Chapter 2 #2
“Pay him no attention,” I instructed Mornaday.
“He is tetchy because he is having difficulty with his latest commission.” Upon occasion, Stoker undertook the rehabilitation and refitting of zoological specimens, exercising his mastery of the taxidermic arts for discerning clients who were prepared to pay astronomical fees for the privilege.
Other men might have done so for sybaritic reasons, but not Stoker.
His needs were modest, his personal luxuries limited in the extreme.
But he did harbour an unholy lust for the accoutrements of his trade, and he invariably ran tremendously overdrawn accounts at the various suppliers.
The house of Deyrolle in Paris, those purveyors of the most splendid of taxidermic fittings, were forever sending chastening letters regarding the state of his balance in their books.
The result was his occasional foray into commissions which were, to put it delicately, beneath his talents.
“Or, rather, his lack of one. He is upset about the walrus.”
“I am not upset about the walrus,” Stoker said, clearly seething.
J. J. blinked several times as if trying to bring Stoker into focus. “What are you stuffing now?”
“It is not stuffing,” he corrected coldly. “It is mounting. And I am mounting nothing. I have not been invited to participate.”
I leant near to Mornaday, pitching my voice to a confiding tone. “There is a particularly fine walrus, an enormous specimen that has been secured for purposes of display to the general public, but the taxidermists engaged to prepare it have been less than satisfactory.”
“They have ironed out all of the wrinkles!” Stoker roared.
“Wrinkles? The wrinkles of a walrus?” Mornaday asked in some perplexity.
“Odobenus rosmarus,” I explained. “A very large pinniped indigenous to the Northern Hemisphere.”
“Veronica,” Mornaday said icily, “I know what a bloody walrus is. I have read Lewis Carroll, you know. I am not entirely illiterate.”
“Well, then. You may be one step ahead of the taxidermists who have the commission of mounting the walrus in question,” I said.
“They were presented with only the hide, and they subsequently applied sound if unfortunate reasoning to the task. They have, I am sorry to say, stuffed the skin to capacity, smoothing out all of the characteristic wrinkles of the creature.”
“It. Is. Not. Stuffing,” Stoker repeated through gritted teeth.
I waved an airy hand. “However it has been done, it has been done badly, and the poor thing looks as if it were about to burst. Most disconcerting.”
“It does not bear thinking about,” Stoker said. “Mornaday, you had a reason for coming, one presumes?”
“I have and I do. But J. J.’s matter is more pressing.” He turned to J. J. “How did you lose your post?”
Her expression darkened and she looked around for the aguardiente, but I had taken the precaution of concealing the bottle behind my chair.
“I wrote a story my editor didn’t much care for.
About a landlord in Whitechapel who takes advantage of his tenants, raising rents on them when they are ill for the sole purpose of forcing them out of his lodgings and into the workhouses. ”
“Why did your editor object to that?” I asked.
“Because the landlord is his brother. The editor was away, and his assistant approved the piece. It went to print before anyone could stop it. It was a good piece,” she added mulishly. “The landlord is thieving scum, and the editor isn’t much better.”
“But how did you lose your room?” Mornaday pressed.
“I was slightly in arrears from last month, and I had promised to make it up to my landlady.” She paused to let a fat tear roll down her nose.
It hesitated on the tip, then plopped into Nut’s fur.
J. J. gave a great sniff and went on. “I would have done, if the paper hadn’t taken my last wages to pay for the window I broke on the way out.
I had to be escorted from the premises.”
“Poor J. J.,” Stoker said gently. He picked up his biscuit tin and held it out to her. “Shortbread? Cook’s secret recipe. I think there’s a bit of ginger in, but I can’t be sure.”
J. J. accepted a piece and chewed it woefully. “Definitely ginger.”
“There is more if you like.”
“I ought to eat it, it may be my last meal. I shall have to live on stale crusts and cheese stolen from mousetraps. I will be forced into degrading work like prostitution or standing for Parliament.”
“Nonsense,” Stoker said. “There will always be food here for you. And you will always have a roof over your head so long as Veronica has a place to live.” My mouth dropped open, and Stoker took the opportunity to stuff a piece of shortbread into it as he went on.
“Isn’t that right, dearest? After all, you have the chapel folly all to yourself, and J.
J. cannot take up much room. You will hardly know she is there. ”
J. J. gave a hiccup. “Oh, that’s so kind of you, Veronica! I will be the very best of guests. Quiet as a mouse, I shall be. And I do not snore much at all.”
I bared my teeth at Stoker in what a stupider man might have mistaken for a smile.
“Not at all, J. J. You are most welcome.” Stoker gave me the sleekly satisfied grin of a cream-sated cat.
He had got his own back since I had raised the painful matter of the walrus, and he had upped the ante decidedly.
I turned to Mornaday. “Since that is settled, let us have it clearly. Tell us about your body.”
“Why do you persist in believing there is a body?” he demanded.
I arched a brow and said nothing until he puffed out a sigh of defeat.
“Very well. There is a body.”
It is not my way to crow when I am right, but I must have betrayed my pleasure, for Stoker spoke up. “Do not gloat, Veronica. It is unbecoming.”
“I do so love to be right,” I replied. “Now, tell us. Who is dead? Where? When? How can we help?”
“The name of the deceased is Maurice Quincey. And he was found in a carriage outside Highgate Cemetery a fortnight ago.”
“A ghoulish place to die,” Stoker mused. Of all the graveyards in London, none was more magnificent or more atmospheric than Highgate.
“That is not the worst of it,” Mornaday said. “Quincey’s physician said it was natural causes, that the fellow had had a weak heart and was never going to make old bones.”
“You think otherwise?” J. J. ventured. She hiccuped again, but the shortbread seemed to be sopping up the worst of the aguardiente. And the instincts of an investigative reporter are impossible to quash. “Why?”
Mornaday hesitated, then blurted out the answer in a rush. “Because he had a pair of puncture wounds on his neck. They were spaced two inches apart and they dripped blood. It was inexplicable.”
“Not inexplicable,” I corrected in a thrilled tone. “It was the work of a vampire.”