The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Volume Two Page 6

  At this very exquisite moment, in the distant reaches of her mind Miss Temple was aware that she had become lost, and with some difficulty located in her memory—or the memories of so many others—a thin voice against the ecstatic roar, the words of Mrs. Marchmoor to Miss Vandaariff about the card, about concentrating on a moment to relive it, to take control of the sensation, of the experience itself. The girl’s nimble tongue sparked another spasm of pleasure within her loins and Miss Temple—through the eyes of whoever had given her experience to this book—looked down and with excruciating effort focused her mind on the feeling of the girl’s hair between her hands, her fingers pushing against the braids, studded with beads, and then the beads alone, the color … they were blue, of course they were blue … blue glass … she made herself stare into it, deeply, gasping again, thrusting her hips despite herself but somehow pushing her attention past the sweetly searching tongue, driving all other thoughts and sensations from her mind until she saw and felt nothing save the surface of glass and then, in that clear moment, with the force of her entire being, she willed herself elsewhere, pulling free.

  Miss Temple gasped again and opened her eyes, surprised to see that her head was against the floor, pressed into the pile of fabric to the side of the book. She felt weak, her skin hot and damp, and pushed herself to her hands and knees, looking behind her. The Contessa’s suite of rooms was silent. How long had she been looking at the book? She could not begin to recall all of the stories she had seen—been a part of. Had it taken hours, lifetimes?—or was it like a dream, where hours could transpire within minutes? She rolled back on her heels and felt the unsteadiness of her legs and, to her discomfort, the slickness between them. What had happened to her? What thoughts were now embedded in her mind—what memories—of ravaging and being ravaged, of blood and salt, male and female? With a dull irony, Miss Temple wondered if she had become the most thoroughly debauched virgin in all of history.

  Forcing her drained body to move, Miss Temple carefully wrapped the damask shawl around the book and tied it. She looked around her for her green bag. She did not see it. Had it not been wrapped around her hand? It had been, she was sure … but it was gone.

  She stood, taking up the wrapped book, and turned her attention to the still half-open door. As quietly as possible she peered through the gap into the parlor. For a moment she was unsure whether she had truly left the book, so strange was the sight before her, so wholly composed, as if she gazed into a Pompeian grotto recreated in the modern world. Mrs. Marchmoor sat reclining on the slope of a divan, her beige dress unbuttoned and pushed to her hips and her corset removed, upper body naked save for the triple row of pearls that tightly spanned her throat. Miss Temple could not help but look at her left breast, heavy and pale, the fingers of the woman’s left hand idly teasing the nipple, for her right was quite blocked by Miss Vandaariff’s head. Miss Vandaariff, no longer wearing the mask, blonde hair undone down the length of her back, lay fully on the divan next to Mrs. Marchmoor, eyes closed, legs curled, one hand closed in a soft fist in her lap, the other softly supporting the second breast, from which she nursed dreamily, for comfort, like a satiated milk-drunk babe.

  Across from them, in an armchair, a cheroot in one hand and his pearl-tipped ebony stick in the other, once more in his fur, sat the Comte d’Orkancz. Behind him, standing in a half-circle, were four men: an older man with his arm in a sling, a short, stout man with a red complexion and livid scars around his eyes, and then two men in uniforms that, from her contact with Doctor Svenson, she knew must be from Macklenburg. One was a severe, hard-looking man with very short hair, a weathered, drawn face, and bloodshot eyes. The other she knew—from the card, she realized, she knew him most intimately—was Karl-Horst von Maasmärck. Her first corporeal impression of the Prince was less than favorable—he was tall, pale, thin, depleted, and epicene, lacking a chin, and with eyes reminiscent of uncooked oysters. But past all of these figures her gaze moved quickly to the second divan, upon which sat the Contessa Lacquer-Sforza, her cigarette holder poised perfectly, a thin thread of smoke curling up to the ceiling. The lady wore a tight violet silk jacket with a fringe of small black feathers to frame her pale bosom and throat, and dangling amber earrings. Below the jacket her dress was black and it seemed, as if she were some elemental magic being, to flow down her body and directly into the dark floor … where the previous litter of garments had been joined by the wholly savaged contents of Miss Temple’s slashed and ruined carpet bag.

  With the exception of Miss Vandaariff’s, every set of eyes stared at Miss Temple in complete silence.

  “Good evening, Celeste,” said the Contessa. “You have returned from the book. Quite impressive. Not everyone does, you know.”

  Miss Temple did not reply.

  “I am happy you are here. I am happy you have had the opportunity to exchange views with the Comte, and with my companion Mrs. Marchmoor, and also to acquaint yourself with dear Lydia, with whom you must of course have much in common—two young ladies of property, whose lives must appear to be the very epitome of an endless horizon.”

  The Comte exhaled a plume of blue smoke. Mrs. Marchmoor smiled into Miss Temple’s eyes and slowly turned the ruddy tip of her breast between her thumb and forefinger. The row of men did not move.

  “You must understand,” the Contessa went on, “that your companion Cardinal Chang is no more. The Macklenburg Doctor has fled the city in fear and abandoned you. You have seen the work of our Process. You have looked into one of our glass books. You know our names and our faces, and the relation of our efforts to Lord Vandaariff and the von Maasmärck family in Macklenburg. You even”—and here she smiled—“must know the facts behind the impending elevation of a certain Lord Tarr. You know all of these things and can, because I’m sure you are as clever as you are persistent, guess at many more.”

  She raised the lacquered holder to her lips and inhaled, then her hand floated lazily away to again rest on the divan. With a barely audible sigh her lips parted in a wry, wary smile and she blew a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth.

  “For all of this, Celeste Temple, it is certain you must die.”

  Miss Temple did not reply.

  “I confess,” the Contessa continued, “that I may have misjudged you. The Comte tells me I have, and as I’m sure you know the Comte is rarely wrong. You are a strong, proud, determined girl, and though you have caused me great inconvenience … even—I will admit it—fury … it has been suggested that I tender to you an offer … an offer I would normally not make to one I have determined to destroy. Yet it has been suggested … that I allow you to become a willing, valuable part of our great work.”

  Miss Temple did not reply. Her legs were weak, her heart cold. Chang was dead? The Doctor gone? She could not believe it. She refused to.

  As if sensing defiance in her quivering lip, the Comte took the cheroot from his mouth and spoke in his low, rasping, baleful manner.

  “It could not be simpler. If you do not agree, your throat will be cut straightaway, in this room. If you do, you will come with us. Be assured that no duplicitous cunning will avail you. Abandon hope, Miss Temple, for it will be expunged … and replaced by certainty.”

  Miss Temple looked at his stern expression and then to the forbidding beauty of the Contessa Lacquer-Sforza, her perfect smile both warmly tempting and cold as stone. The four men gazed at her blankly, the Prince scratching his nose with a fingernail. Had they all been transformed by the Process, their bestial logic released from moral restraints? She saw the scars on the Prince and on the stout man. It seemed that the older fellow shared their glassy-eyed hunger—perhaps his marks had already faded—only the other soldier bore a normal expression, where certainty and doubt were both at play. On the face of the others was only an inhuman, uncomplicated confidence. She wondered which of them would be the one to kill her. She looked finally to Mrs. Marchmoor, whose blank expression masked what Miss Temple thought was a genuine curiosity … as i
f she did not know what Miss Temple would do, nor what, once she did submit, might possibly come of it.

  “It seems I have no choice,” Miss Temple whispered.

  “You do not,” agreed the Contessa, and she turned to the large man seated next to her and raised her eyebrows, as if to signal her part in the matter was finished.

  “You will oblige me, Miss Temple,” said the Comte d’Orkancz, “by removing your shoes and stockings.”

  She had walked in her bare feet—a simple stratagem to prevent her from running away with any speed through the ragged filthy streets—down the stairs and out of the St. Royale Hotel. Mrs. Marchmoor remained behind, but all of the others descended with her—the soldier, the stout scarred fellow, and the older man going ahead to arrange coaches, the Comte and Contessa to her either side, the Prince behind with Miss Vandaariff on his arm. As she walked down the great staircase, Miss Temple saw a new clerk at the desk, who merely bowed with respect at a gracious nod from the Contessa. Miss Temple wondered that such a woman had need of the Process at all, or of magical blue glass—she doubted that anyone possessed the strength or inclination to deny the Contessa whatever she might ask. Miss Temple glanced to the Comte, who gazed ahead without expression, one hand on his pearl-topped stick, the other cradling the wrapped blue book, like an exiled king with plans to regain his throne. She felt the prickling of the carpet fibers between her toes as she walked. As a girl her feet had once been tough and calloused, used to running bare throughout her father’s plantation. Now they had become as soft and tender as any milk-bathed lady’s, and as much a hindrance to escape as a pair of iron shackles. With a pang of desolating grief she thought of her little green boots, abandoned, kicked beneath the divan. No one else would ever again care for them, she knew, and could not but wonder if anyone would ever again care for her either.

  Two coaches waited outside the hotel—one an elegant red brougham and the other a larger black coach with what she assumed was the Macklenburg crest painted on the door. The Prince, Miss Vandaariff, the soldier, and the scarred stout man climbed inside this coach, with the older man swinging up to sit with the driver. A porter from the hotel held open the door of the brougham for the Contessa, and then for Miss Temple, who felt the textured iron step press sharply into her foot as she went in. She settled into a seat opposite the Contessa. A moment later they were joined by the Comte, the entire coach shuddering as it took on his weight. He sat next to the Contessa and the porter shut the door. The Comte rapped his stick on the roof and they set forth. From the time of the Comte’s demand for her shoes to the coach moving, they had not spoken a word. Miss Temple cleared her throat and looked at them. Extended silence nearly always strained her self-control.

  “I should like to know something,” she announced.

  After a moment, the Comte rasped a reply. “And what is that?”

  Miss Temple turned her gaze to the Contessa, for it was she at whom the question was truly aimed. “I should like to know how Cardinal Chang died.”

  The Contessa Lacquer-Sforza looked into Miss Temple’s eyes with a sharp, searching intensity.

  “I killed him,” she declared, and in such a way that dared Miss Temple to speak again.

  Miss Temple was not yet daunted—indeed, if her captor did not want to discuss this topic, it now constituted a test of Miss Temple’s will.

  “Did you really?” she asked. “He was a formidable man.”

  “He was,” agreed the Contessa. “I filled his lungs with ground glass blown from our indigo clay. It has many effective qualities, and in such amounts as the Cardinal inhaled is mortal. ‘Formidable’ of course is a word with many shadings—and physical prowess is often the simplest and most easily overcome.”

  The ease of speech with which the Contessa described Chang’s destruction took Miss Temple completely aback. Though she had only been acquainted with Cardinal Chang for a very short time, so strong an impression had he made upon her that his equally sudden demise was a devastating cruelty.

  “Was it a quick death, or a slow one?” Miss Temple asked in as neutral a voice as she could muster.

  “I would not call it quick.…” As the Contessa answered, she reached into a black bag embroidered with hanging jet beads, pulling out in sequence her holder, a cigarette to screw into the tip, and a match to light it. “And yet the death itself is perhaps a generous one, for—as you have seen yourself—the indigo glass carries with it an affinity for dream and for … sensual experience. It is often observed that men being hanged will perish in a state of extreme tumescence—” she paused, her eyebrows raised to confirm that Miss Temple was following her, “if not outright spontaneous eruption, which is to say, at least for the males of our world, such an end might be preferable to many others. It is my belief that similar, perhaps even more expansive, transports accompany a death derived from the indigo glass. Or such at least is my hope, for indeed, your Cardinal Chang was a singular opponent … truly, I could scarcely wish him ill, apart from wishing him dead.”

  “Did you confirm your hypothesis by examining his trousers?” huffed the Comte. It was only after a moment that Miss Temple deduced he was laughing.

  “There was no time.” The Contessa chuckled. “Life is full of regrets. But what are those? Leaves from a passing season—fallen, forgotten, and swept away.”

  The specter of Chang’s death—one that despite the Contessa’s lurid suggestion she could not picture as anything but horrid, with bloody effusions from the mouth and nose—had spun Miss Temple’s thoughts directly to her own immediate fate.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you must know,” answered the Contessa. “To Harschmort House.”

  “What will be done to me?”

  “Dreading what you cannot change serves no purpose,” announced the Comte.

  “Apart from the pleasure of watching you writhe,” whispered the Contessa.

  To this Miss Temple had no response, but after several seconds during which her attempts to glance out of the narrow windows—placed on either side of their seat, not hers, assumedly to make it easier for someone in her position to either remain unseen or, on a more innocent planet, fall asleep—revealed no clear sense of where in the city she might now be, she cleared her throat to speak again.

  The Contessa chuckled.

  “Have I done something to amuse you?” asked Miss Temple.

  “No, but you are about to,” replied the Contessa. “ ‘Determined’ does not describe you by half, Celeste.”

  “Very few people refer to me with such intimacy,” said Miss Temple. “In all likelihood, they can be counted on one hand.”

  “Are we not sufficiently intimate?” asked the Contessa. “I would have thought we were.”

  “Then what is your Christian name?”

  The elegant woman chuckled again, and it seemed that even the Comte d’Orkancz curled his lip in a reluctant grimace.

  “It is Rosamonde,” declared the Contessa. “Rosamonde, Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza.”

  “Lacquer-Sforza? Is that a place?”

  “It was. Now I’m afraid it has become an idea.”

  “I see,” said Miss Temple, not seeing at all but willing to appear agreeable.

  “Everyone has their own plantation, Celeste … their own island, if only in their heart.”

  “What a pity for them,” declared Miss Temple. “I find an actual island to be far more satisfactory.”

  “At times”—the Contessa’s warm tone grew just perceptibly harder—“such is the only way those locations may be visited or maintained.”

  “By not being real, you mean?”

  “If that is how you choose to see it.”

  Miss Temple was silent, knowing that she did not grasp the Contessa’s larger point.