Lydia? Miss Temple looked at the blonde woman. Could this be the daughter of Robert Vandaariff, the fiancée of the Doctor’s drunken Prince, the heiress to the largest fortune imagined? The object of her gaze did not respond, save to search again for the decanter, this time catching it, pulling out the stopper, and pouring another glass.
Mrs. Marchmoor chuckled. Lydia Vandaariff downed the contents—her fifth glass?—and positively bleated, “Shut up. You’re late. What are the two of you talking about? Why am I talking to you two when it’s Elspeth I’m supposed to see? Or even more—the Contessa! And why are you calling her Temple? She said her name was Hastings.”
Miss Vandaariff wheeled to Miss Temple, squinting with suspicion. “Didn’t you?” She looked back to Mrs. Marchmoor. “What do you mean, ‘hunted down’?”
“She is making a poor joke,” said Miss Temple. “I have not been found—on the contrary, it is I who have come here. I am glad you spoke to the Comte—it saves me time explaining—”
“But who are you?” Lydia Vandaariff was becoming drunker by the minute.
“She is an enemy of your father,” answered Mrs. Marchmoor. “She is undoubtedly armed, and intends some mayhem or ransom. She killed two men the night of the ball—that we know of, there may be more—and her confederates have plans to assassinate your Prince.”
The blonde woman stared at Miss Temple. “Her?”
Miss Temple smiled. “It is ridiculous, is it not?”
“But … you did say you were at Harschmort!”
“I was,” said Miss Temple. “And I have tried to be kind to you—”
“What were you doing at my masked ball?” Miss Vandaariff barked at her.
“She was killing people,” said Mrs. Marchmoor tartly.
“That soldier!” whispered Lydia. “Colonel Trapping! They told me—he seemed so fit—but why would anyone—why would you want him dead?”
Miss Temple rolled her eyes and exhaled through her teeth. She felt as if she had become marooned in a ridiculous play made up of one rambling conversation after another. Here she had before her a young woman whose father surely sat at the heart of the entire intrigue, and another who was one of its most subtle agents. Why was she wasting time confirming or denying their trivial questions, when it was in her own power to take control? So often in her life Miss Temple was aware of the frustration that built up when she allowed other people their own way of action when she very clearly knew that their intentions were absolutely not her own. It was a pattern followed endlessly with her aunt and servants, and again now as she felt herself a shuttlecock knocked between the two women and their annoyingly at-odds nattering. She thrust her hand into her bag and pulled out the revolver.
“You will be silent, both of you,” she announced, “except when answering my questions.”
Miss Vandaariff’s eyes snapped wide at the sight of the gleaming black pistol, which in Miss Temple’s small white hand seemed fearsomely large. Mrs. Marchmoor’s reaction was, on the contrary, to adopt an expression of placid calm, though Miss Temple doubted the depths of its serenity.
“And what questions would those be?” Mrs. Marchmoor replied. “Sit down, Lydia! And stop drinking! She has a weapon—do try and concentrate!”
Miss Vandaariff sat at once, her hands demurely in her lap. Miss Temple was surprised to see her so responsive to command, and wondered if such discipline had come to be the only kind of attention she recognized and thus, though her entire rambling rant would seem to contradict the idea, what she craved.
“I am looking for the Contessa,” she told them. “You will tell me where she is.”
“Rosamonde?” Miss Vandaariff began. “Well, she—” She stopped abruptly at a look from the end of the table. Miss Temple glared at Mrs. Marchmoor and then turned back to Lydia, who had placed a hand over her mouth.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Miss Temple.
“Nothing,” whispered Miss Vandaariff.
“I should like you to finish your sentence. ‘Rosamonde?’ ”
Miss Temple received no answer. She was particularly annoyed to see a small curl of satisfaction at the corner of Mrs. Marchmoor’s mouth. She turned back to the blonde woman with an exasperated snarl.
“Did you not just exclaim to me about the injustice of your position, the predatory nature of those around you, and around your father, the loathsome quality of your intended husband, and the degree to which you—despite your position—are accorded no respect? And here you defer to—to whom? One who has only these weeks shifted her employment from a brothel! One who is an utter minion of the very people you despise! One who quite obviously bears you no good will at all!”
Miss Vandaariff said nothing.
Mrs. Marchmoor’s expression devolved into a grim smile. “I believe the girl plays tricks upon us both, Lydia—it is well known she has been thrown over by Roger Bascombe, the prospective Lord Tarr, and no doubt it is some pathetic attempt to regain his affection that brings this person to our door.”
“I am not here for Roger Bascombe!” spat Miss Temple, but before she could continue, or wrench the conversation back into her control, the mention of Roger had prompted Miss Vandaariff to carom back to her pose of condescending superiority.
“Can it be any surprise he has dropped her? Just look at her! Pistols in a hotel restaurant—she’s a savage! The type that would do well with a whipping!”
“I cannot disagree,” replied Mrs. Marchmoor.
Miss Temple shook her head at this scarcely credible idiocy.
“This is nonsense! First you say I am a murderer—an agent in league against you—and now I am a deluded heartsick girl! Pray make up your mind so I can scoff at you with precision!” Miss Temple confronted Miss Vandaariff directly, her voice rising near to a shout. “Why do you listen to her? She treats you like a servant! She treats you like a child!” She wheeled again to the woman at the end of the table, who was idly twirling a lock of brown hair around a finger. “Why is Miss Vandaariff here? What did you intend for her? Your Process? Or merely the thralldom of debauchery? I have seen it, you know—I have seen you—and him—in this very room!”
Miss Temple thrust a hand into her green bag. She still had one of the Doctor’s glass cards—was it the right one? She took it out, glanced at it and stumbled to her feet—causing Mrs. Marchmoor to menacingly half-rise from the table. Miss Temple recovered her wits—pulling herself out of the blue depths—and brought the revolver to bear, motioning the woman back into her seat. It was the wrong card, with Roger and herself—still the sinister immersion itself might be enough. Miss Temple set the card in front of Miss Vandaariff.
“Have you seen one of these?” she asked.
The querulous blonde looked to Mrs. Marchmoor before answering and then shook her head.
“Pick it up and look into it,” said Miss Temple, sharply. “Be prepared for a shock! An unnatural insinuation into the very mind and body of another—where you are helpless, trapped by sensation, subject to their desires!”
“Lydia—do not,” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor.
Miss Temple raised the revolver. “Lydia … do.”
There was something curious, Miss Temple found, in the ease with which one could impose on another an experience that one knew—first hand—to be disquieting, or frightening, or repugnant, and at the grim satisfaction one took in watching the person undergo it. She had no idea of Miss Vandaariff’s intimate experience, but assumed, from her childish manner, that she had been generally sheltered, and while she was not thrusting her brusquely into the carnal union of Karl-Horst and Mrs. Marchmoor on the sofa—though she would have been happy to do so—she still felt a little brutal in forcing even this less transgressive card upon her at all. She remembered her own first immersion—the way in which she had naïvely assured Doctor Svenson it was nothing she could not bear (though she had been unable to fully meet his eyes afterwards)—and the shocking sudden delicious troubling rush of sensation she’d felt as the Prince ha
d stepped between his lover’s open legs, the lover whose undeniably sweet experience she had herself then shared for that exquisite instant. As a young lady, the value of her virtue had been drilled into her like discipline into a Hessian soldier, yet she could not exactly say where her virtue presently stood—or rather could not separate the knowledge of her body from that of her mind, or the sensations she now knew. If she allowed herself the room to think—a dangerous luxury, to be sure—she must face the truth that her confusion was nothing less than the inability to distinguish her thoughts from the world around her—and that by virtue of this perilous glass her access to ecstasy might be as palpable a thing as her shoes.
Miss Temple had taken out the card as a way to prove to Miss Vandaariff in one stroke the wicked capacity of her enemies and the seductive dangers they might have already offered, to warn her by way of frightening her and so win the heiress to her side, but as she watched the girl gaze into the card—biting her lower lip, quickening breath, left hand twitching on the table top—and then glanced to the end of the table to see Mrs. Marchmoor studying the masked woman with an equally intent expression—she no longer knew if the gesture had been wise. Faced with Lydia’s intensity of expression, she even wondered if somehow she had done it to gain perspective on her own experience, as if watching Miss Vandaariff might be watching herself—for she could too readily, despite the need to pay attention, the obvious danger, imagine herself again in the lobby of the Boniface, eyes swimming into the depths of blue glass, hands absently groping her balled-up dress, and all the time Doctor Svenson knowing—even as he turned his back—what was passing with a shudder through her body.
Miss Temple recalled with shock the words of the Comte d’Orkancz—that she would fall prey to her own desire!
Her hand darted forward and she snatched the card away. Before Miss Vandaariff could do anything but sputter in mortified confusion, it had been stuffed back in the green bag.
“Do you see?” Miss Temple cried harshly. “The unnatural science—the feeling of another’s experience—”
Miss Vandaariff nodded dumbly, and looked up, her eyes fixed on the bag. “What … how could it be possible?”
“They plan to use your place of influence, to seduce you as they have seduced this man, Roger Bascombe—”
Miss Vandaariff shook her head with impatience. “Not them … the glass—the glass!”
“So, Lydia …” chuckled Mrs. Marchmoor from the end of the table, relief and satisfaction in her voice, “you weren’t frightened by what you saw?”
Miss Vandaariff sighed, her eyes shining, an exhalation of intoxicated glee. “A little … but in truth I don’t care about what I saw at all—only for what I felt …”
“Was it not astonishing?” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor, her earlier concern quite forgotten.
“O Lord … it was! It was the most exquisite thing! I was inside his hands, his hunger—groping her—” She turned to Miss Temple. “Groping you!”
“But—no, no—” began Miss Temple, her words interrupted by a glance to Mrs. Marchmoor, who was beaming like a lighthouse. “There is another—with this woman! And your Prince! Far more intimate—I assure you—”
Miss Vandaariff snapped at Miss Temple hungrily. “Let me see it! Do you have it with you? You must—there must be many, many of them—let me see this one again—I want to see them all!”
Miss Temple was forced to step away from Miss Vandaariff’s grasping hands.
“Do you not care?” she asked. “That woman—there!—with your intended—”
“Why should I care? He is nothing to me!” Miss Vandaariff replied, flapping her hand toward the end of the table. “She is nothing to me! But the sensation—the submersion into such experience—”
The woman was drunk. She was troubled, damaged, spoiled, and now yanking at Miss Temple’s arm like a street urchin, trying to get at her bag.
“Control yourself!” she hissed, taking three rapid steps away, raising the pistol—though here she made the realization (and in the back of her mind knew that this was exactly the kind of thing that made a man like Chang a professional, that there were things to learn and remember about, for example, threatening people with guns) that whenever one used a gun as a goad to enforce the actions of others, one had best be prepared to use it. If one was not—as, in this moment, Miss Temple recognized she was not prepared to do against Miss Vandaariff—one’s power vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle. Miss Vandaariff was too distracted to take in anything save her strangely insistent hunger. Mrs. Marchmoor, however, had seen it all. Miss Temple wheeled, her pistol quite thrust at the woman’s smiling face.
“Do not move!”
Mrs. Marchmoor chuckled again. “Will you shoot me? Here in a crowded hotel? You will be taken by the law. You will go to prison and be hanged—we will make sure of it.”
“Perhaps—though you shall die before me.”
“Poor Miss Temple—for all your boldness, still you comprehend nothing.”
Miss Temple scoffed audibly. She had no idea why Mrs. Marchmoor would feel empowered to say such a thing, and thus took refuge in defiant contempt.
“What are you talking about?” whined Lydia. “Where are more of these things?”
“Look at that one again,” said Mrs. Marchmoor soothingly. “If you practice you can make the card go more slowly, until it is possible to suspend yourself within a single moment as long as you like. Imagine that, Lydia—imagine what moments you can drink in again and again and again.”
Mrs. Marchmoor raised her eyebrows at Miss Temple and cocked her head, as if to urge her to give up the card—the implication being that once the heiress was distracted the two of them—the adults in the room—could converse in peace.
Against all her better instincts, perhaps only curious to see if what Mrs. Marchmoor had just said might be true, Miss Temple reached into her bag and withdrew the card, feeling as her fingers touched its slick cool surface the urge to look into it herself. Before she could fully resolve not to, Miss Vandaariff snatched it from her grasp and scuttled away to her seat, eyes fixed on the blue rectangle cupped reverently in her hands. Within moments Lydia’s tongue was flicking across her lower lip … her mind riveted elsewhere.
“What has it done to her?” Miss Temple asked with dismay.
“She will barely hear us, and we can speak clearly,” answered Mrs. Marchmoor.
“She seems not to care about her fiancé.”
“Why should she?”
“Do you care for him?” she demanded, referring to the explicit interaction held fast within glass. Mrs. Marchmoor laughed and nodded at the blue card.
“So you are held within that card … and on another I am … encaptured with the Prince?”
“Indeed you are—if you think to deny it—”
“Why should I? I can well imagine the situation, though I confess I don’t remember it—it is the price one pays for immortalizing one’s experience.”
“You do not remember?” Miss Temple was astonished at the lady’s decadent disregard. “You do not remember—that—with the Prince—before spectators—”
Mrs. Marchmoor laughed again. “O Miss Temple, it is obvious you would benefit from the clarity of the Process. Such foolish questions should nevermore pass your lips. When you spoke to the Comte, did he ask that you join us?”
“He did not!”
“I am surprised.”
“He in fact threatened me—that I should submit to you, being so defeated—”
Mrs. Marchmoor shook her head with impatience. “But that is the same. Listen, you may wave your pistol but you will not stop me—for I am no longer of such a foolish mind to be so occupied with grievance—from asking again that you recognize the inevitable and join our work for the future. It is a better life, of freedom and action and satisfied desire. You will submit, Miss Temple—I can promise you it is the case.”
Miss Temple had nothing to say. She gestured with the revolver. “Get up.�
��
If Mrs. Marchmoor had convinced her of one thing, it was that the private room was too exposed. It had served her purpose to pursue her inquiries but was truly no place to linger—unless she was willing to risk the law. With the revolver and the card both in her bag, she drove the women before her—Mrs. Marchmoor cooperating with a tolerant smile, Miss Vandaariff, still masked, making furtive glances that revealed her flushed face and glassy eyes—up the great staircase and along to the Contessa Lacquer-Sforza’s rooms. Mrs. Marchmoor had answered the inquiring look of the desk clerk with a saucy wave and without any further scrutiny they passed into the luxurious interior of the St. Royale.
The rooms were on the third floor, which they reached by a second only slightly less grand staircase, the rods and banisters all polished brass, that continued the curve of the main stair up from the lobby. Miss Temple realized that the winding staircases echoed the red and gold carved ribbons around the hotel’s supporting pillars, and found herself gratified by the depth of thought put into the building—that one could expend such effort, and that she had been clever enough to note it. Miss Vandaariff glanced back at her again, now with a more anxious expression—almost as if some idea had occurred to her as well.
“Yes?” asked Miss Temple.
“It is nothing.”
Mrs. Marchmoor turned to her as they walked. “Say what you are thinking, Lydia.”
Miss Temple marveled at the woman’s control over the heiress. If Mrs. Marchmoor still bore the scars of the Process, she could only have been an intimate of the Cabal for a short time, before which she was in the brothel. But Lydia Vandaariff deferred to her as to a long-time governess. Miss Temple found it entirely unnatural.
“I am merely worried about the Comte. I do not want him to come.”
“But he may come, Lydia,” replied Mrs. Marchmoor. “You do well know it.”
“I do not like him.”
“Do you like me?”
Gordon Dahlquist Page 4
