The Dark Volume mtccads-2 Page 38

  The man was not Robert Vandaariff.

  Miss Temple cleared her throat. He looked up and showed himself to be younger than she'd first assumed. His hair had receded to the rear of his skull—but upon seeing his face she doubted he was much older than Chang, and his firm jaw and strong hands bespoke a masculinity that made her twitch. He set down the quill and the metal tool and stood, a politeness that took her by surprise.

  “I did not know there were any ladies in the house…”

  “I am Miss Stearne, a friend to Lydia Vandaariff. I fear I am interrupting all sorts of things everywhere.”

  “Not at all, I'm sure.”

  “There seems to have been a fire.”

  The man gestured broadly with a wry smile. “And yet the house is of a size that some fifty rooms remain for civilized occupation. Would you care for tea?”

  “No thank you.” The last thing Miss Temple wanted was to be introduced to a servant as a friend of Lydia's. “I trust I am not disturbing your work.”

  “Not at all.”

  A silence hung between them, to her mind fetid with possibility.

  “You have not said your name,” said Miss Temple, a little appalled for blinking her eyes as she did so.

  “My apologies. I am Mr. Fochtmann.”

  “What a very interesting mass of papers,” she said, pointing. “They look very… goodness, mechanical and scientific.”

  Still smiling, Mr. Fochtmann turned the top page of each pile facedown, hiding their contents from her eyes. “A woman like yourself cannot be interested in anything so tiresome. Will you sit?”

  “No, thank you. I'm sure I will be late for the train—”

  “Caroline Stearne I am aware of,” he said. “But you said ‘Isobel’—”

  “We are cousins,” said Miss Temple easily. “Caroline has traveled with Lydia to Macklenburg.”

  Miss Temple wondered if Captain Tackham and his dragoons were searching for her, whether they might appear at any time.

  “Apparently there has been no word sent from her party,” Fochtmann observed. “Though they are gone now over a week.”

  “Who writes postcards after getting married?” The skin above her breasts flushed with memories from the glass book (… a blindfolded man straining at the touch of two tongues at once… the careful liquid insertion, one at a time, of a string of amber beads…). She blinked to find he had cocked his head, watching her.

  “But there has been word. From the court at Macklenburg. The party did not arrive.”

  “Not arrive? That is impossible.”

  “It is at the least strange.”

  “Sir, it is difficult to credit at all! Where is the outcry? Where are the journalists—the naval search parties, troops of lancers scouring the coasts? If the heir to Macklenburg is missing—” She stopped, staring at Mr. Fochtmann quite seriously. “Has anyone told Lydia's father?”

  “Her father cannot be found.”

  “But he is Robert Vandaariff!”

  “Is he, though?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Will you not take a seat, Miss Stearne?”

  “I have told you I cannot.”

  “And yet I think you should. I would go so far as to recommend it for your health.”

  FOCHTMANN'S VOICE remained pleasant as ever. “You have been exposed to the glass. I can see it in your skin. Perhaps the exposure has been minimal—it has not caused you to lose any of your lovely hair. But you do know what I am talking about, and I must insist that you answer my questions.”

  “What questions?”

  Fochtmann glanced to the door, then back to her, staring hard, as if what he found in her countenance would determine his choice— that he was making a choice, right then. Miss Temple smothered another spasm of nausea. A cold shaft of understanding from the Comte's memories pierced her thoughts, the tip of a blade shoving past a cupboard lock and splintering it open.

  The hearth. The man was in his shirtsleeves. He had cauterized Mrs. Marchmoor's shattered wrist in the kitchen hearth fire.

  Fochtmann indicated the papers before them on the table.

  “It is an entire world of the ‘mechanical and scientific’ These are times when opportunity rides side by side with disaster.”

  “And you would avoid the disaster.”

  “For myself, to be sure.”

  “And your… employers?”

  “I only know what I've been told—nothing a man can trust. There are fissures between them—it can be the only reason I am engaged.”

  Miss Temple nodded slowly. “And perhaps…I am not…exactly… who you take me to be,” she said.

  Fochtmann rapped the papers sharply, as if some inner gamble had been won.

  “So which of them sent you? It is all very well to replace Lorenz, but before anything else I must know whether the blue glass has killed him. No one will hazard a guess—especially since all of them are sick as well.”

  “Doctor Lorenz dead? Well, Doctor Lorenz was nothing—the Comte's dogsbody only.”

  “You know the Comte? You knew him?”

  “Knew? You do not mean the Comte is dead?”

  Fochtmann squinted at her as if she were a strangely behaving insect.

  “I wonder at your indifference. Your own cousin, Caroline Stearne, was part of the same party. She is most likely dead as well.”

  Miss Temple did her best to gasp aloud.

  “Do not pretend!” he scoffed, pleased at catching her out. “You yourself bear signs of this indigo decay—and here by luck you have blundered into the only man who can save you!” He snatched up his pen and searched for clean paper. “Tell me whatever you have heard them say—Lorenz, the Comte, anyone. I will make sense of it myself. Obviously a young woman has not come all this way on her own initiative—who do you serve?”

  He looked up suddenly. “No no—I'm a fool! It's Vandaariff!”

  He stabbed the quill at her clasped hands. “What is that case?”

  Miss Temple raised it with a shrug and waggled the handle between her fingers. “It is empty. I was instructed to collect a particular item from the Comte's laboratory. But it is already gone.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that? Who else but Vandaariff could marshal the resources to steal so many machines away? But he lacks something and was forced to send you to retrieve it—someone harmless who would attract no suspicion.”

  “Why would Vandaariff destroy his own house?”

  “Why scruple at the house when he has already sacrificed his daughter? The stakes must be beyond imagination! What were you instructed to retrieve? Where are you to take it?”

  “I do not know. It was a… a thing. I was told no more.”

  “But you were given details, a description…”

  “I was told it was bright metal, and perhaps the size of…”

  She held out her hands and extended her fingers to indicate triggers and knobs. She thought of the wicked snouty implement the Comte had employed to violate Lydia Vandaariff and began to describe it. As she spoke Fochtmann set down the quill and began to search through the piled documents.

  “And it would fit in your case?” he asked.

  “Apparently the item folds.”

  “Ah… as I assumed…”

  Fochtmann pushed one wide page of foolscap across the table to her. She turned it right side up and saw a cross-section diagram of the exact object, labeled in the Comte's hand an “ethereal irrigator.” Miss Temple inhaled sharply through both nostrils and met Fochtmann's gaze—anything to look away from the diagram. At the sight of it her flesh crawled, imagining its usage—the prone form of Lydia Vandaariff, limbs secured, legs forced apart, the thickened blue mixture to be extruded from the metal snout at the exactly right temperature. She bit back her disgust—at Lydia's weakness, at the uselessness of women, at the arrogance of human effort, at Fochtmann's idiotic pride. Miss Temple set the page down.

  “Aren't you curious where it is?” he asked.


  “Not anymore.”

  “Do not be downhearted. I have seen others far worse off than you.”

  “Where is the Duke of Stäelmaere?”

  “Indeed,” said Fochtmann, as if her question illustrated his point. “Having done a minimal examination, I have to admit, the dynamic properties of this indigo clay are singular. To turn a little thing like death on its damned head…”

  Miss Temple ignored him, suppressing the burn in her throat.

  “And where is Colonel Aspiche?” she croaked.

  Fochtmann frowned at the interruption.

  “Where is Robert Vandaariff?” he demanded.

  “Where is Mrs. Marchmoor?”

  “Where did he take all the machinery?”

  “Where is Mrs. Marchmoor?”

  “No, you must answer me! Where is Robert Vandaariff? Why does he want this particular tool? Why did he send you?” He slammed both fists onto the table, his long arms like the forelegs of a powerful horse. “You cannot brave me unless you are prepared to brave Mrs. Marchmoor! However… if you cooperate with me now…”

  Miss Temple shivered to recall the glass woman hammering her mind.

  “You have no choice,” he said, gently as a farmer easing a lamb onto the block.

  “It's because you can see, isn't it?” she said. “You understand what this glass can do, perhaps now more than any man alive… they have employed you like a coachman, but they do not comprehend that you will gain an advantage over them all… over her, over the world.”

  Fochtmann smiled tightly, immensely pleased with her description.

  “What will you do with me?” Miss Temple asked.

  “That depends. You must do what I say.”

  “Must I?”

  He chuckled. Miss Temple leaned across the table, as if to share a final secret, daring him to hear it. Despite himself, Fochtmann leaned down to meet her. Her voice was a whisper.

  “You were given a chance.”

  She swung the case with all her strength, for it was well made, with sharp metal corners—one of which caught Mr. Fochtmann's shining forehead like the spike of a chisel. He reeled with a cry, one hand to the wound, blood already pouring through his fingers and across the Comte's papers.

  “O! O damn you to hell! Help! Help me—help!”

  Instead of running to the door, which had been her first impulse, Miss Temple instead went directly at the weaving, keening man. He saw her coming and croaked his defiance, waving a spattered palm to ward her off, but she swung the case again, with both hands, hard, cracking it straight into his right kneecap. Fochtmann toppled with a squawk at her feet. Miss Temple felt the sickening black presence in the back of her throat. She brought the case down once more on Mr. Fochtmann's head and stopped his movements altogether.

  HE WAS still alive, for the bellows of his chest beat like the wet wings of a newborn insect. Miss Temple seriously considered cutting his throat with the knife in her boot—inflamed without even noticing by seven different memories of that very action, nose thick with the remembered smell, hands twitching at how hot the spray—but instead she sensibly crossed to the door and locked it. She returned to the prone man—curious at how out of their element a tall person seems when on the ground, like fish on a tar-baked dock. Ignoring the dark coagulated smears above his face, she stepped to his topcoat, hung on a chair: cigars, matches, a scented handkerchief, a brass case of visiting cards printed with swirling script on a pale green bond paper (Marcus Fochtmann, Theoretical Engineer, 19 Swedter Street).

  The outer pocket contained something heavy and clinking, and Miss Temple extracted a canvas pouch, sewn shut, like a bag of grape-shot for a tiny cannon. She sensed a glimmer of nauseating memory and forced it away—any more and she would vomit. What did every detail matter—no doubt the bag held machine parts—and she shoved it angrily back into his coat.

  The final pocket was custom-made, for it was long and perfectly suited for what it in fact held, a rolled piece of stiff vellum. Miss Temple hesitated, but could not prevent herself from unrolling the paper. The sheet held an elegant sketch by the Comte d'Orkancz of a slotted brass pedestal, trailing thick metal tubes and black hoses. At the sight of the sketch a black acrid surge brought Miss Temple to her knees, gagging, but the harsh strain on her throat was subsumed by a wave of perception as to the pedestal's function. The slot held a glass book. The tubes and hoses were attached to a person, laid out upon a table—the machine serving to connect the glass book to that person's mind. Depending on how one set the seven brass knobs, alchemic energy could flow in either direction. If the energy was directed toward the book, the person's mind was drained and the book inscribed with their memories. If the energy was directed toward the person, the book's contents were imprinted on the person's mind, obliterating their own memory—and possibly, if one chose to use the word, their soul.

  Miss Temple gasped as if she had been submerged in water and with desperate fury ripped the vellum drawing in half and then half again, pulling the pieces to ragged bits. Her mind swam with black loathing, and when her eyes found Fochtmann laid out next to her, his eyelids fluttering, she was at once caught between the futility of any action and the sharp urge to end his life. The knife lay in her boot. Fochtmann's right hand feebly groped the carpet. He was an enemy. If one saw the world with open eyes, was it anything but cowardice to halt half-way? Chang would not have scrupled to kill him. The Contessa would have slain the man without a qualm. Miss Temple wanted to believe her rage was her own, but as she swayed on her feet she knew it had been contaminated every bit as much as her desire.

  With a tremor of fear she tried to remember some moment of her own—some instant she could claim—but found only a new swirl of visions, like the flutters of a dovecote, set loose inside her head. She squeezed her thighs together and sucked hard on her lower lip, appalled at the sudden rush of sweetness in her loins, and groaned (… smooth cool marble against her bare buttocks, her fingers, heavy with ecclesiastical signets, forced into a grunting man's mouth…), willing her thoughts to something else—to someone else—but it seemed as if every bit of care and affection in her heart had been translated to mere hunger, the impulse of animals, a callous cycle of need and dissipation, of emptiness and death at the end of everything, woven into each moment, inevitable and cruel. She remembered Chang's hand on her body and gagged, steeped in the horrid futility of each morsel of longing.

  MISS TEMPLE wiped her eyes on a sleeve, wishing herself back to a time when everything had always seemed so clear. But how long ago was that? Before leaving her island? Before Roger's letter ended their engagement? Before the glass book? Miss Temple was not one to care about causes, or about cares in the first place—it was a simpler life without them—but she could not bear being so subject to forces she insisted on seeing as external, as unthinkable plagues. A larger thought hung within her reach—the differences between one death and another, or between her killing of Roger and the hanging of a renegade by her father's overseer… her benefit from each, her participation in each. More examples flared from the Contessa's book, murders and executions and desperate struggle, those collected lives rising to mirror a secret history she could not deny—how violence, rather than gold, was the true currency of her world, and how in such a world, to her sharp shame, she remained a very wealthy girl indeed.

  But Miss Temple appreciated shame no more than criticism, and shoved this unwelcome conclusion away as if it were a malingering servant in her path. On her way to the door she paused to wipe the edges of Lydia's case on the carpet. The last thing she needed was to stain her dress.

  MISS TEMPLE realized she had not properly understood the glass woman. Fochtmann must have been sought out some time ago, perhaps as soon as the airship had been aloft. Even if only in the interest of survival, Mrs. Marchmoor was casting a wider net—hiring her own expert on the glass, hunting down Charlotte Trapping, ransacking the minds around her for diplomatic advantages. But the Duke's usefulness was only a matter of
time, and the glass woman would need another mouthpiece.

  At once Miss Temple saw the glass woman's plan, and the reason she had come to Harschmort: to implant the contents of the book— the Comte's memories and sensibility—into the vacant mind of Robert Vandaariff. With both the Comte's knowledge and Vandaariff's vast fortune at her call, what need she fear from any survivor of the Cabal— what from any quarter anywhere?

  Yet this book was now Miss Temple's. And the Comte's machinery— whose now was that? And where was Robert Vandaariff? Every element of the glass woman's plan had gone wrong. Miss Temple's torment of minutes before was shoved aside by her own ably working mind—these plagues would prove as tractable as any other apparently devastating tragedy. Did the loss of a mother or a father's violence dog her every step as a woman? Of course not—she scarcely recalled either to mind at all.

  Her intention had been to climb through a window and hike across the fens to the train. Yet as she sought the proper ground-floor room, Miss Temple was aware of another possibility, like the echo of her boots against the marble. If Harschmort was riddled with her foes, they were now scattered and beset: Fochtmann bloodied, Rawsbarthe debased, Mrs. Marchmoor perhaps quite literally broken… she asked herself what Chang would do in the same circumstances and knew he would hunt down whoever had offended him. Miss Temple turned to the more rational Doctor Svenson, and immediately remembered the sad face of young Francesca Trapping. If he were here, the Doctor would no more leave Harschmort now than take the child's life himself.

  She allowed herself a sneer at the Doctor's tractability, just on the off chance such sneering might convince her that she could in fact walk on, but it did not, and so Miss Temple stopped, besieged all the more by her own meanness of spirit. There really was nothing wrong with simply saving herself. Indeed, she was certain the Doctor and Chang would both advise this exact course of action for her, while never once considering it for themselves. This realization settled the matter at once.