by Alan Bradley
"I shouldn't think he's still alive? Dr. Kissing, I mean. He'd be very old, though, wouldn't he? I'm willing to bet everything I have that he's been dead for ages."
"Then you shall lose all your money!" said Max with a whoop. "Every blessed penny of it!"
ROOK'S END WAS TUCKED into the folds of a cozy bed formed by Squires Hill and the Jack O'Lantern, the latter a curious outcropping of the landscape which, from a distance, appeared to be an Iron Age tumulus but, upon approach, proved to be substantially larger and shaped like a skull.
I steered Gladys into Pooker's Lane, which ran along its jaw, or eastern edge. At the end of the lane, dense hedges bracketed the entrance to Rook's End.
Once past these ragged remnants of an earlier day, the lawns spread off to the east, west, and south, neglected and spiky. In spite of the sun, fingers of mist still floated in the shadows above the unkempt grass. Here and there the broad expanse of lawn was broken by one of those huge, sad beech trees whose massive boles and drooping branches always reminded me of a family of despondent elephants wandering lonely on the African veld.
Beneath the beeches, two antique ladies drifted in animated dialogue, as if competing for the role of Lady Macbeth. One was dressed in a diaphanous muslin nightgown, and a mobcap which seemed somehow to have escaped the eighteenth century, while her companion, enveloped in a cyanide blue tent dress, was wearing brass earrings the size of soup plates.
The house itself was what is often called romantically “a pile.” Once the ancestral home of the de Lacey family, from whom Bishop's Lacey took its name (and who were said to be very distantly related to the de Luces), the place had come down in the world in stages: from being the country house of an inventive and successful Huguenot linen merchant to what it was today, a private hospital to which Daffy would instantly have assigned the name Bleak House. I almost wished she were here.
Two dusty motorcars huddling together in the fore-court testified to the shortage of both staff and visitors. Dumping Gladys beside an ancient monkey puzzle tree, I picked my way up the mossy, pitted steps to the front door.
A hand-inked sign said Ring Plse., and I gave the enameled handle a pull. Somewhere inside the place a hollow clanking, like a cowbell Angelus, announced my arrival to persons unknown.
When nothing happened I rang again. Across the lawn, the two old ladies had begun to feign a tea party, with elaborate mincing curtsies, crooked fingers, and invisible cups and saucers.
I pressed an ear to the massive door, but other than an undertone, which must have been the sound of the building's breathing, I could hear nothing. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death. Underlying that, like a groundsheet, was the sharp tang of the disinfectant used to swab the floors—dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, by the smell of it—a faint whiff of bitter almonds which was uncommonly like that of hydrogen cyanide, the gas that was used to exterminate killers in American gas chambers.
The entrance hall was painted a madhouse apple green: green walls, green woodwork, and green ceilings. The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum. Whenever I stepped on one of its pustulent brown blisters, the stuff let off a nasty hiss and I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.
Against the far wall, in a chromium wheelchair, an ancient man sat gazing straight up into the air, mouth agape, as if expecting an imminent miracle to take place somewhere near the ceiling.
Off to one side a desk, bare except for a silver bell and a smudged card marked Ring Plse., hinted at some official, yet unseen, presence.
I gave the striker four brisk strokes. At each ting of the bell, the old man blinked violently, but did not take his eyes from the air above his head.
Suddenly, as if she had slipped through a secret panel in the woodwork, a wisp of a woman materialized. She wore a white uniform and a blue cap, under which she was busily poking limp strands of damp straw-colored hair with one of her forefingers.
She looked as if she had been up to no good, and knew perfectly well that I knew.
"Yes?" she said, in a thin but busy, standard-issue hospital voice.
"I've come to see Dr. Kissing," I said. "I'm his great-granddaughter."
"Dr. Isaac Kissing?” she asked.
"Yes," I said, "Dr. Isaac Kissing. Do you keep more than one?"
Without a word the White Phantom turned on her heel and I followed, through an archway into a narrow solarium which ran the entire length of the building. Half way along the gallery she stopped, pointed a thin finger like the third ghost in Scrooge, and was gone.
At the far end of the tall-windowed room, in the single ray of sunshine that penetrated the overhanging gloom of the place, an old man sat in a wicker bath chair, a halo of blue smoke rising slowly above his head. In disarray on a small table beside him, a heap of newspapers threatened to slide off onto the floor.
He was wrapped in a mouse-colored dressing gown—like Sherlock Holmes's, except that it was spotted like a leopard with burn holes. Beneath this was visible a rusty black suit and a tall winged celluloid collar of ancient vintage. His long, curling yellow-gray hair was topped with a pillbox smoking cap of plum-colored velvet, and a lighted cigarette dangled from his lips, its gray ashes drooping like a mummified garden slug.
"Hello, Flavia," he said. "I've been expecting you."
AN HOUR HAD PASSED: an hour during which I had come to realize truly, for the first time, what we had lost in the war.
We had not got off to a particularly good start, Dr. Kissing and I.
"I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.
I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.
"A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”
I recognized it as one of those questions which doesn't require an answer. I raised the corners of my lips into what I hoped was a Mona Lisa smile—or at least one that signaled the required civility.
"So you're Jacko's daughter," he said. "You're not a bit like him, you know."
"I'm told I take after my mother, Harriet," I said.
"Ah, yes. Harriet. What a great tragedy that was. How terrible for all of you."
He reached out and touched a magnifying glass that perched precipitously atop the glacier of newspapers at his side. With the same movement he pried open a tin of Players that lay on the table and selected a fresh cigarette.
"I do my best to keep up with the world as seen through the eyes of these inky scribblers. My own eyes, I must confess, having been fixed on the passing parade for ninety-five years, are much wearied by what they have seen.
"Still, I somehow manage to keep informed about such births, deaths, marriages, and convictions as transpire in our shire. And I still subscribe to Punch and Lilliput, of course.
"You have two sisters, I believe, Ophelia and Daphne?"
I confessed that such was the case.
"Jacko always had a flair for the exotic, as I recall. I was hardly surprised to read that he had named his first two offspring after a Shakespearean hysteric and a Greek pincushion."
"Sorry?"
"Daphne, shot by Eros with a love-deadening arrow before being transformed by her father into a tree."
"I meant the madwoman," I said. "Ophelia."
"Bonkers," he said, pressing out his cigarette butt in an overflowing ashtray and lighting another. "Wouldn't you agree?"
The eyes that looked out at me from his heavily lined face were as bright and beady as those of any teacher who had ever stood watch at a blackboard, pointer in hand, and I knew that I had succeeded in my plan. I was no longer a “little g
irl.” Whereas the mythical Daphne had been transformed into a mere laurel tree, I had become a boy in the lower Fourth.
"Not really, sir," I said. "I think Shakespeare meant Ophelia to be a symbol of something—like the herbs and flowers she gathers."
"Eh?" he said. "What's that?"
"Symbolic, sir. Ophelia is the innocent victim of a murderous family whose members are all totally self-absorbed. At least that's what I think."
"I see," he said. "Most interesting.
"Still," he added suddenly, "it was most gratifying to learn that your father retained enough of his Latin to name you Flavia. She of the golden hair."
"Mine is more of a mousy brown."
"Ah."
We seemed to have reached one of those impasses that litter so many conversations with the elderly. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep with his eyes open.
"Well," he said at last, "you'd better let me have a look at her."
"Sir?" I said.
"My Ulster Avenger. You'd better let me have a look at her. You have brought her along, haven't you?”
"I—yes, sir, but how—?"
"Let us deduce," he said, as quietly as if he had said let us pray.
"Horace Bonepenny, onetime boy conjurer and longtime fraud artist, turns up dead in the garden of his old school chum, Jacko de Luce. Why? Blackmail is most likely. Therefore, let us suppose blackmail. Within hours, Jacko's daughter is ransacking newspaper archives at Bishop's Lacey, ferreting out reports of the demise of my dear old colleague, Mr. Twining, God rest his soul. How do I know this? I should think it obvious.”
"Miss Mountjoy," I said.
"Very good, my dear. Tilda Mountjoy indeed—my eyes and ears upon the village and its environs for the past quarter century."
I should have known it! Miss Mountjoy was a spook!
"But let us continue. On the last day of his life, the thief Bonepenny has chosen to take up lodgings at the Thirteen Drakes. The young fool—well, no longer young, but still a fool, for all that—then manages to get himself done in. I remarked once to Mr. Twining that that boy would come to no good end. I hesitate to point out that I was correct in my prognostication. There always was a whiff of sulphur about the lad.
"But I digress. Shortly after his launch into eternity, Bonepenny's room at the inn is rifled by a maiden fair whose name I dare not utter aloud but who now sits demurely before me, fidgeting with something in her pocket which can hardly be anything other than a certain bit of paper the shade of Dundee marmalade, upon which is printed the likeness of Her Late Majesty Queen Victoria, and bearing the check letters, TL. Quod erat demonstrandum. Q.E.D.”
"Q.E.D." I said, and without a word I pulled the glassine envelope from my pocket and held it out to him. With trembling hands—though whether they trembled from age or excitement I could not be certain—and using the tissue-thin paper as makeshift tweezers, he peeled back the flaps of the envelope with his nicotine-stained fingers. As the orange corners of the Ulster Avengers came into view, I could not help noticing that his nicotine-stained fingertips and the stamps were of a nearly identical hue.
"Great Scott!" he said, visibly shaken. "You've found AA. This stamp belongs to His Majesty, you know. It was stolen from an exhibition in London just weeks ago. It was in all the papers."
He shot me an accusing look over his spectacles, but his gaze was drawn away almost at once to the bright treasures that lay in his hands. He seemed to have forgotten I was in the room.
"Greetings, my old friends," he whispered, as if I weren't there. "It's been far too long a time." He took up the magnifying glass and examined them closely, one at a time. "And you, my cherished little TL: What a tale you could tell.”
"Horace Bonepenny had both of them," I volunteered. "I found them in his luggage at the inn."
"You rifled his luggage?" Dr. Kissing asked, without looking away from the magnifying glass. "Phew! The Constabulary will hardly caper in delight upon the village green when they hear of that. nor will you, I'll wager."
"I didn't exactly rifle his luggage," I said. "He had hidden the stamps under a travel sticker on the outside of a trunk."
"With which, of course, you just happened to be idly fiddling when out they tumbled into your hands."
"Yes," I said. "That's precisely how it happened."
"Tell me," he said suddenly, swinging round to look me in the eye, "does your father know you're here?"
"No," I said. "Father's been charged with the murder. He's under arrest in Hinley."
"Good Lord! Did he do it?"
"No, but everyone seems to think he did. For a while, even I thought so myself."
"Ah," he said. "And what do you think now?"
"I don't know," I said. "Sometimes I think one thing and sometimes another. Everything's such a muddle."
"Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell me this, Flavia: What is it that interests you above all else in the universe? What is your one great passion?"
"Chemistry," I said in less than half a heartbeat.
"Well done!" said Dr. Kissing. "I've put that same question to an army of Hottentots in my time, and they always prattle on about this and that. Babble and gush, that's all it is. You, by contrast, have put it in a word."
The wicker creaked horribly as he half twisted round in his chair to face me. For an awful moment I thought his spine had crumbled.
"Sodium nitrite," he said. "Doubtless you are acquainted with sodium nitrite."
Acquainted with it? Sodium nitrite was the antidote for cyanide poisoning, and I knew it in all its various reactions as well as I know my own name. But how had he known to choose it as an example? Was he psychic?
"Close your eyes," Dr. Kissing said. "Imagine you are holding in your hand a test tube half-filled with a thirty percent solution of hydrochloric acid. To it, you add a small amount of sodium nitrite. What do you observe?"
"I don't need to close my eyes," I said. "It becomes orange . orange and turbid."
"Excellent! The color of these wayward postage stamps, is it not? And then?"
"Given time, twenty or thirty minutes perhaps, it clears."
"It clears. I rest my case."
As if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, I grinned a stupid grin.
"You must have been a wizard teacher, sir," I said.
"Yes, so I was. in my day.
"And now you've brought my little treasure home to me," he said, glancing at the stamps again.
This was something I hadn't counted upon; something I hadn't really thought through. I had meant only to discover if the owner of the Ulster Avenger was still alive. After that, I would hand it over to Father, who would surrender it to the police, who would, in due course, see that it was restored to its rightful owner. Dr. Kissing spotted my hesitation at once.
"Let me pose another question," he said. "What if you had come here today and found that I'd hopped the twig, as it were; flown off to my eternal reward?"
"You mean died, sir?"
"That's the word I was fishing for: died. Yes."
"I suppose I should have given your stamp to Father."
"To keep?"
"He'd know what to do with it."
"I should think that the best person to decide that is the stamp's owner, wouldn't you agree?"
I knew that the answer was “yes” but I couldn't say it. I knew that, more than anything, I wanted to present the stamp to Father, even though it wasn't mine to give. At the same time, I wanted to give both stamps to Inspector Hewitt. But why?
Dr. Kissing lighted another cigarette and gazed out the window. At length, he plucked one of the stamps from the folder and handed me the other.
"This is AA," he said. "It is not mine; it don't belong to me, as the old song says. Your father may do with it as he wishes. It is not my place to decide.”
I took the Ulster Avenger from him and wrapped it carefully in my handkerchief.
"On the other hand, the exquisite li
ttle TL is mine. Mine own, without the shadow of a doubt.”
"I expect you'll be happy to be sticking it back into your album, sir," I said with resignation, slipping its mate into my pocket.
"My album?" He gave a croaking laugh that ended in a cough. "My albums are, as dear, dead Dowson put it, gone with the wind."
His old eyes turned towards the window, gazing without seeing at the lawn outside where the two old ladies still fluttered and pirouetted like exotic butterflies beneath the sun-dappled beeches.
"'I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion.’
"It's from his Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae. Perhaps you know it?”
I shook my head. “It's very beautiful,” I said.
"To remain sequestered in such a place as this," Dr. Kissing said with a broad sweep of his arm, “for all its dowdy decrepitude is, as you will appreciate, a most ruinous financial undertaking.”
He looked at me as if he had made a joke. When I offered no response, he pointed to the table.
"Fetch out one of those albums. The uppermost, I think, will do."
I now noticed for the first time that there was a shelf wedged in below the tabletop, upon which were two thick bound albums. I blew off the dust and handed him the top one.
"No, no. open it yourself."
I opened the book to the first page, which contained two stamps: one black, the other red. By the slight marks of gummy residue and the ruled lines, I could see that the page had once been filled. I turned to the next page… and the next. All that remained of the album was a gutted hulk: a sparse, ravaged thing that even a schoolboy might have hidden away in shame.
"The cost, you see, of housing a beating heart. One disposes of one's life one little square at a time. Not much of it left, is there?"
"But the Ulster Avenger!" I said. "It must be worth a fortune!"
"Indeed," said Dr. Kissing, glancing once more through the magnifier at his treasure.
