1
Bavaria, September 1889
You must not go into the forest
at night," the innkeeper warned, his voice trembling with fear.
"Something dangerous walks there in the darkness."
He carried on
in this vein for some time as I applied myself to a stein of Weissbier
and a plate of crisp, excellent sausages. My friend and travelling
companion, the Viscount Templeton-Vane, listened politely as the fellow
grew more vehement.
"The creature that walks by night, it is part
wolf, part man. It has but one eye, the other a gaping hole of deepest
black. It keeps to the shadows, and if you dare to come near, it snarls
like a bear," he went on, his eyes round in his chubby, shiny face. He
was a character straight from a storybook, plump and bearded, an imp of a
fellow, with lines of good humour etched upon his face. But there was
no mirth to be found upon his visage as he told his tale, only fear,
brightening his eyes and causing his mouth to tremble ever so slightly.
Behind
him, a lurking barmaid whose ample charms were scarcely contained by
the lacing of her dirndl threw her apron over her head and fled through
the door to the kitchens.
The viscount-Tiberius to his
friends-quirked up one expressive brow. "My good man, calm yourself.
Surely this is some piece of local lore meant to frighten the feeble. We
English are made of sterner stuff."
"But it is true," the fellow
insisted, colour pinkening the cheeks above the white fringe of his
beard. He glanced around and lowered his voice. "I have seen it, a
hulking shadow, moving in the silence of the firs. And when I stepped in
its direction, it reared back and it growled with the fiendish fury of a
hound of Hell."
Tiberius, usually a man of cool logic, looked startled. "Growled, you say?"
"Like a wolf," the man confirmed.
I
sighed. It was time to put an end to this. "My good man," I said
politely to the innkeeper, "whilst I must concede that your use of
alliteration is impressive, I think we can dismiss the notion of a
hybrid monster roaming these mountains."
He gave me a look of profound injury and slunk away, muttering.
Tiberius
met my gaze. "Can we? I realise the local folk are a superstitious lot,
but how exactly would you explain the existence of such a creature?"
I
ticked off the qualities as I said them. "A tall, unsociable creature
that keeps to the shadows, shuns the society of respectable people, and
growls its displeasure? Tell me, who does that seem to describe?"
Tiberius' mouth went slack, then curved into a smile. "You mean-"
"Yes, Tiberius. I think we have, at long last, found your brother."
The
Honourable Revelstoke Templeton-Vane-Stoker, familiarly-had not been
lost so much as slightly misplaced. For some months Stoker and I had
enjoyed an intimate relationship that had proven thoroughly fulfilling,
indeed enrapturing, in all the particulars. We were work colleagues,
engaged in the endlessly fascinating task of preparing museum exhibits
for our employer, Lord Rosemorran. We were also neighbours, each of us
inhabiting a small folly on his lordship’s Marylebone estate.
And
we were occasional partners in detection, as falling over corpses had
become something of a habit. In short, our lives were so fully entwined
it was difficult to say where one left off and the other began. We
enjoyed it all-from the scientific work to the investigation of crime,
to the exuberant physicality of our more private endeavours. (Stoker is
singularly suited to the amatory arts through a combination of bodily
charms, robust stamina, and an enchanting thoroughness that might have
startled a less experienced or enthusiastic partner than I.)
But
following a painful interlude, Stoker had taken himself off to nurse his
wounded feelings. When last he and I had been together, there had been a
complication regarding my marital status. Not a complication so much as
a husband-one I had believed dead and whose resurrection was most
unwelcome. The fact that we had nearly died as a result of Harry's
dramatic appearance into our lives had not endeared him to Stoker, and
he had taken his leave of England whilst still believing me bound
forever to a man with criminous tendencies. As his parting words had
been a directive to grant him time and privacy to smooth his ruffled
feathers, I had naturally concurred. By the next morning he was gone,
leaving only a hastily scribbled line to explain he was off to Germany
in pursuit of a trophy-as a natural historian, his employment entailed
procuring and improving a vast array of specimens-but no invitation to
join him ensued.
At almost precisely the same moment, a letter
had arrived from Tiberius urging me to come to Italy, where he had
persuaded his hostess, an aging papal marquise, to part with a prized
collection of rare birdwing butterflies. I am, first and foremost, a
lepidopterist. I did not hesitate to pack my carpetbag and board the
first train out of London. Through the end of the spring and the whole
of that summer I accompanied Tiberius as he made his way through Italy,
sending boxes of butterflies back to Lord Rosemorran's burgeoning
museum.
From Stoker, I had not a single line, although Lord
Rosemorran frequently alluded to Stoker's peregrinations through the
Black Forest in his own letters. I thus had a vague idea of where Stoker
was, and I was not at all distressed by our lack of communication. I
knew two things: the depth of our feelings for one another and the fact
that absence makes the heart as well as the libido grow stronger. I had
little doubt that Stoker missed me-all of me.
No, the fact that
he had taken his leave so abruptly and with no effort at a proper
good-bye did not distress me in the slightest. And while another woman
might have grown increasingly irritated that the post forwarded from
England brought not the merest scrap of a postcard, to say nothing of a
proper letter, I naturally devoted myself entirely to the study of
lepidoptery. I passed my days in hunting specimens that flittered and
fluttered from the Dolomites to the Sicilian hills and back again. I
grew leaner and more firmly muscled from scrambling over peaks and
pastures. I set out at daybreak each morning from our lodgings, when the
night's dew still bespangled the grasses at my feet. I did not return
until the languid golden sun dropped beyond the horizon, leaving a few
last gentle rays to show me the way back. I never used my net; its
presence was merely a habit from my previous expeditions. Instead I
followed the butterflies, making careful study of their mazy
meanderings, their behaviours and habitats.
And when I returned
to the solitude of my room, I spent long hours writing up my findings
both for my private notes and for publication in the Aurelian journals.
Invariably, I dropped into bed exhausted by my exertions, only to rise
at dawn and repeat the process. Not for me the languid evening passed in
mournful contemplation of the distance-both literal and
figurative-between myself and the person I considered to be my twinned
soul. I would not permit myself to waste away in pining and regret. I
had the celibate consolations of science, and I made full advantage of
them.
If I am to be strictly honest within these pages-and I have
sworn to be so-then I will admit to the occasional wakeful night or
interminable afternoon when I found my thoughts inhabited by his
familiar form and face. When these moods came upon me, so strong was my
longing for him, it required all of my discipline to refrain from
flinging my things into a bag and dashing to him. The only remedy was
another strenuous day spent in pursuit of my studies, driving myself
physically harder than ever before even as I enumerated his flaws. I
catalogued them as I strode the Italian hills, whipping up my annoyance.
"What
sort of man just leaves? And without so much as a proper kiss
good-bye," I muttered to the nearest rock in a fit of particular
frustration on the isle of Capri. "What kind of fellow thinks it is
acceptable simply to disappear for months on end and send no assurances
of his well-being? Not a telegram, not a semaphore flag, not so much as a
hint of a postcard with his current address? An ass," I told the rock.
But
even as I said the words, I knew Stoker was not entirely to blame. He
had left still believing I was the wife of another man. Only a handful
of hours had passed between Stoker's departure and my learning the truth
of my marital status-that I was not, and never had been, legally
married.
Why then did I leap at Tiberius' invitation instead of rushing after Stoker to stop him before he left England?
It
was some months before I could face the answer: I was a coward. When I
learnt of Stoker's resolve to leave, to take time for himself to
consider our attachment, my initial reaction, the longing of my heart,
had been to go to him. And therein lay my terror. I, who had laboured
and loved independent of real connection for so long, was entirely and
besottedly enraptured with this man. When I most had need of a
confidant, I had not turned to him out of fear of dependency, and when
he left, the desire to run to him had kindled that fear once more.
So
I drove it out with hard physical exercise, with time and distance,
hoping I could blunt the sharp edge of my resistance to committing
myself fully to Stoker. My demeanour, ordinarily so tranquil as to be
remarkable, was frequently waspish as I came back, always, to the fact
that even if I wanted to go to him, he had insisted upon the gift of
time. If time was what he wanted, he should have all the time in the
world, I decided. In fact, I would grow weary and withered and ancient
before I would stir a single step towards him. If I suffered from the
loss of his company, then he should suffer as well, I decided. I had my
dignity, after all.
I do not know how long I might have
maintained my lofty determination to wait for him to make the first
move. I might still be wandering the Lombard hills, butterfly net in
hand, had Tiberius not appeared one morning at breakfast, bags packed
and travel arranged. Our hotel, a converted castello, was very fine and
comfortable but with few of the comforts so beloved of the English
traveller. The beds were hard, the pillows nonexistent, and the
mosquitoes particularly aggressive. Worst of all possible woes, the tea
was unspeakable and I had almost resigned myself to drinking coffee. I
was peering into the murky depths of the teapot when Tiberius took the
chair across from me.
"I wish to find Stoker," he said flatly. "Do you know where one might run him to ground?"
I
put aside the crime that passed for tea in those parts and gave him a
level look. "Somewhere in Bavaria, if Lord Rosemorran's letters are
accurate. But his lordship can be vague about such things, and this is,
after all, Stoker of whom we are speaking, a man inclined to follow his
most wayward impulses. He might be in Batavia. Or Bolivia. Or Bechuana."
He did not respond to my little witticism and I gave him a close look.
Tiberius was, like all the Templeton-Vane men, a singularly handsome
fellow. But there were plummy shadows under his eyes, and a line, slim
but severe, etched its way across his brow. "Tiberius, why do you want
to find Stoker?"
He hesitated, itself cause for alarm, and then said three words which chilled me to my marrow.
"I need him."
The
fact that Tiberius Templeton-Vane, ninth viscount of the same,
expressed any emotion as lowering as need of another person was mildly
terrifying. He was the most self-possessed man I had ever met, his
character having long since been shaped by the ineffable knowledge that
he was the firstborn son of an aristocrat, heir to a fortune, a title,
and an estate. His privilege was as much a part of him as his elegant
hands or his superb sense of dress. Tiberius, so long as I had known
him, needed no one and nothing-least of all his scapegrace brother.
Stoker had, almost since the cradle, been considered the cuckoo in the
nest. (The fact that their mother’s dalliance with an Irish painter was
actually responsible for Stoker’s paternity only augmented this
division.) Stoker had rebelled against the family’s strictures, taking
himself off for the first time when he was twelve years of age. His
putative father, the eighth viscount, had him apprehended and returned
to Cherboys, the family estate in Devon, but Stoker simply ran away
again. And again. Every time he was hauled back to Cherboys, he bided
his time and then left. In due course, the viscount stopped retrieving
him and Stoker fell in with a travelling circus before studying medicine
in Edinburgh and later becoming a surgeon’s mate in Her Majesty’s Navy.
Through
his perambulations, he had lost the thread of connection with his
family, and by the time I had met him, some three years previous to
these events, there was almost no communication between Stoker and his
three brothers, their father having died the year before I came into his
life. He had been independent for so long that it had almost become a
matter of pride for him that he did not rely upon the Templeton-Vane
name or its influence to open doors for him. He lived by his own
talents, and this was met by his brothers sometimes with good-natured
bafflement and sometimes with resentful envy. Their own lives had been
laid out for them by the late Lord Templeton-Vane, and none of the three
had the courage or will to deviate from the appointed path. Tiberius,
as the eldest, had succeeded to the title. The second, Sir Rupert, had
been granted a baronetcy for his services to the Crown as a barrister
who dabbled in secret diplomacy. The youngest, Merryweather-shoved into
the Church, possibly against his will-had been granted the living of the
parish of Dearsley, the village nearest to Cherboys. The brothers were
settled, with varying degrees of satisfaction, in their roles.
And
yet. Now and then, so fleeting I could almost believe it my own fancy,
each of them had looked at Stoker with something akin to jealousy. I was
not surprised. It was the same expression frequently aimed in my
direction, usually by women with too many children and too much time
spent embroidering tea cloths. To make one's own money, to direct one's
own destiny, these were heady gifts indeed.
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