The Case of the Left-Handed Lady

All is well?

I am a liar. All is not well. Not at all.

But, decides the girl named for solitude, it will be.

Someday.

Because she will attend to it.

“The nerve of the girl!” he whispers between teeth set edge to edge. “The impudence, the effrontery, the sheer, unmitigated daring of her!” But as he glares at the evidence that, once again, his sister has outsmarted him, his hands relax along with his mouth, his thin lips twitch into a smile, and he begins heartily and almost joyously to laugh.

As I placed fresh fuel on the hearth-fire of 221 Baker Street, I felt all the pain of that thought, but also some solace: whether he knew it or not, and whether he liked it or not, my brother Sherlock was giving me such shelter as family might offer. He was giving me refuge.

As I had chosen not to accept the lot of other girls – would it always be like this? Running, hiding, dodging, disguised? Enola, alone?

“I am going now. Please convey my good wishes to our brother Mycroft – ”

I stopped him with a gesture of my weapon. “No nearer, I warn you.” In fact I could never have hurt him, but he knew me so imperfectly that he halted.

“My dear Sherlock,” I told him almost tenderly, although I still held my dagger at the ready to keep him from approaching me, “the greatest harm I could possibly suffer would be to lose my liberty, to be forced into a conventional life of domestic duties and matrimony.”

I could only hope that Dr. Watson had taken in most of this, for my brother evidently had not. He responded in much the same way as before. “Enola?”

“My dear Sister – ”

His dear sister.

Those words – how oddly they affected me.

Every nerve told me to flee.

Yet, instead, like an overlarge black moth drawn to a candle-flame, I ghosted into the room with the others.

With my brother.

With the girl whom I had wanted to be my friend.

And with the fatherly Dr. Watson.