The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer Page A

pleated underskirt of rose-grey satin. But there was nothing of richness in the tears stark on her staring face, and nothing of the nobility in the way she flew at me between the trees like a bloodied swan, wings of nearly white hair falling out from under her hat to flap about her shoulders.
    A pair of frightened-looking maids came hurrying up behind her. In their aprons and white lace caps, they must have run straight out of the house after her. “Your Grace,” they cried, coaxing, “Your Grace, please come in, do, and have a cup of tea. Please, it’s going to rain.” But the duchess seemed not to hear them.
    “Mrs. Holmes.” I felt her bare hands trembling as she grasped at me. “You are a woman, with a woman’s heart; tell me, who could have done this evil thing? Where could my Tewky be? What am I to do ?”
    Holding her quivering hands in both my own, I felt grateful for the heavy veil hiding my dismayed face, grateful for the gloves that separated my warm flesh from hers, so cold. “Have courage, um, Your Grace, and, um . . .” I fumbled for words. “Be of good hope.” Then I could blunder on. “Let me ask you this: was there anywhere . . .” The way she doted on him, she might have spied or surmised. “A place on the grounds where your son would go to be alone?”
    “To be alone?” Her swollen, red-rimmed eyes blinked at me utterly without comprehension. “Whatever do you mean?”
    “Sheerest nonsense,” proclaimed a resonant alto voice behind me. “This insignificant widow knows nothing. I will find the lost child, Your Grace.”
    Turning, I found myself looking at the most extraordinary woman, even taller than I and far bulkier, shockingly hatless and uncoifed. Her wiry hair spread about her head, shoulder to shoulder, for all the world as if she were a white lamp and her hair a red shade: not chestnut, not auburn, but true red, almost scarlet, the colour of a poppy blossom, while her eyes glared out of her rice-powdered face as sooty dark as a poppy’s black heart. So arresting were her hair and face that I barely noticed her clothing. I have only a vague impression of cotton, perhaps from Egypt or India, in some barbaric crimson pattern, petalled around her massive body as wildly as the poppy-hued hair around her face.
    The duchess gasped, “Madame Laelia? Oh, you’ve come, as I begged you to, Madame Laelia!”
    Madame what? Madame Spiritualist Medium, I surmised, this being one role in which women, the morally and spiritually superior gender, commanded greater respect than men. But such characters—or charlatans, as my mother would have it—evoked the spirits of the dead. And surely the duchess most fervidly hoped her son was not one of those, so what was this oversized female doing—
    “Madame Laelia Sibyl de Papaver, Astral Perditorian, at your service,” the statuesque one proclaimed. “Whatever is lost, I can surely find, for the spirits go everywhere, know all, see all, and they are my friends.”
    The duchess now seized upon this woman’s large yellow-gloved hands, while I, like the two meek maids, stood there with my mouth airing, thunder-struck. But, in my case, not by this woman’s grotesque appearance. Nor by her talk of spirits. While I wanted to believe that I would somehow persevere after my corporeal body was gone, I imagined that if it were so, I would have better things to do than to knock on furniture, ring bells, and shake tables. Nor did the word astral impress me. Of all that Madame Laelia Sibyl de Papaver had said, it was a single word that rendered me motionless and speechless.
    That word: Perditorian.
    From the Latin perditus, meaning “lost.”
    Perditorian: one who divines that which is lost.
    But . . . but how dare she, with all her blather of spirits, title herself so nobly? Knower of the lost, wise woman of the lost, finder of the lost: That was my calling.
    I was a perditorian. Or I would be. Not astral. Professional. The world’s first professional,