The Chemickal Marriage

to attacking whoever came within reach. After the first crazed assaults, the soldiers no longer scrupled in their response, and before their eyes had clubbed a shrieking woman to the ground with their musket-butts.
    Svenson took Francesca in his arms and veered into a side street, itself a crush. The people around them did not speak – their faces, drawn, bloody, streaked with ash, made plain what they too had survived. Svenson shifted his burden and winced at the pain from his injured rib, sure he could hear the
click
of bone against cartilage. He mumbled soothingly and caressed Francesca’s hair, and soon enough she settled into sleep, a heavy but tractable weight.
    Celeste Temple was dead. Chang was determined to kill himself. Phelps and Cunsher were taken. Doctor Svenson was alone.
    Or was that true? He could make no sense – no moral sense – of the encounter in the Palace. The woman had cut Elöise’s throat … still he shuddered to recall the teasing caress of her breath.
    The Contessa would be his task.
    He kept on, beyond the Citadel, past the University, through the ugly brick of Lime Fields. At the corner of Aachen Street he set Francesca down andas she yawned – and his arms throbbed with relief – did his best to improve their appearance, sponging soot from their faces and brushing ash from their clothes.
    Aachen Street was lined with old mansions that had been subdivided into smaller townhouses, and then – fashion and fortune shifting across the town – purchased anew and grandly recombined. In the centre of the block stood one such, with a tall iron fence that had been painted green and a guardhouse next to the gate. He had not recognized the address when Francesca had said where they must go, and it took a moment even now to interpret his sense of familiarity. It was the light – he had never seen the place during the day – but how many times had he been here to collect his Prince? The Old Palace had no sign advertising itself, but, as an exclusive brothel catering to the city’s most powerful, he did not suppose one was required.
    The man in the guard box waved them away, but Francesca called out shrilly, ‘We have come to see Mrs Madelaine Kraft.’
    The guard directed his gruff answer to Svenson. ‘We are not open to visitors –’
    ‘Mrs Kraft,’ Francesca insisted.
    ‘Mrs Kraft is not here.’
    ‘She is so.’
    ‘She is not well.’
    ‘Mrs Kraft not being well is
why
we must see her. We were
sent
.’
    Svenson saw a twitch at the front window’s curtain. Before the child could speak again, he squeezed her shoulder. Francesca turned impatiently – with her pasty complexion and protuberant eyes it was the reproachful gaze of a piglet in a butcher’s window – but Svenson held his grip for silence.
    ‘The fact is, sir, we have walked far, through terrible disarray, with instructions to call on Mrs Kraft. If it is a mystery to you, it is also to me. I do not know who she is.’
    The guard turned back to his box. ‘Then I must say good day to you –’
    Svenson spoke quickly. ‘You say she is not well, good sir, but I will hazard more than that. I will hazard she has been stricken
insensible
.’ The guard paused. ‘
Further
, I will surmise that no surgeon has been able to penetrate the cause. What is more – and if I am wrong, do drive us from yourdoor – I say that Mrs Kraft was first taken ill during a visit to Harschmort House some two months ago –
and so she remains
.’
    The guard’s mouth had fallen open. ‘You said you did not know her.’
    ‘I do not. And you have kept her condition secret, yes?’
    The guard nodded warily. ‘Then how – who –’
    ‘Permit me to introduce myself. Captain-Surgeon Abelard Svenson –’
    Francesca threatened to spoil everything with an eager, dead-toothed smile. Svenson leant forward, blocking the guard’s view. ‘As the child said, we were
referred
. It may be I can do nothing … yet, if I can …’
    A muffled
thud
came from the guard box, recalling the guard to his hut like a dog on its master’s lead. Francesca squeezed Svenson’s hand. The guard hurried out and unlocked the gate.
    ‘Quickly,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing grows in the daylight but shadows.’
    Standing in the lavish parlour holding the hand of a seven-year-old girl only complicated the Doctor’s usual reaction to such establishments: disapproval of the architecture of prostitution – its tyranny, dispassion, degradation – and jealousy at