by Alan Bradley
Stiff upper lip, and all that.
There were times I could kill him.
I waited long enough to count to twenty-three, then crept to the door, listened, and tiptoed like a wraith into the corridor.
Moments later, I was soberly descending the staircase into the foyer.
Miss Deportment of 1951.
As I reached the bottom step, the doorbell rang.
For a moment, I thought of ignoring it. It was, after all, Dogger’s duty to greet visitors, not mine.
“What a shabby thought, Flavia,” an unwelcome voice said inside my head. “Dogger has enough on his plate without having to run to the door for every passing stranger.”
My feet walked me across the foyer. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand in case of overlooked jam or drool, straightened my clothing, adjusted my pigtails, and opened the door.
If I live to be a hundred I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes.
On the doorstep stood the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the latter holding a bouquet of papery silver-white flowers.
“We’ve come, dear,” Miss Lavinia said simply, clutching her string bag tightly in front of her chest. Miss Aurelia nodded happily and waved her free hand vaguely behind her.
I followed the direction of her gesture.
I could scarcely believe what I saw: Behind Miss Aurelia, a long column of mourners snaked down the steps, out across the gravel sweep, across the lawn to the drive, along the avenue of chestnuts, and into the distance, all the way to the Mulford Gates and beyond.
Rich people, poor people, friends and strangers, men, women, and children, all with their eyes on the front door of Buckshaw and every last one of them dressed in black.
Aside from in cinema films, I had never seen so great a horde of people gathered together in one place.
“We’ve come, dear,” Miss Aurelia reminded me, poking my shoulder with a sharp finger. Miss Lavinia twisted her string bag, and I knew at once that she had come prepared: that she had brought sheet music suitable for the occasion in the hope that she and her sister would be called upon to perform some appropriate dirge.
I have to admit I was thrown into a tizzy. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do.
How was I to deal with all these people? Was I to greet them one by one? Usher them, one or two at a time, in an orderly fashion into the house and herd them up the stairs to the chamber of mourning?
What was I to say to them?
I needn’t have worried. My elbow was suddenly seized in an iron grip and a voice hissed into my ear: “Get lost.”
It was Feely.
In spite of the dark circles under her eyes, which, I noticed, had been artfully retouched, not to hide but to enhance them, she was the image of bereaved beauty. She simply glowed with grief.
“Oh, Miss Lavinia,” she said in a weak, exhausted voice, “Miss Aurelia. How awfully good of you to come.”
She stuck out a pale hand and touched each of them in turn on the forearm.
As she turned her head Flavia-wards, she gave me such a glare!
Feely had the knack of being able to screw one side of her face into a witchlike horror while keeping the other as sweet and demure as any maiden from Tennyson. It was, perhaps, the one thing I envied her.
“We brought these, dear,” Miss Aurelia said, thrusting the flowers at Feely. “They’re immortelle. Xeranthemum. They’re said to represent, you know, the Resurrection and the Life. They’re from our greenhouse.”
Feely took the flowers and sandwiched herself between the sisters as if for support, and was already moving with them into the foyer, leaving me alone on the doorstep to face what Daffy would call the madding crowd.
I was taking a deep breath, determined to do my best, when a voice at my ear said, “I’ll look after this, Miss Flavia.”
It was Dogger. And, as always, in the nick of time.
With a grateful and yet bereaved smile, since we were still on public display, I turned and floated wistfully into the house. In the foyer, I took to my heels and was up the east staircase like a rocket.
“The resurrection and the life,” Miss Aurelia had said.
There it was again! From the Apostle’s Creed: “… the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”
I recalled instantly my own thought: “I have restored my mother to life through the magic of chemistry.”
After developing the ciné film upon which Harriet’s images appeared, those words had rung out in my mind like Christmas bells. Something else, too, had chimed: the sound of the inner shiver which indicated that something unknown was being stored up for a later time.
Now it came shooting with full awareness back into my brain.
I would bring my mother back to life! And this time, it would not be just a dopey dream, but an actual scientific accomplishment.
There was so much to do—and so precious little time.
NINE
FATHER HAD DECREED THAT we, the immediate family, would take turns standing watch over Harriet. He himself would take the first shift of six hours, he had decided, from two until eight o’clock. Feely, as next oldest, would serve from eight till two in the morning, followed by Daffy until eight A.M., at which time I was to take over until two in the afternoon. Aunt Felicity had at first been written off on grounds of age.
“Nonsense, Haviland!” she had told him. “I’m as capable as you are. More, when you come right down to it. You must not deny me my vigil.”
And so the rota had been rearranged. We each would be assigned a watch of 4.8 hours, which came out neatly, as Daffy pointed out, at 4 hours and 48 minutes per person.
Aunt Felicity would stand watch from 2:00 this afternoon until 6:48 in the evening; Father from 6:48 until 11:36; Feely from 11:36 until 4:24; Daffy from 4:24 until 9:12 in the morning; and me from then until 2:00 tomorrow afternoon, the time of the funeral.
It was a typical de Luce solution: logical beyond question, and yet, at the same time, mad as a March hare.
There was just one problem: In order to carry out the work I intended to do, my watch needed to be in the latest hours of the night and the earliest hours of the morning.
In short, I needed to switch shifts with Feely.
Feely, however, was busy soaking up sympathy from the Misses Puddock and I didn’t want to deprive her of that. I’d tackle her later about swapping shifts.
Meanwhile, I needed to prepare for what might well prove to be the greatest chemical experiment of my life. There wasn’t an instant to lose.
Upstairs in my laboratory I riffled through my notebook. I knew I had written down the details somewhere.
Ah, yes—here it was: Hilda Silfverling, a Fantasy, by Lydia Maria Child. Daffy had once entertained us with it at the breakfast table: the tale of a poor, unfortunate woman in Sweden who was about to have her head chopped off after being falsely accused of infanticide.
I had never forgotten the learned chemist of Stockholm in the story, “whose thoughts were all gas, and his hours marked only by combinations and explosions.”
To be perfectly honest, it was the only part of the tale that had really interested me. This scientist, whose name was never given so that I could look him up in Scientific Lives, had discovered a process of artificial cold by which he could suspend animation in living creatures. Even more importantly, he had discovered a way to restore the subject, Hilda Silfverling in this case, to life whenever he wished.
“Is that really possible?” I had asked.
“It’s fiction,” Daffy had said.
“I know. But couldn’t it be based on truth?”
“All writers would have you believe that their stories are based on truth, but the word ‘fiction’ is formed from a word meaning ‘to contrive.’ You, in particular, ought to relate to that.”
I bit my tongue, hoping she would continue, and she did.
“Take Jack London, for instance,” she said. My sister loved to show off.
“What about him?”
“Well, he wrote what amounted to essentially the same story. ‘A Thousand Deaths,’ it was called. About a man whose occupation was allowing himself to be killed in as many different ways as you can imagine, then brought back to life by his father, who was something of a mad scientist.”
“Like Dr. Frankenstein!” I said excitedly.
“Exactly. Except that this fool let himself be poisoned, electrocuted, drowned, strangled, and suffocated. Among other things,” she added.
Now this was my kind of reading!
“Where can I find a copy?”
“Oh, in the library, somewhere,” Daffy had sniffed, waving me away with an impatient hand.
It had taken quite a while, but in the end, I had found it almost by accident in a rather grubby penny book.
And what a disappointment! Rather than giving any specific details about his many deaths and resurrections, the author allowed his character to ramble on vaguely about magnetic fields, polarized light, nonluminous fields, electrolysis, molecular attraction, and a hypothetical force called apergy, which was claimed to be the opposite of gravity.
What a load of bloody codswallop!
I could have come up with a better theory of resurrection from the dead with both hands tied behind my back at the bottom of a pond in a potato sack.
In fact, I did, even though I couldn’t take full credit for it myself.
I had been passing the time of day with Dogger in the greenhouse, trying to think of ways to ask him about his imprisonment with Father in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but without actually seeming to.
“Dogger,” I had asked with a burst of sudden inspiration, “do you know anything about jiujitsu?”
He pulled a root-bound plant from its pot and prodded it tenderly with his trowel. The root ball looked like a Martian’s brain.
“Perhaps,” he said at last, “a little.”
I tried to breathe through my ears so as not to break his fragile train of thought.
“Long ago, before I—”
“Yes?”
“As a student—” Dogger said, picking at the roots with his fingers as if he were unraveling the strands of the Gordian knot, “as a student, I had occasion to study for a time the Kano system of jiujitsu. It was popular in my day.”
“Yes?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I was much interested in the art of kuatsu, that branch of the subject which deals with the lethal blows, but much more important, the healing and restoration of life to those who may have suffered them.”
My eyes must have widened. “Restoration of life?”
“Just so,” Dogger said.
“You’re pulling my leg!”
“Not at all,” Dogger said, giving the plant a gentle shake to dislodge the old soil. “Professor Kano’s methods were used for a time, I believe, in certain special instances by the Royal Life Saving Society, in cases of drowning.”
“They restored drowning victims to life? Dead people?”
“I believe so,” Dogger said. “Of course I never actually witnessed it myself, but I was nevertheless taught the sharp blow which was needed to restore life to the dead.”
“Show me!” I said.
Dogger stood up and turned round. “Stick your finger into my spine.”
I gave him a halfhearted prod.
“Higher,” he said. “A little higher yet. Yes, that’s it. The second lumbar vertebrum. A sharp blow there with the second knuckle will do the trick.”
“Shall I try it?” I asked eagerly. “Get ready!”
“No,” Dogger said, turning round to face me. “In the first place, I’m not dead, and in the second, the fatal blows are never actually delivered except in cases of dire emergency. In practice, it is sufficient to announce them.”
“Biff!” I said, delivering a powerful punch with a projecting knuckle, but pulling it at the last possible instant. “Consider it delivered!”
“Thank you,” Dogger said. “Very good of you, I’m sure.”
“Phew!” I said. “Imagine that: the resurrection of the dead by a poke in the back. There’s no mention of that in the Bible, but perhaps Jesus wasn’t aware of it.”
“Perhaps.” Dogger smiled.
“It seems crazy, doesn’t it? Completely crazy, when you come right down to it, I mean.”
“Perhaps,” Dogger said again, “and perhaps not. It is quite widely known that in the primitive societies, and perhaps no less in our own, the healers are quite often neurotics or psychotics.”
“Meaning?”
“That they suffer from certain nervous disorders—that they may even be deranged.”
“Do you believe that?”
The greenhouse was so still that I fancied I could hear the plants growing.
“Sometimes I must, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said at last. “I have no other choice.”
Those, then, had been the two instances that had set my mind on restoring Harriet to life. Although the very thought of such a thing might be repellent to some, I found it nevertheless exciting. Exhilarating, even!
In the first place, I had no fear of corpses: none whatsoever. The past year had brought me face-to-face with a half dozen of the deceased, and I must admit that I had found them all, each in his or her own way, far more interesting than their living counterparts.
Then, too, there was Father. How deliriously happy he would be to have his beloved restored to him! In all the years I could remember, I had never seen Father smile—I mean really smile and show his teeth.
With Harriet home and alive and happy among us on the drawing room hearth, Father would be a different person. He would laugh, make jokes, hug us, ruffle our hair, play games with us, and, yes, perhaps even kiss us.
It would be like living in an earthly paradise: a modern-day land of Cockaigne, such as is seen in those paintings by Pieter Brueghel that Feely is so fond of; a land of milk and honey in which there was no rationing, no bitterly cold rooms, and no decay.
Buckshaw would be new again, and we all of us would live together happily ever after until the cows came home.
All I needed now was to work out a few of the chemical details.
TEN
WHEN I TURNED THE key in the lock of my laboratory and stepped inside, I found Esmeralda perching contentedly on a nearby test-tube rack and Undine boiling an egg over a Bunsen burner.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “How dare you! How did you get in?”
The place was becoming as peopled as Paddington Station.
“I came across the roofs,” she said cheerily, “and down that little staircase.” She pointed.
“Bugger!” I’m afraid I said, making a mental note to install a deadbolt.
“I needed to talk to you,” she said, before I could say something worse.
“Talk to me? Why ever would you want to do that?”
“Ibu said I was never to go to bed angry with anyone.”
“Well, what difference does that make? Besides, it isn’t bedtime yet.”
“No,” Undine agreed, “it isn’t. But Ibu sent me for my nap, and a nap counts as bed, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose it does,” I said grudgingly. “But what has that to do with me?”
“I’m cheesed off with you.” She pouted, planting her fists on her hips. “I have a bone to pick with you and I can’t possibly nap until we’ve had a jolly good chin-wag about it.”
“Chin-wag?”
“A powwow. A council of war.”
“And what,” I asked, making my voice drip with sarcasm, “have I done to deserve your displeasure?”
“You treat me like a child.”
“Well, you are a child.”
“Of course I am, but that’s hardly reason enough to treat me like one, do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I think I do,” I admitted.
How Daffy is going to love talking to this curious, nitpicking little creature! I thought
.
“What, in particular, have I done?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“You underestimate me,” she said.
I nearly chucked my kippers. “Underestimate you?”
“Yes, you set me at naught.”
“I beg your pardon?” I laughed. “Do you even know what that means?”
“Set me at naught. It means you disbelieved me. You disbelieved me about the saltwater crocodile and you disbelieved me again when I told you that Ibu and I were at the railway station this morning.”
“I did not!”
“Come off it, Flavia—admit it.”
“Well,” I said, “perhaps just a little …”
“See?” Undine crowed. “I told you so! I knew it!”
A sudden clever thought popped into my mind. Daffy had more than once accused me of possessing a certain low cunning, and she was right.
“When did you arrive at the station? Before or after the train?”
“Before—but only just. Ibu said, ‘Here it comes now’ as she was parking at the end of the platform.”
“Which end?” I asked, almost too casually.
“The far end. I don’t know my directions very well, but the end farthest from Buckshaw.”
“The south end,” I said. “The direction from which the train arrived.”
Undine nodded. “Near the luggage trolley.”
Now I knew she was telling the truth. Although there had been no luggage trolleys on the platform at Buckshaw Halt for years, someone had managed to rustle one up from somewhere for the occasion of Harriet’s sad return. Part of my mind had noticed it being piled high with the luggage of those strangers, whoever they may be, who had brought her body home.
“Let’s play a game,” I suggested brightly.
“Oh,” Undine said. “Yes, let’s. I adore games.”
“Do you know how to play Kim’s Game?”
“Of course,” she scoffed. “Ibu used to read to me from Kim at bedtime in Sembawang. She said it was a good fairy tale, even if Kipling was a goddamn Tory, and a jingoist to boot. He visited Sembawang, you know.”
“Jingoist?” She had caught me by surprise. It was likely that even Daffy didn’t know the meaning of the word.