Gordon Dahlquist - The Chemickal Marriage

The pleasure of her discovery bled easily into confidence and Miss Temple decided to return on foot. Her path kept to avenues lined with banks, trading houses and insurance firms, yet Miss Temple was not large, and the crowded walkways became a gauntlet of bumps and jostles, with never an apology and often an oath. This was the discontent she had seen in the Circus Garden, but further inflamed. She turned at a knot of men storming out of the Grain Trust, shouting insults over their shoulders, and was nearly flattened by two constables swerving towards them, cudgels ready. Chastened, Miss Temple veered to the tea shops of St Vincent’s Lane, where one could always find a carriage. The city felt unmoored, a reactive writhing that brought to mind only unpleasant visions of beheaded poultry.

As she crossed the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye and raised an envelope of whorled red paper.

‘Not ten minutes ago,’ he said.

‘Who is it from?’ The envelope bore no writing she could see. ‘Who brought it?’

The clerk smiled. ‘A little girl. “This is for Miss Celeste Temple,” she said, and so directly! Her hair was near your colour – brighter, though, quite nearly crimson, and such fair skin. Is she a niece?’

Miss Temple spun behind her, the sudden movement attracting the attention of other guests.

‘She is gone.’ The clerk was now hesitant. ‘Climbed into a handsome black brougham. Do you not know her?’

‘Yes – of course – I did not expect her to arrive so soon. Thank you.’

It had to have been Francesca Trapping. But how could the Contessa be so confident as to send the child in by herself – was she not afraid the girl would run? What had been done to her?

Miss Temple walked calmly to the rear stairs, beyond any eyes. She took out her revolver and began to climb.

The door to her rooms swung silently open at her push before stopping against the broken leg of the chair Marie had propped against the knob. Miss Temple glanced at the extra bolt: sheared away.

She eased into the foyer, not daring to breathe, her eyes – and the pistol barrel – darting at every piece of furniture. The maid’s room door was open. Marie was not there.

To her own bedchamber door a second red envelope had been affixed with a knife. Miss Temple tugged it free. At the sound, a cry of fear echoed from within.

‘Marie?’ Miss Temple called. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Mistress? O my heavens! Mistress –’

‘Are you hurt , Marie?’

‘No, mistress – but the noise –’

‘Marie, you may come out now. They are gone. You will be safe.’

Miss Temple pushed the front door closed, no longer bothering with the chair. She turned to the sound of her own bolt sliding back and Marie’s pale face peeking out.

‘We will call for supper,’ Miss Temple said. ‘And a man to repair our lock. Corporal Brine will be back directly, and I promise, Marie, you will not be left alone again.’

Marie nodded, still not prepared to step into the parlour. Miss Temple followed her maid’s gaze to the two red envelopes in her hand.

‘What are those?’ Marie whispered.

‘Someone’s mistake.’

The lock had been replaced and Miss Temple’s inevitably frank talk with the manager, Mr Stamp, concluded. Stamp’s mortification that his hotel had been so effortlessly penetrated by criminals was exactly balanced by his resentment of Miss Temple for having attracted said criminals in the first place, and it had taken all of her tact – never amply on supply – to settle the matter, for she knew his truest wish, finance notwithstanding, was to turn her out. Mr Brine appeared in the door some minutes later, out of breath, for the tale of the attack had reached him in the lobby and he had run all the way up the stairs. After Brine had asked to see for himself that Marie was well – which Miss Temple allowed only on the hope that such attention might persuade the maid that much sooner to effective service – she received his own report, a tale that eased her mind not at all.

He had indeed found the brown-coated man, who had not only eluded Ramper at Stropping, but had looped around and followed Ramper to the Boniface. Upon Ramper’s departure, the man had trailed him to Worthing Circle, where Ramper had hired a carriage. The brown-coated man hired a carriage of his own, but Mr Brine had not been able to engage a third carriage in time and had lost his quarry. With a shake of his head – the square nature of which made the gesture more like the swivelling of a wooden block – he described the man as ‘weedy and queer’, with a large moustache. The brown coat was out of fashion and too large for its wearer.

At this point Mr Brine burst into another apology, but Miss Temple abruptly stood, forcing Brine to stop speaking and rise with her.

‘The fault is mine alone, Mr Brine. You warned me. If you would let me know when Mr Pfaff sends word.’

She sat on her bed with the two red squares upon her lap, turning each in her hands for any hint of what they might contain. That the envelopes came from the Contessa seemed clear: the first to trumpet her command of Francesca Trapping, the second to make plain Miss Temple’s mortal weakness. Neither fact could be gainsaid. She plucked the knife from her boot and sliced open the first envelope. The red paper was stiffer than it appeared. Inside was only a snip of newsprint, by the typeface recognizably from the Herald .

–grettable Canvases from Paris, whose Rococo Opulence languishes in a mire of degenerate Imagination. The largest, abstrusely entitled The Chemickal Marriage , happily eschews the odious, irreligious Satire of Mr Veilandt’s recent Annunciation , but the only Union on display is that of Arrogance and Debauchery. The Composition’s Bride, if one can bear to thus describe a Figure so painstakingly degraded

Miss Temple had seen the artist’s work and did not dispute the assessment, though she did not know this particular piece. That the decadent artist Oskar Veilandt and the Comte d’Orkancz were one and the same was not widely known, for Veilandt was supposed to have died in Paris some years before. If she could acquire the entire article from the Herald , she would certainly learn more.

Miss Temple took up the second envelope, heavier than the first, and cut along its seam. She peeked inside and felt her breath catch. With delicate care she drew the blade around the next two sides, peeling it open as fearfully as if it were a box that held a beating heart.

The envelope had been pinned to the door quite deliberately to avoid damaging the small square of glass it held – no thicker than a wasp’s wing, and the colour of indigo ink pooled across white porcelain. She glanced at the door. This had come from the Contessa. The glass might hold anything – degrading, deranging, unthinkable – and to look inside would be as irrevocable as leaping from a rooftop. Her parched throat tasted of black ash … the Comte’s memories told her that the thinness of the glass allowed only the simplest inscription, that the memory must be brief.

The skin on the back of her neck tingled. Miss Temple forced her eyes around the room, as if cataloguing its reality might give her strength. She looked into the glass.

Two minutes later – she glanced at once to the clock – Miss Temple had pulled her eyes free. Her face was flushed, yet her transit of the glass fragment had not been difficult: the captured memory was but the viewing of a roll of parchment … the architectural plan of a building she did not know.

The Contessa had wasted her strategic advantage to acquaint Miss Temple, an enemy , with an unhelpful newspaper clipping and an equally pointless map. Obviously each might be useful, if she knew what they meant … but why would the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza desire Miss Temple to become even more entangled in her business?