by Alan Bradley
We flew like the wind, basking in the September sunlight and drinking in the fresh autumn air, so it was only when we were halfway down the south slope of Denham Rise that the penny dropped.
My posterior was braced firmly against one of the Fergie’s wings and my feet on the clanking hitch. As we sped along, the ground beneath was just a rushing blur of greenish black.
But why, I thought suddenly, would a farmer be so far from home with no trailer rumbling along behind; no plow, no harrow swaying in the rear? It simply made no sense.
I felt my hackles beginning to rise.
“Who sent you?” I shouted above the whistling wind and the roar of the Fergie’s engine.
“What?”
I knew from my own experience that he was stalling for time.
“What?” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard him, which made me suddenly and inexplicably furious.
“It was Father, wasn’t it?”
But even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that I was wrong. There was no more chance that Father would telephone Dieter than that the Man in the Moon should ring up the rat catcher.
“Inspector Hewitt!”
I was clutching at straws. The Inspector was equipped with his own official transportation, and would never send a civilian on one of his errands.
Dieter shoved up the throttle in its quadrant and the tractor slowed. He pulled off into a small lay-by where a wooden platform was piled with milk containers.
He turned to me, not smiling.
“It was Ophelia,” he said.
“Feely?” I screeched. Had my sister sent Dieter to follow me? All day?
How dare she! How doubly-damned dare she! This was an outrage.
That I should be thwarted—torn away—kidnapped, virtually, from an important investigation—by my own sister made me see red.
Bright red.
Without a word, I jumped down from the tractor’s hitch, lifted Gladys onto the road, and set off walking down the hill, my head held high and my pigtails swaying.
When I got far enough away to remember it, I put one foot onto a pedal and mounted, shoving off shakily, but recovering enough to begin an offended but dignified coasting.
Moments later, I heard the tractor’s engine rev up, but I did not look back.
Dieter pulled alongside, driving precisely to keep pace.
“She was worried about you,” he said. “She wanted me to see that you were all right.”
Feely worried about me? I could hardy believe it. I could count on one finger the times she had treated me decently in the past couple of years.
“To spy on me, you mean,” I shot back.
It was a mean thing to say, but I said it. I quite liked Dieter, but the thought of him being under my sister’s thumb made me livid.
“Come on, hop up,” Dieter said, bringing the tractor to a full stop. “Your bicycle, too.”
“No, thank you very much. We prefer to be alone.”
I began pedaling to get ahead of the tractor. I suppose I could have pulled over and waited, then climbed aboard for a graciously accepted ride into the village.
But by the time I thought of it, I was already halfway up the high street.
I was disappointed not to find Dogger at work in the greenhouse. It was always such a pleasure to slip in, sit quietly down beside him, and fall into easy conversation, like two old gaffers on a bench beside the duck pond.
Second choice, when I wanted information, was Mrs. Mullet, but as I discovered when I stepped into the kitchen, she had already gone home for the day.
I’d have given anything to be able to pump Daffy about the Hobblers, but something kept me from asking any more of her. I still hadn’t taken my revenge for her part in the cellar inquisition, even though I had already twice broken my injured silence to ask her about Poseidon and about Hilda Muir—or Hildemoer, to be more precise—and the pixies.
It seemed to me that you couldn’t possibly win a war in which you were forever going over to the other side for advice. Also, fraternizing—or whatever you call it when sisters do it—with the enemy diluted one’s resolve to kick them in the teeth.
My head was fairly fizzing with information, and there had been little time to sort it all out.
Some of the more interesting points had already begun to come together in my mind, clustering and curdling in much the same way that silver chloride (good old AgCl) forms a sort of chemical cheese when a soluble chloride is added to silver nitrate.
Soluble! That was the word. Would I ever be able to solve this complex tangle of puzzles?
One thing was immediately clear: I needed to know more—much, much more—about the Hobblers, and it was clear that no Hobbler of my immediate acquaintance was going to make my life easier by spilling the beans.
TWENTY-ONE
I AWAKENED TO THE roar of water on the roof tiles and in the drains—the sound of Buckshaw in the rain.
Even before I opened my eyes, I could hear that the whole house had come alive in a way that it never did in dry weather—a deep, wet breathing in and out—as if, after a mad dash down the centuries, the tired old place had just thrown itself across the finish line.
There would be little winds in the corridors, I knew, and sudden cold drafts would spring up in out-of-the-way corners. In spite of its size, Buckshaw had all the comfort of a submarine.
I wrapped myself in my blanket and stumped to the window. Outside, the stuff was coming straight down, as if it were lines drawn with pencil and a ruler. It was not the kind of rain that was going to pass away quickly—we were in for hours of it.
Father acknowledged my presence at the breakfast table with a curt nod. At least he didn’t try to make chipper conversation, I thought, and for that I offered up a little prayer of thanksgiving.
Feely and Daffy, as usual, were busily pretending that I didn’t exist.
Rainy days cast a darker than usual pall over our morning meal, and today was no exception.
Our September breakfast menu had been in force for almost two weeks now, and the base of my tongue shrank back a little as Mrs. Mullet brought to the table what I thought of as our daily ration of T.O.A.D.
Toast
Oatmeal
Apple Juice
Dates
The dates, stewed and served with cold clotted cream, were another of Mrs. Mullet’s culinary atrocities. They looked and tasted like something that had been stolen from a coffin in a midnight churchyard.
“Pass the dead man’s,” Daffy would say, without looking up from her book, and Father would fix her with a flickering glare until the latest philatelic journal dragged his attention back to its pages—a time span of, usually, no more than about two and three-quarter seconds.
But today Daffy said nothing, her arm reaching out robotically and shoveling a few spoonfuls of the vile mess into her bowl.
Feely wasn’t down yet, so I made a relatively easy escape.
“May I be excused, please?” I asked, and Father grunted.
Seconds later I was in the hall closet, fishing out my bright yellow waterproof.
“When cycling in the rain,” Dogger had told me, “being visible is more important than keeping dry.”
“You mean that I can always dry out, but I can’t be brought back to life when I’m impaled on the horns of a Daimler,” I said, partly joking.
“Precisely,” Dogger had said with a perfect tiny smile, and gone back to waxing Father’s boots.
It was still coming down like lances as I made a dash for the greenhouse, where I had left Gladys. Gladys didn’t much like the rain, since it made her skirts muddy, but she never complained.
I had plotted my course to Rook’s End with great care, avoiding both the Gully and the house of the dreaded Mrs. Bull.
As I pedaled along the road towards Bishop’s Lacey in my yellow mackintosh, I remembered what Dogger had said about visibility. In spite of the mist that hung like tatters of gray laundry over the soaked fields, I cou
ld probably be seen for miles. And yet, in another sense, because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
I thought of the time Mrs. Mullet had taken me to see The Invisible Man. We had gone on the bus to Hinley to replace an Easter dress that I had ruined during a particularly interesting—but failed—experiment involving both sulfuric and hydrochloric acids.
After a sickening hour in Fashions by Eleanor, a shop in the high street whose windows were bandaged over with paper banners in dreadful shades of pink and aqua—“Latest Easter Frocks for Young Misses!” “New From London!” “Just in Time for Easter!”—Mrs. Mullet had taken pity on me and suggested a visit to a nearby A.B.C. tea shop.
There we had sat, for three quarters of an hour at a table in the window, watching people stroll by on the pavement outside. Mrs. M had become quite chatty and, forgetting perhaps that I wasn’t her friend Mrs. Waller, had let slip several things that, although they were not important at the time, would probably come in handy when I was older.
After the tea and the pastries, with most of the afternoon still ahead of us (“You was a real trouper about the frock, dear—in spite of them two witches with their tapes and pins!”), Mrs. M had decided to treat me to the cinema she had spotted in the narrow street beside the tea shop.
Because Mrs. Mullet had seen it years before, she talked all the way through The Invisible Man, nudging me in the ribs as she explained it to me minute by minute.
“ ’E can see them, like, but they can’t see ’im.”
Although I was amused at the mad scientist’s idea of injecting a powerful bleach to render himself invisible, what truly shocked me was the way he treated his laboratory equipment.
“It’s just a fill-um, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, as I gripped her arm during the smashing of the glassware.
But all in all, I thought, looking back on it, the entertainment had not been a success. Invisibility was nothing new to me. It was an art I had been forced to learn from the day I took my first step.
Visible and invisible: the trick of being present and absent at the same time.
“Yaroo!” I shouted to no one in particular as I splashed past St. Tancred’s and into the high street.
At the far end of the village, I turned south. Through the rain I could just make out in the distance the Jack o’Lantern, a skull-shaped formation of rock that overhung my destination, Rook’s End.
I was now running parallel to and a half-mile due east of the Gully, and before many minutes had passed, I was gliding along the edge of one of the great lawns that stretched off in three directions.
I had been at Rook’s End once before to visit Father’s old schoolmaster, Dr. Kissing. On that occasion I had found him in the decaying solarium of the nursing home, and was not looking forward to setting foot in that particular mausoleum again today.
But much to my surprise, as I leapt off Gladys at the front door, there was the old gentleman himself sitting in a wheelchair beneath a large, gaily colored umbrella that had been set up on the lawn.
He waved as I plodded towards him through the wet grass.
“Ha! Flavia!” he said. “ ‘It can be no ill day which brings a young visitor to my gate.’ Horace, of course—or was it Catullus?”
I grinned as if I knew but had forgotten.
“Hello, Dr. Kissing,” I said, handing over the packet of Players I had filched from Feely’s lingerie drawer. Feely had bought the things to impress Dieter. But Dieter had joked her out of it. “No, thank you,” he said when she offered him the packet. “They ruin the chest,” and she had put the cigarettes away unopened. Feely was uncommonly proud of her chest.
“Ah,” Dr. Kissing said, producing a box of matches as if from nowhere and striking one expertly as he was still opening the packet of cigarettes. “How very kind of you to think of my one great weakness.”
He inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs for what seemed like an eternity. Then, letting it escape as he spoke, he gazed off into the distance, as if addressing someone else.
“Thus he ruins his Health, and his Substance destroys,
By vainly pursuing his fanciful Joys,
Till perhaps in the Frolick he meets with his Bane
And runs on the weapon by which he is slain.”
And runs on the weapon by which he was slain?
My blood chilled as he spoke the last line. Was he referring to his own smoking of cigarettes—or to the bizarre death of Brookie Harewood?
A conversation with Dr. Kissing was, I knew, a game of chess. There would be no shortcuts.
“The Hobblers,” I said, making the opening move.
“Ah, yes.” He smiled. “The Hobblers. I knew you would ask me about the Hobblers. One should have been disappointed if you hadn’t.”
Could Mr. or Mrs. Pettibone have told him of my interest? Somehow, it seemed unlikely.
“Surely you don’t suspect that I am one of them?”
“No,” I said, struggling to keep up with him. “But I knew that your niece—”
Until that very moment I had nearly forgotten that Dr. Kissing was Miss Mountjoy’s uncle.
“My niece? You thought that Tilda was keeping me briefed on your …? Good lord, no! She tells me nothing—nor anyone else. Not even God himself knows what Tilda’s left hand is doing nowadays.”
He saw my puzzlement.
“One needs look no farther than one’s own hearth,” he said.
“Mrs. Mullet?”
Dr. Kissing coughed a wheezy cough—which reminded me uncomfortably of Fenella—and consoled himself by lighting another cigarette.
“It is common knowledge that you are situated, as it were, in close proximity to the estimable Mrs. Mullet. The rest is mere conjecture.
“One has not, of course,” he went on, “communicated personally with the good woman,” he said. “But I believe she is known far and wide for, ah—”
“Dishing the dirt,” I volunteered.
He made a little bow from his waist. “Your descriptive powers leave me in the dust,” he said.
I could easily grow to love this man.
“I know about Nicodemus Flitch,” I told him, “and how he brought his faith to Bishop’s Lacey. I know that there are still a few practicing Hobblers in the neighborhood, and that they still gather occasionally at the Palings.”
“To conduct baptisms.”
“Yes,” I said. “For baptisms.”
“A much more common practice in years gone by,” he said. “There are nowadays few Hobblers left of childbearing age.”
I tried to think of who they might be. Certainly not Tilda Mountjoy or Mrs. Pettibone.
“I believe poor Mrs. Bull was the last,” he said, and I noticed he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
“Mrs. Bull?”
Was Mrs. Bull a Hobbler?
“Mrs. Bull, who lives in the Gully?” I asked. “The one whose baby was taken by Gypsies?”
I couldn’t help myself. Even though I didn’t believe it, the fearful words slipped out before I could think.
Dr. Kissing nodded. “So it is said.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
I was in fine form now, catching every shade of the old man’s meaning.
“I must confess that I don’t,” he said. “And I expect that you would like me to tell you why.”
I could only manage a stupid grin.
Although the rain was still beating down upon the umbrella with a monotonous drumming, there was a surprising stillness and a warmth beneath its protective cover. Across the lawn, the dreadful house that was Rook’s End crouched like a giant stone toad. In one of its tall windows—in what had once perhaps been the ballroom—two old ladies, in outlandish and outdated costumes, were dancing a stately minuet. I had seen this pair on my last visit to Dr. Kissing, executing their timeless steps beneath the trees, and now they had obviously spotted me.
As I watched, the shorter of the two
paused long enough to wave a gloved hand and the other, seeing her partner’s greeting, came almost to the glass and made a deep and elaborate curtsy.
By the time I brought my attention back to Dr. Kissing, he was lighting another cigarette.
“Until last year,” he said, watching the smoke vanish into the rain, “I was still able to make my way to the top of the Jack o’Lantern. For a young man in tip-top physical condition, it is no more than a pleasant stroll, but for a fossil in a wheelchair, it is torture.
“But then, to an old man, even torture can be a welcome relief to boredom, so I often made the ascent out of nothing more than spite.
“From the summit, one can survey the terrain as if from the basket of a hot-air balloon. To the northwest, in the distance, is Greyminster School, scene of my greatest triumphs and my greatest failure. To the west, one has a clear view of the Palings, and behind it, Buckshaw, your ancestral home.
“It was at the Palings, incidentally, that I once asked the lovely Letitia Humphrey for her hand in holy matrimony—and it was at the Palings that Letitia had the jolly good sense to say no.”
“I’ll bet she lived to regret it,” I said gallantly.
“She lived—but without remorse. Letitia went on to marry a man who made a fortune adulterating wheat flour with bone dust. I am given to understand that they made each other very happy.”
A cloud of tobacco smoke made his sigh suddenly visible in the damp air.
“Did you regret it?” I asked. It was not a polite question, but I wanted to know.
“Although I scale the Jack o’Lantern no more,” he said, “it is not entirely because of my infirmities, but rather because of the increasingly great sadness that is visible from the summit—a sadness which is not nearly so noticeable from the lower altitudes.”
“The Palings?”
“There was a time when I loved to gaze down upon that ancient crook in the river as if from the summit of my years. In fact, I was doing so on that day in April, two and a half years ago, when the Bull baby disappeared.”
My mouth must have fallen open.
“From my vantage point, I saw the Gypsy leave her encampment—and later, saw Mrs. Bull pushing the baby’s perambulator along the Gully.”