The Case of the Left-Handed Lady Read Online Free PDF

clawed at the thing, fumbling it off of me and flinging it to the floor.
    There on my hearth-rug it lay.
    The garrote.
    I had heard that they were made of wire, but this one was fashioned instead of some sort of smooth, white cord knotted to a stick of wood.
    Caught in that knot I saw a cluster of brown hair – my own. Wrenched from my head as the garroter had twisted the device tighter and tighter around my neck.
    Swaying where I stood, I had to close my eyes for a moment, realising that only my high collar, stiffened with whalebone, had kept me alive. London’s constables wore high-collared tunics for the same reason. How astonishing, and fearsome, to think that such a simple device could terrorise an entire metropolis, even the police.
    Fearsome also, and shameful, to realise that not any courage or wit of my own had saved me. Forgetting my weapon, like a bumbling fool I had kicked and clawed, no better than any other preyedupon female. Collar or no collar, I might be dead had those drunkards not happened along. Yes, I decided, indeed, they must have interrupted the garroter. Why else would he have left his lovingly fashioned apparatus around my neck?
    Trembling badly, I forced myself to open my eyes again, studying that loathsome device.
    Lovingly fashioned, indeed. The stick, of polished malacca wood, might have been taken from a gentleman’s cane. Hardly the sort of implement one would expect of a street thug. And the cord –
    A stay-lacing.
    That is to say, the lacing from a lady’s corset.
    Sudden sickness lurched through me, and with it, a blaze of anger. Snatching up the foul-minded, insolent thing, I flung it into the fire.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH
     
    FOR TWO DAYS I STAYED IN BED, CONVEYING to Mrs. Tupper by signs, as I could barely speak, that I had a sore throat – a common enough ailment at the time of year; I am sure she thought nothing more of it. The high ruffled collar of my nightgown hid my bruised neck.
    It could not, however, comfort my bruised and ruffled feelings. While accustomed to physical pain – often enough as a child I had fallen from a bicycle, a horse, a tree – I found myself not at all accustomed to being hurt by another human being in such an offhanded way. It was not only my sore throat that prevented me from eating the soups and jellies Mrs. Tupper offered me. It was the malice of what had happened that made me sick.
    Malice, and impropriety – no, far more than impropriety. Some – some evil I could not yet name.
    Something about the stay-lacing.
    What sort of man would attack a woman with a weapon derived from a cane – the sort of stick used to thrash schoolchildren – and a corset ? Intimate feminine apparel by which upper-class females were compressed to fit into their ridiculous dresses, making them ornamental to society, prone to fainting spells, and susceptible to internal injuries and death? It was largely in order to escape strait-lacing that I had given brothers Mycroft and Sherlock the slip. I had fled so that no so-called boarding school could thrash me or try to cut me in half at the waist, and now someone had put that – that thing – around my neck ?
    For what purpose? To rob me of what?
    And why with such a strangely disturbing weapon?
    Was it indeed a man who had attacked me, or some madwoman?
    These were questions for which I lacked answers.
    By the third day I could talk a little, and I returned to Dr. Ragostin’s office, where I made myself comfortable – in body, if not in mind – reading the stack of newspapers that had accumulated during my absence.
    I found my message to Mum in the newspapers, for I had sent copies to Fleet Street by post, but I found no message from Mum to me.
    Of course it was too early to expect a reply. Still, I could not help looking. I wanted –
    This would not do. Feeling sorry for myself like a child, wanting Mummy. What would Mother have told me if she were here? Utterly predictable: “You will do very well on your own,