The Dark Volume (48 page)

“Miss Temple! Nor I—of all people—
you!”

Andrew Rawsbarthe had always been the servile functionary hovering at Roger's right arm, and as a young woman inured to servantry from an early age—and servantry of an especially abject status—Miss Temple had regarded him as merely a more animated, speaking species of footstool.

“Permit me to observe you do not look at all well.”

“A smithereen of fatigue,” offered Rawsbarthe, plucking at his shirt collar. “Extra duties with this recent
unrest
. It will pass.”

“You have lost a tooth.”

“But I have found
you,”
the man replied, his tongue reflexively sliding over the gap. “In Harschmort House.”

“I believe it is
I
have done the finding.”

Miss Temple noticed Mr. Rawsbarthe's eyes upon her bosom… and was shocked that instead of sparking her bitter ire, she sensed with a mocking pleasure what power his covetous desire granted her, and what she might now be able to
do
.

His eyes flicked to the open door behind her.

Sensing that Rawsbarthe sought to prevent her exit, she reached for the door herself and swung it closed, the clasp catching with a well-greased
click
to shut them in together.

“That is a new coat you wear,” said Miss Temple. “And of a finer cut. Do you know where Mr. Bascombe—your superior—is?”

Mr. Rawsbarthe cleared his throat and swallowed. “Do
you
?”

“Do you know why you molt to pieces like a dying parrot?”

“Roger Bascombe is dead!” blurted Rawsbarthe, openly gauging her reaction to this news.

“Is he?”

“Do you deny it?”

“Why should I?”

“Because Bascombe was murdered! He accompanied Deputy Foreign Minister Crabbé to Macklenburg, but they never arrived— cables from Warnemünde have confirmed it!”

“Not arriving does not make him dead, much less murdered.”

Rawsbarthe stepped closer, shaking his head with a cloying tolerance. “Do you imagine the Queen's Privy Council and her Ministries remain idle when so much hangs in the balance? I know you were this very morning found at Stropping Station and taken to the Palace. I know your disfigured criminal accomplice—yes, yes, we are
aware
of your
activities
—has re-emerged from the gutters where he fled. And the German spy? His own government has issued papers for his arrest—by now he's been dragged home in chains, or had his throat cut by his countrymen! You know about Roger Bascombe! You know about Arthur Trapping!”

“Ah, well then, it is impossible to dissemble.” Miss Temple found herself smiling enigmatically and batting her eyes. “I put a bullet through Roger Bascombe's heart myself.”

RAWSBARTHE WAS silent. Miss Temple deliberately inhaled, the small swell of her breasts momentarily confounding the man's attention, and then let out a poor little sigh.

“You will undoubtedly want to arrest me—it is natural. And yet… have we not made enough amiable conversation between us— at the Ministry, at Mr. Bascombe's home, at so many very dull receptions—to possess between us
some
understanding?”

“You…
shot
him?”

“Dear Mr. Rawsbarthe…what I
mean
to say—and I may be wrong, and if that is so, we must proceed to unfortunate outcomes—”

“The murder of Roger Bascombe—”

“Enough about Bascombe.”

“Miss Temple, as much as I might prefer—”

“Mr. Rawsbarthe, I do not believe you are a fool.”

“I am gratified by the sentiment, I'm sure.”

“Indeed, so—please—if you could just step…
here.”

She took his arm—causing him to nervously lick his lips—and guided him two steps to the mirrored cabinet. Rawsbarthe flinched.

“Look at my skin.” Miss Temple nodded to her mirrored image. “Below the eyes.”

“You are a perfectly attractive young woman—”

“O Andrew, normally I should blushingly agree with you, but the two of us must be honest… I look ill.”

“People often do.”

“Not me.”

“No doubt the toll of your recent
immorality
—”

“Andrew… look at yourself.”

At once he pulled away. “I—I am a representative of the Foreign Ministry, and I insist that you accompany me downstairs. You must see the Duke—”

“How do you think I arrived?”

Rawsbarthe put a hand to his mouth. “You saw the Duke? You spoke with him? Impossible, he speaks to no one.”

“Of course he doesn't—”

“But how are you free? Did they not know you?”

“Of course they did!”

“How can that be?”

“Have you
seen
the Duke? Andrew, listen to me, for your own sake…”

Rawsbarthe's eyes shirked away from hers and he squeezed the leather case.

“Andrew, answer me! Have you
seen
the Duke?”

Rawsbarthe waved at the mirror without looking at it. “If you refer to his Grace's illness—most definitely not the blood fever that has been rumored—rumored to infect all Harschmort, and yet here we are!—it is but an ague that will pass! If in the meantime others of us shake under his Grace's chills, it is another sort of loyalty, of
service
…”

Rawsbarthe took another step away, staring at the carpet like a shamed dog, his voice colored by an unpersuasive chuckle.

“Whatever you have
assumed
—well, trust you are not the first to make the error! Indeed, the inner workings of a modern government must appear a veritable
spider's web
of influence and compulsion to the humble citizen, and so the commonplace—an ague!—turns into mystery, crisis, plague! I do not know what Mr. Bascombe ever explained to you—very little, I should think, you being, indeed, a w-w-woman—”

“Mr. Rawsbarthe—”

“Now I must take you downstairs with all dispatch. Mr. Bascombe spoke at all times with discretion—I have heeded no insinuations about what compromised your engagement, even now, despite those questionable men who have become your
companions.”

Miss Temple stepped nearer and he began to stammer. She could smell the frangipani perfume on her skin and wondered if he could as well. Rawsbarthe took a breath with a quivering determination, as if he had been abruptly pushed to some inner precipice.

“A great deal has changed, Miss Temple. I do not promise I am in a position to help you—but yet it may be that I am not wholly without influence. I
have
been summoned to Stäelmaere House… on several occasions… a sign of favor I should not have dreamed of one week ago.”

“I have just been there myself,” observed Miss Temple.

“Then you know!” he said quickly, and then caught himself. “Or perhaps not, perhaps you did not—cannot—truly appreciate—”

“Appreciate
what
exactly?” She came closer, despite the unclean odor of his mouth.

“How bold you are, I see that—even if you try to influence me— toward, ah, leniency—but—but nevertheless, because you know—
knew
—Mr. Bascombe, you can at least appreciate my good fortune, even to be
invited
—”

“O I
do
appreciate it,” she whispered.

“Do you truly?”

“I should like every detail! Once you entered Stäelmaere House— the seat of the Privy Council itself… the corridor with the glass cases and those awful old paintings—were you ushered to a room? Come, Andrew… what do you
remember?”

“Naturally, I was not alone—”

“Were you with Mr. Soames?”

“How do you know Soames?” Rawsbarthe's voice was pinched. “Soames is
new! He
didn't see the Duke? Soames is hardly worthy of—”

“Soames does not matter,” she assured him. “The
room
. It was dark?”

“His Grace is notoriously particular.”

“So you did see the Duke?”

“Of
course!
And we
heard
him.”

“What did he say?”

“I… I… the words themselves…”

She waited. Rawsbarthe clutched his hands.

“Andrew… surely you
remember?”

“Ah… well—”

“How can you not remember what the Duke of Stäelmaere said to you
personally?
The highest achievement of your career?”

Rawsbarthe was silent. Her lips almost touched his blood-scabbed ear.

“I will tell you why, Andrew. You fell asleep. Every one of you. You had dreams. A pain in your head… the taste of copper in your throat. You knew exactly what you must do, though you cannot recall receiving any instruction. And afterward none of you said a word—”

“Silence b-bespeaks the high respect—”

“Listen to yourself! It is Mrs. Marchmoor!”

“I beg your pardon? I am unacquainted with any M-M-Mrs.—”

“The glass woman.”

Rawsbarthe attempted a blanched smile. “I must assure you again there are no
women
in Stäelmaere House—the Duke's, ah,
martial
proclivities—”

She took his shoulder and thrust him again toward the mirror. Mr. Rawsbarthe bleated his protest and squeezed shut his eyes.

“Andrew! Mrs. Marchmoor has rummaged in your thinking like it was a
bag!”

“Miss Temple—”

“Look at yourself!”

He did, but at once burst free with a stricken cry, shoving past and knocking Miss Temple across one of the chairs. By the time she pulled herself upright, there was no sign or sound of Andrew Rawsbarthe at all.

MISS TEMPLE found her side staircase. The walls were lined with painted niches aping the shadowed passageways of a cathedral, each holding allegorical figures that Miss Temple—whose biblical education had been attended to with a gratifying indifference—nevertheless recognized as the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Despite her hurry she could not help but stare as she went down, the toads, blood, lice, and fire presaging her own descent into the stinking mire that had already swallowed poor Rawsbarthe. But the final landing stopped her cold, for the wider section of wall allowed for a more elaborate tableau, and she stood there, Francesca Trapping's bandaged arm fresh in her mind, facing the death of the Egyptian firstborn, where pitiless angels dangled lifeless children from both hands, hovering above a crowd of keening women.

At the base of the stairs was a door on a swing. She was near the kitchens. The corridor wound past rooms stuffed with barrels and crates and crocks and bottles and baskets and burlap sacks, rooms storing pots and pans both massive enough to cook a wild boar whole and comedically small, as if for a Roman banquet of larks. Yet every room she passed, in what ought to have been the busiest part of the household, was devoid of servants.

At a larger archway she wrinkled her nose and looked about her for the source of the smell—matted straw thrown onto the mess, the actual cleaning laid aside for some luckless drudge, perhaps a soup-bowl's worth of mustard yellow vomit. Miss Temple had reached the enormous central kitchen hearth, radiating heat from a bed of white flaking coals. The benches and tables that filled the room had all been pushed aside, as if making room for… something. She advanced slowly, and the smells of gastric excrescence gave way to the stench of indigo clay. A pebble crunched beneath her foot—a fleck of blue glass. The smell was thicker at the hearth itself, the heat against her face. On the brick border of the oven lay a dusting of tiny blue needles…

What
had
happened in the garden? And where was everybody
now
?

She staggered and put a hand over her mouth, turning her face and groping for the nearest table to support her. What had just happened?

She had framed the questions in her mind… and then suddenly received a sickening flick of an answer… the glass woman had been in here, and in such distress that the agony projected from her mind had sickened the minions around her. The knowledge had come from the Comte's memories—Miss Temple's own mind drawing unbidden from that pool, dangerously and without warning…

Miss Temple bent over and did her best to rid herself of the nausea, but nothing came. She felt the blood rushing to her head and stood, grim and once more consumed with an anger not altogether hers.

THE CORRIDOR ended at another swinging door and she pushed through to an elegant dining room. A crystal chandelier in the shape of a three-masted frigate hung over an enormous long dark table. The glass craft floated like a ghost ship, bearing a mere half-dozen candles, their glow abetted by a standing candelabrum on the table itself, set next to a man in his shirtsleeves. He sat in the master's own thronelike seat, and busied himself amidst a mass of papers. One ink-stained hand held an old-fashioned feather pen and the other a metal tool she had seen used on a ship to measure distance. Beyond him lay the doorway out.

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.”