“As you see,” the man on stage continued, “the subject is both highly responsive and content to remain within her self. Such are the immediate effects, along with varying degrees of dizziness, nausea, and narcolepsy. It is why, during these early stages, supervision—protection—is of vital concern.” He snapped his fingers again and from the opposite rampway emerged the second canine escort, guiding the last of the three women in white. She was led to the powerful man, walking perfectly normally, where she curtsied. He took her hand from the escort (who departed the stage) as she straightened, and turned her to face the gallery. She curtsied again.
“This lady,” the man went on, “has been our subject for three days. As you see, she remains in complete control of her faculties. More than this, she has been liberated from strictures of thought. She has in these past three days embraced a new method of life.”
He paused for his dramatic words to register fully, and then continued, a note of dry disdain audibly rising in his voice.
“Three days ago, this woman—like so many others, like so many others here this evening, I presume—believed herself to be in love. She is now positioning herself, with our assistance, to be in power.” He paused and nodded to the woman.
As she spoke, Miss Temple recognized the low voice of the woman in the feathered cloak. Her tone was the same as when she told the story of being with the two men in the coach, but the cold dreamy distance with which she spoke of herself gave Miss Temple chills.
“I cannot say how I was, for that would be to say how I was a child. So much has changed—so much has become clear—that I can only speak of what I have become. It’s true I thought myself to be in love. In love because I could not see past the ways in which I was subject, for I believed, in my servitude, that this love would release me. What view of the world had I convinced myself I understood so well? It was the useless attachment to another, to rescue, which existed in place of my own action. What I believed were solely consequences of that attachment—money, stature, respectability, pleasure—I now see merely as elements of my own unlimited capacity. In these three days I have acquired three new suitors, funds for a new life in Geneva, and gratifying employment I am not permitted”—here she shyly smiled—“to describe. In the process I have happily managed to acquire and to spend more money than I have hitherto in my entire life possessed.”
She had finished speaking. She nodded to the gallery, and took a step backwards. Once more the escort appeared, took her hand, and walked her into darkness. The powerful man watched her exit, and turned back to his audience.
“I cannot give you details—any more than I would provide details about any of you. I do not seek to convince, but to offer opportunity. You see before you examples of different stages of our Process. These two women—one transformed three days since, the other just this night—have accepted our invitation and will benefit accordingly. This third…you will watch her transformation yourselves, and make your own decisions. You will bear in mind that the severity of the procedure matches the profundity of this transformation. Your attention—along with your silence—is quite the limit of what I ask.”
With this, he knelt and picked up one of the wooden boxes. As he crossed with it to the table, he casually pried the top back with his fingers and tossed it aside with a flat clatter. He glanced at the woman, who swallowed with nervousness, and placed the box onto the table, next to her leg. He pulled out a thick layer of orange felt, dropped it onto the floor, and then frowned, reaching into the box with both hands, performing some adjustment or assembly. Satisfied, he removed what looked to Miss Temple like an overly large pair of glasses, the lenses impossibly thick, the frames sheathed in black rubber, trailing hanks of copper wire. The man leaned across the woman’s front, blocking her from view, and tossed her white mask to the side. Before they might know her identity, he lowered the strange piece of machinery onto her open face, tightening it with short powerful movements of his hands that caused the woman’s legs to twitch. He stepped back to the box. The woman was breathing hard, her cheeks were wet, the sleeves of her robe balled up in her fists. The man removed a wickedly toothed metal clamp, attached one end to the copper wire, and secured the other inside the box to something Miss Temple could not see. Upon his doing this, however, the thing inside the box began to glow with a pallid blue light. The woman caught her breath and grunted with pain.
In that exact moment, Miss Temple did the same, for a sharp stabbing sensation pricked her spine directly between the shoulders. And as she turned her head to see the woman in red was no longer in the doorway, she felt from her other side that woman’s breath in her ear.
“I’m afraid you must come with me.”
Throughout their passage from the darkened gallery, across the balcony, and down the stairs themselves, the woman had maintained the pressure of her pinpoint blade, convincing Miss Temple not to call out, pretend a faint, or even to trip her adversary so she might fly over the railing. Once they had reached the long marble corridor, the woman stepped away and tucked her hand back into a pocket—but not before Miss Temple could note the bright metal band across her fingers. The woman glanced up to the balcony, to make sure no one had followed, and then indicated that Miss Temple should lead the way back down the corridor toward the rest of the house. Miss Temple did so, desperately hoping for an open door she could dash through, or the intervention of some passer-by. She already knew that there were other guests—that the events in the operating theatre were hidden from outside eyes within the larger gathering taking place in the whole of the house. If she could only reach that collection of people, she was certain she would find aid. They passed several closed doors, but Miss Temple’s journey to the staircase had been so focused on the people around her that she had little memory of anything else—she’d no idea where these might go, or even if one of these doors might be where she had entered. The woman drove her ahead with sharp shoves past any landmark where she thought to linger. At the first of these offensive gestures, Miss Temple felt her sense of propriety to be fully overwhelmed by her fear. She was frankly terrified what was going to happen to her—that she could be so subject to abuse was just another sign of how low she had fallen, how desperate her straits. At the second shove, a rising level of annoyance was still nevertheless overborne by her own physical frailty, the woman’s weapon and obvious malice, and the knowledge that, as she could certainly be accused with trespassing and theft, she had no legal ground to stand on whatsoever. At the third such shove, however, Miss Temple’s natural outrage flared and without thinking she whipped round and swung her open hand at the woman’s face with all the strength in her arm. The woman pulled her head back and the blow went wide, causing Miss Temple to stumble. At this the woman in red chuckled, insufferably, and once more revealed the device in her hand—a short vicious blade fixed to a band of steel that wrapped across her knuckles. With her other hand she indicated a nearby doorway—by all appearances identical to every other in the corridor.
“We can speak in there,” she said. Glaring her defiance quite openly, Miss Temple went in.
It was yet another suite of rooms, the furniture covered with white cloths. The woman in red closed the door behind them, and shoved Miss Temple toward a covered divan. When Miss Temple turned to her, eyes quite blazing, the woman’s voice was dismissive and cold.
“Sit down.” At this, the woman herself stepped over to a bulky armchair and sat, digging out her cigarette holder and a metal case of cigarettes. She looked up at Miss Temple, who had not moved, and snapped, “Sit down or I’ll find you something else to sit on—repeatedly.”
Miss Temple sat. The woman finished inserting the cigarette, stood, walked to a wall sconce and lit it, puffing, and then returned to her seat. They stared at each other.
“You are holding me against my will,” Miss Temple said, out of the hope that standing up for herself had prompted this conversation.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The woman inhaled, blew smoke aw
ay from them and then tapped her ash to the carpet. She studied Miss Temple, who did not move. The woman did not move either. She took another puff, and when she opened her mouth to speak, smoke came out along with her words.
“I will ask you questions. You will answer them. Do not be a fool. You are alone.” She looked pointedly at Miss Temple and then, shifting her voice to a slightly more dry tone of accusatory recitation, began in earnest. “You arrived in a coach with the others.”
“Yes. You see, I am from the hotel,” Miss Temple offered.
“You are not. It will not aid you to lie.” The woman paused for a moment, as if trying to decide her best course of questioning. Miss Temple asserted herself.
“I am not afraid of you.”
“It will not aid you to be stupid either. You came on the train. How did you know what train to take? And what station? Some person told you.”
“No one told me.”
“Of course someone told you. Who are your confederates?”
“I am quite alone.”
The woman laughed, a sharp scoffing bark. “If I believed that, you’d be headfirst in a bog and I’d be done with you.” She settled back into her chair. “I will require names.”
Miss Temple had no idea what to say. If she simply made up names, or gave names that had nothing to do with the matter, she would only prove her ignorance. If she did not, the risk was even greater. Her knee was trembling. As calmly as she could, she put a hand on it.
“What would such a betrayal purchase me?” she asked.
“Your life,” answered the woman. “If I am kind.”
“I see.”
“So. Speak. Names. Start with your own.”
“May I ask you a question first?”
“You may not.”
Miss Temple ignored her. “If something were to happen to me, would this not be the most singular signal to my confederates about the character of your activities?”
The woman barked again with laughter. She regained control over her features. “I’m sorry, that was so very nearly amusing. Please—you were saying? Or did you want to die?”
Miss Temple took a breath and began to lie for all she was worth.
“Isobel. Isobel Hastings.”
The woman smirked. “Your accent is…odd…perhaps even fabricated.”
As she was speaking in her normal voice, Miss Temple found this extremely annoying.
“I am from the country.”
“What country?”
“This one, naturally. From the north.”
“I see…” The woman smirked again. “Whom do you serve?”
“I do not know names. I was given instructions by letter.”
“What instructions?”
“Stropping Station, platform 12, 6:23 train, Orange Locks. I was to find the true purpose of the evening and report back all I had witnessed.”
“To whom?”
“I do not know. I was to be contacted upon returning to Stropping.”
“By whom?”
“They would reveal themselves to me. I know nothing, so I can give nothing away.”
The woman sighed with annoyance, stubbed out her cigarette on the carpet, and rummaged for another in her bag. “You’ve some education. You’re not a common whore.”
“I am not.”
“So you’re an un-common one.”
“I am not one at all.”
“I see,” the woman sneered. “Your expenses are paid by the work you do in a shop.” Miss Temple was silent. “So tell me, because I do not understand, just who are you to be doing this kind of…‘investigation’?”
“No one at all. That is how I can do it.”
“Ah.”
“It is the truth.”
“And how were you first…recruited?”
“I met a man in a hotel.”
“A man.” The woman sneered again. Miss Temple found herself studying the woman’s face, noting how its almost glacially inarguable beauty was so routinely broken by these flashes of sarcastic disapproval, as if the world itself were so insistently squalid that even this daunting perfection could not stand up against the onslaught. “What man?”
“I do not know him, if that is what you mean.”
“Perhaps you can say what he looked like.”
Miss Temple groped for an answer and found, looming out of her unsettled thoughts, Roger’s supervisor, the Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr. Harald Crabbé.
“Ah—let me see—a shortish man, quite neat, fussy actually, grey hair, moustache, polished shoes, peremptory manner, condescending, mean little eyes, fat wife—not that I saw the wife, but sometimes, you will agree, one just knows—”
The woman in red cut her off.
“What hotel?”
“The Boniface, I believe.”
The woman curled her lip with disdain. “How respectable of you…”
Miss Temple continued. “We had tea. He proposed that I might do such a kind of task. I agreed.”
“For how much money?”
“I told you. I am not doing this for money.”
For the first time, Miss Temple felt the woman in red was surprised. It was extremely pleasant. The woman rose and crossed again to the sconce, lighting a second cigarette. She returned to her seat in a more leisurely manner, as if musing aloud. “I see…you prefer…leverage?”
“I want something other than money.”
“And what is that?”
“It is my business, Madam, and unconnected to this talk.”
The woman started, as if she had been slapped. She had been just about to sit again in the armchair. Very slowly, she straightened, standing tall as a judge over the seated Miss Temple. When she spoke, her voice was clipped and sure, as if her decision had already been made, and her questions now merely necessary procedure.
“You have no name for who sent you?”
“No.”
“You have no idea who will meet you?”
“No.”
“Nor what they wanted you to find?”
“No.”
“And what have you found?”
“Some kind of new medicine—most likely a patent elixir—used on unsuspecting women to convert them to a lifetime spent in the service of corrupted appetites.”
“I see.”
“Yes. And I believe you are the most corrupted of them all.”
“I’m sure you are correct in every degree, my dear—you have much to be proud of. Farquhar!”
This last was shouted—in a surprisingly compelling voice of command—toward a corner of the room blocked from view by a draped changing screen. Behind it Miss Temple heard the sound of a door, and a moment later saw her escort from before emerge, his complexion even redder, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. “Mmn?” he asked; then, making the effort to swallow, did so, and cleared his throat. “Madam?”
“She goes outside.”
“Yes, Madam.”
“Discreetly.”
“As ever.”
The woman looked down at Miss Temple and smiled. “Be careful. This one has secrets.” She walked to the main door without another word and left the room. The man, Farquhar, turned to Miss Temple.
“I don’t like this room,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
The door behind the screen led them into an uncarpeted serving room with several long tables and a tub of ice. One of the tables held a platter with a ravaged ham on it, and the other an array of open bottles of different shapes. The room smelled of alcohol. Farquhar indicated that Miss Temple should sit in the only visible chair, a simple wooden seat with no padding, a high back, and no arms. As she did, he wandered over to the ham and sawed away a chunk of pink meat with a nearby knife, then skewered the chunk on the knife and stuck it into his mouth. He leaned against the table and looked at her, chewing. After a moment he walked to the other table and leaned against it, tipping a brown bottle up to his teeth. He exhaled and wiped his mouth. After this moment of rest, he contin
ued drinking, three deep swallows in succession. He put the bottle on the table and coughed.
The door on the far side of the room opened and the other escort, with the flask, stepped in. He spoke from the doorway. “See anything?”
“Of what?” Farquhar grunted in reply.
“Fellow in red. Nosing about.”
“Where?”
“Garden?”
Farquhar frowned, and took another pull from the brown bottle.
“They saw him out front,” continued the other man.
“Who is he?”
“They didn’t know.”
“Could be anybody.”
“Seems like it.”
Farquhar took another drink and set the bottle down. He nodded at Miss Temple.
“We’re to take her out.”
“Out?”
“Discreetly.”
“Now?”
“I expect so. Are they still occupied?”
“I expect so. How long does it take?”
“I’ve no idea. I was eating.”
The man in the door wrinkled his nose, peering at the table. “What is that?”
“Ham.”
“The drink—what’s the drink?”
“It’s…it’s…” Farquhar rummaged for the bottle, sniffed it. “Spiced. Tastes like, what’s it…cloves? Tastes like cloves. And pepper.”
“Cloves make me vomit,” the man in the doorway muttered. He glanced behind him, then back into the room. “All right, it’s clear.”
Farquhar snapped his fingers at Miss Temple, which she understood to mean that she should stand and walk to the open door, which she did, Farquhar following after. The other man took her hand and smiled. His teeth were yellow as cheese. “My name is Spragg,” he said. “We’re going to walk quietly.” She nodded her agreement, eyes focused on the white front of his dress shirt, stained with a thin spatter of bright red blood. Could he have been just shaving? She pulled her eyes away and flinched as Farquhar took her other hand in his. The two men glanced at each other over the top of her head and began to walk, holding her firmly between them.