We had offered Julius the hospitality of Stoker’s little temple whilst Stoker spent the night with me in my Gothic chapel. Sleep proved elusive. We were eager to embark upon the next phase of our investigations, and notes had been dispatched to Mornaday and J. J., requesting their appearance as early as possible. But it was neither of them who knocked upon the door of the Belvedere as Stoker and I finished breakfasting. Stoker went to answer whilst I broke pieces of sausage for the dogs.
“Miss Trevelyan!” I heard Stoker exclaim. “What brings you to us?”
He escorted her in and urged her to a chair—none too soon from the look of her.
The creature who seated herself seemed a wraith of the woman who had called upon us with Eliza Elyot. Her hair, always untidy, had taken on a life of its own, struggling from its pins to spill down her back in a tangled snarl. Violet crescents shadowed her eyes, and her extreme pallor was the sort favoured by fashionable girls or wasting consumptives. Only her lips bore any colour, the incarnadine shade of having been gnawed in her distress. She moved, endlessly and restlessly, always plucking at her skirts or twisting her fingers together. The nails were bitten tothe quick, and it occurred to me that no part of Undine Trevelyan had escaped her own depredations.
“Miss Trevelyan.” Stoker spoke with the gentleness he invariably employed when faced with women in distress, but she started violently. He softened his voice further still. “I am glad you have come to us. Whatever grieves you, Miss Speedwell and I will render you aid, you have my promise.”
She opened her mouth, but no sound issued forth. She swallowed hard, then tried again, managing a hoarse, rusting voice. “It is Eliza. She would not go to Miss Fleet’s as you suggested. We returned to our lodgings instead, but Eliza left soon after and told me to remain there. She would only say that she had business to attend. That was just after we left you. I dare not go to the police—she told me most particularly that I must stay at home until she came, but she has not. What am I meant to do?” Her appeal was piteous as she looked from one of us to the other.
“Miss Trevelyan,” I began in a soft, deliberate tone, “there is no delicacy I may employ which will make our news palatable to you.”
Her eyes flared. “Eliza—you have news of her? Is she ill? Is she hurt?”
“We presume she is physically unharmed,” Stoker assured her. “But she may be in some trouble. In fact, we are certain of it.”
Undine clutched the arms of the chair as if they were her sole anchor to the earth itself. She swayed a little and I reached for my vinaigrette, but she shook her head. “I am all right. Tell me.”
“We think she may have harmed someone else,” Stoker told her.
“Ambrose Despard,” she whispered.
Stoker and I exchanged startled glances. “You anticipated this?” I asked.
“No,” she replied fiercely. “I did not. Neveranticipated.”
“But you do not disbelieve us,” I pressed.
She shook her head, dropping her gaze to her lap. “No. I know wellenough what Eliza is capable of.” Slowly, deliberately, she folded back the edge of her sleeve. A narrow purple line braceleted the wrist; on the inside of the forearm, five plum-coloured finger marks stood in stark relief against the pale flesh. I thought of Undine’s watchfulness during our previous meeting, the way her eyes never left Eliza’s face. I had mistaken it for devotion, but perhaps it had been the wariness of a mongoose considering a cobra.
“She mistreated you.” Stoker’s manner was perfectly calculated to inspire confidences, entirely free of judgement or blame, and yet Undine, steeped in loyalty, hastened to defend Eliza.
“Not at first,” she said faintly. “Not for a long time, in fact. We were happy together. We made a home.” She shoved the sleeve down, covering the marks of Eliza’s violence. “I sensed in her some strength that I lack, some talent greater than my own.”
“Miss Fleet says you are an artist of great promise,” I told her.
She managed something that was not quite a smile. “Perhaps once. But not for a long time. It was a question of money, you see. When we set up housekeeping—” She paused, her colour flaring high, but she held up her chin, refusing to apologise for the unconventional life she had led. “We had very little money. At first, it seemed romantic, like something from Murger’s novel of Bohemian life. I remember snow falling through the roof and onto our bed the first winter and thinking it splendid to suffer together.” She shuddered. “But one must eat. And a crust shared is still a crust. At Eliza’s urging, I took commissions, wretched things that paid hardly enough to keep us in bread and coal. Every penny I earned, she counted and spent. Finally, a day came when there were no pennies to be had. Even the pittance Lord Ambrose paid would no longer stretch to our expenses. That is when she showed me the truth of who she was.”
“And by then you could not leave her?” Stoker asked gently.
“I cannot explain it in a way that anyone else would understand,” she said in sudden frustration. “How to make you see that she was a genius, tortured and brilliant? That I felt honoured to be near her? That it was a privilege to keep her fed, to feel the warmth of her attention and affection? Knowing all that she had lost made her pitiable in my eyes but also magnificent. Who else could rise, phoenixlike, from all she had suffered?”
I might have pointed out that Eliza Elyot had not risen at all save for treading on Undine’s own back, but it seemed unkind. I remained silent and she went on.
“I vacillated between admiring her more than any person I have ever known and dreading the sound of her step upon the stair. I never knew which I would encounter, the friendless soul in need of succour? The frustrated scientist who longed for purposeful work? She is an ever-changing mystery to me, and that has been my greatest torment and my keenest joy. Until now.”
She dropped her head into her hands for a long moment. She made no sound, but when she raised her gaze to ours, unshed tears shimmered in her eyes.
“She did not say where she was bound when she left our lodgings, but I believe she meant to go to Lord Ambrose, to confront him about Julius being alive all these years, about the lies he had told her. She wanted answers for his treachery, and she believed she deserved them.”
“Did she take any sort of weapon?” Stoker inquired.
Undine paused, then nodded. “For economy’s sake, I sometimes reuse canvases. When I pry them loose from their stretchers and cut them down, an awl is occasionally necessary to start a hole to fix the nail to the new stretcher. My awl was missing after Eliza left.”
An awl was an inspired weapon, I thought. Light enough to be easilywielded by a woman, sharp and precise, small enough to fit into a lady’s reticule.
“And it was there before she left?” Stoker asked.