The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

to her audience as if it were a sumptuous meal—every moment of her smiling enthusiasm belied by the girl’s arching back and clutching fingers, her red face and grunts of animal pain. To Miss Temple’s lasting disgust, the spectators whispered and applauded at every key moment, treating the entire affair like a circus exhibition. Did they have any idea who lay in sweating torment before them—a beauty to rival any Royal, the darling of the social press, heiress to an empire? All they saw was a woman writhing, and another woman telling them how fine a thing it was. It seemed to her that this was Lydia Vandaariff’s whole existence in a nutshell.
    Once it was over however, Miss Temple chided herself bitterly. She did not think she actually could have broken from the two soldiers, but she was certain that this period of sparking, ghastly chaos was the only time she might have had a chance. Instead, as soon as the Comte’s men unstrapped Lydia and eased her limp form from the table—the unctuous Miss Poole whispering eagerly into the shattered girl’s ear—the soldiers stepped forward and hefted Miss Temple into her place. She kicked her legs but these were immediately caught and held firmly down. In a matter of helpless seconds she was on her back, the cotton pads beneath her hot and damp from Lydia’s sweat, the belts cinched close across her waist, neck, and bosom and each limb tightly bound. The table was angled so those in the gallery could see the whole of her body, but Miss Temple could only see the glare of the hot paraffin lamps and an indistinct mass of shadowed faces—as uncaring to her condition as those waiting with empty plates are to the frightened beast beneath the knife.
    She stared at Lydia as the tottering young woman—sweat-sheened face, hair damp against the back of her neck, eyes dull and mouth slack—was briskly examined by Miss Poole. With a tremor Miss Temple thought of the defiant course of her short life—itself a litany of governesses and aunts, rivals and suitors, Bascombes and Pooles and Marchmoors…she would now join them, edges stripped away, her velocity set to their destinations, her determination yoked like an ox to work in someone else’s field.
    And what had she wanted instead? Miss Temple was not without insight and she saw how genuinely free the Process had made both Marchmoor and Poole, and—she did not frankly doubt it—how Lydia Vandaariff would now find her will of steel. Even Roger—her breath huffed around the gag with a plangent whine as his visage crossed her inner eye—she knew had been formerly restrained by a decency rooted in fear and timid desire. It did not make them
wise
—she had only to recall the way Roger could not reconcile her present deeds with the fiancée he had known—but it made them fierce. Miss Temple choked again as the cotton wadding nudged the slick softness at the back of her throat. She was
already
fierce. She required none of this nonsense, and if she’d carried a man’s strength and her father’s horsewhip these villains would as one be on their knees.
    But in addition Miss Temple realized—barely listening to Miss Poole’s disquisition—that so much of this struggle came down to dreams. Mrs. Marchmoor had been released from the brothel, Mrs. Stearne from fallow widowhood, and Miss Poole from a girlish hope to marry the best man within reach…which was all to say that of course she understood. What
they
did not understand—what no one understood, from her raging father to her aunt to Roger to the Comte and the Contessa with their wicked violations—was the particular character of her own desires, her own sunbaked, moist-aired, salt-tinged dreams. In her mind she saw the sinister
Annunciation
fragments of Oskar Veilandt, the expression of astonished sensation on Mary’s face and the gleaming blue hands with their cobalt nails pressing into her giving flesh…and yet she knew her own desire, however inflamed at the rawness of that physical transaction, was in truth elsewhere configured…her colors—the pigments of her need—existed before an artist’s interposition—crumbled, primal minerals and untreated salts, feathers and bones, shells oozing purple ink, damp on a table top and still reeking of the sea.

    Such was Miss Temple’s heart, and with it beating strong within her now she felt no longer fear, but near to spitting rage. She knew she would not die, for their aim was corruption—as if to skip the act