Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

MISS TEMPLE wiped her eyes on a sleeve, wishing herself back to a time when everything had always seemed so clear. But how long ago was that? Before leaving her island? Before Roger's letter ended their engagement? Before the glass book? Miss Temple was not one to care about causes , or about cares in the first place—it was a simpler life without them—but she could not bear being so subject to forces she insisted on seeing as external, as unthinkable plagues. A larger thought hung within her reach—the differences between one death and another, or between her killing of Roger and the hanging of a renegade by her father's overseer… her benefit from each, her participation in each. More examples flared from the Contessa's book, murders and executions and desperate struggle, those collected lives rising to mirror a secret history she could not deny—how violence, rather than gold, was the true currency of her world, and how in such a world, to her sharp shame, she remained a very wealthy girl indeed.

But Miss Temple appreciated shame no more than criticism, and shoved this unwelcome conclusion away as if it were a malingering servant in her path. On her way to the door she paused to wipe the edges of Lydia's case on the carpet. The last thing she needed was to stain her dress.

MISS TEMPLE realized she had not properly understood the glass woman. Fochtmann must have been sought out some time ago, perhaps as soon as the airship had been aloft. Even if only in the interest of survival, Mrs. Marchmoor was casting a wider net—hiring her own expert on the glass, hunting down Charlotte Trapping, ransacking the minds around her for diplomatic advantages. But the Duke's usefulness was only a matter of time, and the glass woman would need another mouthpiece.

At once Miss Temple saw the glass woman's plan, and the reason she had come to Harschmort: to implant the contents of the book— the Comte's memories and sensibility— into the vacant mind of Robert Vandaariff. With both the Comte's knowledge and Vandaariff's vast fortune at her call, what need she fear from any survivor of the Cabal— what from any quarter anywhere?

Yet this book was now Miss Temple's. And the Comte's machinery— whose now was that? And where was Robert Vandaariff? Every element of the glass woman's plan had gone wrong. Miss Temple's torment of minutes before was shoved aside by her own ably working mind—these plagues would prove as tractable as any other apparently devastating tragedy. Did the loss of a mother or a father's violence dog her every step as a woman? Of course not—she scarcely recalled either to mind at all.

Her intention had been to climb through a window and hike across the fens to the train. Yet as she sought the proper ground-floor room, Miss Temple was aware of another possibility, like the echo of her boots against the marble. If Harschmort was riddled with her foes, they were now scattered and beset: Fochtmann bloodied, Rawsbarthe debased, Mrs. Marchmoor perhaps quite literally broken… she asked herself what Chang would do in the same circumstances and knew he would hunt down whoever had offended him. Miss Temple turned to the more rational Doctor Svenson, and immediately remembered the sad face of young Francesca Trapping. If he were here, the Doctor would no more leave Harschmort now than take the child's life himself.

She allowed herself a sneer at the Doctor's tractability, just on the off chance such sneering might convince her that she could in fact walk on, but it did not, and so Miss Temple stopped, besieged all the more by her own meanness of spirit. There really was nothing wrong with simply saving herself. Indeed, she was certain the Doctor and Chang would both advise this exact course of action for her, while never once considering it for themselves. This realization settled the matter at once.

SHE REACHED an odd hallway lined with marble heads (Romans—a doomed cruelty marked the faces, like animals still ferocious in a cage) and she stopped. On the floor lay a jumble of clothing and broken glass—shattered champagne flutes by what remained of the stems. The wine was dried but was still tacky beneath her boots. Miss Temple stepped over the mess, but as she went she found more debris—spilled food that had been stepped on, broken masks from the final night's ball, female undergarments—the corridor looking as if it had not been visited once by a servant in the whole intervening week. Finally she reached a set of double doors left ajar, and heard running water, the murmur of voices—and strangest of all, the plink of an out-of-tune piano.

She entered an entirely lovely atrium, with a glass ceiling and a stone fountain set into the floor, the whole surrounded by tall potted trees. The piano sat beneath the wide, splitting leaves of a banana plant and the man slumped against it—thick-waisted, in his shirtsleeves and stocking feet, a gold-leather mask pulled down around his neck—did not play , but picked at the keyboard with one index finger, like a sated chicken amongst scattered seed. The atrium held at least twenty more people, lolling on chairs and benches or on the tile— men and women kissing each other quite openly, others fast asleep, half-dressed, the floor more littered than the hallway, with bottles and plates and rotting food. Every third person still wore a mask. All had once been arrayed in the finest evening attire, now rumpled or discarded—even exchanged, for more than one woman wore a topcoat or evening jacket, and at least one man—the opened bodice strange against the hair on his chest—a lady's gown. This was the last band of the Cabal's adherents, confounded by appetite and the excess that Harschmort could supply. Miss Temple studied the still bodies she first assumed were asleep and wondered how many might be dead.

Her foot kicked a toppled wineglass. The man at the piano stopped, turning to her. Others looked up from their absorptions, and soon they were all staring.

“Who is it?” one fellow whispered to a bearded, shirtless man crouched at his feet.

“Have they come back?” called an older woman, her petticoats pulled up above vein-mottled thighs. “Is it time?”

“You don't have a mask,” a young woman chided Miss Temple. Another next to her poured brandy into teacups. Both their chins were matted with dried slime. “Everyone has been instructed to wear masks.”

“I have just arrived,” replied Miss Temple. “I am looking for three children.”

The young woman with the brandy bottle began to snigger. Miss Temple kept on, stepping around groping couples—in one case groping men —and felt the rising flush in her limbs. She reached the fountain—happy to find nothing worse than a sunken pair of shoes in the water. They all continued to stare at her.

“There has been a fire,” she told them. “Lord Vandaariff is gone.”

The woman with the bottle sniggered again.

“The soldiers are coming,” Miss Temple said. “You should be ready—all of you.”

But with the exception of the man at the piano, the tattered adherents had gone back to their dissipation. Miss Temple met the man's gaze, and then he too resumed his distended, internal melody.

IF TACKHAM had been taking the children to the main floor and Mrs. Marchmoor's hand had been mended in the kitchens, then that meant her enemies were gathered in the center part of the house. Miss Temple had just decided to cross the next hallway and try what doors she could, for the people behind her—like animals in a human zoo— made her shiver, when something caught her eye. At first she was frightened to turn, fearing it was another assignation that would bring her to her knees, but it was only a dark mark on the wall, a broken vertical line that indicated a hidden door. She could not stop herself, even if she assumed it to be full of more revelers. Miss Temple went to the door and opened it wide.