“Yer an uncommon good judge of ’orses, m’lady, if ye don’t mind me saying so,” the cabbie added. “Most of the ladies favours the fancy equipages wit ’ackneys.”
“Yes, I saw one of those the other day.” Eureka! Suddenly in that relaxed and idle moment I remembered! “An overlarge four-wheeler all smeared with polish,” I said with unfeigned, enthusiastic disapproval, “and the horse wasn’t a Hackney, but something of the sort, racy and high-headed, foaming at the bit, black with white feet all feathered like a Clydesdale’s—”
“Ay, I know the one, very flashy action, knees up to ’is nose. A lot o’ wasted wear an’ tear if you ask me. That’s Paddy Murphy an’ ’is Gypsy ’orse.”
“Really!” Giving Pet a final pat, I walked a few steps and climbed into the man’s cab, handing him a nice shiny sum of money in advance in order to forestall hesitation or questions. “Do you think you could find this Murphy person and take me to him? I must speak with him.”
“Oh, sure and begorrah, it’s remimbering thim I am right enough,” said the other cab-driver without hesitation, even before I had fully described a frail girl in a citrine-hued bell skirt and her two dowager chaperones. My driver had without much difficulty located Paddy Murphy in a stable-yard of the Serpentine Mews, seated upon a bale of straw with a mug of ale in hand while he offered the other cabbies a look, for a penny, at some mysterious marvel he kept in a pasteboard box. This he had put away hastily upon my arrival, standing up and tugging his cap. Now, clutching the shilling I had handed him, Paddy Murphy spoke on with true Irish loquacity. “If only because the two auld battle-axes—beg pardon, m’lady, the matron ladies—grudged me the fare, they did, and me squiring thim hither and yon all the livelong afternoon.”
“Hither and yon where, exactly?”
“To be sure, if there’s a linen-draper’s shop in London where we dinna go, I dinna know of it. Oop one street an’ down the nixt. It was looking in the shop winders they were, walking—or one uv the grand ladies walking and the other in the cab with that poor craythure uf a girrul at their beck an’ call. Now and agin they’d take her inside a mercer’s or some such an’ I was to wait, blockin’ traffic, with the coach-drivers cursing me eyes and me ancestors, begging yer ladyship’s pardon, and thin we was to stop for a package, blockin’ traffic some more, or wait for an order to be filled, an’ the constables roarin’ at me and threatenin’ me license, and all the while I’m countin’ on the fare…”
While the other cab-driver stood at my elbow as if he considered himself my escort and guardian, I listened with interest but with increasing impatience—well-concealed, I hope, for it is futile to attempt to hurry an Irishman in the telling of a tale—but I wanted to know, where did Cecily Alistair ultimately go?
“…rather give it up intirely than iver go through such a riggy-ma-roll agin,” Paddy Murphy was saying, “but it couldna be helped, for the poor wee colleen, she could barely walk, so it seemed. And far be it from me to judge me betters, but it was none too kind to her those grand ladies was, if I do say it who shouldna be noticing.”
“But I am very glad you did notice,” I told him, discreetly displaying financial proof of my approval in my gloved hand: a pound note that would be his if he spoke on satisfactorily. “Please continue. Where did you take them ultimately?” I quite wanted to know where Ladies Aquilla and Otelia were hiding Cecily. “Are they staying at one of the hotels?”
“Why, no, my lady. I took them ladies an’ all their packages to a place called Inglethorpe.”
Viscountess Otelia’s humble abode. My heart sank.
“The grandsome two, that is,” added my rosy-faced informant. “But before that, the little one, the wee lassie, why, they dropped her off at a boot.”
“A what?”
“Ay, that were the peculiarest part o’ the whole peculiar business. They had me stop at a boot along the Thames, and two watermin in flat hats, they took the girrul.”
A boat, I belatedly understood as I demanded, “Took her where?”
“Why, in the boot out onto the river, my lady. I dinna see any more.”
I wanted to stamp my foot, roll my eyes, burst out crying. Confound and blast everything! This was the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
The last straw—at which a similarly proverbial drowning person might grasp. Unwilling to let even the most slender of hopes drift by.
Finding myself willing to play the latter desperate role, “Show me where,” I demanded of the Irish cab-driver. “Where, exactly, you left her. Take me there.”
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
HALF AN HOUR LATER I STOOD AT THE FOOT OF A squalid little pier on the Thames, my nose wrinkled against stench, looking for—for Cecily Alistair? Here? It was a place even more wretched than the bleak streets where I had last found her. Down along the black water swarmed filthy beggar children, “mudlarks,” scavenging bits of bone, wood, or metal from the muck. Tattooed men swaggered in and out of hulking brick buildings marked “Trawlers Ltd” or “Siam, Burma, Orient Line” or “Launches for Hire.” Steamships and tall-masted sailing ships and innumerable smaller vessels crowded the straitened river whilst a hulking mechanism called a “dredger” loomed over everything, giving forth a deep roar punctuated by the curses of sailors, the shrieks of mudlarks, and the yawps of seagulls wheeling overhead. Trying to take it all in, I felt my heart sink.
Still grasping at straws, I asked the half-drunken cab-man beside me, “Did you actually see her being rowed away by watermen?”
“Sure and I did!”
And surely they had taken her to a houseboat or some such lodging which, unlike a hotel, could move about, changing location from day to day. Fiendishly clever. Nearly impossible to discover.
Nevertheless, I mumbled, “Which way did they go?”
He pointed upstream. I glanced in that direction, sighed, and started to turn away, utterly defeated. But something white-flecked caught my eye. Straightening, I looked again, peering at a gaggle of brown gingham in the distance.
No longer lethargic and mumbling—quite the opposite, staring like a bird dog on point—I exclaimed, “Is there an orphanage hereabouts?”
He answered in the affirmative, indicating a dull green mansard roof looming perhaps a block away. Instantly the noisiest possible seagull flock of memory, suspicion, and conjecture whirled into my head, all my thoughts yelling at once: little girls with shorn heads following the ha-ha man, what the deuce was his name, Baron Dagobert Merganser, in his sister-in-law’s mansion; why not his own home? Perhaps because he did not want it known who he really was? But why had he been consorting with orphans at all? He seemed hardly the charitable type. And why at such a ticklish time, when he was holding his well-to-do niece captive to force her to marry his son—
…arrangements have been made to use some quite secluded chapel.
Oh. Oh, my goodness. Did orphanages have chapels?
It seemed probable that they did, but I did not know for sure, and I should have investigated the matter thoroughly, of course, for it might have been the merest coincidence that there was an orphanage near this particular pier on the Thames; moreover, the orphans I had seen at Inglethorpe might have come from a different institution altogether, their presence might have signified nothing, et cetera—
Yet, as my brother Sherlock would have said, it was suggestive, was it not? A chance offered itself, and there was no time for research and hesitation: the unfortunate Lady Cecily was to be forcibly wed tomorrow morning.
Desperate measures were called for.
Two hours later, walking towards the Witherspoon Home for Waifs and Strays, I tried to see something to indicate the presence of a chapel—a stained-glass window, for instance—but I observed only the upper part of an exceedingly plain three-storey stone-and-plaster edifice surrounded by a tall wooden fence with its vertical planks so close-set, one could not even peep through the cracks. Most unattractive, that barrier, and most uncompromising.
/> I found it easy enough, at that point, to look as if I were about to weep.
This being exactly the effect I desired. I was got up as a waif. A rather tall waif, but a waif nevertheless. In order to present a stick-thin, indeed cadaverous figure, I had put aside all my improvers, regulators, and enhancers—no small decision, as along with them I put aside my defensive armour—corset and dagger—and most of my usual supplies. I carried with me only a few carefully selected items in my pockets.
These did not include food, and there had been no time to eat; my stomach yowled with hunger, and I felt a bit faint—well, so much the better for the impression I needed to make. With a combination of vinegar and soap I had rendered my skin pasty and blistered, and a touch of lamp-black made my eyes appear haggard, my cheeks hollow. My own hair, allowed to tangle down my back, was quite ugly enough for any ragamuffin, especially after I had rubbed it and myself with coal-ash. I wore the midden-picker’s exceedingly humble and dirty clothing, hanging far too large upon my bony shoulders and chest, and I had even gone so far as to tear some rips in the cloth. My feet I wrapped with rags. On my head, indeed almost covering my eyes, I had placed a bowler hat rescued from the street, well squashed by horses’ feet and carriage wheels. As a pauper girl will use any such item to keep her head warm and covered, the effect was, I thought, most salubrious.
As was my hesitation. Anyone watching would see a waif trying to gather courage to venture into the fenced and forbidding unknown, not quite decided to give up her starveling freedom for the sake of food, a shorn head, and domestic servitude. They could not possibly know that the vacillating waif was actually an aspiring Perditorian not quite decided whether she really needed to risk contacting her brother.
Indeed, after pacing the area of the orphanage awhile, making sure there was only one way to get in or out, I retreated.
But only for a brief period of time, during which I pencilled a note, expressing much greater certainty than I actually felt, as follows:
Sherlock,
Shortly prior to nuptial travesty, C.A. will attempt to exit Witherspoon orphanage, 472 Huxtable Lane, with pink fan. Meet her at gate; I leave it to you to assist her from there.
E.H.
With greatest trepidation I folded this and addressed it to 221b Baker Street, for all my instincts warned me against giving my brother the slightest idea where I might be found at any particular time. Certainly he would try to trace the message back to me—no matter, for I would not remain in the same place, and any description a messenger might give of me would tell him only that I had disguised myself as a beggar—but what if, on the morrow, he engaged assistance, not only to rescue Lady Cecily, but to ensnare me?
Yet I had no choice. For the sake of the hapless lady I must risk myself in more ways than one.
I gave the message to a licensed commissionaire; very surprised and puzzled he was to accept such a literate communication and substantial fee from a wretch such as I appeared to be, but I knew he would deliver the note without fail; that was his duty.
Then, as there was no time to hesitate any longer, I walked—or staggered, rather, for beneath my ragged and filthy skirt I kept my knees bent, in order to shorten my height whilst simulating a crippling case of rickets—I made my way back to the Witherspoon Home, applied to my eyes a rag in which I clutched a bit of onion in order to produce some tears, then knocked on the gate.
“Name?” asked an exceedingly plain matron seated at a rather inadequate desk, filling out a form for me.
“Peggy, mum.” Standing before her, I had to remember to keep my knees bent. The effort caused me to sway a bit. So much the better.
“Surname?”
“Just Peggy, mum.”
“Parents?”
“Not what I ever ’eard of, mum.” In the broadest Cockney accent I could manage, with a sniffle. Too tall to seem quite pathetic otherwise, I had decided to be lachrymose and simple.
With a sigh the woman marked a box: Illegitimate. But she tried once more. “Date and place of birth?”
“I don’t rightly know, mum.”
“Baptism?”
“What’s that, mum?”
“Have you been baptised?”
“’Ow wud I know, mum?” Tears in my tone, and my stomach also audibly lamented.
The matron looked at me, then lifted a little Chinese bell from her desk and tinkled it. The shape of the bell, sans handle, was the same as the shape of her monumental white cotton cap.
At the summons of the bell, a little girl came in who looked exactly the same as all the other little girls in the place: unsmiling stare, cropped hair, brown gingham pinafore over an even uglier brown frock. “Yes, Matron?”
“Bring bread and tea, child.”
“Yes, Matron.” The girl bobbed and departed.
“Sit down, Peggy,” said the matron kindly to me. “Have you ever been incarcerated?”
“What’s that, mum?”
“Have you ever been put in prison for any crime?”
“No, mum.”
“Have you ever been in the workhouse?”
And so it went. While I sat, shaking with nerves and hunger, shedding occasional tears, and gobbling (quite sincerely) a great deal of plain bread and weak tea, she determined that I had little if any education, had not attended Sunday school, did not possess any money or any friends or relatives to pay for my care, had not received parish relief, and had not been treated for scrofula, scarlet fever, whooping cough, or smallpox.
“Subject to fits?”
“No, mum.”
“Incontinence of urine?”
“Beg pardon, mum?”
She puffed her thin lips, then with visible effort made herself say, “Do you wet yourself or your bed?”
“No, mum!”
“Very well, ah”—she cast her eye back over the papers she had just filled out—“Peggy.” Laying down her pen, she rang her bell again, and this time a girl about my age came in carrying an armload of clothing in which brown gingham predominated. “You have had enough to eat for the time being. Go along with this little woman now, have a bath, and then I will check you for, ah, any infections or infestations, and cut your hair.”
The moment for which I had been waiting.
“Cut my hair, mum?” Wide-eyed, I wobbled to my feet. “But mum, I don’t want my hair cut.”
“You must have it cut if you are to stay here, child.”
“But, mum—”
“Do you wish to be fed, clothed, and educated? If so, you must have your hair cut in a hygienic manner. And you must be vaccinated against smallpox.”
“You—mean—a needle, mum?” This was an unexpected chance for me to pretend even greater terror—every Cockney has a horror of vaccination—and I took full advantage of it. “I can’t stand no one puttin’ no pision in me wit no needle, mum!”
“Nonsense. It’s not poison, and of course you can stand the prick of a needle; every girl here has done so.”
The starch and scorn in her tone were just what I needed to help me truly cry out loud. “I don’t know if I can bear it, mum!”
“Well, then you must go back out on the street.”
“No, mum, please, I’m ’ungry.”
“Then if you wish to stay, you must do as I say. Decide.”
As if in a frenzy of despair and vacillation I raised my clasped hands. “I can’t decide! I needs to pray on it. A few minutes to pray on it, mum. Is there a chapel, mum?”
She eyed me suspiciously, but my unexpectedly devout request could hardly be refused, especially not in front of the “little woman” standing there—sullen, silent, and probably required to pray several times a day.
“Very well,” she muttered, looking up to instruct the girl. “Take her to the chapel—”
Eureka!
“—then return to your regular duties. I will check on her in a few minutes.”
A few minutes were all I needed.
Once the indifferent waif-in-wait
ing had showed me to the chapel—a dim little sanctuary constructed as an ell of the main building—the instant its holy doors had closed behind her retreating personage, I sprang from my pew, whisked up the pile of clothing the girl had deposited beside me, and took cover. I was hiding under the pulpit when I heard the matron come in.
“Child?” she called. “Child?” And after a pause, during which most likely she consulted her papers regarding my name, “Peggy, come here at once!”
I did not, of course.
Grumbling aloud, “Where can the nitwit have got to?” she went out again, to inquire, and as soon as she had done so, I set myself to find a better hiding place in case I were truly searched for. It has been my observation that people playing hide-and-seek peer into things and under things, downward but hardly ever upward. Also, climbing is my forte. For both of those reasons, upward I went, with no trouble at all ascending the tall, ornately carved cabinet of the pipe-organ and slipping first my new clothing—which I had done up into a bundle for easy carrying—then my personage onto its sturdy canvas top. There, cradled by that dust cover, inches from the chapel ceiling, surrounded by the organ cabinet’s aspiring cornice, I lay in relative safety and complete comfort when the matron came back, with a few companions, for another look.
I heard them, rather than saw them, poking about:
“I imagine she’s got cold feet and gone.”
“Towheedle at the gate says not.”
“He’s been napping again, then, for how else can she have got out? And she’s not here.”
“She might be wandering the halls. She’s none too bright.”
“She’ll go where she smells food, mark my words.”
“We must keep guard on the kitchen, then.”
“Well, she’s certainly not in this chapel.” They stood almost directly under me. “We must tell everyone to be on the lookout—”
“What a nuisance,” one of them complained, “and tonight of all nights, when we have so much preparation for tomorrow.”
The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan Page 9
