The Chemickal Marriage

spine. Apparently.’
    ‘It could kill you!’
    ‘It has not yet.’
    ‘It was the Comte’s alchemy that killed Lydia Vandaariff.’
    ‘She was killed by the Contessa.’
    ‘But she would have died – you well know it! He only cared about the thing inside her – his blue abomination –’
    ‘Do you suggest I am with child?’
    ‘Why will you not tell me what you saw?’
    Her voice had become too loud, but, instead of matching her, Chang answered softly, ‘I do not know, Celeste. Not a memory, not a place, not a person.’
    ‘An
ingredient
,’ said Svenson. ‘Neither one of you has described the experience as concerning memory – and you have both retained your minds. Logic thus suggests the red glass is not a mechanism for capture but for change. Is that right, Francesca? You did see the Contessa make the ball of red glass, didn’t you?’
    ‘She was very angry. The man made a mistake.’
    ‘Mr Sullivar,’ said Chang. ‘At the glassworks.’
    ‘He stoked the oven too much. The ball cracked and wouldn’t work properly.’
    ‘Did she make another?’ asked Svenson.
    ‘Didn’t need to.’ Miss Temple flinched, both at the child’s deadened teeth and at the bright gleam in her eyes.
    Chang insisted on going first, with the lantern. Once down, he held the light high to guide their descent. Miss Temple bundled her dress and wriggled through the hatchway, aware that Chang’s lantern showed him her stockinged calves – and more, depending on the exact gather of her petticoats. She paused in her climb, ostensibly to make sure of her clutch bag, but in truth to indulge a tremor at prolonging her exposure. She imagined Chang’s gaze rising from her legs to her face as she reached the ground, each studying the other for a sign of intent. But her nerve failed and she finished facing the brickwork, turning only at Chang’s brusque offer to take her hand. She held it out to him and hopped to the tunnel floor. Chang called for Svenson to send the child.
    The tunnel was new brick, more secret construction on the part of HaraldCrabbé and Roger Bascombe. Miss Temple walked behind Chang, happy to let Svenson hold Francesca’s hand, and wondered when her fiancé, Bascombe, had last walked these halls. Had he still loved her then? Had he ever come from here to her arms, all the more thrilled at keeping his secret?
    Brooding on Roger Bascombe made Miss Temple feel foolish. She shifted her attention to Chang, fighting the impulse to reach out and run a finger down his back. She started at a touch on her own shoulder. Svenson indicated a growing rumble in the walls.
    ‘The turbines. We are under the bridge.’
    Miss Temple nodded without interest. She had imagined the sound was the river itself, flowing past in the dark, an enormous serpent dragging its scales across the earth.
    The iron stairs echoed with their footfalls, and the sound launched flurries of motion above their heads.
    ‘Bats.’ Chang aimed the lantern at a niche of cross-braced girders. The little beasts hung in rows, wide-eared, small teeth polished white by darting tongues. Miss Temple had seen bats often, whipping across the veranda at twilight, and these did not disturb her. She enjoyed their little fox faces, and smiled to see such awkward things wheel about so fast.
    Francesca stared down through the gaps in the iron staircase. Miss Temple forced herself to remember their first meeting in the corridors of Harschmort. She had tried to be kind, and when she had seen Francesca again at Parchfeldt, had there not been
some
sympathy between them? The child’s tangled hair made plain she’d not been cared for. But the Contessa’s habitual thoughtlessness hardly explained Francesca’s deadened teeth.
    Miss Temple did not remember herself at seven years of age with any clarity. Her mother was well dead, of course, but who had been her father’s housemistress? There had been nine in turn, and Miss Temple ordered her youth through the prism of their reigns, consorts to a relentless, unfeeling king. At seven the housemistress was most likely Mrs Kallack, a harsh lady whose Alsatian husband had died of fever soon after bringing her to the tropics. Mrs Kallack’s success in the house was due to her ability to meet Miss Temple’s father with utter subservience, and then, like a two-headedidol, wreak his brutality on the rest of the household. Miss Temple had hated her, and recalled with grim satisfaction when Mrs Kallack was found dead in the