Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche Page 10

  Chapter the Fourteenth

  Dame Haskell and I sat on the bench at the bottom of her garden and talked a good while longer. She told me that her son, Myzella’s father, lived in another farmhouse nearby, but I did not feel I could learn anything more by calling upon him and his wife, nor did I wish to open their wounds afresh. I concluded my visit and came away with greatest sympathy for all the Haskells, but not much the wiser as regarded Flossie.

  What was I to tell Tish? No plan of action, except the unsatisfactory one of trekking from asylum to asylum in search of Flossie, came to mind. Once in my hired carriage, I sat staring at the Surrey countryside without the slightest appreciation of its loveliness, and once upon the train back to London, I watched the telegraph poles fly past my window in exactly the same way. As the train slowed to pull into the Dorking Station, I gazed unseeing at the people on the platform—

  One of whom was Sherlock Holmes.

  Not even disguised. He wore his country tweeds and his deerstalker hat.

  At first, in my daze of gloom, I felt only the faintest niggling of recognition, and then I blinked, sensing that he was someone familiar, and then I gasped and shot up as if a pin had stuck me, running out of my compartment. Just as the train screeched and wheezed to a stop, I reached a doorway, shoved past the conductor stationed there, and—not wishing to call my brother’s famous name aloud—I put thumb and forefinger to my mouth and blasted quite a clear, loud whistle.

  He turned; I waved; he saw me. So, of course, did everyone else, the expressions on their faces exhibiting how aghast they were that a female quite properly clad in a teal traveling costume with matching hat should behave in such an unladylike manner. So much the worse for them. I grinned as Sherlock headed towards me, carrying a valise and, if I read his face aright, trying not to smile.

  “What have you been up to now, Enola?” he asked with a mock scowl once we had achieved the privacy of our compartment.

  I retorted, “I might well ask you the same thing.”

  “Indeed.” Now he looked quizzical and—it took me a moment to identify an expression I had never previously seen on his face—yes, Sherlock looked sheepish. “But there’s little enough to report.”

  “Please do report what little there is.”

  “Let me first light my pipe.” Once this was done, and once he had emitted a cloud of smoke no more noxious than usual, he leaned back in his seat and commenced his narration. “I traveled out here Friday evening, and yesterday, in the guise of a reasonably sober Irishman, I applied for a station as a groom at the Dunhench stables, but I was turned down. I loitered to gossip but learned nothing concerning our client’s sister. I invited myself to take tea in the servant’s hall, chatting up the women, but they gave nothing away except by the rigidity of their postures and the tightness of their faces; they know something but are frightened of it.”

  “So you made no progress.”

  “Wait a moment. It gets worse. I took my leave on foot, doubled back to hide in the woods, and found a leafy dingle in which to doze until late at night when all the lights in Dunhench Hall had gone out. I then burgled the place. I need not bore you with details; suffice it to say that should I ever require another career, I would make an excellent burglar. I quickly penetrated the library and opened the safe I found hidden behind a large but unlovely oil painting of an ancestral Rudcliff. I riffled both the safe and the desk thoroughly in search of any suggestive leaf or scrap of paper, anything to reveal the whereabouts of the putative asylum to which Lady Felicity was committed, or the pseudonym under which it might have been done, but I found nothing. Not the slightest indication.”

  “Finding nothing does not prove there is nothing to find.”

  “I found rather less than nothing. Having failed in the library, I stole upstairs and into Lord Cadogan’s suite of rooms, their location having been revealed to me in the course of my conversation with his servants. There, with greatest stealth, I attempted to examine by rushlight the papers on his dresser top and bedside table. However, he awoke, and I was obliged to flee.”

  “Sherlock! Did he see you?”

  “He saw no more than something that went bump in the night, nor did anyone else, although I must say the man has an excellent pair of lungs. However, a brave lad sped off on horseback to alert the constabulary, who are scouring the countryside for suspicious persons. I thought it wise to take early leave of Threefinches, so here I am. And now, Enola, your report?”

  Trying to think how best to begin, I quipped, “Might I borrow your pipe?”

  “Nonsense, Enola.” But he could not quite keep the corners of his mouth from twitching upwards.

  “Well, Tish and I visited Bedlam, and returned much shaken in our emotions and our plans, for we learned it was quite possible, in any given asylum, for Flossie to be in residence without our ever seeing her.”

  “There were some wards to which you were not admitted.”

  “Exactly. Also, wherever Lord Cadogan has committed Flossie, surely he is paying well to have her concealed.”

  “Have you gained any insight as to why he might have dealt with her so?”

  “Wait a minute. Today I visited St. John’s to talk with the Haskells. Because the local doctor confessed on his deathbed, we now know conclusively that darling Caddie’s first wife, Myzella, was indeed committed to an insane asylum, where—”

  Sherlock interrupted with what for him must be called considerable excitement. “Which asylum?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The Haskells had it closed down as a pesthole; Myzella among many others had succumbed there to Thames River damps. Apparently Lord Cadogan then felt free to marry again.”

  “And once again to marry below his station in life.” Sherlock bit on his pipe stem and puffed hard, frowning—most likely because he found it distasteful to talk with a female, me, about such a sensitive topic as matrimonial union. “Enola, has it occurred to you to wonder why he wed Flossie Glover, no matter how pretty and talented she was, when he could have had…” Apparently overcome with delicacy, he failed to complete the sentence.

  I endeavored to complete it for him. “When he could have had any available woman from scullery maid to maid of honour. I would respond that he is the sort of man who considers women fungible.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Fungible. Interchangeable, one much the same as another, like cattle or clothespins or checkers on a board. Our mother taught me the word to describe a certain kind of womanizer.”

  “My dear sister!” My candor shocked him.

  “Dear brother, you know it’s true. I daresay the reason Lord Cadogan did not marry a titled woman was that a woman of rank, with a powerful family, would have been much more difficult to discard when he tired of her.”

  “Then why marry at all?”

  “For the sake of an heir, most likely. But for some reason he quickly tired of Flossie. I imagine she was rather too decent a person for him.”

  Sherlock puffed his pipe in silence for some time, and continued to hold it in his teeth even after it went out. I watched the view from the window—we had reached the wretched Southwark slums of London—but I saw only the disturbing images in my mind. A beautiful woman barefoot, her clothing clawed to rags, her hair half pulled out by the denizens of a madhouse. And the cad of a so-called gentleman who had put her there, who had cast her off like a rag. Lord Rudcliff riding his high horse to hounds. Lord Rudcliff in an expensive smoking jacket, smiling over his wine. Lord Rudcliff ogling the servant girl who brought him his nightcap.

  As we pulled into Victoria Station, my brother blinked, roused, and pocketed his pipe. “What are we to tell our client?” he asked me. “That we have exhausted all avenues of inquiry?”

  “There must be something we can do about that cad!” My vehemence and volume surprised me; I gentled my tone. “I must think, Sherlock. And I must do so without the assistance of shag tobacco.”

  * * *

&n
bsp; I knew myself to be tall, like my brother, and dolichocephalic, like my brother, and regrettably similar to him in profile, which is to say, proboscis. But I also knew myself to be quite unlike him in many ways even aside from being female. Dr. Watson’s accounts of my brother portrayed him as forgetting to eat when he was at his most brilliant. I, however, never forget to eat, and I believe a good meal being well digested is as significant an aid to the brain as it is to any other portion of my personage.

  So, upon returning to the Professional Women’s Club, I dined well on saddle of mutton with mint sauce and parsley, hot potato crisps, apple dumplings, and rice pudding. Afterwards, alone in my room, I seated myself at my desk and brought out pencil and paper as unconsciously as many women take up their knitting. (My mother saw to it that I was not taught to knit, crochet, embroider, or play the piano; she wanted to make quite sure that I would never become domestic or decorative.) Idly, as if of its own accord, rather like the pointer on a Ouija board, my hand started sketching, producing a nastily leering caricature of Lord Cadogan Burr Rudcliff II’s ever-so-handsome face.

  Warming to that subject, I drew him sticking out his tongue, then falling off a horse with posterior in the air, then with his coattails flapping as he ran after a fleeing woman, who metamorphosed as I drew her from a scullery maid to someone more like the women I had seen at Bedlam. Setting Caddie aside, I found myself drawing picture after picture of them, the so-called madwomen: barefoot, ragged, abject, slumped on benches, curled like rubbish on the floor. One of them was Flossie. Although I had never met her, I had seen her photograph and her twin sister, Tish. Filling paper after paper, I drew Flossie, thin and haggard, dressed in a heavy quilted canvas strong dress, then Flossie in rags with her long hair in a dreadful tangle hanging down, then Flossie quite lovely in an evening gown, and then Flossie in a magnificent new hat and a jacket with stylishly puffed shoulders. Opposite her I drew Tish, very smart and rather daring in a bowler, a waistcoat, a high collar, and a flowing ascot.

  Usually something helpful would float up from the more obscure recesses of my mind when I went on a sketching jag like this. But I knew better than to think about it. I drew Flossie again, on quite a spirited horse in a riding habit, and then Tish—but I had only just sketched in her face when something quite unusual happened.

  Someone knocked on my door.

  Papers scattered all over the floor as I arose and hurried over, calling, “Who is it?”

  “Tish.”

  “Tish!” I opened the door wide, welcoming her in, so delighted to have a visitor that I forgot I had no good news for her.

  She stepped into my room, saw my sketches strewn across the coconut-fiber matting at my feet, and exclaimed “You drew these? They are wonderful! Don’t step on them!” She crouched and started picking them up, taking a close look at each one. “I see that your opinion of Lord Cadogan agrees with mine … Oh! You drew me!”

  “That’s not you,” I said, trying to tease a smile out of her. “That’s Flossie dressed like you.”

  “Of course. That’s why you made me pretty.”

  Hearing a shadow in her whimsy, I protested, “Tish, you are pretty.” Sitting down on the floor beside her, I picked up another drawing, the one in which I had memorialized the wine-red evening gown, and joked, “This is you dressed up as Flossie.”

  But as I spoke, as I heard my own words, something splashed and bubbled deep in my mind. I sat with my mouth open.

  Nor had Tish smiled, only reached for a sketch of a barefoot woman in rags. In a pained tone she said, “This may be what Flossie looks like now.”

  “Oh,” I whispered, my eyes widening like the ripples of my thoughts. “Oh, my blessed stars.”

  Chapter the Fifteenth

  Tish and I talked for hours that night. I gave her a full report of all the efforts made by Sherlock, and by me, to find out exactly what had happened to Flossie. I told her about conversing with Sherlock on the train that afternoon, and his questioning whether we had exhausted all avenues of inquiry. And then I confided in her that there was a plan beginning to sketch itself in my mind, only a few lines of which were at this point plain to me, but she could help me work it out if she would be so kind. Taking my time, I explained as best I could. She was at first incredulous. Later, as I convinced her that I earnestly believed in the scheme I had begun to form, Tish was terrified, dreadfully frightened, yet at the same time courageously willing to try.

  By the time midnight neared, it had become obvious that neither of us would sleep that night, so I persuaded Tish to let me do her hair in an elaborate coif, after which I crowned her with one of my most elegant hats, applied a hint of rouge to her lips and cheeks, and covered her mannish costume with a flowing, fur-trimmed polonaise. I loaned her my best kid gloves, then gave her a dainty, lace-edged handkerchief and instructed her how to dangle it between thumb and forefinger by its middle, for a lady must always carry something in one hand. Then off we went, as all the clocks of London were striking the witching hour, to call on Sherlock.

  According to Dr. Watson’s accounts, the great Sherlock Holmes hardly ever slept, being wont to research, ponder, or do chemical experiments all night. However, that night no light showed in his windows or Mrs. Hudson’s, either. For several reasons, including the effort Tish and I had expended to dress her up for the occasion, I felt unwilling to retreat. I both pounded on the door and rang the bell, knocking up Mrs. Hudson and, in due course, my brother.

  Yawning, he came out of his bedroom in a dressing gown and carpet slippers, blinked at Tish, arched his brows and inquired, “Lady Felicity?”

  “You see, Tish?” I told her, trying not to gloat. “You can carry it off.”

  Sherlock said, “Tish?” then corrected himself, “Miss Glover, please be seated,” then said to me, “She can carry off what?”

  “Impersonating her sister.”

  “Evidently. But why is it necessary to demonstrate this in the middle of the night?”

  “Because I do not think she will allow me to dress her up like a doll ever again.”

  “Quite right,” said Tish from her chair. “Nor will it be necessary. I’ll gladly exchange this monstrous hat for bare feet and a ragged dress.”

  Sherlock’s eyebrows levitated yet higher, and he pleated his long personage to sit upon his settee. Then his brows descended as he eyed me, hawklike. “Enola, are you concocting one of your bizarre schemes?”

  “The most bizarre ever,” I acknowledged. Then I sat down and told him about it.

  * * *

  “Risky,” Sherlock said half an hour later, puffing on his pipe as I had seldom seen him puff before. “Very risky, and it will all be up to you, Miss Glover.”

  She raised doubtful eyes to him. “Do you really think I can do it?”

  “You must, for this harebrained venture may be our only hope of finding your sister. I admit I have no better option to offer.”

  “You think we should try, then.”

  “Yes, and we must plan the exploit down to the last detail. We will need beeswax, soap, vinegar, petroleum jelly, rice powder, greasepaint—and what about your hair? Is it exactly the same colour as your sister’s?”

  “No. She, um, enhances hers with lemon juice,” said Tish, blushing at her own candor. After hesitating, she added, “Nor do I think any amount of tangling will achieve the proper effect. I think—I think it would be best if we cut it all off.”

  “My dear young lady!” Sherlock protested, aghast.

  “Tish can borrow my wigs until it grows out again,” I told him in my most soothing tone. Men, I thought, so excitable about trifles.

  Tish added, “The effect will be so horrifying that he will scarcely notice what I say or do, in case I lose my nerve.”

  “A good point. But you fairly make my head spin, you two.” Sherlock glanced at the Persian slipper on his mantelpiece as if he were thinking of refilling his pipe, shook his head, then turned to us with a decided gesture. “It is very late. L
et us convene again tomorrow morning. I have several affairs of moment in hand,” added Sherlock, “including quite a delicate matter involving a gold mine in the Andes and a recent chupacabra attack on the British ambassador to Chile, but I admit that even that little puzzle does not exhibit the features of novelty and ingenuity promised by the singular adventure of Dunhench Hall. Young ladies, you can count on my presence and support.”

  * * *

  By morning, I had slept a little, my excitement of mind had calmed somewhat, and I realized more soberly the danger into which I proposed to send Tish for Flossie’s sake. In order to protect Tish, we would have to plan as if organizing a military sally into enemy territory.

  Sherlock, I am sure, realized the same, for when I arrived at his lodging I found him setting up a large chalkboard and arranging chairs to face it. Then, to my pleasant surprise, in came Dr. Watson. As I greeted him and gave him a cup of tea, I remarked to Sherlock, “You have called in reinforcements.”

  “Indeed, and I wish we had more. Ah, good morning, Miss Glover,” he said as she entered. He introduced her. “Miss Letitia Glover, my friend and associate Dr. Watson.”

  “We met once before, briefly.” Just the same, always the gentleman, Watson stood up and bowed, very nearly spilling his tea.

  Tish asked Sherlock, “Does he know?”

  “He knows only that we need to free your sister, who happens to be your twin, from a lunatic asylum, the location of which is yet to be determined.”

  “And,” said Watson, “I appreciate the chance for revenge upon the man who forged my signature on an official document.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Sherlock.