A Treacherous Curse

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  Henry Stihl made a sound of disgust and returned to his book. His father was more composed. He stroked his moustaches thoughtfully. “Not particularly. We unearthed a pretty cache of pottery and excavated a pavement.”

  “A pavement!” muttered Henry with some feeling.

  Horus Stihl ignored his son. “Ours was not nearly as productive and engaging a time as was had by the Tivertons,” he remarked.

  “Yes, their find was extraordinary,” Stoker said smoothly.

  “Too extraordinary,” Henry said from behind his book.

  “Indeed?” I asked, lifting my brows.

  Henry did not elaborate. His father gave me an apologetic smile. “Henry has been at school for several seasons, and last year was his first time in the field since he was a child. Our discoveries were less than scintillating, so that’s why I decided to have a go at Amarna. I hoped we would find something to write home about this time, but I am sorry to say luck was not on our side. The boy is still resentful that we did not share the Tivertons’ good fortune.”

  “But you might have,” I said in a voice silken with insinuation. “I understand they were digging on a concession you had last year.”

  “And should have had this year!” burst out young Stihl. His eyes were blazing and a muscle in his jaw twitched furiously. “I don’t know how they did it, but they secured the firman and cut us right out.”

  Something flickered behind the sharp blue eyes. “Now, son, Sir Leicester Tiverton is not the sort of man who would do a friend down in business,” his father said mildly.

  “And yet he did,” Henry Stihl riposted with real bitterness.

  “But what could have prompted such an act?” Stoker asked.

  The elder Stihl shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  Henry Stihl rose stiffly, clutching his book on drains. “Please excuse me,” he said quietly as he fled the room.

  No one spoke for a long moment. The only sound was the steady ticking of the mantel clock, a hideous thing painted with Highland scenes.

  I cut my eyes at Stoker and flicked them quickly in the direction of the door. He rose. “Do excuse me, Mr. Stihl. I’m afraid I just remembered—there is a telegram I need to send.”

  The millionaire nodded, and Stoker took his leave, giving me a significant glance as he did so. I turned back to Mr. Stihl.

  “I must apologize. Discussing the Tivertons seems to have upset young Mr. Stihl, and that was not my intention.”

  His smile, barely visible under the lavish white fringe of his moustaches, was tired. “I have stopped keeping count of the things that upset young Mr. Stihl.”

  “I believe Miss Iphigenia Tiverton is similarly prickly,” I observed mildly.

  His expression was one of wistful fondness. “It’s a difficult thing to lose one’s mother, particularly a mother as unique as Lady Tiverton.”

  “I understand she wrote some highly regarded works on Egyptology,” I told him.

  “That she did,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Lucie Ward Tiverton was a miracle of a woman. Do you know she was diagnosed with consumption at the age of nineteen? Specialists told her she would be dead within two years. She lived to be more than forty years of age, and that by the sheer force of her will. I have never known a woman who could light up a room the way she could,” he said, his voice suddenly thick with emotion. The Tivertons had mentioned Horus Stihl’s affection for Lucie Tiverton, but I began to wonder if his feelings had not been more significant by far.

  “Is Miss Iphigenia very like her mother?”

  “Lord love you, no! Lucie was sharp as Toledo steel and with eyes, great dark eyes that would look right into your heart and dare you to tell the truth. Poor Figgy takes after her father’s side, both in looks and temperament. But I have high hopes she will emerge from her adolescence as a credit to the mother she has lost,” he finished gallantly.

  I smiled back. “Children, I am told, are both blessing and burden, long after they are grown.”

  “You can say that again,” he replied with heartfelt emotion. “I have never understood my own boy, not from the day his mama pushed him into the world. He takes after her people, quiet bookish folk,” he confided. “The Stihls were doers. They carved out a place and a name for themselves in America when you Brits were cutting the heads off your kings.”

  “Well, we don’t make a habit of it,” I said.

  He chuckled and waved a hand. “The point is, we Stihls have got in the way of shaping our own destiny. We make our mark in the world. We take risks and damn the consequences, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “I will. I am of similar bent,” I assured him.

  He gave me an admiring look. “The problem is, too much of that in the bloodline eventually breeds stupid.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “People are like horses, Miss Speedwell. Bloodlines carry certain traits. Too much of the same kind of blood eventually breeds stupid. I had a racehorse so simple he followed a pig around because he thought they were kin. Families are the same. We Stihls are fire-in-the-blood types, always up for a challenge, never backing away from a fight. But my mother was a second cousin to my father, and that was just too much of a good thing. My younger brother was so impatient, he once deliberately burned down a house just to cook a steak. I thought if I married a woman different, someone sober and refined, it would dilute some of that Stihl bullheadedness.”

  “It seems to have worked,” I mused. “Mr. Henry Stihl is certainly a young man of quiet tastes.”

  “Quiet tastes!” He snorted. “I have to pay him ten whole American dollars just to get him to go to a music hall and have a little fun. He’s sober as a parson, and half as interesting. I just wish he would put the damn books down and live a little, if you’ll pardon the expression,” he added hastily.

  “Certainly. But you are fortunate, Mr. Stihl. Your son takes an interest in your travels and excavations. Surely that is something you can share.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose. But the bloom has gone off the rose a bit. I had the devil’s own time getting him out to Egypt this year. I don’t know as he will want to go back again.”

  “Why?” I pried gently.

  But for all his expansive habits of conversation, Horus Stihl could be close as an oyster. He gave me a bland smile. “I have bored you too long with discussions of my family. You are a sympathetic listener, Miss Speedwell.”

  I batted my lashes and did a few other revoltingly female things, but the moment for confidences was past. Knowing when to surrender the field, I rose.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Stihl.”

  He took the hand I offered, holding it carefully in his own, as if it were a precious object. “The pleasure has been entirely mine, Miss Speedwell. I am only sorry I could not help with your search for Mr. de Morgan.”

  I paused, then seized the chance for one last desperate throw of the dice. “Mr. Stihl, if you know anything at all, I should consider it a personal favor if you would tell me. It might help us to discover the truth behind Mr. de Morgan’s disappearance and offer some consolation to his grieving wife.”

  Horus Stihl flinched a little at the mention of a grieving wife. He was, as his son had pointed out, a sentimental man, and I had pressed ruthlessly upon that vulnerable point. But he merely shook his head.

  “I wish you every success,” he replied obliquely.

  Defeated but determined to be gracious, I went to the door, followed closely by Mr. Stihl, who insisted upon opening it himself. “Miss Speedwell,” he said, “wait here a moment.” He disappeared into his bedchamber, returning a moment later with a pair of volumes bound in identical faience-blue kid. They were stamped in gold on the spines. The first was called A Lady’s Adventures upon the Nile while the second was titled Further Adventures of a Lady Egyptologist. Both were authored by Lady Tiverton.

 
; “Take them,” he urged. He was quite close, and I caught the sharp spicy scent of bay rum, warmed by the skin of his freshly barbered chin.

  “Mr. Stihl, I couldn’t possibly,” I protested.

  He smiled. “She was a very dear friend, and I have many copies. It would please me greatly for you to have them.”

  Then, in a wholly unexpected gesture, he swept a low bow and kissed my hand. I left him then, but the brush of his silken moustaches against my fingers lingered for some time.

  • • •

  I collected Stoker from the lobby, where he was comfortably ensconced reading a newspaper article about the recent establishment of the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC. Without letting him finish, I tossed the newspaper aside and bore him off into the gloom.

  “Blast this weather!” I muttered as we stepped from the lambent warmth of the hotel. “I would sell my virtue for a sunny day and a tropical trade wind.”

  To his credit, Stoker did not point out that my virtue was no longer mine to sell. Instead, he tucked my hand in the crook of his arm and guided me down the street. We proceeded from the hotel in the direction of Bishop’s Folly, neither of us inclined to summon a hansom. It was frigid and mizzling, filthy weather, but the temperature had dropped from the previous day and the air was too cold to bear its usual stink of horse and rotting vegetables and coal smoke. It was sharp as a new blade, that air, and I drew in several lungfuls of it as we moved through the gathering shadows, pacing off our steps between the glowing pools of light from the streetlamps.

  “So, Mr. Stihl was impervious to your charms?” he hazarded as we crossed a street behind an omnibus.

  “Not entirely. He was kind enough to give me copies of Lady Tiverton’s Egyptian memoirs,” I told him, deliberately omitting the millionaire’s kiss to my hand. “He is a child in a grown man’s suit—all enthusiasm and rush and forwardness. I fancy his son is exhausted.”

  “And prickly as a cactus.”

  “He has that in common with Iphigenia Tiverton,” I observed. “They should form a club. Children of obstreperous parents.”

  “Little wonder that Stihl and Tiverton got on so well for so many years. They are of a type.”

  “And even smaller wonder they eventually fell out,” I added. “Both of them strike me as highly idealistic, extremely stubborn men. As soon as one of them conceived of a slight, he would nurse it to the grave. That sort always bears a grudge.”

  “But over what?”

  I shrugged. “Egyptology, what else? Sir Leicester permitted simple avariciousness to come between him and his friend, as Mr. Henry Stihl so acutely observed. I am only surprised his father does not admit the quarrel.”

  “He had no other complaints?”

  “None. He was quite correct in his praise of Sir Leicester’s abilities—if not his probity—and he has a soft spot for Figgy, although it is not half what he felt for her mother.”

  Stoker nodded. “He’s the sort who would have done well with daughters. All indulgent benevolence. I pity his son.”

  “Do you? Is it worth pitying the sole heir of a millionaire?”

  Stoker snorted. “Henry Stihl will earn every penny of his inheritance, I assure you. No doubt he has totted up every slight in a ledger somewhere.”

  “I suspect his father has caused him a great deal of embarrassment. I further suspect that Horus Stihl is entirely unaware of the effect he has on his son. He is mystified by the boy. He clearly wishes he had some more dashing fellow for an heir.”

  “Thus my pity for him. I am only too familiar with the subtle vengeances of a father on the figure of a son he does not value.” The words were spoken lightly, but a lifetime of slights rested in those few words. Stoker had amassed a collection of petty hatreds from his father, and he showed them to precious few.

  Deliberately, I changed the subject. “So, the friendship of twenty years has foundered upon Sir Leicester’s avarice in claiming the tomb for himself. Is he naturally disloyal, or do you think something else prompted him?”

  Stoker was silent for some minutes as we navigated a particularly crowded thoroughfare, turning at last into a quiet residential street bordering a private square. The trees in the square had given up their leaves, the slim black branches bearing a thin coat of ice. They stirred suddenly in a gust of wind, clicking together like the finger bones of a dead man.

  Stoker squeezed my hand, quite unconsciously, I thought. He spoke at last. “What if the Tivertons were short of money? Egyptology is a devilishly expensive proposition. He has a country house in Surrey, a daughter to educate and launch into Society, a wife to keep. He has kept pace for twenty years with an American millionaire, underwriting his own expeditions. What if he has gone to the well once too often?”

  I tipped my head. “That would account for his desire to keep the hoard to himself. Many a greater man has sacrificed a friend for the sake of a fortune. But there is more than just money at stake.”

  “Fame,” Stoker supplied.

  “Precisely. Despite the paucity of the find, this discovery will forever be known as the crowning glory of the Tiverton Expeditions. It will be written in all the books and newspapers. Sir Leicester has secured himself a place in Egyptological history. Perhaps that is as great an inducement as money.”

  “Perhaps.”

  We walked on for several minutes more before I could steel myself for what must come next.

  “We have interviewed the Tivertons and Horus Stihl,” I began slowly. “We have set Lady Wellingtonia to ferreting out any Society gossip that might prove useful, and Julien d’Orlande is keeping a careful eye upon the goings-on at the Sudbury. But there is one obvious stone we have not yet overturned.”

  The arm beneath my fingers tensed. “I see no reason—”

  I pushed on ruthlessly. “Of course you don’t. You are not thinking logically. We must interview her. Caroline de Morgan is the last person to see her husband. She knows something.”

  “She knows nothing.” His voice was harsh.

  “You cannot say that for certain.”

  “Sir Hugo and Mornaday both said she was in hiding.”

  “Sir Hugo and Mornaday are, for all their gifts, merely men. They lack imagination. She is in the care of her parents.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I do, actually.” I matched his coldness with an arctic chill of my own invention. “I have confirmed that she is in London, currently residing at the home of her parents in a house in Kensington just off the Cromwell Road.”

  He stopped dead, wrenching his arm free. He had stopped in a shadow, but his eyes blazed through the darkness. “How in the name of bleeding Jesus do you know that?”

  I felt my lip curl. “I have my methods.”

  It took him only a moment to work it out. “George.”

  “He is a most obliging fellow and quite clever. It took him only an afternoon to find the house and to confirm that she is there. We must speak with her.”

  A stillness settled over him, so complete, so encompassing, that I could not reach him. He had moved a thousand miles from me and yet we stood half a foot apart. I could feel the warmth thrown off by his big body in the cold air, but he was as far away and forbidding as a mountain.

  “I do not wish—”

  “It is not about what you wish,” I cut in savagely. “Caroline de Morgan might well hold the key to her husband’s disappearance and we have to clear your name. So I will see her and I will ask her whatever questions must be asked, and I will do it with you or without you.”

  What he said next was something so profane that no clergyman in England would have shriven him afterwards. I waited while he expounded upon his theme, calling me every name he could conceive and a few I had never heard.

  “Are you quite finished?” I asked after some minutes. I spoke the words in a tone of co
mplete boredom, careful not to let him see that my hands were trembling.

  “Quite,” he said, biting off the word sharply.

  “Good. There is no time like the present,” I said, turning to whistle for a hansom.

  CHAPTER

  9

  We settled into the cab, locked in our silences. Stoker and I had two forms of disagreement, violent and vocal discord or completely mute hostility. Our current disaffection manifested as the latter. I knew he was enraged at my insistence, but he was more enraged that I was right. Caroline had to be faced, and the fact that he could not avoid her galled him more than anything else about this business.

  For my own part, I tried not to think about how desperately he must care about her to be so deeply affected. I had heard his tortured cries in nightmares; I knew she haunted him still. I had felt his lips on mine, moving to form the syllables of her name even as he pushed himself out of my embrace. I was grateful for it. Stoker and I were partners rather than lovers, but the blow to my amour propre still stung. I had forgiven him, not that he noticed. He had no memory of that aborted kiss, at least none that he had ever acknowledged by so much as a flicker of an eyelash. But he must have remembered the dreams. No man could suffer as he did and not remember when the morning came. He called her name then too, an invocation in the darkness, but she never came except as a ghost to torment him. It was a score I meant to settle with her one day, I promised myself as the hansom rattled along. I had provided the driver with the address and Stoker did not seem surprised.

  “This house in Kensington,” I began in a tone of marked froideur, “I take it the place has been in her family?”

  “Her father purchased it,” he replied after a long silence. “His family were in manufacturing in the North. Something to do with plumbing supplies. Her mother is an Honourable. She was the daughter of a baron before she married Marshwood.”

  “She married down,” I observed. “Either she truly loved him or her people had no money.”

  “Very much the latter,” he said in a hollow voice. He was reciting from memory and had no attachment to the words themselves, but I wanted to keep him talking. Anything to prevent him from thinking too much about what he must do once we arrived.