A Curious Beginning

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Of course,” I explained patiently, “but he was at luncheon.”

  “And you could not wait an hour for the fellow to come back?”

  “One cannot play games with septicemia, Mr. Stoker. It was common knowledge that the doctor’s Sunday luncheons were taken with a great deal of good Irish whiskey. He would not have been in a fit state to take off so much as a hangnail if I had waited for him. So I asked Archie if he would like for me to take matters into my own hands, as it were, and he said he would just as soon have me as the doctor, and between us we managed quite well.”

  “How is it that you were not brought up on charges?” he demanded. “Practicing medicine without the proper license is thoroughly illegal.”

  I pulled a face. “Really, Mr. Stoker, I should have thought that you would understand the notion of an action taken in extremis. And the doctor himself admitted it was very neatly done. Besides, if there had been any sort of inquiry, he would have been brought up on disciplinary actions for being an inebriate. I agreed to go quietly, and he agreed to forget the whole thing—quite sensible of us both, under the circumstances.” I smoothed my skirts. “We seem to have digressed. You have not answered my point that one may travel with all the necessities of a comfortable life quite handily.”

  His gaze narrowed in suspicion. “Yes, well, if this is your way of angling for an invitation, you needn’t think I will bring you along if I plan an expedition. I have no need of amateur lepidopterists.”

  “I am not an amateur,” I replied tartly. “I have supplied specimens to some of the foremost collectors in this country and abroad.”

  “Indeed. And what are your rates? Asking as one professional to another,” he said rudely.

  “Three pounds for the average specimen. Naturally, I charge more for special orders.”

  “Three pounds! Do you dip the bloody things in gold first? That is highway robbery.”

  “It is the standard rate for quality specimens, and mine are the best,” I retorted. “And fear not, Mr. Stoker. If I were to travel with a formal expedition, I should want a leader with a good deal more nerve and initiative than you seem to enjoy. Besides, I am well aware of the narrow-mindedness and lack of original thought demonstrated by most gentlemen explorers, and I could never bring myself to work under their direction. I am much better suited to my own devices. My own travels have always been undertaken at my own initiative. I go where I choose.”

  To my surprise, he did not take offense at my riposte.

  “And where do you mean to go now, Miss Speedwell?”

  I tipped my head, considering. “I had in mind the Malay Archipelago. I should like to try for a Hypolimnas, I think. The bolina in particular is quite striking, and I am certain I could find a buyer without difficulty. In fact, I should probably have to beat them off with a parasol if I am successful.”

  The efforts of the previous night and past day seemed to have caught him up at last, for he yawned broadly.

  “You ought to rest,” I told him, half wondering if he would refuse out of sheer mulishness. “I know you have been working almost continually upon the elephant, and a rest would enable you to return fresh to the fray. I would be very happy to pass the time in reading, if you would not mind the loan of your library,” I added, nodding towards the shelves bowed by the weight of the ponderous volumes.

  He opened his mouth—no doubt to protest—but I reached for his tea tin and took it firmly from his hand. “You really do look quite wretched, you know.”

  If I had been more timid, there is no question he would have cursed me and gone straight back to work. But I was dauntless, and he allowed me to take the tin from him as he stretched his limbs upon the sofa. Almost as soon as he was recumbent, his entire body succumbed to fatigue and he slept. Huxley puffed a sigh of indignation, for his master was far too large to permit him to share the sofa. He retreated under it to snore wetly as I roamed the workshop.

  I moved to the specimen shelves to look over the Wardian cases, handsomely made, and each set with a small metal plaque incised with a series of letters—R.T.-V. I traced them idly with a fingertip, a growing suspicion beginning to take root in my mind. “R.T.-V.,” I murmured. “Revelstoke Templeton-Vane. Now, this is a very interesting development indeed.”

  I dredged up all that I knew of the famed explorer and natural historian, but the facts were few and I had been on the other side of the world when his story had been splashed across English newspapers. The darling of the naturalists, he had established himself as a brilliant scholar with a series of papers reconciling Darwin’s and Huxley’s conflicting views of natural selection. But everything had been lost on a disastrous expedition to . . . Where was it? I cudgeled my brain and could not recall until I remembered Mr. Stoker’s brief mention of hiking the Amazon. That was it, of course. He had headed a single expedition to South America, and that one trip had seen his career wrecked upon the shoals of infamy. I had heard only snatches of his ruin, but there had been vicious rumors, and he had all but disappeared from the scientific community for years.

  But here were his Wardian cases, consigned to a derelict Thames-side warehouse. And then there was the matter of his name. It took little imagination to derive Stoker from Revelstoke. So, the once brilliant comet whose light had burned out so flamboyantly had come to rest in obscurity and poverty, I reflected as I looked about the dilapidated room.

  I ran a finger over one of the cases and it came away black. I shuddered. It was unthinkable to sit idly by when I was surrounded by so much filth. As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter. While Mr. Stoker slumbered on, I swept the floor, dumping the sweepings into the dirt yard I found behind the workshop. I cleared out the ashes from the stove, putting them carefully aside in a pail and leaving a thick bed under the grate. This I polished and laid with a new fire, kindling it merrily as I rummaged about the meager stores for the makings of a soup. I scoured a wide pot and put it to the boil, hoping it had not held something unsavory in the recent past. I found a beef bone only a little past its prime and put it into the pot, adding a few limp carrots and their tops, and an onion with its sprouted green cap. In the dirt yard I discovered a struggling herb, etiolated as it was, and chopped it to add to the pot. There was salt in great quantities—he apparently used it in many of his preparations—and I did not think he would begrudge a little for the soup pot. I added this with crumbs of the loaf from the earlier repast to thicken the broth. As it bubbled away, I found spoons and took up the pail of ashes to polish them, rubbing them until they gleamed.

  After this, I continued to tidy the workshop, dusting the cases and straightening the books and wiping the sticky worktables of the worst of their grime. The endless stacks of newspapers, I was amused to see, had provided him with drawing paper, for most of the margins held small sketches—some faces or ships, others botanical specimens or animals. He was a gifted artist, I realized, capturing in a few strokes of pencil or charcoal the essence of what he intended to depict. I had attempted enough sketches and paintings of my butterflies to know true talent when I saw it. His technique was rough and hasty, but his talent was far beyond my own.

  I tamped the newspapers into neat bundles without sorting them, skimming the headlines to see what I had missed in the years I had been abroad. The Irish question appeared often, as did the Mahdist War in the Sudan. The Prussians featured frequently, but that was no surprise. The Prussians were always up to something nefarious. And there had been an impressive number of gunfights in cities in the western United States. But that, too, was no great surprise. In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms. I put these aside and moved on to the shelves holding bottles of chemicals. He had a collection of them, many potent, all flammable, and quite a few capable of producing nasty burns if permitted to touch bare skin. Most bottles containe
d preservatives in various dilutions, although one bore a label that crumbled at the tentative poke I gave it. I sniffed experimentally and was assaulted at once by the cloying pickled smell of formaldehyde. I gave it a wide berth and continued on, tidying until I had brought a reasonable semblance of order to the place. I was intrigued to find a florilegium of Romantic poetry tucked under a pot of hide glue and was just about to settle in to read when I heard a roar of outrage.

  “Holy Christ, I told you not to touch anything.” Mr. Stoker had come awake, wincing a little as he sat up and worked the stiffness from his muscles.

  “I did not move anything,” I assured him. “I merely stacked the books and correspondence so they would not fall over, and I cooked a meal. I would have replaced the preservative solution in some of those appalling jars, but it does not seem to be plain ethyl alcohol, and I did not wish to damage the specimens by changing the solution.”

  “At least you have that much sense,” he said grudgingly. “The solution is of my own devising.”

  “And not very effective,” I told him, pointing towards the jars of suckling pigs floating in scummy yellow fluid.

  “Those were early efforts, designed to show me where the flaws were in the formula,” he said nastily. “And if Your Highness would care to look at the specimens on that shelf, I think you will find the solution is clear as Irish crystal.”

  I did as he bade, nodding in approval. “Well-done. That is perhaps the finest preserving work I have seen. Did you use plain formaldehyde? No, of course, you will not tell me. I ought not to have asked. I should love to see you preserve something. I have only ever managed to fix butterflies, and of course, mounting Lepidoptera is nothing so difficult as mounting mammals.”

  He gave me a curious and not wholly friendly stare. “How did you come to be interested in butterflies? They are the usual province of the lady naturalist, but I am rather surprised you didn’t find yourself studying something with teeth.”

  “Hm.” I was examining another of his little pigs, marveling at the curl of its pink tail. “How extraordinary. One can almost hear it squealing.” The specimen, one of his best, was so arrestingly lifelike I was not entirely certain it had not moved. Like my butterflies, it gave the impression of cessation, as if it had paused in whatever it was doing but only for a moment. Stillness coupled with expectancy; these are the qualities all good preparations must convey.

  I shook myself free of my reverie. “What was that? Oh, butterflies. They afforded me the chance to get away from the villages where I grew up. Girls are not supposed to go roaming about the countryside without purpose. It is considered eccentric. So I bought a butterfly net and a killing jar, and that made it quite all right.”

  A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “That I can understand. I was always thought odd for stuffing my pockets with jars of frogspawn and dissecting rabbits instead of eating them.”

  I smiled at the notion of him as a boy with a pocketful of bottled tadpoles, but he suddenly tired of conversation. With an abruptness I had noted before in his manner, he gave me a cool look and picked up his pot of glue. “I think I will return to my elephant. I have wasted quite enough time already.”

  He strode back to his pachyderm, leaving me to amuse myself with Huxley. I did not mind. “Reclusive men are a good deal of work,” I murmured to the dog. Mr. Stoker was not my first encounter with a fellow uncomfortable in the company of women, and would assuredly not be the last. He might have a pathological dislike of women in general, but with a certainty borne of experience, I put his thorniness down to a heartbreak in his tender youth. Some people never recovered from their early losses, I reflected. I ladled out bowls of soup for Huxley and myself, pointedly ignoring Mr. Stoker as he worked at the elephant. The fragrance of the soup rose in a steamy cloud, inviting and rich, and the dog and I sipped contentedly until Mr. Stoker threw down his spatula and stalked to the soup pot. “What is this, then?”

  “Food for the dog,” I said evenly.

  He gave me a sour look and ladled up a portion. There were no other bowls, so he took his in a chipped porcelain basin that was clearly a piece of laboratory equipment.

  “It is a miracle you have not poisoned yourself,” I observed.

  He shoveled a spoonful of soup into his mouth. “I would make a rather cutting remark about poisoning myself on your cooking, but I cannot. This is sublime. I can’t think when the last time was I had hot food.”

  He ate three bowls, each more slowly than the last, until he scraped the final savory spoonful and gave a sigh of repletion.

  “You do not take very good care of yourself,” I said. It was an observation, not an accusation, and he seemed to take it as such.

  He shrugged. “Too much work, too little time, and too little money. You were not wrong about my habits. I sleep when I can and grab the odd bit of food when I think of it to keep myself going. And there is always gin,” he added with the jaded air of a practiced debauchee.

  I said nothing but went to my bag and retrieved the flask. “Here. Something I picked up on my travels. I find it quite bracing.”

  He took it from my hand and swallowed deeply, then spluttered so hard he nearly choked. “Good God, what the devil is that?”

  “South Americans have a specialty called cachaça, something like rum but made from sugarcane rather than molasses.”

  “I am familiar,” he said with a rueful look. “I lost the better part of a year to the stuff in Brazil. But it was nothing like this.”

  I deliberately overlooked the reference to his past. If he had worked so diligently to conceal his true identity, it was not my place to unmask him. At least not yet. “When I was butterflying in Venezuela, my host was a gentleman with extensive sugarcane fields in Brazil. He finds cachaça to be a trifle tame for his tastes, so he distils it twice. This rather more potent aguardiente is the result.”

  He took a second swallow, this one more modest, and wiped the neck of the flask upon his sleeve as carefully as a lord. He blinked heavily. “I think I have gone blind. And I am quite certain I do not care.”

  I capped the flask and replaced it in my bag. He flipped up his eye patch, and to my astonishment, I saw that his eye was whole and unblemished as the other, aside from a narrow white scar crossing the lid. I noticed also they were blue, not the striking bright blue of a Morpho but the very dark blue of Limenitis arthemis astyanax, a Red-spotted Admiral I had hunted successfully in America. Compared to the frivolous Morpho, the Admiral was a very serious sort of butterfly.

  “You have sight in that eye,” I said, almost accusingly.

  He nodded, pressing his knuckles into his eyes. “As much as in the other, believe it or not. But it fatigues easily, and when it does, my vision becomes blurred. I see two of everything instead of one. Then I’ve no option but the patch to rest it.”

  “Thereby fatiguing the other,” I pointed out.

  He replaced the patch and shook his head as if to clear it. “No help for it if I am to get that bloody elephant finished.”

  Just at that moment there came a scraping noise from the doorway.

  “I’ve brought the evening papers, Mr. S.,” Badger said brightly. “And your sweets.”

  He handed over the newspapers and a twist of peppermint humbugs to Mr. Stoker, who fell on them greedily. I turned to the boy. “I am so glad you’ve come. I have a bowl of soup that will go to waste if you don’t eat it up, and if I give more to the dog he will be terribly sick. Would you mind?” I ladled out the soup into Mr. Stoker’s basin and wiped off the spoon.

  Badger washed neither his hands nor his face, applying himself directly to the food. He slurped as happily as Huxley had, finishing the bowl in minutes as Mr. Stoker flicked through the newspaper. Suddenly, he sat forward, every muscle in his body so still I knew something very bad indeed had happened.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

 
He did not speak. He merely gripped the newspaper, his knuckles turning white. I came to stand behind him, reading over his shoulder.

  “No!” I exclaimed, dismayed. “It cannot be.”

  The headline was sensational, but it was the details of the story that gripped my attention. A German gentleman, identified as the Baron von Stauffenbach, had been found dead in his study. The room had been ransacked and the police were treating the death as suspicious. There were no clues as to the identity of the assailant. It ended with a note that an inquest was to be held in two days’ time.

  “It cannot be,” I repeated.

  “It is,” Mr. Stoker said flatly. “He must have been murdered just after he returned home.”

  “Murdered!” Badger looked up from his soup bowl. “Who’s been killed, then?”

  I glanced to Mr. Stoker, but he seemed unable to reply, his expression one of frozen horror. As I watched, the newspaper trembled slightly in his hand. Clearly he was in the grip of strong emotion, and in no fit state to react.

  “A friend,” I told the boy. “Perhaps you ought to go now, Badger.”

  He licked the last of the soup from his bowl and rose obediently. The action seemed to rouse Mr. Stoker, and he stood, flinging aside the newspaper.

  “Not so fast, lad. I have telegrams to send.” Having thrown off his torpor, he moved like one possessed, his actions swift and desperate. He tore a bit of paper from a scientific journal and scribbled in the margin. “You will send twelve copies of this wire—one to each of these twelve offices. Send them and wait for replies, do you hear? Most of them will be in the negative. You can throw those away. But the one that is in the affirmative, that one I will have.” He scrawled another missive and handed it over. “This telegram only goes to Cornwall, to be delivered by the messenger directly into the hands of the addressee and no other,” he instructed. He rummaged through a collection of tins and jars to cobble together a handful of coins. “More when you come back.”