The Case of the Left-Handed Lady: An Enola Holmes Mystery Page 12

  Just looking at her, I wanted to scream with frustration. Desperately I desired to help her, free her, rescue her, do something – but what?

  Go fetch a police constable? But he would have no knowledge of the disappearance of Lady Cecily, and therefore no reason to detain her.

  Race to tell Lady Theodora all that I knew, then let her deploy the authorities? But that would take hours, perhaps even a day, and in the meantime, what if something happened to Lady Cecily?

  “Let them set their imperialist police on us,” cried her captor to the street-corner crowd, “let them give us another Bloody Sunday! For next time we will colour our flags with the hue of our beaten heads! Next time we will fly red flags of revolution!” And the men tossed their ragged caps in the air, wildly shouting, cheering for their newfound messiah.

  But I knew that beneath the wild black wig and false beard he was no working-class hero.

  He was a sham. A rich shopkeeper’s son.

  And he was glorying in the power with which he swayed the crowd.

  He liked to wield power, apparently.

  Watching the subjugated girl, Lady Cecily, I knew I could not turn my back on her even for a moment, lest she disappear again. I must get her away from him. Here. Now.

  But how? Un-Mesmerise her? This was done, I had heard, by performing the magnetic manoeuvres in reverse; it seemed most unlikely that I could accomplish it. Seize her and carry her off bodily? But then I would be pursued as a kidnapper, for she would cry out and struggle against me. I knew she would, for while she looked as meek as a dove – standing there with downcast eyes, handing out pamphlets – tame as she seemed, I knew full well there was another side to her, not the Lady Cecily who drew smudgy pastels but the left-handed lady who drew bold, dark –

  Wait a minute.

  Lady Cecily – or the wan pauper girl whom I knew to be Lady Cecily – was giving out papers with her right hand.

  And as this realisation flashed upon me, such an electric illumination of simultaneous conjecture, hypothesis, and hope burst upon my benighted mind that I am sure my eyes went as round as bull’s-eye lanterns. Safely hidden by my black veil, my mouth gaped. I whispered, “Oh, my stars and garters!”

  Oh.

  Oh, if only I could do it: make contact with the left-handed lady, acting on the premise that only the proper and docile right-handed Lady Cecily had fallen under the power of the villain.

  If the secret, rebellious left-handed lady lurked unfettered within this meek creature before me, I had to communicate with her, and quickly, and in a way that would cause her to connect with me as if by telegraph wires, almost instantly.

  More by instinct than by conscious thought I knew how it might be done.

  Her charcoal drawings, you see, had strangely affected me. Touched some deep recognition in me. Almost as if she and I could be soul-mates.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, she might similarly recognise me.

  So, reaching into a pocket for pencil and paper – I always carried some with me – I opened the political pamphlet, hid the paper behind it, and standing with the gas-light to my back so that only the gaunt, listless girl in rags could see me, I drew.

  Instinct, again, more than conscious thought, told me what to draw, how best to depict freedom as Lady Cecily had experienced it. Doing so, I sketched as rapidly and well as ever I had done in my life.

  I drew a likeness of Lady Cecily, dressed in stylish modern “Turkish” bloomers, pedalling a bicycle – skimming the earth by her own power, as I too loved to do. Lady Cecily, strong and beautiful, smiling, with the wind ruffling her hair and blowing her hat-ribbons in the air.

  And as my pencil flew, out of the tail of my eye I could see the right-handed pauper girl grow motionless, forgetting her assigned task of handing out political tripe. I saw her stiffen, her gaze riveted upon the drawing.

  I switched the pencil to my left hand. Very clumsily I began to scrawl beneath the drawing, from right to left, in mirror writing: “Who – ”

  But I had gone a bit too far. She dropped her basket, and before I could complete the question her left hand shot out, snatching the pencil and paper away from me. Dull as soot no longer, she stood before me like a small and icy flame, demanding, “How dare you? What do you think you are doing? Who are you?”

  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 co
uld 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 b
eard.

  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.”

  She eluded his grasp and marched off. Not running away. On frozen feet wrapped in rags, she walked at an aristocratic pace. Perhaps hers had been a dual personality once, but not anymore. No one could have mistaken her for a pauper in that moment; she sailed like a ship on the Thames, every inch a lady.

  “Wench, don’t you dare defy me!”

  She made no reply but to keep walking.

  “Proud bitch, I’m warning you.” And although Alexander Finch’s voice did not rise, something in his tone turned me colder than the night ever could, and raised the small hairs on the back of my neck.

  Dual personality?

  No, it was not Lady Cecily who had gone the way of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  I saw her hasten her pace slightly as she kept walking.

  “No chit of a girl turns her back on me !” shouted Finch as he whipped something out of his pocket.

  Something long.

  Long loop of white.