The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (17 page)

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Authors: Nancy Springer

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Luckily, no one around us paid any attention, for the crowd roared agreement with Alexander Finch as he harangued, “Let them set their sabre-waving cavalry upon us, let them massacre us as they did at Peterloo, yet we will persevere !”
Lady Cecily sounded as if she quite wanted a sabre to wield upon me. “Who
are
you?”
And on the spur of that moment – oh, dear, how the cavalry metaphor does take hold – I mean, at that time of crisis, not knowing how else to calm her and answer her, I did something the Sister should never have done.
Had never done before.
I lifted my veil.
I let her see my face.
My long, plain, “Ciceronian” face.
She stared. She took a breath and let it go in a puff, as if blowing out a candle-flame. “Why,” she said softly, “you’re just a girl.”
She continued to study me as if both puzzled and intrigued.
“You draw marvellously well,” she added.
I thought of the superb charcoal artworks she had never let anyone see, and something must have shown in my face, something that made her smile.
“You’re no nun,” she said in a light tone as if teasing a girl-friend. “Whatever are you doing in that absurd habit?”
In my most aristocratic accent, so that she would know we were alike in class as well as in other ways, I responded, “Lady Cecily, one might also ask – ”
I meant to twit her about being a baronet’s daughter dressed in rags. But as I spoke her name, she froze, and let out a squeak, almost a scream, as if she had not known I knew her. As if she had not heard me call her by name before. As if she had been deaf then, but could hear me now.
Her reaction, fortunately, went unnoticed amidst the cheering of the crowd.
“Lady Cecily,” I tried again, “there is no need for alarm. I wish only to befriend you. To take you somewhere warm and safe, give you supper, and get you out of those rags.”
She looked down at herself, then up at me again with a wild, frightened stare, then all around her, bewildered and half panicked, as if she scarcely knew where she was.
“The company here is most unpleasant,” I gently remarked. “Shall we go?” Taking her left hand – bare and blue, her poor hands, chapped with cold – I drew her a few steps away from Alexander Finch and his mob of followers.
“The working man has a right to unionise for a fair hourly pay,” that street-corner orator bellowed, “and a fair working day!”
Lady Cecily stopped where she was. “No,” she faltered. “No, I – I can’t.”
“Why not?” My tone remained soft and even, for above all I must not excite her again, must not risk drawing Finch’s attention to her. And to me.
“He – my loyalty – the cause – the name of Cameron Shaw shall be written in the history of England; he will be a great man someday.”
“Who?”
“Cameron Shaw!” With a glance of fervid devotion she indicated the black-haired, black-bearded rabble-rouser on his soap-box. “Do you mean to say you have never
heard
of him?”
Soothingly and also truthfully I answered, “I am most anxious to hear all about him. How did you meet him?”
“I – it was – most peculiar . . .” With her brow creased, she stood again bewildered, her eyes watering while she shivered in the cold like a lost child.
“Come,” I told her, and again taking her by the hand, I led her away.
 
At the first corner I veered onto a different street, out of Alexander Finch’s sight should he chance to turn his head. Then, breathing out, I slowed my pace so that Lady Cecily could get along more comfortably – stumbling on her half-frozen, rag-wrapped feet – but also so that I could attempt to decipher where we were and where we were going. Nothing looked familiar about any of the empty streets I scanned. I neither saw nor heard anyone else nearby; this neighbourhood seemed mostly deserted on a winter night, although anybody from a pickpocket to Jack the Ripper himself could have lurked in the foggy, smoky shadows between the street-lamps.
Lady Cecily’s teeth began to click like my rosary, such was the chill of the night and her fright. Stopping for a moment, finding in my pockets some of the strength-replenishing candies I always carried with me, I gave them to her. As she fumbled to unwrap one and place it in her mouth, I took off my fur-lined gloves and put them onto her frigid hands. I opened my mantle and invited her to share its warmth, wrapping it around both of us, my left arm around her shoulder as if she were a little sister.
And my right hand fingering the hilt of my dagger as we moved on again.
“So tell me,” I asked her once more, gently, “How did you meet this, um, Cameron Shaw?”
“I – I can barely speak of it. You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I promise you I will think nothing of the sort. How did it happen?”
“In a dream,” she replied. “He came to me in my – in my sleep, in my mind, like a black-haired angel summoning me to be a handmaiden of his – of his crusade.”
“Ah,” I murmured in what I hoped was a comforting, encouraging way, although I had to exercise my strongest self-control to keep from shuddering at the image forming in my mind: the disguised villain standing over her bed as she slept, staring at her with his eerie eyes, passing his hands over her slumbering innocence to penetrate her with the vital principle of his animal magnetism, taking her into his power before she could completely awaken.
“I was chosen,” said the trembling lady. “Called. Like Joan of Arc.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“You
do
understand, don’t you?” Good; I had managed to keep my furious feelings out of my voice. All in a relieved rush Lady Cecily spoke on. “Then I awoke in the middle of the night, and there was no one in my room but the call was so strong that I got out of bed. I knew exactly what I must do.
There were humble clothes laid out waiting for me, a skirt and blouse and shawl such as a washerwoman might wear. I put them on over my nightgown. The window was open. I climbed out. I climbed – down – down . . .”
The fearsome memory halted both her words and her feet. We stood at a benighted crossroads, and I recognised nothing in any direction, not even to tell east from west or north from south.
Blindly choosing a side street, I set off again, herding her along with me, before I spoke. “Down the ladder.”
“How do you know?” But without waiting for an answer she went on. “Yes, the ladder, and it was so high, and it trembled, I was terrified, but I had to do it. He – Cameron Shaw, you know – he was waiting for me at the bottom.”
“Had you ever met him before?”
“No, never! Except in the dream. That is what makes it all so very – uncanny, you see.”
So she did not recognise Alexander Finch under that false hair and fake beard.
Alexander Finch. Shopkeeper’s son. I remembered how I had first seen him as nothing more than a nondescript youth. Dressed like a “gent,” but aside from dandified clothing, a nothing. How woodenly he had stood, seemingly without spirit, as the elder Finch had ranted at him.
But now I began to understand: All that rage had not been wasted upon him. He had taken it in. A lifetime’s worth.
And it had made him a person whom I should be very loath to trust.
Lady Cecily stiffened under my arm, my mantle. As suddenly as if she were a puppet and someone had pulled her strings, she halted, saying in a strange tone, “I ought to be getting back.”
“Back where? Home?”
“I have no home.”
“Certainly you have a home. A baronet’s mansion.”
“With Daddy always and forever droning about the Burden of Empire and the Progress of Man, meanwhile intending to marry me off to anything titled and wearing trousers? No. I cannot go back there.”
I tightened my arm around Lady Cecily’s shoulders, touched by her honesty. And by her conversation. One must realise that I had gone for the better part of a year lacking any intimate conversation with another human being, and this girl – so much like me, after all – just talking with her, I experienced great warmth of feeling for her.
“There are other possibilities,” I said.
“Such as the life you have chosen, perhaps? How did you do it? Who are you? You have not yet told me your name.”
And oh, I wanted to. I yearned to tell her all about myself.
My most lonely, peculiar, eccentric self.
Maybe – maybe it would not after all be necessary to return her to her life of smudged pastels and the polite, right-handed taking of tea.
Maybe she could instead live – like a sister – with me?
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH
 
I FELT MY LIPS TREMBLING AS THEY PARTED. I felt my breathing hasten. I heard myself say, “Enola. My name is Enola Holmes.”
And I would have told her more. I would have told her all about myself, if it were not that, just at that moment, a voice intervened from the darkness.
“Cecily! Come here!”
The voice of her master.
Not far away.
Lost and circling, I had failed to get her well away from him. And I am sure you will think that I overspeak, gentle reader, when I say that I felt the presence of his rage like a force of nature in the night, but I tell you merest truth: His fury vibrated in the sooty shadows, palpable.
I felt Lady Cecily startle like a frightened fawn, and cringe, and begin to shake. “I must get
back,
” she whispered in terror.
“No!” Holding on to her as I wildly scanned the neighbourhood for some escape or refuge, at last I recognised a nearby street. I had visited there. I knew where I was, and which way to flee –
But she broke away from me.
“Lady Cecily, no!”
She never so much as turned her head in farewell; indeed, she seemed not to hear me. Nor did she run from me. Like a somnambulist she walked away from me – or rather, towards him. I could see him now, a blacker form in the darkness at the bottom of the street. While I stood rigid in the shadows, she shuffled towards him like a blind person, in grimed rags that might once have been white.
“Cecily!” He saw her in the street-lamp light. Although I heard no gladness in that recognition.
I heard fearsome peril.
“How dare you leave your work. Come
here.
”
It appeared that he had not heard me or seen me. Yet. I pulled my veil down to conceal my face.
He stalked towards Lady Cecily; she walked to meet him. In the middle of the shadowed, deserted street she faced him, head bowed as if she were a naughty child. I heard him speak to her in tones that mocked, yet menaced.
I did not catch the words, for my attention was fully occupied with any sounds I myself might make, slipping towards them.
I saw him lower his bearded head to breathe into Lady Cecily’s face. I saw her cringe.
Taking a twisted way through the deepest shadows, I crept nearer to them, quite near, without being seen.
“Listen to me. You listen, worthless chit,” he was saying as I tiptoed towards him from one side, and his anger would have been fearsome enough in and of itself, but there was more; it was the Mesmerist commanding her, the magnetiser holding her helpless with his cobra stare. “You shall obey me or you will be punished. For your disobedience tonight you forfeit your supper. What have I just told you? Speak.”
Like an echo of him or a ghost of herself she started to whisper, “For my disobedience – ”
At that moment I charged. With a yell worthy of a street urchin I darted both hands into the Mesmerist’s face and gripped hair. Savage, screeching, tugging as hard as I could, with one hand I snatched off his wig. With the other I pulled off his false beard.
Lady Cecily shrieked; had she been corseted, I believe she might have fainted. But with a great gasp she rallied, crying, “Alexander
Finch
?”
There he stood, in his own head naked even of his tinted eyeglasses, seeming unable to think what to do or say.
“Alexander
Finch
!” Lady Cecily shouted, outraged. It was as I had thought; she would bear ill usage from one whom she admired, but she could not abide being deceived. “Impostor! Fraud!” All had reversed in that moment as I stood aside, flinging the disgusting hairy objects in my hands down on the street. “How dare you play me for a fool!”
“Silence,” he told her with an attempt at his former authority.
“Silence? You vile beetle, no, you
maggot
!” He did indeed rather resemble a maggot with his round pale head, his pallid eyes. “You worm, you may well wish for silence, but I will not rest until every police court in England has heard of your infamy.” With a glare fit to cut him open like a razor, she turned to walk away.
But this man knew no shame. He grabbed for her. “Don’t turn your back on me. I am talking to you.”

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