“What about Alice’s Sunday dress?” asked Justine from under the bed. She looked like a quarter of a spider, with her long legs sticking out. Suddenly, Mary felt like laughing, which would have been most inappropriate under the circumstances.
“It’s still in the chest of drawers. I can’t find her nightclothes, but I suppose she would have been abducted in those. They didn’t take anything except what she was wearing at the time.”
Justine crawled back out from under the bed. “Look,” she said. “This was tangled in the sheets.”
It was a pocket handkerchief of white linen, clearly a man’s. As soon as Justine held it out to her, Mary could smell the distinctive odor of chloroform. It was monogrammed in black thread with an M.
“Dinner is ready!” Mrs. Poole called from the doorway. “I want you both to stop crawling about on the floor and get something to eat. After all that gallivanting around Europe, you must be famished for a good English dinner.”
Mary was feeling rather hollow inside. When had she last eaten or gotten a good night’s sleep? Even in the luxury of the Orient Express, with Diana snoring on the bunk above her, she had lain awake, worrying about Alice, Mr. Holmes, and Dr. Watson. Then, she had felt helpless—now, thank goodness, she could actually do something. The only antidote to worry was action. She would solve this mystery, just as Mr. Holmes himself would have.
“Could M be Marvelous Martin?” she asked Justine several minutes later when they were sitting in the dining room eating a very English dinner indeed. “Cat said he was teaching Alice to use her powers and his name starts with an M. I can’t think of anyone else in her life with an M—except me.” Justine was eating a roasted potato, which Mrs. Poole had made particularly for her.
“You can’t live on vegetables alone, miss,” she had said to the Giantess. “You’ve gotten thinner since you left, the both of you. It’s that European cuisine, as they call it. Good English food will fatten you right up again!” Diana had chosen to take her dinner in the kitchen with Archibald so she could play with Alpha and Omega, who had grown in the last few weeks. When Mary had left, they were still kittens—compact balls of fluff already deadly to mice, with large green eyes. Now they were starting to look like gangly adolescents.
“Surely not Martin,” said Justine, taking a second helping of Brussels sprouts. She must be feeling that hollow sensation as well—Justine never took seconds. “Martin is such a gentle man. I knew him for many years in the circus. He could not harm a fly, and anyway, from what Catherine told us, Alice knew and trusted him. He would have no need to come into her bedroom in the middle of the night to kidnap her. He could simply tell her to accompany him somewhere. We can ask him—Catherine gave me the address of the boardinghouse where the circus performers who didn’t go on the European tour are staying—but I cannot believe that he would be involved.”
“Then I suggest the following plan,” said Mary. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll go to Baker Street and see if Mrs. Hudson has heard anything from Mr. Holmes or Dr. Watson. And we should search their flat—perhaps they left clues of some sort as to their whereabouts? Then, and I hesitate to suggest this but I think it must be done, we should go to the Society of St. Mary Magdalen and ask for an interview with Mrs. Raymond. If she is indeed the woman Frau Gottleib mentioned—created by Dr. Raymond in his quest to harness the energic powers of the Earth—then she has a motive to kidnap her own daughter. Perhaps she and Martin—yes, I know you don’t believe it’s Martin—are working together for some purpose? But why such a woman would become director of a society for the salvation of prostitutes, I cannot imagine. Perhaps she isn’t the same Mrs. Raymond at all—it’s not an uncommon name. I wish I had asked Frau Gottleib more about Dr. Raymond and his experiments before we left, but there wasn’t time.” She should have made the time—mentally, Mary berated herself. She had been so worried about Alice and the whole situation at home that she had not gathered as much information as she should have. Mr. Holmes would not have made that mistake.
“And then perhaps after that we can see Martin?” said Justine. “I do not want him to be unjustly suspected. I’m certain he will be as shocked by Alice’s disappearance as we are. He cannot possibly have anything to do with this situation.”
CATHERINE: I still can’t believe you suspected Martin! He’s the gentlest creature imaginable, and the last person who would chloroform anyone. Anyway, he treats Alice as though she were his own daughter, I suppose, because she’s the only one he’s met whose powers are even stronger than his.
ALICE: Martin has been very good to me always. But he was a bit to blame, in his own way.
As Mary was heading down the hall to bed, after having tucked Diana in, she met Mrs. Poole coming out of her room.
“I’ve turned down the bed, miss,” said Mrs. Poole. “And there’s a hot water bottle at the foot. I’m sorry to raise this subject when you’re so tired, but I suppose I’d better. There’s very little money left of what you and Catherine gave me before you departed for Europe. I’ve been buying groceries on credit, and the rates are coming due. I hate to bother you—”
Mary felt mortified—had they really left Mrs. Poole with so little? But she had not expected Catherine and Beatrice to join her and Justine on the continent—she had assumed they would be here, looking after the household. Instead, they had left Mrs. Poole and Alice alone—and look what had come of that! “I’m glad you did,” she said. “And it’s not a bother, of course. In my waist bag you’ll find—goodness, I don’t even know how much it is without doing conversions in my head. A bunch of francs and krone—I spent the last of our pounds and shillings getting us home. Also my pistol and some bullets. Could you take the foreign currency to Threadneedle Street tomorrow and have it exchanged? And could you please telegraph Mina and tell her we’re arrived safely? I’m so sorry, Mrs. Poole. I should have made better arrangements.” That money would carry them through—well, Mary did not know how long. They would each need to start working again, soon. But they would have to solve this mystery first. She thought, with a pang, about the fact that she would not be returning to work for Mr. Holmes tomorrow morning, but trying to locate him in the labyrinth of London. Was she more worried about the job, or the man? This was no time to make such distinctions. The man was the job—to get back one, she would have to find the other.
“That’s quite all right, miss. You can’t think of everything, now can you? After all, you rescued Miss Van Helsing, and that’s the important thing. Although Miss Murray’s telegram didn’t provide many details?”
And Mrs. Poole, epitome of a housekeeper that she was, would never ask for them! Still, it was clear to Mary that she would like to know what all of them had been doing since they left Park Terrace. After all, Mrs. Poole was human—she would never admit to curiosity, but she would certainly feel it! “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. It was Diana’s doing, really, but don’t tell her I said that. Oh, and she almost burned down a mental hospital in the process!”