The Chemickal Marriage

own existence at the Boniface, where she was tolerated but hardly loved. And what of those people she had met in her romance with Roger Bascombe? Not all had been Roger’s direct friends or family; there had been
some
who might have, had they desired, maintained relations with Miss Temple. Scarcely a single call had come.
    Her handbag containing Roger’s notebook had been taken by the soldiers without her ever having read it. Miss Temple wished she’d never seen the thing, hating her curiosity. She put her head in her hands and sighed.
    She looked up with a dawning revulsion and walked to a knobbed wall panel. The back of her mouth burnt. Miss Temple pulled the panel wide. In the centre of a bare room stood a table covered with an oilskin sheet. A second, stained square of oilskin protected the floor beneath.
    In the Comte’s memories the horrid odour echoed necrotic tissue first encountered in a Parisian
atelier
, but Miss Temple’s main recognition came from the pollution in her own body, from the tainted book.
    She lifted the oilskin sheet. Her stomach seized. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. Saliva filled her mouth and she wheeled, willing herself to vomit, but nothing came. With a punitive determination Miss Temple reached again for the oilskin and, so as not to lose her nerve, flipped it wide. Francesca Trapping lay on the table like a forgotten doll, broken and tattered. The dress had been cut away and so had parts of the corpse, darkcavities opened with an unstinting cruelty. Miss Temple put her fist to her mouth and forced herself to look. She had abandoned the girl. She had triggered the explosion at the Customs House. This was
her
doing.
    She felt her throat catch, aware of a stupidity she could not see past. The gaping holes … missing portions of the child’s body. This was like the victims at Raaxfall, from whose corpses the knots of transformed flesh had been removed … but … but no, it was
not
the same. Those cavities had been ragged and irregular, formed by blue glass blooming into flesh. These incisions were precise and clean … surgical.
    She stared down at the bloodless small hands, the feet turned in to touch at the toes – and realized the clothes
had
been cut away. The fabric was not torn or burnt, nor was it stained with blood – there was no sign of death by explosion or violence. What was more – she choked as the thought came home – the excavations in Francesca’s body were not from any random blast. Through the Comte’s knowledge of anatomy she saw what had been removed: kidney, spleen, lung, heart, thyroid, even the roof of the girl’s open mouth … Francesca had been dissected as deliberately as a hanged man sold for science. She had not been killed in the Customs House. Francesca had been poisoned by the Comte’s book, her organs wholly consumed with rot.
    How soon before Miss Temple succumbed as well?
    It was not a generous thought, and she was ashamed. The murdered child lay before her. The small mouth yawned, slate-coloured lips gore-smeared from the extracted palate. How in the world had Francesca Trapping ended up
here
? Knowledge of the Comte’s alchemy had been confined to an extremely small circle, and most of them lay in the grave. Francesca’s dissection cast this Mr Schoepfil, who held both Miss Temple and Francesca’s body in his custody, in an entirely more terrifying light.
    Francesca’s dress hung off the table like discarded wrapping paper. Miss Temple wondered when the dress had been purchased, and by whom, if it was a final memento from the girl’s mother or something the Contessa had purloined for their stay in the tunnels. Sensible cloth, well sewn. Miss Temple cocked her head … several bits seemed of a double thickness.
    The first pocket contained a tangled tuft of hair poorly tied with ribbon.Miss Temple recognized its colour. This was Charlotte Trapping’s, not taken from her head, but scavenged by Francesca from her mother’s hairbrush. The child had kept it with her, from Mrs Trapping’s disappearance right to the very end. Miss Temple put it back. The second pocket held a tiny leather sleeve, like a case for the Doctor’s monocle. She prised it open and revealed, snug in an impression of orange felt, a blue glass key.
    Miss Temple tucked the key sleeve in her own pocket and turned at a scuffing from the outer room. A tall man with a starched collar, whose pointed features were undone by coarse tufts of hair in his