The Contessa only pushed past him into the trees.
When they emerged on the other side, another road crossed before them, overgrown with grass and knee-high saplings. Svenson realized it must have predated the canal, for it curved away around the forest, and recalled all the ruins he had passed in the woods while walking with Elöise. Parchfeldt Park was a sort of graveyard—like any forest perhaps, where every new tree fed on the pulped-up corpses beneath it. But as graveyards always brought to the Doctor's mind his own mortality, so standing on the derelict road placed all the new life and effort he had seen—the barge, the re-fitted factory, its master's blazing ambition—within the heavy shadows of time.
The Contessa had not spoken since they'd seen the torch-led crowds. Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and she turned to him.
“If I had not appeared, did you intend to simply approach the front door and charm the inhabitants to your will?”
He was aware that sharp questions and a mocking tone must be strange to her, and did not doubt he was angering the woman—and yet his questions were also plainly meant. What had she expected? What seeds of defeat or despair might find purchase in her heart?
“You're a strange man,” she at last replied. “I remember first meeting you at the St. Royale, where it was immediately obvious you were an intelligent, dutiful, tractable fool. I do not think I was wrong—”
“I admit Cardinal Chang cuts a more spectacular figure.”
“Cardinal Chang is merely another stripe of heart-sop idiot—you could each learn a thing from your little provincial ice floe. Yet I am not speaking of them, Doctor, but of you.”
“What you think cannot be my concern.”
The Contessa gazed at him, so wan and simple it made him blanch. “I will find the proper word for you someday, Doctor. And when I do, I shall whisper that word into your ear.”
The Contessa turned and began to walk toward the factory.
“Where are you going?” he cried. “We do not know who is there! We do not know why—if you have not called them—these people, your minions, have assembled!”
The Contessa looked over her shoulder—an action he was certain caused her pain.
“Content yourself with your card,” she called back to him. “The ideals you place upon the world are broken. There is nothing necessary here at all.”
THE SHIMMER of her silk dress caught the moon even after he could, no longer distinguish her shadow from the surrounding dark, and then she was around the curve and gone. He did not follow, wondering why, and looked back at the trees where they had come from, and then down the overgrown road as it led away from the factory… a path he might follow to another world. He reached into his pocket for his cigarette case and felt his fingertips touch the cold glass card. Was there enough moonlight to see? Was it not an intensely stupid thing to do in such open ground?
Doctor Svenson sighed, regretting the act already (what had Elöise said, that knowing more of a thing invariably meant more pain?), and turned his gaze into the glass.
WHEN HE finally looked up again the world around him seemed unreal, as if he had been staring into the sun. He felt the sweat on the back of his neck and a stiffness in his fingers from gripping the glass rectangle so tightly. He slipped it back into his tunic pocket and rubbed his eyes, which seemed to be moist… tears? Or merely his body's response to not blinking? He began walking toward the factory.
The card had been infused with Trapping's memory, but that made sense, since the man would have taken part in many gatherings where the Cabal recruited its intimates, where the cards were a prominent lure. Svenson had looked into two cards before this, each different from the other in the manner of captured experience. The first contained one specific event—the Prince's intimacy with Mrs. Marchmoor, when the woman's sensations had been bled into the glass on the spot. The second card, holding the experiences of Roger Bascombe, had been an assemblage of impressions and memories, from his groping of Miss Temple on a sofa to the quarry at Tarr Manor. To fabricate it, the memories must have been distilled into the card well after the fact, from Bascombe's mind.
Trapping's card—as the Doctor now thought of it—was different from each of these. Its experience was not rooted in images, or even in tactile sensations. Instead, it conveyed—and to a hideous degree—an emotional state alone. There was context—and here the card was similar to Bascombe's card, with an apparently random flow of trivial incidents: the foyer table of the Trappings' house at Hadrian Square… the Colonel's red uniform reflected in polished silver as he ate a solitary breakfast… the house's rear garden, where he watched his children from a cushioned chair. Yet suffusing each of these moments was a feeling of bitterness, of selfish need and brutish reaction, of exile and isolation, of a man whose bluff, unthinking complacency had been punctured by sorrow sharp as an iron nail.
Mrs. Trapping appeared nowhere, yet her absence was not its source. What reason did Arthur Trapping have to be so bitter? His ambition had been handsomely rewarded… and suddenly Svenson placed Colonel Trapping's bottomless resentment: he owed the Xonck brothers for everything he had achieved. Each gleaming point of disgust spelled it out: a calling card in the foyer from Francis, Trapping's red uniform a disgraceful sign of Henry's patronage, the very house itself a wedding present, the children—even these, Svenson thought, shuddering, came under Trapping's eyes with guilty sparks of hatred, before the lightness of their voices spun the anger into a binding net of grief. And this struck Svenson most of all—that the lasting impression from Colonel Trapping was not rage, but unanswerable sadness.
If Mrs. Trapping was absent from the card, Elöise Dujong was even more so—was she not the man's mistress? This was convenient if Elöise hoped to assuage Svenson's anger, but Doctor Svenson was not truly angry—perhaps, he thought dryly, it was a lifelong failing. The choices Elöise had made, however much apart from his own desires, were too easily seen to be contingent and human. She had done what she had done—though he did not especially want to think about it— just as he had buried his own grief for Corinna in useless service. And yet, to present him with the experience of this man—was that not simply cruel? Being the object of such cruelty deadened his heart. What else would she expect? What could trump the visceral distaste of being placed within his rival's body? That Trapping was sad? That Trapping loathed his in-laws? What did either of these matter when Svenson would have happily seen Trapping horsewhipped by both brothers and thrown into a salt-bath?
THE LIGHT still blazed through the factory's windows, and Svenson could see the shadows of a gathered crowd against the wooden wall. As he came nearer he heard a buzz of discontentment, affronted mutters, and calls of disbelief. The gate had not opened, a turn of events the crowd found altogether unexplainable. The men with torches held them high, the better to shout to the unanswering windows. Their dress was not as formal as when he'd seen these same people at the final Harschmort gala, but there was no question they represented the highest levels of profession, the military. There was also a rank of younger faces within the whole—those for whom profession was but a path to pass the time, high-born siblings or cousins living near enough to taste the titles they would never hold, forever nursing jealousies and resentments. Svenson compared this gathering with the servants and clerks he'd met on the train to Tarr Manor, seduced into selling the dark secrets of their masters in exchange for what to the Cabal must have seemed like red feathers given to South Sea islanders for land—a decent place to live and enough money for a new coat in winter. What could any of the well-placed people before him lack, by what lures had they been led along? The Doctor shook his head—the terms did not matter at all. The Cabal had suborned each group by dangling before their eyes a credible prospect of hope.