“I think you should examine her again—properly this time. We may learn a good deal.”
His hand stilled. “I don’t want to.” His voice, a strong and resonant baritone, rumbled soft and low with a note of something akin to pleading.
“Whyever not? Death is your trade,” I reminded him with a broad gesture towards the dozens of taxidermic trophies scattered about the Belvedere.
“Animals,” he countered. “I work with animals, and the purpose of my work is to make them seem lifelike again, to restore dignity to what remains of them. Prodding that poor girl would feel wrong. Disrespectful.” I remembered then a similar discussion on the subject of mummies during our third investigation. Stoker had held forth with considerable passion on the inherent dignity of the dead and our responsibility as the living to respect it.
“I understand,” I told him gently. “She is no longer a fairground attraction, fashioned of wax for the masses to pay a tuppence to gawk at. She was a person—isa person. And that person deserves justice if she was mishandled. What if you are correct and there is a family that grieves her still? Do they not deserve answers? And even if it is not possible to find them, does she not deserve our best efforts at justice?”
I could see my words were beginning to sway him. A tiny muscleworked furiously in his jaw as his hand tensed on Betony’s head. She nuzzled nearer to him, and he lowered his face to the thick fur.
“Stoker?”
When he raised his head, he wore an expression of resignation. “I suppose if I refuse you will carry on, making appeals to my emotions?”
“I am making sound logical arguments in appeal to your intellect,” I corrected. “You know as well as I do that the first step of any scientific inquiry is observation. Everything else flows from that.”
“And you will continue posing these logical arguments until I capitulate?”
“I will. I have just eaten a hearty meal, and I enjoyed an excellent sleep last night. I can do this for hours,” I promised him.
He heaved a gusty sigh of surrender. “I am well acquainted with your stamina, Veronica. Very well. If we are going to do this, then let us get on with the thing and have done with it.”
***
It was the work of some few minutes to prepare. Although the unfortunate Beauty was already dead, we instinctively wished to preserve some semblance of modesty in our researches as well as affording her every possible respect. To that end, we sent the dogs to the mews with the stable boy and made our preparations. The examination would require greater care and more intense observation than Stoker’s previous efforts. Every lamp that could be found was brought along with a selection of mirrors to illuminate our makeshift mortuary.
Stoker collected various implements of the surgeon’s trade—and the taxidermist’s, although that was not an altogether happy thought—and we moved silently to our task. I helped him remove the glass lid of the casket. In the lamplight, her skin glowed, gilded alabaster with a rosy hue that lingered just below the surface.
“Extraordinary,” I murmured. “One almost expects her to speak.”
“I hope to Christ not,” Stoker muttered in reply. The nearer we came to the crucial moment, the darker his mood, and I did not hold it against him. Men are seldom cheerful when they have been persuaded out of an emotional state into rationality. They are, in my experience, creatures of feeling rather than thought, and one must make allowances.
I carried on, ignoring his lowering mood, and helped him to gently lift the Beauty once more onto the worktable. Her limbs were neither entirely pliable nor did they exhibit the stiffness one associates with corpses of some age.
“I noted before that she is lighter than one might expect given her height and her apparent state of health at her death,” I observed. “She was not undernourished.”
“It is to do with the water,” Stoker said in an absent tone. “Whatever method was used to preserve her must first have removed the water from her tissues. Water is the author of destruction, hastening decomposition.”
“Hence the Egyptians’ use of natron salts to desiccate the mummies,” I replied.
“Just so.” He bent near to her skin, observing the texture closely through a magnifying glass. “But natron has not been used here. It is a harsh method, drawing out every drop of moisture from the body and leaving only the withered husk behind. Mark the nature of her skin. If she had been treated with natron, it would have the texture of old leather. But she is fresh and dewy as a flower.”
A less robustly confident woman than myself might have issued a sigh of irritation at his obvious admiration of her charms, but I am nothing if not entirely secure within myself.
“Did you say something?” Stoker raised his head.
“Nothing whatsoever,” I told him firmly.
We removed her clothing a second time with a slow, almostreligious reverence, putting the garments aside for further inspection after we had finished with the Beauty herself. Following this, Stoker scrutinised her from head to toe with the glass, prodding and peering, and making occasional sotto voce remarks to himself.
“Anything of note?” I asked dryly when he had finished his extremely thorough examination.
“Nothing obvious to indicate a cause of death, if that is what you mean,” he said. “There are no marks of violence—not a stab wound or garrote mark. No markers of poison either.”
“Would they be detectable?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The most common and lethal poisons, yes. Discolourations of fingernails or skin are the most common. Burn marks around the mouth for corrosive acids, that sort of thing. I shall take a small sample of her hair to perform a Marsh test for arsenic, but I suspect it will prove negative.”