Hi, I'm Millie Bobby Brown,
and I play Enola Holmes
in the new Netflix film
Enola Holmes.
I'm here to give you a sneak peek,
a little reading moment,
Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess.
Wait! I saw something.
Rising over the house tops
like an ostrich feather upon a lady's hat stood
a white plume in the gray sky.
The smoke of a steam locomotive. Peddling towards it,
I soon heard a roaring, shrieking, clanging noise.
The engine coming in,
I arrived at the platform just as it did.
Only a few passengers got off and among them,
I had no difficulty recognizing two tall male Londoners
who had to be my brothers.
One of my brothers had grown a bit stout,
showing an expanse of silk waist coat,
That would be Mycroft,
I supposed, the older by seven years.
The other – Sherlock – stood straight as a rake and lean
as a greyhound in his charcoal suit and black boots.
Swinging their walking sticks,
they turned their heads from side to side,
looking for something,
but their scrutiny passed right over me.
Meanwhile, everyone on the platform stole glances of them.
I straightened and approached the two Londoners,
not quite succeeding in holding my head high.
"Mr. Holmes and, um, Mr. Holmes?"
Two pairs of sharp grey eyes
fixed upon me.
Two pairs of aristocratic brows lifted.
"You um, you asked me to meet you here."
"Enola?" they both exclaimed at once,
and then in rapid alternation, "What are you doing here?
Why did you not send the carriage?"
"We should have known her,
she looks just like you, Sherlock."
The taller, leaner one was indeed Sherlock then.
I liked his bony face, his hawk-eyes, his nose like a beak.
But I sense that for me to look like him was no compliment.
"I thought, she was a street urchin, on a bicycle,
why the bicycle?
Where's the carriage Enola?"
I blinked, "Carriage?”
There was a landau gathering dust in the carriage house,
but there had been no horses for many years.
The stout one, Mycroft explained,
"Why are we paying a stable boy, then? And a groom?"
"I beg your pardon."
"Are you telling me there are no horses?"
"Later, Mycroft. You!"
With commanding ease, Sherlock summoned a loitering lad.
"Go hire us a landau."
He tossed a coin to the boy, who touched his cap
and ran off.
"We had better wait inside," Mycroft said.
"Where's your hat Enola?"
Somehow the moment had passed for me to say,
"How do you do?"
or for them to say, "So nice to see you again my dear,"
and shake hands or something of that sort,
even though I was ashamed of my family.
But then also, I was beginning to realize that,
“Please meet at station” had been
request for transportation,
not for me to be present myself, in person.
Speaking to me,
Sherlock decreed in that offhand imperial way of his,
"You should have been in long skirts since you were twelve.
Whatever was your mother thinking of?
I suppose she's gone over entirely to the Suffragists?"
"I don't know where she's gone," I said.
And to my own surprise, for I had not wept until
the moment I burst into tears further mention of mum,
then was pushed off until we sat in the hired landau
with my bicycle strapped on behind swaying,
along to Kinford.
I am sure that they thought I was weeping for my mum–
as I was.
But truthfully, I was weeping for myself,
Enola.
Alone.
That night I could not sleep, indeed.
At first I could not even be still.
In my nightgown, barefoot,
I paced, paced, paced my bedroom
as I imagined a lion at the London Zoo might pace his cage
Later, when I turned my coal-oil lamp low,
put out my candles and went to bed,
my eyes would not close.
I heard Mycroft retire to the guest bedroom.
I heard Lane and Mrs. Lane tread upstairs to their quarters
on the top floor,
and still, I lay staring at my shadows.
The whole reason for my distress was not obvious
as may at first appear.
It was Mycroft who had me angry,
but it was my changing thoughts about my mother
that made me upset, almost queasy.
It feels very queer to think of one's mother
as a person like oneself, not just mum.
She had been weak as well as strong.
She had felt trapped as I did,
she had felt the injustice of her situation just as keenly.
She had been forced to obey as I would be forced to obey.
She wanted to rebel, as I desperately yearned to rebel,
without knowing how I would ever, or could.
But in the end she managed it, glorious rebellion.
Confound her,
why had she not taken me with her?
Kicking off her covers to lunge out of bed,
I turned up the oil lamp, stalked to my desk.
Its border of stenciled flowers did not cheer me now.
Seized paper and pencil from my drawing kit and drew
a furious picture of my mother, all wrinkles and jowls
with her mouth a thin line... going off in her
three stories and a basement hair
and her Turkey back jacket, flourishing her umbrella
like a sword.
While the train of her ridiculous bustle,
trailed behind her.
Why had she not taken me into her confidence?
Why had she left me behind?
Oh, very well, I could understand,
however painfully that she had not wanted to trust
a young girl with her secret,
but why had she not at least offered me
some message of explanation?
And why, oh why, had she chosen to leave me on my birthday?
Mum never in her life, took a stitch without thread.
She must've had a reason,
but what could it be?