The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline (2 page)

 

Scutari? Reading the missive twice, I could make no sense of it other than the threat. Yet, as arresting as the message was, the spiked handwriting alarmed me more.

“Do you recognise the writing?” I demanded.

“Eh?” Mrs. Tupper put her ear-trumpet to her ear.

Into it I shouted, “Do you know this hand?” already guessing the answer, for if the anonymous threatener had thought she would know his writing, he would have disguised it, perhaps pasting together letters cut out of newspapers, as was the wont of popular-fiction villains.

“Eh? Know the man? How would I?” Confound everything, at times such as this I quite wished I could just scribble her a note. But, like most common folk, Mrs. Tupper could read only slowly and with difficulty.

“The
writing
!” I tried again.

“Never seen it. I’d remember, wouldn’t I, a thorn-patch like that?” Gesticulating, she expressed alarm and bewilderment. “I think ’e’s mistaken me for someone else.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully, as Tupper was hardly a common name. Indeed, I had never met any other Tupper. But it was, of course, her long-dead husband’s name, and there might be a few of his surviving relatives in London. “Did Mr. Tupper have family?”

“Eh?” She put the trumpet to her ear.

Into it I bawled, “Mr. Tupper!”

“Died in Scutari.” Mrs. Tupper clutched herself as if cold, although it was a fine May evening. “Almost thirty-five years ago an’ I’ll never forget it. ’Orrible place. Like ’ell on earth.”

I lapsed back in my comfortless chair, scolding myself: Scutari. Of course. The British headquarters in Turkey during the Crimean War.

I asked, “Was Mr. Tupper in the army?”

“Eh?”

To spare the gentle reader any more of this, let me set forth in a straightforward fashion the tale that she told me over the next few hours in a far more confused way, and understandably so, for the Crimean War was one of the most confused conflicts ever undertaken by human stupidity: England and Napoleonic France, of all the unlikely allies, joining with heathen Turkey, even more unlikely, against the already-dying giant that had been Ottoman Russia. “Theirs not to wonder why, theirs but to do or die,” doomed men charging straight into cannon-fire for the sake of a godforsaken peninsula in the Black Sea: the Crimea, chiefly occupied by lice the size of spiders, great fat leaping fleas, and rats so big that terriers ran away from them.

Mr. Tupper, however (Mrs. Tupper explained to me), had voyaged to the Crimea as a business venture, being a sumpter, one who sold to soldiers the goods their own thieving suppliers failed to provide for them. Seizing the opportunity, off he went, taking his bride along without a second thought. They were both the merest youngsters. They saw the officers’ wives accompanying their husbands with carriage-loads of servants, silverware, and linens, as if going to war were a holiday. Indeed, women by the thousands accompanied the armies, females ranging from camp-followers to Sisters of Mercy, little knowing that most of them, like the men, would die.

Not from battle, but from disease.

“Crimean fever, it were,” explained Mrs. Tupper. “There Thomas lay not knowing nothing, with blood running out of ’is ears, ’is eyes, ’is mouth an’ nose. Me, trying to ’elp, I paid a couple of the native beggars to lay ’im in an ox-cart for me, an’ that way I took ’im to the big ’ospital there at Scutari, ye know.” She shook her head, remembering her own innocence. “I thought maybe the doctors an’ nurses there could fix ’im up. The word were that they ’ad nurses new from England.”

But those nurses, as I was later to learn, were subject to the commands of the army surgeons, who regarded them not only as interfering females in a male domain but, even worse, as civilian spies sent to ruin an otherwise good time with their hen-witted ideas about
caring
for common soldiers. The army placed many restrictions on these annoying women. In the name of propriety, for instance, females were not allowed in the wards at night.

Each morning, then, they needed to remove those who had died since the day before.

Including Mr. Tupper.

“I tidied ’im a bit, sewed ’im up in ’is blanket, an’ they put ’im in the same big grave as thirty others done passed away during the dark hours,” Mrs. Tupper told me, going on to explain that meanwhile, her livelihood—her husband’s goods, tent, pack-ponies, et cetera—had vanished as if into smoke, looted by wartime thieves. Left with no means to get home to England, she found herself amongst others consigned to the very lowest regions of the inferno that was Scutari. Beneath the barracks, or hospital, ran a maze of cellars, and it was here that Mrs. Tupper took refuge along with other widows, orphaned children, crippled old peasants left behind by their families, all manner of beggars—of which she was now one.

“’An me not in the best of ’ealth, either.”

But rather than elaborate on this interesting statement, Mrs. Tupper got up to light a few candles. While she was on her feet (no small undertaking, at her age—heavens, she had to be more than fifty!), she opened a carved wooden box I had often noticed, centred as it was upon her sideboard. From this box she brought me a fading photograph to look at. “That were taken of Mr. Tupper an’ me on our wedding day,” she declared as I studied the posed portrait of two young people in the absurd clothing of mid-century—his vast drooping bow-tie, and her skirt spread wide over hoops and crinolines, like an inverted bowl. My good landlady had lapsed into a reminiscent mood, seeming almost to have forgotten about the frightening letter that had caused her to confide in me in the first place.

Directing her attention back to the black-inked, brutal missive, I shouted into her ear-trumpet, “What are you supposed to deliver? What message? To whom?”

“I dunno!” Seating herself again, she hugged herself with her skinny arms. “I’ve thought an’ thought an’ I just dunno! What with losing the baby an’ all, I might’ve forgot.”

An odd, almost seasick, upside-down feeling took hold of me and rendered me speechless. I simply could not imagine . . . my dear old landlady, she who now spent her days stewing oxtails and tatting pillow-slips, had once traveled to a barbaric land, lost her husband, and then, “not in the best of ’ealth” . . .

Mrs. Tupper must have seen myriad shocked questions in my face.

“Stillborn it were,” she explained, “an’ no wonder, fer I were more’n half starved, my clothes in rags an’ no bed to lie on in them caves, an’ no sleep to be ’ad, either, for the rats would nibble yer fingers.” With her arms still clasped around herself, she rocked her hunched upper body to and fro. “A ’ellish place it was. Folk went mad. One of ’em took my baby an’ flung it into the sea. I thought fer sure I would perish, too, an’ that grieved I were, I didn’t greatly care.”

I whispered, “How ever did you escape?”

And there was no need for me to shout in her ear-trumpet, for she understood my question well enough, from my face if not from my lips.

“The English nurse lady it were,” she said. “Funny, I hain’t thought of ’er in years. Yet she were famous at the time; the soldiers, they called her the Lady with the Lamp. ’Undreds of them she nursed every day like a mother. ’Ow or why she found time to take mercy on me is a miracle.” Mrs. Tupper’s watery gaze seemed to see not me, but a distant place of the past. “Maybe she ’eard I wouldn’t . . .” My landlady’s papery old face actually flushed pink. “I wouldn’t, if you know what I mean, like them camp-followers. . . . Most of the women in the cellars would do anything for the sake of food an’ pennies, an’ I don’t blame ’em, but I just couldn’t bring meself . . . Maybe that were it. ’Owever it come about, one day one of them crippled boys she adopted fetched me to ’er. Up in a corner tower she were, an’ me with barely strength to climb the stairs. There must’ve been a ’undred people in that room, jabbering all French an’ whatnot, coming an’ going with sponge baths an’ bandage lint an’ shirt buttons an’ lemons an’ tincture of iodine an’ knitted Cardigans an’ Balaclavas an’ who knows what all; she ’ad ’er own storehouse in there.”

“What was her name?” I murmured, trying to remember—for I, also, had heard of this remarkable Englishwoman, although I must admit that my knowledge of the Crimean War was sorely lacking; my education, dependent upon my father’s library, had focussed on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the like.

“She saw to it that I were washed an’ fed,” marveled Mrs. Tupper, “an’ fine clothes she give me, better’n what I was married in, an’ she arranged my passage ’ome an’ paid for it out of ’er own purse. An’ that gracious she were, chatting to me—though I barely understood a word she said. Deaf I was even back then, but I never said nothin’, for I ’oped it would go away, bein’ just from the gunfire there at Sevastopol, ye see, when Mr. Tupper an’ me were taking brandy to the troops while the Russian ladies set up on top of the ’ill with their parasols an’ their picnic baskets, watching like it were a music ’all show.”

Good heavens. She had been in
battle,
too? My little old landlady?

Hardly knowing what to think or how to continue this rambling interview, I once more lifted the mysterious missive that had come in her post and showed it to her. “Mrs. Tupper,” I implored, “do you have any idea—”

She shook her toothless head vehemently. “I just don’t know!” she cried. “It don’t make no sense. I were nobody over there!”

A very brave nobody, I thought. But still, a mere accidental woman caught in the war. So who on earth was her mysterious enemy, and what did he—for unmistakably the ferocious handwriting was that of a man—what did he want of her? Now, thirty-four years afterward?

Although my curiosity might never be satisfied, still, I felt it my duty to help her with this mysterious matter.

SO, AS EVERY VIRTUOUS YOUNG LADY SHOULD DO, I sought the advice of an older, wiser, masculine head, consulting a man of the world: Dr. Leslie Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian—my employer.

I jest. Dr. Ragostin was fictitious, my invention so that I should have the opportunity to search for missing things and persons. All the next day, at work as Miss Meshle, the great man’s secretary, I puzzled over Mrs. Tupper’s problem: how to deal with the sender of her mysteriously threatening letter?

As was my custom, I first sat at my desk and composed a list of questions:

Unhelpful, overall. I did not really feel that the threatening letter had come from an American. In no way was America concerned in the Crimea; moreover, there was something quite European about X’s hedgehog handwriting, including the ink—

I added to the list,

Then I sat scowling at the list without another worthwhile thought until Joddy, the page-boy, came in with the morning’s newspapers and, since it was May, a bouquet of lilacs I had requested for the sake of their heavenly scent.

Nor did I achieve anything more that day than to compose, and bang out upon the very modern type-writing machine I had recently purchased, the following to be placed in the newspaper personal advertisements:

 

“T” for Tupper; I did not know Mrs. Tupper’s first name.

Relieved to find her in the kitchen that evening cooking one of her ghastly messes and none the worse for wear, I showed her this, receiving her permission to place it in the newspapers.

The next day I typed numerous copies, took them around to all the dailies on Fleet Street, and hoped that would be the end of the matter.

Would that it were so.

That was a Wednesday.
Carrier pigeon has no message
was published in the Thursday morning editions. On Thursday evening, as I wended my way back to Mrs. Tupper’s ramshackle house crammed between the tenements of the East End, my thoughts were mainly of supper, hoping it would be something at least remotely palatable. I walked up the front steps expecting some aroma—whether of stewed herring, chicken livers, or some less disgusting variety of meat—but the moment I opened the door, all such thoughts fled my mind.

I saw drawers hanging open, chairs overturned, shelves knocked down, crockery broken upon the plank floor.

I smelled cigar smoke, and whale oil leaking from a smashed lamp, and the distressingly physical odour of fear.

I heard the smothered sound of someone crying. “’Elp!” came a muffled feminine voice, sobbing. “Please ’elp me!” The sound scorched my heart, for what despicable sort of villain would distress or harm such a deaf old dear as Mrs. Tupper?

And what else might he do?

Could he be still on the premises?

Snatching my dagger from my bodice—with its hilt disguised as a large, hideous brooch, it nestled between my buttons, sheathed in my corset—with weapon in hand, I entered the ransacked house, looking sharply about me as I made my way towards—I could see her now, bound hand and foot, gagged by a dish-towel—

Not Mrs. Tupper!

“They ’it me!”

Tied to a kitchen chair was a rawboned girl perhaps twelve years old, whose swaddled, wet, and reddened face I did not recognise at first as I cut the twine that secured her feet and hands. But as she herself tore the gag off, I realised that it was Florrie, Mrs. Tupper’s daily girl-of-all-work, whom I had seen only a few times, as she generally finished before I arrived home.