“Naturally, I was not alone—”

“Were you with Mr. Soames?”

“How do you know Soames?” Rawsbarthe's voice was pinched. “Soames is new! He didn't see the Duke? Soames is hardly worthy of—”

“Soames does not matter,” she assured him. “The room. It was dark?”

“His Grace is notoriously particular.”

“So you did see the Duke?”

“Of course! And we heard him.”

“What did he say?”

“I… I… the words themselves…”

She waited. Rawsbarthe clutched his hands.

“Andrew… surely you remember?”

“Ah… well—”

“How can you not remember what the Duke of Stäelmaere said to you personally? The highest achievement of your career?”

Rawsbarthe was silent. Her lips almost touched his blood-scabbed ear.

“I will tell you why, Andrew. You fell asleep. Every one of you. You had dreams. A pain in your head… the taste of copper in your throat. You knew exactly what you must do, though you cannot recall receiving any instruction. And afterward none of you said a word—”

“Silence b-bespeaks the high respect—”

“Listen to yourself! It is Mrs. Marchmoor!”

“I beg your pardon? I am unacquainted with any M-M-Mrs.—”

“The glass woman.”

Rawsbarthe attempted a blanched smile. “I must assure you again there are no women in Stäelmaere House—the Duke's, ah, martial proclivities—”

She took his shoulder and thrust him again toward the mirror. Mr. Rawsbarthe bleated his protest and squeezed shut his eyes.

“Andrew! Mrs. Marchmoor has rummaged in your thinking like it was a bag!”

“Miss Temple—”

“Look at yourself!”

He did, but at once burst free with a stricken cry, shoving past and knocking Miss Temple across one of the chairs. By the time she pulled herself upright, there was no sign or sound of Andrew Rawsbarthe at all.

MISS TEMPLE found her side staircase. The walls were lined with painted niches aping the shadowed passageways of a cathedral, each holding allegorical figures that Miss Temple—whose biblical education had been attended to with a gratifying indifference—nevertheless recognized as the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Despite her hurry she could not help but stare as she went down, the toads, blood, lice, and fire presaging her own descent into the stinking mire that had already swallowed poor Rawsbarthe. But the final landing stopped her cold, for the wider section of wall allowed for a more elaborate tableau, and she stood there, Francesca Trapping's bandaged arm fresh in her mind, facing the death of the Egyptian firstborn, where pitiless angels dangled lifeless children from both hands, hovering above a crowd of keening women.

At the base of the stairs was a door on a swing. She was near the kitchens. The corridor wound past rooms stuffed with barrels and crates and crocks and bottles and baskets and burlap sacks, rooms storing pots and pans both massive enough to cook a wild boar whole and comedically small, as if for a Roman banquet of larks. Yet every room she passed, in what ought to have been the busiest part of the household, was devoid of servants.

At a larger archway she wrinkled her nose and looked about her for the source of the smell—matted straw thrown onto the mess, the actual cleaning laid aside for some luckless drudge, perhaps a soup-bowl's worth of mustard yellow vomit. Miss Temple had reached the enormous central kitchen hearth, radiating heat from a bed of white flaking coals. The benches and tables that filled the room had all been pushed aside, as if making room for… something. She advanced slowly, and the smells of gastric excrescence gave way to the stench of indigo clay. A pebble crunched beneath her foot—a fleck of blue glass. The smell was thicker at the hearth itself, the heat against her face. On the brick border of the oven lay a dusting of tiny blue needles…

What had happened in the garden? And where was everybody now?

She staggered and put a hand over her mouth, turning her face and groping for the nearest table to support her. What had just happened?

She had framed the questions in her mind… and then suddenly received a sickening flick of an answer… the glass woman had been in here, and in such distress that the agony projected from her mind had sickened the minions around her. The knowledge had come from the Comte's memories—Miss Temple's own mind drawing unbidden from that pool, dangerously and without warning…

Miss Temple bent over and did her best to rid herself of the nausea, but nothing came. She felt the blood rushing to her head and stood, grim and once more consumed with an anger not altogether hers.

THE CORRIDOR ended at another swinging door and she pushed through to an elegant dining room. A crystal chandelier in the shape of a three-masted frigate hung over an enormous long dark table. The glass craft floated like a ghost ship, bearing a mere half-dozen candles, their glow abetted by a standing candelabrum on the table itself, set next to a man in his shirtsleeves. He sat in the master's own thronelike seat, and busied himself amidst a mass of papers. One ink-stained hand held an old-fashioned feather pen and the other a metal tool she had seen used on a ship to measure distance. Beyond him lay the doorway out.

The man was not Robert Vandaariff.

Miss Temple cleared her throat. He looked up and showed himself to be younger than she'd first assumed. His hair had receded to the rear of his skull—but upon seeing his face she doubted he was much older than Chang, and his firm jaw and strong hands bespoke a masculinity that made her twitch. He set down the quill and the metal tool and stood, a politeness that took her by surprise.

“I did not know there were any ladies in the house…”

“I am Miss Stearne, a friend to Lydia Vandaariff. I fear I am interrupting all sorts of things everywhere.”

“Not at all, I'm sure.”

“There seems to have been a fire.”

The man gestured broadly with a wry smile. “And yet the house is of a size that some fifty rooms remain for civilized occupation. Would you care for tea?”

“No thank you.” The last thing Miss Temple wanted was to be introduced to a servant as a friend of Lydia's. “I trust I am not disturbing your work.”

“Not at all.”

A silence hung between them, to her mind fetid with possibility.

“You have not said your name,” said Miss Temple, a little appalled for blinking her eyes as she did so.

“My apologies. I am Mr. Fochtmann.”

“What a very interesting mass of papers,” she said, pointing. “They look very… goodness, mechanical and scientific.”

Still smiling, Mr. Fochtmann turned the top page of each pile facedown, hiding their contents from her eyes. “A woman like yourself cannot be interested in anything so tiresome. Will you sit?”

“No, thank you. I'm sure I will be late for the train—”

“Caroline Stearne I am aware of,” he said. “But you said ‘Isobel’—”

“We are cousins,” said Miss Temple easily. “Caroline has traveled with Lydia to Macklenburg.”

Miss Temple wondered if Captain Tackham and his dragoons were searching for her, whether they might appear at any time.

“Apparently there has been no word sent from her party,” Fochtmann observed. “Though they are gone now over a week.”

“Who writes postcards after getting married?” The skin above her breasts flushed with memories from the glass book (… a blindfolded man straining at the touch of two tongues at once… the careful liquid insertion, one at a time, of a string of amber beads…). She blinked to find he had cocked his head, watching her.

“But there has been word. From the court at Macklenburg. The party did not arrive.”

“Not arrive? That is impossible.”

“It is at the least strange.”

“Sir, it is difficult to credit at all! Where is the outcry? Where are the journalists—the naval search parties, troops of lancers scouring the coasts? If the heir to Macklenburg is missing—” She stopped, staring at Mr. Fochtmann quite seriously. “Has anyone told Lydia's father?”