The Butterfly Conspiracy Read online

  Ashes from the burning conservatory wafted on the air around them, staining her precious dress. She was in the street with nothing but the clothes on her back. In an hour her life had spiraled out of control, and she had no idea how much worse it might still become.

  “Come.” Taking her arm to lead her into the darkness, Royston said slowly and insistently, “Proving your innocence and saving your future should now be our only objective.”

  CHAPTER 4

  As they hurried through the darkened streets, Merula expected people to throw suspicious glances at them and stop to stare after them. But the elderly gentleman who came up to them, his cane ticking on the pavement, passed them with his chin on his chest, his eyes on the stone in front of him and his mind probably on some deep mathematical problem or perhaps the latest chess move in a game with a friend.

  Merula enjoyed drawing conclusions about people from their appearance, and this man with his white beard and narrow chest had something bookish and scientific about him that placed him, in her mind, as a private tutor with a well-bred protégé or perhaps even at a college in Cambridge.

  A little boy with dirty cheeks who should have been in bed by now ran past them, clutching an apple. Royston, securing his jacket containing the precious proof to clear her uncle, looked after him with a frown. “He probably didn’t acquire that by honest means,” he said with a nod.

  Merula hitched a brow. “How can you know that? Maybe he is on his way home from his grandmother’s house.”

  Royston shook his head. “You have an idyllic view of how these people live.”

  “What people exactly?”

  “Poor people. You have probably never set foot in one of the poorer areas. Have never seen their houses or the way they have to scrape by to make a living. You think that when the servants at your uncle’s house leave, they go to places with rooms as big as yours and bed linens just as white and clean.”

  “Absolutely not,” Merula said. She didn’t want to tell him how she had caught one of the youngest maids at the laundry cabinet running her hands over the silk sheets Aunt Emma adored and smelling each and every item to inhale the scent of soap so utterly foreign to the environment in which she herself had grown up.

  This girl was the middle daughter of a family of seven children. The eldest son was at sea and two others were working as carpenters making coffins. She had told all that to Merula without shame, her cheeks flaming only because she had been caught red-handed.

  Merula had told her that it wasn’t a good idea to finger household goods, as it might get her dismissed, but had promised her in the same breath that she could have some soap to wash her own clothes at home to show her family how well off she was in her new position.

  The girl had been delighted and reported back after her day off that everybody had wanted to smell her clothes, not just her family, but all the children who lived along the street and even the grandmothers who sat out on their wooden chairs cleaning vegetables for dinner or making brushes from pig hair.

  “That is not good,” Royston said by her side.

  Merula froze. “What is not?” she asked in a whisper.

  Royston nodded ahead of them. “The tall house with the lights on in the upper floor is my friend’s. But look who’s guarding it.”

  Merula followed his glance to a policeman who was standing on the edge of the pavement like a sentry, letting his eye drift casually across the traffic that passed in the street: a hansom, an empty cart, a cyclist balancing precariously across the cobblestones.

  She asked, “Do you think he is there for a reason? Does he suspect we are coming here?”

  “I doubt the police can be so well organized in so short a time.” Royston produced his watch and opened it, studying the hour with a frown. “The men who came to your uncle’s house to set the conservatory on fire weren’t with the police. They were probably Havilock’s footmen, who were in a panic after the death at the lecture. Or, rather, who were made to panic by that irritating nephew of Lady Sophia. Foxwell was far too eager to accuse your uncle of murder.”

  “After what you told me during the ride, I’m not surprised. Foxwell must have known about the public row between his aunt and my uncle. He must really believe my uncle is humiliated enough to retaliate.”

  “But if he really cares for your cousin Julia, would he accuse her father and risk him ending up on the gallows?”

  Merula frowned. “Who says Foxwell really cares for Julia? Perhaps he only flirted with her as he does with every handsome young woman and his aunt mistook the matter for a genuine affection. Perhaps the entire argument with my uncle wasn’t necessary, but Lady Sophia didn’t know that.”

  Royston nodded. “Possibly. Nevertheless, we have a policeman who might see us entering the house. Judging by the look of him, nothing escapes his eye. Two people who look … well, slightly disheveled will immediately have his undivided attention. And even though he won’t know now that we are wanted, he might learn that later tonight and lead the police straight to us. He’s probably eager to spot something—a pickpocket or a burglar prowling—to get a promotion. The last thing we need if we want to find refuge with my friend.”

  Merula bit her lower lip. “Doesn’t he have an entire round to make? He can’t stand here all night watching these few houses. He might miss something important somewhere down the street.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Royston said with a sour expression. “That he is not eager and out to spot anything but just acting like he’s watching something so he doesn’t have to walk about. For all we know he could be the laziest man on the force and determined to grow roots here for the rest of the night.”

  Merula sighed. The cold wind made her shiver, and she wasn’t keen on staying out much longer in her stained dress. “What about the cocoon?” she whispered. “It needs constant high temperatures to hatch. We may be disturbing the process and hurting the only evidence we have to clear Uncle Rupert.”

  Royston nodded. Suddenly his expression lit, and he gestured. A tall boy with a hat pulled deep over his eyes sauntered over and looked at them. “You want me, governor?” he asked in a brass tone.

  Royston dug his hand in his pocket and produced a coin. “This is yours if you can get that policeman away from there. Take him down the street or whatever.”

  The boy cocked his head. “How would I do that? If I stick out my tongue at him, he’s not coming after me.”

  “I think a resourceful young man like you can think up something. Especially when the inducement is right.” Royston produced another coin.

  The boy’s expression went from suspicious to tempted. He glanced at the policeman’s broad, stern back, then at the coins in Royston’s palm. Fast as lightning, he snatched them up and said, “You don’t have much time, governor.” And away he went, sneaking in the shadows of the houses to get behind the officer.

  “What is he going to do?” Merula asked with a wriggle of excitement in her stomach.

  “I have no idea,” Royston responded, “but as he warned us, we won’t have much time. We’d better be quick about our part.” He kept his eyes on the officer, who was still blissfully ignorant of what was about to happen.

  Suddenly, without warning, a figure shot from the darkness behind him and bumped into him. In an instinctive movement, the policeman grabbed at the boy’s waist to arrest him, but he was too late. The boy already had the policeman’s baton and rushed off with it, brandishing it like a sword. The policeman swore and ran after him.

  “That’s our cue.” Royston put his arm around Merula to usher her quickly across the street and into the house of his friend. “The only thing that can go wrong now is him not opening the door.”

  Merula’s exultation died a sudden death. “Not opening the door? You mean that we will be standing there on the steps in full view of everybody passing by to ring a bell that might not be answered? Doesn’t your friend have servants?”

  “He tries to have servants,” Royston
replied enigmatically.

  They were at the foot of the steps already and walked up, Merula feeling as if she were going up to a podium or an auction block. “Hurry,” she hissed.

  Royston had already rung the bell. They heard it jangle somewhere deep within the house. On the ground floor everything was dark; only upstairs did bright light fill the windows.

  Royston said, “He’s probably experimenting, not listening to anything.”

  He rang again.

  Merula glanced anxiously in the direction in which the policeman had vanished after the little thief. Did she already see his imposing figure coming back? Did she see the light from the street lanterns gleaming off the brass on his uniform?

  The door opened and a tall man with long whiskers and a little scar under his right eye stared at them with mild surprise. “You need not have rung so often, my lord,” he told Royston in a tone more rebuking than polite. “I’m not deaf.”

  “I didn’t expect you here.” Royston pulled Merula inside and closed the door. He exhaled a moment. “Now, Bowsprit, if somebody comes to the door asking for me or a Miss Merriweather, we are not here, you understand?”

  Most servants would have thought this a rather odd command, even if they were too well trained to show it, but Bowsprit didn’t even move a muscle. He just nodded. “Very well, my lord. Pleased to meet you, Miss Merriweather. You look cold. Shall I make a fire in the drawing room?”

  “No, no fire or light in the downstairs rooms,” Royston barked. “Upstairs.”

  “But … Galileo is conducting a rather … odd experiment.”

  Royston looked over Bowsprit’s rolled-up shirtsleeves. “I take it you are assisting him? The things you do when I’m not around. Then again, it’s most useful you’re here so you can help us sort out this whole sordid affair. Up we go.”

  Bowsprit reconciled himself to the inevitable and walked ahead of them with the dignity of a first-class butler, even though his bare arms, covered with reddish-blond hair, and mud-caked boots didn’t really fit the image.

  Halfway up the stairs, Merula caught the smell. Her face scrunched up as she tried to determine what it was exactly.

  Royston cast her an apologetic look. “Try not to pay attention to it.”

  That was almost impossible to do, as the smell was pungent and pervasive. When they entered the room, it wafted full at them, coming from the haze in which a shadowy figure stood with a vial in his hand shouting, “This is it! This is it!”

  Bowsprit waved both his hands in the air to disperse the haze and even went to throw open a window, but Royston overtook him and gestured to him to leave it closed. He quickly pulled all the curtains shut so that curious people in the street couldn’t see any figures moving inside the room.

  Merula hovered near the door, holding a hand to her face to block out the smell and wondering if it was in any way dangerous to inhale. She hadn’t forgotten the remarks of the frightened people at the lecture about poisoned wallpaper and inhaling poisonous scents or gasses. She knew a little about chemistry and how some substances when they became warm released gasses into the air that could, for instance, be explosive. She hoped it wasn’t the case here, as a Bunsen burner was cheerfully flaming on a bench in the middle of the room, surrounded by all kinds of bottles, jars, and vials.

  Some vials contained liquids, either brightly colored or pale like water; other had crystals in them that were deep purple or bright blue. On the floor were scratch marks and stains as if the wood had been burned away by something spilled. Still, the man holding the foul-smelling vial was not even wearing gloves.

  Had Bowsprit just called him Galileo? Could that be his real name?

  “You do realize what this means?” the owner of the house exclaimed, waving the vial. “What has been considered impossible for generations has been proven to work after all. I have to make notes of this sequence.”

  He inhaled exultantly, only to add with a sigh, “If I could remember exactly what I did. I’ve been at it since dawn, and somehow the attempts have become a little muddled in my mind.”

  Royston said, “You can help us with a more urgent problem.” He cleared some books from a small table, under protestations from their host that he was ruining the order, and put down his jacket. Folding it open, he exposed the cocoon of Attacus atlas.

  Their host, having put the foul-smelling vial in a holder, approached with narrowed eyes. “Must be imported from the East,” he said in concentration. “No species of this size around here. New? Can I actually be the first to see it hatch?”

  “We do hope it will hatch and you can see it,” Royston confirmed, “but some precautions may be in order. The creature that crawled from one of these earlier today is under suspicion of murdering a member of the Royal Zoological Society.”

  “You are jesting,” their host said.

  Royston shook his head. “I was there when it happened. The butterfly sat on a woman’s bare arm, and within moments she started to gasp, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed. Smelling salts couldn’t bring her back to consciousness. A doctor declared her dead shortly after. And everybody clamored that it was the butterfly’s doing and that the person who had brought it to the lecture should be punished.”

  Galileo’s pale eyes descended on Merula. “That would be you?” he asked. “I assume that my dear friend Royston has abducted both you and the twin of your alleged killer to have me establish there is no poison in the creature and you are not to blame for the lady’s death? My, my, how gallant of you, Raven.”

  Royston flushed under his collar and said, “You have it all wrong. The police have the alleged guilty party in custody. Miss Merriweather’s uncle.”

  “But you are right,” Merula said hurriedly, “in the sense that I am the one hatching the butterflies in my uncle’s conservatory. I took Attacus atlas with us to the lecture tonight to show it off. I released it because I was told it couldn’t be a real, live creature. Then it descended on Lady Sophia’s arm and…”

  “Lady Sophia?” Galileo echoed. “Poor Albert Rutherford’s widow?”

  “I don’t know if we should call him poor,” Royston protested, but Galileo said, “He was a poor fellow for having to be married to her. She wanted to be in control of everything. Including his collection. Did you know he has the most amazing poisonous darts from Africa? They are projected by so-called blowguns. A very effective means of killing someone—if you can get close enough, of course.”

  “And Rutherford had those darts lying around the house?” Royston asked at once.

  Galileo nodded. “That’s what I heard.”

  Royston looked at Merula. “Maybe Foxwell found an ingenious way of introducing such an exotic poison from a dart into Lady Sophia’s food or drink. Who says she can’t have already been poisoned before she came to the lecture?”

  Galileo looked doubtful. “The poisons on those darts work extremely fast. They were meant for hunting, you see. For taking down monkeys and all. If the poison took too long to work, the monkey could just jump away and the hunter would never recover his prey.”

  “A matter of minutes, you’d say?”

  “Moments, sooner. That is why exotic poisons are so exciting. They do something to the human body that is quite extraordinary.”

  “I thought cyanide also causes a pretty quick death,” Merula said.

  Royston raised his hands. “Before we go into all kinds of violent death … Galileo, please put this cocoon with your other insects where it will be warm and safe until it hatches. Remember what I said, though, and treat the creature that will come out of it with utmost respect. I don’t want to have it on my conscience to see you lying dead on the floor.”

  Galileo made a scoffing sound. He put on a glove and picked up the cocoon. He went to a door leading into another room. When he caught Merula watching him intently, he gestured for her to follow him.

  Royston said, “You’re not afraid of snakes?”

  Merula hitched a brow at him. “Not as
long as they are caged.”

  Galileo waited for her in the doorway, spreading his hands in an all-compassing gesture. “Welcome to my little sanctuary.”

  The room was hot, as it had been in her uncle’s conservatory at home. The shelves were not lined with books but with glass containers holding branches, rocks, and sand. Glancing past the containers, Merula first had the impression they were empty, until in the fourth she spied a large black spider sitting in the shade of the branch in its cage. It was as large as the palm of her hand and quite hairy.

  Suppressing her instinctive revulsion, Merula went closer and studied the creature, then let her gaze return to the cases beside it, which she had at first thought to be empty. In the first, a snake just as green as the leaves of the branch in its cage lay perfectly still between them, not even blinking its eyes.

  In the second container, a bit of black body was visible in the back. Shiny, it seemed coated with something.

  “Scorpion,” Galileo said at her shoulder. “Really aggressive creatures. Kill quickly with a sting of the tail. I can explain better when he’s showing more of himself.”

  “Where did you get all of these?” Merula asked.

  “My first snake came from an importer of Eastern goods who actually found it in a crate with folding screens. It had slipped in and come all the way across the sea. The man was petrified and called me in, and I caught it and brought it here. Unfortunately, I have not been able to train it to respond to either whistles or milk.”

  Merula had to laugh. “I think Arthur Conan Doyle took a little artistic license there.”

  Galileo smiled in response. “I’m not complaining. The idea of killing someone by letting a snake in through a ventilator shaft is so brilliant I wish I had thought it up myself. Although I still believe a good doctor would have spotted the bite marks. Snakes have quite powerful jaws, and the injection of the poison would leave discoloration, bruises if you will. Conan Doyle’s story says that they looked for signs of poison on the dead woman’s body and found nothing. I readily believe that they wouldn’t have found anything inside her body, as they didn’t know to look for snake poison. But the bite marks!”