The Chemickal Marriage Read Online Free PDF

Ramper had hired a carriage. The brown-coated man hired a carriage of his own, but Mr Brine had not been able to engage a third carriagein time and had lost his quarry. With a shake of his head – the square nature of which made the gesture more like the swivelling of a wooden block – he described the man as ‘weedy and queer’, with a large moustache. The brown coat was out of fashion and too large for its wearer.
    At this point Mr Brine burst into another apology, but Miss Temple abruptly stood, forcing Brine to stop speaking and rise with her.
    ‘The fault is mine alone, Mr Brine. You warned me. If you would let me know when Mr Pfaff sends word.’
    She sat on her bed with the two red squares upon her lap, turning each in her hands for any hint of what they might contain. That the envelopes came from the Contessa seemed clear: the first to trumpet her command of Francesca Trapping, the second to make plain Miss Temple’s mortal weakness. Neither fact could be gainsaid. She plucked the knife from her boot and sliced open the first envelope. The red paper was stiffer than it appeared. Inside was only a snip of newsprint, by the typeface recognizably from the
Herald
.
–grettable Canvases from Paris, whose
Rococo
Opulence languishes in a mire of degenerate Imagination. The largest, abstrusely entitled
The Chemickal Marriage
, happily eschews the odious, irreligious Satire of Mr Veilandt’s recent
Annunciation
, but the only Union on display is that of Arrogance and Debauchery. The Composition’s Bride, if one can bear to thus describe a Figure so painstakingly degraded
    Miss Temple had seen the artist’s work and did not dispute the assessment, though she did not know this particular piece. That the decadent artist Oskar Veilandt and the Comte d’Orkancz were one and the same was not widely known, for Veilandt was supposed to have died in Paris some years before. If she could acquire the entire article from the
Herald
, she would certainly learn more.
    Miss Temple took up the second envelope, heavier than the first, and cutalong its seam. She peeked inside and felt her breath catch. With delicate care she drew the blade around the next two sides, peeling it open as fearfully as if it were a box that held a beating heart.
    The envelope had been pinned to the door quite deliberately to avoid damaging the small square of glass it held – no thicker than a wasp’s wing, and the colour of indigo ink pooled across white porcelain. She glanced at the door. This had come from the Contessa. The glass might hold anything – degrading, deranging, unthinkable – and to look inside would be as irrevocable as leaping from a rooftop. Her parched throat tasted of black ash … the Comte’s memories told her that the thinness of the glass allowed only the simplest inscription, that the memory must be brief.
    The skin on the back of her neck tingled. Miss Temple forced her eyes around the room, as if cataloguing its reality might give her strength. She looked into the glass.
    Two minutes later – she glanced at once to the clock – Miss Temple had pulled her eyes free. Her face was flushed, yet her transit of the glass fragment had not been difficult: the captured memory was but the viewing of a roll of parchment … the architectural plan of a building she did not know.
    The Contessa had wasted her strategic advantage to acquaint Miss Temple, an
enemy
, with an unhelpful newspaper clipping and an equally pointless map. Obviously each
might
be useful, if she knew what they meant … but why would the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza desire Miss Temple to become even
more
entangled in her business?
    Taking into account the curiosity of maids, Miss Temple hid the clipping and glass square beneath a feathered hat she never wore. The red envelopes were left in plain sight on her desktop, each now containing arbitrary swatches of newsprint.
    The night brought only a terse note from Mr Pfaff: ‘Glassworks engaged, following on.’