The Case of the Girl in Grey Read online

  THE WOLLSTONECRAFT DETECTIVE AGENCY

  The Case of the Missing Moonstone

  The Case of the Girl in Grey

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Jordan Stratford

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2016 by Kelly Murphy

  Chapter head illustration copyright © 2016 by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780385754446 (trade) — ISBN 9780385754453 (lib. bdg.) — eBook ISBN 9780385754460

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Disarming

  Chapter 2: Ghost Girl

  Chapter 3: Trithemius

  Chapter 4: Burke’s Peerage

  Chapter 5: Inclement

  Chapter 6: A Hurried Scrawl

  Chapter 7: Snapdragons

  Chapter 8: Ghost Hunting

  Chapter 9: The Secret Language of Candles

  Chapter 10: Cryptography

  Chapter 11: Muddle Ducks

  Chapter 12: Monsoon

  Chapter 13: A Stranger in Brown

  Chapter 14: Confidences

  Chapter 15: Church Records

  Chapter 16: Storybook Pages

  Chapter 17: Leeches

  Chapter 18: Jam Butty

  Chapter 19: The Hospital

  Chapter 20: The Crypt

  Chapter 21: Almost All Is Well

  Chapter 22: A Tale in the Library

  Chapter 23: The Cleverest Girl in England

  Notes

  AMICUS EST TAMQUAM ALTER IDEM

  For

  Scarlet Abraham

  Alexander Gryphon Bex

  Penelope Brooks

  Rose Hoover

  Sagan Aurora Kilauea Oliphant

  Sally Louise Standiford

  Isolde Tan

  Arden & Freya Teather

  Cameo Wood

  who were there ab initio

  Detail left

  Detail right

  PREFACE

  This is a made-up story about two very real girls: Ada Byron, who has been called the world’s first computer programmer, and Mary Shelley, the world’s first science-fiction author. Ada and Mary didn’t really know one another, nor did they have a detective agency together. Mary and Ada were eighteen years apart in age, not three, as they are in the world of Wollstonecraft.

  Setting that aside, the characters themselves are as true to history as we are able to tell. At the end of the book, there are notes that reveal more about what happened to each of them in real life, so that you can enjoy the history as much as I hope you’ll enjoy the story. Because the history bit is brilliant.

  –JORDAN STRATFORD

  “Did!” Ada growled through gritted teeth. She whirred the black iron coal shovel down through the air at her sister.

  Nimble as a circus performer, nine-year-old Allegra pivoted on the stair just in time to dodge the slice of the shovel. She pressed her own attack up the stairs, lunging with her hooked fire poker.

  “Did not!” shouted Allegra.

  “Did!” cried Ada, knocking the poker aside with her shovel.

  The two girls traded blows, one scratching the paneling of the stairway, the other taking a deep chunk out of the white banister.

  Allegra hopped back down one stair, then up again, thrusting past Ada’s head, pulling back to use the poker’s nasty hook. Ada raised her shovel over her shoulder to catch the hook with another clang and a puff of soot.

  Poker and shovel locked together, the older sister flicked her wrist, whipping the poker from Allegra’s grip, spinning it right around until it shot like an arrow back down the stairs to embed into the doorframe with a reverberating thud.

  Ada leveled the shovel into Allegra’s face in triumph. Quick as lightning, Allegra dropped to her knees, grabbed her sister’s ankles, and gave a sharp yank. Ada’s bottom spanked hard against the wooden stair. She started to yowl like a wet cat, the shovel skittering down the stairs and along the tiled hall.

  The toe of a gleaming black shoe stopped the shovel’s slide. Above the black shoe was a black-cuffed trouser of a long black suit, and very far atop the suit was the drawn and displeased face of Ada’s very large, tall butler, Mr. Franklin. He said nothing, but his silence and his look of disapproval were enough to stop Ada’s wailing immediately. He folded himself to pick up the shovel without bending his legs, which struck Allegra as very flexible and Ada as a long way down, and rose again to pluck the still-trembling poker from the woodwork.

  Embarrassed, both girls rose and coughed, smoothing their gowns and brushing the soot from their hands, making more of a mess in the process. Neither sister could entirely remember the reason for the staircase duel in the first place, “dids” and “did nots” gone in an instant.

  The butler stared at the pair for a moment with a raised eyebrow, then slowly turned, returning the implements to the fireplace. The girls remained humbled for as long as they could manage, which was about two entire seconds.

  “That was brilliant!” cried Allegra. “You have to show me how to do that!”

  “The disarm? It’s in the book. Agrippa, I think. Capo Ferro? Fencing books. They’re in the library.”

  “You couldn’t just show me?”

  “You couldn’t just read a book?” Ada replied.

  “Honestly, Ada, you’re mean.”

  “You’re impossible,” declared Ada, marching up the stairs to the library. Allegra followed, although she pretended not to.

  Ada found a book on sixteenth-century fencing and pressed it into her sister’s hands. “Didn’t you take a room?” she asked, still pushing on the book, prodding Allegra subtly toward the door.

  “I took three, really,” admitted Allegra, not taking the hint at all. “They were just empty.”

  “They weren’t empty—they had things in them.”

  “Things under sheets,” Allegra clarified.

  “Things that weren’t yours,” Ada replied.

  “Well, they’re just rooms. And you have a lot of them.”

  Indeed, there were a lot of rooms in the stately Marylebone house in the heart of London, and most of them were empty, except for things under sheets. Curiously for such a grand house, there had been only four people living there: Lady Ada Byron; her silent butler, Mr. Franklin; the cook, whose name Ada really was making an effort to remember; and Miss Cumberland, Ada’s maid
. Ada’s father, the notorious Lord Byron, had died on an adventure in Greece two years earlier, when Ada was nine, and her mother had taken to the family estate in the country. But she had not taken Ada. This had left Ada alone with the three servants. Alone, that is, until Ada’s half sister, Allegra, had arrived on Ada’s doorstep, taking over three rooms and never seeming to settle in any of them.

  Until very recently, Ada’s world had been a comfortable, sense-making place of books and ideas, of drawings and charts, of mathematics and puzzles, of machines and inventions and a hot-air balloon of her own making, tethered to the roof, in which to think. Then a month ago all had changed. Her governess had departed, a tutor had arrived, and a fellow tutee and friend with an appetite for adventure appeared. That was certainly enough change for one eleven-almost-twelve-year-old girl.

  And none of that called for an additional sister.

  Ada admitted to herself that Allegra was a most capable nine-year-old. She could read and write and juggle, she could do perfect handstands and even recite some Latin and Italian due to having been raised by nuns on the continent. But “settling” seemed completely beyond Allegra’s abilities. She would fidget, or tap, or twirl at random, or run all the way upstairs and all the way down again if she forgot something. Allegra was so unsettled that she unsettled herself all the way from Italy to England, seemingly for the sole purpose of unsettling Ada.

  “You’re only here until—”

  “I know, I know,” Allegra interrupted. “Christmas, when your mother gets home. I’ll bet she’ll have kittens when she sees me!”

  “You think she’ll bring you a cat?” asked Ada, confused.

  “No, cranky-head. It means she’ll go mad! I’ll remind her of our dad, and she absolutely hates him. And me. Isn’t that marvelous? She’ll lay an egg!”

  Ada loved words and tried to use them very carefully. She found her sister’s jumble of egg-laying kittens unsettling. Here, in the library in front of all these treasured books, mixing up words seemed even worse than usual.

  Ada really wanted to be alone, but it seemed that three almost-empty bedrooms was not enough space for Allegra to twirl about in.

  “Never mind me—” started Allegra.

  “I won’t, then,” interrupted her sister, more nastily than she intended.

  “I’ll be off to the circus soon,” continued Allegra. “I ran away from the nuns for some excitement. And your detective agency is boring.”

  “That’s not what you wrote in your letter,” said Ada. “You wrote that you were coming here to be a Wollstonecraft detective, even though it’s supposed to be a secret.”

  “It is a secret!” said Allegra excitedly. “That’s why I wanted to do it in the first place.”

  “If it’s a secret, how did you know? And how did Mother know?”

  While Ada had her suspicions, she wasn’t sure.

  She and Mary Godwin had been entirely clandestine when they’d placed an advertisement in the Times to announce the formation of a private and secret constabulary for the apprehension of clever criminals. And they had used clandestine names when they pursued their first case. Yet a week ago, Ada had received a letter from her mother, the baroness, ordering her to shut down the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, and the very next day, Ada had received a letter from her half sister, Allegra, saying that she was coming to join them. How did everyone know?

  “Nuns!” answered Allegra. “Nuns know everything. They have some sort of secret nun powers.”

  “Nuns?” Ada was unconvinced. “You may have lived in a convent, but Mother—”

  “Secret nun powers,” Allegra repeated. “Anyway, I heard them talking about how your mother was going around the bend—”

  “What bend?”

  “The bend. About you and Mary playing detective.”

  “We weren’t playing. We are detectives. We detected. We put a clever criminal in the newspaper.”

  This was true. Ada and Mary had solved a rather delicate case involving a missing jewel, a distraught heiress, an innocent maid, a phony fishmonger, and three men in red fezzes. The clever criminal was indeed in the newspaper, and he was also in prison.

  Sadly, Ada’s hot-air balloon had been lost in the apprehension of the culprit. Its charred remains (the balloon, not the culprit) were now on the bottom of the river Thames rather than at the top of the Byron house. Ada had been sketching plans for an improved balloon—but it wouldn’t be ready soon enough to save her from her unsettling sister.

  “In any event, you’re boring, and you won’t let me be a detective, so I’m off to the circus. Straightaway after Christmas.”

  “We’re not boring, Allegra. Mary and I are trying to help people. I’m the clever one, and Mary does people. Well, she notices things about them. It’s not that we won’t let you. I just don’t know what you’d do.”

  “I can juggle.”

  “How would that help?” Ada asked.

  “I’m very bendy. I’ve been practicing for the circus.”

  “We’re a secret constabulary, Allegra. We don’t need bendy.”

  “You never know,” sulked Allegra.

  Mary Godwin was having sister troubles of her own. Her stepsister Jane was also determined to join the secret Wollstonecraft Detective Agency but vague about what she might contribute.

  Jane had embarrassed Mary on their first morning carriage ride to the Byron house by asking Charles (the boy behind the book) why he was there, and if it was proper for him to accompany young ladies so, and if he was being ungentlemanly and (she stressed the word) antisocial by reading in front of them.

  Charles, as Mary had expected, handled himself expertly, although his answer was too direct for Jane’s taste: Charles had no money for a carriage, and so he traded work for the coachman for a ride to work, which gave him a moment’s peace to enjoy his book, as long as he pretended he wasn’t there and nobody minded.

  “Which we don’t,” Mary assured. “Mind, that is. Not at all.”

  Jane had further embarrassed Mary by insisting on calling Charles “Master Dickens,” something Mary then realized she ought to have been doing all along.

  After the first week of carriage rides, Jane had settled into the routine, and aside from what struck Mary as an overly formal “Good morning,” Jane had kept largely to herself, immersed in her own book. The carriage turned from their home on Polygon Road down Eversholt Street, seemingly in the wrong direction, only to turn again the right way some minutes later. This turn took them toward the outer circle of Regent’s Park proper, its manicured green all around them.

  Without warning, the carriage rocked back, bucking the girls nearly into Charles’s lap, and Mary’s knee landed hard on the rough wooden planks. The horses cried out in front, hooves hammering the autumn-wet road.

  “Are you both unhurt?” asked Charles, offering a hand. As they nodded and righted themselves, Mary opened the carriage door to see what was the matter, and in the grey of the sky and the road and the rain, she caught a glimpse of a girl, perhaps a little older than herself, in a grey shift, soaking wet and shivering.

  “It’s a madwoman!” shouted the coachman in the rain. “She ran in front of us like the devil were on her heels! Nearly ran ’er to ’er death, we did!” Mary didn’t hesitate to shoot after her, with Charles not long behind—but another carriage bolted past, cutting him off from Mary’s pursuit.

  The grey girl fled alongside a hedge bordering an important-looking building of white stone before disappearing into some trees. Mary ran after her until all was a blur: the green hedge, the white stone, the grey girl.

  “Wait!” shouted Mary at the vanishing girl. “Are you all right?”

  Mary leaned a gloved hand against a tree to catch her breath. A pale-faced girl peered out from behind another tree a short distance on, auburn hair tangled and rain-pasted to her cheeks.

  “I say,” panted Mary, “I do hope you’re all right. You’ve had a bit of a fright, I should think.”

&nb
sp; “No,” replied the girl, as though from a great distance. “I’m not all right.” There was a strange, otherworldly note in her voice.

  Mary was alarmed. “Was it the horses? Were you hurt?”

  “No,” came the reply. “It wasn’t the horses. I’m just not all right.”

  “Please do come back to the carriage. Out of the rain. You’re soaked through. We can take you home.”

  “I’m not all right,” said the girl in grey. “And I’m not going home.” With that, she turned an even whiter shade of pale and fled into the trees alongside the path, quick as a bird.

  Mystified by the disappearing girl’s odd behavior, Mary was unsure of what to do. She turned to see Charles, just catching up.

  “Miss Godwin? Are you altogether well?” he inquired. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Perhaps I have, Master Dickens.” Mary adjusted her bonnet and pulled her cape against the rain as she gave Charles a nod of thanks. “Perhaps I have.”

  Up in the library, burrowed in a book, Ada heard the lion’s-head knocker, the sounds of doors, and the fetching of trays: all the formalities of “visitor.” Ada’s list of approved visitors had a single name on it, and as she was quite sure that this name did not belong to whomever Mr. Franklin had deposited in the downstairs parlor, she didn’t feel the need to investigate.

  Until, of course, she heard a flurry of light footsteps on the stairs. Allegra was on her way to investigate, and Ada knew she ought to head her off.

  Mr. Franklin loomed at the bottom of the stairs in such a fashion that Allegra was unable to find her way around him. He blocked her path until Ada, relatively composed, was behind her. The butler then pivoted like a hinged door, directing their attention to Anna Cumberland, Ada’s maid, as she emerged from the parlor. Anna smiled and bobbed a quick curtsy.