The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer Page B

logical, scientific perditorian.
    All in one gasping breath of inspiration, I knew this as surely as I knew my real name was Holmes.
     
    I scarcely noticed how the maids escorted the duchess and Madame Laelia into the hall, perhaps for tea, perhaps for a séance; I did not care. Back in the woodlands that encircled Basilwether Park, I walked at random, oblivious to the drizzle that had begun to fall, my thoughts running wild with excitement, building upon my original scheme to find Mum.
    That plan remained simple: Upon arriving in London, I would hail a cab, tell the driver to take me to a respectable hotel, and have dinner and a good night’s sleep. Staying at the hotel until I found suitable lodgings, I would set up bank accounts—no, first I would go to Fleet Street and place encrypted “personals” in the publications I knew Mum read. Wherever she was, would she not continue to read her favourite journals? Of course. I would wait until Mum replied. Just wait.
    That would suffice, if—as I often found it necessary to reassure myself—if indeed Mum was alive and well.
    In any event, wait was all I could do.
    Or so I had thought. But now, now that I had found my calling in life, I could do so much more. Let my brother Sherlock be The World’s Only Private Consulting Detective all he liked; I would be The World’s Only Private Consulting Perditorian. As such, I could associate with professional women who met in their own tea-rooms around London—women who might know Mum!—and with the detectives of Scotland Yard—where Sherlock had already filed an inquiry concerning Mum—and with other dignitaries, and also perhaps with disreputable persons who had information to sell, and—oh, the possibilities. I was born to be a perditorian. A finder of loved ones lost. And—
    And I ought to stop dreaming about it and start doing it. Right now.
    The only possibility, as I had been thinking before I was interrupted, seemed to be perhaps a tree.
    Backtracking through the boringly well-tended woodlands of Basilwether Park, I concentrated now on looking for that particular tree. It would be located not too near Basilwether Hall and its formal garden, and not too near the edge of Basilwether Park, either, but in the middle of the woods, where adult eyes would be least likely to spy. And like my refuge under the overhanging willow in Ferndell’s fern dell, it had to be distinctive in some way. Different. Worthy of being a hideaway.
    The thin rain had stopped, the sun had come out, and I had nearly circled the estate before I found it.
    It was not one tree, actually, but four growing from a single base. Four maple seedlings had planted themselves in the same place, and all had survived to form a symmetrical cluster whose four trunks rose at a steep angle from one another, with a perfect square of space in between.
    Planting one booted foot upon a gnarl and grasping a handy bough, I swung myself up to stand perhaps three feet above the ground inside the encompassing V’s of the trunks, a perfect axis at the hub of a foursquare leaf-encircled universe. Delightful.
    Even more delightful: I saw that someone, presumably young Lord Tewksbury, had been here also. He had hammered a large nail—a railroad spike, actually—into the trunk of one of the trees on the inside. No one walking by was likely to notice it, but there it sturdily jutted.
    To hang something upon? No, a much smaller nail would have served that purpose. I knew what this spike was for.
    To set one’s foot upon. To climb.
    Oh, glorious day, to climb a tree once again after so many weeks of ladylike confinement . . . But oh, consternation, for what if anyone observed me? A widow lady in a tree?
    I looked all around, saw no one, and decided to chance it. Ridding myself of my hat and veil, concealing them in the leaves overhead, I hoisted my skirt and petticoats into a bunch above my knees, securing it with hatpins. Then, setting my foot upon the spike and seizing a