Before Lady Rose could reply, there was a commotion at the door. Porters arrived bearing an enormous and obviously weighty crate. Lady Rose danced around it. “She’s here, Papa! She’s here!”
I looked in some alarm to his lordship. “She?”
The earl hurried to explain as Stoker directed the porters where toplace their burden. “It is a trifle complicated. Perhaps it is better to show you.”
The porters eased the crate to the floor and left, their pockets weighted with the earl’s generous gratuities as Stoker applied a prybar to the lid. It was the work of moments to have the thing opened, and as the wooden sides of the crate fell flat, we stared in frank astonishment.
Inside the crate was a long glass box, a crystal casket, and inside lay a waxwork figure on a satin pillow. It was a young woman with long dark hair, rippling unbound over her shoulders. She wore an old-fashioned dress of heavy red velvet edged in fine lace, four inches deep. The neckline was deep and square, revealing an unblemished décolletage the same pale hue as the graceful hands. They were not, as one might expect, folded at the breast in a posture of stiff repose. Instead, they rested at her thighs, palms gently curved, the fingers tapered and relaxed. Her face was singularly beautiful, each feature moulded with grace, from the arch of the dark brow to the delicate line of the jaw. The complexion was pale except for the flush across the cheekbones and rosy lips which were softly parted. The whole effect was one of a maiden captured in enchanted slumber, a fragment of a fairy tale translated from the page to our workroom.
“She is exquisite,” Stoker said hoarsely. His gaze rested dreamily upon her face, and I suppressed a flicker of irritation. One cannot be envious of a waxwork, I reminded myself firmly. I turned to our employer. “Where did you find her?”
“There is a warehouse in Shoreditch that currently holds a few items I haven’t had the chance to transfer here,” he said. I looked around at the already crowded Belvedere wondering precisely how much more his lordship intended to bring us. We could scarcely move about the place as it was. He must have seen something of my thoughts in my expression, for he hurried on. “Only a few items,” he assured me. “Very small.You will hardly notice them when they arrive. But I happened to stop in to deposit a quite modest collection of—”
“My lord, you are not only keeping things in Shoreditch we knew nothing of, you areaddingto them?”
He had the grace to look abashed. “Well, one sees things and one simply cannot resist them.” He spread his hands helplessly. “In this case, I had purchased a full set of German tilting armour—very fine, fourteenth-century—from an auction house quite near to the warehouse. It seemed easiest to take delivery there and leave the armour until we had cleared space here in the Belvedere. Whilst I was there, I happened to notice the adjoining warehouse was clearing out items that had been left and never claimed.” He nodded towards the figure in the glass casket. “When I heard there was a waxwork for sale, it seemed the happiest of coincidences. Rose had asked for one for her birthday.”
“Had you?” I asked his daughter.
She was hopping from one foot to the other, fairly vibrating with excitement. “Oh, yes. Sidonie takes me sometimes to Madame Tussaud’s.” Their mother long dead, the earl’s children were left frequently in the care of his sister. Since governesses left the house as frequently as the soiled laundry, the lady’s maid, Sidonie, was occasionally pressed into service to lend a hand. I was not surprised that her notion of an appropriate outing for Lady Rose was a trip to the waxworks. The excursion was cheap and thrilling and conveniently located a quick walk away in Baker Street. “I am particularly fond of the Hall of Horrors,” Lady Rose went on. “But Sidonie thinks I am too young to see them, so I made a point of escaping her to see the murderers. She found me in front of Burke and Hare,” she said, pulling a face. “They robbed graves, you know. Anastything to do. So then we went to see something nicer and she showed me the Sleeping Beauty.”
“Ah,” I said, suddenly understanding. The figure was one of the mostfamous of Madame Tussaud’s works, although likely not sculpted by her own hand. Unlike our waxwork, that lady was gilt-haired and rested on a chaise longue in a posture of exhausted abandon. There was the faintest whiff of the erotic about her, the way one arm had been thrown above her head, revealing the delicate, naked skin of her wrist. It was said she had been modelled upon the luscious form of the Comtesse du Barry, the last mistress of Louis XV, a commission to memorialise the lady’s artful charms. Others said she was a noble widow put to the guillotine for resisting the advances of Robespierre. But whether royal courtesan or victim of vengeance, the true attraction of the figure lay in its refinements. The torso had been fitted with a clockwork mechanism to simulate the motion of breathing. To stand and watch her was an extraordinary experience. She ceased to be a waxwork and became instead a fairy-tale figure, abelle au bois dormant, drifting into dreams, and it was not uncommon to see visitors to Madame Tussaud’s whispering and tiptoeing away, leaving her to undisturbed repose.
“And you wanted a waxwork of your own?” I asked Lady Rose.
“Not just any waxwork,” she said, her eyes gleaming again with that devilish light. “I want one thatbreathes. My very own Sleeping Beauty.”
“For what purpose?” I demanded. She was only a child, of course, lacking the maturity of an adult, but surely she could not think the finished waxwork would be a suitable plaything.
She rolled her eyes heavenwards. “For the purpose of charging admission, of course. Papa says I can keep the proceeds.” The brightness in her expression, which I had mistaken for childish excitement, suddenly revealed itself as keenly entrepreneurial, and I experienced a dart of something akin to respect for her.
She turned to Stoker. “Can you do it? Will you?”
Stoker circled the glass casket, scrutinising the figure inside. “You want me to modify this waxwork to make it breathe, as Madame Tussaud’s Sleeping Beauty does?”
“Is it too much trouble?” the earl put in, a line furrowing its way between his brows.
“I do not think so,” Stoker said slowly. “The mechanism itself is simple enough. One would only need make an incision here—” He indicated the side of the mannequin and sketched an elliptical shape with his hands. “Then around in order to make space for the chest to rise. With the proper gears and rods and a bit of luck, it will run indefinitely.” He bent swiftly, peering through the glass. “We shall have to be careful removing the gown if you want her to wear it again. It will not be easy to manipulate it over the limbs. The wax is flexible, but it will have been sculpted over armature.” Lady Rose shot him a puzzled glance and he explained. “A sort of skeleton, a framework of metal. It gives structure and strength to the figure.”
Any other father might have blanched with horror to hear his daughter discussing a subject as inappropriate aslimbswith a man, but his lordship had no such qualms. He had never shielded his children from any topic of learning or conversation for which they had a sincere interest.
Lady Rose pursed her lips thoughtfully. “No, I think she would look well in blue. We shall have a new gown made. I will pay for it out of my pocket money,” she assured her father.
He smiled kindly. “Never mind that, Rose. We will tell Stoker thank you and be on our way now,” he urged.
“Oh, yes,” she said, turning to Stoker, face suffused with gratitude. “Thank you ever so much! When do you think she will be finished?”
“Rose,” her father said in a warning tone. “Stoker has other work, you know.”
She gave Stoker a graceful curtsy by way of apology. “Whenever you can then, Stoker. Only do make it soon,” she urged.
Stoker grinned and tossed her a piece of honeycomb. She snatched the candy out of thin air and skipped from the room, tugging her papaby the hand. I could hear snatches of her enthusiastic conversation as they went.
“You indulge that child,” I began mildly.
He shook his head. “I would have done this for anyone. It is a singularly thrilling piece of work. The figure will require a little refurbishment, I think, as well as the mechanism. And I think I may learn a thing or two about sculpture. This is an extraordinary piece of art, quite unlike anything I have seen before in its delicacy. If I could figure out how it was done and translate that to the swan I have been working on...”
His voice trailed off as he bent again to the waxwork figure, running adoring eyes over her from tip to toe. He murmured to himself as he circled her, making mental notes on his planned improvements.
