“If one word of this is breathed to any other soul, I will see all your backs whipped raw.” Thorpe nodded to the dragoon with the satchel. “Help hold him fast.”
Thorpe picked the cloth away with thick leather fingertips. The blue glass book flickered in the firelight. He knelt in front of Chang, so their faces were at a level, and delicately opened the book. Chang glanced once into the swirling blue depths and wrenched his eyes away.
“I am told,” the Lieutenant said, “that after this, when you are killed, you will not feel a thing. I have no relish for executions, so I hope it is true. Corporal?”
Chang felt a hand grip the hair on the back of his head and push him down. He twisted his face and shut his eyes, resisting with all his strength. This was an empty book. Gazing into it, or touching it with his flesh, would cause the whole of his memory to be drained like a wine-cask.
And why was he fighting it—merely pride? Was this not what he had wanted—oblivion after Angelique's destruction? Was this not what he sought in opium, in poetry, in the brothels? It was not a decision he cared to be made for him… yet… his eyes drifted closer to the swirling blue plate, daring to be seized…
The Corporal pushed down even harder. Chang's face was inches away. Would the orange rings in his pocket protect him? Or merely prolong his agony? He could feel the cold emanating from the slick surface—
THE DRAGOON standing guard with a saber shrieked like a woman and thrashed forward onto his face. Thorpe leapt free of the man's weapon, cradling the fragile book beneath his body. Chang just glimpsed a glittering spike of blue sticking out of the dying trooper's spine before a black-cloaked figure hurdled the body and tackled the Lieutenant into the rotting bench where Vandaariff had perched. The two men landed with a hideous crash, but then the shadowed figure rose and swept the cloak aside to reach for another blue stiletto. The officer's mouth gaped with harsh astonishment, the bulk of his torso frozen stiff, for the book had been crushed on impact and the broken sheets driven deep into his chest.
The men holding Chang went for their blades. Chang dove for the razor and slashed wildly behind him. The Corporal howled, blood spitting from his wrist, and Chang drove a heel into his groin. The Corporal doubled over and Chang kicked the man brutally across the jaw. Francis Xonck stood over the second soldier—whose open eyes gazed unnaturally backwards from his twisted head—a dragoon's saber in his non-plastered hand. Chang rolled to his feet, dropping the razor to seize the Corporal's blade.
But Xonck's face was a death mask, chin and neck dark with blue discharge, and his eyes fluttered, as if the room before him made up but a portion of what he saw, as if the effort of the attack—of controlling his mind enough to make it—had been too much. He stabbed the saber into the dirt, and held out an empty hand.
“There will be too many for myself alone… too many for you… perhaps you will accept… a temporary… expedience.” The words emerged from Xonck's mouth as if through a sack full of slick stones.
“These soldiers…” said Chang. “Mrs. Marchmoor…Margaret… she is coming.”
“I should think so.” Drool covered Xonck's lips. “That means she's found your little miss.”
AN HOUR later, twisting through the woods until even with the moon above them Chang had no idea of where they'd gone, and stopping twice for Xonck to be ill, they reached a ridge, and upon it a sudden gap of meadow. Far below curled a gleaming snake of canal water. From the canal a pale road had been cut through the trees, at the end of which loomed a bright building. Its high windows bled enough light into the black air for a Royal christening.
In the silence Chang could hear the thrum of machines.
“Frightfully bad form,” Xonck rasped next to him. “The swine have begun without us.”
Nine. Incision
DOCTOR SVENSON refused to consider himself the sort of man who might kill a woman, under even the most heinous of circum-stances, heinous being a perfectly apt word to describe the woman before him. The Contessa had requested a cigarette from the Doctor's case and was deftly inserting it into her black lacquered holder. She caught the Doctor's gaze and shyly smiled.
“Would you have any matches?”
Svenson slipped the dead barge-master's clasp knife into his trouser pocket and pulled out a box of matches. He lit one and offered it to her, nodding to his own case, still in her hand.
“May I?”
“It is very lovely,” she remarked. “I suppose the laws of salvage compel me to return it.”
She held it out and his fingers just barely grazed hers—cool, soft—as he took it.
“As if you were one for laws.”
The Contessa blew a plume of smoke toward the guttering fire.
“These are quite raw,” she said. “Where do you get them?”
“Purchased from a fisherman,” replied the Doctor. “Danish.”
“In the city, you were smoking something else. They were black.”
“Russian,” said Svenson. “I buy them from an agent in Riga. I used to call on him when my ship stopped in port. Being no longer with a ship, I order them over land.”
“I'm sure you could acquire them nearer.”
“But not from him. Herr Karoschka—one so rarely finds a decent man of business.”
“Rubbish.” The Contessa tapped her ash toward the fire. “The world is ankle-deep with decent men of business—it is exactly why so many are so poor. Their delusion is merely the ordure in which more hardy crops thrive.”
Svenson nodded in the direction of the barge-master's body. “Are you always so merry after killing a man?”
“I am this merry when I have survived. Will we speak like reasonable people or not? The food is wholesome, the bottle contains—it is the country, one condescends—a clean-tasting cider, and if you put more wood on the fire like a kindly person, it might well revive.”
“Madame—”
“Doctor Svenson, please. Your querulous niceties only make it more awkward to speak freely, as we must. Unless you have decided to dash out my brains after all.”
Her tone was arch and impatient, but Svenson could see the fatigue in her face—and it surprised him. The Contessa's normal temperament was so fully armored—he naturally thought of her as a seductress or a killer, but never anything so fragile as a woman. Yet here the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza had been reduced to cutting a man's throat for his dinner and a meager fire.
“Where is Elöise Dujong?” he asked, his voice even.
The Contessa burst out laughing. “Who?”
“You were with her, madame. In her uncle's cottage—you arranged—”
“Arranged what? And when?”
“Do not hope to lie to me! You saw her—”
The Contessa choked gleefully on her cigarette.
“Madame! She directed you to Parchfeldt Park.”
“We did not meet at all. I saw her in Karthe, I admit it—a slag-heap I have scrubbed from my memory—but she did not see me. She was skulking after some man.”
“She was attacked by Francis Xonck.”
“I don't suppose it was fatal?”
“He mistook her for you.”
The Contessa shrugged as if to say this meant nothing, but then met the Doctor's cold gaze. Her smile faded away. “And so Francis followed on the train—not reaching the freight car before I was gone. It was you that prevented him from doing so, wasn't it? That gunshot.”