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

  “Oh, no!” I sat rather abruptly, because my knees weakened. “I am not – I don’t – such a title – ”

  “Well, the quality of your speech says you’re not what you appear to be, either.”

  While not titled by birth, certainly not one to be presented at court, I was a squire’s daughter, and as such, a member of the gentry, one who does not work for money. And my accent, if not my clothing, betrayed my rank. Sitting with my mouth airing, I scolded myself internally: I must be more careful. This was why I had decided the nocturnal Sister must be a mute – because my distinctive voice might give me away.

  At the same time I began to understand why Lady Cecily might have entered into correspondence with this young man. Beneath his bland exterior lay a great deal of intelligence and – and some other, less definable qualities.

  Indeed, for a moment I felt quite uncomfortable as he leaned on his elbows studying me through his tinted spectacles, which made it difficult for me to see his eyes or read their expression.

  Just as I started to turn away from his scrutiny, the young man almost smiled. For a moment there was a flicker of some realisation – knowledge, or triumph – in his smirk. He said, “I do believe we have met. What, may I ask, is your name?”

  “Certainly you may ask,” I told him, controlling my tone as best I could.

  A moment passed before he understood that I would not answer. Then he seemed to drop the subject entirely. “I personally feel that boot-laces are far superior to buttons,” he remarked, holding up the tan boot. “They obviate the tedium of a button-hook, and mould the leather more closely to the limb of the wearer.” Which should not have been desirable or necessary, were the lower extremities not meant to be seen, after all, a glimpse now and then, as this young man knew quite well – though I felt a bit odd hearing him insinuate so. As he spoke, he yanked upon the laces to demonstrate their function, for all the world like a maid pulling upon stay-laces, giving the boot a wasp waist where an ankle should have been.

  I barely looked. “Indeed.” My attention remained on his round, blank, bespectacled face. “And if I am a lady, then would you consider yourself a gentleman?”

  “Just my point. This country is mad for valuing people according to their titles.” He continued to strait-lace the tan boot. “Why should an idle so-called aristocrat be considered more of a gentleman than any thrifty, sober, industrious member of the working class?”

  As he spoke this outrageous nonsense, I sensed passion beneath his cool exterior.

  Uncertain where it might lead, I asked cautiously, “You are in favour of democracy, then?” Shocking, if so, even to one who had been raised by a Suffragist.

  But he replied, “I scorn all such labels.” Indeed he almost sneered, setting down the tan boot, now appearing strangled in its own laces. “I pigeon-hole no one, I’ll befriend anyone,” (he said rather viciously,) “and if someone needs help, I’ll help them, whether they’re a scullery-maid or – ”

  The way he broke off gave me my cue. “Lady Cecily needed help?”

  His hard voice lowered, if not exactly softening. “Flat tyre on her bicycle, that was all, when I was out running errands on mine, and I patched hers with my kit, and we got to talking.”

  “Alexander!” roared a male voice close at hand.

  The young man in question lifted the delicate fawn-coloured boot. “To place an order, miss, all you need do is post us a tracing of your right foot – ”

  Mr. Ebenezer Finch hove into view, ranting, “Alexander, I told you – oh.” He broke off rather ungraciously. “I see. You’re helping a customer.”

  How very odd, I thought, that while the father was so choleric, the son appeared so stoical. More than stoical. Nearly wooden.

  After his father departed, without acknowledging the interruption in the least the young man told me, “Lady Cecily was a serious sort of girl. She’d been reading Das Kapital, and we discussed the exploitation of the masses.”

  Das Kapital? I had heard whispers of the book – it was considered shocking, no, beyond shocking, Not Nice At All, simply deplorable. However, as with many such topics mentioned only in undertones – “life of ill repute,” for instance – I had not the faintest idea what it was, actually.

  However, Mr. Alexander Finch did not seem to require my comprehension in order to keep talking. “Lady Cecily considered our meeting most fortuitous. She wanted me to show her the proletariat.”

  Proletariat? A government building, perhaps?

  “Not just domestics, clerks, and artisans, but the true toiling downtrodden factory-fodder masses,” Mr. Alexander went on. “Naturally, I obliged her. We corresponded, and over a period of time – ”

  “Oh!” I interrupted.

  “I beg your pardon, is something wrong?”

  “Not at all.” I had exclaimed because now I saw how Lady Cecily’s charcoal drawings had come to be created. “You took her to the dock district, and the workhouse, and St. Giles, and the fish market at Billingsgate.”

  “How did you know that?” I saw a hint of a frown on his brow that had until now remained as smooth as new cheese. “Yes, exactly so. She would go bicycling with her friends, arranging to meet me, and I would escort her to see how most people in this world-famous city live.”

  Marx. I remembered now. An appalling man named Karl Marx had written Das Kapital. “Lady Cecily was a Marxist?” I whispered, for this could not be spoken out loud.

  “I have told you, I have no use for such labels.” The young man’s scorn of my intellectual capacity showed quite plainly.

  “My apologies,” I said meekly, for my upbringing as the disgrace of the Holmes family had made me quite accustomed to being looked down upon. (Literally so, in this case, as I sat in the bentwood chair and Alexander Finch stood behind the counter.) “I am sorry to trouble you with so many questions. Just let me ask you this: Why did Lady Cecily wish to see the, ah, proletariat?”

  “Why, for education she could not obtain elsewhere, of course. She asked endless questions. Why were there so many pawn-shops. Why did the milkmaid lead a donkey behind her. What were ‘drippings’ and where did they come from. Why were children making bandboxes, and poor women sewing burlap sacks.”

  “But she must have wanted this knowledge for some reason. What were her plans?”

  His tone, although still quite calm, became rather less pleasant. “To make a whipping boy of me, by the look of things.”

  Not at all the answer I had expected. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Whatever could be plainer?” He mimicked my dismay. “She has gone off somewhere, while I take the blame.”

  Rather helplessly I suggested, “Perhaps she didn’t realise you would be blamed.”

  “Why the ladder, then?”

  I sat silent, knowing all too well why the ladder: so that Lady Cecily’s family, aware of her only as a girl who drew sugary pastels, would think she had gone off with a seductive beau, silly young thing.

  Whereas in truth, a young lady who read Marx might be capable of anything.

  I asked Mr. Alexander Finch, “But did she not confide in you at all? Have you any idea where she has gone ?”

  “I don’t know a thing about any of it,” the young man said, arranging the boots so that they formed a straight line marching across the counter-top, “but what I think is, she walked right out the front door and put that ladder there herself.”

  CHAPTER THE NINTH

  ON MY WAY BACK TO ST. PANCRAS STATION I stopped at a bookshop. “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx,” I told the portly gentleman behind the counter.

  He did not move; indeed, he appeared to have, like various fairy-tale unfortunates, turned to stone, except for his mouth, which opened and closed several times.

  “I assure you,” I told him, “that after I have had a brief look inside it, I fully intend to cover it in baize and use it as a doorstop.”

  His mouth settled into a disapproving line before he spoke. “In English translation, mi
ss, or in the original German?”

  “In English, of course.” Did I look like a scholar? Did I sound like one? Oh, dear, I must be more careful to control my gentrified accent, with which Alexander Finch had twitted me.

  I did not at all know what to think of Alexander Finch. I had been able to read very little in his face, but his manner was odd at times. Never quite improper, but subtly peculiar. Yet I felt sympathy for him, subject as he was to his father’s temper; I admired his stoicism, and I appreciated his willingness to speak frankly with me. His theory that Lady Cecily had left by the front door and placed a misleading ladder at her own window appealed to me; it was the sort of thing I would have done.

  All in all, however, leaving the bookshop with my heavy parcel, I felt that I had not learned much.

  And after scanning portions of Das Kapital that evening in the privacy of my lodging, I felt that – except for having learned what “proletariat” was, namely, the common people – other than that, I knew rather less than before. Lady Cecily, a convert to Marxism after reading this book? I had studied Hobbes, Darwin, even Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man with interest, but Marx – I must admit that Marx put me to sleep.

  Quite soundly. I awoke the next morning wondering what sort of intellect Lady Cecily might possess, to be able to appreciate such rarefied rubbish.

  And what, considering some of his rather shocking statements, Alexander Finch had been reading.

  And if Lady Cecily had indeed marched out the door on her own, what had she worn, and where had she gone, and for what purpose?

  But all such questions flew from my mind unresolved as I sat in my office sipping my morning tea and looking through the newspapers, for in the personal column of the Pall Mall Gazette I spied the following:245255 33151545 3315 4445154144 12432445244423 335144155133 21245215 45353424222345 333545231544

  Snatching for paper and pencil, I scrawled the alphabet in lines of five letters, then set to work.

  245255. Second line, fourth letter, I. Fifth line, second letter, V. Fifth line, fifth letter, Y.

  IVY.

  It was for me!

  Feverishly I worked on. Fully deciphered, the message said, IVY MEET ME STEPS BRITISH MUSEUM FIVE TONIGHT MOTHER.

  Oh.

  Oh!

  So quick, so sudden, just like that, to see my mother again? I felt as if my heart had stopped.

  And just as quickly it started again, beating hard and quick like a regimental drum, as a thick porridge of conflicting emotions stirred through me. I loved Mum. I hated her. She had abandoned me. She had rescued me. She didn’t love me. But she had given me freedom, by slipping me a great deal of money and also by the way she had raised me. Her stubborn independence, her adamant championing of women’s rights –

  Wait a minute.

  IVY MEET ME STEPS BRITISH MUSEUM FIVE TONIGHT MOTHER.

  The British Museum? That despised institution? Mum loathed the British Museum for its continual insults to female scholars. “Steps British Museum” seemed a most unlikely place for her to choose for a rendezvous.

  And in that moment, the moment doubt entered my mind, I discovered that, contrary emotions notwithstanding, I wanted to see my mother. Yearned to. I quite desperately tried to believe the message anyway, telling myself that Mum had simply chosen the British Museum because it was a convenient meeting place, centrally located in a respectable area of the city.

  But at the same time I could almost hear her remembered voice inside my head adjuring me, Enola, think.

  I thought.

  And my thoughts provided no comfort. This message did not use our code of flowers in any way. Mum would not have said “meet me” – she would have made some reference to either the scarlet pimpernel or the mistletoe, both longtime symbols of a tryst. She would not have said “Mother.” Instead, she would have said “your chrysanthemum,” meaning Mum.

  Inescapable conclusion: This message had not been placed in the newspaper by her.

  But I still wanted to believe it must have been Mum. Who else could have –

  Oh, no.

  I knew who.

  And thinking of him, my too-clever brother, I needed to say something quite naughty. “Oh, my stars and garters!”

  Such was my degree of perturbation that it was difficult to keep presence of mind. I managed to muster that valuable commodity just sufficiently to scan the rest of the personal advertisements in all of the newspapers. In case there might really be something from Mum.

  There was not, of course. Indeed, it was a bit too soon; previous missives had taken a week or more to arrive. While I had no idea how or where the Gypsies wintered, I pictured Mum somewhere far out in the countryside, requiring time to receive her publications by mail, decipher my message, check the train schedules, and post a reply.

  And as she would be coming into London by rail, would she not have asked me to meet her at, or near, some railway station? Surely she would.

  British Museum, humbug. Whoever had placed that advertisement had his own considerations in mind, not Mum’s.

  Whoever? Humph. I knew well enough that it was Sherlock.

  Although it took me a few hours, and a headache, to hypothesise how this disturbing turn of events might have come about, then decide what to do.

  Luckily Dr. Ragostin’s excellent secretary had kept Dr. John Watson’s address.

  Early in the afternoon, I took a cab to that worthy physician’s office, finding myself let out in front of a modest practice-and-residence on a side street of northwest London.

  A page whom Joddy could have emulated for manners showed me into a small, slightly shabby waiting-room and told me that the doctor was currently out but should return soon, for his consulting-hours began at one. The casement clock in the corner read a quarter till that hour. I was glad to wait.

  As the clock chimed one, a stout old woman with a goiter and a uniformed commissionaire with a limp joined me in the waiting-room. However, I was let into the doctor’s consulting-room first.

  Like his waiting-room, it was small and just a trifle thread-worn about the upholstery and draperies.

  “Miss, um . . .” Standing up behind his desk to greet me, the kind-eyed doctor recognised me, but could not place me.

  “Miss Meshle, from Dr. Ragostin’s office.”

  “Miss Meshle!” His smile lighted his otherwise commonplace face, making it positively charming. “Do sit down.” He motioned me into the patient’s chair and seated himself behind his desk again. “And what may I thank for this unexpected pleasure?”

  So open and friendly was his manner that I believe I actually blushed. I would have adored this man for a father.

  Until that moment, although I had often thought how nice it would be to have a friend or – or family, I suppose, not eccentric and scattered but real family that spent evenings reading in the parlour – still, I hadn’t realised I would have liked to have a father. My own father had passed away when I was four years old, and until that moment I hadn’t particularly missed him.

  But I did now.

  “I, um, am afraid, that is, I must not take up much of your time,” I told Dr. Watson, faltering a bit from surprise at my own feelings. “Dr. Ragostin has, ah, reviewed your case and, um, sent me to ask you a question.”

  “By all means. I am delighted to hear of his interest. Just yesterday I was saying to myself that I must stop by his office and inquire . . . but now here you are. Please do go on.”

  “Dr. Ragostin would like to know, has Mr. Sherlock Holmes been following certain ciphers in the personal columns of the Pall Mall Gazette?”

  “Holmes always reads the ‘agony columns’ in all of the major newspapers,” Watson replied.

  “Yes, but any ciphers in particular? Did you notice anything upon his desk, for instance, when you visited him?”

  “Oh, yes, but that had nothing to do with the newspaper. Ciphers, yes, but it was a dainty little booklet of them, handmade, with watercolour flowers painted upon it. Not at
all the sort of thing one would expect to find Holmes working upon. More like a lady’s hobby. Holmes quite snapped at me when I tried to have a closer look at it.”

  It was as I had feared. Feeling a bit weak, I closed my eyes.

  “Miss Meshle? I know you said you are not here to consult me as a physician, but – are you ill?”

  “Just a dreadful headache, Dr. Watson.”

  Quite a headache indeed. The “lady’s hobby” had to be my cipher book, created by Mum and given to me upon my fateful fourteenth birthday in order that its secret messages might tell me where her hoarded fortune was hidden. It was, indeed, my most precious memento of my mother. But my first day in London, it had been stolen from me by a cutthroat while I was unconscious, and I had thought it lost and gone forever.

  Now, however, I saw what must have happened: When Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard had gone to arrest Cutter, he had searched the boat’s cabin. He had found this flowery little booklet, incongruous enough in such a place that he had showed it to his friend Sherlock Holmes. Or perhaps the great detective had been there for the search and had seen the item in question himself.

  And had recognised his mother’s handwriting.

  This, then, was how my brothers knew of my financial well-being. After solving the ciphers, Sherlock must have made certain inquiries or investigations at our mutual childhood home, Ferndell Hall.

  At the same time, he had very likely deduced a connection with ciphers he had seen in the personal columns of the Pall Mall Gazette – ciphers that mentioned “chrysanthemum” and “ivy.” Almost certainly he had solved them as well. He had been eavesdropping, as it were, on the communications between me and Mum.

  And now he had placed his own advertisement to bait a trap for me.

  “Miss Meshle.” Dr Watson sounded concerned. “You do not look well at all.”

  After taking my pulse and inquiring what I had eaten for luncheon, the good doctor gave me a bromide and had me lie down on the cot in his examining-room while he consulted with his other patients. Perhaps an hour passed before he poked his head in and asked, “Any better?”