“Oh, really? I rather thought it was. Most common.”
She turned, as if dismissing a servant.
Maeve Harvill did not act like a carpenter’s daughter or a baker’s niece. She was a princess. Not an especially nice one.
“You’ll have come to see poor David.”
“Poor” David owned this house and was the support of his whole family. Charles wondered if Davey even knew that.
“About the unpleasantness in the park.”
“You know about that?”
“It was in the newspapers,” she said, tossing a glance at Kate. “Do you know Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge? He’sghastly.”
That was the first child-thing she had said.
“Does Uncle Satt call here often?” asked Kate.
“He’s not my uncle. He stays away unless he absolutely can’t help it. Will he go to jail? I’m sure what happened to Leslie is all his fault.”
“You knew the late Mr. Sackham?” Charles asked.
Maeve considered Kate and then Charles, thinking. She pressed an eyetooth to her lower lip, carefully not breaking the skin, mimicking Sarah—whom it was hard to think of as the princess’s sister.
“Is this to be an interrogation?”
“They be ‘tectives, Auntie,” said Dickie.
“How exciting,” she commented, as if on the point of falling asleep. “Are we to be arrested?”
She held out her arms, voluminous sleeves sliding away from bird-thin wrists.
“Do you have handcuffs in my size?”
She spied something on a small table. It was Dickie’s twig-clue. She picked it up, held it alongside her own forefinger, and snapped it in half.
“Dirty thing. I can’t imagine how it got in here.”
Dickie didn’t cry but one of his eyes gleamed with a tear-to-be.
Maeve made a fist around the twig fragments as if to crush them further, then opened her hand to show an empty palm. With a flourish she produced the twig—whole—in her other hand.
Kate clapped, slowly. Maeve smiled to herself and took a little bow.
“I be a ‘tective,” said Dickie, tears gone and delight stamped on his face. “Auntie Maeve be a conjurer.”
“She should go on the halls,” said Kate, unimpressed. “Mystic, Magical Maeve, the Modern Medusa.”
The girl flicked the twig into a grate where no fire would burn till autumn. Neither of her hands was dirty , the neatest trick of all.
“She makes things vanish, then brings “em back.” said Dickie.
“That seems to happen quite often in this family,” commented Charles.
“More things vanish than come back.” said Maeve. “Has he told you about the Bun Bandit from two doors down?”
“A successful conclusion to a baffling case?”
Maeve smiled. “Sidney Silcock might not think so. He was thrashed and put on bread and water. Dickie has to keep out of the way when Sidney pays a call. A retaliatory walloping has been mentioned. There’s a fellow who knows how to bide his time. I shouldn’t be surprised if he waits years, until everyone else has forgotten what it was about. But the walloping will be heroic. Sidney is one to do things on an heroic scale.”
“He sounds a desperate villain.”
“He’s desperate all right,” said Maeve, smiling her secret smile again.
“Greedy Sid’s sweet on ‘er,” said Dickie.
She glared calmly at her nephew.
Sarah came into the room, took in the scene, and nipped her lip again.
“Sarah, dear, I have been renewing a friendship. This, I am sure you realise, is Charles Beauregard, the intrepid fellow who rescued me from the gypsies in the wood.”
“Yes, Maeve, I realise.”
Sarah was not unconditionally grateful for this rescue. Sometimes she wished Charles had left well enough alone, had not lifted the princess from the snow, not carried her out of the wood.
“Davey says he’d like to see you,” Sarah told Charles, quietly—like a servant in her mistress’s presence. “And the lady.”
“You are privileged,” said Maeve. “My brother rarely likes to see me.”
She was playing with a glass globe that contained a miniature woodland scene. When shook, it made a blizzard.
“Happy memories,” she commented.
“Davey’s upstairs, in his studio,” said Sarah. “Drawing. He’s better than he was earlier.”
Sarah held the door open. Kate stepped into the hall, and Charles followed. Sarah looked back, at her son and her sister.
“Dickie, come help in the kitchen,” she said.
Dickie stayed where he was.
“I can see he stays out of trouble while we have visitors,” said Maeve. “I’ve been practicing new tricks.”
Sarah was unsure. Dickie was resigned.
“I be all right, Ma.”
Sarah nodded and closed the door on the children. A tear of blood ran down the groove of her chin, unnoticed.
“Maeve hasn’t changed,” said Charles as Sarah led them upstairs.
“Not since you saw her,” she responded. “But she did change. When she were away. As much as Davey, not that anyone do listen to I. Not that Mam listened, God rest her.”
From the landing, Charles looked downstairs. All was quiet.
“Come through here,” said Sarah. “To the studio.”
* * * *
iv: “industry is a virtue”
Kate was expecting Ben Gunn—wild hair, matted beard, mad eyes. Instead, she found a presentable man, working in a room full of light. Beard he had, but neatly trimmed and free of beetles. One eye was slightly lazy, but he did not seem demented. Davey Harvill, B. Loved, sat on a stool, over paper pinned flat to a bench. His hand moved fast with a sharp pencil, filling in intricate details of a picture already sketched. To one side was a neat pile of papers, squared away like letters for posting. By his feet was a half-full wastepaper basket.
This was the neatest artists’ studio she had ever seen: bare floorboards spotless, walls papered but unadorned. Uncurtained floor-to-ceiling windows admitted direct sunlight. The expected clutter was absent: no books, reference materials, divans for models, props. Davey, in shirtsleeves, had not so much as a smudge of graphite upon him. He might have been a draper’s clerk doing the end-of-day accounts. It was as if the pictures were willed into being without effort, without mess. They came out of his head, whole and entire, and were transmitted to paper.
Mrs. Riddle let Kate and Charles into the room, coughed discreetly, and withdrew.
Davey looked up, nodded to Charles and smiled at Kate. His hand moved at hummingbird speed, whether his eye was upon the paper or not. Some mediums practiced automatic writing; this could be automatic drawing.
“Charles, hello,” said Davey.
As far as Kate knew, the artist had not seen Charles in eight years.
“How have you been?” asked Charles.
“Very well, sir, all things considered.”
He finished his drawing and, without looking, freed it from its pinnings and shifted it to the pile, neatening the corners. He unrolled paper from a scroll, deftly pinned it in place and used a penknife to cut neatly across the top. A white, empty expanse lay before him.
“Busy, of course,” he said. “Industry is a virtue.”
He took a pencil and, without pause, began to sketch.
Kate moved closer, to get a look at the work in progress. Most painters would have thrown her in the street for such impertinence, but Davey did not appear to mind.
Davey’s pencil-point flew, in jagged, sudden strokes. A woodland appeared, populated by creatures whose eyes showed in shadows. Two small figures, hand in hand, walked in a clearing. A little boy and a girl. Watched from the trees and the burrows.
“This is my friend Kate Reed,” said Charles.
Davey smiled again, open and engaging, content in his work.
“Hello, Kate.”
“Please forgive this intrusion,” she ventured.
/> “It’s no trouble. Makes a nice change.”
His pencil left the children, and darted to the corners of the picture, shading areas with solid strokes that left black shadows, relieved by tiny, glittering eyes and teeth. Kate was alarmed, afraid for the safety of the boy and the girl.
“I still haven’t remembered anything,” said Davey. “I’m sorry, Charles. I have tried.”
“That’s all right, Davey.”
He was back on the central figures. The children, alone in the woods, clinging together for reassurance, for safety.
“What subject is this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Davey, looking down, seeing the picture for the first time, “the usual.”
Now his eyes were on the paper, Davey stopped drawing.
“Babes in the Wood?” suggested Charles. “Hansel and Gretel?”
Something was wrong about the children. They did not fit either of the stories Charles had mentioned.
“Davey and Maeve,” said the artist, sadly. “I know everything I draw comes from that time. It’s as if it never ended, not really.”
Charles laid a hand on the man’s—the boy’s—shoulder.
Davey began to work again on the children, more deliberately now.
Kate saw what was wrong. The girl was not afraid.
As Davey was doing the girl’s eyes, the pencil-lead broke, scratching across her face.
“Pity,” he said.
Rather than reach for an india rubber and make a minor change, he tore the paper from the block and began to make a ball of it.
“Excuse me,” said Kate, taking the picture from its creator.
“It’s no use,” he said.
Kate spread the crumpled paper.
She saw something in it.
Charles riffled through the pile of completed illustrations. They were a sequence. The children entering the woods, taking a winding path, walking past færie dwellings without noticing, enticed ever deeper into the dark.
Kate looked back at the rejected picture.
The girl was exactly the child-woman Kate had met downstairs, Maeve. Her brother had caught the sulky, adult turn of her mouth and made her huge brush of hair seem alive. A princess, but a frightening one.
In the picture, the children were not lost. The girl was leading the boy into the woods.
“This is your sister,” said Kate, tapping the girl’s scratched face.
“Maeve,” he said, not quite agreeing.
“And this is you? Davey?”
Davey hesitated. “That’s not right,” he said. “Let me fix it...”
He reached for his pencil, but Charles stayed his hand.
They all looked closely at the boy in the picture. He was just beginning to worry, starting to consider unthinkable things—that the girl who held his hand was, in a real sense, a stranger to him, a stranger to everyone, that this adventure in the woods was taking a sinister turn.
It might be Davey, as he was when he went into the woods eight years ago, as a nine-year-old.
But it looked more like Dickie, as he was now.
* * * *
v: “Richard Riddle, Special Detective”
“If I were a real detective,” said Auntie Maeve, “I shouldn’t be content to waste my talents tracking down bun-thieves. For my quarry, I should choose more desperate criminals. Fiends who threaten the country more than they do their own trouser-buttons.”
Dickie trailed down the street after his aunt.
“I should concentrate exclusively on cases which constitute a challenge, on mysteries worth solving. Murders, and such.”
Maeve led him past the Silcock house, which gave him a pang of worry. Greedy Sid was, like the Count of Monte Cristo, capable of nurturing over long years an impulse to revenge. Behind the tall railings, bottom still smarting, the miscreant would be brooding, plotting. Dickie imagined Sidney Silcock, swollen to enormous size, become his lifelong nemesis, the Napoleon of Gluttony.
“The mystery of Leslie Sackham, for instance.”
The name caught Dickie’s mind.
He remembered Mr. Sackham as a bendy minion, hair floppy and cuffs ink-stained, trailing after Mr. Bulge in attitudes of contortion. A tall man, he tried always to look up to his employer, no matter what kinks that put into his neck and spine. Sometimes, Mr. Sackham told stories to children, but got them muddled and lost his audience before he reached the predictable endings. Dickie remembered one about Miss Fay Twinkledust, who put all her sparkles into a sensible investment portfolio rather than tossing them into the Silver Stream to be gobbled by the Silly Fish. Mr. Sackham had been a boring grown-up. Now he was dead, the limits of his bendiness reached inside the works of a dynamo, Dickie felt guilty for not having liked him much.
It would be fitting if he were to solve the mystery.
Everyone would be grateful. Especially if it meant the Gift could open after all. Mr. Bulge’s business would be saved from the Silly Fish. Dickie understood the fortunes of the Harvill household depended in some mysterious way on the enterprises of “Uncle Satt”—though only babies and girls read that dreary Treasury for anything but Uncle Davey’s pictures.
Maeve took his hand.
“Where are we goin’?”
“To the park, of course.”
“Why?”
“To look for clues.”
At this magic word, Dickie was seized by the rightness of the pursuit. Whatever else Maeve might be, she was clever. She would make a valuable detective’s assistant, with her sharp eyes and odd way of looking at things. Sometimes, she frightened people. That could be useful too.
Though it was too warm out for caps, scarves, and coats, Maeve had insisted they dress properly for this sleuthing expedition. They might have to go underground, she said.
Dickie wore his special coat, a “reversible” which could be either a loud check or a subdued herringbone. If spotted by a suspected criminal one was “tailing,” the trick was to turn the coat inside-out and so seem to be another boy entirely. He even had a matching cap. In addition, secret pockets were stuffed with the instruments of his calling. About his person, he had the magnifying glass, measuring callipers, his catapult (which he was under strict orders from Ma not to use within shot of windows), a map of the locality with secret routes pencilled in, a multipurpose penknife (with five blades, plus corkscrew, screwdriver, and bradawl), and a bottle of invisible ink. He had made up cards for himself using a potato press, in visible and invisible ink: “Richard Riddle, Special Detective.” Da approved, saying he was “a regular Hawkshaw.” Hawkshaw was a famous detective from the olden days.
Maeve, with a blue bonnet that matched her dress, was a touch conspicuous for “undercover” work. She walked with such confidence, however, that no one thought they were out on their own. Seeing the children—not that Aunt Maeve was exactly a child—in the street, people assumed there was a governess nearby, watching over them.
Dickie didn’t believe in governesses. They came and went so often. Ma lamented that most found it difficult to work under a baker’s wife, which proved the stupidity of the breed. He might bristle at parental decrees, especially with regards to the overrated virtues of cleanliness and tidiness, but Ma knew best—better than a governess, at any rate. Some were unaccountably prone to fits of terror. He suspected Maeve worked tricks to make governesses vanish on a regular basis, though she never brought them back again. He even wondered whether his aunt hadn’t had an unseen hand in one of his greatest triumphs, the Mystery of the Cheating Governess. Despite overwhelming evidence, Miss MacAndrew had maintained to the moment of her dismissal that she had done no such thing.
In the park, children were everywhere, playing hopscotch, climbing anything that could be climbed, defending the North-West Frontier against disapproving wardens, fighting wild Red Indians with Buffalo Bill. Governesses in black bombazine flocked on the benches. Dickie imagined a cloud of general disapproval gathering above them. He pondered the possibility t
hat they were in a secret society, pledged to make miserable the lives of all children, sworn to inflict etiquette andwashes on the innocent. They dressed alike, and had the same expression—as if they’d just been made to swallow a whole lemon but ordered not to let it show.
He shouldn’t be at all surprised if governesses were behind the Mystery of the Mangled Minion.
Mr. Sackham had died in the park. There were always governesses in the park. They could easily cover up for each other. In their black, they could blend in with the shadows.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 9
