by Alan Bradley
As noted, I had all the ingredients of a roaring fire—all, that is, except one.
Wherever there are paraffin lamps, I thought, paraffin can not be far away. I let down the hinged side panel of the caravan and there, to my delight, was a gallon of the stuff. I unscrewed the cap of the tin, splashed a bit of it onto the waiting firewood, and before you could say “Baden-Powell,” the teakettle was at a merry boil.
I was proud of myself. I really was.
“Flavia, the resourceful,” I was thinking. “Flavia, the all-round good girl.”
That sort of thing.
Up the steep steps of the caravan I climbed, tea in hand, balancing on my toes like a tightrope walker.
I handed the cup to the Gypsy and watched as she sipped at the steaming liquid.
“You were quick about it,” she said.
I shrugged humbly. No need to tell her about the paraffin.
“You found dry sticks in the locker?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I …”
Her eyes grew wide with horror, and she held out the cup at arm’s length.
“Not the bushes! You didn’t cut the elder bushes?”
“Why, yes,” I said modestly. “It was no trouble at all, I—”
The cup flew from her hands with a clatter, and scalding tea went flying in all directions. She leapt from the bunk with startling speed and shrank herself back into the corner.
“Hilda Muir!” she cried, in an eerie and desolate wail that rose and fell like an air-raid siren. “Hilda Muir!” She was pointing to the door. I turned to look, but no one was there.
“Get away from me! Get out! Get out!” Her hand trembled like a dead leaf.
I stood there, dumbfounded. What had I done?
“Oh, God! Hilda Muir! We are all dead!” she groaned. “Now we are all dead!”
THREE
SEEN FROM THE REAR, at the edge of the ornamental lake, Buckshaw presented an aspect seldom seen by anyone other than family. Although the tall brick wall of the kitchen garden hid some parts of the house, there were two upper rooms, one at the end of each wing, that seemed to rise up above the landscape like twin towers in a fairy tale.
At the southwest corner was Harriet’s boudoir, an airless preserve that was kept precisely as it had been on that terrible day ten years ago when news of her tragic death had reached Buckshaw. In spite of the Italian lace that hung at its windows, the room inside was a curiously sanitized preserve as if, like the British Museum, it had a team of silent gray-clad scrubbers who came in the night to sweep away all signs of passing time, such as cobwebs or dust.
Although I thought it unlikely, my sisters believed that it was Father who was the keeper of Harriet’s shrine. Once, hiding on the stairs, I had overheard Feely telling Daffy, “He cleans in the night to atone for his sins.”
“Bloodstains and the like,” Daffy had whispered dramatically.
Far too agog for sleep, I had lain in bed for hours, open-eyed and wondering what she meant.
Now, at the southeast corner of the house, the upstairs windows of my chemical laboratory reflected the slow passage of the clouds as they drifted across the dark glass like fat sheep in a blue meadow, giving no hint to the outside world of the pleasure palace that lay within.
I looked up at the panes happily, hugging myself, visualizing the array of gleaming glassware that awaited my pleasure. The indulgent father of my great-uncle Tarquin de Luce had built the laboratory for his son during the reign of Queen Victoria. Uncle Tar had been sent down from Oxford amidst some sort of scandal that had never been quite fully explained—at least in my presence—and it was here at Buckshaw that he had begun his glorious, if cloistered, chemical career.
After Uncle Tar’s death, the laboratory was left to keep its secrets to itself: locked and forgotten by people who were more concerned with taxes and drainage than with cunningly shaped vessels of glass.
Until I came along, that is, and claimed it for my own.
I wrinkled my nose in pleasure at the memory.
As I approached the kitchen door, I felt proud of myself to have thought of using the least conspicuous entrance. With Daffy and Feely forever scheming and plotting against me, one could never be too careful. But the excitement of the fête and the moving of the Gypsy’s caravan to the Palings had caused me to miss lunch. Right now, even a slice of Mrs. Mullet’s stomach-churning cabbage cake would probably be bearable if taken with a glass of ice-cold milk to freeze the taste buds. By this late in the afternoon Mrs. M would have gone home for the day, and I would have the kitchen to myself.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
“Got you!” said a grating voice at my ear, and everything went dark as a sack was pulled over my head.
I struggled, but it did no good. My hands and arms were useless, as the mouth of the sack was tied tightly about my thighs.
Before I could scream, my assailants—of whom I was quite sure there were two, judging by the number of hands that were grabbing at my limbs—turned me head over heels. Now I was upside down, standing on my head, with someone grasping my ankles.
I was suffocating, fighting for breath, my lungs filled with the sharp earthy smell of the potatoes that had recently occupied the sack. I could feel the blood rushing to my head.
Damn! I should have thought sooner of kicking them. Too late now.
“Make all the noise you want,” hissed a second voice. “There’s no one here to save you.”
With a sinking feeling I realized that this was true. Father had gone up to London to a philatelic auction, and Dogger had gone with him to shop for secateurs and boot polish.
The idea of burglars inside Buckshaw was unthinkable.
That left Daffy and Feely.
In an odd way I wished it had been burglars.
I recalled that in the entire house there was only one doorknob that squeaked: the door to the cellar stairs.
It squeaked now.
A moment later, like a shot deer, I was being hoisted up onto the shoulders of my captors and roughly borne, headfirst, down into the cellars.
At the bottom of the stairs they dumped me heavily onto the flagstones, banging my elbow, and I heard my own voice shrieking with pain as it came echoing back from the vaulted ceilings—followed by the sound of my own ragged breathing.
Someone’s shoes shifted in the grit not far from where I lay sprawled.
“Pray silence!” croaked a hollow voice, which sounded artificial, like that of a tin robot.
I let out another shriek, and I’m afraid I might even have whimpered a little.
“Pray silence!”
Whether it was from the sudden shock or the clammy coldness of the cellars I could not be certain, but I had begun to shiver. Would they take this as a sign of weakness? It is said that in certain small animals it is instinctive when in danger to play dead, and I realized that I was one of them.
I took shallow breaths and tried not to move a muscle.
“Free her, Garbax!”
“Yes, O Three-Eyed One.”
It sometimes amused my sisters to slip suddenly into the roles of bizarre alien creatures: creatures even more bizarre and alien than they were already in everyday life. Both of them knew it was a trick that for some reason I found particularly upsetting.
I had already learned that sisterhood, like Loch Ness, has things that lurk unseen beneath the surface, but I think it was only now that I realized that of all the invisible strings that tied the three of us together, the dark ones were the strongest.
“Stop it, Daffy. Stop it, Feely!” I shouted. “You’re frightening me.”
I gave my legs a couple of convincing froglike kicks, as if I were on the verge of a seizure.
The sack was suddenly whisked away, spinning me round so that I now lay facedown upon the stones.
A single candle, stuck to the top of a wooden cask, flickered fitfully, its pale light sending dark shapes dancing everywhere among the stone arches of the cellar.
&nbs
p; As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw my sisters’ faces looming grotesquely in the shadows. They had drawn black circles round their eyes and their mouths with burnt cork, and I understood instantly the message that this was intended to convey: “Beware! You are in the hands of savages!”
Now I could see the cause of the distorted robot voice I had heard: Feely had been speaking into the mouth of an empty cocoa tin.
“ ‘French jet is nothing but glass,’ ” she spat, chucking the tin to the floor where it fell with a nerve-wracking clatter. “Your very words. What have you done with Mummy’s brooch?”
“It was an accident,” I whined untruthfully.
Feely’s frozen silence lent me a bit of confidence.
“I dropped it and stepped on it. If it were real jet it mightn’t have shattered.”
“Hand it over.”
“I can’t, Feely. There was nothing left but little chips. I melted them down for slag.”
Actually, I had hit the thing with a hammer and reduced it to black sand.
“Slag? Whatever do you want with slag?”
It would be a mistake to tell her that I was working on a new kind of ceramic flask, one that would stand up to the temperatures produced by a super-oxygenated Bunsen burner.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just mucking about.”
“Oddly enough, I believe you,” Feely said. “That’s what you pixy changelings do best, isn’t it? Muck about?”
My puzzlement must have been evident on my face.
“Changelings,” Daffy said in a weird voice. “The pixies come in the night and steal a healthy baby from its crib. They leave an ugly shriveled changeling like you in its place, and the mother desolate.”
“If you don’t believe it,” Feely said, “go stand in front of a looking glass.”
“I’m not a changeling,” I protested, my anger rising. “Harriet loved me more than she did either of you two morons!”
“Did she?” Feely sneered. “Then why did she used to leave you sleeping in front of an open window every night, hoping that the pixies would bring back the real Flavia?”
“She didn’t!” I shouted.
“I’m afraid she did. I was there. I saw. I remember.”
“No! It’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. I used to cling to her and cry, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Please make the pixies bring back my baby sister.’ ”
“Flavia? Daphne? Ophelia?”
It was Father!
His voice came at parade-square volume from the direction of the kitchen staircase, amplified by the stone walls and echoing from arch to arch.
All three of our heads snapped round just in time to see his boots, his trousers, his upper body, and finally his face come into sight as he descended the stairs.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, peering round at the three of us in the near-darkness. “What have you done to yourselves?”
With the backs of their hands and their forearms, Feely and Daffy were already trying to scrub the black markings from their faces.
“We were only playing Prawns and Trivets,” Daffy said before I could answer. She pointed accusingly at me. “She gives us jolly good what-for when it’s her turn to play the Begum, but when it’s ours she always …”
Well done, Daff, I thought. I couldn’t have concocted a better spur-of-the-moment excuse myself.
“I’m surprised at you, Ophelia,” Father said. “I shouldn’t have thought …”
And then he stopped, unable to find the required words. There were times when he seemed almost—what was it … afraid? … of my oldest sister.
Feely rubbed at her face, smearing her cork makeup horribly. I nearly laughed out loud, but then I realized what she was doing. In a bid for sympathy, she was spreading the stuff to create dark, theatrical circles under her eyes.
The vixen! Like an actress applying her makeup onstage, it was a bold and brazen performance, which I couldn’t help admiring.
Father looked on in thrall, like a man fascinated by a cobra.
“Are you all right, Flavia?” he said at last, not budging from his position on the third step from the bottom.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
I was going to add “Thank you for asking” but I stopped myself just in time. I didn’t want to overdo it.
Father looked slowly from one of us to another with his sad eyes, as if there were no words left in the world from which to choose.
“There will be a parley at seven o’clock,” he said at last. “In the drawing room.”
With a final glance at each of us, he turned and trudged slowly up the stairs.
“The thing of it is,” Father was saying, “you girls just don’t seem to understand …”
And he was right: We no more understood his world than he did ours.
His was a world of confetti: a brightly colored universe of royal profiles and scenic views on sticky bits of paper; a world of pyramids and battleships, of rickety suspension bridges in far-flung corners of the globe, of deep harbors, lonely watchtowers, and the heads of famous men. In short, Father was a stamp collector, or a “philatelist,” as he preferred to call himself, and to be called by others.
His every waking moment was spent in peering through a magnifying lens at paper scraps in an eternal search for flaws. The discovery of a single microscopic crack in a printing plate, which had resulted in an unwanted hair on Queen Victoria’s chin, could send him into raptures.
First would come the official photograph, and elation. He would bring out of storage, and set up on its tripod in his study, an ancient plate camera with a peculiar attachment called a macroscopic lens, which allowed him to take a close-up of the specimen. This, when developed, would produce an image large enough to fill an entire page of a book. Sometimes, as he fussed happily over these operations, we would catch snatches of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Gondoliers drifting like fugitives through the house.
Then would come the written paper which he would submit to The London Philatelist or suchlike, and with it would come a certain crankiness. Every morning Father would bring to the breakfast table reams of writing paper which he would fill, page after laborious page, with his minuscule handwriting.
For weeks he would be unapproachable, and would remain so until such time as he had scribbled the last word—and more—on the topic of the queen’s superfluous whisker.
Once, when we were lying on the south lawn looking up into the blue vault of a perfect summer sky, I had suggested to Feely that Father’s quest for imperfections was not limited to stamps, but was sometimes expanded to include his daughters.
“Shut your filthy mouth!” she’d snapped.
“The thing of it is,” Father repeated, bringing me back to the present, “you girls don’t appear to understand the gravity of the situation.”
Mainly he meant me.
Feely had ratted, of course, and the story of how I had vaporized one of Harriet’s dreadful Victorian brooches had come tumbling out of her mouth as happily as the waters of a babbling brook.
“You had no right to remove it from your mother’s dressing room,” Father said, and for a moment his cold blue stare was shifted to my sister.
“I’m sorry,” Feely said. “I was going to wear it to church on Sunday to impress Dieter. It was quite wrong of me. I should have asked permission.”
It was quite wrong of me? Had I heard what I thought I’d heard, or were my ears playing hob with me? It was more likely that the sun and the moon should suddenly dance a jolly jig in the heavens than that one of my sisters should apologize. It was simply unheard of.
The Dieter Feely had mentioned was Dieter Schrantz, of Culverhouse Farm, a former German prisoner of war who had chosen to remain behind in England after the armistice. Feely had him in her sights.
“Yes,” Father said. “You should have.”
As he turned his attention to me, I could not help noticing that the folds of skin at the outer corners of his hooded eyes�
�those folds that I so often thought of as making him look so aristocratic—were hanging more heavily than usual, giving him a look of deeper sadness than I had ever seen.
“Flavia,” he said in a flat and weary voice that wounded me more than a pointed weapon.
“Yes, sir?”
“What is to be done with you?”
“I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to break the brooch. I dropped it and stepped on it by accident, and it just crumbled. Gosh, it must have been very old to be so brittle!”
He gave an almost imperceptible wince, followed instantly by one of those looks that meant I had touched upon a topic that was not open for discussion. With a long sigh he shifted his gaze to the window. Something in my words had sent his mind fleeing to safety beyond the hills.
“Did you have an enjoyable trip up to London?” I ventured. “To the philatelic exhibition, I mean?”
The word “philatelic” drew him back quickly.
“I hope you found some decent stamps for your collection.”
He let out another sigh: this one frighteningly like a death rattle. “I did not go to London to buy stamps, Flavia. I went there to sell them.”
Even Feely gasped.
“Our days at Buckshaw may be drawing to a close,” Father said. “As you are well aware, the house itself belonged to your mother, and when she died without leaving a will …”
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness that reminded me of a stricken butterfly.
He had deflated so suddenly in front of us that I could scarcely believe it.
“I had hoped to take her brooch to someone whom I know …”
For quite a few moments his words did not register.
I knew that in recent years the cost of maintaining Buckshaw had become positively ruinous, to say nothing of the taxes and the looming death duty. For years Father had managed to keep “the snarling taxmen,” as he called them, at bay, but now the wolves must be howling once again on the doorstep.
There had been hints from time to time of our predicament, but the threat had always seemed unreal: no more than a distant cloud on a summer horizon.
I remembered that for a time, Father had pinned his hopes on Aunt Felicity, his sister who lived in Hampstead. Daffy had suggested that many of his so-called “philatelic jaunts” were, in fact, calls upon Aunt Felicity to touch her for a loan—or to beg her to fork over whatever remained of the family jewels.