An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(3)
Stoker and I exchanged glances again. After a few of our more recent adventures, I had had quite enough of princesses, but Stoker’s concern was more pragmatic.
“Surely you do not mean to present me,” he said gently.
Stoker’s status as a man whose marriage had ended in divorce put him socially beyond the pale. He could never be presented at Court, nor would any member of the royal family or the highest circles of society recognize him in public. This troubled him not at all; in fact, on more than one occasion he observed he would have divorced his mildly homicidal wife far earlier if he had known it would result in people leaving him in peace.
Lady C.’s expression was one she did not often adopt, but it was sternly effective. She could not bear hypocrisy, and the notion that Stoker should be ostracized for divorce when almost every member of refined society was cheerfully committing adultery was one she found enraging.
“I have spoken to the princess’s entourage and made it quite clear that the dictates of the Hippolyta Club forbidding exclusion on the grounds of marital status are to be honored, regardless of royal custom.”
I grinned at him. “You know the rules, Stoker. We do not discriminate against the divorced here, but the fact that you are a man means you are welcome only on sufferance.”
I turned back to Lady C. “And I am to be presented as well?”
“As one of the official representatives of the club,” she said, clearly expecting I would appreciate the honor.
I thought of what would most likely be endlessly boring rules on protocol and forced conversation with a princess who would most likely be dull in the extreme if not actively stupid. I bared my teeth in a smile. “What an unexpected delight,” I told her. “I cannot wait.”
CHAPTER
2
The next few days were ones of frantic activity, with more boxes being delivered from Alice Baker-Greene’s grandmother. That imperious old lady sent each with lengthy instructions on how the memorabilia were to be displayed written in a firm, bold hand. There was a small crate filled with tiny belts and pickaxes—a child’s collection of climbing gear. I brandished the murderous little things at Stoker.
“Can you imagine learning to climb as a child?” I asked.
Stoker looked up from where he was applying lavish amounts of glue to a sculpted base. “Did she?”
“She did indeed. Her grandmother taught her. Have you not read Climbing in the Peaks: A Lady Mountaineer’s Guide to the Pennines by Mrs. Pompeia Baker-Greene?”
“I have not,” he admitted.
I curled a lip. “She is a pioneer of the alpinist movement, a founding fellow of the Hippolyta Club, and yet you haven’t read her magnum opus. You are a dreadfully lax explorer.”
He gave me a repressive look. “I have had rather a busy time of it lately,” he reminded me. He was not entirely wrong. Between sleuthing out murderers, cataloging the Rosemorran Collection, and allowing ourselves to experience the rumbustious pleasures of the flesh, we had had little time to spare for hobbies.
“It is quite a good read, although she does spend rather a lot of time discussing rocks. Mountaineers do love their rocks,” I added wistfully. “In any event, she chronicles her attempt first to teach her son to climb as a child still in skirts and later her granddaughter.”
“Where is her son now? Alice Baker-Greene’s father?” he asked as I plucked a jaunty little Tyrolean cap from the box.
“Dead,” was my succinct reply. “A climbing accident in the Karakoram.”
“Two climbing deaths in one family?” He gave a visible shudder. “How unspeakably tragic.”
“Three, actually,” I corrected. “Pompeia Baker-Greene’s husband, Alice’s grandfather, also perished on a mountainside. Somewhere in the Andes, if memory serves.”
“I wonder what on earth drives them to it?” he asked, almost more of himself than of me.
He returned to his diorama, gathering up a handful of fresh, springy moss to apply to the damp glue. “The same that keeps us at it,” I surmised. “The thirst to net each new specimen or mount each new mammal. There is nothing in natural history that is not new again every time we encounter it, no greater mystery than things that exist apart from man and with no interest in us.”
“How poetic,” he murmured before favoring me with a few appropriate lines from Keats. There were always appropriate lines from Keats, I had learnt from my association with Stoker. He maintained that there was not a single occasion to which a few stanzas might not be applied. I had, during one rather notable interlude, challenged Stoker to produce a fitting quote, and I can only say that what followed was highly instructive although not wholly coherent, diverted as he was by my own distracting efforts at the time.
I rummaged in the drifts of excelsior in the box, finding a few unremarkable books—a selection of climbing memoirs and geological surveys with a decrepit and outdated collection of flora and fauna, all inscribed by various family members now perished on assorted mountainsides. At last there was nothing left to the box but bare boards and a single photograph.
I extracted it, wiping the last shreds of excelsior free. The photograph was framed in rosewood inlaid with a mountain motif of darker woods and mother-of-pearl. It depicted a woman posed against an outcropping of rock, a light dusting of snow on the ground. She was dressed in a lady’s mountaineering garb, a coil of rope slung across her torso, ice axe poised at her side, a jaunty spotted handkerchief knotted at her throat. Her face was turned to the camera and her expression was serene, guarded almost. But there was no mistaking the faint lines of good humor at her eyes and mouth. She was just past the first flush of youth and had obviously never been a beauty, yet it would have been apparent to anyone unacquainted with her that this was a woman of great strength of character and irrepressible spirit.