The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets

by Nancy Springer

  Confound everything. I needed to make a quick escape, before I keeled over.

  Carrying my boots, I padded—as silently as I could, in my wobbly condition—to the hothouse door, where I halted and listened.

  As I had hoped, I could hear the two sisters’ quarrelling voices below. As long as they continued to berate one another, I would know where both were. And any servants would no doubt be busy eavesdropping.

  Although, on second thought, I doubted there were any servants. If Flora was all that she seemed to be, Pertelote could not risk having “’elp,” lest someone find out too much.

  Very quietly I opened the hothouse door, then slipped out and down the stairs.

  In a front room somewhere Flora was clamouring, “Ye’ll always take care of me, won’t ye, Sissy? Answer me. Ye’ll always take care of me.”

  Except the time the rats ate her face.

  Feeling very cold as well as very shaky, I crept down more back stairs, through an empty kitchen, out a back door, and then I ran, tottering, not caring that the stones bruised my feet or that I was fleeing into the worst thug-rookery in London City.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

  QUAINTLY ENOUGH, MY DIRTY AND DISHEVELLED appearance served to protect me in these low, swarming streets. Last night’s drunkards groaned in the gutters. A girl in a grimy pinafore and not much else huddled in a doorway, her bare feet blue with cold. Boys in shabby shirts and trousers enormously too big for them, rolled up like life-preservers around their twiggy limbs, ran after a well-upholstered woman, begging for pennies. Wives emptied slops, flannel-vested workmen trudged about their business; a man with a push-cart shouted, “’Ot buns, sausage, suet pudding! ’Ot fat pudding fer yer breakfast!” No one paid me any attention as I sat on the kerb of a pavement to put my boots back on, or as I purchased from the street vendor an unspeakably vile sausage at which I gnawed while I limped along. Had the lovely Miss Everseau minced into these brawling thief-ridden streets, she would at once have been set upon, robbed, stripped of her fine clothing and let go naked if at all. But a frowsy-haired, wild-eyed, cut and bruised young woman who looked as if she had been in a fight was not noticed whatsoever.

  When I arrived back at my lodging, however—the one on Dr. Watson’s street, being a great deal closer at hand—matters were different. Luckily, the sharp-eyed landlady happened to be out, but I found it necessary to bribe the gawking young girl-of-all-work into silence with a shilling, and a promise of more should she tell her mistress only that I was un-well and required my meals to be brought up to my room. And yet another shilling to provide me with a bath, but say nothing of it.

  Thus it was that, by early afternoon, fed, clean, decently clad in a posy-print house-dress, the cut on my face patched with sticking-plaster, I paced my room, fretting.

  Pertelote’s voice echoed within my mind: Flora. You are to kill no one ever again. What ’ave you done with Dr. Watson?

  Dear heavens, I needed to find out.

  If I were to help Dr. Watson—if he were yet alive!—I desperately needed to know more about Flora. Her last name. Whether she had ever really killed anyone. Whether she had really been committed, and whether Dr. Watson had signed the order, giving her a motive to take revenge upon him. And I needed to find out the exact procedure for having a person put away; I knew only that it required the signatures of a family member and a couple of medical doctors on some papers. With my various questions I needed to go to the borough office, the police, the lunatic asylum, Colney Hatch itself, and investigate—

  But with a cut, however superficial, on my face, I could not possibly go as the beautiful Miss Everseau. Even the merest pimple would have kept such a lady in seclusion until it healed.

  Yet I had no other disguise available to me here, not even a full veil. And even if I had, it would have been of small help, for only the lovely Miss Everseau, in my experience, could wheedle information out of officialdom.

  Until the scratch above my mouth healed—no matter how much I moved about my room, I could not run away from this inexorable fact—until my face healed or I found a suitable disguise for it, I could do nothing.

  I could not even leave my lodging when anyone might see me.

  Intolerable. What might happen to Dr. Watson in the meantime?

  What might already have happened to him?

  “Confound everything! This will not do!”

  Leave Watson to Flora’s dubious mercies for even a day longer? I would never be able to face myself in the mirror again if I did so. Yet I could see no other option, except…

  Except to communicate with my brother Sherlock.

  And the very thought threw me instantly into a terror. The idea of going to see him was simply out of the question. Even supposing I sent him a message; he was so clever, how easily he might trace it back to me! To judge by the accounts I heard of Sherlock Holmes, anything—my choice of stationery, the colour of my ink, something about my handwriting, a postman’s fingerprint—any trifle might betray me to him.

  I simply could not risk it.

  Yet I had to.

  If I did nothing, and Dr. Watson died…

  “Piper, ma’am,” came the timid voice, along with an equally timid knock at my door, of the girl-of-all-work, whom I had sent out for a Pall Mall Gazette.

  “Thank you. Just leave it on the stand, please.”

  Once she had departed, I fetched the paper into my room and, still pacing, I scanned it for any further news of Dr. Watson. There was, of course, none. Impatiently tossing the rest of the newspaper away, I turned next to the “agony columns.” As I rather expected—for it had appeared every day since the first time I had seen it—there I found once again “422555 415144423451 334244542351545351 3532513451 35325143 23532551 55531534 3132345

  5441143543251331533.”

  Deciphered: IVY DESIRE MISTLETOE WHERE WHEN LOVE YOUR CHRYSANTHEMUM.

  And still I did not know what to do.

  I knew my mother. She was simply not the “love” sort. She would not have sent for me.

  Yet how I wished she had. Especially now, when I was so worried about Dr. Watson. Mum would know what to do. I felt sure she would.

  If by the tiniest unlikely possibility this message had come from her—could I let the chance go by? If she had extended the hand of familial affection to me now, and if I did not respond, would she extend it ever again?

  Perhaps she intuited that I might be a trifle upset with her, and she wished to make amends?

  Yet my mother—WHERE WHEN—surely Mum, being the one who had to travel into London, from the Gypsies only knew where, would prefer herself to set the time and meeting place?

  Might it be that someone did not wish to make me suspicious by naming the wrong sort of place?

  While thoughts such as these ran through my mind—circled, rather, like a dog chasing its tail—my eyes went about their own business, scanning onwards into the “agony columns,” where nothing particularly demanded their scrutiny until they happened upon a quite arresting, and mysterious, “personal” all in capital letters:

  ALONE PART PART ALONE

  Unattributed and unsigned.

  ALONE PART PART ALONE

  That was all.

  I peered at it, bewildered, as I am sure a great many other readers were, by such an enigmatic, anonymous message in such bold print that one could not help but notice it. No cipher either. Plain English. Someone quite wanted to tell someone else something—but what? Part alone? Part from whom? And how otherwise than alone? No difficulty there for me; I was always alone, my very name spelled alone backwards—

  Then I saw.

  ENOLA TRAP TRAP ENOLA

  I burst out laughing, enormously relieved. It was a cipher after all, so childishly simple that only a genius such as Mum could have placed it. Thanks to her, I now knew for sure that the IVY DESIRE MISTLETOE message was a canard, undoubtedly originating from my dear brother Sherlock. And I now knew something far more important: My mother might not
be motherly in any usual sense of the word, but she did care for me. In her way.

  Quite a difficult task, that of assisting my brother to locate Dr. Watson, remained before me, but I felt more able to face it now. Envisioning my mother’s face—with warm affection—I calmed enough to sit down. Fortified in my resolve, I took pencil and a sheaf of foolscap paper in hand.

  So. What did I need to communicate to my brother, and what could be left out?

  First of all, what exactly did I know as fact?

  With my paper in my lap I scrawled:

  I know that Pertelote said “What’s ’e done now.” Or it could have been “What’s she done now,” sounding much the same. Meaning the sister.

  I know that Pertelote speaks of her husband Mr. Kippersalt as alive, but Flora speaks of him as deceased.

  I know that Pertelote told Flora, “Don’t plant no more people”??? What did Flora reply? Something about putting someone in a place that would “do for him.” Did she refer to Mr. Kippersalt? Or did she refer to Dr. Watson?

  I know that Pertelote asked her, “What have you done with Dr. Watson?”

  I know that Flora dressed as a man; almost certainly it was she who sent the bizarre bouquets.

  I know that Pertelote told her not to kill anyone “ever again.” Did Flora kill Watson?

  A most upsetting question.

  In between jottings, I doodled, and now I began to draw in earnest. While far from being an artist, I have a knack for drawing people’s faces in an exaggerated sort of way, and I have found that doing so helps me think. I sketched Pertelote. (What was her real name? Had she recognised me outside her window? More questions to which I had no way of finding answers.) I drew Flora as a man complete with nose and goatee, considering that she made a much more satisfactory man than a woman, and it was narrow-minded of Pertelote to think otherwise. But how had Flora come to adopt this disguise?

  Then I remembered, and wrote:

  Flora said, “I ’ad to act the part o yer ’usband, now, didn’t I?”

  Pertelote said to let him rest in peace.

  Although suffering a certain degree of self-doubt since my theory of Watson and the noseless soldier had proved to be so badly mistaken, still, I began to hypothesise what may have happened between Pertelote, Flora and the missing Mr. Kippersalt. Although attempting to help his wife’s sister at first, Mr. Kippersalt had eventually found Flora unbearable and had her committed to Colney Hatch. (While I sat thinking, I drew Flora as a woman, putting features similar to Pertelote’s on her.) Pertelote, however, whose life had been devoted to Flora since the unfortunate incident of the hungry rats, could not let her sister be locked up for a lunatic, even though Flora arguably was one. Forced to choose between her husband and her sister, she championed the latter, defied her husband and had Flora released from the insane asylum.

  Flora then promptly killed Mr. Kippersalt.

  This event apparently had not broken Pertelote’s heart. Pertelote had helped conceal the crime by pretending her husband was still alive. Meanwhile she had tried to take control of her sister so that no more such unfortunate incidents would occur. Flora, apparently, still intended to make trouble of some sort…

  Of course.

  Remembering another snippet of overheard conversation, I made a note:

  “You’ll be sorry! You an’ any doctor ’oo signs an order for you!”

  Flora still held a grudge against Dr. Watson, who had signed the order to have her put away. Surely I had hit upon the truth of the matter.

  But—what had she done to him? Killed him?

  The thought sent a chill through me, and a pang to my heart. I hesitated to accept it.

  Musing, I sketched Flora as I had seen her, nose and face putty torn off. But it was hard—painful, I mean—to depict her that way, poor woman. I imagined two Cockney children, on their own in the most abject poverty while their mother scrubbed some more fortunate woman’s floor—or perhaps their mother was dead already. Or perhaps she had beaten and ceased to love the older child when she had come home to find the younger one’s face eaten off by rats. Or perhaps she had ceased to love the disfigured one. Mother or no mother, growing up that way, so disfigured, was enough to make anyone insane.

  Shuddering, I looked down at my drawing to find that in my sympathy, or perhaps in a sort of understanding beyond logic, I was turning Flora to flowers.

  I had given her a convolvulus mouth, an upside-down rosebud for a nose, and now I went on to give her poppies for eyes, and for hair, asparagus fronds, of course, wild and stringy. She made quite a bizarre bouquet.

  Ye gods in white nightgowns, I was back where I had started.

  All of the flowers except the rose—which, upside down, symbolised the opposite of love—had been in the original bouquet I had seen in Mrs. Watson’s parlour.

  And I quite understood all of them except the asparagus. What on earth was the meaning of asparagus?

  For the matter of that, why did Flora grow so very much asparagus in her hothouse?

  For bouquets? She had enough fronds for a thousand. To eat? She could have supplied all of Holywell Street, but I had seen no evidence that any spears had ever been cut—

  Spears.

  That might be it, I reflected. A spear, a stabbing weapon: hatred or death. Why, the name of the plant itself included the sentiment in a way; a-spear-a-gus—

  Spear of Gus.

  I sat straight up with a cry, scattering papers left and right, for in that moment of blazing-white electric-search-light illumination I saw it all, I understood everything, seemingly insurmountable difficulties fell away, and I knew exactly what to do.

  CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

  THERE WOULD BE NO NEED, AFTER ALL, TO RISK my freedom by writing a letter to my brother Sherlock.

  Instead, nearly giddy with excitement, I seized upon a fresh piece of paper and began to compose a communication of another sort.

  Several moments later, I finished, thus:

  5453411155 43535343 315323435155 3211543132 114455231533 114413 125334 3334 13421414513444112354. E.H.

  I did not allow myself to hesitate over my bravado in signing this with my own initials. I daresay I resembled my brother Sherlock not only nasally but in other ways; it seemed that, like him, I needed to have my little moments of drama.

  And surprise. For which reason, I have withheld from you, gentle reader, the sense of the above message at this time, and while I am sure you are capable of deciphering it, I hope you will refrain for the few remaining pages of this narrative.

  Once I had inked a final copy of my cipher, blotted it, folded it and sealed it with wax, I considered how best to convey it to the Pall Mall Gazette, as soon as possible so that it would appear in tomorrow morning’s edition. I could not possibly trust this important errand to some street urchin. But a uniformed messenger boy or a licenced commissionaire could be questioned and traced back to me. Eventually, rolling my eyes, I realised I was on my own, as usual, and rose to see about it. With a combination of pencil and “recondite emollient” I coloured the sticking plaster on my face to be, I hoped, less noticeable, at least after dark—I could not have attempted this undertaking in daylight. But at nightfall, in my rusty-black dress and shawl, wearing my wig and my most wide-brimmed face-shadowing hat with a strip of veil attached for good measure, I ventured forth to Fleet Street.

  All went well. An indifferent night-clerk who hardly looked at me took my money and my message, promising to send it straight along to the printing press.

  Good. But I knew that, if I returned to my lodging now, ordered supper like a sensible young lady, and prepared for slumber, I would not be able to sleep. I still felt electrified through and through with anticipatory excitement, plus worry—about Dr. Watson. If he was where I deduced he was, he would survive this one additional night, and all would be well. Over and over again I reviewed my reasoning with the same conclusion. Yet I could not seem to find confidence in my own mental ability. What if I were over
looking something? What if I were mistaken? What if I were a stupid, blundering girl who should have run straight to the great Sherlock Holmes, a man of action, and let him handle everything?

  I could not bear to go back to my room and wait. Instead, emboldened by the dagger riding in my corset and feeling myself to be a sufficiently inconspicuous figure in the dark, I made my way back into the “abominable little labyrinths of tenements crowded and huddled up together, to the perpetual exclusion of light and air, and the consistent fostering of dirt, disease and vice…the stifling courts, lanes, yards and alleys shouldering one another and cabining, cribbing, and confining whole nests of poverty-stricken inhabitants,” as the Penny Illustrated Paper would have it—in other words, to the neighbourhood behind Holywell Street, where that morning I had seen a girl wearing a pinafore with no dress under it, her bare feet blue with cold.

  At this time of night the streets swarmed with half-drunken men and women, street vendors hawking cheap shellfish or ginger beer or sweets, and on every block a painted female selling something else. And beggars—entertainers, some would have preferred to be called. I stopped to watch a grubby man who had trained a rat to stand on its hind legs in his hand whilst he plied a white handkerchief to make it represent in quick succession a Roman senator in toga, an Anglican clergyman in alb, then a white-wigged barrister, and with the addition of a second handkerchief, a lady being presented at court. He attracted a laughing crowd which dispersed like smoke the instant he pulled off his cap; I was the only one to give him a penny. Then I went off to find the children left behind—or left entirely—by their gin-seduced parents.