A Perilous Undertaking

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “I can well imagine,” I told her. Lady Cordelia lapsed into silence then, making no further inquiries, and I was grateful. I was an accomplished liar when the occasion demanded but as a rule I preferred honesty.

  As we neared Bishop’s Folly, Lady Cordelia roused herself. “I must bid you farewell for a few weeks, Miss Speedwell. I am leaving to take the boys to school for the Michaelmas term, and then I am off to Cornwall to establish the girls and their new governess at Rosemorran House. His lordship has decided London offers too many diversions and thinks the girls may settle better to their lessons in the country,” she told me. I was not surprised at Lord Rosemorran’s decision, only that he had troubled himself to think of his children in the first place. As a rule, his lordship—a vague and gentle fellow—was far more interested in his latest scholarly project than his own progeny. He left the practical management of his children to his sister, expecting that his whims would be carried out with little fuss or bother to himself. Only Lady Cordelia’s life was continually upended by his demands. It would never have occurred to him that she might have interests of her own to pursue.

  “When will you return?” I asked.

  She gave a tired shrug. “That depends entirely upon the children. If Rose will behave herself and stop putting frogs into the soup tureen, I might manage October sometime. Otherwise, I will have to remain until it is time to collect the boys for Christmas. I do not like leaving his lordship alone during his recovery, so I am glad to say that a relation of ours is coming to stay.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, our great-aunt, Lady Wellingtonia Beauclerk.”

  I lifted a brow. “Wellingtonia?”

  “She was born on the day Waterloo was fought. Her father was an aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington. She is a very interesting old lady . . . rather eccentric.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “I hardly like to say,” she hedged. “Far better for you to make up your own mind,” she added briskly. The carriage rocked to a stop and Lady Cordelia put out her hand. “Until we meet again, Miss Speedwell.”

  • • •

  Iran Stoker to ground in the Belvedere where he was busy cataloging the contents of a bookshelf. He gave a low, ardent groan, like that of a lover on the precipice of fulfillment. “His lordship has Pliny’s Natural History—all thirty-seven volumes,” he said, caressing book nine, one of the volumes on zoology. He looked up and must have seen something in my expression, for he put the book aside at once.

  “I was going to offer tea, but I think something stronger,” he said. We made our way up to the little snuggery on the first floor. Once a bolt-hole of the third Earl of Rosemorran, who had built the Belvedere to escape the demands of his wife and thirteen children, it was now our private retreat. Surrounded by shelves and case furniture, it held a comfortable sofa, an armchair, a tiled Swedish stove, and a writing table as well as a campaign bed that had once belonged to the Duke of Wellington. With the little water closet concealed behind the wall, it had provided us with a safe haven during our previous adventure, and it had become our custom to withdraw to it when we wished for seclusion. The elder Beauclerks were mindful of our privacy, but Lord Rosemorran’s children were an inquisitive lot, and I was forever falling over one or another of them in the Belvedere. The snuggery was the only spot free of sticky fingerprints and prying ears. Trotting obediently at Stoker’s heels came his bulldog, Huxley, and the earl’s Caucasian sheepdog, Betony. She ought to have been lying at her master’s feet, offering him companionship during his recuperation, but since Stoker had come to live at Bishop’s Folly, she had transferred her affections to him—and to Huxley, who seemed a little bewildered by her devotion. Huxley settled with a wet snort into his usual bed, an overturned elephant’s foot, while Bet arranged her mammoth proportions into a suitably enormous basket. The fact that the basket had once served as the gondola to a balloon piloted over Versailles by the Montgolfier brothers troubled her not at all.

  Stoker poured out a stiff measure of whiskey and handed me a glass. I waited until he had stirred up the fire in the stove and taken his own chair before launching into my tale. He listened, his expression carefully neutral until I finished.

  His first words were cordial in tone if not in content. “Have you lost your bloody mind?”

  “If you mean to abuse me, let me finish my whiskey first.”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “Veronica, you have obligated us to a member of the royal family—and not for some trifling favor. You have promised that we will solve a murder.”

  “Yes, that is rather the idea.”

  “We are not investigators,” he pointed out, his tone decidedly more acid. “We are natural historians.”

  I waved a hand. “Precisely. We are trained to observe life in the closest detail, to pursue facts, to hypothesize, to conclude—all necessary skills for a detective. We didn’t do so badly this past summer,” I reminded him.

  “We were very nearly killed for our pains,” he retorted.

  “Oh, don’t fuss, Stoker. The most significant injury sustained in the course of that investigation was when you stabbed me, an action for which I have entirely forgiven you.”

  “That was an accident,” he returned, clipping the words off sharply.

  “Of course it was. You would never stab me deliberately—at least, not without excellent provocation.”

  “Such as this?” he asked.

  “Don’t be peevish, Stoker. It makes your lips go thin and you have such a beautiful mouth.”

  He hid the feature in question by taking a swift drink of his whiskey while I continued on.

  “Think of it,” I urged. “The two of us, out there in the vast city, sleuthing down a murderer in a hunt of our own making. You cannot say we did not enjoy our last adventure, nor can you deny that we have both of us seen enough excelsior and packing crates to last until the New Year.”

  “Take me through it again,” he ordered, and I did, aware that he was scrutinizing the tale this time with all the fervor of his training as a scientist. He closed his eyes and thrust his hands into his hair, tumbling the long dark locks through his fingers as he listened.

  When I finished, he shook his head, dropping his hands and reaching once more for his whiskey. “I do not like it.”

  “Well, murder is generally regarded as disagreeable,” I replied.

  “I mean the whole affair. It’s none of my business if half of London wants to garrote the other half and serve them up on parsley.”

  “Feathers,” I said succinctly. “You have the most keenly developed sense of justice of any man I have ever known. You would never let an innocent fellow like Miles Ramsforth swing for a crime he did not commit.”

  Stoker leaned forward, his bright blue eyes glittering. “But we have only the princess’s word that he didn’t.”

  “You think she is lying.” An uncomfortable snake of doubt curled itself coldly around the base of my spine.

  “I think it is possible. Veronica, you must look at this rationally. If she has information that can save his life, why does she not come forward?”

  “I asked her,” I reminded him. “She said she could not say. That lives would be ruined.”

  “What is that against the death of an innocent man?” he demanded. “Rather than agree to do this for her, you ought to have called her bluff—insisted she go back to Sir Hugo and tell the truth, whatever the cost.”

  I said nothing. I merely stared into the depths of my whiskey glass, surprised to find it empty.

  “I know why you didn’t,” he told me, his voice suddenly gentle. “You think that by doing this for her—for them—that they will acknowledge you somehow, that it will make up for all the years of neglect.”

  “Of all the absurd—” I burst out, but he carried on, as implacable and unstoppable as an incoming tide.

  �
�I understand that you believe you have something to prove to them, but you don’t. You are worth a thousand of them, Veronica. But they will never see it. If you set yourself up as their lackey because you want their approbation, it will not stop. This is a game you cannot win, so do not play it. Walk away now, before they’ve got under your skin,” he warned.

  “Like your family have yours?” I shot back. I had not meant to say it, but once the words were there, hanging in the air between us like pieces of rotten fruit, I could not take back the stink of them.

  “What do you mean?” His voice was even and calm, and that is how I knew he was truly angry. A thundering, barking, pillaging Stoker was a happy Stoker. But stillness was the thing that betrayed his deepest rage.

  I rose and went to the chinoiserie cabinet in the corner. It took only a moment to lay my hand upon the letter. “This. From your brother, two weeks ago. Your father is dead and you said not a word to me. You have not been absent, so I know you did not attend his funeral. Your brother alludes to other letters written by assorted members of your family. I have searched the Belvedere and found eleven. Tell me, were there more?”

  I wanted him to swear at me, something vicious and suitable for a former sailor, but he merely sat, a muscle working furiously in his jaw as he listened.

  “If you truly did not care for your family, you would not have kept the letters. But you did. And they all bear the same message—your family want to see you. They implore you to name a time and place. But you have ignored them all, driving them to distraction, it seems. You have no high ground here, Revelstoke,” I said coldly. “Not when you are playing a game of your own.”

  He passed a hand over his face, and with the gesture, the coiled anger seemed to ebb a little. “God, you have a brutal tongue when you put a mind to it. Sharp as a blade and twice as lethal.” He poured out a second measure of whiskey for us both and drank his off swiftly. “Very well. My father is dead and my family beg my presence which I will not grant them. You’re quite right. I have withheld myself because it gives me pleasure to think of them gnashing their teeth over it. It is a satisfaction you ought to permit yourself,” he advised. “Tell the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to go hang themselves.”

  “After,” I said, and with that single word he suddenly understood. Comprehension broke over his features like morning across a landscape, and he shook his head slowly.

  “Poor child,” he murmured.

  “Don’t you dare. I will brook no pity from you,” I warned.

  “You don’t want to solve this puzzle of theirs so they will like you,” he said, giving voice to the feelings I could not acknowledge even to myself. “You want to do it so you can throw it in their faces.”

  I drained my own whiskey, taking courage from the burn of it. “Something like that,” I admitted finally.

  He considered this a long moment, then shrugged. “As good a motive as any. Besides, if you save a man’s life and tell your family to go to the devil, it might improve that temper of yours. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the freight of anger you have been hauling about. And I understand it, better than anyone. You have been in a foul mood ever since we discovered the truth about your parentage.”

  “I have not! Besides, you only knew me for a few days before we learned the truth. How do you know what I am like? This might be my usual temper.”

  His grinned, then settled to the particulars of our investigation. “We cannot neglect our obligations here,” he warned.

  “Naturally,” I conceded. “We shall simply have to work more quickly and finish our cataloging for the day before luncheon. That will give us the rest of each day and the evening to investigate.”

  He shook his head. “You are mad. And I am madder still for letting you talk me into this.”

  I gave him a wry smile. “We will be like Arcadia Brown and her faithful sidekick, Garvin,” I said, invoking our favorite literary detective. Stoker claimed not to enjoy popular fiction, but ever since I had introduced him to the lady investigator’s adventures, he had devoured them while still pretending to be above such diversions.

  He narrowed his gaze. “If you are expecting me to brandish a pistol and go haring off with you, crying ‘Excelsior!,’ you will be waiting until the crack of doom,” he warned. “I am only doing this because I know there is no point in attempting to talk you out of it, and you will need someone to watch your back with a murderer on the loose.”

  I grinned at him and lifted my glass in salute. “It begins.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  As natural scientists, Stoker and I approached the investigation in a suitably academic manner. First, we decided to gather as much information as possible. Stoker was finishing the mount of a particularly nasty Nile crocodile, so after speeding through my usual duties in the Belvedere, I took the opportunity to dig through Lord Rosemorran’s collection of periodicals, collecting every scrap of detail regarding the Ramsforth case. It was our good fortune that Lord Rosemorran was a newspaper enthusiast, subscribing to the respectable broadsheet publications as well as the most lurid tabloids, and from every corner of the kingdom—Gravesend to John o’ Groats. The cheaper publications were predictably morbid with their endless carping upon the gore-stained blood in which the victim had been found, while the broadsheets took a loftier tone of condemnation of the Bohemian lifestyle and its related immoralities. Hampered as we were by not examining the scene when the crime was fresh, we at least had the advantage of getting the story from every possible angle.

  I pored over the newspapers until my eyes ached and my fingers were black with ink, reading aloud pertinent details and taking copious notes. I discovered Louise had been quite effective at relating the irrefutable facts of the situation: Artemisia was dead, and Miles Ramsforth, after refusing categorically to speak at all upon the subject, was about to hang for her murder. Everything else seemed open to interpretation. One scandal sheet called him a child of Lucifer while the quality press seemed to think him a rakishly charming fellow who had nobly chosen to go mutely to the gallows rather than excite further scandal by breaking his silence. The fact of Artemisia’s pregnancy was seized like a moldy bone by the rabid journalists of the gutter press and neatly glossed over by their more elevated brethren. The only thing they all agreed upon was that the sooner he was hanged, the better for everyone.

  The most detailed descriptions were to be found in a nasty little rag called The Daily Harbinger. They had created a special issue with elaborate color illustrations of the murder scene, and I waved it at Stoker.

  “Here is an excellent illustration of Miles Ramsforth. He looks quite respectable in the broadsheets, but the Harbinger makes him look utterly villainous. Still, I think he is rather handsome, or would be if it were not for that chin.”

  Stoker came to look over my shoulder. “Weak,” he agreed. “No doubt the reason for his muttonchops.” He stroked his own jaw, looking quite satisfied, as well he might. I had seldom seen a more firmly set bone on any man.

  I turned the page to find a gruesome illustration of the murder scene—Miles Ramsforth’s bedchamber. It might have been an elegant room under other circumstances. It was lavishly furnished in old Tudor oak, from the linenfold paneling to the four-poster bed hung with layers of deep crimson bed-curtains. I imagined when they were drawn, the bed itself would be very cozy, a warm, scarlet womb, perfect for snuggling into on cold nights. I peered closer. “Look how frightful. They’ve even managed to match the blood to the bed-curtains,” I said with a shudder at the puddle below the scarlet hangings. The edges of the pool were irregular, and a quick examination of the article explained. “It says the murderer must have trod in the blood at some point.”

  “The murderer must have been dripping in the stuff,” Stoker pointed out as he returned to carefully fit an eyeball into his crocodile. He launched into a technical explanation of the velocity of the blood pumping from arterial vess
els versus that of venous vessels. “I was standing next to a fellow who lost half his head to a cannonball during the Alexandria bombardment,” he finished helpfully. “Looked as if we’d all been bathing in gore.”

  “Apparently that is how the police ruled out any other possible murderers,” I said, returning to the article. “They inspected everyone’s clothes and shoes—guests, staff. It says that Ottilie Ramsforth, who might otherwise have been suspected, wore unblemished white without a speck of blood anywhere upon her person. Only Miles Ramsforth was drenched in the stuff.”

  “If he didn’t do the deed himself, how does he account for that?”

  I tossed the paper aside. “He said he trod in the blood when he found the body and claimed his clothes became soiled because he was so shocked upon discovering her that he lifted her up.”

  “A flimsy bit of flummery,” Stoker countered, and I agreed.

  “Apparently that is when he stopped talking to the police. He gave them an initial statement claiming his innocence, then nothing more. He would not even help his solicitors except to say that if they could not save him without his help, he did not deserve to be saved.”

  “A curious line to take when one’s life is at stake,” Stoker put in.

  We had just decided to send out for packets of fish and chips and eat à deux in the Belvedere when a note arrived from the main house. I opened it with begrimed fingers, cursing soundly as I read.

  “What?” Stoker demanded.

  I brandished the paper at him. “Our presence is requested for a late supper. It seems Lady Wellingtonia has arrived earlier than expected and is quite eager to make my acquaintance. We are asked to come on the hour.”

  Stoker glanced at the case clock and muttered something unprintable. We had scarcely a quarter of an hour to make ourselves presentable, but I always kept an extra frock close at hand, and a quick scrub in the water closet and a change into black silk effected a tremendous improvement. Stoker had no time to shave the whiskers that darkened his jaw, but he washed quickly and thrust his arms into an evening coat, snatching up a bit of discarded silk to fashion into a neckcloth as we hurried to the house. The dogs, accustomed to Stoker’s habit of feeding them titbits from the table, scampered along behind us, charging off only at the last minute to chase a rabbit. The dinner gong was just sounding as we reached the drawing room, slightly out of breath and looking rather too bedraggled for a smart supper party.