A Curious Beginning

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “I do not know, and I care less,” he muttered, clipping the end of the silk thread neatly. “It will certainly scar now,” he warned me. “Don’t you dare tell anyone that is my work. I used to be famous for the delicacy of my stitching, but now you’ve gone and ruined it.”

  I surveyed the line of tiny, precise stitches and shrugged, wincing only slightly. “I shall consider it a badge of honor, a souvenir of our adventures when I am in my dotage and no one believes I once pursued a murderer.”

  He opened his mouth to speak then but thought better of it. He tidied away the tools of his trade as I took up my shawl. I did not bother to re-dress, and he put my shirtwaist to soak in the little domestic office Lady Cordelia had mentioned. He came to sit beside me when he had finished. The packet lay in my lap, and I touched the violet silk ribbon.

  “Why do you hesitate?” he asked.

  “I suppose I have a keen appreciation for anticipation,” I said lightly. “But I do not expect you to understand.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that difficult,” he replied. “Before you open that packet all things are possible. It might contain any secret at all. It might be the Casket Letters, or the baron’s laundry list, or the revelation that your mother was a Russian princess.”

  “Precisely,” I said with a small smile.

  He rummaged in my bag a moment and returned with two of my slender cigarillos. He lit them from the fire and passed one to me. “Then let us enjoy our moment of anticipation to the fullest,” he said.

  “Thank you for not lighting your appalling cigars,” I told him as I savored the sweet smoke.

  He grunted by way of response and we sat for a little while in companionable silence.

  “Sometimes it is better not to know,” he said suddenly. He lifted his gaze to mine. “Sometimes it is better for secrets to be left alone.”

  “If I am not mistaken, that is the voice of experience.”

  “It is.” He dropped his gaze to his hands, the cigarillo clasped lightly in his fingers. A slender stream of blue smoke rose, curling sinuously. He fell silent then, and I did not have the heart to pry.

  “We do not even know this packet has information about me,” I pointed out. “It might be something else altogether.”

  “Quite,” he told me. He reached forward and ground out the last of his cigarillo on the stove. He took mine and did the same. “Very well. As Arcadia Brown would say, ‘Excelsior!’” he proclaimed, lifting a mocking brow.

  The ribbon seemed to protest at being untied. It hesitated a moment, then gave way under my insistent fingers. There was a drift of papers onto my lap, letters and newspaper cuttings, and I plucked one at random. It was from an American newspaper, a photograph with a small notice.

  I read aloud, my voice suddenly hoarse. CELEBRATED IRISH ACTRESS LILY ASHBOURNE BEGINS AMERICAN TOUR, the headline ran. I read the rest of the piece, a brief description of her triumphs on the English stage, and studied the photograph. I handed it to Stoker without comment, but his was brief and to the point.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “This cutting is from 1860. I was born in 1862. Twenty-first of June, to be precise. She must be my mother,” I said, my voice tight. “Don’t you think?”

  A fleeting smile touched his mouth. “She couldn’t be more like you if you had been twins,” he assured me. I looked again at the elegantly resolute face, the ripple of black hair, the eyes with their curious expression of challenge.

  “There is something audacious about her,” I said.

  “I should imagine so,” he agreed. “Stage actresses are not known for their reticence.”

  I picked up another piece of paper. “This looks like a letter to the baron—it is addressed to ‘Dearest Max.’”

  “What does it say?”

  I skimmed the prose quickly, noting the looping scrawl of the handwriting, the pale violet ink, the heavily underscored words. “It is from Lily. And—oh God.”

  He put out his hand and I gave him the letter.

  “‘Dearest Max, I hardly have the words to thank you for your kindnesses to me and to Baby. I was so low when you came to see us, and your assurances have revived my spirits. You know he will not receive my letters; my only hope lies with you. You must make him see his duty to me—and to our child. I shudder to think what will become of us if he persists in casting us off so completely. And you must not think I care about money or anything else. I want him, Max. I know he loved me once, and I believe he loves me still, in his heart of hearts. If only he would come to see me, to see his child, I know he would find the strength to defy his family. If he goes through with this marriage, I do not know what I will do. He cannot marry her, Max—he must not. It will be my destruction, and he will carry that for the rest of his life.’”

  He broke off. “The letter is dated 20 February 1863.”

  “I was eight months old,” I calculated.

  “And your father was not doing his duty, either by you or your mother.”

  “So Max was acting as intermediary, consoling my mother and reminding my father of his obligations even as he planned to marry another woman. I wonder if he went through with his wedding.”

  Stoker had picked up another cutting, and as he read it, his face paled. “I suspect so.”

  “What is that?”

  His expression was apologetic. “Your mother’s obituary. Dated 20 March 1863.”

  “Less than a month after sending Max that letter saying she did not know what she would do if my father married another woman.” I did not take the cutting from him. “Stoker, did she—”

  He shook his head. “I cannot imagine how. Not if she was buried in this cemetery,” he said, reading off the name. “Our Lady of Grace. In Dublin.”

  I blinked in surprise. “She was Catholic.”

  He nodded gravely. “Apparently. There is a mention of the priest who presided over her funeral, a Father Burke. Look here, it is his obituary. He died six years after your mother and according to this was the parish priest of Greymount in Dublin. Veronica, he would never have let her be buried in holy ground if she had taken her own life.”

  “Still,” I persisted. “It is too coincidental. Unless she simply willed herself to die. Is that even possible?”

  He shrugged. “I have seen stranger.”

  “So, my mother was an Irish Catholic actress. I suppose Ashbourne was a stage name. I wonder if there is any way of tracing her through the burial records to find her real name.”

  “No need,” he said, producing another cutting. “Her real name was Mary Katherine de Clare.”

  “De Clare?” I took the cutting. Another piece from her triumphant American tour of 1860, but this one went into great depth about her past. “She ran away from home,” I told him. “Born to a respectable Irish family and they disowned her when she went on the stage. Here is a photograph of her with her brother,” I said, pointing to the cutting. “Edmund de Clare, as a boy of fifteen.”

  Stoker scrutinized the photograph. “Is this the fellow who accosted you at Paddington?”

  I nodded and he handed back the cutting. The photograph was taken some years before Mary Katherine de Clare had changed her name and taken her place on the stage. She was dressed in a suitably girlish frock, standing behind her seated brother, serious in his town suit, but with the same elegant bones and graceful demeanor as his sister.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” I murmured.

  Stoker shrugged. “Perhaps he felt revealing himself as your uncle was too private a matter for a crowded train station.”

  “Perhaps.”

  I read on, learning more about my mother. Famed as a gifted tragedienne, she had built her career upon the death scenes of Juliet and Ophelia. But she had been best known for the role of Phaedra in an English adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre. There was a photograph of her, dressed in purest white,
poison vial held aloft as she contemplated her fate. I raised my eyes briefly. “I presume you have noticed all her best roles were suicides?”

  His expression was skeptical. “That proves nothing.”

  “I suppose not,” I conceded. I burrowed through the rest of the papers—a motley collection of obituaries, notices from her plays, and two photographs. “My God,” I breathed. “Stoker, look.”

  I handed him a photograph of Lily Ashbourne holding an infant. He read, “‘Me with Baby. December 1862.’ You were six months old.”

  I had been a plump infant, sitting upright in my mother’s lap for the photograph. I must have moved, for my face was faintly blurred at the edge. But Lily’s face was perfectly immobile, the moment captured forever, like a birdwing butterfly pinned to a card in all its brilliance. It had been nearly twenty-five years, but Lily Ashbourne’s beauty was undimmed so long as that photograph existed to give truth to it. I peered closer and saw clutched in my chubby fist a tiny velvet mouse. Chester.

  Wordlessly, Stoker handed me one of his great scarlet handkerchiefs to wipe my eyes. I moved on to the second photograph. Another photograph of me, clearly from the same sitting, for my white petticoats, stiff with embroidery, were unchanged. But Lily was missing. Instead, I was held by two women, their expressions wooden. Lily had contrived to look natural for the camera, as at ease as she might have been with a portrait painter. But these two were unaccustomed to having their pictures taken. Their chins were sharp, their mouths pursed in expressions of wariness. But even so, I knew them.

  “It is Aunt Nell and Aunt Lucy!” I exclaimed. “The Harbottle sisters. I always thought they took me from a foundling home, but they must have known my mother.”

  I turned over the photographs. Scribbled in the same hand as the other, in a scrawl of violet ink: “Baby with Ellie and Nan.” “I don’t understand. Who are Ellie and Nan?”

  Together we sorted through the papers until Stoker brandished one, triumphant. “I have it. A mention in this notice about her American tour that Miss Ashbourne will be traveling with her dresser, Nan Williams, and her maid, Ellie Williams, sisters.”

  I sat back, my mind working furiously. “It makes no sense. Why would Nan and Ellie Williams change their names to Lucy and Nell Harbottle? And given me the name Veronica Speedwell? You notice there is no indication of what my mother called me, only ‘Baby.’ What does it mean?”

  We searched through the rest of the papers, but there was nothing more to be learned.

  Finally, we gave up, assembling the papers in a rough chronological order before tying them up again. I poured more of the aguardiente and we drank in silence, as comfortably as brothers in arms, as our thoughts ran ahead.

  “It is possible,” Stoker said finally, stretching out his booted legs, “that your father had much to lose by your birth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That letter from your mother to Max. She insists that she does not want money from your father. That means he must have had it to give. And he is refusing, for the sake of his family, to acknowledge your birth. Whatever relationship he enjoyed with your mother, it was finished by the time you were a few months old—possibly because of his engagement to another woman.”

  “And Lily was disconsolate.” I picked up the thread of his idea. “She even threatened suicide, albeit obliquely, in her letter. What if she was more explicit in her communications to my father? He had a family to think of, money, reputation. He was at the very least from a wealthy merchant family.”

  Stoker shook his head. “I would lay money on aristocracy. Gentry at least.”

  “You really think so?”

  He curled a handsome lip in scorn. “If there is one thing I can smell, it is the stink of my own kind trying to cover their hypocrisy. Besides, she was a famous beauty, a successful actress, the sort of woman who would not favor a poor nobody with her attentions. No, to attract her notice he would have to be someone with a name, connections.”

  “That makes her sound rather mercenary,” I protested.

  “Love affairs often are,” he returned easily. “They are an exchange of goods. He brought money to the liaison; she clearly brought beauty.”

  “I don’t think so. She mentioned in her letter to the baron that she had loved him, and he her.”

  “It is possible. But at the beginning, to be noticed amidst all those other wealthy stage-door Johnnies, he must have had something quite special. Either he was very, very rich, or very, very handsome.”

  “And very, very ruthless,” I added. “Imagine, courting Lily Ashbourne, the loveliest actress of her time, and then leaving her so coldly when she got with child. She was clearly devastated.”

  Stoker’s voice was thick with constraint. “He might have been as well, you know. If she was correct, then he did love her, at least for a while. Perhaps his family made him marry this other woman.”

  “And so he cut off Lily—and his own child—without a word? That does not sound like the action of a feeling man.”

  “Sometimes the deeper a man’s feelings, the less able he is to act upon them,” he said hoarsely. “Or speak of them.”

  I finished off my share of the aguardiente. “I shall not ask about your devils, Stoker.”

  He gave a shrug and poured more of the liquor for himself. “They have been my closest companions for five years now. We’re old friends, the devils and me.”

  I looked at the packet of papers still sitting upon my lap. “It looks as if I have devils of my own now.”

  “Do you?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Because everything in that packet shows that it is entirely possible my father murdered my mother.”

  “Veronica—”

  “No, hear me out, I beg you. He wanted free of her and of me. She wasn’t going quietly. There were letters to Max—perhaps more than this one. Perhaps she made threats even. She was well-known. The newspapers would have trumpeted this story to the skies if they had got hold of it. We know he had a new wife to shield, a name to protect. We know my mother died very suddenly when she was scarcely twenty. And we know she could not have been a suicide, as she was buried in hallowed ground. Tell me it is not at least possible that my father murdered her.”

  Stoker gave me an even stare. “It is possible,” he said finally.

  “Could you at least pretend not to agree? I find myself in need of a devil’s advocate.”

  He moved as if to touch my hand, then seemed to think better of it. “You have never struck me as the sort of woman to give way in the face of something difficult. Don’t tell me I have misjudged you.”

  “Of course not,” I said, squaring my shoulders.

  “It is a terrible thing to believe your father capable of such a thing. But there is another fact which points to some difficulty from your father: your aunts were afraid, deeply so, if they changed their names and left Ireland.”

  “It explains so much,” I mused. “We moved so many times when I was a child—and never for any good reason that I could discover. I would go off hunting, chasing after my butterflies, and when I came home, the aunts would have us half-packed and that would be the end of it.”

  “It must have been difficult to make friends.”

  “I wish you and I had met as children,” I told him suddenly.

  “I don’t. You would have dragged me behind the nearest hedgerow and had your way with me before I sprouted hairs on my chin.”

  I smiled at him and he almost, very nearly, smiled back. “I think I should like to sleep now,” I told him.

  He rose then and tugged my feet until I was stretched upon the sofa. He tucked a blanket around me and bent to stoke the fire. When he had finished, he took another blanket and made a makeshift pallet upon the rug, taking the flask of aguardiente with him.

  “There is always Wellington’s campaign bed,” I reminded him.
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  “I would rather be near to the fire.”

  “In the interests of propriety, you ought to be at least on another floor of the Belvedere,” I teased.

  “I do not care. I am staying with you until this business is finished.”

  “Lady Cordelia will think—”

  “To the devil with what Lady C. thinks.” He settled himself heavily onto the blanket and removed his boots. He took no pillow but folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes, taking the occasional deep draft from the flask. “I like Cordelia but I shall bloody well be damned if I do anything just because she might have thoughts she oughtn’t.”

  I smiled into the silence that followed this pronouncement.

  “Veronica?”

  “Yes, Stoker?”

  “I know you are resilient as India rubber, but when the lot of this hits you, it will come like a brickbat. Trust me.”

  I thought of the secrets he carried, the pain that bedeviled him—pain of which he could not yet bring himself to speak. “And what should I do when that happens?”

  “Do not keep it to yourself. Someone reminded me of the story of the Spartan boy and the fox. Someone who ought to take her own advice.”

  With that he fell silent, and soon his breathing was deep and even and he slept, while I lay wakeful long into the night, thinking of all we had learned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The next morning I woke to find Stoker had risen and gone, the flask of aguardiente entirely empty. He must have wakened some time in the night and finished it off, but I did not mind.

  “‘Take it,’” I muttered, thinking of Sir Philip Sidney, “‘thy necessity is greater than mine.’” I refilled the flask with plain whiskey from the store cupboard—not half as potent, but useful in a pinch, I decided—and still there was no sign of Stoker. The little room for washing was empty, so he must have already attended to his ablutions. I did the same, pleased to find that my arm was stiff but there was no sign of incipient infection. Whatever his professional faults, he was a gifted doctor. I dressed myself with a little difficulty and opened the door upon a June morning dazzling enough to lift the dourest spirits. Flowers bloomed around the door of the Belvedere, and drifts of early rambling roses were just unfurling their petals, filling the morning with their fragrance. I stood upon the step, drawing in great lungfuls of the air, as good as any to be found in London.