Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

“Dear Mr. Rawsbarthe…what I mean to say—and I may be wrong, and if that is so, we must proceed to unfortunate outcomes—”

“The murder of Roger Bascombe—”

“Enough about Bascombe.”

“Miss Temple, as much as I might prefer—”

“Mr. Rawsbarthe, I do not believe you are a fool.”

“I am gratified by the sentiment, I'm sure.”

“Indeed, so—please—if you could just step… here.”

She took his arm—causing him to nervously lick his lips—and guided him two steps to the mirrored cabinet. Rawsbarthe flinched.

“Look at my skin.” Miss Temple nodded to her mirrored image. “Below the eyes.”

“You are a perfectly attractive young woman—”

“O Andrew, normally I should blushingly agree with you, but the two of us must be honest… I look ill.”

“People often do.”

“Not me.”

“No doubt the toll of your recent immorality —”

“Andrew… look at yourself.”

At once he pulled away. “I—I am a representative of the Foreign Ministry, and I insist that you accompany me downstairs. You must see the Duke—”

“How do you think I arrived?”

Rawsbarthe put a hand to his mouth. “You saw the Duke? You spoke with him? Impossible, he speaks to no one.”

“Of course he doesn't—”

“But how are you free? Did they not know you?”

“Of course they did!”

“How can that be?”

“Have you seen the Duke? Andrew, listen to me, for your own sake…”

Rawsbarthe's eyes shirked away from hers and he squeezed the leather case.

“Andrew, answer me! Have you seen the Duke?”

Rawsbarthe waved at the mirror without looking at it. “If you refer to his Grace's illness—most definitely not the blood fever that has been rumored—rumored to infect all Harschmort, and yet here we are!—it is but an ague that will pass! If in the meantime others of us shake under his Grace's chills, it is another sort of loyalty, of service …”

Rawsbarthe took another step away, staring at the carpet like a shamed dog, his voice colored by an unpersuasive chuckle.

“Whatever you have assumed —well, trust you are not the first to make the error! Indeed, the inner workings of a modern government must appear a veritable spider's web of influence and compulsion to the humble citizen, and so the commonplace—an ague!—turns into mystery, crisis, plague! I do not know what Mr. Bascombe ever explained to you—very little, I should think, you being, indeed, a w-w-woman—”

“Mr. Rawsbarthe—”

“Now I must take you downstairs with all dispatch. Mr. Bascombe 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 Stäelmaere 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. Bascombe, 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 Stäelmaere House— the seat of the Privy Council itself… the corridor with the glass 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 assured 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 Stäelmaere 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 glass woman.”

Rawsbarthe attempted a blanched smile. “I must assure you again there are no women in Stäelmaere 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 passageways 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 massive enough to cook a wild boar whole and comedically small, as if for a Roman banquet of larks. Yet every room she passed, 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 glass. 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…