Another noise, now near the fire. While Svenson had been examining the body, the killer had quite silently circled around.
Svenson forced himself to walk—no longer caring for silence— directly toward the fire. A twig tugged insolently across his ear. Some one was there.
On the blanket, one hand picking at the food in the checkered handkerchief, the other tucked out of sight to her side, knelt the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza. She met his arrival with a mocking smirk.
“Doctor Svenson. I confess, you are no one I expected in this particular wood—apart, one supposes, from symmetry—and yet having seen you approach so earnestly…”
Her dress was of poor-quality silk, dyed deep maroon. Her black boots were smeared with mud, and above the left one he could see her white calf. She swept her hand across the blanket, as if to welcome him, indicating the exact spot where the blue card had been set, and spoke again, careful as any cobra.
“Will you not sit? Such old acquaintances like ourselves must have so very much to talk about—we should scarcely notice if it were the end of the world.”
Seven. Cinders
AS A GIRL Miss Temple had once, after insisting upon it for a steady hour, tagging along at his side as he surveyed the fields from the raised high road, been given a puff from the pipe of Mr. Groft, the overseer of her father's plantation. She had immediately become sick— realizing the puff was not likely to be repeated, the young Miss Temple had made it a mighty one—dropping to her knees as the overseer spat oaths above her, for if her father found out he would be sacked. She had stumbled back to her rooms with a splitting pain behind her eyes and a reeking taste that would not leave her mouth no matter how she scrubbed it with lemon slices. Mr. Groft indeed was sacked, but that was the following month and had involved improprieties with house girls, three of whom had been promptly sold (including a sweet fat thing, always kind but whose name Miss Temple had since forgotten), for her father's authority brooked no challenge whatsoever.
It was some years later, preparatory to her voyage to the continent, when Miss Temple, goaded by that same iron cagework of rule, found herself in her father's study. Despite her imminent departure he had ridden to the far side of the island to inspect a new planting and was not expected to return before she sailed, simplifying everything for them both. She had wandered through the house and along the paths of the garden and the open balconies, smelling the sweet, musky fields. She knew she might never return. But in the study, sitting in her father's large leather chair—the horsehair stuffing clumped and flat and kept this way precisely because her father believed a lack of ease sharpened the mind—Miss Temple was suddenly restless, and looked to the closed study door, wondering if she ought to lock it even before she formed any sense of what she was going to do.
One of her hands had idly traced a path, finger by finger, up the inside of her thigh. Despite a fullness of tension in her flesh, not yet demanding but palpable, she pulled her hand away, for she did not choose—since it seemed that she had wandered now pointedly to the heart of her father's domain—to so expend her desires. Instead, she opened the cedar box of cigars, wrinkling her nose. With a shocking and scandalous presumption she took one out and bit off the end, just as she had seen her father do on hundreds of occasions—and she knew, had she been male, this would have been a common occurrence, even such a thing as to bring two men together. She picked the bitter flakes from her mouth and wiped them onto the cracked leather of the chair, then leaned to the candle on the desk top. She puffed four times before the thing took fire, gagged, spat out the smoke, and puffed twice more, swallowing the smoke with a cough. Her eyes watered. After another puff she erupted with a hacking that would not stop. The awful taste was back in her mouth. But she continued to inhale, determined, until there was an inch of tightly coiled grey ash at the end. Miss Temple wiped her lips on her sleeve, feeling dizzy.
It was enough, her edge of restlessness blunted by disgust—with both the tobacco and her own desire. She set the smoking cigar on the metal ashtray and collected her candle, walking unsteadily from the room—uncaring whether a servant would clear it away before her father returned or if he would find the evidence of her invasion himself… a last fittingly oblique communication between them.
THE FOULNESS of these old memories was but a childish shadow to what she had so foolishly just opened herself. Miss Temple lay on her back beyond the gardens of Harschmort, panting hard, staring up without registering the slightest detail of cloud or sky, insensible to any cries that might have echoed beyond the hedgerows, to gunshots, and to time. She reached up slowly, as if the air had become gelatinous with dread, and touched her dripping mouth. Her fingers were wet with saliva and a clotted string of black bile. With a concentrated effort she turned her head and saw, gleaming where it had fallen, the blue glass book. She swallowed, her throat raw from retching, and sank back again, feeling the stalks of tall grass poking at her hair, her will sapped, with all the sickness in her mind rising again like a flooding mire.
Since looking into the glass book in the Contessa's rooms, Miss Temple had been determined that its insistent, delirious memories not overwhelm her, knowing such an initial surrender could easily stretch into a span of days. But Miss Temple's disapproval of a world so defined was primarily fearful, for such surrender frightened her very much. Miss Temple did not consider herself as priggish—she did not tremble at her own natural appetites—yet she knew some pleasures were different. When she imagined them inside her mind, she imagined her mind stained.
But the second book changed all of this. It had colored Miss Temple's thoughts to the same extreme degree as the first—or recolored them, overlaying every vivid impulse ash grey. The Contessa's book had been compiled from countless lives, while the book on the grass contained the memories of a single man—but his memories had been harvested at the very moment of death, infecting each instant of his captured experience with a toxic, corrupting, nauseating dread. It was not unlike the pageants one saw carved on medieval churches— lines of people, from princesses to peasants to popes, trailing hand in hand after Death, the trappings of their lives exposed as vanity. Scenes of lust—and what scenes they were!—became disgusting charades of rotting meat, sumptuous banquets became fashioned whole from human filth, every strain of sweet, sweet music became re-strung to the coarse calling of blood-fed crows. Miss Temple had never imagined such despair, such utter hopelessness, such bottomless bankruptcy. The first book's bright empire of sensation, its unstable riot beneath her skin, had been mirrored by bitter futility, with the acrid dust that was every person's inheritance.
But Miss Temple understood why Francis Xonck had chosen this book to keep. How quick his thoughts must have flown just to see the possibility, to seize an empty glass book. He had preserved in its unfeeling depths—the freezing glass no doubt pressed to the dying man's face—all the alchemical knowledge of the Comte d'Orkancz.
She shoved her body onto one elbow, pursing her lips with a twinge of irritation that hinted at recovery, and looked over her shoulder at the book, whose surface had taken on a satisfied glow. Miss Temple doubted there was any person—even Xonck, even Chang—strong enough to actually immerse themselves in its contents without being utterly overwhelmed. Mrs. Marchmoor's hand had passed into it without harm… but what did that mean? The glass woman may have learned the book contained the Comte—why else would she have gone to Harschmort?—but if she had been able to absorb the actual contents of the Comte's mind, then she would have had no need for Miss Temple and no reason to seek the Comte's tools and machines. Miss Temple recalled the three glass women ransacking the minds of everyone in the Harschmort ballroom—invisibly passing everything they saw to the Comte… it only made sense that he had forbidden them to enter his own mind. Could that taboo extend to his mind when encased in the book? Mrs. Marchmoor had come to Harschmort to insert the book into another body—one the glass woman believed she could control. But that must mean she had no idea of the taint, the corruption coloring all of its contents.