The Case of the Overextended Metaphor
This is not an American pulp ”detective” novel, so when I write that the door opened and a “dame” came into my room, I mean simply that it was Dame Edith Thorndyke.
“You must help me, Mr Penrose,” she said. “I am at my wits’ end.”
“My name,” I said, “is Ashford.”
“I thought we’d settled on Penrose.”
“No, it was quite unsuitable. As were Grimbald and Lydgate.”
“Were you not at one time using Deane?”
“I will thank you not to mention that.”
After that I offered her tea, and served it, and we spent a quarter-hour drinking Darjeeling and discussing the weather. (Sunny, winds light to variable.) Then she left, protesting an engagement. The next day she returned, having remembered the reason she had come.
“You must help me, Mr…Ashford,” she said. “I’m at my wits’ end.”
“Please, my dear lady, tell me what troubles you. Darjeeling?”
“It’s not that. I quite like Darjeeling. No, it’s my husband, Lord Mumford. He has gone missing. By that I mean has gone hunting for young, unmarried persons of the female persuasion.”
“There is no reason to beat about the bush, madam. You mean doxies. Adventuresses. Soiled doves. Ladies of imperfect virtue.”
“Yes, hussies.”
“Although I am unconvinced that is at all the same thing, I will help you in any way I can.”
I left immediately, pausing only for tea, and to pocket my trusty Lefaucheux pinfire revolver.
I knew immediately that hunting for his Lordship directly would yield no result. Instead I sought out the nearest “popsie” and, through blandishments and the skillful application of a quantity of the ready, inveigled an invitation to the salon of a certain Mrs Linkhaber-fford, a woman of dubious repute.
When I arrived, I found the situation far worse than I had imagined. Euphemism had run riot, to the extent that it was impossible to tell whether any individual was a dove, a flower, a summer’s day, or a sort of fish, possibly a bream.
I found his Lordship in the drawing room, indulging in a positive orgy of malapropisms. His companions were egging him on, praising his linguistic prowess and flattering his poetical flights, indifferent as they were.
I confronted him immediately. “Cease this folly at once, Mumford,” I said, once we had been formally introduced.
“Shan’t,” he said. “I suppose it was Edna who sent you.”
“Edna?” I said. “It was Dame Edith Thorndyke who sent me.”
“Who? My wife is the right honorable Edna Thorndike.”
“Thorndike? Not Thorndyke? I thought there was something ‘dodgy’ about this ’lay’. Have you enemies who would like to see you edited out of the picture?” In my agitation my metaphors became somewhat disarranged.
We made our escape then, myself and the doggerel-addled Lord Mumford, forcing our way past the ladies by thrusting money into their hands. But when I returned to my lodgings, the mysterious woman was “one with the snows of yesteryear”.
“C’est la vie,” I observed, regarding the room now filled with her absence. “Les carottes sont cuites.” But I felt that I had not seen the last of this astonishing woman.
Coming soon: The Murder of Hubert Thumberberry.