No one touched her, or spoke. She remained bent over—who knew how long?—until her sobbing eased, eyes squeezed shut. She was so frightened, in a way even more than in her deathly struggle with Spragg, for that had been sudden and violent and close and this…they had given her time—so much time—to steep in her dread, to roil in the prospect that her soul—or something, some fundamental element that made Miss Temple who she was—was about to be savagely, relentlessly changed. She had seen Caroline on the stage, limbs pulling against the leather restraints, heard her animal groans of uncomprehending agony. She recalled her own earlier resolve to jump from a window, or provoke some sudden mortal punishment, but when she looked up and saw Caroline waiting for her with a tender patience, she understood that no such rash gesture would be allowed. Standing next to Caroline were Miss Vandaariff and her maids. The young woman was dressed in two white silk robes, the outer—without sleeves—bordered at the collar and the hem with a line of embroidered green circles. Her feet were bare and she wore a small eye-mask of densely laid white feathers. Her hair had been painstakingly worked into rows of sausage curls to either side of her head and gathered behind—rather like Miss Temple’s own. Miss Vandaariff smiled conspiratorially and then put a hand over her mouth to mask an outright giggle.
Caroline turned to the maids. “Miss Temple can change here.”
The two maids stepped forward and for the first time Miss Temple saw another set of robes draped over their arms.
Caroline walked between them, black feathered mask across her eyes, holding hands with each, the three followed by another trio of black-coated Macklenburg troopers with echoing black boots. The marble floor of the corridor—the same great corridor of mirrors—was cold against Miss Temple’s still bare feet. She’d been stripped to her own silk pants and bodice and, as before, given first the short transparent robe, then the longer robe without sleeves, and finally the white feathered mask—all the time aware of the eyes of Miss Vandaariff and Caroline frankly studying her.
“Green silk,” said Lydia approvingly, as Miss Temple’s undergarments were revealed.
Caroline’s eyes met Miss Temple’s with a smile. “I’m sure they must be specially made.”
Miss Temple turned her head, feeling her desires—foolish and naïve—on display every bit as much as her body.
The maids had finished tying the string and then stepped away with a deferent bob. Caroline had dismissed them with a request to inform the Contessa that they awaited her word, and smiled at her two women in white.
“You are both so lovely,” said Caroline.
“We are indeed.” Miss Vandaariff smiled, and then shyly glanced at Miss Temple. “I believe our bosom is the same size, but because Celeste is shorter, hers looks larger. For a moment I was jealous—I wanted to pinch them!” She laughed and flexed her fingers wickedly at Miss Temple. “But then again, you know, I am quite happy to be as tall and slender as I am.”
“I suppose you prefer Mrs. Marchmoor’s bosom above all,” said Miss Temple, her voice sounding just a bit raw, attempting to rally her caustic wit. Miss Vandaariff shook her head girlishly.
“No, I don’t like her one jot,” she said. “She is too coarse. I prefer people around me to be smaller and fine and elegant. Like Caroline—who pours tea as sweetly as anyone I have ever met, and whose neck is pretty as a swan’s.”
Before Caroline could speak—a response that surely would have been an answering praise of Miss Vandaariff’s features—they heard a discreet tap at the door. A maid opened it to reveal three soldiers. It was time to depart. Miss Temple tried to will herself to run at the window and hurl herself through. But she could not move—and then Caroline was taking her hand.
They were not half-way down the mirrored corridor when behind them erupted a clatter of bootsteps. Miss Temple saw the whiskered man, Blenheim, whom she took to be Lord Vandaariff’s chamberlain, racing toward them with a group of red-coated Dragoons in his wake. He carried a carbine, and all of the Dragoons held their saber-sheaths so they would not bounce as they ran.
In a moment his group had passed them by, running ahead to one of the doors on the far right side…a room—she had tried to maintain Harschmort’s geography in her head as they walked—that bordered the exterior of the house. Caroline pulled on her hand, walking more quickly. Miss Temple could see that they were nearing the very door she had gone through with the Contessa, where she had previously found her robes, the room that led to the medical theatre…it seemed a memory from another lifetime. They kept walking. They had reached it—should she try to run?—Caroline did not release her hand but nodded to one of the soldiers to get the door. Just then the door ahead of them—where Blenheim’s party had gone—burst open, spewing a cloud of black smoke.
A Dragoon with a soot-smeared face shouted to them, “Water! Water!”
One of the Macklenburg men turned at once and ran back down the hall. The Dragoon disappeared back through the open door, and Miss Temple wondered if she dared dash toward it, but again before she could move, her hand was squeezed by Caroline and she was pulled along. One of the remaining Macklenburg troopers opened the door to the inner room and the other anxiously shepherded them inside away from the smoke. As the door shut behind them Miss Temple was sure she heard an escalation of shouts and the echoing clamor of more bootsteps in the marble hall.
It was once more silent. Caroline nodded to the first soldier and he crossed to the far door, the one cunningly set into the wall, and vanished through it. The remaining man installed himself at the hallway entrance, hands behind his back, and his back square against the door. Caroline looked around, to make certain all was well, and released her grip on their hands.
“There is no need to worry,” she said. “We will merely wait until the disturbance is settled.”
But Miss Temple could see that Caroline was worried.
“What do you think has happened?” she asked.
“Nothing that Mr. Blenheim has not dealt with a thousand times before,” Caroline replied.
“Is there really a fire?”
“Blenheim is horrid,” said Lydia Vandaariff, to no one in particular. “When I have my way he will be sacked.”
Miss Temple’s thoughts began to race. On the far side of the theatre was another waiting room—perhaps that was where the soldier had been forced to go…she remembered that her own first visit had revealed the theatre to be empty. What if she were to run to the theatre now? If it was empty again might not she climb into the gallery and then to the spiral staircase, and from there—she knew!—she could retrace the path of Spragg and Farquhar across the grounds and through the servants’ passage back to the coaches. And it was only running on floors and carpets and the grassy garden—she could do it with bare feet! All she needed was a momentary distraction….
Miss Temple manufactured a gasp of shock and whispered urgently to Miss Vandaariff. “Lydia! Goodness—do you not see you are most lewdly exposed!”
Immediately Lydia looked down at her robes and plucked at them without finding any flaw, her voice rising in a disquieting whimper. Caroline’s attention of course went the same way, as did the Macklenburg trooper’s.
Miss Temple darted for the inner door, reaching it and turning the handle before anyone even noticed what she was doing. She had the door open and was already charging through before Caroline called out in surprise…and then Miss Temple cried out herself, for she ran headlong into the Comte d’Orkancz. He stood in heavy shadow, fully blocking the doorway with his massive frame, somehow even larger for the thick leather apron over his white shirt, the enormous leather gauntlets sheathing his arms up to each elbow, and the fearsome brass-bound helmet cradled under one arm, crossed with leather straps, great glass lenses like an insect’s eyes and strange metal boxes welded over the mouth and ears. She flung herself away from him and back into the room.
The Comte glanced once, disapprovingly, at Caroline, and then down to Miss Temple.
“I have
come myself to collect you,” he said. “It is long past time you are redeemed.”
EIGHT
Cathedral
Chang made a conscious effort to bend his knees—knowing that a rigid leg could easily mean a shattered joint—and did so just as he collided hard with a curving, hot wall of filthy, slippery metal. The actual time in the air, undoubtedly brief, was enough to allow a momentary awareness of suspension, a rising in his stomach which, due to the total darkness in the shaft, was exceptionally disorienting. His mind made sense of the fall—he’d struck a curve in the pipe, after a drop of perhaps ten or fifteen feet—as his body crumpled and rolled, losing all pretense of balance or control, and then dropped again as the pipe straightened into vertical once more. This time he slammed down even harder, knocking the breath from his lungs on a welded corner—he’d struck a gap where his pipe was joined by another, his upper body striking the seam and his legs continuing past, dragging him downwards. He scrabbled for a grip, couldn’t get one on the slick metal—covered with the same slimy deposit caked onto the lattice in the urn—and slid down into the darkness, just keeping hold of his stick as it clattered from under his coat. But the impact had slowed his descent, and he was no longer falling but sliding—this pipe was set at an angle. The air rising up to Chang was more noxious and becoming hotter—it seemed grimly probable that this path would feed him into their furnace. He pressed his legs and his arms to the side of the pipe, grudgingly but surely slowing his descent. By the time he slammed into the next junction he was able to catch hold of the lip and stop himself completely, legs swinging below him in the dark. He pulled himself up with an effort and wedged his torso into the opening, so he was nearly balanced and could relax his arms. Chang caught his breath, wondering how far down he had come, and what in the utter world he had been thinking.
He shut his eyes—he couldn’t see anything anyway—and forced himself to focus on what he could hear. From the pipe below came a steady, metallic rattle, in time with regularly spaced gusts of steaming, chemically fouled air. He leaned into the second, joining pipe, which was not as large—large enough to hold him?—and cooler to the touch. He waited, allowing time for a longer cycle, but heard no such rattle from its depths nor felt any such toxic exhalations. He realized absently that his head hurt. The first tendrils of bilious nausea were rising in his stomach. He had to get out. He wrenched himself around in the narrow space and slipped his feet into the narrower pipe. There was just room to fit, and Chang pushed from his mind the prospect of the pipe getting thinner mid-way down—he did not want to think about trying to claw his way back against the slippery interior. He tucked his stick under his coat and pinned it with his left arm, and eased himself down as slowly as he could, pressing his legs against the side of the shaft. There was less of the greasy accretion and Chang found that he could more or less manage his descent, for the pipe went down at a milder angle. The farther he sank from the main shaft, the clearer became the air, and the less he worried about being dropped into a cauldron of molten glass. The pipe continued for some distance—he stopped even trying to guess—and then flattened out, blessedly without narrowing, so that he was on his back (and doing his best to keep his mind from tales of coffins and live burial). The pipe still curved, but now horizontally…as if, he thought with a smile, it traveled around the floor of a circular room. He inched along feet first—unable to turn—trying to make as little noise as he could, though he was forced to stop once, preventing by sheer force of will the voiding of his stomach—jaw clenched against the rising bile, huffing like a wounded horse through his scarred nasal passages. He pushed himself on until, so suddenly it took his fogged mind a moment to make sense of what he was seeing—that he was seeing anything at all—the blackness above him was punctuated by a chink of light. He reached up to it carefully and felt the underside of a metal clasp, and then by delicately searching around it sketched out the borders and sweetly welcome hinges of some sort of panel.
Chang turned the clasp to the side, slipping the bolt clear, and then brought both hands beneath the panel and slowly pushed. The hinges gave way with a rusted groan. He stopped, listened, and forced himself to listen more, another whole agonizing minute. A dim light poured into the shaft and he could see with disgust how rusted and filthy it was. He pushed again, and with a longer squeal of protest the panel swung clear. Chang gasped at the cleaner air and sat up. Only his head and the tip of one shoulder fit with ease through the gap. He was in some sort of brick-walled machine room—a secondary one, perhaps, thankfully not in use—with several similarly sized pipes coming through the walls from different directions, all converging at an enormous riveted metal boiler, clotted with dials and smaller hoses. He shifted back inside the pipe and extricated his right arm and once again his head and then, over the course of an awkward, desperate minute, he was able to force his left arm and torso through the gap, gouging his ribs and his shoulder in the process. Feeling like an insect emerging from its sticky cocoon—and just as feeble—Chang inched his way onto the floor and took in the room around him. It was really quite small. Hanging from a row of hooks was a collection of syringes and stoppered glass tubes, a pair of leather gloves and one of the infernal brass and leather helmets. Undoubtedly his escape hatch was employed to test whatever liquid or gaseous concoctions would be steeped in the iron cauldron. Next to the hooks was an inset sconce with the lower third of a fat, guttering tallow candle—the source of the dim light that had wormed through the latched panel. That it was alight told Chang that someone had been in the room recently…and would be coming back.
At that moment he did not care about them, the machine, or its purpose. Under the rack of pipes was a dirty leather fire bucket. Chang crawled to it and vomited without any effort at all until his stomach had nothing more to give and his throat was raw. He sat back and dug out a shirt-tail to wipe his mouth, then pulled it out farther to smear the filth of the furnace pipes from his face. Chang forced himself to his feet and looked at his red leather coat with bitter resignation. The pride of his wardrobe was most assuredly ruined. The coal dust could have been cleaned, but as he wiped at the caked chemical deposits he saw the red leather beneath had been discolored and blistered, almost as if the coat itself was burned and bleeding. He scooped away as much of the mess as he could with his fingers and then wiped his hands on his filthy pants, feeling as if he’d just swum through a demonic mire. He took a deep breath. He was still light-headed, pain pounding behind his eyes like a hammer—the kind of pain he knew, barring opium, he would be carrying with him for days. He expected that some sort of pursuit must even now be working its way to these depths of the house, if only to confirm that his bones were cracking and popping in a furnace, or he was choked to death in the pipes above it, stuck like a dead squirrel in a chimney. Chang felt the parch of his throat and the desperate dizziness in his head. He needed water. Without it he would die on the blade of the first Dragoon that found him.
The door was locked, but the lock was old and Chang was able to force it with his skeleton keys. It opened into a narrow, circular corridor of brick lit by a sputtering torch bolted into a metal bracket above the door. He could not see another torch in either direction. He quickly walked into darkness to his right. Just around the curve the way ended at a bricked-in wall whose mortar was noticeably fresher than the side walls or the ceiling. Chang walked back past the boiler room in the other direction, looking up at the oppressive ceiling and the circular path of his corridor. He was sure it corresponded to the side of the larger chamber. It was vital—to give himself some breathing room, and to find Miss Temple—that he find some way to climb.
The next torch was bracketed near an open doorway. Inside was a spiral staircase of stone with a bright iron rail on the inner wall. Chang looked up, but could only see a few yards ahead because of the curving stairs. He listened…there was a sound, a low roar, like the wind, or heavy distant rain. He began to climb.
It was twenty steps to another open door
way and another circular corridor. He poked out his head and saw its ceiling was banked as if it were the underside of a stadium. Chang stepped back into the stairwell and shut his eyes. His throat was burning. His chest felt as if it was being squeezed from within—he could just imagine the grains of glass boring into his heaving lungs. He forced himself into the hall, looking for some kind of relief, following the path back to where, on the floor below, his boiler room had been. There was another door in the exact spot, and he forced the lock just as easily. The room was dark. Chang worked the torch from its bracket and thrust it inside: another boiler with another set of metal pipes coming through the walls—perhaps this was the juncture where he’d been unable to hold his grip. His eye saw another leather fire bucket on the floor. He stepped to it and with relief saw that it held water—filthy, brackish, unwholesome, but he did not care. Chang dropped the torch, pulled off his glasses and splashed it onto his face. He rinsed the filthy taste from his mouth and spat, and then drank deeply, gasping, and drank again. He sat back, leaning against the pipe, and looped his glasses back into place. He hawked up another gob of who knew exactly what and let it fly into a dark corner of the room. It was not a night at the Boniface, but it would do.
Chang was back in the hallway, returning to the stairs. He wondered that no one had come down to search for him—either they were sure he was dead…or he’d fallen farther than he’d thought…or they were concentrating on the most important places he might have landed first…all of which made him smile, for it told him his enemies were confident, and that confidence was giving him time. But perhaps they were only making sure he didn’t reach a particular room to interrupt some particular event—after which it would not matter if they hunted him down at their leisure. It was possible—and it could only mean Celeste. He was a fool. He ran for the stairway and charged up it two steps at a time. Another door. He stepped out—another narrow, dusty hallway with a banked ceiling—and listened. The dull roar was louder, but he was convinced that these were only service corridors, that he was still below the main access. Would he have to go to the absolute top before he could find a way inside? There had to be another way—the path above was sure to be swarming with soldiers. Chang sprinted down the corridor in each direction, first to the right, where his boiler had been—another door to an empty room whose boiler had either been removed or not yet installed—and another dead end. He turned and jogged to the left. The roar became louder, and when he reached its dead end—no door at all in this part of the corridor—he placed his hand on the brick, and felt a faint vibration in time with the rumbling sound.