The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

understanding her father was to consider him a natural force, like the ocean or the clouds, and to weather sunny days and storms alike without being personally aggrieved. She knew he had fallen ill, that he would most likely not be living once she returned—if she ever did return—to her island home. It was a thought to prick her conscience with sorrow if she let it, but she did not let it, for she did not really know if the sadness was any different from that she felt at missing the tropical sun. Miss Temple believed that change brought sorrow as a matter of course. Was there particular sadness in her father’s absence—either on account of distance or death? Was there sorrow in the fact that she could not for certain say? Her mother she had never known—a young woman (younger than Miss Temple was now, which was a strange thought) slain by the birth of her child. So many people in the world were disappointing, who was to say the lack of any one more was a loss? Such was Miss Temple’s normal waspish response to the expression of sympathy at her mother’s absence, and if there did exist a tiny deeply set wound within her heart, she did not spend time excavating it for the benefit ofstrangers, or for that matter anyone at all. Nevertheless, for some reason she could not—or chose not to—name, she found her sympathies touched by the masked woman’s jumbled ranting.
    “If you were to see him,” she asked kindly, “what do you guess the Comte d’Orkancz would advise you to do?”
    The woman laughed bitterly.
    “Then why don’t you leave?”
    “And where am I to go?”
    “I’m sure there are many places—”
    “I cannot
leave
! I am
obliged
!”
    “Refuse the obligation. Or if you cannot refuse, then turn it to your advantage—you say you ought to be a queen—”
    “But no one will
listen
—no one
imagines—
”
    Miss Temple was growing annoyed. “If you truly want to—”
    The woman snatched up her glass. “You all sound the same, with your prideful
wisdom
—when it only serves to justify your place at my table! ‘Be free! Expand your perceptions!’ A load of mercenary rubbish!”
    “If you are so assailed,” replied Miss Temple patiently, “then how have you managed to come here, masked and alone?”
    “Why do you think?” The woman nearly spat. “The St. Royale Hotel is the only place I
can
go to! With two coachmen to make sure I am delivered and collected with no other stop in between!”
    “That is ridiculously dramatic,” said Miss Temple. “If you want to go elsewhere,
go
.”
    “How can I?”
    “I am sure the St. Royale has many exits.”
    “But then what? Then where?”
    “Any place you want—I assume you have money—it is a very large city. One simply—”
    The woman scoffed. “You have no
idea
—you cannot know—”
    “I know an insufferable child when I see one,” said Miss Temple.
    The woman looked up at her as if she had been struck, the port dulling her reactions, her expression tinged with both incomprehensionand a growing fury, neither of which would do. Miss Temple stood and pointed to the somewhat isolated swathe of red drapery on the left-hand wall.
    “Do you know what that is?” she asked sharply.
    The woman shook her head. With a huff, Miss Temple walked over to the curtain and yanked it aside—her ingenious plan momentarily crushed by the flat section of wall that was revealed. But before the woman could speak, Miss Temple saw the indented spots in the painted wood—that it
was
painted wood and not plaster—where one could get a grip, and then the deftly inset hinges that told her how it opened. She wedged her small fingers into the holes and pried up the wooden shutters to reveal a darkened window, the reverse of the golden-framed Dutch mirror, offering the two of them an unobstructed view of the lobby of the St. Royale Hotel and the street front beyond.
    “Do you see?” she said, herself distracted with the strangeness of the view—she could see people who were only three feet away who could not see her. As she looked, a young woman stepped directly to the window and began to nervously pull at her hair. Miss Temple felt a discomfiting shiver of familiarity.
    “But what does it mean?” asked the blonde woman in a whisper.
    “Only that the world is not measured by your troubles, and that you are not the limit of the intrigue that surrounds you.”
    “What—what nonsense—it is like looking into a fish tank!”
    Then the woman’s