The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

for a moment, staring at the bed and the traces of the body that had lain there.
    “If it worked,” said Miss Temple, “I do not know why he has burnt her dress.”
    “No.” Svenson nodded, sadly.
    “No,” snapped Chang. He turned from them and walked out to the garden.

    Miss Temple looked to Doctor Svenson, who was still on the bed, his expression one of concern and confusion, as if they both knew something was not right. He began to climb off—awkwardly, his coat and boots cumbersome and his lank hair falling over his face. Miss Temple was quicker to the door, snatching up her flowered bag where Chang had left it—it was shockingly heavy, Marthe was an idiot to think she could carry the thing for any distance—and lurching into the garden. Chang stood in the middle of the lifeless lawn, staring up at the boarded windows of the house—windows that in their willful impenetrability struck Miss Temple as a mirror of Chang’s glasses. She flung down the bag and approached him. He did not turn. She stopped, perhaps a yard from his side. She glanced back to see Doctor Svenson standing in the greenhouse doorway, watching.
    “Cardinal Chang?” she asked. He did not answer. Miss Temple did not know if there was anything so tiresome as a person ignoring a perfectly polite, indeed sympathetic, question. She took a breath, exhaled slowly, and gently spoke again. “Do you know the woman?”
    Chang turned to her, his voice quite cold. “Her name is Angelique. You would not know her. She is—she
was
—a whore.”
    “I see,” said Miss Temple.
    “Do you?” snapped Chang.
    Miss Temple ignored the challenge and again held up the scrap of burnt silk. “And you recognize this as hers?”
    “She wore such a dress yesterday evening, in the company of the Comte—he took her to the Institute.” Chang turned to call over her shoulder to Svenson. “She was with him there, with his machines—she is obviously the woman you saw—and she is obviously dead.”
    “Is she?” asked Miss Temple.
    Chang snorted. “You said it yourself—he has burnt the dress—”
    “I did,” she agreed, “but it really makes little sense. I do not see any freshly turned earth here in this garden, do you?”
    Chang looked at her suspiciously, and then glanced around him. Before he could answer her, Svenson called out from the doorway, “I don’t.”
    “Nor did—forgive the indelicacy—I find any
bones
in the stove. And I do believe that if one were to burn such a thing as a body—for I have seen the bodies of animals in such a fire—that at least some bones would remain. Doctor?”
    “I would expect so, yes—the femur alone—”
    “So my question, Cardinal Chang,” continued Miss Temple, “is why—if she is dead and he is abandoning this garden—does he not bury or burn her remains right here? It truly is the sensible thing—and yet I do not see that he’s done it.”
    “Then why burn the dress?” asked Chang.
    “I’ve no idea. Perhaps because it was ruined—the bloodstains the Doctor described. Perhaps it was
contaminated.
” She turned to Svenson. “Was she wearing the dress when
you
saw her, Doctor?”
    Svenson cleared his throat. “I saw no such dress,” he said.
    “So we do not know,” announced Miss Temple, returning to Chang. “You may hate the Comte d’Orkancz, but you may also yet hope to find this woman alive—and who can say, even recovered.”

    Chang did not reply, but she sensed something change in his body, a palpable shifting in his bones to accommodate some small admission of hope. Miss Temple allowed herself a moment of satisfaction, but instead of that pleasure she found herself quite unexpectedly beset by a painful welling of sadness, of isolation, as if she had taken for granted a certain solidarity with Chang, that they were alike in being alone, only to learn that this was not true. The fact of his feelings—that he
had
feelings, much less that they were of such fervor, and for this particular sort of woman—threw her into distress. She did not desire to be the object of such a man’s emotions—of course she didn’t—but she was nevertheless unprepared to face the depth of her loneliness so abruptly—nor by way of consoling someone else—which seemed especially unjust and was hardly Miss Temple’s
forte
to begin with. She could not help it. She was pierced by solitude, and found herself suddenly sniffing. Mortified, she forced her eyes brightly open and tried to smile,