girl sheds her virtue, her thoughts become every bit as corrupted as her body—”

“Be quiet !” spat Phelps to his shocked colleague. Phelps turned back to Miss Temple. “It is pointless to speculate, pointless to discuss. I am bound by an oath to my Queen.”

“Your Queen?” Miss Temple sneered. “And who do you think that will be in a fortnight? A blue glass monstrosity who but one week ago was an upper echelon whore !”

The pain took hold of her mind like an iron hand, its fingers bunching tight into a fist through the very fabric of her thoughts, an excruciating crush that shot a thread of blood from each nostril. The two men before her faded to the palest glimmers, as if the coach had been flooded with the brightest summer sun, as if each of her eyes had been somehow smeared with fire. She squeezed shut her eyes, but the brightness blazed through her lids. Into her very soul she felt the malevolent burn of Mrs. Marchmoor's violent disapproval. Miss Temple arched her back, gagging against what felt like an impossibly sustained whip crack along her spine.

She sat up on one elbow and dabbed at her nose with one hand, pulling it away and looking at her red-tipped fingers. Phelps passed her a folded handkerchief, and she struggled to a sitting position, wiping her face and where the blood had dripped onto her dress. In the center of her thoughts was a buzzing, as if she had not slept for three days.

Was this how it had begun, for Soames and Fordyce and the other servants of Stäelmaere House? Would she have sores and splitting nails and her hair dropping out in clumps? Did she already? Miss Temple sniffed deeply, refolded the handkerchief, and pressed it quickly to each corner of her eyes. She looked out the window. They had left the city altogether and rode along a country road bordered to either side by wide, flat brown fields of marsh grass. Fen country—and as she formed that thought she smelled a tang of salt in the cooler air. She looked up to meet the gaze of Mr. Phelps.

“We are going to Harschmort House,” she said.

THE JOURNEY lasted another hour, during which there was little talk. Phelps had shut his eyes, with only his left hand's restless plucking at a spot of loose plaster on his cast to betray his wakefulness. Soames slept without any disguise, his mouth open and his posture slack, like a switched-off machine. Despite her own weariness, Miss Temple did not follow their example. There was no reason not to, she knew— even if she were to open the coach door and fling herself to freedom, Mrs. Marchmoor could still reach out and stop her. Miss Temple examined the front of her dress with annoyance, and lifted the stained portions to her mouth and sucked on them one after another, tasting the blood and working the fabric back and forth between her tongue and teeth. Her thoughts sank into a brood.

If she had followed Francis Xonck and stolen his book out of a determined antagonism to evil, she would have happily curled herself up for a proper nap. But Miss Temple knew, for hers was a habitually lacerating scrutiny, that the daring theft had been spurred by the confusion she felt in the wake of the Contessa's seduction and rebuff—that her stabbing action was in fact a running away. With a growing conviction she began to wonder if the entirety of her adventures, from first following Roger's coach to ending his life inside the airship, had not been a flight from a deeper and unflattering truth about her character and its essential paucity.

She had no answer for such thoughts save assertion, and her powers of insistence were low. The Contessa had advised her to abandon her adventure utterly. Even Elöise had attempted to dissuade her from any further investigation—was she so certain these warnings were wrong? Her adventures had altered her character—into a woman who had done murder, a woman whose body inflamed to depravity at the merest spark. It was a feral life like Chang's, and rootless like the Doctor's—marked by isolation and anonymity, by danger and, without any question, eventual doom. It was also, Miss Temple bit her lip to admit it, a life like the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's.

Her thoughts were jarred by a sudden shift in the surface of the road. They had reached the cobbled drive leading to the Vandaariff estate. She cleared her throat rather deliberately and was gratified to see Mr. Phelps open one eye in response.

“Have you ever been to Harschmort House?” she asked.

He exhaled wearily and shrugged himself to a more respectable posture.

“I have.”

“With Deputy Minister Crabbé?”

“Indeed.”

“And Roger Bascombe?”

Phelps glanced at the still-sleeping Soames, and then out the window at the dispiriting landscape.

“Before the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, there were regular communications between his office, Lord Vandaariff's people, and officials of the Privy Council. It was in no small part owing to Lord Vandaariff that the Duke was able to achieve the control over the Privy Council that he presently enjoys.”

“I would say the Duke enjoys very little,” said Miss Temple, “these days.”

“My point,” continued Phelps, “is that since the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, no word has arrived from Lord Vandaariff whatsoever.”

“Of course there hasn't,” said Miss Temple.

“It is easily explained by the epidemic at Harschmort House of blood fever—”

“Blood fever!” She tossed her head at the compartment behind them. “Have you asked her ?”

Phelps licked his lips. “Who?”

“Who?” She mocked him openly. “Her! Mrs. Marchmoor! Margaret Hooke! Not saying her name will not change the fact of her existence, nor lessen her power.”

“I cannot say I am… personally… acquainted with the lady.”

Miss Temple delicately blew her nose into the wadded handkerchief.