by Alan Bradley
“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.