A Dangerous Collaboration

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  There was a reluctant interest in my work, I could see, but she smothered it swiftly as she turned back to her Cestrum. “That doesn’t account for you seeing him. Like that.”

  “Naked? My dear Mertensia, how very Puritanical of you. I thought Catholics were supposed to be more broad-minded about such things. There is no shame in the human form, particularly Stoker’s. His is especially well sculpted.”

  Her hand jerked and a lush blossom fell to the grass. “Damn,” she muttered. She turned to me again. “I meant because of your engagement to his brother.”

  “Oh, that. Well, I suppose it will do no harm to confess that my betrothal to Tiberius is a fiction. He thought it unseemly for us to travel together otherwise. He said it was because Malcolm was rather conventional about such matters, but I suspect it was more to annoy Stoker than for any other purpose.”

  “You really aren’t engaged to Tiberius?”

  “Shall I vow on something? I haven’t a Bible at hand, but perhaps my word would do.”

  “I believe you,” she said finally. “And I think I know why Tiberius would have made up such a story. It isn’t because of Stoker or religion. It is because of Malcolm. They have always been competitive with one another, ridiculously so. Malcolm’s bride disappeared, so Tiberius appears with a beautiful fiancée. It is a way of keeping score,” she explained.

  “How very childlike men can be,” I observed.

  “Frequently,” she agreed. She put aside her secateurs and rummaged in her pocket, withdrawing a slender dark brown cigarette. She lit it, scraping a lucifer on the stone bench. She drew in a deep breath of sharp smoke and handed the cigarette over to me. I took it, pulling in enough smoke to blow an elegant ring.

  “Oh! Will you teach me how to do that?”

  “Certainly.” I spent the next quarter of an hour explaining the mechanics of the smoke ring and guiding her. Her first few efforts were lopsided, but the last was even prettier than mine.

  “You are a natural,” I told her. She ground out the cigarette on the sole of her boot.

  “I miss this,” she said. “It has been a long time since . . .” She trailed off and I knew she was thinking of Rosamund.

  “You were school friends with Rosamund, weren’t you?” I asked. “It must have been a dreadful shock when she disappeared.”

  She shook her head. “The shock came earlier.” She looked at me, her dark gaze resting a long moment on my face, assessing. In the end, she decided to trust me, at least a little. “I thought we were friends, truly. I was so happy when it was arranged that she should spend the summer with us. I had had so little company here. I loved Malcolm’s friends, but to have a companion of my own . . .” She let the rest of the sentence hang unfinished in the air. “But she was different. I saw it as soon as she arrived. There was something hard about her. The posts she had taken were difficult. She was worn and tired and a little more.”

  “A little more?”

  “Angry. Nothing so obvious that you could put your finger on it, but it was there. A sort of edge to her. She was careful never to make any remarks in front of others, only me. But she would sit here on this bench and look around and I knew she was plotting something.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “To marry my brother and make herself queen of the castle,” she told me flatly. “I ought to have realized it sooner. We had talked about the castle when I was at school with her. Our dormitories were arranged with the girls two to a bed, and Rosamund was my bedmate. We would lie awake, long after the others had fallen asleep. I was too homesick to go to sleep. So I talked about the castle and she encouraged it. I told her all the legends, the giant, the Three Sisters, the mermaids and Spanish sailors. And I told her about Malcolm, how he was the loveliest brother imaginable. I think I made him out to be a bit of King Arthur and Siegfried and Theseus all in one. I quite adored him,” she said with an apologetic little smile. “Younger sisters often do. And I didn’t realize what it must have sounded like to a girl with Rosamund’s meager prospects. I was lonely for a castle and a wonderful big brother, and all she had was that bare room at school and the extra chores she had to do as a scholarship pupil. I never realized it was cruel.”

  “You were a child,” I reminded her.

  “A fanciful one. I spun her stories and she believed them as much as I did. In the end, she helped me run away. She gave me the little bit of pocket money she had and she lied for a whole day, telling the headmistress that I was abed with a stomachache. She got into terrible trouble. She was lucky not to be expelled. Malcolm helped with that,” she said with a vague smile. “He was so horrified that I had run away from school and so relieved I had made it home unscathed. Poor darling! He was so terribly young for such responsibility and not very good at being a guardian. Lucian was running mad at his school and there I was, halfway to getting my best friend expelled. He did the only thing he knew how—he threw money at the headmistress until she agreed to keep Rosamund on. Rosamund had only a glimpse of him that day when he went to settle things, but it was enough. She made up her mind then and there to live in our castle one day and to marry the prince who had appeared as if out of nowhere to save her.”

  “He must have made quite an impression upon her,” I said.

  “He did indeed. I am not surprised. To someone like Rosamund, who had known only the stings of privation and no real ease in her life, Malcolm must have seemed like a revelation. He was courteous and wealthy. He represented security, and when he stepped in like a figure out of myth to arrange her future at the school, she idolized him just a bit.” She broke off with a small smile. “I know it seems ludicrous that Malcolm could form the focus of a young girl’s fantasies. To me, he is so very ordinary. But he is not a bad-looking fellow, and Rosamund was so determined to see him as a hero. I think she was quite surprised to finally come to the island and find him a very regular sort of person.”

  “Was it a long time between your leaving school and her visit here?”

  “Oh, years,” she told me. “We kept in touch, after a fashion. I am a haphazard correspondent, but Rosamund wrote the first of each month, without fail. When she finished school, she had to take employment. There was never any question but that she would have to support herself. She wrote of her employers, her duties, her circumstances. At first, she was wildly entertaining about it all. She wrote with a sort of archness and made it seem like a lark. But as she changed posts and never quite found a place that suited her, she had to take smaller wages, less congenial employers. The tone of her letters changed. Finally, she decided to go out to India, but she was not due to take up her post for some time. It seemed the perfect opportunity to let her come to the island for a little rest.”

  “Let her come?” I seized upon the curious phrasing. “Did she invite herself?”

  “Very nearly,” she told me. “She sent a rather desperate letter, reminding me a little too pointedly about my promise to have her to stay. It rubbed me up the wrong way, but I realized I was being churlish. I had promised her, after all. And I decided it might be pleasant to have her. I thought it would be a few months only, a summer of working in the garden and sailing around the island, teaching her our ways and giving her a bit of respite before she had to charge into the fray again. But I saw it almost immediately, the way she looked at Malcolm, at the castle, at everything. There was such naked longing on her face.”

  “Like a child at a sweetshop window?” I guessed.

  “Not quite. This was something altogether darker, more determined. It was as if she meant to have it all or die in the attempt—”

  She broke off, covering her mouth with her hand as she realized what she had said.

  “Mertensia, what do you think became of her?” I asked gently.

  She dropped her hand and rose abruptly from the bench, taking up her secateurs once more. “I don’t know. And I wish people would stop
trying to find out.”

  “You don’t want to discover what happened that day?”

  “No. What purpose can it serve?” she demanded. “If she ran away—and even with the evidence of the bag, it is just possible—it will only make Malcolm miserable. If she died accidentally, it will make him miserable. If someone—”

  She turned her attention to her plants, saying nothing more, her mouth set in a stubborn line.

  “If someone murdered her,” I finished. “We must acknowledge the possibility that this might have happened. And if it did, who stood to benefit from her death?”

  She remained silent, refusing to answer. Just then, Stoker strode into the garden.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I know casual visitors are not meant to be here, but I heard voices.”

  She turned in obvious pleasure, her mouth going slack when she saw the bruises on his face. “Stoker! What on earth has happened?”

  “I was sleepwalking,” he told her. “A family affliction. My brother suffers from it as well.” The lie was a smooth one but it would never have fooled anyone more worldly than Mertensia Romilly.

  “I have arnica in the stillroom. It will help with the bruising,” she told him.

  “I am very grateful to you,” he replied.

  She flushed and I rose, knowing a cue to leave when I saw one. “I should be getting on,” I murmured.

  “A moment, Veronica,” she said. Her face was illumined with a sort of vitality that made her almost attractive. “You ought to see the glasswings.”

  “The glasswings,” I repeated dully. My heart began to thud within my chest. “Are they here?”

  She nodded, leading us to a nearby bush. “They were feeding earlier upon the lady of the night. The caterpillars eat her leaves and the grown butterflies—what do you call them?”

  “Imagoes,” I replied. “Or imagines, if you prefer.”

  “Imagoes, then. They feed upon the blossoms. The flowers are only open at night and they are already beginning to close. But if we are still and quiet, they may return.”

  The three of us seated ourselves upon the grass, sharing the last bread roll companionably as we waited. The sky grew overcast as the minutes stretched into long passages of time. The small stars of the jasmine blossoms, mistaking it for dusk, began to fold in on themselves like maidens at prayer, closing their petal-hands together and nodding gently upon the vine. Oddly, the scent of them grew stronger as they faded, almost as if, knowing they were about to slumber, they sent out an invitation borne on the wind to come before it was too late. My head grew heavy with the fragrance of the lady of the night as it wrapped its tendrils around me, holding me fast and coaxing me into a state of torpor. I could not have moved even if I wanted to, so somnolent was I. Mertensia seemed similarly affected, her head nodding quietly upon her breast as the last bit of roll slipped from her fingers and onto the grass. A nimble squirrel leapt out to claim it and scurried back again into the shadows. Stoker stretched out upon the grass, his hands laced behind his head as his lids drooped.

  My own eyelids were low when I saw the first flutter of movement. It was a suggestion, nothing more. A wisp of something upon the wind, dancing just out of the range of my perception. I snapped my head up, forcing my eyes open wide. And there it was, a glasswing, the size of a man’s hand, flapping lazily towards the Cestrum, alighting as elegantly as a queen upon the blossom. I could not breathe, could not speak, and even if I had the power, I would not have roused Mertensia or Stoker. For that moment, the glasswing was my own private little miracle.

  As I watched, transfixed, another came into the little glade, moving with the same slow majesty. Another came behind, and yet another, until the shrub was full of them, their wings of clear cathedral glass fluttering languidly against the dark green of the vines. Each stood perched upon a single creamy blossom, drinking deeply, the black veins of their wings stark against the white flowers. Almost against my will, I rose and moved towards them, my footsteps noiseless in the damp grass underfoot.

  They did not notice, or if they did, they did not care. They continued to drink, sipping nectar like Olympian gods. On impulse, I put out my hand, brushing gently against the vine. It shuddered lightly, upsetting the nearest glasswing. She hovered in the air, just above my fingertips, as if deciding whether to grace me with a gesture. She alighted upon my upraised hand as if bestowing a favor, her wings beating double time in case she had need of a hasty retreat. But after a moment she slowed them, walking forwards on legs as slender as lines of ink upon a page. She crept up my arm, until she reached my shoulder, perching there and spreading her wings to catch the rays of the changeable sun. For a moment, she was gilded by the flame, a perfect living jewel, and the beauty of it was more than I could bear. She would exist for so short a time, but her existence brought something irreplaceable to the world. Perhaps her beauty was all the greater for the fact that it was fleeting.

  Without warning, she gave one great flap of those heavy wings and was gone, disappearing over the iron gates upon the salty sea wind. Her friends followed soon after, each taking its leave of the little glade like nuns retreating after vespers. I watched until the last of them had risen over the gates, disappearing from sight.

  “Magnificent, aren’t they?” I had not heard Mertensia come to stand behind me.

  I nodded, careful to keep my back to her until I had composed myself.

  “Come back whenever you like,” she told me softly. “There is a spare key in the stillroom if you want to let yourself in.”

  “That is very kind,” I replied.

  “It isn’t kindness to give a thirsty man water,” she said. “It is human decency.”

  I inclined my head towards a still-dozing Stoker. “I am certain he would appreciate a tour of your garden. It is most interesting.” She blushed a little—in pleasure, I thought. She was a curious soul, Mertensia, I reflected. I would be sorely disappointed if she turned out to be a murderess.

  Stoker roused himself with a start. “My apologies,” he said through a tremendous yawn. “I must beg your indulgence for my bad manners.”

  Mertensia smiled and I saw the smallest shadow of a dimple at the corner of her mouth. “It is no matter. Island air takes most incomers that way.” She dipped her head shyly. “By way of a forfeit, you should come to pay morning calls and carry my basket.”

  Stoker leapt to his feet but before he could respond, I stepped forward. “What a delightful idea! I should love to see more of the island. How clever of you to suggest it, Mertensia.”

  She darted a glance from me to Stoker and back again. “Of course. Let me go and get what I need. I will be back shortly and we can go.” She vanished from the poison garden and Stoker gave me a level look.

  “That was cruelly done,” he said in a soft voice.

  “Cruel! I think it more cruel to encourage her,” I replied shortly.

  He reared back on his heels. “I am doing no such thing.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes heavenwards. “Stoker, you are an exceedingly handsome man, unlike anyone she has likely ever met in the whole of her sheltered existence. You share her interests and you are courteous. I am no mathematician, but that particular equation adds up to a naïve young woman being halfway to falling in love with you.”

  He flushed scarlet to his ears and muttered something inaudible before clearing his throat. “Do you really think so?” he asked, his expression frankly appalled. “I was only attempting to be kind.”

  “I know you were,” I said, a trifle more gently. “I am not certain if you are aware, but you have an effect upon women.”

  “Not all women,” he corrected.

  I could not rise to the bait, I told myself fiercely. If I were to admit the depth of my feelings for him, I risked the ruination of the dearest thing in the world to me—his friendship. It was a small and pale shadow of what I
wanted from him, but it would have to suffice. Having made a point of refusing anything more, I could not now demand it as my due. I had made this particularly cold bed and it was my lot to lie in it. Alone.

  Instead I primmed my mouth, taking a schoolmistressy tone. “Mind that you do not attract her more than you can possibly help,” I instructed.

  He seemed sincerely puzzled by the direction. “How in the name of seven hells do I do that?”

  “Let her carry her own basket,” I told him impatiently. “And for the love of almighty Jesus, button your shirt!”

  His hands went guiltily to his collar, which—never tidy at the best of times—had come undone, baring a long column of beautifully muscled throat. “I had trouble this morning,” he confessed. “My arm has stiffened and doesn’t want to reach that high.”

  “Oh, let me,” I ordered. I wrenched the collar tight and pinned it with ruthless efficiency. “There, at least you are decent for the company of respectable women,” I pronounced.

  I made the mistake of glancing up into his face then. A smile played about his lips, and his eyes were bright with amusement. “Veronica,” he murmured.

  I stepped back so sharply I nearly lost my balance. “She is coming,” I told him. “Try to be less adorable.”

  To his credit, he did try. He could not leave off his gentlemanly instincts long enough to let her carry her own basket, but he worked neatly around this.

  “I am afraid the injury in my arm is playing up,” he said smoothly, “but Veronica is hale as a horse. She will be only too happy to carry your basket.” He thrust the object into my arms and set off with Mertensia, leaving me to come behind, laden like a donkey. The basket clinked ominously and Mertensia looked around in some irritation.

  “Mind you are careful with that,” she warned. “Some of the bottles contain remedies that are quite out of season.”

  I pulled a face and set myself to keeping up with them, not an easy task given that Stoker was determined to make quick work of the outing. He was destined to be thwarted by his hostess’s strategy of keeping him at her side for the whole of the excursion. Mertensia attempted to dally at every possible landmark, pointing out every shrub and outcropping along the path, to which Stoker made artful replies. Unable to bring himself to be rude to her by means of short responses, he instead took the opportunity to give her lengthy lectures of such catastrophic dullness that only a saint could have possibly endured them with patience. I caught snatches of phrases here and there as I caught them up, bits of impenetrable Latin delivered with the somber air of a Welsh parson.