She ignored him. Svenson caught the Contessa's uninjured shoulder and pulled the woman to a stop, her furious glare causing him to take back his hand at once.
“If you expect my help, you must say.” He gestured at the bright building. “You and Xonck were both to have been cavorting in Macklenburg for how long? Another month? Two? All this was set in motion without regard to your present state or his. It is either Xonck's secret plan against you all, or it is mutiny in his absence.”
“Francis is coming—that is all that matters.”
“Whatever of his you have—whatever his book contains—can you really want it for yourself?”
“Really, Doctor, I want him not to kill me—whether Francis dies or we make peace, I care little. But at this moment I care least of all to be caught on the road!”
Behind them Svenson heard a cry—distant, but telling. The barge-master had been found. The Contessa picked up her dress and quickened her pace to a run. Svenson dashed after her.
“We must hide!” he hissed.
“Not yet!”
“They will see us!”
She did not reply, bearing straight toward the house. Over his shoulder Svenson saw a lantern wink on and off in sequence. Figures silhouetted in an upper window of the white building replied with their own signal. With a sinking realization he knew the bargemen would assume him to be the murderer.
Abruptly the Contessa dodged from the road. The Doctor followed, the undergrowth whipping around his knees. The Contessa vanished into the trees. An instant afterward the branches were slapping Svenson's face in the dark. The double doors of the building had opened wide—pools of light bobbed forward and over the trees. Then the Contessa stopped and he was right upon her, nearly knocking her down.
“There is a party, coming down the road,” he whispered, “from the—the—”
“Factory,” she finished his sentence. “Follow me. Walk on the leaves!”
She darted ahead again, not quite so fast, moving with hushed footfalls under a line of high, old elms. He followed, making up the ground with his longer strides, and saw she held her dress with only one hand, to favor her injury. The minutes passed in silence, the moonlight flickering through the treetops onto her shoulders. With a puncturing loneliness, Svenson marveled at how delicate a woman the Contessa truly was, in contrast to the enormity of her character. He tried to imagine possessing the same determination, for he too had driven himself to extremes, but it had always been in the service of someone else.
The Contessa reached with her good left arm and took hold of Svenson's tunic, slowing them both to a stop. Through the trees before them he could see torchlight. He reached carefully into his pocket for his monocle and fit it over his eye. The torches were moving—figures on the march down a different forest road… but marching toward the factory. Was this a second search party? Had they been cut off? He looked behind him, but saw no one following under the trees.
He turned back to the roadway, screwed in his monocle more tightly, and frowned. The party walked with the serious intent of soldiers on a forced march—except, by their dress, these were evidently figures of quality. At least thirty people had passed… and the stream showed no sign of ending.
“This is no search,” he breathed into the Contessa's ear, his concentration even then pricked by the smell of her hair. She nodded, but did not shift her gaze.
The line of figures finally came to an end. As if the decision had been made together, both the Doctor and the Contessa inched forward. The road indeed led straight to the large brick building—fronted here by a high wooden wall and an iron-bound gate. They turned to look in the other direction, to where the strange crowd had appeared. Perhaps fifty yards away another set of torches was bobbing toward them.
“Now!” the Contessa whispered. “Keep low!”
They broke from their shelter and dashed across the road—horribly exposed for an instant—and stumbled into another grove of trees, this one more tangled with broken limbs. They threw themselves down in the shadows.
“You know those people,” whispered Svenson.
The Contessa did not answer.
“I believe the preferred term is ‘adherents,’” he hissed, “those fools who have pledged their loyalty to you and your associates—and had it seared into their souls by the Process. One wonders what in the world such a collection of people is doing so far out in the countryside—almost as much as one wonders why you did not reveal yourself to them. It would seem the answer to all your present difficulties. That you did not tells me their presence here is a mystery—and that you fear they retain no loyalty to you at all.”
The Contessa only pushed past him into the trees.
When they emerged on the other side, another road crossed before them, overgrown with grass and knee-high saplings. Svenson realized it must have predated the canal, for it curved away around the forest, and recalled all the ruins he had passed in the woods while walking with Elöise. Parchfeldt Park was a sort of graveyard—like any forest perhaps, where every new tree fed on the pulped-up corpses beneath it. But as graveyards always brought to the Doctor's mind his own mortality, so standing on the derelict road placed all the new life and effort he had seen—the barge, the re-fitted factory, its master's blazing ambition—within the heavy shadows of time.
The Contessa had not spoken since they'd seen the torch-led crowds. Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and she turned to him.
“If I had not appeared, did you intend to simply approach the front door and charm the inhabitants to your will?”
He was aware that sharp questions and a mocking tone must be strange to her, and did not doubt he was angering the woman—and yet his questions were also plainly meant. What had she expected? What seeds of defeat or despair might find purchase in her heart?
“You're a strange man,” she at last replied. “I remember first meeting you at the St. Royale, where it was immediately obvious you were an intelligent, dutiful, tractable fool. I do not think I was wrong—”
“I admit Cardinal Chang cuts a more spectacular figure.”
“Cardinal Chang is merely another stripe of heart-sop idiot—you could each learn a thing from your little provincial ice floe. Yet I am not speaking of them, Doctor, but of you.”
“What you think cannot be my concern.”
The Contessa gazed at him, so wan and simple it made him blanch. “I will find the proper word for you someday, Doctor. And when I do, I shall whisper that word into your ear.”
The Contessa turned and began to walk toward the factory.
“Where are you going?” he cried. “We do not know who is there! We do not know why—if you have not called them—these people, your minions, have assembled!”
The Contessa looked over her shoulder—an action he was certain caused her pain.
“Content yourself with your card,” she called back to him. “The ideals you place upon the world are broken. There is nothing necessary here at all.”
THE SHIMMER of her silk dress caught the moon even after he could, no longer distinguish her shadow from the surrounding dark, and then she was around the curve and gone. He did not follow, wondering why, and looked back at the trees where they had come from, and then down the overgrown road as it led away from the factory… a path he might follow to another world. He reached into his pocket for his cigarette case and felt his fingertips touch the cold glass card. Was there enough moonlight to see? Was it not an intensely stupid thing to do in such open ground?