The Case of the Left-Handed Lady: An Enola Holmes Mystery Read online

  Seeming to writhe like a white snake in the night.

  It is one thing to suspect, or even to know in one’s heart, but quite another thing actually to see. The sight stunned me out of my wits for a moment, so that I could only cry out, “No!” and leap at him to stop him.

  Most ineffectually.

  He quite simply clouted me with the back of his fist, sending me flying to one side, after which he paid me no further heed. Perhaps he remembered my panicked flight after our other nighttime encounter, and expected the same. Perhaps he thought no female could do anything more than scream, faint, or run away. Perhaps in his murderous rage he did not think at all.

  His blow felled me to the cobblestones, where I lay with all the breath knocked out of me. Paralysed for a moment. Unable to move.

  But I could see.

  I saw that maddened villain spring like a beast of prey after Lady Cecily. Pouncing upon her from behind, he threw the garrote over her head and drew it tight.

  Lady Cecily’s face contorted. Her eyes rolled skyward. Her hands flew to her neck, clawing at the vicious unseen thing constricting, constricting to cut short her life, just as my hands had done that dreadful night when –

  And in that stunned instant, gasping for breath and remembering, I learned what it meant to “see red.” The night turned that hue before my eyes as wrath galvanised me so that I leapt to my feet. My dagger seemed to spring to my hand, so fiercely had I drawn it. Weapon raised, I hurtled towards the garroter.

  Cruel. He has no reason to enslave her except that he likes to play with power. He had no other reason to attack me, either. To strangle me senseless, nearly to death, before – although perhaps only because of a chance interruption – he had stopped to amuse himself by having a look at my face.

  “Maggot!” I cried. “You – sewer rat, you repulsive, creeping – ” Confound my genteel upbringing, I could not think of any name foul enough to call that evil wretch as I plunged the knife into him.

  Into the swollen muscle of his upper arm. Not his heart. Even such a monster I did not care to kill.

  With a hoarse cry he let go of his vile murder-toy; Lady Cecily dropped to the cobblestones.

  I think Alexander turned to face me, hands lifted to fend off my blows, but indeed I scarcely know. I remember only that I stabbed him again, in the arm or shoulder, stabbed and stabbed again in a halfblind blood-hued fog of fury; I do not know how many times I struck him, or how well, or what words I ranted, or whether he tried to wrest the knife away from me, before I realised that I was stabbing at nothing but the air.

  I blinked, hearing his running footsteps, and my vision cleared so that I saw him clutching himself as he fled.

  Blood spotted the cobbles.

  And on the cold street Lady Cecily lay crumpled amidst her rags, white and still.

  Heavens have mercy, I had been saved by a high, whalebone-ribbed collar the night I was attacked – but she wore none.

  She sprawled as if dead.

  “Please, no,” I whispered, starting to shake all over as wrath gave way to dread; my hand shook as, without conscious thought, I returned my dagger, all bloody, to its sheath in my busk. “Please,” I begged the night as I knelt beside Lady Cecily, for in that moment I realised how deep the garrote had bitten into her delicate neck. And confound my hands, they trembled so badly that I could barely grasp the ugly thing, taking dreadful moments to loosen it.

  Frantically I felt at her throat for breath, at her wrist for pulse. I thought I felt a flutter of something – perhaps – but I quaked so that I could not tell for sure.

  Help. I needed help for the lady.

  And by a strange, maybe even providential chance, I knew where help was to be found.

  Close at hand.

  Lifting the lady’s limp form in my arms, I staggered to my feet, blundering towards a modest office-and-residence nearby. Closed, shuttered, and locked now, of course, for the night, but I stumbled up the white stone steps to the door, leaned there, and freeing one hand, I plied the brass knocker with all my remaining strength.

  I kept up my frenzied knocking until the door actually opened. Still clinging to the stricken lady, I staggered, nearly falling, into the front hallway.

  I only glimpsed the very startled parlour-maid who had let me in, for my panicked gaze had fixed on the equally startled gentleman emerging from the library with an after-dinner drink in his hand – Dr. Watson.

  I tried to say something to him, but choked on my own words, for right beside the good doctor walked his dinner companion and friend – my brother – Sherlock Holmes.

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

  LUCKILY IT WAS SCARCELY POSSIBLE FOR me to react with more panic than I was already revealing – in my agitation of manner, for my face remained hidden by its dense black veil.

  And luckily Sherlock Holmes’s attention, like Dr. Watson’s, was all taken up by the limp, very possibly lifeless girl sagging against me.

  “Good heavens!” Striding to me, Watson picked up Lady Cecily as if cradling a child. Nearly running, he carried her into the warm, well-lighted library.

  Following, my brother asked, “Is she breathing?”

  “Only just.”

  She was alive, then. Hearing that, suddenly I felt light-headed, indeed light of person, as if I might float, such a burden had been lifted from me.

  Doctor Watson laid the lady upon a leather davenport and applied his trained fingers to her wrist. “Her pulse is weak. Brandy, Holmes!”

  My brother was already striding towards the decanter, his back to me. The parlour-maid stood at some distance from me, clinging to the stairway newel as if she might faint. At that moment I could have simply turned, stepped out of the door, and slipped away into the darkness.

  I knew I should. There was no reason for me to stay. Lady Cecily would be well cared for.

  And there was every reason for me to leave. Dr. Watson’s attention might turn towards me, or the attention of his friend might do the same; my brother might recognise me. Moreover, at any moment Lady Cecily might regain her senses and say my name, which like a fool I had told her.

  Every nerve told me to flee.

  Yet, instead, like an overlarge black moth drawn to a candle-flame, I ghosted into the room with the others.

  With my brother.

  With the girl whom I had wanted to be my friend.

  And with the fatherly Dr. Watson.

  Kneeling beside his patient, removing the cord from her neck, Watson exclaimed, “What sort of brute would garrote a beggar girl!” He called towards the entryway, “Rose, send for the police!”

  Rose, I supposed, was the parlour-maid, who might or might not feel well enough to respond.

  At Watson’s elbow now with the brandy, Holmes said, “That’s no beggar girl. Look at her teeth. All her life they have been well cared for.”

  Administering the brandy, Watson did not immediately answer.

  “Look at her skin, her features. Our guest is a lady.”

  “If that’s so, then what is she doing in such – ”

  My imperious brother interrupted. “There is some mystery here.” Hawk-like, he turned on me where I stood just within the library door, perhaps ten feet from him. His steel-grey eyes fixed on my much-besmirched mantle, and his eyebrows shot up. “Is that blood?”

  I suppose that, on my black clothing all draggled by the muck of the street, and in the gas-light, it was hard to tell what the wet stains were.

  “Blood?” Glancing up to see what Holmes was talking about, Dr. Watson also looked at me, then stood up quite suddenly. “Madam, are you injured?”

  Actually, I was hurt, my face bruised and aching from Alexander Finch’s blow. But I shook my veiled head to indicate the negative.

  Again, I could have fled, should have fled, but some pernicious yearning kept me where I was.

  Dr. Watson asked, “Why do you not speak?”

  “The Sister of the Streets is a mute, I have heard,” Holmes told h
is friend without looking at him; his grey gaze remained nailed upon me as if he might thereby pierce my veil.

  “Or perhaps she is hurt and in shock,” said Dr. Watson. “That does look like blood. Quantities of blood.”

  “We lack data to arrive at any conclusion,” said Holmes, and he started towards me to investigate.

  I whipped out my dagger.

  My brother stopped where he stood, perhaps six feet from me. Everything seemed to stop in that moment as I threatened with my razor-sharp honedsteel blade. Even the ticking of the clock seemed to stop. I remember utter stillness, utter silence.

  The knife’s silver-coloured tip wore a red veil.

  The silence stretched, then broke. Watson broke it, his voice a bit strained. “I think it’s not her blood, Holmes.”

  “I would quite like to know whose,” murmured the great detective. Then he spread his hands towards me in a pacific yet quelling gesture, and he started to protest, or cajole, “My dear Sister – ”

  His dear sister.

  Those words – how oddly they affected me.

  “Do not condescend to me!” I hardly recognised my own quite distinctive, aristocratic voice bursting forth, as it never should have done, from under my veil. “I am in no need of assistance. On the other hand, Lady Cecily” – with a jerk of my weapon I indicated the still-unconscious girl lying on the sofa – “daughter of Sir Eustace Alistair, requires more care than I can give her.” Although she was unlikely ever to receive it – care for her alienisation of the psyche, her secret left-handed self. But if the police were on the way, there was no time to explain. I continued, “The villain who garroted her – ”

  His voice glassy and cracked with – with incredulity, I suppose – my brother interrupted, “Enola?” His face had gone as keen and white as a fine carving in marble.

  “Do not speak. Listen.” There was no time for melodrama; I had to finish what I was saying. “Please attend to what I am telling you. The garroter is Alexander Finch, a youth who once contrived to befriend the lady, and who has since Mesmerised and kidnapped her. He masquerades as a labour platform-trumpet named Cameron Shaw. You will find his disguise in the street, and you are likely to find him at some surgeon or hospital, with the marks of my knife on him.”

  I could only hope that Dr. Watson had taken in most of this, for my brother evidently had not. He responded in much the same way as before. “Enola?”

  Having done all I could for the interests of justice, I softened my voice considerably. “My dear brother, please put your mind at ease concerning me. The day I took my cipher booklet out of your desk, did you by chance find a handkerchief belonging to me, wrapped around a slice of onion?”

  I wished to convince him, you see, that my weeping had been an actor’s performance. To reassure him.

  But he seemed not to follow my meaning at all. He only leaned towards me, his alabaster features vibrant with barely constrained emotion. “Enola, you must be sensible. You cannot continue in this foolish fashion, alone, unguided, wayward!”

  Dr. Watson, gawking, seemed about to say something – as I dreaded that he should – but a movement and a groan from Lady Cecily claimed his attention.

  She would recover. With a pang my heart let go of hopes for her friendship; I had to settle for knowing she was safe now.

  And hoping that she would eventually find freedom.

  As I had.

  “Sherlock,” I told my brother earnestly and quietly, “I am doing very well on my own, thank you.”

  “Do you mean to tell me you are all right?”

  “Quite so. Although,” I remarked, “a bit worried about our mother, as I have not yet heard from her in response to my most recent message.”

  “Tell me where she is, then, and I will find her!”

  Ah! He did not, after all, know everything!

  I replied, “Such would not be her wish, no matter what extremity.”

  “And you, Enola? You insist on following her willful example? You shall come to harm!”

  “My dear Sherlock,” I told him almost tenderly, although I still held my dagger at the ready to keep him from approaching me, “the greatest harm I could possibly suffer would be to lose my liberty, to be forced into a conventional life of domestic duties and matrimony.”

  “You cannot possibly mean that. Every decent woman’s calling is to take her proper place in society.” He stepped towards me.

  I stopped him with a gesture of my weapon. “No nearer, I warn you.” In fact I could never have hurt him, but he knew me so imperfectly that he halted.

  “I cannot believe a word you are saying, my dear sister,” he all but begged. “Let me see your face.”

  It was little enough for him to ask, but I could not allow it; Dr. Watson might recognise Ivy Meshle in me. “No.” In the same moment I realised it was a ploy to take my attention away from my weapon; one uses two hands to raise a veil. “No, my oh-so-clever brother, I think not.” Still, my voice remained gentle; I hoped he could hear in its tone my affection for him. “I am going now. Please convey my good wishes to our brother Mycroft – ”

  A considerable thumping commotion sounded behind me. At once, lowering my knife to hide it in the folds of my mantle, I turned and sped out of the library, just as the parlour-maid and a constable blundered in at the front door.

  “Stop her!” my brother cried, but the parlour-maid, quite excited, was tugging the constable towards where Lady Cecily lay, and before Sherlock Holmes could shout again, I had darted out of the door, running down the street.

  “Stop her!” My brother’s voice rang like a bugle in the night. I heard pursuit behind me, the constable’s thudding footfalls and my brother’s lighter, longer stride.

  Like a hunted animal I leapt an iron railing and thumped down into a servants’ basement area. Fleeing for my very life – loss of freedom would have killed me – I sped out the back way and so into the maze of tool-sheds, workshops, and animal pens behind the houses. As I paused inside a carriage house to catch both my breath and my wits, I heard my brother speaking with the constable; then heard the latter halt at the call box on the street corner.

  Oh, how lovely. Within moments he would have every police-man in London on the lookout for me.

  “Bring me a lantern,” my brother’s commanding voice ordered someone. “She can’t have gone far.”

  I ran out of the other end of the carriage house and onward, blindly, my thoughts frantic, despairing: Sherlock Holmes would search every horsestall, every cowshed, every shadow in the mews, while on the streets police patrolled; there was no place to hide.

  My black mantle, my cowl and veil, my habit – they marked me, now and forevermore; I had to get rid of them.

  But then what? Run home in my red flannel underpinnings?

  In order to change my appearance and elude the pursuit, I needed a refuge.

  But where could I go, with every man’s hand turned against me?

  And every woman’s hand at the mercy of a man’s?

  As I had chosen not to accept the lot of other girls – would it always be like this? Running, hiding, dodging, disguised? Enola, alone?

  I did not allow myself to answer that question, forcing myself to think instead of what to do for the moment, as I emerged onto a cobbled thoroughfare and darted across it, recognising it as somewhere I had been before –

  Baker Street.

  Of course.

  My feet, apparently possessing more intelligence than my head, had carried me to the one place where my brother was least likely to search for me.

  With energy born of new hope I sped towards number 221, then darted behind the house. In the small backyard, as I had noticed on my previous visit, stood a single tree of the obliging, knobby sort known as “London Plane.” Up its excellent trunk I swarmed with no trouble at all, and after that it took only slight manoeuvering to climb onto the roof of the kitchen porch.

  None too soon. As I sat, panting, two constables passed on opposit
e pavements of Baker Street, the one calling to the other, “Gel in a nun’s gear, Sergeant says.”

  “Wit a knife, wot I ’ear, an’ irrational,” replied the other. “ ’Ard to believe, but they say, dangerous.”

  “ ’Isteria,” said the other sagely. “Common affliction uv ’er sex.”

  I wondered whether that was what Sherlock thought of me. Irrational. Hysterical.

  Yes, it probably was.

  After removing my boots so as to be more silent,

  I padded across the roof to the window I judged must lead to my brother’s chamber. Gently I tried it, and it opened quite easily; as I expected, it was not snibbed. My brother was, after all, still my mother’s son, and a healthful sleeper, one who let in the fresh air at night.

  Slipping inside and closing the window behind me, already I was planning how I would search his wardrobe for something else to wear – I knew he kept many disguises. He had even at times passed himself off as an old woman. A skirt, a shawl, and a hat of some sort would be all I needed.

  Then I would wait, and rest, until I heard the door opening downstairs before I slipped out again the way I had come.

  I knew I must never again disguise myself as the Sister of Charity.

  I wondered whether it would still be safe to disguise myself as Ivy Meshle. Perhaps not. Holmes and Watson would surely discuss the night’s events, and Watson might confess his visit to “Dr. Ragostin” now.

  I wondered whether I would ever see Lady Cecily again.

  Probably not.

  The only way for me to be safe and free was to be – be what my name decreed me. Enola. Alone.

  As I placed fresh fuel on the hearth-fire of 221 Baker Street, I felt all the pain of that thought, but also some solace: whether he knew it or not, and whether he liked it or not, my brother Sherlock was giving me such shelter as family might offer. He was giving me refuge.

  STILL IN THE CHILL OF WINTER, FEBRUARY, 1889

  AT DAWN, THE GREAT DETECTIVE CLIMBS the stairs to his rooms, his step uncharacteristically leaden due to the fatigue and frustration of hours spent searching for a black butterfly that had paused for a few moments almost within his grasp before disappearing into the night, gone like a spirit – but his sister is no spirit, confound everything; she is a mere skinny broomstick of a girl, unequipped with wings, and could not possibly have actually flown away from the stony face of London; wherever could she have got to? Why could he not find her?