The Case of the Missing Moonstone

by Jordan Stratford

  “Dear Ada, I can hardly follow you at all when you’re like this. Not supposed to what?”

  “Smell. Like lavender. Like anything,” said Ada, her words choppy between sobs.

  “Well,” suggested Mary calmly, “we might ask Anna to wash it again, only without lavender.”

  Ada suddenly seemed un-upset. In fact, there wasn’t even the customary sniff or tear-wipe one might expect when someone who was recently crying isn’t anymore. It was like a switch being thrown. There was crying-Ada, and then there wasn’t.

  “Who’s Anna?” Ada asked, without a touch of emotion.

  “Anna. Miss Cumberland. She’s the maid.”

  “Whose maid?”

  “Your maid. She lives here, in the house.”

  “Does she?” Ada seemed to recall something about that, a Miss Cucumber, or Cabinet, from downstairs.

  “Yes. She’d like to be a lady’s maid someday, but for now she’s the housemaid.”

  “I didn’t know there were different kinds,” said Ada, wondering why she didn’t know that. “How do you know about her?”

  “I asked,” said Mary.

  Ada found that comforting, asking and finding out. “What’s your mother’s work?” asked Ada, changing the subject.

  “Pardon?” Mary found herself confused by Ada’s rapid change of mood and subjects.

  “Peebs said something about your mother’s work. What does she do?”

  “She wrote. She was a writer. She said that men and women should only be as different as they wish to be, and that education and profession should be available to all.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” said Ada. It seemed rather obvious to be considered a “work,” though, in her estimation.

  “She died when I was very small,” added Mary. “I don’t remember her.”

  Ada was suddenly uncomfortable with the small sadness in Mary’s words.

  “My father was a writer too,” Ada blurted. “He’s dead as well. When I was eight.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Mary.

  “I didn’t really know him. And Mother won’t talk about him. She won’t let his books in the house. His friends used to come to visit, but she shooed them away.”

  “May I ask how your father died?” said Mary cautiously.

  “Three years ago, in Greece. There was a war. I’ve seen all the maps. He went to fight for the Greeks so they could have their own country. And he got sick and died.”

  “Oh dear. But that’s very brave. An extraordinary adventure.”

  Ada had heard this before, about her father, but such comments always evoked her mother’s displeasure. She wasn’t sure what to think.

  “How did your mother die?” asked Ada.

  “Making me,” said Mary.

  “I’m glad,” said Ada, and immediately realized it was a horrible thing to say. She wasn’t glad that Mary’s mother died. She was just glad that Mary got made, that’s all she meant. She suddenly felt very stupid, and angry at herself.

  Mary noticed that Ada was holding her breath.

  Mary too had been shocked by Ada’s words, but quickly saw that Ada was unused to talking about feelings, hers or anyone else’s, and had meant no harm. Mary could see it in her eyes, along with a sheen of embarrassment.

  “Thank you,” said Mary, clearly understanding what was meant.

  Ada exhaled.

  “Now,” added Mary, “let’s see Anna about that dress, shall we?”

  The following week was one of fast friendship for Ada and Mary, and Mary was let in on three secrets.

  The first, to Mary’s delight, was the balloon. Mary found that even though she was a forehead taller than Ada, she could stand in her stocking feet inside the room-that-was-a-wicker-basket and just barely fit. She’d suggested bringing up a little table and chairs so that the two of them could take their tea in the gondola, and Ada seemed pleased at the idea.

  The second secret was in the form of a visitor, a Mr. Babbage. Ada came to life whenever she spoke of him or of her anticipation of his visits. One day, when Ada had disappeared from the drawing room, where their studies had been laid out, Mary went to see where Ada had wandered off to, which was the library, as it was more often than not.

  Mary found Ada seated on the floor, but curiously enough she was neither reading nor drawing. She was merely sitting, her back tall and straight and her legs tied up in some sort of knot. While this struck Mary as remarkable, it was less remarkable than the sight of a grown gentleman, slightly portly and balding but well attired, seated likewise on the floor opposite Ada with his eyes closed.

  “This is Mr. Babbage,” whispered Ada without moving. “Don’t speak to him.”

  “All right,” agreed Mary in hushed tones. “What is happening, exactly?”

  Ada remained motionless and breathed slowly before answering.

  “Mr. Babbage’s friend Mr. Everest has returned from India with some interesting ideas about mathematics. We’re to sit like this and imagine ourselves as points on a curve, and then write equations about it.”

  “Are you really?” said Mary, simply because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. None of this looked like her idea of mathematical equations at all. It looked like sitting on the floor.

  “Mr. Babbage says this is how you imagine things in India. Mr. Everest showed him.”

  Still not knowing what to say, and not meaning to intrude, Mary excused herself politely and left Ada to her silent friend.

  Ada’s third secret—which she didn’t keep on purpose, she just had no one to mention it to—was “the bleh,” or at least that’s what Ada called it. The Byron Lignotractatic Engine, or BLE. And it was marvelous in the way that such perfect, intricate things are marvelous. It lived in a darkened room off the library, a paneled, forgotten room that may, in the long history of the house, have been intended for storage, as it had no windows to the outside world.

  The bleh reminded Mary of the workings of a music box—spools of sprockets with tiny hammers that did or didn’t click on a bumpy bit. But the bleh was a chorus of music boxes, a symphony of them, and its music, Ada explained, was numbers. You set the tiny spools in rows to represent numbers, wound up the engine in different ways depending on what you wanted to do with them, adding or subtracting or multiplying or dividing and remembering, and let it clack away on springs and ratchets so that different numbers finally emerged.

  “What kind of numbers?” Mary inquired.

  “Anything can be numbers,” said Ada. “That’s the trick. Here, look.” And she released the winding spring so that all the spindles spun in their slots, then settled with a satisfying click, as if to announce something.

  Mary was still puzzled.

  “Not down here, look up there.” Ada pointed to a row of upright brass rods, some thirty-two of them, each with a stack of wooden cubes strung down it. Mary could see that each side of each cube was stained a slightly different shade of brown, from light to dark. The rods had gears along the bottom, and all of that was connected to the cabinet of spindles beneath.

  “Watch,” said Ada.

  Mary stepped back as Ada once again ran the engine, clicking along its conversation of numbers. But this time, Mary’s attention was on the towers of little blocks strung along the brass rods. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.

  A horse. Galloping.

  Each cube, now light, now dark, fluttered in place, and the blocks together made a picture, and that picture was moving. Alive. Wondrous. A horse galloping along a forest of wooden cubes, over and over and over.

  Mary didn’t realize that her hand was over her mouth until she saw Ada’s eyebrow at that odd angle again. Mary laughed at herself.

  “When you say anything can be numbers,” asked Mary, “what do you mean?”

  “This horse. Maps. Leaves. Things that move.”

  “People?”

  “People, I suppose. I’m … better at some numbers than others.”

  “
This is marvelous,” said Mary.

  “I know. That’s what Mr. Babbage has been helping me with. Or me him. The numbers. You need numbers to turn things into other numbers.”

  “It’s magic.”

  “No, it’s simple. There’s just a simple thing, and another simple thing, and another, and another, piled on top of each other. The whole is big, but each thing is simple. You just need to keep track.”

  “Like a pianoforte,” Mary offered.

  “I don’t know how to play the piano,” said Ada, wondering for the first time if she should.

  “Each key pushes a hammer,” Mary explained. “The hammer hits a string inside the piano and plays one note. Just one. But play the keys together and you get music.”

  “The bleh,” said Ada, smiling with delight, holding out her hand in a now-you-finally-get-it gesture.

  “More,” said Mary breathlessly. “Show me more.”

  And Ada did, and Mary marveled, until the carriage arrived to take her home to the Godwin house in Somers Town.

  With increasing frequency, Ada took to sitting alongside Mary while Peebs tutored. She didn’t really participate, although she did offer the occasional correction when Peebs got something wrong.

  When Ada did engage Peebs, it was usually to ask if he had a book on a particular subject. If he did not, he’d bring one the next morning, and she’d spend the day engrossed.

  Few things distracted Ada from her bubble of reading. But she did note a curious exchange between Mary and Peebs, and a second curious exchange between Peebs and Mary. Ada had never been terribly good at picking up on curious exchanges, and was pleased to think she was getting better at it.

  In the first exchange, Ada could tell that Mary was unusually emotional about thanking Peebs for being her tutor. It turned out, as Ada listened intently, that Mary’s only alternative would have been to be sent away to school. This thought visibly frightened Mary—being away from her family, enduring a school’s strict order and endless recitation, and being struck with a cane for breaking rules you might not even know about. This was all awful, of course, but what interested Ada most were little nuances she’d never noticed before: a certain something in Mary’s voice, the way the pupils of her eyes got bigger, how her mouth tightened ever so slightly. All these things were being cataloged and labeled and filed away in Ada’s brain for later reference. So this is what happens when people are upset and trying not to show how much, she thought. Fascinating.

  The second exchange—and this was quite brilliant as far as Ada was concerned—occurred when Peebs showed up late and out of sorts and confessed to Mary that he had been particularly distressed by a story in the newspaper about impoverished orphans. Ada noted that as he talked, bright red spots appeared on his cheeks, which was interesting, but the brilliant part was the newspaper itself.

  Ada had never given much thought to newspapers before, but as soon as she looked at one, it was like opening a hundred books at once. Odd, disconnected bits of information. Names. Deaths and marriages. Fires and kidnappings. Courts and magistrates. Announcements of inventions and medicines. Information that might take years to find its way into books.

  Some of this was clearly rubbish—one bit would contradict the bit right next to it, and they couldn’t both be true, which led Ada to wonder who was putting this newspaper together in the first place. What frustrated Ada was that as soon as she became interested in a bit of information in the newspaper, the article was over. When she expressed this, Peebs told her there would be another newspaper the next day with more information, and Ada could scarcely believe she’d been missing out on this small miracle all this time.

  Days passed in a new routine of Ada’s descending the stairs upon Mary’s arrival, and of Peebs’s gifting of the morning’s paper. Ada would spend much of the morning reading, interrupting Peebs to ask him the odd question to determine if the scandals of members of Parliament might be interesting (they weren’t), and then more or less settling into a comfortable fog of carpets and tea and tinkering and drawing and biscuits.

  “Crime,” said Ada one afternoon, out of nowhere, while reading the newspaper. There was a goodly bit about crime in the newspaper.

  “Mmm?” Mary had been reading too, a book on Greek mythology. Orpheus was climbing the long stair out of the underworld and was about to take a forbidden glance at Eurydice to see if she was still there. Mary always wanted to shout at him not to do it.

  “Crime,” Ada repeated. “I’ve never really thought about it before.”

  “I imagine there’s much wickedness in the world,” answered Mary, detached.

  “Why?” asked Ada.

  “I cannot say. Perhaps it is just in our nature,” said Mary, looking up from her book.

  “But you have a nature, and you’re not a criminal.” And after a pause, Ada added, “Are you?”

  “Heavens, no. One makes choices. Choices have consequences,” Mary repeated, although she couldn’t say from where.

  “So, criminals are choosing to be criminals.” Ada had a way of asking questions that didn’t sound like questions, and Mary had a way of knowing when.

  “I suppose so. I think it depends on the crime. If you’re starving and steal bread, I imagine you don’t have much of a choice. But if you’re a kidnapper, or a highwayman, then, yes, these are choices. I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “Criminals aren’t very clever,” Ada declared.

  “No?”

  “No. They get caught. It’s always in the newspaper. Only they don’t say ‘caught,’ they say ‘apprehended,’ which means the same thing.”

  “Well, I imagine ‘Criminal Not Getting Apprehended’ wouldn’t make much of a newspaper story, so they probably leave that bit out.”

  “Leave bits out? Of the newspaper?”

  “Well, I’m only supposing. But I can hardly see them putting things in the newspaper that don’t happen.”

  “No,” agreed Ada. “That makes sense.” She pondered. “So the newspaper criminals are the not-clever ones, and the ones that aren’t in the newspaper must be clever.”

  “Not as clever as you, I’m sure,” said Mary.

  “Probably not,” admitted Ada. She wasn’t boasting; it was just very likely to be true.

  “I imagine,” said Mary, her mind returning to her book, “that you could apprehend quite a few criminals. Being more clever than they.”

  “That would at least put them in the newspaper,” agreed Ada, the idea striking her as rather tidy somehow. Once things were in the newspaper, they were almost as good as being in books, and that meant she had a place in her brain to put them. Like solving a puzzle. “I could be a magistrate, or on the constabulary, and put criminals in the newspaper.”

  “Prison,” corrected Mary. “Criminals go to prison, not to the newspaper.” This point seemed completely irrelevant to Ada. “But you couldn’t, of course. Young ladies cannot be magistrates, or on the constabulary.”

  “Why not?” asked Ada.

  “Because we are young ladies. And you especially are a young Lady. Big L. It’s simply not allowed.”

  Ada was displeased at this. “Your mum wrote that book,” she said.

  Mary was puzzled, thinking Ada was referring to the half-closed Greek mythology book Mary page-kept with her thumb.

  “Your mum wrote that girls can do whatever,” Ada continued. “Education. Profession.”

  Mary, now fully engaged, put down her book.

  “My dear Ada, my mother wrote about how things ought to be, not how they are.”

  Ada continued looking displeased, which made Mary go on. “Of course, how are things to be the way they ought, unless we make them so? And if clever criminals can make choices to become criminal and remain clever enough to not go to prison—or the newspaper,” she added for Ada’s benefit, “then why can’t we be magistrates or on the constabulary? In fact, we ought to be, if we so choose.”

  “Well, we can’t,” said Ada. “I’m only elev
en. And you’re fourteen.”

  “There is that,” admitted Mary.

  “And if Mother or Peebs found out, they would be …”

  “Yes?”

  “Incendiary,” said Ada.

  “Theoretically, that would only be if they found out,” said Mary cautiously.

  “A secret constabulary, then,” said Ada. Thus satisfied, she returned to her newspaper.

  To Mary’s way of thinking, rather a lot depended on words. And to her, the word “secret” meant intrigue. Adventure. Romance. It meant everything that Mary, in her fourteen-year-old heart of hearts, knew that she was. The word “secret” had suddenly made Mary’s heart bang around madly in her ribs, as the butterfly had done weeks before. She thought she was going to burst.

  “This,” said Mary as calmly as she could, which was hardly at all, “is a very. Good. Idea.”

  “What is?” said the part of Ada that wasn’t reading the newspaper, having forgotten already.

  “A secret constabulary,” replied Mary. “Except they are called ‘private detectives.’ A detective agency.” And she leaned forward for full effect, whispering, “A secret one.”

  Ada still wasn’t fully aware of what Mary was saying, and continued with the part of her brain that didn’t think it needed to be.

  “You could put an advertisement in the newspaper,” she suggested, without enthusiasm.

  “How can we advertise something that’s secret?” asked Mary.

  “Well,” said Ada, a bit more of her brain paying attention, “you could say there’s a detective agency and keep secret the bit where it’s us.”

  “You know, that’s terribly clever.”

  “Mmm,” agreed Ada.

  “We’ll need to come up with a secret name. Or rather, a name for the secret. To put in the advertisement. In the newspaper.”

  “You should call it after your mum; it was her idea,” said Ada, which it wasn’t, not technically, but Mary knew what she meant. “What was her name?”

  “Mary,” said Mary.

  “That’s not a very good secret name. It’s yours. Did she have another name?”