A Curious Beginning

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  Sir Rupert gave a short laugh, like the bark of a fox, and we left him then, emerging into Chancery Lane just as the street began to fill with solicitors and barristers and clerks, all bound for their luncheon tables.

  Stoker took my arm. “Put down your veil. I don’t like how crowded the street has become, and we must have a think.”

  I drew the light silk veil over my features. “I have just the spot,” I told him. “Where no one would ever think to look for us.”

  • • •

  An hour later we were in the Tower of London listening to the Yeoman Warder’s speech of welcome. We had paid our admission by cobbling together a few coins. Most had gone to fish and chips, fragrantly greasy and eaten straight from the newspaper, with Stoker complaining all the while that respectable ladies did not eat in the street.

  “Since when do such trivialities concern you?” I demanded.

  “They do not, but they will draw attention to you,” he reminded me. I shrugged and finished every delectable bite of my crispy cod.

  “That was sublime,” I told him as we threw away the greasy newspapers and joined the queue to enter the Tower. I listened eagerly to the Yeoman Warder’s patter, then quickly assessed our options. With Stoker hard upon my heels, I directed my steps to the squat bulk of St. Thomas’s Tower. We emerged at the top to find clouds gathering and a cold river mist rising.

  Stoker gave me a quizzical look. “What the devil are we doing here?”

  “I have never been to the Tower of London,” I told him simply. “It might be my last chance.”

  “Veronica—” he began, but I waved him off.

  “I am not prey to martyrdom, Stoker. I have no intention of letting these ruffians abscond with me. But I would be a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity for new experiences, you must agree.”

  He gave a gusty sigh. “Very well. But why here? It is bloody cold.”

  “You have answered your own question. We are not likely to be followed or overheard, and I always find a brisk breeze clears my head. So we shall stand up here and let the wind buffet us while we work it out.”

  He peered over the edge of the tower to the swirling green waters of the Thames.

  “Traitors’ Gate,” I observed. “Just think of all the Tudors who came this way to meet their fates—Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, the Countess of Salisbury, poor little Lady Jane Grey. Not a comforting thought.”

  “Yes, well, royalty has a history of going to bloodthirsty lengths to retain its hold on power,” he commented dryly. He dropped his head. “Damn me for a fool. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You are not wrong. The history of our country is quite forthcoming on the fate of traitors and pretenders. Even unwilling ones,” I said, thinking of the sad little puppet Jane Grey. “But that was a different time. We live in a modern age, Stoker. And in a world with steamships and telegraphs and suspension bridges, I find it difficult to believe anyone would be put to death for the misfortune of having the wrong blood.”

  “Are you willing to take that chance?” he asked.

  “No.” I took one last shuddering glance at the padlocked gate and turned to Stoker. “So let us begin. Who would have motive to wish me harm?”

  “The royal family,” he said promptly.

  I considered, then shook my head. “I think not.”

  “They have the most to lose if you make your claim,” he pointed out.

  “But look at them—really look at them. What are they? They may be royal, but they have the values of middle-class Germans. They believe in God and duty and respectability. Granted, my father may have erred against that in his liaison with my mother, but consider what he did. When he believed himself in love for the first time, he did not simply seduce the girl. He married her. No one in the whole of the Empire could have known better than he what he was risking in doing so. But he did it. He may have regretted it afterward when he realized the enormity of it all, but he did not simply sin with her and damn the consequences. The Prince of Wales is a romantic.”

  Stoker snorted. “Have you paid attention to the newspapers? Your princely father has seduced the wives of half the court. He has been named in divorce proceedings, Veronica. That is hardly the sort of thing one would expect from a romantic.”

  “It is precisely the sort of thing I would expect,” I countered. “He thinks with his heart. He is in love with women and the idea of love. He believes himself chivalrous. He married Lily because it was wildly improbable, like something out of myth—or his own family history. Have you forgot Edward IV? He married a widowed nobody and made her Queen of England. No doubt the Prince of Wales thought he could do the same, and somehow, between marrying Lily and announcing his betrothal to Princess Alexandra, he changed his mind. But what?”

  Stoker retrieved the page he had torn from the Brief History and scrutinized it for a long moment. “He changed his mind—or something changed it for him,” Stoker said slowly. “And I’ve just realized what it was. The date your parents married—it was the autumn of 1861. By the following year, he became engaged to Princess Alexandra. Do you remember what happened in December of 1861?” he asked, brandishing the page.

  “Hardly,” I replied. “I was, you will recall, in utero at the time.”

  “In December of 1861, Prince Albert died.”

  I stared at him, comprehension turning to certainty as Stoker elaborated. “The Prince Consort fell ill after he visited the Prince of Wales at university. The royal court never addressed the rumors, but they walked together for hours in a chilling rain. What would drive a man of not terribly robust health to take his son for a private walk where no one could overhear them in killing weather?”

  “A scandal about to break,” I finished breathlessly. “He had learned of the marriage.”

  “Or at least heard something of their liaison. Enough to send him straight down to school to upbraid his son, even though they would have been together in just a few weeks for Christmas.”

  “And what a burden that would be for an impressionable, romantic youth,” I went on. “Married in haste to an unsuitable woman, waiting for an opportunity to introduce her to his family and win their blessing, and then his beloved father, the bulwark of the entire family, is dead—because of him, because the shock of the news killed him.”

  “That impressionable, romantic youth would be devastated,” Stoker said. “He would carry that guilt to the end of his days. And it would poison everything and everyone to do with that marriage.”

  “Of course. He wouldn’t have been able to bear to look at her after that.” I stopped and did a quick bit of arithmetic. “Lily would have been three months into her pregnancy with me. Surely the Prince of Wales knew about it. Perhaps he even planned to tell them at Christmas during the happy family gathering, brazening the thing out—‘I have wonderful news! I am married and she is expecting an heir!’—but then death comes for his father first, shattering everything. The queen is utterly devastated by grief, destroyed by it, withdrawing almost totally from society. The prince could never have told her then—it surely would have killed her. And he bears the burden of her blame for his father’s death.”

  “Meanwhile she has been planning his marriage to a beautiful Danish princess,” Stoker said, picking up the thread. “And what choice does he have but to acquiesce? He must agree to the betrothal to atone for killing his father.”

  “And so he relinquishes his future with Lily and her child in order to do his duty as his mother, as England, would define it. He gives them up in order to expiate the sin of killing his own father. He breaks all ties with the woman he loves and his child and marries for reasons of state.”

  Stoker rubbed his chin. “Plausible. I would go so far as to say probable. But that still does not tell us what his role has been in all of this. Or what your uncle’s purpose in seeking you out has been.”

&nbs
p; “That depends entirely on whether he knows the identity of Lily’s husband,” I pointed out. “I suspect if we were to pry into Edmund de Clare’s associates in Ireland we would find separatists among them. He comes from an old Catholic family. It is entirely logical that he would support Home Rule.”

  “And men have done quite a lot in order to be the power behind the throne,” he said with a nod towards the surrounding towers. “These stones alone have seen their share of ruthless uncles.”

  “Which would also account for why my uncle was so keen to remove you from the scene but without harming me,” I pointed out. “He would want me in good health.”

  “With an eye to?”

  “Abducting me to Ireland seems the likeliest,” I said finally. “Some Catholic stronghold where he can tuck me away and keep me under his thumb while he presents my claims.”

  “Christ,” Stoker said with a grimace, “there are enough islands and hideaways, he could keep you hidden a hundred years or more and no one would find you. And in the meantime, he could be filling your head with tales of family and God and free Ireland.”

  “And doubtless marrying me off to a suitable separatist fellow of his choosing,” I said with a shudder.

  “You might have a point. If he marries you off and gets you breeding, he could do even more with your child than he could with you. He wouldn’t even need you then,” he said in a sepulchral voice.

  “If you are trying to frighten me, I assure you, my imagination is every bit as Gothic as yours. I can well imagine the poisoned tea or the slim dagger in the night and the claims that I succumbed to a fever while everyone rallies around my infant,” I said repressively. “But we can agree that dear uncle Edmund has no immediate designs upon my life.”

  “But he would have had ample reason for wanting the baron dead,” Stoker pointed out. “De Clare would need more than you in his power—he would need the proofs of your claims. If Max refused to surrender them . . .” His voice trailed off and I gave a shudder. I hated to think that a man—a man I had liked and who had been kind to me—had been killed for me.

  “But he is not the only possibility,” Stoker said with some relish. “There is another candidate just as likely.”

  I stared at him in dawning comprehension.

  “It cannot be Mornaday! He has come too often to our aid.”

  Stoker shrugged. “So it seems. But has he been coming to our aid or merely thwarting your uncle’s attempts to spirit you out of England? Think of it. Your uncle, aside from having his men lay unfriendly arms upon me, has shown only an inclination to talk to you. That you have refused him has driven him to increasingly more desperate actions—actions which have not harmed so much as a hair upon your head.”

  “Bosh!” I declared. “He tried to have you drowned in the Thames, in case you have forgot.”

  “Only because he thought I was your abductor. And to an outsider, it would seem as if I had taken you into my power and kept you there.”

  “You’re forgetting the incident at Paddington Station,” I reminded him triumphantly. “I eluded him entirely of my own volition. If I had truly been your captive, why wouldn’t I have seized the opportunity to go with my uncle and escape your clutches?”

  “Perhaps he thinks I’ve mesmerized you. Perhaps he thinks I have made dire threats of violence should you attempt to go. Perhaps he thinks you’ve fallen prey to my considerable charms and are in love with me—to your own detriment.”

  I pulled a face. “Be serious.”

  “I am. We cannot know what your uncle believes the situation to be. We can only hypothesize based upon his actions. And his actions are those of a man who wishes to talk.”

  “And Mornaday’s are those of a man who wishes to enact a rescue,” I countered.

  “We have only his word for the fact that he is with Scotland Yard,” Stoker said. “We did not ask him to present his credentials.”

  “We were half drowned,” I reminded him. “It was an awkward time to insist upon formalities. Besides, if Mornaday had some nefarious purpose, why intervene at all?”

  “To prevent your uncle from persuading you to leave the country.”

  “Oh, that is preposterous! Mornaday is no more a villain than you are,” I said with a touch of waspishness.

  “You cannot discount a theory simply because it does not suit your prejudices,” he reminded me. “That is bad science.”

  “And this is not science. It is something entirely different. You still have not explained how Mornaday might be involved if he is not a detective from Scotland Yard. What is his purpose?”

  He shrugged. “To get within his power the previously unknown daughter of the Prince of Wales.”

  “How does he even know of my existence? For whom does he work?”

  “Occam’s razor,” he said. “The simplest explanation is the likeliest. If only a handful of people knew of your existence and most are dead, the one still alive is the most logical person to have told him.”

  “My father. You believe my father set Mornaday on my trail? Do you think he had Max killed as well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His brow was furrowed and I resisted the urge to throw something at him. “You are seriously considering the possibility that the Prince of Wales, a man devoted to card games and shooting pheasants and genteel debauchery, has orchestrated a plot to murder his father’s oldest friend and run me to ground?”

  “His father’s oldest friend,” Stoker said, repeating the words as if tasting them on his tongue. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way, but you’re right. It was Max he turned to when he needed a witness for his marriage to Lily. And no doubt Max was the one who paid money—the prince’s money—into the Harbottle accounts for your keep.”

  “You see? Would a man really kill the family friend who has done so much for him?” I demanded.

  “I should think it would give him all the more reason,” was Stoker’s reply.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In due course, the chill breeze off the Thames drove us down from the tower and we walked the Outer Ward, making a slow loop between the inner buildings of the Tower and its surrounding fortifications. There were visitors aplenty that day, and we threaded our way between groups chattering in German and Italian and French, guidebooks in hand as they pointed out the various attractions.

  “Pity for them the Menagerie has been emptied out,” Stoker said. “It must have been quite the experience to stand in this place and hear the roaring of lions.”

  “They didn’t belong here,” I protested. “They should never have been brought to this country.”

  He raised a brow. “You find that different from what we do as naturalists?”

  “I do. We preserve the natural dignity of the animal,” I said firmly. “We study them in the name of scientific inquiry. The creatures that were kept here were simply trophies, balm to the royal sense of self-importance.”

  “Yes, well, royal senses of self-importance require a lot of balming,” he reminded me. “And we still haven’t finished deciding who is behind the plot against you.”

  “Not the royal family, of that I am certain, in spite of your dim view of my father,” I began. “But I will concede that they have handlers, men who are highly placed and willing to turn a blind eye to a bit of bloody work if it will preserve the stability of the monarchy.”

  “A courtier, then. Very likely. And how does Mornaday fit into this?”

  I considered. “He might be a private detective, but he might also be precisely as he claims—an inspector with Scotland Yard. That would make him a reluctant ally to whichever puppet master pulls his strings. He claims he was tasked by his superior at Scotland Yard with monitoring our activities—perhaps even ordered to secure us. He has refused because he believes I am no threat, but his masters will not be appeased. He is torn between the
conflicting claim of duty and his own instincts. In that case, he does the only possible thing: he warns us to flee. He might be rapped on the knuckles for failing in his job, but he will not be ruined. And we escape the clutches of whatever forces at Scotland Yard are working against us.”

  “Not ‘whatever forces,’” Stoker corrected grimly. “There is only one division of Scotland Yard that would concern itself with royal scandal—Special Branch.”

  “I thought Special Branch were formed to deal with the Irish problem.”

  “Originally, yes. But they have expanded their purview over the past few years. Special Branch are discreet to the point of secrecy. If someone close to the royal family wanted something investigated on their behalf, they would go to Special Branch.”

  “How convenient to have so many people to clear up one’s indiscretions,” I said with a trace of bitterness. I felt a rush of cold wind. It was an atmospheric place, the Tower. The very stones seemed heavy with the memory of pain.

  We fell to silence, and I amused myself watching a Tower raven strut about, preening his handsome feathers as smugly as a lord. Legend held that if the ravens left the Tower, the monarchy itself would fall, and from his demeanor, it seemed as if this fellow knew his own importance.

  One of the guards strode past and the raven quorked irritably at him, scolding him in his throaty little voice. Stoker started to laugh, but I grasped his arm, digging my fingers into his muscle.

  “Stoker, what if Mornaday’s urging us to flee was a warning?”

  “Of course it was a warning,” he said, rolling his eyes. “A rather poor one considering it came after we had already been abducted.”

  “Not that,” I told him impatiently. “What if Mornaday knows of something else, some other danger.”