Gordon Dahlquist - The Chemickal Marriage

She dashed back, skidding to a stop in the doorway. Mr Brine lay flat on his face, a pistol barrel hard against the base of his skull. Glaring at Miss Temple was a man whose brown coat was buttoned tight up to his neck.

She heard a breath to her left, in the shadows. She dodged back, just ahead of hands attempting to seize her, and bolted through the opened panel, fumbling for a latch to hold it shut. The first kicks were already cracking the wood as she flung herself up a ladder, climbing with both hands and feet. At the top she bulled through a hanging flap of canvas and sprawled into the sudden brightness of an attic room. By its iron stove stood a tall, thin figure in his stockinged feet, wearing steel-blue uniform trousers and a seaman’s woollen jumper. He had not shaved. His right hand gripped a long-barrelled Navy pistol and his left – fingers shaking and skeletal – held an unlit cigarette. Miss Temple screamed.

Doctor Svenson sank to his knees, setting the pistol to the floor and extending both pale hands, speaking gently.

‘Celeste … my goodness – O my dear girl –’

At the final splintering of the panel below Svenson sharply pitched his voice to her pursuers: ‘Stay where you are! It is Celeste Temple! There is no concern, I say – wait there!’ He nodded to her, his blue eyes bright. ‘Celeste, how have you come here?’

Miss Temple’s voice was harsh, her throat choked equally with surprise and rage.

‘How have I come here? I ? How are you alive ? How – without a single word – without –’ She jabbed her pistol at his own. ‘We might have shot one another! I ought to have shot you!’ Her eyes brimmed hot. ‘And just imagine how I would have wept to find you dead again !’

Mr Phelps had given her cocoa in a metal mug, but Miss Temple did not intend to drink it. She sat on a wooden chair next to the stove, Svenson – having put on his boots – near her with his own mug. The abashed Mr Brine perched on what was obviously the Doctor’s bed, the frame sagging with his weight. On either side of Brine stood Mr Phelps – balding, his watery eyes haunted, yet no longer so openly ill-looking – and a sallow-eyed man introduced as Mr Cunsher, whose voluminous brown coat had been hung on a hook. Without it Cunsher looked like a trim woodland creature, with a woollen waistcoat and patched trousers, all – in contrast to the Doctor – scrupulously clean.

‘Celeste,’ offered Svenson, after yet another full minute of silence, ‘you must believe I wanted nothing more than to speak with you.’

‘The Doctor’s wounds should have killed him,’ explained Phelps. ‘He was confined to bed for weeks –’

‘I was fortunate in that the sabre cut across the ribs without passing beneath,’ said Svenson. ‘A prodigious amount of blood lost, but what is blood? Mr Phelps saved my life. He has seen the error of his ways, and we have thrown in together.’

‘So I see.’

Svenson sighed hopelessly. ‘My dear –’

‘If they were followed, we must leave,’ muttered Cunsher. He spoke with an accent Miss Temple could not place.

‘We were not followed,’ Brine protested gruffly.

‘Cunsher has been our eyes,’ said Phelps.

Miss Temple sniffed. ‘He went to Parchfeldt.’

‘And he has watched your hotel. Your movements have been observed by our enemies. And your fellows –’

‘Have been taken,’ said Miss Temple. ‘When they went to Harschmort, I know.’

‘Celeste,’ Svenson’s voice was too gentle, ‘you have been very brave –’

Miss Temple resisted the urge to fling the cocoa in his face. ‘Chang is dead. Elöise is dead. You tell me I am watched, that my efforts have been undermined. If I could find you, are your efforts any better? I should not be surprised if the Contessa herself has taken the house next door just to laugh at your useless sneakery.’

No one spoke. Miss Temple saw doubt on Cunsher’s face, and disdain on Phelps’s. Mr Brine looked at the floor. Doctor Svenson reached towards her, gently pulled away the mug and set it on the floor. Then he took Miss Temple’s hands in his own, the fingers long and cold.

‘I say you are brave, Celeste, because you are – far braver than I. Despair gives a hero’s strength to anyone. To be a heroine in life is altogether different.’

Miss Temple grudgingly tossed one shoulder. Doctor Svenson looked to the others.

‘And I expect she is correct. We should depart at once.’

They walked single file through the houses behind Albermap Crescent, Phelps in the lead, then the Doctor and Miss Temple, Mr Brine at the rear. Mr Cunsher had stayed to feed all evidence of their inhabitation to the stove. He would join them further on.

‘Why can we not simply return to the Boniface?’ asked Miss Temple.

‘Because I do not care to deliver myself into my enemy’s hand,’ Phelps whispered without turning. He waved them through a battered wrought-iron gate. ‘Keep low … do not speak … with any luck no one will see …’

Beyond the gate lay shuttered houses, riven walkways choked with weeds and an open common. Through the darkness Miss Temple perceived a host of canvas tents and winking lanterns, and snatches of talk in other tongues. Svenson took her hand. She wondered if she ought to take Mr Brine’s, so no one would be lost, but did not. A dog barked near one of the tents, and a chorus of yaps rose all around. The party broke into a run, outpacing the human calls that followed the dogs, challenges sent out to passing ghosts.

Their way ended at a high stone wall. Phelps began patting at it like a blind man. Miss Temple looked back. The dog had again provoked the chorus of its fellows.

‘I expect that’s Mr Cunsher,’ whispered Brine.

‘Who is Mr Cunsher?’ Miss Temple asked.

‘A man known to the Ministry,’ said Svenson. ‘You would call him a spy.’

‘But not from here .’

‘No more than you or I, which recommends him, this city being a snakepit … ’

Miss Temple realized the Doctor had quietly drawn the Naval revolver.

‘At last … at last ,’ muttered Phelps, and she heard the turn of a key. ‘Quickly, inside and up the stairs.’

‘A relic of an older time.’ Phelps’s whisper rebounded off a brick ceiling. He tamped the lamp wick to a lower flame and slid a fluted glass over it. ‘A portion of ancient city wall – a tower left to secure river traffic, and then left again as a useful hole for stuffing things and people one’s government ought not to have. I learnt of it from the late Colonel Aspiche, who stumbled across it as a subaltern. Once assigned to Palace duties, he sought out the key … a key which I took it upon myself to, ah, take.’

‘Colonel Aspiche was horrid,’ said Miss Temple.

Phelps sighed. ‘I am sure you must have found him so – as you must find me. Ambition has made apes of better men, and far worse.’

‘How do you feel ?’ asked Miss Temple, not interested in another apology. ‘The sickness from the blue glass – has it passed? Are its effects reversed?’

‘In the main, though not without cost – I do not think I shall ever sleep the night through without some dream of her staining my mind. If Doctor Svenson owes his life to my efforts, I owe my sanity to his.’

Svenson smiled tightly, snapping open his silver case for a cigarette. ‘You ask what I have done these weeks, Celeste, apart from tending my own wounds. Do you still have the orange metal rings? Cardinal Chang stuffed a quantity into my pocket – I assume he did the same to you.’

Miss Temple flushed at the memory of Chang’s fingers thrusting into the bosom of her dress, for it had become a fixture of her intimate relief. Svenson hesitated at her silence, but then went on. ‘The qualities of this orange mineral counter those of the blue glass; thus the rings enabled each of us to resist the powers of Mrs Marchmoor. You will remember the liquid we used to cure Chang’s wounds in the airship. I was able to distil a kind of tincture from my supply of rings. Crude, to be sure, yet it minimized the poison in Mr Phelps. With time and proper tools I could do more – if I knew what the alloy was , I could do more still.’