He shrugged and closed the door so we should not be disturbed. Without discussion, we took the opportunity to separate. We might both claim the general occupation of natural historian, but our fields were rather different. Whereas I focused upon the intricate empire of lepidoptery, his speciality was taxidermy, the creation of animal mounts that resurrected dead specimens to a semblance of life. Both required a keen eye for detail as well as a certain creativity of thought. Our talents complemented each other perfectly.
The first room was a workroom of sorts—Artemisia’s studio, stacked with canvases in various stages of completion, books on art, paints, brushes, and odd props. Enormous north-facing windows, now shuttered, must have provided her with excellent light, and even with the flickering illumination of candles—Sir Frederick had not troubled to have the highest floor fitted with gas—it was easy to see why her paintings had garnered such acclaim. She favored grand pictures, with the figures painted larger than life, the colors astonishingly brilliant. Stoker stepped to the nearest, a study of Delilah holding the shorn locks of Samson, whilst I slipped through the half-closed door into the next room.
This must have been her living quarters, for the chamber was fitted with a table and chairs, and a single armchair drawn close to the fire. A worn but colorful rug warmed the bare boards of the floor, and an assortment of tiny cushions, each sewn from a scrap of brilliant silk, were heaped in the chair. Across the mantel marched a collection of items, framed photographs, little china animals, and papier-mâché boxes. The walls were covered in bright rose-patterned wallpaper, and nearly every square inch had been hung with art—from sketches held lightly in place with drawing pins to paintings properly framed in gilded wood. Even the scrubbed table was covered in a cloth knitted of riotous stripes of red and green and violet. Behind a découpaged screen I found a washstand and a narrow bed made up with Irish linen.
I went to the washstand and examined the few articles there. They were laid out in good order. A tooth mug with brush and powder, a hand glass, a few pots of unguents and powders, and a green glass bottle with a chemist’s label pasted on the front.
“What the devil is this?” I asked, picking it up and holding it to the light. It was nearly empty, just a few drops of some greenish milky fluid left in the bottom. The label had been wetted at some point, for it had peeled away from the bottle, leaving only the start of a name and the date. Maud Er—
“Maud Eresby,” I finished, remembering Artemisia’s real name. The date was two months before her death.
“Stoker,” I called. “Come and see.”
He appeared in the doorway, carrying a sketchbook. I brandished the bottle at him. “What do you know of this? The label is missing.”
He uncorked and gave a deep sniff, tipping his head as he considered the odor. He turned the bottle up, coaxing a pearly drop or two onto his finger. He gave it a tentative lick, holding it on his palate a long moment before swallowing.
“Raspberry leaf,” he pronounced finally. “With a few other things I can’t quite identify.”
“Raspberry leaf? For what purpose?”
“It strengthens the womb. It is given to women who are in danger of miscarrying so they can retain the child,” he explained.
I blinked at him. “She was unmarried and expecting a child by her married lover. Most women in those circumstances would welcome a miscarriage, but she took steps to prevent one?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps she wanted a babe. Many women feel the need for a child,” he pointed out, tactfully avoiding my own disinclination for the event. “Or perhaps she did not want it but could not bring herself to let it die if she had the means to prevent it.” His brow furrowed suddenly. “But if she were in danger of miscarrying the child, why was she in Miles Ramsforth’s bed the night she died?”
I blinked again. “Is it not possible to enjoy bed sport during one’s pregnancy? You mean women have to go without for the duration? Nine months without sexual congress? That’s monstrous.”
Stoker’s complexion was tinged with pink. “If the pregnancy is a healthy one and the child well established, it is generally believed to be safe to engage in such activities. But if there is the slightest danger to the child or mother, it would be strictly forbidden.”
“And why take the chance of losing a child that way if she is dosing herself with this to keep it?” I finished.
“An excellent question.”
I nodded towards the sketchbook. “What have you there?”
“A bit of explanation,” he said, opening the sketchbook to a page near the back. “Recognize the fellow?”
The work lacked a signature but was clearly Artemisia’s. Even in miniature, I saw the same bold lines and elegant composition as her other works. It was a sketch of an unclothed male figure, graceful and lithe, stretched out upon a little sofa, his legs spread invitingly, his head crowned with the tiny tips of a satyr’s horns. The face was Julian Gilchrist’s.
“The sofa is in the other room,” Stoker supplied helpfully. “She must have sketched it here.”
“And she must have known him very well indeed,” I added, noticing the state of excitation she had captured with regard to his male appendage. I leaned closer, taking a more appreciative look. “And one might congratulate her if she did.”
Stoker snatched the sketchbook away, slamming it closed. “Don’t be vulgar,” he ordered, as cold and imperious as a Roman emperor.
I narrowed my eyes. “For a gentleman of aristocratic birth, you sometimes demonstrate the overly precious morals of a tradesman,” I told him.
“What a vile thing to say.” His tone was genuinely aggrieved. He might abuse his kind lavishly and even cast his vote as a Radical, but he was still an aristocrat, blood and bone, and as such deplored the notion that he might have anything in common with the middle class and its affected morality. He was no snob; he moved between the lavish decadence of the highest orders and the lax bonhomie of the lowest with equal ease, taking no more notice of a duke than a dustman, but he had no patience for the priggishness of the merchant class.
“Oh, very well, I apologize. But you have brought us a rather interesting clue,” I mused. “Apparently Artemisia was on very intimate terms with Julian Gilchrist. Mightn’t that be the source of his ill humor?”
“It would certainly fit,” he agreed. “Particularly if she threw him over for Miles Ramsforth.”
“And that would give Gilchrist excellent motive for killing her and letting Ramsforth swing for it.”
Stoker rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “He’s the right height for the malefactor who left us the warning last night. Did he know we were going to investigate?”
I nodded. “Remember what Ottilie Ramsforth told us about last night’s dinner party. Apparently Her Royal Highness was not at all discreet about the matter.”
I glanced about the room. It was quiet, so far removed from the entertainment downstairs. There was only dust and stillness and a sense of time having stopped. In a manner of speaking, it had. Sir Frederick had locked the door upon these rooms with Artemisia’s death. She would never cross the threshold again, never lie upon that counterpane to sleep, never brew a cup of tea in the pot with the chipped handle. A slow breath of cold air swept across the nape of my neck, soft as a fingertip. I resisted the impulse to shudder, but Stoker must have seen something.
“What is it?” he asked softly.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
His expression was grim. “With the life I have led, I cannot afford to.”
CHAPTER
10
On our way out of Havelock House we passed Cherry bearing a basket covered with a plain black cloth. She lifted the cloth to reveal a heap of funeral biscuits wrapped together in pairs and sealed with a wafer of black wax. Each packet bore a label with a delicately scrawled dedication to Artemisia, her dates of birth and death, and a little
bit of verse. “You must each take one,” she instructed. “In memory of Miss Artemisia.”
We obediently accepted the packets. “Please convey our regards to Sir Frederick tomorrow,” I told her.
“Yes, miss. He’s tucked up in bed where he ought to be. This is all a bit of a strain on him.” Her chin was set with a rigid determination.
“You are very fond of your master,” I observed.
“He is good to me,” she said simply. “And I don’t like to see him upset.”
“How fortunate for him to have such a loyal champion,” I told her. She gave a start and colored sharply.
“I would never presume,” she began.
I touched a fingertip to her sleeve. “He is fortunate,” I repeated. The angry color in her cheeks softened to a flush of pleasure.
“Thank you, miss.”
Stoker put his hand to the small of my back as he guided me out the door. “What was that all about?”
“I have a feeling Cherry could prove useful to us before this business is finished. One of us has to cultivate her, and I suspect you are too modest to exert yourself to seduce her.”
He blanched. “One of these days, that tongue is going to cut someone, Veronica.”
“I sincerely hope so.”
• • •
The next morning I appeared at the Belvedere bright and early. I left Stoker slumbering in my bed after another chaste and pointless night. No further threat had appeared, but we had enjoyed a late drink together—a fresh batch of aguardiente had arrived from my friend in South America—and a smoke. I had finally persuaded Stoker away from his filthy cigars, preferring the fruitier aroma of my own slender cigarillos. He ate his pack of funeral biscuits, crunching through the aniseed wafers as we considered suspects and batted around theories, but in the end there was simply not enough information to permit the drawing of any conclusions. Although we had formed impressions of the various players in our little drama, it was far too soon to theorize properly, and this lack of focus left me feeling tetchy and a little irritable.
The trouble was we had no clear direction on how to proceed. I hoped a perusal of the morning’s newspapers might offer a spark of inspiration, so I took myself down to the Belvedere earlier than was my custom. The hall boy, George—a sturdy lad of some eleven or twelve years—had already carried down the copy of The Daily Harbinger, and I had almost finished reading the last page when Stoker appeared, soaked to the skin. The skies had opened, the rain teemed, and the gardens were awash. He toweled his hair and lit the stoves while I wiped the dogs and gave them a horse’s femur to gnaw companionably upon.
“Bloody hell, this hump is the work of a ham-fisted amateur.” Having finished his crocodile, Stoker’s newest task was the repair of the mount of an imperfectly taxidermied camel, and he swore lavishly as he inspected it carefully. “Just look at the shape of it,” he demanded. “You’ll not find that in nature. It looks more like a dowager duchess than a Bactrian.”
I made soothing sounds as I returned to my newspaper. Stoker finished pulling the stitches from the hide and carefully peeled it away from the stuffing. Instantly, a wave of noxious odor rolled out—a combination of mold, dust, and something far worse.
“Good God, Stoker, what is that?” I demanded, covering my nose with a handkerchief.
He reached into the decaying sawdust of the humps to retrieve a nest of small corpses. “Mice. I think.”
He tossed them onto the fire and I threw in a handful of dried lavender for good measure. I had learnt through experience that Stoker’s experiments were invariably odiferous. He returned to his humps, lifting out a few more indelicacies as he cleaned the thing down to the bones. It was an old-fashioned mount, with the animal’s skin stretched to cover the sawdust stuffing secured over the bones. In recent years, natural historians had come to favor sculpted armatures of metal or wood in place of the skeleton, leaving the bones to be displayed separately. It was a sound practice, for it afforded study of both the skeletal structure and the hide at the same time. It was also considerably more hygienic, Stoker pointed out, but required the skills of a sculptor to re-create the animal in its new form.
The thought of sculpture brought a question to mind. “When do you mean to pose for Miss Talbot?” I inquired. I leaned forward swiftly. “The Daily Harbinger is running a retrospective of Artemisia’s murder—a different feature every day until the hanging. It is deliciously ghoulish.”
Sweating from his exertions wrestling with the camel hide, he had stripped off his shirt, so frequent an occurrence in our work that I had grown immune to the sight of his exposed and formidable musculature. Almost.
He shrugged as he coaxed the skin from the beast’s rump. “I do not see the purpose of posing.”
“We have discussed this, Stoker. The purpose is to spend time with the possible suspects in Artemisia’s death,” I reminded him as I read over the article. “Ah! A new description of the death scene. In lavish detail with a stern warning for the more delicate readers,” I said, rattling the newspaper.
He came to stand next to me, his skin slick with sweat and flecked with sawdust, and read the piece aloud over my shoulder. “‘Miss Maud Eresby was discovered in a state of exsanguination in the great bedchamber at Littledown. She was laid out peacefully upon the bed, but the composure of her situation only served to heighten the gruesomeness of the crime itself. Gore soaked the bedding through to the floor below, leaving behind a stain that cannot be removed.’” He quirked up a brow. “Ghoulish indeed.”
I sat back, giving him a thoughtful look. “Would she have really bled so much or is that an exaggeration?”
“The post-mortem report given at the inquest suggested a single slash to the throat with a very sharp instrument,” he said coolly, befitting a former surgeon’s mate in Her Majesty’s Navy. “Once open, the sinister exterior jugular vein did its work, causing her to lose so much blood her heart had nothing left to pump.”
“And the very sharp instrument was found to be Miles Ramsforth’s razor, taken from the washstand across the room,” I supplied. “How much force would it take to accomplish such a deed with the single slash of a gentleman’s razor?”
He shrugged. “According to what we have read and heard, Artemisia was a young woman in the prime of health and statuesque in figure. A small person could not have done this. It was a man.”
“Not a woman?”
He shook his head. “Not likely. For a woman to do this, she would have to be bigger and stronger than Artemisia—which certainly lets out the ladies we have met in connection with this crime. Ottilie Ramsforth is slightly below average height and slender, while Emma Talbot is smaller yet.”
Stoker returned to his repulsive camel while I continued to muse. “I have met one woman who is tall . . . and she is a sculptress with strong hands,” I said slowly.
“Who is that?”
“My aunt Louise.”
He paused, a cloud of sawdust haloing his head. “You cannot be serious.”
“It is a possibility,” I insisted.
“It is not. She is a princess.”
“And royalty are immune from homicidal tendencies? Study your history, Stoker. I think you will discover that is how most of them became royal in the first place.”
“That is not what I mean,” he countered. “I am rather more familiar with the breed than you are. Believe me when I tell you, a royal would never soil their hands when there are minions who will gladly do the deed for them. They don’t handle money, they don’t knock on doors—for the love of Christ, Veronica, they scarcely even wipe their own—”
I held up a quelling hand. “I take your meaning. Very well. But I still like the idea.”
“I am certain you do,” he replied with a curl of his handsome lip. “You would enjoy nothing better than to show them up, and I do not blame you for it. But you give them
far too much credit. They have not the wit or subtlety or strength of character to accomplish a murder.”
“Perhaps.” I steepled my fingers under my chin. “Whom do you like as our murderer?”
“Julian Gilchrist,” he said, slanting me a wicked glance.
“You are only saying that because you concussed him. Perhaps you ought to send him a nice basket of fruit by way of apology.”
“Apology! The bastard came to when I went to put him down and tried to bite me. Unsporting, I’d call that,” he said, his tone a trifle hurt.
“He was heavily intoxicated,” I reminded him.
Just then the George the hall boy appeared. “Hello again, miss. First post,” he said as he handed over a stack of envelopes. I gave them a cursory glance as he went to observe Stoker.
“That’s a silly-looking horse, sir, if I do say it,” George observed.
Stoker said something unintelligible. His head was firmly lodged inside the camel’s rump as he excavated piles of sawdust.
“It is not a horse, George,” I said absently. “The domestic horse is Equus ferus caballus. The specimen into which Mr. Templeton-Vane has currently thrust his head is Camelus bactrianus, the Bactrian camel. It is native to the steppes of Central Asia.”
The boy stared goggle-eyed at the thing until I offered him a bit of honeycomb from Stoker’s dwindling supply and he scampered off, sucking happily as I riffled through the post. There were advertisements and bills and one or two professional journals of little interest to either of us. The Quarterly Report of the Society for the Protection of Lesser Marsh Beetles was of no consequence, and I tossed it into the basket of discarded papers we kept for starting fires. Two envelopes remained, and they were equally intriguing. The first was addressed to Stoker and bore a coat of arms topped with a coronet embellished with nine silver balls. It required little effort to deduce the letter was from Stoker’s brother, the new Viscount Templeton-Vane.
A Perilous Undertaking Page 10
