The Chemickal Marriage

in supplication. In their hands were open books and closed, torches, laurels, lilies, roses, harps, keys – and on the tombs so many inscriptions, from the Bible or in Greek or Latin.
    None of it touched Miss Temple, for she was too near the Comte’s estimation of such piety. To his mind, and thus persuasively to hers, such trappings of grief and hope were akin to a toddler’s scrawl.
    The skin of her elbow stung from her awkward fall, and, unable to reach with her hands, she rubbed it against her stomach. She had risked everything in attacking Vandaariff, but Foison had merely pulled her away. At the Customs House, he had twice sought her life with a thrown blade. She had become a valued commodity.
    Beyond a spiked iron gate stretched a dim avenue lined with vaults. The gate stood between Egyptian obelisks, but their plaster had crumbled to reveal red brick, the work of an especially unscrupulous builder.
    Foison unlocked the gate. The vaults had no names across their lintels, only metal numbers nailed into the stone. At the avenue’s end was a vault with the number 8, deliberately placed sideways. Foison sorted another key, then surveyed the sky above them. Miss Temple was reminded of a snake tasting the air with its tongue.
    The vault door scraped open, and from inside the tomb rose a golden light. Someone waited inside.
    Foison went first. He’d no weapon ready, nor had he brought a lantern. Miss Temple came next, prodded by a fellow with a cutlass, and then the others in a line. Instead of a horrid vault lined with niches, they entered ananteroom gleaming with blue ceramic tile. The far wall was fashioned like an ancient city gate, with a crenellated top and narrow windows, all aglow.
    ‘The entrance to Babylon,’ said Foison, removing her gag. ‘The Ishtar Gate.’
    ‘Ah.’ In Miss Temple, vanished cultures met a sense of justice as to their vanishing.
    ‘In Ishtar’s temple is eternal life.’
    A flicker of recognition came from the Comte’s memories. Miss Temple tried to place the source … was it the light? She saw no candles or lanterns – the golden light came from the other side of the blue wall.
    Foison opened the gate with an elaborate key with teeth like a briar’s thorns. His men thrust Miss Temple through and slammed the gate. She cried out, naming Foison a coward and his master a degenerate toad. There was no reply. She heard the vault door close, and the cold lock turn.
    The tomb was bright without the aid of a single lantern or candle. The floor was copper, polished near to a mirror. She recalled the metal on the walls of Vandaariff’s room, and the sheets of steel hanging amongst the machines at Parchfeldt. A thread of bile burnt her throat like an incision and she knew: this interior part of the tomb had been a commission to prove the Comte’s abilities – an unknown artist first brought to Vandaariff’s attention by a new and intimate adviser, the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza …
    Miss Temple held up a hand and waved, making tiny shadows. The decorated ceiling was honeycombed by dozens of shafts that rose high to the surface and drew the sunlight down, directing the beams with mirrors and colouring their glow with glass.
    More grimly, however, the shafts meant Miss Temple’s earlier assumption had been wrong. No one else had entered the tomb – she
had
been abandoned. She looked for an edge to slice through the cord binding her wrists, but the walls and floor were smooth. The room’s only feature was a slab of white marble, carved to depict silken bedclothes pulled open across it.
    Two names were carved: Clothilde Vandaariff and, in fresh-cut letters, Lydia Vandaariff. No dates or epigraphs accompanied the names – nor, in the case of Lydia, could the tomb contain a body. Miss Temple wondered if it was her fate to serve as Lydia’s proxy.
    She sank down against the stone. Her forearm throbbed, and it seemed she had not slept in days. She curled on her side, yet, despite her fatigue, the solitude only gave Miss Temple’s mind more opportunity to seethe …
    When they had collided with Mr Harcourt and the Palace guard, Chang had seized her hand. They did not speak as they fled, but then a reckless turn left them in a dead-end room, with no time to double back.
    ‘The wardrobe,’ he hissed, pushing her to it. Chang leapt to a writing desk and dragged it beneath the room’s single high window.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Get in the wardrobe!’
    Chang vaulted onto the