It had become increasingly apparent to him over the past weeks that he had, yet again, run out of things to do, which was a perilous state of affairs. He had staved off ennui for a while this time by first renovating his house again and then by restoring an old Jaguar E-type, but the kitchen was as improved as it was going to get and the Jag was running better than new, and he had felt the soft, inexorable tides of boredom rolling in. It was November, the grey end of the year, and November always made him feel his age.
He had considered going up to Scotland, moping about a bit in more appropriate scenery. Going back to his roots. There were several extremely good reasons not to do this, but faced with the spectre of serious boredom Ruthven had begun to let himself imagine the muted melancholy colors of heather and gorse, the coolness of mist on his face, the somewhat excruciatingly romantic ruins of his ancestral pile. And sheep. There would be sheep, which went some way toward mitigating the Gothic atmosphere.
Technically Edmund St. James Ruthven was an earl, not a count, and he only sort of owned a ruined castle. There had been a great deal of unpleasantness at the beginning of the seventeenth century that had done funny things to the clan succession, and in any case he was also technically dead, which complicated matters. So: ruined castle, to which his claim was debatable, almost certainly featuring bats, but no wolves. Two out of three wasn’t bad, even if the castle didn’t overlook the Arges?.
Ruthven wasn’t much of a traditionalist. He didn’t even own a coffin, let alone sleep in one; there simply wasn’t room to roll over, even in the newer, wider models, and anyway the mattresses were a complete joke and played merry hell with one’s back.
He took the crumpled wrappers into the kitchen and disposed of them. Having seen Varney properly installed in one of the guest bedrooms, and been reassured that his condition—while serious—was stable, Ruthven had spent a couple of hours looking through his own not inconsiderable library. The peculiar nature of the weapon Varney had described didn’t fit with anything that immediately came to mind, but something about the idea of it was familiar.
Now, having killed a few hours, he judged it late enough in the morning to call August Cranswell at the British Museum, hoping to catch him in the office rather than somewhere in the complicated warren of the conservation department. He was rather more relieved than he would have liked to admit when Cranswell picked up on the third ring, sounding distracted. “Hello?”
“August,” Ruthven said. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No, no, no—well, yes, but it’s okay. What’s up?”
“I need your help with a bit of research. As usual.”
“At your service, lordship,” said Cranswell, a smile in his voice. “Also as usual. What’s the topic this time?”
“Ceremonial daggers. To be more exact, ceremonial daggers dipped in something poisonous.” Ruthven leaned against the kitchen counter, looking at the draining board by the sink: Greta’s surgical instruments lay side by side on the stainless steel, once more boiled clean. It had been a long time since he’d been called upon to sterilize operating tools, not since the Second World War, in fact—but the memory was still vivid in his mind seventy-odd years later.
Cranswell’s voice sharpened. “What kind of poison?”
“We don’t know yet. But the dagger itself is extremely peculiar.”
“You are not being even slightly reassuring,” Cranswell said. “What happened?”
Ruthven sighed, removing his gaze from the probes and tweezers and directing it at the decorative tile work on the walls instead. He sketched out the events of the past night and morning as briefly as he could, feeling obscurely as if the details ought to be communicated in person, as if the phone line itself was vulnerable. “Varney is stable, at least,” he concluded, “and all the … foreign material … has been removed and taken for proper analysis. Greta says he should recover, but nobody knows quite how long it’ll take, and she pointed out the rather obvious similarities between this business and the Ripper cases. But the dagger is why I’m calling you.”
“Wow,” said Cranswell, sounding somewhat overwhelmed, and then rallied: “Tell me everything you can. I don’t have our catalog of arms and armor memorized, but I can go and look.”
“Varney didn’t get a good look at it—he described it as a spike, or a short weapon like a rondel dagger. But the blade itself was cross-shaped. Like two individual blades intersecting at right angles. I have no idea how one would go about making such a thing.”
“I’ve seen something like that, but it wasn’t a knife,” Cranswell told him. “Lawn sprinklers have spikes like that to anchor them in the ground. I’m guessing your friend didn’t encounter a ritual lawn sprinkler stake, however.”
“The likelihood is slim. But if you could look through the daggers you’ve got hidden away and see if anything even close to this exists in your catalog, I’d appreciate it—but mostly I want you to check the manuscript collection.”
“Manuscripts,” Cranswell repeated. “You think this thing might show up in one of them?”
“It’s the monk costumes. I can’t get the medieval warrior-monk orders out of my mind, you know, taking up arms in the service of some flavor or other of god. Varney said they went on a bit about unclean creatures of darkness and purification and so on, which is difficult to credit in the modern age, but then again this whole wretched business is somewhat unbelievable.”
“I’ll have a look,” said Cranswell. “If we have anything it’ll be in storage; none of the manuscripts on display are likely to have anything useful to offer, but I’ll check.”
“Thank you. I … do know you’re busy,” Ruthven said, wryly. “I appreciate it.”
“I could kind of use a break right now, actually. I’ll call you this afternoon if I find anything, okay?”
“Splendid,” he said. “If you aren’t doing anything tonight and feel like being social, come over. I’ll make you dinner in partial recompense for your time.”
Cranswell chuckled. “Done,” he said. “Any opportunity to avoid eating my own cooking, you know. Okay, I’ll go see what we’ve got.”
“Thank you,” Ruthven said again, meaning it. He set the phone back in its cradle, feeling somewhat guilty at having dragged another person into this business but mostly relieved to have Cranswell’s assistance and his access to a staggering number of primary sources.
Greta rubbed at the hollows of her temples, leaning against the lab bench and watching her ex-boyfriend twiddle knobs on his microscope. “Well?” she said.
“Well what?” Twiddle, twiddle. “How do you expect me to do any sort of analysis if you keep interrupting me to say ‘well’? In fact I can’t make out anything useful in this. Just looks like a sharp piece of silvery metal to me. I’ll have to run it through the GC-MS.” Harry sounded interested.