Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche Read online

  “Was this done a long time ago?” I asked Dawson.

  Arms loaded with clothing, she turned towards me. “That? No, the paint’s hardly dry on that, miss. She did it the day she…” Dawson choked, failing to finish her sentence, and hustled past me without looking at the painting, seeming suddenly in a great hurry to exit the unfortunate lady’s chambers. “This way, miss,” she directed me, her voice quivering.

  Following her out of the door, I finally realized her intention. “Surely you cannot expect me to wear the clothing of your so misfortunately expired mistress!”

  “Why not, dearie? What does she need them for now?” Dawson sounded unwontedly familiar. More; she sounded, although quite calm, a bit hysterical.

  “But I—I am quite tall, you know.”

  “It won’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  More than a bit hysterical. I judged it best to be silent, trailing after her to The Fern Room, following, like a good donkey, where I was led. But my mind had taken off galloping in several directions.

  * * *

  Dawson had a footman bring up my carpetbag and parasol and sent for a maid named Jill. Listening to Dawson give Jill some rather alarming instructions, I bent over so that neither would see what I was doing, slipped my dagger out of my corset and hid it deep in my carpetbag, firmly and silently assuring myself that it was unlikely Jill would discover that my bosom was filled with papers, pound notes, and other supplies; all should now be well.

  Dawson helped me out of my green dress while Jill hung up my spare dress, a ruched nankeen frock, declaring it charming but not formal enough for dinner. Then, while Dawson set to work with scissors, needle, and thread, replacing my ripped overskirt with a similar one “borrowed” from one of the purloined gowns, Jill took on the challenge of making me presentable to dine with the earl, trying Flossie’s evening gowns on me. Although they accommodated my girth, they were, as I had predicted, too short for me, and ways had to be found around this difficulty.

  During these hours of sewing and fitting, it was quite natural for the housekeeper, the maid, and me to talk about fashion, and by complimenting Lady Felicity’s wardrobe, I devised ways to ask questions about her. Jill and Dawson willingly and warmly spoke of her as a ray of sunshine, a songbird, and a blessed angel. Gently pressing them to be a bit more specific, I learned that Felicity liked to arrange flowers, drive her pony-phaeton around the park, and create fancy boxes out of seashells and the like. I learned that she preferred boysenberry jam on her breakfast scones, disliked kidneys whether or not they were served with beans, and adored ice cream. But as for details of her final illness and sad departure from this mortal realm, I could learn none. On that topic, the housekeeper and the maid were as indefinite as if we spoke of an imaginary person.

  Most perplexing.

  Nor could I blame their vagueness on stupidity, for both showed evidence of intelligence. Jill, for instance, made some of Flossie’s gowns “work” on me by adding lace-up “waists” to cover that problem area. As for length, fashions had recently changed so much that skirts could now stop just below the ankle instead of dragging on the ground, so all was well in that regard, although sweeping hemlines had to be straightened.

  Finally Jill costumed me to her satisfaction in a wine-red frothy confection that bared my arms and collarbone. She then placed a filmy combing wrapper around my shoulders and began to address the problem of my wayward tresses. (I continued efforts to converse, turning the talk to Lord Cadogan; was he a master with foibles and failings? But I learned little.) After brushing my hair one hundred strokes in the hope of civilizing it, Jill subdued it sufficiently to coil it atop my head, securing it there with an army of metal clips and pins. Into my coif’s interstices she poked pink silk roses to match the pink velvet waist concealing the muddle in the middle of the dress like a cummerbund. After removing the combing wrapper, she looked me over and declared me “ravishing,” but asked whether I wanted my face and arms dusted with rice powder. I declined. Both she and Dawson declared me pretty as a picture and said it was a pity I could not see myself, as all the looking-glasses were shrouded. (Silently I begged to differ. No one had draped the mirror in Lady Felicity’s bedchamber.) Then, bobbing, both Dawson and Jill allowed themselves to be dismissed, leaving me to myself and my own thoughts.

  Those thoughts were various and disturbing, so much so that I extracted paper and pencil from my fussy wine-red bosom in order to write them down. I wrote:

  If Flossie expired due to such a virulent disease that her body had to be cremated, why is her bedroom not closed off, quarantined, fumigated?

  Why is the mirror in her room, and only her room, not draped with black?

  Why does her last watercolour look so odd?

  Why are Dawson and Jill so willing to dress me up in their late mistress’s clothes?

  Why are they so vague about her demise?

  Why has the earl invited me to dine? He should be in deep mourning.

  How am I to let Sherlock know where I am?

  Even after I hid this list in my wine-red bodice, my thoughts continued so restlessly that I could not abide the battling green decor of my bedroom anymore. Exiting, I wandered downstairs, found my way to the parlour with the pedestal table, and sat at it. As on every pedestal table in most parlours in England, there were displayed a redoubtable Bible, a Grecian goddess gracefully holding a plate for the collection of calling cards, a vase of flowers, several small photographs in freestanding oval frames, and a silver salver bearing the afternoon post. Topmost among the letters lay one with a typewritten address. Eyeing it curiously, I found that I recognized the return address, also typewritten. It was the letter Tish had said she would write to Caddie.

  Exercising some mental discipline, as I had no good excuse if I were caught riffling through the mail, I turned my attention elsewhere. On this particular pedestal table lay a sizeable item that scarcely looked like a book, for its ornate intaglio-velvet covers puffed like upholstery. But when I picked up this peculiar cushiony thing, it opened in the middle, and I found myself gawking at photograph after photograph mounted by means of decorative cardboard corners upon thick black paper. Such was my first experience of a photograph album, and a fine one it was, beginning with smeared and blotched silvery daguerreotypes that had to date back to the beginning of photography, nearly fifty years ago. They represented Larimer Trask Rudcliff, fifth Earl of Dunhench, and his wife, Olga Thorpe Rudcliff.

  After lighting a lamp so that I could see more properly, I skipped over several generations of Rudcliffs to study the more recent, sepia-toned likenesses, looking for my host, Cadogan Burr Rudcliff number two. And there he was in the requisite wedding photograph, the lady being his first wife, Myzella Haskell Rudcliff, so labeled. She wore a great deal of white and seemed a bit smothered in point lace and orange blossoms. He wore a top hat and tails in which he somehow managed to look jaunty despite the need to maintain a pose for a full minute.

  The next photograph was a death portrait of Cadogan Burr Rudcliff I, presumably Caddie’s father, laid out in a casket so fine it might as well have been a sarcophagus.

  Death portrait followed death portrait. Cadogan Burr Rudcliff III, who must have been Caddie’s son, dead and swaddled in white at the age of two and a half. Then an old female Rudcliff, rather grand, who was perhaps Caddie’s mother. Then a little girl, Angelica Myzella Rudcliff, surely his daughter, who had lived to be three before succumbing to diphtheria and being laid out in white ruffles and lace.

  But then came another wedding portrait in which Cadogan Burr Rudcliff II stood tall beside Felicity Glover Rudcliff, aka Flossie. I recognized her at once, for she looked just like her twin, Letitia Glover, my client, although more feminized in her traditional white gown, cascades of lace, and a crown of rosebuds on her head to hold her veil.

  More black pages remained to be filled, but that was the last photograph in the album. I closed it thoughtfully.

  I had seen no death portrait of Flo
ssie.

  Even more telling: I had seen none of Caddie’s first wife, Myzella.

  This fact disturbed me. Greatly.

  Chapter the Eighth

  Dinner only increased my perturbation. A footman seated me—or rather enthroned me, on an ornate, heavy chair with arms—at one end of a long table formally laden with linen, crystal, and silver. And there I waited, eyeing the empty seat at the other end of the table.

  Lord Cadogan Rudcliff came in unconscionably late, carrying the afternoon post and sorting through it. As I watched, he threw one letter—Tish’s letter, the only typewritten one!—into the fire without opening it to read it. Well! Caddie was a cad.

  He laid the post aside, turned, and bowed to me with exaggerated courtesy before his footman enthroned him opposite me. There must have been a hundred candles lit, on the table, the chandelier, the sideboard, yet the room seemed dark and enormous to me, and I was reminded of Little Lord Fauntleroy’s first dinner with his ferocious grandfather. I felt quite as small as that angelic child, and fully as fictitious. I knew myself to be a sham, a clown in a borrowed gown, miserably aware of my bare, scrawny arms and neck.

  “Are you well this evening, Miss Basilwether?” Lord Rudcliff inquired most politely and insincerely.

  “Quite well, and grateful for your hospitality, my lord.”

  “Please, call me Caddie.”

  At that exact ill-fated moment, as he offered me this rather daunting intimacy and as I was being served a bowl of turtle soup, I noticed the elegant silver-plated epergne centred on the table, no larger or more tastelessly ornate than most such fripperies, yet more disturbing to behold. Its molded stem did not depict the usual swans, shepherd boys, or cherubs. Instead, it duplicated the statue I had seen in front of Dunhench Hall! My host’s table was decorated with a proud and shining miniature of himself.

  I had not until that moment realized that the statue out front was Caddie. The existence of the statue had slipped my mind until I saw the epergne. But the combination in my mind of the statue, the vainglorious portrait in the main hall, and now the epergne—all indicated to me that Caddie fancied himself even more greatly than I had suspected.

  Rendered perverse by the thought but maintaining a mask of ladylike imbecility, I peered down the candlelit table and chirped, “Oh! What a lovely centrepiece! You must admire Lord Byron very much.”

  “Lord Byron? Hardly!” My host reacted heatedly. “Lord Byron was a molly boy with a clubfoot!”

  All innocence, I blinked across the distance that separated us. “But your epergne looks just like him.”

  I am pleased to say I made him blush. Even he, for all his force of ego, did not have the effrontery to explain that the object in question was fashioned after himself. He blurted, “Never mind the blasted epergne!” But in no more time than it takes to turn the page of a book, he regained his manners and his practiced charm. “Enough about me. Tell me about yourself, Ermintrude.” He helped himself to my first name as readily as he helped himself to some biscuit to go with his soup. “Where were you brought up?”

  “Just about anywhere between Wales and Scotland.” I tried to change the subject, referring to the excellent soup I was eating: “I have always regarded turtle soup as rather a mystery. How in the world does one skin a turtle?”

  “I think that is something a lady should not really want to know. Tell me, Ermintrude, are you related to the Essex Basilwethers of Belvidere?”

  Oh, dear. My choice of alias, I realized, had been most unwise under the circumstances. “Distantly,” I answered, and luckily the arrival of the fish saved me from further conversation for the time being. Different wines were served with each course, but I sipped only water.

  “Do you not care for wine, Ermintrude? Has anyone ever called you Trudy?”

  I skipped the first question in favour of answering the second one. “Certainly not if they wished to escape bodily harm.”

  He laughed far too heartily for a recently bereaved husband, increasing my unease. There was something shrewd, calculating, even predatory in the focus of his eyes and his attention on me.

  “My mother was a friend of her most gracious grace, Wilhelmina, Duchess of Basilwether,” he said. “Such a grand lady.”

  Hearing mockery in his tone, and having no idea what Tewky’s mother’s name was, although “Wilhelmina” seemed far too old-fashioned, I found myself in a quandary. I could not safely say I had never heard of Lady Wilhelmina, although it was entirely possible that he had made her up. So, cautiously, I said, “Of course I know the duke and duchess. Was Wilhelmina his mother’s name?”

  “Yes, indeed! And what relation is she to you? Your grandmother?”

  “My great-aunt.”

  “Indeed? How very peculiar, as she never existed.”

  It was my turn to blush, and blush I did, furiously; he had well and truly skewered me. “Oh, well,” I babbled, “perhaps I was thinking of my great-aunt Mehitabel. I have never been good at keeping track of relationships.”

  “And yet you have come to Threefinches to research your family tree?”

  Confound and blast! Hoist by my own petard! But I had to say something. With as much dignity as I could muster I stated, “I intend to master my own shortcoming.”

  He laughed again, heartily and not very pleasantly. But whilst I was trying to decide whether to take offense and make a frosty exit, the footmen came in with the “joint,” meaning the meat course, which was in actuality a jugged hare accompanied by mashed turnips. Even had the fare been more to my taste, I had by then lost all appetite. But I pretended great interest in the contents of my plate, and did not look up at the occupant of the other end of the table for a considerable while.

  He cooperatively remained silent, accommodating my sulk. And at last, of course, there came a time when I had to see what he was up to and lifted my gaze to glance at him.

  He was sitting quite at his ease, elbows most uncouthly on the table, smiling in a wolfish way. “So, my dear,” he inquired in a most by-the-way manner, “Who are you, really?”

  “I am not your dear,” I retorted, before I even realized the full implications of his question.

  “Very well, but who are you, sitting at my dinner table all dressed up in my wife’s second-best evening gown?”

  I glowered, partly because he had mentioned poor Felicity in such a tearless, offhand way, but mostly because I did not know how to answer. Never before had I found myself so ignominiously outfoxed.

  Lord Cadogan grinned down the length of the table at me. I quite wanted to throw something at him.

  “Let me help,” he said in a way that sounded far more triumphant than helpful. “Having made a lifelong study of females, I believe you are much younger than you pretend to be. Because you are tall, you have been able to pass as a woman, when actually you are hardly more than a little girl, isn’t that so? You are a runaway from a strict papa, aren’t you?”

  Of all his verbiage, one phrase struck me as a most curious thing to say. “A lifelong study of females?”

  He ceased any pretense of being nice. “Answer me! You are a runaway, are you not?”

  “Indeed I must be, as you are an expert and you say so.”

  “Do not trifle with me!” He stood up, and that hint of danger I had seen in the glint of his eyes now glared. I had faced many an angry man, but there was something different, something terrifying in the furious self-will of this oh-so-handsome aristocrat menacing me. “What is your name?”

  Because he frightened me, I answered too pertly. “Why? What do you do with runaways?”

  Lowering his head like a charging bull, he started towards me. “I lock them up until they beg to go home!”

  He looked as if he intended to lay hands on me! Bolting to my feet, I reached for the dagger I always carried in my dress front—confound it! This dress had no front, and I had no dagger. Turning to flee, I collided with a footman who had just come in carrying the dessert tray. Like a chocolate-and-vanill
a volcano, custard erupted onto me, him, and I hope the Earl of Dunhench, although I did not see. I only heard him order, not even loudly, “Seize her.”

  The footmen obeyed without the slightest hesitation, as if their master had directed them to remove a dish from the table; I wondered what unspeakable tasks they might have undertaken for him in the past.

  “Lock her in her room.”

  Off I went lodged between the two men who had hold of me by the arms. I struggled, of course, but I could not wriggle as I would have liked, because the scanty and flimsy evening gown I wore would have slithered right off of me. And I could not scream, because the loathsome Caddie came along behind us with his hand over my mouth so tightly that I could not even manage to bite him.

  But there came a moment when I would have cheerfully stopped struggling, and needed to remind myself to keep on writhing. And when they had shoved me inside the room, locked me in, and gone away, I needed to exert myself to pound on the imprisoning door, shouting after them, “You should be ashamed of yourselves! You, Dunhench, you are no gentleman!”

  Then I turned up the gaslight and allowed myself to smile. It is true that I felt a degree of chagrin, having been treated so, but my humiliation was offset by elation, because I found myself exactly where I most wished to be. Rudcliff and his bullying boobies, evidently having failed to confer with Dawson, had locked me in the wrong room. Perhaps because I wore Lady Felicity’s dress, and from that they had made a false assumption, they had locked me into Lady Felicity’s chambers.

  Chapter the Ninth

  Searching has always been the passion of my life. As a child, I searched the woods of Ferndell, for whatever I might find—bright pebbles, a magpie nest, a skeleton? Now, sloughing off my borrowed finery and putting on a dressing gown, I looked forward to searching Lady Felicity’s chambers in much the same spirit.