by Alan Bradley
“Of course, she never did,” she added softly, “and frankly I’ve not since had the heart to hand it over to him, the poor man. He grieves so.”
Grieves? Although I had never thought about it in precisely this way, it was true. Father did grieve, but he did so in private, and mostly in silence.
“The painting, I suppose, belongs to him, since your mother paid me for it in advance. She was a very trusting person.”
Was she? I wanted to say. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know her as well as you did.
Suddenly, I needed to get out of this place—to be outdoors again where I could breathe my own breath.
“I think you’d better keep it, Mrs. Harewood—at least for now. I wouldn’t want to upset Father.”
Hold on! I thought. My whole life was given over to upsetting Father—or at least to going against his wishes. Why now was I filled with a sudden desire to comfort him, and to have him hug me?
Not that I would, of course, because in real life we de Luces don’t do that sort of thing.
But still, some unknowable part of the universe had changed, as if one of the four great turtles that are said to support the world on their backs had suddenly shifted its weight from one foot to another.
“I have to go now,” I said, backing, for some reason, towards the door. “I’m sorry to hear about Brookie. I know he had lots of friends in Bishop’s Lacey.”
Actually, I knew no such thing! Why was I saying this? It was as if my mouth were possessed, and I had no way of stopping its flow of words.
All I really knew about Brookie Harewood was that he was a poacher and a layabout—and that I had surprised him in his midnight prowling. That and the fact that he had claimed to have seen the Gray Lady of Buckshaw.
“Good-bye, then,” I said. As I stepped into the hallway, Ursula turned rapidly away and scuttled out of sight with a wicker basket in her hand. But not so quickly that I missed the look of pure hatred that she shot me.
As I bicycled westward towards Bishop’s Lacey, I thought of what I had seen. I’d gone to Malden Fenwick in search of clues to the behavior of Brookie Harewood—surely it was he who had attacked Fenella Faa in the Palings, for who else could have been abroad at Buckshaw that night? But instead, I had come away with a new image of Harriet, my mother: an image that was not as happy as it might have been.
Why, for instance, did it gnaw at my heart so much to see Feely and Daffy, like two contented slugs, secure and basking in her glow, while I lay helpless, wrapped up like a little mummy in white cloth; of no more interest than a bundle from the butcher?
Had Harriet loved me? My sisters were forever claiming that she did not: that, in fact, she despised me; that she had fallen into a deep depression after I was born—a depression that had, perhaps, resulted in her death.
And yet, in the painting, which must have been made just before she set out on her final journey, there was not a trace of unhappiness. Harriet’s eyes had been upon me and the look on her face had shown, if anything, a trace of amusement.
Something about the portrait nagged at my mind: some half-forgotten thing that had tried to surface as I stood staring at the easel in Vanetta Harewood’s studio. But what was it?
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of it.
Relax, Flavia, I thought. Calm down. Think about something else.
I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind, the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers, for instance, or oatmeal. Then, when the fugitive word was least expecting it, I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it, catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
“Thought-stalking,” I called the technique, and I was proud of myself for having invented it.
I let my mind drift away towards tigers, and the first one that came to mind was the tiger in William Blake’s poem: the one that burned away with fearful symmetry in the forests of the night.
Once, when I was younger, Daffy had driven me into hysterics by wrapping herself in the tiger-skin rug from Buckshaw’s firearm museum and creeping into my bedroom in the middle of the night, while reciting the poem in a deep and fearsome snarl: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright …”
She had never forgiven me for throwing my alarm clock. She still had the scar on her chin.
And now I thought of oatmeal: in the winter, great steaming ladles of the stuff, gray, like lava dished from a volcano on the moon. Mrs. Mullet, under orders from Father—
Mrs. Mullet! Of course!
It was something she’d told me when I’d asked about Brookie Harewood. “His mother’s that woman as paints over in Malden Fenwick.
“P’raps she’ll even paint you in your turn,” Mrs. M had added. “In your turn.”
Which meant that Mrs. M knew about the portrait of Harriet! She must have been in on the secret sittings.
“Tiger!” I shouted. “Tye-ger!”
My words echoed back from the hedgerows on either side of the narrow lane. Something ahead of me bolted for cover.
An animal, perhaps? A deer? No, not an animal—a human.
It was Porcelain. I was sure of it. She was still wearing Fenella’s black crepe dress.
I brought Gladys to a skidding stop.
“Porcelain?” I called. “Is that you?”
There was no answer.
“Porcelain? It’s me, Flavia.”
What a foolish thing to say. Porcelain had hidden in the hedgerow because it was me. But why?
Although I couldn’t see her, she was probably close enough to touch. I could feel her eyes upon me.
“Porcelain? What is it? What’s the matter?”
The eerie silence lengthened. It was like one of those parlor séances when you’re waiting for the dial on the Ouija board to move.
“All right,” I said at last, “take your time. I’m sitting down and I’m not moving until you come out.”
There was another long wait, and then the bushes rustled and Porcelain stepped out into the lane. The look on her face suggested that she was on her way to the guillotine.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
As I took a step towards her, she moved away, keeping a safe distance between us.
“The police took me to see Fenella,” she said shakily. “In the hospital.”
Oh, no! I thought. She’s died of her injuries. Let it not be true.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking another step. Porcelain fell back, raising her hands as if to fend me off.
“Sorry?” she said in a strange voice. “What for? No!—Stay where you are!”
“Sorry for whatever’s happened to Fenella. I did everything I could to help her.”
“For God’s sake, Flavia,” Porcelain screamed, “stop it! You bloody well tried to kill her, and you know you did. And now you want to kill me!”
Her words hit me like a body blow, knocking the wind completely out of me. I couldn’t breathe; my head was spinning, my mind was spinning, and there was a sound in my head like a swarm of locusts.
“I—”
But it was no good—I couldn’t speak.
“Fenella told me all about it. You and your family have hated us for years. Your father drove Fenella and Johnny Faa off your estate and that’s why Johnny died. You took her back to their old camping place so that you could finish the job, and you very nearly did, didn’t you?”
“That’s insane,” I managed. “Why would I want to—”
“You were the only one that knew she was camped there.”
“Look, Porcelain,” I said. “I know you’re upset. I understand that. But if I wanted to kill Fenella, why would I bother going for Dr. Darby? Wouldn’t I simply let her die?”
“I—I don’t know. You’re confusing me now. Maybe you wanted an excuse—just in case you hadn’t killed her.”
“If I’d wanted to kill her, I’d have killed her,” I said, exas
perated. “I’d have kept at it until I was finished. I wouldn’t have botched it. Do you understand?”
Her eyes widened, but I could see that I had made my point.
“And as for being the only one around that night, what about Brookie Harewood? He was roaming around at Buckshaw—I even caught him in our drawing room. Do you think I killed him, too? Do you think someone who weighs less than five stone murdered Brookie—who probably weighs thirteen—and hung him up like a bit of washing from Poseidon’s trident?”
“Well …”
“Oh, come off it, Porcelain! I don’t think Fenella saw her attacker. If she had, she wouldn’t have blamed it on me. She’s badly injured and she’s confused. She’s letting her mind fill in the blanks.”
She stood there in the lane staring at me as if I were the cobra in a snake charmer’s basket, and had suddenly begun to speak.
“Come on,” I said, getting Gladys ready to go. “Hop on. We’ll go back to Buckshaw and find some grub.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going back to the caravan.”
“It isn’t safe,” I said. Perhaps by presenting the nasty facts without varnish I could change her mind. “Whoever bashed in Fenella’s skull and stuck a lobster pick up Brookie’s nostril is still wandering about. Come on.”
“No,” she said. “I told you, I’m going back to the caravan.”
“Why? Are you afraid of me?”
Her answer came a little too quickly for my liking.
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“All right, then,” I said softly. “Be a fool. See if I care.”
I put a foot on a pedal and prepared to push off.
“Flavia—”
I turned and looked at her over my shoulder.
“I told Inspector Hewitt what Fenella said.”
Wonderful, I thought. Just bloody wonderful.
Someone once said that music has charms to soothe a savage breast—or was it “beast”? Daffy would know for sure, but since I wasn’t speaking to her, I could hardly ask.
But for me, music wasn’t half as relaxing as revenge. To my way of thinking, the settling of scores has a calming effect upon the mind that beats music by a Welsh mile. The encounter with Porcelain had left me breathing noisily through my nose like a boar at bay and I needed time to simmer down.
Stepping through the door into my laboratory was like gaining sanctuary in a quiet church: The rows of bottled chemicals were my stained-glass windows, the chemical bench my altar. Chemistry has more gods than Mount Olympus, and here in my solitude I could pray in peace to the greatest of them: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (who, when he found a young assistant in a linen draper’s shop surreptitiously reading a chemistry text which she kept hidden under the counter, promptly dumped his fiancée and married the girl); William Perkin (who had found a way of making purple dye for the robes of emperors without using the spit of mollusks); and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who probably discovered oxygen, and—more thrilling even than that—hydrogen cyanide, my personal pick as the last word in poisons.
I began by washing my hands. I always did this in a ceremonial way, but today they needed to be dry.
I had brought with me to the laboratory an object that was normally strapped to Gladys’s seat. Gladys had come fully equipped from the factory with a tire repair kit, and it was this tin box with the name of Messrs. Dunlop on the lid that I now deposited on my workbench.
But first I closed my eyes and focused on the object of my attentions: my beloved sister, Ophelia Gertrude de Luce, whose mission in life is to revive the Spanish Inquisition with me as the sole victim. With Daffy’s connivance, her recent torture of me in the cellars had been the last straw. And now the dreadful clock of revenge was about to strike!
Feely’s great weakness was the mirror: When it came to vanity, my sister made Becky Sharp look like one of the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary—an order with which she was forever comparing me (unfavorably, I might add).
She was capable of examining herself for hours in the looking glass, tossing her hair, baring her teeth, toying with her pimples, and pulling down the outer corners of her upper eyelids to encourage them to droop aristocratically like Father’s.
Even in church and already primped to the nines, Feely would consult a little mirror that she kept hidden inside Hymns Ancient and Modern so that she could keep an eye on her complexion while pretending to refresh her memory with the words to Hymn 573: All Things Bright and Beautiful.
She was also a religious snob. To Feely, the morning church service was a drama, and she its pious star. She was always off like a shot to be the first at the communion rail, so that in returning to our pew, she would be seen with her humble eyes downcast, her long white fingers cupped at her waist, by the maximum number of churchgoers.
These were the facts that had sifted through my mind as I planned my next move, and now the time had come.
With the little white Bible Mrs. Mullet had given me on my confirmation day in one hand and the tire kit in the other, I headed for Feely’s bedroom.
This was not as difficult as it might seem. By following a maze of dusty, darkened hallways, and keeping to the upper floor, I was able to make my way from Buckshaw’s east wing towards the west, passing on my way a number of abandoned bedrooms that had not been used since Queen Victoria had declined to visit in the latter years of her reign. She had remarked to her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, that she “could not possibly find enough breath in such a wee dwelling.”
Now, behind their paneled doors, these rooms were like furniture morgues, inhabited only by sheet-covered bedsteads, dressers, and chairs which, because of the dryness of their bones, had been known sometimes to give off alarming cracking noises in the night.
All was quiet now, though, as I passed the last of these abandoned chambers, and arrived at the door that opened into the west wing. I put my ear to the green baize cloth, but all was silent on the other side. I opened the door a crack and peered through it into the hallway.
Again nothing. The place was like a tomb.
I smiled as the strains of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring came drifting up the west staircase: Feely was busy at her practice in the drawing room, and I knew that my work would not be disturbed.
I stepped into her bedroom and closed the door.
It was a room not totally unknown to me, since I often came here to filch chocolates and to have a good old rifle through her drawers. In design, it was much like my own: a great old barn of a place with high ceilings and tall windows; a place that seemed better suited to the parking of an aeroplane than the parking of one’s carcass for a good night’s sleep.
The greatest difference between this room and my own was that Feely’s did not have damp paper hanging in bags from the walls and ceiling: bags that during heavy rainstorms would fill up with cold, dripping water that turned my mattress into a soggy swamp. On those occasions, I would be forced to abandon my bed and spend the night, wrapped in my dressing gown, in a mousy-smelling wing chair that stood in the one dry corner of the room.
Feely’s bedroom, by contrast, was like something out of the cinema. The walls were covered with a delicate floral pattern (moss roses, I think) and the tall windows were bracketed with yards of lace.
A four-poster with embroidered curtains was dwarfed by the room, and stood almost unnoticed in a corner.
To the left of the windows, in pride of place, was a particularly fine Queen Anne dresser, whose curved legs were as slender and delicate as those of the ballet dancers in the paintings of Degas. Above it, on the wall, was fastened a monstrous dark-framed looking glass, too large by far for the dainty legs that stood beneath. The effect was rather Humpty Dumpty–ish: like an obscenely oversized head on a body with leprechaun legs.
I used Feely’s hairbrush to prop open the Bible on the dresser top. From the tire repair kit, I extracted a tin of magnesium silicate hydroxide, better known as French chalk. The stuff was meant to keep a freshly patch
ed inner tube from sticking to the inside of the rubber tire, but this was not the application I had in mind.
I dipped one of Feely’s camel-hair makeup brushes into the French chalk and, with one last glance at the Bible for reference, wrote a short message across the mirror’s surface in bold letters: Deuteronomy 28:27.
That done, I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and gently dusted away the words that I had written. I blew the excess chalk from where it had fallen on the dresser top, and wiped up the few traces that had drifted to the floor.
It was done! The rest of my plan was guaranteed.
It would unfold itself through the inexorable laws of chemistry, without my having to lift a finger.
When Feely next parked herself in front of the mirror and leaned in for a closer look at her ugly hide, the moisture of her warm breath would make visible the words that I had written on the glass. Their message would spring boldly into view:
Deuteronomy 28:27
Feely would be terror-stricken. She would run to look up the passage in the Bible. Actually, she might not: Since it had to do with personal grooming, she might already have the verse off by heart. But if she did have to search it out, this is what she would find:
The LORD shall smite thee with the boils of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scurvy, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.
As if the boils weren’t bad enough, “emerods” were hemorrhoids, the perfect added touch, I thought.
And if I knew my sister, she wouldn’t be able to resist reading the rest of the verse:
The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of heart; and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled alway, and there shall be none to save thee.
Feely would toss up her marmalade!
Having seen the message materialize before her very eyes, she’d believe it to be a telegram from God, and—by the Old Harry!—would she be sorry!
I could see it now: She’d fling herself down and grovel on the carpet, begging forgiveness for the rotten way she’d treated her little sister.
