An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6) -Deanna Raybourn Page 0,3

of frantic activity, with more boxes being delivered from Alice Baker-Greene’s grandmother. That imperious old lady sent each with lengthy instructions on how the memorabilia were to be displayed written in a firm, bold hand. There was a small crate filled with tiny belts and pickaxes—a child’s collection of climbing gear. I brandished the murderous little things at Stoker.

“Can you imagine learning to climb as a child?” I asked.

Stoker looked up from where he was applying lavish amounts of glue to a sculpted base. “Did she?”

“She did indeed. Her grandmother taught her. Have you not read Climbing in the Peaks: A Lady Mountaineer’s Guide to the Pennines by Mrs. Pompeia Baker-Greene?”

“I have not,” he admitted.

I curled a lip. “She is a pioneer of the alpinist movement, a founding fellow of the Hippolyta Club, and yet you haven’t read her magnum opus. You are a dreadfully lax explorer.”

He gave me a repressive look. “I have had rather a busy time of it lately,” he reminded me. He was not entirely wrong. Between sleuthing out murderers, cataloging the Rosemorran Collection, and allowing ourselves to experience the rumbustious pleasures of the flesh, we had had little time to spare for hobbies.

“It is quite a good read, although she does spend rather a lot of time discussing rocks. Mountaineers do love their rocks,” I added wistfully. “In any event, she chronicles her attempt first to teach her son to climb as a child still in skirts and later her granddaughter.”

“Where is her son now? Alice Baker-Greene’s father?” he asked as I plucked a jaunty little Tyrolean cap from the box.

“Dead,” was my succinct reply. “A climbing accident in the Karakoram.”

“Two climbing deaths in one family?” He gave a visible shudder. “How unspeakably tragic.”

“Three, actually,” I corrected. “Pompeia Baker-Greene’s husband, Alice’s grandfather, also perished on a mountainside. Somewhere in the Andes, if memory serves.”

“I wonder what on earth drives them to it?” he asked, almost more of himself than of me.

He returned to his diorama, gathering up a handful of fresh, springy moss to apply to the damp glue. “The same that keeps us at it,” I surmised. “The thirst to net each new specimen or mount each new mammal. There is nothing in natural history that is not new again every time we encounter it, no greater mystery than things that exist apart from man and with no interest in us.”

“How poetic,” he murmured before favoring me with a few appropriate lines from Keats. There were always appropriate lines from Keats, I had learnt from my association with Stoker. He maintained that there was not a single occasion to which a few stanzas might not be applied. I had, during one rather notable interlude, challenged Stoker to produce a fitting quote, and I can only say that what followed was highly instructive although not wholly coherent, diverted as he was by my own distracting efforts at the time.

I rummaged in the drifts of excelsior in the box, finding a few unremarkable books—a selection of climbing memoirs and geological surveys with a decrepit and outdated collection of flora and fauna, all inscribed by various family members now perished on assorted mountainsides. At last there was nothing left to the box but bare boards and a single photograph.

I extracted it, wiping the last shreds of excelsior free. The photograph was framed in rosewood inlaid with a mountain motif of darker woods and mother-of-pearl. It depicted a woman posed against an outcropping of rock, a light dusting of snow on the ground. She was dressed in a lady’s mountaineering garb, a coil of rope slung across her torso, ice axe poised at her side, a jaunty spotted handkerchief knotted at her throat. Her face was turned to the camera and her expression was serene, guarded almost. But there was no mistaking the faint lines of good humor at her eyes and mouth. She was just past the first flush of youth and had obviously never been a beauty, yet it would have been apparent to anyone unacquainted with her that this was a woman of great strength of character and irrepressible spirit.

And I was not unacquainted with her. “It is a very good likeness,” I remarked to Stoker.

He came to look over my shoulder. “Good climbing hands,” he said, nodding towards them, crossed as they were over the head of her ice axe. They were broad of palm and long of finger, surprisingly elegant. “You met her, then?”

“Once,” I said. “Here at the club—it must have been