by V. Penley
The Missing Boy
Lady Eugenie’s School for Girl Sleuths, Volume 1
V. Penley
“It is rarely best to start at the beginning, since so few people can agree something has truly begun.”
Detective Malveaux, from “My Early Career”
Table of Contents
Chapter One: A Buried Body
Chapter Two: A Morning Debate
Chapter Three: A Failed Lesson
Chapter Four: Tea; and, then, a Game
Chapter Five: A Loss
Chapter Six: Dinner—and an Argument
Chapter Seven: The Marchioness Divulges her Revelation
Chapter Eight: In the Roadster
Chapter Nine: A Bumbling Inspector
Chapter Ten: The Trip to Town
Chapter Eleven: Checking the Accounts
Chapter Twelve: The Race to London
Chapter Thirteen: To Catch a Thief
Chapter Fourteen: The End of the Chase
Chapter Fifteen: Goodbye, for Now
Chapter One: A Buried Body
“Dear me,” Mrs. Todderham exclaimed.
She had reached for her morning copy of the Barnardshire Gazette and, in doing so, had casually swept her eyes over the large photograph above the fold. Only minutes earlier, little Jimmie Styles had delivered the paper on his bicycle, and had brought her the news: “Suffragette stomped!” he had said, handing her the paper.
Mrs. Todderham hadn’t immediately understood what he meant. But now, wedged in her breakfast nook, her eyes floated up to the headline, which echoed Jimmie’s pronouncement.
SUFFRAGETTE STOMPED!, the headline blared, in blunt, bold script. Indeed, Jimmie had been quite right.
The picture was equally blunt: what appeared to be a woman in a black dress, falling onto her back in the middle of a race track; and, beside her, a horse improbably lying on its side. The horse’s four hooves pointed directly at the camera, and the woman’s hat, as if to get out of the way, skipped and tumbled across the raceway toward the photographer’s lens. Most disturbing of all, no one seemed to be paying any attention to either the stomped suffragette or to the offending horse. A crowd ringed the two fallen figures, but their heads had turned to look around the bend, following the lead horses as they approached the finish line.
A hand over her heart, Mrs. Todderham read the text:
“9 June 1913. Suffragette Emily Davison, in an apparent suicide attempt, ran in front of King George’s horse, Anmer, at Epsom Derby yesterday. The notorious Ms. Davison, widely excoriated for her militant suffragette work, is a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and has been jailed multiple times in connection with their explosive activities. As recently as 1909, she had attempted to advance the improbable cause of women’s suffrage by violently attacking the Chancellor of the Exchequer, throwing rocks at his carriage.”
“Well,” Mrs. Todderham muttered, alarmed as much by the text as by the photograph. “I always said nothing good ever came of voting.” She flipped the paper over to read below the fold, where the story explained the suffragette faction to which Ms. Davison belonged and its increasingly violent militancy. Mrs. Todderham, tucked away in the sleepy town of Barnardshire, was only dimly aware of the London Suffragettes and of their drive for the vote.
Having finished the story, Mrs. Todderham put the paper down and then looked out her window. What she saw shocked her nearly as much as the sight of a freshly stomped suffragette, Emily Davison: a man was shoveling a hole in the ground, for no apparent reason. Bending at the knees, he pitched a shovel into the hard earth, stepped on it, and then tossed the earth aside. Mrs. Todderham looked closely. Unfortunately, she did not know him.
Four months earlier, the impressive house across the lawn, Clarendon Grange, had been sold to an anonymous purchaser. The Grange had been owned by Earl Graystone, who for decades had been Mrs. Todderham’s employer. In fact, Mrs. Todderham’s tiny thatched cottage had housed the estate’s landscaper, the job her dear husband had fulfilled for twenty-five years before his death. When Early Graystone passed away, Clarendon Grange had been put up for sale. But title to the little cottage had passed, by way of will, to the Todderhams, out of gratitude for their service.
Despite inquiries in town, Mrs. Todderham did not know the identity of her new neighbor. The Grange had been bought by a trust, and the land records accordingly hid the owner’s true identity. She had heard a rumor that the purchaser was a royal peer, apparently a Duke from another part of the country.
Her friend, the Marchioness Carlyle, had confirmed the rumor.
“They’ve tried to obscure it by deed!” the Marchioness said breathlessly, waving a paper around. “But I’ve made contacts in London. The beneficiary of the trust is a Duke, from Clowdon.”
“Clowdon?”
“A Duke!” the Marchioness had repeated.
And over the past four months, the two women had contrived to make his acquaintance. Yet they were always greeted by an empty Grange. Speeding to Barnardshire in his motor car, the Duke popped in for little more than an hour, then sped away as fast as he had come. Mrs. Todderham saw only dust from the road, never the man himself.
The man digging the hole—and putting a good bit of elbow into it, too, Mrs. Todderham admired—could not have been the Duke. A Duke would never dig his own hole. If she had to guess, Mrs. Todderham would say he was the Duke’s valet. Tall, and with pitch black hair, the man had a gangly gate and looked Irish. She hoped he was.
Riveted, Mrs. Todderham continued to watch. She worked through three pieces of toast as the hole grew. And when she ran out of coffee and toast, she raced around the kitchen, fixing more breakfast before settling back in her nook.
In the abstract, there was nothing unusual about a shovel breaking the Barnardshire earth in June. But there was no reason for the valet to be digging, either. Mrs. Todderham couldn’t see anything on the ground in need of burial. It was the mystery that gripped her. The unknown. Why was this man digging this hole, today of all days?
Nothing ever happened in Barnardshire, not since the death of her dear husband, George. Mrs. Todderham turned to say, “Come see this,” then remembered that George had passed on and that she was alone.
She sat, comfortably wedged into the breakfast nook, smearing marmalade over her new pieces of toast, and watched.
After digging for another half hour, the valet dropped the shovel and went inside. When he returned, another man followed, and Mrs. Todderham knew at once that he had to be the Duke. As equally as tall as his valet, but with bright, fair hair, he moved inside a halo of light. Mrs. Todderham leaned forward, to get a closer look, and upset her marmalade pot, which poured its contents all over the prone body of Mrs. Emily Davison.
The two men stood looking into the hole, talking. The valet pointed out something and the Duke, hands in pockets, nodded. Then the two men shook hands, and the Duke got into his motor car, leaving his valet alone with a freshly dug pit. Mrs. Todderham moved nearer the window for a closer view.
After ten minutes of additional digging and fiddling, the valet went back inside; and, when he returned, Mrs. Todderham exclaimed, “Oh no!”
The valet carried a table—and not a small table, of the sort that would be wedged in between a bed and a wall—but a rather larger one, something quite as large as Mrs. Todderham’s table in her breakfast nook. The valet carried it, legs up, to the hole in the ground, where he dropped it right-side down.
“Dear me,” Mrs. Todderham whispered. She looked around and saw Puss, lapping at the marmalade. She scooped him up.
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The valet returned next with a chair; and then, in a final surprise, reappeared with a bundle slung over his shoulder. “A body!” Mrs. Todderham whispered to Puss, whose paws rested on the windowsill.
Round and long, the entire package had been tied up in a white sheet with ropes positioned in the middle and then at either end. The valet hefted the bundle into the pit, then slowly shoveled back in the mound of dirt, sealing everything underground.
At this point, Mrs. Todderham was quite beside herself. The morning had progressed from shock (at Mrs. Davison) to mystery. But now it approached terror. Death had, once again, stolen onto her patch of land in the country. Had the Duke participated in a murder? Had he requested that his valet cover up the body as he raced back to his landed estate, in Clowdon?
Flummoxed, and unable to make up her mind, Mrs. Todderham knew there was only one person to contact: the Marchioness Carlyle, who lodged at Vinegar House a half mile away. Mrs. Todderham determined to seek her friend’s counsel as soon as possible.
The valet finished shortly. He smoothed the surface with the flat side of the shovel and then, hat on his head, hitched up his horse and wagon to clop away.
Curiosity drove Mrs. Todderham outside.
*
Bess Todderham gained the far side of the lawn with Puss nipping at her heels. Both mistress and cat trembled slightly from the horror of what they had witnessed—and in anticipation of what they were to find. Clarendon Grange rose before them, forbidding even in the bright light of late morning.
Mrs. Todderham half expected the body to be visible when she reached the pit. But there was little to see. No grave marker had been left behind, nor any other clue as to what was buried beneath. There was simply a flat expanse of freshly dug earth.
“It’s odd,” Mrs. Todderham whispered to Puss, who curled around her ankle, “that a body should be buried so out in the open.” She looked up and saw the sun afloat on a sea of blue. This grave was probably even visible from the road.
When she looked back down, Puss had untangled himself from her ankles and had actually stepped onto the grave, leaving a series of footprints on the smoothed earth.
“Oh no. Puss,” Mrs. Todderham said, waving her hand. “Puss, get off it. Come here. Puss.”
But the cat ignored her and walked out into the center of the grave, a chain of footprints like flower petals trailing behind him. Puss paid her commands no attention, and Mrs. Todderham began flapping her hands in the air, as if to wave him off.
“Puss!” she said louder, and unable to think of anything else to do, she wrapped her hands around the handle of the shovel and pulled it from the ground. She then tried to maneuver the cat off the grave, but succeeded mostly in dragging the heavy shovel around, digging marks in the dirt because the shovel was much heavier than she had anticipated. “Puss, you’re giving us away!” she cried and feared that she could hear a motor car coming up the road: the Duke returning.
Puss then sat down in the center, wrapping his tail around his legs, and surveyed the scenery.
They were truly done for now. The Duke, or his valet, would return and see the paw marks. Swiftly, they would deduce that the old woman next door had uncovered the grave, and then they would come for her. Assuredly, there was enough room in the grave for her own body.
“We’re done for Puss!” she cried, dropping the shovel. A tremor ran through her body. The cat, licking a paw, stood and walked back to the thatched cottage.
Just as swiftly as the panic had gripped her, Bess Todderham became resolute. There was really only one thing to do: dig up the earth, exactly as the valet had done, and then scoop it back in. Mrs. Todderham listened and, hearing no motor car over the beat of her heart, determined to get on with. “You have an over-active imagination, Bess Todderham,” she said, and set to digging, tut tutting herself.
Though the grave had been deep enough for a table, the body sat very close to the surface. With a couple of scoops, Mrs. Todderham had unearthed one end of the bundle. The fabric wasn’t a bed sheet but canvas. With the tip of the shovel, she pressed down onto it; and, when the whole thing depressed slightly, as a body would, she cried out, dropping the shovel for a second time.
Her fears had been realized.
*
“It looks like a body,” Mrs. Todderham said, standing at the pit with her friend, the Marchioness Carlyle. Mrs. Todderham had hustled down the road to Vinegar Hill, and now the two women had returned to examine the corpse. The Marchioness had dug around the entire bundle, exposing it and the table top.
“It assuredly is in the shape of one,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “It has the solidity of one as well. Old flesh. I think I can feel bone.” Her forehead wrinkled as she pressed the point of the shovel into something hard.
“Should we unwrap it?” Mrs. Todderham asked.
“My dear, whatever for?”
Mrs. Todderham was silent. “I don’t know.” She continued to look around, her eyes peeled for the town Inspector. The entire time, her mind had been racing.
Marchioness Carlyle was equally distressed. A murder in Barnardshire, of all places! When her husband, the Marquis had died, she had searched for a place to retire. And she had settled on this hunk of earth, which seemed delightfully removed from both her son’s family as well as the frenzy of the modern world. But the world, in the form of motor cars and loud youth—and even modern art—had certainly found her. And now murder, following like a shadow!
But most distressing of all was the suggestion that the Duke—the man Marchioness Carlyle had singled out to wed her daughter, Lady Eugenie—might have been involved.
The Marchioness had been unable to understand her friend’s blubbering when Mrs. Todderham had pounded on her door. And she had resisted the plain meaning of the language that Mrs. Todderham had spoken: the Duke of Clowdon had murdered a man and had buried him with the help of his valet.
“But that’s impossible,” the Marchioness Carlyle had said. “Because he is to marry my….” But she had stopped herself. Because he is to marry my daughter, was the reason she had left unsaid.
As the Marchioness had learned from her own snooping, the Duke of Clowdon was the possessor of a large estate in a northern county. He was also, equally important, single. For months, Marchioness Carlyle had conspired to make an introduction of her daughter, Lady Eugenie. That introduction could not happen in a prison. This body, wrapped in canvas, needed to disappear.
“It’s such a beautiful day,” Mrs. Todderham said.
“Indeed,” the Marchioness replied shortly. Her ears were peeled for the sound of a motor car, or of a carriage. She heard nothing but a light breeze rustling the grass. She tried to gauge whether the loose soil would hold her if she stepped into the pit.
“Perhaps we should contact Inspector Feagley.”
“Nonsense!” The Marchioness slammed the shovel down in front of her friend. Mrs. Todderham pulled up short, her face all surprise.
“The last thing we need is the law involved,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “In particular, that bumbling old fool, Inspector Feagley. He will not only fail to retrieve this body; he will end up burying us both in the pit as well.”
Mrs. Todderham nodded quietly. “Then what are we to do?”
“Let me think,” the Marchioness said. “You have flustered me with your questioning, non-stop since I laid eyes on you this morning.”
The Marchioness gripped the shovel in her gloved hands. A small idea had skipped into view, one which might exonerate the Duke, and she tried to grab at it.
“You never saw the Duke carry out the body, did you?” she asked, peering out of the side of her eyes at her friend.
“N-n-o,” Mrs. Todderham stammered. “Though he stood with his valet and looked at the grave after it had been dug.”
The Marchioness waved her hand. “It’s not a crime to watch a murder. Or to be shown one.” She sniffed. “You saw nothing else, did you? Try to think.”
Mrs. Todderham f
elt herself shrinking under her friend’s gaze. The Marchioness possessed a steel trap mind, and Mrs. Todderham never felt she could keep up. She didn’t want to let her friend down.
“No,” Mrs. Todderham finally said. She relaxed as the Marchioness smiled.
“Wonderful!” The Marchioness exclaimed. “I will write Eugenie directly.”
“Oh, where is she? Still in London?”
Marchioness Carlyle nodded. “Terribly alone, too. She’s running some sort of school for girls. Apart from her students, she has only that old cook, you know. The one I had to let go.”
“I hope Eugenie is not involved in that suffragette activity,” Mrs. Todderham said. “Did you read the paper this morning?”
“To step in front of a horse!” the Marchioness cried. She paused, trying to remember why that Davison woman had tried to kill herself. And then she remembered what the word “suffragette” meant, and felt the full force of its absurdity. “For a vote!” she laughed—so loudly that she almost lost her hat. Reaching up, she jammed it back onto her head—which slammed her jaws shut as well.
“I will send a telegram to Eugenie this moment. I see how I can make this introduction come off.” She handed her friend the shovel and pointed at the wrapped bundle resting atop the table.
“Cover it up, will you?”
Chapter Two: A Morning Debate
Though living in London, Lady Eugenie was not involved with the suffragette movement, or with any movement whatsoever, because she was preoccupied with something else: running a school for girl sleuths.
Located in a sandstone building just north of Soho, Lady Eugenie’s school was nearly invisible to the outside world. You could pass it every day without so much as notice or a nod. Only a small sign, stating simply “School for Girls,” was visible to the street.
Herself no more than a dozen years older than many of her pupils, Lady Eugenie stood in front of the class made up of six girls. The entire school, all twelve students and two staff, had risen in the hour before dawn. Young women, living alone in London, had to rise early to attack the world—or else the world would attack you.
