Read Online The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online

brass like Mother’s bed, with knobs on the ends, served the purpose.
    And all of this had to be done before the Lanes rose at dawn.
    Altogether, my nights were far more active and satisfactory than my days.
    I did not ever find what I most desired—any note of farewell, affectionate regard, or explanation from Mum. But truly, at this point, not much explanation was needed. I knew that she had practised her deceptions for my sake, at least in part. And I knew that the money she had so cleverly slipped to me was meant to give me freedom.
    Thanks to Mum, therefore, it was in a surprisingly hopeful, if nervous, state of mind that, one sunny morning in late August, I mounted to the seat of the conveyance that was to take me away from the only home I had ever known.
     
    Lane had arranged with a local farmer for the loan of a horse and a kind of hybrid contraption, or “trap,” a luggage-wagon with an upholstered seat for me and the driver. I was to travel to the railway station in comfort, if not in style.
    “I hope it doesn’t rain,” Mrs. Lane remarked, standing in the drive to see me off.
    It hadn’t rained in weeks. Not since the day I had gone searching for my mother.
    “Unlikely,” said Lane, giving me his hand so that I could step up to my seat like a lady, one kid-gloved hand in his while the other lifted my white ruffled parasol. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
    Smiling down on Lane and Mrs. Lane, I settled first my bustle, then myself, next to Dick, my driver. Just as my bustle occupied the back of the seat, Mrs. Lane had arranged my hair to occupy the back of my head, as was the fashion, so that my hat, rather like a beribboned straw dinner plate, tilted forward over my eyes. I wore a taupe suit I had chosen carefully for its nondescript, indeed ugly colour, its 19½-inch waistband, full skirt, and concealing jacket. Beneath the jacket I had left the skirt’s waistband unbuttoned so that I could corset myself as lightly as possible, almost comfortably. I could breathe.
    As would be needful very soon.
    “You look every inch a lady, Miss Enola,” said Lane, standing back. “You’ll be a credit to Ferndell Hall, I’m sure.”
    Little did he know.
    “We’ll miss you,” quavered Mrs. Lane, and for a moment my heart reproached me, for I saw tears on her soft old face.
    “Thank you,” I said rather stiffly, starching myself against my own emotion. “Dick, drive on.”
    All the way to the gate I stared at the horse’s ears. My brother Mycroft had hired men to “clean up” the lawn of the estate, and I did not want to see it with my wild rosebushes cut down.
    “Good-bye, Miss Enola, and good luck,” said the lodge-keeper as he opened the gates for us.
    “Thank you, Cooper.”
    As the horse trotted through Kineford, I sighed and allowed my glance to roam, taking a farewell look at the butcher’s shop, the greengrocer’s shop, black-beamed, whitewashed thatched cottages, public house, post and telegraph office, constabulary, more Tudor cottages with tiny windows scowling under their heavy straw forelocks, the inn, the smithy, the vicarage, the granite chapel with its mossy slate roof, headstones tilting this way and that in the graveyard—
    I let us trot almost past before I said suddenly, as if I had just that moment thought of it, “Dick, stop. I wish to say good-bye to my father.”
    He pulled the horse to a halt. “What was that, Miss Enola?”
    When dealing with Dick, full and simple explanations were necessary. “I wish to visit my father’s grave,” I told him one patient word at a time, “and say a prayer for him in the chapel.”
    Poor Father, he would not have desired such prayers. As a logician and an unbeliever, Mum had once told me, he had not desired a funeral; his request had been for cremation, but after his demise, his wishes had been overruled for fear that Kineford might never recover from the scandal.
    In his slow, worried way Dick said, “I’m to drive you to the