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Authors: Nancy Springer

The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (16 page)

BOOK: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
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I had to.
Muttering something naughty, I strode across the street. But as I neared the doss-house, to my surprise a strange man stepped out of the shadow where Alexander Finch should have been. A man with long black hair and a spade-shaped full black beard. Only the skin around his eyes showed, starkly pallid beneath the beard, for he wore no eyeglasses, and his eyes – even though they did not look at me, I felt their force. Even in the night I saw how curiously bright, almost silver, they were. Beneath my veil my jaw dropped, my mouth gaped, and only with the most arduous mental discipline did I keep from gasping out loud.
The man was Alexander Finch. In disguise. But I would not have known him had it not been for the cloth cap, flannel shirt, corduroy jacket, and trousers he wore.
Intent on his business, he had taken no particular note of me amongst the others passing by. As he turned his back to knock on the door of the doss-house, I slipped into the hiding place he had just quitted.
He knocked hard, impatiently, upon the door until it opened. Then, in honey-and-vinegar tones, Finch inquired, “Would my lady care to take the air?”
She did not answer, only slipped out of that dark doorway like a frightened animal – indeed, I would not have kept a dog in such a hole.
“Give me the lantern.”
She carried a lantern? Apparently. I saw movement, and then Alexander Finch struck a match.
And at my first plain sight of Lady Cecily, I struggled anew to keep from crying out. I would not have known her had he not led me to her – indeed, I think her own mother might not have recognised her gaunt, pale face, her hair all in a dirty tangle beneath the cloth tied around her head, her shivering shoulders warmed only by a shawl, her skirt threadbare and tattered, her feet wrapped in rags. Only because my pencil had traced so many times those delicate features could I believe my eyes.
Lady Cecily, a beggar girl carrying a large basket.
He lit the lantern and handed it back to her. She said something, although she spoke so timidly, I could not hear the words.
“Work first,” he answered aloud. “Food afterward.”
Again she murmured, her eyes huge and pleading.
But this time, instead of answering, he puffed his lips in exasperation, then peered at her and darted his fingertips towards her face as if he were shaking some sort of fluid out of himself and into her. His own face had gone very still, his curiously lightcoloured eyes fierce, focused, gleaming. His hands traced several sinuous passes around her head, then down over her shoulders. I would not have believed it had I not seen, but I saw: Without ever touching her, he took her utterly into his power. All hope and yearning, all her feeble life-force faded from her eyes, so that she stood like a most unlikely porcelain doll, starveling and ragged, in a sooty glass bell.
“Work first,” her master repeated. “Food afterward.”
Without another glance at her, the wild-haired black-bearded scoundrel walked off in the direction of Paddington Station, and she limped after him, carrying both lantern and basket, like a rag-tag tied to his elbow. He was no taller than most youths, but her head, bowed, barely reached the level of his shoulder.
Staying well behind them, but allowing myself the luxury of the pavement this time, I followed, my mind in a hullabaloo of horror, curiosity, and speculation, for I could not yet quite take in what I had seen. And all the while my entire person, indeed my very skin, tingled with urgency to do something, assist her in some way, intervene – but how? And against what, exactly?
I could not yet make sense of the circumstances. I could only watch.
At a corner opposite a public house, some roughlooking men clotted beneath a street-lamp. I saw Alexander Finch, with Lady Cecily trailing behind him like a child, stop to greet them. After handshakes all around, they set up a wooden crate of some sort, and Alexander – or the black-bearded impostor I could scarcely believe to be Alexander – got upon the improvised dais and started to speak. Keeping to the shadows, I stood too far off to hear properly, but I caught references to “capitalist oppression,” “empire built upon the backs of exploited labour,” “workers’ rights” and so forth. Undoubtedly I was observing Finch, the “outside influence” of which the newspaper columnists spoke, in the very act of fomenting unrest in the working class, specifically the carters and dock-workers, as the clerks at the Finch Emporium had said. That they knew of the young master’s nighttime activities surprised me not at all; servants and the like always know everything, although they will tell nothing, except to one another.
Ascending his speaking platform, Alexander had given Lady Cecily her orders, and now she stood at a small distance from him, beneath another gas-lamp mounted upon the wall of the corner building, rather woodenly reaching into her basket and offering each person who stopped to listen something small and white.
My word. Joddy had said he had seen her with “papers.”
Pamphlets. For a labour union or some such rabble-rousing endeavour.
Already a considerable crowd of men, and a very few women, had gathered to listen to Alexander Finch’s harangue. I would perhaps be not unduly noticed if I approached, just another by-passer, who happened to be a nun, on the street?
After considering for a moment, I decided to take the risk.
Trying to show neither haste nor hesitation, I walked towards Lady Cecily.
“. . . the opiate of the masses!” the bearded Finch was declaiming from his – yes, I think it actually was a soap-box. “As all too plainly demonstrated in every good English aristocrat’s favourite childhood hymn: ‘All creatures great and small, the Lord God made them all;
the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate’?
The good lord
God
is said to have decreed that three quarters of the populace shall live and labour in bone-skewing mind-stunting poverty, while a favoured few shall occupy their days by having their servants assist them in five changes of clothing?”
One could not help but admire the fervour and clarity with which he spoke. He was brilliant. I agreed with much of what he was saying. It was hard to believe the foul deeds of which I suspected him.
Yet one could speak truth and still be a villain.
And there stood Lady Cecily.
A few heads turned as I reached the edge of the crowd, but most who stood upon that corner wanted only to listen, whether in shock or in admiration. As for Finch himself, intent as he was on his oration, I hoped he did not notice the black-mantled, veiled Sister of Charity. Or even if he did, I imagined he could not at this moment devote much thought to our previous meeting, under what had been for me most unpleasant circumstances.
As for the girl with the basket, she stood as dull as the soot falling all around us, and as silent. Only when I passed directly in front of her, halfheartedly she poked a pamphlet at me.
It was necessary that the mute Sister of the Streets must speak tonight, if never again.
“Lady Cecily,” I whispered to that personage as I accepted her tract.
She did not look at me.
“Lady Cecily!” I spoke softly, yet close to her ear. I am sure she must have heard.
Yet she did not respond at all, not with a blink, a breath, a glance, not even with a startled twitch.
“Twice we have assembled peaceably as is our right,” the street-corner platform speaker passionately declaimed, “twice we have marched to Trafalgar Square under the silken flags of our guilds, to adjure the West End of London to remember us – and the police have beaten us back with billy-clubs. And after we withdrew bloodied and defeated, this is what one member of Parliament had to say: ‘It is in bad taste for people to parade their insolent starvation in the face of the rich and trading portions of the town. They should have starved in their garrets.’ ”
The crowd now overflowed into the street, as far as the opposite pavement, yet amongst all those bystanders one heard not a sound except the voice of the black-haired orator. Alexander Finch’s vehement silver glance passed like magnetism over and through the crowd, and to a man the listeners stood entranced. They gazed as if they were –
Finally I allowed myself to think it.
Mesmerised.
Like Lady Cecily.
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
 
MESMERISM. THE STUFF OF MUSIC-HALL entertainments and parlour amusements.
I would not have believed it had I not seen it.
But I
had
seen him do it to Lady Cecily. However briefly, I had seen him make the magnetic passes with his hands and penetrate her with his gaze, as Mrs. Bailey amongst others had described to me. And now Lady Cecily stood before me on a street corner: listless, in rags, an automaton, forgetting her hunger in order to hand out anarchist pamphlets.
Just looking at her, I wanted to scream with frustration. Desperately I desired to help her, free her, rescue her, do something – but what?
Go fetch a police constable? But he would have no knowledge of the disappearance of Lady Cecily, and therefore no reason to detain her.
Race to tell Lady Theodora all that I knew, then let her deploy the authorities? But that would take hours, perhaps even a day, and in the meantime, what if something happened to Lady Cecily?
“Let them set their imperialist police on us,” cried her captor to the street-corner crowd, “let them give us another Bloody Sunday! For next time we will colour our flags with the hue of our beaten heads! Next time we will fly red flags of revolution!” And the men tossed their ragged caps in the air, wildly shouting, cheering for their newfound messiah.
But I knew that beneath the wild black wig and false beard he was no working-class hero.
He was a sham. A rich shopkeeper’s son.
And he was glorying in the power with which he swayed the crowd.
He liked to wield power, apparently.
Watching the subjugated girl, Lady Cecily, I knew I could not turn my back on her even for a moment, lest she disappear again. I
must
get her away from him. Here. Now.
But how? Un-Mesmerise her? This was done, I had heard, by performing the magnetic manoeuvres in reverse; it seemed most unlikely that I could accomplish it. Seize her and carry her off bodily? But then
I
would be pursued as a kidnapper, for she would cry out and struggle against me. I knew she would, for while she looked as meek as a dove – standing there with downcast eyes, handing out pamphlets – tame as she seemed, I knew full well there was another side to her, not the Lady Cecily who drew smudgy pastels but the left-handed lady who drew bold, dark –
Wait a minute.
Lady Cecily – or the wan pauper girl whom I knew to be Lady Cecily – was giving out papers with her
right hand.
And as this realisation flashed upon me, such an electric illumination of simultaneous conjecture, hypothesis, and hope burst upon my benighted mind that I am sure my eyes went as round as bull’s-eye lanterns. Safely hidden by my black veil, my mouth gaped. I whispered, “Oh, my stars and
garters
!”
Oh.
Oh, if only I could do it: make contact with the left-handed lady, acting on the premise that only the proper and docile right-handed Lady Cecily had fallen under the power of the villain.
If the secret, rebellious left-handed lady lurked unfettered within this meek creature before me, I had to communicate with her, and quickly, and in a way that would cause her to connect with me as if by telegraph wires, almost instantly.
More by instinct than by conscious thought I knew how it might be done.
Her charcoal drawings, you see, had strangely affected me. Touched some deep recognition in me. Almost as if she and I could be soul-mates.
Perhaps, just perhaps, she might similarly recognise me.
So, reaching into a pocket for pencil and paper – I always carried some with me – I opened the political pamphlet, hid the paper behind it, and standing with the gas-light to my back so that only the gaunt, listless girl in rags could see me, I drew.
Instinct, again, more than conscious thought, told me
what
to draw, how best to depict freedom as Lady Cecily had experienced it. Doing so, I sketched as rapidly and well as ever I had done in my life.
I drew a likeness of Lady Cecily, dressed in stylish modern “Turkish” bloomers, pedalling a bicycle – skimming the earth by her own power, as I too loved to do. Lady Cecily, strong and beautiful, smiling, with the wind ruffling her hair and blowing her hat-ribbons in the air.
And as my pencil flew, out of the tail of my eye I could see the right-handed pauper girl grow motionless, forgetting her assigned task of handing out political tripe. I saw her stiffen, her gaze riveted upon the drawing.
I switched the pencil to my left hand. Very clumsily I began to scrawl beneath the drawing, from right to left, in mirror writing: “Who – ”
But I had gone a bit too far. She dropped her basket, and before I could complete the question her left hand shot out, snatching the pencil and paper away from me. Dull as soot no longer, she stood before me like a small and icy flame, demanding, “How dare you? What do you think you are doing?
Who are you?
”
BOOK: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
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