The Chemickal Marriage

said nothing apart from a single polite inquiry as to whether she required a doctor before a bath was drawn or whether, preparatory to either, she might prefer a meal.
    She huddled naked in the copper tub until the water went tepid. A maid stood deferentially in the dressing-room doorway with fresh towels, nervously glancing between the dull face of the soaking woman and the sharp knife Miss Temple had insisted stay within reach, atop a wooden stool. Dressed enough to have a doctor examine her, Miss Temple had kept the weapon in her lap. The white-whiskered man applied a salve and bandage to her forehead, frowned at the fading weal of a bullet above her ear and left a powder to aid her sleep. Miss Temple ate two slices of buttered bread, stopping at the first flicker of nausea. She dismissed the maid, locked the corridor door and wedged it with a chair, did the same for the door of her chamber and curled into bed, the blade under her pillow like a snake in wait beneath a stone.
    She slept for three hours before her fears rose up to wake her. She lay in the dark. Chang. Svenson. Elöise. Their deaths could not be undone.
    Her survival felt like a betrayal, and every small comfort arrived with a sting. Yet Miss Temple had withstood such stings all her life. The next morning she made her first list of everything she ought to do and found herself filling two diligent pages. She set down the pen and wiped her nose. In truth it was simpler to keep one’s heart a stone. She rang for breakfast and a maid to curl her hair.
    She sent to her aunt in Cap-Rouge, requesting the return of Marie (of her own two maids, the one who could read), and then spent the day – making a point to be accompanied by footmen from the Boniface – attending to her most basic needs: bank, clothes, weapons and, most important of all, news.
    She did not fear for her immediate safety. When her train had arrived, the platforms of Stropping Station were no longer thick with dragoons. Brown-coated constables had been posted to manage the openly hostile crowds of travellers, but their only charge was to maintain order, not search for potentialfugitives. Nowhere had she seen posters offering a reward for her capture, or for that of any of her former companions.
    She scoured the newspapers, but found only a standard refrain of imminent crises: the Ministries paralysed, the Privy Council in disarray, business at a standstill. For Miss Temple, this was excellent: the more the world was hampered, the freer she would be to act. She sallied out, a hotel footman to either side, gratified by the frayed tempers that seemed to catch at every inconsequential jostle.
    Her journey that first morning did not stretch to any destination she might deem provocative – that is, she did not venture near the St Royale Hotel, the Foreign Ministry, Stäelmaere House, the Macklenburg diplomatic compound or the Hadrian Square residence of Colonel and Mrs Trapping. All these places might have become bolt-holes for enemies that still lived. When the Contessa’s spies found her at the Boniface, all well and good. She would not be so vulnerable.
    And if her other great enemy had survived the destruction at the Parchfeldt factory? Miss Temple had last glimpsed Lord Robert Vandaariff face down in a pool of black slime, about to be swarmed by an angry mob … yet had he lived? It would be a fool who assumed otherwise.
    Miss Temple paused (the scarlet-coated footmen halted obligingly with her) at the cobbled road’s sudden descent, gazing at a district of the city she had never visited. One footman cleared his throat.
    ‘Shall we turn along the avenue, miss?’
    Miss Temple strode ahead, down to the river.
    Cardinal Chang had mentioned it once, and the detail – a proper name from his secret life – had taken Miss Temple’s mind with the attractive force of a silver buckle to a magpie. When she stood in the street outside the Raton Marine, she was unprepared for the surge of tenderness that filled her heart. The tavern lay in a nest of filthy streets, with the buildings to either side tipping like old drunkards. The people in the street, openly staring at the finely dressed young woman with two liveried servants, seemed to Miss Temple like humanity’s bilge, beings who could scarcely take two steps without leaving a stain. Yet in this place Cardinal Chang had been
known
– these ruins were his world.
    Again the footman cleared his throat.
    ‘Wait here,’ said Miss Temple.
    A