The Case of the Missing Marquess (3 page)

“Was she carrying any sort of baggage or parcel?”

“No, indeed, miss.”

“Not even a reticule or hand-bag?”

“No, miss.” Mother seldom carried anything of the sort. “I think I would have noticed if she were.”

“Was she by chance wearing a costume with a, um . . .” The word
bustle
would be indelicate when speaking to a male. “With a train? With tournure?”

Very unlike her, if so.

But with memory dawning in his eyes, Lane nodded. “I cannot bring to mind her exact apparel, Miss Enola, but I do recall she wore her Turkey-back jacket.”

The kind of jacket that would accommodate a bustle.

“And her high-crowned grey hat.”

I knew that hat. Meant to be military in appearance, resembling an upside-down flowerpot, it was sometimes, by the vulgar, called three-storeys-and-a-basement.

“And she carried her walking umbrella.”

A long black implement meant to be used like a cane, as sturdy as a gentleman’s stick.

How odd that my mother should go out with a mannish umbrella, a mannish hat, yet swishing that most flirtatious feminine tail, a bustle.

JUST BEFORE DINNERTIME, A BOY BROUGHT a reply from my brothers:

Chaucerlea, the nearest town with a railway station, lay ten miles beyond Kineford.

In order to meet the early train, I would have to set off at dawn.

In preparation, that evening I bathed—quite a bother, dragging the metal tub out from under the bed and placing it before the hearth, hauling buckets of water upstairs and then teakettles of boiling water to pour in for warmth. Mrs. Lane was of no help, for—even though it was summertime—she needs must build a fire in my bedchamber, all the while declaring to the kindling, the coals, and finally the flames that no sane person would bathe on such a damp day. I wanted to wash my hair, also, but I could not do so without Mrs. Lane’s assistance, and she developed a sudden rheumatism in her arms while declaring to the towels she was heating, “It’s no more than three weeks since the last time, and the weather not nearly warm enough.”

I bundled into bed directly after my bath, and Mrs. Lane, still muttering, placed hot water bottles at my feet.

In the morning I brushed my hair a full one hundred strokes, trying to render it glossy, then tied it back with a white ribbon to match my frock—girls of the upper classes
must
wear white, you know, to show every fleck of dirt. I wore my newest, least soiled frock, with very nice white lace pantalets below, and the traditional black stockings with black boots, freshly polished by Lane.

After so much dressing at such an early hour I had no time for breakfast. Snatching a shawl from the rack in the hallway—for it was a very chilly morning—I set off on the bicycle, pedalling hard in order to be on time.

Cycling, I have found, allows one to think without fear of one’s facial expressions being observed.

It was a relief, yet hardly a comfort, to think about recent events as I sped through Kineford and turned onto the Chaucerlea Way.

I wondered what in the world had happened to my mother.

Trying not to dwell on that, I wondered whether I would have difficulty finding the railway station, and my brothers.

I wondered why on earth Mum had named my brothers “Mycroft” and “Sherlock.” Backwards, their names spelled
Tforcym
and
Kcolrehs.

I wondered whether Mum was all right.

I wondered whether I would recognise them at the train station. I had not seen them since I was four years old, at Father’s funeral; all I remembered of them was that they had seemed very tall in their top-hats draped in black crepe, and severe in their black frock coats, their black gloves, their black armbands, their gleaming black patent leather boots.

I wondered whether Father had really expired of mortification due to my existence, as the village children liked to tell me, or whether he had succumbed to fever and pleurisy as Mum said.

I wondered whether my brothers would recognise me after ten years.

Why they had not visited Mother and me, and why we had not visited them, of course I knew: because of the disgrace I had brought upon my family by being born. My brothers could ill afford to associate with us. Mycroft was a busy, influential man with a career in government service in London, and my brother Sherlock was a famous detective with a book written about him,
A Study in Scarlet,
by his friend and fellow lodger, Dr. John Watson. Mum had bought a copy—

—and we had both read it. Ever since, I had been dreaming of London, the great seaport, the seat of monarchy, the hub of high society, yet, according to Dr. Watson, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” London, where men in white ties and women decked with diamonds attended the opera while, in the streets, heartless cabbies drove horses to exhaustion, according to another favourite book of mine,
Black Beauty.
London, where scholars read in the British Museum and crowds thronged theatres to be Mesmerised. London, where famous people held séances to communicate with the spirits of the dead, while other famous people tried to scientifically explain how a Spiritualist had levitated himself out of a window and into a waiting carriage.

London, where penniless boys wore rags and ran wild in the streets, never going to school. London, where villains killed ladies of the night—I had no clear idea what these were—and took their babies in order to sell them into slavery. In London there were royalty and cutthroats. In London there were master musicians, master artists, and master criminals who kidnapped children and forced them to labour in dens of iniquity. I had no clear idea what those were, either. But I knew that my brother Sherlock, sometimes employed by royalty, ventured into the dens of iniquity to match wits against thugs, thieves, and the princes of crime. My brother Sherlock was a hero.

I remembered Dr. Watson’s listing of my brother’s accomplishments: scholar, chemist, superb violinist, expert marksman, swordsman, singlestick fighter, pugilist, and brilliant deductive thinker.

Then I formed a mental list of my own accomplishments: able to read, write, and do sums; find birds’ nests; dig worms and catch fish; and, oh yes, ride a bicycle.

The comparison being so dismal, I stopped thinking to devote my attention to the road, as I had reached the edge of Chaucerlea.

The crowd in the cobbled streets daunted me somewhat. I had to wind my way among persons and vehicles unknown in the dirt lanes of Kineford: men selling fruit from barrows, women with baskets peddling sweets, nannies pushing prams, too many pedestrians trying not to be run over by too many carts, coaches, and gigs, beer-wagons and coal-wagons and lumber-wagons, a carriage, even an omnibus pulled by no less than four horses. Amid all this, how was I to find the railway station?

Wait. I saw something. Rising over the house-tops like an ostrich feather upon a lady’s hat stood a white plume in the grey sky. The smoke of a steam locomotive.

Pedalling towards it, I soon heard a roaring, shrieking, clanging noise—the engine coming in. I arrived at the platform just as it did.

Only a few passengers got off, and among them I had no difficulty recognising two tall male Londoners who had to be my brothers. They wore gentlemen’s country attire: dark tweed suits with braid edging, soft ties, bowler hats. And kid gloves. Only gentry wore gloves at the height of summer. One of my brothers had grown a bit stout, showing an expanse of silk waistcoat. That would be Mycroft, I supposed, the older by seven years. The other—Sherlock—stood straight as a rake and lean as a greyhound in his charcoal suit and black boots.

Swinging their walking sticks, they turned their heads from side to side, looking for something, but their scrutiny passed right over me.

Meanwhile, everyone on the platform stole glances at them.

And to my annoyance, I found myself trembling as I hopped off my bicycle. A strip of lace from my pantalets, confounded flimsy things, caught on the chain, tore loose, and dangled over my left boot.

Trying to tuck it up, I dropped my shawl.

This would not do. Taking a deep breath, leaving my shawl on my bicycle and my bicycle leaning against the station wall, I straightened and approached the two Londoners, not quite succeeding in holding my head high.

“Mr. Holmes,” I asked, “and, um, Mr. Holmes?”

Two pairs of sharp grey eyes fixed upon me. Two pairs of aristocratic brows lifted.

I said, “You, um, you asked me to meet you here.”
“Enola?”
they both exclaimed at once, and then in rapid alternation:

“What are you doing here? Why did you not send the carriage?”

“We should have known her; she looks just like you, Sherlock.” The taller, leaner one was indeed Sherlock, then. I liked his bony face, his hawk eyes, his nose like a beak, but I sensed that for me to look like him was no compliment.

“I thought she was a street urchin.”

“On a bicycle?”

“Why the bicycle? Where’s the carriage, Enola?”

I blinked: Carriage? There were a landau and a phaeton gathering dust in the carriage house, but there had been no horses for many years, not since my mother’s old hunter had gone on to greener pastures.

“I could have hired horses, I suppose,” I said slowly, “but I would not know how to harness or drive them.”

The stout one, Mycroft, exclaimed, “Why are we paying a stable boy, then, and a groom?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are you telling me there are no horses?”

“Later, Mycroft. You!” With commanding ease, Sherlock summoned a loitering lad. “Go hire us a brougham.” He tossed a coin to the boy, who touched his cap and ran off.

“We had better wait inside,” Mycroft said. “Out here in the wind, Enola’s hair more and more resembles a jackdaw’s nest. Where’s your hat, Enola?”

By then, somehow, the moment had passed for me to say, “How do you do” or for them to say, “So nice to see you again, my dear” and shake hands, or something of that sort, even though I was the shame of the family. By then, also, I was beginning to realise that PLEASE MEET AT STATION had been a request for transportation, not for me to present myself in person.

Well, if they did not desire the pleasure of my conversation, it was a good thing, as I stood mute and stupid.

“Or your gloves,” Sherlock chided, taking me by the arm and steering me towards the station, “or decent, decorous clothing of any sort? You’re a young lady now, Enola.”

That statement alarmed me into speech. “I’ve only just turned fourteen.”

In puzzled, almost plaintive tones Mycroft murmured, “But I’ve been paying for the seamstress . . .”

Speaking to me, Sherlock decreed in that offhand imperial way of his, “You should have been in long skirts since you were twelve. What ever was your mother thinking of? I suppose she’s gone over entirely to the Suffragists?”

“I don’t know where she’s gone,” I said, and to my own surprise—for I had not wept until that moment—I burst into tears.

 

Further mention of Mum, then, was put off until we sat in the hired brougham, with my bicycle strapped on behind, swaying along towards Kineford. “We are a pair of thoughtless brutes,” Sherlock had observed to Mycroft at one point, while providing me with a large, very starchy handkerchief hardly comforting to the nose. I am sure they thought I was weeping for my mum—as I was. But truthfully, I wept also for myself.

Enola.

Alone.

Shoulder to shoulder on the seat opposite me, my brothers sat together, facing me yet looking at anything else. Plainly they found me an embarrassment.

I quieted my sniffling within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, but I could not think of anything to say. A brougham, being little more than a wheeled box with small windows, does not encourage conversation, even if I were inclined to point out the beauties of nature, which I most definitely was not.

“So, Enola,” asked Mycroft gruffly after a while, “are you feeling well enough to tell us what has happened?”

I did so, but there was little to add to what they already knew. Mum had left home early on Tuesday morning and had not returned since. No, she had left me no message or explanation of any sort. No, there was no reason to think she might have taken ill; her health was excellent. No, there had been no word of her from anyone. No, in answer to Sherlock’s questions, there had been no bloodstains, no footprints, no signs of forced entry, and I did not know of any strangers who had been lurking about. No, there had been no ransom demand. If Mum had any enemies, I did not know of them. Yes, I had notified the Kineford police constabulary.

“So I can see,” Sherlock remarked, leaning forward to peer out the window of the brougham as we rolled into Ferndell Park, “for there they are, along with every loiterer in the village, prodding the bushes and peering about in the most ineffectual manner.”

“Do they expect to find her sheltering under a hawthorn?” Grunting as his frontal amplitude got in his way, Mycroft leaned forward to look in his turn. His bushy eyebrows shot up under the brim of his hat. “What,” he cried, “has been done to the grounds?”

Startled, I protested, “Nothing!”

“Absolutely, nothing has been done, apparently for years! All is sorely overgrown—”

“Interesting,” Sherlock murmured.

“Barbaric!” Mycroft retorted. “Grass a foot tall, saplings springing up, gorse, bramble bushes—”

“Those are wild roses.” I liked them.

“Growing on what should be the front lawn? How, pray tell, does the gardener earn his pay?”