Chapter the First
’Tis I, Enola Holmes of whom the misfortunate woman made mention. Gentle reader, have you deduced from my name that I am the scandalous younger sister of Sherlock Holmes? And, being the most intelligent of all possible readers, have you noticed that, backwards, “Enola” spells “alone”? Surely you have. By the winter of my seventeenth year, having just lost one of the very few people who cared about me, I had concluded that, indeed, being a Holmes meant being a lonely misfit.
Such was my thinking on a bitterly cold day in late February—the winter had been mild so far, allowing a grave to be dug, but on that morning of my friend’s burial, the graveyard grass crackled underfoot and the air felt like crushed glass in one’s lungs. I was as quick as anyone to leave the graveside once the vicar said, “Go in peace.” But as the little group of us passed through the cemetery on our way out, I heard a faint, fairy-bell sound that wafted and waned in the icy breeze, a ringing noise coming from somewhere amongst the tombstones and the towering old lime trees.
“What on earth?” I said, halting.
“Nothing that need concern us,” declared Jackanapes—I think of him as Jackanapes, although his proper name was something else entirely. A fashionable young sort of nuisance, he was the only man amongst us—well, we were merely five: the nurse, two housemaids, Jackanapes, and I. The nurse was a ship-in-full-sail sort of spinster named Dobbins; the housemaids, Lois and Ethel, were merest girls, no older than I was. All of us females huddled half-frozen in our cloaks and deployed thick, old-fashioned muffs to warm our hands. Jackanapes had his head hunched well down in his collar, his hands in his coat pockets, and he was shivering.
“Nothing that need concern us at all,” repeated Jackanapes.
Now, I am not Enola Holmes for nothing: I wanted to know what was what, and I did not feel inclined to listen to Jackanapes. “It concerns me,” I said, setting off in the direction from which I thought the sound might be coming, striding at a most unladylike gait across the frozen grass between the tall, toppling gravestones.
“Sounds like a handbell, of all things!” I added.
“It’s only the wind!” Jackanapes called in protest.
“What, you think there’s a schoolteacher in the wind perhaps, summoning a class to order amidst the graves?” I retorted, but as I forged onward and did not turn around, and as the wind was indeed strong, probably he did not hear me. The ringing of the bell sounded almost lost to me one moment but louder the next, and it was hard to tell where it was, whether amongst the wilderness of graves or perhaps somewhere on a nearby street. It might indeed have been a stray piece of metal banging in the breeze. But I have a large lump of curiosity on my dolichocephalic head, and also I had a suspicion that it might be important.
“It’s a ghost,” whimpered Ethel from somewhere behind me.
“Nonsense,” said Dobbins in her characteristically brisk way. “Who ever heard of a ghost ringing a bell?”
“It might be a person trying not to become a ghost,” I said softly, hesitant to voice my concern lest I be thought a fool. Only ignorant, stupid people, according to my brothers Sherlock and Mycroft, believed the stories that folk were commonly buried alive, that many corpses had been dug up by grave robbers and found with their coffin lids scratched to flinders and their fingernails shredded! Only simpletons thought that their loved ones needed to be protected after death. Only the gullible would fall victim to the swindlers who sold expensive “safety coffins” equipped with bell systems—
As I rounded the corner of a lordly granite mausoleum I could not only hear the bell clearly, I could see it! A brass bell caught the sun—not that the sun ever amounted to much in London, but the bell shone as bravely as it was able—there it flashed in the light, and I could see it as well as hear it plainly. It hung, and swung, and rang, mounted on the side of a temporary wooden marker standing at the head of a recent grave still mounded with raw earth.
“The wind is making it ring,” said a sour male voice behind me. Yes, Jackanapes had followed.
“No, look at the string!” Emerging from the base of the boxlike wooden substitute for a gravestone, a thin white cord dipped and tightened, dipped and tightened rather like the string of a kite that might or might not fly away.
“It’s moving,” said one of the housemaids huddled behind me; I think it was Lois.
“Somebody’s in there,” said the other, even more stupidly.
“Fancy that!” I snapped, lunging forward. On my knees beside the grave, and never mind the icy cold penetrating my black silk skirt, I tore at the dirt with my hands, digging like a puppy dog and utterly ruining my new black gloves. But even as the others joined me, my mother’s voice in my mind ordered me Enola, think! and I realised we were too slow. We could never expect to extricate the unfortunate person in the grave before she expired—yes, it was a female; her name, Trevina Y. Trairom, was painted on the stout wooden marker—and, glancing at that boxy edifice, I noticed that, along its corner, it had hinges!
At once I pounced, tore at it with my grubby fingers, found the latch, and got it open. Within, I discovered, of all things, a bellows hanging from a hook. I grabbed it and suffered an awful moment of Enola think! Think, think, think! before I comprehended where to address it: inside the bottom of the grave marker—one might as well term it a cupboard—jutting just above the surface of the earth, stood a wide-open pipe through which ran the string and over which someone had fastened a swatch of netting. Rending that veil, I thrust the snout of the bellows into the pipe, then pumped with a sort of frenzied enthusiasm. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” I called into the pipe, and immediately felt furiously embarrassed at myself, although really, I knew of no rules of etiquette applying to the circumstances.
The moment I spoke, the bell stopped ringing, which was rather a relief. The silence that followed, however, was a bit daunting.
“Miss Trairom?” I ventured, halting the bellows for a moment.
I heard a small, choked sound that might have been a sob or a sign of mirth, and then a soft, ladylike voice wafted up: “Mr. Stanley?”
Heavens, such presence of mind! But as I blinked in surprise, a shadow fell on me and there stood Jackanapes, barking, “Work that bellows, Miss Holmes! I am going to find the watchman.” Then, “Keep digging!” he exhorted the others, and off he galloped.
I plied the bellows with energy for some moments, but I wondered—yes, a person must needs breathe, but was a stream of frigid air really what Miss Trairom wanted, frozen as she must be whilst lying in the wintry ground? The dates on her marker read 8 March 1874–18 February 1891. She was sixteen years old. Today was the twenty-first; assuming that the customary two days had passed before interment, she had been lying in the cold, buried, overnight if not longer! Yes, surely she needed air, but how frozen she must be!
I stopped pumping the bellows and addressed the orifice in the ground again. “Miss Trairom?”
But she did not respond.
“Miss Trairom!”
Nothing.
“Trevina!” I cried, becoming a bit wrought.
And again, nothing. But Nurse Dobbins spoke up. “Miss Holmes, she’s fainted, and no wonder. I suggest you keep working that bellows.”
A fraught time followed. Pumping the bellows failed to ease my mind, but it at least warmed my chilled personage until I began to “glow,” which is what ladies do rather than perspiring. Once I started panting, the nurse came and relieved me of the bellows. I knelt at the foot of the grave and dug with my hands, distressed to see how little progress had been made that way. Blessedly, two young labourers with shovels appeared, along with Jackanapes and an older man in a battered trilby hat who exclaimed, “What the dashed dickens is this?”
Standing up and rubbing earth off our hands as the men with shovels took over digging, we stared at him.
“What’s a ding-dong-bell grave doing here?” he elaborated. “I got no notification of no grave going in here.”
Obviously he belonged to the class of people who routinely used double negatives, so I felt no need to roll my eyes. “My good sir,” I bespoke him, “all the more reason we must speedily unearth it, before the occupant expires.” Fishing in the bosom of my black mourning “weeds,” I produced lucre rendered even more filthy than usual by my grimy fingers.
“Hustle it up, you fellows,” he expostulated at the labourers, and he himself stooped to hurl clods out of the way. It seemed to take eons, and I started shivering again as much from nerves as from the gelid air, but at last the shovels struck wood, the coffin was cleared, and without wasting time to raise it from the ground the old man clambered into the grave and wrenched it open.
“She’s alive, by Jove,” he bellowed. “There’s breath rising white from her nose, like.”
Unceremoniously I jumped in there and shoved him aside so I could see. And what I saw was so outrageous that I gasped.
“How peculiar,” I whispered.
Although deathly pale, she was a beautiful young woman, small and slender; that was not unexpected. But around her dark hair was wound an odd circlet of pink ribbon in which was bound a small, drooping posy of anemones. A much larger sheaf of withered pink roses lay strewn atop her midsection. Lying next to her in the coffin was a large earthenware jug, flat grey in colour, with a great hole broken out of it, utterly useless and not at all decorative. And—what made me gasp—lacking hat, gloves, shoes, or stockings, she was clad only in a diaphanous white, clinging dress that nearly bared her maidenly breasts! Worse, it quite clearly revealed that she wore no undergarments of any kind!
“She’s all but naked!” exclaimed Jackanapes in a choked voice.
“Never mind that,” I snapped at the same time as I pulled off my cloak and covered her with it. “Get her out.” I felt one of her piteously bare hands; it was stiff and cold. I raised my voice. “Lift her out of this wretched coffin and let us get her somewhere warm!”
“The same for all of us,” whispered Ethel with pathos. Yet she removed her cloak. Then Lois, then Dobbins, also, all of them took off their wraps and laid them on the ground to fashion a makeshift bed, whilst Jackanapes and the old man poked my cloak beneath Trevina’s sadly compromised personage before they lifted her and placed her there. Meanwhile the labourers had gone to fetch the only available form of transport, which was a wheelbarrow, and into this exceedingly humble vehicle the unconscious woman was lifted, together with her improvised bed and coverings, by all four men.
“This way.” At my fastest walk, with my teeth chattering, I led the odd company out of the graveyard to the gate where Florence Nightingale’s carriage awaited us, its matched pair of Cleveland Bay horses stamping and snorting; they felt the cold, too.
Yes, I refer to the modest but capacious carriage that served the Nightingale residence located near Hyde Park. You must understand, gentle reader, that for the past fortnight I had been staying at the home of the “lady with the lamp,” because Mrs. Tupper, my dear old former landlady, who boarded there, had fallen ill with typhoid fever. As she had no one else to care for her, I had taken leave of my studies at the Women’s Academy to nurse her, so it was Mrs. Tupper, you see, with whom I had been staying up nights until she most sadly succumbed. It was Mrs. Tupper for whom I wore black, and who Miss Nightingale’s servants and I had laid to rest at the cemetery that day. The nurse and housemaids had come because they had grown fond of her, and I because I thought a great deal of her for the motherly way she had treated me during my days in the East End, and Jackanapes because he was always poking his clever nose into everything.
Still, he and the other men laid Miss Trairom on the carriage seat quickly and gently enough. Thrusting money into the hands of the watchman and the labourers, I sprang into the carriage to pillow the young woman’s head on my lap. The rest of us crowded in, and we were off at a brisk trot, the coachman having been instructed. It is entirely my fault that I did not notice a little mostly white dog, kind of a beagle-terrier mix, running along behind us. But of course, the London streets are full of strays.
Also, I was too busy to look out the window. I chafed Miss Trairom’s hands, and Dobbins chafed her bare feet all blue with cold, and presently she stirred and softly moaned, but she grew still and silent again before we reached the large, welcoming home where Florence Nightingale, “the Bird,” kept to her aerie on the top floor. “The lady with the lamp” had been an invalid ever since she returned from the Crimea, you see.
“Take Miss Trairom to the sickroom,” I ordered Jackanapes and the coachman. I knew that this refuge on the first floor had been thoroughly cleaned, all the bedding washed and boiled, whilst Mrs. Tupper’s remains awaited burial in a cold corner of the stable; Florence Nightingale was a devoted follower of Pasteur, Koch, and Lister, and she made sure that all of her servants took heed of “germs” whether they believed in them or not. I darted into the house ahead of the others and flew past the usual crowds of people occupying the morning room, library, parlour et cetera without paying any attention to curious glances turned my way. Reaching the baize-covered doors leading to the house’s nether regions, I stuck my head through and bellowed, “Hot water bottles! And tea, and a hot toddy!”
A confused bustle ensued. The maids retrieved their cloaks. I instructed Jackanapes to send for a doctor. Nurse Dobbins and I got the insensible young woman out of her ridiculous excuse for clothing and into a warm flannel nightgown. She seemed terribly thin and fragile, and mottled all over with what might have been yellowing bruises! We put thick wool stockings on her feet, piled hot water bottles all around her in the luxurious sickbed, heaped eiderdown comforters over her, and tried to get her to drink her toddy, which smelled delicious—lemon, honey, herbs, whiskey—but she remained insensible and we could not make her swallow; the drink merely dribbled down her chin.
“I do wish she would wake up,” I whispered to no one in particular. Perhaps because I had felt so helpless whilst poor old Mrs. Tupper was dying, I quite warmly wanted my cemetery foundling to awaken, and live, and be well, even though we had never been properly introduced and I barely knew her! I pulled a chair to her bedside, sat, took her hand between both of mine, and rubbed it, trying to make it become warm. Nurse Dobbins did the same to the patient’s other hand.
“She’s still quite cold,” Dobbins murmured. “I wish that young medico would hurry!”
I quite wished we had called Dr. Watson, but his practice lay on the other side of London, whilst other physicians were to be found much nearer at hand. I wondered if Watson had heard anything from Sherlock lately. I myself had not heard from my brother in weeks.
The “young medico” rushed in at last, threw back the covers, pulled his stethoscope out of his top hat, and examined the patient. “If she lives, she’s quite likely to have a quinsy or pneumonia,” he said when I had explained the circumstances. I felt like telling him that the same was true of all of us who had been at the cemetery, but I did not.
He opened Trevina Trairom’s mouth and pulled her tongue, trying to awaken her, but she did not respond.
“What’s the matter with her?” I exclaimed.
He pried one eyelid open with his thumb, then the other, then he stood back and dusted his hands. “Her pupils are tremendously dilated. She has been drugged.”
Nurse Dobbins returned, bringing new hot water bottles, in time to hear that. “With what?” she demanded.
“Some sort of opiate. It’s hard to tell.” I heard a shrug in his voice.
“And that yellowish mottling of her skin, is that some sort of jaundice, or the remains of bruising?”
Bruising, I felt sure. Miss Trairom had been ill-used, and my jaw clenched at the thought.
The doctor, however, seemed bored. “Again, it is hard to tell.” He turned towards the door. “She seems a bit wasted, perhaps from fever. If she comes around,” he said with an air of afterthought, “keep her in bed for a couple of weeks, and feed her pap.” He stuck his stethoscope back into his hat, positioned the hat on his head, and out the door he went.
Nurse Dobbins stood looking down at the patient. “We ought to put something in the newspapers about her,” she said as if thinking aloud. “Find her family.”
“No,” I said instantly and decidedly. “If she had a decent family, she wouldn’t be covered with bruises, and they wouldn’t have put her in the coffin that way. You saw what she was wearing when we brought her in.”
“Still…”
“I have a strong inkling that she would be safer if we held our tongues, Dobbins.”
“Well, it’s very late, anyway. Miss Holmes, why don’t you go get something to eat, and some sleep.”
From this communication I deduced that she and I would divide the sickbed duties the way we had when Mrs. Tupper was ailing, so I did as she said. I had some supper in the kitchen, took a nap in the little bedroom Miss Nightingale had provided for me, and returned to Trevina Trairom’s bedside a few hours later, after dark, to find her still unconscious, although some colour had come back into her cheeks and she had grown much warmer, as I discovered when I touched her hand.
“She’s breathing sweetly,” Dobbins pronounced, “and she seems quite comfortable.”
“I’ll stay the first part of the night with her, then,” I said. “Sleep well, Dobbins.”
And so it came about that, when Trevina opened her eyes sometime during the wee hours, it was I that she saw.
I did not at first realise that she was awake, for I was reading; it’s a deplorable vice of mine to be always and forever reading. But I heard a little cough, looked up, and she was smiling at me ever so slightly.
“Mr. Stanley, I presume?” she said. Her voice was low and sweet.
“Humbly at your service!” I rose from my chair, turned up the gas lamp for better illumination, and went to stand by her. “No, actually my name is Enola. Are you thirsty? Hungry?” I felt myself grinning with joy that she was awake and in her right senses.
I could see her thinking about my question. “I suppose I am,” she said slowly. “Both.”
I reached up and yanked the bell-pull to summon whatever unfortunate maid was sleeping in the kitchen. Quite alight with good feeling, I blurted to the patient, “Are you surprised to be alive?”
Again, she had to think before answering. “Well, I don’t exactly remember dying,” she said finally.
Do try to be sensible, Enola, I told myself. “Is there family I can notify where you are, Miss Trairom? A mother, a father?” I myself had neither; my father had died when I was quite young and my mother when I was fourteen. I was quite alone in the world except for my brothers Sherlock and Mycroft. But some young people, I reminded myself, had parents.
However, Miss Trairom looked sorely puzzled. “I really don’t know. Why do you call me by that name?”
My grin quite vanished; I felt my face stiffen. “Is ‘Trevina Trairom’ not your name?”
“Trevina, yes.” Her face brightened a bit. “But ‘Trairom’—I have never heard of it.”
Indeed, I thought, it was a peculiar name. However, England was full of peculiar names; I gave it a mental shrug. “Then may I ask, what is your surname?”
“I suppose I must have one, but I don’t remember it.” Looking distressed, Trevina struggled to sit up in bed. “I don’t seem to remember anything. I don’t know who I am!”
Chapter the Second
Gentle reader, pray do not become too disgusted with me as I admit that my first sensation, upon hearing these words, was one of excitement, delight, indeed exultation. Please bear in mind that I am by predilection and by trade a perditorian, a finder of lost things, and had Fate ever placed in my way a more gratifying challenge? Not, this time, would it be my quest to find a missing person, for the person was right there in front of me—but instead, my task would be to find a person’s missing past, her missing place in society, her missing family—or possibly even her lost mind?
Indeed, such was my jubilation that I might have said something quite unfortunate if the maid had not happened to enter at that moment, bearing a tray. Recalled to my duties, I went over to Trevina—I must needs call her Trevina, as “Miss Trairom” was simply not her name. Telling her, “Never mind, we’ll talk about that later,” I put both arms behind her back and I helped her sit up in bed. However, she took one look at her tray and cried, “No!” quite fiercely. “No, I will not eat pap!”
I already thought highly of her because she had been so quick about my calling her Dr. Livingstone, retorting by calling me Mr. Stanley. She was intelligent, and her show of spirit now made me like her even more. Pap was indeed disgusting stuff. I wouldn’t want to face it. My heart suddenly pierced with tenderness for my foundling, I told the maid, “Bring soup, Phyllis.” There was always, day and night, year in and year out, a big pot of soup simmering on the back of the stove, with suitable leftovers being added to it daily.
“Nurse told me the doctor said pap.”
“The doctor is a hydrocephalic martinet. Bring soup.” I gave Phyllis a look that inclined her to obey me, and shortly later, Trevina was eating her soup, hesitantly at first and then more eagerly, although she was careful not to drip or slurp, I noticed. For this and many other reasons—her very correct speech, her hands unblemished by calluses, the cleanliness of her teeth—I concluded that she must be a lady. Certainly she applied her napkin to her mouth with all the delicacy of a lady.
As I cleared away her tray, she asked me, “Where am I?”
“Safe,” I told her, easing her back in the bed so that she could lie down. “Rest, now.”
“No, confound it, I want to know where I am!”
“In Florence Nightingale’s house.” As she continued to stare at me, I added, “In London.”
She nodded, but her chin jutted a bit dangerously. “And what is going to happen to me here?”
“Nothing dreadful. Have some faith, silly girl!” I pulled a droll face at her. “You’re not yet strong. Perhaps you will remember who you are when you feel better. Just go to sleep.”
She made a face back at me, sighed, closed her eyes, and slept within moments.
Only then did it occur to me to posit some doubts, for this case—identifying a semi-nude young lady buried alive in a coffin equipped with a bell, forsooth—was decidedly irregular, indeed suspicious. Was it some sort of practical joke being played upon me, or a trap? But, if so, by whom? And why? For what purpose? Logic suggested none, and blast everything, I did not want to become as heartless as my brothers sometimes managed to be. Despite my questioning mind, all of my sympathies were with Trevina, and I resolved to aid her to my utmost.
* * *
In the morning, I sent a note to the aerie at the top of the house, received permission to ascend, and climbed several flights of stairs to see Florence Nightingale.
Knowing what I was about, I opened her door narrowly and slipped in so as not to let the cats out. Along with her in her spacious, sunlit chamber lived a large family of splendid yellow striped Persian cats. Greeted by a chorus of meows, I took care not to step on scampering kittens. Adults with tails the size of cricket bats lolled upon the Axminster carpet and all the furnishings. Sitting up in her large, ornate bed and cuddling a gargantuan cat in her arms, Florence Nightingale awaited me, gifting me with her serene smile. Despite her age, she remained a plump, old-fashioned beauty with her hair quaintly parted in the middle and smoothed back under an odd sort of lace scarf. “Enola,” she greeted me, “I thought you had gone back to your club.”
I had meant to return to my room in the Professional Women’s Club as soon as Mrs. Tupper’s funeral was over, but here I was still in the sad black dress I had worn for it. I had been too busy to change clothes! But at least I wasn’t sick. Lois had a quinsy and Ethel was in bed with the grippe, but, blessedly, neither had yet come down with pneumonia, which could very well prove fatal.
“Please sit down, Enola.” Playfully Miss Nightingale waved the cat’s paw to direct me towards a chair. “You look pale. Do you miss Mrs. Tupper terribly?”
The moment I seated myself, a cat leapt into my lap. I patted it doubtfully; I had uncertain feelings about cats. I also had uncertain feelings about how dutifully to mourn the dear departed. “She was wretchedly ill,” I said, “and she was so very old, nearly sixty, and she was ready to go. She told me so.”
“Yet you wear black? Eudoria would not want that for you.”
It was not always a good thing that Miss Nightingale had known my mother, who had made quite sure I would not wear mourning for her. “I have not had a chance to shed this dress, that is all,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yes, I have heard you brought an unfortunate home from the cemetery! How extraordinary!”
“You don’t mind that I brought her here, do you?”
“Of course not! I live to serve. Bismark,” she addressed the cat in her arms, who was becoming unruly, “we don’t scratch. There you go.” She decanted the creature over the side of the bed and returned her attention to me. “There is something on your mind, Enola?”
“Yes. The young woman who was buried alive…”
“She’s awake, isn’t she? Talking, eating?”
“Yes. But she doesn’t remember how she came to be buried. She doesn’t remember who she is. She doesn’t remember her own name.”
Florence Nightingale’s mouth opened to form an O, and stayed that way.
“Nurse suggested advertising to find her family,” I said in all fairness, “but I do not believe that is a good idea. There are bruises all over her, and the doctor says she was drugged, and whoever put her in that coffin … you have heard how indecently she was dressed?”
Still speechless, Miss Nightingale nodded.
Copyright © 2026 by Nancy Springer
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