The Case of the Missing Marquess (8 page)

“Thank you,” I told him as I withdrew my gloved hand from his grubby fist. “Come back for me in ten minutes.”

Nonsense; I knew he’d be half an hour or more in the public house.

“Yes, miss.” He touched his cap.

He drove away, and amid a swirl of skirts I minced into the chapel.

As I had expected and hoped, I found it unoccupied. After scanning the empty pews, I grinned, tossed my parasol into the castoff-clothing-for-the-poor box, hoisted my skirts above my knees, and dashed for the back door.

And out into the sunlit graveyard.

Down a twisting path worn between the tottering headstones I ran, keeping the chapel between me and any witness who might be passing upon the village street. When I reached the hedge at the bottom of the chapel grounds, I leapt more than climbed the stile, turned right, ran a bit farther, and yes, indeed, yes! There waited my bicycle, hidden in the hedge, where I had left it yesterday. Or rather, yesternight. In the small hours, by the light of a nearly full moon.

On the bicycle were mounted two containers, a basket in front and a box in back, both packed full of sandwiches, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, water flask, bandaging in case of accident, tyre repair kit, knickerbockers, my comfortable old black boots, toothbrush, and such.

On my person, also, were mounted two containers, hidden beneath the taupe suit, one in front and one in back. The one in front was a quite unique bust enhancer that I had secretly hand-sewn for myself out of materials purloined from Mum’s wardrobe. For the container in back, I had devised a dress improver of like sort.

Why, leaving home, had my mother worn a bustle, yet left its horsehair stuffing behind?

The answer seemed obvious to me: in order to conceal in the dress improver’s place the baggage necessary for running away.

And I, being blessed with a flat chest, had carried her example a step further. My various and proper regulators, enhancers, and improvers remained in Ferndell Hall—stuffed up my chimney, actually. In their places upon my person I wore cloth containers—baggage, in effect—filled with unmentionables wrapped around bundles of bank notes. In addition, I had folded a carefully chosen spare dress and secured it to my back between my petticoats, where it perfectly filled my train. In the pockets of my suit I had a handkerchief, a cake of soap, comb and hairbrush, my now-precious booklet of ciphers, smelling salts, energy-sustaining candies . . . indeed, I bore a steamer trunk’s worth of essentials.

Hopping onto my bicycle, letting my petticoats and skirts modestly drape my ankles, I pedalled off across country.

A good cyclist does not need a road. I would follow the farm lanes and pasturelands for the time being. The ground was baked hard as iron; I would leave no tracks.

By tomorrow, I imagined, my brother the great detective Sherlock Holmes would be attempting to locate a missing sister as well as a missing mother.

He would expect me to flee from him. Therefore, I would not. I would flee towards him.

He lived in London. So did Mycroft. On that account, and also because it was the world’s largest and most dangerous city, it was the last place on earth either of them would expect me to venture.

Therefore, I would go there.

They would expect me to disguise myself as a boy. Very likely they had heard about my knickerbockers, and anyway, in Shakespeare and other works of fiction, runaway girls always disguised themselves as boys.

Therefore, I would not.

I would disguise myself as the last thing my brothers would think I could, having met me as a plain beanpole of a child in a frock that barely covered my knees.

I would disguise myself as a grown woman. And then I would set about finding my mother.

I COULD HAVE PEDALLED STRAIGHT INTO London by the main road, but that would never do. Too many people would see me. No, my plan for getting to London was simply—and, I hoped, illogically—to have no plan. If I myself did not know what exactly I was doing, then how could my brothers guess?

They would hypothesise, of course; they would say, “Mother took her to Bath, so perhaps she has gone there,” or “In her room there is a book on Wales, with pencil markings on the map; perhaps she has gone there.” (I hoped they would find the book, which I had placed in the dollhouse as a false clue.
The Meanings of Flowers,
however, too large to carry with me, I had hidden among hundreds of other stout volumes in the library downstairs.) Mycroft and Sherlock would apply inductive reasoning; therefore, I reasoned, I must trust to chance. I would let the land show me the way eastward, choosing the stoniest ground or whatever would show my tyre marks the least.

It did not matter where I found myself at the end of that day, or the next. I would dine upon bread and cheese, I would sleep in the open like a Gypsy, and eventually, wandering along, I would encounter a railway line. By following it one way or the other, I would find a station, and so long as it was
not
Chaucerlea (where my brothers would surely inquire for me), any station in England would do, for all railways ran to London.

So much for a seventeen-inch waist, oatmeal for breakfast and wool next to the skin, matrimonial prospects, the accomplishments of a young lady, et cetera.

Such were my happy thoughts as I pedalled across a cow pasture, along a grassy lane, then onto open moorland, and away from the countryside I knew.

In the blue sky overhead, larks sang like my heart.

As I kept to byways and avoided villages, not too many people saw me. An occasional farmer looked up from his turnip field, unsurprised by the sight of a gentlewoman upon her bicycle; such cycling enthusiasts had grown increasingly common. Indeed, I met with just another such beige-clad figure upon a gravel wagon track, and we nodded in passing. She looked all of a glow from the heat and the exercise. Horses sweat, you know, and men perspire, whereas ladies glow. I am sure I looked all of a glow also. Indeed, I could feel all-of-a-glow trickling down my sides beneath my corset, the steel ribs of which jabbed me under the arms most annoyingly.

By the time the sun stood overhead, I felt quite ready to stop for luncheon, all the more so as I had not slept the night before. Seated under a spreading elm tree, upon a cushion of moss, I badly wanted to lie down and pillow my head there for a while. But after I had eaten, I forced myself to get back upon the bicycle and pedal onward, for I knew I must get as far away as possible before the pursuit began.

That afternoon, aptly enough considering my thoughts of Gypsies, I met with a caravan of the nomad folk in their brightly painted round-topped house-wagons. Most gentry despised Gypsies, but Mother had allowed them to camp sometimes upon the Ferndell estate, and as a child I had been fascinated by them. Even now I halted my bicycle to watch them pass, gazing eagerly upon their many-coloured horses prancing and tossing their heads despite the heat, with the drivers needing to hold them in more than urge them forward. And I waved to the travellers in the wagons without fear, for of all people on earth Gypsies were the least likely to speak of me to the police. The men darkly ignored me, but some of the bare-headed, bare-necked, bare-armed women waved back, and all of the ragged children waved and squealed and called out, begging. Shameless, dirty, thieving lot, Mrs. Lane would have called them, and I suppose she was right. Yet if I’d been carrying pennies in my pocket, I would have thrown some to them.

Also that afternoon on a country road I met a travelling peddler, his wagon hung round with tin-ware and umbrellas and baskets and sea sponges and birdcages and washboards and all manner of trifles. I stopped him and had him show me everything in his stock, from copper kettles to tortoise-shell combs for the back of the hair, in order to disguise my purpose before I bought the one thing I really needed: a carpet-bag.

Laying it across my handle-bars, I pedalled on.

I saw other wayfarers, on foot and in conveyances ranging from coach-and-four to donkey-carts, but my memories become faulty as my weariness blurred the day. By the time night fell, every part of my person ached, and I felt fagged as never before in my life. Walking now upon turf cropped to the roots by sheep, pushing my bicycle and leaning upon it, I struggled up a low, limestone-studded hill on top of which stood a grove of beeches. Once I reached the concealment of the trees, I let my bicycle fall where it would, while I myself collapsed in dirt and last year’s leaves, my spirits as low with evening as they had been high with morning, for I wondered: Would I find strength to get on that bicycle again tomorrow?

I could sleep where I was. Unless . . . for the first time I thought: What if it rained?

My plan not to plan seemed more foolish with every panting breath I drew.

After I had despaired for a while, I managed to stagger up and, in the concealing darkness, take off my hat, hairpins, and the baggage I carried on my person, along with my tormenting corset. Too weary even to think of food, I folded to the ground again and, wearing petticoats and my much-soiled taupe suit as my only covering, fell asleep within moments.

So nocturnal had my habits become, however, that sometime late at night I awoke.

No longer the least bit sleepy, I felt famished.

But there was no moon tonight. The sky had clouded over. It might indeed rain. And without moonlight or even starlight, I could not see to find myself the food I had packed in the box on the bicycle. Nor could I see to find, for the sake of light, the tin of matches I had stupidly left in the same place. I would consider myself fortunate if I stumbled upon the bicycle at all.

“Curses,” I muttered naughtily, feeling beech twigs scratch my face and catch at my clothing as I lurched to my feet.

But the next moment I forgot about food. I stood staring, for at no great distance I saw lights.

Gas lamps. Glimpsed between the trunks of the hilltop trees, they twinkled in the distance like earthbound stars.

A village. I had come up one side of the hill not knowing, and too weary to realise, that a village lay on the other side.

A town, rather, being large enough to have gas laid on.

A town with, perhaps, a railway station?

And even as I thought it, there came floating to my ears, across the dark of night, a train whistle’s long tenor call.

 

Very, very early the next morning, I stole out of the beech woods—so early, I hoped, that few if any folk would catch sight of me. Not that I was afraid anyone would recognise me. It was just that it would look a bit odd for a well-dressed widow, on foot, with a carpet-bag, to emerge from such primitive lodging.

Yes, a widow. Head to toe, I wore the black garb of mourning I had taken from my mother’s closet. The costume, by indicating that I had been married, added a decade or more to my age, yet allowed me to wear my comfortable old black boots, which would not be noticed, and my hair in a simple bun, which I could manage. Best of all, it made me nearly unrecognisable. Hanging from the brim of my black felt hat, a dense black veil enveloped my entire head, so that I looked rather as if I intended to raid a beehive. Black kid-leather gloves covered my hands— I had made sure of this detail, as I lacked a wedding ring—and dull black silk covered me from my chin to my black-booted toes.

Ten years ago, Mum had been thinner, so her dress fit me nicely with my corset barely tightened at all; indeed, no corset would have been necessary if it were not to support my improvised baggage in the necessary areas. What I’d packed on the bicycle I now carried in the carpet-bag or in my pockets. Disliking to dangle a reticule, my mother had provided all her dresses with ample pockets for handkerchief, lemon drops, shillings and pence, et cetera. Blessings be upon the stubbornly independent head of my mother, who was also the one who had taught me to ride a bicycle. I regretted having to abandon that faithful mechanical steed to the beech woods, but I most certainly did not regret abandoning my ugly taupe suit.

In the grey half-light of daybreak, I stole downhill along a hedge to a lane. Very stiff from yesterday’s exertions, I realised that my aches and pains were actually a blessing: they forced me to walk slowly. Thus, at a ladylike gait in keeping with my disguise, I made my way along the lane to a gravelled road, and so into the town.

Dawn had progressed to a dull sunrise, threatening rain. Shopkeepers were just opening their shutters, the ice-man was hitching up his sway-backed nag to make his rounds, a yawning maid threw a bucket of something unspeakable into the gutter, a ragged woman swept a street crossing. Newsboys heaved stacks of the morning edition towards the curb. A match-seller sitting at a corner—a beggar, really—cried, “Let there be light; a match for the gentleman?” Some of those who passed by were indeed gentlemen in top-hats, others workmen in flannels and caps, yet others nearly as ragged as himself, but he cried “gentleman” to them all. He made no attempt to sell a match to me, of course, for ladies did not smoke.

BELVIDERE TONSORIUM declared gold letters painted on the glass of a door beside a red-and-white spiral-striped pole. Ah, I had heard of a town called Belvidere, satisfactorily distant from Kineford. Looking about me, I saw SAVINGS BANK OF BELVIDERE carved upon the stone lintel of a stately building nearby. Very good; I had achieved my goal.
Well done,
I thought, picking my way between horse droppings,
for a mere girl of limited cranial capacity.

“Onions, potatoes, parsnips!” called a man pushing a barrow.

“Fresh carnation for the gent’s buttonhole!” cried a shawled woman offering flowers from a basket.

“Shocking kidnapping! Read all about it!” bellowed a newsboy.

Kidnapping?

“Viscount Tewksbury snatched from Basilwether Hall!”

I did indeed want to read all about it, but first I wanted to find the railway station.