The Chemickal Marriage

she held her breath. But then the pink colour began to drain away. Had that happened when Chang looked into the card, to view the painting? Svenson had no clear memory. Chang’s breathing thickened. His skin went paper-white. The blue card made things worse as well. Svenson yanked the card away and heaved a sigh of relief as these latest symptoms too reversed themselves.
    ‘It is not science,’ Svenson said helplessly. ‘It is not medicine, playing with a life as if it were a cooking pot, adding this and subtracting that. I am sorry, Celeste – desperately sorry –’
    He turned, expecting to find a face in tears. But Miss Temple stood at the platter. He saw her hand close around the reddish ball, but he was on his knees, and Chang lay between them. Svenson’s reaching arm fell short.
    Miss Temple’s shoulders heaved with convulsions. He spun her round, tearing the ball from her grasp and hurling it against the wall, where it shattered. Miss Temple’s eyes were dead. Black fluid rimmed her mouth.
    ‘Celeste! Celeste – you idiot girl!
Celeste!
’
    She did not hear. He eased her down, but her eyes refused to clear. Oily bubbles bloomed between her lips, but he could not make out the words, if words they even were. She arched her back against a bout of choking. Doctor Svenson knelt between his fallen comrades, ridiculous victims, and groaned aloud.
    A cupboard door below the worktop popped open, driven by the heel of a diminutive black boot.
    He blinked. The cupboards. They had not looked in the cupboards.
    She wriggled out legs first, stockings stretched around a colt’s knobbed knees, then little hands pulled her body into view. Francesca Trapping stood and brushed at her very rumpled dress in an automatic gesture that had no effect whatsoever. Her red hair was all tangles and snarls, her face unclean.
    ‘You are alive,’ Svenson whispered.
    Francesca took in Miss Temple and Chang, nodding as if their conditions were steps in a recipe she had memorized.
    ‘There is little time.’ Her shrill voice was raw. ‘By tomorrow Oskar will have had his way.’
    With a shudder Svenson saw the teeth in her mouth had gone grey.
    ‘Francesca … what has she done?’
    ‘What was required. What she has done to you.’

Four
Catacomb
    It had not been her intention to act rashly. But the impulse to snatch up the red ball was a spark of clarity within the riot she had felt since Chang had been recovered. Her delight at his survival, an unexpected flood of joy, had been immediately displaced by a host of clamouring thoughts and images – and none of that turmoil touched the man himself. In the tunnels, on the train, even when Chang held her hand, the
distance
between them was agony. A sea of feeling lay within his heart, she knew, as she knew it held her only hope of peace – yet he remained, as ever, untouchable and withheld.
    And so she had entered the red sphere. A frightening energy suffused Miss Temple’s mind, as if the glass were reacting
to
her – measuring …
examining
. This was not the brutal plunder of a blue glass book, with a victim’s mind drained whole. In the red sphere Miss Temple felt her mind being explored like a stretch of uncharted coastline. Unfortunately, the Comte’s knowledge provided no more detail beyond another glimpse of the painting, the apple in the Groom’s black hand. She was sure this
examination
was but a first step of its function, a preface to some larger task, like a wall being scrubbed before receiving new paint.
    And then, quite suddenly, the spell was broken, its work unravelled. This was the flaw in the glass. At once the foul tide in her rose, and her mouth formed words, a last memory. The Comte had whispered in her ear … no, not to her, but to Lydia Vandaariff, as his alchemical poisons remade her body. The young woman had been terrified – that had given him pleasure – such fear had seemed
appropriate
…
    ‘I do not like her,’ said a small rasping voice. ‘I should prefer to let her die. She let Elöise die. Elöise loved me. She did nothing. The Contessa did not say
she
would come, or
him
. Just you. We ought to leave them here.’
    ‘You must let me work …’ muttered Doctor Svenson.
    ‘Why is her mouth black? Has she drunk ink? What is she trying to
say
?’
    A damp cloth cooled Miss Temple’s face. She rolled her head to the side. The red mist dimmed. Three words congealed inside her mind.
    ‘Flesh of dreams,’ Miss Temple croaked. The