Enola holmes and the mar.., p.1
Enola Holmes and the Mark of the Mongoose, page 1
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To all the writers who inspired me.
Prologue
“He has taken to calling me ‘Cotswold,’” remarked Wolcott Balestier, smiling at his sister as they took tea together in front of the hearth.
“Then he is fond of you.” Caroline Balestier smiled back not quite as sweetly—her brother had a more gentle, affectionate temperament than she did. Here they were, two Americans in London, England, because his foolish, idealistic notions had taken him hither, and it therefore followed that she, forsooth, had to go, too. It was an undisputed fact in society’s mind that every gentleman needed a woman—mother, sister, wife, it didn’t matter—to “do for” him.
“Carrie? What is it?” his kind voice asked, and she realised she must have been glowering.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” Mentally shaking herself, she smiled and took a scone. “Is your business with him going well?”
“Almost better than I can believe. He has invited me to write a novel together with him, and he never does that! He writes rings around everybody. He writes rings around me!” So serious he forgot to eat, Wolcott leaned towards her. “He is really, truly a genius with words, Carrie. In my ten years in publishing, I’ve never met, or expected to meet, a man with a more outstanding literary gift.”
“What makes him so outstanding?” asked Carrie, speaking quite lightly so as to conceal her own deep feelings. She had met the man a few times, but once would have been enough. A vital, muscular man, he was so much the opposite of her gentle, slender brother that the two of them formed a most unlikely alliance, and Carrie marveled to think of Wolcott’s friend: his blunt, magnetic intensity, his brilliant talk about his many adventures, his enthusiasms and sometimes his despairs—it was rumored that he had suffered a nervous breakdown not long ago! His tempers—this was a man who truly needed a strong woman to do for him! She had already made up her mind to marry him.
Wolcott, stirring his tea thoughtfully, had not yet answered her. “Cotswold?” she addressed him playfully.
He looked up at her with a gaze far older than would seem possible for a young man in his twenties. “It’s his passions, or rather, his convictions,” said Wolcott. “Many people can write, but few have such force of soul. Here, Carrie.” He started exploring his waistcoat pockets with slender fingers. “I looked over his shoulder as he was penning this, and it impressed me so much that I copied it. Here.” He handed her a much-folded sheet of paper. “Read that.”
She read. It started in mid sentence: “… the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the same oar together, and are yoked by the intimacies of toil. This is a good love, and, since it allows, and even encourages, strife, recrimination, and brutal sincerity, it does not die, but grows, and is proof against any absence.…”
As opposed to the not-so-austere love between a man and a woman?
Thinking this, Carrie looked up with a bleak feeling, but she was not going to let it conquer her; all things were possible and could be dealt with. She said quite evenly, “I have never heard of such a thing.”
Wolcott gave her a small, skewed smile. “You and most people, I imagine. But Ruddy is different.”
Again completely controlling the timbre of her voice, Carrie asked, “Is that what you think he looks for from you? ‘The austere love of men who have toiled together?’ Is that why he is asking you to co-author a novel with him?”
“It might be,” said Wolcott.
Chapter the First
The front door opened so suddenly and forcefully that it badly startled me, causing me to pencil a ruinous scrawl across the conic sections I was so carefully drawing for my geometry class. Vexed, I looked up to see Joddy, the boy-in-buttons, hurrying to offer his tray to take the visitor’s card, but the man brushed past him to stride towards my desk, causing an odd pleating effect within my mind, as if time folded and compressed. After all, it had been less than a year since I had made peace with my much older brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, while before that I had been on the run from them, terrified of them, and in disguise. Therefore, even though I was now free to be my youthful self in a tailored linen suit with skirt cut short just below my ankles—even though I was now at liberty to be the real-life, very modern, May 1890 Enola Holmes—it’s small wonder that once again I felt myself to be the fussy-frilly and obedient Ivy Meshle at her job in the reception vestibule of the great Dr. Ragostin’s office. After all, the sign was still painted on the front window: Dr. Leslie Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian. (An impressive way of saying that the completely imaginary doctor, my “cover,” purported to be a finder of missing persons.)
“Where’s Ragostin?” barked my visitor, addressing me principally with his cleft chin, above which I saw mostly a great deal of dark brown moustache, bristling eyebrows, and thick spectacles. He could not have been more than twenty-five years old, dressed like a gentleman but quite lacking a gentleman’s manners.
He looked familiar, distantly, as if he might be a Somebody I had seen in the newspaper, and he was handsome in a forceful way … for whatever reason, he put me sufficiently off balance so that I found myself uttering a meek Meshle sort of reply. “Dr. Ragostin is not here, but I am authorised to help you. Please be seated.”
He did no such thing, but continued to tower over me, his moustache hiding everything about his mouth but the very middle of his lower lip; I wondered how he circumnavigated that biscuit-duster in order to eat. He was saying, loudly, “I need Ragostin to find Wolcott Balestier!”
Pencil in hand, I tried to write it down. “Would you spell—”
“He may be a victim of foul play! I’ve alerted Scotland Yard, but they won’t listen to me!”
I tried again. “Would you please—”
“It’s those vermin venomous pirates have got him!”
I verily felt my eyes widen at that. “Pirates?” A black flag bearing a skull-and-crossbones fluttered in the wind of my mind.
“Craven back-stabbing cowards! They’d better not hurt my chum Cotswold!”
“Who?” I demanded, meaning the most intriguing pirates, seafaring marauders with sneers picturesquely scarred by the sword.
“My mate! My buddy! The best friend a man ever had! Wolcott Balestier!”
Oh, bother. We were back where we started. “Would you please spell the name, please?”
At last, and quite loudly, he did so. I copied it on top of my spoilt conic sections.
“Where’s Ragostin?” he insisted. “I’m told he’s the specialist!”
“I am authorised to handle the preliminaries,” I soothed. Actually, “Dr. Ragostin,” who was entirely a figment of my imagination, had gone out of business in July of the previous year, when I had ceased to need him to protect me from the way Mycroft and Sherlock insisted on interfering with my life. Now on amicable terms with them, I was pursuing my education and had almost concluded my first year in the Women’s Academy. So, faced with my loud and vehement visitor, I should have left Dr. Ragostin in retirement, but there was something about the idea of pirates—might the missing victim have been forced to walk the plank? I was quite fascinated. “What is Mr. Balestier’s relationship to you?”
“Friend!”
“And his home address?”
He answered me only partially. “Maiden Lane! Where’s Dr. Ragostin, the damn quack?” Such was the crude urgency with which this man spoke, nearly shouting. “He must find Cotswold!”
Cotswold was the name of a region in England near the River Severn, but evidently this pepper-pot of a man meant it as the nickname of a person, for, thrusting his tobacco-stained hand into his waistcoat, from some hidden pocket over his heart he drew a small photograph of the face of a man no older than himself, but in many ways quite his opposite. “Cotswold” had no bristling visage, no scrub-brush moustache, and no eyeglasses. Indeed, he had skin as fine as a lady’s, gentle arched brows over large, intelligent eyes, an elegant nose, and a wide but subtle mouth ever so slightly smiling. Reaching for the photograph, I noticed Cotswold’s immaculate collar, tidy hair, puckish ears, modest yet sufficient chin. But my vehement visitor did not yield the photograph; he snatched it away from me and slipped it back into his waistcoat.
“I want Ragostin!” he demanded again.
I answered quellingly, “I will tell him—”
“I will damn well tell him myself!” Lunging past my desk to the double doors of the office proper, the impetuous young man first pounded on them, then tried to thrust them open, only to find they were locked.
Necessarily, in order to turn around and see whether he would next try to b
“I’ll do no such thing!” Fists clenched, he wheeled to glare at me. “I’ll deal directly with the professional or not at all!”
That struck a nerve, and so much for patience. I glared straight back at him, and because I am tall, our dueling stares quite equally clashed at close distance, intensified by the thickness of his spectacles. With fervor I told him, “I am the professional! Dr. Leslie Totally Fictitious Ragostin is merely my most unfairly necessary pseudo-masculine identity. I myself am the scientific perditorian, the finder of the lost! I—”
I was going to vow to find his friend, but he cut me off with a most appalling curse. “You?” he went on, wild-eyed and yelling. “You ostrich biddy with the mouth of a muleteer! You mud-head snipe-nose, you are the she-demon Putana who sucks men’s blood, whose milk poisons babies! Banish yourself! Aroynt thee!”
I admit I stood there open-mouthed, speechless, yet someone spoke for me. A child’s valiant voice shrilled, “Look ’ere, yer don’t talk to Miss ’Olmes that way!” Joddy shoved his small self between me and the raving visitor.
Who seized him by the ear as if to lift him off the floor by that frail appendage.
Joddy yelled out in pain.
Whipping my dagger out of my bosom, I addressed its point to the disagreeable man’s throat and told him, “Let the boy go.”
Open-mouthed and speechless in his turn, he did so. But then his jaws clamped shut and his arm shot out, his hard hand grabbing for my wrist to disarm me.
I dodged him, dagger still at the ready, and as for Joddy, he grabbed the police whistle from my desk and ran to the front door, flinging it open to blow a shrill summons.
Coolly I informed the visitor, “According to the Children’s Charter that Parliament passed last year, it is no longer legal in England to harm innocents.”
“Fatuous girl, put your pig-sticker down before you hurt yourself!”
Instead, I took a step back, tossed the dagger upwards, then caught it neatly by the hilt with my other hand as it descended. I had been practicing. “Girl me no girl,” I told the hot-headed man. “Remember, I am the one who is going to find your missing mate.”
“Unnatural female,” he said between clenched teeth, “daughter of a bullock, I am wasting my time here.” He turned on his heel—which is a dreadful and doubtful cliché, but he actually did it—and with great impetus he strode to the door. Signaling Joddy with a tilt of my head to let him go without further ado, I waited until he exited with a slam, then sheathed my dagger.
Perhaps I should admit to a slight feeling of weakness in the knees. Quite gladly I returned to my seat. Joddy approached to put the police whistle back into the Japanese bowl on my desk where such oddments reposed, and as he did so, he darted a furtive look at me.
“Thank you, Joddy, for your conspicuous gallantry,” I told him, my tone assuring him that he had done right. “I will deal with the constable if he appears, which is not likely.” Reaching into a drawer for my best-quality sketching paper, I began, whilst it was still fresh in my mind, to draw the face of Wolcott Balestier as I remembered it from the photograph.
I felt Joddy’s gaze upon me anxiously again, and I chose to answer his unspoken question: What was I doing?
“My best revenge for that bully’s rudeness,” I said, “will be to locate his missing friend for him.”
* * *
When my favourite cabbie arrived to take me home that evening, pale citrine shafts of springtime sun angled through the London fog so fetchingly that I lingered, standing at the kerb for a moment to pat his horse’s nose. “Hello, Brownie,” I said to the horse, and to the driver, “Have you had a good day, Harold?”
“Proper sausage an’ pork, miss.” This, I gathered, meant that he had made good money. “Praise be,” he elaborated, “the warm weather brings folk out fer a ride in the ’ansom. And how was yer day, Miss Enola?”
“Interrupted. I have not done my geometry lesson,” I admitted. After the Vociferations of the Vehement Visitor, I had utterly lost interest in conic sections, put them aside, and spent the rest of the day drawing a detailed head of “Cotswold,” and also making many disrespectful sketches of his friend, the fiery client who was not a client and whose name I did not know.
“Harold,” I asked, “where is Maiden Lane?”
He contorted his face and tugged at his right earlobe, pondering. “Hain’t it somewhere in Charing Cross, Miss Enola?”
“Let us go see, Harold. Take me there.”
“Straightaway?”
“Yes, straightaway.” I got into the cab. “This very moment.”
We clip-clopped off. The ride to Maiden Lane was not long. At the centre of the web of old London, Charing Cross nested, an oddly rhyming spider of main roads: the Mall, Pall Mall, Whitehall, the Strand, Northumberland.… Shouting inquiries at other cab-drivers, Harold drove to a part of London just off of Belford Street near the Strand.
From the airy seat of the hansom I saw crowds of well-dressed men and women on the pavements, most of them hurrying home for dinner. I saw no ragamuffin children, beggars, or vendors; this was a genteel neighbourhood. My attention fixed at once on a woman—a handsome woman, worthy to be called a lady really, in a silvery silk gown, but why was she standing on the corner as if she had something to sell? Pale and statuesque amidst natty gentlemen and ladies in flowery springtime frocks, she appealed to all who passed, touching their sleeves, stopping them and engaging them in the most urgent conversation whilst showing them something.
What in the world? One did not see religious zealots and the like in the better neighbourhoods. I simply had to find out what she was about. But even as I lifted my parasol to rap the roof of the cab, Harold turned a corner onto a side street and stopped. “This be it, Miss Enola,” he called down to me from his perch above and behind me. “Maiden Lane.”
I stepped out and turned to address him on high. “Might you and Brownie wait a moment whilst I take a stroll?”
“Of course, miss.”
It was a nice, if narrow, street of small shops with flats above them. I set off, but not at a strolling pace. Briskly, like the earnest and orderly pedestrians around me, I walked back towards the corner on which the interesting lady stood. As I neared her, I could hear her importuning voice quite clearly. “Have you at any time today seen him?”
Good heavens, she was an American! Unmistakably, by her accent. Was that why her conduct was so very eccentric?
Quite shamelessly clutching at the elbow of the gentleman ahead of me, she stopped him. “Have you seen this man? He didn’t come home last night.” In her other hand she displayed a large, framed photograph.
Even from a few paces away I could see it. And recognise it. Good heavens some more, it was the same fellow, the same photograph that the vehement visitor had showed me: Wolcott whatever-his-name-was. Cotswold.
I must admit I experienced a distinct sensation of glee.
The gentleman shook his head with a slight bow, then continued on his way, but quite willingly I took his place. “I beg your pardon, miss, but you say someone’s gone missing?” Being taller than she was, I had to look down, peering beneath the brim of her feathery pouf of a hat to see her face.
Instantly, sympathy crowded out my glee when I saw she was fighting back tears. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Hers was not a lovely face; it was a bit too square and strong for a woman, and her proboscis was nearly as pronounced as mine, a worthy reason for me to feel even more sympathy for her.
“I’m so sorry,” I said quite truthfully as she rather shakily showed me the photograph. “I haven’t seen him. Is he your husband?”
“No!” Her voice trembled like her hands. “No, he is my brother! I keep house for him!”
Indeed, her face resembled that of her brother. She had the same fine skin, arched brows, speaking eyes, sweetly wide mouth.
