CHAPTER TWENTY
W
hen I came to, I was lying on a sofa in the snug of the Belvedere.
How he managed to get me out of the hansom and through the gardens without attracting attention I could not imagine.
“Quite simple, really.
I told the cabman you were an inebriate,” he informed me.
He sat me up and wrenched my jacket aside.
Next came my shirtwaist, leaving me in my corset cover.
I snorted.
“What?”
he demanded.
“I was just imagining poor Lady Cordelia’s face if she were to see us now.
We do seem to be very frequently thrown together in various states of undress.”
He thrust my flask of aguardiente at me.
“Drink this and hush.
I shall have to clean it before I can tell how badly you’ve undone my handiwork.”
The next few minutes were not pleasant, but he was quick and thorough, and as I had observed before, unfailingly gentle.
As it happened, I had lost only a stitch or two, and he repaired my torn flesh, fussing all the while.
“Why the devil do I waste my skills upon you when you persist in rushing headlong into peril?”
he remonstrated.
That particular remark was so blatantly unfair, it did not even merit a response, so I let it pass.
I was too busy puzzling over the events of the evening.
“Do you think the fellow who shot tonight—whether Mr. de Clare or not—meant to do us a good turn?
Or was he after the baron’s murderer and we were simply the unwitting beneficiaries of his attack upon the assassin?”
“I do not know, and I care less,” he muttered, clipping the end of the silk thread neatly.
“It will certainly scar now,” he warned me.
“Don’t you dare tell anyone that is my work.
I used to be famous for the delicacy of my stitching, but now you’ve gone and ruined it.”
I surveyed the line of tiny, precise stitches and shrugged, wincing only slightly.
“I shall consider it a badge of honor, a souvenir of our adventures when I am in my dotage and no one believes I once pursued a murderer.”
He opened his mouth to speak then but thought better of it.
He tidied away the tools of his trade as I took up my shawl.
I did not bother to re-dress, and he put my shirtwaist to soak in the little domestic office Lady Cordelia had mentioned.
He came to sit beside me when he had finished.
The packet lay in my lap, and I touched the violet silk ribbon.
“Why do you hesitate?”
he asked.
“I suppose I have a keen appreciation for anticipation,” I said lightly.
“But I do not expect you to understand.”
“Oh, it isn’t that difficult,” he replied.
“Before you open that packet all things are possible.
It might contain any secret at all.
It might be the Casket Letters, or the baron’s laundry list, or the revelation that your mother was a Russian princess.”
“Precisely,” I said with a small smile.
He rummaged in my bag a moment and returned with two of my slender cigarillos.
He lit them from the fire and passed one to me.
“Then let us enjoy our moment of anticipation to the fullest,” he said.
“Thank you for not lighting your appalling cigars,” I told him as I savored the sweet smoke.
He grunted by way of response and we sat for a little while in companionable silence.
“Sometimes it is better not to know,” he said suddenly.
He lifted his gaze to mine.
“Sometimes it is better for secrets to be left alone.”
“If I am not mistaken, that is the voice of experience.”
“It is.”
He dropped his gaze to his hands, the cigarillo clasped lightly in his fingers.
A slender stream of blue smoke rose, curling sinuously.
He fell silent then, and I did not have the heart to pry.
“We do not even know this packet has information about me,” I pointed out.
“It might be something else altogether.”
“Quite,” he told me.
He reached forward and ground out the last of his cigarillo on the stove.
He took mine and did the same.
“Very well.
As Arcadia Brown would say, ‘Excelsior!
’” he proclaimed, lifting a mocking brow.
The ribbon seemed to protest at being untied.
It hesitated a moment, then gave way under my insistent fingers.
There was a drift of papers onto my lap, letters and newspaper cuttings, and I plucked one at random.
It was from an American newspaper, a photograph with a small notice.
I read aloud, my voice suddenly hoarse.
CELEbrATED IRISH ACTRESS LILY ASHBOURNE BEGINS AMERICAN TOUR
, the headline ran.
I read the rest of the piece, a brief description of her triumphs on the English stage, and studied the photograph.
I handed it to Stoker without comment, but his was brief and to the point.
“Bloody hell.”
“This cutting is from 1860.
I was born in 1862.
Twenty-first of June, to be precise.
She must be my mother,” I said, my voice tight.
“Don’t you think?”
A fleeting smile touched his mouth.
“She couldn’t be more like you if you had been twins,” he assured me.
I looked again at the elegantly resolute face, the ripple of black hair, the eyes with their curious expression of challenge.
“There is something audacious about her,” I said.
“I should imagine so,” he agreed.
“Stage actresses are not known for their reticence.”
I picked up another piece of paper.
“This looks like a letter to the baron—it is addressed to ‘Dearest Max.
’”
“What does it say?”
I skimmed the prose quickly, noting the looping scrawl of the handwriting, the pale violet ink, the heavily underscored words.
“It is from Lily.
And—oh God.”
He put out his hand and I gave him the letter.
“‘Dearest Max, I hardly have the words to
thank you for your kindnesses to me and to Baby.
I was
so low when you came to see us, and your assurances have revived my spirits.
You know he will not receive my letters; my
only hope lies with you.
You
must make him see his duty to me—and to our child.
I shudder to think what will become of us if he persists in casting us off so completely.
And you must not think I care about money or anything else.
I want
him, Max.
I know he loved me once, and I believe he loves me
still, in his heart of hearts.
If only he would come to see me, to see his child, I know he would find the strength to defy his family.
If he goes through with this marriage, I do not know what I will do.
He
cannot marry her, Max—he must not.
It will be my destruction, and he will carry that for the rest of his life.
’”
He broke off.
“The letter is dated 20 February 1863.”
“I was eight months old,” I calculated.
“And your father was not doing his duty, either by you or your mother.”
“So Max was acting as intermediary, consoling my mother and reminding my father of his obligations even as he planned to marry another woman.
I wonder if he went through with his wedding.”
Stoker had picked up another cutting, and as he read it, his face paled.
“I suspect so.”
“What is that?”
His expression was apologetic.
“Your mother’s obituary.
Dated 20 March 1863.”
“Less than a month after sending Max that letter saying she did not know what she would do if my father married another woman.”
I did not take the cutting from him.
“Stoker, did she—”
He shook his head.
“I cannot imagine how.
Not if she was buried in this cemetery,” he said, reading off the name.
“Our Lady of Grace.
In Dublin.”
I blinked in surprise.
“She was Catholic.”
He nodded gravely.
“Apparently.
There is a mention of the priest who presided over her funeral, a Father Burke.
Look here, it is his obituary.
He died six years after your mother and according to this was the parish priest of Greymount in Dublin.
Veronica, he would never have let her be buried in holy ground if she had taken her own life.”
“Still,” I persisted.
“It is too coincidental.
Unless she simply
willed herself to die.
Is that even possible?”
He shrugged.
“I have seen stranger.”
“So, my mother was an Irish Catholic actress.
I suppose Ashbourne was a stage name.
I wonder if there is any way of tracing her through the burial records to find her real name.”
“No need,” he said, producing another cutting.
“Her real name was Mary Katherine de Clare.”
“De Clare?”
I took the cutting.
Another piece from her triumphant American tour of 1860, but this one went into great depth about her past.
“She ran away from home,” I told him.
“Born to a respectable Irish family and they disowned her when she went on the stage.
Here is a photograph of her with her brother,” I said, pointing to the cutting.
“Edmund de Clare, as a boy of fifteen.”
Stoker scrutinized the photograph.
“Is this the fellow who accosted you at Paddington?”
I nodded and he handed back the cutting.
The photograph was taken some years before Mary Katherine de Clare had changed her name and taken her place on the stage.
She was dressed in a suitably girlish frock, standing behind her seated brother, serious in his town suit, but with the same elegant bones and graceful demeanor as his sister.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
I murmured.
Stoker shrugged.
“Perhaps he felt revealing himself as your uncle was too private a matter for a crowded train station.”
“Perhaps.”
I read on, learning more about my mother.
Famed as a gifted tragedienne, she had built her career upon the death scenes of Juliet and Ophelia.
But she had been best known for the role of Phaedra in an English adaptation of Racine’s
Phèdre.
There was a photograph of her, dressed in purest white, poison vial held aloft as she contemplated her fate.
I raised my eyes briefly.
“I presume you have noticed all her best roles were suicides?”
His expression was skeptical.
“That proves nothing.”
“I suppose not,” I conceded.
I burrowed through the rest of the papers—a motley collection of obituaries, notices from her plays, and two photographs.
“My God,” I breathed.
“Stoker, look.”
I handed him a photograph of Lily Ashbourne holding an infant.
He read, “‘Me with Baby.
December 1862.’
You were six months old.”
I had been a plump infant, sitting upright in my mother’s lap for the photograph.
I must have moved, for my face was faintly blurred at the edge.