by Alan Bradley
“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 do
wn 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 sa
id. “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?