The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (17 page)

“You’re here about Isobel Hastings.”

“I am.”

Madelaine Kraft did not reply, which he took as an invitation to continue.

“I was asked to find her—a…
lady
returning from an evening’s work covered in blood.”

“Returning from where?”

“I was not told—the understanding was that the quantity of blood was singular enough for her to be remembered.”

“Returning from whom?”

“I was not told—the assumption being the blood was his.”

She was silent for a moment, in thought. Chang realized that she was not thinking of what to say, but weighing instead whether or not to say what she was thinking.

“There is the missing man in the newspaper,” she said, musing.

Chang nodded absently. “The Colonel of Dragoons.”

“Could it be him?”

He answered as casually as he could, “It’s entirely possible.”

She took another sip of tea.

“You will understand,” Chang went on, “that I am being honest.”

This made her smile. “Why would I understand that?”

“Because I am paying you, and your bargains are fair.”

Chang reached into his coat for the wallet and extracted three crisp banknotes. He leaned forward and set them down on the blackboard. Madelaine Kraft picked up the notes, glanced at the amount, and dropped them into an open wooden box next to her tea cup. She glanced at the clock.

“I’m afraid there is no great deal of time.”

He nodded. “My understanding is that my client desires revenge.”

“And you?” she asked.

“First, to know who else is searching for her. I know the agents—the officer, the ‘sister’—but not who they represent.”

“And after that?”

“That will depend. Obviously they have already been here asking questions—unless you are involved in this business yourself.”

She cocked her head slightly and, after a moment of thought, sat down behind the desk. She reached over for another sip of tea, took it, and kept the cup, holding it between her breasts with both hands, watching him evenly across the desk top.

“Very well,” she began. “To begin with, I do not know the name, and I do not know the woman. No person of my household—or of my household’s acquaintance—appeared in the early hours of this morning displaying any quantity of blood. I have made it a point to
ask,
and I have received no such answer. Next, Major
Blach
was here this afternoon. I told him what I have just told you.”

She pronounced the name unlike Jurgins or Wells, as if it was foreign…had he spoken with an accent? The others had not mentioned it.

“And the sister?”

She smiled conspiratorially. “
I
have seen no sister.”

“A woman, scars on her face, a burn, claiming to be Isobel Hastings’s sister, a ‘Mrs. Marchmoor’—”

“I have not seen her. Perhaps she’s still to come. Perhaps she does not know this house.”

“That’s impossible. She has been to two other houses before me, and she would know this one before all the rest of them.”

“I am sure that’s true.”

Chang’s mind raced, sorting quickly—Mrs. Marchmoor had known the other houses, she had bypassed this one—to a swift conclusion: she did not come because she would be
known
.

“May I ask if any women of your household have recently…graduated to other situations, perhaps without your consent? With light brown hair?”

“It is indeed the case.”

“The type to be searching for a blood-soaked relative?”

“Hardly,” she scoffed. “But you said burns across the face?”

“They could be recent.”

“They would need to be. Margaret Hooke has been gone four days. The daughter of a ruined mill owner. She would not be known at any lower house.”

“Does she have a sister?”

“She doesn’t have a soul. Though it appears she’s found something. If you can tell me what that is—or who—I’ll be kindly disposed.”

“You have a suspicion. That’s why we’re talking.”

“We’re talking because one of several regular customers of Margaret Hooke is presently in my house.”

“I see.”

“She saw many people. But anyone wanting to learn what might be learned…as I said, there’s little time to talk.”

Chang nodded and stood. As he turned to the door she called to him, her voice both quiet and more urgent at the same time. “Cardinal?” He looked back. “Your own part in this?”

“Madam, I am merely the agent of others.”

She studied him. “Major Blach did ask for Miss Hastings. But he also sought any information about a man in red, a mercenary for hire, perhaps even this bloody girl’s accomplice.”

He felt a chill of warning. The man had obviously asked Mrs. Wells and Jurgins too, and they had said nothing, laughing at Chang’s back. “How strange. Of course, I cannot explain his interest, unless he had been following my client, and perhaps observed us speaking.”

“Ah.”

He nodded to her. “I will let you know what I find.” He stepped to the door, opened it, and then turned back. “Which lady of your house is entertaining Margaret Hooke’s customer?”

Madelaine Kraft smiled, her thin amusement tinged with pity.

“Angelique.”

He returned to the front of the house and collected his stick, then so armed—and untroubled by the staff who seemed to understand that it had been arranged—approached the man in white. Chang saw that he held another small piece of blue paper, and before he could speak the man leaned forward with a whisper. “Down the rear staircase. Wait under the stairs, and then you may follow.” He smiled—Kraft’s acceptance smoothing the way for his own. “It will provide the additional benefit of allowing you to leave unseen.”

The man went back to his notebook. Chang walked quickly past him into the main part of the house, along wide welcoming archways that opened onto variously entrancing vistas of comfort and luxury, food and flesh, laughter and music—to a rear door, watched by another burly man. Chang looked up at him—he was tall himself and found the immediate density of so many taller, broader figures a little tiresome—waited for the man to open the door, and then stepped onto the landing of a slender wooden staircase leading down to a narrow, high passageway of some twenty yards. This basement passage was significantly cooler, moist-aired, and lined with brick. Directly beneath the staircase was a hutch with a door. Chang pulled it open and climbed inside, bending nearly double to fit, and sat on a round milking stool. He pulled the door closed and waited in the dark, feeling foolish.

The interview had raised more questions than it had answered. He knew his conversation with Rosamonde in the map room had been unobserved, so Black must know of him independently—either from some other informant, from seeing him at the Vandaariff mansion, or, he had to admit, from Rosamonde herself. If Mrs. Marchmoor was also Margaret Hooke, then Angelique was in danger of disappearing as well—though Madelaine Kraft’s suspicion had not stopped her from accepting the regular client who might have been the cause. Perhaps this meant that the client was not as important as some other party, or some other power, yet hidden in the shadow—information she hoped Chang could provide. Chang rubbed his eyes. In the course of a day he had placed himself in the shadow of one murder, performed another, and set himself against at least three different mysterious parties—four if he counted Rosamonde—without any real knowledge of the larger stakes at hand. Further, none of this had brought him a step closer to finding Isobel Hastings, who grew more mysterious by the hour.

Despite his racing mind, it was only a minute before he heard the door open and the descending weight of footsteps on the stairs above his head. A man was speaking, but Chang couldn’t make out the words over the noise—to his best guess there were at least three people in the party, perhaps more. Finally they were off the stairs and walking away from him down the passage. He cautiously opened the hutch door, and peeked out: the party could only walk single file in the narrow space, and all he could see was the back of the rear figure, an unremarkable-looking man in a formal black topcoat. He waited until they reached the far end of the passage before slowly pushing the door open and extricating himself. By the time he was once more standing at his full height, they had rounded a corner and disappeared. Walking as much as possible on his toes to reduce the sound of his footsteps, he followed at a trot to make up the distance.

At the corner he stopped, listening, and again heard the voice—low and strangely muttering—but not the words themselves, obscured by jingling keys and their fumbling at a lock. He silently dropped to a crouch and then risked edging one eye around the corner—knowing that anyone looking would be less likely to notice an eye at a less-than-normal eye height. The party was some ten yards away, standing in front of a locked, metal-bound door. The man in the rear still stood with his back to Chang, the closer view revealing him to be younger with thin, oak-colored hair plastered flat to his skull. Beyond him Chang could see parts of three other people: a small man in an ash-grey coat bent over the door, attempting to find the right key, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a thick fur, impatiently tapping a walking stick on the floor and leaning down—he was the one muttering—to the fourth person, tucked under his arm like a flower in a grenadier’s bearskin: Angelique. Her dress was deep blue, and she did not react to whatever the man was saying, gazing without expression at the elegant grey man’s hands as he sorted through keys. The lock turned—he’d found the right one at last—and he opened the door, looking back at the others with a trim twitch of a smile. It was Harald Crabbé.

At this the man in the fur snapped open a pocket watch and frowned. “Where in hell is he?” he said, his voice an iron rasp. He turned to the third man and hissed balefully, “Collect him.”

Chang darted back around the corner, desperately looking around him for a place to hide. He was fortunate in that, being in a crouch, his eyes naturally looked upwards, and saw a pair of iron pipes, as wide as his arm, running the length of the passage just below the high ceiling. Behind him he heard another voice—Crabbé—interrupt the nearing footsteps of the third man, just at the corner, a step away from discovering Chang.

“
Bascombe
.”

“Sir?”

“Wait a moment.” Crabbé’s tone changed—clearly now he was addressing the man in the fur. “Another minute. I should rather not give him any insight into our growing displeasure, nor the satisfaction such knowledge would undoubtedly bring. Besides”—and here his voice changed again, to an awkward sugarish tone—“his
prize
is with us.”

“I am no one’s prize,” replied Angelique, her voice quiet but firm.

“Of course you aren’t,” assured Crabbé, “but he needn’t know that until we’re ready.”

Chang looked up in horror. At the far end of the passage, above the staircase, the door was opened. Someone was coming. He was caught between them. In a surge of strength he took three steps and jumped, bracing one foot against the wall and thrusting off, catching the other foot on the opposite side and thrusting again, higher, so that his outstretched arms could reach the pipes. A pair of legs were visible descending the stairs. The group around the corner would hear any second. He pulled himself up, wrapping his legs around the pipes, and then through sheer force rolled over above them, so he faced the floor, quickly tucking the ends of his coat so they didn’t hang. He looked down with despair. His stick was still on the floor, close to the wall, where he’d set it when he’d peeked around the corner. There was nothing he could do. They were coming. How long had he taken? Had he been seen? Heard? A moment later—holding his breath despite his heaving chest—Chang saw the third man, Bascombe, step around the corner—standing bare inches from his stick. The footsteps neared from the other end—louder than he’d thought. It was more than one person.

“Mr. Bascombe!” one of them shouted, a kind of exuberant greeting made all the more hearty (or fatuous) by the fact that the men had most likely been apart for all of five minutes. But the tone served to announce that they were on an adventure together, an
evening
—and declare as well who was that evening’s guide. Chang’s skin prickled with loathing. He exhaled silently through his nose. He could not believe they had not seen him—and prepared to drop onto Bascombe, attack the newcomers, then run for the steps. The pair passed directly beneath. He froze, again holding his breath. One man, a sharp fellow in a crisp black tailcoat, bristling red side whiskers, and long, thick, curled red hair (obviously the man who had called out), supported the shambling steps of another taller, thinner man in a steel blue uniform, capped with a squat, blue-plumed shako, with medals across his chest and tall boots that unmercifully hampered his alcoholic gait. Once they were close enough, Bascombe stepped forward and took the uniformed man’s other side, and the three of them vanished around the corner.

Chang stayed above the pipes until he heard the iron door close behind them, then swung himself down to hang by his arms and drop to the floor. He brushed himself off—the pipes were filthy—and picked up his stick. He exhaled, berating himself for being trapped so foolishly. He had only been saved by the uniformed man, he knew, whose stumbling drunken state had diverted attention away from anything else. He thought back to the conversation between the man in fur and Crabbé: which of the two men had they been waiting for—the drunken officer or the hearty fop? And though he resisted the thought—for it led to naught but slow disintegration of his peace—as he walked around the corner and stared at the iron door they’d closed behind them…which among them all had laid claim to Angelique?

She’d come from Macao as a child, orphaned when her father, a Portuguese sailor, had died in a knife fight his second day off the ship. Her mother had been Chinese, and her appearance had transfixed Chang from the moment he’d seen her in the main room of the South Quays—where she had found a kind of home after the cruelty of the public orphanage. Exotic beauty and a strangely compelling reserve had elevated her first from that squalid lair to the Second Bench and finally this last year, at the ripe age of seventeen, to the perfumed heights of the Old Palace, Madame Kraft having purchased her contract for an undisclosed amount. This had effectively placed her beyond Chang’s reach. He had not spoken to her in five months. Of course he had barely spoken to her before that—he was not one for speaking in general, and still less to anyone for whom he might possess actual feelings. Though he told himself she was well aware of the special place she held within his—he could not say “heart”, for what was that in a life like his (perhaps “panoramic painting” was a more accurate description of the rootless pageant of Chang’s existence)—this had prompted no significant words on her part, for no matter her own feelings, she preferred silence as much as he. At first this might have been a question of language, but by now it had become an expression of professional manner, one with a bright smile, pliant body, and impossibly distant eyes. In the devastating moments they’d spent in what passed for intimacy, Angelique was never other than polite and practiced, but always allowed just a glimpse of a boundless inner landscape held firmly in reserve…a glimpse that went through Chang’s very soul like a fishhook.