“But why?” asked Mary. “What would make a couple surrender their own children?”
“Poverty? I’ve known families so poor, they placed a child for adoption just to know she would be fed.”
“That’s horrid,” said Mary, her heart breaking at the thought.
“It is,” agreed Charles.
“It’s also a conundrum.”
“What’s a conundrum?”
“It means a difficult puzzle,” said Mary.
“Thank you, Miss Godwin, for that most edifying definition.” Charles smirked.
Mary looked up and smiled. “Oh—sorry, of course. I meant I don’t understand why we have a record of Lizzie’s adoption when we know she lived with her father until he died.”
“Well…” Charles shuffled through his documents. “Yes, here’s a note showing the Earnshaws adopting a baby in 1813. And here, I found their marriage certificate. It matches one of the dates on the list,” said Charles.
“Oh, I copied their marriage as well. Silly of me.”
“Did you? I didn’t see you at that ledger,” noted Charles with some curiosity.
“Yes, it’s right here, look,” said Mary, flipping pages. Charles did the same, and they exchanged their papers.
“Our copies are different—one must be wrong.” She handed Charles’s copy back to him.
“This baffles me, I must admit,” said Charles. “No, look, same people, different dates. Two weddings.”
“Two weddings? Why would the same people get married twice?”
“Well, the earlier one, here, was officiated by the parson and witnessed by the verger,” said Charles. “People who work in the church, likely to be there any day. But here’s my copy…”
“Two years later,” finished Mary. “Signed by the bishop himself, and witnessed by Lord and Lady Illegible. What do you make of it, Charles?” Mary asked.
“Well, the first has the feel of a paupers’ wedding. No family. Just a ‘Will you marry us please and be quick about it.’ ”
“A secret wedding!” exclaimed Mary. “And the second?”
“A society wedding, by the looks of it,” said Charles. “Still, as you say, a conundrum.”
Mary looked out the window. For all their research, they were no closer to making sense of it all.
“We need to give this some sort of shape,” she mused.
“Yes?”
Again Mary paused. They were still ages from home.
“Once upon a time,” murmured Mary.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dates. People…Let’s play a game. Or rather, let’s tell a story. Look, let’s place all our papers in order by date, and we’ll make a little story out of it as we go along.”
Charles agreed. “All right. I believe I have our beginning.”
“Once upon a time…,” said Mary, leading.
“Once upon a time, a young lady was born to a wealthy West London family and baptized by the bishop, with a Lady Smoodge here as godmother.”
“Smoodge?” asked Mary.
“With your forgiveness, I’m afraid I was unable to make out the signature.”
Mary nodded. “And so the little girl grew up in a great house. And one day, she fell in love with a fellow named George and was married at the little church there in the market square.”
“But a very poor wedding,” continued Charles. “Not the wedding one would expect for a girl growing up in a grand house.”
“Because…George was poor,” Mary surmised. “And they eloped, out of love. A secret wedding! How utterly romantic.”
“And here,” said Charles, shuffling papers and handing over a note, “is an acknowledgment of rents paid on a church-owned farm.”
“So he just worked a church farm?”
“It would seem so,” said Charles.
“And then—such joy. Two baby girls, born to a couple in love,” Mary romanticized. “It was the best of times.”
“It was the worst of times,” said Charles grimly, presenting notes showing mounting debts on the farm and, finally, the note showing that the couple had placed the children with the church for adoption.
“But I don’t understand. Why would Calpurnia’s family turn their backs on her? And her daughters?”
“Scandal, Miss Mary, or the threat of it. She married a pauper, clearly without her family’s permission, and chose a pauper’s lot. But there is a turn, here, in our story,” said Charles. “A year later, here is a donation to the church, and a handsome one at that, from George Earnshaw.”
“Four hundred pounds a year!” cried Mary, reading the slip of paper. “From holdings in…Jamaica?”
“It would seem that the young Mister Earnshaw, having been driven to desperation by poverty, traveled abroad to seek his fortune. And made it, in an extraordinary amount of time.”
“Good heavens” was all Mary could say.
“And here is the second wedding certificate. The bishop and lords and ladies attending.”
“A proper Society wedding, as Jane would say.”
“It would seem so,” said Charles. “Her pauper a prince at last, he now presents himself as a suitable suitor, and they can be married publicly, their past behind them.”
“But they must find their lost children,” said Mary, adding another page to the story. “And at last they find, and adopt, Lizzie, their own daughter, and return to Dedlock Hall in happiness, as a family.”
“But no sign of Alice,” said Charles. “And another sad turn here. Lizzie’s mother passes away, of fever, to be buried on the grounds of Dedlock Hall in a new mausoleum.” Charles held the papers documenting the blessing of the crypt and the burial of Lizzie’s mother, but all Mary could think of in that instant was the word “fever.” Worry for Ada was the weight of a hundred books on her chest. She rallied herself and returned to the story.
“So Lizzie and her father comfort each other, and make a life together, rattling about that huge estate, with Lizzie apparently never learning of Alice.”
“And there the story seems to end,” said Charles, disappointed.
“I can’t imagine that Mr. Earnshaw would ever stop looking for his lost girl….How sad that we should find her instead.” Suddenly Mary sat up straight. “Oh!”
“Miss Mary?”
“Maybe he did find her. Maybe that was the good news he wrote to Mrs. Somerville about!”
“But…how did Alice come to be running in front of our carriage? When did she become an escaped lunatic?”
Mary slumped in her seat again. “I have no idea.”
Later that afternoon, burdened with story and sneezy with dust, Mary and Charles entered the Marylebone house. Allegra was on her way up the stairs as Miss Cumberland was on her way down, and at the top loomed the eerie dark-browed doctor. Peebs stood immediately behind Mary.
“Leeches!” said Allegra. “There were leeches.”
“Best thing for fever,” said the doctor in his strange accent. “Leeches.”
“Horrible squirmy black things,” added Allegra. She noted something disturbingly leech-like in the doctor himself.
“Is Ada awake?” Mary asked.
“A little,” answered Allegra. “She’s not making any sense. She sort of mumbles and falls asleep again. But she’s asking for you.”
“Can I see her?”
Miss Cumberland nodded, trotting down the stairs to what must have been her hundredth kettle boiling of the day.
“John?” asked Peebs of the doctor, who gave a slow, resigned shrug, as though to slough off the dread that clung to him like a fog.
“The worst is over, I suspect,” the doctor said. “But the child is very weak.”
The grim fellow let himself out without a further word, leaving only the echo of a chill in his wake.
“You know him?” asked Allegra.
“Doctor Polidori was a friend and traveling companion of your father’s—one of the few the baroness has yet to exile, evidently,” said Peebs. “N
ow, why don’t you tell me about the leeches?” And he led her off to the library, out of everyone’s way. Charles followed Peebs, as it seemed the only appropriate thing to do.
Mary wondered where Jane had gotten to.
As soon as Mary entered Ada’s room, she felt that something was terribly wrong. Before her was something she’d never seen before: Ada’s floor.
Gone were the mushrooming mounds of drawings and plans, the hunks of machine parts and disassembled gears, stray rusty tools, and upturned inkpots. Instead there was just…floor.
Mary looked past the still-sleeping Ada in the bed to Mrs. Woolcott, beside her.
“What have you done?” Mary asked.
“I’ve just tidied up a bit, dear, not to worry.”
“What have you done?”
“Well, you can’t have thought it was like that all the time, can you?” answered Mrs. Woolcott. “Ordinarily I’d smooth out her papers and run them to the attic, and she’d take them to the balloon. But I see you’ve done away with that. She must miss it terribly.”
“She does, and who are you?” Mary asked rudely.
“Miss Godwin, I do realize the circumstances are extraordinary, but there is simply no cause for such an accusatory tone. I was not the one who led to the destruction of Lady Ada’s balloon—”
“No, who are you, really?” Mary was quite beside herself.
At this, Ada stirred. Mary rushed to her bedside, and Mrs. Woolcott picked up a glass of water.
Ada’s eyes fluttered, and opened slightly. They reminded Mary of glass marbles.
“Miss Coverlet?” croaked Ada, her lips parched from fever.
“Here. You hush now, Ada. Don’t try to speak. You’re a bit woozy from the leeches, so best rest up now.”
Ada looked slowly around the room.
“Mary?” she said.
Mary realized she was squeezing Ada’s hand very tightly, and that she was crying.
“I’m here. Oh, Ada, I’m so glad you’re awake. There’s so much to tell you—”
“A secret wife,” mumbled Ada weakly as she was drifting off. “Find the ghost. Find…the will.”
The mention of a will shot a chill through Mary—echoes of the words of the ghost girl. There was a knock on the open door.
“Mary?” said Jane, the great grey newspaper in her hand. “You’ll wish to see this.” Mrs. Woolcott shot Jane an icy look.
“Not now, Jane,” said Mary in a hush. But Ada was already asleep, grey and raspy.
“No, honestly, now. It’s the afternoon paper, and it just arrived. Look.”
Jane crossed the too-empty floor like a ship with a large grey sail in front. “Here,” she said, shaking one hand to show Mary the page. The words were tall and narrow: ESCAPED LUNATIC APPREHENDED.
“It’s your ghost,” said Jane. “At the hospital, part of the College of Physicians in—”
“Regent’s Park,” Mary finished.
Mary’s mind raced. How could Alice be apprehended and the story in the newspaper already? She’d seen her just this morning!
“Enough, girls,” scolded Mrs. Woolcott. “Lady Ada needs rest, not a newspaper. Now out, the pair of you!” Mrs. Woolcott gathered linens and headed off to fetch more, attempting to herd both Jane and Mary out of the room.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jane, exasperated, “and I do realize we keep asking this of you, but who are you, exactly, that you know such things?”
Mrs. Woolcott looked as though she were about to be cross with Jane but then shrugged slightly. “You know who I am. But I think you mean to ask who I was, which is to say Miss Coverlet, Lady Ada’s nurse and governess since she was a baby—and, I suspect, since I was scarcely older than yourself, Miss Mary.”
At this bit of information the floor of Mary’s brain became slightly less cluttered and, she dared to think, slightly less hazardous. It was about time something started making sense.
“Miss Coverlet,” Mary said. “You left to marry, and therefore you left service, and this very household, now to return as Mrs. Woolcott.”
“As you say, Miss Mary. Now may I attend to these linens?”
Mary nodded and realized that she still clutched the jumble of notes from her expedition in her chilled hand, among them Ada’s list that was both Roman numerals and not, because of the Greek.
She took the scrap of paper and laid it on the desk, flattening it out as best she could, and slid it back beside a polished brass lamp, seeing her own fingers upside down and distorted in the metal’s reflection.
But so too was the message on the paper. The Greek letters, the larger of the Roman numerals. Upside down in the reflection, it almost looked like—
“Mary?” Ada murmured, waking. “I’m hungry.”
A pale and blanket-swaddled Ada descended the stairs, and a once-hushed household erupted.
“Ada! You are not to be out of bed in your state!” said a disapproving Mrs. Woolcott.
“Ada!” cried Mary, whirling around. “I was fetching something for you. You needn’t have gotten up!”
“Ada! You’re awake!” cried Jane.
“And a relief to see you so, Miss Ada.” Peebs smiled.
“Good day to you, Miss Ada,” added Charles.
“You look terrible,” said Allegra.
“I want to know what’s going on,” said Ada thinly, giving a weak effort at a stomp on the stair. “And a jam butty.”
If possible, Mrs. Woolcott’s disapproval deepened, but she gave a resigned sigh. “You may have a brief conversation with your visitors and something to eat while sitting tucked up by the fire in the library. Then it’s back to bed with you.”
Everyone rushed to make a comfortable place for Ada, and Allegra, having adopted Ada’s penchant for bread and butter, fetched just what she wanted from the upstairs kitchen and handed Ada some of that morning’s bread with a dollop of butter and jam on a small white plate. Ada nodded appreciatively and tucked in.
When she had finished, Ada raised a finger. “Where are we.” It was not a question.
“Church records,” Mary said.
“What are those?” Allegra asked.
“Well, it’s a list,” explained Mary. “A very, very long list, about who married whom and when, and when babies were born, and then who died and was buried. Orphanages and adoptions too. All these events, all these dates, draw a kind of picture. Births, marriages, relations…a family tree.”
“Aha!” cried Jane, presenting her well-loved copy of Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage. She opened a page at random to a well-known Society family. “Like this,” she continued, showing Allegra, “but for normal people.”
“Exactly,” Mary said. “Or in this case, rather extraordinary people, or rather, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstance.”
And so Charles and Mary repeated the story of love, and loss, and partial reunion of the Earnshaw family.
“A secret twin,” marveled Allegra. “Lizzie will be so happy.”
“Except when she finds out her sister is an escaped lunatic,” said Jane waspishly. “Oh—recently recaptured lunatic.”
“She didn’t seem a lunatic when we saw her this morning,” offered Mary.
“More scared than mad, I’d say,” volunteered Charles.
“I’d be scared if I were married to Sir Caleb too,” muttered Ada.
“Married?” asked a shocked Mary.
“He was after the fortune, Alice and Lizzie’s fortune,” said Ada. “We heard them, Lizzie and I did. Caleb married Alice, but Lizzie’s father figured out that Caleb was a rotter and made sure he was on the outs forever by putting that in his will. Caleb and Bouillabaisse got hold of the will and destroyed it, but there’s a copy somewhere, and they’re afraid of it. So they got rid of Alice and decided to try again with her sister, the sister who didn’t know she was one.”
“That’s beastly!” cried Mary.
“Mmm,” agreed Ada.
“But he’s a baronet!” objected
Jane.
“So,” said Charles, trying to weave this new piece into their story, “Alice gets locked up in the hospital of the College of Physicians, escapes somehow, almost gets run over by our carriage, and is running around London like a ghost.”
“And getting apprehended again,” added Jane. “It was in the newspaper, just now.”
“Good heavens,” said Mary. “Alice was warning us that Lizzie was in danger this morning. But she’s clearly in danger herself. We must try to rescue her.”
Charles was about to speak again when Mrs. Woolcott entered the library.
“Please excuse me,” she began, “but Miss Ada needs to rest.”
“But—” started Allegra.
“But nothing, dear. It seems I must set the house to rights, as you know I ought. Now off with you, and I’ll have Mrs. Chowser make some soup for Lady Ada, and you’ll dine in the dining room as in a proper house. In the meantime, off!”
“Quite right,” agreed Peebs. “I’ll gather my things and be off.”
Chastised, although cheerfully, they stood and bowed a little and scuttled out of the library.
In the hall, on the way to Ada’s bedroom, Mary pulled them all aside. “We have to get in to see Alice,” said Mary.
“I’m coming,” insisted Ada.
“You are hardly in any condition—” Mary began.
“Coming,” said Ada, resolute.
“We must speak to Lizzie as well, somehow, and warn her of the danger,” said Mary.
“We wrote yesterday but we never heard back,” said Jane.
“Perhaps Sir Caleb is intercepting her letters?” worried Mary.
“Can we get word to Mrs. Somerville?” asked Charles.
“She was sent off on a ruse,” said Ada. “Scotland.”
“What’s a ruse?” asked Allegra, imagining it as some kind of exotic animal.
“A ploy,” explained Mary quietly, which didn’t help.
“A wild goose chase,” offered Charles, which did.
“We’ll have to go to Lizzie ourselves, then. Sneak in tonight,” said Jane.
“Sneak where?” asked Peebs from the top of the stairs, giving them all a fright.
The Case of the Girl in Grey Page 8
