An Unexpected Peril

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “The weather is turning,” Stoker remarked as he cast a practiced eye upon the line of rooftops. “It will be icy by morning.”

  I shivered in my seat. Like all butterfly hunters, I was most at home in tropical lands where the most flamboyant species of lepidoptera flourished. Give me a jungle, a forest lush with green and thick with flower-scented air that steamed gently, pulsing with life and promise, and I was a happy woman. This sooty, smirched chill that penetrated one’s clothes and settled into the bones was most difficult to bear in January. The calendar had turned, the days were lengthening, spring was a promise, but it was a long and shiversome season until May blossoms would ripen.

  It took longer than I might have preferred to reach the club, but we arrived at last to find Lady C.’s anxious white face peering from one of the upstairs windows. She dropped the curtain when she saw us alight from the hansom, hurrying downstairs to meet us as we entered.

  “Whatever is the problem—” Stoker began but she hissed him to silence.

  “Hush! Not here. Upstairs,” she said, bustling us up to the exhibition room. She drew a key from her pocket and unlocked the door, making it fast behind us once she had peered down the corridors to make certain we were not observed.

  Stoker did not have to repeat his question. There was a gentle crunch underfoot as we trod on broken glass, powdering it into the carpet. The display cabinet had been broken.

  “An unfortunate accident,” I began. But Lady C. shook her head.

  “There are scratches on the lock,” she told us, her expression grim. “Someone had a go at forcing it but couldn’t manage it. They might have feared to take too long or simply lacked the strength to break it. In any event, they found it easier to break the glass.”

  “What is missing?” Stoker asked, peering in the cabinet.

  “Only one thing, as far as I know,” she said. “Alice Baker-Greene’s summit badge from the Alpenwalder Climbing Society.”

  Stoker and I surveyed the contents of the case. Everything I had placed there was accounted for, albeit several things had been jostled in the miscreant’s theft and bits of glass sparkled like diamonds on the velvet display cloth.

  “Have you looked through the rest of the exhibition?” Stoker asked.

  Lady C. shook her head. “That is why I asked you to come. I thought you might notice more than I would if anything else had been taken.”

  We made a quick appraisal of the various shelves and cabinets, looked through the photographs and mementoes. Stoker quietly moved behind the draperies where we had stowed the parcel with the climbing rope as I turned to Lady C. “Nothing else appears to be missing.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “Well, that is a mercy, although how I am to explain to Mrs. Baker-Greene that her granddaughter’s summit badge is missing is anyone’s guess. I am not looking forward to telling her we have managed to lose one of her most treasured mementoes.”

  “You hardly lost it,” I pointed out. “It was stolen.”

  “Because we were lax with security,” she returned in some bitterness. “Perhaps we ought to engage some sort of security, although we have never had need of it before. There has always been an atmosphere of trust in this place, a trust that has now been grossly violated.”

  “Who was here yesterday evening?” I asked.

  She spread her hands. “The members come and go, as you well know. The ledger is supposed to be used to sign in whenever one visits, but that is not always practiced,” she added with a slightly reproachful glance at me. It was not undeserving. I myself occasionally failed to sign the ledger and had even earned a stern rebuke from the club authorities for omitting to declare Stoker as a guest one evening. The club had strict rules about the admission of gentlemen, permitting them only by prior arrangement or during events which were open to the public.

  Lady C. went on, furrowing her brow. “I suppose I ought to go and inspect the ledger and see what I can learn from that.”

  “I cannot imagine any member of the club doing such a thing,” I began.

  “They didn’t,” Stoker said soberly as he came to join us.

  Lady C. brightened. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because it is not just the badge that has vanished,” he said, giving me a level look. “The cut climbing rope is missing. Veronica and I put it behind the draperies for safekeeping and it is gone.”

  Lady C. stared at him a long moment. “I do not understand. The badge at least was metal. Why on earth would someone wish to take an old rope?”

  “Because it was very likely a murder weapon,” I told her.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I must go to Hestia,” she said, invoking the name of the portress and directress of the club. “She has been deciding upon a course of action and wishes to meet at once.”

  “We will clear it up,” I told her. “I know where the brooms are.”

  She hurried off and I bent to tidying away the broken glass, no easy task when much of it had been ground to slivers in the carpet.

  “You can leave off smiling anytime, you know,” Stoker said as he plucked splinters of glass from the velvet display shelves.

  “I am not smiling.”

  “Veronica, I can see your face. I know precisely what your mouth is doing.”

  I sat back on my haunches. “Very well. I am smiling. Do you know why?”

  “Because you think this will change something,” he said, calmly dropping the splinters into a dustpan.

  “It changes everything! We know now that our hypothesis was correct. Alice Baker-Greene was murdered.”

  “That is not our hypothesis,” he pointed out. “It is yours and it demonstrates a woeful failure of logic.”

  I made a scoffing noise. “You were the one who first introduced the possibility of murder,” I reminded him.

  “For which I am immensely sorrowful,” he replied. “One cut rope does not a murder make.”

  “It does if that cut rope meant a woman plunged to her death. Ow!” I swore as a bit of glass jammed into my finger.

  “Let me see,” he ordered. “Here in the light.”

  I went to stand next to him, extending my finger where a bright bead of ruddy blood stood. He peered at it, then took a slender knife from his pocket. Stoker’s pockets were invariably a repository for all manner of oddments—coins, vestas, paper twists of sweets, great crimson handkerchiefs, assorted glass eyeballs, lockpicks. One never knew what lurked in there, but Stoker always managed to produce the proper tool for any occasion. He bent his head to the task, plying the knifepoint so quickly and deftly that I never felt the splinter move. He dropped it into the dustpan with a delicate clink and the blood welled afresh. I expected him to wrap it in one of his enormous scarlet handkerchiefs.

  Instead, he took the fingertip in his mouth, giving it a gentle suck. A jolt of a most arresting sensation coursed through me, so much so that I was entirely incapable of speech.

  After a moment, he removed my finger from his lips, examining it in satisfaction. “The suction and the saliva help with clotting,” he told me. “Of course, it is not a technique one would care to employ on anyone to whom one was not intimately connected.”

  I said nothing. I stepped closer, lifting my face to his as I applied a caress to a specific and wholly enthralling portion of his anatomy to assess its readiness.

  “Veronica!” He grasped my wrists, putting me firmly away. “This is hardly the time or place,” he began.

  I moved forward again, pressing my hips to his. “That is rather the point,” I murmured.

  “We will be discovered,” he protested.

  “Will we?” I breathed, trailing a kiss from his earlobe down his neck. “How very dangerous.”

  “Veronica.” This time it was a groan and he did not push me aside. Instead he buried his hands in my hair, kissing me as thoroughly as he
did everything, which is to say, expertly and with exquisite attention to detail. I was just reaching for the hem of my petticoat when he gave a maidenly gasp and thrust me away. “Veronica, what has got into you? That is quite enough,” he said, straightening his disordered garments. He buttoned his shirt, finishing just as Lady C. appeared. I dropped the last splinter of glass into the dustpan.

  “Hestia has spoken with the Alpenwalders. It has been decided the less said about this the better,” she told us, her expression grim.

  “The Alpenwalders! What business is it of theirs?” I demanded.

  Lady C.’s tone was even, but it seemed an effort. “They are underwriting the expenses of the exhibition and Hestia felt obliged to inform them of this development. They were most insistent upon discretion. They have a horror of any sort of bad publicity.”

  “Reasonable enough,” Stoker put in. “If the mountaineering business is already suffering thanks to Alice Baker-Greene’s death, then any news story which revives the whole sordid business must be unwelcome.”

  “Exactly that,” Lady C. said. “And Hestia agrees with them. She will have a joiner come tomorrow to fit a new panel of glass to the cabinet. In the meanwhile, the room is to be kept locked at all times and I will keep the key.”

  “What of the thefts?” Stoker inquired.

  “At Hestia’s encouragement, I will of course write to Mrs. Baker-Greene to inform her of the loss of the summit badge,” she said evasively.

  “And the rope?” I challenged.

  She smoothed her skirts. “There is no need to mention it further.”

  “You cannot possibly mean to condone theft,” I began.

  “I am not condoning anything because I do not know who has perpetrated this deed and it will profit no one to pursue it,” she pointed out in a too-reasonable voice. “It is out of my hands, Veronica, and the decision has been made. The matter goes no further.” She looked around. “Very tidy,” she said, giving an approving nod. “Your hard work is much appreciated. Now, if you do not mind, I have to leave and I am under orders to permit no one to remain without either myself or Hestia in attendance.”

  “You do not trust us alone in the exhibit we are helping to mount?” I asked, my voice dangerously calm.

  “It is not a matter of trust,” she said, moving towards the door. “It is a matter of knowing when to let things be for the greater good.”

  She escorted us from the room and locked it firmly behind us, pocketing the key. “Thank you for your assistance today. You have been most helpful.”

  “Not as helpful as we might,” I protested, sotto voce. It occurred to me to storm Hestia in her aerie and demand she take the matter seriously, but I did no such thing. To begin with, I had Stoker in tow, and gentlemen were not received in the offices except by prior appointment. And, if I am to be honest, I was distracted and unhappy at the turn of events.

  “I am rather put out with Lady C.,” I quibbled as Stoker and I journeyed back to Bishop’s Folly. “I thought she had more spirit than to simply accept a directive from on high. She seems to forget that we are highly experienced in these matters and brushes us aside as if we were kitchen maids! Come to think of it, she might as well have summoned maids to tidy up that mess and I wonder she did not.”

  “She needed people she could trust,” he pointed out as he stared at the passing scenery.

  “She did not trust us,” I reminded him. “She set us to clearing up and then ordered us out.”

  “She trusted us with the truth of the burglary.”

  “Until she decided to take orders from Hestia and sweep the whole matter under the carpet,” I said darkly. It was the first time Lady C. and I had even approached a falling-out. We had traveled together the previous year and she had shared confidences with me that I knew she had enjoyed with no other soul on earth. It rankled then that she would not trust me now with something so much less personal.

  “I thought we were friends,” I muttered when Stoker did not reply.

  He continued to stare out the window, distracted.

  I poked experimentally at his ribs, and he jumped a mile. “What in the name of seven hells was that for?” he asked, rubbing at his torso.

  “I was abusing Lady C. Your response to that ought to be one of undiluted support for my position.”

  “I was friends with Lady C. before you and I were ever acquainted,” he reminded me. “And I happen to think she is right in this case. The Alpenwalders are a notoriously touchy lot. It would no doubt sour relations between our countries to pursue this incident.”

  “It is not an incident,” I corrected sharply. “A woman has been murdered and I am apparently the only person who cares.”

  He sighed. “We have no proof—”

  “Because it was stolen.”

  He gave a growl of frustration and reached for me, but I slid to the far end of the seat. “Do not put a hand on me or I will demonstrate for you the Corsican stranglehold taught me by a very nice bandit chief of my acquaintance.”

  He gave me a wary look as if he doubted my purpose, but he remained where he was, clearly reluctant to risk my willingness to inflict bodily harm.

  “You seemed eager enough for me to put a hand on you at the club,” he said mildly.

  “That was different.” My cheeks were hot, beating with blood. “That was when I thought you cared about innocent victims and righting injustices.”

  “Or,” he said slowly, “was it when there was a possibility we might be discovered and you found yourself excited by the danger of it?”

  I said nothing, keeping my gaze pinned to the seat opposite. He gave a little laugh and settled back in the seat. His hand crept near mine and I slapped it away. He laughed again and when the cab drew to a stop outside the little side gate at Bishop’s Folly, I sprang from my seat, leaving him to pay. By the time he had sorted out the fare and bade the driver farewell, I was halfway to my vivarium. I did not look back.

  CHAPTER

  6

  For the remainder of the day, I busied myself in the vivarium in contemplation of my chrysalides. The butterflies were proving decidedly reluctant to emerge, but I attended the Indian birthwort faithfully, watering it and pruning the odd dead leaf, to ensure a proper food supply when they chose to make their appearance.

  When I had finished, I moved on to a special corner where I was nurturing the last of my Malachites. I had secured a very small population of Siproeta stelenes caterpillars from the Iguazu Falls of the Argentine and had guarded them fiercely through their pupation. They had rewarded my care with a brilliant display of color and size, the largest growing to an astonishing four and three-quarters inches, well beyond the average for that particular lepidopteron. They were, as their common name suggests, a pretty shade of green, albeit without the emerald flamboyance of the Rajah Brooke’s Birdwing, one of my personal favorites.

  But the viridian of my Malachites was enchanting in its own right, and I watched them with tremendous satisfaction as they flapped and fluttered their way around the vivarium. Like most other butterflies, they suckled nectar from flowers, but their favorite food was rotting fruit, lavishly supplemented with bat dung and the occasional mammalian corpse. His lordship’s coachman provided a steady supply of mice from the carriage house, which my greedy Malachites devoured with gusto. It was a curious thing to observe butterflies feeding eagerly on dead flesh—a sight that caused more than one lady visitor to recoil and reach for her smelling salts. I never begrudged them their curious diet. They offered too much joy in return to quibble over a few bloated mice here and there.

  It was in the nature of butterflies to live transitory lives, fleeting as they were lovely, and it was with resignation that I watched as they lived out their brief existence, bursting into jeweled magnificence and then, after a few short months of activity, fading into oblivion. It was no easy feat to keep them alive throug
hout the deepening chill of a British autumn. The coal fires were kept stoked and the steam heat pushed through the pipes of the vivarium with the warmth of Hades, but still it was a struggle to drive the temperature above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, the necessary threshold for Malachites to fly. They drooped lower and lower upon their leaves, sulking amidst the bushes until, one by one, they perished, fluttering gracefully to the stone floor like drifts of paper born on an ill wind. I had collected them as they died, removing them gently to the Belvedere, where I mounted each upon a piece of card penned with the name of the species and its place of origin and date and place of death.

  There was one last holdout against the intemperate frosts, the largest and most theatrical of the males, an enormous fellow who winged slowly about the females, dazzling them with his size rather than his speed. The smaller males darted furiously about, displaying their wings in lavishly acrobatic maneuvers, but my big, slow, steady favorite—whom I nicknamed Hercules—outdid them all, securing the favors of even the most timid of maiden butterflies. The vast majority of the dainty green eggs that had been laid amidst the shrubs were the product of his bridal flights, and in the end, he was the only one left, moving like a sad shadow through the limbs of the little jungle I had created, as if searching for the friends and wives he had lost.

  I was not entirely surprised to find that his time had come at last. He lay on the floor of the vivarium in the shadow of a bush, his wings still trembling with the effort of flight. I lifted him onto my palm, bringing my hand up to my face so that I might see him clearly. He raised one forewing in what a fanciful person might have called a salute.

  “Good-bye, my dear little friend,” I murmured. “Rest now.”

  He flapped again a time or two but remained nestled in my palm. I sat in the fragrant steamy air of the vivarium, perspiration pearling my temples, and marveled at this exquisite creature with his viridian wings, so delicate they seemed hardly capable of holding his weight aloft. And yet they had, bearing him throughout his adventures until at long last his voyaging was finished. They were miracles of architecture, the lepidoptera, and I felt, along with a pang of loss, a fervent gratitude that I had discovered them as my life’s work. There was nothing so fragile as a butterfly wing, nor anything as lovely.