An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(20)

I shoved her letter aside and picked up another, this written on heavy paper embellished with the heading of the Sudbury Hotel. It was short and equally unsatisfying.


My dear Miss Speedwell,


I hope this note finds you well. I am writing to inform you that His Excellency, Chancellor von Rechstein, declines to address the matter you brought to our attention. With kind regards, Baroness Margareta von Wallenberg.



I shook the envelope, but there was nothing more. Only a single line of dismissal to indicate that nothing would be done to investigate the murder of Alice Baker-Greene. My chance to persuade Stoker to undertake this new adventure was at an end and I was, quite plainly, bereft.

But why? I had not known the woman well, I reminded myself. And countless miscarriages of justice were done every day. Why did this particular lack of conclusion feel so brutal?

I put this letter aside, shoving away the plate of duck. It was congealing now, and I had no appetite for it. I was conscious only of a keen, sharp-edged sense of loss. I had, by any measure, all that I could wish for. I was healthy and not uncomely. I had work I loved, friends I treasured, and a man for whom I would walk through fire—and, in fact, had upon occasion and in the most literal sense. I could find no reason for the overwhelming sense of agitation I felt, but I rebelled against it.

I had experienced such emotions once or twice before. The remedy, I had found, was movement. To hurl one’s few possessions into a carpetbag and embark for a new adventure was the only solace. To leave behind one’s woes in a damp and fogbound land, awaking in brilliant sunshine, the air heavy with spices and the promise of fresh endeavors, this was true happiness. A train bound for anywhere, a ship unfurling its sails for some new shore. Steam whistle and snapping canvas, those were the lullabies that soothed a savage soul. And I had no recourse to them, I reflected bitterly. For now that I had joined myself in affection to Stoker, I could no longer run from myself as I had once so blithely done. I must, instead, sit and face my demons.

For a long while—too long—I sat sulking in the gloom as the candles guttered out and the fire burned low. Unlike the Roman baths and the vivarium with their lavish steam heat, the follies had not been fitted with modern conveniences. It was left to me to tend my own modest hearth. After the clock had struck ten, I noticed a growing chill, something more insistent than the usual January cold. I opened the door of the folly, gazing up at the moon. It was waxing, very nearly full, a lopsided baroque pearl of a moon. But it was shrouded in grey shadows, rimmed with cold blue light, and I saw splinters of ice dancing in the glow of the doorway. I shut the door quickly against the brutal cold, stirring up the fire until it crackled merrily. I whistled to Vespertine, curling myself against his wiry, woolly warmth as I watched the flames. I could pretend to myself for just a little while that they were not plain London flames, kindled on a hearth of simple stone. They were the flames of a bonfire scented with herbs on a Corsican hillside, of a funeral pyre lavish with incense on a riverbank in India, of a cook fire in South America, smelling of roasting meats.

I smiled to myself, thinking of my adventures, and in due course, warmed by my memories and my dog, I slept.



* * *



? ? ?

I woke to bitter cold, the windows rimed with a narrow tracery of ice. I washed, gritting my teeth against the frigid water, and dressed in my warmest ensemble, a costume of heavy violet wool tweed with lapels of black velvet. I had had a little coat made of black velvet for Vespertine, but he gave me a reproachful look from under his heavy brows as I tried to fit it, preferring instead to bound out into the frosted gardens as soon as I opened the door. Betony, whose thick coat was meant for the wind-ravished steppes of the Caucasus, was romping happily in the brittle, frost-blackened grass whilst Huxley and Nut were nowhere to be seen. I found them, curled one on either side of Stoker as he finished his breakfast, his attention fixed upon the newspaper propped against the teapot.

I hastened upstairs to examine once more the file of cuttings on Alice Baker-Greene. There was no new information to be found. I had read every piece thoroughly the day before. I tossed them aside in exasperation. A single new snippet of information would be enough, I told myself. Just one small wisp to dangle in front of Stoker to coax him into action. I had no notion of what I required, only that there must be something to intrigue him, goading him to undertake the investigation of his own volition.

It took me less than a quarter of an hour to find it. An issue of the Daily Harbinger from the end of November. The Ripper news had settled into something less than hysteria, and one or two measured voices suggested his reign of terror might have come to an end. Without fresh victims to exploit, the Harbinger had been forced to revive other stories, raking them afresh to blaze back into the white-hot heat of scandal. And they had done their best with the meager details of Alice Baker-Greene’s death, revisiting the story of her fatal fall, this time with eyewitness accounts in lurid detail and assorted photographs. One picture I had seen before, the posed portrait of Alice on the Alpenwald, but it was bracketed with an earlier photograph of her standing atop a peak in the United States, suffragette banner in hand. The last was a particularly unappetizing funeral portrait of Alice lying in her coffin after her funeral.

My eyes flicked swiftly from the photograph to the byline and I found no surprises there. J. J. Butterworth from Hochstadt, the Alpenwald. Our old friend had taken herself off to the tiny principality to interview witnesses, no doubt embellishing their stories with a few enhancements of her own invention. She had included a summary of the coroner’s report—verdict: accidental death—as well as the formal testimony of Captain Durand, the commander of the princess’s personal guard and a frequent climber himself. He testified to witnessing Alice climb that day, explaining that it was a common pastime of the Alpenwalders to observe the tiny black dots of mountaineers through telescopes fixed to the castle balconies. He explained that her climb had begun much in the usual way and that he had watched her until she rounded the breast of the mountain, heading upwards to the unseen challenge of the devil’s staircase. Some minutes later, he revealed, he had heard a scream and then she had hurtled into view, falling from a terrible height to her instant death. Naturally, he rushed to the scene, as did many others who had witnessed her fall. The most usual route up the mountain, as sketched by the intrepid Miss Butterworth, began in a little wood just beyond the central square of Hochstadt, lying in a verdant green forest that nestled against the walls of the castle courtyard. To sit in one of the many biergartens with a warm glass of spiced wine or a cold stein of beer and watch the climbers toil up the mountain was one of the Alpenwalders’ favorite pastimes, it appeared. And dozens of people had watched Alice Baker-Greene fall to her death. There was nothing unusual in the circumstances, Captain Durand had insisted. A tragic accident and no more.