The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

two strides and was gone.
    Mrs. Stearne looked once at Miss Temple and then to Lydia, her expression tinged with concern, and then met the smiling face of Miss Poole whose dashing figure had just—in her own opinion at least—somehow turned Mrs. Stearne, in her plain severe dark dress, from her place.
    “I’m sure we shall speak later,” said Miss Poole.
    “Indeed,” replied Mrs. Stearne, and she swept after the Comte.
    When she was gone Miss Poole flicked her hand at the Comte’stwo men. Above them all the door had opened and people were flowing into the gallery, whispering at the sight below them on the stage.
    “Let us get dear Lydia on the table. Gentlemen?”
    Throughout Miss Vandaariff’s savage ordeal the two soldiers from Macklenburg held Miss Temple quite firmly between them. Miss Poole had stuffed a plug of cotton wadding into Miss Temple’s mouth, preventing her from making a sound. Try as she might to shift the foul mass with her tongue, her efforts only served to dislodge moistened clots at the back of her mouth that she then worried she might swallow and choke upon. She wondered if this Dujong woman had been with Doctor Svenson at the end. At the thought of the poor kind man Miss Temple blinked away a tear, doing her best not to weep, for with a sniffling nose she’d have no way to breathe. The Doctor … dying at Tarr Manor. She did not understand it—Roger had been on the train to Harschmort, he was not
at
Tarr Manor. What was the point of anyone going there? She thought back to the blue glass card, where Roger and the Deputy Minister had been speaking in the carriage … she had assumed Tarr Manor was merely the prize with which Roger had been seduced. Was it possible it was the other way around—that the need for Tarr Manor necessitated their possession of Roger?
    But then another nagging thought came to Miss Temple—the last seconds of that card’s experience—metal-banded door and the high chamber … the broad-shouldered man leaning over the table, on the table a woman … that very card had come from Colonel Trapping. The man at the table was the Comte. And the woman … Miss Temple could not say.
    These thoughts were driven from her head by Lydia’s muffled screams, the shrieking machinery, and the truly unbearable smell. Miss Poole stood below the table, describing each step of the Process to her audience as if it were a sumptuous meal—every moment of her smiling enthusiasm belied by the girl’s arching backand 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