A Perilous Undertaking

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  Stoker choked again on his port while I groped for a response. Lady Wellie went on in a blithe tone. “I am older than Father Thames, children, and I have made my peace with it. But I have a few years left before Death asks me to dance, and I mean to enjoy them as I have the rest. Now, tell me why you are interested in Freddie Havelock.”

  Before I could think of a good lie, Stoker spoke. “Building upon the work of Charles Willson Peale, I have in mind a thoroughly new means of organizing the displays of the natural history specimens his lordship has in the Belvedere. I want to place them each in a setting reminiscent of their habitat in the wild. If we were to position paintings in the background of each display, very detailed and specific paintings, we could conjure an atmosphere of reality unlike anything that has been seen before.”

  I gaped at him. “Stoker, that is brilliant.” Too late, I realized we were supposed to be partners, and as such, I ought to have known about such a scheme.

  But Lady Wellie was sharp as a talon. “You are unfamiliar with this plan, Miss Speedwell?”

  “It is the first I have heard of it,” I told her truthfully.

  “Then why were you so keen to make the acquaintance of Sir Frederick?” she asked, her dark gaze inquisitive. A tiny smile curved the corners of her mouth, as if she sensed my discomfiture and it amused her a little.

  “I wanted to surprise Miss Speedwell with the endeavor,” Stoker lied smoothly. “It was my suggestion that we make his acquaintance with an eye to viewing his art.”

  She gave a slow nod, reluctantly, I fancied, accepting his explanation. “Well, Freddie is unique, and he might have done justice to your project at one time, but not now.”

  “Why not now?” I asked.

  Lady Wellie spread her hands. “Freddie is very nearly a cripple,” she said flatly. “A few years ago he began to experience episodes of tremors in the limbs. He had enough strength to do the ordinary things—shave himself, write a letter—but he hadn’t the ability to hold a paintbrush for more than a few hours. He made his reputation on the size of his canvases, great hulking things, larger than life, they are. You ought to see the portrait of me in the Helicon Club—bosoms the size of an infant,” she said with a raucous laugh. “But with his diminished capacity for work, a canvas of that sort would have taken him years to finish. He tried miniatures, but they demanded a finesse of which he was no longer capable. He turned his hand to designing furniture instead and decorating his house. Frightful pile of a place—looks like Brighton Pavilion inside.”

  “Havelock House?”

  “That’s the one,” she said with a nod. “He inherited a tidy sum from his father—you’ve heard of Septimus Havelock?” She looked from me to Stoker and both of us made noises of assent. “Most famous artist of his generation, Septimus was. His portrait of Queen Victoria upon her accession secured his admission to the Royal Academy at the unprecedented age of seventeen. There was not a crowned head in Europe he didn’t paint, and he finished his career at the court of the tsars as the Russian emperor’s pet artist. Quite a legacy for Freddie to live up to.” She paused to reach for a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker, applying herself diligently to picking out nutmeats whilst we waited for her to resume her tale. “Freddie had very little interest in his inheritance when he was young—wanted to make his own way, and I say good for him. A fellow ought not to rest upon his family name,” she added with a meaningful glance at Stoker. “If he has skills, he ought to use them in service of queen and country.”

  Stoker studied his fingernails and made no reply.

  “Sir Frederick did establish himself,” I reminded her.

  “That he did,” she agreed. “He was a very talented painter in his own right, but he has never measured up to his father’s genius and it has always been rather a sensitive point,” she told me with a knowing nod. “When Frederick’s body began to fail him, he built that magnificent monstrosity on the edge of Holland Park—a sort of combination of house and studio and gallery. He meant to create a salon for aficionados to gather and discuss art, but he also intended to use the space as a nursery for budding artists.”

  “A generous scheme,” I remarked.

  Lady Wellie snorted. “Generous, yes. Freddie is generous, but usually only when it benefits him.”

  “And how does this establishment benefit him?”

  “He gets to play God. He advises them on what commissions to take, what manner of art to pursue, with whom they should sleep. With his little protégés gathered about him, he is still important, still a kind of paterfamilias to the up-and-coming. Provides them with introductions to wealthy benefactors, too—the sort of men who have more money than taste and can afford to pay handsomely to be taught what to like.”

  My heart thrummed with excitement. I had wondered exactly how to guide Lady Wellie onto the subject of Miles Ramsforth, but she had led us to the very edge of the story herself.

  I widened my eyes, adopting an innocent expression. “Isn’t Sir Frederick related to that poor Mr. Ramsforth?”

  Lady Wellie’s dark eyes sharpened. “Miles Ramsforth? Yes, he is. Odd to call him ‘poor’ when he is a convicted murderer, child,” she said mildly.

  “Perhaps he is innocent,” I offered. “He has provided no alibi.”

  “Which rather points to his guilt,” Lady Wellie countered. “But you are an optimist, I see, Miss Speedwell. A trait I have often observed amongst lepidopterists.”

  “I have pointed out that very thing to her,” Stoker put in.

  Lady Wellie was regarding me thoughtfully. “Yes, the butterfly hunter likes the mazy chase of the beautiful, fluttering just out of reach. But it is a curious thing, to hunt the butterfly instead of the tiger,” she added in a low voice. “You mete death with your own hands, do you not, Miss Speedwell? I wonder, would you stop at a butterfly?”

  I put my hand to my teacup, wrapping my fingers carefully about the warm porcelain. “Death is a necessary balance to life, Lady Wellingtonia.”

  She gave her cackling laugh again. “You needn’t tell me, Miss Speedwell. I am nearer to it than you.”

  Just then Mr. Baring-Ponsonby snored loudly, rousing himself again. “Eh, what’s that? Yes, I will have that pudding now,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He looked down at his empty bowl, the merest trace of crème anglaise puddling in the bottom. “I seem to have eaten it already. How disappointing.”

  Stoker affected an angelic expression of innocence and Lady Wellie rose. “Never mind, Cecil. You’re too fat anyway.” Stoker offered his arm to her, and Mr. Baring-Ponsonby escorted me. The hour was late, the case clock in the hall chiming a quarter past midnight as we emerged from the little supper room.

  “I must thank you both for a most diverting evening,” Lady Wellingtonia said. She presented Stoker with her cheek to kiss but merely held out her hand to me. She wore old-fashioned mitts of lace, costly little scraps that neither veiled her aged hands nor warmed her but were worn simply to demonstrate that she had money enough for fripperies.

  I touched the gnarled hand lightly, careful to avoid the fingers with their swollen joints. She wore heavy rings set thickly with old, filthy diamonds.

  She gave me a slow nod. “You must let me know how you make out with Freddie,” she said with an odd twinkle in her eye. “He can’t paint your little landscapes, but I daresay he knows someone who will.”

  With that, she bade us good night and we left the warmth and light of the main house for the gardens, dark and heavy with rising fog. A lantern had been left for us, and Stoker carried it, guiding us both along the path to the Belvedere, the dogs racing up to trot dutifully at our heels. Without discussion, we chose to settle in for a nightcap in our place of work rather than repair to the separate tiny dwellings where we slept.

  Lord Rosemorran had generously provided us with living accommodations on his estate, permitting us to choose from a collection
of small follies scattered about the grounds, each decorated in some outlandish style and fitted with many of the modern amenities. While most young Englishmen bent on the Grand Tour spent their time collecting art and social diseases, the Beauclerk men had acquired an assortment of outbuildings, shipping them home at great trouble and hideous expense. They had variously been used as playhouses, bathhouses, summerhouses, guesthouses, and in one notable case an hermitage.

  But there were no hermits in evidence when Stoker and I took up residence, he in a Chinese temple in the pagoda style and I in a Gothic chapel complete with tiny gargoyles and a vaulted ceiling painted with stars. Mercifully, the rudiments of plumbing had been installed and gas laid on, so accommodation in our tiny abodes had proven quite satisfactory.

  If only the rest of the estate fared so well, I thought as we made our way down to the Belvedere. The property was a vast one by London standards, although rather mean for a man who owned more than thirty thousand acres of Cornwall. But the grounds that availed the various earls plenty of scope for their acquisitive passions also required a great deal of upkeep—upkeep that was not always forthcoming. Between the little follies and the Belvedere lay the glasshouse, a cast-iron pavilion built in the style of the Crystal Palace. In fact, it was a model, built by Sir Joseph Paxton himself when he was tinkering with the design for the eventual site of the Great Exhibition. Once a splendid repository for the various plants and birds collected by the present earl’s father, it was now an eyesore, with more windows broken than whole, fragments of glass powdering the weedy grass that had grown up around it. It was hid from the main house by a maze of hornbeam, and I doubted our patron had thought of it from one year to the next. That was a pity. The design was a miracle of modern invention, for it wedded iron and glass into a lacy, delicate structure that defied gravity, soaring like a cathedral of crystal, capturing light and multiplying it. Or it had, I imagined, before weather and neglect had had their cruel way with it. Now it stood, hunched and silent, a bedraggled figure in the fog, as if embarrassed by its wrecked splendor, like a raddled courtesan seen in the unkind light of day.

  “Lord Rosemorran ought to do something with that,” I grumbled. “He might pull it down and put the space to better use.”

  “Like a tennis court?” Stoker suggested derisively. We were united in our scorn for organized athletics.

  “Like a shooting gallery,” I countered. “I should like someplace to practice.”

  “When hell freezes solid,” Stoker told me. Suddenly he stopped, rearing back so suddenly that I collided against his back, a wall of solid muscle as impassable as stone. The dogs, alerted to his mood, began to dance about, sniffing intently and whimpering.

  “Stoker, what the devil is the trouble?”

  He had stopped just short of the Belvedere. He said nothing but raised the lantern high and jerked his head towards the door. It was closed, as we had left it, but now a piece of paper hung there, affixed by a drawing pin.

  Stoker wrenched the note loose, holding the lantern aloft so we both could see. It was a single sheet of foolscap, the writing scrawled in harsh capitals that nearly pierced the page, the ink thick and blotted, as if from a badly mended nib.

  KEEP OUT OF THIS OR YOU WILL MEET THE SAME END

  All at once the dogs, who had been circling and whining, charged past, flinging themselves into the depths of the garden, giving tongue like a pack of hounds hot upon a fox as a shadow detached itself from behind the glasshouse and began to run, a black cloak billowing behind like the wings of a fallen angel.

  Instantly, Stoker started off after the dogs, reaching for the knife he kept in his boot. I picked up my skirts in both hands and ran after him, hurtling over hedges as we followed the sound of the dogs. Neither of us remembered the lantern, and in the darkness I tripped—over the hapless Patricia, I noticed with some irritation—and by the time I had righted myself, it was finished. Stoker had retrieved the dogs and was returning, dripping wet from the fog and fairly vibrating with rage.

  “Did you find him?”

  “Gone,” he said bitterly, and he tugged off his sodden coat and waistcoat. “He went clean through the gap in the east wall where the masonry is crumbling. It was all I could do to keep the dogs from following.”

  “Useless creatures,” I said, ushering them inside and fetching them each a marrowbone for their troubles. “They might at least have provided us with a clue.”

  Stoker stripped off his shirt to wipe his face and sodden hair, then tugged it back on. “Ah, but they did,” he told me, grinning in triumph. He tossed me a piece of fabric, no bigger than an inch by two.

  “What is this?” I turned over the scrap, noticing the plain wool fabric and tiny stitches.

  “Whoever he was, he wore a cloak. Huxley managed to get his teeth into the hem of it and tear that bit off as the fellow dodged through the gap.”

  “Well, at least you earned your marrowbone,” I told Huxley, throwing Bet a reproachful glance. She panted happily as she gnawed at her undeserved prize.

  “Can you tell anything from the fabric?” I asked, passing it back to Stoker.

  He shrugged. “Nothing of note. But at least it is a clue of sorts. I wonder what sort of malefactor has been scampering about in the fog?”

  “We are agreed that this refers to the business Princess Louise has set us upon?” I asked.

  Stoker rolled his eyes. “Are you in the habit of receiving threatening missives from strangers?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a habit,” I hedged.

  He narrowed his gaze. “Veronica.”

  “Well, some butterfly collectors can be quite dogged in their pursuit. There are specimens worth more than this estate, you know.”

  “And have you any in your possession?”

  “Not at present,” I replied smoothly.

  He considered that a moment. “I think I may have pursued the wrong field of natural science.”

  “Undoubtedly. I had five pounds off of Lord Bowen for the pretty little specimen of Euploea mulcibes I found him last week.” Stoker raised his brows. “Striped Blue Crow,” I explained. “A little brush-foot indigenous to India. I put him in touch with a dealer out of Madras who happened to have a male with the most curious mutation—”

  “Veronica.” His voice was low and tight with the sort of control which meant I had very few seconds before he lost his temper entirely. I was halfway tempted to goad him into it—few things were more arousing to me than the sight of Stoker in full froth—but I had made a vow to myself never to bed an Englishman, and although Stoker frequently tested my resolve, I had not yet abandoned it.

  “No, Stoker. I know of no one who currently has reason to threaten us.”

  “Us?” he queried.

  “It is not addressed to me,” I pointed out. “And it was placed where both of us work. It might just as easily have been meant for you.”

  He reared back, affronted. “I haven’t given anyone reason to want to kill me.”

  “Are you quite certain? Think carefully. I am convinced we could compile a list,” I said sweetly.

  He sighed. “I spent the better part of the afternoon wrestling with a recalcitrant crocodile,” he informed me. “I have no interest in crossing swords with you for the rest of the night. Come on.”

  He whistled up the dogs and grabbed the lantern as he seized my wrist with his other hand.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded.

  “To bed.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  To my mingled annoyance and relief, Stoker’s invitation to bed was issued in the strictest sense of the word. He locked us into my little Gothic chapel and then proceeded to spend the night sleeping next to me, his head bumping the footboard and his feet resting on the pillow beside me. It was not the first time we had slept in such a fashion, and I doubted it would be the last. A thousand question
s chased and tangled in my mind, but I thrust them aside, counting backwards from one hundred in Tagalog until I drifted off to sleep.

  I awakened to the pleasant sight of Stoker stretching himself and pulling on his shirt.

  “No attacks by villains bent upon writing at us?” I teased.

  He favored me with a glower. “Whoever left that note was bold enough to trespass onto the private property of an earl and he was quick enough to elude apprehension.”

  “You needn’t favor your sex so highly,” I pointed out. “Our miscreant might have been a woman.”

  He snorted. “Do you really think a woman could elude me?” I looked him over from tumbled black hair to work-roughened hands to shoulders and thighs heavy with muscle.

  “I cannot imagine the woman who would want to,” I said, batting my lashes furiously.

  “Stop flirting and take this seriously,” he ordered. “You agreed to do this ridiculous thing for a princess and within hours we are threatened. Does that not put you off the whole business?”

  “No,” I replied slowly. “If anything, it has made me more determined than ever. For one simple reason.”

  “Bloody-minded stubbornness?” he asked.

  I pulled a face. “We have not lifted a finger to begin this investigation in earnest, and already we have a clue. Whoever wrote this has just given us the first solid proof that Miles Ramsforth is innocent.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “True enough. And whoever it was is clearly panicked, but why?”

  “Because they know who actually killed Artemisia,” I supplied.

  “And they don’t want the truth to come out. I will grant you that, the logic is solid. But why come after us? We haven’t stirred any hornets’ nests yet.”

  I pondered a moment. “Princess Louise did. She told me she intended to speak to Ottilie Ramsforth and Sir Frederick Havelock at dinner last night. She meant to smooth the way for us, prepare them we would be asking questions on her behalf.”