“I do not know, but I mean to find out,” I said with a grin. “Is it not a glorious thing to be embarked once more upon adventure?” I went to sit on his lap. It was not a posture I adopted often, but Stoker was always highly appreciative when I did so. He wrapped his arms about me and rested his head on my shoulder.
“Whatever did I do before you blazed into my life like a comet?”
I curled my fingers into the thick, tumbled waves of his hair and pulled his head back so I could look into his face. “I cannot imagine.”
The next few minutes were spent in a thoroughly satisfactory manner until a gentle cough from the doorway drew our attention. We sprang apart, upsetting the teapot which Stoker managed to catch in midair. He settled it back onto the tea table as I leapt to my feet with genuine delight.
“Lady Wellie!” Lord Rosemorran’s great aunt, Lady Wellingtonia, was a firm friend, as loyal as she was elderly, and she was, in her own estimation, older than the tombs of Egypt. She had been a frequent confidante in our earliest investigations, but one in particular had caused her to suffer from considerable disillusionment. She had taken herself off to Scotland to lick her wounds. She had travelled with her companion, an elderly, quite deaf, and amorously accomplished clergyman by the name of Cecil Baring-Ponsonby with her. Their Scottish sojourn had been followed by a tour of the Levant which was itself succeeded by a lengthy stay on one of the smaller Greek isles.
Her travels did not seem to have done her much good, I reflectedsadly. She walked always with the aid of a stick now, gripped in hands grown more gnarled than they had been a year before. And her complexion—always weathered—was grooved even more harshly by the bright sun and brisk winds of the Aegean. But her eyes were the same brilliant black they had ever been, missing nothing in their sharp scrutiny like a clever bird or a watchful crocodile.
Stoker jumped to offer his chair, and she thanked him, settling herself with a sigh. “I am sorry to come among you unawares, children. I did knock,” she added with a sly grin.
“Nonsense,” I said briskly. “Your company is always most welcome. And unexpected! His lordship did not mention you were coming home.”
“He did not know. I had no fixed plan, but a fortnight ago, I woke one morning and realised I was heartily sick of lamb, so I roused Cecil and told him to make the arrangements. I was, although I despair of the sentimentality of the word, homesick.”
“You have chosen a poor time to return,” Stoker pointed out. “Autumn is hardly London at its best.”
She snorted by way of reply. “You tell no lies, my boy. My rheumatics started as soon as we sailed into English waters. I can hardly walk for this hip.” She thumped the offending spot with her fist. “Still, it is good to be home. I have only just arrived and made my greetings to the family. I see Rosemorran still has all of those frightful children.” She gestured towards the bonnet perched on the tamarin. “I suspect that is Rose’s doing.”
“Naturally,” Stoker told her with a smile.
“As is the corpse,” she added, baring her teeth at him.
“You’ve come to see the waxwork?” I inquired.
“Not a waxwork,” she corrected. “Unless Rosemorran has the wrong end of the stick. He said you found a body inside. Show me.”
We did as commanded, unshrouding the glass coffin once more. She said little, surveying the features of the Beauty for some time inperfect silence. Once, she motioned for a magnifying glass, peering through it for a long minute before handing it back to Stoker.
“I presume you have theories?”
I laid out what little we knew. “We believe she may be a drowning victim pulled from Regent’s Canal in 1873. She was never identified, and there appears to be some little confusion about what became of the body.”
Her gaze sharpened. “How so?”
“She was taken to Plumtree and Son, a mortuary in Chelsea where they commissioned a death mask for publication in the newspaper with a plea for information. The mask was apparently never finished and the notice never inserted.”
“1873?” Lady Wellie’s eyes turned heavenwards as she thought. “A Carlist War was being fought in Spain. There was rioting in Chipping Norton in favour of a group of women sentenced to hard labour for their efforts to organise agricultural workers. Schliemann discovered Troy. And in the city was a dreadful outbreak of cholera, if memory serves.” It did, of course. Memory would never dare disappoint her. She shifted her attention to us. “Any of those might have proven more interesting to the editors of the newspapers than a solitary unidentified drowned girl.”
“But if it were simply that,” I countered, “then she ought to have been laid to rest in a pauper’s grave like the rest of the unknown dead in this city.”
“She was not?” Lady Wellie’s brows rose in interest.
“No,” Stoker told her. “The records at Plumtree’s indicate she was buried in their own cemetery in Berkshire, but we have discovered that to be impossible. She simply vanished.”
Lady Wellie nodded towards the coffin. “Or did she? Yes, I think you must entertain William of Ockham’s principle here. One cannot have both the vanishing corpse of a drowned young woman and a well-preserved specimen with the same characteristics and no connectionbetween them. It is too much of a coincidence to be borne.” Stoker made to guide her to the chair again, but she waved him off, wrapping her hands around the knob of her walking stick. Her fingers were twisted and heavy with old, filthy diamonds of enormous size. “If I sit again, I may well never get out of that chair. One despises growing old, but”—she gestured towards the coffin—“if the alternative is that, I suppose one must be reconciled.”
She turned to me. “Come with me as I unpack, child.” I knew Lady Wellie enough to understand it was not so much an invitation as a command. She said “I” but the clever reader will immediately intuit that Lady Wellie stirred herself to as little labour as possible besides the handing over of presents purchased on her travels. The actual work was done by a bevy of maids, cap ribbons snapping and aprons fluttering as they dashed to and fro under her beady eye.
“That is a very rare specimen of the blue-rumped parrot, my dear girl,” she told one unfortunate maid who was in danger of mishandling a stuffed trophy. “I mean it as a present for Mr. Templeton-Vane, and if you muss so much as a feather on its head, I shall send you to Borneo to fetch another.”
The harried maid thrust it into my hands, and I set it aside with all due care. “How is it you have a Bornean parrot when you went no further east than Jerusalem?” I inquired.
Lady Wellie slanted me an enigmatic look. “I had it off a trader in Cairo.”
“Stoker would be the first to tell you not to indulge in such extravagance on his behalf,” I told her.