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When we arrived back in London, it was to a predictably chaotic environment. Courtesy of the Easter holidays, the children were home. Lady Cordelia, distracted by the maternal joys of having her own child to tend—albeit in the guise of a foundling left in her care—let them run positively wild, and for all his fondness, Lord Rosemorran was never an attentive parent. Being opportunistic by nature as all children are, the younger Rosemorrans had been left to their own devices. The eldest, Viscount Launceston, heir to the title, was contentedly teaching himself Greek with an eye to excavating antiquities in the Peloponnese. Apart from the odd bit of digging in the herbaceous borders to perfect his field techniques, he troubled no one. His sister, Lady Juno, was also of a scientific bent, although her experiments in chemistry resulted in assorted repellent odors and the odd explosion, which the rest of the family accepted as all in a day’s work. The rest of them were variously involved in shipbuilding, arboreal management, photography, stage illusions, and Egyptology. This meant that no matter where one ventured on the estate, there was bound to be a child constructing a yacht, up a tree, developing photographic plates, sawing a sibling in half, or attempting to mummify a rat thoughtfully provided by one of Cook’s cats. These were all acceptable and even laudable endeavors, being undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. (One might quibble about the value of mastering the tricks of stagecraft, but putting this point to the child in question resulted in a lengthy lecture regarding the intricacies of light theory and something to do with prisms. I endured the conversation for a quarter of an hour before reeling away for the revivifying consolation of strong drink.)
But the most impetuous and precocious of his lordship’s children was the youngest—Lady Rose. Even now I cannot write those two words without a shudder. To pronounce the name “Lady Rose” is to conjure an image of feminine delicacy and refinement, but there was no more savage and ruthless creature upon the earth. I would, with delight, welcome a thousand eruptions of Krakatoa before enduring a minute longer than necessary in her company. She has, from the first moment of our acquaintance, made it her mission to thwart me. I have found my bedsheets soaked with ink, my hair tonic replaced with treacle, the toes of my shoes stuffed with pins.
It is not in my temperament to permit such treatment to pass unremarked upon, but Lady Rose has a decided advantage over me: youth. It is unseemly for a grown woman to embark upon a war of wills with a child of eleven, but I frequently daydreamed with real pleasure of hoisting her to the top of the tallest monkey puzzle tree by her petticoats or feeding her a tart laced with syrup of ipecacuanha.
The casual reader may wonder why Lady Rose took a position of instantaneous and implacable hatred towards me, but the reason is quite simple: Stoker. Lady Rose had, from the cradle, entertained a fiendish adoration of the man, fueled by his generosity with sweets and his willingness to let her play with the more outlandish supplies in his workshop. More than once I had come upon them, heads bent near as Stoker explained the proper way to fit a glass eyeball. She had developed a genuine and impressive enthusiasm for natural history, with a particular gift for bones. The child could take one look at a long bone and pronounce its genus and species. Her father was content to indulge her until she ordered a copy of all fourteen volumes of Bertrand’s Mammalia at astonishing expense and charged it to his account at Hatchards.
By way of punishment, he suspended her pocket money, which led her to a few fairly outlandish schemes. First, she stripped the larder of food, filling a small wagon and pulling it down the street as she sold off half a ham, a cold roast of beef, grouse from his lordship’s Scottish estate, various imported cheeses, and the rock cakes Cook was saving for teatime. She turned a particularly impressive profit on the Alpenwalder cheese I had carried home for his lordship, and the earl felt the loss of this anticipated treat so keenly, he confiscated every coin she earned. So, Lady Rose, mindful of her sister’s fashionable new gown with beetle-wing embroidery, had embarked upon a new plan—one she did not share until we reached Bishop’s Folly to find the entire garden throbbing with small greenish orbs winging their way from leaf to leaf as they solemnly consumed everything in sight.
“Rose,” her father said faintly. “What have you done?”
“I was breeding beetles,” she said, standing with her feet astride like a tiny Colossus, hands in fists upon her hips. “I was meant to sell them to dressmakers for pocket money.”
The gardener, staring at the carnage, resigned on the spot, and his lordship went after him, good gardeners being difficult to find and even more difficult to keep within the confines of the city.
“A very clever idea,” Stoker told her kindly.
“But pointless,” I put in. “The beetles most commonly used for embroidery are wood-boring varieties such as Sternocera aequisignata. Unfortunately, these are common rose chafer beetles. You have managed to unleash approximately a thousand Macrodactylus subspinosus into the garden instead.”
“I did not unleash them,” she replied darkly. “They unleashed themselves. I had them in a very nice Wardian case until they found a way out.”
I gave a start. “A Wardian case? Do you mean you were breeding them in the Belvedere?” After knocking the arm off a particularly rare and elegant caryatid—Lady Rose could be accident-prone—she had been forbidden from the Belvedere unless specifically invited by either Stoker or myself.
“I couldn’t exactly breed them in my bedroom,” she protested. “I share with Juno and you know how she is about bugs. It isn’t fair, either, for she’s always blowing things up or mixing solutions that smell like rotten eggs, and no one ever seems to mind.”
“She,” I returned acidly, “has never destroyed an entire garden. I went to great trouble to secure those particular succulents for Patricia. What is she meant to eat now?” I asked, gesturing towards the Galápagos tortoise that lumbered sadly by. Lady Rose and I had once reached an entente based upon my sharing with her a method to induce a harmless bout of vomiting in one of her brothers who had been particularly annoying, but the fragile bond of understanding had well and truly snapped. I was especially fond of Patricia. Tortoises do not have much personality to speak of, but Patricia was gregarious, as tortoises go. She had recently suffered a disappointment in love, and I had consoled her by planting a row of her favorite succulents, the last pulpy leaf of which fluttered to the ground at my feet, shorn free by the rapacious beetles.
“I didn’t mean to,” Lady Rose insisted.
Stoker put a hand to her shoulder. “I know. Come, there are a few violet creams left in my cupboard in the Belvedere, and I’ve brought home a real find and I will need help with the uncrating.”
“What is it?” she asked with narrowed eyes.
He bent near, pitching his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “A thylacine.”
Her mouth dropped open into a perfect O. “A thylacine! You’re joking.”