The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

garden in the rear of the house, what Miss Temple assumed was once the prison’s parade ground. The entire idea of living in such a place struck her as morbid, if not ridiculously affected, all the more when the rooms one lived in were so covered in lace as to seem one great over-flounced pillow. Lydia immediately retreated to an inner closet with two of her maids to change clothes, muttering at them crossly and tossing her head. Miss Temple was installed on a wide lace-fringed settee. This had served to expose her filthy feet, prompting Mrs. Stearne to call for another maid with a basin and a cloth. The girl knelt and washed Miss Temple’s feet carefully one at a time, drying them on a soft towel. Throughout, Miss Temple remained silent, her thoughts still a-swim at her situation, her heart alternating between anger and despondence. She had committed their path from the front door to Lydia’s apartments to memory as best she could, but with only the barest hope of escape for that way was lined with servants and soldiers, as if the entire mansion had become an armed camp. Miss Temple could not but notice that nowhere around her was a single thing—a nail file, a crystal dish for sweets, a letter opener, a candlestick—she might have snatched up for a weapon.
    When the girl had finished, collecting her things and nodding first to Miss Temple and then Mrs. Stearne before backing from the room, the two remained for a moment in silence—or near silence, the hectoring comments of Miss Vandaariff to her maids reaching them despite the distance and closed doors.
    “You were in the coach,” Miss Temple said at last. “The pirate.”
    “I was.”
    “I did not know your name. I have since met Mrs. Marchmoor, and heard others speak of Miss Poole—”
    “You must call me Caroline,” said Mrs. Stearne. “Stearne is my husband’s name—my husband is dead and not missed. Of course, I did not know your name either—I knew no one’s name, though I think we each assumed the others were old hands. Perhaps Mrs. Marchmoor was an old hand, but I am sure she was as frightened—and thrilled—as the rest of us.”
    “I doubt she would admit it,” replied Miss Temple.
    “So do I.” Caroline smiled. “I still do not know how you came to be in our coach—it shows a boldness, to be sure. And what you must have done since…I can only guess how hard it was.”
    Miss Temple shrugged.
    “Of course.” Caroline nodded. “What choice did you have? Yet, to most people, your path would have been plagued with choice—while to you it seems inexorable—quite like my own. However much our characters may be fixed, they are only revealed to us one test at a time. And so we are here together after all, with perhaps more in common than any of us would care to admit—though only a fool does not admit the truth once it is plain to her.”

    The woman’s dress was simpler than Mrs. Marchmoor’s, less ostentatious—less like an actor’s idea of how the wealthy dressed, she realized—and she was pained that her heart’s impulse was to think of her captor kindly (this being rare enough in Miss Temple’s life to be a surprise in itself, captor or no). No doubt the woman had been placed for that very purpose, for a natural sympathy that had somehow survived the Process or could at least be readily counterfeited, to worm Miss Temple’s determination that much further from its sticking place.
    “I watched you,” she said accusingly, “in the theatre…you were…
shrieking
—”
    “I’m sure I was,” said Caroline. “And yet, perhaps it is most like having a troubling tooth pulled. The act itself is so distressing as to seem in no way justified…and yet, after it is done, the peace of mind…the ease of being—and I speak of a former life of no great difficulty, you understand, merely the fraying worries that are part of every day—I cannot now imagine being without this…well, it is a kind of bliss.”
    “Bliss?”
    “Perhaps that sounds foolish to you.”
    “Not at all—I have seen Mrs. Marchmoor—her sort of—of—
spectacle
—and I have seen the book—one of your glass books—I have been inside, the sensation, the debauchery—perhaps ‘bliss’
is
an applicable word,” said Miss Temple, “though I assure you it is not my choice.”
    “You mustn’t judge Mrs. Marchmoor harshly. She does what she must do for her larger purpose. As we all are guided. Even you, Miss Temple. If you have peered into these