by Alan Bradley
I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing.
It was a coffin which, once clear of the shadows of the luggage van, gleamed cruelly in the harsh sunlight.
In it was Harriet. Harriet.
My mother.
TWO
WHAT DID I THINK? How did I feel?
I wish I knew.
Sadness, perhaps, that our hopes were dashed forever? Relief that Harriet had come home at last?
It should have been dull black, her coffin. It should have had frosty silver fittings, with covered urns and cherubs with downcast eyes.
But it did not. It was of rich oak, polished to such an obscene brilliance that it hurt my eyes. I found that I could not look at the thing.
Oddly enough, the scene which popped into my mind was that one at the end of Mrs. Nesbit’s novel The Railway Children, in which Bobbie, on the station platform, flings herself into the arms of her wrongfully imprisoned daddy.
But there was to be no such tender ending for me, or, for that matter, for Father or Feely or Daffy, either. No, there was to be no such happy conclusion.
I glanced quickly at Father, as if he might give me a clue, but he, too, stood frozen in his own private glacier, beyond all grief and beyond all expression, as the coffin was draped with a Union Jack.
Alf Mullet snapped a sharp salute and held it for a very long time.
Daffy gave my ribs a dig with her elbow and pointed with the faintest inclination of her chin.
At the south end of the platform, a rather stout old gentleman in a dark suit was standing apart from the others. I recognized him instantly.
As the bearers moved slowly away from the train, bent under their sad burden, he removed his black hat in respect and lowered it to his side.
It was Winston Churchill.
Whatever could have brought the former Prime Minister to Bishop’s Lacey?
He stood there alone, watching in the deadly hush as my mother was carried to the open doors of a motor hearse, which had appeared in uncanny silence as if from nowhere.
Churchill watched as the coffin, preceded by an officer with a drawn sword, was borne gently past Father, past Feely, past Daffy, and past me, then placed himself shoulder to shoulder with Father.
“She was England, damn it,” he growled.
As if awakening from a dream, Father’s eyes lifted, came to rest, and focused on Churchill’s face.
After a very long time, he said, “She was more than that, Prime Minister.”
Churchill nodded and seized Father’s elbow. “We can ill afford to lose a de Luce, Haviland,” he said quietly.
What did he mean by that?
For a moment, they stood there together in the old sunshine, these two seemingly defeated men, brothers in something far beyond me: something I could not even begin to imagine.
Then, having shaken hands with Father, with Feely, with Daffy, and even with Aunt Felicity, Mr. Churchill came over to where I was standing, a little apart from the others.
“And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches, young lady?”
Those words! Those exact words!
I had heard them before! No—not heard them—seen them!
The roots of my hair were suddenly standing on tiptoe.
Churchill’s blue eyes were piercing, as if he were staring into my soul.
What did he mean? What on earth was he suggesting? What was he expecting me to say?
I’m afraid I blushed. It was all I could manage.
Mr. Churchill stared intently into my face, taking my hand and giving it a gentle squeeze with his remarkably long fingers.
“Yes,” he said at last, almost as if to himself, “yes, I do believe you have.”
And with that, he turned and walked away from me along the platform, acknowledging, with solemn nods to the left and to the right, the recognition of the villagers as he slowly made his way through them to his waiting car.
Although he had been out of office for ages, there was still a remarkable air of greatness about this plump little man with his bulldog face and the startling stare of his great blue eyes.
Daffy was already whispering in my ear. “What did he say?” she asked.
“He said that he was sorry,” I lied. I didn’t know why, but I knew that it was the thing to do. “Just that he was sorry.”
Daffy gave me that squinty evil look of hers.
How could it be, I wondered, that with our mother lying dead under our very noses, two sisters could be almost at each other’s throats over a simple fib? It seemed ridiculous, but it was happening. I can only suppose that that’s the way life is.
And death.
What I did know for certain was that I needed to get home, that I needed to be locked in the silence of my own room.
Father was busy shaking hands with all the people who wanted to give him their condolences. The very air was alive with the reptilian hissing of their Ss and the little animal squeals of their Ys.
“Sorry, Colonel de Luce … sorry … sorry,” they were telling him, over and over again, each in his or her own turn. It’s a wonder Father didn’t go mad on the spot.
Could no one think of anything original to say?
Daffy once told me that there are approximately half a million words in the English language. With so many to choose from, you’d think that just one person, at least, could find something more original than that stupid word “sorry.”
That’s what I was thinking when a tall man in a coat too long and much too heavy for such a lovely day detached himself from the crowd on the platform and made directly for me.
“Miss de Luce?” he asked, in a surprisingly gentle voice.
I was not accustomed to being addressed as “Miss de Luce.” It was a name usually reserved for Daffy or Feely—or for Aunt Felicity.
“I am Flavia de Luce,” I said. “And you are?”
It was a response Dogger had taught me to give automatically when spoken to by strangers. I glanced over and saw Dogger hovering solicitously at Father’s side.
“A friend,” the man said. “Just a friend—of the family. I need to talk to you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking a step backwards. “I’m—”
“Please. It’s vitally important.”
Vitally? Anyone who used the word “vitally” in everyday conversation could hardly be a villain.
“Well …” I said, wavering.
“Tell your father that the Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. He’ll understand. I must speak to him. Tell him that the Nide is under—”
The man’s eyes widened suddenly in puzzlement—or was it horror?—as he looked over my shoulder. What—or whom—had he seen?
“Come along, Flavia. You’re keeping everyone waiting.”
It was Feely. My sister gave the stranger a tight, polite smile as she put a hand on my shoulder and gave it an unnecessarily hard tug.
“Wait,” I said, ducking to one side and breaking away from her grip. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dogger was already holding open the door of Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce Phantom II, which he had parked as close to the platform as he possibly could. Father was halfway to the car, shuffling alarmingly, his head bowed.
It was not until that moment, I think, that I realized what a crushing blow this whole business must be to him.
He had lost Harriet, not once, but twice.
“Flavia!”
It was Feely again, her eyes bugging with cold blue impatience. “Why,” she hissed, “must you always insist on being such a—”
A shriek from the engine’s whistle blotted out her last few words, but I was easily able to lip-read their shocking shape.
The train began to move, slowly at first. We had been told during our briefing by the undertakers that, as we departed the station, the train would be taken to a disused railway yard somewhere north of East Finching to be turned round for its return run up to London. It was a breach of undertaking etiquette, as well as being
“uncommon bad luck,” according to Mr. Sowerby, of Sowerby & Sons, to run a funeral train backwards.
By now, Feely was dragging me—literally—towards the waiting Rolls.
I tried to break free, but it was no use. Her fingers dug deeply into the muscle of my upper arm, and I was dragged stumbling along, gasping in her wake.
A sudden shout broke from among the stragglers at the station. I thought at first it was Feely’s cruel treatment of me that had caused the outcry, but I saw now that people were running towards the edge of the platform.
The guard’s whistle was blowing frantically, someone was screaming, and the engine banged to an abrupt halt with clouds of steam billowing out from beneath its driving wheels. I struggled free of Feely’s grasp and elbowed my way back along the carriages, squeezing past the possible Air Vice-Marshal, who seemed rooted to the spot.
The villagers stood transfixed, many hands clapped to many mouths.
“Someone pushed him,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere behind me in the crowd.
At my feet, as if reaching for my shoes, a human hand stuck stiffly out, with awful stillness, from beneath the wheels of the last carriage. I knelt down for a closer look. The newly filthy fingers were wide open, reaching for help that would never arrive. On the wrist, which was almost indecently naked, tiny golden hairs stirred gently in the moving air beneath the train.
My nostrils filled with the smell of hot, oily steam, and with something else: a sharp coppery odor which, once experienced, is never forgotten. I recognized it at once.
It was the smell of blood.
Shoved up nearly to the dead elbow was the still-buttoned cuff of a coat too long and much too heavy for such a lovely day.
THREE
THE ROLLS CREPT ALONG the lane at a snail’s pace behind the hearse.
Even though Buckshaw Halt was little more than a mile from the house, I knew already that this sad journey was going to take simply ages.
The analytical part of my brain wanted to make sense of what I had just witnessed on the railway platform: the violent death of a stranger beneath the wheels of the train.
But a wilder, more primitive, more reptilian force would not allow it, throwing up excuses that seemed reasonable enough at the time.
These precious hours belong to Harriet, it was telling me. You must not steal them from her. You owe it to the memory of your mother.
Harriet … think only of Harriet, Flavia. It is her due.
I let myself sink back into the comforting leather of the seat and allowed my mind to fly back to that day last week, in my laboratory.…
Their drowned faces are not so white and fishy as you might expect. Floating barely beneath the surface in the blood-red light, they are, in fact, rather the color of rotted roses.
She still smiles in spite of all that has happened. He wears a shockingly boyish expression upon his face.
Beneath them, coiled like tangled tentacles of seaweed, black ribbons dangle down into the liquid depths.
I touch the surface—write their initials in the water with my forefinger:
So closely are this man and this woman tied together, that the same three letters stand for them both: Harriet de Luce and Haviland de Luce.
My mother and my father.
It was odd, really, how I had happened upon these images.
The attics at Buckshaw are a vast aerial underworld, containing all the clutter, the castoffs, the debris, the dumpings, the sad dusty residue of all those who have lived and breathed in this house for centuries past.
Piled on top of the moldering prayer chair, for instance, upon which the terrible-tempered Georgina de Luce had once perched piously in her powdered periwig to hear the whispered confessions of her terrified children, was the crumpled wreckage of the home-built glider in which her ill-fated grandson, Leopold, had launched himself from the parapets of the east wing scant seconds before coming to grief on the steel-hard frozen ground of the Visto, bringing to an abrupt end that particular branch of the family. If you looked carefully, you could still see the stains of Leopold’s oxidized blood on the glider’s frail linen-covered wings.
In another corner, stacked in a stiff spinal curve, a pile of china chamber pots still gave off their faint but unmistakable pong in the tired, stuffy air.
Tables, chairs, and chimneypieces were squeezed in cheek by jowl with ormolu clocks, glazed Greek vases of startling orange and black, unwanted umbrella stands, and the sad-eyed head of an indifferently stuffed gazelle.
It was to this shadowy graveyard of unwanted bric-a-brac that I had fled instinctively last week after Father’s shocking announcement.
To the attics I had flown, and there, to keep from thinking, I had crumpled into a corner, reciting mindlessly one of those shreds of childhood nonsense which we fall back on in times of great stress when we can’t think what else to do:
“A was an archer who shot at a frog;
“B was a butcher who had a black dog.
“C was a crier—”
I wasn’t going to bloody well cry! No, I bloody well wasn’t!
Instead of archers and criers, I would distract my mind by rehearsing the poisons:
“A is for arsenic hid in a spud,
“B is for bromate that buggers the blood …”
I was up to “C is for cyanide” when a slight movement caught my eye: a sudden scurrying that vanished swiftly behind a crested French armoire.
Was it a mouse? Perhaps a rat?
I shouldn’t be at all surprised. The attics of Buckshaw are, as I have said, an abandoned dumping ground where a rat would be as much at home as I was.
I got slowly to my feet and peeked carefully behind the armoire, but whatever it had been was gone.
I opened one of the dark doors of the monstrosity, and there they were: the smart black carrying cases—two of them—shoved into the far corners of the armoire, almost as if someone hadn’t wanted them to be found.
I reached in and dragged the matching containers out of the shadows and into the half-light of the attic.
They were covered in pebbled leather with shiny nickel-plated snaps, each case with its own key, which hung, fortunately, from the carrying handles by a bit of ordinary butcher’s string.
I popped open the first box and swung back the lid.
I knew at once by its metallic crackle finish, and the way in which its mechanical octopus arms were folded into their fitted plush compartments, that the machine I was looking at was a ciné projector.
Mr. Mitchell, proprietor of Bishop’s Lacey’s photographic studio, owned a similar device with which he occasionally exhibited the same few tired old films at St. Tancred’s parish hall.
His machine was larger, of course, and was equipped with a loudspeaker for the sound.
Once, during a particularly dreary repeat showing of The Paper Wasp and Its Vespiaries, I had whiled away the time by inventing riddles, one of which I thought rather clever:
“Why is the House of Commons like a ciné sound projector?”
“Because they both have a Speaker!”
I could hardly wait to tell it at the breakfast table.
But that had been in happier times.
I fingered the snap and opened the second box.
This one contained a matching device, smaller, with a clockwork crank on its side and several lenses mounted in a rotating turret on its snout.
A ciné camera.
I lifted the thing to my face and peered through the viewfinder, moving the camera slowly from right to left as if I were filming.
“Buckshaw,” I intoned in a newsreel voice. “Ancestral home of the family de Luce since time immemorial … a house divided … a house apart.”
I put the camera down rather abruptly—and rather roughly, I’m afraid. I did not feel like going on with this.
It was then that I noticed for the first time the little gauge on its body. The indicator needle was calibrated from zero to fifty feet, and it stood nearly
—but not quite—at the end of its range.
There was still film in the camera—even after all these years.
And if I were any judge, about forty-five feet of it had been exposed.
Exposed but never developed!
My heart lunged suddenly into my throat, trying to escape.
I nearly choked on it.
If my suspicions were correct, this film, this camera, might well contain hidden images of my dead mother, Harriet.
Within the hour, having made my preparations, I was in my chemical laboratory in Buckshaw’s abandoned east wing. The lab had been constructed and outfitted towards the end of the Victorian era by the father of Harriet’s uncle Tarquin de Luce, for a son whose spectacular collapse at Oxford was still, even after more than half a century, only whispered about among those dreaming spires.
It was here in this sunny room at the top of the house that Uncle Tar had lived, worked, and eventually died, his research into the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide having led, or so it had been hinted, to the destruction in Japan, six years ago, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I had happened upon this kingdom of abandoned and glorious glassware some years ago during a rainy-day exploration of Buckshaw and promptly claimed it as my own. By poring over his notebooks and duplicating many of the experiments in my late uncle’s remarkable library, I had managed to make of myself a more than competent chemist.
My specialty was not, though, the pentoxide of nitrogen, but rather the more traditional poisons.
I pulled the ciné camera from under my jumper where I had stuffed it just in case, in my descent from the attics, I had been intercepted by one of my sisters. Feely had turned eighteen in January and would be, for just a short while longer, seven years older than me. Daffy, with whom I shared a birthday, would soon be fourteen, while I was now almost twelve.
In spite of being sisters, we were none of us what you would call great friends. We were still working out new ways to torture one another.
In the small photographic darkroom at the far end of the laboratory, I reached for a brown glass bottle on the shelf. METOL, it said on the label in Uncle Tar’s unmistakable spidery handwriting.