The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

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 herwith 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 not, for she was both curious and proud, but wonder if this was how she had looked as well.
    The widow’s cheeks were flushed, her lower lip absently plucked between her teeth, her fingers white with pressure as they squeezed the glass, her breath shot through with sighs, the silk robe sliding as she moved, soft and thin enough to show the stiffened tips of each breast, the barely perceptible rocking of her hips, one long leg stretched out to the carpet, its toes flexing against some hidden force, and on top of all of this, to Miss Temple’s discomforting attraction, was the fact that Elöise still wore her feathered mask—that, to some degree, Miss Temple felt she was not gazing at Elöise at all, but simply a Woman of Mystery, as she had made of herself in the Contessa’s Dutch mirror. She continued to stare as Elöise repeated the cycle of the card, Miss Temple now able to locate, at the same slight inhalation of breath, the moment of Mrs. Marchmoor pulling the Prince’s body into hers, hooking her legs around his hips and pressing him tight … and she wondered that she herself had been able to remove her attention from the card without difficulty—or without difficulty beyond her own embarrassment—where Elöise seemed quite trapped within its charms. What had she said about the book—about people being killed, about her own swooning? With a resolve that, as perhaps too often in her life, cut short her fascination, Miss Temple reached out and snatched the card from her companion’s hands.
    Elöise looked up, quite unaware of what had happened and where she was, mouth open and her eyes unclear.
    “Are you all right?” Miss Temple asked. “You had quite lost yourself within this card.” She held it up for Elöise to see. The widow licked her lips and blinked.
    “My heavens … I do apologize …”
    “You are quite flushed,” observed Miss Temple.
    “I’m sure I am,” muttered Elöise. “I was not prepared—”
    “It is the same experience as the book—quite as
involving
, if not as
deep
—for