The Chemickal Marriage

Temple reached the empty landing, she pointed to the ceiling with her revolver. Brine nodded, his cudgel ready. But the staircase did not continue up. If Mr Phelps was using the house to hide, it must be in an attic …
    Far below them, quite unmistakably, came the creak of the pantry door. Miss Temple blew out the candle. At once her heart sank. Behind them shone a double line of smeared footprints, glowing palely with the moon. She looked down at her boots and saw them rimed with the mortar from the doorstep – some phosphorescent paste? It had been a snare. Their location would be plotted for the man downstairs as neatly as a map. She desperatelyscuffed her boots across Rawsbarthe’s carpet, then pulled Brine’s head to her ear.
    ‘Guard the stairs,’ she hissed. ‘Surprise him. I will find the way up!’
    In Rawsbarthe’s wardrobe she pawed through hanging clothes, hoping a ladder might be tucked behind them. Her foot caught on an open trunk and she stumbled full upon it, wrinkling her nose at the iron tang of blood. The trunk held jumbled clothing – impossible to see more without light – but her fingers confirmed, by the amount of stiffened fabric, how very much blood there had been.
    She groped across the bedchamber. Her luminous footprints muddled the floor. Between the basin and the bookcase lay three feet of open wall. Miss Temple felt along it until one blind finger found a hole ringed with painted iron. She hooked the ring and pulled. The wall panel popped free on newly oiled hinges.
    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 noconcern, 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