“And your mama never lets me forget you might have been a marchioness if I hadn’t paid court to you myself and let Harwich get on with it. You’d have married him and gone on to be mother to a new generation of hypochondriacs,” Rupert put in dryly before turning to us. “Again, what do you want with Ambrose?”
“It is rather difficult to explain,” I said with a smile. “And we have taken up so much of your valuable time already.”
“Oh, do tell,” Lavinia urged. “I hear so little interesting gossip.”
“Very well,” I began. “Apparently Lord Ambrose is a keen collector of teaching mannequins, wax models of the female form that are completely correct, as it were. As intact as a human woman. They are sometimes known as Anatomical Venuses. I am told the level of detail is extraordinary even to the inclusion of pubic—”
Rupert surged out of his chair and made directly for the writing desk in the corner. “Say no more.” He dashed off a few words on a sheet of writing paper headed with his name and arms, then signed it with a flourish before stuffing it into an envelope. “There you are. An introduction.”
I took it with a smile of real affection. “Thank you, Rupert. Very good of you, I am sure. Do get some rest, and try a mustard plaster on your chest before that cough gets worse.”
He nodded and thrust the envelope into my hands. “I shall. In fact, I think I will go upstairs this very minute. Good afternoon,” he said, herding us into the entrance hall. He turned back into the drawing room and banged the door closed as Lavinia walked us out.
Stoker took an affectionate leave of his sister-in-law and thanked her handsomely for the tea. He started down the front stairs to the pavement as Lavinia leant down to me, pitching her voice low.
“Entirely anatomically correct?” she asked.
“So I am given to understand.”
She paused, her expression thoughtful. “Do come again for tea when you know for certain. I should love to hear all about it.”
“I will,” I promised her. I kissed her good-bye and turned to go.
“Oh, and Veronica?
“Yes, Lavinia?”
“Ask if there is such a thing as an Anatomical Adonis, will you?”
CHAPTER
7
In deference to the baleful weather and the unsociability of the hour between tea and dinner, Stoker and I chose to postpone our visit to Lord Ambrose and retreated to the Belvedere where we enjoyed our evening meal amongst the comfortable chaos of dogs, books, paintings, natural history specimens, weapons, sculptures, and the occasional mummy. Given the eccentric and eclectic nature of our surroundings, the glass casket with its waxen figure did not seem altogether out of place. We had replaced her after Lord Rosemorran’s visit—as much for her dignity as to preserve the state of her. Changes in temperature and humidity could only cause her to decay, a thoroughly unappetising thought when one considered that we took most of our meals in the Belvedere.
“I do hope we shall discover her name,” I said as Stoker applied himself to the last of the apple blancmange Cook had sent up to follow the roast duck and trimmings.
He looked up, his gaze resting upon the slumbering form. “More to the point, I hope we discover who did this to her.”
“You are convinced it was some act of violence that led her to being thus preserved?”
“How can it not?” he asked. He laid aside his spoon—a sure sign of his preoccupation. “No young woman of respectable family would have gone missing without some hue and cry being raised.”
“What makes you think her family were respectable?” I put in. “She may well have been an unfortunate wretch who made her living by her wits. We have seen enough of those women in the course of our adventures.” I paused and in the silence which followed I knew we were both thinking of the audacious Elsie—“From Chelsea, loves!”—the irrepressible lady of the night whose path had crossed ours in the course of two separate investigations. And any thought of Elsie must conjure a memory of the brief time we had spent with her friend, Mary Jane Kelly, a pretty, generous girl whose life had been snuffed out at the hands of a fiend.[*]
Stoker shook his head slowly. “I cannot say why I am certain she was not a creature of the streets, but I am.”
I shrugged. “You are an observant man by nature and your skills have been honed by experience. No doubt you saw something in your brief examination of her body from which you drew subtle conclusions.”
“Perhaps.” He dropped a hand to ruffle the ears of Betony, Lord Rosemorran’s Caucasian sheepdog, who—like most females who encountered Stoker—had fallen completely under his spell. She responded by rolling her eyes back ecstatically in her head. Beside her, Nut the pharaoh hound and Huxley the bulldog awaited their turn along with my newest acquisition, an Italian greyhound that shivered in spite of the tiny sweaters Stoker had knitted for her.
“Et tu, Al-‘Ijliyyah?” I asked repressively. Of all the animals in our menagerie, only Vespertine the deerhound preferred my company, often resting in noble composure at my feet. The greyhound, naturally, did not answer my question, and I turned back to Stoker, following thetrain of thought to its logical conclusion. “If the cursory examination you made led you to draw inferences about the Beauty—”
“The what?”
“The Beauty. We must call her something, and she is, after all, a sort of Sleeping Beauty, is she not? In any event, the Beauty revealed some small part of her secrets to you during your first encounter with her.”
“And?” His hand continued to stroke Betony’s ears but his gaze was wary.