The Chemickal Marriage

your face?’
    ‘O goodness, I would step away like a Christian.’ Pfaff raised his eyebrows affably. ‘Then again, most incidents of face-spitting can be laid to drink. Perhaps it would be more proper to cut a spitting man’s throat, to spite the devil inside.’
    Miss Temple did not appreciate trifling. ‘Why does this Nicholas consider you fit for my employ?’
    ‘I am skilled in opening doors.’
    ‘I requested no
thief
.’
    ‘I speak broadly, miss. I am a man who finds
ways
.’
    Miss Temple bit back a tart remark. A man like Pfaff, now unavoidable, must be met with intelligence and a smile.
    ‘Did you know Cardinal Chang?’
    ‘Everyone knew him – he cut a rare figure.’
    ‘You were his friend?’
    ‘He would on occasion allow a fellow to stand him a drink.’
    ‘Why would you do that?’
    ‘You knew him, miss – why would I
not
?’ Pfaff smiled evenly, watchingher bag and the hand within it. ‘Perhaps you’ll enlighten me as to the present business.’
    ‘Sit down, Mr Pfaff. Put those things away.’
    Pfaff restored the weapons to their places and stepped to an armchair, flipping out his coat-tails before settling. Miss Temple indicated the silver service on a table.
    ‘There is tea, if you would have some. I will explain what I require. And then you – with your
doors
– will suggest how best it can be done.’
    Miss Temple soaked again that night in the copper tub, auburn hair dragging like dead weeds across the water. Her thoughts were stalled by fatigue, and the sorrow she strove to avoid loomed near.
    She had told Mr Pfaff only enough to start his work, but his mercenary trespass of the roles formerly occupied by Chang and Svenson left Miss Temple feeling their absence. Even more troubling, close conversation with Pfaff had awakened, for the first time since leaving Parchfeldt Park, the spark of Miss Temple’s blue glass memories. It was not that Pfaff himself was attractive – on the contrary, she found him repellent, with brown teeth and coarse hair the colour of dung-muddled straw – but the longer he had remained in her physical proximity, the more she felt that dreaded bodily stirring, like a stretch of invisible limbs too long asleep.
    In the copper tub, Miss Temple took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, inching herself towards the brink of her fears. In her struggle against the Cabal, she had exposed herself to the contents of two blue glass books. The first had been deliberately compiled by the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza as an opium den of pleasure and violence. Staring into its swirling depths, Miss Temple had experienced the bright, hot memories of innumerable lives – in
her
thoughts and in
her
limbs – and Miss Temple’s literal virtue became a mere scrap of protest before the debauchery she had known. Ever since, this book’s contents had lurked beneath her thoughts, and a glimpse of skin or smell of hair, a mere rustle of cloth, could call forth pleasures sharp enough to drop Miss Temple to her knees.
    The second book had contained the memories of but a single man, the Comte d’Orkancz, preserved in blue glass by Francis Xonck aboard thesinking airship in the very moment the Comte’s life bled away. The great man’s mind had been captured, but the contaminating touch of death had corrupted its character, twisting the aesthete’s discrimination into a bitter disdain for life. Miss Temple’s glimpse of this second book had left her gasping, as if her throat had been coated with rancid tar. Ignorant of the tainted nature of these memories, the remaining factions of the Cabal had convened at the Xonck Armaments works at Parchfeldt and agreed between them to infuse the book’s contents into the emptied mind of Robert Vandaariff – hoping at a stroke to regain the Comte’s alchemical knowledge for their use as well as take control of Vandaariff’s fortune, the largest in the land. Resurrected in Vandaariff’s body, the Comte, despite his unbalanced soul, had quickly triumphed over his former servants: Mrs Marchmoor, Francis Xonck, Charlotte Trapping and Alfred Leveret were all dead. Only the Contessa had survived to stand against him … only the Contessa and Miss Temple.
    At Parchfeldt Miss Temple had received her own revelation. As she walked through the factory, she had suddenly
known
the task of each machine. However poisonous, her touch of the Comte’s memories had provided insights into his science. If Robert Vandaariff did still live, it was