The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

rise to her hands and knees, and saw the blacked soles of the woman’s bare feet and the singed, discolored silk at the hem of her robes.
    “Can you understand me?” Miss Temple hissed impatiently. “Miss Dujong?
Miss Dujong.
”
    The woman turned to her voice, hair across her face, doing her best to move in the awkward robe that, with Doctor Svenson’s greatcoat, was tangling her legs. Miss Temple sighed and crouched in front of the woman, doing her best to give an impression of kindness and care, knowing well there was precious little time—or, to be honest, feeling—for either.
    “My name is Celeste Temple. I am a friend of Doctor Svenson. He is behind us—he will catch up, I am sure—but if we do not escape his efforts will be wasted. Do you understand me? We are at Harschmort House. They are keen to murder us both.”
    The woman blinked like a rock lizard. Miss Temple took hold of her jaw.
    “Do you
understand
?”
    The woman nodded. “I’m sorry…they…” Her hand fluttered in a vague and indefinite gesture. “I cannot think…”
    Miss Temple snorted and then, still gripping her jaw, sorted the woman’s hair from her face with brisk darts of her fingers, tucking away the wisps like a bird stabbing together its nest. She was older than Miss Temple—in her presently haggard condition it was unfair to guess by how many years—and as she allowed herself to be held and groomed, there emerged in her features a delicate
wholeness
with which Miss Temple grudgingly found a certain reluctant sympathy.
    “Not thinking is perfectly all right.” Miss Temple smiled, only a little tightly. “I can think for the pair of us—in point of fact I should prefer it. I cannot however
walk
for the pair of us. If we are to live—to
live,
Miss Dujong—you must be able to move.”
    “Elöise,” she whispered.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “My name is Elöise.”
    “Excellent. That will make everything much easier.”

    Miss Temple did not even risk opening the far door, for she knew the corridor beyond would be full of servants and soldiers—though why they did not come at the fire through this room she had no idea. Could the prohibition against entering such a secret room—one that so obviously loomed in the Cabal’s deepest designs—carry over in the staff to even this time of crisis? She turned back to Elöise, who was still on her knees, holding in her arms a savaged garment—no doubt the dress she had arrived in.
    “They have destroyed it,” Miss Temple told her, crossing past to the open cabinets. “It is their way. I suggest you turn your head…”
    “Are you changing clothes?” asked Elöise, doing her best to stand.
    Miss Temple pushed aside the open cabinet doors and saw the wicked mirror behind. She looked about her and found a wooden stool.
    “O no,” she replied, “I am breaking glass.”
    Miss Temple shut her eyes at the impact and flinched away, but all the same the destruction was enormously satisfying. With each blow she thought of another enemy—Spragg, Farquhar, the Contessa, Miss Poole—and at every jolting of her arms her face glowed the more with healthy pleasure. Once the hole was made, but not yet wide enough to pass through, she looked back at Miss Dujong with a conspiratorial grin.
    “There is a secret room,” she whispered, and at Miss Dujong’s hesitant nod wheeled round to swing again. It was the sort of activity that could easily have occupied another thirty minutes of her time, chipping away at this part and at that, knocking free each hanging shard. As it was, Miss Temple called herself to business, dropped the stool, and carefully stepped back to Elöise’s tattered dress. Between them they spread it across their path to absorb at least what fallen glass it could, and made their way through the mirror. Once in, Miss Temple gathered the dress and, balling it in her hands, threw it back across the room. She looked a last time at the inner door, her worry grown at the Doctor’s non-arrival, and reached for the cabinet doors on either side, pulling them to conceal the open mirror. She turned to Elöise, who clutched the poor man’s coat close to her body.
    “He will find us,” Miss Temple told her. “Why don’t you take my arm?”

    They did not speak as they padded along the dim carpeted passageway, their pale, smoke-smeared faces and their silken robes made red in the lurid gaslight. Miss Temple wanted to put as much distance as she could between