Stoker emerged from behind the screen with the bit of linen draped about his hips and the talaria fluttering from his ankles. I rose instantly.
“I shall leave you to it, then,” I said. “Thank you for the chat, Miss Talbot. It has been most instructive.”
• • •
For all I knew I was leaving Stoker alone and almost entirely unclothed in the presence of a murderess, but I was consoled that Stoker had all the instincts for self-preservation of a Bengal tiger. I had little doubt that with his superior inches and reflexes, he could best Miss Talbot if she chose to assault him. Instead I turned my attention to Julian Gilchrist’s room to search for the ledger. I moved on soundless feet, a skill I had honed hunting butterflies, and gained his room without seeing anyone. I closed the door softly behind me.
It was past noon and weak sunlight slanted in. Dust motes floated in the shafts, and for some unaccountable reason I thought of Zeus visiting Danaë in the shower of gold. Shaking off the idle fancy, I started in on Gilchrist’s mattress, feeling my way slowly down the length of it. It was lumpy and stained with substances I did not care to think of. But the sheets were clean, and I wondered how recently Cherry had obliged him upon them.
The mattress yielded nothing, and another perusal of his single bookshelf gave up no secrets. Open on the floor, a small valise had been packed with some of his clothes and his collection of brushes. He was clearly planning to leave Havelock House, and I wondered if the princess’s emeralds were meant to finance a new life abroad. Was he intending to use the story of the commission in Birmingham to cover his disappearance?
Anything that was broken or worn had been left behind, with only the best of what he owned tucked into the valise. I searched the room carefully, finding nothing of interest. His possessions were mostly grubby, cheap things, obviously purchased at little expense and used without care. Only his brushes and pigments were quality, but they offered no clues. I poked through his clothes, searching pockets and seams, and just when I was prepared to admit defeat, I felt it—the outline of a key. He had not concealed it carefully; it was merely buttoned into the pocket of a waistcoat of a particularly virulent shade of blue. The key itself was small and heavy, fashioned of old brass that had tarnished badly. I held it in my palm, wondering what it might fit as I stood in the center of the room, circling slowly. I had examined his bed, his books, every place he might cache the ledger. Were we wrong about his involvement?
I held the key like a divining rod, as if waiting for it to point the way. But in the end, it was my talent as a lepidopterist that came to the fore. One cannot hunt butterflies without painstaking attention to detail. I had trained myself through long and arduous years to note the most minute of variations between species, for those distinctions could well mean the difference between a dinner of roast beef and one of tinned beans. I thought of the pretty Limenitis archippus masquerading as a Danaus erippus in Lord Rosemorran’s collection and wondered what in this room might conceal a keyhole.
It took me less than two minutes to find it. A bit of paneling in the corner, so cleverly joined I found it by touch and not by sight. I applied my fingertips and the molding alongside shifted, giving up its secrets. “Excelsior!” I breathed, fitting the key to the lock. It turned noiselessly, and the paneled door swung open upon silent hinges. My pulse beat swiftly in my throat, percussive testament to my excitement. What would I find there? The ledger? Drafts of the blackmail note? The cupboard was deep in shadow, and I reached in with careful hands, satisfied to see that they did not tremble in spite of the burgeoning thrill of the chase.
But I was not careful enough, and with a faint whisper, a shadowy specter rushed towards me, engulfing me in its embrace. I shrieked and fell to the floor as it landed on top of me, and a good few seconds passed before I realized my assailant was, in fact, a greatcoat of some antiquity, smelling of moth. I must have brushed it free from its peg and it had fallen out, enveloping me in its heavy folds.
I muttered a curse I had learnt from Stoker and searched the garment for any clue. When I finished, I put the thing aside and rose to examine the cupboard, finding only dust and a dessicated common clothes moth for my trouble.
“Tineola bisselliella,” I muttered. “You are no help to me.”
I picked up the greatcoat, intending to replace it. My fingers had just closed over the fabric when I realized that in the fuss of it falling out, somehow the peg had become dislodged. No doubt the weight of the coat had pulled it free, for the thing was monstrous, heavy as a bear’s pelt, I observed as I put it aside again. I felt around the bottom of the cupboard for the peg, running my fingers gently over the surface. I found it at the back of the wardrobe, just out of easy reach, and with a sigh of annoyance, I hitched up my skirt and put my knee inside the cupboard to push myself further.
My hand had just closed over the peg when I heard a sharp crack and felt the perch beneath my knee give way. I leapt backwards as the pieces of the bottom fell, revealing a hidden compartment. “No doubt where he keeps his dirty underlinen,” I grumbled, but nonetheless I peered inside.
The compartment was not large, but it was big enough to hold a pasteboard box. I lifted it out in eager hands. There were no markings upon the box, and it might have been a collection of saucy letters or indecent postcards, I reminded myself. There was no reason to believe it might be a clue.
And yet. My heart hammered within my chest precisely as it had just before I had spotted my first Morpho Blue.
I lifted the lid, forcing myself to set it aside before I looked at the contents. There was no ledger, no half-written blackmail note. Only a pair of ladies’ dancing slippers. They were of excellent make, the soles kidskin and the uppers sewn of stiff white satin. They had been embellished with tiny beads and bits of lace, and they were fragile, beautiful creations.
Or they would have been, if they had not been stained with blood. One was merely touched with it, a slight streak across the instep, but the sole of the other had been saturated with gore, now dried to a rusted patch. I held it in my hands and thought for a mad moment of the tale of Cinderella and of the cruel stepsisters who had mutilated their own feet for a chance at a crown. It was their bloody slippers that had given them away. Who might these slippers betray?
I turned over the soiled slipper and had my answer. Stitched neatly in blue silk thread on the inside of the shoe were initials: the initials of a murderess.
“That cunning devil,” I murmured.
CHAPTER
25
I rocked back on my heels, still holding the bloodstained slippers. Was it possible that the woman who owned these shoes had committed the foul deed of slitting Artemisia’s throat?
I replaced the slippers in the pasteboard box and fitted the broken boards back into place. They would not stand up to scrutiny, but they would pass muster should anyone glance inside. I retrieved the peg, hung the greatcoat, and locked the cupboard, careful to pocket the key. With any luck, Gilchrist would think it simply misplaced. A more cautious man would have kept it upon his person, I reflected in disapproval. He was a woefully poor accomplice.
Unless he was no accomplice at all? What if he had done the deed and the wearer of the slippers had merely been handmaiden to the crime? But what inducement could he have offered to secure her cooperation? Perhaps he had kept the slippers to purchase her complicity, threatening her with proof of her involvement?
Before I could indulge in a brown study that would profit no one, I shook myself from my reverie and went in search of Miss Talbot and Stoker. I found them as expected in her studio, but I stopped on the threshold, my hand still upon the doorknob. She was sketching, as I had anticipated, and he was posing, yet nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him. She had, through some unholy method I could only imagine, persuaded him to leave off his loincloth entirely. He wore only a helmet and the talaria, the wings of the sandals gently brushing his an
kles. His torso and arms were liberally illustrated with the tattoos of his travels, but they obscured nothing of his beautiful musculature. His back was to me, and I could see every inch of undraped flesh, from the strong neck to the shoulders corded with effort as he raised a sword in his right hand. His left arm was bent as he lifted the head of Medusa, a foul thing covered in woolen snakes with little red silk tongues that darted out as if to touch him. She had captured him at the moment of victory, Perseus triumphant, back and legs tensed against the monumental task of slaying the Gorgon. The line of his figure, curving inwards at the small of his back, outwards over firm buttocks and muscular thighs, was as graceful and powerful as anything in creation, and I stood in silent admiration for a long moment before either of them spoke.
“For the love of Christ, if you’re coming in, close the door. There’s a draft,” Stoker ordered.
“How did you know it was I?” I asked, closing the door and advancing into the room so I could address him from the front.
He flicked his gaze to the shield propped against one leg. “The same way I am supposed to have cut off her head,” he said with the barest nod to Medusa.
The shield was highly polished, and the angle afforded him an excellent view of the door.
“Are you comparing me to a Gorgon?”
“I shall compare you to worse if you don’t stop distracting my model,” Miss Talbot said sharply.
“My apologies.” I turned my back to Stoker, and Miss Talbot sketched furiously for a few minutes more before throwing down her charcoal in triumph. Her very manner had changed. Now that she had completed her task, there was a sleekness about her, the sort of feline satisfaction I had enjoyed upon acquiring a new lover. Her artistic thirst slaked, she was relaxed as she wiped her hands.
She looked over the sheets of drawing paper. “Thank you,” she said to Stoker by way of dismissal.
He stepped away from the plinth and behind the screen to resume his clothes as she turned back to me. “You saw him,” she said, nodding towards the now empty plinth. Her voice was pitched low and intimate, a conversation for just the two of us. “What did you think?”
“Majestic,” was the only word that served, so it was the only one I used.
She bowed her head. “He will be the making of me,” she said fiercely, with an expression of rapture upon her face. So might Moses have looked upon seeing the Promised Land.
She and I said nothing more, and in a moment Stoker appeared, dressed and presentable, at least as presentable as he could be with tousled hair and a cheekful of honey pastilles.
Miss Talbot said nothing, merely smiled as we took our leave. But I noticed that her eyes fell to the parcel in my hand, and I saw too the tightness of her jaw, the quick drop of the eyelids as she clenched her fist. And when she opened her hand, I saw that she had broken her charcoal in two.
• • •
Stoker and I were quit of Havelock House before he asked about the parcel. “Soon,” I said, and the minute we gained the privacy of the Belvedere, I displayed my trophy.
He gave a soundless whistle and put out a finger to touch the spoiled slippers. “Do we know whose?”
“Look inside,” I instructed.
He did and sat back, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “This is not enough,” he said. “No jury in England will hang her on the strength of bloodied slippers. She might have trod in the stuff quite innocently.”
I snorted. “Do you really believe that?”
“What I believe is immaterial. The point is what the counsel for the defense can persuade a jury to believe. And let us not forget, juries are made of men, and no man is easily swayed to believe a woman capable of such an atrocity. They will seize any excuse to avoid convicting the female of the species, particularly if it means she will swing for it. Think of the Madeleine Smith case.”
“Blast,” I muttered. Smith had stuffed her former lover full of arsenic—arsenic she had been proven to have purchased—yet the jury could not bring itself to return a conviction. She had not been entirely exonerated, but she had been freed just the same.
“Besides,” Stoker said, holding up his fingers as he enumerated the following points. “Gilchrist wrote the threatening note to us. He wrote the blackmail note to the princess, and he kept these slippers in a secret place, no doubt to control his puppet. He must be masterminding the whole endeavor.”
“Oh, there you are again—championing him for the role of criminal mastermind! In my experience,” I said with a tart edge, “the female of the species is far more dangerous. I should put my money on him as cat’s-paw in this plot. She gave him the slippers to hide, and the rest was done at her bidding.”
Stoker said nothing, and I was surprised he had not warmed more quickly to my theory. After all, he had more reason than most men to mistrust women; his own wife had left him for dead in the Brazilian jungles. The fact that he did not hate my sex upon principle spoke to a certain native nobility in him, I decided.
I went on. “You will have to concede that I am a better judge of the character of men than you.”
He made a noise I have seldom heard outside a barnyard, a sort of braying guffaw that might have suited a donkey. “You believe you know the male character better than I? Shall I remind you that I am, in fact, myself a man?”
“I am perfectly aware of that,” I replied, “and it is this overfamiliarity with the gender that blinds you. You have never had cause to make a study of men because you are one, whereas I have devoted years to the subject.”
“You study men?” His jaw had gone slightly slack, as if he could not entirely believe I told the truth.
“Certainly. With all the interest and vigor that I apply to my lepidoptery,” I said with considerable pride.
“For what purpose?”
“Why do we study any subject?” I demanded. “To know it better. In this case, pure curiosity might have sufficed—I find the human male to be an endlessly fascinating entity. But as it happens, my more pressing motivations are twofold. First, I require men to satisfy those physical urges to which healthy adult Homo sapiens are prey. Now, you might imagine that securing partners for such activities is a simple matter, but I assure you, it is thoroughly complicated. One must assess a gentleman’s cleanliness, his attractiveness, his education, his manners and morals, and above all his discretion. Then, one must carefully plot one’s advances. A mistimed overture is a calamity.”
“I can imagine,” he said in a slightly strangled voice. But he had asked, and I plunged on ruthlessly.
“And the second motivation for making a study of men is my own safety. I have circumnavigated the globe three times in the past seven years, and I have found myself in every possible situation: shipwrecked, fêted, hunted, wined, dined, and very nearly served up en brochette to a rather nasty cannibal upon whose island I was forced to take refuge during a Fijian typhoon. I have endured hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, malaria, Corsican brigands, Balkan Customs officials, and evangelical Christians bent upon missionary work, and had only my wits upon which to rely. My judgment, quite simply, has saved my life. I will defer to it now. Julian Gilchrist is a weak, vain man. He is nothing more than a pawn in this disgraceful game.”
“Very well,” he conceded finally. “Whichever of them is the author of this atrocity, we must catch them in the act of collecting the jewels. If she fetches them, that complicity plus these slippers is enough to secure her cooperation. Although I hardly think that is the case,” he said coldly. “It is perfectly obvious that Julian Gilchrist is the leading figure in this drama.”
I pointed to the guinea coin attached to his watch chain. “Shall we wager?” I asked with a devilish grin. We had laid a guinea upon the results of our last investigation, and he never failed to seize the opportunity to remind me that he had had the better of me. It was beyond time that I redeemed myself.
“Very well.
But since I already have the coin, what will you give me if I win?” His gaze was intent, but if he meant to convey any sort of subtext to his offer, I refused to acknowledge it.
“The satisfaction of being right will have to suffice,” I told him coolly. “Now, we have a few hours to make our preparations.”
“Preparations?” His gaze narrowed. “What kind of preparations?”
“It is time to load the firearms,” I said, rubbing my hands together.
“Absolutely not,” he told me in a voice that brooked no argument. “I will have my knives and that is sufficient. You know how I feel about firearms. And if memory serves, the last time you went abroad armed, you ended up losing the bloody thing in the Thames—just before I almost drowned saving your life.”
“That is not quite how I recall the events,” I said. “But if it consoles you, very well. I will not take a revolver.”
But Stoker said nothing about other implements of pain, and after I had repaired to my little chapel to assume my expedition costume, I slipped an assortment of minuten through the cuffs of my sleeve. The little entomological pins were slender as threads, but I had once had occasion to spend two days aboard a raft in the Yellow Sea with a Chinese gentleman who had been most instructive on the application of them to tender places. The principles behind it conflicted with Western scientific theory, yet none could deny their efficacy when implemented with a skilled hand. Unfortunately, mine was not, and the most I had done was draw a little blood and injure a bit of manly pride. Still, they gave me a touch of courage, as did the last-minute addition of my tiny velvet mouse, Chester. I tucked him into my pocket, a little murine consolation for the adventure ahead. Mindful of Stoker’s admonitions against firearms, I slipped a single knife into my boot top, knowing he could hardly cavil at that since he would no doubt be equipped with at least three of his own.
A Perilous Undertaking Page 29