“And you think that since Stoker publicly whipped the fellow last year, his name will be bandied as a potential villain in the piece?”
“It is only a matter of time,” Sir Hugo said. “De Morgan was apparently a very likable fellow. No known enemies apart from Stoker. A few small outstanding debts of honor, one or two tradesmen’s bills, but nothing worth killing a man for. There is no one in de Morgan’s life who bore him the sort of grudge Stoker did.”
“Then why hasn’t his name come up before now? Why hasn’t he been interrogated or arrested?”
“Because no one else at Scotland Yard knows what I know,” Sir Hugo replied with obvious satisfaction. “The disputation last year was not a matter of public record, but the facts are to be found in a rather singular file in my collection at Special Branch.”
I gaped at him. “You have had him investigated. Because of me!”
He did not even have the grace to look embarrassed. “Naturally. If a person is going to spend as much time as Stoker does with a member of the royal family in such an intimate situation as the two of you enjoy—”
“I am not a member of the royal family, and it is the grossest violation of his privacy—” I was just warming to my theme when Stoker turned back from the window.
“The newspapers,” he said flatly. “How long do we have before they discover de Morgan’s connection to me and rake it all up again?”
Sir Hugo’s expression was apologetic. “A few days if we are lucky. The file is in my personal collection, but there are men in my employ who gathered the information and we must be prepared in case a tongue should wag. That is why I asked you here. I wanted to advise you that this scandal was about to break. There is not a newspaper in England that will fail to print your history with the de Morgans—in the most lurid detail. They will throttle every fact, twist every truth for a good story. Whatever you thought they did to your name the last time, it will be trebled. You must get right away. I know Lord Rosemorran has a shooting box in Scotland that he would be more than happy to put at your disposal—”
“No.” Stoker and I spoke in unison.
Sir Hugo blinked his puffy, streaming eyes. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Stoker gripped the back of his chair, his knuckles white. “I mean that I was not here the last time. I did not fight. I made no effort to save my good name. That has been lost to me forever, but I have clawed back some shreds of decency and dignity and I will not have them taken from me again.”
Sir Hugo started forwards, but Stoker flung up his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “I will not flee. I will not hide. I am not a murderer, and I do not care who says that I am. I will keep my name.”
With that, he turned on his heel and strode from the room. After a long moment, we heard the bang of the front door as he quitted the house. I clucked my tongue at Sir Hugo.
“Really, Sir Hugo, that was badly done. You ought to have known better. If you wanted him to go away, you should have ordered him to stay.”
Sir Hugo tipped his head. “He said almost exactly the same about you one time. What is it about the pair of you that you must be so contrary?”
“What is it about the rest of the world that it cannot take us as we are?” I asked.
I rose, and Sir Hugo caught at my hand. “You will be careful, Miss Speedwell?”
“With him? There is no need,” I promised him. “He is changeable as the sea but solid as the earth.”
“What will you do?” he asked almost plaintively.
I shrugged. “What we must, Sir Hugo. We will find John de Morgan.”
• • •
Stoker was waiting for me when I emerged from the house, his expression thoughtful. “I ought not to have left you. It was rude.”
“That is the least of your offenses,” I told him, not breaking stride as I passed. “What kind of impossible moron have you become? Do you really intend to find John de Morgan?”
“Certainly,” he said, falling into step beside me. “Don’t you?”
“It is the logical course of action, and it is the one I told Sir Hugo we would pursue, but you must admit it is madness.”
“How so?”
“How so? How so? You cannot be so dull-witted. In the first place, we have employment. We have been engaged by Lord Rosemorran to catalog his collection, not hare off after possible murderers. In the second, we do not know if it is even possible to find John de Morgan. I would direct you to Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the likeliest. A man has a wife with whom he does not always get on amiably and a fortune in stolen gems. Any fool could draw a line between those two points. He ran away,” I pronounced, crossing the street in the wake of a hansom.
“Furthermore,” I said, increasing my pace, “there is the matter of publicity. You heard Sir Hugo. Once the newspapers get their teeth into this story, they will not turn loose of it. They will tear you to pieces, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. And,” I added with a touch of malice, “it will displease the royal family if they get wind of what we are about.”
Stoker’s long stride kept up easily. “To answer your objections,” he said with maddening calm, “we have been involved in newspaper-worthy exploits before and never yet seen our names in print. This matter has no direct connection to the royal family, so they should not care in the slightest what we do. If anything, they should be grateful if our efforts cause John de Morgan to be found and the mystery solved. As far as the work in the Belvedere, we have a century’s worth of cataloging. A few days will hardly matter, and I didn’t notice you raising an objection when we flitted off to investigate the Miles Ramsforth case at your instigation.”
I stopped so suddenly that Stoker carried on several steps before he realized I had not kept pace. He turned and I gave him a long, level look. “They will hunt you, you know. They will hunt you like a pack of feral dogs. And they will break you.”
Something cold touched his smile. “Let them try.”
CHAPTER
4
Stoker was in an unaccountably foul mood for the rest of the day. Rather than attend to his jaunty little platypus, he instead tore into the hide of a white rhinoceros that had been afflicted with mildew, cutting into it with a savage satisfaction. I tidied up a gonerilla—a New Zealand Red Admiral, a brownish black butterfly with chic red slashes—took the dogs for a run, and wrote an article for the Surrey and Home Counties Aurelian Society Semi-Quarterly Folio on the subject of Satyrium w-album, the White-Letter Hairstreak, an unprepossessing and surprisingly elusive little butterfly with a fondness for elms.
At last, as teatime beckoned, the dogs and I settled down in the upstairs snuggery. Stoker’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, had formed a fast friendship with his lordship’s immense Caucasian shepherd, Betony. Well, perhaps not so much a friendship as a torrid affair that had already resulted in one litter of extremely unfortunate-looking puppies. They were an inseparable though comical pair, and I gave them each a pat as I passed out horse tibias for them to gnaw on. (The bones, I should note, came from an obliging fellow who sent them to us believing them to be the leg bones of tiny dinosaurs.)
As the dogs settled happily to their treat, Stoker flung down his tools and shook the moldering sawdust from his person.
“Have a rock cake,” I suggested, proffering the plate. “Cook has outdone herself. This batch is actually edible.” One of the perquisites of living and working at Bishop’s Folly was that our meals were provided by the earl’s cook. While her roasts were unsurpassed and her puddings were Stoker’s greatest joy in life, her rock cakes inevitably lived up to their name, thanks to her habit of taking an afternoon tipple of cream sherry followed by a nap. The scullery maid left in charge of the cakes was usually to be found hanging over the shrubbery, watching the gardener’s boy wield his hoe, with the result that the cakes invariably suffered.
But nothing c
ould keep Stoker from cake, and he applied himself with vigor as I poured the tea.
“I know you do not wish to discuss it,” I began.
“Then why are you introducing the subject?” he countered through a mouthful of crumbs.
“Because we must develop a strategy. No good general goes into battle without a plan,” I said stoutly. “Caesar wouldn’t have done so.”
“Caesar was murdered by his friends,” he reminded me.
“Because he didn’t listen to the woman in his life,” I countered.
“Touché.” He helped himself to another rock cake, slathering this one with jam and cream.
“You have the table manners of a Visigoth.”
“I am hungry,” he protested. “You try excavating the insides of a rhinoceros on an empty stomach. He was full of rubbish. I found a litter of dead kitten skeletons in there and newspapers from the passing of the Corn Laws. And a snakeskin.”
“I know,” I told him with a fond glance. “There are bits of it in your hair.”
He brushed most of them away, then shrugged and went back to his cake whilst I reboarded my train of thought. “Now, to proceed logically, we must begin at the beginning. In Egypt.”
“Yes,” he said with a twist of the lips. “It all began in Egypt, didn’t it? But not the Egypt you think.”
I blinked. “Not the Tiverton Expedition?”
“No. The Egypt of 1882. When John and I were in Egypt together, when we first encountered her.” He sat back in his chair, the rest of his cake untouched on the plate. Tendrils of steam rose from the cup in his hands, sinuous ribbons that twisted in the air. “John and I were both assigned to HMS Luna. That is how we met.”
“What was his position?”
“Master-at-arms—a position to which he was distinctly unsuited. John was not the most disciplined of souls. But he managed. He ran afoul of the captain on our first voyage, and I was tasked with stitching him up afterwards. We became friends—the best of friends.”
His voice trailed off as he gazed into the depths of his cup.
“What was his situation? Who were his people?”
Stoker shrugged. “His father was a vicar, the younger son of a younger son. John’s great-uncle inherited the family home and the baronetcy that went with it. John had no prospects, save what he made of himself in the navy. He had already tried the church and reading law. The navy was his father’s last attempt at sorting him out.”
“Was he troubled?”
“No more than I,” he said. “Naval life suited us. There were months of excruciating boredom. God, you cannot imagine the tedium of life at sea.” He must have remembered my own travels then, because he smiled a little. “Or perhaps you can. But that’s when you really get to know another man. I liked John. He was the closest thing I had to a brother.”
“You have three brothers,” I reminded him.
“And they are the closest thing I have to acquaintances. Tiberius and Rupert were at school before I took much notice of them, and Merryweather was barely out of the nursery when I left. John was my first real experience of camaraderie. I trusted him.”
He broke off and swallowed a quick draft of his tea.
“And then Egypt,” I prompted.
“The Bombardment of Alexandria. July of 1882.” He cocked his head. “Where were you then?”
I counted backwards, reckoning the dates. “Let’s see. I would have just turned twenty. Ah, that was my South Seas and Indian Ocean trip. In July of 1882, I was floating on a raft in the middle of the Coral Sea with a Chinese gentleman. We were shipwrecked off the New Hebrides.”
“One of your lovers?”
“Certainly not. He was four times my age, although that was not the reason for my restraint. As it happened, he was a religious and had taken a strict vow of chastity. He was also most informative on the subject of the defensive arts. We passed the time by practicing holds and spearing sharks.”
“I ought to have known.” He took another drink of his tea, then shook his head. “This needs something.”
I poured a measure of aguardiente into his cup and he stirred it with a finger. “Better,” he pronounced after a taste. “Where was I?”
“Heaving bombs at civilians in Alexandria.”
“Otherwise known as the reason I left the navy. Ironic, isn’t it? I managed to get myself mentioned in despatches for the very engagement that persuaded me I could not kill for a living.”
“You were the surgeon’s mate. You ought to have been saving people.”
“I did a fair bit of that as well. But I had no taste for the business of war. I left the navy, as did John.”
“But that was to have been his career,” I pointed out. “What plan had he formed?”
His mouth twisted again. “One doesn’t speak of John de Morgan and plans in the same breath. He wanted to go where I went. He thought adventure would follow and we would manage somehow. We spent the last of our pay in Cairo, living like lords as long as the money lasted.”
“And that is where you met . . . her.”
“Yes. At a dance given at the consulate. It was just before we resigned our posts, so we were both in uniform, looking quite dashing in our blue coats. All the naval lads were the toast of Cairo, at least for the moment. We went everywhere—dances, polo fields, sailing up the Nile. The consul-general held a grand party for us, and a family called Marshwood came. The husband was attached to the consulate in some minor capacity. The wife was one of those overbearing Englishwomen who sustain themselves on gossip and complaint while the sons gambled away their prospects. But the daughter. She was unlike the rest of them. They got up a tableau that night as part of the amateur theatricals to entertain us. She was robed as the incarnation of Justice, all golden hair and long white gown, so ethereal I could not imagine even touching the hem of her gown. I do not know where I got the courage to approach her. I only remember it was more terrifying than the bombardment had been. I did not even ask to be presented properly. I simply walked up and asked her to dance, and when she put her hand in mine, it trembled. And I thought myself the most fortunate man alive.”
I crumbled a piece of cake with my fingers. “She must have been beautiful.”
“Like an angel,” he said slowly. “And I have never been religious. But if you had asked me in that moment if seraphim existed, I would have pointed you to her and you would have believed.”
My tea had gone cold and scummy, and I put the cup aside, careful not to let it rattle in the saucer.
“And so you married her.”
“I married her.” He fell silent again, and that silence encompassed the whole of their time together, for when he spoke again, he said nothing of the marriage itself. “After the divorce, she married John. I have heard the odd bit of news here and there. He has attempted to attach himself to numerous expeditions, but his reputation was rather blackened by the scandal of marrying a divorced woman. Nothing to the scorching my own name took,” he added with a grim smile.
“Do you think he abandoned her?”
He shrugged. “It is possible. John left everything else in his life when he found it dull or it lost its charm for him. He is not a steady sort of man.”
“And do you think him capable of stealing the diadem?”
He gave me a curious look. “I sometimes thought John de Morgan would steal the miter off the pope’s head if he thought he could make use of it. He was a prankish boy. I cannot tell you what sort of man he has become.”
“I rather wonder that you were friends with him,” I said lightly.
“Then you have a kinder opinion of me than I deserve.” He drank off his tea and motioned for the flask again.
“It is empty,” I lied.
“Veronica.”
I sighed and handed it over. He did not bother with tea this time, merely tipped his head b
ack and emptied a considerable amount of the liquor straight into his mouth. He gave a shudder of satisfaction.
As he drank, my mind whipped back some months to a night I had not entirely forgot. I held only pieces of it in my memory. The rest were lost to opium and cocaine, thanks to an ill-advised foray into intoxicants during our previous investigation. But I remembered the feeling of his lips on mine, the broad sweep of his back muscles under my palms. And I remembered the name he had whispered into my mouth before I shoved him away. Caroline.
I gave him a tight smile. “I pity her. She must be in a terrible state, not knowing what has become of her husband. Perhaps we should pay a call upon her.”
He did not flinch, but something caused his hand to flex and his mouth to draw back for an instant. “I think not.”
“As you wish,” I said silkily. He gave me a sharp look, but I evaded his gaze as I emptied my cold tea into the slops bowl and poured a fresh cup.
“But you are quite correct that we must discover what happened to John de Morgan,” I said. “I see that now. And if you intend to investigate, I mean to help you. After all, we have sleuthed out two murderers already at my behest. One might even say I owed you,” I concluded, deepening the smile.
He said nothing, but his brows drew together and a line etched itself between them.
“However”—I smoothed my skirts over my lap—“if we are not going to call upon Mrs. de Morgan, we ought to gather the facts as clearly as we can, and I can think of one person right under our noses who is bound to know everything about Sir Leicester Tiverton’s expedition.”
Stoker had fallen into a brown study but roused himself. “Oh. Who might that be?”
“Lady Wellingtonia, of course,” I said. The aunt of our benefactor, Lord Rosemorran, Lady Wellingtonia was a formidable woman with her fingers in more pies than a baker’s son. She knew everyone and, more importantly, she was up-to-date on the latest gossip. If there was anything of interest to be discovered about the Tiverton Expedition, Lady Wellie would know it. She hoarded information like diamonds, and she was not averse to sharing it—within reason.
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