sat sulking in the gloom as the candles guttered out and the fire burned low. Unlike the Roman baths and the vivarium with their lavish steam heat, the follies had not been fitted with modern conveniences. It was left to me to tend my own modest hearth. After the clock had struck ten, I noticed a growing chill, something more insistent than the usual January cold. I opened the door of the folly, gazing up at the moon. It was waxing, very nearly full, a lopsided baroque pearl of a moon. But it was shrouded in grey shadows, rimmed with cold blue light, and I saw splinters of ice dancing in the glow of the doorway. I shut the door quickly against the brutal cold, stirring up the fire until it crackled merrily. I whistled to Vespertine, curling myself against his wiry, woolly warmth as I watched the flames. I could pretend to myself for just a little while that they were not plain London flames, kindled on a hearth of simple stone. They were the flames of a bonfire scented with herbs on a Corsican hillside, of a funeral pyre lavish with incense on a riverbank in India, of a cook fire in South America, smelling of roasting meats.
I smiled to myself, thinking of my adventures, and in due course, warmed by my memories and my dog, I slept.
* * *
• • •
I woke to bitter cold, the windows rimed with a narrow tracery of ice. I washed, gritting my teeth against the frigid water, and dressed in my warmest ensemble, a costume of heavy violet wool tweed with lapels of black velvet. I had had a little coat made of black velvet for Vespertine, but he gave me a reproachful look from under his heavy brows as I tried to fit it, preferring instead to bound out into the frosted gardens as soon as I opened the door. Betony, whose thick coat was meant for the wind-ravished steppes of the Caucasus, was romping happily in the brittle, frost-blackened grass whilst Huxley and Nut were nowhere to be seen. I found them, curled one on either side of Stoker as he finished his breakfast, his attention fixed upon the newspaper propped against the teapot.
I hastened upstairs to examine once more the file of cuttings on Alice Baker-Greene. There was no new information to be found. I had read every piece thoroughly the day before. I tossed them aside in exasperation. A single new snippet of information would be enough, I told myself. Just one small wisp to dangle in front of Stoker to coax him into action. I had no notion of what I required, only that there must be something to intrigue him, goading him to undertake the investigation of his own volition.
It took me less than a quarter of an hour to find it. An issue of the Daily Harbinger from the end of November. The Ripper news had settled into something less than hysteria, and one or two measured voices suggested his reign of terror might have come to an end. Without fresh victims to exploit, the Harbinger had been forced to revive other stories, raking them afresh to blaze back into the white-hot heat of scandal. And they had done their best with the meager details of Alice Baker-Greene’s death, revisiting the story of her fatal fall, this time with eyewitness accounts in lurid detail and assorted photographs. One picture I had seen before, the posed portrait of Alice on the Alpenwald, but it was bracketed with an earlier photograph of her standing atop a peak in the United States, suffragette banner in hand. The last was a particularly unappetizing funeral portrait of Alice lying in her coffin after her funeral.
My eyes flicked swiftly from the photograph to the byline and I found no surprises there. J. J. Butterworth from Hochstadt, the Alpenwald. Our old friend had taken herself off to the tiny principality to interview witnesses, no doubt embellishing their stories with a few enhancements of her own invention. She had included a summary of the coroner’s report—verdict: accidental death—as well as the formal testimony of Captain Durand, the commander of the princess’s personal guard and a frequent climber himself. He testified to witnessing Alice climb that day, explaining that it was a common pastime of the Alpenwalders to observe the tiny black dots of mountaineers through telescopes fixed to the castle balconies. He explained that her climb had begun much in the usual