The Case of the Girl in Grey

by Jordan Stratford

  “And if a spark flies from the flame,” he continued, “it means a letter shall soon arrive by hand.”

  The part of Mary’s brain that was growing to resemble Ada’s silently asked how else a letter would be expected to arrive, by pigeon? She dismissed it and returned her attention to Mr. Hazzlit’s candle secrets.

  “Should the wick fold back on itself and fall into the wax, it heralds the arrival of a stranger.” He waited a dramatic beat. “Or a thief.” He had his audience in the palm of his hand at that.

  “As the wax slips down the side of the candle, should it form a loop, why, that’s a coffin handle and means that bad luck will befall the one it faces. But the worst of all…the worst of all is the ‘winding sheet,’ one fat, long drip of wax, meaning a horrible fate awaits the person opposite.” His speech delivered, he smiled and leaned back in his chair.

  “Opposite whom?” Mary asked after a moment of silence.

  “I’m sorry?” asked Mr. Hazzlit.

  “The winding sheet. Is it the person who can see it, who would be opposite the candle, or the person who can’t see it, opposite the person who can see it who would be opposite the candle.”

  “Don’t be difficult,” sighed Jane.

  “I’m not being difficult, I merely wish to…”

  “My dear children,” said Mr. Hazzlit, “I had no intention of setting discord upon this most hospitable table. I was merely sharing folktales.”

  “Please do excuse our Mary,” said Mrs. Godwin. “She suffers from an excess of imagination.”

  “I’m entirely convinced, madam, there’s no such thing as an excess of imagination.” Mr. Hazzlit smiled.

  Mary smiled at this and gave a confident nod in the direction of Mr. Hazzlit, who returned it.

  Hours later, Mary and Jane climbed into the same small bed, knees knocking together in the cooling dark, with only a single candle to read by. Mary caught herself looking for a winding sheet in the wax and was relieved to find none.

  Mary had settled into the opening pages of Mansfield Park and the fortunes of Miss Fanny Price as she settled in with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Jane’s cold foot nudged Mary’s shin under the covers.

  “Your Peebs is in here,” said Jane.

  “He’s not my Peebs,” answered Mary.

  “As you like. Anyway, he’s here.” Jane pointed. “Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to Sir Timothy Shelley, and his father was Sir Bysshe Shelley, first Baronet of Castle Goring. His family goes all the way back to 1379 and the Earl of Arundel.”

  “Gosh” was all Mary could say to that.

  “So what’s a gentleman doing being a tutor?” Jane wondered aloud.

  Mary asked herself if it was the right time to share with her sister that Peebs was a spy, sent on behalf of Ada’s (and Allegra’s, she supposed) dead father to keep them from becoming, well, too much like Ada’s distant mother, the baroness. No, she decided. It was not the right time. And perhaps never would be.

  This business about Peebs being her father’s patron as well as a spy was unsettling and made it difficult for her to concentrate on her book. Mary’s eyes were blurring in the dim candlelight, her novel and her own thoughts mixed up, and the arrival of the Crawfords at Mansfield began to impose upon her dreams.

  Across London, Ada lay awake in the October night. She kept a candle lit in the glass lantern, as she had since she was a baby, and found its glow a comfort, enjoying the curious shadows cast by the clumps of drawings tacked to her walls and by the bits and bobs of machine parts that covered every flat surface.

  When she heard the click of her bedroom door, Ada just sighed ever so slightly as a mostly-asleep Allegra tiptoed around piles of disassembled clocks and tools and stiffening tar-smelly goop in bowls across the floor. Allegra said nothing as she climbed in beside Ada, falling the distance to sleep she hadn’t already covered, which wasn’t very far.

  Something had bothered Ada for several nights now. Her case—not this one but the last one, the first case of the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, involving a mysterious pendant in the form of an acorn and a villain posing as a gentleman posing as a fishmonger, or some combination thereof. All had been settled neatly, with the innocent maid out of prison and returned to service, the pendant in the hands of its rightful Turkish owners, and a young heiress free to marry a young gentleman with a clear name, thanks to Ada and Mary’s efforts.

  And yet.

  It didn’t entirely add up, and Ada was at a loss to define how, exactly. She had mapped and sketched and diagramed all the variables she had encountered in the case, and all had been accounted for.

  Except for one niggling, sneaking suspicion that eluded Ada’s efforts at definition. A twitching hunch that teased her out of the corner of her eye, that darted away when her attention settled on it, like the half-seen tattoo on the fishmonger’s arm. And there was the same certain unknown something about this case too, the matter of Lizzie and Sir Caleb. Whatever this something was, Mrs. Somerville had sensed it, and even her enormous mind was not grand enough, or grand in precisely the right way, to scuttle it out into the middle of the kitchen and squash it with a broom.

  No, that’s beetles, thought Ada sleepily.

  Of course, she thought, grasping at waking before slipping into sleep. Remembering the spine of the book in Lizzie’s uncle’s library that had seemed so familiar, although forgetting, as sleep took her, why it was important.

  The book was Steganographia.

  “So,” Peebs coaxed from his small audience of girls, “after the death of Alexander the Great, the end of the Golden Age gave rise to…?”

  There was quiet for a moment, there in the Marylebone house parlor. The girls looked at the pages of Greek capital letters that Peebs had made for each of them: an alphabet beginning with alpha, beta, gamma.

  “Rome,” said Allegra, softly. All looked at her in a subdued amazement.

  “What?” she asked. “I know loads about Rome. Nuns were always going on about it. Lived there for a bit, I did, in between…” And she fell sadly silent.

  “In between?” Mary asked.

  “Trips,” said Allegra. “Papa would come and take me on a trip for a month or two. Then wherever we ended up, he’d just, well, put me in a new convent.”

  “That’s beastly!” exclaimed Jane.

  “Jane!” chastised Mary.

  “He’d come back,” said Allegra. “Every year or so…”

  “Well, it is beastly,” Jane insisted, and Mary had to agree. Her heart broke for this little girl, who’d been played with and put on the shelf like a toy, to be raised by a new set of strangers after each adventure. Her heart broke a little too for Ada, as that same father never came back for her at all. Mary felt suddenly grateful for her bed, her room, her family, which had remained pretty much the same since her father had married Jane’s mother, and they all stayed put together in the Polygon.

  Ada wasn’t listening. She was doodling over her Greek alphabet, knowing that she’d forgotten something, and that memory might be drawn from her head like ink from the quill. And then it was.

  “Steganographia,” she said.

  “Again?” asked Jane, bored already.

  “There’s a copy in Lizzie’s library.”

  “Is that unusual?” said Mary. “You have a copy in your library.”

  “It could be the copy Mrs. Somerville misplaced before she borrowed mine, or Mr. Babbage’s,” Ada conceded. “But it seemed out of place in that library. And it is an unusual book.”

  “Your wizard book?” asked Allegra.

  “Not a wizard book. A book about codes, disguised as a wizard book.”

  “I imagine,” added Jane, “that having a wizard book—even a pretend one—would get you in more trouble than having a book about being a spy.”

  “A spy?” Allegra asked.

  “Spies use codes,” said Mary helpfully.

  “I’d love to be a spy,” Allegra said. “Or a wizard.”

  “It has
nothing to do with wizards!” said Ada, beginning to get frustrated. “It’s about cryptography, and I think it’s important.”

  “Criptawhatnow?” said Allegra, not helping with Ada’s frustration.

  “Cryptography,” said Peebs, “from the Greek kryptos, or ‘hidden.’ ”

  “Hidden writing, specifically,” said Ada. “A code.”

  “But not, one hopes, crypt as in, well, crypts, with dead people in them,” said Jane.

  “Actually…,” began Peebs.

  “Impossible, all of you!” Ada raised her voice. “Cryptography uses words or letters or numbers to stand in for different words or letters or numbers, so that outsiders won’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Like our clandestine names,” added Mary cheerfully.

  “Yes. Well, no, not really,” said Ada, although she was disappointed to say so, as Mary was at least trying.

  “There are different kinds of codes,” Ada continued. “One is to just take what you mean to say and jumble it up, and all people see or hear is a jumble of nonsense. But people might suspect that the jumble is really a code.”

  “Codes need keys,” said Peebs. “An agreement in advance, so that there’s a way to unjumble the message when you’re ready to read it.”

  “The marvelous thing about steganography—” Ada began.

  “Greek again,” interrupted Peebs. “Steganos means ‘covered’ or ‘protected.’ ”

  Ada gave Peebs a quick glare and soldiered on.

  “The marvelous thing about steganography,” she said, “is that if we agree in advance that when I ask if you’d like a cup of tea, it really means we’re in immediate danger, then I could warn you without anyone else knowing you were being warned. We would disguise the secret message as a perfectly ordinary message.”

  “Oh!” said Allegra. “And if I said the phrase ‘You’re about to be eaten by tigers’ really means there’s treasure here and we should start digging, then no one else would know about the treasure.”

  “Don’t you think they’d be alarmed at the thought of tigers?” asked Jane. “That’s hardly a perfectly ordinary message.”

  “Well, maybe they would be alarmed, but then they’d run away, so when we found the treasure, we’d keep it all to ourselves,” answered Allegra.

  “Back to the point,” said Mary, getting a little frustrated herself. “We know that Mrs. Somerville is aware of steganography—hidden messages—because she wrote in Ada’s book. And we know that same book is in the library at Dedlock Hall. So I believe what Ada is saying is that if there is something fishy going on, it might have something to do with codes—codes hiding as perfectly ordinary things.”

  “Thank you,” said Ada.

  Although, as with Mary’s hunch that the ghost girl in the park was somehow relevant to their case, Ada couldn’t say precisely how codes might be involved—or what they might mean if she found them.

  In her mind’s eye, Ada envisioned a blackboard with half a mathematical equation. She’d need more numbers to fill in the equation before solving it.

  But where to find them?

  Ada sat in the guest bedroom in Dedlock Hall, her overnight bag on the bed, a bed much larger than her own, trying to remember why she’d thought it was a good idea to come. True, the other half of the equation—the part that was not already firmly in the blackboard of her imagination—was here. And she knew she was the one who would spot a clue if one existed. But she had suddenly remembered with some insistence that she didn’t like to go out. At all.

  The room was chilly, the coals in the fireplace doing little to warm the air, and there was an unfamiliar smell. She was a little put off by the amount of floor she could see—so unlike the landscape of books and clothes and bits of invention that cluttered her bedroom floor at home. The tidiness made Ada feel small and slightly queasy.

  Her first night away, after eleven, almost twelve, years in Marylebone, and never a night at the home of a friend. She missed Mary and knew at once it had been a mistake to come without her. She missed Anna; she missed Miss Coverlet, her old nursemaid, gone for weeks now. She even missed Allegra and realized she must be losing her mind. Ada caught herself tugging at her dress.

  There was a quick knock on the door, but even the knock didn’t sound right. Fortunately, Lizzie’s auburn hair popped around the door, with Lizzie under it, and Ada remembered that she did like her.

  “Settled in all right? Ready to go for an explore?”

  Ada nodded, hopping off the bed and taking Lizzie’s hand.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that Sir Caleb and Mr. Brocklehurst suspect nothing,” said Lizzie. “They rarely leave the drawing room, where they smoke and speak about who-knows-what, so I thought we might have a moment to ourselves. Where would you like to go?”

  “Well, the library is a good place to start,” suggested Ada.

  “We’ll have to wait. Uncle is something of a permanent fixture there. If you think there is something incriminating in the library, we’ll have to investigate after he goes to bed.”

  Ada asked Lizzie to recount everything again from the beginning, and as they wandered the endless corridors of Dedlock Hall, Lizzie recalled how her father had seemed out of sorts before his tragic accident; how her uncle and Mr. Brocklehurst had found her a suitor, and how Sir Caleb had come to stay; how Mr. Brocklehurst had wanted Lizzie to sign over her money to Sir Caleb before the wedding, and how she had declined.

  “Because he’s fishy,” said Ada.

  “Indeed, although I suspect this is Brocklehurst’s fishing and not Caleb’s. And when I asked him…”

  “You asked him?” asked Ada.

  “I did. Why do you seem surprised?”

  “It’s just the sort of thing I would have done,” said Ada.

  “Well, that’s good then,” said Lizzie, pleased with herself.

  “And?”

  “And he told me that talk of business was unladylike and should be left to gentlemen, and that I must trust him to know what is best and blah-dee-blah-dee-blah.”

  “Well, that could be fishy or he could just be horrible.”

  “Or just a gentleman confronted by a direct question by a young lady. That rarely seems to go well,” said a resigned Lizzie.

  The girls came to a side door that let out onto a garden path. The rain had given way to a halfhearted late-afternoon fog. Lizzie nodded the direction with her chin, and they continued speaking once they were outside.

  “Perhaps,” continued Lizzie as they crunched along the gravel path, “things will be different when we travel to Jamaica.”

  “Jamaica?”

  “Yes, Sir Caleb has dealings in Jamaica. And we’re to go there for a honeymoon, right after the wedding. Brocklehurst included.”

  “Do you want to marry him? Do you have to?”

  “Yes, I do have to, or at least I think I do.”

  “Why?” asked Ada, not understanding.

  “A young lady doesn’t simply reject a baronet her uncle has decided upon. It isn’t done.”

  “I’d ask why it isn’t done, but I don’t think you could explain it in any way it would actually make sense,” admitted Ada.

  “I fear you’re right about that.”

  “Mary’s mum wrote a book,” said Ada. “Mary Wollstonecraft. She said girls should be able to do whatever they like.”

  “Wouldn’t that be delightful?” Lizzie said with a sigh. “Perhaps one day it shall be so. I take heart in the successes of Mrs. Somerville, so I imagine the world must be changing, but how quickly I cannot say.”

  They strolled on toward the front of the house, and there, to the right and on the verge of the forest, was the stone house, the mausoleum, in which Lizzie’s mother and father were entombed.

  “Crypt,” said Ada to herself.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Crypt. Cryptography. Would you mind terribly if I took a look?”

  “At the mausoleum? Whatever for?”

&nbs
p; “I’m not sure,” said Ada. “But I’m looking for something, and something tells me that the crypt is a good place to start. Have you brought pencil and paper?”

  “I have, in fact,” said Lizzie.

  “Well, then, let’s investigate.”

  The granite face of the mausoleum had two fat pillars carved out of it, with a triangular roof above and some sort of family crest at the center. Instead of a door, there was an ornate ironwork grille, like a garden gate, painted a gleaming black. Keeping the grille in place was a long iron bar with a latch. Ada unlatched and removed the bar and pushed the gate, which swung inward easily on well-attended hinges. She entered.

  There were two long rectangles set flat into the stone floor—the resting places of Lizzie’s mother and father—and around them a series of large letters carved into the stone.

  “What are those?” Ada asked, pointing to the inscriptions, her eyes not yet adjusted to the gloom.

  “Muddle ducks, I always called them,” answered Lizzie.

  “Why?”

  “See? There’s an M, and a D, and an L. Over there is a D and a V and some X’s. Muddle ducks. My father would come here, when I was little, and place flowers on Mother’s grave. I thought ‘muddle ducks’ was an odd thing to put on a memorial.”

  “These are Roman numerals,” realized Ada. “Letters that stand for numbers, from thousands of years ago. Used for dates, mostly. Years.”

  “Letters as numbers?”

  “Yes. I is one, V is five, X is ten, and so on,” Ada said. “Hand me that paper.”

  Lizzie did, and Ada took a moment to sit on the cold stone floor and jot down the deeply carved letters.

  “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What is?” asked Lizzie.

  “Well, some of these have…dots, underneath, look,” said Ada, pointing. “That V there is five. This C here, for a hundred, and this I, for one. Also, I don’t think these are Roman at all, here and here. Also with little holes under them.”