The Dark Volume mtccads-2

by Gordon Dahlquist

  A blast of sensation, like the sharp choking rush of black smoke from a stovepipe, shot through the flesh of her arm and without warning enveloped her mind before she could even blink. Miss Temple flew back with a strangled cry, struck the wall, and rolled into the grass, her eyes blind, vomiting without heed, moaning through each spasm like a terrified animal. For she knew now that what Xonck's book contained was death, and its obliterating taste had taken root inside her soul.

  Five. Carapace

  AS IT WAS the nearest place certain to be void of any occupant, L Chang had dragged the insensible man into the closet and through the connecting door into Colonel Trapping's private rooms, locking the door and lighting a single candle after making sure every window shade had been tightly drawn. His captive's topcoat, black suit, and shoes were well made and crisp—Chang was reminded of the odious Roger Bascombe. He held the candle close to the man's face, pulling back the lid of each eye. The whites were bloodshot and yellowed, but the pupils reacted to the candlelight. Chang turned the man's jaw—already a bruise was darkening where his blow had landed—and frowned to see his lips were also bleeding. Had he broken a tooth? With some distaste he peeled back the lower lip, surprised by the raw color of the gums and a newly missing canine. The gap was on the opposite side of the mouth from where Chang had struck him.

  Chang rolled back on his heels and slapped his captive on the face. The man coughed and Chang slapped him again, noticing a patch of scalp above his left ear, pink and raw, like the mistake of a razor or— he was not sure why the thought came to mind—as if his prisoner had sacrificed a lock of hair to some witch's ceremony. Chang glanced at the room, well kept and undisturbed. Any secrets it held would require a thorough search, and yet—the Ministry man was now blinking and wheezing—Chang felt there was more to it, that the room was not well kept so much as embalmed. The Colonel's desk was completely clean—not a blotter, not pens or an ink-pot, even the square sorting compartments empty of envelopes, as if the desk was new. Every trace of Arthur Trapping had been discreetly removed.

  The man coughed again and tried to sit. Chang's free hand easily gathered up the lapels of the fellow's coat, and twisted the fistful of fabric into a knot beneath his jaw.

  “You will answer my questions,” he whispered, “quietly and with speed. Or I will cut your throat. Do you understand?”

  The man looked into Chang's covered eyes with dismay. Chang was aware—what with the candlelight—that his appearance must be even more mysterious than normal, and he permitted himself a satisfied smile.

  “Who do you serve? What Ministry?”

  “Privy Council,” the man whispered.

  “The Duke is alive?”

  The man nodded.

  “Then what about the woman?”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “Margaret Hooke. Mrs. Marchmoor. The glass woman.”

  The man swallowed. “I'm afraid I am not acquainted—”

  Chang casually tipped the candle and dropped a spatter of wax onto the functionary's forehead. The man hissed with pain and clenched shut his eyes.

  “She would be with the Duke,” Chang explained patiently. “If you have seen the Duke, you must have seen her.”

  “No one has seen the Duke!” the man protested. “Everyone is waiting—all the Ministers, the Generals and Admirals, the Men of Business. There are rumors—blood fever at Harschmort House, quarantine …”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In his rooms! The Duke does not appear—merely sends his servants on—on—on—errands—as he requires information—”

  “What information?”

  “Whatever we can find—”

  Chang dripped another stream of wax and used the man's subsequent writhing as a pause, allowing a shift in his questions.

  “What is your name?”

  “Rawsbarthe!” the man whined. “Andrew Rawsbarthe—assistant to the Deputy Under-Secretary of the Foreign Ministry.”

  “Who is the Deputy Under-Secretary?”

  “Roger Bascombe.”

  Chang laughed out loud. “You are Bascombe's assistant? You are older than he by five years!”

  Rawsbarthe sputtered, “Mr. Bascombe's ascent at the Foreign Ministry is due to his great talents—and once Mr. Bascombe discovers how I have been so roundly mistreated—”

  “Roger Bascombe is dead.”

  “What?” Rawsbarthe licked his swollen lips. “May I ask how you know this?”

  “My name is Chang.”

  FOR A moment Rawsbarthe looked up without understanding, and then suddenly his entire body burst into a thrashing attempt to get away. As the fellow was on his back and in no way strong, it was simple for Chang to pin him with one knee and shift his grip to the fellow's throat, squeezing tight.

  “You are a criminal!” Rawsbarthe gasped.

  “And you were searching Mrs. Trapping's private room. I do not believe a woman's bedchamber is the lawful province of any Ministry.”

  “Mrs. Trapping has been summoned to the Duke's presence! She has not complied. My investigation is fully within the scope of the Privy Council's powers—”

  “Then why are you alone in the dead of night? Where are your soldiers? Where is your writ?”

  “I…” Rawsbarthe gulped and twitched his cheek where a fleck of wax had hardened, a milky teardrop. “I… I do not answer to the likes of… ah…”

  “Why does the Duke want to see Mrs. Trapping?”

  “Her brother—”

  “Which brother?”

  Rawsbarthe frowned as if this were the question of an idiot. “Henry Xonck has withdrawn to his home in the country—an attack of fever. With his munitions works, such incapacity becomes a matter of national interest—”

  Before the man could finish, Chang hauled Rawsbarthe to a sitting position against the side of a bedpost. Chang stood, ready to send a kick wherever it might prove necessary.

  “So what did you find here? In the national interest?”

  “Well, firstly—goodness, it seems the room is not Mrs. Trapping's room at all.”

  “Goodness indeed,” sneered Chang. “Empty your pockets.”

  Rawsbarthe shrugged his coat back into place and patted it vaguely, as if trying to remember where the pockets actually were. He plucked out an envelope and peered at the writing.

  “Yes… here… and the woman whose belongings do in fact fill it—one—ah—one—Elöise Dujong—”

  “Tutor to the Trapping children.”

  Rawsbarthe's eyes went wide. “You know her?”

  Chang snatched the envelope from Rawsbarthe's grasp. “Keep talking.”

  “The room is hers! Her clothes fill the closet connecting to the Colonel's chamber! Yet the children have no rooms on this floor of the house! It may well be that Elöise Dujong is the Colonel's mistress! Yet with such a settled inhabitation of the nearby room, Mrs. Trapping must herself be fully aware of the arrangement!”

  Chang dealt enough with the back staircases and alleyways of so ciety to know this sort of arrangement was far more common than was believed. What he did not know—and must discern, for his own safety—was where Elöise's involvement stopped. Was she merely Trapping's mistress… or more? Trapping had been on the periphery of the Cabal, a go-between serving the Xoncks and Vandaariff… but Elöise was hardly unobservant… or a fool…

  Chang looked down at the envelope, sorting his earliest memories of Elöise at Harschmort—she had been whispering advice into Charlotte Trapping's ear. But on their last night—when she had been captured in the Comte's laboratory—it had been Francis Xonck who had taken personal charge of her. Could it be that Elöise was dear to Xonck—that he had manipulated events to spare her?

  “Why take this?” Chang asked Rawsbarthe. “There were many others.”

  “N-no reason at all, merely to satisfy my superiors that I had successfully entered—”

  Chang sent the toe of his boot sharply into Rawsbarthe's ribs, turning the man's words into a
wheeze. The letter was a single page, folded over, covered in script, addressed to Mrs. Elöise Dujong, 7 Hadrian Square… the postal marks were smudged, with no clear date, nor was there any other writing to indicate who the envelope was from. He glanced to Rawsbarthe, who was looking up at him with some trepidation.

  Mrs. Dujong,

  I trust you will forgive my presumption, yet the matters at hand are too vital for etiquette to prevent sharing what I have learned. Your loyal attachment to Colonel and Mrs. Trapping is well known and so I fear you may be the only person in a position to give warning about the imminent danger that now threatens them both. I say both, yet it is for the Lady I am most urgently concerned. You must perceive the depth of interests arrayed against Mrs. Trapping's recent and misguided efforts of enquiry. I have included such tokens that may convince you of my good intention, and implore you to reveal this letter to no one, most particularly the Lady herself.

  Word may be left in my name at the St. Royale Hotel and I shall respond directly. In this I am your humble and obedient servant,

  Caroline Stearne

  There was nothing else in the envelope. Chang crouched down, leaning his face closer to Rawsbarthe.

  “Where is the rest of it?” he asked.

  “I've no idea!” the man squeaked.

  “Who is your immediate superior after Bascombe?”

  “M-Mr. Phelps!”

  This was going nowhere.

  “Why give him this? Of all her things? The truth—or I shall cut off your nose.”

  “Because it mentions Mrs. Trapping! And she has vanished!”

  “Vanished as of when?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “Then who is in charge of the Xonck family interests?”

  Rawsbarthe shook his head. “Stewards, directors, factory managers—but no one can step forward. They all wait for Henry Xonck to recover, though the Doctors give no hope—but the nation's defense, our capacity for military action—”

  “I am not aware of any need for war.”

  Rawsbarthe sputtered. “Simply because you are not aware does not mean that genuine threats—”

  Chang snapped the envelope at Rawsbarthe's nose.

  “What ‘misguided efforts’ was Charlotte Trapping engaged in? Is she being blackmailed? By someone who wants her newly expanded share of the Xonck empire?”

  “I've n-no idea!”

  “Do you know this Caroline Stearne?”

  “Unfortunately not—however, as soon as you allow me to leave I assure you that one of my very first points of business will be to inquire for her at that very hotel.”

  “Do not bother. The woman's throat has been cut ear to ear this last week.”

  Chang stood. If only the letter had a date! How had Caroline Stearne known to write Elöise? When had she known? Such a warning may have steered Charlotte Trapping away from discovering the Cabal's plot, but might it not also have protected the woman when her husband and older brother were both marked for ruin? Serious and stable like Bascombe, Caroline Stearne had been in the first rank of the Cabal's minions, but Chang had no illusion that she would do such a thing on her own impulse… so who amongst the Cabal had directed her?

  Chang turned to Rawsbarthe, who had grown rather accustomed to looking up at the ceiling.

  “Where is Colonel Aspiche?” asked Chang.

  “Who?”

  “Colonel of Dragoons—the 4th Dragoons.”

  “How on earth should I know?”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Is there a reason he wouldn't be?”

  Chang dropped to his knees and drove his fist hard across Rawsbarthe's jaw, knocking the man senseless once more. He stood, flexed the fingers in his glove, and tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat. He'd been in the Trapping house far too long.

  FIVE MINUTES later Chang was on the street, unseen and unremarked, threading his way toward the White Cathedral, itself no particular destination but on the way to others he had not yet chosen between. One possibility would be the Palace—Stäelmaere House itself—to find firsthand about the Duke and the glass woman. Charlotte Trapping had been missing for three days… yet for the Captain and his soldiers to reach Karthe, they must have been sent well before that, soon after the airship had set forth. He was sure the true sequence of events would tell him who lay behind it, and their real intentions… but it was very late and the pleasure Chang had felt from his encounter with Sapp and Horace had faded before the unremarkable complexity of what he had learned of Elöise. She was an intelligent woman, but the idea that an intelligent woman would make the choices her room had spelled out, as he knew perfectly intelligent people did every day of the week, was nevertheless dismaying.

  He reached the Cathedral and kept on, up St. Margaret's to the Circus Garden, but turned well before he reached its lights—even at this hour burning bright—wending by habit back toward the Library. In another five minutes he reached the squat hut housing the sewer entrance, and ten minutes after that heaved open the hatch in the Library basement. He climbed the inner staircases in silence, located the pallet in the dark—quietly displacing the bottles around it (the spot was used in the afternoons by an especially gin-steeped catalog clerk)—and gratefully stretched the whole of his frame onto its welcome softness. He laid his coat over his body like a stiffened blanket and folded his glasses into the outside pocket. He exhaled in the dark, feeling the bones in his shoulders settle into the pallet, the edges of his mind already beginning to fray into dream… he recalled a stanza from the Coeurome retelling of Don Juan, extending the story into the new world—“that eternal optimism of desire/persistent as plague”—but then the words blurred, flowing from line to line like a bubbling stream of broken ink… then the lines became smoke against a white sky, Doctor Svenson's cigarettes, curling up… smoke rising from Angelique's shattered torso… from the Contessa's lacquered cigarette holder. Chang's last thought was of that same smoke, exhaled from the Contessa's mouth into the ear of Celeste Temple, still feverish on her bed. Then Celeste opened her eyes, the whites swirling with the filth that had been blown into each blinking globe.

  CHANG WOKE to shafts of dimmest morning falling five floors through a lattice of metal catwalks and staircases, all the way from skylights of thick streaked glass on the roof. The effect was very much like a prison—or how Chang imagined a prison to be—but he enjoyed it nevertheless, taking pleasure in willful limitation. He padded his way to the archivist's closet, where he found water, a mirror, and a chamber pot. The water was not hot, so he did not shave, but rinsed his neck cloth, wrung it out, and then draped it across his shoulders to dry. He grimaced at the state of his once-fine leather coat, ruined first by passage through the furnace pipes of Harschmort and second by immersion in the sea. But Chang had no money to replace it. As the lining was whole and the coat still kept him warm, he resigned himself to being mistaken, with his glasses, for a blind beggar.

  Morning ablutions as complete as they were ever going to be, Chang climbed to the ninth floor of stacks, emerging on the third floor of high vaulted public rooms. He crossed to the Document Annex, where the government publications were housed. Like every public room in the Library, the Annex was graced with a pink-streaked marble floor and a large cartouche above the door bearing the arms of the aristocratic family funding that particular room's construction (in this case the extinct and unregretted Grimps). In direct opposition to its opulent trappings, the Annex, owing to its ever-expanding contents, had been crammed with shelving, covering the walls and in free-standing rows, some fifteen feet tall, requiring ladders and the help of Library staff to find anything whatsoever.

  For Chang, the collection was a ready source of information about land holdings, changes in law, marriages, estates, legacies, census surveys—anything (which meant everything) the dogged grind of the government decided ought to be set down for posterity. He started at the beginning. The Duke was alive, which meant his puppet mistress, Mrs. Marchmoor, must be a
s well. Charlotte Trapping was not in her house, and the Palace bureaucracy sought her. By all accounts she was no idiot (unless one took into account her marriage), only a woman who had been routinely shunted aside from her family's power…

  Chang rolled a wooden ladder into position and climbed to its highest rung. On the top shelf was a wooden tray holding the newest reports not yet of a quantity to be bound. Chang scooped up the contents and stepped easily down the ladder with his arms full, sure as a cat, crossing to a wide table. He dropped the pile onto it without ceremony.

  When the 4th Dragoons had been re-posted to serve at the Palace, Chang had used Ministry announcements to trace where the order had come from. Thus he had uncovered a bargain made between Henry Xonck and Deputy Minister Crabbé. While Chang was not a man to imagine purity in the intentions of others, even he had been surprised by the nakedness with which a man of business like Xonck had insinuated his agenda into that of the government. By placing Colonel Trapping—his own brother-in-law—at the center of the Palace, Xonck ensured that he would receive advance notice of all military actions, diplomatic agreements, tariff decisions—an almost infinite number of events that he could then skillfully exploit to his financial advantage. In turn, Crabbé had been given—quite without lawful precedent—the equivalent of a private army at his own command, which also—being now executed by the Queen's soldiers—put an official government stamp on all of the Cabal's actions. The arrangement had been audacious and arrogant. But now Chang was curious about the finer details that—due to the grind of bureaucracy— might not have been published initially. What had Henry Xonck been promised for his part in the bargain? And by extension what might Charlotte Trapping have discovered since that final night at Harschmort House?

  The reports were an uncollected jumble, from every Ministry and each department, but Chang sorted rapidly, discarding documents on agriculture, legal reform, medical patents, cheese, livestock, and stamps. He paused at a mention of royal game preserves, his squinting eyes caught by a reference to Parchfeldt Park. Chang held the paper up to his face and read more closely: a portion of land running directly through the park's southern quarter had been given over to the public interest to allow an arm of the Orange Canal to be extended across the width of the preserve. Chang frowned. What was on the far side of Parchfeldt Park that required access to the canals, and through them the sea? He set this aside and sorted through the rest of the unbound papers, but nothing else caught his interest. He shrugged. That a Parchfeldt canal had anything to do with the Xoncks was mere speculation. On a whim he crossed to the Interior Ministry documents, looking for any previous attempts to open this portion of Parchfeldt to private usage. With some satisfaction he found a cluster of petitions brought forward by a certain Mr. De Groot, the apparently ill-favored owner of a local mill. All had been denied. The requests had persisted for ten years and then abruptly ceased, leaving a gap of some three years with no requests whatsoever… until this last winter, when one was put forward by a Mr. Alfred Leveret.