Chapter Text
Enola knew that running away was an utterly moronic idea, when her brilliant and powerful brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft respectively, would search for her, but she just couldn’t help it. Mycroft had decided that after he had to assume responsibility of her, because their mother had abandoned her, the best course of action was to marry her off, to “a man high above your station, so you best not ruin this, Enola.”
Her mother had told her of how awful men could be, and Enola knew that anyone of high station willing to marry her, would be an awful old man, only interested in her siring an heir. Enola thought this was an awful idea, but pleading as much as she could did nothing, so she made a plan and ran away, as a boy with all the money her mother had left for her of course.
As Enola had boarded the train, she had of course noticed the commotion caused by the fancily dressed family looking for their son, as had everyone else boarding the train. But, unlike others aboard the train, she had noticed that the family definitely seemed to know who the last man to board the train was. Enola had been sitting in the train carriage, thinking about the mystery, when an extremely large bag opposite her began to move.
Enola watched with a strange fascination, which quickly turned to confusion, and a slight bit of fear, as a knife ripped through the bag, followed by a hand, and then a head. Then the bag fell from the rack and the person inside, for Enola and her detective skills had indeed concluded a person was inside, made a very loud and very pained grunt. Enola’s fear quickly grew and she, as politely as she was able, asked him to get out of the carriage. Her fear did not come from this young man, for she believed she could easily defeat him, but instead from the idea she could be discovered and sent back to Mycroft and his ludicrous arranged marriage.The young man, unaware of her plight, refused to leave the carriage, even after her requests for him to leave became a lot less polite.
“You’re a strange looking gentleman.” He stated, trying to change the topic off of him leaving the carriage as requested. Enola’s response was neither polite nor ladylike, but why would she be polite to this stranger, and since when had she ever been ladylike?
“You think you look normal?” Enola scoffed, shifting to minimize her chest. Unfortunately, this just brought the irritating stranger’s attention to precisely the area she had been trying to hide.
“You’re not a boy at all!” He exclaimed, as though having figured out a great mystery.
“I might be!” Enola said, as though her voice had risen two octaves during the sentence. “Who are you?”
“What are you?” This was the only sentence that the man deemed worthy of a proper response, as he stuck out his hand and responded;
“I’m Viscount Tewkesbury, the Marquess of Basilwether.”
Enola’s response of “You’re a nincompoop.” did not go down well with the Viscount.
He quickly rebutted, “I’ll have you know, I have just undertaken a particularly daring escape--”Enola was fast becoming sick of this man and his arrogance, especially considering he wasn’t even correct!
“You haven’t escaped! There is a man in a brown bowler hat currently on this train, searching for you, and once he finds you, he will think I helped hide you, and I will be endangered by this. Therefore, I ask you to get out of this carriage.” Enola said this all with extraordinary calmness, although she was seething on the inside.
The Viscount responded to Enola, but the only things she really heard were “You remind me of my uncle,” which is a strange thing to say to a teenage girl and “I’m free.” Enola quite simply did not care, so she once again asked him to leave her carriage.
She was pleasantly surprised when he actually did so, and began to settle down and relax into her seat. Less than a minute later, the Viscount was back, heavily slamming the carriage door while shouting about the man in the bowler hat. Enola decided this was far too much effort, when all she was trying to do was avoid a marriage and find her mother, so she left the carriage. As she walked down the corridor the man in the bowler hat aggressively bumped into her. Now call it a gut feeling, but she did not trust that man’s intentions toward the nincompoop she had left in her carriage. She paused, but began to walk away from the carriage again, until she heard what could only be signs of an attack and calmly walked back towards the carriage.
Once there she got quite the shock! Tewkesbury was being shoved out of the carriage, leaning above the fast moving countryside, and failing to get back onto the train. Tewkesbury started to yell when he realised they were approaching a tunnel, and Enola did the only thing she could, pick up the attacker’s walking stick and hit him with it. The man fell back into the carriage, and Tewkesbury came far too close to being slammed into a stone wall. Luckily for Tewkesbury, Enola managed to pull him back in, milliseconds before the door was smashed off.
Enola and Tewkesbury rushed towards the front of the train, closely followed by the evil bowler hat man. Once they reached the coal compartment, they climbed onto the side, and Enola figured out a truly insane plan. As the bowler man reached out to grab Tewkesbury, a second before the train crossed a high bridge, Enola grabbed Tewkesbury’s clothes, and jumped off of the train, pulling him off with her. They fell heavily, and rolled down the hill with remarkable speed, Enola just managing to stop herself from falling off the cliff and into the water below.