by Alan Bradley
In the end, his sister must have turned him down. Just recently, and with our own ears, we had heard her tell him he must think about selling his philatelic collection. “Those ridiculous postage stamps,” she had called them, to be precise.
“Something will turn up,” Daffy remarked brightly. “It always does.”
“Only in Dickens, Daphne,” Father said. “Only in Dickens.”
Daffy had been reading David Copperfield for the umpteenth time. “Boning up on pawnshops,” she had answered when I asked her why.
Only now did it occur to me that Father had intended to take Harriet’s brooch—the one I had destroyed—to a pawnbroker.
“May I be excused?” I asked. “I’m suddenly not feeling well.”
It was true. I must have fallen asleep the instant my head touched the pillow.
Now, hours later, I was suddenly awake. The hands of my alarm clock, which I had carefully dabbed with my own formulation of phosphorescent paint, told me that it was several minutes past two in the morning.
I lay in bed watching the dark shadows of the trees as they twitched restlessly on the ceiling. Ever since a territorial dispute between two of my distant ancestors had ended in a bitter stalemate—and a black line painted in the middle of the foyer—this wing of the house had remained unheated. Time and the weather had taken their toll, causing the wallpaper of nearly every room—mine was mustard yellow with scarlet worms—to peel away in great sheets which hung in forlorn flaps, while the paper from the ceilings hung down in great loose swags whose contents were probably best not thought about.
Sometimes, especially in winter, I liked to pretend that I lived beneath an iceberg in an Arctic sea; that the coldness was no more than a dream, and that when I awoke, there would be a roaring fire in the rusty fireplace and hot steam rising from the tin hip-bath that stood in the corner behind the door.
There never was, of course, but I couldn’t really complain. I slept here by choice, not by necessity. Here in the east wing—the so-called “Tar” wing—of Buckshaw, I could work away to my heart’s content until all hours in my chemical laboratory. Since they faced south and east, my windows could be ablaze with light and no one outside would see them—no one, that is, except perhaps the foxes and badgers that inhabited the island and the ruined folly in the middle of the ornamental lake, or perhaps the occasional poacher whose footprints and discarded shell casings I sometimes found in my rambles through the Palings.
The Palings! I had almost forgotten.
My abduction at the kitchen door by Feely and Daffy, my subsequent imprisonment in the cellars, my shaming at the hands of Father, and finally my fatigue: All of those had conspired to make me put the Gypsy clean out of my mind.
I leapt from my bed, somewhat surprised to find myself still fully clothed. I must have been tired!
Shoes in hand, I crept down the great curving staircase to the foyer, where I stopped to listen in the middle of that vast expanse of black-and-white tiling. To an observer in one of the galleries above, I must have looked like a pawn in some grand and Gothic game of chess.
A pawn? Pfah, Flavia! Admit it: surely something more than a pawn!
The house was in utter silence. Father and Feely, I knew, would be dreaming their respective dreams: Father of perforated bits of paper and Feely of living in a castle built entirely of mirrors in which she could see herself reflected again and again from every possible aspect.
Upstairs, at the far end of the west wing, Daffy would still be awake, though, goggling by candlelight, as she loved to do, at the Gustave Doré engravings in Gargantua and Pantagruel. I had found the fat calf-bound volume hidden under her mattress while rifling her room in search of a packet of chewing gum that an American serviceman had given to Feely, who had come across him sitting on a stile one morning as she was walking into the village to post a letter. His name was Carl, and he was from St. Louis, in America. He told her she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Feely, of course, had come home preening and hidden the gum, as she always does with such tributes, in her lingerie drawer, from which Daffy had pinched it. And I in my turn from her.
For weeks afterwards it was “Carl-this” and “Carl-that” with Feely prattling endlessly on about the muddy Mississippi, its length, its twists and bends, and how to spell it properly without making a fool of oneself. We were given the distinct impression that she had personally conceived and executed the formation of that great river, with God standing helplessly on the sidelines, little more than a plumber’s assistant.
I smiled at the thought.
It was at that precise instant that I heard it: a metallic click.
For a couple of heartbeats, I stood perfectly still, trying to decide from which direction it had come.
The drawing room, I thought, and immediately began tiptoeing in that direction. In my bare feet, I was able to move in perfect silence, keeping an ear out for the slightest sound. Although there are times when I have cursed the painfully acute sense of hearing I’ve inherited from Harriet, this was not one of them.
As I moved at a snail’s pace along the corridor, a crack of light suddenly appeared beneath the drawing-room door. Who could be in there at this time of night? I wondered. Whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t a de Luce.
Should I call for help, or tackle the intruder myself?
I seized the knob, turned it ever so slowly, and opened the door: a foolhardy action, I suppose, but after all, I was in my own home. No sense in letting Daffy or Feely take all the credit for catching a burglar.
Accustomed to the darkness, my eyes were somewhat dazzled by the light of an ancient paraffin lamp that was kept for use during electrical interruptions, and so at first I didn’t see anyone there. In fact, it took a moment for me to realize that someone—a stranger in rubber boots—was crouched by the fireplace, his hand on one of the brass firedogs that had been cast into the shape of foxes.
The whites of his eyes flashed as he looked up into the mirror and saw me standing behind him in the open doorway.
His moleskin coat and his scarlet scarf flared out as he came to his feet and spun quickly round.
“Crikey, gal! You might have given me a heart attack!”
It was Brookie Harewood.
FOUR
THE MAN HAD BEEN drinking. I noticed that at once. Even from where I stood I could detect the smell of alcohol—that and the powerful fishy odor that accompanies a person who wears a creel with as much pride as another might wear a kilt and sporran.
I closed the door quietly behind me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, putting on my sternest face.
Actually, what I was thinking was that Buckshaw, in the small hours of the morning, was becoming a virtual Paddington Station. It wasn’t more than a couple of months since I had found Horace Bonepenny in a heated nocturnal argument with Father. Well, Bonepenny was now in his grave, and yet here was another intruder to take his place.
Brookie raised his cap and tugged at his forelock—the ancient signal of submission to one’s better. If he were a dog, it would be much the same thing as prostrating himself and rolling over to expose his belly.
“Answer me, please,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He fiddled a bit with the wicker creel on his hip before he replied.
“You caught me fair and square, miss,” he said, shooting me a disarming smile. I noticed, much to my annoyance, that he had perfect teeth.
“But I didn’t mean no harm. I’ll admit I was on the estate hoping to do a bit of business rabbitwise. Nothing like a nice pot of rabbit stew for a weak chest, is there?”
He knocked his rib cage with a clenched fist and forced a cough that, since I had done it so often myself, didn’t fool me for an instant. Neither did his fake gamekeeper dialect. If, as Mrs. Mullet claimed, Brookie’s mother was a society artist, he had probably been schooled at Eton, or some such place. The grubbing voice was meant to gain him sympathy. That, to
o, was an old trick. I had used it myself, and because of that, I found myself resenting it.
“The Colonel’s no shooter,” he went on, “and all the world knows that for a fact. So where’s the harm in ridding the place of a pest that does no more than eat your garden and dig holes in your shrubbery? Where’s the harm in that, eh?”
I noticed that he was repeating himself—almost certainly a sign that he was lying. I didn’t know the answer to his question, so I remained silent, my arms crossed.
“But then I saw a light inside the house,” he went on. “ ‘Hullo!’ I said to myself, ‘What’s this, then, Brookie? Who could be up at this ungodly hour?’ I said. ‘Could someone be sick?’ I know the Colonel doesn’t use a motorcar, you see, and then I thought, ‘What if someone’s needed to run into the village to fetch the doctor?’”
There was truth in what he said. Harriet’s ancient Rolls-Royce—a Phantom II—was kept in the coach house as a sort of private chapel, a place that both Father and I went—though never at the same time, of course—whenever we wanted to escape what Father called “the vicissitudes of daily life.”
What he meant, of course, was Daffy and Feely—and sometimes me.
Although Father missed Harriet dreadfully, he never spoke of her. His grief was so deep that Harriet’s name had been put at the top of the Buckshaw Blacklist: things that were never to be spoken of if you valued your life.
I confess that Brookie’s words caught me off guard. Before I could frame a reply he went on: “But then I thought, ‘No, there’s more to it than that. If someone was sick at Buckshaw there’d be more lights on than one. There’d be lights in the kitchen—someone heating water, someone dashing about …’ ”
“We might have used the telephone,” I protested, instinctively resisting Brookie’s attempt to spin a web.
But he had a point. Father loathed the telephone, and allowed it to be used only in the most extreme emergencies. At two-thirty in the morning, it would be quicker to cycle—or even run!—into Bishop’s Lacey than to arouse Miss Runciman at the telephone exchange and ask her to ring up the sleeping Dr. Darby.
By the time that tedious game of Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button had been completed, we might all of us be dead.
As if he were the squire and I the intruder, Brookie, his rubber-booted feet spread wide and his hands clasped behind him, had now taken up a stance in front of the fireplace, midway between the two brass foxes that had belonged to Harriet’s grandfather. He didn’t lean an elbow on the mantel, but he might as well have.
Before I could say another word, he gave a quick, nervous glance to the right and to the left and dropped his voice to a husky whisper: “ ‘But wait, Brookie, old man,’ I thought. ‘Hold on, Brookie, old chum. Mightn’t this be the famous Gray Lady of Buckshaw that you’re seeing?’ After all, miss, everyone knows that there’s sometimes lights seen hereabouts that have no easy explanation.”
Gray Lady of Buckshaw? I’d never heard of such an apparition. How laughably superstitious these villagers were! Did the man take me for a fool?
“Or is the family specter not mentioned in polite company?”
Family specter? I had the sudden feeling that someone had tossed a bucket of ice water over my heart.
Could the Gray Lady of Buckshaw be the ghost of my mother, Harriet?
Brookie laughed. “Silly thought, wasn’t it?” he went on. “No spooks for me, thank you very much! More likely a housebreaker with his eye on the Colonel’s silver. Lot of that going on nowadays, since the war.”
“I think you’d better go now,” I said, my voice trembling. “Father’s a light sleeper. If he wakes up and finds you here, there’s no telling what he’ll do. He sleeps with his service revolver on the night table.”
“Well, I’ll be on my way, then,” Brookie said casually. “Glad to know the family’s come to no harm. We worry about you lot, you know, all of us down in the village. No telling what can happen when you’re way out here, cut off, as it were …”
“Thank you,” I said. “We’re very grateful, I’m sure. And now, if you don’t mind—”
I unlocked one of the French doors and opened it wide.
“Good night, miss,” he said, and with a grin he vanished into the darkness.
I counted slowly to ten—and then I followed him.
Brookie was nowhere in sight. The shadows had swallowed him whole. I stood listening for a few moments on the terrace, but the night was eerily silent.
Overhead, the stars twinkled like a million little lanterns, and I recognized the constellation called the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, named for the family of girls in Greek mythology who were so saddened by their father’s fate—he was the famous Atlas who was doomed to carry the heavens on his shoulders—that they committed suicide.
I thought of the rain-swept afternoon I had spent in the greenhouse with Dogger, helping him cut the eyes from a small mountain of potatoes, and listening to a tale that had been handed down by word of mouth for thousands of years.
“What a stupid thing to do!” I said. “Why would they kill themselves?”
“The Greeks are a dramatic race,” Dogger had answered. “They invented the drama.”
“How do you know all these things?”
“They swim in my head,” he said, “like dolphins.” And then he had lapsed into his customary silence.
Somewhere across the lawn an owl hooted, bringing me back with a start to the present. I realized that I was still holding my shoes in my hand. What a fool I must have looked to Brookie Harewood!
Behind me, except for the paraffin lamp that still burned in the drawing room, Buckshaw was all in darkness. It was too early for breakfast and too late to go back to bed.
I stepped back into the house, put on my shoes, and turned down the wick. By now, the Gypsy woman would be rested and be over her fright. With any luck, I could manage an invitation to a Gypsy breakfast over an open campfire. And with a bit more luck, I might even find out who Hilda Muir was, and why we were all dead.
I paused at the edge of the Palings, waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the deeper gloom among the trees.
A wooded glade in darkness is an eerie place, I thought; a place where almost anything could happen.
Pixies … Hilda Muir … the Gray Lady of Buckshaw …
I gave myself a mental shake. “Stop it, Flavia!” a voice inside me said, and I took its advice.
The caravan was still there: I could see several stars and a patch of the Milky Way reflected in one of its curtained windows. The sound of munching somewhere in the darkness told me that Gry was grazing not far away.
I approached the caravan slowly.
“Hel-lo,” I sang, keeping the tone light, in view of the Gypsy’s earlier frame of mind. “It’s me, Flavia. Knock-knock. Anyone at home?”
There was no reply. I waited a moment, then made my way round to the back of the caravan. When I touched its wooden side to steady myself, my hand came away wet with the cold dew.
“Anyone here? It’s me, Flavia.” I gave a light rap with my knuckles.
There was a faint glow in the rear window: the sort of glow that might be given off by a lamp turned down for the night.
Suddenly something wet and horrid and slobbering touched the side of my face. I leapt back, my arms windmilling.
“Cheeses!” I yelped.
There was a rustling noise and a hot breath on the back of my neck, followed by the sweet smell of wet grass.
Then Gry was nuzzling at my ear.
“Creekers, Gry!” I said, spinning round. “Creekers!”
I touched his warm face in the darkness and found it oddly comforting: much more so than I should ever have guessed. I touched my forehead to his, and for a few moments as my heart slowed we stood there in the starlight, communicating in a way that is far older than words.
If only you could talk, I thought. If only you could talk.
“Hel-lo,” I called again, giving Gry�
�s muzzle one last rub and turning towards the caravan. But still, there was no reply.
The wagon teetered a bit on its springs as I stepped onto the shafts and clambered up towards the driving seat. The ornamental door handle was cold in my hand as I gave it a twist. The door swung open—it had not been locked.
“Hello?”
I stepped inside and reached for the paraffin lamp that glowed dully above the stove. As I turned up the wick, the glass shade sprang to light with a horrid sticky red brilliance.
Blood! There was blood everywhere. The stove and the curtains were splattered with the stuff. There was blood on the lampshade—blood on my hands.
Something dripped from the ceiling onto my face. I shrank back in revulsion—and perhaps a little fright.
And then I saw the Gypsy—she was lying crumpled at my feet: a black tumbled heap lying perfectly still in a pool of her own blood. I had almost stepped on her.
I knelt at her side and took her wrist between my thumb and forefinger. Could that thin stirring possibly be a pulse?
If it was, I needed help, and needed it quickly. Mucking about would do no good.
I was about to step out onto the driving seat when something stopped me in my tracks. I sniffed the air, which was sharp with the coppery, metallic smell of blood.
Blood, yes—but something more than blood. Something out of place. I sniffed again. What could it be?
Fish! The caravan reeked of blood and fish!
Had the Gypsy woman caught and cooked a fish in my absence? I thought not; there was no sign of a fire or utensils. Besides, I thought, she had been too weak and tired to do so. And there had certainly been no fishy smell about the caravan when I left it earlier.
I stepped outside, closed the door behind me, and leapt to the ground.
Running back to Buckshaw for help was out of the question. It would take far too long. By the time the proper people had been awakened and Dr. Darby summoned, the Gypsy might well be dead—if she wasn’t already.