The Missing Heir

by Tracy Barrett

  Xander’s phone rang. “It’s Mom,” he reported to Xena. “She’s through with her errands and is waiting outside to take us home.”

  Xander held the door open for Xena as she carried the box past Mr. Brown’s office, calling out, “Thanks! Bye!” as he waved at them. They pushed it through the false box in the back of the pub, and then Xander carried it down the corridor and past the curious gazes of people having lunch, and ran with it through the drizzle to the car.

  As soon as they were back in their apartment, their mother shut herself in her office to write up some reports and to inspect the gadgets that had just arrived. Xena dumped the contents of the box onto the dining room table. “You start going through the papers,” she told Xander, counting on her brother’s speed-reading ability to sort through the documents and identify which ones could be helpful. “I’ll try again to figure out what some of the notes in the casebook mean.”

  She left the old notebook open next to her while she booted up. Once online, she checked “Somerset House.” The name had seemed familiar when she read it in the casebook, but she couldn’t place it. She found it easily on the Internet. It turned out to be one of the few museums in London that their mother hadn’t taken them to. Xena clicked on “About Us” on the museum’s Web site. The original palace had been built in the seventeenth century, just like the Borogovian mansion. Could there be some connection there? She didn’t see how. The museum used to be a duke’s private palace. It had been rebuilt in the eighteenth century and now had art galleries, music programs, and films, and in winter there was a great-looking skating rink. It must be an interesting place, Xena thought, but what does any of this have to do with Sherlock Holmes or a missing princess? She decided to leave it for the moment and see if any of the other clues were more helpful.

  The next thing to figure out was that drawing of the ship in the casebook. Xena wasn’t too familiar with boats, but even to her, this one looked old-fashioned. Didn’t they have steamships by the late nineteenth century? This one, the one Sherlock had sketched, had lots of sails. Did Sherlock suspect that someone had taken the princess away on a ship? Why would they do that, and then come right back and return her?

  Xena leaned in closer and realized that what was written on the ship must be its name.

  She got Xander’s magnifying glass and read H, then M, then S, then a long word. What was it? She squinted. Why did Sherlock have to write so small? Aha! It said “H.M.S. Pinafore.” She wasn’t sure what a pinafore was—an article of clothing, she thought. She looked it up in an online dictionary. It was something like an apron, and girls used to wear them to keep their clothes clean. The dictionary showed a picture from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to illustrate it.

  But the princess who had been kidnapped was much too young to wear something like that, and there were no other little girls in the household, as far as she knew. Maybe Xander had turned up something in the papers—perhaps there was a niece visiting, or a young servant. Just as Xena thought of Xander, he sneezed.

  “More musty old papers,” he said. “I wish I wasn’t allergic to them.” He carefully picked up a yellowed sheet, examined it, and added it to a stack. “There’s nothing useful here. It’s just a bunch of notes, like bills, and contracts with servants and security guards and that kind of thing. Nothing important.”

  “There must be some reason why Sherlock saved them,” Xena reminded him. “Let’s go through them once more.”

  Xena began to look through the yellowed papers. She felt a moment of hope when she found a copy of a birth certificate for the baby, but it didn’t say more than the fact that it was a girl named Stella, and they already knew that. There were bills from the workmen who had refurbished the palace, as well as blueprints for the addition built by King Boris and Queen Charlotte. The maze of white lines and arrows and notations on the architectural drawings meant nothing to Xena. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.” She was exasperated. “What’s that?” She pointed to another paper, which Xander had set aside. He leaned over her shoulder and sneezed again, this time almost right in her ear.

  “Yuck!” she said. She closed the box of documents so that the musty smell would stay contained, and handed him a tissue.

  “This one’s kind of interesting,” Xander said. “It’s a contract between Queen Charlotte and the nanny, Miss Mimsy. It must have been a pretty bad job. The nanny couldn’t do anything but take care of the princess. She had a half day off once a week, but the rest of the time, she had to be with the baby, night and day. She wasn’t allowed to get married and couldn’t even have a boyfriend. Here, this is what it says: ‘As is customary, you will not marry while in my employ, as you might be tempted to allow your duties to your own family to interfere with your duties to mine.’ Miss Mimsy didn’t have her own room but shared it with the princess. She couldn’t even make friends with the other servants.”

  “How long had she been working for the queen when the baby was born?”

  Xander examined the paper. “It looks like the queen interviewed Miss Mimsy a few months earlier, when she settled in London to watch over the remodeling of the mansion. Miss Mimsy started work the day after the baby was born.”

  “What else did you find out?” Xena asked.

  “There are some newspapers from when the baby was kidnapped. This article is about when the king and queen got home and found that the princess was back. It says, ‘Nobody had seen her being returned, but in their joy, the means of her abduction and her return did not seem important. A few days later, though, the king decided that the fiend who had taken his only child might attempt to do so again, for who knew what nefarious purpose, and so they employed the famous detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes to try to discover the perpetrator.’”

  The thought of the terror that the king and queen must have felt, and their confidence in Sherlock, made Xena and Xander more determined than ever to solve their case. But could they succeed at this when the police didn’t seem able to do anything? If Xena and Xander had failed in one of their earlier cases, it would have been disappointing, but at least nobody would have been really harmed. It was one thing to find a missing painting or an ancient amulet, or to track down a beast in the English countryside—all things they’d done in the past. But it was quite another thing to look for a missing friend who seemed to have been kidnapped.

  “Lunch!” their mother called from the kitchen.

  “Did you see anything else in those papers?” Xena asked her brother as they sat down to chicken soup.

  “There were some other contracts. The Borogovian king and queen had a lot of people working for them! There was a first upstairs parlor maid and a second upstairs parlor maid, and a butler, and a whole crew of gardeners and cooks and security guards.”

  “Anything more about the baby, I mean.”

  “There was something about Miss Mimsy. She said she really loved the baby and was terrified when she was kidnapped.”

  “I bet she was!” Xena said. “If she hadn’t been sleeping so heavily, whoever took Stella wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.”

  “Something I don’t get, though,” Xander said. “If Miss Mimsy was drugged, how could she run to the telegraph office so soon? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to send someone else? Maybe she wasn’t drugged at all, just pretending! She could have put that opiate thing in her cup herself after she drank most of the cocoa.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Xander shrugged and blew on his soup.

  Their mother joined them. “How’s the case coming?”

  “Okay, I guess.” Xena was not feeling optimistic. “Sherlock’s notes are even harder to understand than usual.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like there’s a sketch of a ship,” Xena said. “It’s one of those ships with lots of sails. The king and queen were on a ship, but what does that have to do with anything? It must be just a doodle. There’s a name written on the side of it, but that doesn’t make any sen
se either.”

  “What’s the name?” her mother asked.

  “It says ‘Pinafore.’”

  “Oh, as in Little Buttercup?”

  Xander froze with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Sherlock had called Miss Mimsy a buttercup! “What do you mean?” He lowered the spoon carefully back into the bowl.

  Their mother launched into song. “I’m called Little Buttercup, dear Little Buttercup, though I could never tell why!”

  Xena and Xander’s first reaction was relief that none of their friends were there to hear her—aside from it being a strange song, their mother couldn’t carry a tune, a fact that their musician father teased her about frequently. Their second was curiosity.

  “Who’s Little Buttercup?” Xena asked. “And where did that song come from?”

  “You mean you’ve never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan?” They shook their heads, and their mother rolled her eyes. “What do they teach kids in schools these days?” She sighed. “W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were two men who wrote comic operas in Victorian England. The operas were hugely popular at the end of the nineteenth century, and people still put them on today. Buttercup was a character in their most famous operetta, H.M.S. Pinafore. I don’t remember much about her except that she sold things to the sailors onboard the Pinafore—tobacco, scissors, watches, that kind of thing.”

  “Wow!” Xena said. “Thanks, Mom!”

  “Does that help?”

  “I don’t see how right now,” Xena admitted, “but at least we know what Sherlock was talking about.”

  “Anything else? I might not have Sherlock’s blood in my veins or a photographic memory, but there are some things I’ve picked up in all my many years!”

  “Can’t think of anything,” Xena said. She and Xander finished their lunch and loaded their bowls and spoons into the dishwasher. Xena wiped down the kitchen table, and by the time she went back into the living room, Xander had already pulled the papers out of the box again and put them next to the open casebook.

  “Look at this,” he said, handing a yellowing paper to Xena. “It’s from a police interview with Miss Mimsy.”

  Xena quickly scanned the handwritten questions and answers. “Huh!” She put the paper down. “So Miss Mimsy had studied to be an opera singer! I wonder if that has something to do with the drawing of the ship, since it’s got the same name as that operetta. What do you think?”

  Xander shook his head. “I don’t think so. It says that she was in music school, but her family lost all their money in the Panic of 1893, whatever that was, so she had to become a nanny. She worked for some aristocratic families before Queen Charlotte hired her. She had good recommendations from the other people she worked for, including a countess.” He rummaged around. “The letters are here someplace.”

  Before he found what he was looking for, his phone rang. His eyes met Xena’s. Could it be Alice?

  “Hello?” His face fell, and he looked at Xena and shook his head. She felt her shoulders sag. “Oh, really?” Xander went on. “Okay. No, nobody knows. What day did you say? I’m sure she’ll be back by then. Yes, I have your number. I’ll tell her to call you as soon as I see her.”

  He snapped the phone shut. “That was someone from Talented Brits. They said that Alice passed the first audition, and they want her to come to the live audition next week.”

  “Don’t they know she disappeared?”

  “Duh! It’s all over the news!”

  “What are you two arguing about?” Their father had come in.

  “We’re not really arguing,” Xena said. “It’s just that this case is so frustrating. The clues are so weird! There’s something in the casebook about the H.M.S. Pinafore, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the princess.”

  “Are you sure?” their father asked. “What have you found out about the operetta?”

  “Not much,” she admitted.

  He disappeared into the study and came out with an encyclopedia of music. “The Net isn’t the best place to learn everything, you know.” He leafed through the book and began reading them a synopsis of the story. It was hard to follow and kind of unbelievable, and they exchanged glances. Trust their dad to get excited about something so silly!

  “‘Little Buttercup and the captain,’” their father read, “‘then sing a duet entitled “Things Are Seldom What They Seem.”’” Xander raised his eyes in a question to Xena, and she nodded vigorously. Those were the exact words that Sherlock had said to Miss Mimsy!

  “Sorry, Dad,” Xander said. “Could you start over from the beginning?”

  “Sure!” He seemed pleased at Xander’s interest.

  It turned out that the operetta was complicated, with people falling in love with other people who weren’t of the right social class for them to marry. Buttercup wasn’t a major character at the beginning, but she became important when it turned out that she had been a kind of foster mother to two of the men in the story when they were little boys, and she accidentally switched them, and somehow that led to everybody being able to marry all the right people.

  Their father snapped the book shut. “Got what you needed?”

  “I don’t think so, but thanks anyway.”

  “And what about the other clues?” Xander asked.

  “What other clues?”

  “You know, like those circle things in the casebook.”

  “Those are just doodles,” Xena said. “And those other words—‘Norwood’ and ‘rattle’—there isn’t enough there for me to investigate online. There must be at least a hundred hits for each of—” She broke off when she realized that Xander wasn’t listening. He got to his feet and went to the bookcase, where he pulled a fat volume off the shelf. Xena recognized it as being Dr. Watson’s famous accounts of Sherlock’s solved cases. Xander turned the pages without hesitating and mutely held the page up where Xena could see it.

  “‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,’” she read. “So why didn’t you remember this before, Mr. Photographic Memory?”

  “It’s just like you and the computer,” he retorted. “Norwood is a pretty common name. I knew I’d seen it before, but I didn’t know where, exactly, until it came to me just now.”

  “What was the case about?”

  Xander scanned the pages to remind himself. “I don’t think what the case is about is so important,” he said. “It’s one of the clues in it that Sherlock must have been thinking about.”

  “What clue?” Xena felt like strangling him.

  “Fingerprints!”

  “So?”

  “Look at those swirls again.”

  Xena examined the casebook page. “You know, they do kind of look like fingerprints!” Xena typed something on the keyboard. “Okay, it says here that in Sherlock’s time, the police knew that all people have different fingerprints, but in England they weren’t used as evidence in crimes until 1901, when Scotland Yard set up the United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau. When was the kidnapping again?”

  “December 1894.”

  “So then why would Sherlock be interested in fingerprints?” Xena asked. “They couldn’t have records of criminals’ fingerprints if the government didn’t even start keeping track of them until after the princess’s kidnapping. They wouldn’t have anything to compare with the fingerprints he found.”

  Before Xander could speculate, his phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that he had a text message. Without much interest, he glanced at it, and then sat up straight. “It’s from your phone! It must be Alice!” He opened the message and then wordlessly showed it to Xena: “riting u while noones here took me up 2 the”

  Then it stopped, as though the sender had to hastily press SEND before finishing. Xander frantically punched buttons to call her back, but instead of Alice’s timid “Hello?” he heard his sister’s voice telling him to leave a message. He sent back a text message saying, “where r u?”

  “What is it?” Xena asked.

  “She must
have turned off the phone.” Xander was glum.

  “Or someone else did.”

  “That would mean someone caught her at it. Someone who doesn’t want anyone to know where she is. Someone—”

  “Someone who knows now that we’re on the case,” Xena finished for him. Neither one spoke what was in their minds. Would the ruthless kidnapper come after them next?

  CHAPTER TEN

  So you kiddies think the message came from the missing princess?” Two days had passed since they had talked to the police about the handwriting in the note that was supposedly from Alice, but unfortunately, once again the same officer was at the desk. His tone was polite, but Xena detected a smirk in his voice. They explained again, and the officer opened Xander’s phone, looked at it in bewilderment, and handed it back to Xander. “Show me what you saw.”

  Xander found the message and passed the phone back to the man.

  “This makes no sense,” the officer said, and this time it wasn’t a smirk but irritation that both of them heard clearly. “And here, what’s this?” His large fingertip covered the screen.

  “I can’t see where you’re pointing.” Xander tried to sound polite.

  “It looks like the sender was someone named Xena.” He looked hard at both of them. “Didn’t you say that was your name, young lady?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Unusual name, wouldn’t you say? Not likely there are two Xenas sending messages to this lad’s phone.”

  “But—”

  “And,” said the policeman, as though in triumph, “the princess’s name is Alice. Not Xena, is it?” He snapped the phone shut and handed it to Xander. “You kids must have something better to do than to play tricks on the police. Did you ever hear of interfering with an investigation?” He held up a finger for silence as Xena was about to say “but” again, and she clamped her lips shut. “It’s a serious offense, but I have kids of my own, so I won’t report you. Not this time, anyway. However, if you poke your noses into this again …” He didn’t need to finish the sentence.