“It wants cleaning out,” he explained happily, anticipating with real pleasure many hours spent raking bits of decaying filler from its imperfectly preserved insides.
“Your tastes will ever surprise me,” I remarked dryly. I expected some vigorous rejoinder, but he was already peering intently into the creature’s mouth, neatly eluding the long, menacing ivory tusks.
“Amazing!” he exclaimed. “Do you realize that this is the largest single specimen of Odobenus rosmarus ever to be seen on English shores? Two thousand two hundred and forty-five pounds. And a half,” he added with all the pride of a new father observing his offspring for the first time.
“You don’t say,” I murmured. Stoker’s dogs, Huxley and Nut, and his lordship’s enormous Caucasian sheepdog, Betony, sat patiently at his heels, waiting for the destruction of the trophy to begin. Stoker had—upon several occasions and in exhaustive detail—explained that the fashion for stuffing specimens had been discarded for the more aesthetically pleasing and accurate method of mounting them. Older examples of the taxidermical arts had been stuffed with sawdust, newspapers, old book pages, rags, whatever was to hand when the job was in progress. Stoker had even unearthed a foul nest of dead kittens in one particularly vile specimen. It was his practice to take such trophies and deftly unstuff them, if one may be permitted to use such a word, removing the putrefying fillers and cleaning the various hides and skins to restore them to lustrous life. He fashioned his own eyeballs after intensive research into the proper shape and color and pupillary details, and he sculpted his own armature to hold the refurbished exteriors. It was a gift, of that there could be little doubt, to bring these creatures back to life, resurrecting them so perfectly that one could easily imagine they had been alive only a moment before—indeed might still be alive, only arrested in mid-breath. More than once I had glanced quickly back at one of his trophies, certain I had caught movement in the tail of my eye. I was not surprised the walrus had diverted him. I had met him when he was engaged in assembling an elephant of dramatic proportions, and with Stoker size was always a consideration.
I took myself up the narrow twisting stair of the Belvedere into the gallery that provided a snuggery of sorts. It was furnished with low bookshelves and a campaign bed once belonging to Wellington as well as a few other cozy comforts. My own dog, Vespertine, trotted obediently behind, coming to rest lightly at my feet with a hopeful glance. The poor fellow had lost his mistress a few months previously and had taken to following me about with persistent devotion. He was a Scottish deerhound, tall and elegant, and had a habit of looking down his aristocratic nose at Huxley the bulldog and Nut the pharaoh hound. Huxley had belonged to Stoker when I met him, but Nut—like Vespertine—was the souvenir of an investigation, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that Stoker and I were going to have to be a little more judicious in our acquisitions of animals unless we meant to start a dog circus.
I rootled through the stacks of newspapers until I found the ones I wanted: issues of the Daily Harbinger from the previous October. The front pages were covered in lurid illustrations from the murder scenes of that fiend popularly known as Jack the Ripper, but in the latter pages of one edition, I saw a mention of Alice Baker-Greene. It was the merest snippet, a paragraph only, stating that the renowned climber had died upon the slopes of the Teufelstreppe in an attempt to summit the mountain out of season. There was no byline on the piece, and I flapped it aside in irritation. I rummaged through a few more issues until I found a proper tribute. This one was more informative, detailing Miss Baker-Greene’s history as part of the noteworthy Baker-Greene climbing family. Her grandparents had begun the tradition, using the Pennines as their training ground. They took along their son, who soon distinguished himself as one of the youngest men ever to summit the Matterhorn. He was an ambitious youth, determined to gain access to peaks previously unchallenged by Englishmen—notably the Himalayas. There was a brief mention of his demise in the Karakoram and his father’s later death in an avalanche in the Andes. The only surviving member of the family was the elder Mrs. Baker-Greene, who had taken charge of her orphaned young granddaughter. She had curtailed her climbing in order to raise the child, but when she discovered the girl perched atop a substantial deposit of talus, she realized that it would be futile to think she could keep young Alice from mountaineering. The elder Mrs. Baker-Greene had resumed her travels, taking the girl with her when school terms permitted, teaching her everything she knew about the pursuit.
By the time she was twenty, Alice Baker-Greene had surpassed her family’s achievements, becoming the first woman to summit Coropuna. She gained fame for never shying from a challenge, setting herself impossible tasks and working doggedly at them until she achieved them. She was the first to climb without male porters or guides on the grounds that her accomplishments would never be recognized if there was the slightest possibility that a man might be credited with the work. She led teams of amateur lady climbers around the world in order to finance her solo climbs upon the more demanding peaks. She was outspoken, arguing forcefully for admission to the various mountaineering clubs that refused her entry on the grounds of her sex.
The piece went on to describe the contretemps that arose on the fateful expedition to South America with Douglas Norton, adding rather more colorful detail than the lady herself had included when she had related the tale to me. According to the Daily Harbinger, upon the descent of El Cielo, she had publicly horsewhipped Douglas Norton, challenging him to a duel and claiming that he had stolen her summit. In return, he had laughed at her and claimed that El Cielo was no longer fit to climb since a woman had touched its summit. It was the last time she climbed with a man. From then on, she climbed alone or with her ladies, proving her achievements by planting a small green banner blazoned with her name at each peak. When guides removed her banners to call her accomplishments into question, she had begun to climb with photographic equipment, hauling the heavy camera to the summit in order to prove her success. I thought of the collection of photographs hung along the stairs of the Curiosity Club, silent testimony to one woman’s determination to prove her worth.
“I wish we had met again, Alice,” I murmured as I paged through the newspaper to find the conclusion of the piece. “I think we would have got on rather well.”
The rest of the article discussed her political leanings. Rebelling against the cult of True Womanhood with its insistence upon domestic virtue and bodily delicacy, Alice Baker-Greene had been a vehement advocate of fresh air and robust exercise, putting forth the notion not only that were women strong enough physically to endure the arduous requirements of mountaineering, but that they were better suited to the challenges of solitude or cooperation that different expeditions required. She claimed women were, by nature and nurture, more adaptable and easygoing than men, better able to govern their tempers and work in harmony with circumstances rather than against them. She detailed the numerous examples of men who had perished on mountaintops from their stubborn refusal to accept that conditions had turned murderous. She did not have to cite her father and grandfather as examples. It was well-known that on her grandfather’s fatal climb, her grandmother had protested against the prevailing wind, pointing out that the damp warmth of it was likely to spawn avalanches. The men had pushed on, and only Alice’s grandmother, with the wisdom born of long experience, had turned back, and she alone survived.