A Murderous Relation

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “You see,” Mr. Pennybaker explained, “the king and his queen, Charlotte, were quite interested in natural history. The queen received as a wedding present her own painted ass, but that was a full zebra, a she-ass. The poor thing’s mate died en route from Africa,” he said mournfully. “Otherwise, we might have bred them here.”

  “It was attempted,” Stoker told me. “The queen’s zebra was crossed with a donkey and something quite similar to a quagga was produced. But the king was given a proper quagga. It eventually died, and its remains were thought lost for decades.”

  “Until I found them!” crowed Mr. Pennybaker. He moved around his specimen, peering into its eyes. “I do not know what to say, my good fellow. I look into his eyes and I would think she lives again,” he marveled.

  Stoker said nothing, but I could feel the surge of satisfaction within him. He took tremendous gratification in his work, and this specimen was something of which he could be rightfully proud.

  “What state was it in when you found it?” I asked Mr. Pennybaker.

  His expression was aghast. “A ruin, my dear lady. A ruin. I cannot think how Mr. Templeton-Vane has resurrected him, but he is a veritable magician. I had only a hide to give him, and that a moth-eaten relic. Not a single bone, not an eyelash remained! And from that he has given me . . . this.” He broke off, admiring his trophy again.

  I turned to Stoker. “When did you do this?”

  He shrugged. “It was my primary commission whilst you were in Madeira. I took apart a few zebras and donkeys to assess the skeletal structures and build an armature. Then I sculpted the body, mounted it, and made the necessary repairs in the hide,” he said, as if it were as simple as making a cup of tea. “There was nothing left to do by the time you returned except finish the eyes.” One of the most interesting—and gruesome—parts of Stoker’s job was the creation of the eyeballs for his mounts. He trusted no one else with their painting, preferring to take a fine sable brush and finish the task himself. This particular specimen looked out with a watchful expression, her gaze fixed on a distant point on the horizon, as careful as one would expect a herd animal to be upon the grassy waves of the African plains.

  “It is a marvel,” I told him.

  “A marvel?” Mr. Pennybaker said, blinking furiously. “It is a miracle! My dear lady, do you realize that this creature is now extinct?”

  “Is it really?”

  Stoker shrugged. “There may be a few left in the African interior, but none in European captivity. The last one died a few years ago and the remains were not saved.”

  “A tragedy!” Mr. Pennybaker said, his brows waving furiously, like the antennae of an angry beetle. “A crime!”

  “Well, at least you have this one,” I soothed.

  He nodded, turning once more to his prize. “This is far in excess of my imaginings,” he said solemnly. “And it calls for a celebration—a toast!”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Mr. Pennybaker proposed marking the occasion of the quagga’s arrival with a toast, I expected a glass of sherry, sticky and sickly sweet, poured from a dusty bottle and offered up in a cordial glass of some antiquity.

  Instead there was French champagne of a decidedly extravagant vintage, poured into the finest crystal and—at one point—my shoe. I will admit that Mr. Pennybaker’s high spirits were infectious, and although Stoker enjoyed a glass or two of the refreshing beverage, the rest of the bottles were consumed by Mr. Pennybaker and myself with giddy enthusiasm. We talked long into the night about the state of natural history, opera, the burgeoning threat of a unified Germany, and shoes.

  “It takes a woman of great distinction to wear a shoe such as this,” he pronounced as he slid the black kidskin slipper from my foot. “It is nunlike in its simplicity. But note here the delicate curve of the heel, the austerity of the little strap across the instep. It is poetry! A sonnet in shoe leather,” he said, tipping the last of the champagne into it. He sipped and smacked his lips.

  Stoker sighed, rising. “I think it is time we said good night,” he suggested. It took another two glasses before Mr. Pennybaker and I agreed, and we exchanged Continental kisses on both cheeks as we parted.

  “What a darling little man!” I murmured into Stoker’s chest as we settled into the carriage for the ride home. “Pity about his stuffed kittens, though.”

  Stoker’s chest rumbled under my cheek and it was a moment before I realized he was laughing. “Go to sleep, Veronica. I will wake you when we are home.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In point of fact, he did not wake me when we arrived home. I woke alone and dressed in the clothes from the night before with a pounding headache and a taste in my mouth like a decaying wolverine. Having not reached my bed until the small hours of the morning, I rose much later than was my custom. I washed and dressed and made my way to the Belvedere, the enormous freestanding ballroom where the Rosemorran Collection was housed. It was both workspace and refuge for Stoker and for me. Amongst its riot of paintings, statues, specimens, and artifacts, we found occupation and joy. How happy I was to lose myself once more amid the splendid chaos! It was as if someone had looted a particularly erudite and accomplished city and carried home the spoils for us to explore. (Which, if I am honest, is not far from the facts. The previous Earls of Rosemorran had been devoted to the notions of empire and colonialism, which we must now find repugnant. It is a tribute to my own hypocrisy that I could simultaneously appreciate the collections and deplore the method of their assembly.)

  It is my earnest belief that much physical affliction may be overcome by studiously ignoring it, and so—in spite of my headache and slightly sour stomach—I ate. As was my habit at breakfast, I took the meal at my desk. Food had been carried down by one of the maids and left atop a moldering sarcophagus—an imperfect specimen of the Greco-Roman period of Egyptian occupation. I consumed a hearty plate of the now tepid offerings and the morning edition of the Daily Harbinger. It was not the most elevated of London periodicals, to be sure. From its lurid headlines to its unnecessarily graphic illustrations, it was designed to appeal to the lowest of impulses. But I had good reason for reading it. The newspaper frequently displayed the byline of one J. J. Butterworth, a gifted and audacious reporter who had crossed our path during a particularly challenging investigation into an Egyptological curse.* I would have deplored Butterworth’s penchant for the purplest of prose, but I could not deny the arch wit, the unparalleled grasp of facts, and the ability to convey them in sharp, succinct fashion. The fact that Butterworth was a woman attempting to carve a career for herself in a distinctly masculine world appealed to me; I, too, had often published under my initials in order to preserve the incognita of my sex. My natural sympathies lay with her—so long as she kept her knife away from me and mine.

  But she had more impressive game to hunt, I reflected as I studied her latest piece. They had not given her the front page; that honor was reserved for more senior writers bent on howling outrage against the Jews, the poor, the Catholics, the immigrants, and anyone else they thought might possibly be behind the appalling crimes in Whitechapel. They castigated Sir Charles Warren, the captain of Scotland Yard, with obvious glee, calling for his resignation in the face of his failure to apprehend the culprit. They speculated wildly on methods of investigation, and an entire column was devoted to letters from vulturelike members of the reading public urging ever more outrageous solutions. And page after page featured descriptions of the hideous mutilations inflicted upon the victims in stomach-churning detail.

  J. J. Butterworth’s article stood out amid this orgy of sensationalism. Rather than focus on the crimes or the perpetrator, she had instead turned her pen to the subject of the victims. She named them, repeatedly, and described the lives they had led. She made them not faceless drabs who got no better than they deserved, as so many believed them to be. Sh
e told their stories, painting portraits of grinding poverty relieved only by the temporary respite to be found in a bottle of gin. She described the few options available to women who had been let down by society, by their families, by their menfolk. She talked of pathetic attempts at dignity and self-respect, the desperate cobbling together of an income by way of picking hops or making silk flowers, and how these uncertain wages must so often be augmented by the selling of the only commodity such women could command—their own bodies. Butterworth called out the evils of a class system that did not offer opportunities to women such as these; she condemned the church and the government and every other institution that regularly looked past these women as though they did not exist. It was a brutal and scathing indictment of those who held the power to amend but did nothing with that authority.

  That J. J. Butterworth was such a firebrand was no surprise; that the Daily Harbinger chose to publish such a diatribe, albeit buried far towards the back, did give me a moment’s reflection. The proprietors prided themselves on stoking the fires of sensationalism, generating public debate about the most polarizing topics of the day. They attacked anyone they could rouse to reaction and thus sold more newspapers than many of the more sedate journals. But they were scandalmongers, not ideologues. They might champion the poor and downtrodden this week against the wealthy, but next week they would be just as likely to call for the expulsion of the Chinese from Limehouse on the grounds that they trafficked in human beings and opium. (The engagement of the Chinese in either of those practices was greatly exaggerated. There were far more native-born English selling their own kind into the basest of trades, and the only opium house I ever personally entered was maintained by a schoolmaster in Bloomsbury.)

  I moved on from Butterworth’s piece to a lengthy article about the rising threat of anarchists, the tragic death of a famous lady mountaineer, and a detailed description of the monument to George Washington presently to open in the city bearing his name. It was a singularly odd-looking edifice, an obelisk of faintly Egyptian design.

  “But with not a single hieroglyph,” I sniffed just as Stoker appeared, eyes heavily shadowed and a fresh growth of morning whiskers upon his jaw. Trotting after him were the dogs, Lord Rosemorran’s Caucasian shepherd, Betony, Stoker’s bulldog, Huxley, and his newest acquisition, a pretty Egyptian hound called Nut. Huxley and Bet had already produced a litter of extremely questionable attractiveness and were devoted to one another. But they had admitted Nut with good grace, and she was a dainty, unobtrusive creature given to displays of adoration where Stoker was concerned. He tossed sausages to each of the dogs, then reached for a piece of toast and dunked it directly into the pot of honey.

  “How is Lady Wellie?” I asked.

  “Resting,” he said. “I looked in on her a few times in the night. She roused once towards dawn and took a little brandy with an egg beaten into it, then slipped into sleep again.” I started to open my mouth again, but he shook his head. “It is too soon to know what sort of permanent effect this will have upon her health.”

  He finished his toast and reached for another piece. “What are you reading?”

  I did not mention the monument—Stoker had very strong opinions on architecture—but acquainted him with the latest on anarchists and deceased lady mountaineers before giving him the highlights of J. J. Butterworth’s article. He lifted a hand halfway through.

  “Don’t, I beg you. It is too much to bear this early in the morning.”

  The clock in the Belvedere was a singularly unattractive thing, enormous and held in the paws of a slightly cross-eyed sphinx. I gave it a meaningful look. “It is not morning. It has just gone noon.”

  He groaned and reached for the teapot, pouring himself a large cup of tepid, muddy brew. As he sipped, I thought of what Lady Wellie had been trying to communicate when she had fallen ill.

  “Do you think she was simply confused?” I asked. “She asks us to return because of the Whitechapel murders, says it is a matter of life and death, and then asks us instead to retrieve a jewel on the prince’s behalf. It makes no sense.”

  Stoker shrugged. “It must have, at least to her. Somehow those things must be connected in her mind.”

  “But what connection could there possibly be between a prince of the realm and those dreadful murders?” I demanded.

  “Good morning, all!” came a cheerful voice from the doorway. The dogs roused themselves, welcoming our visitor with an enthusiasm that bordered on the ridiculous. Huxley sniffed him eagerly whilst Betony made a gurgling noise of pleasure deep in her throat and Nut applied herself to rolling ecstatically upon her back in front of him.

  “Mornaday!” I exclaimed with mingled pleasure. Stoker was far less keen.

  “Mornaday,” he said curtly.

  Sir Hugo’s junior at Special Branch, Mornaday had been, upon occasion, both adversary and ally. We had encountered Mornaday during our first adventure in detection, and while I liked him—he boasted a pair of merry dark eyes and an endearing charm that could coax birds from the trees—Stoker found him decidedly less amiable. The pair of them raised one another’s hackles and they usually spent most of their time circling one another like feral cats. They tallied their grudges against one another with maddening accuracy and held them close, nurturing them with care.

  “Well, if you are not a sight for the sorest of eyes,” Mornaday said, stepping neatly over Nut to kiss my hand. “Far too long, it’s been.” His gaze held the faintest touch of reproach. “Do I have to marry you myself to prevent you from haring off for parts unknown?” he demanded.

  “I sent you picture postcards,” I reminded him.

  “You did?” Stoker raised a brow and Mornaday beamed at him, settling comfortably onto a camel saddle with the air of a man well pleased with himself.

  “She did indeed. What’s the matter, Templeton-Vane? No letters from across the azure sea?” he teased.

  Stoker stuffed the last piece of toast into his mouth and rose. “I am going to polish my eyeballs,” he informed me. He strode off to his workbench, where he retrieved a tray of glass eyes, each of them glittering balefully in the light.

  Mornaday shuddered. “He is a cold-blooded one, he is.”

  “You are terribly squeamish for a policeman,” I observed mildly.

  He made no apologies. “I have a gentle heart,” he said, laying a solemn hand upon that organ. “But jesting aside, I am glad to see you again.”

  I grinned. “Likewise.” I poured myself a second cup of tea and one for Mornaday. He took it, cradling the china in his palm. I pointed to the newspaper. “I was just reading the latest piece from the pen of J. J. Butterworth,” I said blandly.

  His rosy complexion blazed to life, reddening to the tips of his ears. “Have you, then?”

  “I have. She is most eloquent upon the subject of the Ripper victims. Very moving.”

  “Well, she is a talented writer,” he said.

  “Only a man head over heels in love would affect a tone so casual,” I told him.

  He blushed further. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” He took a long sip of his tea, evading my gaze.

  “Yes, you do. Or have you forgot the evening you drank too much of my very effective aguardiente and confessed your unrequited passion for Miss Butterworth?”

  “I remember,” he replied, a trifle sullenly.

  “What is the matter? Does she still hold you at arm’s length?”

  His small smile was mirthless. “Arm’s length, leg’s length, and half a mile beyond. She is so committed to making a name for herself as a journalist, she cannot be bothered with matters of the heart.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  He shrugged. “She spends a good deal of time scuttling about the Yard, sniffing for clues about the Ripper.”

  “I meant in a social capacity.”

  “I invited her to ac
company me tonight to the Savoy. The new Gilbert and Sullivan is to debut—The Yeoman of the Guard.” He drew a pair of tickets from his waistcoat pocket and thrust them at me. I studied the squares of coral pasteboard and admired the tiny butterfly embellishment above the legend, FIRST CIRCLE.

  “A promising choice,” I said by way of encouragement. I tried to pass them back, but he waved me off.

  “She says she is otherwise engaged,” he told me sourly. “You may as well use them yourself.”

  “But surely you could invite someone else,” I began.

  He rose, putting his cup down abruptly. “I haven’t the heart. Besides, it is probably for the best she refused me. I bought the tickets some weeks back and circumstances have changed. It is all hands to the tiller until the Ripper is apprehended. Sir Hugo would have my guts for garters if I left the Yard for more than half an hour. If he learns I’ve come here, I’ll be in the blackest of books,” he added with a pleading look.

  “He shall never learn it from me,” I promised. “Is there no fresh new line of inquiry that might lead to this monster’s apprehension?”

  He spread his hands. “I wish there were. He is a fiend, the likes of which I have never seen. You can read in the newspapers what he has done to them, but I will never speak of it.”

  “You needn’t fear my sensibilities,” I assured him. “I am of strong mettle.”

  “I am not,” he retorted. “I had to attend one of the autopsies and I sicked up my breakfast.”

  I was not surprised. The ferocity of the crimes was appalling, and I found it endearing that a London policeman who had seen his share of atrocities was still gentle enough to be affected by the humanity of the victims.

  I tapped the tickets. “You must allow me to repay you.”

  He waved. “No need between friends.” He jerked his head towards Stoker’s workbench. “Promise you will take him.”