‘Broken,’ Mr G observed, rather obviously for him.
‘Are you surprised after it was in a fire, fell so far and was crushed by a block of granite?’ I pulled a twig from her hair.
My guardian polished his eye on his sleeve and then on a scarlet cloth from his satchel.
‘For your benefit I should have said only broken.’ He reinserted his eye. ‘And it was limestone.’ He wiped his hands on a blue handkerchief.
The doll’s body was chilled from more than a decade in the shadows and most of the remnants of her dress fell away as I picked her up. In the hollow left by her body, countless creatures burrowed from the light.
I shook the dirt out – thin black beetles scattering with it -and her right eye sprang open, sapphire blue sparkling in the August sun. The snail’s shell was empty.
The doll was too big to fit with all the other paraphernalia inside my handbag so I wiped her down and sat her on top of everything else, her arms over the sides of the bag as if she were taking a bath.
‘Come, March.’ He gave me his hand to help me to my feet and kept holding mine until we were back on level ground.
‘Thank you,’ I said, touched by his unusual concern.
‘I should not like you to fall and sprain or fracture your wrist or ankle,’ he told me, ‘or burst your nose or crack a rib or concuss yourself on something harder than your skull. It would be almost irritating.’
We reached the house again where his cane stood against a section of wall which was still papered though stained.
‘What is the trowel for?’ I asked.
‘Trowelling,’ he replied. ‘Where was the main staircase?’
I surveyed the wreckage. ‘Over there,’ I decided. ‘By the central chimney stack. There are the parts of some treads sticking out of the wall and you can see the marks where the rest would have been inserted. It must have gone straight up. . .’ I counted the bricks. ‘About four steps to a small mezzanine before it split to the left and right. I can almost make out the rectangular areas where they must have collapsed.’
‘Either you can make them out or you cannot,’ Mr G said shortly and I narrowed my eyes.
‘I can just about, but the outlines are not clear.’
‘That which is clear,’ he screwed the trowel on to the ferule of his cane, ‘is very often not.’
‘Patented?’ I enquired of his device.
‘Pending.’ Sidney Grice leaned forward, shovelling an inch-thick layer of debris aside. ‘No sign of any rot or woodworm yet,’ he decided and tapped the exposed floorboard. ‘And, despite being American, the oak sounds solid enough.’ He stepped over the wall.
‘Be careful,’ I warned and my guardian snorted as he inched away.
‘According to Biedburger’s prolix 1877 edition of A Study of Social Converse in the Western Home Counties that is the fourth most common piece of advice given by women to men.’ Mr G raised his right leg like a strutting cockerel. ‘In my experience it is the seventeenth, but then most women I have come across would not be distressed.’ He placed his heel with great precision. ‘In fact they would be delighted if anything adverse happened to me.’ He lowered his toe. ‘Pay particular heed to the next event.’
A sheet of broken glass shattered under his sole.
‘Was that it?’
Sidney Grice went down on his haunches. ‘Yes.’ And scooped a curved sliver of glass and three samples of speckled dust into four test tubes to tuck them into the special tiny pockets in the canary lining of his coat.
‘Shall I pay less particular heed from now on?’
My guardian rose in that effortless hydraulic-power-company way of his and leaned on his front foot to test the next section. ‘I expect so.’ He edged further out.
‘What is that?’ I pointed to a metal pipe sticking out of the debris, and he shuffled sideways towards it.
‘A splendid tribute to English steel manufacturing.’ He pulled out the shaft of a garden shovel with all but a stump of the wooden handle burned away. ‘Discoloured by heat but otherwise in excellent condition.’ Sidney Grice turned it this way and that.
‘But why would it be in here?’ I pondered.
He put it back down. ‘If I were in the mood for speculation I might cobble together a theory, but I shall leave you to work one out.’
‘Thank you.’ I swept out my hand in a mock bow.
Mr G stepped over a mound and stumbled.
‘Be careful,’ I cried, adding hastily, ‘I am sorry, that slipped out.’
‘Babbage with his difference engine would have been hard-pressed to calculate the number of words that escape unchecked from your lank throat.’ Sidney Grice bent to toss two bricks and several smaller fragments aside and dug in with his trowel. ‘The boards are distinctly less solid here,’ he announced, ‘not through the actions of insects, nor mould nor rodents, as far as I can ascertain at a glance, but as a result of aqueous precipitation tending to pool in this area.’
‘I shall not repeat my advice,’ I promised.
‘It might be more pertinent now.’ He took another step and wobbled. ‘If this gives way and I die, I have left instructions in my study regarding the disposal of my corpse filed under NDM for National Day of Mourning.’
‘Only one day?’
‘More would be vulgar.’ There was a loud crack and he tipped sideways. ‘A prudent man might make a retreat and I may be discovered in that category.’ Mr G jumped back over the pile just as it slid forwards in a miniature landslide. The floor where he had been standing collapsed and the rubble crashed through a crater five or six feet in diameter, clattering into the cellar and exploding into dust.
‘Are you all right?’
Sidney Grice coughed. ‘Of course.’ He wafted the air with his wide-brimmed hat and peered into the precipice at his feet. ‘Well, that was stimulating.’
‘Will you come back now?’ I begged.
‘I shall return,’ he vowed, ‘but not immediately.’ He stuck out his left leg and tested a joist.
‘You are not thinking. . .’ I began as he slid his foot along.
‘Thinking and doing,’ he said. ‘Hush.’
My guardian placed his other foot on the beam but I could not see through the clouds of dust whether it sagged or not. He extended his cane to some six feet or so and held it horizontally, as I had seen in a photograph of Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls.
‘What are you doing?’ I demanded.
Mr G turned his head to look back at me and I wished he had not, for he wobbled alarmingly. ‘I believe that hush is generally recognized as an injunction to hold one’s tongue but, since you ask, I am crossing a seven-foot-four-inch wide chasm by means of a conveniently affixed oaken beam.’
‘But why?’
‘Because it is too far for me to jump from a standing start.’
I decided that it was safer to let him concentrate on the task in hand. His shortened right leg did not make his task any easier and he tipped worryingly every time he put his weight on it. At last he neared the other side.
‘The floor does not look robust enough to support me,’ he announced and dipped so suddenly that I thought he had fallen.
‘Be careful,’ I squeaked before I could stop myself, but Mr G gave no sign of having heard me. He was on one knee, his cane balanced across the beam, and rooting around in his satchel. He had his knife out and seemed to be scraping at a broken board jutting from the other side a foot or two over the abyss. I could hear scratching noises but he had his back to me and all I could see was his arm going to and fro. A test tube appeared and disappeared.
‘Intriguing,’ my godfather said and got to his feet, reversing cautiously as he avoided the projecting rusty nail heads.
‘Shall I come and help?’ I offered.
‘You shall not.’
But I had already hitched up my skirts and stepped into the house.
The floor felt less solid than I had expected as I tried to follow my guardian’s footsteps. T
he rubble shifted and I was glad I had my parasol to steady me. I could see the side of his face as I rounded the mound.
‘Get back.’ He froze.
‘What is it?’
I had been with my guardian when people had died in unspeakable agony but had never seen such a look of horror on his face. It drained of blood in an instant and his right eye fell unheeded, bouncing off a lathe and clinking on the cellar floor far below.
‘Underneath the beam.’ He gasped. ‘Bats, dozens of them.’
I craned my neck and saw them. He had not exaggerated their numbers for the whole joist was thick with them, clinging to the undersurface, rats wrapped in leather wings.
‘Ninety-six at a glance,’ he calculated.
‘But why did they not fly away when their ceiling broke and all the light flooded in?’ I wondered.
‘Perhaps you would like to write a paper on the motivations of chiroptera,’ he suggested acidly. ‘I can wait here whilst you equip yourself with the requisite materials.’
‘I believe they are dead,’ I proposed. ‘Bats’ feet lock so that they do not fall from their perches when they are asleep and the same holds true when they have died.’
Mr G shivered. ‘I did not know you were such an expert.’
He took another careful step back and one more until he was within a foot of the edge. Something twitched under the floor close to the plank he had examined.
‘Close your eye,’ I shouted.
‘What?’
But for once Sidney Grice did as he was told. He crossed his arms defensively in front of his face and a solitary bat shook itself free, flying up through the hole, rising through the dust, swooping around his head, and I knew that if he sensed it swirling about him like a moth near a lamp post, my guardian would fall. I darted towards him, flailing with my parasol and caught him on the upper arm.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘Defending you.’
‘Do not tell me from what,’ he begged.
I had never known him so helpless, this man who faced death with a calmness that would do credit to a regiment of guards. I waved my parasol again and the bat whirled away.
‘You are safe now,’ I said.
Sidney Grice opened his eye, swivelled, and took hold of the end of my parasol, and I led him like a blind man off that beam, back across the floor, through the window and out of Steep House.
42
The Terror of Seeming
SIDNEY GRICE WAS shivering as he set foot on the mossy flagstones by the site of the front door, and I would have offered him my flask but I knew that he would refuse it.
‘Do you want to sit down for a while?’ I asked.
‘Why on earth would I be standing if I did?’ he replied sharply, evidently having composed himself again.
His hand was steady as he poured out the last of his tea.
‘What did you find over there?’ I beat some dust off the sleeve of my dress.
Sidney Grice swallowed his beverage and drew the test tube out of his top waistcoat pocket. ‘What do you make of that?’
The doll leaned over with me, winking suggestively.
‘It looks like shavings of wood.’ I wiggled the tube to separate its contents. ‘With flakes of dark brown paint.’
Mr G drained his cup. ‘Not paint, March.’ His voice rang through the forsaken lands and the ruins of Steep House. ‘Varnish. Do you not see? The floor near the main staircase had been varnished.’
‘But most floors in good houses have been treated with something.’ I handed him back his find.
My guardian slipped the test tube into one of the leather sleeves sewn inside his satchel. ‘Yes.’ He loosened up his shoulders. ‘But some of it has been burned off.’
‘But it would be – in a fire.’ Not for the first time I was baffled.
Mr G raised his hands like an Old Testament prophet. ‘Have you learned nothing under my masterly tuition?’ His voice fell accusingly. ‘It is in the ordinary that most extraordinary is to be found. That is Grice’s fourth law.’
‘I thought it was the ninth,’ I said.
Sidney Grice sniffed. His face was as coated as a miller’s at the end of a morning’s work. ‘I have upgraded it.’
The doll and I looked at each other and her eyes rolled back into her head.
A velocipede stood against the trunk of a chestnut tree. The tyres had perished and ragweed wound between the spokes. Perhaps Eric had left it there carelessly when he had raced to the scene, an unthought of action that lived beyond him and his parents.
Mr G got out a folded patch and tied it.
‘You do not have a spare with you?’
‘I am tired of wearing it.’
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked in concern, though the socket looked a great deal less inflamed than I had known it to be.
‘Always.’ My guardian’s head went down, the weight seemingly too great for his neck. ‘Come, March.’ His head rose slowly. ‘Our work here is done.’
Through the poplars on the western boundary I spotted the slate roof and two chimneys of New House, and we deviated from our path to get a better view but could still see no lower than the upper floor.
‘So Lucy must have had a bedroom in that corner.’ I pointed to the front.
‘If their descriptions are to be believed.’
‘Shall we call on the way home?’
‘I have no craving to do so.’
‘Then I shall.’
‘As you wish.’
We skirted an ornamental pond. Flame-blue dragonflies darted and dipped over it and my guardian blenched but forced himself to continue. ‘My fear of things that flap is rational,’ he explained stiffly as he relocked the gate. ‘The fact that you do not share my fear is merely an indication of your irrationality.’
I did not reply, for this was one thing I did not want to argue about. He knew it was a weakness, but the anxiety he had exhibited was nothing to the terror Sidney Grice had of seeming to be human.
43
Heels, Wheels and Lemonade
LUCY AND FREDDY were out, Aellen told me, and I clucked in annoyance. If Sidney Grice had waited a minute he could have given me a lift home.
A whippet was chasing its tail round a man in tails and an opera hat playing ‘I Adora Flora. Why Don’t She Notice Me?’ on the harmonica. The man clicked his fingers and the dog went up on to its hind legs. I often worry how cruelly animals have been trained, but this dog was wagging its tail and looked, if anything, a bit too well-fed.
I reached for my purse and was so engrossed in watching as I left Amber House that I stumbled on the kerb and heard a snap. ‘Blimmit,’ I cursed as I put out my parasol to stop myself tumbling under the front wheels of a brougham speeding along.
‘Take a bit of water with it,’ the driver shouted as they clattered past.
‘Take a lot and drown yourself in it,’ I yelled back, thankful that my guardian was not within earshot. ‘Oh blart.’ I nearly stumbled again as my heel came adrift.
‘This is your lucky day.’ The bootmaker materialized at my side. ‘And mine.’
He looked so pleased and I felt so stupid that I almost stalked off, but it is difficult to march with dignity when one heel is hanging by a thread.
‘Can you fix it?’ I asked, and he smirked.
‘Well, I ain’t a clock mender.’
‘Do I need to take it off?’
‘Not if you don’t mind showing a bit of fetlock.’
It would be a great deal easier than unlacing, taking off, replacing and relacing my boot, I decided.
‘’Ang on to the lamp post then,’ he instructed, and I leaned my parasol against it before taking a grip on the hot green-painted iron. ‘Foot up.’ I bent my knee and he took my ankle between his knees as a blacksmith might shoe a horse. ‘That’s lucky. The ’eel is broken.’
‘I know it is,’ I retorted irritably.
‘No, I’m sayin’ the ’eel is snapped froo, not orf. If
I jest bang a nail in, it’ll tide you over nice.’ He clinked about in his canvas bag. ‘That’ll do it.’ More clinking. ‘Now, this won’t ’urt a bit.’ He started to tap, whistling along with the verse that went Oh Flora don’t ignora me todaaaaay, and five knocks later he wiggled the heel about and lowered my foot to the ground. ‘That’ll get you ’ome if you don’t play ’opscotch on the way.’ He waved his hammer like a flamboyant auctioneer. ‘Bring ’em back when you’ve got anovva pair on and I’ll set you up wiv two noo heels. Those ones are rubbish.’
I did not tell him I had paid six pounds for them three weeks ago. ‘How much do I owe you?’
The bootmaker scratched under his cap as if solving a complicated calculation.
‘Five spinners,’ he decided, and I ran through every possible rhyme in my head. ‘Spinnin’ Jennies – pennies,’ he explained.
‘You made that one up,’ I accused and he wrinkled his nose. He was a much smaller man than I had thought, I realized, now that he was close – hardly any taller than me and slightly on the plump side, and his skin was almost as smooth as Sidney Grice’s. He still had a brown stain on his upper lip and a trace on his lower, like a child who hadn’t had his face washed after eating chocolate – a birthmark, I decided.
Dark Dawn Over Steep House Page 18