Free A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn

sorting them, skimming the headlines to see what I had missed in the years I had been abroad. The Irish question appeared often, as did the Mahdist War in the Sudan. The Prussians featured frequently, but that was no surprise. The Prussians were always up to something nefarious. And there had been an impressive number of gunfights in cities in the western United States. But that, too, was no great surprise. In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms. I put these aside and moved on to the shelves holding bottles of chemicals. He had a collection of them, many potent, all flammable, and quite a few capable of producing nasty burns if permitted to touch bare skin. Most bottles contained preservatives in various dilutions, although one bore a label that crumbled at the tentative poke I gave it. I sniffed experimentally and was assaulted at once by the cloying pickled smell of formaldehyde. I gave it a wide berth and continued on, tidying until I had brought a reasonable semblance of order to the place. I was intrigued to find a florilegium of Romantic poetry tucked under a pot of hide glue and was just about to settle in to read when I heard a roar of outrage.
    â€œHoly Christ, I told you not to touch anything.” Mr. Stoker had come awake, wincing a little as he sat up and worked the stiffness from his muscles.
    â€œI did not move anything,” I assured him. “I merely stacked the books and correspondence so they would not fall over, and I cooked a meal. I would have replaced the preservative solution in some of those appalling jars, but it does not seem to be plain ethyl alcohol, and I did not wish to damage the specimens by changing the solution.”
    â€œAt least you have that much sense,” he said grudgingly. “The solution is of my own devising.”
    â€œAnd not very effective,” I told him, pointing towards the jars of suckling pigs floating in scummy yellow fluid.
    â€œThose were early efforts, designed to show me where the flaws were in the formula,” he said nastily. “And if Your Highness would care to look at the specimens on
that
shelf, I think you will find the solution is clear as Irish crystal.”
    I did as he bade, nodding in approval. “Well-done. That is perhaps the finest preserving work I have seen. Did you use plain formaldehyde? No, of course, you will not tell me. I ought not to have asked. I should love to see you preserve something. I have only ever managed to fix butterflies, and of course, mounting Lepidoptera is nothing so difficult as mounting mammals.”
    He gave me a curious and not wholly friendly stare. “How did you come to be interested in butterflies? They are the usual province of the lady naturalist, but I am rather surprised you didn’t find yourself studying something with teeth.”
    â€œHm.” I was examining another of his little pigs, marveling at the curl of its pink tail. “How extraordinary. One can almost hear it squealing.” The specimen, one of his best, was so arrestingly lifelike I was not entirely certain it had not moved. Like my butterflies, it gave the impression of cessation, as if it had paused in whatever it was doing but only for a moment. Stillness coupled with expectancy; these are the qualities all good preparations must convey.
    I shook myself free of my reverie. “What was that? Oh, butterflies. They afforded me the chance to get away from the villages where I grew up. Girls are not supposed to go roaming about the countryside without purpose. It is considered eccentric. So I bought a butterfly net and a killing jar, and that made it quite all right.”
    A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “That I can understand. I was always thought odd for stuffing my pockets with jars of frogspawn and dissecting rabbits instead of eating them.”
    I smiled at the notion of him as a boy with a pocketful of bottled tadpoles, but he suddenly tired of