The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

the bread and cheese purple. Nevertheless she ate them as slowly and methodically as she could—alternating carefully small bites of each in succession and chewing each mouthful at least twenty times before swallowing. So passed perhaps fifteen minutes. She drank off the rest of the canteen and re-corked it. She balled up the paper and with the canteen in her hand poked her head back into the passageway. The Major and the Envoy were where they had been before.
    “I have finished,” she called, “if you would prefer to collect the canteen.”
    “How kind of you,” said Envoy Flaüss, and he nudged the Major, who marched toward her and snatched the canteen from her hand. Miss Temple held up the ball of paper.
    “Would you take this as well? I’m sure you do not want me passing notes to the conductor!”
    Without a word the Major did. Miss Temple batted her eyelashes at him and then at the watching Envoy down the passageway as the Major turned and walked away. She returned to her seat with a chuckle. She had no idea what had been gained except distraction, but she felt in her mild mischief a certain encouraging return to form.
    At St. Porte, Major Blach did not enter her compartment. Miss Temple looked up to the compartment door as the train slowed and no one had appeared. Had she annoyed him so much as to give her a chance to open the window? She stood, still looking at the empty doorway, and then with a fumbling rush began her assault on the window latches. She had not even managed to get one of them open before she heard the clicking of the compartment door behind her. She wheeled, ready to meet the Major’s disapproval with a winning smile.
    Instead, in the open door stood Roger Bascombe.
    “Ah,” she said. “Mr. Bascombe.”
    He nodded to her rather formally. “Miss Temple.”
    “Will you sit?”
    It seemed to her that Roger hesitated, perhaps because she had been found so evidently in the midst of opening the window, but equally perhaps because so much between them lay unresolved. She returned to her seat, tucking her dirty feet as far as possible beneath her hanging dress, and waited for him to stir from the still-open door. When he did not, she spoke to him with a politeness only barely edged with impatience.
    “What can a man fear from taking a seat? Nothing—except the display of his own ill-breeding if he remains standing like a tradesman … or a marionette Macklenburg soldier.”
    Chastened and, she could tell from the purse of his lips, pricked to annoyance, Roger took a seat on the opposite side of the compartment. He took a preparatory breath.
    “Miss Temple—Celeste—”
    “I see your scars have healed,” she said encouragingly. “Mrs. Marchmoor’s have not, and I confess to finding them quite unpleasant. As for poor Mr. Flaüss—or I suppose it should be
Herr
Flaüss—for
his
appearance he might as well be a tattooed aboriginal from the polar ice!”
    With satisfaction, she saw that Roger looked as if a lemon wedge had become lodged beneath his tongue.
    “Are you finished?” he asked.
    “I don’t believe I am, but I will let you speak, if that is what you—”
    Roger barked at her sharply. “It is not a surprise to see you so relentlessly fixed on the trivial—it has always been your way—but even
you
should apprehend the gravity of your situation!”
    Miss Temple had never seen him so dismissive and forceful, and her voice dropped to a sudden icy whisper.
    “I apprehend it very fully … I assure you … Mr. Bascombe.”
    He did not reply—he was, she realized with a sizzling annoyance, allowing what he took to be his acknowledged rebuke to fully sink in. Determined not to first break the silence, Miss Temple found herself studying the changes in his face and manner—quite in spite of herself, for she still hoped to meet his every attention with scorn. She understood that Roger Bascombe offered the truest window into the effects of the Process she was likely to find. She had met Mrs. Marchmoor and the Prince—her pragmatic manner and his dispassionate distance—but she had known neither of them intimately beforehand. What she saw on the face of Roger Bascombe pained her, more than anything at the knowledge that such a transformation spoke—and she was sure, in her unhappy heart, that it did—to his honest desire. Roger had always been one for what was ordered and proper, paying scrupulous attention to social niceties while maintaining a fixed notion of who bore