It did not surprise Mary to find the house nearly silent when Mr. Franklin admitted her and took her cape. Ada was likely reading and Peebs was likely writing or planning lessons. Nodding to the ever-silent butler, she climbed the stairs to the library and found it empty of Ada. There was more nothing in the drawing room. She knocked on Ada’s door. Still nothing. Curious, but hardly extraordinary. She went back downstairs, where she found it very curious that Peebs emerged, visibly shaken, from the parlor, envelope in hand.
The expression on Mr. Franklin’s face was curiouser still.
Something was wrong.
Peebs began buttoning his coat at the bottom of the stairs, looking pale and sad.
“Whatever’s wrong, Peebs?” asked Mary. Ada was close at her heels, having come from the upstairs kitchen, bread and butter in hand. She hadn’t seen the curious expression on Mr. Franklin’s face, but it was clear to her that Mary was upset at Peebs’s being upset. Ada was momentarily proud of herself for noticing such a thing, but her pride quickly vanished in the face of concern for her friend.
“I’m afraid that I must take my leave of you.” Peebs’s voice was tight, and two bright red circles bloomed on his cheeks. “There has been a letter from the baroness. I have been dismissed.” He cleared his throat. “Effective immediately.”
Mary could scarcely breathe. She’d had no time to speak with Peebs privately about being a spy. She would be sent away to school and never see Ada again. Her mind was spinning and she knew the secret within her chest was going to explode at any second.
“What letter? Let me see it,” demanded Ada.
Peebs dutifully handed her the note, folded three times and then in half, with a cracked wax seal in blood-red. Her mother’s.
Ada read it aloud:
Mr. Snagsby,
It has come to my attention that you have allowed the girls under your tutelage to operate a detective agency. You may not be aware of this, as Lady Ada can be particularly clandestine in her activities, but the situation is unacceptable nonetheless. You are dismissed from service immediately, and are to send that Godwin girl off as well.
Please tell Lady Ada that she is to remain in the house until my return from the country after Christmas. She shall not receive any further visits from Mr. Babbage. And this “Wollstonecraft Detective Agency” nonsense is at an end.
Lady Anne Isabella Byron
Baroness Wentworth
“How could she possibly know?” asked Mary, bewildered.
“Her spies are EVERYWHERE!” shouted Ada, crumpling the paper and throwing it away.
The word “spies” was too much for Mary, who shouted “PEEBS IS A SPY!” as loudly as she could. Ada went white as a sheet. Mary instantly regretted her outburst.
“No, no! Not like that. He’s not a spy for your mother. He’s a spy for your father!” she babbled. “I was going to tell you but I wanted to give him a chance to explain himself first and I never got the chance!”
Ada shook with rage.
Peebs shot Mary a hurt glance. “It is true,” he admitted. “My name is not Snagsby, it’s Shelley—”
“You’re Percy Shelley,” gasped Mary. Ada didn’t know who that was.
Peebs continued. “I was a friend of your father’s, Ada. Before he died, he made me promise to keep an eye on you, and serving as your tutor allowed me that opportunity. I knew your mother would never countenance my being here if she knew my real identity. I apologize for misleading you.”
There was a long, strange almost-silence, like the hissing of a fuse before a bomb explodes. It was Ada, breathing in as if she were sucking through a straw. A bomb would have been quieter.
“You KNEW?” she screamed at Mary. “Peebs was a spy and you KNEW? You kept a SECRET from me? I thought you were supposed to be my FRIEND! GET OUT! ALL OF YOU! GET! OUT!” and she stormed upstairs, shaking each and every step with an expert stomp, headed no doubt all the way to the attic, and the roof.
But when she reached the top of the stairs, Mary quietly said “Ada?” in a way that made Ada turn and look down, furious and sad at once, tears welling in her eyes.
Mary simply opened her hands wide, showing blackened thumbs. “Mesmerism. Uncanny influence” was all she said, and she uttered it with a resigned desperation. Ada could make nothing of it, and to be fair, Mary had to admit she couldn’t either. Ada resumed trembling with fury and remounted her attack on the stairs, bound for her balloon.
Peebs said nothing, and could not look Mary in the eye as he left. Mr. Franklin gave Mary a slow, sympathetic look, and handed her her cape, fastening it about her shoulders.
Peebs had not closed the door behind him, and Mary looked out at the steps to Marylebone Road, spattered with rain. Her heart suddenly porcelain, Mary took reluctant steps into an altogether different story, one without adventure, without clandestine names, without mystery, without uncanny influence. Without her friend.
The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency was finished.
It was difficult to tell whether the shaking in the balloon’s wicker gondola was from the wind outside or the enraged girl inside.
The space was too small to pace in, but Ada felt as though her entire body had been scooped out and filled with tigers, pacing in cages made of her hands and ribs and head. So she shook, and growled, the tigers helping her out in that way at least.
Peebs was a spy. She had thought he was useless, except for providing the odd book, but obviously he was clever enough to be a spy and had been hiding this cleverness the whole time. He could have been interesting. Useful. The thought frustrated her tremendously.
And Mary had betrayed her by keeping secrets. Peebs and Mary had been in—what’s the word? Cahoots. They had been in cahoots, laughing at her over their little shared secret.
Perhaps Mary was a spy too! Who had sent her here, anyway? To share her tutor. Ada realized she didn’t know. Could it have been her mother?
Ada growled and added her mother to her list of perpetrators: her mother who had left her in the Marylebone house with Miss Coverlet who had abandoned her and with Mr. Franklin who at least never bothered her. And with Miss Cumberland who—
Huh.
That was interesting, at least. She had remembered her maid’s name without even thinking about it. Ada knew she wasn’t good with names that she hadn’t read. Maybe …
No. She was going to make the Peebs cannon big enough to blast the lot of them clear across London, and they could land in a heap on her mother’s doorstep in the country, and they could all be merrily dreadful together. She took out a small notebook and a pencil, to clear her thoughts.
In her notebook, she made a small lowercase p for Peebs. Following that with a comma, she made another small letter, this time an m for Mary. She put a bracket around the two letters. Thinking, she added an a for herself, and even a small c for Charles, the boy who wasn’t officially there but who had placed the advertisement in the newspaper and brought their mail.
Above the brackets, she made a big W for Wollstonecraft, and then thought to add an F for Mr. Franklin, who had helped by locking Peebs in the distillery closet. This little alphabet soup, bordered by curly brackets, calmed the tigers in the cages of her limbs.
She began another cluster of letters: an r1 for Rebecca Verdigris, and an r2 for Rosie Sparrow, the maid. A b for Beau, and an a2 for Abernathy and an l for Lady Verdigris. Above all this, she placed a large V.
Obviously, there were some things that didn’t fit in the brackets, so she made a new grouping. An a3 for the acorn itself, and a b2 for the fishy-smelling book. A frh1, 2, and 3 for men in fuzzy red hats, and an fm for the fishmonger. Even an o for the omnibus that had nearly squished her flat in the road. The guard, g, in Newgate Prison. With each collection of brackets, she simplified all the thoughts in her head down to manageable groups, like variables in an equation.
With a red pencil, she began to make little circles: around Rebecca and Beau, around a forgotten and hastily remembered h for Colonel Havisham, Rebe
cca’s dead uncle who left Rebecca the acorn in the first place. And then a line connecting Havisham with Abernathy, and then another connecting Havisham with his sister, Lady Verdigris.
She put an X through the guard in red pencil; he seemed to be over with. An arrow from the three men in red fezzes leading … where? The exercise made her calm enough to think. Each line and letter made her breathing easier, like emptying a jumble drawer onto the floor, sorting out piles, and only putting back the necessary things.
She could breathe again. She had her books. And she’d hardly seen Mr. Babbage since all this Wollstonecraft Detective Agency business started—surely her mother wouldn’t really prevent him from visiting? It was the baroness, no slouch at mathematics herself, who had encouraged Ada’s love of math in the first place. Would Mr. Babbage side with her mother and stay away? Could Miss Coverlet come back? Could things just go back to the way they were before?
Ada calmed herself. She still had her balloon. She still had her books. She didn’t need Mary or anyone, or even Mr. Babbage, if he was going to be horrid and listen to her mother. She still had her books. Books could tell her everything she needed to know.
Like mesmerism, she thought.
If she could find a book about mesmerism, then that would prove she didn’t need anyone. Books stayed put, and would not abandon her like Miss Coverlet, or that treacherous Peebs, or Mary. Or anyone in the chart of variables she had made.
She grabbed her notebook, popped the hatch, and slid down the thick ropes to the roof, the attic, and the library.
She still had her books.
Anna Cumberland had woken, washed, and dressed before dawn. She stirred up the fire in the kitchen to make tea and warm a basin for Lady Ada, and saw to her breakfast.
There were lists for shopping, and schedules for cleaning. Putting away the fall linens, and getting out the winter linens. There were bills from the florist, from the butcher, from the grocer and the newspaper and the fishmonger, bills for paper and candles and coal and soap and polish, all to be paid by Mr. Franklin on the baroness’s accounts, and all to be sorted first by Anna.
As the thin sun tinted the sky from dark gray to a lighter gray, she fetched coal and kindling and began setting the fires above stairs.
When Anna entered the library, her first thought was that of burglary. Every book was off the shelves, opened and upturned and stacked atwist. The drawers were pulled from the reading desks, and the cupboards were all hanging open. But there, sprawled upon an odd and uncomfortable nest of books, slept Ada herself. No burglar, just a perfectly ordinary eleven-year-old girl genius who happened to have built herself a fort out of every single book in the library.
“Mesmerism,” said Ada sleepily.
“Beg your pardon, Lady Ada?” asked Anna.
“Mesmerism. The practice of inducing a mental state in a subject of which the subject may be unaware.”
“I’m sorry, Lady Ada, but I’m still not—”
“It means,” said Ada, waking up, “that if you use mesmerism on someone, you can make them do something without their even knowing they’re doing it. Uncanny influence. Terribly handy. Explains everything.”
“Does it, Lady Ada?”
“It does, Miss Cumberland.”
Anna was so shocked at Ada’s remembering her name that she nearly dropped her coal shuttle.
“Right,” continued Ada, rubbing her eyes. “Much to do. First, congratulations. You wanted to be a lady’s maid, and I’m not sure what that is exactly, but you are one. Starting now.”
“I’m … Thank you, but I think the baroness—”
“Isn’t here. Not until after Christmas. That’s what she wrote to Peebs. Until then I’m the one with the ‘lady’ in front of my name, and I’m, whatsit, like the captain of a ship.”
“In command?” offered Anna.
“That’s it. In command. So I’ll do what I want. I need you to take these envelopes to the boot-polish factory. Find a boy named Charles.”
“I suspect, Lady Ada, and begging your pardon, there may be several boys named Charles at the boot-polish factory.”
“Ask for one who reads. There can’t be a lot of those, and if there are, so much the better. I bet there’s just the one in particular, though.”
“At once, Lady Ada.”
“Too many variables! That was the problem all along. I wanted to turn everything into numbers and feed them into the bleh. The bleh is the Byron—”
“Lignotractatic Engine,” finished Anna.
“How do you know about the bleh?” asked Ada accusingly.
“I dust it.”
“I suppose you do. But anyway, it didn’t work. At first I thought I had the wrong kind of variables. People—maddeningly hard to quantify. But then I realized that wasn’t the problem at all.”
“No?” Anna ventured.
“No! I had too many variables! Two of those variables were actually the same variable, so I revised the equation and then it all made perfect sense!” Ada was truly excited.
“You seem truly excited, Lady Ada,” said Anna cautiously.
“Of course I’m truly excited. I’ve been scooped out and filled with tigers. I didn’t like it at first but now I see that it’s a good thing. A very good thing. And once I knew what that silly word meant …”
“Mesmerism,” offered Anna.
“Precisely! Once I had that, well, it all just fell into place. So that means envelopes. Why are you still here?”
“Again begging your pardon, Lady Ada, but you haven’t given them to me yet.”
“Ah. Well, they’re around here somewhere.” She dug around her nest of upturned books, graphs, and note scraps. “Here!” She handed a fistful of sealed envelopes, only slightly the worse for wear for having been slept on, each addressed to a different person.
“Now get out!” said Ada, in a cheerful way that seemed to erase all the anger she’d ever said it with. She said it in a way that sounded more like Go on, unwrap your present on Christmas morning. She said it in a way that sounded like Let’s finally have some fun around here on a spring day. Anna nodded, a little overwhelmed by all this talk of mesmerism and variables and tigers and envelopes, and set off to find her coat and bonnet, leaving the last fires unlit.
Peebs held the urgent, personal, and clandestine note in his hand. He knew it was such because the envelope read URGENT! PERSONAL! CLANDESTINE! The note within had summoned him to a very well-to-do estate just north of Primrose Hill, and despite his best efforts at ironing the paper between his palm and his knee, it still bore the marks of having been slept on.
As he neared his destination, he recalled seeing a series of diagrams on the drawing room floor depicting some sort of explosive device labeled PEEBS CANNON, and briefly wondered if the summons might be some sort of trap.
His fears were set aside when he saw Mary getting out of a carriage on the other side of the road. While he had no doubt that Lady Ada was capable of constructing a cannon, he doubted very much she’d ever shoot Mary out of one, despite her anger the day before.
Mary seemed as surprised to see Peebs, as he was to see her. Crossing the street, she took his hand as he made a smart bow. But her eyes did not meet his—she was looking past him. He spun around to catch sight of three red felt hats ducking behind a hedgerow, as though someone were juggling large red cans and suddenly dropped them.
“Miss Godwin,” said Peebs, his attention turning to his former student, “do you know what this is about?”
“I haven’t the foggiest, I’m afraid,” answered Mary. “But this is Verdigris Manor, and we—that is to say, Ada and I, as the Wollstonecraft detectives—had been working on a case here.”
“Then we’d best get inside.”
Just as Mary’s carriage pulled away, another took its place. Ada clambered out, followed by Mr. Franklin, who more or less unfolded himself from the black coach like something crawling out of a beetle. Mary could see that Anna remained inside.
“Envelopes! Good,” declared Ada. “Let’s go.”
“Go where, Ada?” asked Mary.
“Inside. I’ve solved the case. The whole thing.” Mary had never seen Ada this excited.
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” asked Peebs, concerned by this sudden change in Ada’s mood.
Ada leaned forward to whisper loudly to Peebs, “I’m more than all right. I’m full of tigers.” With that, she practically skipped up the stairs to the Verdigris door and let herself in, uninvited. Mr. Franklin followed close behind. With a shrug, both Peebs and Mary completed the train.
The Verdigris clan, including Beau and Mr. Abernathy, had assumed the same spots as on their first meeting with the Wollstonecraft girls: Rebecca was seated on the right, with Beau standing behind her; Lady Verdigris was at the head of the long, dark table, with Abernathy sort of hovering at her side. Ada saw brackets hovering in midair around both sets of people, with a V above the Verdigris clan and a W above herself and her friends.
Ada took a deep breath.
“I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve brought you here.”
“I wasn’t wondering,” said Lady Verdigris. “I received a note saying it was for a school project.”
“I wasn’t wondering either,” added Rebecca. “I received a note saying you had new information as to the missing acorn, and Rosie’s innocence.”
“I wasn’t wondering at all,” said Beau. “I received a note that there was a matter of urgent, personal, and clandestine business.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t wondering,” said Mr. Abernathy. “I received a note saying that you had an enormous fortune and required some advice on how best to manage it, and seeing as how I’m very rich, I might be able to help you.”
“So, none of you are wondering?” asked Ada, disappointed.
“I’m wondering,” said Mary encouragingly.
“As am I, even though I too received a note about urgent, personal, and clandestine business,” added Peebs, in hopes of making Ada feel better.
The Case of the Missing Moonstone Page 8