The Chemickal Marriage

Phelps’s cry, though by then the water’s rush echoed all around them.
    ‘I am to it! O – the cold – O damnation!’
    The icy black water swallowed them all. Chang used the riveted ridges as ladder rungs, hauling himself forward against the current. Again he struck Svenson’s boots, and shoved the Doctor to go faster. The pressure in Chang’s lungs flowered into pain. He felt a tightness in his ears but pressed on, the idea of drowning like a rat in a drainpipe still worse to bear.
    Then Svenson’s feet were no longer there, and Chang’s fingers found the pipe rim itself. He wriggled his way through and shot for the surface of the canal, breaking into the air with a gasp. The others were bobbing near him, pale and heaving, hair plastered to their heads. Chang spun round, searching the banks for men with carbines.
    ‘We have to go on,’ he gasped. ‘They will be here.’
    ‘Go where?’ called Phelps, teeth chattering. ‘Where are we? We shall catch our deaths!’
    ‘This way, sir! There is a rope!’
    A crouching man in a long brown coat had appeared on the canal bank, a hat pulled low over his eyes.
    ‘O Mr Cunsher!’ exclaimed Phelps. ‘Thank God you have found us!’
    The small hut felt like a room at the Slavic baths. Their clothing hung on lines and steamed in the heat of a squat metal stove so stuffed with coal that one could not approach within a yard. A separate line had been draped with a sheet from the cabin’s cot, and behind lurked Miss Temple, unseen.
    Chang wrapped a blanket around himself and cleared his throat, as if the sound might clear his mind. Svenson sat with a mouldy blanket of his own. Phelps had taken the other bedsheet and now stood like a dismal Roman, his bare feet in a pan of hot water.
    The strange foreigner had pulled them from the canal and led them pitilessly through brown scrub woodland to a scattering of squat shacks – stonecutters he said – one of which he unlocked with a hook-ended metal pin. Cunsher spoke only to Phelps, gave an occasional respectful nod to Svenson, and ignored Chang and Miss Temple altogether. He had found their carriage in Raaxfall, heard the explosion and observed the movements of guards at the gate, finally deducing that the canal was the only possible exit within his reach. Cunsher then left them, muttering something to his master that Chang had not heard. To Chang, the drainpipe was no sensible option to occur to anyone. He was glad for this second rescue, but trusted the fellow no more than he trusted Phelps.
    It was not suspicion that now gnawed his peace of mind. Whatever theirdanger, Chang found his thoughts quite irresistibly settled on the proximate nudity of the young woman, not ten feet away behind a single pane of threadbare cloth. He could hear her bare feet on the floorboards, the creak of her body on the wooden stool. Were her arms huddled for warmth or modesty – or were they raised to recurl her hair, breasts exposed and high on her slim ribcage? Chang shifted on his own seat, willing his thoughts elsewhere against tumescence. How long had it been since he’d had a woman?
    ‘Are you warm enough, Celeste?’ Doctor Svenson called.
    ‘Yes, thank you,’ she replied from behind her curtain. ‘I trust you will recover?’
    ‘Indeed.’ Svenson selected a cigarette from his silver case, a civilized veneer already returned to his voice. ‘Though I must admit – when the water rose, my heart was in my throat. You did very well to drive on,’ he said to Phelps. ‘The slightest hesitation would have done for us all.’
    Phelps shuddered. ‘It does not bear thinking. Though one begins to understand why men of adventure are so grim.’ He made a point of looking at Chang. Chang said nothing, his own gaze taken by the long, livid scar across the Doctor’s chest. Svenson inhaled deeply, then thought to offer his silver case to the others.
    ‘Were they not drenched?’ asked Chang.
    ‘Ah – it is the
case
, you see.’ Svenson snapped the silver case closed so they all might hear the catch of its clasp, then popped it open again. ‘Tight as a clam. Will you partake? Tobacco is
highly
restorative.’
    ‘It hurts my eyes,’ said Chang.
    ‘Truly? How strange.’
    Chang turned the subject before Svenson recalled his earlier keenness to examine him. ‘As soon as our clothes are dry, we must move on.’
    ‘We need food,’ croaked Phelps, who had accepted Svenson’s offer. His words were broken by coughing. ‘And