The Case of the Missing Marquess

Enola flees outdoors and spends some time calming herself in her secret hiding spot. She draws caricatures of her brothers and then writes herself a list of questions about her mother’s disappearance. Sherlock uses the family dog to track her to her hiding place. He laughs at the caricatures and admits that she has done a good job with them. He spots her list of questions and reads through them. He expresses surprise at how perceptive her questions are. Enola once again feels a little hope that she might be able to have a relationship with her brothers. Still, Sherlock dismisses her observation that the bustle Eudoria wore on her last day at home was odd, telling Enola that “The whims of the fair sex defy logic” (59). He announces that, as he has solved the mystery, he will be returning to London immediately, but Mycroft will be staying at Ferndell for a short time.

Enola tries to get into her mother’s rooms again, but finds that Mycroft has locked the door. She persuades Lane to open it, explaining that she wants to please Mycroft by wearing something more appropriate to dinner and that none of her own clothes are suitable. Once she is inside, she searches her mother’s walking jacket for Eudoria’s own key. When she finds it, she realizes that this confirms her mother’s intention not to return to Ferndell. She takes the key and one of Eudoria’s dresses.

At dinner that night, Mycroft announces that a seamstress will soon arrive to fit Enola for proper, ladylike clothing. He also tells Enola that she will be leaving for boarding school in a matter of days. Enola is horrified. She does not want to leave Ferndell, and she has heard terrible stories about the way girls are treated at such schools. Eudoria, a proponent of “Rational Dress,” particularly despised the use of corsets at boarding schools. These undergarments were often tightened again and again to make girls’ waists smaller and smaller, until the girls could barely move or breathe. Some girls were injured or even died. Mycroft will not listen to her pleas, however, insisting that she must learn to be a cultured young lady so that someone will eventually want to marry her. He reminds Enola that he has complete legal authority over her and is allowed to do whatever he wishes to force her to comply with his dictates. As he threatens her, Enola suddenly understands completely why Eudoria ran away.

Enola struggles to sleep. She thinks about her mother as a person for the first time and, although she is still hurt by her mother’s decision to leave, she also admires it. She wonders why Eudoria did not leave her a farewell message. Suddenly, she realizes that her mother did—that the book of ciphers must be the message. She retrieves the book and decodes the first cipher, which tells her to look at Eudoria’s chrysanthemums. Confused, she picks up the book on the meanings of flowers. She finds that mums stand for affection and family attachments. She looks up the flowers Eudoria arranged in her room before leaving—sweet peas and thistles—and learns that they stand for departure and defiance. She realizes that the mums the cipher refers to could also be something found in Eudoria’s rooms and thinks of the many watercolors of flowers on the walls.

She sneaks into Eudoria’s rooms using the key she has secreted away and finds Eudoria’s painting of mums. Tucked between the painting and the frame’s backing, she finds a 100-pound note. Disappointed that it is not a letter from Eudoria, Enola returns to bed and cries herself to sleep. When she wakes, she is in a steadier frame of mind and realizes that she now has a large sum of money that Mycroft does not know about. She wonders if there might be more hidden away, its locations encoded in the rest of the ciphers in her book. She thinks that it is likely and that Eudoria has left the money behind, intending for Enola, too, to make her escape.

Five weeks pass. Each night, Enola decodes a cipher and sneaks into Eudoria’s room to locate more hidden cash. She begins to enjoy the ciphers because she loves finding things, and this is an engaging new way to do it. The seamstress prepares Enola’s new wardrobe and orders her a corset. In these new clothes and wearing her hair in the fashion expected of upper-class young ladies, Enola finds herself constantly uncomfortable and nearly unable to move or sit.

On the day a carriage arrives to take her to her new boarding school, Enola is ready with her escape plan. Realizing that this is exactly what Eudoria must have done, she removes the bustle padding from her new corset and hides her money and other supplies inside. She sandwiches one of Eudoria’s widow dresses between the corset and her own dress. Once she is on the road, she asks the driver to stop at the cemetery, claiming that she wants to pay her respects to her father before leaving town. At the cemetery, she slips away to find her bicycle, which she has hidden nearby.

She takes off across country fields, reasoning that her brothers will mount a search for her along the roads. She decides to make her way to London, where she will hide under her brothers’ noses, which she believes is the last thing they will expect. She also thinks they will expect her to disguise herself as a boy, so she takes the opposite approach, bringing along Eudoria’s black dress and veil so that she can disguise herself as a widowed woman.