The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline (3 page)

Where was Mrs. Tupper?

“They laid ’ands on me!” Florrie spewed forth such a torrent of woe that no sense could be got out of her, while I burned with fear that my landlady lay insensible, or hurt, or—or worse. But I saw no sign of her downstairs. Leaving Florrie to her hysterics, I rushed up to Mrs. Tupper’s bedchamber, dagger in hand. But I found only more ruins—bedstead flung aside and everything from the wardrobe and dresser thrown on the floor; not an inch of carpet was to be seen. Such were the heaps of sheets and blankets mixed with shoes, skirts, shawls, and unmentionables that at first I thought Mrs. Tupper might be lying somewhere underneath. Throwing my dagger aside, like a demented badger I burrowed amongst bed linens, penny weeklies, house-dresses, rheumatism cures, aprons and frocks and—and my landlady’s old black Sunday bonnet—

Holding the venerable bonnet freshly trimmed with new ribbons for Easter, I felt sick yet calmer, more sane.

I retrieved my dagger and sheathed it, reasoning that if there were brigands still in the house, they would have attacked me by now; also, Florrie would have fled the kitchen, whereas I could still hear her lamentations echoing up the stairs.

Having failed to find Mrs. Tupper in her bedroom, I checked my own. Oddly, it had not been ransacked like the rest of the house. I looked into the wardrobe and under the bed. Mrs. Tupper—or what I dreaded to find, her mortal remains—my landlady was not there.

I ran back downstairs. Florrie had moved only to stand up, but her wails were increasingly taking the shape of words. “Gennelmums, my ’ind foot!” Barely intelligible; I could catch a few words now and then. “Come bustin’ in ’ere . . . slappin’ a respegguble girl . . . ’ouse all sixes an’ sevens . . .”

“Where is Mrs. Tupper?” I interrupted.

“. . . rat-face curs fit fer the sewer . . .”

I took her by the shoulders. With difficulty I restrained myself from shaking her. “Florrie. Where is Mrs. Tupper?”

“. . . an’ ’er makin’ pudding dough wit’ ’er sleeves rolled up, nuttin’ on ’er ’ead but ’er ’ouse-cap . . .”

I went ahead and shook the obtuse girl, shouting, “Where is Mrs. Tupper?”

Jerking herself free of my hands, Florrie shouted back at me as if I were the dense one, “I been telling ye! They took ’er!”

 

It required an excruciating hour for me to get the tale out of Florrie. She would not calm down for any coaxing, and eventually I had to say I would summon a constable. (I could not possibly do so, for I myself was a runaway, wanted by Scotland Yard as well as by my very formidable brothers—but the girl did not know that.) Florrie, like any proper East Ender, dreaded having anything to do with the police, so she sat down in a kitchen chair as I told her to, and tried to talk sensibly. “They was dressed like gents, or I wouldn’t ’ave let them in.”

“How many?” I had put the kettle on the stove and was trying to find a cup that was not broken so that I could give her tea.

“Two big bearded blokes.”

“And what did they look like?”

“They ’ad beards like Anarchists.”

And very probably fake. As patiently as I could, I responded, “Aside from the beards. What colour was their hair, for instance?”

She didn’t recall.

“How tall?”

She couldn’t really say. They had seemed huge.

“How old do you think they might have been?”

One seemed younger than the other, but not so a person would notice. And so on. The poor girl’s dim wits were thoroughly addled by her fright.

Understandably so. As far as I could piece together, the two bearded strangers had knocked at the door, asked politely to speak with Mrs. Tupper, and once within the house had quite changed their tone, demanding to be given the message for the Bird.

“They kep’ on saying she should give ’em what she ’ad for the Bird.”

“A Mr. Byrd, perhaps?”

“No mister, no missus, just ‘the Bird,’ wot they say. Bellering into ’er ear-trumpet they were, ‘We know you was a spy for the Bird!’”

CARRIER PIGEON, the mysterious and threatening missive had addressed Mrs. Tupper before instructing her to deliver her BIRD-BRAINED message. She was a bird who was to report to a Bird, then?

Bizarre as it seemed, a pattern did appear to emerge. Otherwise, I might not have believed the ignorant girl-of-all-work still breathlessly babbling:

“‘Wot you got fer the Bird,’ they kep’ yelling at ’er, an’ when she toll ’em an’ toll ’em she din ’ave nothing, they smacked ’er—”

The blackguards! How could they strike a poor old woman?

“—an’ then they smacked me fer interferin’—” Florrie had tried to intervene? My feelings for the girl warmed immediately.

“—and they tied me up an’ commenced ’unting fer it.”

“But—for
what
?”

“I dunno, miss, no more’n Mrs. Tupper did. That flummoxed she were, she cried.”

“Villains,” I muttered, setting a cup of tea in front of the girl.

“Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.”

“There’s no sugar, I’m afraid. It’s all spilled.” I paced the ruined room, unable to sit down with her. “So did these dastardly men find what they were looking for?”

The girl took a long sip of tea, which I could not begrudge her, then finally said, “’Ow wud I know, Miss Meshle?”

Confound her! I wanted to snatch her tea away. Just because she had been tied up with her back to the door, so that she could not see, could she not have
heard
something? As calmly and civilly as I could I inquired, and she reported one of the villains saying they would “take the deaf old bat along an’ ’e could ask ’er ’imself.”

Who on earth was “’e”?

Evidently the thugs had not found “the message to the Bird.”

Who in perdition were
they
?

Was there anything more to be got out of Florrie? Forcing myself to sit down so as to cease towering over the unfortunate girl, I began my interrogation of her all over again, but with no satisfactory results, other than the additional information that the older kidnapper was missing some teeth. (From this I could conclude that he was not of the very best class in society.) When Florrie—ridiculous but popular name; one seemed to run across Florries everywhere—when the obtuse wench began to cry again, I knew it was time to desist.

“Very well, Florrie.” I gave her a shilling. “Run on home, now, tell your mother all about it, and have her spread the word.” Indeed I could not have hushed Florrie’s mother, a washerwoman, had I tried; her Irish tongue served as a megaphone for the neighbourhood. “Please let it be known”—I held up a pound note to indicate fiduciary inducement— “that anyone who saw those men take Mrs. Tupper or who knows anything about it should come here and inform me at once.”

Still sniffling, Florrie nodded, then scuttled out the door.

AND DIRECTLY AFTER FLORRIE, I WENT OUT likewise, still in my striped-and-ruffled poplin dress, my silly little hat and green glass ear-bobs and false curls, for Miss Meshle was a familiar sight on that street, and its other inhabitants would not hesitate to talk with me. Amongst them I hoped to find witnesses to Mrs. Tupper’s abduction.

And so I did, in plenty, for a horse-drawn conveyance was a rarity on that narrow stone-paved lane, and Mrs. Tupper’s unexpected visitors had arrived in a carriage, no less. Many of the neighbourhood loiterers had noticed it.

The “blind” beggar on the corner divulged that the strangers had arrived in a shiny black brougham driven by a pursy, florid man, and the horse had been a bay.

The corner chandler had seen a phaeton with the top up, a coat-of-arms on the door, with a nondescript narrow sort of driver and a black horse that “would’ve been good for a funeral.”

His wife agreed that there was a picture of a white deer or unicorn or something on the vehicle’s door, but said it was a barouche with the top up, not a phaeton, and the horse was brown. The driver had been short and stocky, with a pronounced chin.

The greengrocer had seen a black brougham with bright yellow wheels but no coat-of-arms, drawn by a chestnut horse and driven by a tall, puffy-faced man with a red nose, obviously a heavy drinker and very likely Irish.

The pudding-vendor said that a rather shabby grey cab had waited in front of Mrs. Tupper’s house, the heavy, dark horse looked “more fit for a plough,” and that the driver had one single eyebrow “as thick as thatch” that ran like a roof clear over his nose.

The “lady of the night” on our street, who would also be a “lady of the day” when opportunity offered, said that she had approached the driver while the carriage sat in front of Mrs. Tupper’s house, but had been rudely rebuffed. She said he looked much like any other man, two eyes, mouth, nose in the middle. She said the carriage was black with shiny red wheels, no crest, and the horse was roan.

The street urchins said variously that the horse was black, brown, or red, that the conveyance was a four-wheeler cab, a carriage, or a coach, that the driver was short, tall, fat, thin, old, young; they agreed only that he was unfriendly, throwing no pennies but rather threatening them with his whip.

Regarding any description of the
occupants
of the cab/phaeton/brougham/barouche/carriage/coach, that is to say, the men who had abducted Mrs. Tupper: no one seemed to have seen them getting out of the conveyance and going into the house. Nor had anyone,
anyone,
observed the kidnappers coming out of the house with Mrs. Tupper in hand, or noticed which way they went. Apparently, the neighbourhood’s curiosity had been all for their arrival, not for their departure. And by this time, even if anyone
had
told me what they looked like, I would not have believed a word.

Fit to scream with frustration, and nearly despairing, I returned to the house, lest news arrive from Florrie or her mother, or a demand from the abductors, or something of the sort.

Suppertime had long since passed, but I had no thoughts of eating, nor could I bring myself to sit down, rest, and wait. Rather, I paced the ransacked lower room, kicking broken china out of my way and trying to think. Two rough men demanding a message?
We know you were a spy for the Bird.
Mrs. Tupper, a spy? Ludicrous.

What in the name of nonsense could “the Bird” mean?

What
message? My understanding seemed as dim as the single candle I carried for light, as day had long since turned to night.

What in the world could Mrs. Tupper have got herself mixed up in? I could not imagine her intentionally withholding from two rough thugs anything that they wanted. Mrs. Tupper, for all her adventures in the Crimea, seemed to me hardly the sort of person to indulge in heroics. I believed that if she had any inkling what the villains wanted, she would have given it to them at once.

Yet, evidently they had left without it, for why else would they have taken her with them? They believed she knew where it was, and they intended for their master or employer—the man I called X, or perhaps the mysterious Bird—to induce her to relinquish it—

It?
What was “it”?

The two intruders had plundered the house as if in search of some physical object.

But obviously they had not found it.

Just as obviously Mrs. Tupper knew nothing of it.

Yet—might it nevertheless be here?

 

When I was a little girl—less than a year ago, that era before Mum took her unannounced leave, but it seemed a distant past, those green sweet-scented countryside days before all this grey London smut—when I was thirteen-going-on-ten instead of fourteen-going-on-thirty, I used to run out into the woods of Ferndell Park, my home, and look for things, anything, just searching. Climbing trees, peering into the crannies of the rocks, pretending there was some treasure to be found. The trove I accumulated had included jay-feathers, yellow-striped snail-shells, someone’s garnet earring, plover-eggs, pennies that had turned green, interesting stones that I suspected might contain gems within them—and I suppose I still look for things of value in unlikely places; this has become my life’s calling.

Undertaking to search Mrs. Tupper’s house, then, I set about the task not only with energy born of desperation but with the keen interest of a lifelong Nosey-Nellie and with a practised eye to note anything unusual, anything at all.

As the mysterious intruders had most rudely strewn Mrs. Tupper’s poor belongings, I took the opposite approach: I put things away. Lighting every candle, every lantern and oil-lamp (in outrageous defiance of the usual parsimony of the place), inch by inch I inspected the dwelling and every item therein by replacing each thing where it belonged.

Or, in the case of broken dishes, sweeping up the shards and depositing them in the dust-bin.

Also shattered were the two crockery spaniels who had guarded the ends of the mantel. I inspected their interior surfaces carefully, but saw no sign that anything had been concealed in them.

The contents of Mrs. Tupper’s carved memorabilia box lay torn and strewn on the floor. I inspected them as I collected them: my landlady’s babyhood record of baptism so old and brittle it had broken into pieces along the folds, equally ancient sepia-toned photographic portraits most likely of family members, a similar one of stiffly-ranked children being promoted from the Sisters of Mercy Ragged School of Hoisington—Mrs. Tupper had done well for one who had made her start in a ragged school!—the wedding photograph I had seen before, her yellowing marriage certificate, the deed to the house, et cetera. From all of this I discovered that Mrs. Tupper’s first name was Dinah, but nothing more.

The hour was late, but I could not possibly sleep; I continued working. When I had inspected and tidied the kitchen and parlour to my dissatisfaction, I tore myself a hunk of bread and forced myself to eat it, knowing I needed to safeguard my strength. Then, gnawing the crust, I trudged upstairs to assail Mrs. Tupper’s bedroom.