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

by Nancy Springer

She must speak to no one. She does not belong here. The knowledge does not trouble her, for she has never belonged anywhere. And in a sense she has always been alone.

I looked for her first on the grounds of Ferndell. Managing her estate, Mum liked to let growing things alone. I rambled through flower gardens run wild, lawns invaded by gorse and brambles, forest shrouded in grape and ivy vines. And all the while the grey sky wept rain on me.

I knew my mother was criticised for failing properly to drape vulgar surfaces such as coal scuttles, the back of her piano, and me.

Looking about me in the hush of my mother’s sitting room, I felt rather more worshipful than if I were in a chapel. I had read Father’s logic books, you see, and Malthus, and Darwin; like my parents I held rational and scientific views—but being in Mum’s room made me feel as if I wanted to believe. In something. The soul, perhaps, or the spirit.

Cycling, I have found, allows one to think without fear of one’s facial expressions being observed.

“We should have known her; she looks just like you, Sherlock.” The taller, leaner one was indeed Sherlock, then. I liked his bony face, his hawk eyes, his nose like a beak, but I sensed that for me to look like him was no compliment.

“Barbaric!” Mycroft retorted. “Grass a foot tall, saplings springing up, gorse, bramble bushes—” “Those are wild roses.” I liked them.

“Mycroft,” Sherlock intervened, “the girl’s head, you’ll observe, is rather small in proportion to her remarkably tall body. Let her alone. There is no use in confusing and upsetting her when you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”

Hero or no hero, he—his manner—was beginning to annoy me. And distress me, for my mother was his mother, too; how could he be so cold? I did not know then, had no way of knowing, that Sherlock Holmes lived his life in a kind of chill shadow. He suffered from melancholia, the fits sometimes coming upon him so badly that for a week or more he would refuse to rise from his bed.

“Small wonder they’re bachelors. Must have everything their way. Think it’s their right. Never could abide a strong-minded woman.”

“Pity the girl’s cranial capacity, Mycroft,” Sherlock murmured to his brother, and to me he said gently, “Enola, simply put, we think she has run away.”

I needed to be outside. Fresh air would cool my heated feelings.

One would think I might feel glad to conclude that she was alive. Quite to the contrary. I felt wretched.

Putting down my pencil, I stared at the eddying stream, the fingerlings flowing past like dark tears.

The great Sherlock Holmes asking me for my thoughts? But I had none to offer. I was, after all, a girl of minimal cranial capacity.

You will never be able to move in polite society, and your prospects of matrimony—” “Are dim to nil in any event,” I said, “as I look just like Sherlock.”

“You come from a family of quality, and with some polishing, I am sure you will not disgrace us.” I said, “I have always been a disgrace, I will always be a disgrace, and I am not going to be sent to any finishing establishment for young ladies.”

Girls are supposed to play with dolls. Over the years, well-meaning adults had provided me with various dolls. I detested dolls, pulling their heads off when I could, but now I had finally found a use for them. Inside a yellow-haired doll’s hollow cranium, I had hidden the key to my mother’s rooms. It took me only a moment to retrieve it.

She proposed to sew two dresses with a 19½-inch waist, then two with a 19-inch waist, and so on to 18½ inches and smaller, in expectation that as I grew, I would diminish.

Mrs. Lane, who frequently offered me calves’ foot jelly and the like (small wonder invalids waste away!), grew so worried that she communicated with Mycroft, who assured her that boarding school, where I would breakfast upon oatmeal and wear wool next to my skin, would restore my health.

He would expect me to flee from him. Therefore, I would not. I would flee towards him.

exercise. Horses sweat, you know, and men perspire, whereas ladies glow. I am sure I looked all of a glow also. Indeed, I could feel all-of-a-glow trickling down my sides beneath my corset,

I let my bicycle fall where it would, while I myself collapsed in dirt and last year’s leaves, my spirits as low with evening as they had been high with morning, for I wondered: Would I find strength to get on that bicycle again tomorrow?

Hanging from the brim of my black felt hat, a dense black veil enveloped my entire head, so that I looked rather as if I intended to raid a beehive.

Well done, I thought, picking my way between horse droppings, for a mere girl of limited cranial capacity.

Medium, I surmised, this being one role in which women, the morally and spiritually superior gender, commanded greater respect than men.

Perditorian: one who divines that which is lost. But . . . but how dare she, with all her blather of spirits, title herself so nobly? Knower of the lost, wise woman of the lost, finder of the lost: That was my calling.

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 ...

All around me towered a man-made wilderness, buildings taller and more forbidding than any trees that ever were.

the Gothic towers of the city stood festive yet foreboding against that glowering sky, like candles on the Devil’s birthday cake.

Like figures out of a dream again they appeared and disappeared on the corners, where gas street-lamps cast wan skirts of light.

I walked faster, as if I could somehow escape.

“Bosh. I am not blaming you for being no worse than your betters.”

You may cross Lady Eudoria Vernet Holmes off your list. She knew what she was doing, and if she has come in harm’s way, she has only herself to blame.” Pain roused in my heart again, not a butterfly ache, but pain of a different sort. At the time, I did not know of my brilliant brother’s one crippling weakness; I did not understand how melancholia might make him utter such harsh words.

I actually missed him, with yearning in my heart as if I were a ladybird, ladybird, and I wanted to fly away home—

All my fluttering feelings about him folded their wings and settled into heartache.

and a cloak of ladylike conspiracy in which I could wrap myself. I expected that without much difficulty I could incorporate weaponry as well as defense and supplies into a corset. I could go places and accomplish things Sherlock Holmes could never understand or imagine, much less do.

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.