The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  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.

  This request had been granted.

  HE LEFT the Annex and crossed the marble landing to the reference room, vaulting behind the archivist's counter without a qualm. Moving like a deliberate half-blind bee amongst dusty blossoms, Chang dipped in and out of heavy, flaking volumes—registries of business, of death, catalogs of land transfer. Thirty minutes later he slipped off his glasses and spat into his handkerchief, rubbing the moistened cloth over each tender eye. He had learned what he needed to know: August De Groot had died bankrupt in a debtor's cell. After three years unclaimed and empty, his mill works had been purchased— just this last October—by Alfred Leveret, a senior employee of Xonck Armaments. And now, in the wake of all the recent transactions between Henry Xonck and the Privy Council, the precious canal access had been granted.

  He snorted at the way wealth so effortlessly got its own, De Groot's misery bringing to mind the story of Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a northern mill owner gone bankrupt, no doubt hounded to ruin just as De Groot had been, by others waiting to snap up the leavings for cheap. And what had happened to De Groot's children, or his displaced workers—were any of them driven to a life in the brothels? Were such costs ever considered in the transactions of high finance? Certainly they lay outside the care of any official counting, and thus beyond what the nation could ever admit had occurred. Chang swatted the book dust from his hands.

  IT WAS near eight o'clock. The staff would be arriving. De Groot's factory and its proximity to Parchfeldt struck Chang as the exact sort of circumstance he had been looking for, though his rational mind told him it was far more likely that the widowed Charlotte Trapping had decamped to the cottage of some cousin by the sea, or even to a welcoming foreign capital. But was Charlotte Trapping really the person he wanted to follow? He'd gone into her home only to have his search dislocated by the mysteries of Elöise Dujong… ought he to be investigating her? He climbed quietly up to the map room, hoping to investigate all three quarries at the same stroke.

  Perhaps his distrust finally had the better of him—perhaps he over-estimated the reach of his enemies, and their capacity… or perhaps he was finally learning that their plans for profit and control spread beyond any boundary he had formerly understood. Chang opened the surveyor's codex and found the map number for Parchfeldt Park, then turned to the large cases of the maps themselves, located the proper drawer, and finally hauled the item in question onto the table.

  Like many royal preserves, Parchfeldt was enormous. The park was shaped like a tall Norman shield, and with the Ministry report in mind Chang turned his attention to the southernmost spike, now crossed by the band of a newly laid canal. The park was nearer to the sea than Chang had realized, close to the northern spur of the Orange Canal. Just to the edge of his map he picked out the abandoned—or soon to be so, depending on when the map had actually been made— mill works of the late Mr. De Groot. Chang shook his head. From the mill to the nearest canal had been an awkward circular path, adding days to any delivery, not withstanding the tolls and duties levied along the way—a minor concern to someone like Henry Xonck, but the exact margin of cost to drive a man like De Groot into collapse. With the canal extended, the factory would be but a day from the open sea itself—a shocking advantage, with few or no duties at all. It would be a perfect manufacturing point for goods going abroad… to such a place as Macklenburg.

  He dug Caroline Stearne's letter from his pocket. Two things struck him, the first of which was that Elöise had been contacted at all. Xonck had persuaded Elöise to visit Tarr Manor to find Colonel Trapping only after Trapping had been killed. But this letter meant some other member of the Cabal had targeted Elöise and Mrs. Trapping well before… which was also to say that they had their eyes on outflanking Xonck with regard to his family's fortune. Chang snorted at the brazen strategy… and the letter did mention the St. Royale Hotel. It had to have come from the Contessa.

  Chang turned his attention to the second point—the “efforts” of Charlotte Trapping. The very fact that she was a woman meant that his usual tactic—sorting through the footpaths of paper that nearly every respectable man left in his wake—was useless. It would be nearly impossible for Charlotte Trapping to exercise her desires apart from the consent of her husband or brothers in any way that would be so recorded. That she possessed all manner of personal resources he did not doubt, but discovering their workings would be very difficult.

  Yet if he could not guess what she had done, perhaps he could deduce what might have provoked the Contessa.

  Any objective look at the Xonck family would have found Henry by far the most important, with Charlotte and her socially promoted husband a distant second, and Francis—the rakish dilettante—an ill-considered third. To all appearances, the Cabal was dominated by Robert Vandaariff and Henry Xonck—its true architects posing as mere hangers-on to these great men. If Mrs. Trapping had been curious about her husband's activities, her inquiries would have naturally centered on his relations with those two most powerful men… Chang began to pace between the tables, hands clasped behind his back. He was near to something, he knew. Through Caroline Stearne and Elöise Dujong, the Contessa had warned Charlotte Trapping— t
he distance kept between herself and her object making clear the need for subterfuge and care. Chang strode back to the Annex. On the stairs he saw one of the catalogers from the second floor climbing slowly ahead of him, holding a bulging satchel. Chang ignored the fellow's nod, stalking back to the report about canal-building, flipping the pages… and found an address cited for Mr. Alfred Leveret. This done, he crossed to the volumes of property holdings. Another two minutes told him that Alfred Leveret had recently become the owner of a Houlton Square townhouse. In no way fashionable, Houlton Square offered its residents an unquestionable, drab respectability— the perfect address for an ambitious underling of industry.

  The property record cited another entry, in an appendix… which in turn documented bank drafts … which in turn… Chang flipped page after page, tracking a deliberate trail of obfuscation that spawned a litter of paper across the Annex. But then he slipped his fingers beneath his glasses, rubbing his tender eyes with a smile. He had found it after all. The Contessa had frightened Charlotte Trapping away from prying into Henry Xonck's affairs—like the purchase of De Groot's mill—precisely because they were not Henry Xonck's affairs at all. The money for Leveret's house had come from a bank in Vienna representing Francis Xonck. The factory was his, and the Contessa knew it—which meant she was determined no one else, much less a disenfranchised prying sister, ought to.

  BY THE time Chang slipped from the rear entrance, it was almost ten o'clock. He'd spent far longer than he'd intended in the Library. Through a roundabout route, winding as far north as Worthing Circle—stopping there for a pie and a hot mug of tea from a stall— Chang returned to the shuttered building at the next corner from his own rooming house and forced the door. No one followed. He climbed rapidly to the empty attic and located the floorboard under which he'd stashed the saber of the Macklenburg Lieutenant, killed in his own rooms so long ago. He stuffed the weapon under his coat and returned to the street, ready to draw it in defense if need be, but there was no one.

  Another brisk walk took him to Fabrizi's, to exchange the saber for his repaired stick, apologizing for the loss of his loan. The old man eyed the saber with professional detachment and accepted it—with a clicking sound—as adequate payment. The gold on the hilt and scabbard alone would have bought the stick twice over, but Chang never knew when he would need to presume on Fabrizi for special treatment, and this was a simple enough way to build up a balance. It was nearly eleven. There was just time for a visit to Houlton Square.

  THE SERVANT answering the door was stout and white-whiskered, a man who some years ago might have been of a height with Chang but had since lost an inch to age. His expression upon seeing Chang was admirably impassive—for it was broad daylight, with any number of people in the road to notice an unsavory character calling on so respectable a man as Alfred Leveret.

  “Mr. Leveret,” he said. “My name is Chang.”

  “Mr. Leveret is not at home.”

  “Might one enquire when he will return?”

  “I am unable to say.”

  Chang curled his lip in a very mild sneer. “Perhaps because you do not know yourself?”

  The servant ought to have slammed the door—and Chang was poised to interpose a boot and then drive his shoulder forward to force himself through—but the man did not. Instead, he merely sketched a careful peek at whoever might be watching from the street or nearby windows.

  “Are you acquainted with Mr. Leveret?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” Chang answered. “Yet it appears we have interests in common.”

  The servant did not reply.

  “Charlotte Trapping, for example. And Mr. Francis Xonck.”

  The man's crisp professional veneer—the collar, the coat, the clean-scrubbed nails, the impeccable polish of his shoes—was suddenly belied by his eyes, twitching with the encapsulated worry of two nervous mice.

  “May I ask you a question, Mr….?”

  “Mr. Happerty.”

  “Mr. Happerty. That you entertain a character like myself in the middle of the morning on your own doorstep tells me you have certain … cares about your master. That I am here, never having met the man, is signal enough of his grave situation. I would suggest we speak more frankly—for speak we must, Mr. Happerty—indoors.”

  Happerty sucked on his teeth, but then stepped aside.

  “I am obliged,” whispered Cardinal Chang. Things were far worse than he had assumed.

  THE FOYER of Leveret's townhouse was all one would have imagined, which was to say it expressed an imagination utterly contained: a black-and-white-checkered marble floor, a high-domed ceiling with an ugly chandelier dangling from a chain like a crystallized sea urchin, a staircase marked at regular intervals with paintings nakedly selected to match the upholstery of the reception chairs— optimistic river scenes showing the city's waters in a hue Chang doubted they would possess if Christ Himself walked across them on the brightest day in June.

  Mr. Happerty shut the door, but did not invite Chang farther into the house, so Chang took it upon himself to stalk a few steps toward the open archway.

  “The house is new to Mr. Leveret,” Chang stated. “Were you in his service at his previous residence?”

  “I have allowed your entry only so as to not be further seen from the street,” said Happerty firmly. “You must tell me what you know.”

  “Tell me how long your master has been missing.”

  It was a guess, but a reasonable one. The real question was whether Leveret had fallen victim to the Cabal, or whether something else had occurred in the confusion of the past week—that is, whether the man was simply in hiding, or whether he was dead.

  “I have let you in this house,” said Happerty again. “But I must know more who you are.”

  “I am exactly what I seem,” Chang replied. “I do not care two pins for your master—I am not interested in harming him, if that is what you ask. Or harming you—or I would already have done so.”

  There were no other servants—no crowd of footmen at call to throw him out of doors. Had they all gone? Or been sent away?

  “It has been four days,” said Happerty at last, with a sigh.

  “And to your mind, when you last saw him, did he expect to be gone?”

  “I do not believe so.”

  “No valise? No pocket of ready cash? No changes to his social calendar?”

  “None of those things.”

  “And where is his place of business?”

  “Mr. Leveret travels to the different gun-works throughout the week. But that day…” Happerty hesitated.

  “Can he defend himself?” asked Chang.

  Happerty said nothing.

  “Your employer is in danger,” said Chang. “Henry Xonck is an imbecile and Francis Xonck is dead. Forces more powerful than they, thus very powerful indeed, have made your master their target.”

  Chang found his eye caught by the grain of the close-shaven skin on the underside of Happerty's jaw, reminding him unpleasantly of sliced salmon. The way it rubbed against the white starched collar, Chang expected to see a greasy pink stain. Then the old servant cleared his throat, as if he had made a decision.

  “Mr. Leveret had an appointment at the Palace.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “Such appointments are a regular consequence of government contracts, though Mr. Leveret never appeared himself—they were the province of Mr. Xonck.”

  “Henry Xonck?”

  Happerty frowned. “Of course Henry Xonck. Yet in Mr. Xonck's absence—the quarantine—Mr. Leveret was summoned, to present delivery time-tables related to shore defenses.”

  “Deliveries by way of the western canals?”

  “I only keep Mr. Leveret's house.”

  “Do you know who he met at the Palace?”

  “Apparently he never arrived. They were most insistent he appear. An officer came. Quite beyond all decorum and without any further explanation, his men searched the premises for Mr. Leveret, despite
everything I might do to persuade them otherwise!”

  Happerty had become more animated, describing the disruption of his own domain. Chang nodded in sympathy. “But who was he meeting? At the Palace?”

  “Mr. Leveret's calendar names a ‘Mr. Phelps,’ of the Foreign Ministry—itself a thing that makes no sense for coastal defenses. I do not believe Mr. Leveret had ever met with him before.”

  Happerty gestured, affronted, beyond the archway. In the far room a window had been cracked, the fine lace curtains lay on the floor in a heap, the expensive Italian floor tiles had been scratched…

  “Do you recall the officer in command?” Chang asked.

  “It is my duty to recall everyone. Colonel Noland Aspiche, 4th Dragoons.”

  Chang recalled the looping scars from the Process around Aspiche's eyes, the temporary disfigurement an apt sign of the man's internal distemper. Though he had hated Trapping's corruption, Colonel Aspiche had been seduced by the Cabal with ease. Chang was sure any remorse lay curled like a worm within the Colonel's conscience, making him that much more severe in executing his new masters' agenda.

  “Two more questions, and I must go,” he said, “though I am in your debt, and will do my best to find Mr. Leveret. First, did your master ever visit Harschmort House?”

  Mr. Happerty shook his head no.

  “Second—in the last fortnight, did you ever see his face discolored, a scarring around the eyes? Or was he ever absent for some days at a time when such a condition might have healed without your knowing it?”

  Happerty shook his head again. “Mr. Leveret is a prompt man with regular habits, dining at home each night at half-past six.”

  “In that case, I will ask a third question,” said Chang, his hand on the crystal knob of the door. “You are a man who pays attention. Are you acquainted with Mrs. Elöise Dujong?”