The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

firmly as she could and recalling Chang’s advice for practical action, Miss Temple stepped to the side of Mr. Blenheim and drove the dagger into the side of his body to the hilt.
    He gasped, eyes popping wide and up from the card. Miss Temple pulled the dagger free with both hands, the force of which caused him to stagger in her direction. He looked down at the bloody blade, and then up to her face. She stabbed again, this time into the center of his body, shoving the blade up under his ribs. Mr. Blenheim dropped the card onto the carpet and wrestled the dagger from Miss Temple’s grasp, tottering backwards. With a grunt he dropped to his knees, blood pouring from his abdomen. He could not draw breath nor—happily for the women—make noise. He toppled onto his side and lay still. Miss Temple, gratified to see that the carpet bore a reddish pattern, knelt quickly to wipe her hands.

    She looked up to Elöise, who had not moved, fixed on the fading breaths of the fallen overseer.
    “Elöise?” she whispered.
    Elöise turned to her quickly, the spell broken, eyes wide.
    “Are you all right, Elöise?”
    “O yes. I am sorry—I—I don’t know—I suppose I thought we would creep past—”
    “He would have followed.”
    “Of course. Of course! No—yes, my goodness—”
    “He was our deadly enemy!” Miss Temple’s poise was suddenly quite fragile.
    “Of course—it is merely—perhaps the quantity of blood—”
    Despite herself, the prick of criticism had punctured Miss Temple’s grim resolve, for after all it was not as if murder came to her naturally or blithely, and though she knew she
had
been clever, she also knew what she had done—that it
was
murder—not even strictly a
fight
—and once more she felt it all had moved so quickly, too fast for her to keep her hold on what she believed and what her actions made of her. Tears burned the corners of each eye. Elöise suddenly leaned close to her and squeezed her shoulders.
    “Do not listen to me, Celeste—I am a fool—truly! Well done!”
    Miss Temple sniffed. “It would be best if we dragged him from the door.”
    “Absolutely.”
    They had each taken an arm, but the effort of transporting the substantial corpse—for he had finally expired—behind a short bookcase left them both gasping for breath, Elöise propped against a leather armchair, Miss Temple holding the dagger, wiping its blood on Mr. Blenheim’s sleeve. With another sigh at the burdens one accepted along with a pragmatic mind, she set the dagger down and began to search his pockets, piling all of what she found in a heap: banknotes, coins, handkerchiefs, matches, two whole cigars and the stub of another, pencils, scraps of blank paper, bullets for the carbine, and a ring of so many keys she was sure they would answer for every door in the whole of Harschmort. In his breast pocket however was another key…fashioned entirely of blue glass. Miss Temple’s eyes went wide and she looked up to her companion.

    Elöise was not looking at her. She sat slumped in the chair, one leg drawn up, her face open, eyes dull, both hands holding the blue card in front of her face. Miss Temple stood with the glass key in her hand, wondering how long her work had taken…and how many times her companion had traveled through the sensations of Mrs. Marchmoor on the sofa. A little gasp escaped Elöise’s parted lips, and Miss Temple began to feel awkward. The more she considered what she had experienced by way of the blue glass—the hunger, the knowledge, the delicious submersion, and of course her rudely skewed sense of self—the less she knew how she ought to feel. The attacks upon her person (that seemed to occur whenever she set foot in a coach) she
had
sorted out—they filled her with rage. But these
mental
incursions had transfigured her notions of propriety, of desire, and of experience itself, and left her usual certainty of mind utterly tumbled.
    Elöise was a widow, who with her marriage must have found a balance with these physical matters, yet instead of reason and perspective Miss Temple was troubled to see a faint pearling of perspiration on the woman’s upper lip, and felt a certain restless shifting at her thighs at being in the presence of someone else’s unmediated desire (a thing she had never before faced, unless one could count her kisses with Roger and Roger’s own attempts to grope her body, which now—by force of absolute will—she refused to do). Miss Temple could