Indeed, I took a hansom cab to Mayfair so that I might enjoy, whilst pretending not to notice, the admiring glances of the populace. Never has a fair lady felt less presentiment of impending doom.
Alighting from my cab in front of Florence Nightingale"s handsome brick house, I turned to pay the cabbie- Nearby and closing in on me I heard the most astonishing, almost human cries of joy. The next moment, furry feet nearly bowled me over! As I turned to see what had jumped upon me, time played the most peculiar trick, rather like an accordion with all the air pumped out of it; I might as well have been a child again, so instantly I embraced my beloved dog.
"Reginald!" Without a thought for my dress, for appearances, onlookers, or anything else except Reginald Collie, I sat right down on the pavement to hug him in both arms, laughing and weeping as he waggled and licked my face and cried canine yawps of joy.
Bliss. For brief, ecstatic moments. Then a pair of long, slender, but strong hands came down, clipping a leash to Reginald"s collar, and I looked up into the carefully expressionless face of my brother Sherlock.
But I refused to let go of my happiness. Still laughing, I extended a hand to him and let him help me to my feet. "Mr. Sherlock Holmes!" I burbled in dulcet tones an octave higher than my normal speaking voice. "Oh, just wait until I tell my aunt that I have met the famous Sherlock Holmes!"
Astonishment trumped control; his jaw fairly dropped for a moment before he disciplined it. "That was you in Watson"s parlour?"
"Studying the bizarre bouquet his enemy had sent him. Yes." Still caressing Reginald with one hand, brushing dog hair from my dress with the other, I challenged Sherlock, "Now, confess, you would never have known me if it were not for our furry old friend here."
"I admit you are quite right. I am utterly taken aback. I do hope that the wedding ring I feel beneath your glove is merely part of your disguise?"
"Quite so."
"Then you remain unmarried and, it is fervidly to be hoped, virginal?"
"My dear brother!" I protested with some asperity.
"Forgive me. Of course I should not ask, but-I am all confusion-even I, seldom an admirer of the fair s.e.x, can see that you are quite lovely."
I felt heat in my face, and could not speak, struggling not to smile with too much pride.
Sherlock went on, "It would appear that finishing school is unnecessary."
My expression must have changed, frozen, for he hastened to add, "I no longer have any intention of coercing you into such an establishment, my dear sister, I a.s.sure you. Miss Nightingale has enlightened me regarding the, ah, disadvantages of young ladies" boarding schools."
"How good of her. But has she enlightened Mycroft?" For my elder, and exceedingly stubborn, brother was the one who held legal power over me.
Sherlock"s glance shifted sidewards, confirming my suspicion: I was not yet out of danger. I must get away. At the earliest opportunity.
The thought wrenched my heart, for I quite adored the stimulating company of my brother Sherlock.
In his most crisp tones he said, "My reason for finding you in this irritatingly simple manner-I should have thought of it a year ago!-has nothing to do with Mycroft."
"Something has happened?"
"Quite an odd something. There has been a most peculiar communication from our mother."
CHAPTER THE NINTH.
MUM!.
"Then she is alive?" I exclaimed, my thoughtless response revealing the fear I had scarcely acknowledged to myself: Because I had not heard from her in so many months, she might be no longer with us. Not that she had ever been with us, exactly. What had the Gypsy woman said about an arrow shot into the sky, an owl flying in the moonless night? Mum rode with the caravan of many beautiful horses, black starred with white. Might this have been a poetic way to say she had pa.s.sed on, expired, crossed over-I detested the conventional euphemisms, yet found myself taking refuge in them- My brother"s face a.s.sumed the superior look of a logician. "Because you have not heard from her in several months, you have thought she might be deceased? My dear sister, I did not hear from her in years, yet remained a.s.sured she was very much alive."
"Yes, because you knew she was cadging money from Mycroft," I retorted a bit tartly, masking the tremulous feelings brought on by my paramount thought: how odd, my encounter with the Gypsy only a few hours ago . . . but I said nothing of this to Sherlock. It was not a matter he could investigate with deductive reasoning.
Instead, I demanded, "A peculiar communication? How so? Peculiar in what way?"
"I shall show you and let you draw your own conclusions." He turned as if expecting me to follow.
"At least tell me what does it say?" I cried.
"I cannot. I have not opened it. It is addressed to you."
I could have screamed, my impatience shot to such a fever heat. "Is this one of your callous schemes to ensnare me?"
"Enola!" As he looked over his shoulder at me, I glimpsed emotion in his face, quickly suppressed. "No, I wouldn"t dare," he responded dryly. "But we ought to go sit down." He inclined his head towards Florence Nightingale"s house, where the front door literally stood open, as if it were a public building, with reformers, government officials, and sundry other visitors coming and going at will, although the famous nursing reformer kept herself a strict recluse in the topmost storey. "Surely you can trust me so far."
The truth, to my dismay, was that I would have trusted him a great deal further.
So into the ma.s.sive brick house on South Street we went, unannounced and utterly unnoticed; in no other upper-cla.s.s residence in London, I am certain, would it have been possible for a tall man in a top-hat leading a scruffy dog and carrying a valise to simply walk in, especially when accompanied by a willowy young woman with her hat knocked askew and paw-prints all over her dainty dress. Because the ground floor was crowded-apparently there was a meeting taking place; I saw a great many red Salvation Army jackets-the three of us (counting Reginald Collie) made our way upstairs to the music-room, where Mrs. Tupper customarily spent her days lest someone play the piano-a great joy to her, as even her deaf ears could hear the music if she sat directly beside the instrument.
"Miss Meshle!" she cried the instant I entered. To her, I would always be "Miss Meshle," former boarder and recent rescuer, no matter how little I looked like that pseudonymous person. My disguises never deceived her, for she had seen them all. Tottering up from her rocking-chair, she hugged me around the waist, and I laid my cheek atop her starched white house-cap, which barely reached my shoulder.
Meanwhile Sherlock brought two other chairs over, and we all sat down. There was no need to make polite conversation to Mrs. Tupper; indeed, she directed all her attention to Reginald Collie, patting his head with both shaky hands and exclaiming, "Wot a darlin" good old-fashioned farm collie, the way a collie oughter be, not one of them needle-nosed spider-legged things ye see in Hyde Park . . ."
Meanwhile, Sherlock laid his valise across his knees, opened it, and withdrew from it a large, flat packet made of brown paper, which he pa.s.sed to me. "Some unknown person left this at the kitchen door of Ferndell in the middle of the night."
Staring at the primitive charcoal renditions of stars, eyes, owls, arrows, snakes, moon, and sun, I told him with great certainty, "A Gypsy put it there." I had seen just such designs very recently on the amulets of a certain Gypsy. I had also seen such designs many times before, painted on their colourful wagons.
"A Gypsy! What makes you say so?"
"Why, she has been roaming with them ever since-" The expression on his face reminded me. "Oh, dear. I forgot you didn"t know."
"How on earth do you know?"
"I guessed, and then I asked her in the newspaper. She replied in the affirmative."
"Would you be referring to that confounded nonsense about "the fourth letter of true love"-"
"Forget-me-not," I explained. "The fourth letter is G. The flower for purity is the lily, fourth letter Y, for thoughts it is the pansy, first letter P, and so on."
He shook his head as if no less bewildered than before. "What would Mother want with a band of stinking, thieving Gypsies?"
"Freedom."
"But such wheedling beggars-"
"Bright caravans and beautiful horses, nights under the stars, no boundaries, the world"s oldest nomadic people playing the world"s most exquisite violin music, and no need to dress for dinner ever again."
"Stewed rabbit," he groaned, still shaking his head not so much in negation as inability to believe, "in a tin pot over a smoky, sooty fire . . ."
Paying no attention to him, I studied the brown paper, not so much the chrysanthemum and ivy at its centre-although the sight of that unmistakably familiar artwork squeezed my heart-but what puzzled me was the dark, ominous charcoal symbols all around, especially the four "evil eyes"-for that is what most folk would call them-in the corners. To me they seemed not so much frightening as frightened.
"Gypsies are superst.i.tious folk," I remarked to Sherlock as casually as if I had not undergone the superst.i.tious practise of palmistry with a yellow-eyed Gypsy a few hours before; I still did not know what to think of her. "These markings are just such lucky charms as they work into their copper amulets. But why have they scrawled them all over this packet?"
"If you would open it," he grumbled, "some reason might come to light."
"Wot"s "at?" exclaimed Mrs. Tupper as she noticed the package for the first time.
"We shall see." Although usually I open envelopes with my fingers, I thought I ought not tear this one. "I suppose I ought to use a knife."
CHAPTER THE TENTH.
SHERLOCK STARTED FUMBLING IN HIS POCKETS FOR a pen-knife, but I simply drew my dagger from my bosom, from its sheath in the busk of my corset.
"Of course. How silly of me not to remember," said Sherlock in owlish tones.
Paying no attention, I slit the end of the thin parcel.
Pressing against its corners so that it opened rather like a mouth, I peered inside. I could see nothing except what seemed to be a muddle of shredded packing-paper. This I shook out, depositing it in my lap.
"Wot in "eaven"s name?" chirped Mrs. Tupper.
"Might you ever so kindly sheathe Excalibur, Enola?" Sherlock suggested mildly.
I did so, scarcely noticing his jesting name for my dagger as I studied the ma.s.s of white paper in my lap. In a strip, or perhaps more than one strip, about an inch wide, it was partially covered on one side with blue-ink fragments of my mother"s flyaway handwriting. I knew at once what it was.
But Sherlock said it first. "A skytale."
Such, I find to my astonishment as I write this, is the proper spelling of the word, evidently with its roots in Greek. I had always, since I was a child, thought of it as a "skitalley," for that is the way it is said. Mum and I had played at "skitalley" whilst I was learning to write. It was quite fun. One takes paper, cuts it into even strips, pastes them end to end, winds them around some cylindrical object, writes one"s message lengthwise down the cylinder, then unwinds the paper. One"s message, now all in bits and pieces on the long strip of paper, cannot be read by its recipient (Mum) until she finds the right size of cylinder to wind it around, whether broomstick, rolling-pin, bra.s.s bedpost, lamp-stand-possibilities at Ferndell were manifold but finite.
But what were the possibilities in London? Nearly infinite.
I would not be able to read Mum"s letter until I had found a cylinder of the proper size to wind it round, and my frustration drove me so nearly to tears that I had to bite my lip. This was what I had been longing for since the day Mum went away: a letter, some words of explanation, perhaps affection, perhaps even-dare I think it-love. . . .
"I must contact Lane at once," declared Sherlock in decisive man-of-action tones, "to find out whether there were Gypsies in the vicinity the night this packet was surrept.i.tiously delivered, and if there were, I must make haste to track them down-"
"Oh, nonsense," I cried with vehemence that surprised me, springing as it did from jealousy I had not yet acknowledged-but there it was; this was my packet and I ought to be the one to find Mum. "Mother has always taken quite good care of herself. Hadn"t you better direct your energies towards finding the Duquessa del Campo?" I told him rather viciously.
He had started to rise to his feet, but mention of that name folded him back into his chair. He stared at me for several moments. "Pray do not tell me," he said finally, "that you came down the stairs and pa.s.sed behind me in the Duque del Campo"s foyer this morning whilst I was distracted by the most peculiar behaviour of a cat?"
"Certainly I will not tell you so," I replied sweetly. "I"ll tell you only that Duquessa Blanchefleur is a lady who truly requires rescue, unless she has chosen a most unlikely way to leave of her own free will." I seized upon the opportunity to learn more about the missing person"s background. "Have you contacted her mother and father? Or made inquiries regarding any discord between her and her husband?"
"Of course I have! By all accounts the Earl of Chipley-on-Wye and his Lady wife are scrupulously genteel and without pretensions. While quite naturally they approve of their daughter"s exalted marriage, certainly they did not arrange it or force it. By all accounts, the Duque won his bride via old-fashioned courtship, has proved to be an exceptionally loving husband, and young Blanchefleur has every reason to consider herself a lucky woman."
His dismissive tone rather starched my spine as I thought of the letter I had seen upon Blanchefleur"s desk, and her melancholy, her restlessness. Yet I had seen no signs of preparations to run away. Also, surely she would not choose to disappear in such an odd and uncomfortable manner.
Quelling my irritation, I spoke to my brother levelly enough. "I find it reasonable to think that her disappearance from the Baker Street Underground was not voluntary. Moreover, there can be only one way it was done: She must have been taken down the Underground track in one direction or the other."
"If her ladies-in-waiting are telling the truth."
"I am convinced that they are. You did not see their red eyes all puffed with weeping."
"And you did."
I refrained from answering.
"Are you suggesting that I should go search the tracks? The London Constabulary has already done so."
"And did they find no ways that toshers, tramps, and the like might use to make their way down to the Thames? Old river-beds, for instance?"
"Certainly they saw such rat-holes aplenty. To investigate each is impossible. If the lady was taken into captivity by such a route, there is nothing we can do except wait for a ransom demand."
"Nonsense. You can find the old woman who lured her into the Underground." A toothless toad of a crone with bristles on her chin and a flaring old-fashioned bonnet; why did I seem to recognise . . . But as my mind cast a flickering image like something from a magic lantern, my speech continued. "I do not think Duquessa Blanchefleur was kidnapped for ransom; if such were the case, then surely a demand would have been received by this time. There are other reasons that villains might seize her. The old woman might have been a procuress-"
"Enola!" He actually paled, so aghast was he to hear such a word from my lips.
And as I had only the vaguest idea what a procuress procured, or for what purpose, in the merest spirit of argument I plunged on. "Or she might have been taken for the sake of her clothing."
I suppose I ought to explain that there was a great trade in stolen clothing in the East End, and there had been a few shocking cases of upper-cla.s.s children actually being abducted as they crossed the street to play with a neighbouring child, then turning up, bawling and mostly naked, in a very different area than that whence they came. For this reason, few such children were allowed upon the street without the accompaniment of a guardian-servant.
"For her clothing? The Duquessa is not a child!" To the contrary, I thought; she seemed quite childlike in many ways, but Sherlock laughed heartily. "Most far-fetched. However, had anything of the sort happened, she should have been home again within the day!"
I did not answer. Indeed I scarcely listened, for at that moment I remembered where I had seen-indeed, had known quite well for a few evil days-an old woman with a bristly chin and a hideous bonnet. Without a word I gathered the papers from my lap, jumped up, hugged Mrs. Tupper, gave Reginald Collie one last pat on the head, and, abandoning my gloves and parasol, ran towards the stairs.
"Enola!" I heard Sherlock shout in quite a wrought tone from behind me.
Stuffing the skitalley-I mean skytale-into my bosom, "I shall send word!" I called over my shoulder as I darted downstairs, out of the house, and ran for all I was worth, hearing Sherlock"s footfalls closing in behind me-but the instant I reached the street, I whistled shrilly in a most unfeminine manner, and a pa.s.sing cab pulled up short. I leapt in and thumped the roof, signalling the cabbie to drive on. As it was of course a hansom cab, I sat in full view of my brother as it trotted away; indeed, I looked over my shoulder to see him about twenty feet behind me, breathing hard and looking fulminous. He would be after me directly. I needed a hiding place-but also I urgently needed to reach the East End. Desperately I needed to disguise myself as I had never disguised myself before.
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH.