The Case of the Perilous Palace (The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, Book 4)

by Jordan Stratford

  “Wednesday,” added Ada. “Since Wednesday.”

  “Caricature?” said Sir John, not sure if he should be pleased that he was being given credit, or angry at not having a clue as to what, precisely, was going on.

  “Creature,” corrected Ada. “Primates, Hominidae, Pongo, P. pygmaeus.”

  “Please do excuse me,” said Mary quietly, who gave the tiniest curtsy of her life before leaving.

  “Honestly,” said Ada, exasperated, “is it absolutely impossible to get a piece of fruit? Winter pears? An apple? Anything.”

  Baroness Lehzen stepped forward. “Pardon me,” she said, addressing the palace guards. “You are…?”

  “Burke,” said the first guard. “And this is Wally.”

  “Burke, Wally,” resumed the baroness, “would you be so kind as to fetch a maid, or procure any sort of fruit you may encounter?”

  “Very good, miss,” said Burke.

  “Miss Baroness,” Wally tried to correct. The two trotted off down the hall, and Drina’s little dog, Dash, decided to follow them in hopes they might do something interesting.

  “She can’t be a Miss Baroness” they could all hear from down the hall as the pair argued.

  “Well, she’s not a Highness,” said Wally. “I don’t think.”

  “A Middleness, then” was the reply.

  “You’re going to get us sacked, you know,” Wally said.

  Shortly, Mary returned with a brief apology, followed by a footman with sliced apples, pears, and raisins on a silver tray.

  Mary selected a slice of apple and placed it in Ada’s waiting fingers.

  Ada slowly, carefully extended her arm into the unlit fireplace, and up the chimney. A moment later, she withdrew her hand, and the apple was gone.

  “Again,” she said.

  Mary handed Ada another slice of fruit, and once more Ada placed her arm in and up the chimney. Only, this time she slowly withdrew it practically as soon as she inserted it.

  The room gasped as one, as an impossibly long, red, hairy arm descended from the sooty chamber, with impossibly long grey fingers, groping about for the apple, which Ada offered. The hand took its prize and retreated.

  “That’s right,” Ada coaxed. “Come on out. There’s more. That’s it.”

  The arm returned, attached to a squat, shaggy body covered in red fur. Atop the barrel-shaped torso was its head, with a grey disk of a face and small, bright eyes.

  It was indeed the face Mary had seen in the secret passage, and what was once a horror now seemed both kind and afraid.

  “Faith!” exclaimed the baroness.

  “Zooks!” exclaimed Sir John.

  “Never you mind about them,” Ada told the creature. “Come on.”

  The animal took a step out of the fireplace, and grasped Ada’s hand. It put one finger on its lips as if it was considering what to do.

  “Orangutan,” Ada said. “From the Bonnie Marguerite, out of Borneo, to London for the circus. Stuck in the walls for days, poor thing.”

  “Oozmansvo denenvuk!” squawked Lory.

  Smiling, the orangutan answered. The sounds were remarkably similar.

  “Precisely,” said Ada.

  “Not Hungarian, or Croatian. Orangutan,” Baroness Lehzen said in amazement.

  “Cor, look at that ’andsome fellow,” said Burke from the doorway, Wally behind nodding agreement.

  The orangutan turned, and continued grinning. Drina took a slice of apple from the tray, and offered it to the grateful ape, who took it gently.

  “But why did he go up the chimney?” asked Mary.

  “Well, just now I think he went up there because he was frightened,” said Ada. “And because he’d hidden there before. When the book went missing.”

  “What book?” demanded Sir John.

  “One of the princess’s sketchbooks, Sir John,” explained Baroness Lehzen.

  “You’ve told me nothing of a missing fishhook,” he said huffily. “I am to be inflamed of everything!”

  “Informed,” corrected Ada.

  Drina intervened. “I just noticed it was missing today, Sir John. I’m sure the baroness had no time to tell you until this moment.”

  “Well?” Sir John asked. “Where is it?”

  “Orangutans,” Ada began, “are gentle, curious creatures native to Borneo. This fellow was on a very long boat trip to England, and then was sent, or sold, to the circus. Clearly, he didn’t think much of that, and escaped. He happened upon the palace, scaled the wall for safety, and discovered an unlocked window, in Drina’s apartment.”

  Everyone nodded in unison, even the orangutan.

  “Right, then here he is, terribly lost, when he enters this room, leaving a telltale bit of mud on the floor, and discovers the sketchbook in question. He has a brief conversation with Lory here—”

  “Conversation!” squawked Lory.

  “—and when startled, possibly by a maid who cleans up the mud, but not the trace of it under the door, our friend here finds the closest hiding place, up the chimney, leaving a stray red hair on his way up. He waits for the coast to clear. Then he sees someone”—and Ada here did her best not to emphasize the someone—“enter the secret passage, and follows. I fear he was trapped in there, until his recent release.”

  “That explains everything, Ada,” said Mary, delighted. “Except the location of the sketchbook.”

  “Ah,” Ada said. “I expect”—and she put her arm up the sooty chimney and felt about for a moment—“here. There’s a little ledge…”

  She held in her hand the book, bound in red linen but now quite grimy from the fireplace. She placed the filthy thing in Drina’s grateful hands.

  “Sorry,” she added.

  “Let me see that!” insisted Sir John. Rudely, he snatched the book from the young princess. Certain it was something secretive or incriminating, he examined it with a scowl. After a few pages, however, he relented.

  “Dolls,” he sighed, handing back the book with contempt.

  “Indeed, Sir John,” Drina said, “hardly noteworthy at all.”

  “Anyway, I think I felt something else up there,” Ada said, straining once more up the chimney, blackening her sleeve in the process. “Got it.”

  In Ada’s now coal-black hand shone an equally black object, a small figurine of a cat. Not exactly a cat, she discovered upon examination, but a cat with the head of a woman.

  “Missing this?” Ada offered.

  “Why, yes,” said Drina. “I hadn’t noticed, but it does go on the mantel.”

  The orangutan reached out to touch the cat figure as though it were a beloved pet.

  “May I ask,” asked Ada pointedly, “where this came from?”

  “It was a gift,” answered the baroness. “From your cousin. Medora Leigh.”

  “Why do you keep calling her that? Medora Leigh, I mean.”

  “Lady Ada,” the baroness explained, “it is customary to use one’s formal name at court. Even for your cousin Libby.”

  “One name in here,” Ada said aloud to herself. “And another out there.” She turned the object over in her hand. “A sphinx,” she noted. “Of black quartz.”

  That phrase had turned up in the Wollstonecraft detectives’ last case. The implications were…not good.

  Mary awoke in Kensington Palace, in one of the many guest rooms. The early-morning light was made brighter by the cozy blanket of snow outside the leaded windows. Her previous night’s adventure had let her sleep through the maid’s careful laying of the fire, and she took in the moment to appreciate the luxury of it all. The quiet morning, the warm fire, the fine bedding. She may never again, she thought, awaken like a princess, so best to note every single detail, should she require it for a story.

  But the story fragment t
hat clung to her was not one of royal grandeur, but one born of the terror from last night, gripping the rope, seeing the long stretches of winter earth as hard, and bitter, and desolate. Words came to her, and the room was of course furnished with a writing desk, paper, quill, and ink.

  So immersed was Mary in her story that she did not hear the knock of the maid, inviting her to breakfast, and it took several discreet “ahems” to rouse her.

  An hour later, washed and dressed and breakfasted with still no sign of either Drina or Ada, Mary found herself in the lush, exquisite hall.

  Drina descended the stairs, her hand held tightly by the Baroness Lehzen. Both smiled broadly at Mary, who did her best curtsy. She was certain all of the Marylebone house would fit neatly between the grand front door and the staircase.

  “Mary,” said the princess. “How ever can I thank you? You have done me a tremendous kindness, you and Lady Ada both.”

  “Actually,” said Mary, “I do have just a few questions.”

  “Certainly,” said the baroness, in a tone that suggested they were free from being overheard.

  “Where is Lady Ada?”

  “She mentioned she had a conveyance of her own devising secured to the roof, and said she preferred to go home in that,” Drina said, impressed. “And she has left you a note.” Drina handed the folded, sealed parchment to Mary, who accepted it with a nod, bow, and curtsy all at once.

  “How does it work?” Mary asked. “Your sketchbook, I mean.”

  Drina reflexively glanced left and right, leaning slightly closer.

  “Each doll is a different day. A hat represents one feeling, a dress another. The colors matter, too, and even though I just draw them with pen and ink, I know what the color of each thing is. It’s nothing so dramatic, just my own thoughts and feelings, but private all the same. The only thing I have that is. That’s why it mattered so.”

  “A code,” said Mary.

  “A code,” said Drina.

  “Thank you,” Mary said. Asking further on the subject would be prying, so she changed tack. “And our ape friend?”

  “He is in the care of Burke and Wally. They are extraordinarily fond of him, and have sworn to see him returned to his home.”

  “To Borneo?” Mary marveled.

  “It appears they wish to accompany him, so I have released them from service, by their request,” said Drina.

  “One more question. Eagle mid rho? That was you?” Mary asked.

  “It was,” said Drina with a small smile.

  “Good clue!” Mary acknowledged.

  “It’s not mine, I must confess. Lady Ada’s cousin Medora Leigh discovered the passage upon one of her visits. She referred to it thusly, that I should remember it.”

  “Well, it’s awfully clever,” said Mary.

  And then everything made a horrible, horrible kind of sense.

  Mary felt herself turning grey. Everything she had learned from the first moment she had become friends with Ada jumped up and down, clamoring in her brain for attention.

  Eagle mid rho.

  Image held, or.

  Medora Leigh.

  Anagrams. Word scrambles, all different, but the same letters. A secret code for secret passages.

  The girl who pretended friendship to the princess was the same girl who lurked behind the mirror, writing a boast about how foolish the princess was to trust her. It struck Mary as being so tremendously clever and impossibly wicked at the same time.

  “I say, Miss Mary, are you quite well?” the baroness asked.

  But Mary was not well. As the Ada-bits of Mary’s brain grew louder, so did Mary’s heart feel as if it were retreating in her chest, running away from the awfulness the clues presented her.

  “Drina,” Mary said quietly. “I know you’re made to feel self-conscious about your accent, and I assure you, you do not have one. Not the slightest. But still, you speak German, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Drina, if a little shyly.

  “Eagle mid rho. What is the German word for ‘eagle’?” Mary thought she knew, had heard it or read it somewhere, and wished fervently that she had not, wished she were wrong.

  “Adler,” stated Drina plainly.

  Mary, it turned out, had not been wrong.

  Eagle mid rho was Medora Leigh, and “eagle” also meant “Adler.”

  And “Adler” was Radel.

  Nora Radel, Ada’s nemesis. A criminal mastermind, and lover of word games, the supposedly cleverest girl in England, whose code name was the Sphinx of Black Quartz. Like the black-quartz sphinx given to a princess by a girl named Medora Leigh, who was also called Libby, who was Ada’s own cousin.

  Mary practically fainted on the spot, but her courage prevailed and she gathered her senses.

  “Please do promise me,” Mary managed to get out, “that under no circumstances will you entertain Ada’s cousin until you hear from us. I fear…” But Mary couldn’t find the words for what she feared. And so she settled for “Please. She is not…as she seems.”

  Drina and the baroness said nothing, merely looking at one another, and nodding in seriousness.

  Farewells were said. Mary for the last time stepped into the enchantment of the magnificent carriage and noticed almost none of it, so desperate was she to consult with Ada. Her heart was banging about her chest—she could scarcely believe what she had realized. She tried to calm herself, go over the variables just as Ada would, but it was to no avail. Her imagination spun possible plots and machinations faster than her reason could sort them.

  There was, however, one brief instant when she could swear she snatched a glimpse of bat wings, soaring over London.

  It was at that moment she realized she held in her hand the note that Ada had given Drina, and that Drina had given her.

  Anxiously, she popped the wax of the seal. She unfolded the note, on palace stationery, to reveal a single, brief sentence written in the hand of a twelve-year-old genius.

  The note simply stated:

  “I know.”

  All was abuzz at the Godwin house for dinner on Christmas Eve. Mary and Jane laughed and worked in the kitchen like wooden figures in a cuckoo clock, spinning and stepping and never crashing into one another. Their older sister, Fanny, labored tirelessly alongside Mrs. Godwin, who sang merry little songs in French, and they all glowed as much from happiness as from the heat in the small room. The scent of goose, of cinnamon and nutmeg and plum sauce, enlivened the air, and in the next room, Mr. Godwin was managing both the baby and the stringing of garlands by the fire. All was cozy and festive, warm and welcoming.

  Guests arrived with cheer: first Mr. and Mrs. Woolcott with their ward, Allegra, who gave a knowing wink to Mary and could not wait to explain how simple it was to escape from iron shackles with a snick knife and a modicum of savvy. The Woolcotts were warmed with mulled cider spiced with cloves, and the dusting of snow that had settled upon shawls and hats first melted and then steamed away in the homey, book-strewn apartment.

  Next to arrive was Peebs, fresh from his journey, bearing letters for Mr. Godwin and novels for the girls, who accepted their gifts with broad smiles.

  “La, Peebs, we’ve been having such an adventure!” Mary said, handing him a warm cup.

  “I’m glad you’re well, Mary,” Peebs said. “I do look forward to hearing all about it.”

  “Have you seen Ada?”

  “No,” Peebs replied. “I’ve only just arrived in London. It so happened that I came across some papers I thought might be of some interest to your father, and popped ’round to wish you all a happy Christmas.”

  Mary was about to regale her tutor with her tale of a spied-upon princess, a secret book, a hidden passage, and an exotic orangutan but was cut short by a knock on the door. Seeing that everyone had their hands full in preparation f
or dinner, and that Allegra was attempting to do a handstand in the crowded parlor despite Mrs. Woolcott’s protestations, Mary excused herself to answer the door.

  “Charles!” Mary exclaimed, delighted. “Happy Christmas!”

  “And to you, Mary,” said Mary’s friend with a grin. “I’ve just arrived home and wanted to wish the very best to you and yours.”

  “Oh, do come in,” Mary pleaded.

  But Charles couldn’t stay long. After a hearty thank-you to Peebs for recommending him for his new position, he cheerfully made his way to his own family’s new home.

  Mary returned to the kitchen then, where Mrs. Godwin was bringing out the goose, to a great deal of oohing and aahing. There was another knock, only this one barely audible. Not because it was a soft knock but because of the din of the party—and this knock was farther away.

  Mary handed off a bundle of spoons to Jane, and trotted down the stairs to the door of the Polygon building itself. She opened the door, and a gust of snow blew in.

  The carriage waiting outside resembled a black cake dusted in sugar. And between the carriage and the door stood Ada.

  “Ada!”

  Mary embraced her, and Ada’s shoulders rose into her ears as her only response to the hug.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry,” Mary apologized, remembering that Ada was not always fond of being squished so. “Please, do come in.”

  “No,” said Ada cheerfully. “It’s all a bit people-y in there, I expect, but I am glad to see you.”

  “There’s so much, I don’t know where to begin! Your cousin Libby—”

  “Is Nora Radel. And a criminal mastermind. I know. And you know—well done, Mary. Nobody else knows, though. Well, she knows, of course. But I don’t think she knows we know. Yet. Anyway. I need a plan.”

  “You’ll come up with one, I’m sure of it.”

  “I should hope so,” said Ada. “I’ve just come from the docks. The Bonnie Marguerite set sail this afternoon, with the orangutan. And those two guards, gone with him.”