The Case Of The Cryptic Crinoline Part 1

The case of the cryptic crinoline.

An Enola Holmes mystery.

Nancy Springer.

To my mother.

SCUTARI, TURKEY.

1855.

(The faint of heart may proceed directly to Chapter the First.).

ON THE HILLTOP ABOVE THE HARBOUR STANDS THE huge square building that used to be the barracks for the Turkish army, but is now h.e.l.l's home on earth. The stench of bloated carca.s.sesa"cow, horse, humana"floating in the sea is nothing compared with the stench within that ma.s.sive masonry cube. Shoulder to shoulder on its stone floors lie wounded, sick, or dying men, mostly young British soldiers, many without even a straw pallet beneath them or a blanket for covering. h.e.l.l is relatively quiet; so deeply desperate, helpless, and weak are the patients that they languish almost soundless, dying by the thousands of infection, gangrene, and cholera.

One of those lying insensible, not likely to live through the approaching night, is a young fellow just twenty years of age. By his side crouches a frightened girl even younger than he, his bride of less than a year, who has come to this awful place with him. Most of the men's wives have come along, trailing the regiments with babes in arms, for no way is provided for the soldiers to send home their pay, and separated from their husbands the women will starve.

Many of them are starving anyway.

Watching her husband die, the girl maintains the mute, s.h.i.+vering, and mostly silent misery characteristic of Scutari, for she has seen too much death; she realises that she herself might well die, and she does not dare to hope that the new life she carries within her thin body can survive.

A little farther down the ward, a woman wearing a shapeless grey wrapper and cap washes crusted mucus from a soldier's eyes. Since recently arriving from England, the small group of determined nurses has managed somewhat to improve matters in Scutari. They have scrubbed filthy floors, bathed filthy bodies, boiled the lice out of some of the blankets. The soldier with the infected eyes may go blind, but, as fewer than half of those who enter Scutari come out alive, he should consider himself lucky.

"Keep your hands away from your eyes, now," the nurse tells him, "no matter how much you wish to rub them, for your touch transfers foul matter into them."

Walking through the eight miles of wards comes another nurse, a thin, aristocratic woman who carries a lamp, for night is falling. Her oval face is remarkably sweet, symmetrical, and placid. Her hair, parted precisely in the middle, lies smooth like brown wings beneath a white lace cap that ties under her chin. Slowly she progresses, pausing at the foot of many a patient's pallet and speaking in a soft, melodious voice. "The letter to your mother has been sent, Higgins. . . . Not at all, you are very welcome. Did you eat today, O'Reilly? Good. I should have a blanket for you tomorrow. Did you use a fresh sponge, Walters?" As she pauses where the nurse ministers to the man going blind: "Good. Go to your quarters, now; it's getting dark."

As the nurse leaves, the Lady with the Lamp walks forward again, to pause where the trembling girl crouches beside her unconscious husband. After a look at him, the lady sets down her lamp, seats herself likewise on the cold stone floor, takes the man's blue bare feet into her lap, and begins briskly to rub them with her hands, perhaps warming them a bit.

"It is the only comfort I can give him," she tells the girl, who sits mute and huge-eyed by his side. "You must go now, child. You may come back in the morning."

The thin young wife gazes back at her, wordless and imploring.

The lady replies to that gaze as if to a spoken plea. "I know you wish to stay with him, child, but the rule is that there are to be no females in the wards at night, and if we do not obey, the army may send us back to the kitchen or, even worse, back to England." Her soft voice never rises, and her face, although thin, shows no weariness, resentment, or frustration; it remains angelically serene even as she says, "If that happens, then there will be no nursing for the unfortunates, not even in the daytime. So we must go. Do you understand?"

And, a.s.suming that the girl can hear her, perhaps she thinks the child does understand. Although the younger woman fails to move, there is no defiance in her eyes, only wretched exhaustion.

"Come." Placing the dying man's feet gently back on the floor, the lady takes her lamp and rises. "Come, I will walk with you and light your way." She offers the girl her hand, and after a moment the young bride reaches up to accept that warm grip. The older woman helps her to her feet. For a moment the two of them stand, hand in hand, over thea"one might as well call it a body.

The girl's thin lips move three times before, with an odd plangent abruptness, she speaks. "'E's my 'usband," she states helplessly and unnecessarily.

"I know, dear, but you still cannota""

"'E's a good man," the girl goes on without seeming to hear. "'Is name is Tupper. Thomas Tupper. Somebody besides me oughter remember."

"Yes, of course they should," soothes the Lady with the Lamp. Those who survive Scutari will make famous the comfort of her quiet voice. "Come along now, Mrs. Thomas Tupper."

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

"MISS MESHLE," SAID MRS. TUPPER AS SHE TOOK my empty plate away, "if ye 'ave time to set an' talk a while . . ."

Before my elderly, deaf-as-a-dumpling landlady finished the sentence, she had my fullest attention, because she spoke softly instead of shouting as she usually did, but mostly because, due to her deafness, any attempt at conversation was most unusual. Indeed, her request to "talk" was unprecedented. Generally, after one of her frugal suppers (tonight, spring onions being in season, it had been fish-and-onion soup with bread pudding), I would give her a nod of thanks and retreat behind the closed door of my room, where I could rid myself of the poufs, baubles, and underpinnings of "Miss Meshle," sit in my overstuffed armchair with my feet upon a ha.s.sock, and be comfortable.

"I could use a bit of advice," Mrs. Tupper continued as she took the white crockery soup tureen and placed it on the stove as if it were a pot, then sc.r.a.ped leftover bread pudding into the slop pail rather than into the cat's dish. Greatly wondering what ailed her, I nodded and gestured, signalling my willingness to listen.

"Let's go set down," Mrs. Tupper said.

I was, of course, already sitting, at the table, but we moved to the shabby "parlour suite" at the other end of Mrs. Tupper's single rooma"her house, although clean, was little more than a hovela"and there, as I took a chair, Mrs. Tupper hunched on the edge of the horsehair sofa, fixing me with her watery grey gaze.

"It hain't none of my business, but I've noticed there's more to you than meets the eye," she said as if she felt it necessary to explain why she would confide in such a youngster. "You hain't just a working-girl like you seems to be, not when ye can pa.s.s as a street beggar or yit a lady to the manor born, an' when ye took sich pains goin' out as a nuna""

I made no attempt to hide my shock; she was not supposed to know this. If word were to reach my brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock, enabling them to locate my place of lodging in London's East End, my freedom would be greatly endangered.

But Mrs. Tupper seemed not to notice my consternation. "a"in the dark of night tryin' to 'elp them as is cold an' 'ungry," she went on, "an' where ye get the means, dear only knows." Peering up at me, for she had never been tall, and a dowager's hump had shortened her yet more, she added, "Ye're a good person, Miss Meshle, or whatever yer real name may bea""

"Enola Holmes," I whispered involuntarily. Luckily, she could not possibly hear me and went on without noticing.

"a"an' ye're a force t'be reckoned with, an' I'm 'oping ye can 'elp me."

Often enough she had helped me, nursing me through colds or fevers or, once, injuries, when a garroter had attacked me. She kept a motherly eyea"while I could only imagine what it might be like to have a normal mother, Mrs. Tupper, pressing blood sausage upon me at breakfast and exhorting me out of my fits of melancholia, surely resembled a proper mum. Of course I wanted to help her. "Good heavens," I exclaimed, leaning forward in my turn, "what is wrong?"

Reaching into her ap.r.o.n pocket, she produced an envelope that had evidently come in the day's post, which she handed to me. Nodding and gesturing as if I, not she, were deaf, she encouraged me to open this and read the enclosure.

The daylight from Mrs. Tupper's downstairs windowa"of which she was rightfully proud, as windows were taxeda"the light was waning, but so heavily was the missive printed, in densely black India ink, that I could see it clearly. Slashed across thick paper in the most brutal handwriting I had ever seen, angular and bristling and penned with weapon force, each stroke a club at one end and a rapier at the other, it read: CARRIER PIGEON, DELIVER YOUR BIRD-BRAINEDMESSAGE AT ONCE OR YOU WILL BE SORRY YOU EVER LEFT SCUTARI.

Scutari? Reading the missive twice, I could make no sense of it other than the threat. Yet, as arresting as the message was, the spiked handwriting alarmed me more.

"Do you recognise the writing?" I demanded.

"Eh?" Mrs. Tupper put her ear-trumpet to her ear.

Into it I shouted, "Do you know this hand?" already guessing the answer, for if the anonymous threatener had thought she would know his writing, he would have disguised it, perhaps pasting together letters cut out of newspapers, as was the wont of popular-fiction villains.

"Eh? Know the man? How would I?" Confound everything, at times such as this I quite wished I could just scribble her a note. But, like most common folk, Mrs. Tupper could read only slowly and with difficulty.

"The writing!" I tried again.

"Never seen it. I'd remember, wouldn't I, a thorn-patch like that?" Gesticulating, she expressed alarm and bewilderment. "I think 'e's mistaken me for someone else."

"Maybe," I said doubtfully, as Tupper was hardly a common name. Indeed, I had never met any other Tupper. But it was, of course, her long-dead husband's name, and there might be a few of his surviving relatives in London. "Did Mr. Tupper have family?"

"Eh?" She put the trumpet to her ear.

Into it I bawled, "Mr. Tupper!"

"Died in Scutari." Mrs. Tupper clutched herself as if cold, although it was a fine May evening. "Almost thirty-five years ago an' I'll never forget it. 'Orrible place. Like 'ell on earth."

I lapsed back in my comfortless chair, scolding myself: Scutari. Of course. The British headquarters in Turkey during the Crimean War.

I asked, "Was Mr. Tupper in the army?"

"Eh?"

To spare the gentle reader any more of this, let me set forth in a straightforward fas.h.i.+on the tale that she told me over the next few hours in a far more confused way, and understandably so, for the Crimean War was one of the most confused conflicts ever undertaken by human stupidity: England and Napoleonic France, of all the unlikely allies, joining with heathen Turkey, even more unlikely, against the already-dying giant that had been Ottoman Russia. "Theirs not to wonder why, theirs but to do or die," doomed men charging straight into cannon-fire for the sake of a G.o.dforsaken peninsula in the Black Sea: the Crimea, chiefly occupied by lice the size of spiders, great fat leaping fleas, and rats so big that terriers ran away from them.

Mr. Tupper, however (Mrs. Tupper explained to me), had voyaged to the Crimea as a business venture, being a sumpter, one who sold to soldiers the goods their own thieving suppliers failed to provide for them. Seizing the opportunity, off he went, taking his bride along without a second thought. They were both the merest youngsters. They saw the officers' wives accompanying their husbands with carriage-loads of servants, silverware, and linens, as if going to war were a holiday. Indeed, women by the thousands accompanied the armies, females ranging from camp-followers to Sisters of Mercy, little knowing that most of them, like the men, would die.

Not from battle, but from disease.

"Crimean fever, it were," explained Mrs. Tupper. "There Thomas lay not knowing nothing, with blood running out of 'is ears, 'is eyes, 'is mouth an' nose. Me, trying to 'elp, I paid a couple of the native beggars to lay 'im in an ox-cart for me, an' that way I took 'im to the big 'ospital there at Scutari, ye know." She shook her head, remembering her own innocence. "I thought maybe the doctors an' nurses there could fix 'im up. The word were that they 'ad nurses new from England."

But those nurses, as I was later to learn, were subject to the commands of the army surgeons, who regarded them not only as interfering females in a male domain but, even worse, as civilian spies sent to ruin an otherwise good time with their hen-witted ideas about caring for common soldiers. The army placed many restrictions on these annoying women. In the name of propriety, for instance, females were not allowed in the wards at night.

Each morning, then, they needed to remove those who had died since the day before.

Including Mr. Tupper.

"I tidied 'im a bit, sewed 'im up in 'is blanket, an' they put 'im in the same big grave as thirty others done pa.s.sed away during the dark hours," Mrs. Tupper told me, going on to explain that meanwhile, her livelihooda"her husband's goods, tent, pack-ponies, et ceteraa"had vanished as if into smoke, looted by wartime thieves. Left with no means to get home to England, she found herself amongst others consigned to the very lowest regions of the inferno that was Scutari. Beneath the barracks, or hospital, ran a maze of cellars, and it was here that Mrs. Tupper took refuge along with other widows, orphaned children, crippled old peasants left behind by their families, all manner of beggarsa"of which she was now one.

"'An me not in the best of 'ealth, either."

But rather than elaborate on this interesting statement, Mrs. Tupper got up to light a few candles. While she was on her feet (no small undertaking, at her agea"heavens, she had to be more than fifty!), she opened a carved wooden box I had often noticed, centred as it was upon her sideboard. From this box she brought me a fading photograph to look at. "That were taken of Mr. Tupper an' me on our wedding day," she declared as I studied the posed portrait of two young people in the absurd clothing of mid-centurya"his vast drooping bow-tie, and her skirt spread wide over hoops and crinolines, like an inverted bowl. My good landlady had lapsed into a reminiscent mood, seeming almost to have forgotten about the frightening letter that had caused her to confide in me in the first place.

Directing her attention back to the black-inked, brutal missive, I shouted into her ear-trumpet, "What are you supposed to deliver? What message? To whom?"

"I dunno!" Seating herself again, she hugged herself with her skinny arms. "I've thought an' thought an' I just dunno! What with losing the baby an' all, I might've forgot."

An odd, almost seasick, upside-down feeling took hold of me and rendered me speechless. I simply could not imagine . . . my dear old landlady, she who now spent her days stewing oxtails and tatting pillow-slips, had once traveled to a barbaric land, lost her husband, and then, "not in the best of 'ealth" . . .

Mrs. Tupper must have seen myriad shocked questions in my face.

"Stillborn it were," she explained, "an' no wonder, fer I were more'n half starved, my clothes in rags an' no bed to lie on in them caves, an' no sleep to be 'ad, either, for the rats would nibble yer fingers." With her arms still clasped around herself, she rocked her hunched upper body to and fro. "A 'ellish place it was. Folk went mad. One of 'em took my baby an' flung it into the sea. I thought fer sure I would perish, too, an' that grieved I were, I didn't greatly care."

I whispered, "How ever did you escape?"

And there was no need for me to shout in her ear-trumpet, for she understood my question well enough, from my face if not from my lips.

"The English nurse lady it were," she said. "Funny, I hain't thought of 'er in years. Yet she were famous at the time; the soldiers, they called her the Lady with the Lamp. 'Undreds of them she nursed every day like a mother. 'Ow or why she found time to take mercy on me is a miracle." Mrs. Tupper's watery gaze seemed to see not me, but a distant place of the past. "Maybe she 'eard I wouldn't . . ." My landlady's papery old face actually flushed pink. "I wouldn't, if you know what I mean, like them camp-followers. . . . Most of the women in the cellars would do anything for the sake of food an' pennies, an' I don't blame 'em, but I just couldn't bring meself . . . Maybe that were it. 'Owever it come about, one day one of them crippled boys she adopted fetched me to 'er. Up in a corner tower she were, an' me with barely strength to climb the stairs. There must've been a 'undred people in that room, jabbering all French an' whatnot, coming an' going with sponge baths an' bandage lint an' s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.tons an' lemons an' tincture of iodine an' knitted Cardigans an' Balaclavas an' who knows what all; she 'ad 'er own storehouse in there."

"What was her name?" I murmured, trying to remembera"for I, also, had heard of this remarkable Englishwoman, although I must admit that my knowledge of the Crimean War was sorely lacking; my education, dependent upon my father's library, had focussed on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the like.

"She saw to it that I were washed an' fed," marveled Mrs. Tupper, "an' fine clothes she give me, better'n what I was married in, an' she arranged my pa.s.sage 'ome an' paid for it out of 'er own purse. An' that gracious she were, chatting to mea"though I barely understood a word she said. Deaf I was even back then, but I never said nothin', for I 'oped it would go away, bein' just from the gunfire there at Sevastopol, ye see, when Mr. Tupper an' me were taking brandy to the troops while the Russian ladies set up on top of the 'ill with their parasols an' their picnic baskets, watching like it were a music 'all show."

Good heavens. She had been in battle, too? My little old landlady?

Hardly knowing what to think or how to continue this rambling interview, I once more lifted the mysterious missive that had come in her post and showed it to her. "Mrs. Tupper," I implored, "do you have any ideaa""

She shook her toothless head vehemently. "I just don't know!" she cried. "It don't make no sense. I were n.o.body over there!"

A very brave n.o.body, I thought. But still, a mere accidental woman caught in the war. So who on earth was her mysterious enemy, and what did hea"for unmistakably the ferocious handwriting was that of a mana"what did he want of her? Now, thirty-four years afterward?

Although my curiosity might never be satisfied, still, I felt it my duty to help her with this mysterious matter.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

SO, AS EVERY VIRTUOUS YOUNG LADY SHOULD DO, I sought the advice of an older, wiser, masculine head, consulting a man of the world: Dr. Leslie Ragostin, Scientific Perditoriana"my employer.

I jest. Dr. Ragostin was fict.i.tious, my invention so that I should have the opportunity to search for missing things and persons. All the next day, at work as Miss Meshle, the great man's secretary, I puzzled over Mrs. Tupper's problem: how to deal with the sender of her mysteriously threatening letter?

As was my custom, I first sat at my desk and composed a list of questions: Why "carrier pigeon"? Because she

was going home? Are a carrier pigeon

and a homing pigeon the same? To call