Free The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline by Nancy Springer Page B

told you my secret; you must tell me yours. Why do you conceal your name, and why are you so afraid of Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”
    I sincerely wished I could tell her the truth: Sherlock Holmes was my brother whom I adored, there was no one whose companionship I would rather have shared; the famous detective was—discounting my absent mum, Sherlock and Mycroft were all I had by way of family—yet their masculine ignorance caused them to feel that they must take me in charge and imprison me in a finishing school or some such den of feminine tortures. Therefore I dared not, could not, must not let them find me.
    This was what I wished I could tell the wise and gentle Florence Nightingale, but I knew it could not be so. I said only, “I am terrified that he might find out about me.” True enough, although meanwhile, quite desperately my mind cast about for some plausible lie. But at this crisis of all times my imagination deserted me; I could not begin to think what to say—
    Amazingly, Miss Nightingale supplied for me the story I needed. Very gently she said, “It seems to me that the degree of your concern for, ah, Mrs. Tupper, is perhaps a bit unusual if Mrs. Tupper is indeed merely your landlady?”
    Oh, good heavens. She thought I was an illegitimate daughter, protecting my (presumably) aristocratic father from the stigma of dalliance with—
    Mrs. Tupper. How absurd. Poor, deaf, penny-pinching Mrs. Tupper, my mother?
    Yet not so absurd, for truly, my sweet old landlady was more of a mum to me than my own mother—
    Mum, from whom I had not heard since the incident of the bizarre bouquets, months ago. For whom I dared not search lest I actually find her and learn her true feelings, or lack of any, for me . . . It was not even necessary for me to lie, for long-suppressed injury in that moment attacked my heart with pain so severe, it assaulted my eyes. To my astonishment I found myself crying. The tears running down my face served as my answer.
    Obviously a practical-minded person, Miss Nightingale responded by reaching into a night-stand drawer where apparently she kept a supply of neatly pressed, lace-edged handkerchiefs, for she handed me one. “Dear,” she offered when I had composed myself a bit, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes is reputed to be the soul of discretion.”
    But shaking my head, once more I rose to my feet, this time remembering to pick up the leather carrying-case I had brought with me. “You’ll excuse me, I’m sure.”
    Very kindly she did so.
     
    Still in a most unmindful frame of mind, I made straight for the stairs.
    A grave mistake. I should have, instead, sought out the narrow back steps that the servants used, gone down through the hidden regions of the house, and exited by way of the kitchen and the garden. But my senses had quite forsaken me; like a fool I ran straight down the same way I had come up, through the music-room and the drawing-room to the wide, main stairway, which I began precipitously to descend—
    “But Miss Nightingale is currently engaged. Moreover, she never sees more than one person at a time,” someone below was saying.
    “She must make an exception in this case,” responded a thrilling, familiar voice.
    Nearly toppling with shock and in my hurry to halt, I clutched the banister and clung to it, feeling a bit weak.
    “Watson is my right hand in these matters.”
    Sherlock! And the good Dr. Watson, of course, both of them at the base of the stairway, with Jackanapes trying to tell them that only Holmes would be admitted.
    And there, halfway down the stairs and no more than twenty feet away from them, I stood in plain sight and in great disarray of feature, gawping like a dead fish.
    Dr. Watson, thank my lucky stars—for had he looked at me and recognised me as Dr. Ragostin’s “secretary,” that life would have been all over for me—the good doctor did not see me. He stood staring off towards one of the salons as if Mesmerised, perhaps by the presence of Mr.