“Although,” his lordship went on, “I would expect rather less theatrical window dressing if you were involved. A nice clean beating or a knife to the throat. Those would be far more your style.”
Stoker rolled his eyes heavenwards but refused to rise to the bait. I turned to the viscount. “Do you know the Tivertons?” I inquired.
“I have not had the doubtful pleasure of making their acquaintance.”
“Doubtful?”
He shrugged. “Sir Leicester is an excitable little monkey of a man, although I hear his second wife is unobjectionable and his first wife was an absolute paragon.”
“From whom have you heard that?”
“From one of her most devoted admirers,” he informed us. “Horace Stihl.”
“You know Horace Stihl?” Stoker demanded.
“My dear fellow, I do have a social life, and it does occasionally include befriending Americans. I’m considered eccentric for it. We share an interest in art and have on occasion crossed swords at the auction houses. Ours is a casual connection, nothing more.”
“What can you tell us about him?”
The viscount stroked his chin thoughtfully. “He outbid me at auction for a charming little Fragonard. I have never forgiven him, although we do occasionally meet for dinner. He is devilishly shrewd. Oddly, he is also frightfully romantic, a sentimentalist, and you know I have no time for such things.”
“Are you so unmoved by sentiment?” I asked.
“Sentiment is for children, and Horace Stihl is nothing so much as an overgrown child when it comes to matters of the heart.”
“And you, of course, are entirely lacking in such an organ,” Stoker said nastily.
The viscount clucked his tongue. “If that was meant to be an insult, you will have to try harder, dear fellow. I pride myself on my detachment, save where my interests are stirred,” he added with a significant look at me. “But if you are inquiring about his character, I have found him trustworthy. Once or twice he has put me in the way of a piece he knew I particularly wanted and might have bid for himself.”
“You do not think him underhanded?”
“No more so than any other successful man and probably a good deal less.”
His lordship rose smoothly. “Well, I have satisfied myself that you are both in good health. I will send a telegram to the Dover police informing them that I am alive and well in London and completely mystified as to who might have been masquerading as me.”
Stoker gave him a grudging nod. “Thank you, Tiberius. That is uncommonly decent of you.”
The viscount bowed over my hand. “I am an uncommonly decent fellow.” He rose and bent to my ear, his lips very nearly brushing my skin. “Although I should like more than ever to be indecent with you, my dear Miss Speedwell,” he murmured just loudly enough for me to hear. Before I could reply, he stepped back and raised his voice. “How are your little lunas fairing?”
“Very well. They should emerge from the cocoons any day now. Would you like me to let you know when they have eclosed? You should get to see them fly, after all.”
“I would be delighted.”
He turned to go, then paused and turned back almost as an afterthought. “Oh, and while I deplore the habit of keeping score amongst one’s friends and relations, I think it best if the pair of you remember how very accommodating I have been under the circumstances.”
Stoker gave him a baleful look. “Meaning?”
The viscount smiled, baring strong white teeth in a wolfish smile. “Meaning that one of these days I might well have circumstances of my own which require your accommodation. I shall expect to be able to call in this favor.”
Stoker opened his mouth—no doubt to say something entirely rude—but I forestalled him.
“We shall be at your disposal, my lord.”
“I am counting upon it, Miss Speedwell.”
• • •
“Why on earth did you promise him that we would help him?” Stoker demanded when he had gone.
I shrugged. “I like him.”
Stoker gave me a narrow look. “Of course you do. He is handsome and charming and a lord.”
“Those are the least interesting of his qualities,” I told him. “His lordship is also complicated and unpredictable, with some very intriguing hobbies.”
“I give up,” Stoker told me.
We applied ourselves to our work then, Stoker making good progress on his platypus and my gonerilla at last being revealed in all her exquisite nudity. We had just finished when the afternoon edition of the newspaper was delivered.
I was not surprised to find my world once again upended by the headline. It had become so common an occurrence that I would have been shocked if J. J. Butterworth had found anything else to write about.
MUMMY’S CURSE STRIKES AGAIN
Stoker glimpsed the headline over my shoulder. “What fresh deviltry has happened now?” he demanded. I showed him the article, a lurid piece about the sightings of Anubis in the city.
“Which brings us back to the question, who is playing Anubis? And do not start with any more of that nonsense about spectral visitations,” he warned.
I pulled a face. “I told you, I was merely entertaining possibilities. Think of it as an intellectual exercise. In this case, I quite agree with you that Occam’s razor is appropriate. The simplest explanation is the likeliest.”
“And the simplest explanation is that someone connected with the Tiverton case is going around haunting people in the guise of Anubis.”
“More than one Anubis, thanks to his appearance at the Sudbury,” I reminded him. “But it is most logical to take them one at a time. The figure, whoever he might be, has appeared in Egypt, here in Marylebone, and in the Strand. Now, to suspects. The form was undoubtedly male, which lets out Lady Tiverton and Figgy. We are left with Horus and Henry Stihl, Patrick Fairbrother, and Sir Leicester Tiverton as the most obvious choices.”
Stoker snorted. “Stihl the Younger and Fairbrother I will grant you, but Sir Leicester? And Horus Stihl? They are aged.”
I primmed my mouth. “I think you will concede my expertise on the subject of the male form,” I said sedately. “I can assure you that while both of those gentlemen are of advancing years, they would both strip admirably. Like our Anubis, Sir Leicester has broad shoulders, and if you took away Mr. Stihl’s lavish white hair and moustaches, you would find him significantly younger than you think. He moves with a certain allure,” I finished, thinking pleasurably on his silken moustaches upon my fingers.
Stoker snapped his fingers in front of my face. “If you can tear yourself away from your salacious woolgathering, I would like to point out that you have forgot another man who deserves to be a suspect.”
“Oh?”
Stoker paused, clearly relishing the moment. “First, the reporter for The Daily Harbinger. The fellow is making a name for himself out of all this drivel. It seems at least possible that he is behind some of the more outlandish aspects.”
I nodded. “Well-done,” I acknowledged. “That is certainly plausible. And I have one more name to add to the list of possible villains.”
He quirked up a brow in inquiry, but I held the moment, heightening the anticipation.
“Well?” he demanded. “Who else might be wearing the guise of Anubis?”
“The man who began it all,” I told him. “John de Morgan himself.”
CHAPTER
14
We argued for the better part of an hour. “You cannot be serious,” he said more than once.
“As the grave,” I replied. “All we know for certain is that de Morgan disappeared. We do not know where he is at present. Nor do we know what has become of him.”
“I think it is bloody well obvious he met with foul play in that hole of a hotel,” he returned hotly. “The changes to the
room prove that.”
“The changes to the room are theatrical window dressing. What was the point of them? To confuse and upset Caroline de Morgan. Or to give the appearance of upsetting her,” I added as an afterthought.
“You still think she might be in league with John,” he said sharply.
“I think it possible. She has been clever and devious enough to pretend she is having a mental collapse in order to avoid more questions by the police investigators. Consider, she left Egypt with her husband and turned up in Dover, hysterically claiming he has vanished. Has she been detained? Arrested for his murder? No. She has simply been handed over to the care of her parents. In time she will be forgot, and what then? With no body and no evidence against her, she will fade from notoriety. She can go where she likes, perhaps to meet up with him, perhaps to sell the jewel herself if she has betrayed him.”
He looked at me for a long, inscrutable moment. “You are as good as accusing her of her husband’s murder. At the very least you think her capable of conspiring with him. At worst, you think her a potential murderess.”
“A potential murderess carrying a child,” I said thoughtfully. “That does complicate matters. But that diadem would go a very long way towards supporting her and her infant if she made her escape from England.”
He said nothing more. I turned to the rest of the post, leaving him with his thoughts.
There was the usual assortment of bills and circulars, letters and journals, and I collected everything in a basket to sort later. I took supper alone in my Gothic chapel, relishing my solitude.
Once I had eaten, I went to the Roman temple, where his lordship had installed the latest accomplishments in the plumbing arts. The wash in my own facilities had been insufficient after our Dover adventures, I decided. I needed a proper scrubbing from head to toe and all the attendant relaxation. In the temple were three plunge pools of varying temperatures as well as a soaking tub and a shower bath, the last of which I made full use of in order to scrub myself free of the lingering traces of soot. I returned to my little Gothic chapel to smoke and think over the case. I had supplemented my wardrobe with bits and pieces from the collection in the Belvedere, and my current dressing gown was a rather splendid and tattered robe from the Chinese imperial opera. It was scarlet silk, heavily fringed and embroidered, and I wore it belted at the waist, my hair loose as I sat before the fire to dry it.
Fatigued from our adventures in Dover, I slept, waking far later the next morning than was my custom. Still dressed in my robe of China silk, I perused the rest of the post as I brushed my hair, sorting the letters and bills from the periodicals. At length, all that remained was the parcel I had noted the day before our departure—plainly wrapped and lacking a postmark. I tossed the brown wrapping paper aside to find a pasteboard box of the most common variety. Within it, nestled carefully on a bed of excelsior, was another box, this one of brass worked with Egyptian motifs. I turned it over, but could find no significant markings, no note to identify the sender.
With a sigh, I put it aside and thrust my feet into slippers. Stoker was still sunk deeply into sleep, sprawled over the width of his bed like a starfish. His coverlet had slipped to his hips, revealing chest and belly, both admirably muscled, molded by the benevolent hand of Nature into a form so alluring, it would have given Michelangelo pause to sculpt it. I poked one delectable shoulder.
He growled and put a pillow over his head. “Go away.”
“There has been a development in the case,” I told him.
“I don’t care if Queen Victoria herself has confessed to killing John de Morgan in Trafalgar Square. I need sleep.”
“You need to get out of that bed,” I countered. He growled again, and I reached for the coverlet, twitching it down another six inches to bare his iliac furrows. With a howl of outraged modesty, he bolted to a sitting position, hauling the coverlet up to his collarbone.
“Veronica, have some decency. You very nearly exposed my . . . erm . . .”
“Yes, I have seen your erm before, if you will recall. And you’ve nothing to be shy about. It’s quite impressive.”
He blushed furiously and yanked the coverlet up until only his eyebrows were visible. “My erm is mine to show when I wish, not for your prurient gawping when it suits you. What do you want?”
“I want you to come to my pavilion. I have something to show you. Whether you come naked or not is entirely your affair,” I told him.
I hurried back to my pavilion to dress—the thin China silk robe was little comfort against the February chill—and stoked up the fire. Stoker was five minutes behind, still buttoning his shirt when he arrived.
“This bloody well better be worth it,” he rasped.
I handed him the box. “From an anonymous party.”
He scrutinized it carefully. “And you think it contains a threat?”
“Remember what happened the last time we received an anonymous box in the post?” I prodded.
He grinned. During our previous investigation we had received a clue in the form of a body part that had been carelessly left in the Belvedere until one of the dogs ate it.
Stoker was many things but stupid he was not. He turned the box away from us and opened it from behind. As soon as the lid was opened, a cobra sprang out, launching some six or seven feet across the room before coming to rest on my bed. It fell behind, landing with a thud upon the floor. Together we flattened ourselves, peering under the bed.
“It isn’t moving,” I told him. “Do you think it died from inanition whilst confined in the box?”
He took a closer look, then dove under the bed, emerging with the serpent clasped in one fist. “It didn’t die because it was never alive. It was knit,” he told me, tossing the thing in an easy arc.
I caught it reflexively. The surface was cheap wool, rough and inelegant, nothing like the smooth warmth of an actual snakeskin. “Shabby thing, isn’t he?”
Stoker pointed to the embellishment of the hood and a peculiar dark mark upon the face. “It’s got the teardrop marking under the eye. Someone went to a good deal of trouble to make us think, at least for an instant, that it was real.”
“Pity they wasted the effort. I presume you have seen the thing in the wild?”
“And mounted dozens. Every army man who serves in the East brings one of the beastly things home, but they have often been badly done and I have to take them apart and rebuild them.” He cocked his head curiously. “Where did you become acquainted with them?”
“A particularly memorable interlude at a marketplace in Madagascar. It is an incident I do not recall with especial fondness,” I told him. “Where do we think this fellow came from?”
“I presume you have examined the wrappings?”
“No postmark. It was with the rest of the letters the day before yesterday.”
“Which delivery?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
“The one that was sitting on my desk when Figgy Tiverton was here,” I said, keeping my voice carefully neutral. I needn’t have bothered. He did not trouble to mask his outrage.
“Of all the vile insinuations! That shy and delightful girl,” he began.
“You only think she is delightful because she worships you,” I countered.
“She most certainly does not,” he cut in sharply.
I held up a hand. “I am too fatigued for false modesty, Stoker. You have a peculiar effect upon the fair sex—we may agree upon that. And Miss Tiverton is merely the latest in a long line of females who have succumbed to your charms.”
He was not mollified. “There is no possible way that Figgy Tiverton is responsible for that,” he said, pointing to the woolen snake in my hand. He brandished the box at me. “There is a spring in here to launch the thing at an unsuspecting recipient. It has fangs. It was designed to provoke a response of sheer terror.”
We fell silent.
Then Stoker raised a point that had not occurred to me.
“The box was delivered the day before we went to Dover,” he began. “It was intended as a threat of some sort.”
“It failed spectacularly,” I replied with some relish.
“But only because you have the sensitivity of a Russian boar,” he pointed out. “Most women would have fainted or flailed at such a thing.”
I opened my mouth, but he held up a quelling hand. “I know. You are not most women. It was intended as a compliment.”
I sat a little straighter. “But why was it directed to me? You are engaged in the investigation as well. Why not put both our names on the parcel?”
Stoker gave me an inscrutable look. “Because whoever sent it—and I do not concede for a moment that it was Miss Tiverton—expected hysterics, no doubt with an eye to encouraging you to drop the investigation.”
“How very curious. You wouldn’t drop the investigation for such a silly reason. Why should I?”
“Most people are incapable of understanding a woman like you,” he said simply. “You defy comprehension.”
“That might be the nicest thing you have ever said to me.” Being brushed with the black wings of death had done wonders for his temper. He was still prone to lapsing into silence, but his natural vitality had begun to assert itself once more.
“The timing raises another point,” he went on. “If the box was intended as a warning and we did not heed it, then whoever wants us to leave John de Morgan in peace might attempt more drastic measures.”
He removed the box from my hand. “Therefore, we must take the battle to them.”
“‘Them’? To whom? We don’t know our enemy,” I pointed out.
He shrugged. “Our movements are being observed, at least upon occasion. Otherwise, our little adventure in Dover would never have happened.”
“You think it was a deliberate attempt on our lives and not a spontaneous act born of desperation?”
“Unlikely. It might have been purest coincidence that the hotel just happened to burn down the night we were there, but I don’t like coincidences. I suspect the proprietress was put wise to our investigation and instructed to eliminate the evidence of John de Morgan’s disappearance. The fact that we were there at the same time would have been two very tidy birds slain with a single stone—no corroboration for Caroline’s story and no meddlesome sleuths determined to ask uncomfortable questions.”
A Treacherous Curse Page 20
