The Case of the Missing Marquess

by Nancy Springer

  Tewky demanded, pointing from one drawing to the other, “If that’s Cutter, then who is that?”

  I told him, although the name meant nothing to him: “Madame Laelia Sibyl de Papaver.”

  “I don’t care if yer the Prince of Wales,” said the sergeant at the desk without so much as lifting his eyes to take a look at us, “ye’ll wait yer turn like everybody else. Have a seat.” His gaze still on his papers and blotter, he flapped a meaty hand towards the hallway behind him.

  I smiled at Tewky, who, having just introduced himself as Viscount Tewksbury Basilwether, seemed inclined either to laugh or cry. “I’ll wait with you,” I whispered.

  And somehow in the course of our visit to Scotland Yard I would accomplish my own business there. As when I had ridden my bicycle away from Kineford, my best plan now seemed not to plan.

  Tewky and I sat on one of many benches ranged along the dark wood-paneled passageway, benches of a singularly adamant uprightness and rigidity, worse than any church pews I had ever experienced. Perched beside me, Tewky muttered, “You’re lucky with all that padding.”

  What a shocking thing to say. “Hush!”

  “Don’t tell me to hush. Tell me who you are.”

  “No.” I kept my voice down, for all along the passageway on other benches sat people waiting to speak with the police. Intent on their own conversations and problems, however, none of them had given us a second glance.

  Tewky had the sense to lower his voice. “But you’ve saved my life, maybe. Or at least my honour. And you—you’ve done so much for me. I want to thank you. Who are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why do you want to look like an old maid?”

  “Shocking boy, do mind your tongue.”

  “Shocking girl, am I never to learn your name?”

  “Shhh!” No, I hoped not, but I did not say so. Instead, I said “Hush!” again, gripping his arm, for just down the passageway from us a door was opening, and I saw a familiar man stepping out.

  Two familiar men.

  For a moment I truly felt as if I might faint, and not due to any corseting, either.

  Heaven help me.

  One of the men was Inspector Lestrade. But I had realised, deciding to accompany Tewky into Scotland Yard, that I might encounter Lestrade, and I felt sure he would not recognise me as the black-veiled widow he had met briefly at Basilwether Hall.

  No, what made me weak with alarm was the sight of the other man: Sherlock Holmes.

  Mentally I willed myself to keep breathing, to sit naturally, to blend in with the dark woodwork and the hard bench and the framed etchings on the walls the way a hen partridge blends in with brush. Please, they must not notice me. If either of them recognised me, my few days of freedom were over.

  Slowly they paced towards us, deep in conversation, even though my brother stood so much taller than the ferret-like Lestrade that he had to stoop to put his head close to the lesser man’s. After my first startled look at them, I turned my eyes to my lap, let go of Tewky, and hid my clenched, quivering hands in the folds of my skirt.

  “. . . can’t make head nor tail of this Basilwether case,” came Lestrade’s strident voice. “I do wish you would have a look at it, Holmes.”

  “Holmes?” gasped Tewky, sitting bolt upright at my side. “Is that him? The famous detective?”

  I whispered, “Do please hush.”

  I am sure he heard strong emotion in my voice, for he actually obeyed.

  Sherlock was saying to Lestrade, “Not nearly as fervidly as I wish you would assign more officers to finding my sister.” My brother’s voice, while well in tune, sounded as taut as a violin string. Something in his voice, something unspoken, made a butterfly of emotion flutter painfully in my heart.

  “I would like to, my dear fellow.” Sympathy in Lestrade’s voice, but also a note, I thought, of gloating. “However, if you cannot give me more to work with . . .”

  “The butler confirms that Mother has had no portraits taken of herself or Enola for ten years or more. Confound the woman.”

  “Well, we have that sketch your sister drew of her.” Unmistakably I heard a glint of glee in the Scotland Yard inspector’s voice.

  My brother’s hand shot out and caught him by the arm, halting him; the two of them stood directly in front of Tewky and me. Thanks perhaps to providence, perhaps to blind luck, Sherlock stood with his back to me.

  “Look here, Lestrade.” My brother did not sound angry, not exactly, but his tone, nearly hypnotic in its intensity, made my heart swell with admiration for him and commanded the other man’s fullest attention. Sherlock told him, “I know you think it’s a great blow to my pride, that both my mother and my sister have gone missing, I cannot find a trace of the former, and I have you to thank for information of the latter. But—”

  “I assure you,” Lestrade interrupted, blinking, his gaze sliding to one side, “I have thought nothing of the sort.”

  “Bosh. I am not blaming you for being no worse than your betters.” Brushing aside that perplexing statement with one black-gloved hand, Sherlock riveted the inspector anew with his gaze. “But Lestrade, I want you to understand: You may cross Lady Eudoria Vernet Holmes off your list. She knew what she was doing, and if she has come in harm’s way, she has only herself to blame.”

  Pain roused in my heart again, not a butterfly ache, but pain of a different sort. At the time, I did not know of my brilliant brother’s one crippling weakness; I did not understand how melancholia might make him utter such harsh words.

  “However, Enola Holmes is a different matter entirely,” Sherlock was saying. “My sister is an innocent. Neglected, uneducated, unsophisticated, a dreamer. I feel much at fault for not staying on with her, instead of leaving her to the care of my brother, Mycroft. Despite his fine mind, he has no patience. He never could understand that it takes time, not just harness, to train a colt. Of course the girl bolted, having more spirit than intelligence.”

  Underneath my false bangs and pince-nez, I scowled.

  “She seemed intelligent enough when I spoke with her,” said Lestrade. “She certainly deceived me. I would have sworn she was twenty-five, at least. Poised, well-spoken, thoughtful—”

  My scowl smoothed away. I quite approved of Lestrade.

  My brother stated, “Thoughtful and imaginative, perhaps, but certainly no stranger to the weakness, the irrationality, of her sex. Why, for instance, did she tell the lodge-keeper her name?”

  “Perhaps out of sheer daring, to get in. She was sensible enough, afterward, to take herself straight away to London, where it will be very difficult to find her.”

  “Where anything could be happening to her, even if she were twenty-five. And she is only fourteen.”

  “Where, as I was saying earlier, anything could be happening to a young person of yet more tender years: the Duke of Basilwether’s son.”

  At which moment Tewky cleared his throat, said, “Ahem,” and stood up.

  So, you see, I had no chance to think and, it seemed to me at the time, no choice.

  I fled.

  As the inspector and the great detective turned to gawk at the commonly clad boy, as they blinked and stared, as recognition dawned, I stood up and walked quietly away. I caught only a glimpse of my brother’s face, and had I known how rare a treat it was to see Sherlock Holmes so astonished, I would have enjoyed the moment more. But I did not linger, just took a few steps down the hallway, opened the first door that presented itself, and went in, closing the door softly behind me.

  I found myself in an office with several desks, all of them empty but one. “Excuse me,” I said to the young constable who raised his head from his paperwork, “the sergeant wants you at the front desk.”

  In all likelihood assuming I was recently employed at the Yard as a shorthand transcriber or something of the sort, he nodded, got up, and went out.

  I went out also, by the window. Lifting the sash, I hopped over the sill as if mounting a bicycl
e, alighting on the pavement as if getting off the other side. There were people passing, of course, but without a glance at any of them, as if it were perfectly normal to exit a public building in this manner, I removed my pince-nez and tossed it into the street, where a large horse promptly trod upon it. Standing straight, I walked away briskly, as befit a young professional woman. At the corner, an omnibus was just stopping. I got on, paid my fare, took a seat among many other Londoners upon the roof, and did not look back. Likely my brother and Lestrade were still questioning Tewky as the big bus trundled me away.

  However, I knew it would not take them long to pick up my scent. Tewky would tell them how he and a girl dressed like a widow had escaped Cutter’s boat together. A girl named Holmes. Probably by now Tewky had turned to me, wanting to introduce me, but finding nothing except two sketches—I hoped Lestrade, after talking with Tewky, might realise the significance of the sketches—two caricatures lying on the bench along with a hideous green parasol.

  I rather regretted having to leave Tewky so abruptly, without a farewell.

  But it could not be helped. I had to find Mum.

  I also very much regretted not having been able to spend more time with my brother Sherlock, even if only in disguise, to look at him, listen to him, admire him. I actually missed him, with yearning in my heart as if I were a ladybird, ladybird, and I wanted to fly away home—

  But my famous detective brother did not care to find Mum. Confound him. All my fluttering feelings about him folded their wings and settled into heartache.

  Although—perhaps it was just as well. Sherlock and Mycroft would have wanted Mum back in Ferndell Hall, but obviously she did not wish to be there. When—not if, but when I found her, I would ask of her nothing that might make her unhappy. I was not seeking her in order to take away her freedom.

  I just wanted to have a mum.

  That was all.

  To be in communication with her. Maybe meet now and then to chat over a cup of tea.

  To know where she was.

  Although one could not help fearing, at the back of one’s mind, that she had come to harm—still, I imagined it more likely that Mum had taken herself someplace where there were no corsets, no bustles, and perhaps no hats or boots. Someplace amid flowers and greenery. Ironic, I thought, that I, following her example and making my escape, had gone instead to this cesspool of a city where I had not yet seen a palace, a golden carriage, or a lady in ermine and diamonds. Where I had seen instead an old woman crawling on the pavement, her head infested with ringworm.

  Certainly Mum could never fall to such depths.

  Could she?

  I must be sure not; and I had only a few hours in which to act before the entire London constabulary would be alerted to look for me.

  Alighting from the omnibus at the next stop, I walked a block, then hailed a cab. A four-wheeler this time, for the sake of being closed in, my face unseen. “Fleet Street,” I told the driver.

  As he manoeuvred through the heavy traffic of the city, I once more took paper and pencil in hand, composing a message:

  THANK YOU MY CHRYSANTHEMUM ARE YOU BLOOMING? SEND IRIS PLEASE.

  I distinctly remembered from The Meanings of Flowers that the iris indicated “a message.” Irises in a bouquet alerted the receiver to pay attention to the meanings of the other flowers. The Greek goddess Iris had carried messages between Mount Olympus and Earth via the bridge of the rainbow.

  Many of the other entries in The Meanings of Flowers, however, I could not recall so clearly. As soon as I had found lodgings, I must be sure to obtain a copy of the book for reference.

  Bitterly I regretted the loss of that other, irreplaceable book my mother had given me, my most precious memento of her, my book of ciphers. What Cutter had done with it, I would never know.

  (Or so I thought at the time.)

  But, I assured myself, I did not need it for any practical purpose.

  (Again, so I thought.)

  Taking the message I had composed, I reversed it:

  ESAELPSIRIDNES?GNIMOOLBUOYERAM

  UMEHTNASYRHCYMUOYKNAHT

  Then I zigzagged it up and down into two lines, thus:

  EALSRDE?NMOBOEAUETAYHYUYNH

  SEPIINSGIOLUYRMMHNSRCMOKAT

  Then, swaying on my seat as my cab rumbled along, I reversed the order of the lines to compose my message. This I would place in the personal advertisements columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, which my mother seldom missed, plus the Magazine of Modern Womanhood, the Journal of Dress Reform, and other publications she favoured. My cipher ran as follows:

  “Tails ivy SEPIINSGIOLUYRMMHNSRCMOKAT tips ivy EALSRDE?NMOBOEAUE-TAYHYUYNH your Ivy”

  I knew that my mother, who could not resist a cipher, would give this one her fullest attention if and when she saw it.

  I also knew that, unfortunately, my brother Sherlock, who habitually read what he called the “agony columns” of the daily newspapers, would also notice it.

  But, as he knew nothing of the way ivy runs backwards on a picket fence, perhaps he would not decipher it.

  And even if he did solve it, I doubted he would understand it or connect it to me.

  Once upon a time—it seemed long ago, in another world, but it was really only six weeks ago—once, pedalling along a country road and thinking of my brother, I had made a mental list of my talents, comparing them unfavorably with his.

  Now, riding in a London cab instead of on a bicycle, I found myself compiling in my mind a different list of my talents and abilities. I knew things Sherlock Holmes failed even to imagine. Whereas he had overlooked the significance of my mother’s bustle (baggage) and her tall hat (in which I suspected she had carried quite a stout roll of bank notes), I, on the other hand, understood the structures and uses of ladies’ underpinnings and adornments. I had shown myself adept at disguise. I knew the encoded meanings of flowers. In fact, while Sherlock Holmes dismissed “the fair sex” as irrational and insignificant, I knew of matters his “logical” mind could never grasp. I knew an entire world of communications belonging to women, secret codes of hat brims and rebellion, handkerchiefs and subterfuge, feather fans and covert defiance, sealing-wax and messages in the positioning of a postage-stamp, calling cards and a cloak of ladylike conspiracy in which I could wrap myself. I expected that without much difficulty I could incorporate weaponry as well as defense and supplies into a corset. I could go places and accomplish things Sherlock Holmes could never understand or imagine, much less do.

  And I planned to.

  LONDON, NOVEMBER, 1888

  ALL DRESSED IN BLACK, THE NAMELESS stranger emerges from her lodgings late at night to prowl the streets of the East End. From her unfashionably straight waist swings a rosary, its ebony beads clicking as she walks. The veiled habit of a nun covers her tall, thin body from head to toe. In her arms she carries food, blankets, and clothing for the poor old women who huddle on the steps of the workhouse, the crawling women called dosses, and any others whom she may find in need. The street folk accept her kindness and call her Sister. No one knows her by any other name, for she never speaks. Seemingly she has taken a vow of silence and solitude. Or perhaps she wishes not to flaunt cultivated speech, not to be betrayed by an upper-class accent. Silent, she comes, she goes, an object of curiosity at first but after a few days scarcely noticed.

  In a much wealthier and somewhat bohemian section of the city, someone is opening an office in the same Gothic residence where Madame Laelia Sibyl de Papaver, Astral Perditorian, held séances before her—or rather, his—shocking arrest, the scandal of the season. With the previous occupant gone to prison, in the house’s bay window a placard has appeared: Soon to Be Available for Consultation, Dr. Leslie T. Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian. A scientist must of course be a man, and an important one, quite busy at the University or the British Museum; undoubtedly this is why no one in the well-to-do neighbourhood has yet seen the great Dr. Leslie T. Ragostin. But every day his secretary comes and goes, putting t
hings to rights in his new office, tending to his affairs. She is a plain young woman, unremarkable except for her efficiency, very much like thousands of other young women typists and bookkeepers surviving in London so as to send a little money home to their families. Her name is Ivy Meshle.

  Daily, as befits a virtuous and modest young woman alone in the big city, Ivy Meshle lunches at the Professional Women’s Tea-Room nearest to her place of employment. There, protected from any contact with the predatory male of the species, she sits alone reading the Pall Mall Gazette and various other periodicals. Already she has found in one of these publications a personal advertisement that interests her exceedingly, so much so that she has clipped it out and carries it on her person. It says:

  “Iris tipstails to Ivy

  ABOMNITEUNTNYHYATEUASRMLNRSML

  OIGNHSNOOLCRSNHMMLOABIGOE”

  Sometimes, alone in her cheap lodgings, Miss Meshle (or perhaps the mute, nameless Sister) draws this slip of paper from a pocket and sits down to look at it, even though she has long since deciphered it:

  AM BLOOMING IN THE SUN. NOT ONLY

  CHRYSANTHEMUM, ALSO

  RAMBLING ROSE

  This message was sent, she believes, by a contented woman who is wandering, free, in a place where there are no hairpins, no corsets, no dress improvers: with the Gypsies on the moors.

  If she had any distance to travel, why did she not use the bicycle?

  Why did she not leave by the gate?

  If she struck out across country, on foot, where was she going?

  One hypothesis answers all three questions: The runaway woman had no great distance to travel, needing only to walk out upon the countryside until she met, very likely by prearrangement, with a caravan of England’s nomads.