The Case of the Missing Marquess (7 page)

Often enough I had seen Mum frame her pictures. The frame itself came first, facedown on a table. Then the glass, very clean. Then a kind of inner frame cut out of thick tinted paper. To this the top edge of the watercolour was lightly gummed. Then a backing of thin wood painted white. Tiny nails driven edgewise into the frame held everything in place, and finally Mother would paste brown paper over the back of the frame to hide the nails and keep out dust.

I turned the chrysanthemum picture over and looked at its brown paper.

Taking a deep breath, I pried at one corner with my fingernails, trying to peel the paper off in one piece. Instead, a long strip of brown tore away. But never mind. I saw something nestled at the bottom of the picture, between the brown paper and the wooden backing. Something folded. Something white.

A note from Mum!

A letter explaining her desertion, expressing her regrets and her affection, perhaps even inviting me to join her . . .

With my heart pounding
please, please,
and with my fingers shaking, I fished out the rectangle of crisp paper.

Trembling, I opened it.

Yes, it was a note all right, from Mum. But not the sort of note for which I hoped.

It was a Bank of England note for a hundred pounds.

More money than most common folk saw in a year.

But money was not what I wanted from my mother.

 

I must admit that I cried myself to sleep. But sleep I did, finally, straight through the next morning, and no one disturbed me except that Mrs. Lane came in once and woke me to ask whether I felt ill. I told her no, I was just tired, and she left. I heard her say to someone, probably her husband, in the hallway, “She’s in a state of collapse, and no wonder, poor lamb.”

When I awoke in the early afternoon, although very much wanting both breakfast and luncheon, I did not at once leap out of bed. Instead, I lay still for a moment and made myself consider my situation with a clear head.

Very well. While not what I had hoped for, money was something.

Mum had secretly given me a considerable sum.

Which she had gotten, no doubt, from Mycroft.

By deceitful means.

Was it proper for me to keep it?

It was not any money that Mycroft had ever
earned.
Rather, as far as I could understand, it was money that settled on him for being Father’s firstborn son.

It was the inheritance of a squire. Centuries worth of rent money, with more coming in every year. And why? For the sake of Ferndell Hall and its estate.

In a very real sense, the money, like the chandeliers,
did
go with the house.

Which was, or should be, Mother’s house.

Legally, the money was neither Mother’s nor mine. But morally—many, many times Mum had explained to me how unfair the laws were. If a woman laboured to write and publish a book, for instance, any money it earned was supposed to go to her husband. How absurd was that?

How absurd, then, would it be for me to give that hundred-pound note back to my brother Mycroft just because he had been born first?

Legalities could go jump in a lake, I decided to my satisfaction; morally, that money was mine. Mum had sacrificed and struggled to wrest it from the estate. And she had slipped it to me.

How much more might there be? She had left me many ciphers.

What did Mother mean for me to do with it?

Already, dimly, by her example I knew the answer to that question.

FIVE WEEKS LATER, I WAS READY.

That is to say, in the eyes of Ferndell Hall I was ready to go to boarding school.

And in my own mind, I was ready for a venture of quite a different sort.

Regarding boarding school: The seamstress had arrived from London, settled herself in a long-vacant room once occupied by a lady’s maid, sighed over the old treadle sewing machine, and then taken my measurements. Waist: 20 inches. Tsk. Too large. Chest: 21 inches. Tsk. Far too small. Hips: 22 inches. Tsk. Dreadfully inadequate. But all could be set right. In a fashionable publication my mother would never have allowed in Ferndell Hall, the seamstress located the following advertisement:

This device was duly ordered, and the seamstress began to produce prim, dim-coloured dresses with high whalebone-ribbed collars to strangle me, waistbands designed to choke my breathing, and skirts which, spread over half a dozen flounced silk petticoats, trailed on the floor so that I could barely walk. She proposed to sew two dresses with a 19½-inch waist, then two with a 19-inch waist, and so on to 18½ inches and smaller, in expectation that as I grew, I would diminish.

Meanwhile, increasingly terse telegrams from Sherlock Holmes reported no word of Mother. He had tracked down her old friends, her fellow artists, her Suffragist associates; he had even travelled to France to check with her distant relations, the Vernets, but all to no avail. I had begun to feel afraid for Mum again; why had the great detective not been able to locate her? Might some accident have befallen her after all? Or, even worse, some foul crime?

My thinking changed, however, upon the day the seamstress completed the first dress.

At which time I was expected to put on the Ideal Corset (which had arrived, as promised, in discreet brown paper wrappings) with frontal and lateral regulators plus, of course, a Patent Dress Improver so that never again would my back be able to rest against that of any chair I sat in. Also, I was expected to wear my hair in a chignon secured with hairpins that dug into my scalp, with a fringe of false curls across my forehead similarly skewered. As my reward, I got to put on my new dress and, in new shoes just as torturous, toddle around the hall to practise being a young lady.

That day I realised, with irrational yet complete certainty, where my mother had gone: someplace where there were no hairpins, no corsets (Ideal or Otherwise), and no Patent Dress Improvers.

Meanwhile, brother Mycroft sent a telegram reporting that all was arranged—I was to present myself at such-and-such a “finishing school” (house of horrors) on such-and-such a date—and instructing Lane to see to my getting there.

 

More importantly, regarding my own venture: I spent my days as much as I could in a dressing gown, keeping to my room and napping, pleading nervous prostration. Mrs. Lane, who frequently offered me calves’ foot jelly and the like (small wonder invalids waste away!), grew so worried that she communicated with Mycroft, who assured her that boarding school, where I would breakfast upon oatmeal and wear wool next to my skin, would restore my health. Nevertheless, she summoned first the local apothecary, and later a Harley Street physician all the way from London, neither of whom found anything wrong with me.

Correctly enough. I was simply avoiding corsets, hairpins, tight shoes, and the like, while making up for lost sleep. No one knew that every night, after I had heard the rest of the household go to bed, I got up and worked on my cipher book through the dark hours. I enjoyed the ciphers after all, for I loved finding things, and Mum’s ciphers gave me a new way to do this, first discovering the hidden meaning, then the treasure. Each cipher I unraveled led me into Mum’s rooms in search of more riches she had secreted for me. Some of the ciphers I could not solve, which frustrated me so that I considered ripping the backing off of all Mum’s watercolours—but that hardly seemed sporting. Also, there were many, many, too many paintings, and moreover, not all of the ciphers directed me to them.

There was, for instance, a page in my cipher book decorated with ivy trailing along a picket fence. At once, without even looking at the cipher, I stole into Mother’s rooms in search of a watercolour study of ivy. I found two and ripped the backing off both without success before I rather sullenly returned to my room and faced the cipher:

What in the world? I looked up
ivy
in
The Meanings of Flowers.
The clinging vine stood for “fidelity.” Although touching, this knowledge did not help me. I scowled at the cipher for quite a while before I was able to pick out my name in the first three letters of the top line combined with the first two letters of the bottom line. Then I noticed how Mum had painted the ivy zigzagging in a rather unnatural manner up and down the picket fence. Also, the ivy grew from right to left. Rolling my eyes, I followed the same pattern and rewrote the cipher:

 

Or, reading the words from right to left:

 

Off I went, tiptoeing through the night, to remove the knobs from Mum’s bed and discover that an astonishing amount of paper money can be stuffed inside brass bedposts.

I, in my turn, had to find clever hiding places within my bedroom so that Mrs. Lane’s occasional invasions with dust-cloth would discover nothing. My curtain rods, made of brass like Mother’s bed, with knobs on the ends, served the purpose.

And all of this had to be done before the Lanes rose at dawn.

Altogether, my nights were far more active and satisfactory than my days.

I did not ever find what I most desired—any note of farewell, affectionate regard, or explanation from Mum. But truly, at this point, not much explanation was needed. I knew that she had practised her deceptions for my sake, at least in part. And I knew that the money she had so cleverly slipped to me was meant to give me freedom.

Thanks to Mum, therefore, it was in a surprisingly hopeful, if nervous, state of mind that, one sunny morning in late August, I mounted to the seat of the conveyance that was to take me away from the only home I had ever known.

 

Lane had arranged with a local farmer for the loan of a horse and a kind of hybrid contraption, or “trap,” a luggage-wagon with an upholstered seat for me and the driver. I was to travel to the railway station in comfort, if not in style.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” Mrs. Lane remarked, standing in the drive to see me off.

It hadn’t rained in weeks. Not since the day I had gone searching for my mother.

“Unlikely,” said Lane, giving me his hand so that I could step up to my seat like a lady, one kid-gloved hand in his while the other lifted my white ruffled parasol. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

Smiling down on Lane and Mrs. Lane, I settled first my bustle, then myself, next to Dick, my driver. Just as my bustle occupied the back of the seat, Mrs. Lane had arranged my hair to occupy the back of my head, as was the fashion, so that my hat, rather like a beribboned straw dinner plate, tilted forward over my eyes. I wore a taupe suit I had chosen carefully for its nondescript, indeed ugly colour, its 19½-inch waistband, full skirt, and concealing jacket. Beneath the jacket I had left the skirt’s waistband unbuttoned so that I could corset myself as lightly as possible, almost comfortably. I could breathe.

As would be needful very soon.

“You look every inch a lady, Miss Enola,” said Lane, standing back. “You’ll be a credit to Ferndell Hall, I’m sure.”

Little did he know.

“We’ll miss you,” quavered Mrs. Lane, and for a moment my heart reproached me, for I saw tears on her soft old face.

“Thank you,” I said rather stiffly, starching myself against my own emotion. “Dick, drive on.”

All the way to the gate I stared at the horse’s ears. My brother Mycroft had hired men to “clean up” the lawn of the estate, and I did not want to see it with my wild rosebushes cut down.

“Good-bye, Miss Enola, and good luck,” said the lodge-keeper as he opened the gates for us.

“Thank you, Cooper.”

As the horse trotted through Kineford, I sighed and allowed my glance to roam, taking a farewell look at the butcher’s shop, the greengrocer’s shop, black-beamed, whitewashed thatched cottages, public house, post and telegraph office, constabulary, more Tudor cottages with tiny windows scowling under their heavy straw forelocks, the inn, the smithy, the vicarage, the granite chapel with its mossy slate roof, headstones tilting this way and that in the graveyard—

I let us trot almost past before I said suddenly, as if I had just that moment thought of it, “Dick, stop. I wish to say good-bye to my father.”

He pulled the horse to a halt. “What was that, Miss Enola?”

When dealing with Dick, full and simple explanations were necessary. “I wish to visit my father’s grave,” I told him one patient word at a time, “and say a prayer for him in the chapel.”

Poor Father, he would not have desired such prayers. As a logician and an unbeliever, Mum had once told me, he had not desired a funeral; his request had been for cremation, but after his demise, his wishes had been overruled for fear that Kineford might never recover from the scandal.

In his slow, worried way Dick said, “I’m to drive you to the railway station, miss.”

“There is plenty of time. You can have a pint at the public house while you’re waiting for me.”

“Oh! Aye.” He turned the horse, backtracked, and drew up at the door of the chapel. We sat for a moment before he remembered his manners, but then he secured the reins, got down, and came around to my side to help me descend.