Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The (45 page)

  Eve's face gradually broke into an embarrassed smile.

  'You haven't explained,' she said, 'how Madame Lawrence got the bracelet.'

  'Come over here,' Cecil answered. 'Take these glasses and look down at the Quai du Rosaire. You see everything plainly?' Eve could, in fact, see on the quay the little mounds of mud which had been extracted from the canal in the quest of the bracelet. Cecil continued: 'On my arrival in Bruges on Monday, I had a fancy to climb the Belfry at once. I witnessed the whole scene between you and Miss Sartorius and Madame Lawrence, through my glasses. Immediately your backs were turned, Madame Lawrence, her hands behind her, and her back against the railing, began to make a sort of rapid, drawing up motion with her forearms. Then I saw a momentary glitter... Considerably mystified, I visited the spot after you had left it, chatted with the gendarme on duty and got round him, and then it dawned on me that a robbery had been planned, prepared, and executed with extraordinary originality and ingenuity. A long, thin thread of black silk must have been ready tied to the railing, with perhaps a hook at the other end. As soon as Madame Lawrence held the bracelet, she attached the hook to it and dropped it. The silk, especially as it was the last thing in the world you would look for, would be as good as invisible. When you went for the police, Madame retrieved the bracelet, hid it in her muff, and broke off the silk. Only, in her haste, she left a bit of silk tied to the railing. That fragment I carried to the hotel. All along she must have been a little uneasy about me... And that's all. Except that I wonder you thought I was jealous of the Count's attentions to your friend.' He gazed at her admiringly.

  'I'm glad you are not a thief, Mr Thorold,' said Eve.

  'Well,' Cecil smiled, 'as for that, I left him a couple of louis for fares, and I shall pay his hotel bill.'

  'Why?'

  'There were notes for nearly ten thousand francs with the bracelet. Ill-gotten gains, I am sure. A trifle, but the only reward I shall have for my trouble. I shall put them to good use.' He laughed, serenely gay.

S
OME OF THE best female detectives of the late Victorian period were actually created by male writers. Lois Cayley, who appeared in a series of stories published in
The Strand
before being collected in volume form, is a Cambridge-educated 'New Woman' of the 1890s. Travelling Europe in search of adventure and a means of earning money, Miss Cayley becomes involved in a series of crimes which require all her wit and intelligence to solve. Her creator was Grant Allen, a popular and versatile writer whose other works ranged from science fiction to botany. Born in Canada, Allen had been a professor at a college in the West Indies before arriving in London in the late 1870s to pursue a career as a writer. His best-known and best-selling book was
The
Woman Who Did
, published in 1895, which gained notoriety for its portrayal of an independent woman who defies convention to live as a single mother. Allen's feminist sympathies are clearly in evidence in the Lois Cayley stories and in the creation of Hilda Wade, another female detective whose adventures are recorded in an episodic novel that was finished, after Allen's death, by his friend Arthur Conan Doyle.

O
N THE DAY when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world.

  It was my stepfather's death that drove me to it. I had never seen my stepfather. Indeed, I never even thought of him as anything more than Colonel Watts-Morgan. I owed him nothing, except my poverty. He married my dear mother when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father's will, in paying his gambling debts. After that, he carried my dear mother off to Burma; and when he and the climate between them had succeeded in killing her, he made up for his appropriations at the cheapest rate by allowing me just enough to send me to Girton. So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not think it necessary to go into mourning for him. Especially as he chose the precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his consolidated liabilities.

  'Of course you will teach,' said Elsie Petheridge, when I explained my affairs to her. 'There is a good demand just now for high-school teachers.'

  I looked at her, aghast. 'Teach! Elsie,' I cried (I had come up to town to settle her in at her unfurnished lodgings.) 'Did you say teach? That's just like you dear good schoolmistresses! You go to Cambridge, and get examined till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to yourselves at the end of it all, "Let me see; what am I good for now? I'm just about fit to go away and examine other people!" That's what our Principal would call "a vicious circle" – if one could ever admit there was anything vicious at all about you, dear. No, Elsie, I do not propose to teach. Nature did not cut me out for a high-school teacher. I couldn't swallow a poker if I tried for weeks. Pokers don't agree with me. Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel.'

  'You are, Brownie,' she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up – they called me 'Brownie,' partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because they could never understand me. 'We all knew that long ago.'

  I laid down the paste-brush and mused.

  'Do you remember, Elsie,' I said, staring hard at the paper-board, 'when I first went to Girton, how all you girls wore your hair quite straight, in neat smooth coils, plaited up at the back about the size of a pancake; and how of a sudden I burst in upon you, like a tropical hurricane, and demoralised you; and how, after three days of me, some of the dear innocents began with awe to cut themselves artless fringes, while others went out in fear and trembling and surreptitiously purchased a pair of curling-tongs? I was a bomb-shell in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at first to speak to me.'

  'You see, you had a bicycle,' Elsie put in, smoothing the halfpapered wall; 'and in those days, of course, ladies didn't bicycle. You must admit, Brownie, dear, it was a startling innovation. You terrified us so. And yet, after all, there isn't much harm in you.'

  'I hope not,' I said devoutly. 'I was before my time that was all; at present, even a curate's wife may blamelessly bicycle.'

  'But if you don't teach,' Elsie went on, gazing at me with those wondering big blue eyes of hers, 'whatever will you do, Brownie?' Her horizon was bounded by the scholastic circle.

  'I haven't the faintest idea,' I answered, continuing to paste. 'Only, as I can't trespass upon your elegant hospitality for life, whatever I mean to do, I must begin doing this morning, when we've finished the papering. I couldn't teach' (teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent); 'and I don't, if possible, want to sell bonnets.'

  'As a milliner's girl?' Elsie asked, with a face of red horror.

  'As a milliner's girl; why not? 'Tis an honest calling. Earls' daughters do it now. But you needn't look so shocked. I tell you, just at present, I am not contemplating it.'

  'Then what do you contemplate?'

  I paused and reflected. 'I am here in London,' I answered, gazing rapt at the ceiling, 'London, whose streets are paved with gold though it looks at first sight like flagstones; London, the greatest and richest city in the world, where an adventurous soul ought surely to find some loophole for an adventure. (That piece is hung crooked, dear; we shall have to take it down again.) I devise a Plan, therefore. I submit myself to fate; or, if you prefer it, I leave my future in the hands of Providence. I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I've "cleaned myself ", and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets. Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it. I go where glory or a modest competence waits me. I snatch at the first offer, the first hint of an opening.'

  Elsie stared at me, more aghast and more puzzled than ever. 'But, how?' she asked. 'Where? When? You are so strange! What will you do to find one?'

  'Put on my hat and walk out,' I answered. 'Nothing could be simpler. This city bursts with enterprises and surprises. Strangers from east and west hurry through it in all directions. Omnibuses traverse it from end to end – even, I am told, to Islington and Putney; within, folk sit face to face who never saw one another before in their lives, and who may never see one another again, or, on the contrary, may pass the rest of their days together.'

  I had a lovely harangue all pat in my head, in much the same strain, on the infinite possibilities of entertaining angels unawares, in cabs, on the Underground, in the aerated bread shops; but Elsie's widening eyes of horror pulled me up short like a hansom in Piccadilly when the inexorable upturned hand of the policeman checks it. 'Oh, Brownie,' she cried, drawing back, 'you don't mean to tell me you're going to ask the first young man you meet in an omnibus to marry you?'

  I shrieked with laughter, 'Elsie,' I cried, kissing her dear yellow little head, 'you are
impayable
. You never will learn what I mean. You don't understand the language. No, no; I am going out, simply in search of adventure. What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception. The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the toss-up of it. What is the good of being penniless – with the trifling exception of twopence – unless you are prepared to accept your position in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?'

  'I have never been to one,' Elsie put in.

  'Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for? But I mean to see where fate will lead me.'

  'I may go with you?' Elsie pleaded.

  'Certainly not, my child,' I answered – she was three years older than I, so I had the right to patronise her. 'That would spoil all. Your dear little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure.' She knew what I meant. It was gentle and pensive, but it lacked initiative.

  So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.

  I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which I found myself – a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her. (I don't count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence at Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given away too profusely to everybody to allow of one's placing any very high value upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I must admit I was not in the least alarmed. Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty of high spirits. If my eyes had been like Elsie's – that liquid blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and amazement – I might have felt as a girl ought to feel under such conditions; but having large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or acquired an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather towards cheeriness than despondency. I croak with difficulty. So I accepted my plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise of courage and ingenuity.

  How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens – the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall.

  But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors – the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already – very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation. The great ignore the intrusion of their inferiors.

  'Yes, it's a terrible nuisance,' the eldest and ugliest of the two observed – she was a high-born lady, with a distinctly cantankerous cast of countenance. She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match. 'But what could I do, my dear? I simply couldn't put up with such insolence. So I looked her straight back in the face – oh, she quailed, I can tell you; and I said to her, in my iciest voice – you know how icy I can be when occasion demands it' – the second old lady nodded an ungrudging assent, as if perfectly prepared to admit her friend's rare gift of iciness – 'I said to her, "Celestine, you can take your month's wages, and half an hour to get out of this house." And she dropped me a deep reverence, and she answered: "Oui, madame, merci beaucoup, madame; je ne desire pas mieux, madame." And out she flounced. So there was the end of it.'