Acclaim for Alan Bradley and the Flavia de Luce novels
A RED HERRING Without MUSTARD
“Alan Bradley’s third Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard, exceeds in every way, if that’s even possible, his first two. Flavia uses her trademark cunning by scheming to get even with her older sisters, who lay in wait to torment her. She saves a Gypsy’s life, befriends Porcelain, the Gypsy’s granddaughter, solves a puzzling and bizarre murder involving an ancient nonconformist cult, collects clues the police have missed, and fearlessly ventures into danger. She is always feisty, always smart. I adore her. And while it is wonderful to read her as an adult, I wish I’d had Flavia as a role model while growing up. It’s cool to be smart. It’s cool to be Flavia! And it’s great to be among her legion of fans.”
—LOUISE PENNY,
bestselling author of The Brutal Telling
“This idiosyncratic young heroine continues to charm.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Think of Flavia as a new Sherlock in the making.”
—Booklist
“Outstanding … In this marvelous blend of whimsy and mystery, Flavia manages to operate successfully in the adult world of crimes and passions while dodging the childhood pitfalls set by her sisters.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Bradley’s third book about tween sleuth Flavia de Luce will make readers forget Nancy Drew.”
—People
“Oh, to be eleven again and pal around with irresistible wunderkind Flavia de Luce.… A splendid romp through 1950s England led by the world’s smartest and most incorrigible preteen.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“As satisfying as the mystery is, the multiple-award-winning Bradley offers more.… Beautifully written, with fully fleshed characters … [Bradley] secures his position as a confident, talented writer and storyteller.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Think preteen Nancy Drew, only savvier and a lot richer, and you have Flavia de Luce.… Don’t be fooled by Flavia’s age or the 1950s setting: A Red Herring isn’t a dainty tea-and-crumpets sort of mystery. It’s shot through with real grit.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Whether battling with her odious sisters or verbally sparring with the long-suffering Inspector Hewitt, our cheeky heroine is a delight. Full of pithy dialogue and colorful characters, this series would appeal strongly to fans of Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, and Leo Bruce as well as readers who like clever humor mixed in with their mysteries.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“[Flavia] remains irresistibly appealing as a little girl lost.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Delightful … The book’s forthright and eerily mature narrator is a treasure.”
—The Seattle Times
“Flavia, oh Flavia, how I’ve missed you! … If you like your heroines whip-smart, lippy and resourceful, Flavia’s your gal.… This is a delightful read, and I was so immersed at one point I sailed right through my metro stop.”
—Montreal Gazette
“As hilarious, gripping and sad as the previous books in this enjoyable series … Once again, Bradley succeeds. And so, of course, does Flavia.”
—BookPage
“Bradley has created a marvelous character in Flavia—very adult in some ways, very childish in others, full of energy and curiosity. His story should appeal to readers of all ages looking to escape into a thoroughly entertaining world.”
—Tulsa World
“Bradley’s characters, wonderful dialogue and plot twists are a most winning combination.”
—USA Today
The WEED That STRINGS
the HANGMAN’S BAG
“Flavia is incisive, cutting and hilarious … one of the most remarkable creations in recent literature.”
—USA Today
“Like its heroine, the novel is spiky, surprising fun.”
—Parade
“Bradley takes everything you expect and subverts it, delivering a smart, irreverent, unsappy mystery.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The real delight here is her droll voice and the eccentric cast.… Utterly beguiling.”
—People (four stars)
“There’s not a reader alive who wouldn’t want to watch Flavia in her lab concocting some nefarious brew.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Brisk, funny and irrepressible, Flavia is distinctly uncute, and the cozy village setting has enough edges to keep suspicions sharp.… Bradley gives a pitch-perfect performance that surpasses an already worthy debut.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Her sleuthing skills both amaze and amuse.”
—Mystery Scene
“Endlessly entertaining … The author deftly evokes the period, but Flavia’s sparkling narration is the mystery’s chief delight. Comic and irreverent, this entry is sure to build further momentum for the series.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Smart, funny … His second novel confirms the promise of the first.… Bradley is a writer of great charm and insight, and he infuses even minor characters with indelible personality.… Flavia de Luce, both eleven and ageless, is a marvel and a delight.”
—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
“Wickedly funny, with an eleven-year-old heroine who is meaner than a snake and smarter than a whip.”
—The Times-Picayune
The SWEETNESS at the
BOTTOM of the PIE
“Sophisticated, series-launching … It’s a rare pleasure to follow Flavia as she investigates her limited but boundless-feeling world.”
—Entertainment Weekly (A–)
THE MOST AWARD-WINNING BOOK OF ANY YEAR!
WINNER:
Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel
Barry Award for Best First Novel
Agatha Award for Best First Novel
Dilys Award
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
Spotted Owl Award for Best Novel
CWA Debut Dagger Award
“If ever there was a sleuth who’s bold, brilliant, and, yes, adorable, it’s Flavia de Luce.”
—USA Today
“A wickedly clever story, a dead-true and original voice, and an English country house in the summer: Alexander McCall Smith meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Please, please, Mr. Bradley, tell me we’ll be seeing Flavia again soon?”
—LAURIE R. KING,
bestselling author of Pirate King
“Utterly charming! Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce proves to be one of the most precocious, resourceful, and, well, just plain dangerous heroines around. Evildoers—and big sisters—beware!”
—LISA GARDNER,
bestselling author of Love You More
“Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist, Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned to amuse herself in a big lonely house.”
—MARILYN STASIO,
The New York Times Book Review
“Only those who dislike precocious young heroines with extraordinary vocabulary and audacious courage can fail to like this amazingly entertaining book. Expect more from the talented Bradley.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A delightful new sleuth. A combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes … fearless, cheeky, wildly precocious.”
—The Boston Globe
“An elegant mystery.”
—The Plain Dealer
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Alan Bradley
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley, C. Alan
I am half-sick of shadows: a Flavia de Luce novel / Alan Bradley.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53215-2
1. Girls—England—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Actresses—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Motion pictures—
Production and direction—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR9199.4.B7324I15 2011
813′.6—dc22
2011022373
www.bantamdell.com
Case design: Joe Montgomery
Case art: Ben Perini
v3.1
… She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirrored magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights,
And music, went to Camelot;
Or, when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed.
“I am half-sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.
ALFRED TENNYSON
“The Lady of Shalott”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Postlude
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
• ONE •
TENDRILS OF RAW FOG floated up from the ice like agonized spirits departing their bodies. The cold air was a hazy, writhing mist.
Up and down the long gallery I flew, the silver blades of my skates making the sad scraping sound of a butcher’s knife being sharpened energetically on stone. Beneath the icy surface, the intricately patterned parquet of the hardwood floor was still clearly visible—even though its colors were somewhat dulled by diffraction.
Overhead, the twelve dozen candles I had pinched from the butler’s pantry and stuffed into the ancient chandeliers flickered madly in the wind of my swift passage. Round and round the room I went—round and round and up and down. I drew in great lungfuls of the biting air, blowing it out again in little silver trumpets of condensation.
When at last I came skidding to a stop, chips of ice flew up in a breaking wave of tiny colored diamonds.
It had been easy enough to flood the portrait gallery: An India-rubber garden hose snaked in through an open window from the terrace and left running all night had done the trick—that, and the bitter cold which, for the past fortnight, had held the countryside in its freezing grip.
Since nobody ever came to the unheated east wing of Buckshaw anyway, no one would notice my improvised skating rink—not, at least, until springtime, when it melted. No one, perhaps, but my oil-painted ancestors, row upon row of them, who were at this moment glaring sourly down at me from their heavy frames in icy disapproval of what I had done.
I blew them a loud, echoing raspberry tart and pushed off again into the chill mist, now doubled over at the waist like a speed skater, my right arm digging at the air, my pigtails flying, my left hand tucked behind my back as casually as if I were out for a Sunday stroll in the country.
How lovely it would be, I thought, if some fashionable photographer such as Cecil Beaton should happen by with his camera to immortalize the moment.
“Carry on just as you were, dear girl,” he would say. “Pretend I’m not here.” And I would fly again like the wind round the vastness of the ancient paneled portrait gallery, my passage frozen now and again by the pop of a discreet flashbulb.
Then, in a week or two, there I would be, in the pages of Country Life or The Illustrated London News, caught in mid-stride—frozen forever in a determined and forward-looking slouch.
“Dazzling … delightful … de Luce,” the caption would read. “Eleven-year-old skater is poetry in motion.”
“Good lord!” Father would exclaim. “It’s Flavia!
“Ophelia! Daphne!” he would call, flapping the page in the air like a paper flag, then glancing at it again, just to be sure. “Come quickly. It’s Flavia—your sister.”
At the thought of my sisters I let out a groan. Until then I hadn’t much been bothered by the cold, but now it gripped me with the sudden force of an Atlantic gale: the bitter, biting, paralyzing cold of a winter convoy—the cold of the grave.
I shivered from shoulders to toes and opened my eyes.
The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at a quarter past six.
Swinging my legs out of bed, I fished for my slippers with my toes, then, bundling myself in my bedding—sheets, quilt, and all—heaved out of bed and, hunched over like a corpulent cockroach, waddled towards the windows.
It was still dark outside, of course. At this time of year the sun wouldn’t be up for another two hours.
The bedrooms at Buckshaw were as vast as parade squares—cold, drafty spaces with distant walls and shadowy perimeters, and of them all, mine, in the far south corner of the east wing, was the most distant and the most desolate.
Because of a long and rancorous dispute between two of my ancestors, Antony and William de Luce, about the sportsmanship of certain military tactics during the Crimean War, they had divided Buckshaw into two camps by means of a black line painted across the middle of the foyer: a line which each of them had forbidden the other to cross. And so, for various reasons—some quite boring, others downright bizarre—at the time when other parts of the house were being renovated during the reign of King George V, the east wing had been left largely unheated and wholly abandoned.
The superb chemical laboratory built by his father for my great-uncle Tarquin, or “Tar,” de Luce had stood forgotten and neglected until I had discovered its treasures and made it my own. With the help of Uncle Tar’s meticulously detailed notebooks and a savage passion for chemistry that must have been born in my blood, I had managed to become quite good at rearranging what I liked to think of as the building blocks of the universe.
“Quite good?” a part of me is saying. “Merely ‘quite good’? Come off it, Flavia, old chum! You’re a bloody marvel, and you know it!”
Most chemists, whether they admit it or not, have a favorite corner of their craft in which they are forever tinkering, and mine is poisons.
While I could still become quite excited by recalling how I had dyed my sister Feely’s knickers a distinctive Malay yellow by boiling them in a solution of lead acetate, followed by a jolly good stewing in a solution of potassium chromate, what really made my heart leap up with joy was my ability to produce a makeshift but handy poison by scraping the vivid green verdigris from the copper float-ball of one of Buckshaw’s Victorian toilet tanks.
I bowed to myself in the looking glass, laughing aloud at the sight of the fat white slug-in-a-quilt that bowed back at me.
I leapt into my cold clothing, shrugging on at the last minute, on top of everything else, a baggy gray cardigan I had nicked from the bottom drawer of Father’s dresser. This lumpy monstrosity—swarming with khaki and maroon diamonds, like an overbaked rattlesnake—had been knitted for him the previous Christmas by his sister, Aunt Felicity.
“Most thoughtful of you, Lissy,” Father had said, deftly dodging any outright praise of the ghastly garment itself. When I noticed in August that he still hadn’t worn the thing, I considered it fair game and it had, since the onset of cold weather, become my favorite.
The sweater didn’t fit me, of course. Even with the sleeves rolled up I looked like a baggy monkey picking bananas. But to my way of thinking, at least in winter, woolly warmth trumps freezing fashion any day of the week.
I have always made it a point never to ask for clothing for Christmas. Since it’s a dead cert that you’ll get it anyway, why waste a wish?
Last year I had asked Father Christmas for some badly needed bits of laboratory glassware—had even gone to the trouble of preparing an itemized list of flasks, beakers, and graduated test tubes, which I tucked carefully under my pillow and, by the Lord Harry! he had brought them!
Feely and Daffy didn’t believe in Father Christmas, which, I suppose, is precisely the reason he always brought them such dud gifts: scented soap, generally, and dressing gowns and slipper sets that looked and felt as if they had been cut from Turkey carpet.
Father Christmas, they had told me, again and again, was for children.
“He’s no more than a cruel hoax perpetrated by parents who wish to shower gifts upon their icky offspring without having to actually touch them,” Daffy had insisted last year. “He’s a myth. Take my word for it. I am, after all, older than you, and I know about these things.”
Did I believe her? I wasn’t sure. When I was able to get away on my own and think about it without tears springing to my eyes, I had applied my rather considerable deductive skills to the problem, and come to the conclusion that my sisters were lying. Someone, after all, had brought the glassware, hadn’t they?
There were only five possible human candidates. My father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, was penniless, and was therefore out of the question, as was my mother, Harriet, who had died in a mountaineering accident when I was no more than a baby.
Dogger, who was Father’s general roustabout and jack-of-all-trades, simply hadn’t the resources of mind, body, or finances to lug round lavish gifts secretly by night in a drafty and decaying country house. Dogger had been a prisoner of war in the Far East, where he had suffered so awfully that his brain had remained connected to those horrors by an invisible elastic cord—a cord that was sometimes still given a jerk by cruel Fate, usually at the most inopportune moments.
“ ’E ’ad to eat rats!” Mrs. Mullet had told me, wide-eyed in the kitchen. “Rats, fancy! They ’ad to fry ’em!”
With everyone in the household disqualified for one reason or another as the Bringer of Gifts, that left only Father Christmas.
He would be coming again in less than a week and, in order to settle the question for once and for all, I had long ago laid plans to trap him.
Scientifically.
Birdlime, as any practical chemist will tell you, can be easily manufactured by boiling the middle bark of holly for eight or nine hours, burying it under a stone for a fortnight, and then, when it is disinterred, washing and pulverizing it in running river water and leaving it to ferment. The stuff had been used for centuries by bird-sellers, who had smeared it on branches to trap the songbirds they sold in the city streets.
The great Sir Francis Galton had described a method of manufacturing the stuff in his book The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, a signed copy of which I had found among a heavily underlined set of his works in Uncle Tar’s library. I had followed Sir Francis’s instructions to the letter, lugging home in midsummer armloads of holly from the great oaks that grew in Gibbet Wood, and boiling the broken branches over a laboratory Bunsen burner in a stew pot borrowed—without her knowledge—from Mrs. Mullet. During the final stages, I had added a few chemical twists of my own to make the pulverized resin a hundred times more sticky than the original recipe. Now, after six months of preparation, my concoction was powerful enough to stop a Gabon gorilla in its tracks, and Father Christmas—if he existed—wouldn’t stand a chance. Unless the jolly old gentleman just happened to be traveling with a handy bottle of sulfuric ether, (C2H5)2O, to dissolve the birdlime, he was going to stay stuck to our chimney pot forever—or until I decided to set him free.
It was a brilliant plan. I wondered why no one had thought of it before.
Peering out through the curtains, I saw that it had snowed in the night. Driven by the north wind, white flakes were still swirling madly in the light of the downstairs kitchen window.
Who could be up at such an hour? It was too early for Mrs. Mullet to have walked from Bishop’s Lacey.
And then I remembered!
Today was the day the intruders were arriving from London. How could I ever have forgotten such a thing?
It had been more than a month ago—on November 11, in fact, that gray and subdued autumn day upon which everyone in Bishop’s Lacey had mourned in silence all those whom they had lost in the wars—that Father had summoned us to the drawing room to break the grim news.
“I’m afraid I have to tell you that the inevitable has happened,” he said at last, turning away from the window, out of which he had been staring morosely for a quarter of an hour.
“I needn’t remind you of our precarious financial prospects …”
He said this forgetting the fact that he reminded us daily—sometimes twice in an hour—of our dwindling reserves. Buckshaw had belonged to Harriet, and when she had died without leaving a will (Who, after all, could even imagine that someone so brimming over with life could meet her end on a mountain in far-off Tibet?) the troubles had begun. For ten years now, Father had been going through the courtly steps of the “Dance of Death,” as he called it, with the gray men from His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue.
Yet in spite of the mounting pile of bills on the foyer table, and in spite of the increasing telephonic demands from coarse-voiced callers from London, Father had somehow managed to muddle through.
Once, because of his phobia about “the instrument,” as he called the telephone, I had answered one of these brash calls myself, bringing it to rather an amusing end by pretending to speak no English.
When the telephone had jangled again a minute later, I picked up the receiver at once, then jiggled my finger rapidly up and down on the cradle.
“Hello?” I had shouted. “Hello? Hello? I’m sorry—Can’t hear you. Frightful connection. Call back some other day.”
On the third ring, I had taken the receiver off the hook and spat into the mouthpiece, which began at once to give off an alarming crackling noise.
“Fire,” I had said in a dazed and vaguely monotonous voice. “The house is in flames … the walls and the floor. I’m afraid I must ring off now. I’m sorry, but the firemen are hacking at the window.”
The bill collector had not called back.
“My meetings with the Estate Duties Office,” Father was saying, “have come to nothing. It is all up with us now.”
“But Aunt Felicity!” Daffy protested. “Surely Aunt Felicity—”
“Your aunt Felicity has neither the means nor the inclination to alleviate the situation. I’m afraid she’s—”
“Coming down for Christmas,” Daffy interrupted. “You could ask her while she’s here!”
“No,” Father said sadly, shaking his head. “All means have failed. The dance is over. I have been forced at last to give up Buckshaw—”
I let out a gasp.
Feely leaned forward, her brow furrowed. She was chewing at one of her fingernails: unheard of in someone as vain as she.
Daffy looked on through half-shut eyes, inscrutable as ever.
“—to a film studio,” Father went on. “They will arrive in the week before Christmas, and will remain in full possession until their work is complete.”
“But what about us?” Daffy asked. “What’s to become of us?”
“We shall be allowed to remain on the premises,” Father replied, “provided we keep to our quarters and don’t interfere in any way with the company’s work at hand. I’m sorry, but those were the best terms I could manage. In return, we shall receive, in the end, sufficient remuneration to keep our noses above water—at least until next Lady Day.”
I should have suspected something of the kind. It was only a couple of months since we had received a visitation from a pair of young men in scarves and flannels who had spent two days photographing Buckshaw from every conceivable angle, inside and out. Neville and Charlie, they were called, and Father had been exceedingly vague about their intentions. Supposing it to be just another photo visit from Country Life, I had put it out of my mind.
Now Father had been drawn again to the window, where he stood gazing out upon his troubled estate.
Feely got to her feet and strolled casually to the looking glass. She leaned in, peering closely at her own reflection.
I knew already what was on her mind.
“Any idea what it’s about?” she asked in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. “The film, I mean.”
“Another one of those blasted country house things, I believe,” Father replied, without turning round. “I didn’t bother to ask.”
“Any big names?”
“None that I recognize,” Father said. “The agent rattled on and on about someone named Wyvern, but it meant nothing to me.”
“Phyllis Wyvern?” Daffy was all agog. “Not Phyllis Wyvern?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Father said, brightening, but only a little. “Phyllis. The name rang a bell. Same name as the chairwoman of the Hampshire Philatelic Society.
“Except that her name is Phyllis Bramble,” he added, “not Wyvern.”
“But Phyllis Wyvern is the biggest film star in the world,” Feely said, openmouthed. “In the galaxy!”
“In the universe,” Daffy added solemnly. “The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter—she played Minah Kilgore, remember? Anna of the Steppes … Love and Blood … Dressed for Dying … The Secret Summer. She was supposed to have played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but she choked on a peach pit the night before her screen test and couldn’t speak a word.”
Daffy kept up to date on all the latest cinema gossip by speed-reading magazines at the village newsagent’s shop.
“She’s coming here to Buckshaw?” Feely asked. “Phyllis Wyvern?”
Father had given the ghost of a shrug and returned to staring glumly out the window.
I hurried down the east staircase. The dining room was in darkness. As I walked into the kitchen, Daffy and Feely looked up sourly from their porridge troughs.
“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Mrs. Mullet. “We was just talkin’ about sendin’ up a search party to see if you was still alive. ’Urry along now. Them fillum people will be ’ere before you can say ‘Jack Robertson.’ ”
I bolted my breakfast (clumpy porridge and burnt toast with lemon curd) and was about to make my escape when the kitchen door opened and in came Dogger on a rush of cold, fresh air.
“Good morning, Dogger,” I said. “Are we picking out a tree today?”
For as long as I could remember, it had been a tradition for my sisters and me, in the week before Christmas, to accompany Dogger into the wood on Buckshaw’s eastern outskirts, where we would gravely consider this tree and that, awarding each one points for height, shape, fullness, and general all-round character before finally selecting a champion.
Next morning, as if by magic, the chosen tree would appear in the drawing room, set up securely in a coal scuttle and ready for our attentions. All of us—except Father—would spend the day in a blizzard of antique tinsel, silver and gold garlands, colored glass balls, and little angels tooting pasteboard trumpets, hovering as long as we could over our small tasks until late in the darkening afternoon when, reluctantly, the thing was done.
Because it was the single day of the year upon which my sisters were a little less beastly to me than usual, I looked forward to it with barely suppressed excitement. For a single day—or for a few hours at least—we would be carefully civil to one another, teasing and joking and sometimes even laughing together, as if we were one of those poor but cheerful families from Dickens.
I was already smiling in anticipation.
“I’m afraid not, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “The Colonel has given orders for the house to be left as is. Those are the wishes of the film people.”
“Oh, bother the film people!” I said, perhaps too loudly. “They can’t keep us from having Christmas.”
But I saw at once by the sad look on Dogger’s face that they could.
“I shall put up a little tree in the greenhouse,” he said. “It will keep longer in the cool air.”
“But it won’t be the same!” I protested.
“No, it won’t,” Dogger agreed, “but we shall have done our best.”
Before I could think of a reply, Father came into the kitchen, scowling at us as if he were a bank manager and we a group of renegade depositors who had somehow managed to breach the barriers before opening time.
We all of us sat with eyes downcast as he opened his London Philatelist and turned his attention to spreading his charred toast with pallid white margarine.
“Nice fresh snow overnight,” Mrs. Mullet remarked cheerily, but I could see by her worried glance towards the window that her heart was not in it. If the wind kept blowing as it was, she would have to wade home through the drifts when her day’s work was done.
Of course, if the weather were too severe, Father would have Dogger ring up for Clarence Mundy’s taxicab—but with a stiff winter crosswind, it was always touch and go whether Clarence could plow through the deep piles that invariably drifted in between the gaps in the hedgerows. As all of us knew, there were times when Buckshaw was accessible only on foot.
When Harriet was alive, there had been a sleigh with bells and blankets—in fact, the sleigh itself still stood in a shadowy corner of the coach house, behind Harriet’s Rolls-Royce Phantom II, each of them a monument to its departed owner. The horses, alas, were long gone: sold at auction in the wake of Harriet’s death.
Something rumbled in the distance.
“Listen!” I said. “What was that?”
“Wind,” Daffy replied. “Do you want that last piece of toast, or shall I have it?”
I grabbed the slice and gobbled it down dry as I dashed for the foyer.
• TWO •
A BLAST OF COLD air blew a flurry of freezing flakes into my face as I tugged open the heavy front door. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering, and squinted out at the winter world.
In the first bleak light of day, the landscape was a black-and-white photograph, the vast expanses of the snowy lawn broken only by the ink-black silhouettes of the stark, leafless chestnut trees that lined the avenue. Here and there on the lawns, white-capped bushes bent towards the earth, cringing under their heavy loads.
Because of the blowing snow, it was impossible to see as far as the Mulford Gates, but something out there was moving.
I wiped the condensation from my eyes and looked again.
Yes! A small spot of pale color—and then another—had appeared upon the landscape! In the lead was an immense pantechnicon, its scarlet color growing ever more vivid as it came growling towards me through the falling snow. Lumbering along in its wake like a procession of clockwork elephants was a string of lesser vans … two … three … four … five … no, six of them!
As the pantechnicon made its slow, stiff-jointed final turn into the forecourt, I could clearly make out the name on the side: Ilium Films, it said, in bold cream and yellow letters, painted as if in three dimensions. The lesser lorries were similarly marked, but still impressive as they pulled up in a herd around their leader.
The door of the pantechnicon swung open and a massive sandy-haired man climbed down. He was dressed in a bib overall, with a flat cap on his head and a red handkerchief wrapped round his neck.
As he crunched towards me through the snow, I was suddenly aware of Dogger at my side.
“S’truth,” the man said, wincing at the wind.
With a disbelieving shake of his head, he approached Dogger, sticking out a raw, meaty hand.
“McNulty,” he said. “Ilium Films. Transport Department. Jack-of-all-trades and master of ’em all.”
Dogger shook the huge hand but said nothing.
“Need to get this circus round back the house and out of the north wind. Fred’s generator cuts up something fierce when it gets too cold. Needs coddling, Fred’s generator does.
“What’s your name, little girl?” he asked suddenly, turning to me and crouching down. “Margaret Rose, I’ll bet. Yes, that’s it … Margaret Rose. You’re a Margaret Rose if I ever saw one.”
I had half a mind to march upstairs to my laboratory, fetch down a jar of cyanide, seize this boob’s nose, tilt his head back, pour the stuff down his throat, and hang the consequences.
Fortunately, good breeding kept me from doing so.
Margaret Rose, indeed!
“Yes, that’s right, Mr. McNulty,” I said, forcing a smile of amazement. “Margaret Rose is my name. However did you guess?”
“It’s the sixth sense I’m gifted with,” he said, with what looked like a practiced shrug. “Me Irish blood,” he added, putting on a bit of the old brogue, and giving me a saucy tip of his cloth cap as he stood up.
“Now, then,” he said, turning to Dogger, “their lordships and ladyships will be along at noon in their motorcars. They’ll be hungry as hounds after the drive down from London, so look sharp and see that you’ve got buckets of caviar laid on.”
Dogger’s face was a total blank.
“Here, I’m only joking, mate!” McNulty said, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to dig Dogger in the ribs.
“Joking, see? We travel with our own canteen.”
He gave a jerk of his thumb to indicate one of the vans that sat patiently waiting in the forecourt.
“Joking,” Dogger said. “I understand. If you’ll be so good as to remove your boots and follow me …”
As Dogger closed the door behind him, McNulty stopped and gaped at his surroundings. He seemed particularly in awe of the two grand staircases that led up to the first floor.
“S’truth!” he said. “Do people actually live like this?”
“So I am given to believe,” Dogger said. “This way, please.”
I tagged along as Dogger gave McNulty a whirlwind tour: dining room, firearms museum, Rose Room, Blue Room, morning room …
“The drawing room and the Colonel’s study are off limits,” Dogger said, “as has been previously agreed upon. I have affixed a small white circle to each of those doors as a reminder, so that there will be no breach of—their privacy.”
He had almost said “our privacy.” I was sure of it.
“I’ll pass the word,” McNulty said. “Should be no sweat. Our lot’s pretty clannish, as well.”
We made our way through to the east wing and into the portrait gallery. I was half expecting to find it as it had been in my dream: an icy, flooded wasteland. But the room remained as it had been since time immemorial: a long dim train shed of glowering ancestors who, with just a few exceptions (Countess Daisy, for instance, who was said to have greeted visitors to Buckshaw by turning handsprings on the roof in a Chinese silk smock) seemed to have subsided, one and all, into a collective and perpetual sulk that did not exactly gladden one’s heart.
“Use of the portrait gallery has been negotiated—” Dogger was saying.
“But none of yer ’obnail boots on the floor, mind!” a voice cut in. It was Mrs. Mullet.
Hands on hips, she gave McNulty her proprietary glare, then in a softer voice said:
“Beggin’ your pardon, Dogger, but the Colonel’s off now to London for ’is stamp meet. ’E wishes to see you about the tinned beef, an’ that, before ’e goes.”
“Tinned beef” was a code word meaning that Father needed to borrow money for train and taxi fare. I had discovered this by listening at the door of Father’s study. It was a fact I wished I didn’t know.
“Of course,” Dogger said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
And he vanished in the way he does.
“You’ll have to lay down some tarpaulings on that floor,” Mrs. Mullet told McNulty. “ ‘Par-key,’ they calls it: cherry wood, mahogany, walnut, birch—six different kinds of oak is in it. Can’t ’ave workmen tramplin’ all over the likes of that, can I?”
“Believe you me, Mrs.…”
“Mullet,” said Mrs. Mullet. “With an ‘M.’ ”
“Mrs. Mullet. My name’s McNulty—also with an ‘M,’ by the way. Patrick McNulty. I can assure you that our crew at Ilium Films are hired for their fussy natures. In fact, I can confide in you—knowing it will go no further—that we’ve just come from shooting a scene inside a certain royal residence without one word of complaint from You-Know-Who.”
Mrs. M’s eyes widened.
“You mean—”
“Exactly,” McNulty said, putting a forefinger to his lips. “You’re a very shrewd woman, Mrs. Mullet. I can see that.”
She gave a flimsy smile, like the Mona Lisa, and I knew that her loyalty was bought. Whatever else he was, Patrick McNulty was as slick as nose oil.
Now Dogger was back, his face bland and capable, giving away nothing. I followed as he led the way upstairs and into the west wing.
“The room at the south end of the corridor is Miss Harriet’s boudoir. It is strictly private, and is not to be entered upon any account.”
He said this as if Harriet had just stepped out for a couple of hours to pay a social call in the county, or to ride with the Halstead-Thicket Hounds. He did not tell McNulty that my mother had been dead for ten years, and that her rooms had been preserved by Father as a shrine where no one, or so he thought, could hear him weeping.
“Understood,” McNulty said. “Over and out. I’ll pass it along.”
“The two bedrooms on the left belong to Miss Ophelia and Miss Daphne, who will share a room for the duration. Choose the one you wish to use as a setting and they’ll settle for the other.”
“Sporting of them,” McNulty said. “Val Lampman will be seeing to that. He’s our director.”
“All other bedrooms, sitting rooms, and dressing rooms, including those along the north front, may be assigned as you see fit,” Dogger went on, not batting an eye at the mention of England’s most celebrated cinema director.
Even I knew who Val Lampman was.
“I’d best be getting back to my crew,” McNulty said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “We’ll organize the lorries, then see to the unloading.”
“As you wish,” Dogger told him, and it seemed to me there was a touch of sadness in his voice.
We descended the stairs, McNulty openly running his fingers over the carved banister ends, craning his neck to gawk at the carved paneling.
“S’truth,” he muttered under his breath.
“You’ll never guess who’s directing this film!” I said, bursting into the drawing room.
“Val Lampman,” Daffy said in a bored voice, without looking up from her book. “Phyllis Wyvern doesn’t work with anyone else nowadays. Not since—”
“Since what?”
“You’re too young to understand.”
“No, I’m not. What about Boccaccio?” Daffy had recently been reading aloud to us at tea, selected tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron.
“That’s fiction,” she said. “Val Lampman is real life.”
“Says who?” I countered.
“Says Cinema World. It was all over the front page.”
“What was?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Flavia,” Daffy said, throwing down her book, “you grow more like a parrot every day: ‘Since what? Says who? What was?’ ”
She mimicked my voice cruelly.
“We ought to teach you to say ‘Who’s a pretty bird, then?’ or ‘Polly wants a biscuit.’ We’ve already ordered you a cage: lovely gold bars, a perch, and a water dish to splash about in—not that you’ll ever use it.”
“Sucks to you!”
“I deflect it back unto you,” Daffy said, holding out an invisible shield at arm’s length.
“And back to you again,” I said, duplicating her gesture.
“Ha! Yours is a brass shield. Brass doesn’t bounce sucks. You know that as well as I do.”
“Does!”
“Doesn’t!”
It was at this point that Feely intervened in what had been, until then, a perfectly civilized discussion.
“Speaking of parrots,” she said, “Harriet had a lovely parrot before you were born—a beautiful bird, an African Grey, called Sinbad. I remember him perfectly well. He could conjugate the Latin verb ‘amare’ and sing parts of ‘The Lorelei.’ ”
“You’re making this up,” I told her.
“Remember Sinbad, Daffy?” Feely said, laughing.
“ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck,’ ” Daffy said. “Poor old Sinby used to scramble up onto his perch as he squawked the words. Hilarious.”
“Then where is he now?” I demanded. “He should be still alive. Parrots can live more than a hundred years.”
“He flew away,” Daffy said, with a little hitch in her voice. “Harriet had spread a blanket on the terrace, taken you out for some fresh air. Somehow you managed to work loose the catch on the door of the cage, and Sinbad flew away. Don’t you remember?”
“I didn’t!”
Feely was looking at me with eyes which were no longer those of a sister.
“Oh, but you did. She often said afterwards that she wished it had been you who had flown away, and Sinbad who had stayed.”
I could feel the pressure rising in my chest, as if I were a steam boiler.
I said a forbidden word and walked stiffly from the room, vowing revenge.
There were times when a touch of the old strychnine was just the ticket.
I would go upstairs straight away to my chemical kitchen and prepare a delicacy that would have my hateful sisters begging for mercy. Yes, that was it! I would spice their egg salad sandwiches with a couple of grains of nux vomica. It would keep them out of decent company for a week.
I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang.
“Dash it all!” I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.
I trudged down from the landing and flung open the door angrily.
There, looking down his nose at me, stood a chauffeur in livery: light chocolate coat with corded trim, flared breeches tucked into tall tan leather boots, a peaked cap, and a pair of limp brown leather gloves held a little too casually in his perfectly manicured hands.
I didn’t like his attitude, and, come to think of it, he probably didn’t like mine.
“De Luce?” he asked.
I stood motionless, waiting for decency.
“Miss de Luce?”
“Yes,” I said grudgingly, peering round his body as if there might be others like him hiding in the bushes.
The pantechnicon and vans had gone from the forecourt. A maze of snowy tracks told me that they had been moved round to the back of the house. In their place, idling silently in little gusts of snow, was a black Daimler limousine, polished, like a funeral coach, to an unearthly shine.
“Come in and close the door,” I said. “Father’s not awfully keen on snowdrifts in the foyer.”
“Miss Wyvern has arrived,” he announced, drawing himself to attention.
“But—” I managed, “they weren’t supposed to be here until noon …”
Phyllis Wyvern! My mind was spinning. With Father away, surely I couldn’t be expected to …
I’d seen her on the silver screen, of course, not just at the Gaumont, but also at the little backstreet cinema in Hinley. And once, also, when the vicar had hired Mr. Mitchell, who operated Bishop’s Lacey’s photo studio, to run The Rector’s Wife in St. Tancred’s parish hall, hoping, I suppose, that the story would arouse a feeling of sympathy in our parish bosoms for his rat-faced—and rat-hearted—wife, Cynthia.
Of course, it had no such effect. Despite the fact that the film was so old and scratched and full of splices that it sometimes made the picture leap about on the screen like a jumping jack, Phyllis Wyvern had been magnificent in the role of the brave and noble Mrs. Willington. At the end, when the lights came up, even the projectionist was in tears, although he’d seen the thing a hundred times before.
Nobody gave Cynthia Richardson a second look, though, and I had seen her afterwards, in the darkness, slinking home alone through the graveyard.
But how does one talk, face-to-face, with a goddess? What does one say?
“I’ll ring for Dogger,” I said.
“I’ll see to it, Miss Flavia,” said Dogger, already at my elbow.
I don’t know how he does it, but Dogger always appears at precisely the right instant, like one of those figures that pops out of the door on a Swiss clock.
And suddenly he was walking towards the Daimler, the chauffeur slipping and sliding in front of him, trying to be the first to take hold of the car’s door handle.
Dogger won.
“Miss Wyvern,” he said, his voice coming clearly to my ears on the cold air. “On behalf of Colonel de Luce, may I welcome you to Buckshaw? It’s a pleasure to have you with us. The Colonel has asked me to express his regrets that he is not here to greet you.”
Phyllis Wyvern took Dogger’s extended hand and stepped out of the car.
“Watch your step, miss. The footing is treacherous this morning.”
I could see her every breath distinctly on the cold air as she took Dogger’s arm and floated towards the front door. Floated! There was no other word for it. In spite of the slick walkway, Phyllis Wyvern floated towards me as if she were a ghost.
“We weren’t expecting you until noon,” Dogger was saying. “I regret that the walkways have not yet been fully shoveled and ashes put down.”
“Think nothing of it, Mr.—”
“Dogger,” Dogger said.
“Mr. Dogger, I’m just a girl from Golders Green. I’ve managed in snow before and, I expect I shall manage again.
“Oops!” She giggled, pretending to slip and smiling up at him as she clung to his arm.
I couldn’t believe how tiny she was, her head barely level with his chest.
She wore a tight-fitting black suit with a white blouse with a black and yellow Liberty scarf, and, despite the grayness of the day, her complexion was like cream in a summer kitchen.
“Hullo!” she said, stopping in front of me. “I’ve seen this face before. You’re Flavia de Luce, if I’m not mistaken. I was hoping you’d be here.”
I stopped breathing and I didn’t care.
“Your photo was in the Daily Mirror, you know. That dreadful business about Stonepenny, or Bonepenny, or whatever he was called.”
“Bonepenny,” I said. “Horace Bonepenny.”
I had given my assistance to the police in that case when they were completely stymied.
“That’s it,” she said, sticking out a hand and seizing mine as if we were sisters. “Bonepenny. I keep up paid subscriptions to the Police Gazette and True Crime, and I never miss so much as a single issue of the News of the World. I simply adore reading about all the great murderers: the Brides in the Bath … the Islington Mumbler … Major Armstrong … Dr. Crippen … the stuff of great drama. Makes you think, doesn’t it? What, after all, would life be without puzzling death?”
Exactly! I thought.
“And now I think we should go inside and not keep poor Mr. Dogger standing out here in the cold.”
I glanced quickly at Dogger, but his face was as reflective as a millpond.
As she brushed past me, I couldn’t help thinking: I’m breathing the same air as Phyllis Wyvern!
My nostrils were suddenly filled with her scent: the odor of jasmine.
It had probably been concocted in some perfumery, I thought, from phenol and acetic acid. Phenol, or “benzanol,” I recalled, had been discovered in the mid-seventeenth century by a German chemist named Johann Rudolf Glauber, although it was not actually isolated until nearly two hundred years later by one of his countrymen, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who extracted it from coal tar and christened it “carbolic acid.” I had synthesized the extremely poisonous stuff myself by a process which involved the incomplete oxidation of benzene, and I remembered with pleasure that it was the most powerful embalming agent known to mankind: the stuff that is used whenever a body is required to last, and last, and last.
It was also to be found in certain of the Scotch whiskies.
Phyllis Wyvern had swept past me into the foyer and was now spinning round in a delighted circle.
“What a gloomy old place!” she said, clapping her hands together. “It’s perfect! Absolutely perfect!”
By now, the chauffeur had brought the luggage and was piling it inside the door.
“Just leave it there, Anthony,” she said. “Someone will see to it.”
“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he replied, making a great show of coming to attention. He almost clicked his heels.
There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what.
He stood there for a long moment, perfectly still, as if he were expecting a tip—or was he waiting to be asked in for a drink and a cigar?
“You may go,” she announced rather abruptly and the spell was broken. In an instant he was no more than a member of the chorus in The Chocolate Soldier.
“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he said, and as he turned away from her towards the door, I saw on his face a look of—what was it?—contempt?
• THREE •
“THIS ONE IS SUNNIER, miss,” Dogger was saying. “If you don’t mind, we shall put you in here until your assigned bedroom has been made ready.”
We had been looking at bedrooms, and had arrived at last at Feely’s.
Since we didn’t get much sun at this time of year, I guessed that Dogger could only be thinking of former days.
“It will do admirably,” Phyllis Wyvern said, drifting to the window. “View of a little lake—check … a romantic ruin—check … glimpses of the wardrobe van. What more could a leading lady ask?”
“May I unpack?” Dogger asked.
“No, thank you. Bun will take care of it. She’ll be along directly.”
“It’s no trouble, I assure you,” Dogger said.
“Most kind of you, Dogger, but no—I must insist. Bun is very possessive. She’d swear like blue lightning if she thought anyone else had laid hands on my belongings.”
“I understand,” Dogger said. “Will there be anything else? May I ask Mrs. Mullet to bring you a pot of tea?”
“Dogger, you are a treasure beyond rubies. I’d love nothing better. I’m going to slip into something more comfy and immerse myself in Val’s abominable script. It’s as much as your life is worth if one isn’t word perfect by the time the lights are set up.”
“Thank you, miss,” Dogger said, and was gone.
“Funny old stick,” she said. “He’s been with you forever, of course?”
“Father and Dogger were in the army together,” I said, bristling slightly.
“Ah, yes, companions-in-arms. Quite common nowadays, I understand. Tit for tat. You save my life now and I’ll save yours later. Perhaps you saw me in The Trench in the Drawing Room? Much the same plot.”
I shook my head.
At that instant the door flew open and Feely came rushing in.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. “I told you before what would happen if I caught you in my room again.”
She had not noticed Phyllis Wyvern standing at the window.
She made a grab for me.
“No!”
Feely spun round to see who had spoken. Her raised hand fell to her side, where it hung limply.
For a moment they stood there staring at each other, Feely as if she had been confronted by some ghastly specter, Phyllis Wyvern as she looked when she’d clung defiantly to the rain-lashed spire of the cathedral in the final moments of The Glass Heart.
Then Feely’s lower lip began to quiver, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears.
She turned and fled.
“So,” said Phyllis Wyvern after a long silence, “you have an older sister, too.”
“That was Feely,” I said. “She—”
“No need to explain. Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself!
“My sister’s the same,” she said. “Six years older?”
I nodded.
“Mine, too. I see we have a great deal more in common than a taste for horrific murder, Flavia de Luce.”
She came across the room and, putting a finger under my chin, raised my eyes to hers. And then she hugged me.
She actually hugged me, and I breathed in her jasmine—synthetic or not.
“Let’s go down to the kitchen for tea. It will save Mrs. Mullet a trip upstairs.”
I beamed at her. I almost took her hand.
“It will also,” she added, “give us a chance to pick up the latest gossip. Kitchens are hotbeds of scandal, you know.”
“Ohhhhh!” Mrs. Mullet said as we walked into the kitchen. Aside from that, and gaping a bit, she handled it quite well.
“We decided to come down to the Command Center,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
I could see that she had won Mrs. Mullet over—just like that.
“No, no, no,” she said breathlessly, “sit yourself down, miss. The water’s almost at the boil, and I’ve got a nice lardy cake comin’ out the oven.”
“Lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern exclaimed, putting her hands in front of her eyes and peeking out through her fingers. “Good lord! I haven’t had lardy cake since I was in pigtails!”
Mrs. Mullet beamed.
“I makes ’em for Christmas, as did my mother before me, and ’er mother before ’er. Lardy cake runs in the family, so to speak.”
And so it did, but I wasn’t going to let the cat out of the bag.
“ ’Ere now,” she said, pulling the cake from the oven with a pair of pot holders and placing it on a wire rack. “Look at that. Almost good enough to eat!”
It was an old joke, and although I’d heard it a hundred times before, I laughed dutifully. There was more truth in it than Phyllis Wyvern knew, but I wasn’t going to spoil her treat. Who knew? She might even find the stuff edible.
If cooking were a game of darts, most of Mrs. Mullet’s concoctions would be barely on the board.
Mrs. Mullet sliced the cake into twelve pieces.
“Two for each soul in the ’ouse’old,” she proclaimed, with a glance at Dogger as he came into the kitchen. “That’s what they taught us up at Lady Rex-Wells’s place: ‘Two slices a soul, keeps you out of the ’ole.’ Meanin’ the grave, of course. The old lady said it meant everyone from ’erself right on down to the gardener’s boy. A reg’lar tartar she was, but she lived to be ninety-nine and a half, so there must be somethin’ in it.”
“What do you think, Dogger?” Phyllis Wyvern asked Dogger, who was taking his tea unobtrusively, standing in the corner.
“Good lard makes good bile. Good bile makes good digestion, which results in great longevity,” Dogger said rather tentatively, looking into his cup. “Or so I have heard.”
“And all because of a double helping of lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern said, clapping her hands together in delight. “Well, here’s to the second hundred years.”
She picked up her fork and lifted a morsel to her mouth, pausing halfway to give Mrs. Mullet a smile that must have cost someone a thousand guineas.
She chewed reflectively.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said, putting the fork down on her plate. “Oh, my goodness!”
Even her magnificent acting ability couldn’t suppress the little gag reflex I saw at her throat.
“I knew you’d like it,” Mrs. Mullet crowed.
“But I must be brutal and rein myself in,” Phyllis Wyvern said, pushing the plate roughly away and getting to her feet. “I tend to make a swine of myself when there’s cake to be had, and with lardy cake, it’s no more than a day from lips to hips. I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Mrs. Mullet lifted the plate away and placed it a little too carefully behind the sink.
I knew without a doubt that she would take the slice of cake home, wrap it in gift paper, and put it in her china cabinet between the china-dog salt and peppers marked “A Present From Blackpool” and the slender glass bird that bobbed up and down as it sipped water from a tube.
When her friend Mrs. Waller came to visit, Mrs. Mullet would reverently unwrap the moldy relic. “You’ll never guess ’oo ate the missin’ bit of this,” she would say in a hushed voice. “Phyllis Wyvern! Look—you can still see ’er teeth marks. Just a peek, mind—quick, so’s it doesn’t go stale.”
The doorbell rang and Dogger put down his tea.
“That will be Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said, with a wry grin. “She’ll claim to have missed her connection from Paddington. She always does.”
“I’ll fix ’er a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Mullet said. “The train always makes your stomach go all skew-gee—at least it does mine.
“Gives me the dire-rear,” she whispered in my ear.
In a moment, Dogger was back, followed by a round little woman with iron-rimmed spectacles, her hair tied back in a large tight ball like the tail of the horse, Ajax, that had once been owned by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Both of them, Florizel and Ajax, immortalized in oils, now hung side by side in the portrait gallery.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Wyvern,” the little woman said. “The taxicab took a wrong turning and I missed my connection at Paddington.”
Phyllis Wyvern looked round triumphantly at each of us, but she said nothing.
I felt rather sorry for the little creature, who, now that I thought about it, looked like a flustered cannonball.
“I’m Bun Keats, by the way,” the woman said, giving a jerk of the head to each of us in the room. “Miss Wyvern’s personal assistant.”
“Bun’s my dresser—but she has even greater aspirations,” Phyllis Wyvern said in a haughty, theatrical voice, and I could not tell if she was teasing.
“Hurry along now, Bun,” she added. “Spit-spot! My wardrobe wants unpacking. And if my pink dress is wrinkled again, I’ll cheerfully strangle you.”
She said this pleasantly enough but Bun Keats did not smile.
“Are you related to the poet, Miss Keats?” I blurted, anxious to lighten the moment.
Daffy had once read me “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I’d never forgotten the part about drinking hemlock.
“Distantly,” she said, and then she was gone.
“Poor Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “The more she tries—the more she tries.”
“I’ll give her a hand,” Dogger said, moving towards the door.
“No!”
For an instant—but only for an instant—Phyllis Wyvern’s face was a Greek mask: her eyes wide and her mouth twisted. And then, almost at once, her features subsided into a carefree smile, as if the moment hadn’t happened.
“No,” she repeated quietly. “Don’t do that. Bun must have her little lesson.”
I tried to catch Dogger’s eye, but he had moved away and begun rearranging tins in the butler’s pantry.
Mrs. Mullet turned busily to polishing the covers on the Aga cooker.
As I trudged upstairs, the house seemed somehow colder than before. From the tall, uncurtained windows of my laboratory, I looked down upon the vans of Ilium Films, which were clustered, like elephants at a watering hole, round the red brick walls of the kitchen garden.
The crew members were going about their work in a well-rehearsed ballet, lifting, shifting, unloading rope-handled shipping boxes: always a pair of hands in the right place at the right time. It was easy to see that they had done this many times before.
I warmed my hands over the welcoming flame of a Bunsen burner, then brought a beaker of milk to a bubbling boil and stirred in a good dollop of Ovaltine. At this time of year, no refrigerator was required to keep milk chilled: I simply kept the bottle on a shelf, alphabetically, between the manganese and the morphine, the latter bottle neatly labeled in Uncle Tarquin’s spidery handwriting.
Uncle Tar had been given the gate under mysterious circumstances just before taking a double first at Oxford. His father, by way of compensation, had built the remarkable chemistry laboratory at Buckshaw in which Uncle Tar had spent, by choice, the remainder of his days, conducting what was said to be top-secret research. Among his papers I had discovered several letters that suggested he had been both friend and advisor to the young Winston Churchill.
As I sipped at the Ovaltine, I shifted my gaze to the painting that hung above the mantelpiece: a beautiful young woman with two girls and a baby. The girls were my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. I was the baby. The woman, of course, was my mother, Harriet.
Harriet had secretly commissioned the work as a gift for Father just before setting out on what was to become her final journey. The painting had lain for ten years, almost forgotten, in an artist’s studio in Malden Fenwick, until I had discovered it there and brought it home.
I’d made happy plans to hang the portrait in the drawing room: to stage a surprise unveiling for Father and my sisters. But my scheme was thwarted. Father had caught me smuggling the bulky painting into the house, taken it away from me, and removed it to his study.
Next morning I had found it hanging in my laboratory.
Why? I wondered. Did Father find it too painful to look upon his blighted family?
There was no doubt that he had loved—and still loved—Harriet, but it sometimes seemed that my sisters and I were no more to him than ever-present reminders of what he had lost. To Father we were, Daffy had once said, a three-headed Hydra, each one of our faces a misty mirror of his past.
Daffy’s a romantic, but I knew what she meant: We were fleeting images of Harriet.
Perhaps that was why Father spent his days and nights among his postage stamps: surrounded by thousands of companionable, comforting, unquestioning countenances, not one of which, like those of his daughters, mocked him from morning till night.
I had thought about these things until my brains were turning blue, but I still didn’t know why my sisters hated me so much.
Was Buckshaw some grim training academy into which I had been dumped by Fate to learn the laws of survival? Or was my life a game, whose rules I was supposed to guess?
Was I required to deduce the secret ways in which they loved me?
I could think of no other reason for my sisters’ cruelty.
What had I ever done to them?
Well, I had poisoned them, of course, but only in minor ways—and only in retaliation. I had never, or at least hardly ever, begun a row. I had always been the innocent—
“No! Watch it! Watch it!”
A scream went up outside the window—harsh at first, and agonized, then quickly cut off. I flew to the window and looked out to see what was happening.
Workers were flocking round a figure that was pinned against the side of a lorry by an upended packing case.
I knew by the red handkerchief at his neck that it was Patrick McNulty.
Down the stairs I ran, through the empty kitchen and out onto the terrace, not even bothering to throw on a coat.
Help was needed. No one among the ciné crew would know where to turn for assistance.
“Keep back!” one of the drivers said, seizing me by the shoulders. “There’s been an accident.”
I twisted away from him and pressed in for a closer look.
McNulty was in a bad way. His face was the color of wet dough. His eyes, brimming with water, met mine, and his lips moved.
“Help me,” I think he whispered.
I put my first and fourth fingers into the corners of my mouth and blew a piercing whistle: a trick I had learned by watching Feely.
“Dogger!” I shouted, followed by another whistle. I put my heart and soul into it, praying that Dogger was within earshot.
Without taking his eyes from mine, McNulty let out a sickening gasp.
Two of the men were heaving at the crate.
“No!” I said, louder than I had intended. “Leave it.”
I had heard on the wireless—or had I read it somewhere?—about an accident victim who had bled to death when a railway crane had been moved away too soon from his legs.
To my surprise, the larger of the men nodded his head.
“Hold on,” he said. “She’s right.”
And then Dogger was there, pushing through the gathering crowd.
The men fell back instinctively.
There was an aura about Dogger that brooked no nonsense. It was not always in evidence—in fact, most of the time, it was not.
But at this particular moment, I don’t think I had ever felt this power of his—whatever it was—so strongly.
“Take my hand,” Dogger told McNulty, reaching between the lorry and the packing case, which was now teetering precariously.
It seemed to me an odd—almost biblical—thing to do. Perhaps it was the calmness of his voice.
McNulty’s bloodied fingers moved, and then entwined themselves with Dogger’s.
“Not too hard,” Dogger told him. “You’ll crush my hand.”
A sick, silly grin spread across McNulty’s face.
Dogger unfastened the top half of McNulty’s heavy jacket, then worked his hand slowly into the sleeve. His long arm slid along McNulty’s arm, feeling its way, inch by inch along the space between the upended case and the lorry.
“You told me you were master of many trades, Mr. McNulty,” Dogger said. “Which ones, in particular?”
It seemed rather an odd question to ask, but McNulty’s eyes shifted slowly from mine to Dogger’s.
“Carpentry,” he said through gritted teeth. It was easy to see that the man was in terrible pain. “Electrical … plumbing … drafting …”
Cold sweat stood out in globules on his brow.
“Yes?” Dogger asked, his arm steadily at work between the heavy box and the lorry. “Any more?”
“Bit of tool making,” McNulty went on, then added, almost apologetically, “I have a metal lathe at home …”
“Indeed!” Dogger said, looking surprised.
“… to make model steam engines.”
“Ah!” Dogger said. “Steam engines. Railway, agricultural, or stationary?”
“Stationary,” McNulty said through gritted teeth. “I fit them up with … little brass whistles … and regulators.”
Dogger removed the handkerchief from McNulty’s neck, twisting it quickly and tightly about the upper part of the trapped arm.
“Now!” he said briskly, and a hundred willing hands, it seemed, were suddenly gripping the packing case.
“Easy, now! Easy! Steady on!” the men told one another—not because the words were needed, but as if they were simply part of the ritual of shifting a heavy object.
And then quite suddenly they had lifted the crate away with no more effort than if it had been a child’s building block.
“Stretcher,” Dogger called, and one was brought forward instantly. They must carry these things with them wherever they go, I thought.
“Bring him into the kitchen,” Dogger said, and in less time than it takes to tell, McNulty, wrapped in a heavy blanket, was raising himself on his good elbow from the kitchen floor, sipping at the cup of hot tea that was in Mrs. Mullet’s hand.
“Chip-chip,” he said, giving me a wink.
“And now, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “if you wouldn’t mind giving Dr. Darby a call …”
“Um,” Dr. Darby said, fishing with two fingers for a crystal mint in the paper bag he always carried in his waistcoat pocket.
“Let’s get you to the hospital where I can have a decent look at you. X-rays, and all that. I’ll take you myself, since I’m going that way anyway.”
McNulty was now getting up painfully from a chair at the kitchen table, his arm and hand in a sling, bandaged from shoulder to knuckles.
“I can manage,” he growled, as many hands reached out to help him.
“Put your arm round my shoulder,” Dr. Darby told him. “The good people here will understand there’s nothing in it.”
Crammed together in a corner of the kitchen, the men from the film studio laughed loudly at this, as if the doctor had made a capital joke.
I watched as McNulty and Dr. Darby moved cautiously through to the foyer.
“Now we’re for it,” one of the men grumbled when they had gone. “How’re we to get on without Pat?”
“It’ll be Latshaw, then, won’t it?” said another.
“I suppose.”
“God help us, then,” said the first, and he actually spat on the kitchen floor.
Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed how cold I was. I gave a belated shiver, which didn’t escape the notice of Mrs. Mullet as she came bustling in from the pantry.
“Upstairs with you, dear, and into an ’ot bath. The Colonel’ll be fair cobbled to come ’ome and find you been out gallivantin’ in the snow nearly naked, so to speak. ’E’ll ’ave Dogger’s and my ’eads on a meat platter. Now off you go.”
• FOUR •
AT THE BOTTOM OF the stairs, I was taken with a sudden but brilliant idea.
Even in summer, taking a bath in the east wing was like a major military campaign. Dogger would have to lug buckets of water from either the kitchen or the west wing to fill the tin hipbath in my bedroom, which would afterwards have to be bailed out, and the bathwater disposed of by dumping it down a WC in the west wing or one of the sinks in my laboratory. Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.
Besides, I had never really liked the idea of dirty bathwater being brought into my sanctum sanctorum. It seemed somehow blasphemous.
The solution was simple enough: I would bathe in Harriet’s boudoir.
Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
Harriet’s suite had an antique slipper bathtub, draped with a tall and gauzy white canopy. Like an elderly railway engine, the thing was equipped with any number of interesting taps, knobs, and valves with which one could adjust the velocity and the temperature of the water.
It would make bathing almost fun.
I smiled in anticipation as I walked along the corridor, happy in the thought that my chilled body would soon be immersed to the ears in hot suds.
I stopped and listened at the door—just in case.
Someone inside was singing!
“O for the wings, for the wings of a dove!
Far away, far away, would I rove!
In the wilderness build me a nest …”
I edged the door open and slipped inside.
“Is that you, Bun? Fetch me my robe, will you? It’s on the back of the door. Oh, and while you’re at it, a nice drinksie-winksie would be just what the doctor ordered.”
I stood perfectly still and waited.
“Bun?”
There was a faint, yet detectable note of fear in her voice.
“It’s me, Miss Wyvern … Flavia.”
“For God’s sake, girl, don’t lurk like that. Are you trying to frighten me to death? Come in here where I can see you.”
I showed myself around the half-open door.
Phyllis Wyvern was up to her shoulders in steaming water. Her hair was piled on top of her head like a haystack in the rain. I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t look at all like the woman I’d seen on the cinema screen. For one thing, she was wearing no makeup. For another, she had wrinkles.
I felt, to be perfectly honest, as if I’d just walked in on a witch in mid-transformation.
“Put the lid down,” she said, pointing to the toilet. “Have a seat and keep me company.”
I obeyed at once.
I hadn’t the heart—the guts, actually—to tell her that Harriet’s boudoir was off-limits. But then, of course, she had no way of knowing that. Dogger had explained the ground rules to Patrick McNulty before she’d arrived. McNulty was now on his way to the hospital in Hinley, and probably hadn’t had time to pass along the message.
Part of me watched the rest of me being in awe of the most famous movie star in the world … the galaxy … the universe!
“What are you staring at?” Phyllis Wyvern asked suddenly. “My puckers?”
For once, I couldn’t think of a diplomatic answer.
I nodded.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked, picking up a long cigarette holder from the edge of the tub. The smoke had been invisible in the steam.
I thought carefully before answering. Too low a number would indicate flattery; too high could result in disaster. The odds were against me. Unless I hit it dead-on, I couldn’t win.
“Thirty-seven,” I said.
She blew out a jet of smoke like a dragon.
“Bless you, Flavia de Luce,” she said. “You’re bang on! Thirty-seven-year-old stuffing in a fifty-nine-year-old sausage casing. But I’ve still got some spice in me.”
She laughed a throaty laugh, and I could see why the world was in love with her.
She plunged a pudding-sized bath sponge into the water, then squeezed it over her head. The water streamed down her face and dribbled off her chin.
“Look! I’m Niagara Falls!” she said, making a silly face.
I couldn’t help myself: I laughed aloud.
And then she stood up.
At that very instant, as if in a scene from one of those two-act comedies the St. Tancred’s Amateur Dramatic Society put on at the parish hall, a loud voice in the outer room said, “What in blue blazes do you think you’re doing?”
It was Feely.
She came storming—there’s no other way to express it—storming into the room.
“You know as well as I do, you, you filthy little swine, that no one is allowed—”
Naked, except for a few soap bubbles, Phyllis Wyvern stood staring at Feely through the swirling steam.
Time, for an instant, was frozen.
I was seized by the mad thought that I’d been suddenly thrust into Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, but I quickly rejected it: Even though Feely’s expression was rather like the “I’ll-huff-and-I’ll-puff” look on the face of the wind god, Zephyrus, Phyllis Wyvern was no Venus—not by a long chalk.
Feely’s face was turning the color of water in which beets have been boiled.
“I … I …
“I beg your pardon,” she said, and I could have cheered! Even in the rush of that bizarre moment, I couldn’t help thinking that it was the first time in Feely’s life she had ever uttered those words.
Like a courtier withdrawing from the Royal Presence, she backed slowly out of the room.
“Hand me my towel,” commanded the bare-naked queen, and stepped out of the bath.
“Oh, here you are,” Bun Keats said behind me. “The door was open, so I—”
She caught sight of me and shut her mouth abruptly.
“Well, well, well,” said Phyllis Wyvern. “The delinquent Bun condescends at last to grace us with her presence.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.”
“ ‘I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.’ God help us.”
She mimicked her assistant’s voice in the same cruel and cutting way that Daffy had mimicked mine, but in this case, though, the imitation was brilliant. Professional.
I realized at once that a great actress can never be greater than when she’s starring in her own life.
Tears sprang to Bun Keats’s eyes, but she bent over and began picking up soggy towels.
“I don’t think these rooms are part of the agreement, Miss Wyvern,” she said. “I’d already laid out your bath in the north wing.”
“Mop up this mess,” Phyllis Wyvern said, ignoring her. “Use the towels. There’s nothing worse than a wet floor. Someone could slip and break their neck.”
I took the opportunity to make myself scarce.
Outside, the weather had worsened. I watched from the drawing room window as the snow, driven by a merciless north wind, blurred the outlines of the vans and lorries. By late afternoon, the wind had lessened a little and the stuff was now coming straight down in the gathering dark.
I turned from the window to Daffy, who was sunk deep into an armchair, her legs dangling over the arms. She was reading Bleak House again.
“I love books where it’s always raining,” she had once told me. “So much like real life.” I wasn’t sure if this was one of her clever insults, so I did not reply.
“It’s snowing like stink outside,” I said.
“It always snows outside. Never inside,” she said without looking up from her book. “And don’t say ‘stink.’ It’s common.”
“Do you think Father will make it home from London?”
Daffy shrugged. “If he does, he does. If he doesn’t, he can bunk over the night at Aunt Felicity’s. She doesn’t usually charge him more than a couple of quid for bed and breakfast.”
She reversed herself in the chair, making it clear that the conversation was at an end.
“I met Phyllis Wyvern this morning,” I said.
Daffy did not reply, but I saw that her eyes had stopped moving across the page. At least I had her attention.
“I talked to her while she was bathing,” I confided. I did not mention that this had taken place in Harriet’s boudoir. Whatever I was, I wasn’t a rat.
There was no response.
“Aren’t you interested, Daffy?”
“There’s time enough to meet these thespians later. They always put on a dog and pony show before the actual filming begins. A grace and favor thing. They call it ‘yakking up the yokels.’ Someone will take us round and show us all the ciné gear and tell us what a bloody marvel it is. Then they’ll introduce us to the actors, beginning with the boy who plays the hero as a child and falls through the ice, and ending with Phyllis Wyvern herself.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
Daffy preened a little.
“I try to keep myself well informed,” she said. “Besides, they shot a couple of exteriors at Foster’s last year, and Flossie dished the dirt.”
“I wouldn’t expect there was much dirt if they were only shooting exteriors,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” Daffy said darkly, and went on with her reading.
At four-thirty, the doorbell rang. I had been sitting on the stairs watching the electricians as they snaked miles of black cable from the foyer to far-flung corners of the house.
Father had ordered us to keep to our quarters and not to interfere with the work at hand, and I was doing my best to obey. Since the eastern staircase led up to my bedroom and laboratory, it could be considered, technically at least, as part of my quarters, and I certainly had no intention of interfering with the ciné crew.
Several rows of chairs had been set up in the foyer as if a meeting were planned, and I threaded my way through them to see who was at the door.
With all the noise and bustle of the workmen, Dogger mustn’t have heard the bell.
I opened the door and there, to my surprise, amid the whirling snow, stood the vicar, Denwyn Richardson.
“Ah, Flavia,” he said, brushing the flakes from his heavy black coat and stamping his galoshes like a cart horse’s feet, “how lovely to see you. May I come in?”
“Of course,” I said, and as I stepped back from the door, a certain foreboding came over me. “It’s not bad news about Father, is it?”
Even as one of Father’s oldest and dearest friends, he seldom paid a visit to Buckshaw, and I knew that an unexpected vicar at the door could sometimes be an ominous sign. Perhaps there had been an accident in London. Perhaps the train had run off the tracks and overturned in a snowy field. If so, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be the first to hear it.
“Good lord, no!” the vicar said. “Your father’s gone up to London today, hasn’t he? Stamp meeting, or some such thing?”
Another thing about vicars was that they knew everyone’s business.
“Will you come in?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
As he stepped inside, the vicar must have seen me looking past him in astonishment at his tired old Morris Oxford, which sat in the forecourt looking remarkably spruce for its age, a layer of snow on the roof and bonnet giving it the appearance of an overly iced wedding cake.
“Winter tires plus snow chains,” he said in a confidential tone. “The secret of any truly successful ministry. The bishop tipped me off, but don’t tell anyone. He picked it up from the American soldiers.”
I grinned and slammed the door.
“Good lord!” he said, staring at the maze of cables and the forest of lighting fixtures. “I didn’t expect it to be anything like this.”
“You knew about it? The filming, I mean?”
“Oh, of course. Your father mentioned it quite some time ago … asked me to keep mum, though, and so, of course, I have. But now that the vast convoy has rolled through Bishop’s Lacey, and the caravanserai set up within the very grounds of Buckshaw, it can be a secret no longer, can it?
“I must admit to you, Flavia, that ever since I heard Phyllis Wyvern was to be here, in the flesh, so to speak, at Buckshaw, I’ve been making plans of my own. It’s not often that we’re gifted with so august … so luminous … a visitor and, well, after all, one must grind with whatever grist one is given—not that Phyllis Wyvern may be said to be grist in any sense of the word, dear me, no, but—”
“I met her this morning,” I volunteered.
“Did you indeed! Cynthia will be quite jealous to hear of it. Well, perhaps not jealous, but possibly just a tiny bit envious.”
“Is Mrs. Richardson one of Phyllis Wyvern’s fans?”
“No, I don’t believe so. Cynthia is, however, the cousin of Stella Ferrars, who, of course, wrote the novel Cry of the Raven, upon which the film is to be based. Third cousin, to be sure, but a cousin nonetheless.”
“Cynthia?” I could scarcely believe my ears.
“Yes, hard to believe, isn’t it? I can scarcely credit it myself. Stella was always the black sheep of the family, you know, until she married a laird, settled down in the heathered Highlands, and began cranking out an endless procession of potboilers, of which The Cry of the Raven is merely the latest. Cynthia had been hoping to pop by and give Miss Wyvern a few pointers on how the role of the heroine should be played.”
I almost went “Phhfft!” but I didn’t.
“And that’s why you’re here? To see Miss Wyvern?”
“Well, yes,” the vicar said, “but not on that particular topic. Christmas, as you’ve no doubt heard me say on more than one occasion, is always one of the greatest opportunities not only to receive but also to give, and I have been hoping that Miss Wyvern would see her way clear to re-create for us just a few scenes from her greatest triumphs—all in a good cause, of course. The Roofing Fund, for instance—dear me—”
“Would you like me to introduce you to her?” I asked.
I thought the dear man was going to break down completely. He bit his lip and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his glasses. When he realized he had forgotten to bring them with him, he blew his nose instead.
“If you please,” he said.
“I hope we won’t be intruding,” he added as we made our way up the stairs. “I hate to be a beggar but sometimes there’s really no choice.”
He meant Cynthia.
“Our last little venture was something of a bust, wasn’t it? So there’s all that much more to make up this time.”
Now he was referring, of course, to Rupert Porson, the late puppeteer, whose performance in the parish hall just a few months ago had been brought to an abrupt end by tragedy and a woman scorned.
Bun Keats was sitting in a chair at the top of the stairs, her head in her hands.
“Oh dear,” she said as I introduced her to the vicar. “I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I have the most awful migraine.”
Her face was as white as the crusted snow.
“How dreadful for you,” the vicar said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I can sympathize wholeheartedly. My wife suffers horribly from the same malady.”
Cynthia? I thought. Migraines? That would certainly explain a lot.
“She sometimes finds,” he went on, “that a warm compress helps. I’m sure the good Mrs. Mullet would be happy to prepare one.”
“I’ll be all right …” Bun Keats began, but the vicar was already halfway down the stairs.
“Oh!” she said, with a little cry. “I should have stopped him. I don’t mean to be any trouble, but when I’m like this I can hardly think straight.”
“The vicar won’t mind,” I told her. “He’s a jolly good sort. Always thinking of others. Actually, he came round to see if Miss Wyvern could be persuaded to put on a show to raise funds for the church.”
Her face, if it were possible, went even whiter.
“Oh, no!” she said. “He mustn’t ask her that. She has a bee in her bonnet about charities—dead set against them. Something from her childhood, I think. You’d best tell him that before he brings it up. Otherwise, there’s sure to be a most god-awful scene!”
The vicar was coming back up the stairs, surprisingly, taking them two at a time.
“Sit back, dear lady, and close your eyes,” he said in a soothing voice I hadn’t heard before.
“Miss Keats says Miss Wyvern is indisposed,” I told him, as he applied the compress to her brow. “So perhaps we’d better not mention—”
“Of course. Of course,” the vicar said.
I would invent some harmless excuse later.
A voice behind me said, “Bun? What on earth …?”
I spun round.
Phyllis Wyvern, dressed in an orchid-colored lounging outfit and looking as fit as all the fiddles in the London Philharmonic, was wafting along the corridor towards us.
“She’s suffering a migraine, Miss Wyvern,” the vicar said. “I’ve just fetched a compress …”
“Bun? Oh, my poor Bun!”
Bun gave a little moan.
Phyllis Wyvern snatched the compress away from the vicar and reapplied it with her own hands to Bun’s temples.
“Oh, my poor, dearest Bun. Tell Philly where it hurts.”
Bun rolled her eyes.
“Marion!” Phyllis Wyvern called, snapping her fingers, and a tall, striking woman in horn-rimmed glasses, who must once have been a great beauty, appeared as if from nowhere.
“Take Bun to her room. Tell Dogger to summon a doctor at once.”
As Bun Keats was led away, Phyllis Wyvern stuck out her hand.
“I’m Phyllis Wyvern, Vicar,” she said, clasping his hand in both of hers and giving it a little caress. “Thank you for your prompt attention. This has been a trying day all round: first poor Patrick McNulty, and now my dearest Bun. It’s most distressing—we’re all such a large, happy family, you know.”
I had a quick flash of déjà vu: Somewhere I’d seen this moment before.
Of course I had! It could have been a scene from any one of Phyllis Wyvern’s films.
“I am in your debt, Vicar,” she was saying. “If you hadn’t happened along, she might have taken a bad tumble on the stairs.”
She was dramatizing the situation: That wasn’t the way it had happened at all.
“If ever there’s anything I can do to show my gratitude, you’ve only to ask.”
And then it all came tumbling out of the vicar’s mouth—at least most of it. Fortunately he didn’t mention Cynthia’s coaching lessons.
“So you see, Miss Wyvern,” he finished up, “the roof has been more or less at risk since George the Fourth, and time is now of the essence. The verger tells me he’s been finding water in the font, of late, that wasn’t placed there for ecclesiastical purposes, and—”
Phyllis Wyvern touched his arm.
“Not another word, Vicar. I’d be happy to roll up my sleeves and pitch in. I’ll tell you what; I’ve just had the most marvelous idea. My co-star, Desmond Duncan, will be arriving this evening. You may recall that Desmond and I had some small success both in the West End and on film with our Romeo and Juliet. If Desmond’s game—and I’m sure he will be …”
She said this with a naughty wink and a twinkle.
“… then surely we shall be able to cobble something together to keep St. Tancred’s roof from caving in.”
• FIVE •
I’D BEEN SPENDING SO much time sitting halfway down the stairs that I was beginning to feel like Christopher Robin.
That’s where I was now, looking out across the crowded foyer, where several dozen of the film crew were gathered in little knots, talking. The only one I recognized was the woman called Marion, who had led Bun Keats away in the afternoon. Since Bun was nowhere in sight, I guessed she was still resting in her room.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” someone called out, clapping their hands for attention. “Ladies and gentlemen!”
The buzz of conversation stopped as abruptly as if it had been cut off with scissors.
A pale young man with sandy hair had made his way to the bottom of the staircase, climbed up a couple of steps, and turned to face the others.
“Mr. Lampman will address you now.”
A few discreet lights were brought up to compensate for Buckshaw’s antiquated electrical system.
From somewhere in the shadows behind them, a tiny middle-aged man made his appearance and, like a boy on a country road, strolled slowly and casually across the foyer as if he had all the time in the world. He was dressed, from the top down, in a rather battered olive-green fedora hat, a black roll-neck sweater, and black slacks.
In a different costume, Val Lampman might have passed for a leprechaun.
He turned and faced the others. I noticed that he didn’t ascend even one of the stairs.
“It’s nice to see so many of the old familiar faces—and a few new ones as well,” he said. “Among the latter is Tom Christie, our assistant director—”
He stopped to put his hand on the shoulder of a curly-haired man who had now come over to join him.
“—who will be seeing that everyone is zipped up and that none of you walk into walls.”
A small but polite laugh went up.
“As most of you know by now, we’re embarking under a bit of a handicap. Pat McNulty has suffered an unfortunate injury, and although I’m assured that he’s going to be all right, we’re just going to have to get on without his benevolent mother hen tactics, at least for the time being.
“Ben Latshaw will be in charge of technical crew until further notice, and I know you’ll extend him every courtesy.”
Heads swiveled, but I couldn’t see who they were looking at.
“I’d hoped to have a read-through of the first scene with Miss Wyvern and Mr. Duncan, but as he’s not arrived yet, we’ll substitute scene forty-two with the maid and the postman. Where are the maid and the postman? Ah! Jeannette and Clifford—good show. See Miss Trodd, and we’ll meet upstairs as soon as we’re finished here.”
Jeannette and Clifford made their way across the foyer towards the horn-rimmed Marion, who waved a clipboard in the air to guide them through the throng.
Marion Trodd—so that was her name.
“Val, darling! Sorry I’m late.”
The voice rang out like a crystal trumpet, bouncing from the polished paneling of the foyer.
Everyone turned to watch Phyllis Wyvern begin her descent from the landing of the west staircase. And what a descent it was: She had changed into a Mexican dancer’s costume: white frilled blouse and a skirt like the canopy of a seaside roundabout.
The only thing missing was a banana in her hair.
There was a smattering of light applause and a single wolf whistle at which she pretended to blush, fanning her cheeks with her hand.
She must be freezing in those short sleeves, I thought. Perhaps working under hot lights had made her immune to the English winter.
She paused once, to give a helpless little shrug and point her chin to the upper reaches of the house.
“Poor, dear Bun,” she said, in a suddenly solemn voice—a voice meant to carry. “I tried to get some soup into her, but she couldn’t keep it down. I’ve given her something to help her sleep.”
Arriving at the bottom of the stairs, she floated across the foyer, seized Val Lampman’s forearms, as if to keep him from touching her, and pecked at his cheek.
Even from where I sat, I could see that she missed him by a mile. She looked a little peeved, I thought, that he had stolen her thunder.
As they held each other at arm’s length, the front door opened and Desmond Duncan made his entry.
“Sorry, all,” he said in that voice of his that was known round the world. “Last matinee at the pantos. Command performance. Simply couldn’t bear to tear myself away from the poor dears.”
He was bundled up in some kind of heavy fur coat—buffalo or yak, I thought. On his head was a wide-brimmed floppy hat of the sort worn by artists on the Continent.
“Ted!” he said, patting one of the electricians on the back. “How’s the missus? Still collecting matchbooks? I’ve got one she might like to have—straight from the Savoy.
“Only two matches missing,” he added with a broad pantomime wink.
I had seen Desmond Duncan in a film whose name I have forgotten: the one about the little girl who hires a failed barrister to force her estranged parents to reconcile. I had also seen pictures of him in some of the fan magazines Daffy kept hidden at the bottom of her undies drawer.
He had a sharp, beaked nose, and a projecting chin, which gave him the profile of a thunderbolt: a profile that was probably instantly recognizable from Greenland to New Guinea.
A sudden gasp from above and behind me caused me to crane my neck and look up. I should have known! Daffy and Feely were peering through the balusters. They must be flat on their bellies on the floor.
Feely made shooing motions with her hands, indicating that I wasn’t to give away their presence by staring at them.
I bounded up the stairs and lay down on the floor between them. Daffy tried to pinch me, but I rolled away.
“Do that again and I’ll scream your name and your brassiere size,” I hissed, and she shot me a villainous look. Daffy had only recently begun to develop and was still shy about trumpeting the details.
“Look at them!” Feely whispered. “Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan—actually together here—at Buckshaw!”
I peered down through the railings just in time to see them touch fingertips—like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except that their respective clothing gave them the appearance, from above, of something more like a large bison coming face-to-face with a small pinwheel whirligig.
Desmond Duncan was now removing the bulky coat, which was taken instantly away by a little man who had been trailing him.
“Val!” he said loudly, looking round to take in the whole of the foyer. “You’ve done it again!”
By way of reply, Val Lampman smiled a tight smile and glanced almost too casually at his watch.
“Right, then,” he said. “All present and accounted for. Jeannette and Clifford, as you were. You may stand down. We’ll be taking the principals this evening, after all. First read-through tomorrow morning at seven-thirty, costumes at nine-fifteen. Miss Trodd will hand out the sheets in two hours’ time.”
“Now’s your chance,” Daffy whispered, nudging Feely. “Go ask him!”
In the foyer, the actors and crew were beginning to drift away, leaving Val Lampman alone at the bottom of the stairs jotting something in a notebook.
“No! I’ve changed my mind,” Feely said.
“Silly camel!” Daffy told her. “Do you want me to ask him? I will, you know.
“She’s going to be one of the extras,” Daffy whispered. “She’s got her heart set on it.”
“No!” Feely said. “Shush!”
“Oh, Mr. Lampman,” Daffy said, in quite a loud voice, “my sister—”
Val Lampman looked up into the shadows.
Feely punched Daffy on the upper arm. “Stop it!” she hissed.
I got up from the floor, gave my face a rub with the palm of my hand, adjusted my clothing, and walked down the stairs in a way that would have made Father proud.
“Mr. Lampman?” I said at the landing. “I’m Flavia de Luce, of the Buckshaw de Luces. My sister Ophelia is seventeen. She was hoping you’d be able to give her a small walk-on part.” I pointed. “That’s her up there peeking through the banister.”
Val Lampman shaded his eyes and looked up into the dim woodwork.
“Please show yourself, Miss de Luce,” he said.
Upstairs, Feely got to her knees, then to her feet, dusted herself off, and peered foolishly down over the railings.
There was an awkward silence. Val Lampman lifted his fedora and scratched his thin flaxen hair.
“You’ll do,” he said at last. “See Miss Trodd in the morning.”
The telephone rang in its cubicle beneath the stairs, and, although I couldn’t see him, I heard Dogger’s measured footsteps coming through from the kitchen to answer it. After a muffled conversation, he came out into view and spotted me on the stairs.
“That was the vicar,” he said. “Miss Felicity rang him to say that Colonel de Luce will be staying the night in London.”
It must be snowing like stink! I thought, rather uncharitably.
“Odd that Aunt Felicity didn’t telephone here,” I said.
“She’s been trying for more than an hour, but the line was engaged. She rang up the vicar instead. As it happens, he’s driving over to Doddingsley in the morning to pick up some extra holly for the church decorations. He’s kindly offered to meet Colonel de Luce and Miss Felicity at the railway station there and bring them to Buckshaw.”
“The holly and the ivy,” I caroled loudly, not caring that I was a little off-key.
“When they are both full grown,
Of all the poisons that are in the wood,
The holly wears the crown.”
Probably, I thought, because it contained theobromine, the bitter alkaloid that is also to be found in coffee, tea, and cocoa, and was first synthesized by the immortal German chemist Hermann Emil Fischer from human waste. The theobromine in the berries and leaves of the holly was just one of the cyanogenic glycosides, which, when chewed, release hydrogen cyanide. In what quantities, I had yet to determine, but just the thought of such a delicious experiment made the hairs on my forearms stand up in pleasure!
“You’re thinking of the ilicin,” Dogger said.
“Yes, I’m thinking of the ilicin. It’s an alkaloid in the holly leaves, and it causes diarrhea.”
“So I believe I have read somewhere,” Dogger said.
I could use the same batch of holly I’d dragged home to make the birdlime!
“You’d better watch out …” I sang, as I skipped upstairs with more than just the capture of Father Christmas in mind.
Wet, heavy flakes were falling straight down towards the earth, no two alike as they plummeted past the lighted window of my laboratory—yet all of them members of the same family.
In the case of snowflakes, the family’s name is H2O, known to the uninitiated as water.
Like all matter, water can exist in three states: At normal temperatures it’s a liquid. Heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes a gas; cooled below 32 degrees, it crystallizes and becomes ice.
Of the three, ice was my favorite state: Water, when frozen, was classified as a mineral—a mineral whose crystalline form, in an iceberg, for instance, was capable of mimicking a diamond as big as the Queen Elizabeth.
But add a bit of heat and poof!—you’re a liquid again, able to run easily, with only the assistance of gravity, into the most secret of places. Just thinking of some of the subterranean spots in which water has been makes my stomach tickle!
Then, raise the temperature enough, and Ali-kazam! you’re a gas—and suddenly you can fly.
If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is!
Hyponitric acid, for instance, is absolutely fascinating: At –4 degrees Fahrenheit, it takes the form of colorless prismatic crystals; warm it up to just 7 degrees and it becomes a clear liquid. At 30 degrees the liquid turns yellow and then orange, until at 82 degrees, it boils and becomes a brownish-red vapor: all within a range of no more than 86 degrees!
Stupendous, when you stop to think about it.
But getting back to my old friend water, the thing of it is this: No matter how hot or how cold, no matter its state, its form, its qualities, or its color, each molecule of water still consists of no more than a single oxygen atom bonded to two sister atoms of hydrogen. It takes all three of them to make a blinding blizzard—or a thunderstorm, for that matter … or a puffy white cloud in a summer sky.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
Later, in bed, I turned out the light and listened for a while to the distant sounds of people moving about, making last-minute preparations for the morning. Somewhere in the west wing they would still be adjusting their spotlights; somewhere Phyllis Wyvern would be boning up on her script.
But at last, after what seemed like a very long time, the day’s work was done and, with a last few reluctant creaks and groans, Buckshaw slept in the silence of the falling snow.
• SIX •
I AWAKENED TO THE sound of shoveling. Crikers! I must have overslept!
Leaping out from under the eiderdown, I struggled into my clothing before my flesh could freeze.
The world outside my bedroom windows was the sickly shade of an underdeveloped snapshot: a bruised black and white, under which lay an ever so slightly menacing tinge of purple, as if the sky were muttering “Just you wait!”
A few taunting flakes were still sifting down slowly like little white warning notes from the gods, shaking their tiny frozen fists as they fell past the window.
Half the film crew, it seemed, were at work clearing a maze of pathways between the vans and lorries.
I dug quickly through a pile of gramophone records (Daffy told me I had pronounced it “grampaphone” when I was younger) and, picking out the one I was looking for, dusted it on my skirt.
It was “Morning,” by Edvard Grieg, from his Peer Gynt suite: the same piece of music that Rupert Porson (deceased) had used at the parish hall last September to open his puppet performance of Jack and the Beanstalk.
It wasn’t my favorite piece of morning music, but it was infinitely better than “Let’s All Sing Like the Birdies Sing.” Besides, the disk had that lovely picture of the dog, his head tilted quizzically as he listens to his master’s voice coming out of a horn, not realizing that his master is behind him painting his picture.
I gave the gramophone a jolly good cranking and dropped the needle onto the surface of the spinning disk.
“La-la-la-LAH, la-la la-la, LAH-la-la-la,” I sang along, even putting the little hitches in the right places, until the end of the main melody.
Then, because it seemed to suit the bleakness of the day, I adjusted the control to reduce the speed, which made the music sound as if the entire orchestra had suddenly been overcome with nausea: as if someone had poisoned the players.
Oh, how I adore music!
I flopped limply round the room, sagging with the slowing music like a doll whose sawdust stuffing is pouring out, until the gramophone’s spring ran all the way down and I collapsed on the floor in a boneless heap.
“I hope you haven’t been getting underfoot,” Feely said. “Remember what Father told us.”
I let my tongue crawl slowly out of my mouth like an earthworm emerging after a rain, but it was a wasted effort. Feely didn’t take her eyes from the sheet of paper she was studying.
“Is that your part?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Let’s have a dekko.”
“No. It’s none of your business.”
“Come on, Feely! I arranged it. If you get paid, I want half.”
Daffy inserted a finger in Bleak House to mark her place.
“ ‘In BG, OOF, a maid places a letter on the table,’ ” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“That’s all?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It means that in the background, out of focus, a maid places a letter on the table. Just as it says.”
Feely was pretending to be preoccupied, but I could tell by the rising color of her throat that she was listening. My sister Ophelia is like one of those exotic frogs whose skin changes color involuntarily as a warning. In the frog, it’s trying to make you think that it’s poisonous. It’s much the same in Feely.
“Caramba!” I said. “You’ll be famous, Feely!”
“Don’t say ‘Caramba,’ ” she snapped. “You know Father doesn’t like it.”
“He’ll be home this morning,” I reminded her. “With Aunt Felicity.”
At that, a general glumness fell over the table and we finished our breakfasts in stony silence.
The down train from London was due at Doddingsley at five past ten. If Clarence Mundy had been picking them up in his taxicab, Father and Aunt Felicity would be at Buckshaw within half an hour. But today, allowing for the snow and the practiced funereal pace at which the vicar usually drove, it seemed likely to be well past eleven before they arrived.
It was, in fact, not until a quarter past one that the vicar’s Morris pulled up exhausted at the front door, piled like a refugee’s cart with various peculiarly shaped objects projecting from the windows and lashed to the roof. As soon as they climbed out of the car, I could tell that Father and Aunt Felicity had been quarreling.
“For heaven’s sake, Haviland,” she was saying, “anyone who can’t tell a chaffinch from a brambling ought not to be allowed to look out the window of a railway carriage.”
“I’m quite sure it was a brambling, Lissy. It had the distinctive—”
“Nonsense. Bring my bag, Denwyn. The one with the large brass padlock.”
The vicar seemed a bit surprised to be ordered about in such an offhanded manner, but he pulled the carpetbag from the backseat of the car and handed it to Dogger.
“Clever of you to think of winter tires and chains,” Aunt Felicity said. “Most ecclesiastics are dead washouts when it comes to motorcars.”
I wanted to tell her about the bishop, but I kept quiet.
Aunt Felicity bore down on the front door in her usual bulldog manner. Beneath her full-length motoring coat, I knew, she would be wearing her complete Victorian explorer’s regalia: two-piece Norfolk jacket and skirt, with extra pockets sewn in for scissors, pens, pins, knife, and fork (she traveled with her own: “You never know who’s eaten what with strange cutlery,” she was fond of telling us); several lengths of string, assorted elastics, a gadget for cutting the ends off cigars, and a small glass traveling container of Gentleman’s Relish: “You can’t find it since the war.”
“You see?” she said, stepping into the foyer and taking in the jungle of motion picture equipment at a glance. “It’s just as I told you. The ciné moguls have their hearts set on laying waste to every noble home in England. They’re Communists to the last man Jack. Who do they make their pictures for? ‘The People.’ As if the people are the only ones who need entertaining. Pfagh! It’s enough to make the heavenly hosts bring up their manna.”
I was glad she hadn’t said God, as that would have been blasphemous.
“Mornin’, Lissy!” someone called out. “Tryin’ to go straight, are you?” It was Ted, the same electrician Desmond Duncan had spoken to. He was occupied on a scaffold with an enormous light.
Aunt Felicity stifled an enormous sneeze, rummaging in her purse for a handkerchief.
“Aunt Felicity,” I asked incredulously, “do you know that man?”
“Ran into him somewhere during the war. Some people never forget a name or a face, you know. Quite remarkable. In the blackout, I daresay.”
Father pretended he hadn’t heard, and made straight for his study.
“If it was in the blackout,” I asked, “how could he see your face?”
“Impertinent children ought to be given six coats of shellac and set up in public places as a warning to others.” Aunt Felicity sniffed. “Dogger, you may take my luggage up to my room.”
But he had already done so.
“I hope they haven’t put me in the same wing of the house as those Communists,” she muttered.
But they had.
They’d given her the room next to Phyllis Wyvern’s.
Aunt Felicity had no sooner stumped off to her quarters than Phyllis Wyvern herself strolled casually into the foyer, script in hand, mouthing words as if she were memorizing some particularly difficult lines.
“My dear vicar.” She smiled as she spotted him lurking just inside the door. “How lovely to see you again.”
“The pleasure belongs to Bishop’s Lacey,” the vicar said. “It is not often that our sequestered little village is honored with a visitation of someone of … ah … such stellar magnitude. I believe the first Queen Elizabeth, in 1578, was the last such. There’s a brass plaque in the church, you know …”
It was easy to see that he’d said precisely the right thing. Phyllis Wyvern fairly purred as she replied.
“I’ve been giving some thought to your proposal …” she said, leaving a long pause, as if to suggest the vicar had asked her hand in marriage.
He went a little pink and smiled like a happy saint.
“… and decided that sooner is better than later. Poor Val is facing a couple of unforeseen difficulties: an injured wrangler, a missing camera, and now, I’m told, a frozen generator. We’re not likely to expose any film for a couple of days yet. I know it’s terribly short notice, but do you think you could arrange something for tomorrow?”
A shadow crossed the vicar’s face.
“Dear me,” he said, “I shouldn’t wish to seem ungrateful, but there are certain difficulties of a … ah … practical nature.”
“Such as?” she asked charmingly.
“Well, to be perfectly frank, the WC in the parish hall has gone for a burton. Which means, of course, that any public function is simply not on. Poor Dick Plews, our plumber, has been laid up with influenza for days now, and not likely to be up and about for quite some time. The poor dear man’s eighty-two, you know, and though he’s usually as chipper as a sparrow, this bitter cold …”
“Perhaps one of our technical people could—”
“Most kind of you, I’m sure, but I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it. Our furnace, too, has been baring its fangs. The Monster in the Basement, we call it. It’s a Deacon and Bromwell, made in 1851, and shown at the Great Exhibition—a great steel octopus of a thing with the temperament of a scorpion. Dick has been having an affair of the heart with the brute since he was no more than a lad at his father’s knee. He coddles it outrageously, but in recent years he’s been reduced to casting replacement parts by hand, and, well, you see …”
I hadn’t noticed him yet, but Father had come from his study and was standing quietly beside a pile of packing cases.
“Perhaps a solution is more closely at hand,” he said, coming forward. “Miss Wyvern, welcome to Buckshaw. I’m Haviland de Luce.”
“Colonel de Luce! What a pleasure to meet you at last! I’ve heard so much about you. I’m greatly indebted to you for so graciously opening your lovely home to us.”
Lovely home? Was she being facetious? I couldn’t tell.
“Not at all,” Father was saying. “We are all of us debtors in one way or another.”
There was an uneasy silence.
“I, for instance,” he went on, “am in the debt of my friend the vicar for fetching my sister and me from the train at Doddingsley. A most hazardous mission over treacherous roads, brought to a happy conclusion by his remarkable driving skills.”
The vicar muttered something about winter tires augmented with snow chains and then subsided to allow Father his time in the spotlight with Phyllis Wyvern.
They were still holding hands and Father was saying:
“Perhaps I may be allowed to offer the use of Buckshaw for your performance? It is, after all, only for an evening, and I’m sure it wouldn’t infringe upon our agreement if the foyer were cleared and set up with chairs for a few hours.”
“Splendid!” the vicar chimed in. “There’s room enough here for every soul in Bishop’s Lacey, man, woman, and child, with room left over for elbows. Come to think of it, it’s even more spacious than the parish hall. How odd that I didn’t think of it before! It’s too late for posters and handbills, but I’ll ask Cynthia to produce some tickets on the hectograph. But first things first. She’ll need to get the ladies of the Calling Circle organized to ring round the village and sign everyone up.”
“And I’ll have a word with our director,” Phyllis Wyvern said, letting go of Father’s hand at last. “I’m sure it will be all right. Val can’t say no to me in certain spheres, and I’ll see to it that this is one of them.”
She smiled charmingly but I noticed that both Father and the vicar looked away.
“Good morning, Flavia,” she said at last, but her acknowledgment of my presence came too late for my liking.
“Good morning, Miss Wyvern,” I said, and walked off coolly towards the drawing room with a kiss-my-nelly look on my face. I’d show her a thing or two about acting!
My eyes must have bugged out of their sockets. Dressed in the green silks she had worn when she played the part of Becky Sharp in the Dramatic Society’s production of Vanity Fair, Feely was standing in front of a small round table, putting down a letter, picking it up, and putting it down again.
She would do this most delicately, then with a jerk of hesitation—and then with a sudden thrust, as if she couldn’t stand the sight of the thing. She was rehearsing her appearance—or at least the appearance of one of her hands—in Cry of the Raven.
“I was chatting with Phyllis,” I said casually, stretching the facts a little. “She and Desmond Duncan are doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet on Saturday night, here in the foyer. For charity.”
“No one will come,” Daffy said sourly. “In the first place, it’s too close to Christmas. In the second, it’s too short notice. In the third, in case they haven’t thought of it, no one’s going anywhere in this weather without snow-shoes and a Saint Bernard.”
“Bet you’re wrong,” I said. “I’ll bet you sixpence the whole village turns out.”
“Done!” Daffy said, spitting on her palm and shaking my hand.
It was the first physical contact I’d had with my sister since the day, months before, that she and Feely had trussed me up and dragged me into the cellars for a candlelight inquisition.
I shrugged and walked to the door. A quick glance before leaving showed me that the hand of Becky Sharp was still mechanically picking up and putting down the letter like a clockwork wraith.
Although there was something pathetic about her actions, I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what it was.
Halfway along the corridor, I became aware of angry voices in the foyer. Naturally, I stopped to listen. I am both blessed and cursed with Harriet’s acute sense of hearing: an almost supernatural sensitivity to sound for which I have sometimes given thanks and sometimes despaired, never knowing until later which it was to be.
I recognized at once that the voices were those of Val Lampman and Phyllis Wyvern.
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you’ve promised,” he was saying. “You’ll simply have to tell them that it’s off.”
“And look like a bloody fool? Think about it, Val. What’s it going to cost?—a couple of hours at a time of day when we’re not working anyway. I’m doing it on my own time, and so is Desmond.”
“That isn’t the point. We’re already behind schedule and things are only going to get worse. Patrick … Bun … and we’ve only been here a day. I simply don’t have the resources to keep shoving shipping crates around so that you can do your Faerie Queene impression.”
“You heartless brute,” she said. Her voice was cold as ice.
Val Lampman laughed.
“The Glass Heart. Page ninety-three, if I’m not mistaken. You never forget a line, do you, old girl?”
Incredibly, she laughed.
“Come on, Val, be a sport. Show them you’ve got more in your heart than meat.”
“Sorry, old love,” he said. “No can do this time.”
There was a silence, and I wished I could see their faces, but I couldn’t move without giving away my presence.
“Supposing,” Phyllis Wyvern said in little more than a whisper, “that I told Desmond about that interesting adventure of yours in Buckinghamshire?”
“You wouldn’t dare!” he hissed. “Come off it, Phyllis—you wouldn’t dare!”
“Would I not?”
I could tell that she’d got on her high horse again.
“Damn you,” he said. “Damn you and damn you and damn you!”
There was another silence—even longer this time, and then Val Lampman suddenly said:
“All right, then. You shall have your little show. It won’t make much difference to my plans.”
“Thank you, Val. I knew you’d come round to my way of thinking. You always do. Now shall we go upstairs and join the others? They’ll be getting impatient.”
I heard the sound of their footsteps going up the stairs. I’d give it a few more seconds, I thought, just to be certain they were gone.
But before I could move, someone stepped out from the shadows into the middle of the corridor.
Bun Keats!
She had not seen me. Her back was turned, and she was peeking round the corner into the foyer. It was evident that she’d been eavesdropping on the conversation I’d just happened to overhear.
If she turned round, she’d be almost face-to-face with me.
I held my breath.
After what seemed like an eternity, she walked slowly through into the foyer and vanished from sight.
Again I waited until I heard her footsteps fade away.
“It’s a pity, isn’t it,” a voice said almost at my shoulder, “when people don’t get along?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
I spun round and there was Marion Trodd, with a quizzical—or was it a rueful—half-smile on her face. In spite of her smart tailored suit, her dark horn-rimmed glasses gave her the look of a tribal princess who had rubbed ashes round her empty black eyes in preparation for a jungle sacrifice.
She’d been there all along. And to think that I hadn’t heard or seen her!
The two of us stood motionless, staring at each other in the dim corridor, not knowing quite what to say.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve just remembered something.”
It was true. What I’d remembered was this: While I was not in the least afraid of the dead, there were those among the living who gave me the creeping hooly-goolies, and Marion Trodd was one of them.
I turned and walked quickly away, before something horrid could rise up out of the carpet and suck me down into the weave.
• SEVEN •
FATHER WAS SITTING AT the kitchen table listening to Aunt Felicity. This, more than anything, brought home to me how much—and how rapidly—our little world had been shrunk.
I slipped silently, or so I thought, into the pantry and helped myself to a piece of Christmas cake.
“This has gone on long enough, Haviland. It’s been ten years now, and I’ve looked on in silence as your situation declined, hoping that you’d one day come to your senses …”
This was laughably untrue. Aunt Felicity never missed an opportunity to dig in a critical oar.
“… but all in vain. It’s unhealthy for the children to go on living under such barbaric conditions.”
Children? Did she think of us as children?
“The time has come, Haviland,” she went on, “to stop this incessant moping about and find yourself a wife—and preferably a rich one. It is positively indecent for a tribe of girls to be raised by a man. They become savages. It’s a well-known fact that they don’t develop properly.”
“Lissy …”
“Flavia, you may step out,” Aunt Felicity called, and I shuffled into the kitchen, a little shamefaced at having been caught snooping.
“See what I mean?” she said, darkly, pointing at me with a finger whose nail was the red of exhausted blood.
“I was getting Dogger a piece of Christmas cake,” I said, hoping to make her feel dreadful. “He’s been working so hard … and he often doesn’t take enough to eat.”
I took one of Dogger’s black jackets from behind the door and threw it over my shoulders.
“And now if you’ll excuse me …” I said, and went out the kitchen door.
The cold air nipped at my cheeks and knees and knuckles as I trotted through the falling flakes. The narrow path that someone had shoveled was already beginning to fill in.
Dogger, in overalls, was in the greenhouse, trimming sprigs of holly and mistletoe.
“Brrrrr!” I said. “It’s cold.”
Since he wasn’t in the habit of responding to chitchat, he said nothing.
The Christmas tree Dogger had promised was nowhere in sight, but I fought down my disappointment. He probably hadn’t had time.
“I’ve brought you some cake,” I said, breaking off half and handing it to him.
“Thank you, Miss Flavia. The kettle is just coming to the boil. Will you join me for tea?”
Sure enough: On a potting bench at the back of the greenhouse, a battered tin kettle on a hot plate was shooting out excited jets of steam from lid and spout.
“Let’s rouse Gladys,” I said, and as Dogger filled two refreshingly grubby teacups, I lifted my trusty bicycle from the corner where she had been stowed, and carefully unwound the protective sacking in which, after a thorough oiling, Dogger had wrapped her for the winter.
“You’re looking quite fit,” I told her, making a little joke. Gladys was a BSA Keep-Fit that had once belonged to Harriet.
“Quite fit,” Dogger said. “In spite of her hibernation.”
I propped up Gladys on her kickstand beside us and gave her bell a couple of jangles. It was good to hear her cheery voice in winter.
We sat in companionable silence for a while, and then I said, “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she—for her age?”
“Gladys? … Or Miss Wyvern?”
“Well, both, but I meant Miss Wyvern,” I said, happy that Dogger had made the leap with me. “Do you think Father will marry her?”
Dogger took a sip of tea, put down his cup, and picked up a sprig of mistletoe. He held it up by the stem as if weighing it, then put it down again.
“Not if he doesn’t want to.”
“I thought we weren’t having decorations,” I said. “The director didn’t want the trouble of removing them when they begin filming.”
“Miss Wyvern has decided otherwise. She’s asked me to provide a suitably sized Christmas tree in the foyer for her performance on Saturday night.”
I felt my eyes widening.
“To remind her of the trees she had in childhood. She said that her parents always put up a tree.”
“And she asked you for holly? And mistletoe?”
“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir.” Dogger smiled.
I hugged myself, and not just from the cold. Even the smallest of jokes on Dogger’s lips warmed my heart—perhaps made me too bold.
“Did your parents?” I asked. “Used to put up a tree, I mean? The holly and the ivy and the mistletoe, and all that?”
Dogger did not answer straight away. The faintest of shadows seemed to drift across his face.
“In that part of India in which I was a child,” he said at last, “mistletoe and holly were not easily to be had. I believe I remember decorating a mango tree for Christmas.”
“A mango tree! India! I didn’t know you lived in India!”
Dogger was silent for a long time.
“But that was long ago,” he said at last, as if returning from a dream. “As you know, Miss Flavia, my memory is not what it once was.”
“Never mind, Dogger,” I said, patting his hand. “Neither is mine. Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.”
“I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.”
“Butter and all?” I asked.
“Butter and all.”
“But not the dish.”
“But not the dish,” said Dogger.
Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?
Remembering Father’s orders to keep out from underfoot, I spent what remained of the day in my laboratory making last-minute adjustments to the consistency of my powerful birdlime. The addition of just the right amount of oil of petroleum would keep it from freezing.
Christmas Eve was now just forty-eight hours away, and I needed to be ready for it. There would be no margin for error. I would have just one chance to capture Father Christmas—if, in fact, he existed.
Why was I so mistrustful of my sisters’ tales of myth and folklore? Was it because experience had taught me that both of them were liars? Or was it because I really wanted—perhaps even needed—to believe?
Well, Father Christmas or no, I would soon be writing up the Great Experiment in my notebook: Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.
One way or another, it was bound to be a classic.
Scribbled in the margin of one of Uncle Tar’s notebooks, I had found a quotation from Sir Francis Bacon: “We must not then add wings, but rather lead and ballast to the understanding, to prevent its jumping or flying.”
Precisely what I had in mind for Saint Nicholas! A dose of the old tanglefoot! Later, in bed, my head filled with visions of reindeer stuck fast to the chimney pots like giant bluebottles to flypaper, I realized I was grinning madly in the dark. Sleep came at last, to what might have been the sounds of a distant gramophone.
• EIGHT •
I PAUSED AT THE top of the stairs.
“It’s not right,” a voice was grumbling. “They’ve no right to lumber us with all this.”
“Better keep it down, Latshaw,” said another voice. “You know what Lampman told us.”
“Yes, I know what His Eminence said. Same as he did on the last shoot, and the shoot before that. I’ve heard that beef speech of his enough times I can recite it in my sleep. ‘If you’ve got a beef, tell it to me,’ and so on and so forth. Might as well tell it to the man in the moon for all the good it does.”
“McNulty used to—”
“McNulty be damned! I’m in charge now, and what I say goes. And all I’m saying is this: They’ve got no right to lumber us with all this extra, just so that Her Royal Highness can give the local bumpkins something to gape at.”
I backed slowly away from the staircase, then re-approached it more noisily.
“Shhh! Someone’s coming.”
“Good morning!” I said brightly, rubbing my eyes and going into my best village idiot impersonation. If there’d been time, I’d have blacked out one of my front teeth with pulverized carbon.
“Good morning, miss,” said the one, and I knew by his voice that the other was Latshaw.
“Snowy old morning, eh what?”
I knew this was laying it on with a trowel, but with some people it doesn’t matter. I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.
“Oh, how pretty,” I exclaimed as I reached the bottom of the stairs, clasping my hands together like a spinster who has just been given an engagement ring by a red-faced squire on bended knee.
The south side of the foyer had been transformed overnight into an Italian courtyard in evening. Stone walls painted onto canvas had been set up in front of the wood paneling, and the landing on the south staircase had become a balcony in Verona.
A few artificial trees spotted here and there in pots skillfully disguised as little benches added greatly to the effect. The whole thing was so well done I could almost feel the warmth of the Italian sun.
It was here, I knew, that in just a few hours, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan would be re-creating the scene from Romeo and Juliet: a production that had once kept the West End of London awake until the small hours with curtain call after curtain call.
I had read about it in the musty film and theater magazines that were piled everywhere in Buckshaw’s library, or at least had been until they were cleared away for purposes of filming.
“Best scamper, miss. The paint’s still wet. You don’t want to go getting it all over yourself, do you?”
“Not if it’s lead-based,” I shot back as I wandered casually away, recalling with a little shiver of pleasure the case of the American artist Whistler, who, while painting his famous The White Girl, because of the high content of lead white in the pigment in his prime color had contracted what artists called “painter’s colic.”
Would lead poisoning by any other name taste as sweet? I knew that rats had been known to gnaw through lead pipes because they had acquired a taste for the sweetness of the stuff. In fact, I had begun compiling notes for a pamphlet to be called Peculiarities of Plumbism, and had turned to thinking pleasantly on that topic when the telephone rang.
I went for it at once before it could ring a second time. If Father heard it, we were in for a day of wrath.
“Blast!” I said, as I picked the thing up.
“Hello … Flavia? Have I caught you at an inopportune time?”
“Oh, hello, Vicar,” I said. “Sorry—I just banged my knee on the door frame.”
From Flavia’s Book of Golden Rules: When caught swearing, go for sympathy.
“Poor girl,” he said. “I hope it’s all right.”
“It will be fine, Vicar, when the agony abates.”
“Well, I’m just ringing up to let you know that everything at this end is going splendidly. Tickets nearly sold out and it’s barely sunrise. Cynthia and her telephonic warriors outdid themselves last night.”
“Thank you, Vicar,” I said. “I’ll let Father know.”
“Oh, and Flavia, tell him that Dieter Schrantz, at Culverhouse Farm, has suggested, if your father’s willing, of course, that we use the old sleigh from your coach house to shuttle our theatergoers from the parish hall to Buckshaw. He says he’ll rig up a hitch that will allow him to tow it along behind the tractor. The ride itself should be worth the price of admission, don’t you think?”
Father had agreed, with surprisingly little grumbling, but then, where the vicar was concerned, he nearly always did. There was a friendship between them of a deep and abiding power which I didn’t really understand. Although they had both attended Greyminster, they had not been at the school in the same years, so that wouldn’t explain it. The vicar had no more than a polite interest in postage stamps and Father had no more than a passing interest in heaven, so the bond between them remained a puzzle.
To be perfectly frank, I was a little envious of their easy chumminess, and I sometimes caught myself wishing that I were as great friends with my father as the vicar was.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. Once, while using one of his philatelic magazines to fan the flame of a sluggish Bunsen burner, the pages had riffled open and the words “nascent oxygen” had caught my eye. The stuff, it seemed, had been produced by adding formaldehyde to potassium permanganate, and had been used by the Post Office to fumigate mailbags in the Mediterranean in the days when cholera was a constant threat.
Now here was a fact about stamp collecting that was actually interesting! A bridge—however precarious it might seem—between my father’s world and mine.
“If you ever need any of your stamps disinfected,” I had burst out, “I’d be happy to do them for you. I could whip up some nascent oxygen in a jiff. It would be no trouble at all.”
Like a time traveler who had just awakened to find himself in a strange household in an unexpected century, Father had looked up at me from his albums.
“Thank you, Flavia,” he had said after an unnerving pause. “I shall keep it in mind.”
Daffy, as always, was draped over a chair in the library, with Bleak House open on her knees.
“Don’t you ever get tired of that book?” I asked.
“Certainly not!” she snapped. “It’s so like my own dismal life that I can’t tell the difference between reading and not reading.”
“Then why bother?” I asked.
“Bug off,” she said. “Go haunt someone else.”
I decided to try a different approach.
“You’ve got black bags under your eyes,” I said. “Were you reading late last night, or does your conscience keep you awake over the despicable way you treat your little sister?”
“Despicable” was a word I’d been dying to use in a sentence ever since I’d heard Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, fling it at Miss Cool, the village postmistress, in reference to the Royal Mail.
“Sucks to you,” Daffy said. “Who could sleep with all that caterwauling going on?”
“I didn’t hear any caterwauling.”
“That’s because your so-called super-sensitive hearing has blown a fuse. You’re probably beginning to display the hereditary de Luce deafness. It skips from youngest daughter to youngest daughter and generally sets in before the age of twelve.”
“Piffle!” I said. “There was no caterwauling. It was all in your head.”
Daffy’s left earlobe began twitching as it does when she’s upset. I could see that I had hit a nerve.
“It’s not in my head!” she shouted, throwing down her book and jumping to her feet. “It’s that damned Wyvern woman. She runs old films all night—over and over until you could scream. If I have to listen to that voice of hers saying ‘I shall never forget Hawkhover Castle’ one more time as that cheesy music swells up, I’m going to vomit swamp water.”
“I thought you liked her—those magazines …”
Curses! I’d almost given myself away. I wasn’t supposed to know about what was in Daffy’s bottom drawer.
But I needn’t have worried. She was too agitated to spot my slipup.
“I like her on paper, but not in person. She stares at me as if I’m some kind of freak.”
“Perhaps you are,” I offered helpfully.
“Get stuffed,” she said. “Since you’re such great pals with Lady Phyllis, you can tell her next time you see her to keep the noise down. Tell her Buckshaw’s not some slimy cinema in Slough, or wherever it is she comes from.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, turning on my heel and walking out of the room. For some odd reason I was beginning to feel sorry for Phyllis Wyvern.
In the foyer, Dogger was atop a tall orchard ladder, hanging a branch of holly from one of the archways.
“Mind the ilicin,” I called up to him. “Don’t lick your fingers.”
It was a joke, of course. There was once thought to be enough of the glycoside in a couple of handfuls of the red berries to be fatal, but handling the leaves was actually as safe as houses.
Dogger raised an elbow and looked down at me through the crook of his arm.
“Thank you, Miss Flavia,” he said. “I shall be most careful.”
Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning. That’s what I was doing when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
A gust of snow blew into my face as I opened the door. I wiped my eyes, and only partly in disbelief, for there in the forecourt stood the Cottesmore bus, tendrils of steam rising ominously from its radiator cap. Its driver, Ernie, stood before me, digging at his dentures with a brass toothpick.
“Step down! Step down! Mind your feet!” he called back over his shoulder to the column of people who were climbing down from the bus’s open door.
“Your actors,” he said, “have arrived.”
They came trooping past him and into the foyer like tourists flocking into the National Gallery at opening time—there must have been about thirty in all: coats, scarves, galoshes, hand luggage, and gaily wrapped parcels. They were going to be here, I remembered, for Christmas.
One last straggler was having difficulty with the steps. Ernie made a move to help her, but she brushed away his offered arm.
“I can manage,” she said brusquely.
That voice!
“Nialla!” I shouted. And indeed it was.
Nialla Gilfoyle had been the assistant to Rupert Porson, the traveling puppeteer who had come to a rather grisly end in St. Tancred’s parish hall. I hadn’t seen her since the summer, when she had gone off from Bishop’s Lacey in something of a huff.
But all of that seemed to have been forgotten. Here she was on the front steps of Buckshaw in a green coat and a joyful hat trimmed with red berries.
“Come on, then, give me a hug,” she said, opening her arms wide.
“You smell like Christmas,” I said, noticing for the first time the large protuberance that stood between us.
“Eight months!” she said, taking a step back and throwing open her winter coat. “Have a gander.”
“A gander at Mother Goose?” I asked, and she laughed appreciatively. Nialla had played the part of Mother Goose in the late Rupert’s puppet show, and I hoped my little joke would not stir up unhappy memories.
“Mother Goose no more,” she said. “Just plain old Nialla Gilfoyle (Miss). Jobbing actress, comedy, tragedy, pantomime. Apply Withers Agency, London. Telegraph WITHAG.”
“But the puppet show—”
“Sold up,” she said, “lock, stock, and barrel to a lovely chap from Bournemouth. Fetched me enough to rent a flat, where Junior here can have a roof over his or her head as the case may be, come January, when he or she finally decides to make his or her grand entrance.”
“And you’re starring in this?” I asked, waving my hand to take in the theatrical hubbub in the foyer.
“Hardly starring. I’ve undertaken the less-than-demanding role of Anthea Flighting, pregnant daughter—in a nice way, of course—of Boaz Hazlewood—that’s Desmond Duncan.”
“I thought he was a bachelor. Doesn’t he court Phyllis Wyvern?”
“He is, and he does—but he has a past.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see.” Although I didn’t.
“Let me look at you,” she said, grasping my shoulders and retracting her head. “You’ve grown … and you’ve got a little color in your cheeks.”
“It’s the cold,” I said.
“Speaking of which,” she said with a laugh, “let’s go inside before the acorn on my belly button freezes and falls off.”
“Miss Nialla,” Dogger said as I closed the door behind us. “It’s a pleasure to have you back at Buckshaw.”
“Thank you, Dogger,” she said, taking his hand. “I’ve never forgotten your kindness.”
“The little one will be along soon,” he said. “In January?”
“Spot on, Dogger. You’ve got a good eye. January twenty-fifth, according to my panel doctor. He said it wouldn’t hurt me to sign on for this lark as long as I gave up the ciggies, got plenty of sleep, ate well, and kept my feet up whenever I’m not actually in front of the camera.”
She gave me a wink.
“Very good advice,” Dogger said. “Very good advice, indeed. I hope you were comfortable on the bus?”
“Well, it is a bit of a jolter, but it was the only transportation Ilium Films could lay on to get us from the station in Doddingsley. Thank God the thing’s such a hulking old bulldog. It managed to hang on to the roads in spite of the snow.”
By now, Marion Trodd had shepherded the others away to the upper levels, leaving the foyer empty except for the three of us.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Dogger said, and Nialla gave me a happy twiddle of the fingers like Laurel and Hardy as he led her away.
They had barely disappeared up the staircase when the doorbell rang again.
Suffering cyanide! Was I to spend the rest of my life as a doorkeeper?
Another gust of frozen flakes and cold air.
“Dieter!”
“Hello, Flavia. I have brought some chairs from the vicar.”
Dieter Schrantz, tall, blond, and handsome, as they say on the wireless, stood on the doorstep, smiling at me with his perfect teeth. Dieter’s sudden appearance was a bit disconcerting: It was somewhat like having the god Thor deliver the furniture in person.
As a devotee of English literature, especially the Brontë sisters, Dieter had elected to stay in England after his release as a prisoner of war, hoping someday to teach Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to English students. He also had hopes, I think, of marrying my sister Feely.
Behind him, in the forecourt, the Cottesmore bus had now been replaced by a gray Ferguson tractor which stood putt-putting quietly in the snow, behind it a flat trailer piled high with folding chairs which were covered almost entirely with a tarpaulin.
“I’ll hold the door for you,” I offered. “Are you coming to the play tonight?”
“Of course!” Dieter grinned. “Your William Shakespeare is almost as great a writer as Emily Brontë.”
“Get away with you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
It was a phrase Mrs. Mullet used. I never thought I’d find myself borrowing it.
Load after load, five or six at a time, Dieter lugged the chairs into the house until at last they were set up in rows in the foyer, all of them facing the improvised stage.
“Come into the kitchen and have some of Mrs. Mullet’s famous cocoa,” I said. “She floats little islands of whipped cream in it, with rosemary sprigs slit for trees.”
“Thank you, but no. I’d better get back. Gordon doesn’t like it if I—”
“I’ll tell Feely you’re here.”
A broad grin spread across Dieter’s face.
“Very well, then,” he said. “But just one whipped-cream island—and no more.”
“Feely!” I hollered towards the drawing room. “Dieter’s here!”
No point wasting precious shoe leather. Besides, Feely had legs of her own.
• NINE •
“WELL, WELL, WELL,” MRS. Mullet said. “And ’ow’s everythin’ at Culver’ouse Farm?”
“Very quiet,” Dieter told her. “It is perhaps the time of year.”
“Yes,” she said, although each of us knew there was more to it than that. It would be a grim old Christmas at the Inglebys’ after the events of last summer.
“And Mrs. Ingleby?”
“As well as can be expected, I believe,” Dieter said.
“I promised Dieter a cup of cocoa,” I said. “I hope it won’t be too much trouble?”
“Cocoa’s my speci-al-ity,” Mrs. Mullett said, “as you very well knows. Cocoa is never too much trouble in any ’ouse’old what’s run as it ought to be.”
“Better make three cups,” I said. “Feely will be here in … six … five … four … three …”
My ears had already picked up the sound of her hurrying footsteps.
Hurrying? She was flat out at the gallop!
“Two … one …”
An instant later the kitchen door was edged open and Feely sidled casually into the room.
“Oh!” she said, widening her eyes in surprise. “Oh, Dieter … I didn’t know you were here.”
Hog’s britches, she didn’t! I could see through her like window glass.
But Feely’s eyes were as nothing compared with Dieter’s. He fairly gaped at her green silk getup.
“Ophelia!” he said. “For a moment I thought that you were—”
“Emily Brontë,” she said, delighted. “Yes, I knew you would.”
If she didn’t know he was here, I thought, how could she know he’d mistake her for his beloved Emily? But Dieter, love-struck, didn’t notice.
I had to admire my sister Feely. She was as slick as a greased pig.
Although I know it is scientifically impossible, it seemed as if Mrs. Mullet could boil milk faster than anyone on the planet. With the Aga cooker already as hot as an alchemist’s furnace, and by stirring constantly, she was able, in the blink of an eye, to conjure up steaming cups of cocoa, each with its own tropical island and mock palm tree.
“It’s too hot in here,” Feely whispered to Dieter, as if she could keep me from overhearing. “Let’s go into the drawing room.”
As I moved to tag along, she shot me a look that said clearly, “And if you dare follow us, you’re a dead duck.”
Naturally, I waddled along behind.
Quack! I thought.
“Did you celebrate Christmas in Germany?” I asked Dieter. “Before the war, I mean?”
“Of course,” he said. “Father Christmas was born in Germany. Didn’t you know that?”
“I did,” I said. “But I must have forgotten.”
“Weihnachten, we call it. Saint Nikolaus, the lighted Christmas tree … Saint Nikolaus brings sweets for the children on the sixth of December, and Weihnachtsmann brings gifts for everyone on Christmas Eve.”
He said this looking teasingly at Feely, who was sneaking a peek at herself in the looking glass.
“Two Father Christmases?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
I gave an inward sigh of relief. Even if I did manage to bring one of them down and keep him from his rounds, there was still a spare to carry out whatever was left of the long night’s work. At least in Germany.
Feely had drifted to the piano and settled onto the bench like a migrating butterfly. She touched the keys tentatively without pressing down, as if playing the wrong combination would make the world explode.
“I’d better be getting back,” Dieter said, draining his cup to the dregs.
“Oh, can’t you stay?” Feely said. “I’d been hoping you’d translate some of the annotations on my facsimile edition of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“They should call it The Bad-Tempered Clavier, when you play it,” I said. “She swears like stink when she hits a clinker,” I explained to Dieter.
Feely went as red as the carpet. She didn’t dare swat me in front of company.
With her flushed face and her green outfit, she reminded me of something I’d seen in a recent color supplement. What was it, now …?
Oh, yes! That was it …
“You look like the flag of Portugal,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone so that you can wave good-bye.”
I knew that I would pay for my insolence later, but Dieter’s hearty laugh was worth it.
The house, generally so cold and silent, had suddenly become a beehive. Carpenters hammered, painters painted, and various people looked at various parts of the foyer through makeshift frames formed by touching thumbs and extending their fingers.
An astonishing number of lights had been put into place, some hanging from clamps on skeletal scaffolding and others mounted on spindly floor stands. Black wires and cables twisted everywhere.
Wig-wagging my extended arms for balance, I navigated my way carefully across the room, pretending I was walking across a pit of sleeping snakes—poisonous snakes that could awaken at any moment and …
“Hoy! Flavia!”
I looked up to see the ruddy face of Gil Crawford, the village electrician, grinning down at me through the framework of a high scaffold that had been rigged to span the great front door. Gil had been of much assistance in bringing back to life some of the more Frankensteinian of the electrical devices in Uncle Tar’s laboratory, and had even taken the time to drill me in the safe handling of certain of the high-voltage instruments.
“Always remember,” he had taught me to recite:
“Brown wire to the live,
Blue to the neutral
Greenery-yallery to the propensity
So’s you don’t wake up in Eternity.”
When it came to wires and eternity, Gil was said to be something of an expert.
“ ’E was a Commando durin’ the war!” Mrs. Mullet had once whispered, while gutting a rabbit on the kitchen table. “They was taught ’ow to gavotte people with a bit o’ piano wire round their necks. Gzaaack!”
She’d grimaced horribly, her eyes rolled up, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth by way of illustration.
“ ‘Quick as a wink,’ Alf says. Next minute the victim finds ’isself sittin’ on a cloud with an ’arp in ’is ’and, wonderin’ where in ’eaven’s name the world’s ever got to.”
“Mr. Crawford!” I called up to Gil. “What are you doing here?”
“Keeping the old hand in,” he shouted back above the din of the hammering.
I put one foot on the ladder at the scaffold’s side and began, hand over hand, to haul myself up.
At the top I stepped off onto the broad planks that formed a makeshift floor.
“Used to work this film lark when I was an apprentice lad.” He grinned, rather proudly. “Keep my dues up just in case. You never know, nowadays, do you?”
“How’s Mrs. Crawford?” I asked.
His wife, Martha, had recently invited me for tea while she ferreted out, from a box of cast-off valves, an obsolete rectifier for a radio-frequency fluorescing tube—for which she would take not a penny. It was a debt which I had so far been unable to repay.
“Topping,” he said. “Fair topping. She’s minding the shop so’s I can come out on this caper.”
He worked as he spoke, fastening a second long-snouted spotlight to a tubular cross member with a couple of clamps.
“Busiest time of year it is, too. Sold six wireless sets and three gramophones this week alone, so she did, a four-slice toaster, and an electric egg-cozy. Fancy!”
“You must have a lovely view of things from up here,” I observed.
“So I do,” he said, tightening the last bolt. “Funny you should say so. It’s the same thing that German fellow from Culverhouse told me as he left. ‘Far from the madding crowd,’ he called up to me. Talks over my head but he’s a good lad for all that.”
“Yes, his name is Dieter,” I told him. “He meant Thomas Hardy.”
Gil scratched his head.
“Hardy? Don’t know him. From around here, is he?”
“He’s an author.”
Like any bookworm’s sister, I knew the titles of a million books I hadn’t read.
“Ah!” he said, as if that settled it. “You’d better scramble down now. If the chief sees you up here, both our gooses will be cooked.”
“Geese,” I said. “Latshaw, you mean?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said quietly. “Geese,” and turned his attention to a box of colored filters.
I had nearly reached the bottom of the ladder when I became aware of a face too close for comfort. I jumped to the floor and twisted round to find myself standing almost on Latshaw’s toes.
“Who told you you could go up there?” he asked, his ginger mustache bristling.
“No one,” I said. “I was having a word with Mr. Crawford.”
“Mr. Crawford is on time-and-a-half for a short call in the holiday season,” he said. “He has no time for idle chitchat—do you, Mr. Crawford?”
This last part he called out loudly enough for everyone to hear. I stepped back and glanced up at Gil, who was fussing with his spotlight, but he must have heard.
“I’m sorry,” I said, becoming aware of the sudden silence that had fallen upon the foyer.
“Take my advice, miss,” Latshaw said, “and keep to your quarters. We’ve no time for nuisances.”
In my mind, Latshaw was already writhing on the floor, his face engorged, his eyes bulging from their sockets, hanging on with both hands to his gut, begging for the antidote to cyanide poisoning.
“Help me! Just help me!” he was screaming. “I’ll do anything—anything!”
“Very well, then,” I was telling him, reluctantly handing over a beaker into which I had stirred carefully calibrated proportions of ferrous sulfate, caustic potash, and powdered oxide of magnesium, “but in future, you really must learn how properly to address your betters.”
Perhaps Latshaw was a mind reader, perhaps not, but he turned, strode off abruptly, and began giving right old hob to a carpenter who wasn’t driving a nail properly.
At that very instant a bloodcurdling shriek came echoing from somewhere in the upper regions of the house.
“No! No-o-o-o-o! Let me alone!”
I recognized it at once.
All eyes were turned upwards as I flew past the workers and up the stairs. At the landing, one of the actresses reached out to stop me but I shook her off and continued my flight to the top and along the first-floor corridors, my pounding feet the only sound in the eerie silence that had fallen suddenly upon the house.
Strangers fell back out of the way to let me pass, hands to mouths, their faces frozen with—what was it?—fear?
“No! No! Keep away! Don’t touch me. Please! Don’t let them touch me!”
The voice was coming from Harriet’s boudoir. I threw open the door.
Dogger was crouched in a corner, one of his quivering hands clasping the wrist of the other in front of his face.
“Please,” he whimpered.
“Leave him alone!” I shouted at his ghosts. “Get out of here and leave him alone!”
And then I slammed the door loudly.
I stood perfectly still and waited until I could bear it no more—about ten seconds, I think—and then I said, “It’s all right, Dogger, they’re gone. I’ve sent them away. It’s all right.”
Dogger trembled behind his hands, his face, the color of ashes, looking up at me unseeing. It had been months—half a year, perhaps—since he had suffered a full-blown episode of such terror, and I knew that this time it was going to take a while.
I walked slowly to the window and stood gazing out through a wreath of frost. To the left, in the steadily falling snow, the lorries of Ilium Films were almost hidden beneath the thick white blanket as if, at the end of the darkening day, they were tucked in for a winter’s sleep.
Behind me, Dogger let out a pitiful little whimper.
“It’s snowing again,” I said. “Fancy that.”
In the stillness I could almost hear the falling flakes.
“Isn’t it a wonder, with that number of snowflakes, that no one has ever thought to write a book called The Chemistry of Snow?”
There was silence behind me, but I did not turn round.
“Just think, Dogger, of all those atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, joining hands and dancing ring-around-a-rosy to form a six-sided snowflake. Sometimes they form around a particle of dust—it says so in the encyclopedia—and because of it the form is misshapen. Hunchbacked snowflakes. Fancy that!”
He stirred a little, and so I continued.
“Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.”
I could see Dogger reflected three times over in the triple looking glass on Harriet’s dressing table as he struggled slowly to his feet, and stood at last with his hands dangling limply at his side.
I turned away from the window and, taking one of his hands, led him, shambling, to Harriet’s canopied and ruffled bed.
“Sit down here,” I said. “Just for a minute.”
Surprisingly, Dogger obeyed, and dropped down heavily onto the edge of the bed. I had thought he would balk at the very idea of taking a seat in Father’s shrine to Harriet, but the fact that he did not was probably due to his confusion of mind.
“Put your feet up,” I told him, “while I gather my thoughts.”
I piled a mound of snowy pillows at his back.
With glacially slow speed, Dogger eased himself back until at last he was reclining in what looked, at least, like a comfortable position.
“Stiff Water, we could call it,” I said. “The book, I mean. Yes, that would probably have more appeal. Stiff Water—I quite like that. I expect some people would buy it thinking it was a detective novel, but that’s all right. We wouldn’t care, would we?”
But Dogger was already asleep, his chest rising and falling in gentle swells, and if the tiny crease at the corner of his mouth was not the seed of a smile, it was, perhaps, a lessening of his distress.
I covered him to the chin with an afghan, and returned to the window and there, for what might have been an eternity, I stood staring out into the gathering gloom, into the cold, blowing universes of hydrogen and oxygen.
• TEN •
AT FIVE-THIRTY THE PEOPLE of Bishop’s Lacey began to arrive. First were the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the proprietresses of the St. Nicholas Tea Room.
Incredibly, these two creaking relics had walked the mile through deep drifts of snow, and now their round faces glowed like little red furnaces.
“We didn’t want to be late, so we set out early,” Miss Lavinia said, looking round appreciatively at the decorated foyer. “Very, very swank, isn’t it, Aurelia?”
I knew that they were sizing up the situation, sniffing out the possibilities of being asked to perform. The Misses Puddock had managed to insinuate themselves into every public performance in Bishop’s Lacey since the year dot, and I knew that at this very moment, stuffed handily somewhere into the depths of Miss Lavinia’s handbag would be the sheet music for “Napoleon’s Last Charge,” “Bendemeer’s Stream,” and “Annie Laurie” at the very least.
“It’s not for an hour and a half yet,” I told them. “But you’re welcome to have a seat. May I take your coats?”
With Dogger out of action, I had decided to take over the duties of the doorman myself. I’d certainly had enough practice during the day! Father would be furious, of course, but I knew that he would thank me when he came to understand. Well, perhaps not thank me, but at least spare me one of his three-hour lectures.
But for now, Father was nowhere in sight. It was as if, having received payment for the use of Buckshaw, he had no further obligation. Or could it be, perhaps, that he was ashamed to show his face?
The film crew were putting the finishing touches to the improvised stage, adjusting the lights and moving tall basketwork trumpets of fresh flowers into position at each side of the make-believe courtyard, when the doorbell rang.
Bunching my sweater tightly round my shoulders, I opened the door to find myself nearly nose-to-nose with a complete stranger. He was wrapped in a khaki greatcoat with no insignia that I was quite sure must have been issued by some army or another.
He was short, with freckles, and was chewing gum the way a horse chews an apple.
“This Buckshaw?” he asked.
I admitted that it was.
“I’m Carl,” he announced. “You can tell your big sister I’m here.”
Carl? Big sister?
Of course! This was Carl from St. Louis, Missouri—Carl, the American, who had given Feely the chewing gum I had pilfered from her lingerie drawer—Carl who had told her she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet—Carl who had taught her how to spell Mississippi.
There had been Americans, I recalled, who had shared the airfield with a Spitfire squadron at Leathcote, a few of whom, like Dieter, had chosen to remain in England at the end of the war, and Carl must be one of them.
He was holding a small package, almost completely hidden inside a thicket of green ribbon hung all over with red-and-white candy-cane decorations.
“Camel?” he asked, producing a packet of cigarettes at his fingertips and cleverly flipping it open at the same time with his thumb, like a conjuror’s trick.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Father doesn’t allow smoking in the house.”
“He doesn’t, eh? Well, then, I reckon I’ll hold my fire for a spell. Tell Ophelia Carl Pendracka is here and he’s ready to boogie-woogie!”
Good lord!
Carl sauntered past me into the foyer.
“Say,” he said. “Swell place you got here. Looks like they’re making a movie, am I right? Do you know what? I saw Clark Gable once in St. Louis. In Spiegel’s. Spiegel’s is where this came from …”
He gave the gift a shake.
“My mom picked ’em up for me. Stuck ’em in with the Camels. Clark Gable looked right at me that time in Spiegel’s. What do you say to that?”
“I’ll tell my sister you’re here,” I said.
“Feely,” I said, at the door of the drawing room, “Carl Pendracka is here, and he’s ready to boogie-woogie.”
Father looked up from the pages of his London Philatelist.
“Show him in,” he said.
The imp inside me grinned and hugged itself in anticipation.
I went only as far as the end of the corridor and beckoned Carl with a forefinger curled and uncurled.
He came obediently.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, touching the dark paneling appreciatively.
I held open the study door, doing my best to mimic Dogger in his valet role: a look on my face and a particular posture that indicated keen interest and at the same time keen disinterest.
“Carl Pendracka,” I announced, a trifle facetiously.
Feely looked up from her own to Carl’s reflection in the looking glass as Carl walked briskly to where Father sat, seized his hand, and gave it a jolly good wringing.
Although he didn’t show it, I could tell that Father was taken aback. Even Daffy glanced up from her book at the breach of manners.
“Carl’s family might be related to the King Arthur Pendragons,” Feely said in that brittle and snotty voice she uses for genealogical discussion.
To his credit, Father did not look terrifically impressed.
“Merry Christmas, Miss Ophelia de Luce,” Carl said, handing her his gift. I could tell that Feely was torn between centuries of good breeding and the urge to rip into the gift like a lion into a Christian.
“Go ahead, open it,” Carl urged. “It’s for you.”
Father subsided quickly into his stamp journal while Daffy, pretending to have reached a particularly gripping passage in Bleak House, was secretly peering out from beneath her furrowed brows.
Feely picked at the bows and ribbons as slowly and as fussily as a naturalist dissecting a butterfly under a microscope with tweezers.
“Tear it off!” I wanted to shout. “That’s what wrapping’s for!”
“I don’t want to spoil this beautiful paper,” she simpered.
By the buttons of the Holy Ghost! I could have strangled her with the ribbon!
Carl obviously felt the same way.
“Here,” he said, taking the package away from Feely and poking his thumbs through the folded paper at the ends. “All the way from St. Louis, Mo.—the Show Me State.”
A candy cane clattered to the hearth.
“Oh!” said Feely as the wrapping fell away. “Nylons! How lovely! Wherever did you find them?”
Even Daffy gasped. Nylons were as scarce as unicorn droppings: the Holy Grail of gift-giving.
Father shot up out of his chair as if on a spring. In a flash he was across the room, and the nylons, which he had ripped from Feely’s hands, were dangling from his wrists like adders.
“This is outrageous, young man. Positively indecent. How dare you?”
He brushed the stockings off his hands and arms and into the fireplace.
I watched as the nylons shriveled, writhing and blackening in the flames, transformed by heat into their constituent chemicals (adipoyl chloride, I knew, and hexamethylenediamine). I felt a little shiver of pleasure as the stockings gave up the ghost in one last, delicious flickering flame. Their dying breath, a wisp of the deadly poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide, floated up the chimney and then it was gone. In just a few seconds, Carl’s gift was no more than a sticky black glob bubbling on the Yule logs.
“I … I don’t understand,” Carl said.
He stood looking from Father to Feely to Daffy to me.
“You Limeys are crackers,” he said. “Just plain dizzo.”
“Dizzo,” Carl repeated to me in the foyer, shaking his head in disbelief. Feely had fled, shaken by sobs, to her bedroom and Father, in a thundercloud of outraged dignity, had taken refuge in his study.
“Have a chair,” I said and, as the doorbell rang again, I introduced Carl quickly to the Misses Puddock.
“Carl’s from St. Louis, in America,” I told them, and by the time I reached the door, they were already chatting away like lifelong cronies.
On the doorstep, as if for inspection, was Ned Cropper, gift in hand and brilliantine in hair. A few steps behind him stood Mary Stoker.
Aside from her ruddy complexion and a bit of a squint, Mary might have been a Madonna in the National Gallery as she stood on the doorstep, radiant in the snow.
No room at the inn, I thought uncharitably.
“Ned! Mary!” I crowed, a little too cheerfully.
Ned was the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, Bishop’s Lacey’s sole hostelry, and Mary was the landlord’s daughter. I knew without being told that Ned had brought the gift for Feely: another box of those flyblown prewar Milady chocolates from the window of Miss Cool’s confectionery, its contents lightly frosted with a mold which could, of course, if you had a strong enough stomach, be scraped away before scoffing them.
Ned’s love tributes were generally left on the kitchen doorstep in the dark of the moon to be brought in dangling distastefully between finger and thumb by Mrs. Mullet.
“Them tomcats been round again,” she would mutter.
“I like your hair,” I said to Mary. “Did you get it cut?”
“Cut it myself, special for Christmas,” she whispered. “Do you like it, really?”
“Nobody’s going to give Phyllis Wyvern a second look with you in the room,” I said, giving her arm a squeeze.
“Oh, you!” she laughed, and slapped my hand a little harder than she knew.
“Find a seat,” I told them. “You’re early, so you can take your pick.”
I knew that Ned would choose front row center, and I was right. He’d want to be as close to Phyllis Wyvern as was humanly possible.
A roaring motor in the forecourt announced that Dieter had arrived with the first load of audience. I threw open the door just as the Fergie jerked to a stop, its lamps making cornucopias of foggy yellow light in the falling snow. Behind the tractor, brimming over with passengers—a couple of village men perched precariously on the runners—was Harriet’s sleigh.
A shadow passed in front of my heart.
How sad it was to think that somewhere, Harriet should have died in snow like this. How could such tragedy occur amid such beauty?
That was the way with ghosts, though: They appeared at the strangest of times in the most peculiar places.
I hadn’t long to call my mother’s face to mind; people were already piling out of the sleigh and coming towards the door, laughing and talking excitedly.
“Flavia! Haroo, mon vieux! Joyeux Noël!”
That was Maximilian Brock, the pint-sized concert pianist (retired) who had traded his keyboard and bench for a whole new career as the village gossip mill. It was whispered (but not by me) that he wrote up and sold as fiction to the romance magazines the thinly disguised tales of door-latch scandal he had gleaned in Bishop’s Lacey.
“Lust-sheets,” Daffy called them.
“Have you seen Phyllis Wyvern yet?” Max demanded. “How does she look in life? Are her wrinkles as parched gullies, or was that sheer meanness on the part of Tittle-Tattle?”
“Hello, Max,” I said. “Yes, I’ve seen her, and she’s never been more lovely.”
“And those sisters of yours; still growing?”
“You can ask them yourself,” I said, somewhat impatiently. Once Max got started, you might as well put down roots.
But before he could frame another question, Max was nudged aside by the substantial tummy of Bunny Spirling, of Nautilus Old Hall, looking so much like Mr. Pickwick that it gave me the momentary creeps.
His thumbs hooked tightly in his waistcoat pockets, Bunny patted his stomach and raised his pink nostrils into the air as if he were on the scent of food.
“Flavia,” he said, not putting too much effort into it before scurrying away on curiously dainty feet.
After the sleigh had emptied, Dieter made a tight circle with the tractor and sleigh in the snowy forecourt, and with the wave of a mitt, jounced off to the village for another load.
With Dogger out of commission, I was kept busy welcoming newcomers and chatting up old acquaintances. It was evident that no one else in my family was going to put in an appearance. They had obviously decided that the evening’s performance was the business of the filmmakers, and that there was no need for them to lift a finger. I was on my own.
Not long before starting time, the vicar arrived, huffing and puffing in the foyer, and stamping his feet.
“It’s coming down as if all the angels and archangels are plucking chickens,” he said.
Cynthia hung back, scowling at his blasphemy.
“Constable Linnet tells me that all roads in and out of Bishop’s Lacey are hopelessly blocked,” he went on, “and are likely to remain so until the Hinley road men clear their own turf. It’s the price we pay for being outlanders, so to speak, but nevertheless, it’s dashed inconvenient.”
Marion Trodd came squeezing herself through the hubbub.
“Miss Wyvern is ready, Vicar,” she said. “If you’d be so kind—”
“Of course, my dear. Tell her I shall preface her performance with a few remarks of my own re Roofing Fund, et cetera, and then it’s all hers—oh, and Mr. Duncan’s, of course. Dear me, we mustn’t forget Mr. Duncan.”
As the vicar made his way to the front, Father, Feely, and Daffy, led by Aunt Felicity, filed slowly into the foyer and took their seats in the front row. Since Ned was occupying the chair that should have been mine, I stayed in the back.
I twiddled my fingers at Nialla and she twiddled back, tapping her tummy and rolling her eyes comically.
“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I’ve managed to leave out—”
There was a polite titter to reward the vicar for his sparkling wit.
“We’ve all of us braved the roaring elements tonight to illustrate the wise old saw that Charity begins at home. If we now find ourselves warm and cozy in the ancestral home of the family de Luce, it is entirely due to the kind graces of Colonel Haviland de Luce” (“Hear! Hear!”) “that we are able to come together in such inclement weather to prop up the roof of St. Tancred’s, as it were.
“Without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Miss Phyllis Wyvern and Mr. Desmond Duncan. Miss Wyvern, it is unnecessary to tell you, is a star of stage and screen, who has thrilled all of our hearts in such productions as Whitehall Nellie, The Secret Summer, Love and Blood, The Glass Heart …”
He paused to pull a scrap of paper from his pocket, clean his spectacles with it, and then read what was written on it.
“The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter, The Trench in the Drawing Room, The Queen of Love … ahem … Sadie Thompson” (a couple of nervous titters and a distinctly wolfish whistle), “and last, but not least, The Rector’s Wife.”
This was greeted by general cheers but marred by a single catcall.
Cynthia sat staring straight ahead, her lips pursed.
“Mr. Duncan has been seen most recently in Articles of War. And so without further ado, we welcome to Bishop’s Lacey two great luminaries of the screen, Miss Phyllis Wyvern, ably assisted by Mr. Desmond Duncan, in their world-famous interpretation of a scene from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”
There was no curtain to go up, but in its place, the lights were switched out, and for a few moments we sat in the dark.
Then a spotlight pierced the blackness, picking out a little grove of potted lemon trees. A lettered placard on a wooden tripod told us that this was Capulet’s orchard.
I twisted round far enough to see that the fierce white beam of light was coming from atop the scaffolding above the door, and that the figure hunched over one of the snouted spotlights was Gil Crawford.
Romeo, in the form of Desmond Duncan, came strolling into the grove to a smattering of applause. He was dressed in tan tights, over which was a peculiar pair of red velvet shorts which looked rather like inflated swimming trunks. He wore a white shirt of the peasant variety, all fancy ruffles of lace at the neck and sleeves, and his sporty flat hat was decorated with a pheasant’s tail feather.
He extended his open hands to the audience and took a series of elaborate little bows before speaking his first word.
Come on! I thought. Get on with it!
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
Another pause, and another sprinkling of applause in recognition of that famous voice.
“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
A few sparse hand claps to show that they were familiar with the line.
“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …”
Again he paused, gazing up, his eyes fixed on Juliet’s balcony, which remained, beyond the spotlight’s beam, in utter blackness.
“Spot!” Phyllis Wyvern’s voice commanded loudly from somewhere above Romeo’s head.
The moment was frozen. It seemed to stretch on and on.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …” Desmond Duncan began again, still not quite Romeo.
You could have heard a pin drop in China.
“Spotlight, dammit!” snapped the voice of the fair Juliet from the darkness, and there came from behind me the most frightful crash, as if some metal object had fallen from the scaffold onto the tiles of the foyer.
“… the envious moon,” Desmond Duncan plowed on,
“Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she …”
There was a sudden rustling of silks as Phyllis Wyvern came swishing down the steps from the landing, her feet appearing first at the perimeter of Romeo’s spotlight, and then her dress.
Her costume was absolutely gorgeous, a fawn-colored creation, wide at the hem, tight as blazes at the waist, and shockingly low at the neck. The precious stones that lined the collar and sleeves glittered madly as she passed through the glare of Romeo’s spotlight, and a gasp went up from the audience at the unaccustomed splendor that had materialized so suddenly in their midst.
Into her braided hair was woven a chaplet of flowers—real flowers, by the look of them—and I bit my lip in admiration. How young and beautiful, and how timeless she seemed!
The real Juliet, if ever there was one, would have spit in envy.
Down and down she came, and at last onto the foyer floor, her pointed slippers making a menacing sound on the tiles: like a pair of snakes tiptoeing on their rib ends.
Ned Cropper shrank back a little as she swept past him towards the front door.
She’s leaving! I thought. She’s walking out!
I twisted round in my chair, fighting to remain seated, as Phyllis Wyvern, having reached the scaffolding, seized hold of the ladder, placed a delicately slippered foot on the first rung, and began to climb.
Up and up she went, her Elizabethan dress, even in the darkness, shooting off sparks of light like a comet ascending the heavens.
At the top, she stepped off onto the plank flooring and edged her way along to where Gil Crawford stood watching her approach, his mouth open.
Clinging to the scaffold’s railing with one hand, Phyllis Wyvern hauled off and, with the other, slapped Gil hard across the face.
The sharp crack of it echoed back and forth across the foyer, refusing to die.
Gil’s hand flew to his cheek, and even in the near darkness, I saw the flash from the whites of his terrified eyes.
She hitched up the hem of her dress and maneuvered back to the ladder, which she managed to climb down with surprising grace.
Looking neither to the right nor the left, Phyllis Wyvern processed—there’s no other word for it; she looked as if she were walking in state up the center aisle of Westminster Abbey—she processed across the foyer to the foot of the west staircase, which she climbed, skirt still hitched in one hand, to the landing, where she turned and struck a pose at the railing of her make-believe bedroom balcony.
After a heart-stopping pause, the second spotlight came on with an audible clack, catching her in its beam like some exotic moth.
She clasped her hands to her breast, took a shuddering breath, and spoke her first line:
“Ay me!” she said.
“She speaks!” said Romeo.
“O, speak again, bright angel!” he went on, rather hesitantly,
“For thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a wingèd messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturnèd wondering eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him …”
I couldn’t help thinking of Gil Crawford’s eyes.
“O Romeo, Romeo!” she cooed. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
And so on. The rest of the performance was just a lot of that moon-June-balloon stuff—a load of old mulch, really—and I found myself wishing they had chosen a more exciting scene from the play, one of those involving toxicology, for instance, which are the only really decent parts of Romeo and Juliet.
We had been made to listen to the play in its entirety on one of Father’s compulsory Thursday wireless nights, during which I had formed the opinion that while Shakespeare was good with words, he knew beans about poisons.
The difference between poisons and narcotics seems to have escaped him, and he was in an utter muddle when it came to those vegetable and mineral irritants that act upon the brain and spinal cord.
In spite of all the wordy hocus-pocus about gathering herbs by moonlight, Juliet’s symptoms indicated the use of nothing more mystifying than plain old hydrocyanic acid administered in drinking water.
For ever and ever, Amen.
By now, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan were taking their bows. Joining hands like Hansel and Gretel, they took a couple of steps towards the audience, then backed away, and then advanced again, like waves lapping at the sands.
Flushed with pleasure, or something, they were both perspiring freely, their makeup, at close range, suddenly ghastly in the overhead lights.
Phyllis Wyvern was so close to Ned that his mouth gaped open like a flounder on a fishmonger’s stall, so that Mary had to nudge him in the ribs.
I looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark figure vanishing into the shadows at the head of the stairs, just above Juliet’s makeshift balcony.
It was Dogger, and I realized with a start that he had been there all along.
• ELEVEN •
WITH THE FOYER LIGHTS switched back on, I had my first chance to have a glance round at the entire audience.
There in the back row, with a happy look on his face, sat Dieter. Beside him, chewing on a mint, was Dr. Darby, and behind him, Mrs. Mullet with her husband, Alf.
Each of them seemed caught up in a trance, blinking round in silly wonder, as if they were surprised to find themselves still in their same old bodies.
Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that’s the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.
I had seen a spell woven before my eyes, broken by a slap, then woven again as easily as a granny darns a sock. It was marvelous—a blooming wonder, actually—when you came to think about it.
The actors now had gone to remove their makeup, and the ciné crew vanished to the upper reaches of the house to do whatever they do after a performance. They had not stayed to mingle with the audience, but that, perhaps, was part of the spell.
A gust of cold rushed suddenly into the foyer. Someone had opened the front door for a breath of fresh air, given a gasp, cries had gone up, and now everyone, including me, was crowding for a look outside.
A sharp wind had arisen during the performance and piled a waist-deep snowdrift at the door.
It was easy enough to see that tractor or no tractor, sleigh or no sleigh, no one was going to get home to Bishop’s Lacey tonight.
Still, Dieter was brave enough to give it a try. Bundling up in his heavy coat and scaling the white mountain that had appeared so suddenly, he was soon lost in the darkness.
“Better ring up Tom McGully to bring his snowplow,” someone said.
“No use doing that,” came a voice from the far corner, “as I’m already here.”
A nervous laugh went up, as Tom came forward and peered out the door with the rest of us.
“It’s a mort o’ snow,” he said, somehow making it official. “A mighty mort o’ snow.”
The hands of several ladies flew to their throats. The men exchanged quick glances, their faces expressionless.
Ten minutes later, Dieter was back, caked with the stuff, shaking his head.
“Tractor doesn’t start,” he announced. “Battery’s dead.”
The vicar, as usual, had taken charge.
“Ring up Bert Archer at the garage,” he had told Cynthia. “Tell him to bring his wrecker. If you can’t get through to Bert, leave a message with Nettie Runciman at the exchange.”
Cynthia nodded grimly and plodded off towards the telephone.
“Mrs. Mullet … I saw her here somewhere … Mrs. Mullet, do you think it would be possible to lay on some tea, and perhaps some cocoa for the little ones?”
Mrs. Mullet made for the kitchen, happy to be one of the first enlisted. As she vanished into the passageway, Cynthia reappeared.
“The line is dead,” she announced in a monotone.
“Well, then,” the vicar said, “as it seems we’re here for the duration, we shall just have to make do, shan’t we?”
It was decided with surprisingly little fuss that preference would be given to those with children, who would be allowed, wherever room permitted, to bunk in among the ciné crew who had already been assigned digs on the first floor.
Somewhere during the process, Father had put in a brief appearance, and with a couple of pointed fingers and a few words to the vicar, had mobilized the operation as if it were a precision military exercise. He had then re-vanished into his study.
Those who could not be accommodated upstairs would bunk down in the foyer. Pillows and blankets that had not been used since Harriet was alive would be brought out of their storage presses and handed out to the makeshift refugees.
“It shall be just like old times,” the vicar told them, rubbing his hands together vigorously. “Not unlike the bomb shelters during the war. We shall make a great success of it; a grand adventure. After all, it isn’t as if we haven’t done it before.”
There was more than a trace of Winston Churchill in his voice.
The vicar organized a few games for the children: puss in the corner, blindman’s buff, hide-and-go-seek, with prizes donated by Dr. Darby—mints, of course—to the winners.
The grown-ups gossiped and laughed quietly on the sidelines.
After a while, the more boisterous activities dwindled to guessing games.
As the evening wore on, the false jollity subsided. Yawns appeared, stifled at first but eventually becoming open and damn the niceties.
Children began to doze off, and their parents soon followed. It wasn’t long before most of the displaced villagers of Bishop’s Lacey were in the grips of sleep.
Later, as I lay snuggled beneath my eiderdown, alone in the vast, barnlike coldness of the east wing, I could hear, for a while, the muted buzz of conversation, like the hum of a distant hive.
After a time, this, too, died down, and my ears detected only an occasional cough.
It had been a long, long day, but in spite of it, I couldn’t sleep. In my mind, I saw the bundled bodies scattered helter-skelter in the foyer: sleeping mounds beneath their blankets like so many tussocks in a country churchyard.
I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, but it was no use. Surely everyone was asleep by now, and nobody would be disturbed if I crept to the top of the stairs and took a peek. With the very real threat of Father losing his battle with the taxman, I was now consciously saving up images for a time when I was an old lady—a time when I would rummage through my recollections of Buckshaw as one might turn the pages of a dusty photograph album.
“Ah, yes,” I would quaver in my old woman’s voice, “I mind the time we were snowed in on Christmas Eve. The winter night that Bishop’s Lacey came to Buckshaw.”
I climbed out of bed and into my refrigerated clothing.
Down the corridor I crept, stopping now and then to listen.
Nothing.
I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down upon the makeshift shelter.
Perhaps because it was so close to Christmas, there was something oddly touching about those huddled forms, as if I were an aviator, or an angel, or God, even, looking down from above upon all of these helpless, sleeping humans.
From somewhere far away, in the west wing, came the sound of distant music, and of unreal recorded voices.
So profound was the silence in the house that I was even able to make out the words:
“I shall never forget Hawkhover Castle.”
Phyllis Wyvern was watching herself on film again.
The music swelled, and then died.
Downstairs, someone rolled over and began to snore. From where I stood, I could see Dieter, bundled against the railing on the landing. Smart enough to choose a higher sleeping place, I thought, where the air is slightly warmer, and the flooring not so cold as the tiles of the foyer.
In the hall below, Mrs. Mullet breathed heavily, her arm draped as casually over Alf as the babes in the wood.
Slowly, I descended the staircase, taking special care to tiptoe past the sleeping Dieter.
Over there, against the wall, was Cynthia Richardson, in sleep as relaxed as an archangel on a Christmas card; her face like Flora in the Botticelli painting. I wished I’d had a camera so that I could preserve that unexpected glimpse of her forever.
At her side the vicar slept, his brow deeply furrowed.
“Hannah, please! No!” he whispered, and for a moment, I thought that he had awakened.
Who was Hannah, I wondered, and why was she tormenting him in his sleep?
Upstairs, a door closed softly.
Phyllis Wyvern, I thought. She’s finished for the night with her viewing.
A marvelous idea floated into my mind.
Why not see if she wanted to talk? Perhaps, like me, she was sleepless.
Or what if she was lonely? We could have a nice chat about grisly murders. Being so famous probably meant that all her friends were in it for the money—or the glory: for being able to say they were chummy with Phyllis Wyvern.
She’d have no one to talk to about the things that really counted.
Besides, it would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a world-famous movie star all to myself—even if only for a few minutes.
But wait! What if she was tired? What if she still hadn’t got over that fierce outburst when she’d slapped Gil Crawford’s face? Would she do the same to me? I could almost feel the sting of her hand on my cheek.
Still, if I told Feely I’d spent an hour or so idly chitchatting with Phyllis Wyvern, she’d be sick jealous!
That settled it.
From the bottom of the stairs, I set out on tiptoe across the foyer, picking a precarious and winding path between the sleeping bodies.
While I was still in the midst of the encampment and halfway to the west staircase, a water closet flushed.
I froze.
It was an unpleasant fact of life at Buckshaw that the rickety maze of pipes that passed for plumbing had seen far, far better days. They were, in fact, past their prime when Queen Victoria was on the throne, if one may be permitted to say such a thing.
A flush here or a water faucet activated there transmitted vast shudders and groans to the farthest corners of the house like some bizarre hydraulic signaling system from another age.
To put it plainly, no one at Buckshaw had any secrets—not, at least, in the plumbing department.
I stopped breathing until the shudder of pipes subsided in a far distant clatter. Ned, who was propped up against a wall with his feet splayed out like a cast-off doll, gave a groan, and Mary, whose head was on his knees, turned over in her sleep.
I counted to a hundred, just to be sure, and again began picking my way between the sleeping bodies.
Up the west staircase I went, one step at a time, counting them as I climbed: ten to the landing, another ten to the top corridor.
I knew that the thirteenth tread from the bottom groaned alarmingly, and I took a giant step to climb over it in silence, hauling myself up by gripping the banister.
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