The Dark Volume Part 24

"My name is Chang."

FOR A moment Rawsbarthe looked up without understanding, and then suddenly his entire body burst into a thrashing attempt to get away. As the fellow was on his back and in no way strong, it was simple for Chang to pin him with one knee and shift his grip to the fellow's throat, squeezing tight.

"You are a criminal!" Rawsbarthe gasped.

"And you were searching Mrs. Trapping's private room. I do not believe a woman's bedchamber is the lawful province of any Ministry."

"Mrs. Trapping has been summoned to the Duke's presence! She has not complied. My investigation is fully within the scope of the Privy Council's powers-"

"Then why are you alone in the dead of night? Where are your soldiers? Where is your writ?"

"I..." Rawsbarthe gulped and twitched his cheek where a fleck of wax had hardened, a milky teardrop. "I... I do not answer to the likes of... ah..."

"Why does the Duke want to see Mrs. Trapping?"

"Her brother-"

"Which brother?"

Rawsbarthe frowned as if this were the question of an idiot. "Henry Xonck has withdrawn to his home in the country-an attack of fever. With his munitions works, such incapacity becomes a matter of national interest-"

Before the man could finish, Chang hauled Rawsbarthe to a sitting position against the side of a bedpost. Chang stood, ready to send a kick wherever it might prove necessary.

"So what did you find here? In the national interest?"

"Well, firstly-goodness, it seems the room is not Mrs. Trapping's room at all."

"Goodness indeed," sneered Chang. "Empty your pockets."

Rawsbarthe shrugged his coat back into place and patted it vaguely, as if trying to remember where the pockets actually were. He plucked out an envelope and peered at the writing.

"Yes... here... and the woman whose belongings do in fact fill it-one-ah-one-Eloise Dujong-"

"Tutor to the Trapping children."

Rawsbarthe's eyes went wide. "You know her?"

Chang s.n.a.t.c.hed the envelope from Rawsbarthe's grasp. "Keep talking."

"The room is hers! Her clothes fill the closet connecting to the Colonel's chamber! Yet the children have no rooms on this floor of the house! It may well be that Eloise Dujong is the Colonel's mistress! Yet with such a settled inhabitation of the nearby room, Mrs. Trapping must herself be fully aware of the arrangement!"

Chang dealt enough with the back staircases and alleyways of so ciety to know this sort of arrangement was far more common than was believed. What he did not know-and must discern, for his own safety-was where Eloise's involvement stopped. Was she merely Trapping's mistress... or more? Trapping had been on the periphery of the Cabal, a go-between serving the Xoncks and Vandaariff... but Eloise was hardly un.o.bservant... or a fool...

Chang looked down at the envelope, sorting his earliest memories of Eloise at Harschmort-she had been whispering advice into Charlotte Trapping's ear. But on their last night-when she had been captured in the Comte's laboratory-it had been Francis Xonck who had taken personal charge of her. Could it be that Eloise was dear to Xonck-that he had manipulated events to spare her?

"Why take this?" Chang asked Rawsbarthe. "There were many others."

"N-no reason at all, merely to satisfy my superiors that I had successfully entered-"

Chang sent the toe of his boot sharply into Rawsbarthe's ribs, turning the man's words into a wheeze. The letter was a single page, folded over, covered in script, addressed to Mrs. Eloise Dujong, 7 Hadrian Square... the postal marks were smudged, with no clear date, nor was there any other writing to indicate who the envelope was from. He glanced to Rawsbarthe, who was looking up at him with some trepidation.

Mrs. Dujong, I trust you will forgive my presumption, yet the matters at hand are too vital for etiquette to prevent sharing what I have learned. Your loyal attachment to Colonel and Mrs. Trapping is well known and so I fear you may be the only person in a position to give warning about the imminent danger that now threatens them both. I say both, yet it is for the Lady I am most urgently concerned. You must perceive the depth of interests arrayed against Mrs. Trapping's recent and misguided efforts of enquiry. I have included such tokens that may convince you of my good intention, and implore you to reveal this letter to no one, most particularly the Lady herself.

Word may be left in my name at the St. Royale Hotel and I shall respond directly. In this I am your humble and obedient servant, Caroline Stearne There was nothing else in the envelope. Chang crouched down, leaning his face closer to Rawsbarthe.

"Where is the rest of it?" he asked.

"I've no idea!" the man squeaked.

"Who is your immediate superior after Bas...o...b..?"

"M-Mr. Phelps!"

This was going nowhere.

"Why give him this? Of all her things? The truth-or I shall cut off your nose."

"Because it mentions Mrs. Trapping! And she has vanished!"

"Vanished as of when?"

"Three days ago."

"Then who is in charge of the Xonck family interests?"

Rawsbarthe shook his head. "Stewards, directors, factory managers-but no one can step forward. They all wait for Henry Xonck to recover, though the Doctors give no hope-but the nation's defense, our capacity for military action-"

"I am not aware of any need for war."

Rawsbarthe sputtered. "Simply because you are not aware does not mean that genuine threats-"

Chang snapped the envelope at Rawsbarthe's nose.

"What 'misguided efforts' was Charlotte Trapping engaged in? Is she being blackmailed? By someone who wants her newly expanded share of the Xonck empire?"

"I've n-no idea!"

"Do you know this Caroline Stearne?"

"Unfortunately not-however, as soon as you allow me to leave I a.s.sure you that one of my very first points of business will be to inquire for her at that very hotel."

"Do not bother. The woman's throat has been cut ear to ear this last week."

Chang stood. If only the letter had a date! How had Caroline Stearne known to write Eloise? When had she known? Such a warning may have steered Charlotte Trapping away from discovering the Cabal's plot, but might it not also have protected the woman when her husband and older brother were both marked for ruin? Serious and stable like Bas...o...b.., Caroline Stearne had been in the first rank of the Cabal's minions, but Chang had no illusion that she would do such a thing on her own impulse... so who amongst the Cabal had directed her?

Chang turned to Rawsbarthe, who had grown rather accustomed to looking up at the ceiling.

"Where is Colonel Aspiche?" asked Chang.

"Who?"

"Colonel of Dragoons-the 4th Dragoons."

"How on earth should I know?"

"Is he alive?"

"Is there a reason he wouldn't be?"

Chang dropped to his knees and drove his fist hard across Rawsbarthe's jaw, knocking the man senseless once more. He stood, flexed the fingers in his glove, and tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat. He'd been in the Trapping house far too long.

FIVE MINUTES later Chang was on the street, unseen and unremarked, threading his way toward the White Cathedral, itself no particular destination but on the way to others he had not yet chosen between. One possibility would be the Palace-Staelmaere House itself-to find firsthand about the Duke and the gla.s.s woman. Charlotte Trapping had been missing for three days... yet for the Captain and his soldiers to reach Karthe, they must have been sent well before that, soon after the airship had set forth. He was sure the true sequence of events would tell him who lay behind it, and their real intentions... but it was very late and the pleasure Chang had felt from his encounter with Sapp and Horace had faded before the unremarkable complexity of what he had learned of Eloise. She was an intelligent woman, but the idea that an intelligent woman would make the choices her room had spelled out, as he knew perfectly intelligent people did every day of the week, was nevertheless dismaying.

He reached the Cathedral and kept on, up St. Margaret's to the Circus Garden, but turned well before he reached its lights-even at this hour burning bright-wending by habit back toward the Library. In another five minutes he reached the squat hut housing the sewer entrance, and ten minutes after that heaved open the hatch in the Library bas.e.m.e.nt. He climbed the inner staircases in silence, located the pallet in the dark-quietly displacing the bottles around it (the spot was used in the afternoons by an especially gin-steeped catalog clerk)-and gratefully stretched the whole of his frame onto its welcome softness. He laid his coat over his body like a stiffened blanket and folded his gla.s.ses into the outside pocket. He exhaled in the dark, feeling the bones in his shoulders settle into the pallet, the edges of his mind already beginning to fray into dream... he recalled a stanza from the Coeurome retelling of Don Juan, extending the story into the new world-"that eternal optimism of desire/persistent as plague"-but then the words blurred, flowing from line to line like a bubbling stream of broken ink... then the lines became smoke against a white sky, Doctor Svenson's cigarettes, curling up... smoke rising from Angelique's shattered torso... from the Contessa's lacquered cigarette holder. Chang's last thought was of that same smoke, exhaled from the Contessa's mouth into the ear of Celeste Temple, still feverish on her bed. Then Celeste opened her eyes, the whites swirling with the filth that had been blown into each blinking globe.

CHANG WOKE to shafts of dimmest morning falling five floors through a lattice of metal catwalks and staircases, all the way from skylights of thick streaked gla.s.s on the roof. The effect was very much like a prison-or how Chang imagined a prison to be-but he enjoyed it nevertheless, taking pleasure in willful limitation. He padded his way to the archivist's closet, where he found water, a mirror, and a chamber pot. The water was not hot, so he did not shave, but rinsed his neck cloth, wrung it out, and then draped it across his shoulders to dry. He grimaced at the state of his once-fine leather coat, ruined first by pa.s.sage through the furnace pipes of Harschmort and second by immersion in the sea. But Chang had no money to replace it. As the lining was whole and the coat still kept him warm, he resigned himself to being mistaken, with his gla.s.ses, for a blind beggar.

Morning ablutions as complete as they were ever going to be, Chang climbed to the ninth floor of stacks, emerging on the third floor of high vaulted public rooms. He crossed to the Doc.u.ment Annex, where the government publications were housed. Like every public room in the Library, the Annex was graced with a pink-streaked marble floor and a large cartouche above the door bearing the arms of the aristocratic family funding that particular room's construction (in this case the extinct and unregretted Grimps). In direct opposition to its opulent trappings, the Annex, owing to its ever-expanding contents, had been crammed with shelving, covering the walls and in free-standing rows, some fifteen feet tall, requiring ladders and the help of Library staff to find anything whatsoever.

For Chang, the collection was a ready source of information about land holdings, changes in law, marriages, estates, legacies, census surveys-anything (which meant everything) the dogged grind of the government decided ought to be set down for posterity. He started at the beginning. The Duke was alive, which meant his puppet mistress, Mrs. Marchmoor, must be as well. Charlotte Trapping was not in her house, and the Palace bureaucracy sought her. By all accounts she was no idiot (unless one took into account her marriage), only a woman who had been routinely shunted aside from her family's power...

Chang rolled a wooden ladder into position and climbed to its highest rung. On the top shelf was a wooden tray holding the newest reports not yet of a quant.i.ty to be bound. Chang scooped up the contents and stepped easily down the ladder with his arms full, sure as a cat, crossing to a wide table. He dropped the pile onto it without ceremony.

When the 4th Dragoons had been re-posted to serve at the Palace, Chang had used Ministry announcements to trace where the order had come from. Thus he had uncovered a bargain made between Henry Xonck and Deputy Minister Crabbe. While Chang was not a man to imagine purity in the intentions of others, even he had been surprised by the nakedness with which a man of business like Xonck had insinuated his agenda into that of the government. By placing Colonel Trapping-his own brother-in-law-at the center of the Palace, Xonck ensured that he would receive advance notice of all military actions, diplomatic agreements, tariff decisions-an almost infinite number of events that he could then skillfully exploit to his financial advantage. In turn, Crabbe had been given-quite without lawful precedent-the equivalent of a private army at his own command, which also-being now executed by the Queen's soldiers-put an official government stamp on all of the Cabal's actions. The arrangement had been audacious and arrogant. But now Chang was curious about the finer details that-due to the grind of bureaucracy- might not have been published initially. What had Henry Xonck been promised for his part in the bargain? And by extension what might Charlotte Trapping have discovered since that final night at Harschmort House?

The reports were an uncollected jumble, from every Ministry and each department, but Chang sorted rapidly, discarding doc.u.ments on agriculture, legal reform, medical patents, cheese, livestock, and stamps. He paused at a mention of royal game preserves, his squinting eyes caught by a reference to Parchfeldt Park. Chang held the paper up to his face and read more closely: a portion of land running directly through the park's southern quarter had been given over to the public interest to allow an arm of the Orange Ca.n.a.l to be extended across the width of the preserve. Chang frowned. What was on the far side of Parchfeldt Park that required access to the ca.n.a.ls, and through them the sea? He set this aside and sorted through the rest of the unbound papers, but nothing else caught his interest. He shrugged. That a Parchfeldt ca.n.a.l had anything to do with the Xoncks was mere speculation. On a whim he crossed to the Interior Ministry doc.u.ments, looking for any previous attempts to open this portion of Parchfeldt to private usage. With some satisfaction he found a cl.u.s.ter of pet.i.tions brought forward by a certain Mr. De Groot, the apparently ill-favored owner of a local mill. All had been denied. The requests had persisted for ten years and then abruptly ceased, leaving a gap of some three years with no requests whatsoever... until this last winter, when one was put forward by a Mr. Alfred Leveret.

This request had been granted.

HE LEFT the Annex and crossed the marble landing to the reference room, vaulting behind the archivist's counter without a qualm. Moving like a deliberate half-blind bee amongst dusty blossoms, Chang dipped in and out of heavy, flaking volumes-registries of business, of death, catalogs of land transfer. Thirty minutes later he slipped off his gla.s.ses and spat into his handkerchief, rubbing the moistened cloth over each tender eye. He had learned what he needed to know: August De Groot had died bankrupt in a debtor's cell. After three years unclaimed and empty, his mill works had been purchased- just this last October-by Alfred Leveret, a senior employee of Xonck Armaments. And now, in the wake of all the recent transactions between Henry Xonck and the Privy Council, the precious ca.n.a.l access had been granted.

He snorted at the way wealth so effortlessly got its own, De Groot's misery bringing to mind the story of Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a northern mill owner gone bankrupt, no doubt hounded to ruin just as De Groot had been, by others waiting to snap up the leavings for cheap. And what had happened to De Groot's children, or his displaced workers-were any of them driven to a life in the brothels? Were such costs ever considered in the transactions of high finance? Certainly they lay outside the care of any official counting, and thus beyond what the nation could ever admit had occurred. Chang swatted the book dust from his hands.

IT WAS near eight o'clock. The staff would be arriving. De Groot's factory and its proximity to Parchfeldt struck Chang as the exact sort of circ.u.mstance he had been looking for, though his rational mind told him it was far more likely that the widowed Charlotte Trapping had decamped to the cottage of some cousin by the sea, or even to a welcoming foreign capital. But was Charlotte Trapping really the person he wanted to follow? He'd gone into her home only to have his search dislocated by the mysteries of Eloise Dujong... ought he to be investigating her? He climbed quietly up to the map room, hoping to investigate all three quarries at the same stroke.

Perhaps his distrust finally had the better of him-perhaps he over-estimated the reach of his enemies, and their capacity... or perhaps he was finally learning that their plans for profit and control spread beyond any boundary he had formerly understood. Chang opened the surveyor's codex and found the map number for Parchfeldt Park, then turned to the large cases of the maps themselves, located the proper drawer, and finally hauled the item in question onto the table.

Like many royal preserves, Parchfeldt was enormous. The park was shaped like a tall Norman shield, and with the Ministry report in mind Chang turned his attention to the southernmost spike, now crossed by the band of a newly laid ca.n.a.l. The park was nearer to the sea than Chang had realized, close to the northern spur of the Orange Ca.n.a.l. Just to the edge of his map he picked out the abandoned-or soon to be so, depending on when the map had actually been made- mill works of the late Mr. De Groot. Chang shook his head. From the mill to the nearest ca.n.a.l had been an awkward circular path, adding days to any delivery, not withstanding the tolls and duties levied along the way-a minor concern to someone like Henry Xonck, but the exact margin of cost to drive a man like De Groot into collapse. With the ca.n.a.l extended, the factory would be but a day from the open sea itself-a shocking advantage, with few or no duties at all. It would be a perfect manufacturing point for goods going abroad... to such a place as Macklenburg.

He dug Caroline Stearne's letter from his pocket. Two things struck him, the first of which was that Eloise had been contacted at all. Xonck had persuaded Eloise to visit Tarr Manor to find Colonel Trapping only after Trapping had been killed. But this letter meant some other member of the Cabal had targeted Eloise and Mrs. Trapping well before... which was also to say that they had their eyes on outflanking Xonck with regard to his family's fortune. Chang snorted at the brazen strategy... and the letter did mention the St. Royale Hotel. It had to have come from the Contessa.

Chang turned his attention to the second point-the "efforts" of Charlotte Trapping. The very fact that she was a woman meant that his usual tactic-sorting through the footpaths of paper that nearly every respectable man left in his wake-was useless. It would be nearly impossible for Charlotte Trapping to exercise her desires apart from the consent of her husband or brothers in any way that would be so recorded. That she possessed all manner of personal resources he did not doubt, but discovering their workings would be very difficult.

Yet if he could not guess what she had done, perhaps he could deduce what might have provoked the Contessa.

Any objective look at the Xonck family would have found Henry by far the most important, with Charlotte and her socially promoted husband a distant second, and Francis-the rakish dilettante-an ill-considered third. To all appearances, the Cabal was dominated by Robert Vandaariff and Henry Xonck-its true architects posing as mere hangers-on to these great men. If Mrs. Trapping had been curious about her husband's activities, her inquiries would have naturally centered on his relations with those two most powerful men... Chang began to pace between the tables, hands clasped behind his back. He was near to something, he knew. Through Caroline Stearne and Eloise Dujong, the Contessa had warned Charlotte Trapping- the distance kept between herself and her object making clear the need for subterfuge and care. Chang strode back to the Annex. On the stairs he saw one of the catalogers from the second floor climbing slowly ahead of him, holding a bulging satchel. Chang ignored the fellow's nod, stalking back to the report about ca.n.a.l-building, flipping the pages... and found an address cited for Mr. Alfred Leveret. This done, he crossed to the volumes of property holdings. Another two minutes told him that Alfred Leveret had recently become the owner of a Houlton Square townhouse. In no way fashionable, Houlton Square offered its residents an unquestionable, drab respectability- the perfect address for an ambitious underling of industry.

The property record cited another entry, in an appendix... which in turn doc.u.mented bank drafts ... which in turn... Chang flipped page after page, tracking a deliberate trail of obfuscation that sp.a.w.ned a litter of paper across the Annex. But then he slipped his fingers beneath his gla.s.ses, rubbing his tender eyes with a smile. He had found it after all. The Contessa had frightened Charlotte Trapping away from prying into Henry Xonck's affairs-like the purchase of De Groot's mill-precisely because they were not Henry Xonck's affairs at all. The money for Leveret's house had come from a bank in Vienna representing Francis Xonck. The factory was his, and the Contessa knew it-which meant she was determined no one else, much less a disenfranchised prying sister, ought to.

BY THE time Chang slipped from the rear entrance, it was almost ten o'clock. He'd spent far longer than he'd intended in the Library. Through a roundabout route, winding as far north as Worthing Circle-stopping there for a pie and a hot mug of tea from a stall- Chang returned to the shuttered building at the next corner from his own rooming house and forced the door. No one followed. He climbed rapidly to the empty attic and located the floorboard under which he'd stashed the saber of the Macklenburg Lieutenant, killed in his own rooms so long ago. He stuffed the weapon under his coat and returned to the street, ready to draw it in defense if need be, but there was no one.

Another brisk walk took him to Fabrizi's, to exchange the saber for his repaired stick, apologizing for the loss of his loan. The old man eyed the saber with professional detachment and accepted it-with a clicking sound-as adequate payment. The gold on the hilt and scabbard alone would have bought the stick twice over, but Chang never knew when he would need to presume on Fabrizi for special treatment, and this was a simple enough way to build up a balance. It was nearly eleven. There was just time for a visit to Houlton Square.

THE SERVANT answering the door was stout and white-whiskered, a man who some years ago might have been of a height with Chang but had since lost an inch to age. His expression upon seeing Chang was admirably impa.s.sive-for it was broad daylight, with any number of people in the road to notice an unsavory character calling on so respectable a man as Alfred Leveret.

"Mr. Leveret," he said. "My name is Chang."

"Mr. Leveret is not at home."

"Might one enquire when he will return?"

"I am unable to say."

Chang curled his lip in a very mild sneer. "Perhaps because you do not know yourself?"

The servant ought to have slammed the door-and Chang was poised to interpose a boot and then drive his shoulder forward to force himself through-but the man did not. Instead, he merely sketched a careful peek at whoever might be watching from the street or nearby windows.

"Are you acquainted with Mr. Leveret?" he asked.

"Not at all," Chang answered. "Yet it appears we have interests in common."

The servant did not reply.

"Charlotte Trapping, for example. And Mr. Francis Xonck."

The man's crisp professional veneer-the collar, the coat, the clean-scrubbed nails, the impeccable polish of his shoes-was suddenly belied by his eyes, twitching with the encapsulated worry of two nervous mice.

"May I ask you a question, Mr....?"

"Mr. Happerty."

"Mr. Happerty. That you entertain a character like myself in the middle of the morning on your own doorstep tells me you have certain ... cares about your master. That I am here, never having met the man, is signal enough of his grave situation. I would suggest we speak more frankly-for speak we must, Mr. Happerty-indoors."

Happerty sucked on his teeth, but then stepped aside.

"I am obliged," whispered Cardinal Chang. Things were far worse than he had a.s.sumed.

THE FOYER of Leveret's townhouse was all one would have imagined, which was to say it expressed an imagination utterly contained: a black-and-white-checkered marble floor, a high-domed ceiling with an ugly chandelier dangling from a chain like a crystallized sea urchin, a staircase marked at regular intervals with paintings nakedly selected to match the upholstery of the reception chairs- optimistic river scenes showing the city's waters in a hue Chang doubted they would possess if Christ Himself walked across them on the brightest day in June.

Mr. Happerty shut the door, but did not invite Chang farther into the house, so Chang took it upon himself to stalk a few steps toward the open archway.

"The house is new to Mr. Leveret," Chang stated. "Were you in his service at his previous residence?"

"I have allowed your entry only so as to not be further seen from the street," said Happerty firmly. "You must tell me what you know."

"Tell me how long your master has been missing."

It was a guess, but a reasonable one. The real question was whether Leveret had fallen victim to the Cabal, or whether something else had occurred in the confusion of the past week-that is, whether the man was simply in hiding, or whether he was dead.