The Missing Boy

Lady Eugenie’s School for Girl Sleuths, Volume 1

V. Penley

“It is rarely best to start at the beginning, since so few people can agree something has truly begun.”

Detective Malveaux, from “My Early Career”

Table of Contents

Chapter One: A Buried Body

Chapter Two: A Morning Debate

Chapter Three: A Failed Lesson

Chapter Four: Tea; and, then, a Game

Chapter Five: A Loss

Chapter Six: Dinner—and an Argument

Chapter Seven: The Marchioness Divulges her Revelation

Chapter Eight: In the Roadster

Chapter Nine: A Bumbling Inspector

Chapter Ten: The Trip to Town

Chapter Eleven: Checking the Accounts

Chapter Twelve: The Race to London

Chapter Thirteen: To Catch a Thief

Chapter Fourteen: The End of the Chase

Chapter Fifteen: Goodbye, for Now

Chapter One: A Buried Body

“Dear me,” Mrs. Todderham exclaimed.

She had reached for her morning copy of the Barnardshire Gazette and, in doing so, had casually swept her eyes over the large photograph above the fold.  Only minutes earlier, little Jimmie Styles had delivered the paper on his bicycle, and had brought her the news: “Suffragette stomped!” he had said, handing her the paper.

Mrs. Todderham hadn’t immediately understood what he meant. But now, wedged in her breakfast nook, her eyes floated up to the headline, which echoed Jimmie’s pronouncement.

SUFFRAGETTE STOMPED!, the headline blared, in blunt, bold script. Indeed, Jimmie had been quite right.

The picture was equally blunt: what appeared to be a woman in a black dress, falling onto her back in the middle of a race track; and, beside her, a horse improbably lying on its side. The horse’s four hooves pointed directly at the camera, and the woman’s hat, as if to get out of the way, skipped and tumbled across the raceway toward the photographer’s lens. Most disturbing of all, no one seemed to be paying any attention to either the stomped suffragette or to the offending horse. A crowd ringed the two fallen figures, but their heads had turned to look around the bend, following the lead horses as they approached the finish line.

A hand over her heart, Mrs. Todderham read the text:

“9 June 1913. Suffragette Emily Davison, in an apparent suicide attempt, ran in front of King George’s horse, Anmer, at Epsom Derby yesterday. The notorious Ms. Davison, widely excoriated for her militant suffragette work, is a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and has been jailed multiple times in connection with their explosive activities. As recently as 1909, she had attempted to advance the improbable cause of women’s suffrage by violently attacking the Chancellor of the Exchequer, throwing rocks at his carriage.”

“Well,” Mrs. Todderham muttered, alarmed as much by the text as by the photograph. “I always said nothing good ever came of voting.” She flipped the paper over to read below the fold, where the story explained the suffragette faction to which Ms. Davison belonged and its increasingly violent militancy. Mrs. Todderham, tucked away in the sleepy town of Barnardshire, was only dimly aware of the London Suffragettes and of their drive for the vote.

Having finished the story, Mrs. Todderham put the paper down and then looked out her window. What she saw shocked her nearly as much as the sight of a freshly stomped suffragette, Emily Davison: a man was shoveling a hole in the ground, for no apparent reason. Bending at the knees, he pitched a shovel into the hard earth, stepped on it, and then tossed the earth aside. Mrs. Todderham looked closely. Unfortunately, she did not know him.

Four months earlier, the impressive house across the lawn, Clarendon Grange, had been sold to an anonymous purchaser. The Grange had been owned by Earl Graystone, who for decades had been Mrs. Todderham’s employer. In fact, Mrs. Todderham’s tiny thatched cottage had housed the estate’s landscaper, the job her dear husband had fulfilled for twenty-five years before his death. When Early Graystone passed away, Clarendon Grange had been put up for sale. But title to the little cottage had passed, by way of will, to the Todderhams, out of gratitude for their service.

Despite inquiries in town, Mrs. Todderham did not know the identity of her new neighbor. The Grange had been bought by a trust, and the land records accordingly hid the owner’s true identity. She had heard a rumor that the purchaser was a royal peer, apparently a Duke from another part of the country.

Her friend, the Marchioness Carlyle, had confirmed the rumor.

“They’ve tried to obscure it by deed!” the Marchioness said breathlessly, waving a paper around. “But I’ve made contacts in London. The beneficiary of the trust is a Duke, from Clowdon.”

“Clowdon?”

“A Duke!” the Marchioness had repeated.

And over the past four months, the two women had contrived to make his acquaintance. Yet they were always greeted by an empty Grange.  Speeding to Barnardshire in his motor car, the Duke popped in for little more than an hour, then sped away as fast as he had come. Mrs. Todderham saw only dust from the road, never the man himself.

The man digging the hole—and putting a good bit of elbow into it, too, Mrs. Todderham admired—could not have been the Duke. A Duke would never dig his own hole. If she had to guess, Mrs. Todderham would say he was the Duke’s valet.  Tall, and with pitch black hair, the man had a gangly gate and looked Irish. She hoped he was.

Riveted, Mrs. Todderham continued to watch. She worked through three pieces of toast as the hole grew. And when she ran out of coffee and toast, she raced around the kitchen, fixing more breakfast before settling back in her nook.

In the abstract, there was nothing unusual about a shovel breaking the Barnardshire earth in June. But there was no reason for the valet to be digging, either. Mrs. Todderham couldn’t see anything on the ground in need of burial. It was the mystery that gripped her. The unknown. Why was this man digging this hole, today of all days?

Nothing ever happened in Barnardshire, not since the death of her dear husband, George. Mrs. Todderham turned to say, “Come see this,” then remembered that George had passed on and that she was alone.

She sat, comfortably wedged into the breakfast nook, smearing marmalade over her new pieces of toast, and watched.

After digging for another half hour, the valet dropped the shovel and went inside. When he returned, another man followed, and Mrs. Todderham knew at once that he had to be the Duke. As equally as tall as his valet, but with bright, fair hair, he moved inside a halo of light. Mrs. Todderham leaned forward, to get a closer look, and upset her marmalade pot, which poured its contents all over the prone body of Mrs. Emily Davison.

The two men stood looking into the hole, talking. The valet pointed out something and the Duke, hands in pockets, nodded. Then the two men shook hands, and the Duke got into his motor car, leaving his valet alone with a freshly dug pit. Mrs. Todderham moved nearer the window for a closer view.

After ten minutes of additional digging and fiddling, the valet went back inside; and, when he returned, Mrs. Todderham exclaimed, “Oh no!”

The valet carried a table—and not a small table, of the sort that would be wedged in between a bed and a wall—but a rather larger one, something quite as large as Mrs. Todderham’s table in her breakfast nook. The valet carried it, legs up, to the hole in the ground, where he dropped it right-side down.

“Dear me,” Mrs. Todderham whispered. She looked around and saw Puss, lapping at the marmalade. She scooped him up.

The valet returned next with a chair; and then, in a final surprise, reappeared with a bundle slung over his shoulder. “A body!” Mrs. Todderham whispered to Puss, whose paws rested on the windowsill.

Round and long, the entire package had been tied up in a white sheet with ropes positioned in the middle and then at either end. The valet hefted the bundle into the pit, then slowly shoveled back in the mound of dirt, sealing everything underground.

At this point, Mrs. Todderham was quite beside herself. The morning had progressed from shock (at Mrs. Davison) to mystery. But now it approached terror. Death had, once again, stolen onto her patch of land in the country. Had the Duke participated in a murder? Had he requested that his valet cover up the body as he raced back to his landed estate, in Clowdon?

Flummoxed, and unable to make up her mind, Mrs. Todderham knew there was only one person to contact: the Marchioness Carlyle, who lodged at Vinegar House a half mile away. Mrs. Todderham determined to seek her friend’s counsel as soon as possible.

The valet finished shortly. He smoothed the surface with the flat side of the shovel and then, hat on his head, hitched up his horse and wagon to clop away.

Curiosity drove Mrs. Todderham outside.

*

Bess Todderham gained the far side of the lawn with Puss nipping at her heels. Both mistress and cat trembled slightly from the horror of what they had witnessed—and in anticipation of what they were to find. Clarendon Grange rose before them, forbidding even in the bright light of late morning.

Mrs. Todderham half expected the body to be visible when she reached the pit. But there was little to see. No grave marker had been left behind, nor any other clue as to what was buried beneath. There was simply a flat expanse of freshly dug earth.

“It’s odd,” Mrs. Todderham whispered to Puss, who curled around her ankle, “that a body should be buried so out in the open.” She looked up and saw the sun afloat on a sea of blue. This grave was probably even visible from the road.

When she looked back down, Puss had untangled himself from her ankles and had actually stepped onto the grave, leaving a series of footprints on the smoothed earth.

“Oh no. Puss,” Mrs. Todderham said, waving her hand. “Puss, get off it. Come here. Puss.”

But the cat ignored her and walked out into the center of the grave, a chain of footprints like flower petals trailing behind him. Puss paid her commands no attention, and Mrs. Todderham began flapping her hands in the air, as if to wave him off.

“Puss!” she said louder, and unable to think of anything else to do, she wrapped her hands around the handle of the shovel and pulled it from the ground. She then tried to maneuver the cat off the grave, but succeeded mostly in dragging the heavy shovel around, digging marks in the dirt because the shovel was much heavier than she had anticipated. “Puss, you’re giving us away!” she cried and feared that she could hear a motor car coming up the road: the Duke returning.

Puss then sat down in the center, wrapping his tail around his legs, and surveyed the scenery.

They were truly done for now. The Duke, or his valet, would return and see the paw marks. Swiftly, they would deduce that the old woman next door had uncovered the grave, and then they would come for her. Assuredly, there was enough room in the grave for her own body.

“We’re done for Puss!” she cried, dropping the shovel. A tremor ran through her body. The cat, licking a paw, stood and walked back to the thatched cottage.

Just as swiftly as the panic had gripped her, Bess Todderham became resolute. There was really only one thing to do: dig up the earth, exactly as the valet had done, and then scoop it back in. Mrs. Todderham listened and, hearing no motor car over the beat of her heart, determined to get on with. “You have an over-active imagination, Bess Todderham,” she said, and set to digging, tut tutting herself.

Though the grave had been deep enough for a table, the body sat very close to the surface. With a couple of scoops, Mrs. Todderham had unearthed one end of the bundle. The fabric wasn’t a bed sheet but canvas. With the tip of the shovel, she pressed down onto it; and, when the whole thing depressed slightly, as a body would, she cried out, dropping the shovel for a second time.

Her fears had been realized.

*

“It looks like a body,” Mrs. Todderham said, standing at the pit with her friend, the Marchioness Carlyle. Mrs. Todderham had hustled down the road to Vinegar Hill, and now the two women had returned to examine the corpse. The Marchioness had dug around the entire bundle, exposing it and the table top.

“It assuredly is in the shape of one,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “It has the solidity of one as well. Old flesh. I think I can feel bone.” Her forehead wrinkled as she pressed the point of the shovel into something hard.

“Should we unwrap it?” Mrs. Todderham asked.

“My dear, whatever for?”

Mrs. Todderham was silent. “I don’t know.” She continued to look around, her eyes peeled for the town Inspector. The entire time, her mind had been racing.

Marchioness Carlyle was equally distressed. A murder in Barnardshire, of all places! When her husband, the Marquis had died, she had searched for a place to retire. And she had settled on this hunk of earth, which seemed delightfully removed from both her son’s family as well as the frenzy of the modern world. But the world, in the form of motor cars and loud youth—and even modern art—had certainly found her. And now murder, following like a shadow!

But most distressing of all was the suggestion that the Duke—the man Marchioness Carlyle had singled out to wed her daughter, Lady Eugenie—might have been involved.

The Marchioness had been unable to understand her friend’s blubbering when Mrs. Todderham had pounded on her door. And she had resisted the plain meaning of the language that Mrs. Todderham had spoken: the Duke of Clowdon had murdered a man and had buried him with the help of his valet.

“But that’s impossible,” the Marchioness Carlyle had said. “Because he is to marry my….”  But she had stopped herself. Because he is to marry my daughter, was the reason she had left unsaid.

As the Marchioness had learned from her own snooping, the Duke of Clowdon was the possessor of a large estate in a northern county. He was also, equally important, single. For months, Marchioness Carlyle had conspired to make an introduction of her daughter, Lady Eugenie. That introduction could not happen in a prison. This body, wrapped in canvas, needed to disappear.

“It’s such a beautiful day,” Mrs. Todderham said.

“Indeed,” the Marchioness replied shortly. Her ears were peeled for the sound of a motor car, or of a carriage. She heard nothing but a light breeze rustling the grass. She tried to gauge whether the loose soil would hold her if she stepped into the pit.

“Perhaps we should contact Inspector Feagley.”

“Nonsense!” The Marchioness slammed the shovel down in front of her friend. Mrs. Todderham pulled up short, her face all surprise.

“The last thing we need is the law involved,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “In particular, that bumbling old fool, Inspector Feagley. He will not only fail to retrieve this body; he will end up burying us both in the pit as well.”

Mrs. Todderham nodded quietly. “Then what are we to do?”

“Let me think,” the Marchioness said. “You have flustered me with your questioning, non-stop since I laid eyes on you this morning.”

The Marchioness gripped the shovel in her gloved hands. A small idea had skipped into view, one which might exonerate the Duke, and she tried to grab at it.

“You never saw the Duke carry out the body, did you?” she asked, peering out of the side of her eyes at her friend.

“N-n-o,” Mrs. Todderham stammered. “Though he stood with his valet and looked at the grave after it had been dug.”

The Marchioness waved her hand. “It’s not a crime to watch a murder. Or to be shown one.” She sniffed. “You saw nothing else, did you? Try to think.”

Mrs. Todderham felt herself shrinking under her friend’s gaze. The Marchioness possessed a steel trap mind, and Mrs. Todderham never felt she could keep up. She didn’t want to let her friend down.

“No,” Mrs. Todderham finally said. She relaxed as the Marchioness smiled.

“Wonderful!” The Marchioness exclaimed. “I will write Eugenie directly.”

“Oh, where is she? Still in London?”

Marchioness Carlyle nodded. “Terribly alone, too. She’s running some sort of school for girls. Apart from her students, she has only that old cook, you know. The one I had to let go.”

“I hope Eugenie is not involved in that suffragette activity,” Mrs. Todderham said. “Did you read the paper this morning?”

“To step in front of a horse!” the Marchioness cried. She paused, trying to remember why that Davison woman had tried to kill herself. And then she remembered what the word “suffragette” meant, and felt the full force of its absurdity. “For a vote!” she laughed—so loudly that she almost lost her hat. Reaching up, she jammed it back onto her head—which slammed her jaws shut as well.

“I will send a telegram to Eugenie this moment. I see how I can make this introduction come off.” She handed her friend the shovel and pointed at the wrapped bundle resting atop the table.

“Cover it up, will you?”

Chapter Two: A Morning Debate

Though living in London, Lady Eugenie was not involved with the suffragette movement, or with any movement whatsoever, because she was preoccupied with something else: running a school for girl sleuths.

Located in a sandstone building just north of Soho, Lady Eugenie’s school was nearly invisible to the outside world. You could pass it every day without so much as notice or a nod. Only a small sign, stating simply “School for Girls,” was visible to the street.

Herself no more than a dozen years older than many of her pupils, Lady Eugenie stood in front of the class made up of six girls. The entire school, all twelve students and two staff, had risen in the hour before dawn. Young women, living alone in London, had to rise early to attack the world—or else the world would attack you.

Her school had been open only two years, but it had felt like a protracted war. Eugenie had been skirting bankruptcy and destitution since the school had opened. And now she was battling something else: six sleepy students.

But she was determined to make it a success.

“Class. Attention,” she said, stepping into the room and taking her familiar place in front of the black board. She was prepared to lead them through their morning assignment, which was based on her first detective case from several years earlier.

“I assume everyone has read the assignment I copied out for you?” She looked around expectantly and noted the lack of vigorous nodding.

Eugenie covered her mouth to stifle her own yawn. “In case anyone cannot remember, let me summarize.”

But before she could start, she was interrupted. The students were passing something around the room, down by their feet. Heads bent, as if looking at their books, they passed a note from girl to girl. Eugenie crouched down, to see what had snared their attention.

“Ivie!” Eugenie said, when the piece of paper landed in the hands of her best student. “Ivie, let me see the paper, please.” Eugenie stood and held out her hand.

With a sulk, Ivie gave it over, only having had a chance to glance at it quickly.

It was a piece of newsprint, ragged at the edges where it had been torn out. Dominating the page was a photograph of a woman lying on her back, somewhere…somewhere Eugenie couldn’t tell. She looked at the caption to the photograph.

It was the suffragette, Emily Davison, who had been stomped by King George’s horse.

Eugenie’s students eyed her expectantly. As a teacher, Eugenie had few maxims. But there was one she swore by: meet your students where you find them. If you couldn’t engage with what they were thinking, their ears would be stopped up. Accordingly, she folded the paper and asked them what they wanted to discuss.

And what they wanted to talk about this morning was Emily Davison.

“To rush the King’s horse?” cried Maisie Nebbles, sitting half in her chair at the front of the classroom. There were two rows of students, three girls each, and Maisie and Ivie sat at the head of each row. “She must have been mad. Whatever for?”

“For the vote,” said Ivie Niles, nodding. “No one will allow us to vote unless we interrupt their daily lives.”

Maisie guffawed, but Ivie continued in a steady voice. “If women want anything, they have to stand up and make people uncomfortable. Otherwise people will walk on by you. I’ve seen that happen myself.” She nodded at Eugenie. “There are suffragettes who stand there with signs, who can’t draw a crowd. It is the women who block doors who get the public’s attention.”

Maisie listened with her bottom lip stuck out. She and Ivie jostled constantly and were like two magnetic poles. Eugenie should have been disturbed, except none of the other girls would challenge Ivie. They were too willing to allow Ivie to hold sway.

Ivie turned around to address the class: “Women have known that since our own mum, Queen Mary. Stand outside there with a tin cup and see if anyone comes by to drop your vote in it. Look at the Property Act,” she said. “We had to twist arms to get that passed.”

“What is the Property Act?” one girl ventured, in a thin, unsteady voice.

“Don’t you read?” Ivie snapped.

“Please, Ivie,” Lady Eugenie said gently. “Educate us on the Property Act, if you would be so kind.”

Suddenly, Ivie reddened. “Well, Miss…” she stammered, turning back around to face her teacher. Perhaps Ivie didn’t even know what the Property Act was. Her brow furrowed. “If I remember my reading correctly, before 1870, I think, British women could not inherit property. It passed only to their husbands. The Property Act changed that.”

“That’s about right,” Eugenie said. “They also were unable to keep any money they earned.”

“If they worked,” Ivie said.

Eugenie nodded, remembering that all her students, except Maisie, came from the gentry.

When Eugenie had started her school, she had assumed—wrongly—that her students would come from the middle classes, professional families who needed somewhere to send a daughter. But it turned out that the estates of the propertied classes were teeming with girls whose parents wanted to get rid of them.

Ivie herself had been dumped off because she was too outspoken, too challenging for her family. Her parents had shown up on Eugenie’s doorstep with Ivie standing between them. “Please,” the father had said. A simple word, but desperate. It had been raining on the family’s uncovered heads. The father had said it again, his voice cracking. “Please. Can we come in?” They were responding to her advertisement.

“And why do you want your daughter to attend this school?” Eugenie had asked, laying out tea and passing around hand towels for the family to mop the wet from their brows.

“She’s, well…” The father had looked at his wife for support. Instead, the wife completed his thought. “She’s rather outspoken,” she said. “We’ve sent her to three different schools already. And…” She smiled nervously at her daughter.

Eugenie had seen the intelligence in Ivie’s eyes immediately. And so she had decided to make an argument on the girl’s behalf. “Perhaps she’s just bored. I’m sure she would enjoy a more challenging academic environment than the one I can provide.”

“Please,” the father had said. “We just need to get rid of her.”

And, to date, 11 families had stood on her doorstep, making the same claim.

Ivie now stood before the class, almost as their teacher. “The battle for the vote is the most important fight of our lifetime. And it is a fight requiring that we step in front of a horse. After all, if we had to fight to hold onto our money, as women—money we earned—then surely we must twist arms to obtain the right to vote.”

“Twist arms to get the vote!” cried Maisie, unable to contain herself. Whereas Ivie was tall and thin, Maisie was squat like a bulldog. Her two clenched fists sat on the desk top.

“Yes,” Ivie said coolly, looking down her nose at her opponent. “The right to vote is the most important right a citizen can have.”

“In a monarchy?” Maisie cried, pummeling her forehead with her fists, as if she had heard the stupidest thing said.

A few of the other girls laughed—but stopped as soon as Ivie glared.

Come on, Ivie, Eugenie thought, admiring the girl’s back. Don’t give up now.

Lady Eugenie knew that Ivie would have to face down plenty of men like Maisie in the future. Many men saw debate as a chance to give vent to personal feelings, which were usually strong, crudely phrased, but not always unreasonable. You had to stand your ground with these men.

Fortunately, Ivie did not fold.

“We do not have a pure monarchy,” she said slowly. “We have a constitutional monarchy.”

“With a King,” Maisie said.

“I said ‘constitutional’ monarchy. You can have a king in a constitutional monarchy.”

“Oh.”

“A constitutional monarchy means that most of the decisions that affect our daily lives are made by Parliament, for which people vote.”

In spite of the definitiveness of the last word, Ivie glanced quickly over her shoulder at Lady Eugenie for confirmation, and Eugenie promptly nodded. Britain, indeed, was a constitutional monarchy.

Like a fish with its mouth flapping open, Maisie leaped to her feet so that she could deliver her counterargument directly to the other girls. “Constitutional monarchy means that the rich get to vote and the poor get to beg.” She shook her fist in the air. “And if women get to vote, then poor women can vote on their way to the poor house!”

“Oh, dear,” Ivie said.

“Just like their men!”

A pall settled over the room. No one moved or spoke. With embarrassment, the girls looked everywhere but at Maisie. Some studied their shoes, while others examined the scuff marks their shoes had made on the floor. More than one tried to catch Eugenie’s attention, as if seeking confirmation for what Maisie had said.

Eugenie thought, all in all, that it wasn’t a bad interpretation of the world. She gave a slow, ambiguous nod with her eyes closed.

“If we are to make ourselves useful as women,” Ivie finally said, “we will need all of the responsibilities and duties of men. Whether poor or rich--”

“Like working in the freezing cold to make sure propertied ladies get their morning coal,” Maisie said in a low voice. Ivie pretended not to hear, but she winced nevertheless.

Maisie had been the most recent addition to the school, having started only two months ago; Eugenie’s first scholarship student. Although Eugenie was nearly broke, Maisie had proved worth her weight in gold. She was Eugenie’s protection in the early dawn hours when she went out to pay the school’s bills.

Maisie’s entire family had worked the streets, which is where Eugenie had found her. She had impressed Eugenie when she managed to corral a pick pocket who had stolen Eugenie’s purse one afternoon in Covent Garden.

“Stop!” Eugenie had cried, feeling the purse disentangle from her arm. A young boy had raced away from her, the strap of the purse fluttering in the air behind him. “A thief has stolen my purse!”

Most of the crowd stared, unmoved. But a little girl, as round as a barrel, had dashed after him and, through sheer foot speed, had quickly overtaken the young man. She threw herself onto his back like a bear and wrestled him to the ground. She had his head in a lock when Eugenie jogged up to retrieve her purse.

“Should I hold him until a bobby comes?” the girl had panted. Her face glowed scarlet, while the boy kicked helplessly and had even begun to cry. Something like “Let me go” struggled to escape his choked throat.

“No, it’s fine,” Eugenie had said, feeling some pangs of pity for the boy. She reached down and plucked her purse from his loose hand.

“Are you sure, ma’am?” The girl tightened her hold, which caused the boy’s face to slowly darken to purple and the tongue to slide out. “If he steals once, he’ll steal again! That’s what I say!”

“No no,” Eugenie said, mainly because the girl looked on the verge of strangling him. “I am sure he has learned his lesson. At least he looks as if he has.” She addressed the purpling face. “Am I correct?”

The boy began to nod; sweat had broken out on his face, and his white lip had curled up to greet it.

“Indeed he has,” Lady Eugenie said. “You may release your hold,” she told the girl.

“If you say,” Maisie had replied and then let him go.

Within seconds, the boy had scrambled to his feet and run away.

“You really ought to carry that purse differently, ma’am” Maisie had said, standing up and declining to even brush herself off. Her yellow dress was already quite soiled with bits of food and whatever else dried on it. She took Eugenie’s purse and showed her how to position it on her arm. “You wrap it like this and it can’t be pulled off. My Mum told me that. Try it,” she said. “Try and pull it off.”

Eugenie had tried, and no matter how hard she pulled, the purse had been securely fastened.

“Thank you,” Eugenie had said. “I believe you have taught me an incredible lesson.”

And right then and there, on the busy street, Lady Eugenie had decided to offer to educate the girl. Money, Eugenie had told the girl’s bewildered parents, would not be an issue. In fact, Maisie would pay for herself. And she had.

“Maisie,” Eugenie said, “you aren’t arguing that women shouldn’t vote because some women are poor, are you?”

“Er…no…” Maisie said slowly.

“Poor women should surely vote. Much as poor men already do. I’m sure you would agree.”

“But if women are to act as men,” Maisie said, “then what is the use of women?”

Eugenie laughed, startled. Maisie was certainly clever. “Or of men, for that matter,” Eugenie added.

Ivie looked darkly at her instructor, unsteady. Perhaps she feared that she was losing her audience. But after this flicker of self-doubt, Ivie gathered herself and, chin high, proclaimed, “It is the women of Britain who will lead her to new glories this century.”

A noble, nationalist sentiment that silenced even Maisie.

Eugenie nodded curtly. “Right,” she said. “Well said, Ivie. Perhaps now we can move on.” Both Maisie and Ivie took their seats.

But then Eugenie thought of the one girl in the room she wanted to hear from: Pippa. Pippa had been one of Eugenie’s first students. She was, in fact, a relation. Eugenie’s brother-in-law had had a young daughter, whom the mother thought was mentally slow. It had been out of charity, and out of concern with Eugenie’s financial well-being, that they had invited Eugenie to watch the girl, in London. They would pay her a small stipend and cover any major expenses. Their request was simple: to educate her as best she could—but the primary need was to get Pippa out of the way.

With practically no other options, Eugenie had accepted—and had quickly discovered that Pippa was in no way mentally deficient. If anything, she was deeper, certainly deeper than her parents. As Eugenie would learn, Pippa would look and look at something until she had drained it of every drop of significance. Her mind was ideally suited to the life of detection.

“Pippa,” Eugenie said. “Do you think Ms. Emily Davison was mad when she rushed onto the race track?”

Pippa’s hair was already white—nearly as white as her skin. Blue veins showed at her temples, and she always kept to herself, as if people could see the words through her skull.

“Ma’am,” Pippa began, swallowing. It remained a tremendous struggle for her to talk. She chose to sit in the back of the classroom, though Eugenie would always find her. “I don’t think we can answer whether or not she is mad.”

“And why not?”

Pippa paused. “It’s like this,” she stammered. She swallowed again, and wet her bottom lip. “If Ms. Davison gave up her life to draw attention to the right to vote, then she will be mad if women don’t secure it.”

Eugenie nodded at that.

“But,” Pippa said, “if we do secure it, then history will say that she wasn’t mad.”

“So you think how we view Ms. Davison will depend on the future?” Eugenie asked.

“I…I don’t think anyone can really decide in their own mind whether or not they are normal or not normal,” Pippa said quickly. “So, yes. Other people will decide that for Ms. Davison.”

“Based on the future?”

“Based on how important they consider the right to vote. And whether we do end up securing it.”

“But we know, don’t we, Pippa,” Lady Eugenie said, wishing to correct something. “In our own minds. We know, in our own minds, whether we’re mad or not. Emily Davison knew, certainly. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Eugenie thought back to the day Pippa had arrived at the school. Two trunks of clothes and an envelope full of pound notes had accompanied her. But what Eugenie remembered most clearly was how Pippa’s mother had said, loudly, in front of her soon-to-be abandoned daughter, “Do your best, Genie. I know you will. But something’s just not right in her head!” Pippa had heard her mother, but had showed no reaction.

Pippa was now silent, thinking over Eugenie’s question.

Eugenie wanted the point made, so she persisted. “Whatever people say, Pippa, we know in our own minds that we are not mad.”

“We do, ma’am,” Pippa said, looking up and smiling.

“That’s right,” Eugenie said. “So we do not depend entirely on what other people think of us.”

“But there’s a problem, ma’am,” Pippa quickly interjected. By now, all the other girls were listening intently. Both Ivie and Maisie had turned fully around to look at their pale classmate.

“And what is that?” Eugenie asked.

“Ms. Davison might not live to tell us whether she is mad. So people will have to make up their own minds, regardless of what she thinks. In that way, I guess, other people will decide whether she was mad.”

Eugenie paused, surprised once again by the girl’s insight. “Indeed, Pippa,” Eugenie said. “And that is a problem Ms. Davison did not think through.” Eugenie then clapped her hands. “Since no one can answer with certainty whether Ms. Davison is mad, it would perhaps be best to focus now on our morning studies.

“Class,” she said, stepping behind the table at the front of the room, where she had set up the diorama which she had made the day before. “If you will all please come gather around. We will begin our morning lesson in detection.”

Chapter Three: A Failed Lesson

The girls wandered up to the front of the classroom. Maisie pushed against Ivie, and Ivie jammed an elbow in return. Eugenie ignored them. Pippa hung back, standing behind the other girls; but she was tall, and could see over everyone’s heads and shoulders, save Ivie’s.

All eyes looked down on Eugenie’s diorama, which she had set up the night before on the table. It was a diorama of a castle, the roof missing and each room carefully furnished with miniature beds and tables. It was an exact replica of Thistledorn Manor, where Eugenie, freshly widowed and thrown out of her home, had stayed to lick her wounds for as long as possible, trading on the charity of a distant acquaintance. It was in this castle where Eugenie’s wedding ring had been stolen.

She looked at her girls. “Am I correct that you all have read the back story?”

She had written her own little playlet, complete with a cast of characters. The girls nodded, though some more weakly than others. Eugenie decided to forego a lecture; they had wasted enough time talking about Emily Davison, and half the period for detection studies had been lost. So Eugenie quickly recited the relevant facts.

A weekend in April. Rainy. Chill.

A dozen people gathered for a weekend of shooting and parties.

Eugenie was among them. She had still been in the habit of wearing her wedding ring, though other young women had encouraged her to take it off. “We’re not in the Victorian era anymore, Eugenie,” they said. “You do not have to remain wedded until your own death.”

But Eugenie had continued to wear the ring, not out of any fidelity to her late husband. Instead, she wore the ring because it was safest on her hand. It was her largest asset; the only property she owned outright. She had worn the ring to dinner on that first night at Thistledorn Manor, when everyone had gathered in the grand dining room.

For the benefit of her students, Eugenie pointed down to the miniature dining room, and identified where she had been sitting at the table. She then pointed out where all the other guests had sat.

Because of how steamy the dining room had been that night, Eugenie had removed the ring and placed it underneath her plate for safekeeping. But when she rose from the table at the end of the meal, the ring was gone. With a cry, she had stopped everyone from moving to the library. Much to the embarrassment of her hosts, Eugenie had plunged under the table in full view of everyone, and rooted around on her hands and knees like a hog.

But the ring had not fallen to the floor.

“Look in your pockets,” a friend at dinner had told her.

“I don’t have pockets,” Eugenie said. Her frock was old—and pocketless.

“Maybe it’s in a fold,” the friend had said, patting down the cloth and smoothing out every wrinkle. But the dress had been simple—simple being what Eugenie could afford, and the ring had not fallen into any crease.

It had clearly been taken by someone at the dinner table. Eugenie whispered her suspicions to the friend, who continued to pat. And her friend’s look checked her. She caught Eugenie’s eyes, and held them. To accuse someone of stealing from a fellow guest was poor form—particularly poor form when you were scrounging. Eugenie would never be invited anywhere again if she accused someone of stealing from her. So Eugenie had given a short chuckle and said, “Ooops, we found it.” And then everyone had gone gaily on into the library to enjoy their drinks and conversation.

But the entire time in the library, Eugenie sat thinking. Who had taken the ring? The seat to her left at the dining table had been empty. A guest hadn’t shown at the last minute, and so no one seated to her left could have taken it. Yet Eugenie had placed the ring to her left of her plate. She was sure of that. Perhaps the Lord of the house, who had sat two seats away, at the Western head of the table, had reached far across the table to take it; but Eugenie was sure that she would have seen him do so. Likewise, perhaps the young college professor who sat to her right might have slid his hand over her plate at some point in the evening to grab the ring; but Eugenie was likewise sure that she would have seen that, also.

For the benefit of her students, Eugenie once again pointed to where she sat at the table.

“How would we go about solving who took the ring?” she asked her girls.

In reality, the Lady of the house had taken the ring; or, she had set into motion the plan to do so. During the meal, one of the servers had pinched Eugenie’s ring and then deposited in the Lady’s care that evening, after everyone had retired to bed.

Eugenie had deduced as much while sitting in the library. She had tried to think through who would have been able to steal it. By the next morning, she had arrived at the correct chain of logical deductions.

First, she had identified the servers as the only people in the dining room who had physically come near the ring.  Having seen Eugenie take it off, a server had no doubt waited until plates were changed in between courses, and then he had scooped up the ring in the same motion as he had whisked away the plate.

Second, Eugenie had assumed that a lowly server would not steal from guests. At least, not without permission.

Therefore, Eugenie reasoned, if a server took the ring—and assuredly all signs pointed that way—then he must have felt sufficiently secure in his employment to risk taking it. Which meant that he pinched the ring with the permission from someone high up; and, at Thistledorn Manor, permission to steal could be granted by only one person: the Lady of the house herself.

Now, as Eugenie stood before her girls, she expected them to deduce that the ring had been pinched by a server with the Mistress’s approval. Such logical deductions should be well within the reach of her students—at least at this point. It was June, and the end of the school year was approaching.

“Who,” Eugenie asked, “who do you surmise took the ring?”

Instead of answering, each of the six faces pointed toward her were blank.

“Again,” Eugenie said. “The ring is placed here, under the plate, on this side. Facing the empty chair. And you discover the ring missing when you get up to go to the library after dinner.”

She first looked hopefully to Ivie, whose blonde eyebrows were knotted together. Not a good sign.

Maisie, by contrast, jutted out her lower lip and crossed her arms. The other girls seemed rather confused also.

“Ivie,” Eugenie asked, after several seconds of silence. “Who do you think took the ring?”

Ivie paused, then tentatively reached over the wall of the diorama. “The person seated there.”

“That seat is empty.”

“Oh.” She retracted her hand but offered no additional explanation. Instead, she continued to stare down at the miniature furniture, as if expecting it to rearrange itself and reveal the thief.

Eugenie tried another girl. “Celeste?” she asked. Celeste was usually good at divining human motivation; and, as part of her playlet, Eugenie had included information that Thistledorn Manor was financially strapped. Celeste’s parents, too, were financially strapped—a baron with a smallish estate in Wales. If anyone could add two and two, Celeste should.

But Celeste shook her head. “I…I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Please guess,” Eugenie said.

“This one,” she said, pointing to a seat.

“I was sitting in that seat,” Eugenie said, her voice rising. “Pippa!” she called. She called on Pippa as a last-ditch effort. “What do you think?”

The girls separated and made a space for Pippa directly in front of the model castle. Her eyes swept back and forth, not ceasing for a second.

“I think there was no ring.”

“But Pippa!” Eugenie exclaimed, trying to stifle her annoyance. “This hypothetical is based on my life. This was my ring. Please try to deduce who took it.”

Pippa scanned the dining room again. “I think, in that case, that the ring fell into the folds of your dress, and that you lost it in the library. We should look there.”

Eugenie bit her lower lip—hard.

Yes, she thought, removing her hands from the diorama. There was still plenty of work to do. And there was not much time left in the year to do it.

**

Eugenie left the girls to their lunch and returned to the ground floor kitchen, which she hadn’t seen since first thing in the morning. Mrs. Cabot had gone up to the girls with their lunch.

When the telegram had arrived, Mrs. Cabot had placed it amongst the bills. Eugenie found it as she ate her soup. The telegram had come from her mother, the Marchioness Carlyle (no “Dowager Marchioness,” as she refused the title), in Barnardshire. Eugenie read it, with a bit of foreboding. But she was surprised.

“Come home. Mystery.”

That was all.

Chapter Four: Tea; and, then, a Game

Dreadful.

That word sat uppermost in the Marchioness’ mind as she greeted her daughter’s train at Barnardshire station. The Marchioness had been waiting underneath the giant clock. When the train had pulled in, she had gathered up her things and stood at attention as the passengers disembarked. But she had been unprepared for what looked like a derelict to approach. She had been on the verge of calling a porter for protection when the derelict stopped directly in front of her and said, flatly, “Marchioness.”

It was Eugenie, wearing a rumpled overcoat with a tall stiff arrow collar and a thin tie sticking out. Carrying an umbrella, she could have been mistaken for a slovenly gentleman with a cane walking home from the office in the early morning light.

The Marchioness sighed. Her daughter might not have thrown her lot in with the suffragettes, but her style of dress suggested that running onto a racetrack would be the final, and logical, degradation.

Two girls stood behind Eugenie and they wore pretty dresses—white, with wide pastel ribbons. They carried small valises and stood quietly. One kept her eyes down, while the other stared boldly at the Marchioness.

“And where is your luggage?” the Marchioness asked Eugenie, after a brief hug. Fortunately, I’ve worn gloves, the Marchioness thought, as she removed her hands from the oily overcoat.

“We won’t be staying long,” Eugenie said. “I saw no reason to bring anything other than some unmentionables, which one of the girls is carrying.”

“You have that much confidence in your detection skills?” Marchioness Carlyle asked, raising an eyebrow.

Eugenie shrugged.

“Don’t slouch,” her mother said, which caused her daughter to look off at the train. A classic gesture from childhood: whenever the Marchioness showed concern, Eugenie received it with apathy.

“Well, it is good to see you nonetheless,” the Marchioness said. “The carriage is this way.”

*

From the train station, they had gone directly to Mrs. Todderham’s, who waited rigidly inside her cottage. For the past two days, she had anticipated the Duke or his valet returning and discovering that the shallow grave had been dug up. The light rain in the morning had turned the grave to mud and only served to further reveal the body, which sat on the table as if offered on a giant platter.

Mrs. Todderham heard the carriage pull up and thought it was a motor car. She clutched her chest but then calmed as the Marchioness walked inside. After a brief introduction to Mrs. Todderham, all three women (and two girls) trooped over to the Duke’s property, to inspect the hole in the ground.

As they gained the far side, the Marchioness threw out, “A Duke lives here, you know,” and waved her hand in a manner to encompass the entirety of the estate. “Alone, I think. He’s a bachelor, isn’t he?” she asked, turning to Mrs. Todderham.

“He’s rarely here,” Mrs. Todderham said, her shoulders tensed. She had relaxed somewhat from the presence of the other women, but couldn’t feel entirely comfortable. The valet wouldn’t kill all of them…would he?

The Marchioness eyed her friend crossly. “Yes. I believe he lives quite alone. In any event,” the Marchioness said, “he’s not involved in the crime. That is so, is it not, Mrs. Todderham?”

Marchioness Carlyle proffered a stern look to Mrs. Todderham, who didn’t know how to respond.

“Well, I did see him standing at the grave,” she said.

“But not with the body? I believe that’s what you told me. Correct?”

“It’s not a body,” Eugenie said, stopping at the very edge of the grave. She smiled to herself. “It most definitely is not a body,” she said.

“It isn’t?” Mrs. Todderham said. She began to feel dizzy, as if the globe were spinning very fast. Everything was so confusing now that her husband was dead. “Oh?” she said, touching her forehead.

Lady Eugenie happily stepped down into the grave, which caused a cry to escape from her mother’s lips.

“Eugenie, you will hurt yourself! Come away! It’s muddy.”

“It’s a shallow grave,” Eugenie said, hopping in. She stood beside the table, which came only to her knees, and began to untie the ropes. “There really wasn’t a crime committed here at all. As I will show you shortly.”

“Don’t touch a dead body!” the Marchioness commanded. “Oh revulsion.” She raised her fingers to her eyes—and looked between them.

But her words were drowned out by the sound of a motor car, which came roaring into their presence. Around the bend tore Duke Phillip’s green Wolsely, the driver (the Duke himself), staring with his head out the side window at the scene on his property. Had it not rained earlier in the day, a cloud of dust would have blown behind the car. As it was, they all had to settle for the sound.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Todderham exclaimed. This was precisely what she had dreaded. Now they had reached the end. She felt herself collapse and reached for Marchioness Carlyle’s hand. She found only air. Marchioness Carlyle had turned with a sweetened face toward the motor car, which pulled up short in the driveway, scattering gravel all over the place.

“Stop!” the man cried, throwing himself out of the Wolsely and running toward them with his hand raised. “I dare say, Stop! Don’t touch that!”

As he ran, his tousled hair flew up to form a crown. When he reached them, he stood gulping air but otherwise remained composed. His trim suit was unwrinkled, the tie perfectly slotted between the lapels. He held his hat delicately between two fingers.

“What,” he began, gulping for air, “may I ask,” more air, “are you doing”—“on my property?”

He addressed the question generally to the three women and two girls, though his eyes lingered longest on the youngest woman, Lady Eugenie, who stood in the pit with her hands on her hips. She looked up, without apology.

Mrs. Todderham stepped forward, nearly tripping on a blade of grass. “There…there’s been…a murder!” she cried out. “On your property!”

The man followed the direction of her hand, which shook in the general direction of the pit.

“I…” Miss Todderham began, herself gulping air and shaking. “I…I saw your man. He…digging…the body…” She was unable to string together all of the sensations and impressions that rolled around her mind like marbles. So she ended simply where she had started: with her conclusion. “A murder!”

The man’s lips twitched briefly.

Then he laughed.

“Oh,” he said. “Is that all?” He chuckled again. “If so, there’s been a complete misunderstanding, I’m afraid.” And he casually dropped his hat back on his head, covering his disheveled hair. “Dear me. Let me help you up.” He reached down to offer a hand to Lady Eugenie, who took it and stepped up beside him. She brushed off the hem of her trench coat where dirt had collected.

Well, at least she has the good sense to do that, Marchioness Carlyle observed.

“There has been a mistake,” Duke Phillip said, and gleefully jumped into the pit himself. Picking up the bundle, he tossed it onto the ground near Marchioness Carlyle’s feet. He then climbed back out, knelt on the ground, and untied the final remaining knots.

“As you can see,” he said, pulling away the last length of canvas, “this bundle contains nothing but old bed clothes, tied together. There isn’t a body at all.”

“No…body?” Mrs. Todderham cried.

“None,” the Duke said.

And he was right: there was no body. Instead, there appeared to be a good number of old men’s nightgowns tied end-to-end with some other garments stuffed in and around. Though the entire contraption was long and cylindrical, like a body, there was, in fact, no body and no corpse.

“Oh my,” Mrs. Todderham said, feeling the eyes of her friend, Marchioness Carlyle, land on her with a blow. Her face grew quite red. “I…I had thought….”

Eugenie cut in. Her voice, like her face, was curious. “Why would you do that?” she asked.

“It was a test,” Duke Phillip said, standing and smiling down at her. He had several inches on her. In fact, he was really quite tall—almost as tall as her father had been. Standing, he now had grass stains on the knees of his cream-colored suit; Lady Eugenie suppressed a smile.

“It was for the boys I’m training,” he said, pointing back at his motor car. Slouching against it, completely unnoticed till now, were two boys, also in little suits, much like the Duke’s. Unlike the Duke, they looked uncomfortable in the clothing, their starched collars cutting up into the soft underbelly of their chins. Phillip waved toward them, a signal for them to join the group. “I’m training them. To become detectives.”

Lady Eugenie snapped her head up.

“That’s why I bought the place,” Phillip said. “It’s to be my school. A school, I hope, for gentlemen detectives. And these,” he said, as the boys approached, “are my first pupils. We’ve been studying at my family’s estate in Clowdon until the place here can be sufficiently staffed.”

“Gentlemen detectives?” Marchioness Carlyle said. “You don’t say?”

Her eyes positively glowed with delight. In fact, this was perfect. Instead of attempting to soften Eugenie’s career—no Duke, she had been certain, wanted a wife with a career—perhaps she should now… exploit it?

“So, as you can see,” Duke Philip said. “There is no reason to call the Inspector. No crime at all has been committed.”

“Lovely,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “You have given two old women—and one younger one”—and here she nodded at Lady Eugenie, the eyes saying what the tongue could not: unmarried— “tremendous excitement.” She clapped her hands. “Much excitement. I feel as if I have just seen a mystery play performed in London. Well done.” She waited for her friend to join her in applause. Instead, Mrs. Todderham slouched from exhaustion.

The Duke smiled awkwardly while Eugenie glanced over her shoulder at her mother.

“I’m terribly sorry to have given you all a scare,” Duke Phillip said, particularly to Lady Eugenie, before expanding his gaze and embracing the entire group.

The Marchioness responded, “And we are sorry to have ever thought that a crime could be committed on your property.”

The boys, now standing near their master, glanced about, unable to settle comfortably on anything, though always returning to the faces of the two girls, about their ages. The boys and girls eyed each other with curiosity. The adults, likewise, stood about, unsure of what to say next. As host, the Duke finally coughed and stepped into the silence.

“Would anyone care for tea?” He looked at Eugenie. “It might do well to calm us all down.”

“Certainly,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “I was hoping you would ask.”

“Good,” he said once, nodding slightly. “Come along, then.” He took out a key and then led everyone inside.

“My dear,” Marchioness Carlyle whispered to her friend, Mrs. Todderham, as they all trooped into the Grange for tea, “I couldn’t have planned this any better.”

*

Tea was served in the sun room. The group crowded around, finding seats. The Marchioness had taken the Great Chair, with its back to the room’s entrance, while her daughter and Mrs. Todderham sat on a smallish sofa. Around the perimeter sat the two girls and two boys.

The Duke said he would fix the tea. As he explained, all of his house staff, but for his valet, were back in Cranbrook House, the family estate in Clowdon. He intended to hire staff for his school but had yet to get around to it; he and his valet were equal to any tasks thus far. “My valet is a wonderful cook,” Philip said. But the valet wasn’t there presently, having gone into town. “I’ll have the tea in a minute.”

“That is really quite unnecessary,” Marchioness Carlyle said, upon hearing that this gentleman worth, she had estimated, almost one hundred thousand pounds, would prepare their tea and scones. “Have Mrs. Todderham here fix the tea.” She waved at her friend, offering her services.

With a tumble, Mrs. Todderham had attempted to stand, landing somewhere between the sofa and the serving table, causing the girls to giggle.

“Oh that’s quite alright,” the Duke said. “I am used to living alone and thus serving myself. Before I inherited the estate, I lived with several other bachelors in London. Young men are accustomed to serving themselves these days.”

Without looking, he reached down to Mrs. Todderham, who clamped onto his arm with all her life and unsteadily rose to her feet.

When he left, the Marchioness turned to her daughter. “I should say, this is an impressive house for bachelor. Rather drafty. Though with plenty of room.”

Eugenie knew precisely her mother’s ultimate design. But she played along. It was good that her mother had contacted her, even if no murder had in fact been committed. Almost a year had passed since she had last visited, and the presence of the Duke would block the Marchioness from probing Eugenie too much.

When Duke Phillip returned with the tea, Eugenie volunteered to serve everyone.

“No need,” Phillip said, reaching for the tea pot, which Eugenie grabbed first. “Allow me,” she replied firmly.

The Duke smiled and pulled up an ottoman to sit on. Eugenie poured tea for her mother first, and then for the Duke, before serving Mrs. Todderham. She then got herself a cup and nodded for Pippa to come and serve Maisie and the two young gentlemen.

“Tell me more about this school of yours,” Lady Eugenie asked, wedging herself back down beside Mrs. Todderham on the sofa. “Your school for gentlemen detectives.”

“We’ve been running for only a month,” the Duke said. His eyes blazed up; this was clearly a topic he enjoyed. “And thus far we have only two students.”

“You say we,” Eugenie said. “Do you have a partner?”

“Well, only Michaels, my valet. He actually handles quite a bit of the work. We only call him a valet because that’s what my station requires.”

Eugenie nodded. Had she been a Duchess, then Mrs. Cabot would be her lady-in-waiting. Instead, Eugenie was merely a lady and Mrs. Cabot was therefore her cook.

She lifted the cup to her lips but didn’t take a sip. “Why a detective school?”

Phillip pondered as he sipped his tea. “I’m intrigued by mysteries,” he said finally. “Even as a boy. I’ve always wanted to know. It didn’t really matter what I wanted to know. I just always wanted to know what people were talking about. What they were thinking. I think I was the nosiest boy in my castle.”

The Marchioness laughed. A castle: she couldn’t wait to get to Clowdon and see the family Estate.

“But I never had a taste for murder or extreme crime,” Phillip said. “Though that, of course, is often what people contact me for.”

“Murder?” Mrs. Todderham asked.

Duke Phillip nodded gravely.

“Do you practice detection in the field?” Eugenie asked. “In real time?”

Phillip paused. “I suppose I live all my life in real time, the detection as well as the rest.”

Eugenie smiled. “I mean, do you contract with police, to catch a killer, for example? That sort of thing. Or do you solve cases once they’ve become cold.”

“Never cold,” Phillip said. “Though I have yet to tackle a murderer to the ground, if that’s what you mean by ‘hot.’ Essentially, I started solving cases for my friends. Small fry things. Where has my wife spent that inordinate sum of money, it’s gone? Where has my father put the family jewels? Little things like that. Once, when I was travelling with friends in the Riviera, an elderly lady, quite unknown to us, mislaid her Pekingese. I found it, barking and wet, in the alley behind the hotel. It apparently had climbed out of a window she had left open.”

“I’m surprised it hadn’t been eaten,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “The French, you know.”

Eugenie had certainly understood Phillip’s entrance into the field of criminal detection. The first crime she had ever solved was the case of her missing ring. The rapidity with which she had solved the crime had impressed her enormously. “Are you hoping that crimes will bloom here in Barnardshire?” she asked, trying to figure out why he would open a school for detection in such an isolated spot. “London would certainly be a more logical choice.”

The Duke shook his head. “It’s all hush hush, actually. The business.” He held out his cup for more tea. “That’s one of the reasons I had to buy this old cottage, out of the way. If the boys stayed with me in London, then the gig would be up. I have no children, you know. I also don’t want the expense of putting them up in London, though I’m there frequently. If I can, I would like the instruction to be handled by myself and Michaels.”

Unrelated to anything, the Marchioness laughed again. This was truly a delightful house. She could see Eugenie installed in it as its mistress. It could use a woman’s touch. And this chair was so comfortable….

“All my detective work I perform secretly,” Phillip said. “I don’t advertise. My dear mother would find it scandalous. It’s not suitable for a Duke to go around snooping in people’s windows, trying to discover who has a mistress in London, and who merely has an addiction for gambling.”

“Why teach?” Eugenie asked. She had begun teaching out of necessity: available detection work could not pay her bills. Had she inherited anything from either her father’s or her husband’s estates, Eugenie likely would not be teaching in a cold-water flat in London.

Phillip thought for a bit, resting his replenished tea cup and saucer on his knee. He was finely built, Eugenie could not help but notice. Strong yet incredibly at ease, seated like this on an ottoman at a level below his guests. She couldn’t for the life of her understand why he wasn’t married.

“Why teach?” she blurted out again, when she realized that he had caught her appraising him. The corner of his lip curled up just a bit, as if he knew she had been admiring his form.

“For the assistants, really.” He kicked out his legs to stretch. “I figure I can tail people easier if I have assistance. In a sense, these two gentlemen will allow me to be two places at once, you see. I know that eventually they’ll grow up and want to go out on their own. But I reason that if I start training them while they’re young, then I can get a decade of help from them, at the very least. Cecil is ten and Thomas eleven.”

Mrs. Todderham realized she had something to add, and so she drove herself into the conversation. “You were in Parliament. I heard. Or…or…” Suddenly losing confidence, she looked to her friend for support. “I think….”

She was right. She had indeed heard that—from the Marchioness, on one of her visits to the cottage, hoping to run into the Duke.

Duke Phillip laughed. “The House of Lords, specifically. I served for nearly a year. Unfortunately, it’s not where the action is anymore, so I’ve toyed with resigning my peerage and actually running for office. For the House of Commons.”

“Whatever for?” the Marchioness asked.

Instead of answering her, Phillip answered her daughter, who asked, “Will you really give up your title?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “The House of Lords is now a rump institution. If I’m to make a mark, it will have to be as a commoner. Speaking of mysteries. I never once could figure out how to get a bill passed. Or to get anyone on a committee to pay attention.”

“Lady Eugenie here,” the Marchioness said, nodding toward her daughter, to help focus the Duke’s eyes on Lady Eugenie, “also runs a detective school.”

“Do you really?” He took a quick sip of his tea, and looked curious, absorbed.

Over the rim of her own cup, Eugenie glared at her mother.

“It’s new,” Eugenie said finally. “Not many pupils. But I’m giving it a go. All you can do is try. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.”

“And these must be two of your students,” the Duke said, waving in the direction of Maisie and Pippa. Instantly, Maisie blushed at being recognized. Although she sat like a boy, with her knees far apart, she had been hanging, like a lover, on the Duke’s every word as soon as she had entered the Grange.

“I had thought that they were your daughters,” Phillip said.

“Oh!” Marchioness Carlyle cried out. She had drained her own cup ages ago, and a good thing, too, as she upended it along with the saucer. “Lady Eugenie is quite without children, I can assure you!” And then she dropped her voice, confidentially: “She isn’t married, you know. Quite alone.”

Eugenie couldn’t respond before she heard the horrifying voice of Mrs. Todderham beside her: “But she was married once.”

“Would anyone like more tea!” Eugenie called out, standing with the tea pot. She wanted to get the eyes off herself and move the topic of conversation onto something else. “Maisie, I see your cup is empty.”

“No, ma’—,” Maisie began to say, but bit her tongue at the look Eugenie gave her. Stepping away from the grouping of adults, Eugenie walked to the children and filled up their cups—slowly. She wanted to drag it out forever.

Behind her, the Marchioness Carlyle whispered in the tones of salesperson, “It was a short marriage, quite respectable, before the gentleman died. Through no fault of Lady Eugenie’s, I can attest.”

Actually, Eugenie had married her father’s business partner, a man nearly 25 years her senior. The marriage had been short, childless, but not without affection. Her husband had dropped dead from a heart attack within months of her father’s own death. Eugenie took two deep sighs to steady herself. Her mother would not relent in her pursuit of another appearance at the altar.

When Eugenie returned to the sofa, she pointedly offered to refill everyone’s cup but the Marchioness’. When she sat, she gave a quick glance at the Duke, who sat grasping his knee. His face showed no surprise or any other emotion. Whatever he had heard from the Marchioness had made no impression on him in the least.

Well, good, Eugenie thought. He isn’t interested in me. Surely, her mother could see that. If a man were in the least attracted to her, then he would have been crestfallen to have found out that she had once been married. But the Duke showed no interest whatsoever. Eugenie wanted to put down her cup and wrap her arms around herself, the better to give herself a good shake. The sun room, so warm and golden, had lulled her into believing she were in a dream world.

Silence prevailed. The sun had cleared its apex and had begun to descend, a phenomenon that always brought on moments of reflection. If morning was slow to arise in Barnardshire, dusk was quick to fall. There were several more hours of daylight left, but already shadows had begun to gather in the corners of the room, and the Duke, his back to the windows, had begun to look mysterious.

“I know,” the Duke suddenly said. “Let’s have a game.”

“A game?” Mrs. Todderham repeated. She raised a hand to her head, as if to keep it on her neck.

“A challenge, more like,” he said. He took a quick sip of tea and kept it in his mouth for a second. His eyes were distant; he began to put together the final pieces to a puzzle in his mind. He swallowed and nodded.

“So that your time here won’t be wasted,” he said, “I propose that we have a competition, between our students. Using my hypothetical, of course. The bundle in the grave was only the first clue I had lain for my student detectives,” he said. “There is still the entire hypothetical to run through. I have left the appropriate clues around this cottage. I propose that your lady sleuths and my gentlemen sleuths compete to see who can first solve the mystery.”

“Oh, this won’t end well,” the Marchioness whispered. “Ladies should never compete with gentlemen.”

“I’m not sure I’m up for solving a mystery,” Mrs. Todderham said, stifling a yawn.

The Duke suppressed a smile. “The ladies,” he said, sweeping a hand in the direction of the two girls, Maisie and Pippa.

“Not the spinsters,” the Marchioness called across to her friend. “He means the young girls.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Todderham said, scratching at her scalp.

“And your gentlemen?” Eugenie asked.

“Yes.”

They held eyes. A competition then. To see who was the better professor of detection.

“And you haven’t given them any clues on the ride over?” Eugenie asked. “If this is to be a competition, I want it to be fair.”

“I haven’t said a word,” the Duke said, believably. “In fact, I had planned on the discovery of the body being a surprise. Cecil and Thomas here were to be sent outside, whereupon they would discover the freshly dug grave. From there, I had assumed that they would dig up the body themselves. And then, together, I would have helped them solve the mystery. This way, we can both watch and allow them to solve it themselves.”

Eugenie nodded. “I think my girls are prepared for competition.” Maisie sat on the edge of her seat while Pippa sat poised, ankles crossed, but paying close attention.

“Are there background facts?” Eugenie asked.

“This should be interesting,” the Marchioness said sotto voce. She was not sure that she wanted Eugenie competing with a man that she might marry. What if Eugenie were to lose? Even worse, what if her daughter were to win? Neither seemed desirable.

The Duke turned his ottoman around to address the four children, and Eugenie pulled a second ottoman to sit on, facing Phillip.

Phillip then provided the background information.

Chapter Five: A Loss

With preliminary background facts and ground rules set, the party trundled back outside to look once more at the freshly dug pit.

“We have already pulled out the bundle of clothes, which were secured to look like a body,” Phillip told the crowd. “But it was not a body, obviously. Instead, it was undergarments tied together to approximate a body.”

It was at this moment that Marchioness Carlyle felt her need for a nap, and she asked Eugenie if they could break off the competition and take another tea.

“You can go home,” Eugenie said.

The valet, who had just arrived at Clarendon Grange from town, walked up to the Marchioness. His dark eyes matched the coal black hair, which was neatly parted at the side. He bowed slightly, his arm extended.

The Marchioness would not have felt greater shock had a dining room chair walked up on its hind legs and extended one of its arm. Everyone was silent at this breach of decorum, with the Marchioness particularly aghast.

The valet merely smiled and said, quietly, “I’ll walk you home, ma’am.”

“You will kindly do no such thing!” the Marchioness snapped, and, half turning around, extended an arm for the Duke, whom she imagined would walk her across to Mrs. Todderham’s cottage. But the Duke stood with Eugenie, silently laughing.

“Well!” Marchioness Carlyle said, realizing that she was quite alone. She grabbed Mrs. Todderham’s arm and held on for dear life. “WE—,” she said, to the air, to everybody, “will see OURSELVES across!”

And dragging along her dear friend, who promptly tripped over her own feet and fell to the grass, they by degrees began their journey across the lawn.

“To think!” the Marchioness whispered. “A valet offering to escort me.” She shuddered.

“Unusual,” Mrs. Todderham murmured.

Together, the two women glanced back at him, who stood at attention and saluted them when they glanced his way. “And some sort of Irishman at that!”

Left behind, the Duke turned to Lady Eugenie.

“Your mother is…compelling,” he said.

“She finds you doubly so.” Lady Eugenie smiled despite herself. “Or she finds your money compelling.”

“My money?” the Duke asked. “Why?”

“Well…” Eugenie stopped. She never knew how to observe proper decorum herself. But since they were nearly the same age, perhaps they both practiced decorum in the same loose manner. “She’s compelled by your money because of her spinster daughter.” When he didn’t respond, she clarified: “Me.”

“Ah,” the Duke said. “But who needs marriage when they have detection.”

And as if nothing more needed to be said—because detection was always the pinnacle—he then turned to the four children, who were studying the pit. The boys whispered behind their hands back and forth, while Pippa stared down, her mind spinning like a water wheel. Maisie looked as if she wanted to jump into the pit. Physical: always.

When the Duke had described the background information in the sunroom, Eugenie had seen immediately that the hypothetical had been based on a real historical incident: the disappearance of Lady Laura Ashley in 1833.

In her off hours, Eugenie spent time reading in the history of criminal detection. At the British library, one could see her always with volumes of Allan Pinkerton in her arms, which she carried to a desk and piled up like barricades around her. This reading had constituted her formal education in the field. She hoped that her reading, when harnessed to her instincts, would be enough for her to effectively teach detection, as well as solve her own cases on a part-time basis.

The disappearance of Lady Laura Ashley was commonly known in detection circles as “The Case of the Missing Bride-to-be,” which was the name Detective Malveaux had given it in his handbook on detection. It had occupied ten closely packed pages near the beginning of the second volume. The Detective’s handbook was often checked out of the Library, and so Eugenie knew that she was not the only fan. It had been written twelve years after Malveaux had solved the case, when he had built up enough experience to put out a manual.

The background had been thus: a girl, set to be married in London on a Sunday, had gone missing on Saturday in Dover. She was not in her bedroom the morning of the wedding, nor had anyone seen her since the previous afternoon, when she had been in Dover, visiting distant relations.

They had spent a week visiting, on holiday. On Thursday, Laura Ashley’s father had left to return to London, travelling back alone to attend to urgent business. He had left behind his wife and two daughters (including Laura, the bride-to-be) who were set to travel back on Saturday, the day before the wedding. At that point, the relations whom they were visiting, the Marleys, would come up Sunday morning, just in time for the wedding.

But the women themselves ended up travelling separately back to London as well. The wife left Dover late Thursday evening, soon after her husband, because she had been feeling ill and the Marley house had been too drafty. Transported in a public coach, she had gone straight to her bedroom upon landing home and stayed there until the morning of the wedding, when a knock on her bedroom door informed her that her eldest daughter was missing.

Meanwhile, the family’s youngest daughter had returned home on Sunday morning with the Marleys. Both the mother and the youngest daughter had assumed that Laura, the bride-to-be, had been travelling with the other. It was not until the groom’s family arrived for the wedding that no bride-to-be could be produced. She had gone missing.

Malveaux had been called in, on urgent plea of the father, who was familiar with the French detective’s celebrity. In reality, the pint-sized (and hunchback) Frenchman had made his name as an author of detective fiction, not as a field practitioner; he had never solved a real crime in his life. His column of detective fiction had first appeared in the London Times in 1819, where he solved hypothetical crimes for the pleasure of his readers. The short, four-hundred-word squib mysteries were nearly as small as their author—and equally as popular. All of London had Malveaux mania. The public assumed that “The Little Frenchmen,” as he was called, was a real detective, poking into the bowels of the city to solve shocking crimes.

In 1833, Malveaux was still only a writer, though one who was comfortably well off. Yet, he also craved respectability. And the Ashleys had been an exceedingly wealthy merchant family. They straddled the very pinnacle of the society Malveaux longed to join. Invited to use his detections kills to find the missing Lady Ashley, Malveaux had not hesitated in the least. “Yes,” he had told the messenger, as he pulled on his beard. “Yes. I will come.”

But instead of going to London, where the Ashleys had gathered for the wedding, Malveaux had gone immediately to the Marley house, in Dover, where the Ashleys had spent the prior week. In his memoirs, Malveaux had explained the reasoning behind this decision:

“Evidence of a disappearance should come from the scene of the disappearance, which was Dover, not London. And evidence of disappearance requires immediate preservation, lest the evidence itself disappear.”

Malveaux had had little doubt that Laura Ashley’s disappearance was an inside job. One of his fondest axioms had been: “It takes one to kill, two to disappear,” by which he meant that the most successful disappearances required the help of others. So he had raced by carriage to the Marley estate in Dover.

At the estate, he had discovered the freshly dug pit, but had ignored that instinctively. No one disposing of a body would have left such a large mound of dirt in plain view. Nor could the young lady, had she killed herself, have covered herself back up. The pit, as he realized, was a red herring.

Instead, he had gone directly inside by way of the servant’s entrance. Ignoring the pleas and cries of the staff, he had climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, being dogged at every step by the cook, who demanded to know who the little man was.

At that point, he had identified himself; and Malveaux’s fame had been so great that even the uneducated cook and the charring girl, who followed the cook like a yapping dog, had heard of him. He identified himself and devised a lie: he had been called, he claimed, by the Ashleys to search for the cook’s employer, Mr. Marley, whose carriage had gone missing and who had never made it to London for the wedding.

This story had its intended effect. The cook immediately covered her face and the charring girl burst into tears. The death of an employer was every servant’s worst fear.

Malveaux quickly asked which bedroom was Mr. Marley’s—and, at the same time, divined which bedroom the young Lady Laura Ashley had slept in.

In a state of shock, the cook and the silenced charring girl answered him before retreating downstairs, clinging to each other. Malveaux, left alone, went to work. He immediately found the bedrooms and, stripping off the blankets, looked at the bedsheets, holding each one up to the light of the window. About the middle of the sheet, he found the tell-tale sign—a misshapen stain, like a blob. It was faintly yellow—human sweat or sexual secretions. He was sure this was Miss Ashley’s bedroom.

Detailing his train of thought in his handbook, Malveaux had produced the following inference chain: why would there be human secretions on the bed sheet? Only if she had been naked. And why would they have been naked? Not because it was too warm at night. Thick blankets covered the beds, necessities for cool weather.

No; the only cause of nakedness was sex. And who would have sex on the night before her wedding? A woman who had no intention of getting married the next day and exposing her lack of a hymen!

So Lady Ashley had run away with someone, on the eve of her wedding. A man, quite obviously. But who?

Now that he had made his discovery, Malveaux descended once more to the kitchen and corralled the char girl. Holding her hand patiently, like a child holding the hand of his mother, he guided her back upstairs and invited her to tell him who had stayed in the house the prior evening and where they had slept.

Malveaux had not been looking, like a lesser detective, for the gentleman to have spent the night in the house. No, that would have been too obvious. Rather, he was looking for the entrance into the house. The gentleman had come from outside. And someone had obviously let the young gentlemen in. A note must have been delivered: “Let me see you one more time.” A night of passion had ensued, and then—either before or after coition—a decision had been made to run away. The key to finding the missing couple was to find the person who had let the gentleman in.

It would likely be a man, Malveaux thought. But then he checked himself. It could also be a female confidante.

He then asked the young char girl to tell him who had slept in each bedroom. But she had been so discombobulated that she needed to sit down with a piece of paper and draw out a diagram. In his handbook, Malveaux reproduced it from memory:

After the char girl identified the bedrooms, telling him who slept where, Malveaux had eliminated the bedrooms of all the adults. He could not see Mrs. Ashley perpetrating the entrance, nor Mrs. Marley, the mistress of the house. That left the rooms of the young.

There were four rooms. Lady Ashley’s younger sister, Mary, had spent the night with the youngest daughter of the manor, Louisa. The two older sons also shared a bedroom; and a third bedroom had been for the eldest daughter of the manor, Frances Marley. Then Lady Laura Ashley had had her own bedroom, the fourth.

Moving about the rooms, Malveaux found it difficult to eliminate a room. Always eliminate: that was his iron clad rule. But all the rooms had windows that looked out onto either tree branches (which could be climbed) or to a cupola that could be traversed. A guest could have slipped in through any of them.

Somewhat stumped, Malveaux had been on the verge of returning downstairs to pepper the staff with additional questions, when he saw it. The beds again. The bedroom for the two gentlemen of the manor contained two twin beds; one for each. The bed for the eldest daughter, Frances, was a double; as was the bed of Laura Ashley.

But the bed in the room that the two young girls had slept in was a mere single.

Why, Malveaux speculated, did the youngest Miss Ashley cram into a single bed? Why had she not spend the night with the eldest daughter of the manor or with her sister?

He called the char girl back up to confirm that the eldest Marley daughter, Frances, had slept in the room with the double bed.

“Yes,” the girl had said, trembling. She had been crying a good bit, and Detective Malveaux looked up into her eyes with what he hoped was compassion.

“The two youngest girls shared a single bed?” he asked.

The girl paused. Her forehead crinkled. Then she nodded. “That’s…that’s where they were in the morning.”

“Merci,” he said—and kissed her hand.

The answer was obvious: the youngest Miss Ashley was supposed to sleep with her sister, the bride-to-be, but did not, because her sister was expecting a visitor. And Miss Mary Ashley did not sleep that night with the elder Miss Marley, the owner of the other double bed, because the window to Miss Marley’s bedroom was to be the point of entry. If anyone else had been in the bedroom, the plan would have been exposed. It was the elder Miss Marely’s job to secrete the man inside and deliver him to his lover, with whom he must have run off with.

After scouring the bedrooms for any other piece of circumstantial evidence—a train ticket stub, a scrap of paper with a destination written on it—Malveaux had gone forthwith to the wedding party in London and had interrogated the eldest Miss Marley, who had broken down and immediately revealed the scheme.

Eugenie knew all of this, and thus knew how to solve the crime. The key would be to get to the bedrooms, precisely as Malveaux had, and to move on from there. But she couldn’t say a word to her girls. This was a competition, and she wouldn’t cheat. Maisie eventually said, out loud, “So if there’s nobody here, then she must have run away.”

She looked at the two adults for confirmation, but they kept their faces neutral. Eugenie, however, cried out with pleasure inside her mind. Her girls would solve this! They would win the competition! The two boys, by contrast, continued to whisper between themselves, one of them shaking his head while the other attempted to convince him of something.

Together, and without any signal passing between the four, the children all ran into the Grange at the same time. Eugenie started clapping her hands, following right behind them with the Duke.

“It is Detective Malveaux’s famous Case of the Missing Bride-to-be!” Eugenie whispered under her breath, as she and Duke Phillip followed the children.

Phillip laughed—and gave her a second look as they passed inside. “I see you are a fan of the Little Frenchman’s work.”

“All detectives are,” she said. “Or at least I hope they are. It’s a pity I haven’t introduced my girls to his work yet.”

“A pity for you,” Phillip said, “but an advantage for me. I doubt my boys understand questions of the heart yet. Somehow, they must manage to solve the mystery, in spite of their youth.”

Inside, the children split off—with the boys heading immediately upstairs, much to Eugenie’s dismay. She hoped her girls would follow, but they didn’t.

“Are you sure you haven’t taught them using this case?” Eugenie was annoyed that the boys immediately knew to go upstairs. If Phillip had maybe alluded to the case in front of his boys, then losing would be less painful.

“Oh, I don’t usually teach using a case method,” he said. “We study specific skills. Interrogation. Fingerprinting. Analyzing bodies. And then we read literature to understand the psychology. Dostoevsky, that thing.”

Eugenie tensed. She did none of those things.

“Do you use a case method?” he whispered.

They stood in the kitchen, which Maisie and Pippa were casing. Pippa moved methodically over the utensils, apparently counting them. Maisie had opened an icebox and surveyed everything inside.

The clues are up in the bedroom, Eugenie wanted to scream. Why, oh why, were they spending so much time in the kitchen?

“Sometimes,” Eugenie whispered, finally responding to his question. “The case method has its uses.”

“Interesting. You must educate me on what those uses are. I have heard it used at other schools. Perhaps over dinner tonight?”

Eugenie made no response. If her girls won, she’d happily return. If not, then she would have to see.

Maisie shut the ice box and turned around with her arms crossed. “Can we ask a question?”

“Of course,” Duke Phillip said.

“It’s a question for the cook,” Maisie said.

“And the cook will answer.”

“Well…” Maisie began, but suddenly became shy, so Pippa stepped in. Her pink eyes flitted here and there, never resting on Phillip though she threw her question toward him. “How many people were eating the dinner the previous evening?”

Good, Eugenie thought. That was an excellent question. By determining how many people had eaten a late meal, she was sure to discover—without having to explicitly ask—how many people had spent the night.

“There were seven,” Phillip said.

Pippa mulled that over. Maisie, anxious to move, said, “Let’s go to the dining room,” and so they all climbed a flight of stairs from the kitchen to reach the dining room. Eugenie absorbed every detail of Clarendon Grange’s dining room, but her mind immediately moved upstairs, where she heard tramping feet running around where the bedrooms must be. Undoubtedly, the boys were closing in on a solution.

“Shall we go see them?” Phillip whispered to Eugenie. He nodded, subtly, toward the ceiling.

“Do you think they are about to solve it?”

“Who knows? They could be close.”

Eugenie wanted to cry. She nodded.

Quietly, they left Maisie and Pippa in the dining room, where they were crawling all over the floor, and climbed the stairs. When they reached the top, the boys ran out of one bedroom and into another.

“Which is which?” Eugenie whispered.

But before Phillip could answer, Cecil asked Phillip which room Lady Laura Ashley had slept in.

“That one,” he said, and Eugenie was depressed to see the boys go immediately into it. Eugenie and Phillip followed, watching the two boys strip the sheets from the bed.

They immediately held them up to the window. Then they talked between themselves, until the larger of the two boys dropped the sheet and turned.

“I think we’ve solved it,” he said.

“Write it down then,” Phillip said, handing the boy a slip of paper and a pencil. The boys sat at a desk and wrote out their explanation for the disappearance. For unknown reasons, after they finished, they handed the paper to Eugenie, who against her better judgment looked, hoping that they had gotten it wrong.

The bride has run off with a lover, who was let into the building by the eldest daughter of the lord of the manor.

Oh no, she sighed, folding it back up and handing the paper to Phillip. His face showed that he already knew his pupils had accurately solved the mystery.

At that point, Eugenie’s girls burst into the room. Maisie ran to the window and looked out. “Yeah,” she said. “Here it is. See.” Pippa joined her and she whispered into her ear. Pippa then began to nod vigorously.

“I think we have solved it,” Pippa said.

“Why don’t you tell it to us,” Eugenie said. “Since the boys have already offered their explanation.”

“It’s like this,” Maisie said. She was huffing loudly, big girl that she was. Nevertheless, she rattled off the answer, exactly as the boys had done.

“Well done,” Phillip said.

“But the boys answered it first,” Eugenie said, to explain why the two boys were shaking their hands and laughing in the corner of the room.

Maisie immediately crossed her arms and made a face. Pippa, her chin tipped down, remained silent.

“Maisie,” Eugenie said, quickly intervening. “Congratulate your competitors, please. It was a spirited competition. Both teams handled themselves admirably.”

“Very admirably,” Phillip said.

Though Pippa shook hands gladly, Maisie only did so grudgingly.

On the walk back outside, the game completed, Phillip leaned in and asked what Lady Eugenie’s plans were for the evening.

“I have no idea,” Eugenie said. “Since there was no murder for me to solve, I should think about heading home, I suppose.”

“To London?”

“Yes.”

“But there is no late train,” Phillip said. “You’ll have to catch the 7:00 o’clock tomorrow morning. Say, why don’t you eat with me? My valet has brought back a feast, I’m afraid. More than just us four men can eat.”

Eugenie tried to stall but couldn’t think of a believable excuse. “I need to ask my mother,” she said.

“And I think we know the answer to that.” His eyes were dancing, though the light died when Eugenie didn’t smile. “In any event,” Phillip went on. He had such fine fingers, Eugenie observed. Long and tapered. No wedding ring. She looked away, toward Mrs. Todderham’s cottage as Phillip finished his remark. “If she needs convincing—and I’m not sure she does—but tell the Marchioness that I want to show her my grounds. To see if they meet with her approval.”

“I’m sure she’ll consider it.”

Phillip laughed again. “Dinner is served at 8:00.”

Chapter Six: Dinner—and an Argument

To no one’s surprise, Duke Phillip’s estate did meet with the Marchioness Carlyle’s approval. And she had been most eager to see it.

Everyone returned at dusk for dinner, trooping back across. The Duke had then taken Marchioness Carlyle to visit his duck pond, where in the fading light he had pointed out interesting features of the landscape, and during which the Marchioness managed to pry out of him details about his other estate—the family one—in Clowdon.

Meanwhile, Eugenie and Mrs. Todderham had waited inside Clarendon Grange with the two girls, in the library. Mrs. Todderham nestled down onto the sofa, stifling a yawn, while Eugenie looked closer at the book cases. Disappointingly, they contained few books. The volumes available were detection stories, crammed onto one shelf, along with a complete set of the memoirs of Malveaux. Eugenie guessed that Phillip kept these books for his future students. She had half a mind to write down which volumes he had, so that her girls could be as prepared as his students.

She was disappointed not to see anything of a personal nature. She wondered what he read in his free time—other than Dostoyevsky.

The valet, who doubled as a cook, arrived in the library to announce that dinner would be served shortly; Duke Phillip and Marchioness Carlyle returned soon after the announcement.

“Are you hungry?” Phillip asked the Marchioness.

“Like a lioness.”

To Eugenie, the dining room seemed smaller in the evening than it had earlier in the afternoon, during the competition. Two tables were now crammed into it: a rectangular table with four plates set, and a smaller table in a corner for the children.

“Please, sit anywhere,” Phillip said, taking a seat not at the head but across from where Eugenie sat.

Mrs. Todderham took the Eastern head and hugged her arms in her hands. “This is…cozy.” She had worn only a dress, with bared shoulders. Across the length of the table, she whispered to the Marchioness: “I should have put on that sweater, like you told me.” The Marchioness merely raised an eyebrow in response.

When Michaels came in shortly with bowls of steaming vegetables and a rack of lamb, the heat in the room increased considerably. Eugenie discreetly wiped her brow with a cloth napkin. Her mother, sitting at the Western head, remained coolly composed.

“Let me serve you,” Phillip said, standing and taking plates. Michaels came and left, bringing endless bowls of food and casting glances at the Marchioness, who kept her gaze carefully averted and her hands calmly in her lap. It was a miracle that Michaels had managed to cook as much in so little time. The smells, in such a small space, were intoxicating.

“Please eat,” Phillip said, as he moved to the children’s table to dish out food.

Eugenie, wearied after a long day (they had left London at 4:30) stifled her own yawn and put the first piece of sizzling lamb in her mouth. It instantly melted, filling her sinuses with its scent.

“Well,” Mrs. Todderham said, her cheeks rosy. “This is better than what I would have cooked.”

“Indeed,” the Marchioness said.

In the beginning, conversation was general. Everyone praised the food as they cleaned their initial plate. But after seconds, Mrs. Todderham had revived with animal spirits and decided to put current events into circulation.

“What about the Woman Question?” she asked innocently, picking up a spoon to use for her salad. The salad was served after the main course, in the French style.

“The woman’s question?” Duke Phillip repeated. He chewed thoughtfully and looked at Mrs. Todderham, as if waiting for her to expand. His hands were folded in front of his chin as he chewed a leaf of lettuce. Eugenie knew he was playing dumb. Surely, she thought, a former member of the House of Lords would be aware that women had been agitating for the right to vote. For quite some time, too.

“The right to vote,” Mrs. Todderham clarified, looking down in wonder at the celery stick her spoon was unable to spear. She then giggled softly to herself and picked up a fork.

“What do you feel about women voting?” Eugenie asked evenly, laying down her own utensils so that she could focus on his answer. She wasn’t quite yet over her girls losing to his boys earlier in the afternoon. She sensed an opening to make him uncomfortable.

“Is that what women are trying to do?” he asked.

“Yes,” Eugenie said. “Mrs. Todderham wonders your feelings on the subject.”

“I like women,” Phillip began carefully. “My table would be bereft without women. Quite bare.” He smiled all around; Marchioness Carlyle tittered in response.

Lady Eugenie did not.

“So you support the right to vote then?” she asked. She folded her arms. She had not brought a frock to wear, having had no reason to anticipate a meal with someone of the Duke’s standing; therefore, she wore the same blouse and skirt as she had travelled in, but had taken off the trench coat. Now her arms were cold, so she held them in her hands. “You would support Mrs. Davison, who recently ran in front of a horse to secure the vote for women?”

Phillip dug aggressively into his salad, cutting pieces with a knife and fork. As Eugenie talked, he glanced up at her through his eyebrows, a gleam in his eye. “Did you know Miss Davison?”

“No,” Eugenie said. “I’ve never met her.”

“Are you sure? Not at a meeting in London, perhaps?”

Eugenie began to feel her face color. “I’m neither a suffragette nor a member of the Worker’s Party.”

“Are you sure?” He forked salad into his mouth and chewed equably, his lips barely moving though the muscles at his jaw stood out.

Eugenie shook her head. “This isn’t about me, in the event. And you still haven’t answered the question.”

The Duke sniffed and swallowed his salad down, after which he took a long drink of water, looking at no one. He seemed careful, nervous. Eugenie liked that.

“Well,” he began, after patting his lips with a napkin. “If you really want my answer to whether the franchise should be extended.”

“I do,” Eugenie said.

He smiled quickly to himself, but then straightened his lips. “Well, then I would have to say… I guess I should have to answer…”

Eugenie leaned over the table, blinking.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. He looked her blank in the face. “I don’t see any reason for anyone to vote, actually.”

Maisie, sitting at the children’s table, chuckled along with one of the boys. They then eyed each other quickly and returned to their small plates of salad.

Mrs. Todderham, who had finally picked up her fork, winced at the answer. She glanced quickly at Eugenie and observed that this was not the answer Eugenie wanted to hear, either. Instead, annoyance rose slowly up Lady Eugenie’s face like an uninvited guest up a staircase: first the chin quivered slightly, then the nostrils flared as the eyes glowed; then, at the top of the stairs, her smooth forehead broke into several steps.

Eugenie fell back, and crossed her arms again.

“I’m sorry if that upsets a suffragette such as yourself,” Phillip said, smiling as he bit into his salad.

The Marchioness, for her part, didn’t hear Duke Phillip’s answer—hadn’t even heard her daughter’s own question—because she had been focused on the silverware and the china. Through all the courses, she had managed to upend the bowls and plates to see the imprint on the bottom and was now maneuvering to do the same with the salad plate. Thus far, she had been impressed with the quality of the china. It was as good as the set she and her late husband had once owned. Perhaps better.

“But you can vote,” Lady Eugenie said. “I don’t see how you’ll be elected to Parliament if no one is voting.”

Mrs. Todderham nodded at that. Quite right, she thought. “Oh, are you running?” Mrs. Todderham asked.

Phillip nodded quickly. “Perhaps at some point. There won’t be another election for five years. But back to—.”

“Or do you mean only men should vote,” Lady Eugenie said, cutting him off. “Men like yourself. Men of property.”

At the word property, Marchioness Carlyle lifted her head quickly. But then she groaned, divining the topic of conversation. “Oh my dear,” she whispered, nodding her head in the direction of Michaels, who stood at the door with his hands clasped behind his back. “Let’s not encourage unhappiness with one’s lot in life. Breaches of propriety will only increase if we do.”

“Quite right, ma’am,” Michaels whispered in her direction. “Quite right.”

The Marchioness sat bolt upright, frowning.

“No, no,” Phillip said. “I think this is a most appropriate topic of discussion. Especially with such a committed suffragette as your daughter, Lady Eugenie.”

“I am not a suffragette,” Eugenie said. “I am merely attempting to iron out the inconsistencies and contradictions in your beliefs. There are many. Please assist me, good sir.”

“I would be happy to,” Phillip said, reaching for his fork again. “But I’m afraid I can’t see them.”

“The contradictions?”

“Yes.”

“You want no one to vote,” Eugenie said. “Yet you apparently are comfortable with only men of property voting. I would call that a contradiction.”

“Are you saying a man of property should not be able to vote?” Phillip cocked an eyebrow.

“I said no such thing. I am saying that men of property should not deny others the right to vote. It is, as I said, inconsistent to cherish for oneself what one would deny others. Or maybe not inconsistent. What’s the word?” She looked around the table dramatically. “Oh yes. Selfish.”

“I…I…” Phillip said, leaning back. Some color, on the center of his cheeks, burned through the blond hair there. “I…I reject entirely your line of thought. In fact, I would say that you are completely wrong. And if there weren’t two ladies at my table, I would use stronger language.”

“I think she’s right,” Mrs. Todderham said, nodding toward Eugenie. She was as surprised as the Marchioness that she said it. With an embarrassed smile, Mrs. Todderham explain herself. “I’m not a suffragette, but it does seem a little…inconsistent.”

Phillip reached for his own water and drank. No one spoke.  Eugenie could see the wheels spinning in his head.

She waited for him to finish drinking before saying triumphantly: “I’m sorry. I’ve caught you without anything to say.”

“No, no,” Phillip said, inserting a finger into his collar and loosening it slightly. He ran a thumbnail across his eyebrow and composed himself. The color rapidly left his cheeks and his lips regained their delicate shape.

“You’ve raised good points. Very interesting.” He nodded. “Both of you. Perhaps there is an edge of inconsistency. But I did not ask to be given property. Nor did I ask be born a royal peer.”

“Ah,” Eugenie said.

“But having served in Parliament, I have come to see the beauty of an electoral system in which those with a vested property interest decide how to regulate that property. Those who own property know best how to dispose of it. I should think it rather parallel to your own situation with marriage.”

“My situation…marriage…” Eugenie shook her head, confused. “I don’t….” This was a devious maneuver, meant to throw her off guard. Keep your wits, Eugenie. Her girls had been outmaneuvered earlier in the day; she would not suffer the same fate at the table.

“Yes, you and marriage,” Phillip said. “How many women today would agree to have someone else decide for them who they should marry?” He looked at the other women at the table. “Would you?”

The Marchioness, who was not anti-intellectual, rested her chin on her palm, to watch the exchange. She had no idea who would be the winner, though they looked evenly matched. As best as she could figure, the Duke thought that others shouldn’t tell you what to do with your property. That did seem similar to what the younger women these days said of marriage: “Let me decide.” That was the modern creed. The Marchioness had never seen the parallel until today.

“I don’t follow the analogy,” Eugenie said. “Are you comparing your estate in Clowdhorn—”

“Clowdon.”

“Clowdon. Excuse me.” She took a napkin to wipe her lips; her hand shook slightly. “Are you saying Clowdon is as important to you as my life is to me? Are you saying that no one can tell you what to do with Clowdon because I don’t want to be married off, like some gypsy?”

“Precisely.” Phillip wiped his own lips with a napkin. His hand did not shake and his eyes held hers evenly. “I think it is an apt analogy.”

As ladylike as possible, Eugenie returned the look, though allowing it to harden into a stare. “I disagree. The state regulates my body, yet you would deny me a say in how it is regulated?”

Phillip’s brow creased at the word “body.”

“That’s hardly appropriate.”

“It’s the truth,” Eugenie said. “And there can be no politics without truth.”

Phillip began eating his salad again, not looking up. To someone who had just come into the room, he looked bored, uninterested in the rest of the people at the table. Yet, to Eugenie sitting across from him, his brow looked quite disagreeable, quite ugly.

In truth—if truth was what she was truly after—Lady Eugenie had hardly thought about the suffragette movement at all. She had been born a daughter of privilege herself. She was quite sure that her background precisely paralleled Phillip’s. Her father a Marquis, Eugenie had been born to a family that could trace its lineage back to the Domesday Book. The family’s estate had grown for centuries until it had embraced entire townships. Though it had shrunk over the past hundred years, it had maintained its income during Victoria’s reign, with key investments made by her businessman father, who would have been wealthy in his own right had he been born a commoner. Eugenie had never felt, as a child, anything less than secure; and she had spent her formative years touring Switzerland and the Low Countries.

But when her husband had died—suddenly, keeled over his office desk—and she had lost her home, it was as if she had missed a step. Now her days were focused relentlessly on survival: getting enough food, keeping heat in the school, driving her girls toward academic progress. Her everyday concerns pressed round her. Eugenie moved from a state of privilege to one of near poverty in almost an eye blink, and she had missed that intermediate step—of being a professional woman married to a professional man—where most of the London suffragettes seemed to be located.

Had she been given the right to vote, Eugenie didn’t know if she would even exercise it. And how meaningful were rights if they weren’t exercised?

But Phillip, sitting across from her in his own beautiful house, wearing his beautiful clothes, projected such an easy air of security that she felt compelled to defend the right to vote. People who had everything—such as he—should be charitable. She was certain of that truth. They should be charitable especially when they had proved themselves superior teachers of detection.

She needed to find a weakness—and she thought she had. Phillip, continuing to eat, cleaned his plate and reached for his glass, but it was empty of water.

Eugenie pushed across her own glass, which she hadn’t drunk from yet. The gesture gave her an opening to start again.

“So what did you do in Parliament, if it wasn’t to support a women’s right to vote?” Eugenie smiled weakly, trying to appear teasing. Instead, she was laying a trap. “In the papers, one reads of this vote and that vote. Of speeches. I should imagine it is a veritable bee hive of activity. How did you contribute to the hive?”

He finally looked up but left her water glass halfway between them.

Oh no, Eugenie thought. He doesn’t look that upset.

“Well, I did many things,” he said, nodding. He sat up straighter, and included the Marchioness and Mrs. Todderham in the discussion of his time in Parliament. “I was only in there less than a year, you must understand. Before Asquith rammed through the Parliament Act, which stripped the Lords of their power. But in my time I managed to sponsor several bills. Such as the creation of the new children’s hospital in Clowdon. Increased funding for the poor. I also introduced a bill to fund family planning.”

He waited for Eugenie to respond to that.

She didn’t.

Phillip continued. “I was also fortunate to join the Honorable Charles Cottington of Bumbridge in petitioning the Prime Minister to contribute relief funds for the situation in India.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Todderham said.

Phillip nodded. He continued to tick off several other accomplishments. Despite the quip earlier in the day that he had never passed a bill, he certain had been busy, and he gave the name and substance of each bill he had introduced.

After ticking off each act, he looked openly at the two elderly women for approval, which was promptly given. They gazed at him adoringly. Then he glanced slyly at Lady Eugenie, whose approval was less forthcoming. She sat attentive but unmoved.

Yes, Eugenie thought, I have found his weakness.

It was his vision of himself. A vision that he was a man of the people. Phillip didn’t want anyone to touch his property or to help decide how to dispose of it—that was quite clear. But he also wanted to serve the public. Eugenie didn’t doubt this in the least. He did want to help. He did care about the poor. What he couldn’t give up was control. He wanted to act for other people’s benefit without ever hearing from them.

It wasn’t the worst fault someone could have, Eugenie reasoned. She had certainly met men, of all ages, with far, far worse.

“And women don’t have an interest in society?” Eugenie finally asked. The anger had left her, but a sentence came to mind and she repeated it before thinking: “It will be Britain’s women who return the Empire to its highest glory.”

From the child’s table, Maisie laughed uproariously. The two boys joined in, unaware of the humor. Even Pippa laughed quietly. Clearly the children had been listening closely.

“I have long held,” the Marchioness intoned to the clearly-confused Phillip, “that every woman has her own empire, so long as she has a family at home.”

Michaels whispered, “Quite right, Madame,” and reached down to remove her plate. Marchioness Carlyle, receiving his smile, raised a hand to her throat and glanced away.

“Yes,” Eugenie muttered. “I think I have heard that before as well.”

“I’m sure you were a frightful dictator,” Phillip said to the Marchioness, who burst into a youthful giggle. Like a schoolgirl, she blushed.

“Please, Duke…” She covered her face.

“I’m sure you were frightfully severe.”

Well, Eugenie thought, he at least has broken the tension. And all at once Eugenie felt tired again, a long day having come to an end. She comforted herself with the knowledge that she had found what she had come for: a weakness.

For the remainder of the evening, Phillip carried the conversation by decisively shifting away from Eugenie. He ate little, questioning Mrs. Todderham closely about her experience with Earl Graystone and casting enough quips in the direction of the Marchioness to keep her satisfied.

Very confident, Eugenie told herself.  And why not? He was in his home with guests. In complete command.

By the time dessert arrived, she was sure Phillip had quite forgotten their debate about woman’s suffrage. Mrs. Todderham, exhausted from the stress of the day, had begun to yawn uncontrollably as Michaels slid the bowl of pudding in front of her. Eugenie herself had been yawning behind her hand for the past fifteen minutes, and one of the boys had asked Phillip if he could be excused to go to bed early. The evening unwound, and Mrs. Todderham brought it to an end by announcing she either had to go to bed or she would fall asleep in her pudding.

“Although a lovely pillow,” Phillip said, “I’m afraid you might eat it in your sleep. Another time, then,” he said. Standing up from the table, he glanced at Eugenie for the first time in about an hour.

“Thank you for the meal,” Eugenie said. “It was most unnecessary.” She almost choked on the final word. Why? Was it anger? Fatigue?

No, she thought, pushing away from the table. She felt a lump in her throat but couldn’t identify the cause.

The Duke and his valet then walked the ladies and two girls outside, where stars shone in the sky like diamonds strewn on a lush, black velvet curtain. There was no moon.

Michaels disappeared into an alcove and returned with a lit lamp. He then led Marchioness Carlyle, Mrs. Todderham, and the two girls across, while Philip lit his own lamp to accompany Lady Eugenie a little behind the others.

“I’m afraid I’ve upset you somehow,” Phillip whispered, as he and Eugenie stepped around the open pit.

“Not at all,” Eugenie said.

When the Duke didn’t respond, Eugenie said, “The dinner was wonderful,” but as she had already thanked him, this observation did not revive the conversation.

Duke Phillip then slid his hand around her arm. “Be careful. It’s an unsteady patch of ground here.”

Eugenie did not fight him. In fact, it was quite comforting to have an escort. On more than one occasion, she had been forced to plunge into the dark London night—to solve a mystery, to shadow someone; or, just as likely, to visit a physician on behalf of a sick student—and she had accustomed herself to heightened vigilance, an expectation that a robber lurked in every alleyway. It was nice to give yourself over to someone so strong, even if the stretch between Clarendon Grange and Mrs. Todderham’s cottage was not peopled with criminals, as were London’s alleyways.

“I would like to visit you in London sometime,” Phillip said. It was so dark, Eugenie didn’t know if he looked at her as he spoke. His lamp began to bob rapidly in front of them.

“Oh,” Eugenie said, her heart quickening. “Confident that you’ll win your race for MP, then?”

“Whether in Parliament or not,” Phillip said, “I am often in London. For business affairs and things. I am frequently in the city. I have a home there.”

And other women? Eugenie thought. With luck, the Marchioness had earlier in the evening pried out of him details about any other women. Eugenie would have to devise a scheme to retrieve the information without appearing to ask for it. Of course, if he was truly unattached, the Marchioness would offer that information unsolicited.

Phillip said, “And I would like to see how you run your school for girl sleuths.”

“I must run it quite poorly,” Eugenie said, “judging by the competition results earlier today.”

“Don’t deprecate yourself,” Phillip said. He sounded annoyed. Because his face was hard to see, Eugenie focused on the bobbing lamp and the heat which radiated from his body, only inches away. “Leave your address with Mrs. Todderham before you depart for London. I’ll pick it up from her. Please.”

By now, Michaels and the two elderly women had reached the cottage, and lamps had been lit inside. Michaels was headed back toward them; but, at a slight movement from Phillip, he swerved away.

Phillip stopped short of the cottage, so that they wouldn’t be visible to those inside.

Eugenie’s body turned, a mind of its own, to face Phillip. Things seemed to have advanced rather quickly. It was getting chilly out, so she instinctively stayed as close to him as possible. His body formed a shield against the light breeze coming across his duck pond.

“Thank you,” Eugenie said—though she didn’t know what for, exactly. “For the walk,” she quickly added.

“And you will leave your address with Mrs. Todderham?” He looked down at her intently, not humorously, as if she had something he needed and he wanted to be sure to get.

Eugenie nodded, mute. He must have seen the nod, because he said, “Goodnight then,” and turned on his heel, hurrying back toward Clarendon Grange. The light of his lamp met up with his valet’s. Eugenie stood outside Mrs. Todderham’s cottage until she couldn’t see the lamps any longer.

Phillip and his valet had gone inside, and there was nothing around Eugenie but darkness—and, up above, stars.

Chapter Seven: The Marchioness Divulges her Revelation

It was too late to walk to the Marchioness’ house at Vinegar Hill and sleep there. Accordingly, it was decided that the four women would all spend the night at Mrs. Todderham’s, whose three bedrooms were precisely set up to the task. Eugenie herself took a sofa in the drawing room while the two girls stayed in the third bedroom, the Marchioness taking the largest bedroom for herself.

As the girls prepared for bed, Eugenie sat with them and brushed their hair. Maisie, who typically squirmed as the teeth bit into the knots at the back of her head, instead spoke in a voice full of wonder.

“That house,” she breathed. “I don’t think I’ve ever been inside any quite that large.”

“Hmmm,” Eugenie murmured in agreement. Pippa sat beside her waiting for her own thin white hair to be combed. “It is a very impressive house.”

“And the Duke was so handsome, ma’am,” Maisie said, turning around to look at Eugenie, though the brush was still in her hair. “Wasn’t he, ma’am?”

“Yes, he was very beautiful. I mean….” She paused, seeing Maisie’s eyes go wide. “I mean, he is a charming man.”

Maisie didn’t miss the slip.

On the sofa, after she had tucked the girls in, Eugenie sat with her travelling bag. She pulled out a notebook, in which she kept track of the school’s monthly expenses. In her darkest period—the first few months of the school, when Pippa and Ivie had been her only students—Eugenie had comforted herself at night by going through her list of expenses, reassuring herself that she had enough money. Quickly, it had become a habit. Those little columns of numbers were reassuring. They suggested that nothing could sneak up on her without her knowing. Eugenie was confident that she could handle any problem so long as she saw it approaching from a distance. She could steel herself. She could out-think it.

She hoped.

After going through her expenses and deducting the cost of three train tickets, she put everything away and fully reclined on the sofa. She would only sleep briefly—a nap really—so there was no reason to change out of her skirt. She leaned back, her head resting on the arm of the sofa.

She had not yet shut her eyes, when she was made aware of the figure standing before her in the darkness.

“I thought I saw a light,” the visitor said. The voice was even, and serious.

“There is no light,” Eugenie said. She had snuffed her lamp when she had put her finances away.

“There was. Earlier.”

“Mum?”

“Yes,” the Marchioness said. “Of course.” She withdrew to a rocking chair near the window. “Who else could be worried sick about you, at this hour?”

Eugenie sat up, so that they could have a proper conversation, yet she struggled to see through the dark. “Do you want the light on?” she asked.

The chair began to squeak as it rocked in reply. “I need to speak to you, Eugenie. And I think the darkness will allow me to speak more freely. Please indulge me.”

Oh dear. Eugenie had never known her mother to need the cover of darkness to give voice to her opinions. Morning, afternoon, night—all were acceptable moments for her mother to unburden herself.

Eugenie sighed and leaned back against the sofa, crossing her ankles. She waited for the inevitable deluge.

“I have been very worried about you, Lady Eugenie Margaret Elizabeth Josephine Carlyle Conyers. Very worried.”

“About?”

“About your living alone in London and running a sort of school. Or whatever it is you do.”

Eugenie covered her yawn. The darkness, having sufficiently cloaked the room so that she could not see the Marchioness in the rocking chair, covered her own lack of interest in being lectured.

“I live with Mrs. Cabot, you know. Your former cook. I am hardly alone in the city.”

“I never trusted that woman,” the Marchioness sniffed. “So I take no comfort in that fact.”

“Mum—.”

“I am going to speak, Eugenie.”

Eugenie waited, happily. The rocking chair continued to squeak as it moved back and forth. Slowly, Eugenie began to see the first outline of her mother, and now greater detail. The Marchioness was gripping the arms of the chair, overcome with excitement of the news that she brought.

And here it was: “I have found a solution to your problem.”

“Of living alone?”

“Yes. And even more. Of being a widow.”

Eugenie’s heart came awake.

“The Duke,” the Marchioness said, supplying the expected answer.

“What Duke?”

The Marchioness groaned. “Oh, do let’s not pretend that you don’t know who I mean by ‘The Duke.’ Didn’t you see how he looked at you at dinner? Or earlier? He positively gaped at you when he saw you standing in that grave with the body.”

“Good heavens,” Eugenie said. “I’m sure he has seen more beautiful women than I at that moment.”

“Rubbish,” the Marchioness said. “It’s impossible to tell what will snare a man. I’ve heard some are even interested in a New Woman such as yourself.”

New Woman. Eugenie wanted to laugh.

“I don’t think it matters,” she said instead.

“Do not pretend to be uninterested in him, Eugenie Margaret. You are wasting your breath. I have an intuition when someone is lying. A woman’s intuition. And I can tell when a woman is lying just as well as a man.”

“Go on,” Eugenie said, after a moment, feeling herself chastened.

“I’ve said what I wanted to say.” However, the chair continued rocking. The floorboards creaked.

Eugenie scratched the side of her chin. She knew her mother had not nearly come to the end of her remarks. Nor did Eugenie want her to stop. She knew, deeply, that what her mother said was true: the Marchioness did have intuitions about people, men most of all. Eugenie only had to remember her dear father, and how the Marchioness managed to control him while at the same time convincing him that she had only his interests at heart.  Eugenie’s father, a diamond merchant, melted under his wife’s hands. And Phillip seemed like her father, an old-fashioned sort. Eugenie doubted he went in for the New Woman.

“Do not think I am trying to push him on you,” the Marchioness said. “Nor will I push you on him. I know my limitations, Eugenie. I know how…unhelpful…your first marriage was. Being cut out of Bill’s estate.”

She was quiet for a moment, and Eugenie tried to remember back to her first marriage, which seemed so long ago. She remembered only the end of it, the fear of poverty.

“Remember,” the Marchioness continued, “I will see him often, as we live in the same town. We could be construed, in a sense, as neighbors. Whenever you deign to see me, you will see him. And whenever you want to see him, you can see me.

“Or not,” the Marchioness continued. “I must say, Eugenie, I have been quite disturbed by your lack of interest in finding a husband over the past several years. Quite. If I didn’t know better, I would say you were preparing yourself for a convent.”

Or a life, Eugenie thought.

“And you may certainly take up the vows of Rome,” the Marchioness continued. “I will not stop you. But you have captured his imagination, my dear.” Her voice was now a whisper. The rocking had suddenly stopped, and the Marchioness seemed to be leaning forward. “A Duke, Eugenie!”

“But,” Eugenie said, not feeling any conviction in what she was about to say. “But I want a man who respects me for my mind.”

“Have a son then,” the Marchioness said, falling back. The rocker groaned awake. “Have several. Make the sons the men their father won’t be. But you must make a husband first. And a Duke, Eugenie? Have you been listening this entire time?”

“Attentively.”

“I’ve never really been forthright with you,” the Marchioness said. “It’s a flaw, I see now. I’ve always believed it was my duty to protect you.”

“Please stop.”

“Being forthright? I’ve never been.”

“Stop shielding me,” Eugenie said. “I can handle whatever you have to say.”

“Good,” the Marchioness said. “Because I must unburden myself. Starting tonight.” The rocking started again—rapidly. “You are young and vivacious now, Eugenie. The bloom of youth. For now. But next spring? Two springs from now? Ha. Ha ha ha. Undoubtedly not. Undoubtedly no longer. You showed up here in a trench coat and a frumpy blouse with a man’s tie, a hat that had never seen a season in which it was in style, and negligent stockings. Had I been a man with a hundred thousand pounds a year, I would not have looked at you. At most, I would have asked you to clean out my chimney.”

Eugenie covered her mouth as her mother pushed on. “But, for some improbable reason, the Duke has been snared. His inner wick has been lit. You hold the flame.” She went quiet once again, as if appreciating her metaphors. The runners on the rocker dug into the carpeting, causing tiny squeaks in the floor boards underneath. Then, without warning, the Marchioness stopped. “Don’t let the flame go out, my dear.”

“I don’t think I’m holding a match,” Eugenie said, though she was now sitting fully upright, attentive to all her mother was saying. Eugenie knew that she could trust everything the Marchioness had divulged.

But was she happy to hear it?

There was also a more immediate problem. How to ask about other women? Eugenie did not want to lose her pose of apathy.

The rocking chair squeaked only once, and when the Marchioness spoke next, her breath lightly touched Eugenie’s face; she was standing very close.

“And you have a competitor.”

Eugenie’s heart pinched.

“How do you surmise?” she asked.

“I asked about all of the flowers on the property, playing stupid. He knew the names of the love ones: posies, in particular. The names of the others were a complete mystery. Clearly, he has bought love flowers for someone, and not his dear mother. Otherwise, how would he know the names?”

Not bad reasoning, Eugenie thought, somewhat deflated.

“And I know who it is,” the Marchioness said. “He mentioned many times an MP, Mr. Castlefork, whom I knew slightly from your father’s business affairs. They have a girl, a daughter. I can’t imagine that a Duke of Phillip’s stature would visit the estate of a minor MP unless something else there caught his fancy.”

Eugenie swallowed involuntarily. So there was another woman. Castlefork? She ransacked her brain for information but came away empty-handed. She didn’t really know any members of Parliament. Still, she wished that she knew him. She wished she knew the girl. Eugenie had no illusions when she was outmatched. She hoped that Miss Castlefork was the most beautiful woman in London. In that way, Eugenie would know that she had no chance.

As Eugenie was thinking, the Marchioness Carlyle had bent down for a kiss. She pressed her lips to her daughter’s forehead and then stood.

“She’s nothing to be afraid of Eugenie, I can assure you. A mousy little thing. Barely out of her diapers. I saw her once, when your father was alive. This must have been four years ago, or maybe more. My eyes glazed over her as if she were an undistinguished shanty in a city one passes in a stage coach. A part of the scenery. Not a shelter for a man with options.”

Yes, Eugenie thought. Or No. She was confused.

The Marchioness was not confused. “Perhaps she has blossomed in the interim. Physically, I mean. But if she is anything like the mother, then she has been as stunted mentally as a giraffe growing inside a box.”

Eugenie smiled in the darkness.

“All the Castlefork women are,” the Marchioness said, clucking her tongue. “The mother is precisely the gauche sort who would try to rope a Duke for his money alone. But I’ve heard the family has struggled to educate the daughter. Her mind, apparently, is a sieve. I have doubts that the Duke is truly interested in lugging her around the rest of his life. It’s an enthusiasm, my dear, nothing more. He visits her because she is sweet. She probably flatters him. But even a harmless enthusiasm can become, through repetition, something more.” She reached for her daughter’s hand, found it, and squeezed hard. “Don’t let it.”

Marchioness Carlyle then floated back to her bedroom.

*

Alone with her thoughts, Eugenie found it impossible to sleep. When she was worried about something, she talked it over mentally with herself, long conversations in which she tested hypotheses. But she didn’t feel worried about Phillip. She felt instead…what? Intrigued?

She knew one thing that intrigued her: Miss Castlefork. Eugenie tried to imagine what she was like. Young, apparently. Unburdened with any concerns. Sheltered, probably. Mousy, also—although what the Marchioness meant by “mousy” could mean anything.

Next, Eugenie tried to imagine her appearance: undoubtedly creamy skin, with a shock of dark hair and dark eyes. Vulnerable—yet mysterious. A woman Mr. Singer Sergeant would paint. Wasn’t that the type of woman all the painters put on their canvases?

Docile. Surely that word applied. Miss Castlefork probably was not someone who would argue with a host who had generously provided dinner.

“Oh, rubbish,” Eugenie said, flipping over onto her side. “You are not interested in the Duke, Eugenie. You have other…concerns….”

Lying in the dark, Eugenie saw how stupid she was being. Her mother, though an obvious sharp judge of character, was clearly imagining that Phillip was drawn to the Marchioness’ daughter. There was no reason to believe the Duke had any real feelings for her. He had asked for her address for business purposes, probably.

Had she ever been young and vulnerable? Eugenie somehow doubted it. She had felt a sense of duty marrying her father’s business partner seven years ago. Not that she hadn’t felt affection. He was the first man to take her seriously. Such an accomplished man, too. It had been exciting in its own way, for a girl of 17.

Eugenie remembered the first time she had felt stirrings for William Conyers. Her father had been away from the estate, travelling to Scotland to make new contacts, when Bill had visited. He had ridden up to the house on a horse because he needed to ask her father business questions. Unfortunately, he had forgotten about the trip to Scotland and so arrived only to find the daughter home.

That afternoon, Eugenie had been reading in her father’s study. In fact, she had been sitting at her father’s desk. Her father had kept his history books in his office instead of in the library, and Eugenie had fallen into the habit of reading Gibbon, slowly, whenever her father was away from home. She used a train ticket stub to mark her place, which she slid secretively into the book before returning it to the bookshelf. When her father rode off for his Scotland trip, she had snuck back into the library and retrieved her book. She had been sitting at her father’s desk, reading the book, when her father’s business partner had stormed in.

There had ensued an awkward moment—an older man, a girl reading contraband history, no one else in the house apart from servants.

Bill apologized for walking in unannounced, and Eugenie pretended to be unperturbed, though she quickly covered up the decline of the Roman Empire with papers.

“I had questions to ask your father. I…I had hoped…” He looked around, as if hoping that her father was hiding behind one of the thick curtains.

Eugenie explained the Scottish trip, which caused the older gentleman to nod, embarrassed. “Yes. Right. I had forgotten, though he had certainly told me….”

Because her father had talked business with her, Eugenie possessed a working knowledge of most of her father’s contacts and contracts. She saw a chance to be helpful.

“Is there something in particular you needed?” She gestured at the papers on the desk. “If it’s right here, we can certainly find it…” Her own voice trailed off, hopeful.

“Well,” Bill said, stepping further into the study. Bill Conyers had plump cheeks which reddened from exertion. They were scarlet now. “I have a meeting with one of our clients tomorrow, a Mr. Bales.”

“From Virginia,” Eugenie blurted out. She was very familiar with Bales Plantation, in the United States. They had tobacco, which they shipped three times a year to the London docks. In return, they bought her father’s diamonds.

“Why, yes,” he said, tilting his head. He looked at her oddly. It was as if he was trying to place her in a box but couldn’t find the right one.

“And you are wondering whether they have put in an order for diamonds?”

“Ye…yes…” He paused. “I think your father mentioned correspondence from the Baleses, which I never saw. At some point last week, they wrote to him.”

“If they did, the letter must be here,” Eugenie said. “We can look for it together, if you like.” She stood, to look around the desk, and as she did so a curtain of hair helpfully fell over her face, shielding the burning sensation of her cheeks.

Bill had approached the desk cautiously, perhaps afraid of the girl wearing a thin summer shift who was going through her father’s papers. He was at least 30 years older than she. Being in a room alone with her was scandalous in itself.

Eugenie looked through her father’s correspondence in the desk drawer, keeping her eyes hidden behind the curtain of hair. She tried to maintain her composure.

“Here it is,” Eugenie said, removing the Bales Plantation file. As she handed it to Bill, she bravely kept her chin jutting forward for fear that it would begin trembling.

“Ah, yes,” Bill had said, accepting the file. He then went to the sofa and sat down. From his pocket, he took out his spectacles and spread the papers in front of him on the low table.

Boldly, Eugenie had gone to sit on the sofa across from him as Bill flipped through the papers. He attempted to avoid looking at Eugenie’s bare legs. He failed—twice. “Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s what I thought.” He waved a piece of paper, which must have been the letter.

“They want to discuss the price of diamonds?” Eugenie asked. Actually, she had read the letter two weeks ago, when it had arrived. You couldn’t focus on Gibbon for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and as a break she would read her father’s business correspondence.

“How did you know?” Bill asked, sitting back and staring intently at her over the rim of his spectacles.

“There’s a new business,” Eugenie said. “They’ve been trying to undercut you on price over the past nine months.” Eugenie bit her lip. But she couldn’t help herself. She had been trying to warn her father about the new diamond merchant which had opened in London, but he wouldn’t listen to her. Suddenly, she lept up and bound over to her father’s desk again. Moving quickly, she collected all the papers she had strategically placed around the desk, hoping her father would notice.

Now she brought them to her father’s business partner. She spread them out on the low table so they could go through them individually.

And there, in her father’s study, as she sat barefoot, she explained to her future husband how they could remain competitive by cutting their shipping costs by 25%. It would allow them to pre-empt the upstarts in London and maintain their dominant position in the market.

Bill had listened silently, stunned, and then thanked her, muttering “Really, quite extraordinary…quite…I…I had no idea we were losing market share….”

And after that day, he had returned to her house each week for a year, always to discuss business with her over tea, until she had agreed to marry him.

Eugenie crossed her arms over her chest. She wondered what Miss Castlefork discussed when Phillip visited her. If what the Marchioness said was true, then Eugenie doubted Miss Castlefork excitedly shared business information with the Duke. Instead, she was probably girlish. Sharing gossip about friends.

Then Eugenie realized: maybe that’s what a man like Duke Phillip wanted.

Eugenie sighed, and reminded herself why she had come to Barnardshire: to solve a potential murder mystery at her mother’s request. She had discharged those duties. Now it was time to sleep before heading home. She had thought about Duke Phillip quite enough already, and now she would stop.

“Sleep, Eugenie,” she told herself. She shut her eyes.

Moments later, bored, she opened them and sat up so that she could look out the nearest window. Clarendon Grange, still lit up, blazed away at even this late hour. Eugenie wondered why Phillip hadn’t gone to bed himself. What did he do so late? She knew he claimed to run a school for boy sleuths, but somehow she couldn’t imagine that he needed to spend so much time concentrated on it. Certainly, he wouldn’t have to worry constantly over it like Eugenie did. After all, Eugenie needed her school in order to eat. Phillip, by contrast, owned multiple castles. He also had a partner, Michaels. Whatever work he needed to do could wait for the morning, surely.

At various moments, someone would appear in a window on the top floor of Clarendon Grange, stand still for several seconds, as if looking across toward Mrs. Todderham’s cottage, and then disappear. Eugenie always dipped her head down, fearful that she could be observed.

“You’re acting absurd,” she told herself, and then began to laugh. Whoever stood at the window could not see her inside the cottage. And why would anyone be looking?

With a sigh, Eugenie laid back down on the sofa and rested her hands on her stomach, lacing the fingers.

It was very late indeed before Eugenie’s eyelids stilled and became heavy. What followed was a shallow sleep, without any valleys or peaks. Just a smooth skimming, the air slowly filling her nostrils before being blown out.

She stayed this way for a long time. No dream interrupted her sleep. Instead, she heard only noise, a steady sound like the ocean, though Barnardshire was nowhere near it. And it was in this state, with dawn approaching, that she heard something loud outside Mrs. Todderham’s cottage.

**

A thump. Or thud. Something like a heavy sack hitting the side of the building. It was followed by a whisper coming through the wall. Eugenie opened her eyes and, at the same time, heard something like a voice, a sibilant “s.” The sound quickly evaporated as soon as it penetrated the wall.

Eugenie struggled to sit up, to hear better. Was someone outside? Or had the noise come from inside? Eugenie rubbed her eyes and waited for them to adjust to the darkness, which was rapidly disappearing.

Nothing moved inside the cottage. In the distance, the Marchioness snored as she slept, and a clock ticked in unison. But other than the knock against the wall and the shadow of a whisper, nothing else could be heard.

Perhaps it is only Puss, Eugenie thought. Cats sometimes got into scrapes outside with other wild cats. With luck, Puss had gotten the better of his enemy.

But then Eugenie looked down the length of her body: Puss was actually asleep at the foot of the sofa, curled up on the fringe of her blanket. Dead asleep. So, no: Puss had not been outside.

Eugenie quietly slid out from under the blanket and crept to the window. Unfortunately, only gray light and vague shapes greeted her. She couldn’t see a person or anything other than the scrap of lawn that ran away from Mrs. Todderham’s cottage, as well as a flower garden attempting to rise out of the mists.

Eugenie returned to the sofa—but she remained unsettled. So unsettled that she couldn’t sleep. She had definitely heard something. In fact, she was quite sure that humans had been on the other side of the wall. It was a human voice she had heard, possibly even a cry. What could people be doing outside this early in the morning?

She decided to find out. With bare feet, she tip-toed toward the kitchen, intending to look outside. Along the way, she passed the Marchioness’s bedroom, whose door was shut, and then paused at the room where her two girls slept. Pippa lay flat on her back with her hands crossed neatly on her stomach, while Maisie lay diagonally across the bed on her stomach. Her arms were thrown out and one leg kicked out from beneath the covers. Gently, Eugenie shut their door.

It was lightest in the kitchen, which lacked shades. Eugenie found the door easily, undoing the lock. A cool mist greeted her face as she poked her head out.

Again: there was absolutely nothing. She couldn’t see a thing. Although she knew it sat directly west, Clarendon Grange was also hidden from view, the morning mist as heavy as smoke. Eugenie stepped out to look around, for a body or something, but she came up empty.

Nothing. The area was deserted.

Shaking her head, she hurried back inside, settling back onto the sofa and carefully nudging Puss out of the way, just in time for Mrs. Todderham to rise.

Eugenie had the good sense to leave the woman alone to her morning rituals, so she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.  After Puss hopped off the sofa, Eugenie gradually drifted back into a shallow doze, which was without the ocean sounds and without rest. When she finally sat up again, she smelled breakfast: bacon and fried potato.

The smell had brought the girls awake, and Eugenie rose to join them. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders and greeted the troupe in the kitchen.

“Good morning!” Mrs. Todderham said. “I have your plate right there, Eugenie, already on the table.”

The girls were already seated. Pippa cut a piece of toast with a knife and fork while Maisie ate strips of bacon with her fingers.

“Did you sleep well?” Mrs. Todderham asked.

“Very,” Eugenie lied. She sat beside Maisie and poured herself a cup of coffee.

The Marchioness appeared briefly, to tell Mrs. Todderham that she would breakfast in her bedroom. Mrs. Todderham chirped her agreement, then began the complicated task of settling food on a tray. She arranged everything and, with a grunt, hefted it up and carried it in to her friend.

Eugenie took advantage of the silence to discuss the errors her girls had made the other day during the game. Early morning was the most effective time to give instruction, well before you could get your guard up. Whenever Eugenie needed to discipline her girls, she got them up early and did it.

“You didn’t follow through with your discovery of who was at the castle,” Eugenie said quietly. “You must always remember that, in detection, we study people, not utensils. You went and studied the items in the kitchen. Instead, focus on motivation. Who would be motivated to help Miss Ashley escape? And why? That should have been your focus.”

The girls nodded, eating and listening intently.

“And also opportunity. Often, we can eliminate everyone because they did not have the opportunity to commit the crime. In that way, motivation becomes irrelevant.”

Pippa looked down at her plate while Maisie continued to chew her bacon.

“Well, then,” Eugenie said. “Other than that, you acquitted yourself nicely yesterday.”

“We did?” Maisie asked, after swallowing. “Though we lost to the boys?”

“You won’t always lose to the boys,” Eugenie said. “There will be plenty of victories over boys in the future, I promise. Now finish your breakfast.” Eugenie drained her own cup of coffee and then plunged into her fried potato.

*

As they ate breakfast, young Jimmie Styles’ mum came to the cottage. Mrs. Todderham greeted her at the door.

“Have you seen Jimmie?” she asked, only just stepping into the threshold. Eugenie was enjoying her second cup of coffee after sending the girls back to the bedroom to change and make their bed. Eugenie heard the anxiety in the woman’s voice and looked over her shoulder.

“No,” Mrs. Todderham said. “Not at all. He hasn’t come yet, I don’t think.”

“Did you receive your paper?”

“Let me think,” Mrs. Todderham said, holding a hand to her head.

Eugenie turned around fully to watch the women.

“No,” Mrs. Todderham finally said. “At least I don’t think. Did we get a paper this morning?” she asked Eugenie.

“I don’t think so,” Eugenie said. “I haven’t seen anything on the table.”

Mrs. Styles was a plain woman of average height. In addition to her simple dress, she wore a look of intense worry. “He hasn’t been home yet,” she said. “It isn’t right normal for him to still be gone at this hour.”

Eugenie tried to remember whether a paper had been on the steps when she snuck outside earlier. But she hadn’t seen anything. “Maybe I left the paper outside,” Mrs. Todderham said. She laughed. “I am so forgetful these days, since my dear husband passed.”

The two women then stepped outside, leaving the door open. They had been gone only seconds when Eugenie heard a frightful cry.

Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, Eugenie followed them, carrying her mug of coffee.

The two women were studying a bicycle propped up against the cottage. Jimmie’s mum clutched at her throat as she stared, open-mouthed, at it.

“I assume this is your son’s bicycle,” Eugenie stated. Mrs. Styles nodded.

The bicycle was an ordinary children’s bicycle. There was no identification mark that she could see. It was propped up against the back of the building. Eugenie looked around, for foot marks, but didn’t see anything.

“Perhaps he decided to deliver papers on foot,” Mrs. Todderham said, slowly backing away from the bicycle. Mrs. Styles continued to stare at it, and soon she began to shake her head in a dreadful manner.

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Todderham whispered.

Duke Phillip, who was outside inspecting his grounds, saw the three women and walked over.

“Nothing the matter, I hope,” he called. “A bicycle shouldn’t warrant the attention of three ladies.” He smiled, pleased with his comment—but the smile was wiped away at the sound of Mrs. Styles.

“My boy!” Mrs. Styles cried out, and now her face was truly ugly. “He’s missing! I…I haven’t seen him this morning!”

“And this is his bicycle,” Eugenie told Phillip. She then turned to the mother. “I assume he delivered his papers by bicycle?”

Mrs. Styles nodded her head.

“And what is his route,” Phillip asked, “if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Root?” Mrs. Styles asked, confused “We’re local people.”

“Where does he deliver papers?” Phillip asked mildly.

Eugenie glanced over his clothes. He was freshly pulled together, in a different suit than the one he had worn the day before. His hair was blazing blond in the sunlight. She hugged her blanket more tightly around her, to hide her wrinkled blouse and skirt. She could feel her blouse hitching up in the back. The blanket was not long enough to cover her bare feet but she hoped Phillip wouldn’t notice.

“He goes up the road. All the way to the end. That’s why he couldn’t have walked the entire way,” she said. “It’s miles and miles.” She turned to Mrs. Todderham, as her one ally. “He just couldn’t!”

“Oh, I’m sure he couldn’t,” Mrs. Todderham said, taking the woman in her arms. “We all believe you. I’m sure. This is all so dreadfully confusing.” They hugged as Mrs. Styles continued to cry that Jimmie couldn’t be missing, he was only thirteen.

“Well,” the Duke whispered over the heads of the two women toward Lady Eugenie. “I think we know how to find where he must have disappeared.”

Eugenie nodded. “I’ll get my shoes.”

*

She did more than get her shoes. Once inside, Eugenie ran to find Mrs. Todderham’s hot iron and set to ironing her clothes, the girls sitting in the corner of the bedroom watching their teacher in her knickers.

The Marchioness called from her bedroom “What is that noise, Eugenie?” but she never came in to interrupt her daughter. Eugenie quickly got back into her skirt and blouse and then stepped into the hallway to put on her shoes.

Mrs. Todderham and Mrs. Styles were now in the kitchen, silently holding hands. “What is happening?” the Marchioness asked, stepping from her bedroom. “There is so much noise in this house it is difficult to rest properly after breakfast.”

Eugenie slipped a trench coat around her and bent to tie her boots. She whispered: “The young boy has gone missing. The paper boy.”

“Oh no,” the Marchioness said. “How do we know?”

“He hasn’t come home. And his mum’s in the kitchen with Mrs. Todderham. I’m going out with the Duke to see if we can find any clues up the road.”

“What a good idea,” Marchioness Carlyle said, and repaired to her bedroom—where she knelt near the window, to watch the Duke and her daughter walk over to Clarendon Grange and get into the Duke’s motor car.

“Yes,” she whispered to herself. “Yes.” Inviting her daughter to Barnardshire had been the absolute right thing to do.

Eugenie, however, approached the motor car warily.

“Never ridden in one?” Phillip asked, when Eugenie got into the passenger’s side and shut the door behind her.

“Several times,” she said. Actually, she never had. In London, a lack of money prevented her from going anywhere. She could walk to the store and pay her bills. Still, she didn’t want to seem unsophisticated. She imagined Duke Phillip driving Miss Castlefork around the city.

“Delightful,” the Duke said, and then he looked at Eugenie’s hands. “I guess you always clutch onto the dashboard with white knuckles. From excitement at being back in a motor car, I presume.”

He laughed; and Eugenie stifled a smile herself. He certainly was observant. But she was dealing with a detective, she reminded herself.

“In a minute you’ll have a reason to grab on for safety,” he said. “Would you like a pair of goggles? The wind comes in through the sides.” He was adjusting a black pair over his own eyes.

“No, why?” Eugenie asked.

Phillip smiled. “No reason.” And then he started the Wolsely, which made a loud sound, and soon they were tearing off down the road.

Chapter Eight: In the Roadster

Because the car had a glass windshield, the wind did not hit Eugenie full in the face. Instead, the wind poured in through the sides, where there were no windows, and Eugenie had to let go of the door to cover her eyes and mouth. She started shouting to ask where the goggles were, but Phillip ignored her. Instead, he focused on piloting the car down the road, which was empty at that hour. Their first stop was less than a mile: Marchioness Carlyle’s house, at Vinegar Hill.

It rose stately like the Marchioness herself, with enormous pretension only if you probed. Constructed in the Georgian style, it had been built for a former coal magnate, whose wife had aspired to a life of royalty. The Marchioness had purchased it with the money Eugenie’s father had made in his business. Vinegar Hill suited the Marchioness perfectly. It was large enough to allow her to entertain but too small for her son and his family to visit overnight.

Phillip pulled the motor car into the gravel yard and rolled nearly to the front door.

Eugenie, taking her hands away from her eyes, slowly pulled the hair out of her mouth and ears. A thin layer of dirt covered her face and was gritty in her pores.

“The goggles are in the back,” Phillip said in an off-hand manner as he got out of the car.

“Thank you,” Eugenie murmured. She waited only for him to gain the entrance to the house before she rooted around the back seat, which was covered with papers and books that had become disheveled during the drive. From the corner poked a leather strap, and Eugenie strained to reach it. Once she secured the goggles, she turned her attention to the books and was shocked to find, laying on top of everything else, a novel by Austen!

At last. Now Eugenie knew what Phillip read in his spare time. She had been disappointed not to find anything of a personal nature in the library at Clarendon Grange. But when Eugenie opened the cover, she was shocked to see the name “Castlefork” stenciled in the corner of the fly leaf. Perfect, beautiful, feminine script. Eugenie quickly shut the book and threw it back.

When Phillip returned, he gave her the news: “The paper is there, by the door.”

“So he delivered it,” Eugenie said. “Even after he left the bicycle at Mrs. Todderham’s. He must have walked down and continued his delivery.”

“It would appear so,” Phillip said. “We’ll keep going and check the others along the way.”

At the next house, the woman who answered the door affirmed that she had received her paper that morning, and she brought it out for Phillip to inspect. The same scenario played out at every house on down the road. In fact, everyone had received their morning paper, at every house, until they had reached the county limit.

“I guess he made it all the way to end,” Phillip said. “On foot, apparently.”

“Or someone delivered the papers in place of him,” Eugenie said. “To make sure that no one was tipped off early to the disappearance.”

“You mean, you are thinking he could be kidnapped?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’d rather think he ran away,” Phillip said. “At least, since he is a young boy, I first thought that he would sooner run away than be kidnapped.”

Eugenie didn’t know how to respond to that. She had never been a young boy.

“But if he ran away,” Phillip said, “he probably would have needed his bicycle.”

“Precisely,” Eugenie said. “It would certainly have helped. By contrast, a kidnapper would have taken their own carriage or motor car.”

“Hmmm,” Phillip said. He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel, thinking.

Eugenie could not help herself. “I wonder what Miss Austen would say about all of this.”

Phillip, brow creased, looked at her in surprise. “Miss Austen? Is she a lady detective in London?”

Eugenie nodded to the back seat. This is not the time, Eugenie, she told herself. But she couldn’t help it. She had a need to know.

“Your book,” she said. She reached back and plucked it from the pile before handing to him. Now she, also a detective, would watch his reaction.

“Oh this,” Phillip said casually. He showed no reaction. Instead, he held it in his hand as if it were an ordinary rock or brick.

“Interesting reading material,” Eugenie said. “I had no idea you had a head for romance.”

“I’m returning it for a friend,” he said simply. But instead of throwing it in the back, he let it fall to his lap as he started the roadster.

Wonderful, Eugenie thought, tightening the straps to her goggles. The rubber cut into the skin around her eyes as she chastised herself. You have embarrassed yourself and not gotten any information out of the exchange. She needed to learn to keep quiet.

Phillip cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to do an intensive examination of the road. We’ll have to return to Mrs. Todderham’s, and talk to the boy’s mother. Maybe she knows something important.”

“Yes,” Eugenie said and held on tight.

*

“He’s a simple boy,” Mrs. Styles said, smiling to herself. “Never complained. Not good at school, but neither was me or his father.”

Lady Eugenie had taken the lead in the conversation. She sat close to Mrs. Styles at the kitchen table, while Mrs. Todderham and Duke Phillip stood on the perimeter. Even Marchioness Carlyle had finally been roused from her bedroom, though she still had not spoken to anyone.

“Had he made any mention of wanting to leave home? To visit anyone? Does he know anyone outside Barnardshire?”

Mrs. Styles thought on that, but her face showed disbelief the entire time. “Not that I know,” she said.

“Has he ever had a chance to leave Barnardshire before?”

“No,” she said. “Bertie traveled for work, but…. We both grew up here, in the village. We met working at the printing press in ‘98. Were married later that year. We was married a year when I had Jimmie.”

“How did he secure the job delivering papers?”

“Asked for it,” Mrs. Styles said, with pride. “He went in one day to old Mr. Crayton’s office and asked if he needed a boy for assistance. This was when Jimmie had dropped out of school. He went until he was eleven and said he hadn’t learnt anything useful so he might as well work. To be honest, I felt the same way when I was his age. We always had a paper around the house and that is how he learnt to read, I think. Not in the schools. It was probably from reading the Gazette at home that he got the idea to ask for work at the paper.”

“How long had he been delivering papers?”

“A year or two. I couldn’t really say. Every morning he got up, in the dark. I think he rises before his father.” She smiled.

“And did he get paid?”

The smile faded. “I think so.”

Eugenie detected tension at the mention of money. It was always awkward, maneuvering around those tender places people wanted to protect. Nevertheless, usually those places contained the most vital information.

“He kept the money himself, then?” she asked.

Mrs. Styles looked to her friend, Mrs. Todderham, and then back at Eugenie. “What are you asking? That I took his money?”

“Not in the least,” Eugenie said. “That had not even crossed my mind, I can assure you.”

Mrs. Todderham took her friend’s hand. “Joanna. We are trying to understand where he might have gone. If he kept his money, then he could have bought a train ticket somewhere. But if he had no money, then he probably went on foot. If he bought a train ticket, we’ll need to look over a much farther range. That is why Lady Eugenie is asking about money.”

Mrs. Styles nodded her head. “I see.” She was quiet a moment. “To be honest, I don’t know what he did with the money.”

“Why?” Eugenie asked.

“Cause his father controls the money in the house. I don’t.”

“Bertie?” Eugenie asked. “Your husband?”

Mrs. Styles nodded—then quickly glanced away.

“Well,” Eugenie whispered, “we’ve come to a roadblock.”

“I think,” Duke Phillip interjected, “that we will have to call the police.”

“The police?” Mrs. Styles said. “Why? I was led to believe that you were a detective, Lady Eugenie.”

“I am,” she said. “But we may need more assistance, the kind of assistance that the police are trained and employed to provide.” She turned to Mrs. Todderham. “Are you familiar with the local Inspector?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Todderham said. “We will have to send for him. A note, you see.”

“I will take it,” Duke Phillip said.

Chapter Nine: A Bumbling Inspector

The village inspector had not been in, so Phillip had left the note with Inspector Feagley’s secretary, who had propped it on his desk before grabbing her hat and leaving for the day. When the Inspector had returned from his own lunch, he had read the note and immediately repaired to Mrs. Todderham’s cottage.

Coming round the bend, he did not walk up to the front door. Nor did he go to the side door. Instead, the Inspector squeezed between two hedges to get to the old back door, which had been hammered shut and which had not been used for decades. Bizarrely, the Inspector had visited Mrs. Todderham only last week and had been admitted using the front door, but his memory was like a hand without thumbs. He never retained details.

He took off his hat, wiped his brow, and knocked on the door.

“It is certainly warm,” he said. The walk had done him good, but now he felt worn out. Mrs. Todderham’s cottage was over a mile from town.

When no one answered, he knocked again—to little effect—and so he kept knocking. His knocking continued for so long that the Marchioness, alone in her bedroom, finally pushed open her window and popped her head out. “What is that noise?” she barked.

The Inspector quickly removed his hat and blushed. “I’m sorry, Dowager Carlyle. I wasn’t aware I have walked to your house.” He looked around, dazed.

“It is not my house, sir!” the Marchioness barked. “You have come to Bess Todderham’s house!”

“Have I?” the Inspector asked, delighted. He bowed deeply, as he had been trained by his mother always to do to royalty. “I am Barnardshire’s Inspector, here to meet with Mrs. Styles, about her son, whom is missing.”

“I know who you are!” the Marchioness Carlyle said, noting the Inspector’s incorrect grammar—and even worse form. “Go around to the front!” she commanded, and, pulling her head back in, slammed the window shut.

Somewhat flustered, Inspector Feagley made his entrance at the front of the house, warmly greeted by Mrs. Todderham, who welcomed him into her kitchen.

“I wish I could offer you some tea,” she said, “but I don’t yet have a pot boiled.”

“Quite alright, Madame,” he said, which caused Mrs. Todderham to color pleasurably. Only Inspector Feagley ever called her “Madame,” a title reserved for someone of the Marchioness’s rank. “I am here to meet the missing boy’s mother. She is still here, I take it?”

Mrs. Todderham delivered Inspector Feagley to the kitchen table, which was the command post. Mrs. Styles had, by now (mid-afternoon), grown tired, and she rested her face on her fist, with her eyes closed. She came awake with a start as the Inspector accidently kicked the leg of the table while settling his portly frame onto the seat across from her.

“Well, this is comfortable,” he said. “You always keep a pleasant kitchen. One of the nicest kitchens in the village.”

Mrs. Todderham smiled—but then nodded toward her friend. Eugenie and Philip stood on the perimeter, anxious for the investigation to begin. Time was wasting.

“Ah, yes,” the Inspector said. He patted the pocket on his chest and pulled out the note Duke Phillip had written. Adjusting the glasses on his nose, he unfolded the page and held it a good two feet from his face. He read it again, slowly, to make sure that he remembered the gist of it. Then he folded it back up and returned it to his pocket, before resting his hands across his belly.

“My dear,” he said, showing very small teeth, in an apparent attempt to put Mrs. Styles at ease. “Could you, please, tell me everything that has happened, starting at the very beginning?”

“I wouldn’t know where else to start,” Mrs. Styles said. She sat up straight. “My boy’s name is Jimmie; James, actually, which is his given name, though I’m sure you know that since you two have met in the past.”

The Inspector nodded. “Merely securing preliminaries,” he said. He then patted his other pocket and pulled out a small notepad and pencil. Licking the nub of his pencil, he made a short notation in his little notebook, which had a velvet cover and a bookmark sewn into it.

“And you said he was a male child?” he asked.

Mrs. Styles merely blinked.

“And when was he conceived?” Inspector Feagley continued. “Are you aware of the day and time?”

“Perhaps,” Duke Phillip interjected gently, speaking mostly to Mrs. Styles but in such a manner that the Inspector could hear, “perhaps you could start at the beginning of when you realized your son had disappeared. Not at the beginning of all time.” He lifted his eyebrows to the Inspector, as if to ask, “Yes?”

Inspector Feagley nodded his head. “Right. Of course. Not the beginning of time, no. But when you first thought the lad might be missing.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Styles said. And then she told her story: of discovering that he hadn’t returned, and her flight to see Mrs. Todderham, to check to see if the good lady had had her paper delivered; and then the discovery of the bicycle, propped up against Mrs. Todderham’s cottage.

Continually wetting the pencil tip with his tongue, Inspector Feagley jotted random notes in his notebook. The notes seemed to form a paisley pattern. From where she stood, Eugenie thought that the Inspector was doodling rather than recording meaningful information.

“And does he have friends in town?”

“A few.” Mrs. Styles shook her shoulders. “I haven’t seen them around since Jimmie left school. Or, if I see them around, they never come to visit Jimmie.”

“How about outside town?”

Mrs. Styles thought a bit. “I don’t think so.”

The Inspector nodded and made another note.

“I should say something,” Eugenie offered.

All heads turned in her direction. The Inspector shrugged. “If you like.”

“There was a noise I heard, early this morning,” Eugenie said. “I should have mentioned it earlier but…well, everything was so confused. I didn’t know if it had any meaning, but now I think it might. Around dawn. It was…well, I think it sounded like a body colliding with the side of the house.”

“Eugenie!” Marchioness Carlyle cried, as if Eugenie were admitting to the commission of a crime and not merely having heard it. “I am shocked at you!”

“Huh,” Inspector Feagley said, turning to the Marchioness. “You think your daughter is guilty, eh?”

“I beg your pardon?” Marchioness Carlyle said, all color draining from her face. She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen and looked ready to fall out of it.

“Why don’t we go lie down,” the Duke said kindly, walking up to her and taking her elbow.

“Why, yes,” she said, brightening considerably. “That would be ideal…”

They left the kitchen, and Eugenie continued her story.

“When I heard the noise, I rose to investigate. I went to the front door and looked out. I couldn’t see anything.” Eugenie then told the Inspector about the investigation she and Phillip had undertaken, including their discovery that the papers had been delivered to each house down the road.

The Inspector, having heard her out, shook his head. “That’s a nice story there, Miss, and I’m happy you told it. Quite gracefully, too, I might add.” He put his pencil down. “But it don’t make much sense.”

Inspector Feagley returned his attention to Mrs. Styles. “If he was abducted here, at Mrs. Todderham’s, then how did all of the papers get delivered? Can anyone answer me that?”

Eugenie was somewhat surprised that an Inspector could not think of a scenario that could account for that detail. She waited, patiently, for him to work around to an answer on his own. When neither Mrs. Todderham nor Mrs. Styles spoke up, Eugenie finally did. “Perhaps he had already delivered all the papers and was on his way back when he was attacked,” she said.

“But you heard him deliver your paper, no?”

“No,” Eugenie said. “It was late….or rather, very early, and I had been sleeping. I heard someone. I didn’t know if he had been here before. He may have already delivered the papers on his route and then returned.”

“Didn’t look out a window?” the Inspector asked.

“No.”

“Did you ask, ‘Who’s there’?”

“Why?” Eugenie said. “I was inside. On the sofa.”

“Well then,” the Inspector said, closing his notebook. “We’ll certainly keep an eye out for him. I don’t have any right idea how he managed to deliver all the papers on foot or why he come back here. If you have any ideas—”

Eugenie took one look at Mrs. Styles and then stepped closer to the table. “You are not going to search now? I would think that you and your men, this afternoon, could at least canvas Barnardshire, surely.”

“But where?” The Inspector looked around, confused. His small eyes were lodged like pebbles in their sockets, without light. “His mum doesn’t think he has any friends outside of Barnardshire. He couldn’t get very far if he left on foot. And I haven’t had a report of any suspicious characters around the village.” He raised his eyebrows, which were two bushy caterpillars. “Where else is there to look?”

Go outside, she wanted to say. But she didn’t want to tip off Mrs. Styles to the fact that the Inspector in charge of finding her son was so clueless. She kept her voice level.

“The first few days are critical, Inspector,” Eugenie said. In fact, she rarely solved a case if more than three days had elapsed since its commission. She sat at the table, to make sure that she was heard. The Duke by then had returned to the kitchen, after having put Marchioness Carlyle to rest, and he stood behind Eugenie, his hands around the top of the chair, instinctively knowing how to provide quiet support. It was up to the two private detectives to convince the village Inspector that he needed to begin searching for the missing boy.

“If Jimmie was kidnapped,” Eugenie said, “then there is very little time. He and his captor could be halfway to London by now. Where we’d lose track of them, assuredly.”

The Inspector looked at her with a smile. Eugenie realized he wasn’t lazy or difficult, merely confused.

“I suppose I should ask around,” he said. “In town.”

“Indeed,” Eugenie said. “Please do.” She bit her finger as he gathered his stuff. “And do you have the names of his friends?” she asked.

“Oh no,” Inspector Feagley said, sitting back down. “I suppose I should get those.” He turned to Mrs. Styles and asked her to begin.

*

“I’m afraid we’ll have to solve this on our own,” Eugenie said, as she and Phillip watched Mrs. Todderham and Inspector Feagley walk outside with Mrs. Styles.

The mother had given the Inspector a long list of names of Jimmie’s friends, although she insisted that they probably had no idea where her son had been since they were school friends and her son hadn’t been to school in two years. Eugenie, with sharp insight, had noticed that one person had not been mentioned as possibly knowing where Jimmie had gone: his father, Bertie. In fact, Mrs. Styles never once mentioned Bertie to the Inspector at all.

A tender spot, Eugenie thought.

“He seems like a nice enough man,” Phillip said, standing close beside her. “But very clumsy. I’m sure he is used to finding missing house cats and responding to burglaries in which table linen has been stolen. I hope this isn’t past his capabilities.”

“What are you two talking about?” Marchioness Carlyle asked. She had come back out of the bedroom and stood with one hand on her stomach and another resting on the door frame.

“The missing boy,” Eugenie said, but her mother looked disappointed by the answer.

The Marchioness laughed. “As you can see, our dear Inspector is really quite useless. Two left feet and no brains.” She gave another laugh, but then her face became serious. “I presume you two can locate him?”

Phillip answered. “We will soon find out.”

Chapter Ten: The Trip to Town

The Inspector walked back to town while the Marchioness took afternoon tea with Mrs. Todderham and Mrs. Styles. Eugenie and Phillip returned outside, first to the bicycle.

Phillip crouched down, and Eugenie did her best, in a ladylike manner, to decline, side-saddle, beside him. Unfortunately, she lost her balance and had to put her hand in the dirt.

A minute passed quietly, and then Eugenie asked, “What are you looking for?”

“Any sort of mark or dent,” Phillip said. He moved his fingertips lightly over the bicycle’s frame. For a man, he kept his nails terribly neat. Eugenie looked down and saw that her own thumbnail hadn’t been clipped in a while.

Phillip pulled the bike away from the wall. “There might have been a struggle, while he was on the bicycle. But I only see common nicks and scratches.” He ran a hand across the wheel. “The tire has perfect pressure also.”

“Meaning?”

“It wasn’t ridden for very long.” He stood and dusted off his hands. “A tire like that must be pumped nearly every day to stay inflated. No doubt, this was ridden only to Mrs. Todderham’s and then ditched here.”

“And so he must have delivered the papers by hand.” Eugenie could not piece it together. Why would the boy walk all the way down to the end of the road? “I don’t understand the thump that I heard.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Jimmie Styles,” the Duke said. “It might have been someone else who fell against the side of the house.”

“A struggle you mean?”

“Possibly.”

They went around the side of the cottage. Marchioness Carlyle was snooping, looking out the window at them with a hopeful expression. Eugenie waved her arm—a slashing gesture that meant Go away.

Phillip, who didn’t notice, mildly studied the side of the cottage. The stones looked no different on this wall than on any other, or at least it appeared that way to Eugenie. However, if there were clues to be found on the wall, she wanted to be the one to find them. But as she looked and looked, the wall yielded nothing. Instead, it seemed to throb. She was staring too hard.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, somewhat embarrassed. She imagined that Phillip would pipe up with some comment—a detail that she had overlooked.

“Me neither,” he said, and scratched his chin.

“Perhaps I heard something that wasn’t there,” Eugenie said. “It wouldn’t be the first time, I’m afraid.”

“Nor the last,” Phillip said. “I am quite surprised by the fact that all of the newspapers were delivered on the road. I can’t see how that could have been done by foot. Perhaps someone gave him a lift.”

“You mean someone that he knew?”

“Right.” Phillip nodded. “Someone could have given him a lift to deliver the rest of the papers. Perhaps they promised to bring him back to Mrs. Todderham’s to get the bicycle.”

Lady Eugenie nodded, considering the rightness of it. “Perhaps the person who gave him a lift knew him. Inspector Feagley really did not inquire as to who Mrs. Styles knew—her circle of friends. He asked only about the childhood friends.”

“And only because you mentioned it,” Phillip said. Eugenie smiled wryly.

“The kidnapper could come from the parent’s circle of friends,” Eugenie said.

“Quite right.” Phillip absentmindedly dragged his hand across the stone wall of the cottage. “I think we need to go into town.”

“To speak to Mr. Styles ourselves?”

“To ask around. Perhaps the Inspector is already headed in that direction, yet I doubt it.”

“We should bring the children,” Eugenie said. “For extra eyes and ears.”

*

They took Phillip’s car. Eugenie and Phillip sat with Pippa in the front, while Maisie, elbows out, sat in the back between the two boys. To make room, Phillip had swept the papers and books onto the floor. Eugenie was pleased to see that Maisie rested her feet on Mrs. Castlefork’s novel.

The ride was uneventful, only a mile into town, but Phillip drove slowly, so that the wind didn’t get in anyone’s face. When they finally reached Barnardshire proper, it was a shock, because nothing had prepared Eugenie for it. There had been land and trees and then, suddenly sprung up, a tiny hamlet.

Though home to fewer than a thousand people, Barnardshire had nevertheless grown large enough to maintain a high street. Eugenie looked around, ignorant of whether the town had always been so poor or if its poverty was a recent invention. All the buildings seemed rickety, leaning one way or another, as if in conversation with its neighbor. Sickly trees stood at attention in dirt gardens, and the sun didn’t seem to shine on the town although there were few clouds.

“Is this Barnardshire?” Eugenie asked. She was surprised that the Marchioness would choose to live near such a frayed community.

Pippa looked up at Phillip, who answered neutrally, “Yes.”

Eugenie tried to imagine living here but was quite unable. She wondered where people bought their food, where they got married. It looked like a far-flung outpost to an isolated part of the Empire, or a town in the Wild West of America.

She saw right off where they did their banking—at the one solid building, which sat like a squat bull dog in the public square. It wore its name—“Bank”—boldly, in block letters. Phillip glided the car on by, and Eugenie watched as a man with rust-colored hair and a beard stepped outside and stared, dazedly, at the procession.

There were no other motor cars in Barnardshire. None. Consequently, Eugenie could understand the stares. Instead of motor cars, people still had buggies. Outside of the pharmacy, a horse and buggy waited for its owner to come outside, whereas another buggy, coming toward the motor car, bore the name of the pharmacy on its side, as an advertisement.

Duke Phillip honked in greeting, foolishly, which served only to scare the horse.

“Oh dear,” Phillip said, swallowing, as the horse bucked and reared. The owner’s face, twisted in fear, glared through the window at the Duke.

“Don’t come into the village often?” Eugenie asked.

“Often, actually,” Phillip said. “I never can remember that machines which are familiar to me serve to scare other people.”

“And horses,” Eugenie said.

Pippa looked up with curiosity at her teacher’s face.

I am too obvious, Eugenie told herself. She decided to be professional, so she said, “We should find where Mrs. Styles lives. We’ll have to ask around, since we didn’t get that information from Mrs. Styles herself.”

As they drove along, they passed the Inspector, standing on another stoop, as he enjoyed a glass of beer, one hand tucked into his waistband.

“A hard afternoon,” Phillip said.

“Very.”

“Who is that?” Maisie cried out, secretly elbowing one of the boys, who made a face.

“It’s the man responsible for finding Jimmie Styles,” Eugenie said. “He’s on break.”

Eugenie thought the Inspector noticed her as they passed, though he would have been looking through the bottom of the glass.

Though sleepy, Barnardshire was not deserted. Along the sides of the street women walked with blankets wrapped over their heads, their eyes turning shiftily toward the motorcar, which moved at a crawl. Other women wrapped blankets around their shoulders, with either their heads bare or an old hat on top. In between the buildings young boys ran, playing in the dirt. They, too, stopped and stood with hands shading their eyes to watch the Wolseley pass.

“I guess we have failed to quietly steal into town,” Phillip said.

“The children, at least, will be unannounced,” Eugenie said. The heads of the boys in the back barely poked up over the windows.

Phillip parked the car before a tavern, beside a horse which eyed them warily. Everyone trundled out of the car to begin their investigation.

“Now children,” Eugenie said. She gathered them near the fender. “I want you to fan out. Speak to the other children and make friends. Find out what you can about Jimmie Styles. No detail is too irrelevant. I’m afraid you can’t let on that we are performing an investigation, so don’t write any information down. But remember everything.”

“Ma’am?” Maisie asked.

“Yes.” Eugenie had almost turned around to join Phillip, who stood at the front of the car.

“Who’s in charge?” Maisie asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Of the group.” Maisie had her chin sticking out. “Who is the leader of the four?”

“You, Maisie,” Eugenie said, as Maisie swelled with pride. “Do not let me down.”

“I won’t,” she said.

*

The four children ran off down the street, headed toward the boys who had been playing in between the buildings. Standing on the boarded sidewalk, Eugenie and Phillip tried to find a place to start. “Somehow we need to find the Styles house,” Phillip said. “And I honestly don’t even know where to begin.”

The tavern was dark and inviting, with one of the few signs around. The other buildings were nondescript. Eugenie was puzzled as well. “This is not a town given to using signage.” There were no names on the houses, and no addresses. The house could be anywhere.

“You’ve come here before, though, correct?” Eugenie asked.

“For business,” Phillip said.

“Then we should stop into a business,” Eugenie responded. “Someone should know something. This town is not very large.”

“Let me go in here and ask,” Phillip said. He nodded toward what appeared to be a store of some sort beside the tavern. An elderly gentleman, in a dark cloak, stood on the stoop with a splinter of wood in his mouth. He was using it with his tongue to poke between his teeth. As they approached the door, the man spat—but away from them. Nevertheless, he spat—a crude, unwelcoming gesture.

Eugenie gathered up her skirt in her hands and kept her posture erect. She could rely on her breeding if need be.

The man turned a dirty face toward her as she walked past. She nodded, curtly, and he smiled, toothless. He looked harmless. One could never tell.

Inside the store, three men sat around the counter, laughing as they entered. Eugenie could smell the beans and grain before her eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness. Scales and tin cans crowded the shelves and a burlap sack with a slit in its side spilled grain onto the floor beside the counter. Eugenie stayed close to Phillip, who stopped short of the counter and removed his hat.

“Can I help you, sir?” the man sitting on the highest stool asked. The other men dragged their eyes over Eugenie, then looked with respect at Phillip.

“I am looking for a man who lives in town,” Phillip said. “I wonder if you can help me find him.”

The man shrugged. “Small town,” he said. “I’m certain I know everyone here.”

“Mr. Styles,” Phillip said. “Bernard.”

“Bertie,” Eugenie said, then wished she hadn’t.

One man laughed at seeing a man of Phillip’s obvious standing be corrected by a woman. But the man behind the counter—the owner—showed a different expression.

“Bertie Styles?”

“Yes,” Phillip said. “I need to speak with him, if you can point me in the right direction.”

“Well, he’s not welcome in this store, I can tell you that much.”

Eugenie heard the anger in the man’s voice clearly and flinched. Phillip remained his cool self.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t hoping to bring him to meet you.”

“Good,” the man said. “If I saw him, I’d have him arrested on the spot.”

Phillip raised a hand. “Obviously, I have created a misunderstanding. Instead, I was hoping to meet with him personally.” Phillip put the emphasis on personally.

The man sat up straighter. The respect on the other two’s faces was replaced with anger.

“In that case, no,” the man said. “I’m sorry. I can’t right say where Mr. Styles is.”

Phillip bowed slightly and lifted his hat. “Thank you. That’s all I needed.”

Eugenie wasted little time getting out onto the sidewalk, but she heard over her shoulder the owner shout at them, “Tell Bertie to come pay his bill, if he ever keeps the liquor out of his hand long enough!”

“Dear, me,” Phillip said, letting the door hit them on the way out. He cupped Eugenie’s elbow with his hand and walked with her away from the store.

“He doesn’t sound very popular,” Eugenie said.

“No,” Phillip said, when they had returned to the car. “And neither did we find out where he lives.” The elderly man with the toothpick had left.

“Apparently, I was right that money is tight in the family. I’m sure that has been weighing on Mrs. Styles’ mind this whole time as well.”

Phillip rubbed the back of his neck, and for the first time he looked tired.

“Where to now?” Eugenie asked.

*

Pippa and Maisie followed behind the two boys, Cecil and Thomas, as they ran down the high street. Eugenie had given them some money, to purchase toys or drinks and attempt to blend in. Sweets were a good introduction, and Maisie had told them all to spend their money on sweets. Having been designated the leader, she intended to lead.

However, the two boys didn’t seem much interested in what she had to say. They ran off without asking her permission, so Maisie had been forced to give chase. Her hands involuntarily clenched into fists as she gave chase. But when the boys stopped, they turned to her and asked where they should go. She quickly loosened her palms and smiled.

“Not sure,” Maisie said, looking around. “Let me think.”

“Looks like a store over there,” Pippa said, pointing across the road.

“I see it,” Maisie said—and shot her daggers. She didn’t need Pippa horning in on her authority.

“Should we go over there?” Cecil asked.

“It’s says they offer sweets,” Thomas followed up.

“Let’s go to the store,” Maisie said, as if it were her idea, and the four crossed, waiting for a horse and buggy to pass first.

A sign hanging outside the store read: “Sweets. Toys. Fun.” in yellow lettering. Before they could reach the door, three boys ran around from the back of the building and entered. Maisie led the way for her group, pushing the door open. A bell sounded as they entered, but no one greeted them. It was dark and cool inside.

The high-ceilinged store, with windows near the ceiling, was crammed with several large glass cases, behind which were displayed candies in wicker baskets. The three Barnardshire boys had crowded around one cabinet, poking their fingers into the glass as they discussed what to buy.

On the other side of the store were toys, some behind cases and others hanging from the ceilings or pegs on the walls. Maisie, Pippa, Cecil, and Thomas all went to this side, leaving the Barnardshire boys alone to look at their candies. Maisie scanned for a toy that they could purchase and then play with the three boys.

Two clerks managed the store: an older one and a younger one, both wearing white aprons as if they worked in a butcher’s shop. Maisie looked at the rubber balls gathered in large wicker baskets, and she watched the younger shop owner approach out of the corner of her eye.

“Hello, children,” he said. “I ain’t seen you here in a while. You new?”

Maisie nodded, silently. She wasn’t stupid. She had handled more than one store owner in London.

“Interested in anything?” he asked, clapping his hands. “We have lots of fun toys.”

Maisie shrugged in a practiced manner. After the passage of a sufficient amount of time, she had begun to lift her finger to point toward a rubber ball. But at this moment she heard Cecil speak. “I want that,” he said, and pointed at the wall.

All heads followed his finger. A giant hoop hung on a nail in the wall.

It was a copper hoop, pure copper, and it had a matching stick. The stick, which had a leather handle, was also made of copper. Both the hoop and the stick gleamed in the darkened store.

As soon as Cecil spoke, everything went silent. Even the Barnardshire boys fell quiet. They had bought their small candies and had slowly migrated over to the toy side of the store. As soon as Cecil had said, “I want that” and pointed at the hoop, they had licked their lips and watched.

Maisie understood right off what had happened—Cecil had pointed to the most expensive toy in the store. Every toy had price tags attached, but it wasn’t difficult to surmise what was the least expensive. Whereas the small rubber balls were priced at a half penny apiece, the hoop was two pounds, well beyond the price that anyone but perhaps the shop owner himself could afford to pay for a toy.

Maisie understood well the hierarchy of toys. Having grown up poor herself, she had walked into plenty of shops to buy penny candies. Every store owner carried a variety of toys: those that could be bought cheaply and those that a child could save up for. But there was a third kind of toy: the toy that no child could afford. This toy was prominently displayed so that children could look at it, with longing, while they purchased something different. This third type of toy would bring you in, and then encourage you to buy something cheaper as a substitute—to take some of the edge off the hunger created by the unreachable toy.

Maisie herself had done this plenty of times: half of the fun of going into a store to buy sweets or a stick of gum was the opportunity it afforded to look at the more expensive toys, to be at least close to them. But she could never afford them. And even her bargaining skills had never worked on lowering the price on that third kind of toy.

She suspected that these Barnardshire boys couldn’t afford it, either. And here was Cecil, attempting to purchase the most expensive toy in the store.

“Why don’t we get this,” Maisie said, grabbing his arm and pointing to a basket of rubber balls with her free hand. “We have money for this.”

“No,” Cecil said. “I’ve my own money,” he said in a snotty voice. He reached into his pocket, apparently to pull out his bills.

“Please don’t,” Maisie whispered. This was something else a poor person would never do: reach into a pocket and expect to find bills to pull out.

She put her hand quickly on Cecil’s, clasping his wrist to keep it in place.

The boys crowded around. One of them cried out, “Look! A girl is handling him!” This brought a raft of chuckles at Cecil’s expense.

“Will you let a girl tell you what to do?” another boy asked. His teeth pushed out like the roof to a house, his lower lip tucked under the gable.

Maisie withdrew her hand but not the warning in her eyes.

With a chuckle of his own, the older man, having finished serving the boys candies, came around and stood beside the hoop. “Are you interested in this, eh?” he asked, pulling it off the nail in the wall. “Would you like to feel it?”

Cecil only nodded. It was too late now to back out. He’d have to buy it.

Unfortunately, the group of boys wouldn’t step back and make room for him to roll it; so Cecil was left with no room to do anything but run the hoop through his hands. He ran his hand around a few times and smiled. Pippa tentatively touched it as well.

“It’s good,” Cecil said, for no reason. Maisie nodded, trying to make the scene as natural as possible.

“I’ll take it,” Cecil said.

The younger clerk nodded and took the stick off the nail as well. He grabbed the hoop back and went to the register, where they were to pay. The entire group, including the three Barnardshire boys, moved over at once.

“Are you children from around here?” the clerk asked, writing out a receipt but looking at them over the rims of his spectacles. His eyes slid over the three-piece suits worn by Cecil and Thomas, which stood in stark contrast to the clothes of the other boys. Cecil and Thomas should have taken their jackets off and left them in the car, Maisie could see that now. Another mistake: she would have to tell Lady Eugenie all the errors they were making.

Lady Eugenie had told them the first principle of information gathering: blend in with those who hold information. She couldn’t yet tell whether she and Pippa blended in with the people of Barnardshire village because she hadn’t yet seen any girls outside. Maybe they were kept indoors to do chores.

The clerk finished writing the receipt on a piece of paper while the younger clerk took the price tags off the hoop and stick with a tiny pair of scissors.

“Two pounds, please,” the clerk said; his eyes showed surprise when Cecil handed over two crisp notes.

“Thank you.” The hoop and stick, as well as the receipt, were handed back over the counter, and everyone then moved toward the door.

Maisie knew that she had to engage the local boys in conversation. She turned, expecting to find rage on their faces that someone—a stranger—had come into their store and bought their prized toy. Instead, she saw expectation: they looked like they wanted to play.

“Come on,” she said, and they happily followed.

Once out in the street, Maisie grabbed the hoop away from Cecil, who didn’t say anything in return. Well, she thought, at least he senses he has made a mess. It would have been easier to gather everyone to play with a rubber ball, but they would have to do their best with the hoop.

“Why don’t we all spread out into a circle,” Maisie said, and they found, right beside the store, a gravel lot they could play in.

Cecil held on to the stick. “But you are supposed to use the stick,” he said, “and the hoop rolls out and then returns to you.” Cecil held out the stick for Maisie to see.

She already knew that. The problem, of course, was that only one person could play at a time that way, and they were never going to get to know the Barnardshire boys if Cecil spent ten minutes playing with the hoop by himself. They needed everyone involved and everyone to have fun. That would loosen up the jaws. “Make people happy and they will tell you anything,” her mum had said, when she was a little girl, eating food with her hands beside a fire. Maisie felt a pang for her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in months.

The children had spread out into a lopsided circle. Unfortunately, the three boys were all bunched together on one side of the lot; Maisie, Pippa, Cecil, and Thomas on the other.

“You two know Jimmie Styles?” Maisie asked, rolling the hoop toward the tallest boy, the red-headed one. He caught it and then rolled it across to her. It skipped over the gravel and, on its way back to Maisie, died on its side. She had to run up and fetch it.

“Jimmie? Yeah,” the boy said. “He’s a good friend of mine.”

Maisie pushed the hoop toward Cecil, who stumbled and let the hoop race by him. He had to chase after it, causing everyone to laugh.

It also caused everyone to forget about Jimmie. Maisie tried again. “Is he around here?”

“Who?” the red-head asked. He looked over his shoulder at Cecil, who had finally corralled the hoop when it hit the side of the store. “Hey!” he shouted. “Roll it to me again!”

Instead, Cecil patiently walked to the circle and bent to dust off his legs. Yes, Maisie thought, that was a fine gesture to help make friends. The other boys were covered in dust, and happily so.

After cleaning himself off, Cecil indeed rolled the hoop to the red-headed boy, who picked it up and started to twirl the hoop on his arm, which he held straight out at his side. “Look at this!” he cried. “I always wanted to do this!”

His two friends laughed at him. Even Pippa did.

“Come on,” Maisie said. “Roll it over to Pippa, please. So that we can all play.”

The boy did as she requested, and Maisie once again brought up Jimmie. “Have you seen Jimmie?”

“Why you interested in Jimmie?” he asked, his freckles darkening a little.

Another boy said, “Maybe she’s his girlfriend,” which made them all giggle. Maisie tried to keep her anger from showing.

“He’s my cousin,” Pippa suddenly said. “My mother and father have gone to visit him, but they said Jimmie wasn’t here. They didn’t say where he was.”

Everyone had stopped to look at Pippa, who, because of the paleness of her skin and the whiteness of her hair, seemed less a body than a quiet ghost among them. Accordingly, a voice issuing from that body caught everyone off-guard.

“You his cousin, eh?” the red-headed boy asked. He rolled the hoop to one of his friends, only a few feet away. The hoop got away, forcing him to chase after it. Fortunately, Cecil knew enough not to mock him in return.

“On my mother’s side,” Pippa said.

“Eh, good,” the boy said. “At least not related on the father’s side.”

“What’s wrong with his father?” Maisie asked quickly.

“Nothing really wrong. Except he don’t provide for Jimmie’s family the way he ought.”

One of the other boys spoke up. “He’s a drinker. Drinks like a fish. My mum says he’s drinking his family into the poor house.”

“Don’t he work?” Maisie asked.

The hoop finally started to roll again. Thomas corralled it and rolled it to the red-headed boy, who answered.

“He used to work. I think he had to stop because he couldn’t hardly talk straight. Too much drink makes a man dumb. The tongue is like a sponge, heavy with liquor.”

“Thank you,” Maisie said, stowing away that piece of information. She then gave herself over to the pleasure of the game.

*

A woman with a blanket tied around her shoulders came to the front door. Her face was smudged and the fingers that clasped at the blanket were darkened, like earth roots with soil clinging to them. She cracked the door open only a foot and turned an anxious look at both Eugenie and Phillip.

“Can I help you?” she asked, settling on the feminine face.

Eugenie and Phillip, without a lead, had chosen this building by happenstance.

“Do you know where the Styles family lives?” Eugenie asked, smiling warmly. She saw, underneath the blanket, a baby’s bare leg sticking out. The woman was cuddling her child.

“Who wants to know?” the woman asked quickly. She turned her eyes from Eugenie to look skeptically at Phillip’s suit. Eugenie’s dress and shirt, meanwhile, evaded scrutiny. “You aren’t from the bank, are you?” she asked, her eyes moving from one face to the other.

The eyes began to widen: fear.

“No,” Phillip said. “I have actually been meeting with the wife, Mrs. Styles, and have a message for her husband, Mr. Styles. She is staying with Mrs. Todderham, near Clarendon Grange. Do you know her?”

“Bess Todderham?” The woman’s face softened. “I know her. What’s happened to Joanna…I mean, Mrs. Styles?”

“Nothing has happened,” Phillip said. “Nothing dangerous, I mean. We have simply been sent to fetch Mr. Styles and give him a message. His wife was so discombobulated—confused, confused—when we spoke with her last, that she neglected to give us the address. We neglected to think of it before we left.”

Eugenie thought it was smart for Phillip to avoid mentioning that the boy was missing. There was no reason to get people afraid. The papers in London ran stories, twice a week, darkly warning of an invasion soon to come. The papers never identified the invaders but demanded that the public at large be ready for them, and to be ready by remaining suspicious of anyone you didn’t know. If London was in a state of heightened anxiety, Eugenie could only imagine that the villagers in Barnardshire might be as well.

Also, she and Phillip surely looked like outsiders, riding into the village in that motorcar. Eugenie was not surprised that they had received a cool welcome.

“I believe Bess has some furniture she is giving to Mrs. Styles,” Phillip said. “And she needs her husband to come help. I’ve been sent to fetch him with my horse.”

“Who are you?” The question was less defensive this time but was rather curious. The baby squirmed and gave a small cry, and the woman inserted a hand into the blanket to stroke it.

“I live at Clarendon Grange,” Phillip said. “I am Mrs. Todderham’s neighbor.”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Nice place,” she said. “I’ve been by it, once or twice.”

“I will tell the Duke, the owner, that you approve.” Phillip smiled, but stiffly.

The woman repositioned the baby and refastened her blanket. She nodded at the building across the street, a ramshackle white structure of three stories. “He lives on the third floor up there,” she said. “The upper flat. There’s a set of steps around the back. Just climb up and knock. He left earlier, but he should be back. I think I saw him come back down the street before you two showed up.” And without any conversation, or even allowing Phillip the chance to raise his hat and say thanks, she shut the door on them.

“Well, at least we found an address,” Phillip said, stepping away from the door.

“You did well,” Eugenie said. “Are you now your valet? Did I hear you properly?” Eugenie realized that she had gotten too close to something in the motor car earlier, when she had raised the issue of the Austen book. Now she would settle for teasing and banter. That was safer.

Phillip smiled but said nothing. Together they crossed the street. In the distance, Eugenie saw the bright blue dress of Pippa; she was in a group of children playing a game of some sort. She hoped they could find some useful information as well.

Phillip led the way around the side of the white house and up the creaking steps to the back door on the third floor. Two mangy cats streaked down the stairs in their face, almost upsetting Eugenie’s step. To stay upright, she had had to grab the guard rail to steady herself, but the guard rail seemed ready to snap off and was rickety in its own right, so she gave a small cry.

Phillip quickly grabbed her forearm and held her in place.

“Thank you,” she murmured, sensing her life having flashed in front of her. They then ascended to the top together, side by side, where Phillip knocked on the door.

One would think a telegram had been sent, alerting Mr. Styles to the two people crossing the road, because he opened the door immediately, and showed no surprise at the presence of two strangers on his threshold.

It was the man with the rust-colored beard. Eugenie recognized him immediately. He had been the man stepping out of the bank as they first rode into Barnardshire. He had seemed disorientated then.

Now he was imposing. He stood at the threshold of the flat, blocking the entire doorway. Eugenie tried to discreetly look over his shoulder, but she couldn’t see anything. He sensed her curiosity and checked it, raising his right shoulder to block her view.

“Hello,” Phillip said. He took his hat off and kept it off as he addressed the man.

The man may not have shown surprise, but he didn’t show hospitality either. He was wearing a suit—but an old one. Baggy in the knees and at the waist, it was held up with a piece of string, not even a real belt. The man had a lazy eye which was clouded, and deep in his beard were blubbery lips, that looked wet and were moving as if he was whispering to himself.

“We’re here from Mrs. Todderham’s,” Eugenie said. “Your wife came to us when your son went missing.”

Relief flooded his face, but only for a second. He dropped his eyes, but then raised them again. Eugenie thought she saw alarm.

“Have you…found him?” he asked.

“No,” Eugenie said. “But we wondered if we might ask you some questions. Your wife was so worried that we are afraid we couldn’t quite understand what she was saying.”

“Do you work with Inspector Feagley?” he said. His speech sent some spray, with the “s.”

“No, we’re private detectives,” Phillip said, stepping back slightly.

“Pri…” Confusion creased the man’s brow, and then he suddenly found full voice: “We can’t afford no private detectives! What has Joanna been doing? Contracting with someone to search for Jimmie?”

“We are not working for a fee,” Phillip said sternly, cutting him off and waving a hand to disperse the dastardly spray. “Nor will we ask for any money, I can assure you. You needn’t worry about that.”

“You know my wife, do you?” The bearded man extended a grimy finger and poked Phillip in the chest. “Where is she?”

Phillip carefully brushed the finger off his lapel and, in the same motion, extended his hand, to shake. But Mr. Styles ignored it. “Can we come in?” Phillip asked.

“Where’s Joanna?”

Eugenie tried a different approach. “I know you are worried about your son, Mr. Styles. Your wife feels the same. But we need to ask you questions. Your wife was very worried, and we were unable to get coherent sentences from her. We thought it would be wiser to come directly to you for answers.”

The man didn’t budge, though his eyes had lazily wandered over to Eugenie’s face. He seemed distant. This was a face, Eugenie thought, that was worn by too many drunks in London, those who would congregate near the river at night and who, in the early morning hours, could be seen vacating themselves in the street. It was a look that masked fear and loneliness, and looked hopefully to more drink, the one thing that could fill them.

“Or,” Eugenie said, recognizing his lack of interest in getting out of the door, “we can ask our questions here.”

“I don’t know anything,” Mr. Styles said. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. All I know is that my son should have been home hours ago. Maybe he has just gone off to the next town over.”

Phillip scratched his nose. “Has he done that before? Just run off?”

“Likely,” Mr. Styles said. “I think he’s met a woman over in Cambridgeshire.”

“But he’s thirteen,” Eugenie said.

Before Mr. Styles could retort, Phillip asked, “Do you have a name for this woman? Anything at all that you could give us?”

“Nope,” Mr. Styles said, and he moved back inside in preparation for shutting them out.

Phillip laid a hand flat on the door, holding it in place. “If you can think of anything, anything that might be useful, please let your wife know. Or send a message to Mrs. Todderham. Will you do that?”

“I don’t have no transport,” the man said, and took another step back.

“Anything you might remember,” Phillip said.

He removed his hand, and Mr. Styles slammed the door shut.

“That was enlightening,” Phillip said, once they had descended the rickety stairs. Eugenie knew precisely what he meant.

“He seemed rather cagey, didn’t he?”

They stood together at the foot of the stairs, not sure where to go next. Eugenie thought to look up, over her shoulder. A curtain moved in the window and then was still.

Phillip chuckled. “I did not for a second believe that Jimmie Styles has a woman in Cambridgeshire.”

“I guessed that thirteen was a little young.”

“He was also an undeveloped thirteen-year-old,” Phillip said.

“How could you tell?”

“From the bicycle. It’s a child’s bicycle he used. If he were mature enough to have a woman in Cambridghsire, then I would expect him to ride a man’s bicycle.”

“We will certainly have to check with Mrs. Styles.”

A sudden wind came up, and Eugenie held her hat down on her head. The wind had whipped up loose paper, sand, bottles and cans, which swirled around. They walked off toward the car. “I wonder what he was hiding,” Eugenie mused. “He wouldn’t even let us into the flat.”

“That, no doubt,” Phillip said, “was borne of embarrassment. We might have been better served dressing down before coming into the village. I wasn’t aware of how downtrodden most of the people seem to be.”

Eugenie had seen poverty in London. She hadn’t been forced to live it, but she had come close: the crowded alleyways with the families crammed into flats, several families sharing space at once. Running sewage. Crime. The city under gaslight was not something you could imagine until you had seen it. Even Dickens, in Oliver Twist, hadn’t quite captured its danger. Barnardshire’s poverty seemed rather different. But the people were still skeptical of a Duke knocking on their door, no doubt. The Marchioness would be pleased to know that Eugenie’s negligent stockings helped her pass in the village.

“But if he were embarrassed,” Eugenie asked, “wouldn’t he still invite two detectives into his apartment? After all, his son has been kidnapped; or, at least, we think he has been kidnapped. He is missing, at any rate.”

Phillip merely nodded.

As they walked up the street, they were approaching the children, who rolled a hoop back and forth. Pippa gathered the hoop in her hands and then rolled it across to an unidentified boy.

Eugenie suddenly stopped. “Great Scott!” She grabbed Phillip’s arm. “I remembered something. When we rode into town, I saw Mr. Styles—or at least I think it was Mr. Styles—coming out of the bank there.” She pointed at the squat building—the only brick one in town.

Phillip nodded. “Ransom, you mean? You think he was getting money to pay someone who had kidnapped his son.”

“I wish we could go in and find out,” Eugenie said. “But I rather doubt they would let two strangers know whether a client had withdrawn money.” She thought this over. “We could try, though, since we are here. You don’t have any connections, do you? Being a Duke and all.”

“No,” Phillip said, laughing. “Why?”

“Your position has to be good for something,” Eugenie said, but suddenly stopped. “That came out wrong.”

“Assuredly,” Phillip said. “I think I have proven myself quite useful, actually.” He smirked.

“I mean your title has to furnish you with some sort of an ‘in.’ Somewhere. Connections, you know.”

“Sorry,” Phillip said. “I have no more connections here than does the daughter of a Marquis.”

Eugenie sighed. He always seemed to get the better of her. She might have to learn to live with it.

Eugenie rapidly shook her head, to focus. She would not be seeing Phillip again. She was returning to London—soon. “I guess we must ask Mrs. Styles, then,” she said. “We’ll have to ride back with her so that she can scoot into the bank and check to see if funds have been withdrawn. Oh, I do hate it when spouses can’t trust each other!”

“It is frightful,” Phillip said. “Perhaps the boy sensed something between his parents and split.”

“A tension?”

“Something,” Phillip said. “I feel this is well within our grasp, but we don’t know which thread to grab at.”

Eugenie nodded. By now they were within speaking distance of the children playing with the hoop. Eugenie, raising her hand, hailed them and told them to gather and prepare to head back to Clarendon Grange.

They sat the way they had coming into town: Pippa in the front between Eugenie and Phillip, the two boys and Maisie in the rear. But there wasn’t sufficient room in the car for the hoop. Cecil held it so that it cut into the back of Phillip’s neck.

“Oh dear God, Cecil,” Phillip said, turning around. He took the hoop from the boy and handed it to the children they had been playing with, who were now gathered around the Wolsely.

“A present,” Phillip said, handing it through the window.

The boys took the hoop gingerly and looked at it, their mouths opened. Cecil knew enough not to protest but crossed his arms. As the Wolseley started up and departed, the boys waved until they couldn’t see it anymore.

*

When they returned to Mrs. Todderham’s, the two women met them at the door. The table held the remains of a meal: two tea cups, two plates, and a crock half empty with vegetables and bits of meat. Eugenie tried her best, as soon as they saw her, to dispel any hope that they had found Jimmie while, at the same time, keeping Mrs. Styles sufficiently focused to answer questions that might aid in his location. It was a terrible business having someone missing: every knock on the door carried the promise of reconnection, which was dashed, again and again.

They all returned to the table, and Phillip stood behind Eugenie again, for support.

“We went and spoke to your husband,” Eugenie said.

At that, Mrs. Styles’ face fell. She had trouble forming a sentence. With great difficulty, she finally managed, “You did?”

Phillip interjected: “He wouldn’t let us in or even talk to us. He said he didn’t know anything.”

“My husband has fallen on hard times,” Mrs. Styles said slowly. “He’s a shade of the man I married. I think everyone who knows him can agree.” Mrs. Todderham nodded her agreement and clutched her friend’s hand, providing the support Mrs. Styles needed to continue.

“It was the Railway Strike that did him in,” she said. “Two years ago. I told him nothing good ever comes of a strike, but he said he wasn’t in control of it. It happened and he…he lost his job…” Her voice cracked at the word, and her eyes clenched shut.

That explains the reduced circumstances, Eugenie thought. It explained why the clothes that Mrs. Styles wore had once been fashionable, years ago, but were now beginning to wear. They were seeing her in her present, reduced state. Her husband had wanted to prevent similar scrutiny of himself.

“I am very sorry,” Eugenie said. “Do you think that the Railway Strike is connected to Jimmie’s disappearance in any way?” She didn’t quite know when the Strike had happened.

Mrs. Styles dried her eyes and thought a second, biting down onto the kerchief that her friend, Mrs. Todderham, had gifted her.

“I can’t see how,” she said. “Bertie lost his job and came home. He had been working in Liverpool at the time. We used to have a lovely house,” she said. Her eyes became cloudy, as the house must have risen on a mental hill. But then she focused to attention. “But we lost it. Even before the Railway Strike. And then we’ve moved into smaller and smaller places. A parade of them: from a house to a flat to a shed to a coffin.”

“Is Jimmie your only child?” Eugenie asked. It was rare for families to be so small.

“I had a problem,” Mrs. Styles said. “I…” Her hand moved around her lower abdomen, to explain what her tongue could not.

“That’s quite alright,” Eugenie said, pressing a hand gently to Mrs. Styles’ arm. “I don’t mean to pry. Please continue about your husband.”

She swallowed. “He stays home, mostly. No one will hire him. The name of a man who strikes runs from one end of Britain to the other. He is infamous everywhere, whether at a simple tavern or in a mill. No one wants you once they know you participated in a work stoppage. No one wants a troublemaker. Even if you grovel that you have a family to feed, no one cares.”

Her voice began to crack again.

Eugenie looked at Mrs. Todderham, who shook her head sadly. “It has been quite trying,” she whispered.

“The banks have been hounding us,” Mrs. Styles said. “They constantly send someone around with requests for payments. We took a loan, once. Just to tide us over until Bertie found another job. But all loans must be paid back, I’ve learnt. I learn that lesson every time someone comes knocking at the door.”

“But I saw your husband leaving the bank today,” Eugenie said. “He has at least bought you a little reprieve from your creditors, I should think.”

Mrs. Styles dropped the handkerchief and left it on her lap. Her hand, which had been pressed to her mouth, stayed where it was, forming a claw. She stared at Eugenie, uncomprehending. She finally whispered, “What?”

“Your husband. Mr. Styles. With the red beard. I saw him coming out of the bank when we entered the village this afternoon.” Eugenie looked over her shoulder toward Phillip, to confirm it. He nodded his head.

“We are sure it was him.”

“That can’t be possible,” she said. “We have no money!”

“Perhaps he went to talk with them,” Phillip said. “To settle accounts or come to some sort of repayment agreement.”

“He can’t,” Mrs. Styles said. “We have tried that. Nearly half a year ago. No dice, said the man at the bank. He wouldn’t help us at all. Instead, he sends men to our flat who knock on our door, morning noon and night. Sometimes we must give them things, just to leave us alone. We’ve given away half our furniture that way.” She looked down at her lap, then looked back up. “You didn’t see him taking our bed down to the bank, did you?”

“N-n-no,” Phillip said slowly.

Eugenie assumed that Phillip was thinking the same as she. If Bertie Styles had gone to the bank, then he either went to pay money or to take money out. And judging from what Mrs. Styles had just told them, there was no money to be got out. So why would he have gone to the bank, if not to put money in?

Another question: if he had money, where did he get it?

At the same time, Phillip and Eugenie asked, “Are you sure your husband isn’t working?”

Mrs. Styles looked up and down, first at Eugenie and then at Phillip. Her eyes were wide. “Of course, I know he doesn’t. He was at home when you came to talk to him, wasn’t he? How many men of his age did you see on the streets? They work.” She smiled bitterly. “Now sometimes I get piece work, here and there, but that isn’t something Bertie would help me with, I can assure you.”

“Mrs. Styles,” Eugenie said. “Could you go to the bank with us and see if any money has been deposited into your account?”

She blinked rapidly. “Whatever for? I know I don’t have even a ha’penny on me.”

“To check something,” Eugenie said. “I’m sure the bankers will not give you a hard time. The Duke here will speak to them if they do. He can open doors.”

Phillip raised his eyebrows, but Eugenie maintained her look of seriousness.

Chapter Eleven: Checking the Accounts

Mrs. Styles hesitated at the bank’s entrance. In fact, her body shook so hard that one step forward would have sent her sprawling to the floor.

Eugenie and Phillip crowded in behind her, and bumped up against her backside as she came to a complete stop on the bank’s threshold. Phillip held the door open while Eugenie carefully squeezed past Mrs. Styles and then, taking her arm, helped ease her into the bank.

It was dark inside, and completely empty.

A clerk, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, glanced toward the door and immediately set up crowing, his squawks echoing throughout the room. “Oh!” he cried out. “Oh, now! This is past the limit!”

He slid off his stool, his mouth agape. Because the bank was empty, Eugenie realized that he was addressing them. “Come to make good on your debts, mum? Huh?” His voice was nasty. Audible poison. Having slid off the stool, he stepped around, unlatching a knee-high door and then carefully locking it behind him before barging up to the group as if he owned the place. “Finally going to pay up on your debts, are you? Well this is a day I never thought I would see!”

Mrs. Styles, her face beet red, had taken two steps into the bank but would go no further. Her hands clutched her purse.

Eugenie looked at the clerk, expecting some pity, not this crowing, as if in triumph. He was an ugly little thing—no taller than Mrs. Styles herself, but he sauntered up with his hands on his hips and a voice steeped in moral disapproval.

“Thank you for saving us the pain of hoofing over to your flat again. I see you haven’t brought a sofa or a table. So I’m not sure how you’ll make your payment.”

Mrs. Styles could only stand open-mouthed—and quivering. Eugenie thought the clerk should not be one to take pleasure in another’s poverty. Judging by how short his britches were—stopping half-way between ankle and knee—and how generally unkempt he was, Eugenie guessed he was no better off than Mrs. Styles. Clearly, however, his role as guardian of the bank’s money gave him power—and pleasure.

He stood before Mrs. Styles and looked her up and down. “Or have you come with your hand out, asking for more?” His little rat-like nose quivered with rage.

Phillip stepped between the clerk and Mrs. Styles. “Why don’t you get lost?” he said, quietly. “We are here to talk to the bank president. Not a lowly clerk.”

The clerk snapped his head back, like a tree blown over in a storm. “And who are you, sir? If you don’t mind me asking. You’ve walked in like you are the owner, but I know the owner. He hired me to run this here place.” But the clerk’s voice was somewhat softened as the eyes took in the fine cut of Phillip’s suit and the gold that glimmered on Phillip’s watch chain. “Are you my boss, governor? Has the bank been sold?”

“Why don’t you find your boss?” Phillip said, and flashed several bills to the clerk. “For you,” he said, “to help you on your way.” Then he reached into his jacket and removed a calling card. “You may keep the money. But give this to the bank president. Please.”

As this conversation continued, Eugenie attempted to comfort Mrs. Styles, rubbing her forearm and whispering, “Everything will be fine.”

The clerk stalked off, head held high; slipping the pounds in his pocket, he went to the back of the bank, where an elderly gentleman sat behind a glass window. That must be the bank’s President, Phillip thought. He wished that he had actually deposited money in this bank. But he kept everything with his investors in London. He would have more influence here as a client, even with his title. Titles were, as he realized, too nineteenth century. Real influence could be measured not in title, but in pounds.

The clerk handed the bank’s president the card. After reading it, the white-haired gentleman looked through the glass, his mouth a tiny “O.” He rose immediately and came to the door. The clerk preceded him and returned to Phillip. His manner, Eugenie observed, was still that of one who thought he owned the place.

“Mr. Prescott will see you,” the clerk said, and as the group moved as one toward the man behind the glass window, the clerk made sure to bite at the air in Mrs. Styles’ direction.

Phillip boldly led the group into the office, extending his hand to Mr. Prescott.

“Welcome, Duke Phillip,” the bank President said, shaking Phillip’s hand. He spoke in a dignified, slow manner.

Mrs. Styles audibly cried as Eugenie, practically holding her in her arms, delivered Mrs. Styles into the chair in the center of the ring that fronted Mr. Prescott’s desk.

“I’ve been meaning to stop in,” Phillip said off-handedly, “except I always seem to be called back to London at inconvenient times.”

Phillip and Eugenie sat on either side of Mrs. Styles, who shook.

Mr. Prescott smoothed down the front of his three-piece suit and sat behind his impressive desk. Judging from his accent, he was American—or had spent considerable time in North America.

“I should have made it a priority to stop by your Grange,” Mr. Prescott said. “But I have been busy here handling the community’s credit.”

“Another time,” Phillip said. “I have some investments I have wanted to talk over with someone.”

“Oh. What kind of investments?” He quickly glanced at Mrs. Styles; his look asked, Why are you here? No doubt it was a shock that a Duke should be troubling himself with one of the bank’s worst creditors.

“I’m not yet fully exposed to stocks,” Phillip said. “I have been meaning to ask someone who might perhaps be more knowledgeable about it than I.”

“A royal peer would be a welcome customer,” the president said.

Eugenie coughed—and all eyes turned to her. “But for now,” she said.

“Is this your wife?” the president asked.

“No,” Phillip responded deprecatingly.

“And who are you, Madame?” Mr. Prescott asked, blinking twice behind his wire-rim glasses.

“I am here on behalf of Mrs. Styles,” Eugenie said. She touched the woman’s arm again. Mrs. Styles, though seated between Eugenie and Phillip, had sat so far back in her chair that she seemed to be reclining, legs nearly straight out. Obviously terrified of Mr. Prescott, she was attempting to launch herself back out the door. “We are here to talk about her account.”

“Yes. That.” Mr. Prescott pinched the tip of his nose. His neat, white mustache quivered at the word account. “I had no inkling that the Styles family debt has drawn the attention of Parliament.” He shuffled some papers around and then looked over the tips of his glasses. “Though it certainly is large enough to warrant attention as a national security threat.”

“Then why did you keep lending to Mr. Styles?” Eugenie snapped, drawing a look of rebuke from Phillip. “I mean…it seems to be a bad investment to continue to give to someone who is in financial distress.”

Mr. Prescott, however, appraised Eugenie coolly. “The money was advanced before my tenure here,” he said and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I am not responsible for the lending practices of my predecessor. But it is my fiduciary duty to collect on debts owed. I have been trying, with substantial difficulty, to do so from the Styles family.”

“And we have reason to believe,” Duke Phillip said, “that Mr. Styles, the husband of this dear woman, has paid off some debts recently. Perhaps today, in fact.”

“I have no idea,” Mr. Prescott said simply. “If he paid on his debt, he wouldn’t have given the money to me. He would have paid the clerk out front.”

“Can you ask him?” Phillip said.

“Unfortunately,” the bank President interjected, “our fiduciary duties only allow that information to be given to bank clients. I’m quite sorry.”

“But it’s my husband,” Mrs. Styles said. She had deflated a little, perhaps out of exhaustion, and sat slumped in her chair. “You’ve sent letters saying that I am responsible for my husband’s debts, though only he took out the money. Money I have never seen. That’s why I work all day. To help pay these debts.”

Mr. Prescott sat, unmoved, a pillar of finance.

Eugenie thought a different approach might be appropriate. “Do you have a wife, sir?”

Mr. Prescott refused to answer. His look, already cool, now began to show signs of frost bite.

Oh, dear, Eugenie thought.

“What I mean,” Eugenie embroidered, “is that you can surely imagine the difficulty a woman would have if she were working very hard to pay off her debts but didn’t know how much she owed.”

“I am sure that would be quite difficult,” he said, hands folded in front of him on the desk.

Eugenie raised her eyes. “And wouldn’t you think it best if she understood the amount of her current account debt?”

“Indeed,” the President said. “Which is why she should talk to her husband.”

“Ah,” Eugenie said.

“I imagine spouses speak,” Mr. Prescott said. “Even in the lower classes.”

Eugenie felt a sting at that. She imagined Mrs. Styles felt the blow even harder.

They had reached an impasse. This was precisely the type of man Eugenie was teaching her girls how to handle—rigid, rule bound, unyielding. Someone who wrote the rules and then used them against you, aghast that you should challenge any kind of system you had no opportunity to help create.

Eugenie looked briefly at Phillip, who was looking at her. He, too, was part of the system, and she realized the system was much larger than any of them.

“Well then,” Eugenie said, annoyed. She reached down to gather her skirt in her hands in preparation for rising. She took a breath, disappointed, but then heard a voice suddenly ring out behind her: “Is that my daughter’s hat I see in there?”

Eugenie stopped, trying to place the voice. Was that…

Suddenly, the clerk’s voice shouted, “Ma’am, you can’t go in there! You can’t go behind the barrier!”

And then there was a commotion in the bank lobby, the sound of scuffling and feet moving, as well as the sound of something striking another object.

“You will not tell me where I can and cannot go!”

“You aren’t allowed in there!”

“Don’t you touch me!”

“Ma’am…!”

“Vermin!”

And suddenly the Marchioness appeared in the doorway to Mr. Prescott’s office.

Eugenie turned around. “Hello, Mum.”

“Well, I had been told you would be here!” the Marchioness said. The clerk, who was trying to get past the Marchioness’s considerable bulk, only managed to push her further into the office, and she began hitting him with her parasol. His bleating was muffled.

“Marchioness Carlyle…” Mr. Prescott whispered, rising slowly. His face wore a mask of wonder. “You have never graced us with your presence.”

He quickly moved to the door to take her hands. The clerk, mouth open, fell back, his little red-rimmed eyes full of hate. Finally addressing him, Mr. Prescott hissed, “Return to your stool!” And then he led the Marchioness into his office.

Mrs. Styles happily gave up her seat to the Marchioness and stood near the door.

“Exhausted,” the Marchioness muttered. “Utterly exhausted.” She reached into her purse and took out a silken handkerchief to wipe her brow.

“Would you like a drink of water?” Mr. Prescott asked. “Are you feeling alright?”

“A moment, please,” the Marchioness said. She finished wiping her face, folded the kerchief back up and stored it in her purse.

“My dear, are you attempting to secure a loan?” she whispered to her daughter, leaning in her direction. “Surely, there are banks in London.”

Eugenie explained the situation: that they had seen Mr. Styles at the bank; he had been indebted; and his wife, Mrs. Styles, wanted to know whether he had either deposited some money into the bank or had paid off some of his debts.

Marchioness Carlyle nodded and, without a blink, turned to Mr. Prescott. “That should be easy enough to check, surely.” She settled her hands on her lap.

“W-w-well,” Mr. Prescott said.

“There are rules,” Eugenie said, to which the Marchioness sniffed.

“Mere rules should not prevent you from helping a woman in need?” She smiled at Mr. Prescott.

“Y-yes,” Mr. Prescott said. He was sweating. His forehead was creased with wrinkles, and each began to glisten with moisture. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“Surely,” the Marchioness said, “there is no reason to keep a customer from knowing the current state of her account. I would never have been able to pay off my late husband’s minor debts had that information been kept from me.”

“No,” Mr. Prescott said quickly. “You are absolutely right. There is no reason at all.” He turned to the plate glass. “Sumpkins!” he cried out, and the rat face clerk appeared in the door. “Bring me the ledgers for the Styles account. Please.”

The face disappeared, and the bank’s President spoke confidentially to Marchioness Carlyle. “I quite enjoyed that leg of lamb you served last week.”

Eugenie raised an eyebrow.

“Wonderful,” Marchioness Carlyle said. “I’m serving it again next week. Would Thursday be a good evening?”

“Fantastic,” Mr. Prescott said. “I was unaware you had a daughter,” he said, trying to smile at Eugenie for the first time.

“Yes,” the Marchioness said. “Most of the time, I am unaware as well.”

Mr. Prescott straightened his tie again as Sumpkins walked in carrying the ledger book, out of which innumerable papers threatened to spill and flutter to the floor. The clerk, with a sour face, dropped the entire contraption on the President’s desk, who briskly lined the papers up and flipped to the current account balance.

“Ah,” he said. “We have it all right here. It says that your husband deposited…fifty pounds…” He looked up, as shocked as Mrs. Styles. With eyes blinking, he returned to the page. “…and had that amount credited to his outstanding debts.”

“Fifty…?” Mrs. Styles said. “Where…where could he have gotten that?”

Mr. Prescott looked back down. “It doesn’t say. I have here simply a notation that the bulk has been applied to interest on the loan he secured in February.” He wrote something on a piece of paper. “I can give you a full accounting of your debts, if you would like.”

Mrs. Styles wore an expression that spoke a single message: No, I don’t want to know.

*

“Where do you think the money came from?” Eugenie asked Mrs. Styles. The two women sat in the back seat of Phillip’s motor car. Mrs. Styles looked as if she had soaked through her dress with sweat. The experience of stepping into the bank had been trying.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Styles said. Once outside the bank she had begun to cry. The Marchioness, seated in the front seat, handed her a handkerchief.

Mrs. Styles blew her nose—a loud, honking sound.

“Fifty pounds,” Mrs. Styles said. “I don’t think he ever made that much in all his years of working. How did he get that money?”

“Did your son perhaps save his money?” Eugenie asked again. She had never nailed down just what Jimmie Styles did with his paycheck. No matter how small it might have been, it could accumulate over the course of two years. “Maybe your husband found the money Jimmie made as a paper boy and deposited it into the bank.”

Mrs. Styles thought on this. “No,” she said. “Jimmie once gave me his week’s pay for the delivery and it was but four pence or so. He would not have made that amount of money, not in the two years that he was riding his bicycle and delivering papers.”

“This is certainly awkward,” the Marchioness said.

Phillip agreed. “I think we need to speak to your husband, Mrs. Styles.”

Miserably, she nodded.

Philip started the roadster and handed the Marchioness a pair of goggles.

*

The four ascended the rickety stairway at the back of the leaning white building. This time, Mrs. Styles led the way. Marchioness Carlyle, rather than wait in the car, also came, and struggled mightily, holding onto her daughter to keep up. The stairs were steep—and practically endless. “Dear me,” she whispered. “One will need snow skis to descend.”

“You should have waited in the motor car,” Eugenie whispered to her. “You won’t like it in here.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “I may be of use.”

Eugenie rolled her eyes.

“Was I not of use at the bank, my dear Eugenie?”

“Quite,” Eugenie said. “And how did you know to come in?”

“Why, I saw you. Walking beside the handsome Duke. Though I had hoped you were walking into a chapel, I thought I ought to follow nevertheless.”

They reached the third floor. Without knocking, Mrs. Styles pushed open her own door and stepped inside, calling her husband’s name.

Everyone walked in after her and looked around.

The flat, from inside, was smaller than Eugenie could have imagined. In fact, it was little more than a single room. It was also very dark, because there seemed to be no windows. Eugenie could make out, through the available light, little more than a heavy wash of trash on the floor, something approximating a sofa, and what looked like plates with food encrusted laid out around the floor. An unpleasant odor filled the space and was in no hurry to escape the opened door.

Eugenie turned to her mother, to see once again if she wanted to leave. But the Marchioness, far from shrinking back, actually stepped into the flat and walked toward the seating contraption. Hiking up her skirt, she delivered a hard kick to the sofa.

“Mother!” Eugenie cried. But underneath a mound of clothes and other sundries arose a figure, dislodging the whole mess. He sat up and began to rub its eyes.

“There you are, Bertie,” Mrs. Styles said. “I couldn’t find you.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. And as he looked at the people arrayed around him, his face was quickly gripped by panic. “Who have you brought in here, Joanna?”

It was still too dark inside. “We need some light,” Mrs. Styles said.

Bertie continued to gape at the visitors, including the Marchioness, who towered over him with her arms crossed.

“We require an audience,” she said, in short, clipped speech. “About a certain deposit that you made into your bank account.”

“Oh no,” he moaned.

While Mrs. Styles took a candle from the cupboard, Phillip had moved to the wall and found that a window had been covered with a blanket. Tearing down the blanket, some light dribbled weakly through the dirtied glass. Mrs. Styles lit two candles and set them on a small table. In this trembling light, Mr. Styles sat up fully and pushed the remaining clothes and trash off him. Mrs. Styles’ face showed humiliation, that so many strangers should see that she lived this way. But, fortunately, her good friend Mrs. Todderham was not with them. She, at least, would be spared the horror of the reality of her material life.

Mr. Styles rubbed his head and looked at his wife.

Whipped, the Marchioness thought.

Everyone waited for Mrs. Styles to begin, but she only stood trembling in the middle of the floor. Shortly, she began to burst into tears. “What have you done!”

“Fine if I know,” Mr. Styles muttered. He threw glances at his trembling wife.

Eugenie decided to begin the interrogation. “Mr. Styles. May I call you Mr. Styles?”

“Say anything you like.” He peered at her closer. “Aren’t you the lady detective who came by our place earlier? It looks as if it were you.”

“Yes. I am Eugenie Carlyle. I have been employed by your wife to help find your son, Jimmie, who has been missing since this morning. And as part of our investigation, we have found that you deposited 50 pounds into the Bank, which was credited to your account.”

His mouth fell open.

“How…” he began. But Eugenie cut him off.

“Mr. Prescott was kind enough to show us the books. We saw that payment you had made, which was credited to your debts.”

“The pertinent question,” the Marchioness said, “is where did you get that money?” She took a step forward, placing her foot directly onto the trash. “And don’t lie to me, sir. Have the decency not to lie to your wife, either. She misses her child.”

Mr. Styles looked all around, once in the face of the each of them. But as he made the circuit, his defiance abandoned him. “I sold him,” Mr. Styles said, flatly. His entire face collapsed—cheekbones, jowls, chin. “I sold him yesterday to a man who buys child labor to work in London.”

Mrs. Styles clutched at her throat, and Eugenie gathered her in her arms to keep her upright.

“To sell your son!” the Marchioness accused.

“I haven’t any money, mum,” he said. “You look the type that wouldn’t know what that means. So I should hope you would think before judging me.”

“I won’t judge you,” Phillip said. “But we would like some details. How did you sell your son?”

“It happens around here,” Mr. Styles said. “I don’t remember all the details. But I ain’t the first one. There was a man I worked with, on the rails. He sold his daughter soon after the strike. I asked him to contact whoever he sold her to. They sent everything through the post. No return address.”

“But you responded?” Phillip asked.

“Yes. They proposed thirty, but I held out for more. They came by once, about three months ago. Just to look Jimmie over, make sure he was healthy. Fit. I got ‘em up to 50 pounds after that. My son is in fine shape.” His face almost glowed with pride.

“And they came again to kidnap him?” Phillip was focused unlike the others on the details. Now that they knew what happened to Jimmie, he was determined to find him.

“Yup,” Mr. Styles said, nodding his head like a drunkard. “They did.

“They were supposed to get him before he even left to deliver papers,” he clarified. “Jimmie liked to go buy a cup of coffee from that McInerney woman, you know. The one who runs a kitchen out of her flat. I had plans to nab him on his way out, but the men from London didn’t come soon enough. They were late.” He looked around, as if others should share his annoyance. “When they come, Jimmie had already taken off on his bicycle. We had to chase him.”

Mr. Styles settled his sights on the far window, as if he were seeing the morning unfold again. “When we caught up to him, it was at the Todderham cottage. Still pretty dark, so we were able to sneak up, quiet like. The man held back on the road, in his cab, while I snuck up and clubbed Jimmie on the head, to knock him out.” He looked at Mrs. Styles and his eyes seemed suddenly afire. “I clubbed my own son!”

Now that the true horror had been revealed, Mrs. Styles had steeled herself. She stood up straighter and crossed her arms. Like a monument to patience and maternal understanding, she nodded to her husband, his wet eyes leaking tears, to continue.

“And then I carried him to the cab waiting in the street. And that’s when they handed me the money right then and there. So’s I watched them trot down the road until I couldn’t hear anything anymore, and I went right back to Bess Todderham’s and picked up the newspaper satchel Jimmie carried. I knew I had to deliver those papers, lest someone notice they hadn’t been delivered and contact the printers. I spent the morning walking up the road in the dark, throwing papers every which way with no concern for who should get one or not. When the papers run out, I walked back home as the sun rose.” Mr. Styles’ lips continued to move around, though no words came out. Then, with a sigh, he was still.

No one spoke for a minute. Mr. Styles himself patted around the trash and clothes for something. Finding it—a bottle—he put it to his lips but discovered it was empty. He let it drop to the floor.

“Could you identify this person if you saw him?” Phillip asked.

“Who?” Mr. Styles asked.

“The man who bought Jimmie.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Was a short man. Dark. Looked a little like my old boss, but less well-dressed.”

“Would he recognize you?”

“Doubtful.”

“And did you hold onto the letters?”

“I did,” Mr. Styles said.

Phillip gestured, as if to ask “Where?”

Mr. Styles answered him by looking around the trash that covered the room.

“Oh,” Phillip said.

“We’ll find that letter,” Mrs. Styles said, her voice firm. “And then we’ll find my son.”

Duke Phillip turned to Eugenie. “I think we shall contact Inspector Feagley now.”

Chapter Twelve: The Race to London

Phillip had ruled out riding the entire way to London by car, as he did not have the petrol to make it. The railway, Inspector Feagley said, would suit him quite well enough.

Contacting Inspector Feagley had been a necessity. Once they had concluded that Jimmie Styles had been sold into child labor, they had known that police assistance was unavoidable. For one thing, the written correspondence Mr. Styles had found did not yield up any clues. Apart from a London postmark, Phillip could find no other identifying information. Accordingly, it would have been impossible to rescue Jimmie on their own.

For another thing, finding Jimmie without police protection could endanger their lives—the newspapers were filled with stories of London violence, in particularly the violence of criminal syndicates that exploited child labor. Inspector Feagley was, therefore, the natural contact; he quickly sent a telegram to London to inform them of what had happened. Inspector Feagley informed Eugenie and Phillip that he planned to go to London in two days.

“Why not today?” Eugenie asked, as she and Phillip stood in his office. The Inspector’s small office was tucked onto the third floor of a nondescript building, papers spilling from bookcases and off the sides of his desk. Eugenie had glanced at his bookshelf but had not seen any Detective Malveaux. Instead, she had seen the standard guides to hunting and fishing.

Inspector Feagley shrugged. “You think that is necessary?”

“It might help,” Eugenie said. “The sooner we get there, the better. The mercenary could have sold Jimmie to France by now. They might have received a tip that we are on their tail. A criminal who believes he is suspect behaves in a particularly dangerous manner. They might even kill Jimmie, for all we know.”

Inspector Feagley sucked his teeth, nodding with his eyes shut, before he shouted to his secretary in the outside office. “We’ll need rail tickets for tomorrow, Mabel!”

A grumble came from the secretarial station.

“And perhaps,” Phillip said, “we should—I mean, you should—inform London when we will be arriving. I wouldn’t wish to surprise them.”

The Inspector thought on that as well, and then raised his eyebrows, coupled with a sigh. “Mabel!” he shouted. “Send a telegram that I will be arriving by rail tomorrow morning!”

“And we would like to come, as well,” Phillip said.

“Mrs. Todderham asked us to,” Eugenie quickly added, when it appeared that Inspector Feagley was on the verge of objection. He looked at them with his eyebrows nettled.

But before he could say anything, Phillip asked, “Have I told you about the hunting at my estate in Clowdon?”

*

They met at the railway station the next morning. Bertie Styles came, too, so that he could identify the man who had bought his son.

They all rode in the same rail cabin, seats facing each other, and they boarded early. Bertie Styles sat stiffly, with a look of terror frozen onto his face, which could only have come from several consecutive hours of sobriety. What he had done had finally penetrated his consciousness—and his conscience. He had wet and combed his hair and put on a freshly laundered suit, but he looked as if he were laid out for death. He sat, his lips fluttering every two seconds, as if counting the knocks of his heart.

Inspector Feagley took a window seat, and he had greeted them at the station with enthusiasm. “I always love a trip into the city,” he had said, “though I don’t get to go as much as I’d like.”

He had brought a boxed breakfast, which he started eating as soon as they were on board.  He pulled out first a rasher of bacon, wrapped in brown paper, and chewed off pieces with loud, snapping teeth.  Then he peeled the lid from a small cup of baked beans, which he ate with his mouth open, before finally extracting from the box a stone cold English muffin, which he crumbled in his hand.

Eugenie and Phillip watched him eat—it was difficult not to. Once he had finished, he slid a thumbnail contentedly in between his teeth. Phillip returned to his newspaper. Eugenie humored herself by reading a small book she had brought in the pocket of her trench coat.

“Well, I hope we can find him,” Inspector Feagley said, after a load burp. “I wish we had some sort of a picture so as to help identify him, should we see him.”

“You have met the boy before?” Eugenie asked.

“Few times,” Inspector Feagley said, working on his teeth now with a toothpick.

“At least we have his father here,” Phillip said.

Bertie Styles made no response. Inspector Feagley shrugged and looked out the window. Then the last of the passengers boarded, the final whistle sounded, and the train pulled from the station.

Rather than look out the window, Eugenie stayed focused on her book, which was engrossing. She was so engrossed that she did not notice the curious glances Phillip continually cast in her direction, as if he were trying to decipher the title. When he finished reading his paper, he asked her, “A Miss Austen novel?”

“No,” Eugenie said, and handed it to him.

Phillip read out the title: “Morbidity and Malice in the Victorian Underworld.” He grimaced.

“I leave Miss Austen to you,” Eugenie said. “And to Miss Castlefork,” she said, unable to restrain herself.

Philip handed the book back, without an expression.

The ride was surprisingly short, because there were no stops on the way. Phillip had excused himself to find a smoking car, while Eugenie had briefly set the book on her stomach and closed her eyes for a nap. When she woke, they were pulling into the station and Phillip was chatting comfortably with an elderly woman sitting across from them, who was quite captivated by the smooth manners of her fellow conversant.

“Well, I guess we’re here,” Inspector Feagley said, looking out the window with his eyes wide. He might as well have been a child at Christmastime, looking through a shop window. “Perhaps we’ll have time for something to eat.”

*

Inspector McCloud from the Metropolitan Police met them at the station. He stood out among the porters and crowds like an oak tree in a wheat field. On his nose sat small glasses, which caught the glare and made him look imposing yet mysterious. He identified the group before they could identify him, and with a brief nod of the head he greeted them. Phillip, leading the four, shook the Inspector’s hand.  The tall Inspector, confused, greeted Phillip: “Inspector Feagley, it’s good to meet you.”

“Actually,” Phillip said, “I am here in a private capacity.”

McCloud frowned at his error.

“You want Inspector Feagley,” Phillip said, and turned.

He had expected Barnardshire’s chief detective to be standing behind him. Instead, Inspector Feagley had dropped his notebook and was currently chasing, while half crouched down, for his pencil, which rolled away from him back toward the tracks. When he had gathered everything, he returned to the group, with perspiring face, and belched.

“Hello,” Inspector McCloud said, bending down.

“Hello,” Inspector Feagley said, dropping the pencil again to free up his hand to shake. Eugenie trapped the pencil with her foot.

Mr. Styles continued to look terrified. He stared at all the people milling about, rushing off the train and others rushing on. The whole noise and racket. Perhaps, Eugenie thought, he understood for the first time the consequences of what he had done. He had sold his son to come work in this large, bustling, impersonal city, where the boy was alone and undoubtedly afraid.

On their way to a cab, Phillip filled in Inspector McCloud on the details of the crime—what everyone currently knew. He handed the correspondence to McCloud, who read it absentmindedly. However, when they had arrived at the Metropolitan Police station, everyone was on the same page.

“Child labor is a terrible scourge,” McCloud said, leading them into his impressive office. The Metropolitan Police station was itself like a beehive, almost as busy as the railway station. Men bustled around, and loud voices cried out. McCloud led them all into his office and then shut the door. “Terrible. Daily, we receive tips of boys and girls sold into the city. A terrible scourge.”

“Yet legal,” Eugenie clarified.

“True,” he said, coming off his imaginary soapbox. He stood behind his giant oak desk. On the wall behind him hung an ink drawing of the city, as big as the wall. The map outlined all of London’s precincts in blue ink. “But not the selling of a child into it. That is patently against the laws of his majesty.”

From his desk, the Inspector glared with disapproval at Mr. Styles, who stood with his back to the door. He twisted his beaten hat in his hand. Since entering the station, he had asked continually for a drink, and had been given many glasses of water.

“Yes, right,” Phillip said, to get things back on track. “Do you have any suspects?” he asked McCloud. “I know it’s only been a day since we called. But sometimes you have people you keep under constant surveillance.”

“There are innumerable men who engage in this sort of thing,” the Inspector said. “We arrest them, but they always end up released back onto the street. There could be any number of men, in a city this large. It’s true, what you say, that we keep our eye on people. But there isn’t anyone we know of who left London on the day in question.”

Inspector Feagley had sat down in the chair in front of McCloud’s desk. Phillip walked up to the map for a closer look. Various pins had been stuck at points on the map; on the end of each pin was a small flag, of assorted colors.

“We shadow them regularly and keep notice of their strongholds.” Inspector McCloud motioned to the map. “We have nearly a half dozen men working continually to keep an eye on the most prominent.”

He looked toward the door.

“Is this the father?” Inspector McCloud asked.

Feagley turned around and looked at Styles. “Yes,” he said.

“Come to my desk, please, sir.”

Feagley rose and stepped around the side of the desk while Mr. Styles stayed at the door. McCloud looked with confusion at his shorter peer from the country, who was scanning the London Inspector’s desk.

“I believe he wants Mr. Styles,” Phillip said, ushering the man to the London Inspector’s desk.

“Oh,” Feagley said, resettling himself into the chair and folding his hands.

Inspector McCloud then brought out a book, which contained photographs of various men who ran the largest child labor shops. Eugenie stood behind Mr. Styles as Inspector McCloud flipped through the book. A series of men were shown, in tiny pictures. The first, of a man wearing a stout hat, looked at least ten years old and had been cut out of what Eugenie presumed was a much larger photograph, perhaps one including the man’s family.

Mr. Styles made no indication that he recognized the man. Inspector McCloud then flipped to a new photograph. This one seemed to have been taken when the man was in motion—the thin face was blurred, a background of assorted grays and blacks suggested that it had been taken outside somewhere, perhaps with the man not understanding that he was being photographed. The third picture was merely a drawing; the man could have been anyone: an anonymous face.

Well, Eugenie thought, this wasn’t helping.

At each picture, Mr. Styles shook his head abruptly: No.

Inspector McCloud had flipped through the entire book, about twenty pictures in all, without Mr. Styles having shown a flicker of recognition at even one. Eugenie was unsurprised. The only identifying mark the drunk man had remembered was that the man was short and dark. And all the men in the pictures wore hats.

“Well, then,” Inspector McCloud said, shutting the book. “That was not the start we had hoped for.”

“There must be more,” Eugenie said. “More than 20 men sell children in London, I’m certain.”

“Of course there is more,” Inspector McCloud responded. He looked Eugenie over in a condescending manner, focusing on the waistband of her skirt in particular. She understood the message instinctively: I don’t need advice from a woman.

Phillip, fortunately, stepped in. “Do you have pictures, I think the lady means.”

“No,” Inspector McCloud said. He reached for a glass on his desk and drank deeply from it, then patted down his lips with a napkin. “We have names of others, of course; people suspected. But we do not have photographs.”

“Thank you,” Eugenie said. He gave her a small smile, and she retreated to the corner of the room.

“So what do we do now?” Phillip asked. He gestured toward the map. “Do we go visiting?”

Inspector McCloud shrugged and then sat down behind his desk. He seemed to be rapidly losing interest in the case. He shuffled a few papers. He made a few notes in a notebook. Phillip saw that Eugenie was rapidly sketching something into the back of her crime book, so he drew out the Inspector into an extended conversation, peppering him with questions. Inspector McCloud answered listlessly before becoming annoyed. Abruptly, he brought the meeting to a close with a promise to be in contact “with Barnardshire.”

“Thank you,” Phillip said, shaking the man’s hand and smiling warmly. His face rarely betrayed pique.

Eugenie turned quickly, to hide her face, and tucked her book and pencil back into her trench coat.

*

“That didn’t go well,” Eugenie said. She spoke to Phillip, who grimaced, but Inspector Feagley responded.

“Rather makes it difficult to find a criminal, I should say. We come all this way to look at a few pictures.” He threw up his hands, scattering the pedestrians on the sidewalk.

It was very busy, and they were swarmed by people. Although it was still early afternoon, there was so much commerce in London now that the streets were jammed at nearly all daylight hours.

Eugenie looked at Mr. Styles, to see how he was taking it. He had his head tipped down.

“I did a terrible thing,” he said. “If I had known what it would be like in London, I would never have sent him here.” He shook his head, lips trembling.

Eugenie clutched his arm.

“Let’s find some place to eat,” Phillip said. “So we can get out of this traffic.”

The group stepped aside as two policemen wrestled a criminal into the station.

“But I didn’t bring no money,” Mr. Styles said, feeling his pockets.

“Never mind,” Eugenie said. “It will be taken care of.”

*

They found a bar, tucked underground on a busy street. Nestled in a corner, they sat far enough away from the crush of other patrons so that they could hear themselves think. And that’s all they did do—think. They all looked at their silverware without so much as saying a word. It was slowly descending upon them, like ashes from a fire, that they were going to leave London without having made any attempt at closing in on the man who had bought Jimmie.

They each ordered their food, with Mr. Styles asking only for water. Eugenie, behind his back, ordered a rabbit for him. And then she took out her book.

“What were you writing down?” Phillip asked her. He sat beside her.

“I was trying to sketch the map as best I could,” Eugenie said. “There was a cluster of pins at one section of the city.”

“Where?” Phillip asked and she handed him her book. Inspector Feagley yawned loudly. However, when the food arrived, he dug in without complaint.

“It looked like Covent Garden.”

Phillip’s brow creased. “I can’t believe child slavers would be living in that area.”

“Precisely,” Eugenie said. “It caught my eye immediately. If people are working out of Covent Garden, then I imagine they must be particularly well protected to be so out in the open. Powerful people of sorts.”

Phillip nodded. “Interesting. Did you catch the street names?”

“No,” Eugenie said. “But I know it was the general area.”

“Where?” Mr. Styles looked up, confused. His rabbit sat in front of him, cooked to a crisp.

Eugenie and Phillip recognized at once that Mr. Styles would be of little help. He could identify the robber, but it would be up to them to catch the man and, ultimately, to find Jimmie.

“Here, in the city,” Eugenie said, and then moved the rabbit a little closer to him. “Oh, look. They were kind enough to cook some food for you.”

Inspector Feagley ate noisily. He had ordered a pork pie, which steamed heavily, and a plate full of cooked carrots and peas. Eugenie put her book away and ate, regularly glancing at Phillip. Their minds seemed to be turning on the same axis: they were thinking about the case.

“Well, I’m done then,” Inspector Feagley said, wiping his mouth with a napkin after finishing his dish of carrots. “Quite delicious. It’s always the food I miss about London,” he said. “Nothing better anywhere. Not even in my mum’s kitchen.”

He had finished with more than the food, as well. He stood and shook everyone’s hand. “Since we have no leads, I believe I’ll head back. My work at Barnardshire is endless, I’m afraid.” Phillip laughed, but Inspector Feagley didn’t seem to mind. He told them to reach him in Barnardshire if they found anything.

“I’ll be catching the train back tomorrow,” he said and then yawned before disappearing into the street. Eugenie watched him go.

Phillip swiftly moved to pay the bill, and he and Eugenie walked out onto the street with Mr. Styles, who had managed to eat all of his rabbit, though it hadn’t improved his mood.

“Apparently, we’re finished for the day,” Eugenie said.

“I’ll follow up tomorrow with people I know in the Garden,” Phillip said. “I know all of the landlords. Or most of the them. I’m sure we’ll be able to shake out who is running an illegal business.”

Eugenie nodded.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked.

The sun had reached its apex for the day, though the weather was crisp for June.

“I think I’m all right,” Eugenie said. She tried to transition, mentally, to her duties at the school.

“I gave Detective McCloud my address,” Phillip said. “I doubt it will help.” After a moment, he said, “It’s awkward being here in London with you. I only know you from Barnardshire, you see.” He smiled—awkwardly.

“I’m quite all right,” Eugenie said. “You and Mr. Styles here should rest up for your work tomorrow. I have to work also.”

“Ah, the school,” he said.

She nodded.

“I think I’ll put our friend here up in a hotel.”

“You’re returning to Clowdon?” Eugenie asked.

“You remembered the name,” Phillip said, smiling slightly. “No. Maybe he’ll be more comfortable alone in a hotel. Anyway, I’ll have the boys come down here for a bit. I feel as if we are very close to finding the Styles boy. It’s good that Feagley returns to Barnardshire. I’m sure we will find young Jimmie on our own.”

Eugenie thought that over. She had no idea whether or not they would get close. They didn’t have much of a lead—only a few pins placed around Covent Garden.

“I wish you didn’t have to work,” Phillip said. “It’d be fun to play detective with you in the city.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you have a telephone?” Phillip asked. “In case I need to share a lead or something?”

“No,” Eugenie said. “Sorry.”

“There’s no reason to keep saying that.”

Eugenie bit her lip. The streets were jammed with people. Perhaps most were on their lunch break, hustling to fulfill some errand. Eugenie looked at the crowd, which flowed around the three like water. Sometimes she wished she had chosen to live somewhere less crowded.

Phillip was nodding his head. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to keep in touch. If—,” he paused.

“What?”

“If you want to be involved in finding Jimmie Styles.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Todderham would expect me,” she said. Then she remembered. “Oh.” She reached into her trench coat. “Since you are taking the lead on the investigation, I should give you the book.”

“Thank you,” Phillip said. “You didn’t by chance put your address in it?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Pity.” Phillip smiled. But behind the smile he was watching her intently. “How I am supposed to contact you, then?”

“I’m sure I’ll find you. Your offices in the city,” Eugenie said simply. “Enjoy your afternoon and evening.” She stepped over to give Mr. Styles a hug and then walked briskly toward her school.

Chapter Thirteen: To Catch a Thief

When Eugenie arrived back at the school, Mrs. Cabot greeted her with a cry of relief. The girls had almost driven her mad.

“I am sorry,” Eugenie said. “I shouldn’t have left you alone. And the crime I was called on to solve? Don’t get me started.”

“Your mother,” Mrs. Cabot said, sympathetically. “It is quite understandable.”

Eugenie sent a telegram to her mother, instructing that the girls be sent back to the school. The Marchioness responded, saying they were already on their way. Fortunately, they were old enough to travel on their own. And they arrived that evening, no worse for wear, with Maisie complaining that an old woman sat across from her on the train and lectured her about how to sit properly. Pippa, unsurprisingly, was silent.

Lady Eugenie’s school returned to normal business operations. Having no lesson planned for the day, she decided to improvise, drawing on her girls’ expertise to help solve the Styles kidnapping. Classes started an hour later than normal because she was so exhausted from her trip. She dressed and then explained to the class the facts of the case.

“Where should we look?” she asked.

“All over the city,” Maisie answered.

“If we had the time and resources we could do that,” Eugenie said. “But since time is limited, where should we look?”

“Why is time limited?” Maisie asked.

Ivie answered. “Because it is a kidnapping. You don’t think whoever bought him will keep him in the city, do you? They probably expected the Police to be shadowing them, so they will have the boy sold off somewhere soon.”

“Ivie, where would you look?” Eugenie asked.

“I’d look in Covent Garden, ma’am,” she said. Eugenie had quickly transferred her memory of her pen and ink drawing in the back of her book to a larger sheet of paper and pinned it to the wall.

“Is that where the Duke is looking?” Maisie asked.

At mention of the Duke, a flurry of chattering started up. Eugenie began to feel her face warm as she listened to it.

“Who is the Duke?” one of the girls asked.

Eugenie opened her mouth, but it was Maisie who answered: “He’s very handsome. We played a game at his castle but lost. The he invited us to eat and we had—”

“Maisie,” Eugenie warned. “We are focusing on child kidnapping right now, not on our trip to Barnardshire, though the two are related.”

Maisie crossed her arms. But the other girls looked at each other, their eyebrows raised. They were interested in who the Duke was, and what they had all eaten…

“Pippa.” Eugenie looked toward the back of the classroom. “How should we go about investigating the people in Covent Garden?”

Pippa swallowed. “First we need their names.”

“Correct.”

“And then we need to go to their place of business. Or wherever they are hiding the boys.”

“How will we find out their names?”

“We should ask someone who works in the stores there,” Pippa said.

“How?”

All the girls were silent. Pippa scanned the desk in front of her but couldn’t come up with an answer.

“I know,” Maisie finally said.

Eugenie nodded. Hopefully, more details about Duke Phillip wouldn’t come spilling out.

“We can pretend that we are looking for our brother. We will pretend that we have lost him.”

The girls leaned in closer. They sensed what was about to happen: a field trip.

“Go on.”

Maisie stood to address her fellow classmates. “What we have to do is go into the store, each of us, two at a time, and cry out, ‘My brother! Has anyone seen my brother! We brought him shopping with us but have lost him!’” The girls laughed at their dramatic class mate. “And when they ask what he looks like, we say, ‘Oh my mum will be so angry if we don’t get home.’ And then we say again, ‘Have you seen my brother?’ And we describe what he looks like, after lots of tears and things.”

She turned to Eugenie for help on what Jimmie Styles looked like.

“Twelve or thirteen. Short. With a cowlick in the front.”

“So we say, ‘He’s about this high, with a cowlick in front. Twelve years old.’”

“Can we do this?” Ivie asked Eugenie.

“Yes,” Eugenie said.

“When?”

“I guess…I guess right now.” And Eugenie went downstairs to talk to Mrs. Cabot.

*

They gave the younger, First Form girls an early lunch and locked them into the school with strict instructions not to let anyone in and to hang out of the windows if the building caught on fire.

“I do hate leaving them alone,” Mrs. Cabot said. She had taken off her apron and put on a more appropriate housecoat to play her role as a mother taking her daughters shopping.

“We will be gone an hour at most,” Eugenie said. She had divided the six girls into three groups. Ivie and Celeste would go with Eugenie while Mrs. Cabot would walk with Edwina and Elizabeth. Pippa and Maisie wouldn’t need an adult, since Maisie had grown up on the streets and could handle herself. Outside on the sidewalk, Maisie had once again given her classmates instructions on how they were to pretend to be looking for their brother.

“Thank you, Maisie,” Eugenie said. “Now get names and write them down if you have to. We’ll meet back here in one hour.”

Maisie and Pippa ran off, excited, while Mrs. Cabot moved slowly across the street with Edwina and Elizabeth, holding each girl’s hand. Eugenie, Ivie, and Celeste went in the opposite direction, coming into the Garden from the East side.

It was a drizzly, miserable day, and Eugenie pulled the collar of her rain coat up high to her chin. She wondered if this was a good idea but then checked herself. At worst, the girls would get fresh air for an hour. And maybe she could uncover some helpful bit of information to give Duke Phillip, when she saw him next.

As she and the girls walked along the sidewalk, Eugenie could see, off in the distance, a familiar face coming toward them. It was a boy, about ten. He looked certainly familiar…

Cecil!

She recognized the ears sticking out and a slim suit and tie he wore. He walked along distractedly, looking down at the ground as if he was lost in thought. But as they passed, he eyed her briefly—a flash of recognition—and Eugenie nodded discreetly. Why, he certainly was well trained. Had Eugenie not known who he was, she would never have guessed that he was currently canvassing.

Cecil swiftly disappeared, and Eugenie and the girls stood outside the first shop.

“Who wants to go in?” Eugenie asked.

“I will,” Ivie said, with sufficient seriousness.

“Are you sure?” Eugenie asked. Celeste, who cried every day for the first month that she was at school, would have been Eugenie’s first pick. “Remember that you are frantic because your brother has run off.”

“I know,” Ivie said.

“Well then. Celeste and I will stand over here.” Eugenie and the girl walked across the street to the other side, where they waited for Ivie to dip into the store. She emerged no more than fifteen seconds later and crossed the street, looking depressed.

“What is it?” Eugenie asked.

“I couldn’t do it,” Ivie said.

Eugenie squeezed Celeste’s shoulder, and the smaller girl bound across the road and rushed into the shop. She emerged a minute later with what looked like the shop owner, who stood with his arms folded and looked both ways up the road. Celeste, her hands in her hair, was the perfect actress.

When the shop owner shook his head, Celeste ran off to the left, and then slowly worked her way around to where Eugenie and Ivie stood after the shop owner had retreated into his store.

“He’s seen plenty of boys of that description,” Celeste said.

Eugenie winced. She was afraid of that.

“We’ll have to try another store,” she said, and the group moved further on.

After visiting a dozen or so shops, they had no real lead. Some owners, like the first, said that the Garden was overflowing with 12-year old boys with cowlicks. Others claimed not to have seen anyone they didn’t know by name. Still others didn’t want any noise in their shop, and shooed Celeste out before she could make her pitch. All in all, they were making no progress.

“My feet hurt,” Celeste finally said. Covent Garden was now jammed with people, being mid-day. “Can we rest?”

“Yes, let’s,” Eugenie said. She looked around for a place to sit, but nothing was available. Accordingly, they stood by a store and Celeste rested her back against the brick front. She lifted one foot up, wincing, to take the pressure off the heel, and then returned that foot to the ground before lifting the other.

Eugenie thought it was about time for them to return to the school to meet the others when she glanced through the front window of the store where they were resting. She almost cried out with a start. Phillip was standing at the counter, talking with the shop owner.

A woman stood beside him as well. She had a sketch pad propped up in front of her and was drawing or writing something. She stood at an angle, so that someone on the sidewalk could almost see her face…

Eugenie took a step forward, to get a better look through the window.

The woman wasn’t unattractive. Rather tall. Slender. She wore a conservative skirt and blouse, but no hat. In fact, her hair was somewhat loose. She had a single hairslide in the back but not all of the hair was in a bun. Some strands hung down to her shoulder, untamed.

Could this be Miss Castlefork? Eugenie tried to remember the Marchioness’s description. “A mousy little thing.”

Mousy?

Little?

This didn’t look like her at all. Suddenly, Phillip turned, as if to look out the front window, and Eugenie almost fell backwards. Ivie looked at her mistress with confusion, but suddenly Phillip and the woman were out on the sidewalk, standing a mere foot from them.

“Hello,” Eugenie said, her voice high. She smiled at Phillip and then quickly looked at the woman, whose mind seemed elsewhere. She held a portrait in her hands.

“Oh, hello!” Phillip said, his voice full of honest surprise. “Terribly good fortune to find you out like this during the day. We have news.”

The woman listened to Phillip and then smiled at Eugenie. Phillip took the picture from her and eagerly held it out to Eugenie. “I think we might have found him.”

“Oh…” Eugenie looked at the picture—and then back at the woman.

At that moment, Maisie and Pippa came running up.

“Oh!” Maisie said. “Good Duke,” she said. “I know you.” She pressed her body against Eugenie’s skirts and smiled up at Phillip.

Once all of the girls realized that this was “the Duke,” they gaped and jostled to stand in front of him, to get a better look. Phillip smiled warmly at them, without embarrassment.

The woman, however, didn’t like the attention. Or she had an appointment elsewhere. Because she said, “I need to go,” and then leaned in, kissing Phillip’s cheek before walking off. Instinctively, Eugenie looked over her shoulder, to watch the woman disappear.

“My sister,” Phillip said, when Eugenie turned back around. “An artist. I brought her with me today, hoping she would be of use.” He nodded at the picture Eugenie held. “I think she did an excellent job.”

Eugenie felt the air around her lighten considerably. If she didn’t know better, she would have imagined that the sun was shining. “How helpful,” she said, and turned around to try and see the woman once more before she disappeared. “I wish you had introduced me.”

“Another time,” Phillip said. “But now I think we are very close. We are certainly closing in.”

*

In an ice cream shop, the adults bought the children ice cream and sodas, and then Eugenie and Phillip sat at the table apart from the children. Maisie sat with them, having decided that she was an adult with information to share.

Phillip told them both how he had come to identify the man in the picture. First, he had taken Mr. Styles directly to his sister’s house to draw up a portrait of Jimmie. Cecil had then gone into store after store. The store clerk had seen the boy on multiple occasions, which Cecil then reported back to Phillip. Phillip and his sister had then paid the proprietor a visit.

“So the thief lives above that shop?” Eugenie asked.

“Yes,” Phillip replied. “He only comes out at night, the shop keeper said. And the windows were always covered up. However, she did see many children coming and going from the store.”

“But wouldn’t that suggest that the children weren’t slaves?” Eugenie asked. “Why would they be allowed to run free?”

Maisie interjected with her information, which she was proud to have shared. “Because some of the young boys are in on the theft!” she cried. “I spoke to several myself. They get paid money to send messages and things.”

Eugenie’s eyes were wide. If she lost a student to slavers…“And how did you find them?” Eugenie asked Maisie.

Maisie paused. “I spoke to a source,” she said.

Both Eugenie and Phillip burst out laughing.

“What? What?” Maisie asked. She was coloring—but only because Phillip had laughed at her.

“Are you going to tell me who your source was?” Eugenie asked mildly.

Maisie, with red cheeks, shook her head. Her defiant chin trembled slightly.

“Are you sure?”

Not even a pause this time. Maisie crossed her arms and shook her head.

“Well, then,” Eugenie said. She ordered Maisie another ice cream and sent her to the children’s table so that Phillip and she could talk.

“Did you find a name?” Eugenie asked, turning once again to the picture. It showed a man with a cleft chin, side whiskers, and what looked like a scar on his cheek. It wasn’t the most distinctive face, but she was sure that she could remember it.

Phillip shook his head. “I only just received the portrait.”

“Perhaps you should show it to the Metropolitan Police.”

“I think I’ll go there as soon as we leave.” He drank his soda, through a straw, and then glanced over his shoulder. “Are these all of your students?”

“About half,” Eugenie said. She rested her face in her palm. They were close to finding Jimmie Styles, and she could briefly relax. “The other half are locked in the school, though maybe Mrs. Cabot has returned to free them. I hope.”

“A good lesson for your students in the field,” Phillip said.

“Except it was your boys who broke open the case.” Eugenie smiled. She wanted to ask Phillip a question about his sister, but decided against it. First, she couldn’t think of what to ask, and second, it seemed like an inopportune time.

Instead, Eugenie asked, “How confident are you that we will find this man?”

“Very,” Phillip said. “We know where he lives, we know generally what he looks like. And we know what Jimmie looks like.”

“Do you have Jimmie’s portrait?”

Phillip drank his soda but managed to nod. He pulled a creased sheet of paper from his pocket. Eugenie smoothed it on the table in front of her and surveyed the face.

“He’s an adorable boy.” She shook her head. “It’s terrible what has happened to him.”

“He’ll be free soon enough.”

“And then what?” Eugenie asked. “He goes home to a father who sold him for 50 pounds, and to a mother who is too weak from working herself to the bone to look after him.” She folded up the picture. “It doesn’t seem like much of a rescue to me.”

Phillip raised his eyebrows. “Maybe I’ll invite him to be one of my boys. I could always use a third.”

Eugenie was happy to hear it. But still, her heart was worried. “But there are so many others. We’ll rescue Jimmie, but what about the thousands of others who are sold each year.”

Phillip shrugged. “I know you don’t think much of my time in Parliament, but I can assure you that it gives one perspective. Even Parliament can’t save everyone. Not even close. But you don’t make that your goal. Instead, you do what you can with what you have. It’s enough.”

Eugenie tried to place the phrase: you do what you can with what you have. “Is that Malveaux?” she asked. It didn’t sound familiar.

“It’s too plain spoken for Malveaux,” Phillip said. “Malveaux would have said it better.”

“Who said it, then?”

“Phillip, Duke of Clowdhorn. He hopes one day to represent you in Parliament, after he resigns his peerage.”

Phillip drank the last of his soda and then called over his shoulder to Cecil and Thomas. He turned to Eugenie with a dazzling smile. “I think we have an appointment with the police. Wish us luck.”

Chapter Fourteen: The End of the Chase

Phillip and his two boys left, but not before Phillip promised to send Eugenie a telegram later, to let her know if they had captured the man. Eugenie thought about buying a slice of cake but opted not to. She needed to get back to school, and they had spent enough time in the field.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked her four girls.

They were slumped around their table, empty mugs in front of them. Each girl slowly nodded. Eugenie stood and gathered them round, getting their jackets buttoned up and adjusting their collars. Through the window, Eugenie could see that the overcast skies had finally loosened. Rain fell.

They went out onto the sidewalk anyway and took shelter under the eave, to wait out the light rain. Eugenie’s eyes glazed over the people who passed by, wearing hats or holding slick umbrellas, people she didn’t know. She was looking for Mrs. Cabot but assumed she had returned to the school an hour ago.

After a fitful minute, the rain ceased, and the sky brightened. And it was at this moment that Phillip came back around the corner, walking quickly. His chin was down, but his eyes bore straight ahead.

He acknowledged Eugenie with the slightest nod. “There!” he said under his breath.

Eugenie spun around to find what he was after. All she saw were people, walking singly or in pairs, out of the Garden and toward Bloomsbury. Phillip passed Eugenie, following someone. Eugenie had to wait for the sea of people to part before she saw quite clearly a man in a black suit walking beside a boy, the man’s hand clamped on the boy’s shoulder. For a split second, the boy turned around and looked worriedly over his shoulder.

It was Jimmie!

Swiftly, Cecil and Thomas ran past Eugenie and her girls, and the clouds parted, sending a shaft of light onto the entire group.

“Celeste and Ivie,” Eugenie said, stepping away from the building. “I need you two to run back to school as quickly as possible, do you understand?”

“Wh—,” Ivie began to say, but Eugenie cut her off with a look. Both girls nodded and with Eugenie’s prompting—“Now, go”—they ran off.

Eugenie then touched Maisie and Pippa on the shoulder, to signal they should follow her. Together, the three plunged into the crowd.

For several seconds, Eugenie couldn’t see anything. All around her were bodies, interchangeable, dark colors. She could smell people, as they were all too close. But then she spied, up above the crowd, Phillip’s light hair. He was taller than nearly everyone on the sidewalk, and the sunlight rimmed his head.

“This way,” she said to the girls, taking their hands.

Together, they dodged people, Maisie elbowing slow walkers out of the way.

They walked North for several minutes, where the crowds began to thin considerably. People shot into buildings, returning to work, or else took side streets to go elsewhere. Eugenie could now see Phillip quite clearly, though the boys were gone. Perhaps Phillip had instructed them to spread out and try to cut off the man and Jimmie at an angle.

Eugenie could also see, much farther ahead, Jimmie and his captor. The man did not release his hold on Jimmie’s shoulder. Indeed, he seemed to be strangling the boy as they began to trot, Jimmie’s feet clumsy. Phillip himself began to run. They were moving through Bloomsbury, toward the British Museum.

Eugenie was walking as fast as was ladylike, but she felt herself falling behind. Soon, however, she would see that her slowness was a benefit.

As the group advanced up Endell Street, the man and Jimmie shot over to Broad, where traffic was waiting to cross. But before Phillip could reach them, the carriages and motor cars which had been waiting formed a steady stream and completely blocked Phillip’s advance. Phillip was trapped, helplessly, to wait for a break in the traffic.

Eugenie wasn’t. Instinctively, she plunged into the road. What am I doing, she thought, as she reached the center. Her life—and the lives of her girls—flashed before her eyes.

“Hurry!” she shouted to her girls, the words barely audible over her heartbeat. In a blur, the entire group raced across the road and gained the other side of Endell before the traffic could run them down.

“Hey!” someone shouted and a motor car honked as Eugenie took the other side of the road, Pippa and Maisie at her side. They had safely made it across.

“Well then,” Eugenie said, the blood at her temples giving her a headache. The traffic streamed past and Eugenie looked ahead, hopefully.

The man—and Jimmie—stood some distance ahead of her. They were waiting to cross Broad Street now. The man looked around, somewhat absent-mindedly, while Jimmie stared straight at Eugenie. No one else walked on their side of the street.

“Go slowly,” Eugenie whispered to her girls. She did not know entirely what would happen when she reached the man. Would she put him under arrest? Was a policeman around for her to call?

Jimmie watched them approach, clearly recognizing that they were friendly. He blinked his eyes rapidly, and his parted lips muttered something.

Suddenly, the man turned around. And Eugenie, looking at his face, stopped dead cold. His face was exactly like that of the portrait—the same malevolent expression, the whiskers, the red scar on his cheek.

Look away, Eugenie told herself.

But it was too late. The man instantly recognized that Eugenie was following him. With a start, he grabbed Jimmie’s arm and raced away, crossing Broad and then hopping onto Drury. Maisie and Pippa began running before Eugenie even lifted a foot.

The group crossed the road and then passed a newspaper stand. By now, the Museum loomed up ahead of them, seeming to dwarf St. George’s Church which was directly ahead. Crowds were gathering on Russell, in front of the Museum, pouring in through the gate toward the building’s entrance. Without looking to his right or left, the man crossed, almost getting struck by a carriage, and slipped with Jimmie through the gates.

If Eugenie didn’t hurry, she would lose them. And given how slow she was moving, she knew they had but one chance.

“Wait!” Eugenie told her girls, and they stood on the other side of Hart Street, breathing deep. Eugenie waited for a break in the traffic, and then hurried across.

She grabbed Maisie’s shoulder and turned her around to face her. “Maisie, they’re headed into the museum. I need you to trap them in the Reading Room. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Maisie said. No hesitation.

“Good. Go.” She watched Maisie race through the gate and the crowds. Pippa soon followed. Unseen by Eugenie, the man and Jimmie were entering the Museum, her two girls fast behind them.

But Eugenie stood with the crowd, a hand on her chest. The Little Frenchman had not prepared her for how physical detective work could be.

*

Eugenie needed less than a minute to recover. When she did, she turned to look for Phillip, but she couldn’t see him. By now he had surely gotten across New Oxford Street. She stared at each light-haired man, but they returned a look of surprise or curiosity. There was no more time to wait.

After looking for a policeman, but finding none, Eugenie strode after her girls, purposively.

How many afternoons had Eugenie come to the British Museum to use the library? She came at least twice a week, when afternoon lessons had been completed. But now she had the sensation of entering for the very first time. The butterflies in her stomach made her ill.

“Please trap him,” Eugenie whispered to herself.

The crowds had bottlenecked at the entrance, and Eugenie waited in queue, all the while seeing in her mind Jimmie and the man in the library. When she finally entered, Eugenie moved directly toward the Egyptian rooms. This would be the very first time she could use the secret passage, the one she had learned about from Malveaux. She prayed it would be useful.

The secret passage ran from the Egyptian room down to the basement, but then up again. It was one of a network of tunnels and passageways. Eugenie had learned about them from Malveaux, who had included a diagram in a letter and had reprinted the letter in an appendix to his final volume of memoirs. Few people read his later volumes, and she was sure she must have been the first to uncover the secret passageways, which Malveaux had mentioned off-handedly.

The Museum had initially used the passageways to transport large items which couldn’t be brought easily through the doors. The passageways led to the basement, and others to tunnels underneath the basement. Malveaux had used them to make shortcuts in order to rest his legs, which as he aged had become severely arthritic, and also to hide from the crowds, in front of whom he was too embarrassed to move in such a stiff-legged fashion.

One passageway ran from the Egyptian Room up into the Library, and Eugenie was about to enter the Egyptian Room when she heard a shout. She turned swiftly around. It was Phillip, finally running up, with the police in tow.

“They should be in the Reading Room,” Eugenie said. “Or at least I hope. Two of my girls are on their tail.” Phillip wiped his brow with a silk kerchief and nodded.

Then he raised an eyebrow. “And where are you headed? The Reading Room is this way.”

Eugenie had to bite her lip to keep from smiling. So she knew something that he did not. Finally.

“Why are you smiling?” Phillip asked. “This is serious business.”

“I know,” Eugenie said. “Trust me.”

“Trust you?” He looked confused.

“Trust that I’ll see you in the Reading Room.”

“O…okay,” he said.

Eugenie reached out and shoved his arm. “Now go!”

Phillip smiled, a confident grin, and then gestured for the officers to follow him as he ran North. Eugenie turned into the Egyptian Hall—and was pleased that nearly no one milled about.

Maisie’s footsteps resounded in her head as Eugenie moved toward the statute of King Ramesses. High on his pedestal, he surveyed the gallery in God-like fashion. Eugenie tried to see Malveaux’s diagram in her mind, to identify whether the door was on the North or South side of the pedestal. She ran up to it and place her hand against the stone.

The pedestal gave the appearance of being made of four separate square stones, one on top of the other. In truth, it was all one stone—with a door set on a spring. You had to press the pedestal at the right place to activate the spring, but then it was a flight of stairs down to the basement, which would lead her to the Reading Room.

Unfortunately, the pedestal gave nothing away. Eugenie walked all round, dragging her fingertips over the rough surface, and then peeked over her shoulder. She had only seconds before people came spilling into the gallery. She tried the North side of the pedestal and ran her hand up and down.

Voices echoed in the room as Eugenie found the dead spot, where the pedestal felt hollow. She pressed hard with her hand, and the door immediately popped open. Without further thought, Eugenie pulled the door open with both hands, step around it and into the darkness, and then found the bar on the back of the door, which she pulled to lock herself in.

She heard a satisfying snap. And now everything was dark.

She was inside the tunnel, standing on the steps. Ten steps down, she remembered, and then she would have to run. Inside the pedestal, she couldn’t hear anything but her own breathing—and the sound of something squeaking. Probably mice.

“Steady yourself, Eugenie,” she whispered, and, feeling the rough stone walls, she walked down the steps, counting in her mind.

One, two, three, four, five. She counted five more and then felt around with her toe. No, she was right. Ten steps.

Ahead of her was the basement, which she could still not see. Everything was darkness. But another line from Malveaux came to her: “In the darkness lies all possibilities.”

Eugenie gathered her skirt in her hands so that she wouldn’t trip, and ran.

*

Maisie had tracked the man and Jimmie Styles into the Reading Room, which was filled with mid-afternoon patrons. The man had noticed her and tried to hustle quickly out the other end, but Pippa suddenly appeared in the door and the man knew he was trapped.

“Steady,” he whispered to the boy. He could feel the clavicle through his fingers. “If you say a word, I’ll kill you.”

A patron opened a book and looked at the man. Tensely, he smiled.

“Walk,” he whispered.

Slowly, the man and boy walked around the hushed library, as if looking for a place to sit. Maisie, her fists clenched, followed.

To someone up above, the scene would have been comical. A man and a boy moved as if through a labyrinth of chairs and tables, trying to avoid two girls, each in dark frocks, who also pretended not to be following him. Around the four was a giant, filled library, where the sounds of coughs mixed with the whispers of pages being turned.

The man paused and subtly glanced over his shoulder, looking for the bull-dog looking girl. He thought he could shake her by heading East and then cutting quickly back toward the center. When he spied her, he was surprised by how close she had come.

“Come on!” he whispered to the boy, whose name he hadn’t properly learned. He tugged at his collar.

They walked East. If only he could find an opening, he would cut left. Holding the boy close, he passed several rows of seated patrons and walked purposively, as if toward the books on the wall. A librarian, sniffing, walked past him but only glanced dismissively.

Cut left, the man said, and he tugged Jimmie hard and doubled back around, slipping past seated patrons. He glanced out of the corner of his eye, spying the bull-dog girl, who stopped, caught off guard.

But when the man turned up ahead, he saw the other girl—the whiter than white one—standing in his way like a ghost.

“Bollocks,” the man whispered. One cry—“He’s got my brother”—and the gig would be up. The man felt at his belt for his knife and veered away.

The girls were good at tracking. He had to give them that. Neither girl made a sudden movement or got out of position which would allow him to shoot past. They were moving him closer to the wall, like two female wolves tracking prey into the woods.

If he didn’t find a way out in seconds he would be trapped. Delicate young girls—he would hate to knife them. And in front of so many people. He hoped the blood wouldn’t get on the books. He wasn’t a man for reading, but he had been raised to revere literature nonetheless.

“Stay quiet,” he whispered to the boy. They turned, and walked back to the bookcases.

The man wondered how he had gotten himself into this position. He had made a thousand pounds last month, just as he had made a thousand pounds the month before. It was lucrative work, and easy. In letters to his mother, he had hinted at retirement.

If he could just get out of this spot.

He stopped briefly, to look over his shoulder once more. But what he saw shocked him: it was the policemen, walking into the library with the fair-haired gentleman. He lost it.

He swore out, loudly, and pulled the knife from his belt. Shouting, he ordered Jimmie to climb up onto the second level.

All pages stopped turning, as the patrons looked up, cloudy-eyed, at the sudden commotion.

*

Eugenie had finally reached the basement, but there was no light. She didn’t know how long she would have to run to reach the next flight of steps. “Sixty-seven steps” Malveaux had written—but he was shorter than she. If she ran too far, she’d run into the stairs and fall on her face. She ran for a space and then walked quickly, her hand running along the stone wall.

When her toe stubbed the stairs, she almost fell, but picked herself up. There should be twenty-five steps to the top, which would take her to the first terrace in the Reading Room.

“Hurry Eugenie,” she whispered to herself, taking the steps as fast as she could.

*

The thief had climbed the stairs, pushing the boy ahead of him, and he shouted down to the police to stop chasing them, otherwise the boy would get it. The knife wavered at Jimmie’s throat.

“Steady boys,” Phillip whispered to the police, who walked out onto the middle of the library floor, to shout at the man to let the boy go. Phillip slipped up the steps to follow after him.

By now, Eugenie had reached the head of the stairs. She could see light pouring through the cracks in the bookcase in front of her. Her heart leaped as she rushed up to it, put her hands flat against its back, and pushed it open.

The bookcase slid forward, exactly as Malveaux had described, and she slipped out onto the terrace—directly across from child slaver. The bookcase snapped shut behind her.

He had heard the bookcase move and then watched as a woman emerged from behind it. He was frozen, his mouth open. At that moment, Phillip stepped slowly onto the terrace.

“I have a knife!” the man shouted. He pulled it away from Jimmie’s throat to wave around. “I’ll cut his throat if you don’t let me go.”

Eugenie looked across at Jimmie, whose neck strained.

Two ladies screamed from the Reading Room floor. One fainted. But the rest were curious. The librarians stood with their arms folded, not talking. None, Eugenie was sure, had seen her slip out through the bookcase, only the man across. Now she didn’t know precisely what to do, but one look at Jimmie Styles’ face told her to take it slow.

She quietly stepped to her right and continued walking, prepared to do a circuit of the library. She kept her eyes on the man.

“I’ve killed men before!” he shouted, “And I’m not afraid to do it again. If anyone wants to see this boy alive, they’ll walk out of the library and leave me alone.”

“Come down,” a police officer commanded.

Some people snickered, as if they were watching a play.

“We have you surrounded,” another officer said.

Rather than stop, the man kept walking. He looked back and saw Phillip behind him. He cussed him out.

“Come on, you garbage!” he shouted at Jimmie, wrapping his forearm around Jimmie’s throat. They ran forward.

But they ran toward Eugenie. The reading room was circular, and with both Eugenie and Phillip on either side of him, it was only a matter of time before they closed in.

Eugenie’s heart began beating rapidly. If the man reached her, what would she do? She didn’t have a knife in return. And she knew couldn’t fight him. She had run up to the terrace thinking she could direct the police to the man’s location, not confront him personally. But there was no way to turn around now.

Looking around, she took a giant book off the shelf and held it protectively in front of her body. It would have to do.

Phillip walked methodically after the man and Jimmie, his hands loosely at his sides.

“Let the boy walk,” Phillip said. “I know the police will not look on kindly if he is hurt.”

“Bugger off!” the man shouted.

You could hear a pin drop. Only the floorboards beneath them creaked.

At fifteen yards, Eugenie began to suspect that she would have to rush the man. What I will do, she told herself, is strike the knife with the book, at full arm’s length.

“Put down the knife and let the boy go,” Phillip commanded. The policemen made similar commands.

At ten yards, Eugenie was sure that he would strike her with the knife. She winced, imagining the blade slicing into her skin. You could survive one stabbing, if the attacker didn’t hit vital organs.

“You can’t escape,” Phillip said. “You might as well surrender. There are police on the floor who will arrest you for buying children. Don’t add homicide to the mix.”

At five yards, the man stopped, looking around wildly. For some reason, he reached back and pulled books from the shelf, throwing them weakly onto the floor. Eugenie stopped. And Phillip stopped. Each were only a couple steps from all coming together.

With nowhere to go, the man gripped Jimmie. Behind him the bookcase curved without any spot to hide. Eugenie looked down at her hands and realized she was squeezing the book so hard that she had warped the cover.

“Go to hell!” the man yelled.

Suddenly, he dropped the knife and let go of Jimmie’s hand. Frantically, he swung a leg over the bannister and then lowered himself down, until he was dangling. However, he didn’t fall. Instead, he clung to the bannister, apparently afraid to let go.

“Help me!” he shouted, and the police ran to the spot beneath him.

Eugenie and Phillip ran up to him, but not before Maisie reached him. She had gained the first-level terrace after Phillip and had been following closely behind. She now pushed in front of the adults and hiked up her skirt. Positioning her boot over the man’s white knuckles, she braced herself to step down and crush his fingers.

Patrons suddenly started shrieking as the man hung in the air—and the danger had passed.

“Maisie,” Eugenie whispered, placing a hand on her pupil’s shoulder. The man looked up at the two of them with his brow furrowed. His lips stretched across his teeth.

“Help…” he whispered.

“Maisie,” Eugenie said again.

“I want to crush his hand,” the girl said.

“But we can’t,” Eugenie said. “Now we have to let the police handle this.”

“Why?” She put the sole of her foot against his knuckles and moved it around.

“Detectives work in the service of the law,” Eugenie said. “We find the criminals so that the police can arrest them.”

“I want the law to punish him,” Maise said. She pressed down slightly.

“And they will,” Eugenie said. “We simply have to—”

Before Eugenie could do anything, and before Maisie could slam her foot down on the man’s hands, he slipped.

A fresh shriek rang in the air as the body fell toward the ground, arms flailing.

Rather than catch him, the Metropolitan Police scattered, allowing the body to hit the ground flat on his back. Eugenie, Phillip, and Maisie looked down over the bannister, to see if he was alive.

He had fallen less than five yards and sat up slowly, dazed. The police formed a circle around him, letting the man mutter to himself, before one hauled him up to cuff him.

Someone sniffed behind Eugenie. Jimmie Styles, backed up against the books, broke into tears, his face crumpled like a piece of paper. Eugenie instantly gathered him in her arms and tried to comfort him, while Phillip pumped Maisie’s hand, encouraging her to join his detective school for gentleman sleuths.

All the patrons stood at attention as the Metropolitan Police marched the man out of the reading room. They broke into cheers.

When the man had been placed into the paddy wagon, Eugenie, Phillip, and the children returned to the library’s floor.

“Well done,” Inspector McCloud said, meeting them just outside the library. “I watched the whole thing and was impressed.” He then turned to Eugenie. “You rather emerged out of nowhere,” he said, his face quizzical.

Phillip spun around. “Yes,” he said. “How did you do that? Materializing out of thin air? If I didn’t know better, I would say you flew up to that terrace. Like a bird or something.”

“Another time,” Eugenie said. She ran her hand up the back of Jimmie’s neck. “Now we should worry about getting this boy home.”

Chapter Fifteen: Goodbye, for Now

A gloved hand knocked at the black door to the graystone building north of Soho. It was the building with the plaque stating, “School for Girls.”

No one opened on the first knock, so the gloved hand knocked again. Finally, it knocked a third time, insistent. The man looked for a bell but couldn’t find one. He raised his hand for a fourth knock when the door opened.

Lady Eugenie had been breakfasting with Mrs. Cabot as her girls slowly moved about upstairs, performing their chores and bathing. She had risen to answer the door on the second knock, but managed to turn the handle only as the third landed against the wood.

It was still rather dark out, though lightening the entire time. Summer was coming, at some point. The gaslights were still on along the street, and a random person or two moved about. But Eugenie didn’t look at them. She looked at the man standing before her.

“Duke Phillip,” Eugenie said.

Phillip stepped back down to the street and removed his hat. “I knew I would find the school if I kept walking,” he said. “Is it too early for a visitor?”

“Quite,” Eugenie said. The muscles in her face strained from the effort not to smile. She wore a simple house coat with a nightie underneath—her typical morning wear; and she had assumed that the visitant would be a salesperson or perhaps a parent of one of her girls, come to pay tuition early. Had she known it was Phillip, she would have changed, which was why it was terrible that he was here. She didn’t want to change her morning routine.

“You’re out rather early,” Eugenie said. “Is Parliament open yet? I imagined Lords of Parliament liked to go over their correspondence from constituents before deciding how the nation should be run.”

“But we already know what our propertied constituents think,” Phillip said. “And in any event I’m not in Parliament. I haven’t been elected yet.”

“Canvassing for votes then?” Eugenie asked, and Phillip laughed.

“Not my borough, I’m afraid.”

Eugenie said nothing. It was cold—surprisingly cold, though. She wanted July to arrive—and new things.

“I stopped by because I wanted to thank you,” Phillip said.

“For what?”

“For your help with the investigation. You were not called into Barnardshire to find Jimmie Styles, but you stayed anyway. You and your two girls. We could not have found him without you.”

“You were not called to help, either,” Eugenie said. “I think my contribution was on par with yours. Nothing less.”

Phillip let the remark pass, as a man carrying milk bottles walked toward them and then down the road. A woman came up the street in another direction. With a glance over her shoulder, the woman took in Phillip’s sharp profile. Eugenie smiled at the woman, to hurry her along.

Phillip waited until she was out of earshot. “I was so impressed, in fact, that I wanted to see how you conduct a lesson.”

“Or to steal more of my students.” They both laughed. “I heard you making an offer to Maisie, but I’m afraid you can’t have her. I broke the news, and she’s upset but will pull through.”

“Perhaps I can learn some new teaching techniques instead.”

“The school doesn’t start for another hour. And how did you find me?” Eugenie was sure she had not given Phillip her address.

“Since you didn’t leave your address with Mrs. Todderham, I’ve been wandering the streets,” Phillip said. Eugenie smiled despite herself. She somehow doubted Phillip wandered the city to find her. “I happily stumbled upon a building with the plate ‘School for Girls’ on it, so I took a chance.”

“I don’t believe you,” Eugenie said.

For a minute Phillip said nothing. “Do let me in,” he said, and put his foot on the stoop.

Eugenie looked down at him, standing there on the bottom step, looking like a little boy; the look of expectation on his face heightened his youthfulness. She wanted to ask a question about Miss Castlefork—ask if he had gone to visit her yet. But then she realized that there was no need. He had come to her doorstop first.

Eugenie played her fingers along the edge of the door. She felt a bustle behind her, and Mrs. Cabot cried out, “Who is there? At the door?” She wedged her way through, expecting to see a beggar harassing Lady Eugenie and playing on her sympathies. But it was a man: a quite dashing man, as well.

“Good morning,” he said, lifting the hat again.

“Morning, sir,” Mrs. Cabot said. “I-I had thought it might be someone with delivery for groceries.”

Phillip held up his empty gloved hands. “Sorry. I bring only myself.”

“Mrs. Cabot,” Eugenie said. “This gentleman caller has an interest in our school. He is the master of a school for boy detectives.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Cabot said. “A competitor.”

“I’m hoping to learn the ropes,” Phillip said.

“And I was just telling him that we don’t accept gentlemen callers. Not at this time of the morning.”

Mrs. Cabot watched the exchange closely. She hadn’t seen her employer this happy to talk to someone at such an early hour.

Phillip coughed. “I had hoped there might be a business exception.”

“What do you think, Mrs. Cabot?” Eugenie asked. “Does he look like a respectable businessman?”

Mrs. Cabot smiled. Something was happening, she didn’t know what. It was best to get back to her chores. “It was nice to meet you,” she said, and stepped back inside.

“Let me come in,” Phillip said.

“Not today,” Eugenie replied. “I’m afraid I have to prepare my lesson. Detection before business, at least at this hour.”

“Fair enough,” Phillip said, and took his foot off the step. “Goodbye, then. For now.” And with that, he removed his hat once more to bow before walking down the street.

**THE END**

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