The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals Read online

  THE WOLLSTONECRAFT DETECTIVE AGENCY

  The Case of the Missing Moonstone

  The Case of the Girl in Grey

  The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals

  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 © 2017 by Jordan Stratford

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Kelly Murphy

  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 9780385754484 (trade) / ISBN 9780385754491 (lib. bdg.)

  Ebook ISBN 9780385754507

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

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  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Preface

  Chapter 1: QED

  Chapter 2: Intractables

  Chapter 3: A Purely Theoretical Exercise

  Chapter 4: The Ostrich and the Pug

  Chapter 5: Gaslight

  Chapter 6: Thousands of Thousands

  Chapter 7: Repulsive

  Chapter 8: A Nut for a Jar of Tuna

  Chapter 9: Brobdingnagian

  Chapter 10: Ingredients

  Chapter 11: Shillings

  Chapter 12: Heraldry

  Chapter 13: Adjacencies

  Chapter 14: Dognapping

  Chapter 15: Bavaria

  Chapter 16: Lot 221B

  Chapter 17: Petrichor

  Chapter 18: Coprolite

  Chapter 19: Aghast

  Notes

  Excerpt

  For Tamsin, Betina, Kelly,

  Miki, and Allison

  With thanks to Rob Adelson,

  Ted and Tara Grand, John Lefebvre,

  Nancy Siscoe, Heather Schroder, and Kevin Steil.

  And of course to my family,

  who puts me up and puts up with me in turn.

  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

  Rain spattered forcefully against Ada’s window. The sound merged with the shushing in her ears, mashed as they were against the pillows that propped her up in bed. It was difficult reading only with her right hand, but she was making good progress turning the page with her thumb, though it made her wrist ache. This took her mind away from the wet, black, squirming creatures embedded in her left arm, slowly drinking her blood.

  Her book was also a refuge from the stranger who sat at her bedside. The man gave her a chill whenever she thought of him, let alone looked at him, with his pale complexion and dark caterpillar eyebrows.

  That’s not fair, Ada admitted to herself. Now that she was on the doorstep of her twelfth birthday, she was trying to be more grown-up about this sort of thing. She knew her aversion to strangers, to new things, wasn’t entirely rational. And the man was, she supposed, not entirely a stranger, despite his strangeness. Dr. Polidori had been a friend of her father’s, the father she scarcely knew. And he’d been there, day after tedious day, draining away her blood in small munching gulps from his little pets—the leeches he would gently pluck away with steel forceps and place in their glass jar when he was done.

  “Almost there,” said the doctor in his strange, unplaceable accent, as though sensing Ada’s discomfort. “We must purge the fevered blood.”

  “One would think,” said Ada, meaning herself, “that someone with no blood would be dead, and someone with blood would be more likely to be alive.”

  “That is the case, yes,” said Dr. Polidori slowly.

  “Therefore, more blood is better than less blood, QED,” declared Ada. “That’s Latin, quod erat demonstrandum, meaning ‘thus it is proven.’ ”

  “Your Latin is excellent, Lady Ada,” the doctor acknowledged distantly, teasing away the leeches with his long steel instrument and dabbing the leftover drops of blood on her arm.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Then why are you taking blood out of me?”

  “You suffered a terrible fever,” the doctor declared. “This poisons the blood, which must be removed for you to regain your…vitality.” He savored the final word in a way that made Ada queasy. But she was often queasy after her leechings.

  “Not all my blood, surely,” Ada said.

  “Merely the fevered blood.” Ada again queased at the way he said “blood,” like he’d dropped his tongue on a tiled floor, the word easing and then flopping in his mouth.

  “How can they tell? The leeches, I mean. How do they know fevered blood from good blood?”

  The doctor continued restoring the black worms to their jar. “Such is a mystery of nature.”

  “It’s the sort of thing someone ought to be figuring out.”

  Polidori said nothing.

  “I mean,” Ada continued, “there you are, a little leech, happily lapping up fevered blood, and then you find a spot of perfectly ordinary, good blood. Do you say Ugh, no thank you, I couldn’t possibly? I don’t see it happening. Honestly, there ought to be some sort of evidence….”

  Just then, Ada’s bedroom door clicked open. Gravity and old hinges let the door drift slowly and ghostlike to the wall of its own accord, and in cartwheeled Ada’s nine-year-old half sister, Allegra, still in her nightdress.

  The girl thrust her arms above her head in a silent ta-da! pose, curls bouncing around her face, until she caught sight of Dr. Polidori.

  “Aaaaack!” Allegra said, and hurried out of the room.

  “Allegra is not fond of leeches,” said Ada to Polidori, who again said nothing.

  An hour later, Ada had breakfasted and wiggled wearily into her cherry velvet gown, and made her way to the drawing room in search of a newspaper. She smiled at her best friend, Mary, who stood and gave Ada’s hand a squeeze. Mary’s stepsister, Jane, stood and gave a halfhearted curtsy. Allegra stayed seated in an overstuffed chair, books at her feet unopened, scone crumbs scattered down her morning dress.

  The girls’ tutor, Peebs,
opened his rain-wet leather case and began extracting books, nodding and smiling at the girls. It was not a particularly talkative morning, how-do-you-dos apparently having been satisfied downstairs, before Ada’s arrival.

  Despite it being a grand room for a grand house, the sprawl of girls and books and tutor made the drawing room seem almost cramped. Ada, still tired from her daily leeching, retreated behind a grey wall of newsprint to survey the Times and see what was going on in the world beyond the stately townhouse in Marylebone.

  In truth, Ada was only half-reading, or perhaps reading with half her brain. When the reading half paused to see what the other half had been up to, it continued reading, because what the other half had, in fact, been up to was writing. Ada had written a name in pencil, right there in the pages of the Times.

  Nora Radel.

  Mary Somerville, the smartest woman in the whole world and the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency’s last client, had said that Nora Radel was the cleverest girl in all of England.

  Which made Ada the second cleverest. And, therefore, the most curious.

  Who was this mysterious girl? Why had Ada’s friend and mathematical mentor, Mr. Babbage, who reportedly knew this Nora person, never mentioned her before? Exactly how much cleverer was she than Ada herself, and in what way? The whole thing was driving her mad, or would be if she’d had the energy. But the leeches had drained her, so she was mostly just woozy. Despite all her researches, she’d found no trace of Nora Radel.

  Down the hall in her room, in the midst of a stack of books Ada could picture perfectly, lay a notebook entitled “Intractables,” which contained a series of questions Ada could not pose to her Byron Lignotractatic Engine, or “bleh” for short. The bleh was a large brass calculating contraption of her own invention. It could take into account dozens of factors in a problem via a set of spindles and sprockets, and then clack along until a pattern appeared, which Ada would read as a solution. Or at least a different starting point.

  The bleh was very good for keeping track of things with numbers, like how often a white horse could be seen in the road between the hours of ten and eleven each morning. It could take in the number of times the newspaper reported burglaries involving portraits, and it could even show relationships between the two sets of numbers (horses and burglaries). Even nun sightings, which Allegra had insisted were worth keeping track of.

  But, as yet, the bleh was not particularly good at understanding the patterns of people. Such unexpected things she kept track of in her intractables notebook, as there was simply no quantifying them.

  Nora Radel was such an intractable. Even though Ada had set a spindle aside for her, there were few variables defined, no way of putting the pegs in the holes that made any sense: Girl, yes. London, yes. Clever, yes. Cleverer than me, (a reluctant) yes. Known to Mr. Babbage and Mrs. Somerville, yes.

  Not much to work with.

  And, she had to admit, not much reason to care. She’d had little time for the bleh these past weeks. She had a dirt map to finish and a hot-air balloon to rebuild. Yet care she did.

  “Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species,” said Peebs, beginning his lecture. “Keeping precious creatures organized for grumpy scientists,” he finished, laughing at his own joke. None of the girls responded in any way.

  “Ah,” he concluded. “Right, then.”

  “Taxonomy,” said Ada, not looking up from her newspaper.

  “Precisely,” said Peebs.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” interjected Mary. “But I haven’t a clue as to what you’re going on about. Perhaps if—”

  “Not a word,” interrupted Jane.

  “Nope,” said Allegra. “Start over.”

  “Taxonomy,” Ada repeated. “It’s how you organize animals, how you name them.”

  “Precisely,” said Peebs. “Thank you, Lady Ada. In this way we can categorize all manner of animal in the world—including humans.”

  “Humans are not animals,” snipped Jane.

  “I’m afraid we are, Miss Jane,” countered Peebs.

  “I’m an animal,” volunteered Allegra cheerfully.

  “Circus chimp,” suggested Ada from the recesses of her newspaper.

  Peebs rolled his eyes, and Mary was about to intervene when she noticed a number of things in quick succession.

  First, through the open door she noticed Mrs. Woolcott, Ada’s former governess and current fever-nurse, walking down the corridor, toward the stairs. Next, she noticed Mr. Franklin, Ada’s extraordinarily tall and ever-silent butler, coming up the stairs with what appeared to be an overflowing letters-tray. This was unusual, as the girls had had almost no letters in recent weeks. And, most curiously of all, she noticed a silent exchange between Mrs. Woolcott and Mr. Franklin, in which Mrs. Woolcott offered a very clear “no” with the shake of her head, gathered the bundle of letters, and headed down the hallway toward the library.

  When her attention returned to the drawing room, Mary was startled to see Ada staring directly at her.

  “What?” said Ada.

  “What what, Ada?”

  “What you were noticing what, Mary. I notice when you notice things. I’m getting quite good at it.”

  All eyes were on Mary now.

  “Is everything all right, Miss Mary?” Peebs asked.

  “I just…It seems that…Well, I believe there is correspondence,” said Mary, uncomfortably on the spot.

  “Correspondence,” said Ada, folding her newspaper. She looked quickly around the room.

  “Library,” Ada announced. “Now.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Mrs. Woolcott.

  “Mrs. Woolcott, I’m certain—” Mary began.

  “We are all of us certain of precisely one thing, Miss Godwin, and that is that Dr. Polidori has made it very clear that Lady Ada is to be allowed out of bed for meals and brief tutoring only,” insisted Mrs. Woolcott. She had turned from clicking the key in a cabinet to spy a gaggle of girls at the library door, insisting on seeing the newly arrived letters.

  “Miss Coverlet—” Ada began.

  “It is Mrs. Woolcott now, Lady Ada,” corrected Mrs. Woolcott.

  “Fine. But those are my letters,” Ada said crossly.

  “Ours, to be perfectly frank,” said Jane, and a little whirring click in the counters of Ada’s brain noticed that it was a rather rude tone for Jane to be taking.

  Ada went to plop herself in her favorite high-backed chair when she stopped suddenly.

  “What have you done with my chair?”

  “Nothing at all, Lady Ada; it is right there in front of you,” Mrs. Woolcott assured.

  “It’s not. It’s got the wrong all everything.”

  “I had the cushion reupholstered, if that is what you are referring to.”

  Ada gave it a poke with a finger and made a face.

  Mary and Allegra shot each other a she-shouldn’t-have-done-that look, thinking of poor Mrs. Woolcott. Everything was silent for the briefest of moments while Ada sucked in all the air from the room.

  “MR. FRANKLINNNN!” Ada bellowed.

  It was as though he had been standing there the entire time, invisible, and only now materialized. The butler loomed in the doorframe, silent and expressionless.

  “I need my chair from the drawing room. And get rid of…that.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the library chair.

  “Please,” whispered Mary.

  “Please,” Ada repeated.

  “Mrs. Woolcott,” Mary intervened. “Lady Ada will be seated presently, and tucked in with a blanket if you like. Reading her correspondence would hardly be more taxing than undertaking her studies.”

  “It is not reading the correspondence that concerns me,” said Mrs. Woolcott. “It’s what comes after. Eavesdropping in thunderstorms. Breaking into hospitals. Running off to crypts at all hours…”

  “Perhaps,” Mary added as Mr. Franklin arrived with the overstuffed and un-reupholstered chair from the drawing room, “if A
da read her mail as a purely theoretical exercise…”

  “What’s ‘theoretical’?” asked Allegra.

  “Thinking,” said Mary, smiling. “A thinking-only sort of exercise. A puzzle to be solved in a very relaxing, sitting-down, not-taking-any-action sort of way.”

  “That’s not quite…,” Ada began, having settled in her more-familiar chair.

  “Completely uneventful, I assure you, Mrs. Woolcott,” finished Mary.

  Mrs. Woolcott was unassured, but turned to the small wooden cabinet in which she had locked the neat bundle of letters. After a satisfying click, and a nearly inaudible sigh, the stack was placed in Ada’s lap.

  Ada struggled for a moment with the string, which was knotted in a precise bow. As she tugged, the knot seemed to grow tighter.

  Allegra leapt up from the floor, where she had settled, and neatly sliced the string with a penknife. Ada looked at her little sister in surprise, and was going to ask where the knife had come from, but just as quickly the blade disappeared as though it had never been there in the first place. Proud of herself, Allegra gave a quick smile and sat back down.

  “I daresay, we ought to cancel that advertisement in the Times,” said Mary. “I’d completely forgotten.”

  “Oh, Charles did that, ages ago,” said Ada.

  “He did?” asked Mary. Charles was the boy who shared her morning carriage rides, always with his nose in a book, and he had frequently aided the detectives when needed. Mary felt put out, as making requests of Charles generally fell to her, and she knew nothing of this one.

  “Peebs’s idea,” Ada said, which helped Mary’s feelings a little.

  “Missives are still arriving, though,” remarked Jane. “Word of your problem-solving prowess has spread, I fear, Ada.”