The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

possible.” Mrs. Crowley began to sound the slightest bit tart. “You appear to be a scholar; you do know how to write, don’t you?”
    “But this may be a matter of life or death!”
    Utterly unimpressed, Mrs. Crowley remarked, “Miss Nightingale would not see her parents when they were alive, nor her sister, nor, with few exceptions, anyone else in the past thirty years, so I think it unlikely that she will see you. But you can of course ask.” With a gesture of finality, she indicated the writing implements in my lap.
    Confound everything, if there had been any ivy on the walls of this most peculiar house, I would have gone outside and attempted to climb it to the reclusive Miss Nightingale’s chamber. As there was none, however, I scowled at the paper set before me.
    Even though I felt certain the effort was of no avail, eventually I wrote,
    Dear Miss Nightingale,
Time is pressing; I will be direct: an
elderly woman has been abducted by brigands,
seemingly because she knew you in the
Crimea and carried a message for you. Her
name is Mrs. Dinah Tupper. Have
you any idea where she might be, or who has
taken her?
A Friend
     
    After blotting and folding this, I handed it to the ever-smiling Mrs. Crowley, who took it with a nod and offered the hospitality of the house with a gesture. “Have some tea, dear, or some lemonade, and biscuits. You will be informed the moment you receive a reply.”
    This Miss Nightingale certainly did carry the tyranny of invalidism to an extreme. I pictured her as a thoroughly petulant woman, and although I quite felt as if I wanted to strangle—if not her, then at least something or someone—still, I managed a meek enough nod as I got up and ambled off.
    While attempting to appear purposeless, actually I had become keenly interested in certain aspects of the interior of this house.
    Wandering through the rooms of the ground floor, past tables where numerous visitors partook of finger sandwiches, sliced fruit, hot pastries, and the like—Miss Nightingale certainly gave freely of every hospitality except her own presence!—I eyed embroidered napkins, embroidered table-linens and seat-cushions, even embroidered jam-pot covers! The latter were cunningly stitched with depictions of raspberries, grapes, peaches, apricots, strawberries, currants, or quinces, forsooth, to match the flavours of the preserves they protected.
    Certainly one might expect to find plentiful samples of the ladylike art of embroidery in any upper-class house. Yet I saw no other ladylike arts such as moulded wax flowers, or homemade ruffled silk lamp-shades, or useless little boxes put together out of seashells, or hand-painted glassware, now, did I? Passing into the front parlour, I found no fillet-crocheted antimacassars, but numerous lovingly embroidered pillows. On the walls I saw framed embroidery landscapes as well as the usual plethora of family portraits, some painted, some photographic, a few old-fashioned black-paper silhouettes.
    I gave my attention to the photographic prints—various handsome head studies, some of them in profile like the silhouettes; also some full-length wedding portraits, and a few less formally posed—an old man and a remarkably plain younger woman relaxing in the stonework doorway of a country house, a different old man and a different unlovely woman taking tea at a garden table. I was attempting to guess at relationships when the fashion-plate young “jackanapes in the knickerbockers” came to find me, offering me a note that was, one might assume, my answer from the unapproachable Miss Nightingale. In delicate violet-hued ink on thin violet-scented paper, it quite contrasted with the missive I had sent upstairs.
    I took it, but before reading it, I gestured towards the portraits on the wall and asked the young man, “Would you be so good—can you tell me who these people are?”
    “Oh! Most of them, I can’t say, I’m afraid, but those”—he indicated the old couple at