The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

making her voice as brisk and amiable as she could.
    “It seems that we have each lost someone. You this woman, Angelique, the Doctor his Prince, and my own…my cruel and foolish Roger. While there is the difference that the two of you have some hope—and indeed the desire—to recover the one you have lost…for me I am content to assist how I can, and to achieve my share of understanding…and revenge.”
    Her voice broke, and she sniffed, angry with her weakness but powerless to fight it. Was this her life? Again she felt the gagging absence in her heart—how could she have been such a fool as to allow Roger Bascombe to fill it? How could she have allowed such feelings to begin with—when they had only left her with this unanswerable ache? How could she be still beset by them, still want to be somehow simply misunderstood by him and taken by the hand—her own weakness was unbearable. For the first time in her twenty-five years Miss Temple did not know where she was going to sleep. She saw Doctor Svenson stepping toward her and forced a smile, waving him away.
    “Your aunt,” he began, “surely, Miss Temple, her concern for you—”
    “Pffft!”
scoffed Miss Temple, unable to bear his sympathy. She walked to her bag and hefted it with one hand, doing her best to conceal the weight but stumbling as she made her way to the garden gate. “I will wait in the street,” she called over her shoulder, not wanting them to see the emotion on her face. “When you are finished, I’m sure there is much for us to do…”

    She dropped the bag and leaned against the wall, her hands over her eyes, her shoulders now heaving with sobs. Only moments ago she had been so proud to find the scrap of silk in the stove and now—and why? Because Chang had feelings for some whore?—the full weight of all she had suffered and sacrificed and stuffed aside had reappeared to rest on her small frame and tender heart. How did anyone bear this isolation, this desolated hope? In the midst of this tempest, Miss Temple, for her mind was restless and quick, did not forget the sharp fear inspired by her enemies, nor did she refrain from berating herself for the girlish indulgence of crying in the first place. She dug for a handkerchief in her green bag, her hand searching for it around the revolver, another sign of what she had become—what she had embraced with, if she was honest, typically ridiculous results. She blew her nose. She
was
difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent. She sniffed, bitterly resenting this sort of introspection, despising the need for it nearly as much as she despised introspection itself. In that moment she did not know which she wanted more, to curl up in the sun room of her island house, or to shoot one of these blue-glass villains in the heart…yet were either of these the answer to her present state?
    She sniffed loudly. Neither Chang, for all his hidden moods, nor Svenson, for all his fussy hesitance, were standing in the open street in tears. How could she face them as any kind of equal? Again, and relentlessly, she asked herself what she thought she was doing. She’d told Chang that she was willing to pursue her investigations alone, though in her heart she had not believed it. Now she knew that this was exactly what she must do—for at the moment
doing
seemed crucial—if she was ever going to scour this awful sense of being
subject
from her body. She looked back at the garden door—neither man had appeared. She snatched up the bag with both hands and walked back the way they had come, away from the Boniface. With each step she felt as if she were in a ship leaving its port to cross an unknown ocean—and the farther down Plum Court she went, the more determined she became.
    At the avenue, she hailed a coach. She looked back. Her heart caught in her throat. Chang and Svenson stood in the garden doorway. Svenson called to her. Chang was running. She climbed into the coach and threw the bag to the floor.
    “Drive on,” she called. The coach pulled away and with an almost brutal swiftness she was beyond the lane and any vision of her two companions. The driver looked back at her, his face an unspoken inquiry for their destination.
    “The St. Royale Hotel,” said Miss Temple.

FIVE
    Ministry
    B y the time Chang reached the end of the lane, the coach was out of sight and he could not tell in which direction it had vanished. He spat with