by Alan Bradley
I retraced my steps in perfect silence. At Father’s door, I inhaled as much air as my lungs would hold.
I turned the knob and the door opened.
I stepped inside and began my long trek across the room.
As my eyes became accustomed to the lesser darkness, a lighter patch in the corner showed that Father’s pillows were untouched—his bed was empty.
I froze in my tracks and let my eyes move slowly round the room.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Had he gone to his study?
This was, after all, the morning of Harriet’s funeral. Perhaps he hadn’t slept and had gone downstairs to console himself among his collection of postage stamps, which to him, I suppose, seemed all that he had left.
His wife was gone, his house and estate as good as gone.
None of us were so simpleminded as to think that the moment the funeral was over, the anonymous buyer who had made the sole humiliating offer for our estate would not be pounding at the door.
We would be homeless.
For the first time in its long history, Buckshaw would not be in the hands of a de Luce. It simply didn’t bear thinking about.
I was now at the connecting door to Harriet’s boudoir. I put my hand against the green baize and pushed softly.
The door swung open without a whisper.
Inside, a single candle flickered at the head of the catafalque.
Father was kneeling on the prie-dieu, his face buried in his hands.
Dare I?
Putting each foot down as if I were treading on broken glass, I began making my way across the room.
As one always does in dangerous circumstances, I counted my steps:
One … two … three … four—
I stopped. If Father lowered his hands and opened his eyes I would be plainly visible. The flickering light made my shadow dance faintly on the velvet hangings, black on black.
Five … six …
I reached out and touched the pall, squatted.
My knees gave off an alarming crack.
Father’s fingers dropped and his eyes shot open. He was looking to the right of where I was now crouching. He cocked an ear, turned his head towards the door, then evidently decided that the noise had come from the candlewick. Or perhaps cracking wood.
He gave a heartrending sigh and lowered his face again into his cupped hands.
He began whispering something, but I could not make out his words.
Was it the Lord’s Prayer?
I didn’t wait to find out. His own whispered words would be masking whatever small sounds I might make.
I stuck my hand under the hem of the pall, moved it ever so slowly from side to side, feeling with my fingers for the coal scuttle.
A slight click from my nails told me that I had found it.
I made my fingers walk like spider legs, up the side of the scuttle, over the lip, and down into its depths.
I stifled a sigh of relief as my fingers touched the oilcloth packet.
It was still there! The men from the Home Office had obviously been so preoccupied with their task that they hadn’t wanted—or hadn’t thought—to search the room.
Slowly—ever so slowly—I lifted the wallet clear of the metal coal scuttle, taking great care to not make the slightest scraping. I pulled it out from under the velvet drape and, concealing it with my body, began creeping like a slow crab towards the door.
But wait! The alarm clock!
I could hardly leave the thing behind in the coal scuttle! One coal scuttle was as anonymous as another, but the brass alarm clock was uniquely mine.
Back I crawled, delving again in the near-darkness into the scuttle’s depths. If I touched the wrong thing and the alarm went off, I was done for.
It was like defusing an unexploded bomb. I had to rely on my sense of touch alone.
Slowly … painfully … carefully I raised the clock from its tin tomb.
The silence was so excruciating I wanted to scream.
But a few moments later, I was on my way to the door again.
If Father discovered me now, I decided, I would pretend I had just come in to keep him company. He could hardly object to that.
But he didn’t move a muscle. When I looked back from the doorway, he was still on his knees, his back ramrod straight, his head bowed, and his face pressed into his hands.
It was a picture of my father that I would never forget.
I closed the door gently, passed quickly through his bedroom, and slipped into the hall.
Moments later I was back in my bedroom.
The clock showed 4:18.
It had taken me just sixteen minutes.
Sixteen minutes? It had felt like sixteen hours.
Somewhere a WC flushed and the ancient water pipes gurgled and clanked like chains in a distant dungeon. Buckshaw was coming awake.
In precisely ten hours, I would be arriving at St. Tancred’s with my family for my mother’s funeral.
It seemed incredible.
For as long as I could remember, I had lived in a world in which a missing mother was a somewhat exotic fact of life. But all of that was now about to change.
From this day forward, I would be a girl—and presumably someday a woman—whose mother, like everyone else’s who has ever been bereaved, lay in the village churchyard.
Nothing romantic about that.
I would be just another quite ordinary person.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
TWENTY
THE BEDROOMS AT BUCKSHAW, as I have said before, were like vast, damp zeppelin barns, especially those in the east wing where the loosened, water-stained wallpaper bulged from the walls in the form of wind-filled sails. Some of the rooms possessed papered ceilings that drooped overhead in musty, sagging bags like lowering thunderclouds, except that they were green.
No one ever came here, and even I had only once or twice peeked into the moldering bedchamber at the northeast corner of the house, which, for some long forgotten reason, had always been known as “Angels.”
There was nothing angelic about it: “Mushrooms” would have been a far more appropriate name. I knew for a fact that parts of the room glowed in the dark due to the bioluminescence of the various fungi that were happily eating away at the rotting wooden paneling which lay beneath.
The lighted candle I had brought from the laboratory guttered and spat in the drafty corridor.
The rusty doorknob gave a fiendish squeak, which was closely followed by a wooden groan as the door swung slowly inwards.
The pong of the place struck my nose like a blow from a boxing glove. I would have to work quickly.
I reached for a Louis-the-something chair, but it crumbled at the touch of my hand, as did a Victorian chaise longue, which, when I accidentally kicked it, collapsed in a shower of dust and woodworms. I knew that I had no choice but to return to my laboratory for something sturdy enough to stand on.
Esmeralda shifted impatiently from foot to foot as I threw into a petri dish a handful of feed, which she fell upon with the ferocity of a famished Tyrannosaurus rex, one of her early ancestors.
“Manners,” I reminded her, as I seized a tall laboratory stool and left her to her breakfast.
Back in the room called Angels, I placed the stool near the fireplace, directly in front of an angled and jutting section of the wall that had something to do with the chimney, which lay hidden beneath. The spot was more damp than I should have liked, but it was the only part of the upper wallpaper that was within my reach. The oilcloth wallet, though, would be more than protection enough for the short time I planned on leaving it there.
I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted to read Harriet’s will, but I also knew instinctively that it would be wrong: an unforgivable invasion of Harriet’s and Father’s privacy that could never, ever be explained away. And besides, there wasn’t time.
When I had slid it into an ancient rip in the wallpaper, it was no more tha
n just another bulge in a room full of bulges: safe from the Home Office, safe from the police, safe even from my own family.
As I climbed down from the stool, I noticed the marks its legs had left in the dust on the floor—to say nothing of my own footprints.
Even Inspector Hewitt’s men, Detective Sergeants Graves and Woolmer, would have been able to tell at a glance that someone in Flavia-sized shoes had stood on a four-legged stool in that very spot, and could probably even have made a fair guess as to how far up the wall I had been able to reach.
I hadn’t the time to find and scatter fresh dust to cover my tracks, which left only one option: I would make even more of them.
So round the room I went, stamping four-legged impressions with the stool’s legs everywhere, and making sure to leave as many footprints as I could manage.
When I had finished, Angels looked like a ballroom in which the Dance of the Chimney Sweeps had been held.
I was proud of myself.
I had made it halfway back along the hall, stool in hand, when a voice said, “What are you doing, Flavia?”
It was Undine. She was standing in a little nook where breakfast tea trays had once been prepared, and I hadn’t seen her until she’d already spotted me.
“How long have you been there?” I demanded. “Does your mother know you’re prowling round in the middle of the night?”
“It isn’t the middle of the night,” she corrected me. “It’s morning, and Ibu has already been up for hours. Besides, that’s two questions, and Ibu always says:
“Riddle me no more than once
“Unless you wish to be the dunce.”
I could cheerfully have strangled Ibu—and her daughter—with the nearest pair of nutcrackers, but I controlled myself.
“Ibu says today is your mother’s funeral and that we mustn’t mention it because it might cause you deep distress.”
“Ibu’s very considerate”—I smiled—“and you may tell her I said so.”
I had hopeful visions of Undine parroting my words to Lena and receiving a sound thrashing for her troubles.
“What are you doing with the stool?” Undine asked.
“Watering plants,” I replied, almost without thinking about it. I had become a deft liar when required—and sometimes not.
“Ha!” Undine said, planting her hands on her hips. But she left it at that.
“Run along now,” I told her, surprised at the great pleasure I took in doing so. “I’ve got work to do.”
Which was no more than the truth. I had gone to the library to ferret out the meaning of the stranger’s message, only to be distracted by Daffy’s news about the unexpected arrival of Adam Sowerby.
“He and Father are old friends,” Daffy had reminded me. It was true, but why was Adam suddenly here? And why now? Had he come as a friend of the family to pay his respects to Harriet, or was he here in his role of inquiry agent?
These were things I needed to know.
But first—a return to the library.
As I had hoped it might be, the library was now in darkness. Daffy must have gone to bed soon after I left her, because Paradise Lost was still lying open, facedown, in the same position I had last seen it—which was a sure indication of my sister’s state of mind.
If I had left a book lying open on its face like that, she’d have flung it into my face, along with a fiery lecture on what she always referred to as “respect for the printed word.”
I knew well enough what a gamekeeper was, since there had once been one at Buckshaw, although that was long before my time, of course. Much more recently, Daffy had read to us selected passages from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was interesting if you were keen on country houses but far too full of gush and mush if you were not.
I switched on a small table lamp and went directly to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The Holy of Holies,” as Daffy called it: twelve volumes plus supplement. The Ns were in the seventh volume. I lifted it down, opened it in my lap, and ran my finger down the page:
Nictation … Niddering … Niddicock—
Aha! So that was where Daffy had dredged up the word.
“Flavia, you dim-witted niddicock,” she was fond of saying.
Daffy is the only person I know who mines the Oxford English Dictionary for insults in the same way others dig for diamonds.
Ah, here it was:
Nide (nəid), sb. [ad. F. nid or L. nid-us: the older F. ni is represented by Nye. Cf. Nid.] A brood or nest of pheasants.
My blood was instantly ice water.
Pheasants! A nest of pheasants!
“Pheasant sandwiches!” Harriet’s words on the ciné film.
“And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches, young lady?” Mr. Churchill’s words at Buckshaw Halt.
But what did they mean?
My brain was crawling with words, with images, and with half-formed ideas.
I knew suddenly that I needed to get away from this house of perpetual gloom, get away to somewhere I could think new thoughts—my own thoughts, rather than the worn-out thoughts of others.
I would pack a breakfast-lunch.
Where would I go? I didn’t know.
The dovecote at Culverhouse Farm, perhaps. The dusty tower, silent save for the cooing of the doves, was a tempting hideout. Even a couple of hours away would give me time to think without having to worry about bargers.
I’d be back in plenty of time to get dressed for the funeral.
TWENTY-ONE
MRS. MULLET JERKED AWAKE as I opened the kitchen door. I could tell by her eyes that she had been crying.
“Mrs. M. What are you doing here?”
Her head was still half raised from where it had been cradled in her arms on the kitchen table. She looked as if she didn’t know where she was.
“No, don’t get up,” I told her. “I’ll put the kettle on and make you a nice cup of tea.”
Less than five seconds in the room and I was already taking charge of a woman in distress. How very, very odd.
I patted her shoulder like mad, and surprisingly, she let me.
“You’ve been here all night, haven’t you?”
Mrs. M nodded and pressed her lips tightly together until they were white.
“It’s too much for you,” I told her. “You’ve been working too hard. Daffy told me Adam Sowerby arrived last night. I’ll knock him up and have him run you home.”
“ ’E’s gone already, love. Hours ago.”
Adam gone already? It didn’t make sense. Why, he’d only just arrived.
I dawdled over the sink, taking my time with the kettle, waiting for the water to run cold to allow Mrs. Mullet time to wipe her eyes and poke in the ends of her hair.
“You’ve been overdoing it, Mrs. M,” I said. “You must be exhausted. Why don’t you go up to my room and have a nap? No one will disturb you there.”
“Workin’ too ’ard?” Her voice was suddenly battleship steel. “That’s where you’re wrong, Miss Flavia. I ’aven’t been workin’ ’ard enough. That’s the trouble.”
I put the kettle on the stove and waited for her to subside, but she didn’t.
“There’s work to be done and it’s my place to do it.”
“But—”
“Don’t but me, miss. ’Tisn’t every day Miss ’Arriet comes ’ome, an’ ’tisn’t every day I gets to welcome ’er. No one shall take that away from me—
“Not even you, Miss Flavia.”
I went to her and put my arms around her from behind, resting my cheek on top of her head.
I didn’t say a word because I didn’t need to.
Outside, seen from the kitchen garden, one of the larger planets—Jupiter, I think—was well up above the pink ribbon of the eastern horizon.
It was the dark of the moon, and overhead, the stars sparkled in the inky blue-black vault of the heavens.
I was wiping the dew from Gladys’s cold seat when something rustled near the greenhouse.
There was no reply.
“Adam?
“All right,” I said. “I know you’re there. Come out before I call the police.”
Someone stepped out of the shadows.
It was Tristram Tallis.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was trying not to wake the household.”
“You didn’t frighten me,” I told him. “I thought you were a prowler. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
This was a bit of a stretch, even for me, and I think he knew it. Although Buckshaw did have a firearms museum—or “muniment room,” as Father called it—most of the weapons in its glass cases had likely not been fired since the Roundheads and the Cavaliers had squeezed their triggers in the days of “Jolly Ollie” Cromwell.
“Good job you didn’t,” Tallis said. “I should have been hurt if you’d potted me.”
Was the man twitting me?
I decided to let it pass and find out what he was up to.
“You’re up early.” I tried to put a pinch of accusation in my voice.
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come down and check on Typhon. Sorry, Blithe Spirit, I mean. Oil and so forth.”
It seemed an unlikely excuse for a moment until I remembered that I felt the same way about Gladys.
“Since it might be our last day together, I thought I’d get an early start.”
Our last day together? Was he referring to me? Or to Blithe Spirit?
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, seeing the look of puzzlement on my face. “I’m selling up. Cashing in my chips. As the old song says, I’m off to Tipperary in the morning. I’ve been offered a post shuffling papers in South America.”
“That’s not exactly Tipperary,” I said. I didn’t know where Tipperary was, actually, except that it sounded as if it might be somewhere in Ireland.
“No, not exactly.” He grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think I should wire them and tell them I’ve changed my mind?”
Now I knew he was teasing me.
“No,” I said. “You should go. But leave Blithe Spirit here at Buckshaw, so that when I’m old enough, I can learn to fly her.”