A Curious Beginning

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  But none of these was as disturbing as the sight that met my eyes in the center of the room. There stood an enormous creature, rough flesh sculpted over a steel skeleton, pieces of wrinkled skin half-draped upon it, the rest hanging limp and lifeless to the floor like a discarded garment. Standing below it was a man, stripped to the waist, his naked torso covered in sweat and streaked with black, the smoky soot mingling with a collection of tattoos that spread across his back and down his arms. He wore old-fashioned breeches tucked into high boots and an apron fashioned of leather and fitted with pockets holding various tools that looked like instruments of torture. He was wrestling with the skin of the beast, the muscles of his back and shoulders corded against the strain, and he swore fluently as he worked.

  I felt a smile rising to my lips, for this was no hell, no monster’s den. It was, in fact, the lair of a taxidermist. The shelves along one wall were fitted with Wardian cases containing hundreds—no, thousands—of specimens, a veritable museum of natural history hidden away in a dingy warehouse on the north bank of the Thames. I longed to explore everything at once, but it was the man himself who claimed my attention.

  “Stoker,” the baron called.

  The man whirled, his hands still gripping the animal’s skin, his face imperfectly illuminated by the fire. He was half in shadow, and the shadow revealed him slowly. His left eye was covered by a black leather patch, and thin white scars raked his brow and the cheekbone below. They carried on, down the length of his neck, into the thick black beard, twisting under his collarbone and around his torso. They marred only the skin, I noted, for the muscles beneath were whole and strong, and the entire impression was one of great vitality and energy, strength unbridled. He looked like nothing so much as a fallen god working at a trade.

  “Hephaestus at the forge,” I murmured, recalling my mythology. The baron shot me a quick appraising glance.

  “My dear?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, for the man had dropped his tools and was coming near. Just then he caught sight of me and paused, reaching for a shirt. To my regret, he pulled it on, obscuring his impressive form as he turned to the baron.

  “Max, what the devil—”

  The baron held up a hand. “I come to throw myself upon your mercy, Stoker. This young lady is Miss Speedwell. I must beg your help and ask you to keep her here. I cannot explain yet, but I must leave her with you.”

  Mr. Stoker turned the full force of his gaze upon me, scrutinizing me from my butterfly net to my neatly pinned hat, and shook his head. “Not bloody likely.”

  “Stoker, I know how you feel about your privacy, and I would not ask but I have no choice,” the baron pressed, his voice low.

  If I had had any sense of delicacy, I would have been acutely embarrassed by the situation. As it happened, I was merely bored with their discussion. I had little doubt the baron would prevail, and I was fairly itching to see what lurked amidst the collection Mr. Stoker had amassed. I wandered to the nearest shelf, where I peered at a specimen floating in a jar. It was a pretty little frog with enormous eyes and a faintly surprised expression.

  I could hear them arguing in low voices behind me, the baron’s aristocratic tones punctuated by Mr. Stoker’s occasional profanity. I put out a hand and he called out sharply. “Do not touch that! It took me the better part of a year to find the damned thing and it cannot be replaced.”

  If he expected his harsh tone to cow me, he should learn differently right from the start, I decided. I picked up the jar and turned, setting a pleasant smile upon my lips. “Then you ought to have taken better care of it. Your seal is damaged, and the preservative solution is contaminated. The specimen looks to have been badly fixed as well. Pity, really, it’s quite a fine little Phyllomedusa tomopterna.”

  His mouth tightened. “As the label quite plainly states, it is a Phyllomedusa tarsius.”

  “Yes, I see what the label states, but the label is wrong. You can tell by the coloration of its lower legs. These are very bright orange with pronounced tiger stripes. Tarsius has green legs. Really, I am quite surprised you did not see it for yourself. I should have thought so avid a collector would have noticed such a difference. Ah well, perhaps you have not had the chance to examine it closely.”

  Mr. Stoker’s mouth gaped open until he closed it with an audible snap. “I assure you, Miss Speedwell, I am intimately familiar with that particular specimen, considering I collected it myself in the jungles of the Amazon.”

  I was enthralled. He had appalling manners and questionable hygiene considering the state of his hands, but any man who had been to the Amazon was worth talking to.

  Evidently Mr. Stoker did not share my interest in conversation, for he turned back to the baron to remonstrate with him one last time. “I haven’t time to mind strays for you, Max. I have to finish that bloody great elephant by next month or Lord Rosemorran will not pay me.”

  The baron put out his hand. “My dear friend, I would not ask if necessity did not demand it.”

  Mr. Stoker said nothing, and, doubtless sensing his advantage, the baron pressed it. “I ask you for this one thing in memory of the dangers we have known together.”

  Mr. Stoker’s face flushed dark red. “It is a very genteel form of extortion to remind a man of his debts, Max. Very well, dammit. I am nothing if not a man of my word. You have it. I will keep the lady here until you come for her.”

  The baron put out his hand to clasp his friend by the shoulder. “You have repaid your debt in full with this.”

  “I cannot think how,” Mr. Stoker protested. “Overbearing spinsters are not exactly your stock in trade.”

  I studiously ignored the insult as I replaced his Phyllomedusa. Within a few moments the baron was on his way, taking his leave of me with a bow over my hand and a smartly Teutonic click of the heels.

  He hesitated, my hand still in his, his eyes searching my face. “I leave you in the best care—better than my own, child. I will send word soon.”

  “Please do,” I replied with a touch of asperity as I flicked a glance at Mr. Stoker. He curled a lip by way of reply.

  The baron hesitated. “You must know, if it were in my power to tell you everything . . .” he began. I held up a hand.

  “I have come to know you a little in the course of our journey. I believe you to be a man of honor, Baron. It is plain that you are bound by strong loyalties. I must respect that.”

  “Respect it, but you do not like it,” he finished with a kindly twinkle.

  “And it is apparent you have come to know me a little too,” I acknowledged. “I will bid you farewell in the German fashion then. Auf Wiedersehen, Baron.”

  He clicked his heels together a second time and pressed my hand. “God go with you, Miss Speedwell.”

  He left then, and Mr. Stoker saw him out, returning a moment later to find me studying his specimens again. “The baron did not tell me you were a taxidermist when he suggested I stay with you,” I said pleasantly.

  He returned to his elephant, taking up his tools. “I am a natural historian,” he corrected. “Taxidermy is merely a part of what I do.”

  He offered neither a seat nor refreshment, but I was not prepared to stand on ceremony. I found a moth-eaten sofa lurking under a pile of skins and moved them aside enough to perch on the edge—carefully, for I noticed a leg of the sofa was missing, replaced with a decaying stack of volumes from the Description de l’Égypte. “It is very late—or very early. And yet you are at work.”

  He said nothing for a long moment, and I wondered if he meant to annoy me with his silence. But he was merely examining his glue, and as he began to apply it, he called over his shoulder. “I have not yet been to bed. I gather from Max that you traveled through the night. If you wish to sleep, shove the hides aside and take the sofa.”

  I sighed at this bit of churlishness, but fatigue won out over pride, and I
began to move the hides. Suddenly, something in the bundle growled and I jumped back, nearly upsetting a case of fossilized eggs as I did so.

  “For the love of God, watch what you’re doing!” Mr. Stoker thundered. “’Tis only Huxley. He shan’t hurt you.”

  I peeled away the hides to reveal a bulldog, squat and square, regarding me with statesmanlike solemnity. I slipped him a bit of cheese from my bag and he settled back happily, content to let me take the rest of the sofa. I curled behind him, feeling oddly contented with the warm, furry back of him pressed to my belly, and almost instantly I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I woke some hours later, stiff and cold. The fire had burned down, but Mr. Stoker was once more working without his shirt, displaying his rather splendid musculature as well as his intriguing collection of tattoos. I regarded him through the veil of my lashes for some time as he labored, stretching a piece of elephant’s skin tautly over its padded armature. It required finesse, I realized, for at times he was brutally strong, using the sheer mass of his muscles to force the weighty hide into position; at others he was gently coaxing, his hands as deft as a musician’s. His language altered as well, for as he sweated and shoved, he swore like any common sailor, but as he persuaded, he murmured in a seductive whisper, enticing the beast to do his bidding. He looked younger then, less commanding, and I realized he was probably not so very many years older than myself, but something had hardened him. Only a certain softness at the mouth as it curved in pleasure at his work spoke of any gentleness in him. And the scars were commentary to his courage, for whatever animal he had faced seemed to have taken his eye and nearly his life. I wanted to hear the story, but I knew better than to ask. He did not seem inclined to confidences, and such a story must perforce be an intimate one.

  So I yawned loudly, stretching my arms above my head and giving him time to resume his shirt before I sat up. Huxley nudged my hand and I gave him more cheese, scratching him soundly behind the ears.

  “He is not a lapdog, for Christ’s sake,” his master growled. But Huxley merely rolled over onto his back and offered his belly. I scratched him thoroughly before I rose and went to look at the elephant.

  “You have managed quite a lot. How long was I asleep?”

  “Four hours, more or less.”

  “Very impressive that you accomplished so much in so little time,” I told him.

  “It is still a damned sight too slow,” he lamented. He gestured towards the whole of the beast. “The trouble is securing this section without pulling the stitches there. The clamps are not holding as well as I would like.”

  “What is your plan for moving the specimen when it is finished?” I asked. “Surely you don’t mean to haul it through the streets of London? It ought to have been assembled in situ.”

  He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Yes, I did think of that. I am not entirely devoid of intellect, no matter what you think of my Phyllomedusa.” He had been working the back end of the beast and walked me around to see that the entire front half was missing. “You cannot mount an entire elephant in one go. The skin alone weighs more than a ton. It must be done in pieces, but no one has managed to do it properly, at least not yet. This one is simply an experiment, a chance to refine the process before I begin in earnest.”

  “For a patron? A lord, I believe you said?”

  He nodded. “The Earl of Rosemorran, dilettante and eccentric, but richer than Croesus. He acquired an enormous bull elephant—bones and hide—out of East Africa. I have done other mammal mounts to his satisfaction, so he agreed to let me practice on this smaller fellow to see if I can devise a better method before touching his prize.”

  “And he is paying you for this?” I asked with a dubious glance at the elephant’s unfinished backside.

  His lip curled. “Would I do this for my own amusement?”

  I glanced meaningfully at the collected specimens in the workshop.

  He sighed heavily. “These are not worth the sawdust they’re stuffed with. They were mounted using old methods, and now they are crumbling to bits. I acquired most for next to nothing just so I could tear them apart and assess their imperfections. One cannot innovate new improvements without understanding old failures.”

  I poked the elephant experimentally. “And this one is proving a failure?”

  “Thus far. I wanted to mount him on his own skeleton, but that won’t serve. It will have to be two separate displays, one of just the bones reassembled into an articulated skeleton. The other will be a mount made to look lifelike with the skin properly stretched over a form sculpted to simulate the flesh. The difficulty is in the sheer bloody enormity of it.” The fact that he did not apologize for his language made me like him better. “He must be pieced together, but I have not yet devised a method for doing so without making him look like Frankenstein’s monster. He shall be nothing more than a grotesque if I don’t work it out.”

  I noticed again the black streaks upon his arms—glue as well as soot, I realized, a hazard of his occupation. But the hair was simply a matter of being badly groomed, for it hung past his shoulders in unfashionably long, snarled dark locks that shone with a bluish tint in the late morning light. His beard was heavy and untrimmed, and with the eye patch and the slender gold ring glinting in his earlobe, it gave him the air of a rather impoverished pirate.

  I moved past him to the section he had indicated, peering at the stitches. “You want another pair of hands,” I said firmly. “Tell me where to hold so I do not mar the folds of the skin.”

  He hesitated, and I clucked at him impatiently. “Mr. Stoker, I am offering you my help. I am bored and likely to grow far more so in the coming hours. We do not know how long the baron means us to be thrown together, and we might as well pass the time in some useful fashion. You require extra hands. I have them. Now tell me where to put them.”

  He looked as if he wanted to argue, but in the end he merely pointed and I held the skin taut while he worked. “Hold it firm there,” he barked. “Harder! A kitten could make a better job of it.”

  I tightened my grip and he grunted, the highest praise I was likely to receive, I understood. We worked for some hours, and at length it occurred to me that I was exceedingly hungry and thirsty. He must have sensed my flagging energy, or perhaps his own was dwindling. He brought out a loaf of bread and a suspicious-looking ham and hacked off wedges of both with a clasp knife. I produced a few soft apples from my carpetbag and we ate in silence.

  When we had finished, he reached for a tin and withdrew a cigar, lighting it with a spill from the stove. He drew in great lungfuls of poisonously strong tobacco smoke, blowing it out in long exhalations.

  He caught my stare and gave me a mocking glance. “Where are my manners? Would you like a puff?” he asked, extending the cigar.

  I returned his gaze coolly. “No, thank you. I brought my own.” With that, I went to my carpetbag and drew out a packet of slim cigarillos, lighting one as he had done with a twist of paper at the stove. He stared at me in stupefaction until I blew out a perfect smoke ring, then gave a grudging laugh.

  “Where did you acquire the habit?”

  “Costa Rica,” I told him. “And your cigar is inferior tobacco.”

  “Good tobacco is expensive and I am a pauper,” he said lightly.

  We smoked in silence, and as we did, my gaze fell to the scars that ran underneath his eye patch.

  “Do not feel sorry for me,” he ordered. The air around him fairly crackled with anger, and I regarded him coolly.

  “I shouldn’t dream of feeling sorry for you. You have two fine arms and two working legs and a strong back. You have a brain that seems more capacious than most, and as near as I can make out, your sight is otherwise unimpaired. What possible reason do you have to believe I would pity you?”

  “You would not be the first,” he said, his expression sullen.

 
I gave him a grim smile. “I am afraid you will have to try a great deal harder than that if you desire my sympathy. I have traveled widely in the world, and I have seen men with half as many functional limbs as you and twice the courtesy. If I pity you, it is only because you are so determined to be disagreeable.”

  His only response was a sort of growl, but I was finished with the discussion. I rose and dusted off my hands, grinding out the last of my cigarillo carefully on the sole of my boot.

  “If we are to continue with the elephant, I must have an apron. I have only one other dress in my bag and it is silk.” With that I moved to a pile of discarded cloths, finding at last a piece long enough and clean enough to serve my purposes. I tied it neatly about my waist and set to work again, testing the glue that rested in its pot near the stove.

  “Is this warm enough?” I inquired, lifting the spatula and watching the amber threads pull like so much spun sugar.

  “It wants a bit more heat,” he said, and I noticed that his voice was marginally more cordial than it had been. He showed me how to move the glue closer to the heat to soften it and the proper method of applying it with the various spatulas while he stitched with enormous needles, setting small, precise stitches that would have put any needlewoman to shame.

  We passed a long time busily engaged in our endeavors, working steadily until there was a noise at the door and a boy bounded in. He was a grubby child, no older than ten, but his eyes shone with intelligence and—when they lighted on me—curiosity.

  “The post, Mr. S.,” he said, proffering a single slender envelope. Mr. Stoker flicked a glance towards it and told him to throw it on the fire.

  “Surely you will want to read it,” I protested. He shrugged one heavy shoulder.

  “Why should I? I know the contents well enough to say them off by heart. ‘It is with deepest regret that we must write to inform you that your application to travel with the Royal Museum of Natural History on its forthcoming expedition to Peru has been denied.’ Shall I go on? I know it word for word by now. If you like, I could probably set it to music, perhaps something moody and sad for a duet of oboe and bassoon.”