Chapter 27
Chapter
Stoker and I stood for a long moment in the doorway, regarding the unfortunate Mr. Von Hilsing. Or what remained of him. There was no point in attempting revivification. He had clearly been dead for some few weeks, and the warmth of the house had done him no favours.
“I wonder we did not notice the odour before,” I said, covering my nose with my hand. At such close quarters the stench of mouldering flesh was unmistakable.
Stoker retrieved one of his enormous red bandanna handkerchiefs and offered it wordlessly to me.
I took it and tied it bandit-style around the lower half of my face as he extracted a peppermint pastille from the tin in his pocket and sucked it hard.
He disappeared for a moment into the adjoining dressing room, and I returned to the study, taking a slow tour about the space to see if anything had gone undetected.
I had nearly finished, when I espied a handful of ash left in the fireplace.
The hearth had been swept, but this last bit must still have been burning when the room was tidied.
I knelt swiftly, taking up the poker to sift through the ashes for anything of significance.
Paper had been burnt—quite a bit of it, it seemed.
All of it had been reduced to so much sooty grey fluff, useless for my purposes.
I grumbled as I turned over the last bit, scattering it to powder.
“Is it too much to ask for a clue?”
And just then I saw it—a tiny banner of charred paper stuck to the iron grate.
It was fragile as a butterfly’s wing and I dared not attempt to lift it.
Instead, I contorted myself so that my head was fully inside the fireplace.
I brought with me a candle, the brave flame of it brightening my little cave just enough to read the scrap of burnt paper.
Greville.
“We do not know of any Grevilles,” I muttered. “That is not at all helpful.”
With that, the ruined shred disintegrated, falling to ash. All trace of it was now lost. I backed out of the fireplace, wiping away any sooty smudges as Stoker called to me.
“I am quite fine where I am,” I told him. If the bedroom boasted a corpse, I was reluctant to see what horrors the dressing room might harbour.
“You ought to see this,” he insisted.
I held my breath and joined him in the dressing room. “Does the name ‘Greville’ mean anything to you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he replied in a tone of some distraction.
“I found it on a scrap of paper, burnt in the study fireplace. But without context, I cannot say if it is significant or not. Botheration.”
“Look at this room,” Stoker urged.
Unlike the darkly sumptuous bedroom and the elegant study, the dressing room was a space devoted to a solitary purpose—the health and maintenance of the body.
Ranked against the walls were a series of machines and apparatuses suited to a gymnasium, climbing bars and racks of dumbbells in assorted weights.
A trapeze had been bolted to the ceiling, and tumbling mats were neatly stacked in one corner.
An enormous and intricately calibrated weighing machine stood on one wall, and a series of pencilled inscriptions on the pale paint showed where Von Hilsing had weighed himself each day.
“It never varies by more than four ounces,” I said, marvelling. Stoker had opened the tall cupboard on the opposite wall, which was crammed with bottles and jars and packets of every description.
“Grooming aids and health tonics,” he said.
“Most of which I suspect are nothing more than a bit of coloured water and some flavourings.” He opened one and took a tentative sip.
“Rosemary and honey. Rather tasty that but pointless except to ease a bit of sore throat, as would this slippery elm. A dozen bottles of various preparations all promising a fine head of hair. Peppermint and ginger preparations for stomach ailments. And few things here for the teeth—oil of clove and an embrocation of thyme, pumice toothpaste from Italy. Ah!” He dove into the cabinet, emerging with a bottle of mentholated goose fat, which he rubbed liberally beneath his nose.
“How did you know he would have that?” I asked, applying a touch of the stuff under my makeshift mask.
“Every hypochondriac keeps a fully stocked chest of medicaments,” he replied.
Armed against the smell, he approached the bed, studying Von Hilsing’s recumbent form.
He poked and prodded for several minutes whilst I kept to my post. At one point he returned to the dressing room for nail clippers and made as if to pare a bit of fingernail from the corpse, but he straightened with an exclamation of surprise.
“Christ and seven saints, the whole nail just came off,” he said. He wrapped the fingernail in a bit of paper and stuffed it into his pocket as I turned away.
“Veronica,” Stoker said in a voice that rumbled with suppressed laughter, “are you finding this queasy-making?”
“Not at all,” I assured him. “I am acting as guard so we are not surprised by the miscreants who have left Mr. Von Hilsing in this state.”
“Hm.” He might have carried on tweaking my nose, but he had apparently concluded his brief attempt at a post-mortem. He came to where I stood, taking tiny sips out of my flask of aguardiente and breathing through my mouth.
I offered the flask, and he took a deep draught. “God, that is a nasty business.”
I regarded him with surprise. “I should have thought you inured to this sort of thing.”
“This sort of thing? No, Veronica. I have had precious little experience in examining the half-desiccated bodies of elderly American recluses.”
“But you deal with animals,” I pointed out. “Humans are hardly different.”
“And I seldom deal with shreds of rotting flesh,” he said, taking another pull on the flask. “The smell is so far inside my nose, I think I shall never get it out.”
I retrieved the flask and replaced it under my skirt. “Let us get out into the fresh air, and you can tell me what you have discovered. There is nothing left to be learnt here.”
He did as I suggested, and in a very few minutes we had passed through the mews door again and into the square, both of us breathing happily of the cool night air.
“Coal smoke, horse shit, and rotting garbage,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Heaven.”
We walked until we reached a bench, secluded in the shadows of a spreading oak. A convenient little shrubbery hid the bench from passersby, and we sat gratefully.
“Is it odd that I am hungry?” he asked. “Starving actually.”
I rummaged in my pocket for a packet of greaseproof paper I had secured for just such an event.
I handed it over, and he applied himself to the ham sandwich inside with gusto.
“You are a goddess amongst women,” he said through lusty bites.
“Deserving of the most devoted worship. Although you forgot the mustard.”
“Next time we plan on discovering a rotting corpse, I shall pack a proper picnic,” I assured him.
He grinned at the sarcasm, popping the last morsel into his mouth with a sigh of pleasure.
“I could eat a dozen more, but that helps, my love. Now, as to what I discovered, you will understand that I was able to undertake only the most cursory examination. A thorough postmortem would be required in order to formally establish the cause of death—”
I held up a hand. “Stoker. I am no court of law, and we will have no quibbling. The cause, I beg you.”
“Poison,” he said promptly.
I blinked. “Poison? Just like that? So decisive and certain are you?”
“Absolutely. He was a gentleman of mature years, yes, but like most who are nervous of their physical health, he was in fine fettle. Apart from tinctures and tonics for hair growth and the tin of goose grease which anyone would keep for remedying the odd cold, he had precious little in that chest of medicines—nothing that would suggest underlying health concerns. Treatments for the occasional sore throat or bit of dyspepsia, but nothing significant. No preparations for the heart or liver, nothing for the lungs. He may have been obsessed with his bodily well-being, but there was not a single suggestion of actual ill health. He was slender and well muscled and would have liked better teeth, that is all.”
“His heart might have attacked him,” I said dubiously.
“Might,” Stoker stressed. “But such things are uncommon in men who are not corpulent and intemperate in their habits. Von Hilsing was abstemious, remember. He ate sparingly of a vegetarian diet and drank nothing at all except milk sent in from his own cows. He could afford the best doctors. He might have lived another thirty years or more. Besides which,” he added, “if he had expired of natural causes, why would his staff not alert his doctor? His family?”
I considered this a moment. A breeze had sprung up, rustling the leaves and sending their heady green scent aloft.
Something lushly sweet was blooming nearby, and with the stars winking to life under that benevolent moon, the night might have been a romantic one indeed.
Stoker’s hand had dropped to my neck, where his fingers were making lazy circles against my skin.
It was an absent-minded gesture, one born of unthinking affection, but coupled with that perfumed air, I found myself growing rather warm.
“Are you quite all right?” Stoker asked.
“Entirely,” I assured him. “And I know exactly why someone would not carry the news of Von Hilsing’s death to his next of kin. If you preserve the fiction of his life, you may carry on with his affairs of business, provided you can forge his letters well enough.”
Stoker nodded, the fingers circling even more slowly. “You needn’t even forge the letters—a mere signature would do. Most men of his ilk do not write their own letters. His correspondents would be accustomed to seeing Seward Johnson’s handwriting instead of Von Hilsing’s.”