The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline (10 page)

Looking up my suspects individually, I discovered that, like Lord Sidney Whimbrel, they were deceased, beyond my reach to locate or question.

What, therefore, was I now to do?

I had no idea, for presence of mind was difficult to maintain. Willy-nilly, even though I knew it was most unlikely that he could have traced me here, nevertheless I kept imagining Sherlock Holmes waiting to pounce upon me the moment I set foot outside the door. So disturbing were these thoughts that I could not sit still; I roamed the Professional Women’s Club, the pleasant modern Oriental furnishings of reading-room, card-room, tea-room, and morning-room lost upon me as I fretted, imagining the most grotesque scenarios involving my brother Sherlock, Miss Nightingale, Mycroft, Dr. Watson, Scotland Yard, magistrates in white wigs, and ghoulish boarding school matrons, ad infinitum.

Enola, this will not do.
I needed to think about Mrs. Tupper.

In order to force myself to do so, I realised, I must make a list.

So, taking the nearest seat—on a chintz-upholstered camel-back sofa, very chic, for I found myself in a charming little drawing-room where a few older women had gathered to chat—with paper and pencil in hand I began to write:

 

Et cetera. I started out, as I am sure the gentle reader can see, rather stupid, partly because I was so perturbed of mind and partly because of the distraction of pleasant, intelligent voices conversing all around me. For instance, a tall woman in a loose, comfortable “aesthetic” dress, with her grey hair flowing down her back, was saying, “. . . poor dear Rodney, such a pleasant, well-meaning gentleman, yet so sorely lacking in backbone, while his younger brother—”

“One must wonder,” put in a different woman with a laugh, “how the theory of evolution would account for all the power’s being given to the older brother, yet all the potency to the younger.”

“That’s not evolution, dear. That’s our ridiculous laws of primogeniture.”

“It’s a shame,” said another of the elderly women, “for Rodney will do almost anything Geoffrey says, and Geoffrey’s strength of character is not always the
best
of character, or so I have heard.”

Why was I listening to gossip of people I didn’t even know, when I so badly needed to think? Yet I could not seem to shut my ears. I knew I should move to another room, yet did not.

A comfortable, matronly voice was saying, “Yes, his dear mother would be sorely dismayed. But then, good character in that family has generally run on the female side.”

“Well, doesn’t it generally in any civilised family?”

There was a ripple of laughter, during which the grey-haired aesthetic woman remarked, “Speaking of good families and characters, has anyone heard anything of Lady Eudoria Holmes?”

My mother! Hearing her name spoken aloud in such a comfortable, offhand fashion, I felt such a pang to my heart that for a moment I couldn’t breathe, the world spun, I might faint—nonsense, I never faint; I must not miss a word. Making a great effort to control my speeding pulse and panting breath, I stiffened, eavesdropping intently, although I did not dare to look around at the speakers.

“. . . no news of her at all since she disappeared. One does not know whether she is yet alive.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s alive all right,” put in a third, good-humoured voice. “She’s far too strong minded to lie down and die just yet. I imagine she took off, as the youngsters would say.”

A murmur of agreement sounded all around.

“I hope so,” said the aesthetic woman. “I hope she’s finally had a chance to live her life on her own terms.”

These women had been friends of my mother. Friends of my
mother
! How peculiarly that simple thought, and their proximity, worked upon my sensibilities. Every fibre of my being ached with longing; how I wished I could feel as confidently as they that Mum was alive, and well, and enjoying herself.

“Perhaps she’s gone overseas,” said the good-humoured woman. “She always yearned to travel.”

I had never known that!

“If so, let us hope she wanders far from the Balkans.”

“Trouble there, as always?”

“There and here. I’ve heard that someone is endeavouring to stir up some sort of Crimean War scandal.”

“Again? But why would anyone wish to dredge up that ruck of muck now?”

“Why, indeed.”

“I’m sure I have no idea.”

“Is it about Wreford again, perhaps? Any rehashing of that sordid affair would be most injurious . . .”

“. . . today’s progressive spirit . . .”

As they spoke of politics and reform, at last I was able to turn a deaf ear to their conversation, dismiss my thoughts and feelings regarding Mum (I had become quite adept at doing this), and write:

 

That brought me up short, pencil poised in air as I stared at nothing, for at last, you see, I had asked myself the right question: Who knew of the existence of the cryptic crinoline? Given that no regular “carriers” for “the Bird” were involved, and Mrs. Tupper herself evidently did not realise her fine apparel’s significance . . .

Who
knew
? Certainly not Wreford, Cruikshanks, Hall, or Raglan! Or their heirs.

When a message is sent in secret code, who must have knowledge of it? The sender. And the carrier—usually. And the person to whom the message is being sent might perhaps know that he should be in readiness to receive it.

Florence Nightingale knew.

I wrote:

 

Very well. If Miss Nightingale had not kidnapped my landlady—and, obviously, Mrs. Tupper had not instigated her own abduction—there remained only Lord Sidney Whimbrel.

“But he is Miss Nightingale’s ally—or was, because he is now
deceased
!” I objected to myself aloud, albeit in a whisper. And then, trying to joke, “Unless his ghost—”

No joke. I had seen, and indeed I had been followed by, a man sufficiently identical to the late Sidney Whimbrel—or at least to his silhouette—to be his ghost. But, as ghosts did not exist in the rational world of a scientific perditorian, then that man—the one who had burgled a blue dress in the night, and who, according to Florrie, had carried off Mrs. Tupper—might be Lord Sidney Whimbrel’s kin, most likely his—

Son?

Nonsense, I argued with myself. The Whimbrels were amongst the most honoured and respected of titled British families. The idea of any scion of the Whimbrel family consorting with a common villain to abuse and kidnap my deaf and elderly landlady was preposterous.

But who else could it have been?

And hadn’t Florence Nightingale said something about protecting the Whimbrel family name? And about young Whimbrel having recently been admitted to the House of Lords?

Also, hadn’t the ill-matched pair of miscreants burgling Mrs. Tupper’s house said something sarcastic about “His Lordship”?

“Oh, my stars and garters!” I whispered, realising that however preposterous it was, yet—yet it had to be. “
That’s
what started this imbroglio!”

 

A few minutes later, in the Professional Women’s Club library, I found myself quite thoughtful as I replaced
Boyles
upon the shelf and pocketed the address I had copied out of that useful reference book upon the members of the peerage.

My thoughts were manifold, astonished, and terrified. Such being the case, I also found myself contemplating with dark amusement the eighteenth-century philosophers, Alexander Pope and his ilk, who insisted that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”—in other words, if the baby dies, one must tell oneself that things would have been much worse had it lived; if thousands of orphans are starving in poorhouses, surely it is for some higher purpose, and—in my case—if I found myself hunted, on the run, unable to go home and sleep in my own bed, well, then, wasn’t it wonderful that I had somewhere else to go tonight?

I had learned, amongst other most interesting revelations, the address of the Whimbrels’ town house, where I quite hoped to find Mrs. Tupper.

WHIMBREL HALL STOOD, A LORDLY, WHITE, four-towered mansion, in Mayfair only a block away from Florence Nightingale’s house. At nightfall, still carrying my old brown leather satchel and still dressed in the same dark frock I had thrown on that morning, standing across the tree-lined street in the shadow of a friendly oak to study Whimbrel Hall, I wondered whether its address might have been the one, written upon a card, that Florence Nightingale had given to Mrs. Tupper amidst the horrors of Scutari so long ago.

The Italianate mansion, with its multiple quoins and brackets, looked temptingly simple to climb. But climbing, I had to remind myself, is not the answer to everything; even if I could scale the fence, evade the inevitable watchdog, swarm up the mansion, find entry, avoid detection or capture, and succeed in locating Mrs. Tupper, what then? I could hardly expect her to clamber out of a tower window and down its wall along with me.

Hmm.

Generally I managed to accomplish whatever I wanted either by stealth or by bribery. But in this case—as these people had quite enough money without any help from me—neither would do, and I needed to steel myself to try something I had never done before.

I had discovered, you see, from
Boyles,
that Lord Sidney Whimbrel had been survived by two sons, the elder of whom, and the new Lord Whimbrel, was named Rodney, and the younger of whom was named Geoffrey.

Now,
now,
the conversation I had chanced to overhear in the Professional Women’s Club assumed utmost importance in my mind. Rodney? Geoffrey? Surely not coincidence, especially as the former had recently taken a seat in the House of Lords, providing reason to be gossiped about.

As Rodney, according to the ladies, was the good-hearted brother, I had decided my best course would be to appeal directly to him for Mrs. Tupper’s release. If the younger, less scrupulous Geoffrey had not despatched her already! While I hated to think that any son of the revered Lord Sidney Whimbrel could be capable of such infamy, still, once he had kidnapped her and attempted to extract information from her, then—

Confound logic, anyway. It made my heart ache. And what if it had led me utterly astray? What if I were to sashay up to the door of Whimbrel Hall and either make an utter fool of myself, or—or never come out again?

And as I did so, in my mind, I noticed that I was not the only loiterer on the street. Puttering along, investigating the gutter as if he hoped to find something of value there, came a genteel greybearded sort of poor soul, not quite a beggar, his threadbare clothing that of a gentleman, cadaverous yet walking with a cane, tall but greatly bent by age, his un-trimmed whiskers hiding most of his face while a truncated top-hat shadowed the rest. One should explain that when a top-hat becomes soiled by the wearer’s perspiration and relegated to the secondhand clothing shops, the crown is removed, the stained part cut away, and the shortened crown reset on the brim. The greybeard’s hat was a testament to this process, having undergone it at least three times.

Once before, on a freezing winter night, beside a fire made in a washtub to warm the homeless, I had seen such a hat. Indeed, I had seen the same greybeard, in only slightly different clothes. I recognised this interesting person, and as he approached, my heart began to pound in a most irrational manner, and I stood quite still in the shadow of the oak, terrified lest he see me.

Luckily, he hitched past me on the opposite side of the street without turning his head my way. Once I felt reasonably sure that he had not observed me, I breathed out.

Heavens. What next?

Never removing my gaze from him, I watched as he turned the corner, picking his way along the wrought-iron fence that surrounded Whimbrel Hall.

Even after he had passed out of sight, I did not move from the shadow of the oak. I waited to see whether I might work him into my plan, meanwhile reviewing my case as I had reasoned it out:

Almost as if on cue, the genteel if impoverished greybeard reappeared at the far corner of Whimbrel Hall’s wrought-iron fence.