“What did she want to see ’im for?” asked a man’s voice.
“I dunno. Right wrought up, she was.”
“D’ye think, wit the swag she’s wearin’ on ’er, she might be a shipyard boss’s wife, like? Or a factory owner’s? Tryin’ to talk some sense into ’im about all the trouble ’ee’s stirrin’ up?”
“I always did say them factory ’uns are a rough lot, especially them match girls.” Unbuttoning my cuffs to chafe my wrists, the servant evidently considered herself to be on equal standing with the clerks, for she spoke her mind. “Them and their so-called strike. Too mule-headed to touch chemicals, an’ only workin’ fourteen hours a day now – ”
“It’s not the match girls ’ee’s fomentin’ anymore, it’s the dock-men and – ”
“ – and what they want with all that free time is beyond me, doin’ whatever they like – ”
“ – and the carters and such.”
“ – spoilin’ their reputations, lurin’ good girls out of the domestic service, and this poor lady faintin’ away for want of proper care – where’s the smellin’ salts, for the luvva mercy?”
“Oh! Right ’ere!”
With my eyes once more firmly lidded, I laid still as the pungent restorative was presented to my nose, disciplining myself not to respond, for I wanted to hear more. While my person and face appeared, I hoped, insensible, my mind hopped, shrieked and grabbed like a child presented with sugar-plums: Foment? Alexander Finch? Dock workers? Match girls? Strike? Hadn’t Joddy mumbled something about a match and a strike?
One of the male voices was saying, “The carters is mostly bein’ sensible, wot I ’ear, but the dockyards is all like a pot on the boil to strike a blow for worker’s rights, wot they call it.”
“She ain’t comin’ round.” My nurse sounded worried. “Get me a scissors so’s I can cut her staylacings.”
Oh. Oh, no, she must not be permitted to see my corset. I bestirred my eyelids slightly.
“Wait a minute,” said the kindly woman.
At the same time an unmistakable voice roared from somewhere close at hand, “What’s going on here? Get back to your stations!”
“Yes, Mr. Finch.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The lady fainted, you see.”
“Lady?” bellowed the elder Finch. “What lady?”
I interjected a moan, in order to deflect his attention from his clerks onto me.
“Well, send for a doctor!” he barked. “You men get back to work. You got no business loitering about when a lady’s lying down.”
The door slammed behind their various voices. I opened my eyes, smiled weakly at the servant, and told her I was feeling better, thank you so much, but my over-fed candy-grabbing mind snatched at “loitering.” Alexander Finch had been just a bystander perhaps, who had chanced to be “loitering about” on the night I was unconscious, lying in the street?
Which was only a few days after Lady Cecily had disappeared?
When the police were supposed to be keeping a close eye on him?
Each thought made me feel queasier, more faint and ill, but I forced myself to smile, stand up, and take my leave, for matters of the utmost urgency required my attention.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
BEFORE THE SHADOWY SMOKE-CLOTTED day could darken to even more shadowy night, I returned to the vicinity of Ebenezer Finch & Son. I will spare the gentle reader a full account of the risks of detection I had run in the interval; briefly put, after changing back into Miss Meshle at Dr. Ragostin’s office, I had then, at my lodging, eluded Mrs. Tupper to exit as a nun, wearing my heavily veiled habit for the sake of its total concealment of my features, even though it made me an object of curiosity. I felt the glances of passersby as I walked out of St. Pancras Station; these Londoners had not seen me before. In this reasonably prosperous area there was small need for the Sister of the Street’s ministrations.
Not that I had ventured here for the sake of charity. I came empty-handed. So to speak, as my gloved fingertips beneath my mantle, folded almost as if in prayer, rested upon the concealed hilt of my dagger.
I ventured nowhere near the resplendent front of Ebenezer Finch & Son Emporium. Instead, approaching that seductive establishment from the rear, through a maze of mews where cart-horses and milk-cows were kept, I stopped in the shadow of a pigeon-cote to survey the terrain. Once again I studied the Finch building’s windows, roofline, and rainspouting with an interest which architecture had never before inspired in me; this was the first time I’d had occasion to regard a building as a structure to be climbed. As if surveying a winter tree for the best way up and/or down, with my gaze I traced different routes until I decided how I would do it.
Predicting, then, where in the rapidly darkening back passageways Alexander Finch would descend, I retreated once more into the concealing mews, made a circuit, then found myself a sheltering doorway in which to wait.
Before it was quite dark, as I had expected – for he needed to be able to see his way down somewhat, and he could not give himself away by carrying a light – just at nightfall here he came like a sort of monstrous caterpillar along the rooftops, creeping along shingles or tiles on his knees and elbows, keeping his head down and staying out of sight of any constable who might be standing watch in the street or at the store’s back door. From time to time I lost sight of him behind chimney-stacks, but always in a brief while he reappeared. With a nimble ease that showed how often he had done this before, he swung himself across the gaps between buildings. Having reached the end of the row, he descended to the eaves, swivelled around and let himself down by the water-pipe on to the wooden top of a covered water-barrel and so to the gravel of the corner chandler’s delivery-drive.
I could just make out the pale mask of his face, eyeglasses and all, as he glanced around. Rather than the dandified garments in which I had seen him previously, he wore the rough dark flannel and corduroy of a day-labourer, and a cloth cap. As soon as he had made sure there was no one nearby – or so he thought – he strode off towards the street.
I let him get well ahead of me before I slipped from the shadows and followed.
This, northwest London, was a quarter not nearly so poor as the East End – no ladies of the night or water-spigots stood on the corners; folk here had their own vices and their own plumbing – but neither was it fashionable nor rich. Nondescript, like Alexander Finch’s face, with streets neither crowded nor deserted, it was an area I knew only a little. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I had been in this part of the city: to visit Dr. Watson, to burgle my brother Sherlock’s lodgings, and twice to “shop” at Ebenezer Finch & Son Emporium. Four times not counting the venture of the moment. It is no wonder I rather lost my way as I followed Alexander Finch.
And on several occasions I very nearly lost him. It was, fortuitously, a night rather less thick than usual, but even so, darkness abounded. I had seen the electric lighting along the Thames Embankment – utterly amazing, nearly turning night to day. By comparison, the wavering flames of gas street-lamps only interrupted the night, did not vanquish it. Most of the time Alexander Finch, like the other folk on the street, remained a shadow amongst shadows; I could see him clearly only when he passed directly under a street-lamp.
So that he should not see me in like wise, I walked in the middle of the street – a venture I hope never to repeat. In daytime, it would have been dangerous; at night, and all clad in black, it was doubly so. Even with their coal-oil lamps lit, the carriage drivers could not see me to avoid running me over had I not dodged them: no simple matter, as the footing consisted of nameless, icy slop and horse muck. More than once I nearly fell, and one time I did indeed lose my footing and had to roll across the cobbles to keep myself from being trampled under the horses’ iron-shod hooves. I struggled up, skirt and mantle wet and dragging, just in time to get out of the way of a great clopping Clydesdale pulling a lumber-wagon.
Indeed there were many carts a
nd wagons now; Alexander Finch had led me into a sort of warehouse area adjacent, as nearly as I could reckon, to the great produce market, Covent Garden. Where on Earth –
But even as I wondered, he halted at a decrepit doorway over which an ill-lettered placard advertised:BEDS SIXPENCE/NIGHT
WOMEN’S WARD EIGHTPENCE
TEA, BREAD, WASHING-WATER EXTRA
In other words, the poorest sort of doss-house, or common-lodging house, with flea-and-lice-infested cots set in rows, the sort of place where the pitiful, hairless “crawler” on the workhouse steps had lost her few remaining possessions to a thief. The sort of place that had likely given her the ringworm in exchange.
I guessed – yet could not believe what I was thinking – whom young Finch expected to find within.
But rather than knock at the door, he stepped around the corner of the slovenly building, out of sight.
Biting my lip, I stood like a black, muck-coated statue on the far side of the street, for, I admit, I simply did not know what to do. If I followed him into the narrow space between buildings, surely he would notice me. Yet if I did not follow him –
I had to.
Muttering something naughty, I strode across the street. But as I neared the doss-house, to my surprise a strange man stepped out of the shadow where Alexander Finch should have been. A man with long black hair and a spade-shaped full black beard. Only the skin around his eyes showed, starkly pallid beneath the beard, for he wore no eyeglasses, and his eyes – even though they did not look at me, I felt their force. Even in the night I saw how curiously bright, almost silver, they were. Beneath my veil my jaw dropped, my mouth gaped, and only with the most arduous mental discipline did I keep from gasping out loud.
The man was Alexander Finch. In disguise. But I would not have known him had it not been for the cloth cap, flannel shirt, corduroy jacket, and trousers he wore.
Intent on his business, he had taken no particular note of me amongst the others passing by. As he turned his back to knock on the door of the doss-house, I slipped into the hiding place he had just quitted.
He knocked hard, impatiently, upon the door until it opened. Then, in honey-and-vinegar tones, Finch inquired, “Would my lady care to take the air?”
She did not answer, only slipped out of that dark doorway like a frightened animal – indeed, I would not have kept a dog in such a hole.
“Give me the lantern.”
She carried a lantern? Apparently. I saw movement, and then Alexander Finch struck a match.
And at my first plain sight of Lady Cecily, I struggled anew to keep from crying out. I would not have known her had he not led me to her – indeed, I think her own mother might not have recognised her gaunt, pale face, her hair all in a dirty tangle beneath the cloth tied around her head, her shivering shoulders warmed only by a shawl, her skirt threadbare and tattered, her feet wrapped in rags. Only because my pencil had traced so many times those delicate features could I believe my eyes.
Lady Cecily, a beggar girl carrying a large basket.
He lit the lantern and handed it back to her. She said something, although she spoke so timidly, I could not hear the words.
“Work first,” he answered aloud. “Food afterward.”
Again she murmured, her eyes huge and pleading.
But this time, instead of answering, he puffed his lips in exasperation, then peered at her and darted his fingertips towards her face as if he were shaking some sort of fluid out of himself and into her. His own face had gone very still, his curiously lightcoloured eyes fierce, focused, gleaming. His hands traced several sinuous passes around her head, then down over her shoulders. I would not have believed it had I not seen, but I saw: Without ever touching her, he took her utterly into his power. All hope and yearning, all her feeble life-force faded from her eyes, so that she stood like a most unlikely porcelain doll, starveling and ragged, in a sooty glass bell.
“Work first,” her master repeated. “Food afterward.”
Without another glance at her, the wild-haired black-bearded scoundrel walked off in the direction of Paddington Station, and she limped after him, carrying both lantern and basket, like a rag-tag tied to his elbow. He was no taller than most youths, but her head, bowed, barely reached the level of his shoulder.
Staying well behind them, but allowing myself the luxury of the pavement this time, I followed, my mind in a hullabaloo of horror, curiosity, and speculation, for I could not yet quite take in what I had seen. And all the while my entire person, indeed my very skin, tingled with urgency to do something, assist her in some way, intervene – but how? And against what, exactly?
I could not yet make sense of the circumstances. I could only watch.
At a corner opposite a public house, some roughlooking men clotted beneath a street-lamp. I saw Alexander Finch, with Lady Cecily trailing behind him like a child, stop to greet them. After handshakes all around, they set up a wooden crate of some sort, and Alexander – or the black-bearded impostor I could scarcely believe to be Alexander – got upon the improvised dais and started to speak. Keeping to the shadows, I stood too far off to hear properly, but I caught references to “capitalist oppression,” “empire built upon the backs of exploited labour,” “workers’ rights” and so forth. Undoubtedly I was observing Finch, the “outside influence” of which the newspaper columnists spoke, in the very act of fomenting unrest in the working class, specifically the carters and dock-workers, as the clerks at the Finch Emporium had said. That they knew of the young master’s nighttime activities surprised me not at all; servants and the like always know everything, although they will tell nothing, except to one another.
Ascending his speaking platform, Alexander had given Lady Cecily her orders, and now she stood at a small distance from him, beneath another gas-lamp mounted upon the wall of the corner building, rather woodenly reaching into her basket and offering each person who stopped to listen something small and white.
My word. Joddy had said he had seen her with “papers.”
Pamphlets. For a labour union or some such rabble-rousing endeavour.
Already a considerable crowd of men, and a very few women, had gathered to listen to Alexander Finch’s harangue. I would perhaps be not unduly noticed if I approached, just another by-passer, who happened to be a nun, on the street?
After considering for a moment, I decided to take the risk.
Trying to show neither haste nor hesitation, I walked towards Lady Cecily.
“. . . the opiate of the masses!” the bearded Finch was declaiming from his – yes, I think it actually was a soap-box. “As all too plainly demonstrated in every good English aristocrat’s favourite childhood hymn: ‘All creatures great and small, the Lord God made them all; the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate’? The good lord God is said to have decreed that three quarters of the populace shall live and labour in bone-skewing mind-stunting poverty, while a favoured few shall occupy their days by having their servants assist them in five changes of clothing?”
One could not help but admire the fervour and clarity with which he spoke. He was brilliant. I agreed with much of what he was saying. It was hard to believe the foul deeds of which I suspected him.
Yet one could speak truth and still be a villain.
And there stood Lady Cecily.
A few heads turned as I reached the edge of the crowd, but most who stood upon that corner wanted only to listen, whether in shock or in admiration. As for Finch himself, intent as he was on his oration, I hoped he did not notice the black-mantled, veiled Sister of Charity. Or even if he did, I imagined he could not at this moment devote much thought to our previous meeting, under what had been for me most unpleasant circumstances.
As for the girl with the basket, she stood as dull as the soot falling all around us, and as silent. Only when I passed directly in front of her, halfheartedly she poked a pamphlet at me.
It was necessary t
hat the mute Sister of the Streets must speak tonight, if never again.
“Lady Cecily,” I whispered to that personage as I accepted her tract.
She did not look at me.
“Lady Cecily!” I spoke softly, yet close to her ear. I am sure she must have heard.
Yet she did not respond at all, not with a blink, a breath, a glance, not even with a startled twitch.
“Twice we have assembled peaceably as is our right,” the street-corner platform speaker passionately declaimed, “twice we have marched to Trafalgar Square under the silken flags of our guilds, to adjure the West End of London to remember us – and the police have beaten us back with billy-clubs. And after we withdrew bloodied and defeated, this is what one member of Parliament had to say: ‘It is in bad taste for people to parade their insolent starvation in the face of the rich and trading portions of the town. They should have starved in their garrets.’ ”
The crowd now overflowed into the street, as far as the opposite pavement, yet amongst all those bystanders one heard not a sound except the voice of the black-haired orator. Alexander Finch’s vehement silver glance passed like magnetism over and through the crowd, and to a man the listeners stood entranced. They gazed as if they were –
Finally I allowed myself to think it.
Mesmerised.
Like Lady Cecily.
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
MESMERISM. THE STUFF OF MUSIC-HALL entertainments and parlour amusements.
I would not have believed it had I not seen it.
But I had seen him do it to Lady Cecily. However briefly, I had seen him make the magnetic passes with his hands and penetrate her with his gaze, as Mrs. Bailey amongst others had described to me. And now Lady Cecily stood before me on a street corner: listless, in rags, an automaton, forgetting her hunger in order to hand out anarchist pamphlets.
The Case of the Left-Handed Lady: An Enola Holmes Mystery Page 11