The Case of the Missing Marquess (Enola Holmes, #1)

by Nancy Springer

In any event, “You will do very well on your own, Enola,” she would tell me nearly every day as I was growing up.

Although cordial enough when we met, Mum and I seldom interfered in one another’s concerns.

It was—a hope. A dream. A yearning, really. Now that there might be a chance. I wanted my brothers to . . . I did not dare to think in terms of affection, but I wanted them to care for me a little, somehow.

Perditorian: one who divines that which is lost.

I was a perditorian. Or I would be. Not astral. Professional. The world’s first professional, logical, scientific perditorian. All in one gasping breath of inspiration, I knew this as surely as I knew my real name was Holmes.

In fact, while Sherlock Holmes dismissed “the fair sex” as irrational and insignificant, I knew of matters his “logical” mind could never grasp. I knew an entire world of communications belonging to women, secret codes of hat brims and rebellion, handkerchiefs and subterfuge, feather fans and covert defiance, sealing-wax and messages in the positioning of a postage-stamp, calling cards and a cloak of ladylike conspiracy in which I could wrap myself.

I could go places and accomplish things Sherlock Holmes could never understand or imagine, much less do. And I planned to.

But meanwhile, as she looks at the newspaper clipping, her rather long and angular face softens, rendered almost beautiful, by a smile: for she knows that in the secret code of flowers, a rose of any sort signifies love.