Free A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn Page A

conversation. With an abruptness I had noted before in his manner, he gave me a cool look and picked up his pot of glue. “I think I will return to my elephant. I have wasted quite enough time already.”
    He strode back to his pachyderm, leaving me to amuse myself with Huxley. I did not mind. “Reclusive men are a good deal of work,” I murmured to the dog. Mr. Stoker was not my first encounter with a fellow uncomfortable in the company of women, and would assuredly not be the last. He might have a pathological dislike of women in general, but with a certainty borne of experience, I put his thorniness down to a heartbreak in his tender youth. Some people never recovered from their early losses, I reflected. I ladled out bowls of soup for Huxley and myself, pointedly ignoring Mr. Stoker as he worked at the elephant. The fragrance of the soup rose in a steamy cloud, inviting and rich, and the dog and I sipped contentedly until Mr. Stoker threw down his spatula and stalked to the soup pot. “What is this, then?”
    â€œFood for the dog,” I said evenly.
    He gave me a sour look and ladled up a portion. There were no other bowls, so he took his in a chipped porcelain basin that was clearly a piece of laboratory equipment.
    â€œIt is a miracle you have not poisoned yourself,” I observed.
    He shoveled a spoonful of soup into his mouth. “I would make a rather cutting remark about poisoning myself on your cooking, but I cannot. This is sublime. I can’t think when the last time was I had hot food.”
    He ate three bowls, each more slowly than the last, until he scraped the final savory spoonful and gave a sigh of repletion.
    â€œYou do not take very good care of yourself,” I said. It was an observation, not an accusation, and he seemed to take it as such.
    He shrugged. “Too much work, too little time, and too little money. You were not wrong about my habits. I sleep when I can and grab the odd bit of food when I think of it to keep myself going. And there is always gin,” he added with the jaded air of a practiced debauchee.
    I said nothing but went to my bag and retrieved the flask. “Here. Something I picked up on my travels. I find it quite bracing.”
    He took it from my hand and swallowed deeply, then spluttered so hard he nearly choked. “Good God, what the devil is that?”
    â€œSouth Americans have a specialty called cachaça, something like rum but made from sugarcane rather than molasses.”
    â€œI am familiar,” he said with a rueful look. “I lost the better part of a year to the stuff in Brazil. But it was nothing like this.”
    I deliberately overlooked the reference to his past. If he had worked so diligently to conceal his true identity, it was not my place to unmask him. At least not yet. “When I was butterflying in Venezuela, my host was a gentleman with extensive sugarcane fields in Brazil. He finds cachaça to be a trifle tame for his tastes, so he distils it twice. This rather more potent aguardiente is the result.”
    He took a second swallow, this one more modest, and wiped the neck of the flask upon his sleeve as carefully as a lord. He blinked heavily. “I think I have gone blind. And I am quite certain I do not care.”
    I capped the flask and replaced it in my bag. He flipped up his eye patch, and to my astonishment, I saw that his eye was whole and unblemished as the other, aside from a narrow white scar crossing the lid. I noticed also they were blue, not the striking bright blue of a Morpho but the very dark blue of
Limenitis arthemis astyanax
, a Red-spotted Admiral I had hunted successfully in America. Compared to the frivolous Morpho, the Admiral was a very serious sort of butterfly.
    â€œYou have sight in that eye,” I said, almost accusingly.
    He nodded, pressing his knuckles into his eyes. “As much as in the other, believe it or not. But it fatigues easily, and when it does,