The Chemickal Marriage

found the Contessa’s head and pulled it close.
    Miss Temple had tumbled panting onto the blanket. The Contessa gave her a cold-eyed smirk. ‘And what do you know
now
?’
    Miss Temple’s voice was small. ‘That this changes nothing.’
    ‘
Precisamente
.’ The Contessa took a corner of the blanket to wipe her face. ‘Get dressed and help with my corset. I’m damned if I’ll meet Robert Vandaariff without proper underpinnings.’
    In the end, the Contessa’s clothing
was
too large, even the undergarments,and Miss Temple took back her own. She had carefully hidden the glass key upon disrobing, but still hoped she might find the silk-wrapped spur, that it might have slipped lower into her shift. She searched as unobtrusively as she could. Nothing.
    ‘Is something wrong?’
    ‘No.’ Miss Temple saw the leather case now lay near the Contessa’s foot.
    ‘Mine,’ the Contessa said. ‘Fair exchange.’
    There being no dress to fit her, Miss Temple tied the Contessa’s cotton robe over her corset and shift, and walked in cork slippers with her hair in a towel. The Contessa wore a dark dress and simple shoes, her combed damp hair hanging past her shoulders. She held the leather case in one hand and the candle in the other. A small hamper was Miss Temple’s to carry, contents unknown. A short tunnel took them back to the embankment and a trim, narrow craft, not unlike the skiff Miss Temple had taken from the Raaxfall dock.
    ‘In the front,’ said the Contessa. ‘Try not to tip in and drown.’
    The hamper went first and then Miss Temple, scrambling to the foremost thwart. The Contessa hitched her dress about her waist and settled in the rear of the skiff, stowed the leather case under her seat, and came up with a small box of glass and metal. She lit the candle inside it and wedged the box into a stand, then reached behind her for the tiller.
    ‘There is a pole, Celeste, beneath your feet. We should not run into the bank, but, if we do, you will use it to push off. I will steer. If you think to use that pole on
me
you may discard the idea now, for it will not reach. Are you ready?’
    Miss Temple extracted the pole, which was indeed not very long, and turned to face forward. The Contessa cut the rope tethering them to the landing with a knife. While the weapon was no surprise, it was nevertheless bracing to see. The current caught the skiff and they shot into the dark.
    For the first part of their journey, Miss Temple’s attention was fixed on the half-moon of light preceding the tip of the skiff, watching for dangers of all sorts. Large patches of the ceiling had fallen in, and from those spots dangledropes of black moss. The banks were smooth rock save for the very occasional appearance of another landing. Miss Temple peered at these relics as closely as the light allowed. Sometimes the Contessa would announce their location, ‘the Citadel’ or ‘the Observatory’; but other times, and Miss Temple was convinced it was because she did not know, a landing passed without comment. Soon they flew on in silence and, at last, Miss Temple’s wilful concentration was undermined.
    The act had been obscene and unnatural, with regard to Church teachings (which she dismissed) but also to Miss Temple’s understanding of loyalty, of virtue. Of course she had known
those
sorts of girls – everyone knew them – but in her own person the urge had been absent, or at least unconsidered. That had changed dramatically upon the invasion of her mind by the blue glass book. If a memory held a man’s relish of a woman, then Miss Temple’s experience of it quite
naturally
located that pleasure, that appreciation, in her own body. And many of the memories
were
perverse: women with women, men with men, and more, in such a profusion of incident that her body, if not her moral mind, was taught at last only ripe possibility. And so Miss Temple decided that, while she did not
approve
of the Contessa, or her tongue, it was plain enough that one tongue was much like another. Given that she could not, with her present knowledge and appetite, abjure tongues whole, whether it be a man’s or a woman’s seemed to make no matter at all.
    But loyalty was something else again, and here her thought snagged. The Contessa was her enemy – it was as complete a fact as might exist on earth. How could even the highest claim of expedience justify such …
abasement
? Wasn’t it abasement? Wasn’t it compromise? Betrayal? It was –