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“’Ello, Miss Meshle!” cried Joddy, the boy in buttons who greeted me at the front door of Dr. Ragostin’s stately edifice. Blushing, he then babbled, “Excuse me, I mean, um, good day, Mrs. Jacobson.”
I had been known to him by those names, and more, during the year I was evading my brothers Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes—but those times were no more.
“Both of those persons are as fictitious as Dr. Ragostin himself, Joddy,” I responded with a smile, handing him handing him a bundle of new textbooks I was carrying done up in a strap.
Accepting this in his usual lackwit manner, Joddy gawked up at me—for he had seldom seen me all summer, he probably did not understand what I meant by “fictitious,” nor did he quite know what to make of my sudden appearance in a blouse, a skirt, and a plain straw hat, the simple garb of a scholar. “Um, would yer care for tea, Mrs. Jacobson?” he ventured.
“You will observe that I need no longer disguise myself by wearing a wedding ring, Joddy,” I replied with a smile as I stripped off my gloves. But I had always liked the boy, so I made myself stop teasing him. “I am here simply as myself from now on, and my real name is Enola Holmes. You may place the books on my desk. Yes, I would love some tea, thank you.”
Seating myself in the desk chair, I took a deep breath of satisfaction, surveying my familiar small kingdom in the vestibule outside the double doors leading to the “office” of the great Dr. Leslie Ragostin, Perditorian—the fictitious finder of the lost whose business I, myself, had founded. But, at the moment, I intended to locate no missing persons; I came here simply because it was conveniently proximate to the Women’s Academy where I was beginning my studies, whereas my lodgings at the Professional Women’s Club were much farther away. This comfortable nook, in the boardinghouse I had bought with the money my mother had purloined for me, was perfectly situated to accommodate me between my morning and evening classes.
I opened my textbook of geometry, and from a pocket in my skirt I drew forth my new toys, a compass and protractor. I anticipated that I would quite like geometry, for I loved to draw, and I was to learn a new way of drawing.
I was delightedly making equilateral triangles within circles upon foolscap when Joddy returned with quite a fancy tea tray: a wrought silver strainer full of loose tea leaves balanced on an exquisite cup and saucer with matching creamer and sugarbowl. Joddy poured, then settled the quilted cozy over the teapot to keep the water hot. From so much porcelain and such decorum, I deduced that my arrival had caused some excitement among the servants.
“Do ye require a fire, Miss Meshle?” Joddy asked, as taut as a bird dog on point.
“Miss Holmes,” I corrected him. It felt so good to use my very own name. “From now on and forevermore I am Miss Holmes. No, I do not need a fire; it is not cold. And yes,” I answered the unspoken question that was causing him (and doubtless the others backstairs) such anxiety, “I shall be coming here every day for a while.”
His plump-cheeked young face relaxed; he was very nearly tricked into smiling.
The next day I required a fire, for there was a sudden chill in the air. For a few days the weather continued thus, alternately balmy and frosty, and Joddy’s nose started to run—to my annoyance, for he tended to wipe it on his sleeve. I had just purchased him a handkerchief when one day I arrived, but the boy in buttons was not Joddy. How very odd, for he wore Joddy’s absurd uniform—Prussian-blue jacket with big pearl buttons in close parade down the front, matching blue trousers with white piping down the sides, hat for all the world like a little blue cake with white trimming. For a horridly unsettling moment I thought that someone had taken Joddy and somehow emaciated him overnight, for the uniform hung upon him as if on a skeleton, and his thin, thin face resembled Joddy’s somehow.
This boy in buttons ducked his head and blushed; I suppose I was staring at him. “Paddy, ma’am,” he said to me with a bobbing attempt at a bow after he had shut the door behind us. “Joddy be unwell.”
My mind groped for understanding. “Your name is Paddy.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean yes, Miss ’Olmes.” His voice, like his body, was far thinner than Joddy’s.
“You are Joddy’s brother?”
“A bit younger ’an ’im, yes’m.”
“And you’ve come to take his place because he is sick.”
“Yes, Miss ’Olmes.”
“Do you understand your duties?” How heartless of me, when I should have been inquiring as to the extent of Joddy’s illness.
“Yes, ma’am,” recited Paddy. “I am to sweep the pavement an’ the front steps an’ the like. Tend the front door an’ polish the knob. Look after the vesty-bule. Fetch an’ carry.”
By then I had noticed that he had already lit the fire in the hearth by my desk, and I became more amiable. Graciously accepting his offer of tea, I settled at my desk and started exploring the mysteries of “phi” upon special paper printed all over with tiny squares. Being thus immersed all afternoon, I took no further notice of my boy in buttons until it was time for me to go. As he opened the door for me, I gave him a smile and a penny, saying, “You’ve done very well, but when you get home, please tell Joddy I hope he feels better soon.” Paddy would leave later, after helping serve dinner to the lodgers.
I spent a comfortable night in my room at the Professional Women’s Club, a safe refuge where no men were allowed on the premises. Then, at the Academy the next morning, some of my classmates made overtures of friendship, inviting me to take luncheon with them. So it was not until the afternoon that, pleasantly anticipating a nap on the sofa, I approached “Dr. Ragostin’s” office.
On the front step of the stately house sat such a boy as I had seen many times in the East End, a “street Arab” with bare feet, ragged knickers, and a thin, torn jacket, hapless with his head on his knees, his shabby cap hiding his face.
Such a young vagrant did not belong in my part of London. But as I hesitated before him, uncertain whether the cook would have hysterics if I brought him into the kitchen and gave him something to eat, he raised his head to face me, and I gasped.
It was Joddy!
Joddy, with wet, red eyes, his nose a fountain of greeny-yellow mucus.
“Joddy,” I exclaimed, “you should be home in bed!”
In a clotted voice he inquired, “Paddy?”
“Why, Paddy did quite well!”
“But ’e dint come ’ome.”
A pang seized me as I realized that Joddy’s eyes were tearful and his voice thick not just from illness, but from emotion. He was here on my doorstep, and he had been waiting for me all day, to inquire about his brother.
“Paddy did not return home yesterday evening?” I demanded rather stupidly, as he had just told me so.
“I cain’t find ’im anywhere.” Joddy spoke in the dull tone of one driven almost past tears to despair. “
Me mum is that upset.”
Utterly shocked, I told him, “Wait here. I’ll be back straightaway.” I lunged up the steps and through the door, flung my books on the floor, and ran to the kitchen, where I seized cheese out of the crock and bread from the pantry, loading my pockets.
Washing dishes without looking at me, the cook proclaimed, “That young Paddy left ’ere eight o’clock yesterday evenin’ jist like ’e were supposed ter.”
I plucked apples from a basket.
The cook complained, “I already told this one I don’t know nuffin about Paddy and how dare ’e come ’ere lookin’ like a beggar!”
In all likelihood, I realized with a stab of dismay, Joddy wore the only clothes he owned, and had loaned Paddy his boots yesterday; how had I not realized he and his family were so poor? Snatching an extra shawl from a peg, I ran back outside.
Joddy had started to sob in a weak, hiccupping way. I wrapped the shawl around him and gave him bread warm from the oven. “Come along,” I told him, taking him by the elbow and coaxing him to his feet. My plan was to take him home, ascertain whether his brother had reappeared, and then, if necessary, locate the wretched Paddy. Asking Joddy, “Where do you live?” I stood ready to hail a passing cab.
The miserable boy mumbled something that sounded like “Aldgate Pump.”
“Aldgate Pump?” I exclaimed.
Sucking at the bread he held in both grubby hands, he nodded.
But Aldgate Pump was halfway across London! “How did you get here?”
“Walked.”
A two-hour walk; had he done it every day of his employment with me? Stunned by this revelation, I nearly let a cab drive by before I regained my wits, shot my arm out, and stopped it with a shrill, most unladylike whistle.
“Blimey,” said Joddy, gawking, as I all but lifted him into the cab. Once underway, I extracted paper and pencil from my bosom to draw a picture of the missing person, Paddy, whilst continuing to ply Joddy with food. Once we reached Aldgate Pump, we both drank the water flowing from the mouth of the big brass wolf head jutting out of a tall stone tower surmounted by a wrought iron lamp post. This typically pompous monument to hygiene marked the edge of civilization, so to speak; beyond lay the East End.
I sopped a handkerchief in the pump water and sacrificed it entirely in an effort to clean Joddy’s face. He was so low in spirits that he did not resist me, but I think the cold water refreshed him somewhat. “Which way?” I asked, looking around at a spiderweb of narrow streets all swirling with the usual hurly-burly of the poor: hatless women shouting from doorsteps at tattered, quarreling children, vendors hawking their goods from donkey-carts, boardmen advertising, humanity aplenty—but I saw no sign of poor Paddy.
Silently Joddy led me down one of the crowded roads, pushing past a rat-catcher with full cages who stood talking with two men leading black-and-tan terriers on leashes, bargaining for the use of his rats. Most ladies, I am sure, would have wanted to stop their eyes and ears at the sight of such depravity, but I relished the brawling life of lower-class London: barefoot girls selling matches or sardines or nosegays, blind beggars, tinkers pounding away to mend battered pots, rag-and-bone pickers—
“Ye lovely lydy in a spankin’ new straw ’at!” bellowed someone at me. A man just behind me. I turned to give him a chilling stare, but my mouth dropped open when I saw him: an ordinary-enough chap, but he wore a white top hat with mother-of-pearl buttons sewed cheek by jowl all over it! Also, pearl buttons covered his jacket collar and decorated his shoulders.
“Kind lydy, would yer care to spare a penny fer the horphans?” he asked civilly enough.
I stood speechless. Tugging at my sleeve, Joddy said in tones muffled by mucus, “It’s jist ’Enry Croft.” As if that explained anything.
“Raised in a horphanage I were,” explained Henry Croft. Rows of pearl buttons shimmered down his sleeves, around his cuffs, and down the sides of his trousers, I saw now.
“Orphans?” I inquired. “Or might the penny perhaps go to purchase more buttons?”
“Oh, no, my lydy! People be so careless, I find thim dropped in the street wherever I goes,” he said with the fervor of a true button believer. “I gets up early, and why, just this mornin’ I found these all in a ’eap houtside a public ’ouse.” As he spoke, he reached into his trousers pocket to show me a handful of perfect penny-sized white buttons.
Now, I must admit that Joddy recognized them first. His hand shot up, and he gave a wordless bleat. But at almost the same moment, I demanded of the odd Croft man, “Wait. All in a heap? How many?”
“Why, I dint rightly count.” He began to do so. Much whiter than the cheap ones made of oyster shell that decorated his clothing, these buttons were cut from fine abalone, and instead of holes drilled in them, they had shanks. Even before he concluded, “Nineteen,” I felt quite sure.
“Yes. Nineteen, exactly.” I had always wondered why it wasn’t twenty. These were the buttons from the uniform of a certain boy in buttons now missing.
I reached into a pocket of my own and produced money. Looking “just Henry Croft” straight in the eye, I told him, “I will give you far more than a penny for your orphans if you will take me to where you found these.” His eyes widened, his mouth gaped; I had him hooked like a great fish. “We had better take Joddy home first,” I added, and that wretched boy did not even protest. Eyes swollen and crusted with dried tears, nose even more unsightly, he truly belonged in his bed.
His home, as it turned out, was nearby. His mother, a frantic sort of frizzy-headed hen, met us at the door of the single shoddy tenement room, clung to Joddy, and confirmed that Paddy had not reappeared. Two more children huddled in the folds of her skirt; I gave them all the food that remained in my pockets and saw Joddy nestle among quilts piled in a corner before I left, memorizing the location, knowing I must return with help and, it was greatly to be hoped, with Paddy.
“Now then, this way,” said Henry Croft, striding off at a good clip. As I am regrettably (for a female) long of limb, I had no trouble keeping up with him, and as we walked through the narrow streets, he talked. Profusely. His top hat covered with buttons, he explained, was just the beginning of his ambition; he wanted eventually to have a proper suit with tails all covered with pearl buttons. Costermongers in their “flash boy outfits,” with buttons on their pocket flaps and the fronts of their caps, would look like pearly paupers compared to him. He found buttons in his employment as a street sweeper, and also in back of the paper mill where buttons were cut off rags and just left there. “Wot a waste!” he lamented. “They—”
Crassly, I interrupted. “Are you not curious about those nineteen buttons in your pocket? This boy is missing.” Pulling out the sheet of paper, I showed him the likeness I had drawn of Paddy wearing the pageboy uniform, closely spaced buttons running down the front of the jacket. “Why would anyone take my pageboy and cut his buttons off?”
“Dunno, lydy,” he answered, only dimly interested in anything but himself. “Skinny lad,” he added after I pressed him with silence. “Looks like a pipe cleaner wit’ eyes.”
I sighed. Let me assure you, gentle reader, that my pencil renditions of persons are quite competent and accurate. However, this man was obtuse, so I merely asked, “How much farther?”
“Jist around the next corner.”
Which was occupied, I saw, by a dolly-shop, the cheapest sort of pawnshop, dealing in pots and tinware. A few strides farther on, Henry Croft said, “Right ’ere,” pointing at a trampled patch of unpaved street between a taproom and a doss-house.
“Walk on,” I told him, because many eyes were watching; in that warren, I in my clean and whole clothing was nearly as much of a spectacle as was he. But once around the next corner I stopped and paid him handsomely, and off he went, tipping his preposterous pearly hat at me, quite content to leave me amid a boiling broth of unwashed humanity—all of it hungry for supper, as the sun was lowering (if one could see it behind the pall of smoke, which o
ne could not). A long-aproned baker selling jam tarts balanced a tray above his head with one hand and rang a bell with the other. “Hot eels!” “Ginger beer!” “Rabbit pie!” yelled street vendors lined up along the kerb. Tatterdemalion folk jostled from one dubious source of nutrition to another. Barefoot children chased one another everywhere.
With my drawing of Paddy in hand, I looked around me. I was a well-dressed stranger here, and people would be none too friendly. In such cases, experience had taught me, information would best be obtained from children and drunkards. There would be plenty of drunken men later on. Meanwhile, I approached a ragged girl selling pears from a basket. “Do you know this boy?” I asked as I purchased a pear for a farthing.
She looked quite blank.
“Have you ever seen him?”
She shook her head.
And so did the next several children, and the jam tart man, and an oyster-seller, and sundry others as I wended my way along the street, feeling suspicion like an invisible wall between its denizens and me—but less so with the children. Munching my pear, I showed the picture to a pudding-faced boy leading a toddler by the hand. The boy shook his head, but the baby pointed a wee finger and screamed, “’At’s Buster’s new nakeman!”
“Hush, you!” The boy turned on the little one, but I forestalled him by handing him the remains of my pear. “Where does this Buster live?” I demanded.
Pear already in his mouth, the boy muttered, “The ’Olly an’ Trossel.”
The what? Ollien Hostel? And what in heaven’s name was a nakeman?
Still, I was ahead of where I had been. Buster. Nakeman. Ollya-something. Now, somehow, I had to find Paddy.
Turning around but trying to look aimless, I walked back toward the place Henry Croft had shown me, where the buttons had been. I found that narrow street just as crowded as any other. Folk shied away from me only slightly as I wended my way to the location I sought by the doss-house and the taproom, alert for elucidation of any sort. Might the doss-house, a very primitive sort of inn renting out a patch of floor to sleep on, be considered a hostel? But who was Ollie? I scowled at the crude sign over the taproom door, an advertisement badly in need of repainting, depicting some kind of speckled bird surrounded by a wreath of peculiarly prickly leaves with red dots on them—
Enola Holmes and the Boy in Buttons Page 1