The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline Read Online Free Page A

coat-of-arms, drawn by a chestnut horse and driven by a tall, puffy-faced man with a red nose, obviously a heavy drinker and very likely Irish.
    The pudding-vendor said that a rather shabby grey cab had waited in front of Mrs. Tupper’s house, the heavy, dark horse looked “more fit for a plough,” and that the driver had one single eyebrow “as thick as thatch” that ran like a roof clear over his nose.
    The “lady of the night” on our street, who would also be a “lady of the day” when opportunity offered, said that she had approached the driver while the carriage sat in front of Mrs. Tupper’s house, but had been rudely rebuffed. She said he looked much like any other man, two eyes, mouth, nose in the middle. She said the carriage was black with shiny red wheels, no crest, and the horse was roan.
    The street urchins said variously that the horse was black, brown, or red, that the conveyance was a four-wheeler cab, a carriage, or a coach, that the driver was short, tall, fat, thin, old, young; they agreed only that he was unfriendly, throwing no pennies but rather threatening them with his whip.
    Regarding any description of the occupants of the cab/phaeton/brougham/barouche/carriage/coach, that is to say, the men who had abducted Mrs. Tupper: no one seemed to have seen them getting out of the conveyance and going into the house. Nor had anyone, anyone, observed the kidnappers coming out of the house with Mrs. Tupper in hand, or noticed which way they went. Apparently, the neighbourhood’s curiosity had been all for their arrival, not for their departure. And by this time, even if anyone had told me what they looked like, I would not have believed a word.
    Fit to scream with frustration, and nearly despairing, I returned to the house, lest news arrive from Florrie or her mother, or a demand from the abductors, or something of the sort.
    Suppertime had long since passed, but I had no thoughts of eating, nor could I bring myself to sit down, rest, and wait. Rather, I paced the ransacked lower room, kicking broken china out of my way and trying to think. Two rough men demanding a message? We know you were a spy for the Bird. Mrs. Tupper, a spy? Ludicrous.
    What in the name of nonsense could “the Bird” mean?
    What message? My understanding seemed as dim as the single candle I carried for light, as day had long since turned to night.
    What in the world could Mrs. Tupper have got herself mixed up in? I could not imagine her intentionally withholding from two rough thugs anything that they wanted. Mrs. Tupper, for all her adventures in the Crimea, seemed to me hardly the sort of person to indulge in heroics. I believed that if she had any inkling what the villains wanted, she would have given it to them at once.
    Yet, evidently they had left without it, for why else would they have taken her with them? They believed she knew where it was, and they intended for their master or employer—the man I called X, or perhaps the mysterious Bird—to induce her to relinquish it—
    It? What was “it”?
    The two intruders had plundered the house as if in search of some physical object.
    But obviously they had not found it.
    Just as obviously Mrs. Tupper knew nothing of it.
    Yet—might it nevertheless be here?
     
    When I was a little girl—less than a year ago, that era before Mum took her unannounced leave, but it seemed a distant past, those green sweet-scented countryside days before all this grey London smut—when I was thirteen-going-on-ten instead of fourteen-going-on-thirty, I used to run out into the woods of Ferndell Park, my home, and look for things, anything, just searching. Climbing trees, peering into the crannies of the rocks, pretending there was some treasure to be found. The trove I accumulated had included jay-feathers, yellow-striped snail-shells, someone’s garnet earring, plover-eggs, pennies that had turned green, interesting stones that I suspected might contain gems within them—and I suppose