The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (39 page)

“I know nothing,” he cried. “People use the gallery to meet—I am paid to allow it—I say nothing—I will say nothing about any of you—I swear it—”

“Mr. Shanck—” began Miss Temple, but Chang cut her off, tightening his grip on the man with a snarl.

“The paintings have been gathered together you say—by
whom
?”

Shanck sputtered, utterly outraged and afraid—though not, it seemed to her, of them. “By—
ah!
—by her
father
!”

Once released, the man broke away and fled across the gallery into a room Miss Temple believed actually held brooms. She sighed with frustration. Still, it gave them a moment to speak.

“We must leave at once,” she said. There were noises from beyond the distant doorway. She reached out an arm and prevented Chang from investigating. “We did not yet decide—”

Chang cut her off. “This greenhouse. It may be dangerous enough that numbers will help our entry. It is also nearby.”

Miss Temple bristled with irritation at Chang’s peremptory manner, but then perceived a flicker of emotion cross his face. Though she could not, with his eyes so hidden, guess what feelings were at work, the very fact of their presence piqued her interest. Chang seemed to her then like a kind of finely bred horse whose strengths were at the mercy of any number of infinitesimal tempests at work in the blood—a character that required a very particular sort of managing.

“I agree,” replied Svenson.

“Excellent,” said Miss Temple. She noted with alarm a growing clamor from amongst the brooms. “But I suggest we leave.”

“Wait…,” called Doctor Svenson, and he dashed away from them toward Veilandt’s
Annunciation
. With a quick glance after Mr. Shanck’s closet, the Doctor snatched it from the wall.

“He’s not going to
steal
it?” whispered Miss Temple.

He was not. Instead, the Doctor flipped the picture over to look at the back side of the canvas, the deliberate nodding of his face confirming that he’d found something there to see. A moment later the painting was returned to the wall and the Doctor running toward them.

“What was it?” asked Chang.

“Writing,” exclaimed Svenson, ushering them toward the street. “I wondered if there might be any indication of the larger work, or—seeing as the man was an alchemist—some kind of mystical formula.”

“And was there?” asked Miss Temple.

He nodded, groping for a scrap of paper and a pencil stub from his coat pocket. “Indeed—I will note them down, though the symbols mean nothing to me—but also, I cannot say what they portend, but there were words, in large block letters—”

“What words?” asked Chang.

“
‘And so they shall be consumed’,”
Svenson replied.

Miss Temple said nothing, recalling vividly the blackboard at Harschmort, for there was no time. They were on the avenue, the Doctor taking her arm as he led the way toward the greenhouse.

“In blood?” asked Chang.

“No,” answered Doctor Svenson. “In
blue
.”

“The entrance to the lane that I know is directly opposite the Boniface,” said Svenson, speaking low as they walked. “To reach the garden gate safely, we will have to walk some distance around the hotel and come at it from the opposite side.”

“And even then,” observed Chang, “you say it may be guarded.”

“It was before. But of course, the Comte was there—without him, the guards may be gone. The problem is, I entered through the garden, that is, the back way—and it was dark and foggy, and I have no real idea whether there is a house connected to it—still less if the house is presently occupied.”

Chang sighed. “If we must circle around it will be longer to walk, yet—”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Temple. The men looked at her. She really would need to take a firmer hand. “We will hire a coach,” she explained, and realized that neither of her companions even thought of hiring a coach as a normal part of their day. It was obvious that between the three of them were different sorts of strength, and different brands of fragility. As a woman, Miss Temple perceived how each of her companions felt sure about where
she
might fail, but lacked a similar sense of their own vulnerabilities. It was, she accepted, her own responsibility, and so she directed their attention down the avenue.

“There is one now—if one of you would
wave
to the man?”

Thus conveyed, each one pressing themselves into their seat and away from the windows, they were on the other side of the lane within minutes. Chang gave Miss Temple a nod to indicate he saw no soldiers. They climbed out and she sent the coach on its way. The trio entered the empty, narrow, cobbled lane, which Miss Temple saw was called Plum Court. The gate stood in the middle of the lane—as they neared it the sounds of the adjoining avenues faded before the deepening shadow, for the buildings around them blocked out whatever light did not fall from directly above, which from this clouded sky was very feeble. Miss Temple wondered how any kind of garden could thrive in such a dull and airless place. The entrance was a strange church-like arch set into the wall around a thick wooden door. The arch itself was decorated with subtle figures carved into the wood, a strange pattern of sea monsters, mermaids, and shipwrecked sailors who were smiling even as they drowned.

Miss Temple turned her gaze to the end of the lane and saw, in the brighter light of the avenue, as if it were a framed colored picture, the front of the Boniface. Standing at the door was Mr. Spanning, with a soldier to either side. Miss Temple tapped Chang on the shoulder and pointed. He stepped quickly to the doorway, set down Miss Temple’s flowered bag and dug in his pocket for a heavy ring of many keys. He rapidly sorted through them, and muttered out of the side of his mouth, “Let me know if they see us…and you might step closer to the wall.”

Miss Temple and the Doctor did press themselves against the wall, each of them readying their pistols. Miss Temple felt more than a little anxious—she had never fired any weapon in her life, and here she was, playing the highwayman. Chang inserted a key and turned. It did not work. He tried another, and another, and another, each time patiently flipping through the ring for a new one.

“If there is anyone on the other side of the door,” whispered Svenson, “they will hear!”

“They already have,” Chang whispered in reply, and Miss Temple noticed that he had casually insinuated himself—and they behind him—to the side of the door, clear of any shots that might be fired through it. He tried another key, and another, and another. He stood back and sighed, then looked up at the wall. It was perhaps ten feet tall, but the sheer face was broken around the door by the ornamental arch. Chang pocketed his keys and turned to Svenson.

“Doctor, your hands please…”

Miss Temple watched with some alarm and a certain animal appreciation as Chang placed his boot in the knitted hands of Doctor Svenson, and then launched himself at the overhanging archway. With the barest grip he slithered up to where he could wedge his knee onto the shingles, shift his weight, and then reach as high as the edge of the wall itself. Within moments, and by what Miss Temple felt to be a striking display of physical capacity, Chang had swung a leg over the wall. He looked down with what seemed to be a professional lack of expression, and dropped from her sight. There was silence. Svenson readied his revolver. Then the lock was turning, the door open, and Chang beckoning them to enter.

“We have been anticipated,” he said, and reached out to take the bag from her.

Under its pall of shadow, the garden was a dreary place, the beds withered, the patches of lawn brown, the limbs of the delicate ornamental trees hanging limp and bare. Miss Temple walked between stone urns taller than her head, their edges draped with the dead fallen stalks of last summer’s flowers. The garden bordered the rear of a large house that had once, she saw, been painted white, though it was now nearly black from a layered patina of soot. Its windows and rear door had been nailed shut with planks, effectively sealing it off from the garden. Before her, Miss Temple saw the greenhouse, a once-splendid dome of grey-green glass, streaked with moss and grime. The door hung open, dark as the gap of a missing tooth. As they walked toward it, she saw that Doctor Svenson was studying the garden beds and muttering under his breath.

“What do you see, Doctor?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon—I was simply noting the Comte’s choice of plants. It is the garden of a dark-hearted herbalist.” He pointed to various withered stalks that to Miss Temple looked all the same. “Here is black hellebore, here is belladonna…foxglove…mandrake…castor beans…bloodroot…”

“My goodness,” said Miss Temple, not knowing the plants Svenson was listing, but willing to approve of his recitation. “One would think the Comte was an apothecary!”

“To be sure, Miss Temple, these are all, in their way, poisons.” Svenson looked up and drew her eye to the door, where Chang had entered without them. “But perhaps there is time to study the flower beds later…”

The light in the greenhouse bore a greenish cast, as if one were entering an aquarium. Miss Temple walked across thick Turkish carpets to where Chang stood next to a large canopied bed. The curtains had been pulled from the posts and the bedding stripped away. She looked down at the mattress with rising revulsion. The thick padding was stained with the deep ruddy color of dried blood, but also, near the head, marked with strange vivid spatters of both deep indigo blue and an acid-tinged orange. Taking her rather aback, Doctor Svenson climbed onto the bed and bent over the different stains, sniffing. For Miss Temple, such intimacy with another person’s bodily discharges—a person she did not even know—extended well beyond her present sphere of duty. She turned away and allowed her eyes to roam elsewhere in the room.

While it seemed like the Comte had vacated the greenhouse and taken with him anything that might have explained his use of it, Miss Temple could still see how the circular room had held different areas of activity. At the door was a small work table. Nearby were basins and pipes where water was pumped in, and next to the basins a squat coal stove topped by a wide flat iron plate for cooking either food or, more probably, alchemical compounds and elixirs. Past these was a long wooden table, nailed to the floor and fitted, she noted with a fearful shiver, with leather straps. She glanced back at the bed. Doctor Svenson was still bent over the mattress, and Chang was looking underneath it. She walked to the table. The surface was scored with burns and stains, as was—she noted when her foot snagged in an open tear—the carpet. In fact, the carpet was absolutely ruined with burns and stains along a small pathway running from the stove to the table, and then again from the stove to the basins, and then, finishing the triangle, from the basins to the table directly. She stepped to the stove, which was cold. Out of curiosity, she knelt in front of it and pried open the hatch. It was full of ash. She looked about her for some tongs, found them, and reached in, her tongue poking from her mouth in concentration as she sifted through the ashes. After a moment she stood up, wiped her hands, and turned quite happily to her companions, holding out a scrap of midnight blue fabric.

“Something here, gentlemen. Unless I am mistaken it is
shantung
silk—is it possible this was the woman’s dress?”

Chang crossed to her and took the piece of burnt cloth. He studied it a moment without speaking and handed it back. He called to Svenson, his voice a trifle brusque.

“What can
you
tell us, Doctor?”

Miss Temple did not think the Doctor noticed Chang’s tone, nor the distressed tapping of his fingertips against his thigh, for Svenson’s reply was unhurried, as if his mind was still occupied with solving this newest puzzle. “It is unclear to me…for, you see, the bloodstains
here
…which do, to my experience with the varied colors of drying blood, seem to be relatively recent…”

He pointed to the center of the mattress, and Miss Temple found herself prodding Chang to join her nearer to the bed.

“It seems a lot of blood, Doctor,” she said. “Does it not?”

“Perhaps, but not if—if you will permit the indelicacy—if the blood is the result of a
natural
—ah, monthly—process. You will see the stain
is
in the center of the bed—where one would expect the pelvis—”

“What about childbirth?” she asked. “Was the woman pregnant?”

“She was not. There are of course other explanations—it could be another injury, there could be violence, or even some kind of poison—”

“Could she have been raped?” asked Chang.

Svenson did not immediately reply, his eyes flitting to Miss Temple. She bore no expression, and merely raised her eyebrows in encouragement of his answer. He turned back to Chang.

“Obviously, yes—but the quantity of blood is prodigious. Such an assault would have had to be especially catastrophic, possibly mortal. I cannot say more. When I examined the woman, she was not so injured. Of course, that is no guarantee—”

“What of the other stains? The blue and the orange?” asked Miss Temple, still aware of Chang’s restless tapping.

“I cannot say. The blue…well, firstly, the
smell
is consistent with a strange odor I have smelt both in the Institute and on the body in Crabbé’s kitchen—mechanical, chemical. I can only hazard it is part of their glass-making. Perhaps it is a narcotic, or perhaps…I do not know, a preservative, a fixative—as it fixes memories into glass, perhaps there is some way in which d’Orkancz hoped to fix the woman into life. I am certain he sought to preserve her,” he added, looking up into Chang’s stern face. “As for the orange, well, it’s very queer. Orange—or an essence of orange peel—is sometimes used as an insecticide—there is an acidity that destroys the carapace. Such is the smell of this stain—a bitter concentrate derived by steam.”