He turned, displaying his back. “George and I had these done in Japan,” he told me. Inked across his skin was a large red and blue dragon embellished with fire.
“Very handsome,” I said.
He turned back, his expression wary. “Mind you don’t tell Motherdear. She doesn’t know, you see, and she mightn’t approve.”
I did not bother to explain to Eddy that my opportunities for conversation with Her Royal Highness were limited in the extreme. He shivered then, and I held up my arm, opening my cloak. “There is room enough for you to warm yourself here if you don’t mind sitting quite close.”
He moved to my side, settling himself under my arm as I wrapped the cloak around us both, Stoker’s head still on my lap. We were still sitting thus when Archibond appeared, looking a trifle haggard.
“You seem discomposed, Inspector,” I said coolly. “But I expect managing a madman must be a bit tiring.”
His smile was thin. “Miss Speedwell. I see you and your companions have made yourselves comfortable.”
“As comfortable as possible under the circumstances, although you must admit these are hardly fitting surroundings for a future queen. Oughtn’t there to be silk sheets and roasted duck on gilded plates?”
He ignored my jibe. His gaze was restless, and there was a new wariness about him. I wondered if he was losing his nerve for the enterprise. Perhaps he was discovering for himself how difficult it was to work with someone so devilishly bent upon his grandiose ideals.
“Tell me, Inspector, how precisely do you anticipate being able to prove my claim? I am quasi-legitimate at best,” I said in a deliberately pleasant tone.
“Your grandmother de Clare passed away earlier this year. In going through her effects, your uncle discovered a letter from your mother communicating the details of her marriage as well as your conception and birth.” He twitched a little, his manner one of acute discomfort. “In the letter, she entrusted your care to your grandmother. She made it quite clear that she intended to destroy herself.”
“You have my mother’s suicide note?” I demanded.
“We do,” he affirmed.
“If I was to be given to my grandmother to rear, then why did I stay with the aunts?”
He shrugged. “Apparently your grandmother de Clare was a good Catholic. She never forgave your mother for her act of self-destruction. In spite of your uncle de Clare’s best efforts, she could not be made to see the potential benefit to keeping you in her custody. She was content to let your mother’s friends have the charge of you. By the time your uncle managed to discover their names and whereabouts, they had changed their names and taken you to England.”
“They wanted me,” I said, hardly able to comprehend that the aunts—a courtesy title, for they were no kin to me, having been my mother’s dressers during her time in the theatre—had gone to such lengths to keep me with them.
“They were, by all accounts, devoted to your mother,” Archibond said quietly. “It was most likely a moment of weakness that caused her to write to your grandmother. No doubt she repented it, urged them to take you before any of the de Clares could find you.”
I could well imagine it. My mother, beautiful and broken when my father betrayed their marriage in order to marry his Danish princess, had turned to her dearest friends to help her. What misery, what despair she must have felt! And in a moment of anguish, she had reached out to her blood family, hoping they would give me the understanding and love they had never offered her.
What had caused her to regret her appeal? It must have been a deed borne of desperation. Had she acted in a moment of despair and only realized the seriousness of her plea in the cold light of morning? Had she succumbed to a moment of madness? Had she been so sunk in misery that her lonely existence in that austere family had been transformed, in her mind, to security—the kind of stability she wished for her only child?
In the end, she had opted for the found family of her friends to rear me. We had moved often, always eluding something. I never understood the specter that stalked my childhood. A rumor, a whisper, a glimpse of a familiar face, and the aunts would be off again, packing up whatever cottage or modest flat we had taken, and striking out for parts unknown. But theatre people have a wide acquaintance, and we were often forced to slip quietly away from those who might have exposed the aunts for who they really were, who might have seen a familiar profile as he lingered backstage, waiting for his adored to slip behind the footlights, who might have seen a child and done the maths and realized whose child I was.
They were affectionate enough, the aunts. There were stories at bedtime and my first ring net for butterflying and doses of castor oil when I was ill. But there was always a sort of wariness about them as well. Once whilst hunting in Costa Rica, I had discovered a unique golden chrysalis, the most unusual thing I had ever seen on my travels. I had nurtured it carefully and eventually witnessed the birth of Tithorea tarricina, one of the most exotic and beautiful specimens I had ever handled. I ought to have netted it; such a find would be worth half a year’s salary. I could have named my price with any aurelian collector in Europe. But I could not bring myself to interfere with something so beautiful, so wild. It belonged to nature and not to humankind. So I watched it testing its damp and trembling wings, trying them on the soft breeze that ruffled my hair. It ought to have lurched and listed, but instead it rose in one great flap of those enormous wings and lifted itself above my head, out of reach and beyond the horizon before I realized what was happening. It was like watching a miracle of creation, and I felt no loss at its passing away from me but only joy that I had been, for however fleeting a time, connected with it.
It was only much later that I realized this was the attitude I sometimes detected in the aunts. They could be occasionally at their ease with me, instructing me on how to roast a chicken or make a bed or turn a seam, but then I would catch a glimpse of something watchful in them, as if they had invited a tiger to tea and were surprised and unnerved at how it lolled upon the hearthrug. I was part of them and none of them, and as soon as I could, I made my way in the world, net in hand, to find others like me. I had met a few in the course of my travels—most were base metal and counterfeit in their charms. But one or two had been like Stoker, bright gold and pure through and through. I had no doubt, for all her failings, my mother was the same. It was no use attempting to explain such things to men like Archibond or—worse—my uncle. What is unrefined can never appreciate what is tempered.
And so I did not try. De Clare was a lost soul; I had seen too clearly the glint of obsession in his eyes. It was the expression worn by fanatics and evangelists the world over, the dogged determination to see only one point of view and entertain no truths but the fantasy in one’s own mind. He would see this thing through to the end, no matter how many people it destroyed. I wondered if Archibond’s cool detachment would prove more amenable to persuasion.