by Alan Bradley
“You seem to have been here before,” I called to him, struggling to keep up.
I had meant it as a joke, but almost instantly, I realized what I had said. In a hidden room of my mind, a clinker fell in the bars of an iron grate and the fire blazed up.
That tall figure in the ciné film at the window of the laboratory. “Six foot three, or perhaps four,” Dogger had said.
Tristram Tallis stopped so abruptly in his tracks that I almost collided with his posterior.
He turned round. Too slowly …?
He pinned me with his hooded flyer’s eyes.
“Of course I’ve been here before,” he said. “The day your mother handed over Blithe Spirit.”
“Were you wearing an American corporal’s uniform?” I wanted to ask, but I did not. “Were you poring over papers at the window of Uncle Tar’s laboratory?”
“Oh, yes—of course,” I said. “I’d forgotten. How foolish of me.”
The shadow passed, and a moment later we were strolling side by side along the red brick wall of the kitchen garden as if we were old pals.
I thought—but only for a moment—of taking his hand, but rejected the idea at once.
It would have been excessive.
“I hope you don’t mind using the kitchen entrance,” I said, thinking of the long queue of mourners at the front of the house.
“It wouldn’t be the first time.” He grinned, holding the door open for me in an elaborate manner.
“Mr. Tristram!” Mrs. Mullet shrieked when she saw his face. “Or should I call you Squadron Leader now?”
She came rushing towards us, extending a soapy hand, withdrawing it before he could grasp it, and collapsing into a sort of comic curtsy that left her stuck on one knee.
Tristram hoisted her gallantly to her feet. “Is the kettle on, Mrs. M? I’ve come for a cup of that wizard tea of yours.”
“Just go right through to the drawing room,” she said, suddenly formal. “If you’ll be so good as to show Mr. Tristram in, Miss Flavia, I shall be in with the tea directly.”
“I’d prefer to stay here with you in the control tower,” he said. “Rather like old times.”
Mrs. Mullet was now blushing like billy-ho, rushing round the kitchen, darting into the pantry, and clasping her hands whenever she looked at him.
“I’ve come at a sad time,” he said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and folding himself into it.
“That’s right. Sit yourself down. I shall fetch you a bit of my Arval bread. I made it special, like, for Miss ’Arriet—for ’er funeral, I mean, bless ’er soul.”
She mopped at her eyes with her apron.
Meanwhile, my mind was flying circles above the conversation. “Squadron Leader,” Mrs. Mullet had said. And hadn’t Tristram himself claimed to have been with one of the Biggin Hill fighter squadrons during the Battle of Britain?
How on earth, then, could he possibly have been at Buckshaw before the War dressed in the uniform of an American corporal?
Well, of course, there had been that laughable film A Yank in the R.A.F., which we had been made to sit through as part of the parish hall cinema series, in which Tyrone Power and Betty Grable hopped across the pond to help save us from a fate worse than death.
But Tristram Tallis was no Yank. I was sure of it.
“I’ll leave you two to catch up,” I said, with what I hoped was a considerate smile. “I have a few things to do.”
Up the east staircase I flew, two steps at a time.
First things first. The very thought of Lena being left alone in my laboratory was enough to give me the crow-jinks. I should have shown her out politely before making my mad dash to the Visto, but there hadn’t been time to think.
I needn’t have worried, though. The laboratory door was closed, and the room itself was empty of everyone but Esmeralda, who still sat dreamily perched on the test-tube rack, much as I had left her.
I checked the various traps I always leave set for unwary intruders: single hairs gummed across cupboards, ends of paper sheets jammed haphazardly in drawer openings (on the assumption that no snoop would ever be able to resist straightening them), and, behind each of the inner doors, a thimble filled to the brim with a solution of insoluble ferrocyanide of iron, or Prussian blue, which, once spilled, could not be washed away if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year.
My bedroom, too, was untouched, and I grudgingly awarded Lena a couple of mental marks for honesty.
Now, at last, having set the stage, I was ready to undertake the next and most difficult act: the tackling of Feely.
I had not forgotten my plan to resurrect Harriet: Oh no!—far from it. I had been banishing the idea from the forefront of my mind simply to keep from shrieking out with delight.
The very thought of how ecstatic Father would be was enough to make me hug myself inwardly.
As I crossed the foyer, the strains of the Adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s Pathétique came drifting along the hall from the drawing room in the west wing. Each note hung for an instant in the air like a cold, crystalline drop of water melting from the end of an icicle. I had once referred to this sonata as “the old Pathetic” in Feely’s hearing, and had been rewarded with a near miss by a flung metronome.
This particular bit of Beethoven is, I think, the saddest piece of music ever written since the beginning of time, and I knew that Feely was playing it because she was devastated. It was meant for Harriet’s ears alone—or for her soul—or for whatever might remain of her in this house.
Even listening to it from as far away as the foyer made my eyes damp.
“Feely,” I said at the drawing room door, “that’s beautiful.”
Feely ignored me and played on, her eyes fixed firmly on something in another universe.
“The sonata Pathétique, isn’t it?” I asked, taking great care to pronounce it as if I had been born on the Left Bank and baptized in Notre-Dame.
I could do such things when I wanted to.
Feely slammed down the lid and the piano let out an injured roar of strings, which went echoing on and on for an impressive amount of time.
“You just can’t resist, can you?” she shouted, waving her arms in the air as if she was still at the keyboard. “You do it every time!”
“What?” I asked. I don’t mind having my knuckles rapped when I’m guilty, but I hate it when I’ve done nothing.
“You know perfectly well,” Feely snarled. “And don’t give me that gaping simpleton look of yours. Close your mouth.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about.
“You’re just being tetchy,” I told her. “We agreed that I could point out to you when you were being tetchy without having my head bitten off. Well, you’re being tetchy.”
“I am not being tetchy!” she shouted.
“If you’re not being tetchy,” I said, “then your brain is most likely being devoured by threadworms.”
Threadworms were one of my latest enthusiasms. I had recognized at once their criminal possibilities when Daffy had brought them up one morning at the breakfast table. Not brought them up in the sense of vomiting, of course, but mentioned that she had been reading about them in some novel or another where they were being bred by a mad scientist with nefarious intentions who reminded her of me.
I had seized at once on the possibilities: a colony of threadworms raised in a glass tank in the laboratory, where they were allowed to crawl through soil saturated with cyanide. Was cyanide poisonous to the threadworm? Would they themselves survive while spreading the deadly poison through the brain of their victim with those bristles—setae, Daffy said they were called—which they possess instead of feet?
Feely was gathering a head of steam to erupt when I stopped her dead in her tracks.
“Actually, I’ve come to apologize,” I told her.
“For what?”
“For being inconsiderate. I know how difficult all of this has been on you. I wor
ry about you, Feely—I really do.”
“Oh, horsewater!” she said.
In certain circumstances, my sister Feely had a remarkable way with words.
“Well, I do worry,” I went on. “I know you’re not getting enough sleep. Look at yourself in the mirror.”
If there was one thing Feely did not need to be told, it was to look at herself in the mirror. The looking glasses at Buckshaw—every last one of them—were flaking and peeling from Feely’s constant examination of her own image: her eyes, her hair, her tongue, her complexion.…
Every last crater of her old phizog was cataloged as carefully as it would be by an astronomer mapping the moon.
Yes! It had worked. I could already see Feely craning her neck surreptitiously to have a squint at herself in the chimneypiece mirror. She had fallen for my clever ruse.
“You’re pale,” I said. “You’ve been like that since—” I bit off the next words and gnawed a little at my lower lip. “You always give too much of yourself to others, Feely. You never think of yourself.”
I could see that I had her undivided attention.
“Miss Lavinia and Miss Aurelia, for instance,” I went on. “I could have shown them upstairs to pay their respects. You didn’t need to do that on top of everything else. You should be resting, damn it all!”
I surprised not only Feely, I surprised myself.
“Do you really think so?” she asked, drifting, as if absently, towards the chimneypiece and the hanging glass.
“Yes,” I said. “I do think so. I also think you ought to let me take the late vigil with Harriet and let you get some sleep. You won’t want to look haggard at the funeral, will you?”
This appeal to Feely’s vanity was not exactly fair play, but all’s fair in love and war and manipulating a stubborn sister.
Seeing that she was off guard, I decided to sit tight and see what happened. As I have mentioned before, it has been my experience that a prolonged silence has the same effect as a W.C. plunger when it comes to unclogging a stuck conversation.
And it worked. As I knew it would.
After a time, Feely drifted over to a sideboard and took out a piece of sheet music.
“Look what I found tucked into Tchaikovsky,” she said, handing it over.
I knew that Feely never played Tchaikovsky if she could help it.
“Too many sequins,” she had once told Flossie Foster, and Flossie had nodded knowingly.
Feely handed me a rather dog-eared piece of sheet music.
I took the music from her and read the cover. “Bitter Sweet, an operetta in three acts by Noël Coward.”
Feely flipped the fragile pages. “Look here—near the end.”
Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, I read.
“Harriet loved it. I think it was her favorite song. She used to sing it to Daffy and me when we were children.”
“She never sang it to me,” I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I was just a baby when Harriet vanished in Tibet.
“It’s an old music-hall song,” Feely said, spreading the pages open on the piano’s music holder.
She placed her hands on the keys and began to play, quietly, so as not to be overheard by the mourners.
“Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay!” she sang. “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay.
“Do you know it?”
Actually I did, but I pretended I didn’t. I shook my head. We had been forced to sing the thing in Girl Guides back in the days before I was cashiered.
It was not the most intelligent song I had ever heard.
“I sometimes wonder,” Feely mused, “how well we really knew Harriet—if she was really the person we thought she was.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said sourly.
Feely repeated the first couple of bars on the piano—softly, almost wistfully in a minor key—then picked up the music and put it away.
“About the vigil—” I began.
But before I could say another word, Feely drifted back towards the looking glass.
“Agreed,” she said, leaning in for a closer look at her cantankerous hide.
And that, incredibly, was that.
From 11:36 in the evening until 4:24 in the morning—four hours and forty-eight minutes, to be precise—I was to have Harriet entirely to myself.
TWELVE
AN ENDLESS QUEUE OF bodies snaked in through the open door and across the foyer, shuffling unaware across the black line which, in an earlier century, the warring brothers Antony and William de Luce had painted from front door to butler’s pantry, dividing the house effectively into two distinct halves: a line which was never to be crossed.
Everyone wanted to catch my eye; everyone wanted to touch me, to clasp my hand or my arm and tell me how sorry they were that Harriet was dead.
There was a woman with a lantern jaw and her seven children, each with its own little lantern jaw. It was like looking at a display in the window of a chandler’s shop. I could not remember ever seeing any of them before.
On the far side of the foyer was a skinny gentleman who looked like a startled broomstick. He, too, was a stranger.
“Dear Flavia,” Bunny Spirling wheezed, taking my hand. He was one of Father’s oldest friends, and as such, required some kind of personal response.
I gave him a glum smile, but it was not easy.
Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say “Smile, damn you, smile!”
It is impossible for a young heart to remain gloomy for long, and I could already feel the muscles in my face growing tired from trying.
“The daffodils are so beautiful,” I heard myself telling Bunny, and I saw the tears spring to his eyes as he thought about how brave I was.
Bunny was unaware that the toe of one of his polished black shoes was planted directly on the black painted line: the line that split the house—and our family—into two.
When you came right down to it, it was all about lines, wasn’t it? This black line in the foyer, and the white one that Aunt Felicity had told me I must walk: “Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You must follow it, Flavia.”
They were one and the same, this black line and that white line. Why hadn’t I realized that before?
“Even when it leads to murder.”
An icy chill seized me as a horrible thought crept from my brain to my heart.
Had Harriet been murdered?
“It was decent of the government to lay on a special train to bring her down,” Bunny was saying, his spread hands cradling his substantial stomach as if it were a football. “Damnably decent, but no less than what she deserved.”
But I hardly heard his words. My mind was racing in overlapping circles like a motorcycle in the Wall of Death.
Harriet … the stranger under the wheels of the train … were their deaths connected? And if so, was their killer still at large? Could their killer be here at Buckshaw?
“You must excuse me, Mr. Spirling,” I said. “I’m feeling rather …”
I did not need to finish.
“Take the girl to her room, Maude,” Bunny said in a commanding voice.
A little woman appeared beside him as if she had materialized from thin air. She had been there all along, I realized, but so tiny was she, so still, so quiet, and so transparent that I had not noticed her.
I had seen Mrs. Spirling around the village, of course, and at church, but always in the shadow of the looming figure of her husband, Bunny, in whose shade she was nearly invisible.
“Come along, Flavia,” she said in a voice far too deep for such a frail creature, and, taking my arm in an iron grip, she steered me towards the stairs.
I felt slightly ridiculous, being led along by someone who was shorter than myself.
Halfway up the first flight she stopped, turned to me, and said, “There’s something I want you to know: something I feel I must say to you. Your mother was a remarkably strong woman. She was not as other people.”
We continued upwards. At the landing she said, “How very difficult this must be for you.”
I nodded.
As we climbed the second flight she said, “Harriet always told us that she would come back—that no matter what happened, she would return—that we mustn’t worry. One always hopes, of course,” she said, letting go of my arm, “but now—”
At the top of the stairs she took my hand. “We came to think of her as being immortal.”
I could see that she was controlling the muscles of her face with only the greatest difficulty.
“I like to think that, too,” I replied, feeling suddenly and inexplicably wiser, as if I had just returned from a voyage of discovery.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had more than a couple of hours’ sleep in the past week, have you?” she asked. I shook my head stupidly.
“I thought not. The thing is to get you to bed. In you go.”
We had arrived at the door of my bedroom.
“I’ll have Bunny tell your father you’re not to be disturbed. I’d ask Dogger to bring you up some hot milk to help you sleep, but he’s busy with the hordes at the door. I shall bring it myself.”
“No need, Mrs. Spirling,” I said. “I’m so tired, I—”
I threw out a hand to brace myself against the door jamb.
“A few hours’ sleep will work wonders. I’m sure of it,” I told her, opening the door just enough to slip inside and peer back out at her.
“Thank you, Mrs. Spirling,” I said with a frail grin. “You’re a lifesaver.”
I shut the door.
And counted to thirty-five.
I dropped to my knees and applied my eye to the keyhole.
She was gone.
I took a piece of stationery from the drawer of my bedside table and wrote on it with a pencil, in an intentionally weak and spidery scrawl: Unwell. Ps. Do not disturb. Thnk you. Flavia.