by Alan Bradley
And then quite suddenly, I caught a glimpse of my face reflected in the glassware, watching wide-eyed as the somewhat cloudy liquid in the flask, shifting uneasily, took on, perhaps, a tinge of sickly yellow, as if in the drifting mists of a Gypsy’s crystal ball.
I knew then what I had to do.
“Aha! Flavia!” the vicar said. “We missed you at church on Sunday.”
“Sorry, Vicar,” I told him, “I’m afraid I rather overdid myself on Saturday, what with the fête and so forth.”
Since good works do not generally require trumpeting, I did not feel it necessary to mention the assistance I had offered to Fenella. And as it turned out, I was right to hold my tongue, because the vicar quickly brought up the subject himself.
“Yes,” he said. “Your father tells me you were allowed rather a luxurious Sabbath lie-in. Really, Flavia, it was most kind of you to play the Good Samaritan, as it were. Most kind.”
“It was nothing,” I said, with becoming modesty. “I was happy to help.”
The vicar got to his feet and stretched. He had been snipping away with a pair of kitchen scissors at the tufts of grass growing round the wooden legs of the St. Tancred’s signboard.
“God’s work takes many strange forms,” he said, when he saw me grinning at his handiwork.
“I visited the poor soul in hospital,” he went on, “directly after Morning Prayer.”
“You spoke to her?” I asked, astonished.
“Oh, dear, no. Nothing like that. I’m sure she wasn’t even aware of my presence. Nurse Duggan told me that she hadn’t regained consciousness—the Gypsy woman, of course, not Nurse Duggan—and that she—the Gypsy woman, I mean—had spent a restless night, crying out every now and then about something that was hidden. The poor thing was delirious, of course.”
Something hidden? What could Fenella have meant?
It was true that she had mentioned to me the woman whose fortune she had told just before mine: something about something that was buried in the past, but would that count as hidden? It was worth a try.
“It’s too bad, isn’t it?” I said, shaking my head. “Hers was the most popular pitch at the fête—until the tent caught fire, that is. She was telling me how startled someone was—the person who went in just before me, I believe—when she happened to guess correctly something about her past.”
Had a little cloud drifted across the vicar’s face?
“Her past? Oh, I should hardly think so. The person whose fortune was told immediately before yours was Mrs. Bull.”
Mrs. Bull? Well, I’ll be blowed! I’d have been willing to take an oath that Mrs. Bull’s first encounter with Fenella in several years had taken place in my presence, on Saturday, in the Gully—after the fête.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Quite sure,” the vicar said. “I was standing near the coconut pitch talking to Ted Sampson when Mrs. Bull asked me to keep an eye on her tots for a few minutes. ‘I shan’t be long, Vicar,’ she said. ‘But I must have my fortune read—make sure there are no more of these little blighters in my future.’
“She was joking, of course, but still, it seemed a very odd thing to say, under the circumstances.” The vicar reddened. “Oh, dear, I fear I’ve been indiscreet. You must forget my words at once.”
“Don’t worry, Vicar,” I told him. “I won’t say a word.”
I went through the motions of sewing my lips shut with a needle and a very long piece of thread. The vicar winced at my grimaces.
“Besides,” I said, “it’s not the same as if the Bulls were your parishioners.”
“It is the same,” he said. “Discretion is discretion—it knows no religious bounds.”
“Is Mrs. Bull a Hobbler?” I asked suddenly.
His brow wrinkled. “A Hobbler? Whatever makes you think that? Dear me, that somewhat peculiar faith was, if I am not mistaken, suppressed in the late eighteenth century. There have been rumors, of course, but one mustn’t—”
“Was it?” I interrupted. “Suppressed, I mean?”
Could it be that the Hobblers had gone underground so effectively that their very presence in Bishop’s Lacey was disbelieved by the vicar of St. Tancred’s?
“Whatever her allegiances,” the vicar continued, “we mustn’t pass judgment upon the beliefs of others, must we?”
“I suppose not,” I said, just as the meaning of his earlier words struck home.
“Did you say you were talking to a Mr. Sampson? Mr. Sampson of East Finching?”
The vicar nodded. “Ted Sampson. He still comes back to lend a hand with the tents and booths. He’s been doing it man and boy for twenty-five years. He says it makes him feel close to his parents—they’re both of them buried here in the churchyard, you understand. Of course he’s lived in East Finching since he married a—”
“Yes?” I said. If I’d had whiskers they’d have been trembling.
“Oh dear,” the vicar said. “I fear I’ve said too much. You must excuse me.”
He dropped to his knees and resumed his snipping at the grass, and I knew that our interview was at an end.
Gladys’s tires purred on the tarmac as we sped north towards East Finching. It was easy going at first, but then as the road rose up, fold upon fold, into the encircling hills, I had to lean on her pedals like billy-ho.
By the time I reached Pauper’s Well at the top of Denham Rise, I was panting like a dog. I dismounted and, leaning Gladys against the stone casing of the well, dropped to my knees for a drink.
Pauper’s Well was not so much a well as a natural spring: a place where the water gurgled up from some underground source, and had done so since before the Romans had helped themselves to an icy, refreshing swig.
Spring water, I knew, was a remarkable chemical soup: calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, and assorted salts and sulphates. I grabbed the battered old tin cup that hung from a chain, scooped it full of the burbling water, and drank until I thought I could feel my bones strengthening.
With the water still dribbling down my chin, I stood up and looked out over the countryside. Behind me, spread out like a handkerchief for a doll’s picnic, was Bishop’s Lacey. Through it, this side of the high street, the river Efon wound its lazy way round the village before ambling off to the southwest and Buckshaw.
Now, almost two weeks into the harvest, most of the countryside had traded its intense summer green for a paler, grayish shade, as if Mother Nature had nodded off a little, and let the colors leak away.
In the distance, like a black bug crawling up the hillside, a tractor dragged a harrow across a farmer’s field, the buzz of its engine coming clearly to my ears.
From up here, I could see the Palings to the south, a green oasis at a bend in the river. And there was Buckshaw, its stones glowing warmly in the sunlight, as if they had been cut from precious citrine and polished by a master’s hand.
Harriet’s house, I thought, although for the life of me I don’t know why. Something was welling up in my throat. It must have been something in the well water. I took Gladys from her resting place and shoved off towards East Finching.
From this point on, the journey was all downhill. After a couple of jolly good pumps to get up speed, I put my feet up on the handlebars, and Gladys and I with the wind in our teeth came swooping like a harrier down the dusty road and into East Finching’s high street.
Unlike its neighbors, Malden Fenwick and Bishop’s Lacey, East Finching was not a pretty bit of Ye Olde England. No half-timbered houses here—no riot of flowers in cottage gardens. Instead, the word that came to mind was “grubby.”
At least half the shops in the high street had boarded-up windows, while those that were apparently still in business had rather a sad and defeated look.
In the window of a tobacconist’s shop on the corner, a crooked sign advertised: Today’s Papers.
A bell above the door gave out a harsh jangle as I stepped inside, and a gray-haired man with old-fashioned square spectacles loo
ked up from his newspaper.
“Well?” he said, as if I had surprised him in his bath.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me? I’m looking for Mr. Sampson—Edward Sampson. Could you tell me where he lives?”
“What you want with him, then? Selling biscuits, are you?”
His mouth broke into a ghastly grin, revealing three horrid teeth which appeared to be carved from rotted wood.
It was the same thing, more or less, that the abominable Ursula had said to me at Vanetta Harewood’s door: a bad joke that was doing the rounds of the countryside, the way bad jokes do.
I held my tongue.
“Selling biscuits, are you?” he said again, like a music hall comic beating a joke to death.
“Actually, no,” I said. “Mr. Sampson’s parents are buried in St. Tancred’s churchyard, in Bishop’s Lacey, and we’re setting up a Graves Maintenance Fund. It’s the war, you see … We thought that perhaps he’d like to—”
The man stared at me skeptically over his spectacles. I was going to have to do better than this.
“Oh, yes—I almost forgot. I also bring thanks from the vicar and the ladies of the Women’s Institute—and the Altar Guild—for Mr. Sampson’s help with the fête on Saturday. It was a smashing success.”
I think it was the WI and the Altar Guild that did it. The tobacconist wrinkled his nose in disgust, hitched his spectacles a little higher, and jabbed his thumb towards the street.
“Yellow fence,” he said. “Salvage,” and went back to his reading.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”
And I almost meant it.
The place was hard to miss. A tall wooden fence, in a shade of yellow that betrayed the use of war surplus aviation paint, sagged inwards and outwards along three sides of a large property.
It was evident that the fence had been thrown up in an attempt to hide from the street the ugliness of the salvage business, but with little effect. Behind its boards, piles of rusting metal scrap towered into the air like heaps of giant jackstraws.
On the fence tall red letters, painted by an obviously amateur hand, spelled out: SAMPSON—SALVAGE—SCRAP IRON BOUGHT—BEST PRICES—MOTOR PARTS.
An iron rod leant against the double gates, holding them shut. I put my eye to the crack and peered inside.
Maddeningly, there wasn’t much to see—because of the angle, my view was blocked by a wrecked lorry that had been overturned and its wheels removed.
With a quick glance up and down the street, I shifted the rod, tugged the gates open a bit, took a deep breath, and squeezed through.
Immediately in front of me, a sign painted in blood-red letters on the hulk of a pantechnicon said BEWARE OF THE DOC—as if the animal in question had gone for the artist’s throat before he could finish the letter G.
I stopped in my tracks and listened, but there was no sign of the beast. Perhaps the warning was meant simply to scare off strangers.
On one side of the yard was a good-sized Nissen hut which, judging by the tire tracks leading to its double doors, was in regular use. To my right, like a row of iron oasthouses, the towering junk piles I had seen from outside the gates led away towards the back of the lot. Projecting from the closest heap—as if it had just crashed and embedded itself—was what surely must be the back half of a Spitfire, the red, white, and blue RAF markings as fresh and bright as if they had been applied just yesterday.
The fence had concealed the size of the place—it must have covered a couple of acres. Beyond the mountains of scrap, spotted here and there, scores of wrecked motorcars subsided sadly into the grass, and even at the back of the property, where the scrap gave way gradually to an orchard, blotches of colored metal glinting among the trees signaled that there were bodies there, too.
As I moved warily along the gravel path between the heaps of broken machinery, hidden things gave off an occasional rusty ping as if they were trying to warm themselves enough in the sun to come back to life—but with little success.
“Hello?” I called, hoping desperately that there would be no answer—and there wasn’t.
At the end of an L-shaped bend in the gravel was a brick structure: rather like a washhouse, I thought, or perhaps a laundry, with a round chimney rising up about thirty feet above its flat roof.
The windows were so coated with grime that even by rubbing with my fist, I could see nothing inside. In place of a knob, the door was furnished with what looked like a homemade latch: something cobbled together from bits of iron fencing.
I put my thumb on the tongue of the thing and pressed it down. The latch popped up, the door swung open, and I stepped into the dim interior.
The place was unexpectedly bare. On one side was a large fire chamber whose open door revealed a bottom covered with cold ashes and cinders. On its side was mounted what appeared to be a motor-driven blower.
These things hadn’t changed in four or five hundred years, I thought. Aside from the electric fan, there was little difference between this device and the crucibles of the alchemists that filled the pages of several vellum manuscripts in Uncle Tar’s library.
In essence, this furnace was not unlike the gas crucible that Uncle Tar had installed in the laboratory at Buckshaw, but on a much larger scale, of course.
On the brick hearth in front of the furnace, beside a long steel ladle, lay several broken molds: wooden chests that had been filled with sand into which objects had been pressed to make an impression—into which the molten iron had then been poured.
Dogs, by the look of them, I thought. Spaniels indented in the sand to make a pair of doorstops.
Or firedogs.
And I knew then, even though I had not yet had a chance to test them for authenticity, that it was here, in Edward Sampson’s washhouse foundry, that copies of Sally Fox and Shoppo had been cast: the copies that were likely, at this very moment, standing in for the originals on the drawing-room hearth at Buckshaw.
But where were Harriet’s originals? Were they the fire irons I had seen in Miss Mountjoy’s coach house—the antiques warehouse in which Brookie Harewood kept his treasure? Or were they the ones I had seen in the hands of Sampson, the bulldog man, at the back door of Pettibone’s antiques shop? I shuddered at the very thought of it.
Still, I had already accomplished much of what I had come to do. All that remained was to search the Nissen hut for papers. With any luck, a familiar name might well pop up.
At that moment I heard the sound of a motor outside.
I glanced quickly round the room. Save for diving into the cold furnace, there was nowhere to hide. The only alternative was to dash out into the open and make a run for it.
I chose the furnace.
Thoughts of Hansel and Gretel crossed my mind as I pulled the heavy door shut behind me and crouched, trying to make myself as small as possible.
Another dress ruined, I thought—and another sad-eyed lecture from Father.
It was then that I heard the footsteps on the stone floor.
I hardly dared take a breath—the sound of it would be amplified grotesquely by the brick beehive in which I was huddled.
The footsteps paused, as if the person outside were listening.
They moved on … then stopped again.
There was a metallic CLANG as something touched the door just inches from my face. And then, slowly … so slowly that I nearly screamed from suspense … the door swung open.
The first thing I saw was his boots: large, dusty, scarred from work.
Then the leg of his coveralls.
I raised my eyes and looked into his face. “Dieter!”
It was Dieter Schrantz, the laborer from Culverhouse Farm—Bishop’s Lacey’s sole remaining prisoner of war, who had elected to stay in England after the end of hostilities.
“Is it really you?”
I began dusting myself off as I scrambled out of the furnace. Even when I had come out of my crouch and stood up straight, Dieter still
towered above me, his blue eyes and blond hair making him seem like nothing so much as a vastly overgrown schoolboy.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, breaking out in a silly grin.
“Am I permitted to ask the same?” Dieter said, taking in the whole room with a sweep of his hand. “Unless this place has become part of Buckshaw, I should say you’re a long way from home.”
I smiled politely at his little joke. Dieter had something of a crush on my sister Feely, but aside from that, he was a decent enough chap.
“I was playing Solitaire Hare and Hounds,” I said, making up rules wildly and talking too fast. “East Finching counts double for a compound name, and Sampson’s scores a triple S—Sampson’s, Salvage, and Scrap—see? I’d get an extra point for having someone with a biblical name, but today’s not a Sunday, so it doesn’t count.”
Dieter nodded gravely. “Very complex, the English rules,” he said. “I have never completely grasped them myself.”
He moved towards the door, but turned to see if I was following.
“Come on,” he said, “I’m going your way. I’ll give you a lift.”
I wasn’t particularly ready to leave, but I knew that my nosing around was at an end. Who, after all, can carry out full-scale snoopage with a six-foot-something ex–prisoner of war dogging one’s every footstep?
I blinked a bit as we stepped out into the sun. On the far side of the path, Dieter’s old gray Ferguson tractor stood tut-tutting to itself, like an elephant that has stumbled by accident upon the elephant’s graveyard: a little shocked, perhaps, to find itself suddenly among the bones of its ancestors.
After closing the gate, I climbed onto the hitch between the two rear wheels, and dragged Gladys up behind me. Dieter let in the clutch, and we were off, the Fergie’s tall tires sending up a spray of cinders that fell away behind us like dark fireworks.