The Case of the Missing Marquess (14 page)

I saw the sunlit doorway as a halo of glory surrounding her.

I saw the two villains turn away.

Hanging on to somebody’s old cape for support, I sagged against the wall with relief.

Tewky folded like an easel, sinking to the floor.

Mrs. Culhane quite sensibly did not come in at once, but stood at the door for a while longer. By the time she entered, I had recovered my strength, found a back room with a water tap, soaked a rectangle of faded red flannel, and applied it to Tewky’s face. When he sat up, I transferred my attention to his suffering feet. Dabbing with the rag, trying to remove dirt and blood without hurting him too much, I was studying his raw, sore soles when our toad-like saviour came in, shut and locked her shop door, drew down its blind, and waddled over to me.

“So,” she said, “one day yer a grievin’ widder, and the next day it turns out yer a stringy-hair girl runnin’ from Cutter and Squeaky.”

“Indeed? And who might the gentlemen be? We were not introduced.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s me stomach binder yer using fer a rag.”

I stood up. “Merciful heavens, I think I’ve paid you for it.”

She faced me unsmiling, no cheery robin chirp in her manner or voice today, no “duckie” for me. She said, “Wot ye gave me went to the neighbours. Others who saw.”

This, I realised, must be partly true. She had disappeared from the doorway to bargain with bystanders for their silence.

But by the shrewd glint in her eye I knew it was also partly false. She had promised the neighbours some shillings or a few pounds at the very most.

Still, there was something honest in the grimness of her face as she told me, “There’d best be more where that came from. Cutter would slice me inside out if he knew, make no mistake about it. It’s my life I’m risking fer ye.”

“If you provide what we need,” I told her, “there will be more.”

 

So it was that the next day Tewky and I slipped out of her shop by the back door, strengthened and transformed. We had taken refuge in her rather slovenly kitchen—for she lived in three rooms on the first floor, over the shop—and we had accepted her lumpy porridge gratefully. We had slept, I on her foul-smelling sofa, Tewky on quilts on her floor. We had taken sponge baths. We had applied bag balm (ointment for cow udders) to Tewky’s feet, then wrapped them in bandages. We had outfitted ourselves in apparel from Culhane’s Used Clothing, burning our old things in the kitchen stove.

We had
not
talked, not even to tell one another our names. Our sour-faced hostess had asked us no questions, and we had offered no information. Tewky and I did not even converse between ourselves, lest she overhear. I did not trust her; I would not have put it beyond her to separate me from all of my money if she discovered where I kept it. Therefore I never removed my clothing in her presence, and I never removed my corset at all, not even to sleep. That once-despised garment had become my most precious possession—so long as I did not actually tighten it! Its steely protection had saved my life. Its starchy structure supported and concealed the bust enhancer, dress improver, and hip regulators that disguised both me and my financial means.

I believe and hope that Mrs. Culhane—if that was indeed her name—never discovered this secret. We spoke only to conduct business: Might her shop provide a suit of clothes not too much worn for the boy, and a cap, and an ample pair of shoes, and thick socks? And for me, a blouse, and a bustled or gored skirt such as a typist or glove-counter girl might wear, made of practical material, with pockets? And a jacket, also with pockets, its hem flared to fit over the top of the skirt? And gloves not too spoilt, and a hat not too far out of fashion, and would she give me a bit of help with my hair?

I felt naked to the eyes of the world, leaving that place without my thick black widow’s veil to cover my face, but the truth was that even my own brothers might not have known me. I stooped, and peered nearsightedly through “pince-nez” eyeglasses clipped onto my nose, perched there like a bizarre metal bird. Over the eyeglasses, a considerable fringe of false hair both decorated and hid my forehead, assisting the pince-nez in altering my profile. And over the hair I wore a straw hat trimmed with bits of lace and feathers, very much like any cheap straw hat worn by any struggling young woman in the city.

“Now I just need a parasol,” I told Mrs. Culhane.

She gave me one dyed a hideous but stylish chemically derived green, then escorted us to her back door and held out her hand. Upon her palm I placed, as I had promised, another bank note. We exited, and she closed the door behind us without a word.

Once we had achieved the street, I shuffled as I walked, acting half blind, feeling my way with the folded parasol. I did this partly as disguise, and partly so that Tewky, whose feet were still quite sore, would not appear to struggle along, but rather to walk slowly, accompanying me, for my sake. In our clothing neither new nor worn-out, neither rich nor poor, I hoped we would escape anyone’s attention, for I wanted no one bearing news of us to Cutter.

But I need not have worried. All around us, folk went noisily about their business, taking no notice of us at all. London, that great brick-and-stone cauldron of a city, seemed always on the boil with swirling human activity. A man with a barrow cried, “Ginger beer! Fresh cold ginger beer to cool yer dusty throat!” A water-cart trundled past, followed by boys cleaning the cobbles with brooms. A delivery man pedalled by on the oddest tricycle I had ever seen, with the two wheels to the front instead of the rear, and a great box strapped to the handle-bars. On a corner stood three dark-haired children singing in harmony like angels, in a language I did not know, the middle one with a crockery cup extended for my penny. Just beyond and above them, a ragged man with a paste can and brush balanced on a ladder, sticking up advertisements for shoe blacking, anti-rheumatic elastic wrappings, patent safety coffins. Men in white sack jackets and white trousers nailed a quarantine notice onto the doorway of a lodging. I wondered briefly what vile fevers and diseases wafted up from the stinking Thames, and whether I would perish of cholera or scarlet fever for having set foot on Cutter’s vessel.

Cutter. Charming ruffian. In one of my pockets, along with money and various other useful items I had transferred there from my bust enhancer, I carried a list I had written in some wakeful hours during the night:

How, indeed? I had told Inspector Lestrade. And Madame what-was-her-name, the Astral Perditorian, had overheard.

Had Inspector Lestrade told others? Perhaps, eventually, but would he not first have taken steps to confirm my information? Yet that wire must have been sent to Squeaky almost immediately.

Hmm.

Such were my thoughts as my limping escort and I walked a few blocks to a better neighborhood. Here we found a park of sorts, a patch of grass with four trees under which women trundled prams and a man with a donkey cried, “Rides, treat yer kiddies, a penny a head.” Beside the park, I saw, stood a number of cabs. I would be able to hire one so my little lordship would not have to walk on his suffering feet.

So far, much on our guard, we had not spoken at all, but now that we had left Cutter’s haunts behind, I turned to my companion and smiled.

“Well, Tewky,” I said.

“Don’t call me that.”

I bristled. “Very well, Lord Tewksbury of Basilwether-or-not—” But my annoyance subsided as a thought struck me. I asked, “What do you want to be called? What name had you chosen for yourself when you ran off?”

“I—” He shook his head and turned his face away. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you still want to go to sea?”

He swivelled to stare at me. “You know everything. How do you know so much? Who are you? Are you really related to Sherlock Holmes?”

I bit my lip, for I did not feel as if it would be safe to tell him anything more of myself; already he knew too much. Luckily, at that moment a newsboy howled from the corner by the cab-stand, “Read all about it! Ransom demand for Viscount Tewksbury Basilwether!”

“What?”
I exclaimed. “That’s preposterous!” Almost forgetting to peer and shuffle, I scuttled over and bought a newspaper.
read the headline over, once again, Tewky’s portrait
à la
Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Sitting next to me on a park bench so that we could both see the newspaper at once, Tewky made a muffled sound of dismay. “My
picture
?”

“The whole world has viewed it,” I told him with, I admit, some degree of zest. Then, as he did not immediately reply, I glanced at him to see upon his face an expression of fiery red, utterly anguished humiliation.

“I can’t go back,” he said. “I’ll never go back.”

No longer gleeful, I asked, “But what if someone recognises the picture? Mrs. Culhane, for instance?”

“
She?
When ever would she look at a newspaper? She can’t read. In those slums nobody can read. Did you see any newsboys at the docks?”

He was right, of course, but rather than admit it, I devoted my attention to the text of the article:

 

“Oh, no,” Tewky whispered, anguished anew.

Wincing, I read on without comment.

 

 

Which was, I realised, just one day after that of my own disappearance. So much had happened since, it was hard to believe that only three days ago, I had left Ferndell Hall.

 

 

 

There was more, but at this point I ceased reading. Instead, I sat staring at—at the cab-stand, really. That was what stood before Tewky and me: sporty hansom cabs and clumsy but more roomy four-wheelers, glossy horses and scrawny horses swishing their tails while munching on nosebags of oats, portly cabdrivers and shabby cabdrivers loitering, waiting for fares. But I was not in fact seeing any of this. I was trying to remember what Madame Laelia had looked like, but so much had happened in the past three days that I retained only an impression of red hair, large face, large body, large hands in yellow kid gloves—

A small voice said, “I have to go back.”

It took me a moment to turn and focus on Tewky, pale and handsome and very young, returning my gaze.

“I have to go home,” he said. “I can’t let those bloody villains steal from my family.”

I nodded. “You have an idea who sent the ransom note, then.”

“Yes.”„

“And you imagine, as I do, that they are still upon the hunt for you.”

“For both of us. Yes, indeed.”

“We’d better go to the police.”

“I suppose so.” But his glance slid away.

He studied the tips of his new shoes—new only in a sense, as they had all too clearly been cobbled together from pieces of leather scavenged from old boots.

I waited.

Finally he said, “It wasn’t what I expected, anyway. The shipyards, I mean. The water is filthy. So are the people. They don’t like one if one tries to stay clean. They think one is a snob. Even the beggars spit on one. Somebody stole my money, my boots, even my stockings. Some people are so mean, they would even steal from the crawlers.”

“The crawlers?”

“Dosses, they call them, because they’re always dozing. I’ve never seen any persons so wretched.” His voice lowered. “Old women with nothing left, not even strength to stand on their feet. They sit on the workhouse steps, half asleep but with nowhere to lay their heads, too nearly dead even to beg. And if someone gives them a penny to buy tea, they crawl away to get it.”

With a shock to my heart I remembered the hairless old woman I had seen crawling on the pavement, her head all sores.

“And then they crawl back again,” Tewky said, his voice lower and more struggling by the moment. “And there they sit. Three times a month they are allowed a meal and a night’s sleep in the workhouse. Three times. If they ask for more than that, they are locked up and given three days at hard labour.”