The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (8 page)

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Authors: Nancy Springer

BOOK: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
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Lady Theodora shooed the young Alistairs back to the care of their governess when I came in, and beckoned for me to sit close to her.
“I will myself read the diaries,” I explained to her after making my request, “and inform Dr. Ragostin in the most discreet terms of any indications I may find.”
“I have looked through them,” Lady Theodora responded, “and found nothing that seemed harmful, but by all means, if you think it will help – you will take the greatest care of them?”
I assured her I would, remembering just in time to ask her also for a recent portrait of Lady Cecily so that “Dr. Ragostin” could see what the missing miss looked like. Also, I copied down the name and address of the shopkeeper’s son with whom Lady Cecily had been corresponding, in case “Dr. Ragostin” wished to question him.
As I departed, Lady Theodora embraced me, kissing my cheek with the most unexpected strength of feeling.
Therefore I felt quite wretched, like a shameful fraud, as I took a cab back to Dr. Ragostin’s office. Dr. Ragostin this, Dr. Ragostin that; I was a liar, and finding this lost girl was up to – me? A runaway upstart of fourteen? True, half the domestics and mill-hands in London were my age or younger, and true, also, that any of us who committed a crime would be imprisoned, tried, and hanged right along with Jack the Ripper should the police ever find him – but we had no rights, none, not even a right to the money we earned, until we turned twenty-one. Legally, at age fourteen I did not yet exist. So who on Earth did I think I was – Enola Ivy Holmes Meshle Mrs. Ragostin – to attempt the monstrous hoax that was my life?
Such were my thoughts as I slipped through the secret entry into the locked room where I transformed myself back into Ivy Meshle. My subdued frame of mind lasted through the rest of the afternoon into the evening, when I returned to my lodging with Lady Cecily’s casement photograph and journals done up, as if I had been shopping, in a brown paper parcel tied with string.
After Mrs. Tupper had provided me with a meal of herring stewed with parsnips – most unhelpful to one attempting to grow plump – I retreated upstairs to my room, made myself comfortable in warm socks and a dressing-gown, settled myself in my armchair by the hearth, and with the aid of a hand mirror began to read Lady Cecily’s most recent diary.
The content was not at all what one might expect from a baronet’s daughter. I found nothing about Sunday phaeton rides in Hyde Park, holidays at the seaside, shopping along Regent Street, the latest fashions in millinery, or even a mention of a new dress. Nor did I find any accounts of her diversions with her friends. Instead, the entries were mostly troubled musings:
. . . a great deal of talk about the Poor Law, the “deserving poor” versus those who are undeserving. Unfortunates who have been blinded, crippled, et cetera through no fault of their own are regarded as worthy of charitable aid, but all of those who are physically able, Daddy says, must be morally deficient, lazy, and undeserving of consideration; the beggars should continue to be whipped out of town as has been the custom, or else go to the workhouse. But if work is such a great good, why, then, does the workhouse punish its inmates with dinners of thin gruel after their long hours of the hardest possible labour?
 
 
. . . social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest would hold that there is no such category as “deserving” poor. Those who have showed themselves unable to support themselves should be let alone as Nature takes its course, eliminating them, making way for a superior human race. Of which we of the titled classes, I suppose, are examples? Because we can quote Shakespeare, play Chopin upon the piano, and keep our gloves clean while taking tea?
 
What of the babies? For the most part, the poverty-stricken people who are succumbing to Darwin’s selective process have already reproduced. By this way of thinking, should the babies also be abandoned to perish?
 
. . . the Great Unwashed of the East End are not themselves intellectually capable of organising unions and marches, Daddy declares; some outside influence, very likely foreign and enemy, must be to blame for the disturbances, and the police are fully justified in bloodying heads in order to put a halt to any further and more serious uprisings. He does not deny that the mill-workers live in fever-nests unfit for pigs and toil until they fall down, like galley-slaves under the whips of heartless foremen – but he does not seem to feel that they deserve any better. He does not seem to feel that they are people like us at all. It is so difficult for me to sit and fold my hands in my lap, smile sweetly and listen . . .
After reading this and much more, I still considered myself a fraud, for my weary brain, while sympathetic to Lady Cecily’s point of view, could make nothing practical of it.
Slumber, I decided, was needful. Sleep would knit up the ravelled sleave of care, to quote some Shakespeare myself. Or, in this case, sleep would tidy my yarn-basket mind.
Thus, without admitting that I was afraid, I excused myself from venturing forth in habit and black cowl that night. Instead, I went to bed.
Awakening what seemed like a moment afterward, I found that it was morning.
Somehow, while I had slept so soundly – unusual for me – the muddle in my mind had indeed sorted itself out a bit, so that a thread of reasoning presented itself to me, thus:
I had come to London; I had seen London’s poor; I had felt impelled to help them.
Lady Cecily, by the evidence of her charcoal drawings, also had seen. I did not yet know how this highly irregular encounter had come to pass, nor did I know whether it had happened before or after her questioning journal entries, but somehow (and I must find out how) the young lady had walked amongst London’s poor.
Had she also felt impelled to help them?
Had she perhaps left home of her own free will?
 
Settling into my office to “work” as Ivy Meshle, I read the morning newspapers. Finding no communication from Mum, I tossed the news of the day into the fire, then rang for tea.
Meanwhile, in a contemplative frame of mind, I got out Lady Cecily’s photographic portrait and a sheaf of foolscap paper. Referring to the portrait, I pencilled a quick likeness of the lady. Then, putting the photograph away, I drew her head in profile, recalling other photographs I had seen of her, combining those memories with my observations of her mother and brothers and sisters, all of whom so strongly resembled one another. Over and over again I sketched Lady Cecily, with no aristocratic finery, just her face, from various angles until I began to feel that I had met her in person.
Deep in my work, I had not noticed Joddy entering the office with my tea. Unaware of the boy’s presence, I jumped when his piping voice spoke from behind my shoulder: “I didn’t know you could draw like that!”
It was not his place to comment, but luckily it took me a startled moment to catch my breath before I told him so. And in that moment he spoke again. “I know ’er,” he declared, setting down the tea-tray, then pointing at my portraits of Lady Cecily with his stubby white-gloved forefinger.
Ridiculous. He could not possibly –
Wait a minute.
“Indeed?” I tried not to show how interested I was, for like any servant he would draw himself into a shell if I questioned him too sharply. I kept my tone carefully neutral. “What is her name?”
“I don’t know ’er like
that
. I’ve seen her someplace, is all.”
“Where, pray tell?”
“I don’t remember.”
I swivelled to observe him. There he stood with a faraway gaze, as if trying to recall a dream.
“Was she in a carriage?”
He shook his head slowly, looking puzzled, before he remembered his manners. “No, my – no, Miss Meshle. She were standing on a corner, like.”
“Where? Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, Seven Dials?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well then, doing what? Shopping?”
“No, I don’t think so . . .” Uncertain.
My patience beginning to wear thin, I grumbled, “Selling matches?” A ridiculous notion, for only beggars sold matches.
But, looking mildly startled, Joddy murmured, “Matches. Strike.”
Bean-headed boy, of course one struck a match in order to light it. Restraining myself from rolling my eyes, and trying to keep my impatience out of my tone, I tried another question. “What was she wearing?”
Of course he did not answer what I had asked. “She ’ad somethin’ in a basket,” he said.
As did half the populace of London, I thought, and the other half had something in a barrow. Common folk lived penny-in-hand to pastry-in-mouth, most of them, lacking icebox to keep food or stove to prepare dinner, eating sooty messes they bought from street vendors, the poor living off the poor. “Something in a basket? What?” I asked, utterly surprised and a bit sarcastic, for surely the flea-brained boy had to be mistaken. “Roly-poly puddings?”
“No, Miss Meshle, nothin’ like that. I think it were papers.”
“You think you saw this girl selling
newspapers
?”
I should have kept my mouth closed, or at the very least, my tone under better control.
“No, my – um, no, Miss Meshle.” Frightened into stupidity, Joddy would be of no further use.
Indeed, after a few more attempts, I found that there was nothing more to be got out of him. “That will do. Thank you, Joddy.”
After he had left, I muttered several naughty things in a low tone, then dismissed the episode from my mind. The frustrating, addlepated boy had probably seen some other pretty girl.
 
Sipping my tea and, I admit, admiring my own artwork for a few minutes before I burned it in the fire, I continued to mull over the matter of the missing Lady Cecily.
I discarded the absurd notion that she had eloped, for reasons already mentioned, and also because she would hardly have gone off in her nightgown! Rather, in preparation for such a romantic escapade, she would have been waiting in her most fetching frock.
But supposing her escapade, rather than being romantic, had involved any of the poorer neighborhoods of London – well, the essence remained the same: She would not have gone in a nightgown. Had she perhaps secreted some more humble apparel for herself, and hidden the nightgown to make it appear –
What? That she had been snatched from her bed by a kidnapper?
And forcibly carried down a ladder? Nonsense. Impossible, in my experience of ladders.
Had the ladder been placed at her window as a blind?
If she had gone away on her own, how had she travelled? Had anyone assisted her?
I had too many questions and not enough answers.
Presently I rang the bell again.
“Joddy,” I told the boy-in-buttons when he appeared, “go fetch me a cab.”
Miss Meshle was going shopping.
But not in any of the establishments I normally frequented. I had the cab, which cost sixpence a mile, drop me at the nearest railway station – much less expensive, as I had to travel some small distance, to a northern part of London where I particularly wanted to visit a certain commercial establishment: Ebenezer Finch & Son Emporium.
Exiting the train at St. Pancras Station – a frothy architectural confection if I ever saw one – I walked a few blocks. As Ivy Meshle, an ordinary office worker whose skirt, while decently concealing her ankles, did not trail in the dirt, I attracted leers instead of glares. This time the top-hatted gentlemen took no notice of me at all, and no one suggested it would be my own fault if I came to harm – but male clerks ogled from shop doorways, and a working-class loiterer spoke to me: “ ’Ow do you do, sweet’eart ? What’s yer ’urry? Stop an’ chat a bit.”
Pretending I had not heard, without so much as a glance I strode past him. Thank goodness he did not follow, as had been known to happen. Indeed, a slop-girl walking in the slums enjoyed more peace than any decent female on city streets. I found it necessary to ignore several other male pests before I finally spied my destination.

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