“Of course she does,” Tiberius shot back. “She is the one responsible for keeping Helen away from the brandy snifter.”
“Not very gallant,” I reproved. “But you raise an excellent point, Tiberius. Helen seems quite upset for someone who ought to be accustomed to such things. She saw me in my nightdress and nearly levitated with fright.”
Tiberius stirred. “Did you make yourself known to her?”
“I suppose I ought to have done so, but I was afraid if I spoke she might shriek down the house or fall into a fit of hysterics. It was all most curious.”
Stoker lifted a brow. “How so?”
“Helen does this sort of thing for a living. Madame Helena and all that. She contacts the dead with the same frequency that the average woman might speak with the butcher. And yet the manifestations this evening seemed to distress her.”
“Veronica, she does not actually contact the dead,” Stoker said flatly. “She is a charlatan.”
“Perhaps,” I temporized.
“Perhaps nothing,” he said. His tone was always dismissive when we discussed anything that could not be explained perfectly by scientific inquiry. “She takes money from grieving and desperate people to make them think she is doing something which is quite plainly impossible. The woman is no better than a common cutpurse, stealing money from the unsuspecting.”
“How very uncharitable,” Tiberius murmured.
“Charitable! What cause have I to be charitable to a person like that?” Stoker demanded. “She sits in a room and puts on a voice and suddenly everyone behaves as if it were the Second Coming. It’s maddening.”
“Maddening, but not the point. Helen Romilly was deeply shaken. I think she was as surprised as everyone else at that table at what transpired. She seemed sincerely distressed by the music. In fact, that particular manifestation has left everyone closely connected with Rosamund ill at ease,” I said, trailing off suggestively.
Tiberius’ grey eyes widened. “Except me, you mean. Are you seriously suggesting that I have anything to do with that childish trick?”
I shrugged. “You have the best motive,” I pointed out.
“Motive?” Stoker asked, his expression suddenly bright with curiosity.
I paused and Tiberius took a moment to summon his usual sangfroid. “Very well, Veronica. Tell him. He will enjoy it mightily, I have no doubt. But if you don’t mind, I would rather not be witness to my own exposure. It is a conversation best conducted in privacy.”
“In other words,” Stoker supplied, “‘Get out.’”
Tiberius’ handsome mouth thinned cruelly. “Precisely. I will lock the door behind you. Or ought I to try holy water? A little friendly exorcism might send you on your way.”
I rose and smoothed the skirts of my dressing gown. “Come, Stoker. Tiberius is in a pet, and I cannot blame him. His shoulder must be hurting dreadfully.” I turned at the door and blew him a kiss.
He responded with a muttered profanity and I smiled. No matter how much they brawled, the Templeton-Vane boys were the proverbial peas in a pod.
* * *
• • •
A distinctly unpleasant interlude followed during which I stitched Stoker’s wound under his exacting instructions. He gave my handiwork a long, measured look before nodding his grudging approval. “I suppose it will have to do, although it would have been a damned sight neater if I’d been able to wield the needle myself,” he grumbled.
I dressed the wound, none too gently, and settled myself into an armchair while he stirred the coals. He was silent a long moment as he watched the flames catch, then turned to me, his smile tinged with mischief. “You realize there is no possible way to explain my presence here should I be discovered,” he said, mocking my objection of the previous evening. “Whatever would they think?”
“I am beyond the opinions of provincials,” I retorted.
“I thought you liked the Romillys,” he replied, taking the second armchair and stretching his feet towards the fire now crackling merrily on the hearth.
“I do rather. But it is difficult to become friendly with people who are cohabiting with a ghost.”
He snorted. “Surely you do not believe that nonsense.”
“No,” I said, drawing out the syllable.
“I swear upon my mother’s moldering shroud, if you expect me to believe that there is an actual phantom lurking in the corridors of this castle, I will put you over my shoulder like a sack of wool and carry you away,” he warned.
“It isn’t that I think Rosamund is present,” I protested. “The trick with the music is the product of a nasty imagination—a human one, I have no doubt. But what if there is something beyond that, a presence from beyond prodding the living to do the bidding of the dead?”
His brows knitted together. “A scientist must consider every possible hypothesis,” he said seriously. “And after giving that idea very careful consideration, I can tell you that it is the rankest horseshit.”
“Language,” I murmured.
“Well, honestly, Veronica. You cannot seriously believe that.”
“I did not say I believed it,” I pointed out coolly. “I merely suggested it is a possibility.”
“It bloody well is not.”
“If all scientists were as stubborn as you, we would still be expecting ships to sail off the edge of the world and thinking the sun revolved around the earth.”
“I am not stubborn—”
“Spoken with the obstinacy of a bull,” I said sweetly. “It is not your fault that you suffer from a lack of imagination.”
“A lack of imagination! To refuse to entertain the possibility of an actual ghost playing harpsichords and blowing out candles!”
“I did not mean those things,” I said, striving for patience. “Those were clearly tricks. Drafts can be manufactured with ventilators or candles can be tampered with. As for the music—”
He held up a hand. “It can only have been managed by a human hand. A clockwork mechanism is a damned likelier explanation than a phantom.”
I shook my head. “We searched the harpsichord from tip to toe and found nothing to suggest it had been meddled with. I think someone must have played it and fled through the hidden passage,” I finished. “Which means it could not have been anyone at the séance.”
“Or our miscreant might have left a music box in the passageway and been with us all along,” he countered. “Any of the guests or family might have done that.”
“Or some supernatural agency—” I began.
He snorted. “I still don’t believe it.”
“Of course you don’t. Neither do I. I simply think we ought to consider every possibility before settling on one. There must be an explanation we have not yet discovered. But we will.”
He tipped his head to give me a curious look. “Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“Why must we penetrate the mystery here? Why do we care?”
I blinked at him. “Because it is a mystery? Have you no proper curiosity? No feeling for the challenge?”
“Veronica, we have upon three occasions involved ourselves in such exploits. We have been almost drowned in the Thames, very nearly immolated, chased through the vilest sewers of London, and—no little thing, I should add—I was shot. Explain to me the allurements of such activities, if you will.”
“You were abroad in the night, ready to investigate the music room before I was,” I reminded him.
“Only because I knew you were going to do it and I meant to keep you from trouble,” he countered smoothly. “I should far rather a calm and quiet life with my specimens and my studies.”
“Now, that is the veriest horseshit,” I returned succinctly.
“Language, Veronica,” he said with perfect mimicry. Oh, how I exulted then! To be engaged in an invest
igation once more, sparring with Stoker, was to be more myself than at any other time. I felt a rise of excitement and a sudden ferocious joy as heated as that of any butterfly hunt. Even taking a Kaiser-i-Hind on the wing had not afforded me as much pleasure as this.
“You thrill to the chase as much as I,” I reminded him happily. “You simply like to pretend that such feats of bravado are entirely at my instigation so that you can appear to be the rational and steady one whilst I am given to flights of fancy and ridiculous adventures. And yet, not a single one of those escapades was undertaken without your eager assistance.”
“Assistance?” His voice rose incredulously. “I thought I was the hero of our antics.”
I tipped my head, studying his tumbled hair and bruised face. “No, I have always thought of you as my Garvin.”
“Your Garvin. As in Arcadia Brown’s half-witted sidekick,” he demanded.
“Garvin is not a half-wit,” I reminded him. “He is simply less gifted than his female companion and must defer to her courage. And expertise. And intuition.”
He said something far fouler than his brother had uttered and slid lower in his chair. “That’s a fine how-do-you-do,” he muttered. “Nothing but a bit of muscle.”
“Nonsense,” I soothed. “You are also quite pleasant to look at. Not now, of course, with your lip stuck out like a sulky mule and that bruise blossoming on your face. But when you make an effort, you are very nearly handsome.”
It was the rankest lie. Stoker was not nearly handsome; he was utterly delectable, not in spite of his flaws but because of them. The scar and the untrimmed hair and the signs of rough living only made him seem all the more real. Tiberius might have presented the picture of a perfect gentleman, fresh from his tailor’s bandbox, but Stoker was everything true and vibrant and alive in the world.
To my astonishment, he did not continue to sulk. He suddenly sat up straight, fixing me with a sharp eye. “What did you mean about Tiberius? How is he connected to all of this? And how did his portrait come to be on the harpsichord? I presume he was in love with Rosamund.”
I related to him all that Tiberius had told me of his ill-fated relationship with the lady and his subsequent disastrous marriage. Throughout the recitation, Stoker was silent, studying his feet, his expression inscrutable. When I had finished, he blew out a deep breath.
“That unspeakable bastard,” he murmured. “Who knew he could actually make me feel sorry for him. I never knew things were so bad. He was Father’s pride and joy, you know. The heir to the kingdom,” he said, throwing out his arms expansively. “I was only ever the cuckoo in the nest.”
“Your father does not sound the sort of man to accept his wife’s indiscretion easily,” I mused. “Why did he acknowledge you as his son?”
Stoker gave me a thin smile. “Because he knew it would hurt her more to have me there, every day, under his power and her with no means of protecting me. Under the law, I was his child, and he could beat me or starve me and there wasn’t a bloody thing she could do about it. It was a subtle and sophisticated cruelty, like everything he did.”
“Did he often beat you?” I asked, careful to avert my gaze. I had learnt some time before that looking upon Stoker’s pain was a thing I could not easily bear.
“No,” he answered. “That was the subtlety at work. He knew it was far more effective to do it only very occasionally and without provocation. I would never know when it was coming or why. He thought that would keep me in line, and for a while it did. His tortures of Tiberius were of a more mundane variety.”
“Such as?”
He shrugged. “Breaking things that Tiberius loved. Giving away his favorite horse. Yanking him from a school in which he thrived to place him in one he detested. He did those things to all of us, really. They were designed to toughen us, to make us Templeton-Vanes,” he added with a curl of his lip. “Rupert kept his head down and did as he was told. He never rebelled, never fought back. Merryweather was too young for the worst of Father’s games. Besides, the old devil had his hands full with Tiberius and with me.”
“You fought back,” I guessed.
He grinned. “Every chance I got. And then, when I was twelve, I left altogether. He didn’t much mind. He made inquiries and sent detectives and eventually dragged me back home, but the sport had gone out of it when he realized I would just leave again. And Tiberius had developed his own strategies for dealing with him.”
“What sort of strategies?”
“Tiberius learnt never to love anything or anyone lest it be used against him. He developed that mask you know so well, that polished veneer of urbanity, so detached and lofty he might as well live on Mount Olympus. He has no use for us lesser mortals. Or at least, he didn’t. That is why this Rosamund business is so very disturbing. It makes him human.”
“He told me his wife died in childbed. What happened to the infant?”
“Dead too. Almost immediately after birth.”
“How tragic!” I exclaimed.
“All the more so because it was a boy,” Stoker told me. “Son and heir to the Templeton-Vanes. Lost at birth.”
“What does he mean to do without an heir?” I asked. “Will he remarry, do you think?”
Stoker narrowed his gaze. “Why? Do you mean to keep up this ridiculous charade of a betrothal? If you do, do not have a June wedding, I beg you. Such a cliché.”
“Don’t be nasty,” I ordered. “Very well. I will tell you the simple and rather silly truth behind the charade. Malcolm Romilly is a Catholic and somewhat conservative. Tiberius thought if he presented me as his fiancée, it would make me more respectable than a woman traveling with a man to whom she is not related.”
“I knew it,” he said with soft triumph.
“You did not. You were clearly annoyed at the notion of my becoming your sister-in-law,” I reminded him.
“Memory fails.”
I snorted. “I am very fond of Tiberius, I confess. But that will not dissuade me from my determination never to marry. But Tiberius has a title and an entailment. What will become of them?”
He shrugged again. “Rupert is next in the succession, and he, mercifully, has four sons. The line is secure so long as Tiberius doesn’t mind it going eventually to our nephew.”
“I cannot see him taking another wife,” I told him. “He spoke rather bitterly about the state of matrimony, and having his heart broken so badly over Rosamund—”
Stoker’s eyes rounded in amazement. “His heart broken? You cannot be serious.”
“Of course I am.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“For Tiberius to have broken his heart, he would have to possess one in the first place. Believe me when I tell you, he does not.”
“Feathers,” I said succinctly. “You yourself just said that he learnt to guard his feelings. People who are forced to such stratagems often experience far stronger emotions for having to bottle them.”
“If you say so,” he replied with maddening calm.
“How can you be so immovable? A moment ago you said you felt sorry for him,” I reminded him.
“My sympathies are of the fleeting variety. I have remembered too many of his tortures of me during our youth to waste my tears upon his pain.”
“You are in a filthy mood, and if you cannot talk sensibly, you ought to go.”
He rolled his eyes. “What do you want of me, Veronica? Yes, Tiberius has experienced pain and loss. So have we all.”
“His is freshest right now. Being here is dredging all of it up again.”
“His own fault,” Stoker pointed out calmly. “He needn’t have accepted Malcolm’s invitation. All he had to do was refuse and spare himself revisiting his greatest tragedy, but instead he comes and sticks pins into the pain. Don’t tell me he is deserving of my pity. He has brought this on himself.
”
I was silent a long moment—too long. Stoker gave me a searching look. “What?”
“He has brought this on himself,” I agreed. “But why? It makes no sense.”
“What are you nattering on about now?”
“Everything you just said. I am agreeing with you. Try not to let the novelty throw you off your stride,” I told him. “But you were right. Tiberius is as imperious and controlling a character as I have ever known. He has arranged every facet of his life to his own satisfaction except losing Rosamund. His correspondence with Malcolm has been spotty of late. They were the best of friends for years, certainly, but with Malcolm imposing exile upon himself, they have not met since before Tiberius left for Russia. Yet as soon as Malcolm asked him to come, he agreed. They both claim it is for the sake of rekindling their old companionship, but is that enough to bring Tiberius here knowing that he would encounter memories of Rosamund? Or does he have another purpose in mind?”
Stoker threw up his hands. “Only the lesser devils in hell could answer that, Veronica.”
He stayed another hour, alternately ranting against his brother and idly threatening to return to Tiberius’ room to finish the thrashing he had begun earlier. It took considerable powers of persuasion to keep him with me until he was calm.
“You will not beat the truth out of him and I am bored with stitching you back together,” I said. “Besides, it is rather flattering, considered properly.”
“Flattering? How in the name of seven hells did you come to that conclusion?” he demanded.
“Well, Tiberius might have brought a professional detective into the business. He could have engaged a private inquiry agent to do his sleuthing. Instead, he is relying upon us.”
“Without telling us,” Stoker stormed. “That is the difference between working with us and using us. He has exposed you to danger without the slightest consideration for your safety.”
It was telling that Stoker was more concerned about my own safety than his own. I gave him an indulgent smile. “Do not worry about me. I have brought my knives,” I told him cheerfully.
A Dangerous Collaboration Page 19
