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

by Nancy Springer

  “None taken, I assure you, Lady Theodora.” I allowed my shy, apologetic gaze to drift towards her. “Most preposterous, my being here, but husbands will have their way.”

  I could not have struck a stronger empathic chord in her. “Oh, Mrs. Ragostin!” She actually leaned forward to clasp my gloved hands. “How true! The men run everything, yet they are so wrong! In my heart I know that my Cecily has not – would not go anywhere they say she has. And the fact that they have not found her shows me to be correct. Yet they persist in believing . . . How awful. Even my husband . . .”

  I nodded, thinking ahead to guide the conversation without, I hoped, her noticing. “Is your husband very much older than you are, Lady Theodora?”

  “Only a few years. But – is Dr. Ragostin greatly your senior?”

  “Yes. I am his third wife. Why, I am not much older than . . .”

  She said it for me. Whispered it, actually. “Than my daughter. Lady Cecily.”

  “Indeed. Quite. Therefore, I was thinking . . .”

  “Yes?” Already we had become co-conspirators; our knees almost touched, she sat so close to me, clinging to my hands.

  “I wonder if, as a girl of Lady Cecily’s age, I might notice something that the police detectives have overlooked . . .”

  “Oh, how I wish you would, Mrs. Ragostin! I have been longing to do something . . . but what? And how?”

  I almost forgot to play my role, but remembered in time to hesitate, biting my lip, before I said, “Well . . . one must start somewhere. If it is at all possible, Lady Theodora, might I examine Lady Cecily’s rooms?”

  CHAPTER THE SIXTH

  FIRST, OF COURSE, WE TOOK TEA. THEN, complicity and friendship sealed over the soothing hot beverage and its accompanying marmalade tarts, Lady Theodora called for Lady Cecily’s personal maid, who escorted me to the Honourable Lady Cecily’s rooms.

  The usual thing for gentry is to have one’s bed in a room with a dressing-closet, behind another room where servants and friends come in and out. I walked straight through to look at Lady Cecily’s bedchamber, and it appeared at first glance to be sweetness itself, with a carved and daintily painted sleigh bed, more suitable, I thought, for a girl than for a young lady. Perhaps her mum had tried to keep her a baby? In a corner sat the usual dollhouse, meant to encourage domestic pride, but it did not look as if Lady Cecily enjoyed that sort of thing any better than I did. Her expensive china and porcelain dolls stood neglected on their shelves, dusty even inside their glass cases. Nor, I thought, glancing at similar glass “bells” on the mantelpiece, did she enjoy the genteel craft of moulding roses out of coloured wax.

  “Did Lady Cecily make those herself?” I asked the maid to be sure.

  “Yes, ma’am. My young lady was – ah, is – well versed in all handicrafts.”

  The wax “flowers” looked more like shapeless blobs.

  On the walls hung small, framed pastels: old woman knitting by the fire, country maiden with a basket of eggs, rosy-cheeked child holding a puppy, et cetera.

  “Did Lady Cecily draw those?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Lady Cecily is quite the artist.”

  Debatable, I thought even as I nodded. The pastels, like the wax flowers, appeared colourful but uncertain, their lines and forms much blurred.

  “Lady Cecily has had voice lessons, too, and ballet. In every way she is most accomplished.”

  Fit for the marriage market, in other words, as my brothers wanted me to be: a singing, dancing, French-quoting, delicately fainting decoration to any aristocratic drawing-room.

  I wondered how Lady Cecily felt about her “accomplishments.”

  Aside from the sleigh bed, I saw a similarly ornate wardrobe, a dresser, and a washstand in the young lady’s bedroom. On the dresser stood the usual “set”: ring-stand, silver-embossed comb and brush, hand mirror, cut-glass toilet water bottles, hair tidy. I glanced into the wardrobe, scanning the usual apparel of an aristocratic miss: morningdresses, afternoon-dresses, visiting-dresses, Sunday best, evening-gowns, riding habit, cycling costume, tennis-dress, ad infinitum. “Has it been ascertained what Lady Cecily was wearing at the time of her, ah, departure?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It would seem that she . . .” The maid blushed. “She was garbed for slumber, ma’am. Nothing else is missing.”

  “Indeed. Was her bed slept in?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  One window faced the back of the house, and one faced the side. “At which of these was the ladder placed?”

  The maid indicated the one at the back of the house, out of view of the street.

  “And the window was found open?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were any windows or doors downstairs opened?”

  “No, ma’am. The downstairs doors were locked and barred, and the windows snibbed.”

  “But these windows were not snibbed?”

  “No, ma’am.” The maid sounded as if she pitied my ignorance. “To improve their health, all members of the baronet’s family sleep with the window slightly raised, ma’am, winter or summer, ma’am.”

  Unsurprising; I myself had been raised the same way. Ventilation strengthened the moral resolve of one’s digestion and so forth against disease, and guarded one’s personage against laxness. Therefore, even during the coldest weather, fit to frost one’s nightcap, a window had to be left open an inch or so.

  “So the window sash could have been raised by someone on the ladder outside.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And it was left that way, wide open, with the ladder at the sill?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I backtracked into Lady Cecily’s boudoir, a sizable room lavished with mirrors, chairs, settees, a needlepoint fire-screen (Lady Cecily’s accomplishment, no doubt), potted ferns in the bay window, and near that source of light, Lady Cecily’s easel and art stand.

  And – I thought, at the time, more important – a roll-top desk.

  I opened the desk first. “Some letters were found in here, I understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The police took them, ma’am.”

  “Did they search this desk for other documents?”

  “No, ma’am!” The maid sounded shocked. “Lady Theodora discovered the letters and took them downstairs to the officers.”

  In other words, no detective had been allowed to set foot in these rooms.

  “Quite so,” I said approvingly as I seated myself at the desk to have a look.

  Fervidly I wished I could have seen the letters themselves, not only for content but also for any indications Scotland Yard might have overlooked. “Were the postage-stamps positioned oddly, or reversed ?” If so, it would suggest a code.

  “The letters did not come through the post, ma’am!” I had shocked the maid again. Probably the formidable butler oversaw all postal correspondence.

  “How so, then?” By hand, obviously, but by whose hand?

  “We, ah, we do not know. Ma’am.”

  With the complicity of one of the servants, in other words. Perhaps this very maid, Lily by name. And that line of inquiry had already been exhausted.

  The surface of the desk was occupied by an exquisite writing set, ink-bottle and fountain pens, pen-holder and letter-opener all of jade. In the drawers, along with the usual blotting-paper, pen-wipers and such, I found the lady’s monogrammed stationery and several sticks of sealing-wax in different colours: red for business correspondence, blue for constancy in love, grey for friendship, yellow for jealousy, green for encouragement of a shy lover, violet for condolences. But only the grey stick of wax looked much used.

  Also in the drawers I found Lady Cecily’s address-book, well kept in the petite, curlicue handwriting of an aristocratic miss. I found sundry other papers: shopping lists, reminders of social obligations, moral exhortations themed around the letters of the alphabet, that sort of thing.

  Much more important, I found a stack of journals.

  “Lady Cecily kep
t diaries?” The silk-covered volumes were equipped with tiny padlocks.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But the padlocks had been broken open. “Did the police look at these?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Lady Theodora, then?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In the mirror, ma’am.”

  “I beg your pardon?” But as I spoke, I took one of the books, opened it, and gawked at the handwriting therein. Large, childishly plain, and all slanted leftward – utterly unlike the handwriting of the address book and other papers – it made no sense to me until I realised it was written from right to left, its words running from right to left with even their letters reversed, so that b looked like d.

  “How very peculiar!” I exclaimed. Getting up, I held the diary open towards a standing mirror, in which I could easily read, most frightfully cold. I am wearing no less than nine petticoats

  As a cipher, this backwards writing was hardly worth bothering with.

  “Why in the world did she write that way?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Did you ever see her do it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Like any loyal servant, of course she had seen nothing.

  There were eight diaries, all of them in the same odd leftward writing, unchanged over a period of years. Settling upon the most recent diary, the only one with blank pages at the – the beginning, actually, as the diaries had been written from the back towards the front – I turned to the last (first) entry, then held it to the mirror and read.

  January 2 – I am so dreadfully bored. How can anyone talk of New Year’s Resolutions when no amount of good intentions seems ever to alleviate the suffering in this world? And how can they chatter of perfumes and parties, flounces and necklines and dancing slippers when the streets swarm with orphans and pauper children who have barely even rags to wear, nor shoes for their feet? While their fathers cannot find work and their mothers labour sixteen hours a day in the mills? And while I, in order to be presented to the Queen, practice walking backwards without tripping over a nine-foot train? Mine is a life without any worthwhile purpose, without value, empty of meaning.

  Hardly the sentiments of a young woman about to elope with her secret lover!

  With a mind full of conjecture I left Lily to replace items in the desk while I crossed the room to see what Lady Cecily had been drawing lately.

  On her easel I found an undersized and unfinished pastel of a country landscape, already turning into a shapeless mass of candy-coloured smudge. Atop her art stand lay her pastels.

  Broken. Pink, peach, pale green, aqua, sky blue, lavender, powdery brown, all broken to jagged bits.

  Most interesting.

  I pulled open the drawer of her art stand, finding about what one might expect: pencils, eraser, India ink and art pens still in their box, and – not in a box – sticks of charcoal. Stubs, rather, with blunted tips, dirtying all the contents of the drawer with black powder the way soot besmirched London city. Quantities of charcoal lay everywhere.

  Worn to nubbins.

  I blinked at the pastel daub on the easel, not a hint of black in it anywhere.

  I looked around at the walls and found them innocent of any dark artwork.

  After closing the drawer, I crossed to where the maid was tidying the desk. “Lily, where are Lady Cecily’s charcoal drawings?”

  “Charcoal?” Moving the jade items of the lady’s writing set from one end of the desk to the other, she would not look at me. “I am sure I have no idea, ma’am.”

  I was equally sure that she did, but there was no use saying so. Instead, imagining where I would put artwork if I didn’t want anyone to see it, I went back into the lady’s bedchamber and started peering behind furniture.

  In back of both the dresser and the wardrobe I could see sheets of heavy paper, quite large, leaning against the wall.

  “Lily,” I called, “you’d better help me get these out, unless you want me to smear them.”

  Silently, sullenly, the girl came and helped me push the furniture a few inches away from the walls, so that I could reach behind. Taking the papers by their edges, I carried them to the other room in order to look at them in the light.

  One by one I placed them upon the easel, where their size dwarfed that of the pastel.

  Not only their size. Their – I scarcely know how to explain. Their temper, one might call it. Nothing could have been more unlike the pinky-bluey blurs that had been framed to hang on the walls. These charcoal drawings were rendered in heavy black strokes, knife-sharp and direct, shockingly unsoftened by any shading.

  But the subjects were even more shocking.

  Scrawny, filthy children playing in a gutter beneath a clothesline strung with dead fish.

  Hatless women standing under a street-lamp at night to sew.

  An unshaven man picking up cigar butts.

  An Italian family singing for pennies.

  A barefoot boy kneeling on the cobbles to shine a gentleman ’s boots.

  A ragged woman with a sickly baby “selling” matches door-to-door.

  And many more.

  People from the poorest streets of London.

  People depicted so boldly, so surely, with such unblinking honesty that they could not possibly have been done from imagination. One who was born to be an artist had seen them to draw them. I knew that feeling of fiery connection between eyes and heart and hand. An inspired artist had looked upon these people.

  With passion.

  As I looked upon them with passion.

  Several of the drawings showed starving old women dozing on the workhouse steps. The poorest of the poor, these “crawlers” or “dosses” seldom found strength to move.

  I knew them.

  And so, evidently, did Lady Cecily.

  But how?

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

  “DR. RAGOSTIN WILL CONTACT YOU DISCREETLY,” I told Lady Theodora, “with his thoughts upon the matter.”

  It was fortunate that “Dr. Ragostin” was to supply the thoughts, for mine were in a muddle worse than the most tangled yarn basket that ever was. Out of all the Gordian knot I seized upon only one strand surely, a grey one, another indication that Lady Cecily had not eloped. If her secret correspondence with the shopkeeper’s son had developed into a passionate affair, she would have used a rainbow of sealing-wax other than the grey. No, she had written her letters only in friendship.

  She had gone off not for love, but for some other reason.

  Which, I sensed, had something to do with her odd diaries. The mirror writing.

  And something – although I could not even begin to imagine what – something to do with her extraordinary charcoal drawings.

  The latter were so unladylike and disturbing, both in their bold execution and in their choice of subjects, that I had put them back behind the bedroom furniture and had not mentioned them to Lady Theodora. Not yet, if ever. The diaries, however, I wished to take with me.

  “For my eyes only,” I assured the lady when I had a chance to speak with her privately. Reporting to her dressing-room, I had found her busy with the younger children, two little boys and a little girl romping around her chamber like puppies while she inspected a somewhat older girl for kempt hair, cleanly ears, et cetera. The girl’s face reminded me very much of Lady Cecily as I had seen her in the photographic portraits Lady Theodora had showed me over tea. Indeed, all of the children, including Lady Cecily, much resembled their mother – generous mouth, brilliant, intelligent eyes.

  Lady Theodora shooed the young Alistairs back to the care of their governess when I came in, and beckoned for me to sit close to her.

  “I will myself read the diaries,” I explained to her after making my request, “and inform Dr. Ragostin in the most discreet terms of any indications I may find.”

  “I have looked through them,” Lady Theodora responded, “and found nothing that seemed harmful, but by all means, if you think it will help – you w
ill take the greatest care of them?”

  I assured her I would, remembering just in time to ask her also for a recent portrait of Lady Cecily so that “Dr. Ragostin” could see what the missing miss looked like. Also, I copied down the name and address of the shopkeeper’s son with whom Lady Cecily had been corresponding, in case “Dr. Ragostin” wished to question him.

  As I departed, Lady Theodora embraced me, kissing my cheek with the most unexpected strength of feeling.

  Therefore I felt quite wretched, like a shameful fraud, as I took a cab back to Dr. Ragostin’s office. Dr. Ragostin this, Dr. Ragostin that; I was a liar, and finding this lost girl was up to – me? A runaway upstart of fourteen? True, half the domestics and mill-hands in London were my age or younger, and true, also, that any of us who committed a crime would be imprisoned, tried, and hanged right along with Jack the Ripper should the police ever find him – but we had no rights, none, not even a right to the money we earned, until we turned twenty-one. Legally, at age fourteen I did not yet exist. So who on Earth did I think I was – Enola Ivy Holmes Meshle Mrs. Ragostin – to attempt the monstrous hoax that was my life?

  Such were my thoughts as I slipped through the secret entry into the locked room where I transformed myself back into Ivy Meshle. My subdued frame of mind lasted through the rest of the afternoon into the evening, when I returned to my lodging with Lady Cecily’s casement photograph and journals done up, as if I had been shopping, in a brown paper parcel tied with string.

  After Mrs. Tupper had provided me with a meal of herring stewed with parsnips – most unhelpful to one attempting to grow plump – I retreated upstairs to my room, made myself comfortable in warm socks and a dressing-gown, settled myself in my armchair by the hearth, and with the aid of a hand mirror began to read Lady Cecily’s most recent diary.