A Curious Beginning

“Tell me about your aunt Nell’s death.”


I sighed. “A series of apoplexies. Her first was some months ago, a little after Christmas. It was quite a severe one, robbing her of much movement and most of her speech. The doctor wrote to me in Costa Rica and I organized my passage home. I found her much altered from the woman I had always known. The doctor dosed her heavily with morphia to keep her calm and quiet. A few months after her first attack, she suffered another apoplexy, much more violent than the first, and when she regained consciousness, it became clear she had entirely lost the power of speech. She tried to write, but that, too, was beyond her abilities, and the doctor said it was kinder to keep her under the spell of morphia until she passed. When she died, I will confess, it was a relief to me. I did not like to see her thus. She had always been a person of great energy and purpose, and it was difficult to see her reduced to so little.”

“I can understand,” he said softly. I did not much care for his sympathy in that moment, and I hurried on. “Surely even you must see that this line of inquiry is a dead end. The baron’s past is a far likelier vein than mine. Let us begin with the poor gentleman himself. Had he enemies?”

Stoker shook his head. “None of which I am aware.”

“He was a foreigner. Do you know whence he came?”

“Coburg. He studied in Brussels for a time and then attended university in Bonn.”

“Excellent. And when did he come to this country?”

“Early in the ’40s. He was a childhood friend of Prince Albert. After the Prince Consort married Queen Victoria he had some trouble settling in, and he asked Max if he would come and make his home in England. Max had no ties of his own left in Germany. His parents were dead and he had no siblings, so he came.”

“Did he see the prince often?”

“Not very. The queen was a demanding wife,” Stoker added with a ghost of a smile. “But when she could spare him, the two men had the occasional dinner or ride together. Most often they corresponded by letter. I suspect the prince simply felt more at ease for having one of his own countrymen close at hand.”

“No doubt,” I mused. “But as interesting as his connection with the prince might be, Prince Albert has been dead for decades and, as far as we know, the baron lived unmolested. If there was any sort of motive to harm him from his friendship with the prince, surely it would have caused some villain to act long ago.”

“Agreed. So if the motive is not to be found in his friendship with the Prince Consort, we must look to his more recent past.”

“How did you meet him?” I inquired.

“He was a guest lecturer when I was at university. We had common interests, and he was kind enough to act as mentor to me when I had few friends. Later, much later, he saved me,” he finished simply.

“Was that the debt you both spoke of when he left me with you? The reason you felt you owed it to him to protect me?”

He nodded, and I thought that would be an end of it, but he spoke, each word as slow and heavy as if he were hewing them from a burial place—a burial place deep within himself. “When I was injured in Brazil, what followed was for me a very dark time. I do not speak of it. I do not even let myself think of it. But there are depths to which a man can sink, and I have plumbed them all. I could not bring myself out of it. I was content to stay there and to die there. My wounds had healed, but my body was in a far better state than the rest,” he recalled with a bitter twist of his mouth. “Max sailed halfway around the world to bring me home. If he had not made it his business to search me out, I would have stayed, rotting in a prison I had made for myself, too sunk in despair to find my way out again. It was Max who found me, who cleaned me up and brought me back to England.”

I said nothing, and he went on, speaking in a strangely detached voice, as if in a dream. “I did not appreciate it, not at the time. He wanted me to stay with him in London, but I was still too angry, too lost in my own misery. So I left him and went to the traveling show, running away from the truest friend I ever had. He let me go, at least for a while. Eventually, he found me again and asked me to come back to London. By then I was ready to accept the hand he extended. I took the warehouse for my workshop; I resumed my work. But still I resisted his efforts to rehabilitate me completely. It was as if, having once fallen out of the habit of civilized life, I could no longer find it again. Yet Max never gave up on me. He never stopped believing I could pull myself out of this abyss into which I had stumbled.” He paused and gave a sharp laugh. “It’s funny, really. Do you know what his specialty was? Restoration. He loved nothing more than to take old paintings—pieces damaged by neglect or time or war—and make them whole again. Pity he never finished with me.”