A Treacherous Curse

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  I ran a finger over the seal, tracing the letters of the motto. ALIS VOLAT PROPRIIS. She flies with her own wings. How much easier to do that! If I refused, I should carry on as I had, keeping myself as solitary as I chose. I should be comfortable, I reflected.

  After another moment’s consideration, I drew a clean piece of paper towards me and began to write. The response was short—two words only. I signed and sealed it and slipped it into my pocket to give to George to put into the post.

  I returned to the Belvedere after tea to find Figgy Tiverton perched atop a camel saddle feeding bits of sausage to the dogs. Nut had accompanied her and had taken a perch on Huxley’s favorite pillow, looking down at him with lofty disdain.

  “You ought to put up a sign,” she said by way of greeting. “Cave canem or something. I thought you had a wolf in here.” She nodded to his lordship’s Caucasian sheepdog.

  “Betony wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head, nor would Huxley,” I told her. “You’d be in far more danger from the Galápagos tortoise that roams the grounds.”

  “I saw it. Looks positively prehistoric.”

  “What brings you to see us, Miss Tiverton?” I asked as she fed more titbits to the dogs slavering devotedly at her feet.

  “Us?” she asked, coloring swiftly.

  “Mr. Templeton-Vane will be along in a moment. He is finishing up with his latest project.”

  “I saw,” she said, her blush deepening. “From the windows of the house. I came to call upon Lady Wellie. She knew my mother, and it seemed courteous to pay her a visit since we were back in England.” It was a feeble excuse, and I suppressed a sigh. She wasn’t the first female to use any pretext to see Stoker. With her untidy hair and smeared spectacles, she looked a child still, but she was more of a woman than I suspected her father understood.

  Before I could reply, Stoker entered, kicking the mud from his boots. “Miss Tiverton,” he said, his voice warm with welcome. “How nice of you to call. I see you’ve met Bet and Huxley, and you’ve brought them a friend,” he added, bending to scratch the hound Nut behind her tall, pointed ears.

  “Oh, yes! They’re lovely dogs. Is Huxley yours?”

  “Or I am his,” Stoker said, giving her a devastatingly handsome grin. To my relief, a day spent tinkering with his balloon seemed to have improved his temper to no end. He still looked tired and distracted, but the cold air had whipped color into his cheeks, and he was in a markedly better mood.

  I turned to the pile on my desk and began to sort it as they talked. Stacks of letters and periodicals and a few grubby parcels that I put to the side. “You like dogs, then?” Stoker said. It was a thoroughly redundant question. Stoker had seen her with Nut when we first met them both, but as a conversational gambit, it was effective. Figgy brightened immediately.

  “Very much. Even Nut, although she’s frightfully stupid,” she added with a fond look at her pet. “People think she’s from Egypt because of how she looks, but Father had her shipped over from Malta. She only looks like the dogs in the tomb paintings. People say these Maltese hounds are descended from the Tesem. Do you know the word? It’s a bit of hieratic, or do I mean hieroglyphic? In any event, the Tesem were the hunting dogs of the old pharaohs, a sort of greyhound.”

  “You seem to know quite a lot about ancient Egypt,” he told her. I picked up the lion’s tooth I used for a paper knife and slit open an envelope with vigor.

  She colored furiously. “I don’t, not really. Not compared to my mother. She was a scholar of Egyptology, you know.”

  She fell silent then, her lips pressed tightly together. I skimmed the letter—a request for a certain species of hairy moth—and filed it into a pigeonhole. I moved on to an unwholesome-looking parcel wrapped in brown paper. It was addressed to me but lacked a postmark—no doubt a specimen from yet another collector wanting to see his name on a placard in the Rosemorran museum when the thing was finally complete. I pushed it aside and picked up the latest edition of The Daily Harbinger instead.

  “May I offer you some refreshment, Miss Tiverton?” Stoker asked.

  She shook her head. “I had tea with Lady Wellie, and she stuffed me with all sorts of buns and cakes. In fact, I have overstayed already. My stepmother will be wondering where I am. And I shall have to make up some story or other.” She slid down from the camel saddle, and Stoker was there to assist her, putting a steadying hand to her shoulder. “Oh, thank you,” she said, blushing again.

  I interrupted ruthlessly. “We made the acquaintance of some friends of yours recently—Mr. Horus Stihl and his son, Henry.”

  She rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  Figgy wandered to a bell jar covering a particularly ghoulish display. “What is that?” she demanded.

  “A hand of glory,” Stoker told her. “They were all the rage amongst thieves a century or two ago. It was thought that if a housebreaker carried one, it would cast a spell of slumber over the entire household and he would be able to carry out his work unmolested.”

  Figgy warily eyed the atrocity. “What is it made of?”

  “A human hand,” I told her with some brutality. “Hacked from the body of a condemned criminal and dipped in tallow. The idea is that you light the fingers to serve as a lamp when you are bent upon thievery.”

  She gave it a scornful wave of dismissal. “I’ve seen things heaps nastier than that. My mama once found a mummy case with a person still inside.”

  “You have attended an unrolling?” Stoker asked.

  “There was nothing to unroll. As soon as the lid came off, the poor old thing just fell to dust. He was badly embalmed, you see. He ought to have had a full forty days of immersion in the natron salts of lower Egypt—” She launched into a highly technical explanation of mummification that included all the nastier bits of pulling brain matter out of the nostril cavity and embalming the internal organs, which she related with what I could only think was an unhealthy relish. But Stoker seemed to enjoy it immensely, and I returned to my newspaper while they exchanged disgusting stories.

  At length, the clock in the corner—stolen from the tsarist court in Bulgaria—chimed the hour, and Figgy jumped up with a start.

  “Heavens, is that the time? I must dash.”

  I flicked a glance over the top of my newspaper. “Oh, leaving so soon? Good-bye, then, Miss Tiverton.” I waved a casual hand as I went back to my reading.

  Stoker was frowning at her. “Your parents do not know you are about in the city on your own?”

  Figgy hastened to explain. “I know that sounds terribly cloak-and-dagger, but it isn’t like that. Father’s just stupidly strict sometimes. He does not understand the modern young woman. He thinks I am twelve!” she burst out. “He is perfectly content for me to roam to my heart’s content in Egypt, but here he is so bothered by the dangers of the city, he hardly lets me take a step without an escort. I had a difficult time slipping out to come here today. They shall probably make a terrible fuss when I go back,” she finished darkly.

  “Have you given him reason to be afraid?” I asked coolly. Stoker made a noise of disapproval, but the girl nodded.

  “The last time we were in London he discovered I had been skipping my drawing and French lessons in favor of meetings.”

  “Meetings?” I asked. “You mean, assignations?”

  “Heavens, no! Political meetings. I am a suffragist,” she told us proudly. “And if I were permitted to vote, I should vote Liberal. That is what galls him the most. He’s the most appalling Tory.”

  “Show me an aristocrat who isn’t,” I murmured.

  Stoker bristled. “I resent that.”

  “You are the exception that proves the rule,” I told him by way of consolation. “Miss Tiverton, darkness has fallen. Wait a moment and we will send the hall boy to hail a cab.”

  She looked as if she would have liked to protest, but she shrugg
ed. “Very well,” she said ungraciously. We followed her out, and no sooner had we emerged from the Belvedere than Figgy gave a cry of shock, staggering back and raising a shaking finger. Stoker and I stared to where she pointed, exchanging a quick glance of mutual astonishment, for there, framed between a pair of trees in the distance, backed by a tall stand of shrubs and wrapped in wisps of fog, was the terrible figure of the great god Anubis himself.

  He was bared to the waist, kilted in a pleated linen garment and wearing a heavy collar of gold and precious stones. His feet were shod in gilded leather sandals, and his head was—even now I can barely bring myself to recall the horror of the great black jackal head that tipped ever so slightly, the nose coming forwards as if he were sniffing out his prey.

  Paralyzed in shock, we watched as he raised an accusing hand to Figgy, pointing to her heart. The girl shrieked in terror, covering her face with her hands. A nicer pair of people might have attended the poor child, but niceness has never been one of my virtues, and Stoker was already launching himself towards the little clearing. I followed hard upon his heels, urging him to still greater speed. Stoker held his fists high, and I had already extracted a sharpened hatpin, but we needn’t have bothered.

  The garden was entirely empty.

  Stoker inspected the shrubbery, cursing lavishly. “A hole has been cut, just large enough for a man to fit through and giving directly onto the street. If he had a conveyance waiting, he will be well on his way by now.” He thrust his head through the hole and emerged a moment later like Alice from Wonderland. “As I suspected, the street is empty.”

  “It was cleverly done,” I observed. “The grounds are poorly lit here. He must have realized that we would be shocked into inaction upon first seeing him. That delay purchased him a few precious seconds to retreat through the shrubbery and into a waiting carriage. Still, he would have to be a quick and athletic sort of man.” I hesitated. “If it was a man.”

  Stoker’s look was pure scorn. “Do not even suggest it,” he warned me.

  “What? That this was an actual visitation by Anubis? Stranger things have happened, my dear Stoker.”

  “They bloody well have not. You call yourself a scientist,” he said, trailing off with a sound of disgust. In an effort to prove me wrong, he scoured the ground where the figure had stood, hoping for what? A glimmering sequin or a lost jewel? But there was nothing.

  “Stoker, do give it up. You’ll not even find a footprint. The ground is too hard.”

  “There must be some trace of the devil,” he grumbled.

  “Well, we shall not find it in the freezing darkness. Now, come along. We ought to look to Figgy.”

  “Figgy! Blast, I forgot the child,” he said, hurrying back to where we had left her. She was standing perfectly still, clutching Nut and staring after us with enormous eyes.

  “Well?” she asked sharply. “Did you catch him?”

  “We did not,” I told her. “But I have to wonder why the Lord of the Underworld would disport himself in a Marylebone garden, particularly in these temperatures.”

  Her look was scathing. “You oughtn’t mock what you do not understand,” she intoned darkly.

  “I understand that someone is playing a malicious trick,” I returned with some tartness.

  Stoker stepped forwards. “Come along, Miss Tiverton. I will see you back to the Sudbury myself.”

  “Oh, thank you. I’m most awfully grateful,” she said, turning a shining face to Stoker. I did not bother to tell them good-bye. I retreated to the Belvedere and worked steadily until Stoker returned nearly an hour later.

  “Finished with your errand of mercy?” I asked.

  “I wonder sometimes if you use a whetstone on that tongue or if it is naturally sharp.”

  He flicked through his correspondence while I plucked a dusty, decaying African Map butterfly free and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Unfortunate, I thought, as the African Map—Cyrestis camillus—was a winsome fellow with dashing stripes. I made a note to find his lordship a replacement of suitable quality.

  “What do you make of our supernatural visitation?” Stoker asked. “And no more entertaining the possibility that we have actually seen Anubis. I don’t believe in such rubbish, and neither do you.”

  I sat back in my chair, pondering. “A prank, as I told Figgy. Something designed to get our attention.”

  “But why?” he persisted. “What purpose could be served in trotting Anubis through our garden?”

  “I can think of one,” I told him, slanting him a meaningful look.

  It took him a moment to comprehend. “Veronica, no. I cannot believe that child would do something so devious.”

  “She is the strangest mixture of woman and child,” I observed. “And it would not be the first time a girl has resorted to theatrics to get the attention of a man she finds attractive.”

  He flushed. “Don’t be feeble. Figgy is a girl.”

  “On the cusp of womanhood,” I insisted. “She is not too young to conceive a passion for a man some years her senior.”

  “Even if that were so, and I am not conceding that it is,” he warned, “how would she secure an accomplice to play the part of the god?”

  I shrugged. “Figgy is resourceful,” I told him, repeating what Lady Tiverton had revealed to me earlier in the day.

  “I refuse to believe it,” he said flatly.

  “Now who is being unscientific?” I said mildly. I turned back to my collection of Madagascar butterflies.

  “I wonder what she really came for,” Stoker mused.

  I stared at him a long moment, marveling that any man that enticing could really be so free of vanity. “I daresay we shall know in time,” I told him.

  • • •

  The next morning I awoke in a foul temper, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that I had stayed up far too late, smoking my little Turkish cigarettes and thinking. I finished the first volume of Lady Tiverton’s memoirs and embarked upon the second, but I remembered little of what I read. The books were engaging and well written, full of both scholarly observations and pithy witticisms. There were even photographs taken on some of her travels, but the images always blurred into Caroline de Morgan’s triumphant face as she told us she was expecting a child.

  Throwing off my blankets after a poor night’s sleep, I washed and dressed and was surprised to find Stoker already hard at work in the Belvedere, stripping the rotten sawdust from the inside of his moldering platypus as he recited verses from “The Eve of St. Agnes.” He maintained that Keats had written a poem for every possible mood, and whenever he resorted to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” I knew he was in need of strenuous diversion. He had just got to a rather saucy passage when I interrupted him.

  “That thing looks positively feral,” I observed.

  “It shan’t when I’ve finished,” he replied mildly.

  I spied the latest copy of The Daily Harbinger set neatly to the side. From the blaring headlines, I could tell that J. J. Butterworth had once more scooped his rivals.

  ANUBIS WALKS IN LONDON

  I made a moue of disgust. “How the devil did Butterworth discover that?” I demanded from no one in particular.

  Stoker dug the broken bits of a glass eyeball from his platypus and dropped them to the floor. “The old god was spotted near the Strand last night.”

  I lifted my brows. “The Strand? Near the Sudbury Hotel, you mean. It sounds as if our god paid a visit after he left us.”

  “Not exactly in turn,” he corrected. “Note the time. Anubis was spotted by the hotel at almost exactly the same time as we saw him here. There are two Anubises. Would one call them ‘Anubi’?”

  “That isn’t possible,” I pointed out repressively. “He cannot be in two places at once.”

  “Unless he actually is a god. I believe you wished to entertain that possibility
last night.”

  I sighed and refused to rise to the bait. “So, we have a pair of tricksters assuming the guise of an Egyptian god and running about town.” I tipped my head thoughtfully as I considered the lavish headline. “I could almost suspect J. J. Butterworth himself of taking a hand in this, were it not for the fact that we saw Anubis with our own eyes.”

  Stoker paused, considering. “He still could be behind it. There are no photographs, only statements from eyewitnesses who wished not to be named. Butterworth might have made the whole thing up as a diversion from the fact that he was actually here, playing in the dressing-up box himself.”

  “But to what purpose? Flitting about the city in the guise of Anubis is certainly a way to heighten interest in the curse and sell newspapers, I suppose.”

  “A likely motivation for a reporter,” he said, returning to his platypus. “The story of his visitation will spread. The public will go mad to see the treasures the Tivertons have unearthed. Furthermore, I should like to point out, you have wronged Figgy Tiverton. Clearly she did not engineer the apparition here in order to spend time with me,” he added with a triumphant smile.

  I gave in with bad grace. “Very well. I suppose I was a trifle . . .” I groped for a word.

  “Unsporting,” Stoker supplied. Our eyes met, and for an instant, I felt a rekindling of that strange something which made us alike, that quicksilver understanding that flowed between us.

  I picked up the newspaper and turned to read below the fold. The sight of those bold black letters chilled my marrow. “Stoker, this is monstrous—” I began.

  “It is what we expected.” There was an air of resignation about him that I could not like.

  “It as good as accuses you of John de Morgan’s murder,” I raged. “Does that not upset you?”

  He shrugged one muscular shoulder. “To what purpose? I have my work and my friends, few though they may be. The rest of the world may think what it likes.”

  “They may not believe these lies,” I cut in. “Calumnies! The rankest atrocities,” I began, warming to my theme.