The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (5 page)

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Authors: Nancy Springer

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Something about the stay-lacing.
What sort of man would attack a woman with a weapon derived from a cane – the sort of stick used to thrash schoolchildren – and a
corset
? Intimate feminine apparel by which upper-class females were compressed to fit into their ridiculous dresses, making them ornamental to society, prone to fainting spells, and susceptible to internal injuries and death? It was largely in order to escape strait-lacing that I had given brothers Mycroft and Sherlock the slip. I had fled so that no so-called boarding school could thrash
me
or try to cut me in half at the waist, and now someone had put that – that thing – around my
neck
?
For what purpose? To rob me of what?
And why with such a strangely disturbing weapon?
Was it indeed a
man
who had attacked me, or some madwoman?
These were questions for which I lacked answers.
By the third day I could talk a little, and I returned to Dr. Ragostin’s office, where I made myself comfortable – in body, if not in mind – reading the stack of newspapers that had accumulated during my absence.
I found my message to Mum in the newspapers, for I had sent copies to Fleet Street by post, but I found no message from Mum to me.
Of course it was too early to expect a reply. Still, I could not help looking. I wanted –
This would not do. Feeling sorry for myself like a child, wanting Mummy. What would Mother have told me if she were here? Utterly predictable: “You will do very well on your own, Enola.”
A statement I had always accepted as rather a compliment.
But on this particular day, with the pain in my throat exacerbated by a lump that had arisen therein, I suddenly, achingly realised that I wanted – I wanted something. Or someone.
I wanted no longer to be alone.
Enola, alone, with no one to walk by my side.
With no one to confide in.
With no one to comfort me.
Yet I knew quite well that any companionship simply could not be, not for another seven years – for until I became legally adult, every person who knew me posed a threat to me, of discovery. Joddy, a danger if he learned too much. Mrs. Tupper, likewise. The grocers and bakers who supplied the food I gave to the poor, the washerwoman who did my oddly assorted laundry, the whitesmith who had made my daggers for me, each a risk. I had thought of keeping a pet, but even a dog could ruin me just by recognising me at the wrong time. Old Reginald, the collie from Ferndell, if he were somehow transported to London and encountered me, would hurl himself at me with ecstatic canine cries, no matter how I might be disguised. And if Lane the butler were with him, and Mrs. Lane, if they found me, she would burst into happy tears, for she had been like a mother to me, more so than –
Stop. Enola Holmes, you stop snivelling this instant.
I needed to get up, get moving, accomplish something.
Very well. There was nothing I could do concerning Mum, or concerning Sherlock’s distress until I had heard from Mum. And – although I fervidly wished for justice, or, indeed, revenge! – at this point there was nothing I could do about the unknown garroter who had distressed
me
.
But there
was
, surely, something I could do concerning my life’s calling: being a perditorian. Something I could do about Sir Eustace Alistair’s missing daughter. I had promised myself that, for “his” first case, “Dr. Ragostin” would find her.
I needed to know the particulars.
 
After some thought, I rose and made my way back through various passageways to the kitchen, where the cook and the housekeeper were having their mid-morning cup of tea. Both looked startled to see me enter that room, and apprehensive, because normally I would have simply rung for service, so what was wrong?
“Mrs. Bailey,” I croaked to the cook, “I do not feel quite well. My throat is most dreadfully sore. Do you suppose – ”
“Of course,” cried Mrs. Bailey, relieved, answering my request before I could frame it. Illness, you see, explained my presence in the kitchen, which due to hearth, stove, and water-heater was by far the warmest place in the house. “Tea?” She jumped up to put the kettle on.
“The very thing. Thank you kindly.”
“Do sit down, Miss Meshle,” invited the other one, Mrs. Fitzsimmons, the housekeeper, offering me the chair closest to the fire.
At the table with the two of them, I sipped, briefly answering their inquiries about my health, after which they resumed their conversation. Mrs. Bailey had been to a music-hall the night before to see a Mesmerist, or magnetiser, “one of them pursy, swarthy, shaggy-browed Frenchmen with wolf eyes.” He had been assisted by “a wench in one of them French clinging gowns” who lay on an examining-couch while he had her stare at the usual shiny object – in this case, a candle-flame – and flicked his hands at her face as if sprinkling her with his “vital principle,” then made the customary magnetic passes over her entire person. “Scandalous close to ’er ’is ’ands come, but ’ee didn’t touch her. She lay wit ’er eyes open like a corpse, an’ ’ee told ’er to eat soap an’ she chewed it down like it was toffee.’Ee told ’er she were a pony an’ she whinnied. ’Ee told her she were a bridge, picked ’er up an’ put ’er down again across two chairs and there she lay stiff like stone. ’Ee fired a pistol near her ear . . .”
Sitting and listening, I concealed my impatience with difficulty, for it was all jugglery and rot, of course; Mesmerism had been discredited years ago, along with dead bodies electrically “galvanised” into the appearance of life, incorporeal table-turning, spiritualist slate-writing and all sorts of nonsense masquerading as science and progress.
“. . . invited us to come up and test the trance. One gent pinched ’er, and ’is wife passed smelling salts under ’er nose, and me, I run a ’atpin into her an’ she never so much as twitched. Then after we was done the Mesmerist made more of them magnetic passes with his hands, and up she jumps, all smiling, an’ we give ’em both a real big clap of our’ands as they went out. Then, the next thing, there was a Phrenologist – ”
Oh, no. More pseudo-scientific dust of the past.
I interrupted. “Is it true,” I asked, “that the Queen once shaved her head for a Phrenological reading?”
They could scarcely believe it (no wonder, as I had just made it up, thereby, I am sure, spawning a rumour) but anything was possible: Lady This and Lady That had held séances, Duke So-and-so somnambulated, several young Honourable Lords had experimented with laughing gas, et cetera. I had succeeded in changing the subject to the fascinating foibles of the upper classes – about which, like most domestics, these two knew everything. Scandal might be “hushed up” in the newspapers, but no event in any London household was secret so long as there were servants to whisper with other people’s maids and footmen. Accepting a second cup of tea, I waited for my opportunity. It came when a member of the peerage was mentioned.
Coughing for attention and sympathy, I asked, “Would he be acquainted with Sir Eustace Alistair?”
“ ’Im? I doubt it!” declared Mrs. Fitzsimmons.
“Sir Eustace is just a baronet, don’t ye know,” said the cook.
“And disgraced, to boot,” said the housekeeper with a hushed voice and zestful eyes.
I reacted with satisfactory shock and interest. “Disgraced? How so?”
“By ’is daughter, Lady Cecily! Shameful affair.”
“ ’Orrendous for ’er parents,” said the cook. “One’ears Lady Alistair is quite prostrated, she is.”
The housekeeper replied, the cook interjected, and during the next several minutes between the two of them the story took form, in my mind at least, like a structure emerging from a fog:
The Honourable Lady Cecily Alistair, Sir Eustace’s second oldest, just sixteen years of age and not yet presented at court, had gone missing Tuesday of last week, on which morning a ladder had been found at her bedroom window. Upon being questioned by police authorities, girl-friends of Lady Cecily admitted to her having been approached last summer, while in their company (“ ’ardly never no chaperones anymore, and them girls ’orseback riding, bicycle riding, shopping on their own, wot’s the world coming to?”) by a young “gent,” that is to say, a man of dandified attire but doubtful pedigree. Further inquiry and a search of Lady Cecily’s desk revealed that she and the young man had been corresponding, quite without a proper introduction or the knowledge of her parents. It had taken the police, who had only a first name to work with, four days to locate this impertinent male, who had turned out to be a mere shopkeeper’s son with no proper sense of his place, very likely with aspirations above his station in life; by then, of course, it was Far Too Late (“ ’orrible if she married ’im, an’ even worse if she didn’t”). But as it turned out, she had not been found with him. The young man had protested in the strongest terms his innocence of any wrongdoing. (“Rubbish. Men wants only one thing.”) He had been watched and followed since, but no sign of Lady Cecily had been discovered.
“More tea, Miss Meshle?”
I smiled and shook my head. “No, Mrs. Bailey, thank you very much. I think – I believe I must go attend to business now.”
Returning to the front of the establishment, I withdrew from my own outer office into Dr. Ragostin’s, instructing Joddy that I was on no account to be disturbed. I often napped in Dr. Ragostin’s office during the days, after I had been out all night as the Sister. Judging by Joddy’s impertinent grin, which I ignored, he thought I intended to spend a few hours swaddled in “Afghans” on Dr. Ragostin’s comfortable chintz sofa.
This was what I wished him and the other servants to think.
Aside from the aforementioned sofa facing the hearth, Dr. Ragostin’s inner sanctum featured a rather grandiose desk I had provided for that fictitious personage, leather armchairs for his clients, and the resplendent Turkish carpet upon which those furnishings stood. Between heavily draped windows stood a tall bookshelf, and other bookshelves lined the three remaining walls entirely, except of course that gas sconces upon long mirrors (to reflect the light) separated them. Such plenitude of bookshelves had been left behind by the previous occupant – a so-called spiritualist medium. This had been the séance room.
After locking its door from the inside, closing the thick serge drapes for privacy, and turning up the gas-jet chandelier to illuminate the resulting gloom, I walked to the first bookshelf on the inner wall. There I reached behind a stout volume of Pope’s essays, released a silent latch, then pulled the left edge of the bookshelf towards me. With only fingertip pressure, and utterly without sound – for the hinges were perfectly hung and lavishly oiled – the entire shelf swung open like a door to reveal a small room behind it.
Here, I felt sure, the medium’s accomplices had hidden.
I, however, used the closet-sized space to hide items of another sort.
Which I now needed. In order to be received at the baronet’s residence, I could not go as Ivy Meshle. I needed to effect a transformation.
I lit a candle. Then, shivering with cold – for there was no fire laid on in this room – I pulled off Ivy Meshle’s cheap flounced-poplin dress, along with the bulbous brooch she always wore – with a purpose. Welded to my dagger hilt, this brooch looked like an ornament pinned to my dress-front, but actually allowed my weapon’s handle to protrude between my buttons. Grasping the “brooch,” I drew the dagger from my corset with a flourish, admiring its shining, thin, razor-edged blade a moment before laying it aside.
I laid aside also Ivy Meshle’s false hair, earbobs, et cetera, until I stood in my underpinnings, the most essential of which, ironically, was my corset.
Yes, despite my opinion of corsets, I wore one always – but as my protective friend, never tightened to become my tormentor. For me, a corset provided not constraint, but the freedom it gave by furnishing defense, disguise, and supplies. Aside from sheathing my dagger, the corset supported my Bust Enhancer (where I concealed many useful items, including a small fortune in Bank of England notes) by which, along with Hip Regulators, I maintained a figure quite different than that of the unembellished Enola Holmes.
Undressed, then, except for padding, protection, and petticoats, I bent to a basin and washed away my rouge, grimacing, for the water I kept in the closet was all but freezing, then looked at a mirror. My own long, plain, sallow face, framed by my own long, plain brownish hair, looked back at me.
The hair was a problem. In order to pass as a woman, you see, I had to wear it up. Girls wore their frocks short and their hair long, but women had to wear their dresses long and their hair “up.” While almost every other inch of a gentlewoman must be covered during the daytime, her ears, it seemed, must be always bared.
Today I needed to pass as a gentlewoman. Such ladies, however, had maids to arrange their hair for them, and I had none.
I will spare the gentle reader the details of the struggle. Suffice it to say that nearly an hour later a gentlewoman with her hair up – and mostly hidden beneath a formidable hat – emerged from behind a bookshelf. I wore a grey day-dress custom-made of the finest worsted, yet discreet, almost dowdy, in its styling. And yes, with a brooch centered upon its bosom – this time a tasteful oval made of mother-ofpearl. I possessed, you see, more than one dagger.

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