by Alan Bradley
“Grub,” I said. “I was thinking about grub.”
“Ha!” she shouted. “Sausages with jam! Pickled shortbread! Cold candied tongue with snail sauce!”
And so on, until we reached Buckshaw at teatime and in darkness.
Having handed Undine over to Mrs. Mullet, and begging a fierce headache (“You poor dear. You’d best go up for a nap. Bundle up warm, mind.”), I made my way up the shadowed staircase, which seemed longer and steeper than usual.
· SIX ·
ALONE AT LAST IN my chemical laboratory, I put my back against the door and pushed, as if hordes of barbarians with battle-axes were battering at the other side.
There had been so little time to think. I mean to really think.
I needed to settle my mind: to restore it to some kind of normality.
Everything was out of kilter, and it wasn’t just me.
The prospect of a missed Christmas hung like a pall over Buckshaw. Memories of Christmases past danced just beyond the fringes of consciousness, taunting me with half-remembered sounds and smells: of carols, cranberries, and Christmas crackers; the fresh rustle of wrapping paper and the feel of fat, fresh snowflakes tickling our faces as we trudged through the drifts to church on Christmas Eve.
I took down a glass bell jar from a shelf and placed it on a bench.
In spite of the imagined barbarians at the barricaded door, I unlocked it, opened it, and made my way down the stairs for a raid upon the kitchen.
One of the joys of an old house, such as Buckshaw, is its constancy. The squeaking stairs have squeaked for centuries, and the quiet ones have remained silent. Particular treads that gave out a groan under my feet had similarly misbehaved under the boots, shoes, and slippers of my ancestors. There were no surprises. We de Luces had known since time immemorial how to raid a kitchen in silence. We could do it in our sleep.
I waited until Mrs. Mullet was busy with the cooker, then slipped in and did what I had to do.
Within two minutes I was back in my laboratory, and the pantry was missing three stems of rosemary. I couldn’t resist holding them to my nose and inhaling their intoxicating scent.
I tied the sprigs together with a bit of thread and set them aside.
Now, from a bottom cupboard, I brought out a round iron plate which had once been the base of a flask stand. I lit a Bunsen burner and held the heavy disk to the flame—using oven mitts, of course. Mrs. Mullet wouldn’t miss them.
Within a minute or so, the room was filled with the smell of hot iron: a sharp, acrid aroma, which is what I always imagine railway tracks must smell like in the extremes of an Australian summer.
As a precaution, I opened a window sash. It wouldn’t do to have someone think the house was on fire.
When the disc was nearly red-hot, I placed it on a sheet of Pyrex, sprinkled on it a layer of powdered gum bezoin, placed my bundled sprigs of rosemary on the metal, covered them with the bell jar, and sat down to watch.
The gum bezoin melted at once, causing the little world inside the glass to fill with a dense fog. As the fumes arose, the bundle of herbs took on a coat of silky white crystals: benzoic acid.
The branches of rosemary were now completely covered with artificial hoarfrost: my own private Christmas tree growing somewhere in a secret, snowy wood.
Lacking gifts and decorations, it was not, of course, as comforting as the real thing, but it would have to do.
I put my head down on my arms and fell asleep at the workbench.
—
Hours later—I don’t know the time—I was awakened by a loud clatter. My first thought, of course, was that it was Father Christmas who, in that famous American poem, makes just such a sound on the lawn.
Without even thinking—and only half awake—I dashed to the window. The snow had continued to fall, and the Visto outside was now covered with a flawless white blanket.
As I stood blinking, something hard struck the glass directly in front of my face: the same sound as before.
I opened the window and peered down into the white darkness.
“Who is it?” I called in a hoarse whisper.
“It’s Carl, Flavia. Carl Pendracka. Remember me?”
Of course I remembered him!
Even though, in the long run, he was not likely to become my brother-in-law, I’ve always had a soft spot for Carl Pendracka, another of my sister Feely’s former suitors. Carl was, after all, the one who had described to me how while swimming in St. Louis, Missouri, he had dived under an abandoned pier and found himself floating face-to-face with a bloated corpse. How could I forget him?
“Funny thing was, I knew the son of a gun,” Carl had told me. “His name was Bobby Ryback, and we had gone to the same school. He was a year ahead of me, in the eighth grade. I knew it was him because, in spite of being blue and swollen, he still looked a lot like Bobby Ryback.”
It’s in the sharing of such fascinating tidbits of information that real friendships are formed.
Meanwhile, Carl must have grown tired of waiting for a response. A moment later, he came swarming hand over hand up the dead vines on the side of the house.
“Nya, what’s up, Doc?” he said, wrinkling his nose and making carrot-chewing noises as he swung his legs over the sill and into the room.
Carl was an American, and he actually talked like that. I answered with the expected grin.
His wet army greatcoat and oversized boots gave him the look of a woolly cartoon caterpillar.
“How’s that sister of yours…whatsername?”
“Ophelia,” I said. “Feely. As you know perfectly well. She’s engaged, thank you—as you also know perfectly well.”
“So I heard,” Carl said. “I also heard she and her German pilot have gone kaput.”
Combined with the village gossip mill of Bishop’s Lacey, the jungle telegraph of the air base at Leathcote was faster and much more accurate than even the most high-grade military intelligence—at least, according to Mrs. Mullet’s husband, Alf.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve been away.”
“Roger, wilco,” Carl said. “Over and out. Canada. Land of the loon and the knotty pine.”
For a supposed descendant of King Arthur, Carl could be remarkably dopey.
“What are you doing hanging round at this unholy hour? I might have called the police.”
“Hoping to catch a glimpse of the dearly beloved,” Carl said, and my heart almost broke for his honesty. “I saw your light—knew you were home—knew you’d let me in. Do you think she’d see me?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Carl,” I said. “You can’t stay here. Besides, the dearly beloved is in her bed snoring away like twenty hogs. Her face is slathered with Turtle Oil, her lips are coated with Eau de Suez Vaccine Cream, and her hair is in a bag. She’s hardly the Chelsea Flower Show.”
“I don’t care,” Carl said. “If there’s half a chance, it’s now, while she and Hans—”
“Dieter,” I interrupted. “Dieter Schrantz. He’s almost criminally handsome, you know.” I couldn’t resist twitting him.
“I know.” Carl sighed. “A Norse god.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You find out everything you can about a man called Sambridge and I’ll arrange a tryst.”
“A what?”
“A tryst. You know, like the ones in Georgette Heyer. A secret meeting of lovers.”
I knew at once I’d chosen the right words.
A sudden fire came into Carl’s eyes. He seized my right hand and gave it a couple of powerful pumps.
“Done!” he said. “And done again! Now who’s this Stanfield you need to know about?”
“Sambridge,” I corrected him. “He lives at Thornfield Chase, near East Finching. He’s a wood-carver.”
“Don’t need to know that,” Carl said. “I’ll ask my friend Mordecai. Mordecai’s in Intelligence. Say you want to find out what the King had for breakfast this morning? Ask Mordecai. Want
to know how much the chancellor of the exchequer owes his banker? Ask Mordecai. Who’s the smart money on for the Derby or the Grand National?”
“Ask Mordecai.” I grinned. “And while you’re at it, you can also ask him who won the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake last summer.”
“The horse or the lucky ticket holders?”
“Both,” I told him. “If you think he can.”
Carl made a rude raspberry noise with his mouth. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He put a forefinger to his lips in a sign of secrecy, then, adjusting an imaginary gun belt on his hips, he drawled, “Well, I reckon I’ll climb on my old cayuse and mosey off into the whatchamacallit.”
A moment later, the dead vines outside the window were creaking with his departure.
When I was sure that Carl was gone, I lowered and locked the sash. Taking up a pencil and a scrap of paper, I scribbled a note:
Dear Dogger,
Gone up to London to see a friend. Don’t worry.
And I signed it:
Yours faithfully, Flavia S. de Luce.
I crept through the silent house and pinned the note to the outside of Dogger’s bedroom door.
He wouldn’t read it, of course, until I was gone, by which time it would be too late to stop me.
Downstairs, in the library, I consulted the ABC Railway Guide. The first train of the day was scheduled to leave Doddingsley at 7:03. If I broke all speed records, I could just make it, and be back in time for an evening visit to the hospital.
I hadn’t, of course, counted upon the snow. Fortunately, it was dry, fluffy stuff, which Gladys’s front wheel cut, for the first few miles, like a saber through soft butter. The advantage of traveling so early in the day was that I had the roads to myself.
I inhaled the cold air in great gulps, willing the miles to pass, praying that we would not come to grief in a clatter of metal and ice at the end of some long incline.
Although sunrise would not be for another hour, I couldn’t help wondering what I would look like to some hypothetical observer. Hypothetical farmers and their hypothetical wives were notoriously early risers, and I pictured them glancing out their hypothetical kitchen windows at the silhouette of a phantom girl in a black winter coat on a black bicycle moving steadily across a white winter landscape. An oil painting by somebody dark, like Whistler.
Flavia Cycling, it could be called—or The Ride of the Snow Queen.
Would they wonder who I was and where I was going? Would they care?
Halfway to Doddingsley, we came abruptly upon the tire tracks of an early morning farm tractor, and settled into them. Riding its ribbed footprints, we juddered and bumped our way towards the railway station.
From the top of the last hill, I could see the engine standing panting in the station, clouds of steam obscuring the forward carriages. The stationmaster was already making his way towards the closed crossing gates.
The engine gave out a sharp whistle. It was leaving!
Even as I watched in horror the train began to move.
“No! Wait! Stop!” I shouted, but it was too late for words.
I jerked Gladys’s handlebars sharply to one side and steered her into a steep, narrow gully that ran at a right angle down to the tracks.
With a bang and a series of stomach-churning slithers, we tobogganed in a shower of snow and slush, slipping and sliding, veering from side to side, down the cutting, across the ditch at the bottom, and directly onto the tracks, where we came to an abrupt halt at the end of the platform. The train, like a panting dragon, was picking up speed. It was coming directly at us.
I couldn’t help closing my eyes and waiting for the End.
It’s remarkable how time slows when you’re about to die, and even more remarkable the things that come to mind at such moments of peril.
It was only last summer, here at Doddingsley station, that I had witnessed the death of a stranger beneath the wheels of a train. And it was here, too, although years ago, that the Richardsons’ young daughter had met her tragic end. And now, it seemed, so would I. Cynthia would soon have another death to mourn.
There came a cold, shrill sound of steel against steel and a deafening hiss of steam. My face was suddenly hot and wet.
I dared not move a muscle.
And then the sound of voices: human voices raised in what sounded like anger. A couple of naughty words found their way into my innocent ears.
I was still alive!
I opened my eyes.
I was standing in a cloud of swirling steam, so close to the front of the locomotive that I could have reached out and touched it. But I did not.
Instinct seized me.
I picked up Gladys and marched past the driver and the fireman, both of whom had climbed down from their cab and were kicking up snow as they marched towards me with clenched fists and red, furious faces.
I dragged Gladys onto the platform, leaned her against the brick wall of the station, gave her a reassuring pat on the seat and strolled—looking straight ahead—across to the train. The guard and the stationmaster stood speechless, shoulder to shoulder, mouths open as I sailed past them in the stately way I imagined Aunt Millicent might have done.
“Carry on,” I said, as I stepped into the closest carriage and took a seat.
· SEVEN ·
A GRAY, GRUBBY DAWN was breaking as we arrived in London. The platform was in even more than its usual hubbub. I edged my way slowly—so as not to attract attention—into the center of a jostling mass of schoolboys. Ughhh! Somebody’s sister, I would pretend to be: welcoming a grubby, jammy brother home for the holidays.
We seethed, like a mass of jellyfish, towards the station’s exit.
On the street, a black cab edged forward from the rank.
“Where to?” the driver asked, squinting horribly behind his cigarette. “Buck’num Palace?”
He wheezed like a tin whistle, as if he had made a capital joke.
I climbed into the backseat in a businesslike manner. “Bedford Square,” I told him.
“Any partic’lar address?”
“Number seven,” I said, partly because it was the first number that came to mind, and partly because I guessed that any square, anywhere in London, must have a number seven. A much higher number might have betrayed my relative ignorance of the city’s geography.
“Right-o,” he said as we jerked into motion.
I do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those whom I know and love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged.
Before I knew it, we had reached our destination. I paid the driver, turned away, and walked briskly to the door of number seven, where I pretended to rummage in my pocket for my keys. Judging by the nameplates at the door, the building was a nest of architects.
I waited until the taxi had driven off, then set out in search of the address I was looking for. The numbers began on the east side of the square and proceeded north, then west.
Then suddenly—unexpectedly—among the Georgian doors of solicitors, surveyors, and assorted societies, there it was: LANCELOT GATH, PUBLISHERS.
I tried the cold brass knob, but the door was locked. I rattled it a bit, but it was no use. There were no lights visible in the windows.
I looked up and down the square. Besides my own, there were few footprints in the fresh, unshoveled snow. The business day had not yet begun. I would simply have to wait.
I blew into my cupped hands, producing a kind of hollow owl call. I had left home without gloves or mittens, and I was beginning to regret my haste.
The temperature seemed to be dropping alarmingly. Surely it was colder now than it had been at the station.
I was weighing my options when a man in a caped overcoat turned the corner and approached along the street. In spite of the snow, he was carrying a furled umbrella and a rolled-up newspaper.
He nodded genially as he fished for his keys.
“M
r. Gath?” I guessed.
The man seemed startled at first, and then a slow smile spread across his face.
“Good lord, no. Mr. Gath, like Jacob Marley, has been dead these seven years—well, six, actually, but seven is so much more metrically pleasing, don’t you think?”
I must have looked crestfallen.
“Never mind,” he said. “In spite of Mr. Gath’s precipitous departure, his inconsolable successors continue to crank the sausage machine at the same old stand. Now then, what can I do for you?
“But wait—come in, come in. No point freezing ourselves to death out here on the doorstep when we could just as well be chugalugging tea in a warm study. Are you familiar with the word chugalug? It’s an Americanism. We had it last year in a book about fly-fishing in Colorado. Far too good not to crib, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I managed.
“Come in, come in,” he said, putting his shoulder to the swollen door.
Inside, we stamped the snow from our feet on an ancient jute doormat, and I followed him upstairs.
Not surprisingly, his office was like a cave carved into a cliff of books. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, teetering stacks: Every available surface had been used to create a precarious tower of printed volumes, the piles reminding me of the photos I had seen of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the gigantic termite mounds of Ethiopia.
“Have a chair,” he said, taking my coat and shifting a pile of dusty books from the seat of what looked like a Chippendale.
“Now, then,” he said, when I had settled into it, “I’m Frank Borley. What can I do for you, Miss…ah…”
“De Luce,” I told him. “Flavia de Luce. Actually, I’m doing research on one of your former employees.”
Because I didn’t know her surname, I had to make a game of it.
I leaned forward, lowered my voice, and added in a confidential tone, “She drowned several years ago while diving in the Mediterranean.”
“Good lord,” he said. “Louisa Congreve?”
It was a question but not a question. I let his words hang in the air.
“She was the aunt of a friend,” I said, which was more or less true. “Her family are thinking of having me write her biography.”