An Unexpected Peril

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  When at last he lay still, I rose to my feet and carried him out of the shocking warmth of the only home he had known, through the bone-snapping cold of the gardens and into the Belvedere. I worked for some time, pinning him gently whilst his wings were still pliable and unlikely to break. I wrote a description of this most extraordinary avatar of Siproeta stelenes. After a moment’s consideration, I took up my pen again.

  Known to his friends as Hercules. It was a curious thing to write an epitaph for a butterfly, but it seemed wrong not to honor the dead when we have known them, no matter how small.

  As wrong as leaving Alice Baker-Greene’s murderer unpunished, I thought in some agitation. Dropping the matter was not a choice I made with any great enthusiasm, and I knew it was one Stoker and I would revisit at another time. But I stood a better chance of persuading him if I could marshal a little proof, some tiny indication that a villain had been at work, snatching the life of an innocent woman before her time. And somehow, I promised myself, I would find it.

  Whilst I brooded, Stoker was busily engaged in wrestling with his walrus, an occupation that kept him occupied through the dinner hour. In the end, I ordered a tray from the kitchen, choosing to take my meal in solitude, opening the last post of the day as I ate in my little chapel. Cook had sent a fine breast of duck with a potato and apple galette, but the food gave scant satisfaction when I read my letters. There was one from Lady Wellingtonia Beauclerk, the earl’s elderly aunt and my unexpected friend. Born on the eve of Waterloo, she had served as the power behind the throne for decades, clearing up the untidy messes of the royal family and protecting them from their worst impulses to self-destruction. Given her loyalty to them, she might well have destroyed me for the danger I presented with my secret and semi-legitimate status.

  Instead, she had befriended me as she had Stoker, offering wisdom and an unsentimental affection that meant more to me than most attachments I had ever known. Her usually robust health had taken a turn for the worse during the Ripper’s reign of terror, and after much reflection on her own mishandling of the affair, she had taken herself off to Scotland to her shooting box to recuperate. Given the inclement nature of Scottish weather, I rather suspected she had gone to sulk instead, and she had missed the yuletide, usually spent in the bosom of her rumbustious family. I surveyed the scrawled note as I picked at my duck. She had scribbled a few lines, indicating that she was recovering her health, albeit more slowly than either of us would have wished. I missed her dreadfully, and I was not entirely comfortable with that emotion. Between her departure and that of Tiberius, I felt abandoned by my friends, a state of affairs I would not have credited only a year before. I was accustomed to living my life as unfettered as one of my beloved butterflies, and these new bonds of attachment brought with them not only connection and warmth but a dreadful sensation of loss when my companions were not present.

  I shoved her letter aside and picked up another, this written on heavy paper embellished with the heading of the Sudbury Hotel. It was short and equally unsatisfying.

  My dear Miss Speedwell,

  I hope this note finds you well. I am writing to inform you that His Excellency, Chancellor von Rechstein, declines to address the matter you brought to our attention. With kind regards, Baroness Margareta von Wallenberg.

  I shook the envelope, but there was nothing more. Only a single line of dismissal to indicate that nothing would be done to investigate the murder of Alice Baker-Greene. My chance to persuade Stoker to undertake this new adventure was at an end and I was, quite plainly, bereft.

  But why? I had not known the woman well, I reminded myself. And countless miscarriages of justice were done every day. Why did this particular lack of conclusion feel so brutal?

  I put this letter aside, shoving away the plate of duck. It was congealing now, and I had no appetite for it. I was conscious only of a keen, sharp-edged sense of loss. I had, by any measure, all that I could wish for. I was healthy and not uncomely. I had work I loved, friends I treasured, and a man for whom I would walk through fire—and, in fact, had upon occasion and in the most literal sense. I could find no reason for the overwhelming sense of agitation I felt, but I rebelled against it.

  I had experienced such emotions once or twice before. The remedy, I had found, was movement. To hurl one’s few possessions into a carpetbag and embark for a new adventure was the only solace. To leave behind one’s woes in a damp and fogbound land, awaking in brilliant sunshine, the air heavy with spices and the promise of fresh endeavors, this was true happiness. A train bound for anywhere, a ship unfurling its sails for some new shore. Steam whistle and snapping canvas, those were the lullabies that soothed a savage soul. And I had no recourse to them, I reflected bitterly. For now that I had joined myself in affection to Stoker, I could no longer run from myself as I had once so blithely done. I must, instead, sit and face my demons.

  For a long while—too long—I sat sulking in the gloom as the candles guttered out and the fire burned low. Unlike the Roman baths and the vivarium with their lavish steam heat, the follies had not been fitted with modern conveniences. It was left to me to tend my own modest hearth. After the clock had struck ten, I noticed a growing chill, something more insistent than the usual January cold. I opened the door of the folly, gazing up at the moon. It was waxing, very nearly full, a lopsided baroque pearl of a moon. But it was shrouded in grey shadows, rimmed with cold blue light, and I saw splinters of ice dancing in the glow of the doorway. I shut the door quickly against the brutal cold, stirring up the fire until it crackled merrily. I whistled to Vespertine, curling myself against his wiry, woolly warmth as I watched the flames. I could pretend to myself for just a little while that they were not plain London flames, kindled on a hearth of simple stone. They were the flames of a bonfire scented with herbs on a Corsican hillside, of a funeral pyre lavish with incense on a riverbank in India, of a cook fire in South America, smelling of roasting meats.

  I smiled to myself, thinking of my adventures, and in due course, warmed by my memories and my dog, I slept.

  * * *

  • • •

  I woke to bitter cold, the windows rimed with a narrow tracery of ice. I washed, gritting my teeth against the frigid water, and dressed in my warmest ensemble, a costume of heavy violet wool tweed with lapels of black velvet. I had had a little coat made of black velvet for Vespertine, but he gave me a reproachful look from under his heavy brows as I tried to fit it, preferring instead to bound out into the frosted gardens as soon as I opened the door. Betony, whose thick coat was meant for the wind-ravished steppes of the Caucasus, was romping happily in the brittle, frost-blackened grass whilst Huxley and Nut were nowhere to be seen. I found them, curled one on either side of Stoker as he finished his breakfast, his attention fixed upon the newspaper propped against the teapot.

  I hastened upstairs to examine once more the file of cuttings on Alice Baker-Greene. There was no new information to be found. I had read every piece thoroughly the day before. I tossed them aside in exasperation. A single new snippet of information would be enough, I told myself. Just one small wisp to dangle in front of Stoker to coax him into action. I had no notion of what I required, only that there must be something to intrigue him, goading him to undertake the investigation of his own volition.

  It took me less than a quarter of an hour to find it. An issue of the Daily Harbinger from the end of November. The Ripper news had settled into something less than hysteria, and one or two measured voices suggested his reign of terror might have come to an end. Without fresh victims to exploit, the Harbinger had been forced to revive other stories, raking them afresh to blaze back into the white-hot heat of scandal. And they had done their best with the meager details of Alice Baker-Greene’s death, revisiting the story of her fatal fall, this time with eyewitness accounts in lurid detail and assorted photographs. One picture I had seen before, the posed portrait of Alice on the Alpenwald, but it was bracketed
with an earlier photograph of her standing atop a peak in the United States, suffragette banner in hand. The last was a particularly unappetizing funeral portrait of Alice lying in her coffin after her funeral.

  My eyes flicked swiftly from the photograph to the byline and I found no surprises there. J. J. Butterworth from Hochstadt, the Alpenwald. Our old friend had taken herself off to the tiny principality to interview witnesses, no doubt embellishing their stories with a few enhancements of her own invention. She had included a summary of the coroner’s report—verdict: accidental death—as well as the formal testimony of Captain Durand, the commander of the princess’s personal guard and a frequent climber himself. He testified to witnessing Alice climb that day, explaining that it was a common pastime of the Alpenwalders to observe the tiny black dots of mountaineers through telescopes fixed to the castle balconies. He explained that her climb had begun much in the usual way and that he had watched her until she rounded the breast of the mountain, heading upwards to the unseen challenge of the devil’s staircase. Some minutes later, he revealed, he had heard a scream and then she had hurtled into view, falling from a terrible height to her instant death. Naturally, he rushed to the scene, as did many others who had witnessed her fall. The most usual route up the mountain, as sketched by the intrepid Miss Butterworth, began in a little wood just beyond the central square of Hochstadt, lying in a verdant green forest that nestled against the walls of the castle courtyard. To sit in one of the many biergartens with a warm glass of spiced wine or a cold stein of beer and watch the climbers toil up the mountain was one of the Alpenwalders’ favorite pastimes, it appeared. And dozens of people had watched Alice Baker-Greene fall to her death. There was nothing unusual in the circumstances, Captain Durand had insisted. A tragic accident and no more.

  It was not until I read through J. J.’s interviews with Alice’s landlady, the local priest, and the cheesemonger that I spotted it. The cheesemonger had seen Alice Baker-Greene that morning. It was her custom to carry a small cheese and a loaf in her knapsack when she climbed. She often departed shortly after dawn, preferring to watch the sun rise on the slope of the mountain and take her breakfast on the devil’s staircase as she rested and sketched the routes. That morning, she had been in high spirits, he said, planning to test a new variation on the devil’s staircase that might prove useful when the snows set in before her winter climb. He had waved her off and watched her begin her climb. One other climber appeared that morning, a slender mustachioed man who began to climb a little while before Alice, but whose appearance was nothing near as thrilling as a sighting of the famous mountaineer. J. J. slipped into sticky sentimentality when she concluded that the climber might well have been the last person to see Alice alive on the mountain and ended the piece with a plea to the young man to come forward so she might tell his version of events to the public. She dangled the promise of a reward, but though I scoured the later numbers of the newspaper, I could find no further mention of Alice Baker-Greene. No doubt J. J.’s publisher refused to sanction any further Continental adventures and had ordered her home before she could track down the elusive young man.

  I suppressed a sigh. This was precious little bait to use to entice Stoker into an investigation, I reflected darkly as I tucked the newspaper under my arm, but I would make a manful attempt nonetheless. I went downstairs to the sarcophagus we used as a buffet—Greco-Roman and scarcely worth the cartonnage—and peeked under the lidded dishes dispatched from the main house’s kitchens. Cook had outdone herself. In addition to the usual eggs and bacon, she had sent down a heaping portion of kedgeree and a plate of deviled kidneys.

  “How bad is the storm?” I asked Stoker as I filled my plate.

  “Snow in Kent,” he told me in a tone of bemusement. “And west of the Tamar into the north of Cornwall, if you can believe it. It has snowed so heavily in the Midlands that the trains have stopped and nothing moves. Wales is completely cut off. What is the world coming to?”

  “What of Scotland?” I asked in some concern. I worried for Lady Wellie, marooned as she was in her Highland aerie.

  Stoker intuited my thoughts, but his expression was unconcerned. “She took Baring-Ponsonby with her. I daresay she will be warm enough.” His mouth twitched with a suppressed smile as he spoke.

  Cecil Baring-Ponsonby was a gentleman of even more advanced years than Lady Wellie, but they had been lovers for decades. “Poor old Cecil is nearly ninety,” I reminded him. “He has no more business in such a climate than she does. They ought to have gone to Egypt or a nice remote island in the South Pacific. His lordship owns property all over the world. Surely he might have made her the loan of a handy archipelago.”

  Stoker snorted but said nothing and I returned to the copy of the Daily Harbinger, scouring J. J.’s piece again. I focused this time on the photographs, feeling a sudden spear thrust of irritation that so robust and engaging a woman should have had her life cut short so brutally, so tragically. I peered at the funeral photograph, putting down my toast and reaching slowly for my magnifying glass. After a long moment, I sat back, smiling.

  “I can hear you thinking, Veronica,” Stoker said from behind his newspaper. “What is it?”

  Wordlessly, I produced the cutting and handed it over, using the magnifying glass to point out the detail in the photograph that had captured my attention.

  After a long moment, Stoker slumped in his chair. “Bloody bollocking hell,” he managed. I smiled, a purely feline expression of contentment, and he immediately bristled.

  “See here, Veronica—”

  I held up a hand to forestall his objections. “No. Let us have it plainly with no brangling. Alice Baker-Greene was laid to her eternal rest wearing a climbing costume and the enameled badge of the Alpenwalder Kletterverein Gipfelabzeichen.”

  “Your German pronunciation is execrable,” he put in.

  “Do not sulk. It is unbecoming in a man of your age,” I replied calmly. “Now, this badge is not the plain badge worn by every mountaineer who climbs on the Teufelstreppe. It is the particular and very special badge awarded to those who achieve the summit. So, Miss Baker-Greene is buried in her mountaineering garb with an accolade from the society, a very special society marking her accomplishment. Why, then, I am forced to ask, did we find that exact badge amongst her personal possessions at the club? And furthermore, why was Alice Baker-Greene’s climbing badge stolen from the exhibition on the night before last?”

  Stoker’s response was pointed. “You cannot possibly know the answers to those questions.”

  “I am a scientist,” I told him ruthlessly. “I do not require perfect knowledge in order to form a working hypothesis, only possibilities. Alice Baker-Greene was buried with an Alpenwalder summit badge. This we know from the photograph,” I said, jabbing a finger towards the newspaper in his hand. “Yet an identical—or nearly identical—badge was sent with her personal possessions from Hochstadt. Since an item cannot occupy two places at once, we may safely deduce that there are two badges.” I paused and he gave a grudging nod.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Now, the badge we saw at the Curiosity Club was packed with Alice’s personal possessions from her lodgings and conveyed directly here. It is, I happen to know, Alice’s own badge.”

  “How can you know that?” he demanded.

  I described the nick at the edge of the medal. “Alice showed me herself. She said it got bashed about when she wore it climbing once and she intended never to wear it climbing again.”

  I paused again and he made a restless gesture. “Get on with it,” he growled.

  “The badge at the club is undoubtedly Alice’s own,” I repeated. “But the badge she was buried with was not pinned to her clothing because it was not hers.”

  Stoker waved the newspaper at me. “It is most definitely pinned to her clothing in this photograph.”

  “But that is not where it was found,” I poi
nted out. “Read the article carefully, and you will be struck by one curious fact—the badge was found with her lifeless body on the Teufelstreppe, but clutched in her hand. This is the badge, the undamaged badge, that was pinned to her garments as she lay in her coffin. And I propose that this badge belonged to her murderer,” I finished triumphantly. “And was wrenched from his shirt as Alice Baker-Greene reached out for the last time whilst she struggled for her life on that mountain.”

  He gave a deep groan. “Veronica, of all the melodramatic codswallop—”

  “It is not codswallop. What is more logical than that Alice, whose rope was clearly cut in an act of sabotage, might have struggled with her attacker and ripped a badge from his clothing, carrying down the mountain a clue to his identity? Furthermore, you thought the same yourself, otherwise you would not have had so strenuous a reaction to the realization. ‘Bloody bollocking hell’ were your words, I believe.”

  “I admit, I may have thought something along those lines at first, but almost at once I saw that there might be a dozen other perfectly logical explanations for the presence of a second badge amongst her things.”

  “I would settle for one,” I told him sweetly.

  “It might be a memento,” he said, shoving the newspaper back at me. “Surely she had a love affair or a friendship of some sort—one she mightn’t have wanted made public. So the badge was a sentimental keepsake.”

  “Possible, but weak,” I told him. “Two marks out of ten.”

  “That suggestion is at least a seven,” he countered.

  I flapped a hand. “Two and I am being generous. First, she did have a possible relationship in the Alpenwald with a minor member of the royal family—Duke Maximilian of Lokendorf—”