But along the way, she stumbles into a mystery involving another missing youngster – a 12-year-old viscount or marquess (or both) named Tewksbury Basilwether, who (Enola deduces) has run away for the sea after having a bit too much of being babied by his mother. Concealing in her false bosom and bustle the wads of cash that her mother left hidden around the house for her, Enola bikes, hikes and hitches a train toward London, hoping to hide under her brothers' noses while trying to find her mum. Naturally, the moment the opportunity presents, she runs for it – operating on the principle that the best plan is no plan, because that way no one will anticipate her moves and head her off. So, off the brothers fly, almost as soon as they've landed, leaving Enola to be fitted for her first corset and the equally suffocating confines of a young ladies' boarding school. She's basically Flavia de Luce, only without the chemistry lab or the habit of stumbling over a dead body at every turning.

The grounds of Ferndell Hall have grown wild the closest thing they have to a carriage is Enola's bicycle she runs around in bloomers and boys' shirts, reading stuff by Aristotle and Thackeray and (gulp) Mary Wollstonecraft out of the home library. Mycroft, legally the head of the family, is horrified to discover that all the money he's been sending their mother to employ gardeners, tutors, stable boys and seamstresses, hasn't been spent on anything like that. Sherlock looks down on Enola with crushing arrogance, assuming she is intellectually inferior because (in the first place) she's a female and (with equal emphasis) she has a petite head. After a couple of days, Enola gets worried enough to call in the police and her two brothers. Then, on Enola's 14th birthday, her mum walks out of the house and is never seen again.

Her mum has raised her to be an unconventional female for her time (1888), like herself – a bit of a bohemian artist, a bit of a suffragette (what they called feminists before women could legally vote), a religious non-conformist, a general non-wearer of corsets. You probably don't know this, but besides his older brother Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes also had a younger sister named Enola – her name an anagram for 'alone' – who, in the four years since her father died, hasn't seen hide nor hair of her much older siblings.

Somebody by Nancy Springer