60 pages • 2 hours read
Deanna RaybournA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Veronica and the baron arrive in London in the predawn hours. They stop in a run-down neighborhood that the baron identifies as Stoker’s home and workshop. Inside, they pass through “a series of large rooms, each filthier and colder than the last, and all stuffed with rubbish” (28). Veronica, delighted, realizes that Stoker is a taxidermist.
Stoker himself stands shirtless over his work; when he turns, Veronica sees he is muscled and wears an eyepatch, causing her to draw a comparison to Hephaestus from Greek myth. The baron asks to leave Veronica with Stoker, who instantly rejects this idea. As the baron pleads, Veronica explores, taking particular interest in a preserved butterfly that she believes mislabeled. She is intrigued by Stoker’s claim that he captured the butterfly himself from the Amazon. Stoker agrees to house Veronica only when the baron reminds him of his mysterious debt. The baron departs, promising to return soon.
Veronica compliments Stoker’s taxidermy. He clarifies that he is a natural historian, and taxidermy is just part of that work. Stoker turns back to his project, unwelcoming. He tells Veronica she can clear off a nearby sofa if she wishes to sleep. As she does so, she encounters Stoker’s bulldog, Huxley. They curl up contentedly and fall sleep.
Veronica wakes hours later to find Stoker still at work. She admires both his body and his technique as he restores a piece of elephant skin, noting the man’s many tattoos and intense strength. Veronica, impressed with his progress on the elephant, comments on the impossibility of moving an elephant once it is fully restored. Stoker counters that he is currently experimenting in anticipation of restoring a different elephant for a patron. He expresses his difficulty in working with a body as large as an elephant’s, and Veronica offers to help, claiming she will grow bored and may as well contribute something during their time together. He reluctantly agrees, and they work for several hours.
Stoker ignores conventional propriety and lights a cigar. Veronica produces her own cigarillo, which makes Stoker laugh. He grows uncomfortable when Veronica glances at his eye patch, assuming she pities him, but she says the only pity she might have would arise from his “[determination] to be disagreeable” (38). He becomes somewhat more polite after this.
When the mail arrives, Stoker declines to read it, expecting another rejected application for a Royal Museum of Natural History expedition. Stoker sends away the boy who brought the mail, Badger, with a coin and the meat the butcher had sent him. Stoker claims it was a bad cut, but Veronica can tell it was to help support Badger’s family. Veronica comments on this generosity, given that Stoker’s finances are strained. Stoker sees this as unchangeable, given his constant rejections from the Royal Museum, which Veronica asserts is “a second-rate institution run by charlatans and fools” (41), surprising Stoker.
Veronica tells Stoker how she came to accompany the baron but shrugs off the baron’s concern for her safety, claiming that accompanying him to London saved her the expense of travel. He sternly informs her that she will not spend her money while staying with him; his pride demands that his protection, as he promised the baron, extends to feeding her.
She offers to earn her keep by tidying up. He forbids her from touching his things but accepts her help with the elephant. Veronica notes that Stoker is clearly a gentleman fallen on hard times. He has expensive boots that are worn and patched, and his accent speaks to his education. She laments his “pigheadedness” at continually applying to the Royal Museum when, she asserts, they should be applying to him for aid. Stoker demands an explanation.
Veronica criticizes Stoker’s lack of imagination as she advises him to seek wealthy investors. She cites lady explorers as examples of how simple travel can be achieved. Stoker asks where Veronica obtained her radical ideas; she frames books as forming her education. They debate the merits of learning on one’s own versus from a teacher.
Stoker wonders if her viewpoints have alienated people. She confirms they have, citing a case where she was fired from a hospital after amputating a man’s gangrenous toe without permission, as the doctor was intoxicated. She uses this as evidence of her resourcefulness. Stoker insists he will not invite her on this hypothetical expedition. Veronica retorts that she intends to follow her own expedition instead, to the Malay Archipelago (a group of islands between Australia and mainland Southeast Asia).
Veronica notes Stoker’s tiredness and urges him to sleep. While he does, she explores his specimen cases, intrigued to find them engraved with the initials of famous explorer Revelstoke Templeton-Vane. She recalls the story of the explorer who was briefly viewed as brilliant until an excursion to South America was characterized by scandal. She realizes “Stoker” must be a diminutive for “Revelstoke.”
Unable to stand the disarray in Stoker’s workshop, she tidies and makes a soup. She finds countless small sketches and realizes Stoker is a talented artist. When Stoker wakes, he is annoyed to find that she has moved things. She admires some of his preservation work and explains the origin of her interest in butterflies. As a child, chasing a butterfly made “roaming about the countryside” a suitable purpose for a girl (55). This developed into scientific interest.
They eat the soup, which Stoker reluctantly praises. He removes his eye patch to rub his eye, revealing that he can see from the eye, though it tires easily. He uses the patch to rest the injured eye when fatigue blurs his vision. Badger arrives, and Veronica convinces him to eat the last of the soup by claiming it would otherwise go to waste.
Stoker exclaims over a headline in the paper: Baron von Stauffenbach has been found dead in a ransacked room. Stoker hastily sends Badger to send several telegrams, instructing the boy to wait for responses. When the boy is gone, Stoker begins packing a bag. Veronica attempts to leave, not wishing to tax Stoker in his grief, but Stoker refuses. He believes Veronica to have something to do with the baron’s death, and he will not allow her to leave until he understands the connection. He threatens to restrain her if necessary. Though Veronica is confident in her self-defense techniques, she deigns to stay. When Badger returns with the telegram responses, Stoker reads them and urges Veronica to leave the warehouse without further explanation.
Veronica follows Stoker through London, not pressing him for answers about their destination in deference to his grief. She decides that determining any role she had in the baron’s death is not only her responsibility but the only way she may yet learn about her mother. Stoker takes them via an indirect route to Paddington Station to evade detection.
Veronica briefly steps away from Stoker to use the restroom and is seized by an unknown man. He addresses her by name but refuses to identify himself. He asserts that the baron intended to give Veronica over to his care. Veronica wonders if the man is her father, as is he just old enough and bears her a passing resemblance. She accuses him of lying. Shocked, he identifies himself as Edmund de Clare and solicitously offers to become her “protector” against the approaching “peril.” He warns her away from Stoker but refuses to explain his reasoning.
Veronica pretends to agree with his demands but cites an imaginary stomachache as necessitating a return to the restroom. She evades de Clare and uses the opportunity to return to Stoker. She and Stoker board their train just as it pulls from the station. She does not tell him about the interaction with de Clare, whom she sees through the train window as it pulls away, clearly angry to have been tricked. She decides to continue trusting Stoker until he gives her reason not to.
Veronica remarks on the unnecessary expense of first-class tickets, which Stoker qualifies are for privacy, not comfort. Veronica unsuccessfully attempts to goad Stoker into revealing their destination. As they travel in silence, Veronica recognizes why she distrusts de Clare: If he had truly been sent by the baron, as he claimed, he would have not waited until she was separated from Stoker to approach her—unless de Clare assumed Stoker had abducted her. She resolves to continue trusting her intuition.
They change trains several times before reaching Taviscombe Magna, where they walk through dark countryside. Stoker says they will stay with his friends in a “traveling show.” Veronica pushes for more, arguing that she has been “very cooperative for a victim of abduction” (76). Stoker reiterates his suspicion that she was involved in the baron’s murder, though he admits her innocence is likely. Nevertheless, she is the only connection he has to potential answers. She asks to help him discover the true perpetrator. He refuses, but he does want to clear her name.
Stoker insists they will pose as a newly married couple with his friends, which Veronica criticizes as being “a plot straight from a penny dreadful” (78). He insists, even producing a gold ring as a prop. When she tells him her first name, he laughs at the pun; the plant veronica is commonly known as speedwell. Veronica defensively comments that her Aunt Lucy was an avid gardener. They arrive at an encampment with a sign announcing it as “Professor Pygopagus’ Traveling Curiosity Show” (80).
This portion of the novel focuses on the new relationship between Stoker and Veronica, which initially leads to numerous clashes between their characters. Despite the common interests between them (Veronica studies butterflies, while Stoker is a naturalist with a broader scope), they regularly butt heads over their mutual stubbornness. Stoker represents various aspects of privilege from which she, as a middle-class woman in the Victorian era, has been denied. Stoker is an aristocrat by birth. His wealthy family led to his education and to the funding of his early expeditions, even if they are, by the time of the novel, estranged from one another. Stoker similarly experiences and sometimes invokes a sense of masculine pride that strikes against Veronica’s sense of independence.
These conflicting values—and the way the novel navigates them—further explores how history is characterized in a modern popular fiction novel. Deanna Raybourn’s text characterizes the Victorian era with outdated ideals and restrictions, but it also paints this era as a worthwhile, engaging, and interesting setting. The extent to which Veronica gives in to or flatters Stoker’s pride plays in this intermediate space, especially as Stoker becomes increasingly framed as a potential romantic interest. Stoker emerges as protective—a common masculine archetype for the male romantic lead—without being controlling, ensuring he appears dedicated to Veronica’s safety without it curtailing the novel’s heroine and therefore its plot.
Stoker’s dual privileges as an aristocrat and as a man come into play into his Chapter 6 debate with Veronica about the relative merits of autodidacticism, or learning on one’s own, and having a teacher aid one’s education. Though Stoker argues for the ability of a good teacher to inspire a student, Veronica notes the potential for such a teacher to promote conservative values or instill strict gender roles. Teaching herself, Veronica points out, meant that she was never forced to learn needlework. The novel’s refusal to declare one or the other character the winner of this debate alludes to the different perspectives that Stoker and Veronica each will contribute to their partnership once they agree to work together.
This section further explores its intertextuality with other installments in the detective fiction genre. Veronica’s quip in Chapter 8 that their situation resembles the plot of a “penny dreadful” shows that both author and character are conversant in the tropes of detective fiction; Veronica can recognize the ways in which her story resembles a story. Raybourn also includes “Easter eggs,” which are hidden messages or imagery in a piece of media that reference something else—in this case, other hallmarks of mystery stories. This illustrates her fluency in the mystery genre, contextualizing her work in broader popular media. For example, when Veronica and Stoker go to “Taviscombe Magna” in Chapter 8, this alludes to a mystery series by author Hazel Holt, which takes place in a town called Taviscombe.