The Case of the Missing Marquess (2 page)

One would think that, as Mother and I were not “close,” I should not have minded her disappearance very much. But quite the contrary; I felt dreadful, because it seemed all my fault if anything had gone badly with her. Always I felt to blame for—for whatever, for breathing—because I had been born indecently late in Mother’s life, a scandal, a burden, you see. And always I had counted upon setting things right after I was grown. Someday, I hoped, somehow, I would make of my life a shining light that would lift me out of the shadow of disgrace.

And then, you understand, my mother would love me.

So she had to be alive.

And I
must
find her.

Searching, I crisscrossed forest where generations of squires had hunted hares and grouse; I climbed down and up the shelving, fern-draped rock of the grotto for which the estate was named—a place I loved, but today I did not linger. I continued to the edge of the park, where the woods ended and the farmland began.

And I searched onward into the fields, for Mum may very well have gone there, for the sake of the flowers. Being not too far from the city, Ferndell tenants had taken to farming bluebells and pansies and lilies instead of vegetables, as they could better prosper by delivering fresh blossoms daily to Covent Garden. Here grew rows of roses, crops of coreopsis, flaming patches of zinnias and poppies, all for London. Looking on the fields of flowers, I dreamt of a bright city where every day smiling maids placed fresh bouquets in every chamber of the mansions, where every evening gentlewomen and royal ladies decked and scented themselves, their hair and gowns, with anemones and violets. London, where—

But today the acres of flowers hung sodden with rain, and my dreams of London lasted only a breath or two before evaporating like the mist steaming up from the fields. Vast fields. Miles of fields.

Where was Mother?

In my dreams, you see—my Mum dreams, not the London ones—I would find her myself, I would be a heroine, she would gaze up at me in gratitude and adoration when I rescued her.

But those were dreams and I was a fool.

So far I had searched only a quarter of the estate, much less the farmlands. If Mum lay injured, she’d give up the ghost before I could find her all by myself.

Turning, I hurried back to the hall.

There, Lane and Mrs. Lane swooped upon me like a pair of turtledoves upon the nest, he plucking sopping coat and umbrella and boots from me, she hustling me towards the kitchen to get warm. While it was not her place to scold me, she made her views plain. “A person would have to be simpleminded to stay out in the rain for hours on end,” she told the big coal-burning stove as she levered one of its lids off. “Don’t matter whether a person is common or aristocrat, if a person catches a chill, it could kill her.” This to the teakettle she was placing on the stove. “Consumption is no respecter of persons or circumstances.” To the tea canister. There was no need for me to respond, for she wasn’t talking to me. She would not have been permitted to say anything of the sort
to
me. “It’s all very well for a person to be of an independent mind without going looking for quinsy or pleurisy or pneumonia or worse.” To the teacups. Then she turned to face me, and her tone also about-faced. “Begging your pardon, Miss Enola, will you take luncheon? Won’t you draw your chair closer to the stove?”

“I’ll brown like toast if I do. No, I do not require luncheon. Has there been any word of Mother?” Although I already knew the answer—for Lane or Mrs. Lane would have told me at once if they had heard anything—still, I could not help asking.

“Nothing, miss.” She swaddled her hands in her apron as if wrapping a baby.

I stood. “Then there are some notes I must write.”

“Miss Enola, there’s no fire in the library. Let me bring the things to you here at the table, miss.”

I felt just as glad not to have to sit in the great leather chair in that gloomy room. Into the warm kitchen Mrs. Lane fetched paper imprinted with our family crest, the ink pot and the fountain pen from the library desk, along with some blotting paper.

Dipping the pen into the ink, on the cream-coloured stationery I wrote a few words to the local constabulary, informing them that my mother seemed to have gone astray and requesting them to kindly organise a search for her.

Then I sat thinking: Did I really have to?

Unfortunately, yes. I could put it off no longer.

More slowly I wrote another note, one that would soon wing for miles via wire to be printed out by a teletype machine as:

I directed this wire to Mycroft Holmes, of Pall Mall, in London.

And also, the same message, to Sherlock Holmes, of Baker Street, also in London.

My brothers.

AFTER SIPPING THE TEA URGED UPON ME by Mrs. Lane, I changed to dry knickerbockers and started off to deliver my notes to the village.

“But the rain—the wet—Dick will take them,” Mrs. Lane offered, wringing her hands in her apron again.

Her grown son, she meant, who did odd jobs around the estate, while Reginald, the somewhat more intelligent collie dog, supervised him. Rather than tell Mrs. Lane I did not trust Dick with this important errand, I said, “I shall make some inquiries while I’m there. I will take the bicycle.”

This was not some old high-wheeled bone-shaker, but an up-to-date “dwarf” bicycle with pneumatic tyres, perfectly safe.

Pedalling through the drizzle, I stopped for a moment at the lodge—Ferndell is small for a hall, really only a stone house with its chest puffed out, so to speak, but it needs must have a drive, a gate, and therefore a lodge.

“Cooper,” I asked the lodge-keeper, “would you open the gate for me? And by the way, do you happen to recall opening it for my mother yesterday?”

To which, not quite masking his astonishment at such a question, he replied in the negative. At no time had Lady Eudoria Holmes passed this way.

After he had let me out, I pedalled the short distance to Kineford village.

At the post office I sent my telegrams. Then I left off my note at the constabulary, and spoke with the officer, before I began my rounds. I stopped at the vicarage, the greengrocer’s, the bakery, the confectionery, the butcher’s shop, the fishmonger’s, and so forth, inquiring after my mother as discreetly as I could. No one had seen her. The vicar’s wife, among others, raised her eyebrows at me. I supposed it was because of my knickerbockers. For public cycling, you see, I should have been wearing “rationals”—bloomers covered by a waterproof skirt—or indeed any kind of skirt long enough to conceal my ankles. I knew my mother was criticised for failing properly to drape vulgar surfaces such as coal scuttles, the back of her piano, and me.

Shocking child that I was.

I never questioned my disgrace, for to do so would have been to broach matters of which a “nice” girl must remain ignorant. I had observed, however, that most married women disappeared into the house every year or two, emerging several months later with a new child, to the number of perhaps a dozen, until they either ceased or expired. My mother, by comparison, had produced only my two much older brothers. Somehow this prior restraint made my late arrival all the more shameful for a gentleman Rationalist logician and his well-bred artistic wife.

The eyebrow-raisers bent their heads together and whispered as I pedalled around Kineford again, this time inquiring at the inn, the smithy, the tobacconist’s, and the public house, places where “nice” females seldom set foot.

I learned nothing.

And despite my best smiles and by-the-way manner, I could almost hear a crescendo of excited gossip, conjecture, and rumour rising behind me as I returned to Ferndell Hall in an unhappy state of mind.

“No one has seen her,” I answered Mrs. Lane’s mute, questioning glance, “or has any idea where she might be.”

Again waving aside her offers of luncheon—although now it was nearly tea-time—I trudged upstairs to my mother’s suite of rooms and stood outside the hallway door, considering. Mum kept her door locked. To spare Mrs. Lane the trouble, supposedly—for Lane and Mrs. Lane were the only house-servants—Mum cleaned her rooms herself. She hardly ever allowed anyone to enter, but under the circumstances . . .

I decided to go ahead.

Laying my hand upon the doorknob, I fully expected I would have to hunt up Lane to get the key.

But the knob turned in my grasp.

The door opened.

And I knew in that moment, if I had not known before, that everything had changed.

 

Looking about me in the hush of my mother’s sitting room, I felt rather more worshipful than if I were in a chapel. I had read Father’s logic books, you see, and Malthus, and Darwin; like my parents I held rational and scientific views—but being in Mum’s room made me feel as if I wanted to believe. In something. The soul, perhaps, or the spirit.

Mum had made this room a sanctuary of the artistic spirit. Panels of Japanese lotus-patterned silk dressed the windows, drawn back to let in the light upon slender furnishings of maple wood carved to resemble bamboo, very different from the hulking dark mahogany in the parlour. Down there all the wood was varnished, heavy serge draped the windows, and from the walls stared grim oil portraits of ancestors, but here in my mother’s domain the wood had been painted white, and on pastel walls hung a hundred delicate watercolours: Mum’s airy, lovingly detailed renditions of flowers, each picture no larger than a sheet of writing paper, lightly framed.

For a moment I felt as if Mum were here in this room, had been here all the time.

Would that it were so.

Softly, as if I might disturb her, I tiptoed into the next room, her studio: a plain room with bare windows for the sake of light and a bare oak floor for the sake of cleaning. Scanning the easel, the tilted art table, the shelves of paper and supplies, I caught sight of a wooden box and frowned.

Wherever Mum had gone, she had not taken her watercolour kit with her.

But I had assumed—

How very stupid of me. I should have looked here first. She had not gone out to study flowers at all. She had gone—somewhere, some why, I simply did not know, and how had I ever thought I could find her myself? I was stupid, stupid, stupid.

My steps heavy now, I walked through the next door, into Mum’s bedroom.

And halted, astonished, for several reasons. First and foremost the state of Mum’s shining, modern brass bed: unmade. Every morning of my life, Mum had seen to it that I made my bed and tidied my room immediately after breakfast; surely she would not leave her own bed with linens thrown back and pillows askew and eiderdown comforter sliding onto the Persian carpet?

Moreover, her clothes had not been properly put away. Her brown tweed walking suit had been most carelessly thrown over the top of the standing mirror.

But if not her customary walking outfit—with its skirt that could be drawn up by strings so that only petticoats need get wet or soiled, yet let down at a moment’s notice should a male appear on the horizon—if not this very practical, up-to-date garment for the country, then what had she worn?

Parting the velvet drapes to admit light from the windows, I threw open the wardrobe doors, then stood trying to make sense of the jumble of clothing inside: wool, worsted, muslin, and cotton but also damask, silk, tulle, and velvet. Mum was, you see, very much a free thinker, a woman of character, a proponent of female suffrage and dress reform, including the soft, loose, Aesthetic gowns advocated by Ruskin—but also, whether she liked it or not, she was a squire’s widow, with certain obligations. So there were walking costumes and “rationals” but also formal visiting dresses, a low-necked dinner dress, an opera cloak, and a ball gown—the same rusty-purple one Mum had worn for years; she did not care whether she was in fashion. Nor did she throw anything away. There were the black “widow’s weeds” she had worn for a year after my father’s demise. There was a bronze-green habit left over from her fox-hunting days. There was her grey caped pavement-sweeping suit for city wear. There were fur mantles, quilted satin jackets, paisley skirts, blouses upon blouses . . . I could not make out what garments might be missing from that bewilderment of mauve, maroon, grey-blue, lavender, olive, black, amber, and brown.

Closing the wardrobe doors, I stood puzzled, looking about me.

The entire room was in disarray. The two halves, or “stays,” of a corset, along with other unmentionables, lay in plain sight on the marble-topped washstand, and upon the dresser sat a peculiar object like a cushion, but all of a pouf, made of coils and clouds of white horsehair. I lifted this odd thing, rather springy to the touch, and making no sense of it, I carried it along with me on my way out of my mother’s rooms.

In the downstairs hallway I encountered Lane polishing the woodwork. Showing him my find, I asked him, “Lane, what is this?”

As a butler, he did his very best to remain expressionless, but he stammered slightly as he replied, “That is, um, ah, a dress improver, Miss Enola.”

Dress improver?

But not for the front, surely. Therefore, it must be for the rear.

Oh.

I held in my hands, in a public room of the hall, in the presence of a male, the unwhisperable that hid inside a gentlewoman’s bustle, supporting its folds and draperies.

“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed, feeling the heat of a blush rise in my face. “I had no idea.” Never having worn a bustle, I had not seen such an item before. “A thousand apologies.” But an urgent thought conquered my embarrassment. “Lane,” I asked, “in what manner was my mother dressed when she left the house yesterday morning?”

“It’s difficult to recall, miss.”