The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist #2)(50)

“John did not feel up to attending.”

“So you came alone?”

“Would that disappoint you, Pellinore?”

“Actually, I am pleased to find you here.”

“I sense a thinly veiled insult coming.”

“It must mean he’s much improved—for you to abandon his bedside to dance the night away with other men.”

“Do you know it isn’t your lack of humor that makes you so boring, Pellinore. It’s your predictability.”

She was smiling, but her banter was forced, the lines delivered from an actress who could not identify with her character. The doctor, of course, detected her discomfiture at once.

“Muriel,” he said, “what is it?”

“It’s nothing. Really.” She looked directly into his dark eyes and said beseechingly, “Tell me what happened. John says he doesn’t remember, but I don’t know whether I can . . .”

“I can speak only of the aftermath,” the doctor answered. “The rest—the part I suppose you’d like to know—is speculation, Muriel.”

She waited for him to go on. A few feet away the dance went on, a confusion of whirling color, black and white, red and gold.

“And I do not speculate,” he added.

“He’s changed,” she said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“I don’t mean physically. Though that, too. . . . He hasn’t eaten a decent meal since we returned. He tries . . . and gags to the point of choking. And he won’t . . . He doesn’t want to keep himself properly groomed. You know what a stickler he was about hygiene, Pellinore. I have to bathe him after he falls asleep. But the worst . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . The vacancy, Pellinore . . . He is there . . . and he is not there.”

“Patience, Muriel. It’s been less than three weeks.”

She shook her head. “That is not what I mean. I am his wife. I knew the man who went into the wilderness. I do not know the man who came out of it.”

At that moment Damien Gravois appeared at her side. “There you are,” he cried softly. “I thought I had lost you.”

Muriel smiled down upon his glowing countenance; he was a good two inches shorter.

“Monsieur Henry asked me for a dance,” she teased. “S’il vous plait, pardonnez-moi.”

“Bien sûr, but if Monsieur Henry persists in these outrageous attempts to steal my date away, I shall challenge him to a duel.”

He turned to the doctor. “Now, Pellinore, I am taking the wagers for this year.” He pulled a slip of paper from his waistcoat. “I still have nine twenty, ten fifteen, and eleven thirty open if you’d care to—”

“Gravois, you know I do not gamble.”

He shrugged. Muriel laughed lightly at my bewildered expression. “For the fight, Will. It happens every year.”

“The later times book up quickly,” put in Gravois. “The alcohol.”

“Who fights?” I asked.

“Practically everyone. The Germans always start it,” Gravois said with a sniff.

“It was the Swiss contingent last year,” Muriel said.

“You realize how utterly absurd that is,” Gravois said. “The Swiss!”

“There are few things more hopelessly ridiculous, Will Henry,” said the doctor, “than an all-out brawl among scientists.”

The brawl began a little after ten o’clock—at ten twenty-three precisely, according to Gravois’s watch (he was the designated timekeeper for that year)—when an Italian monstrumologist named Giuseppe Giovanni accidentally (or so claimed Dr. Giovanni later) bumped into the date of a Greek colleague, causing her to spill her champagne down the front of her silk gown. The Greek rewarded the Italian’s clumsiness with a roundhouse blow to the side of Giovanni’s head, which sent his pince-nez flying across the room and into the back of the head of a Dutchman named Vander Zanden, who perceived that the man dancing behind him—a French colleague of Gravois’s—had reached out and flicked him with his forefinger. The ensuing melee cleared the dance floor. Chairs smashed. Glasses and bottles shattered. Men shuffled across the floor with their arms wrapped around each other, impotently pounding their new partners on the back. The band played a rather rollicking ditty for a few minutes until the musicians were forced to flee after two men jumped onto the little stage and grabbed the music stands to hurl at each other’s heads. The police were called to break it up—the duty falling, again, to Gravois, the self-designated master of ceremonies—but it was all but over by the time the police arrived.

“Who won the pool?” asked the doctor afterward.

“You will not believe this, Pellinore,” answered Gravois.

“You did.”

“It is a miracle, is it not?”

“Pity John couldn’t be here,” Warthrop said, taking in the devastation. “This was always his favorite part of the colloquium.”

He did not speak to me until we returned to the Plaza.

“Don’t do it now, but when we get to the door, take a look behind us, Will Henry. I believe we are being followed.”

I followed his instructions, turning at the entrance to the hotel, whereupon I saw hurrying across Fifth Avenue a tall, gangly man of around twenty, a bowler hat pulled low over his ears. He was dressed in a shabby black jacket and threadbare trousers, the knees of which were worn nearly clear through.