by Alan Bradley
And me: Flavia de Luce.
Pawn.
Well, not quite, actually—although that was how I felt at the time.
Since Harriet’s body had been found in a Himalayan glacier, our lives at Buckshaw seemed to have fallen under the control of some unseen force. We were told the when, the where, and the how of everything, but never the why.
Somewhere, in some far-off vastness, arrangements were being made, plans being laid, all of which seemed to trickle down to us as if they were the freshly melted decrees of some unknown ice god.
“Do this, do that—be here, be there,” they commanded, and we obeyed.
Blindly, it seemed.
That was what I was thinking when my acute hearing picked up a clattering noise coming from the direction of the gates. I turned just in time to see a most unusual vehicle appearing from among the chestnuts and the hedges and coming to a halt on the gravel forecourt.
The thing was mint green and boxy, like the caged lift from a Welsh coal mine. It had an open frame upon which a canvas roof could be strapped in case of rain, and a winch mounted on its nose. I recognized it at once as a Land Rover: We had seen a similar model not all that long ago in a safari film at the cinema.
Seated at the wheel was a middle-aged woman in a black short-sleeved dress. She braked and yanked the Liberty scarf off her head as if it were the starting cord for an outboard motor, letting her long red hair tumble to her shoulders in the process.
She stepped down from the Land Rover as if she owned the world and looked about at her surroundings with what was either partial amusement or total contempt.
“Undine, come,” she said, extending a hand in the manner of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There was an alarming flutter in the depths of the Land Rover, and a most peculiar child shot up her head.
She bore no resemblance to the woman, whom I took to be her mother. She had a pasty moon face, pale blue eyes, black-rimmed spectacles of the National Health variety, and the haunting, ageless look of one of those bruised-looking baby birds that has fallen helpless and unfinished from the nest.
Some primal fear stirred inside of me.
They crunched across the gravel and stopped in front of Father.
“Lena?” Father said.
“Sorry we’re late,” the woman answered. “The Cornish roads were—well, you know what Cornish roads can be, and the ones in—good heavens! Could this be little Flavia?”
I said nothing. If the answer was “yes,” she wasn’t going to hear it from me.
“She’s awfully like her mother, isn’t she?” the supposed Lena asked, still talking to Father and not looking at me at all, as if I wasn’t there.
“And you are?” I asked, just as I had asked the stranger at the station. It may have been rude, but on such an occasion as today, one was entitled to a certain brittleness.
“Your cousins, dear—Lena and Undine, of the Cornwall de Luces. Surely you’ve heard of us?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
And all the while, Feely and Daffy were standing open-mouthed. Aunt Felicity had already turned abruptly away and vanished into the black maw of the open door.
“Shall we go inside?” Lena said, and it was not a question. “Come along, Undine, it’s chilly here. We’re likely to catch our deaths of cold.”
It was chilly all right, but not the way she meant. How could you be chilly on such an unseasonably sunny day?
Undine stuck out her tongue as she marched past me and into the house.
In the foyer, Father spoke quietly to Dogger, who went quickly about removing the intruders’ luggage from the Land Rover and hauling it to an upstairs room.
With that seen to, Father turned and began to trudge heavily up the stairs himself, as if his shoes were filled with lead.
Bonggggggg!
A sudden deafening explosion of noise filled the foyer. Father stopped in his tracks and I spun round. Undine was hacking away at the Chinese dinner gong with Father’s prize malacca walking stick, which she had pulled from the umbrella stand inside the front door.
Bonggggggg! Bonggggggg! Bonggggggg! Bonggggggg! Bonggggggg!
The mother seemed oblivious. Cousin Lena—if indeed that’s who the woman was—stood staring appreciatively, with her head thrown back, at the paneling and the paintings as if she were the Prodigal Daughter being welcomed home, peeling off her black gloves almost obscenely as she mentally totted up the value of the artwork.
Now the child was running up and down the staircase—upon which Father had stopped in disbelief—clattering the cane along the uprights of the banister as if they were a picket fence.
Drrrrrrrrrr! Drrrrrrrrrr! Drrrrrrrrrr!
Feely and Daffy were, for the first time in living memory, speechless.
Feely was the first to make a move: She drifted off towards the drawing room. Daffy opened her mouth, then shut it and made for the library at full speed.
“Flavia, dear,” Lena said, “why don’t you show Undine round the house. She’s quite keen on paintings and so forth, aren’t you, Undie?”
I felt what tasted like black vomit rising in my throat.
“Yes, Ibu,” Undine said, slashing at the air with the cane as if she were cutting her way through the jungle.
I kept my distance.
“Perhaps Miss Undine would like to view the sharks,” Dogger suggested. He had reappeared suddenly and silently on the staircase.
There were no sharks at Buckshaw, I was quite sure of that, but part of me was hoping desperately that Dogger had rounded up a few. Perhaps he had secretly stocked the ornamental lake.
SIX
THE GREAT BLACK SHARK came boiling up from the surface, hung motionless for a moment, its massive jaws gnashing at the air, then fell writhing back into the choppy waters.
Undine shrieked. “Again!” she shouted. “Again! Again! Again!”
“Very well, but this one must be the last,” Dogger said, manipulating his bare hands in front of the shaded desk lamp, and the black shadow shark rose up once more on the wall, snapped fiendishly at the air, and splashed back into the billows of waving fingers.
Dogger rolled down his sleeves, rebuttoned the cuffs, and switched off the lamp.
He removed the blankets he had hung over the kitchen windows, and we blinked in the sudden light.
When Dogger had gone, Undine said, “Does he always make sharks?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve seen him form elephants and crocodiles. His crocodile is quite terrifying, actually.”
“Huh!” Undine said. “I’m not scared of crocodiles.”
I couldn’t resist. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen one,” I said. “Not in real life, anyway.”
“I have, too!”
Little did she know that when it came to the bluffing game, she was up against a master. I’ll teach her a trick or two, I thought.
“Where, precisely?” I asked. She probably didn’t even know the meaning of the word “precisely.”
“In a mangrove swamp at Sembawang. It was a saltwater crocodile—they’re the world’s largest living reptile.”
“Sembawang?” I must have sounded like the village idiot.
“Singapore,” she said. She pronounced it Sing-a-PORE, with the accent on the last syllable. “Have you never been to Singapore?”
Since I had not, I wondered how I could best quickly change the subject.
“Why do you call your mother Ibu?” I asked.
“It’s Malay,” she answered. “It means ‘mother’ in Malay.”
“Is Singapore in Malay?”
“No! Malay is a language, you silly goose. Singapore is a geographical location.”
This discussion was not going at all as I had hoped. Time for another diversion.
“Undine,” I said. “What a peculiar name.”
Perhaps “peculiar” was a little harsh, but she had, after all, struck the first blow by calling me a silly goose.
“Not so peculiar as it mi
ght have been,” she replied. “My father wanted to call me Sepia, but my mother prevailed.”
That was the way she spoke: “prevailed.”
What a curious little creature she was!
At one moment, she was a baby bawling for more amusement, and the next, she was talking like some boring old stick from the Explorers Club.
Ageless, I thought. Yes, that was the word that best described Undine: ageless.
Still, I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe her about the Singapore saltwater crocodile. I’d check her up later.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said suddenly, out of the silence. “Ibu has spoken of her often.”
“In Malay?” I asked, meaning to cut.
“In Malay and in English,” she said. “In Singapore, we spoke both languages interchangeably.”
Interchangeably? Don’t make me hurl my gastric acids!
“Have I caused you great distress?” she asked.
“Distress?”
“Ibu said I was not to mention your mother’s name at Buckshaw. She said it would cause great distress.”
“Ibu speaks often of my mother, you say?”
I was still being more than a trifle snotty, but Undine didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes, quite often,” she said. “She cared for her a great deal.”
I have to admit I was touched.
“She wept,” Undine said, “when they took your mother’s body from the train.”
Quite suddenly my mind was reeling.
“From the train?” I asked, disbelieving her. “You weren’t at the station.”
“Yes, we were,” Undine said. “Ibu said it was the least we could do. We were late. We parked off to one side, but we were still able to observe everything.”
“I’m suddenly tired, Undine,” I told her. “Find your own way upstairs. I’m going for a bit of a lie-down.”
I stretched out on my bed, facedown, unable to keep awake, unable to sleep, and guilt was the culprit.
How could I have sat so calmly in the kitchen watching a carefree shadow-show when all the while my mother was lying dead upstairs?
Dead and lost: frozen in a glacier for a decade until some moronic mountaineer, posing for a snapshot, had stepped backwards into a crevasse, where a rescue party eventually found his—and her—icy remains.
How did I feel? Guilty as sin!
Why wasn’t I blubbering and shrieking and ripping out my hair? Why wasn’t I prowling the battlements of Buckshaw, howling into the wind?
Even Cousin Lena had been able to weep at the station. Why then had I stood there on the platform like a piece of rotted timber, more attentive to the death of a stranger than to that of my own mother?
Why had I needed to be reprimanded by a voice from the swamps of my mind?
How could my grief have failed me so miserably?
Perhaps Feely and Daffy had been right all along: Perhaps I really was a changeling. Perhaps Harriet really had plucked me from an orphanage—which would mean, of course, that I had no more real physical connection with her than does a monkey with the moon.
Never in my life had I wanted more desperately to be a de Luce, yet never had I felt less as if I actually were one. My family and I seemed to stand at opposite ends of the universe. I was as much a mystery to them as they were to me, and yet, in spite of it, we needed one another.
I rolled over, faceup, and stared at the ceiling. The great loose bags of water-damaged paper that hung like moldy barrage balloons above my head made me feel as if I were under attack from the very house itself.
I covered my head with a pillow. But it was no use.
In just a few hours, the people of the village would begin arriving at Buckshaw for Harriet’s lying-in-state. Dogger would usher them in small groups up the west staircase to her boudoir, where they would stand gazing at their own reflections in the awful polish of that hideous coffin, whose contents were too horrible to be imagined.
I leapt from my bed and, picking up the ciné projector, carried it into my laboratory darkroom.
Again I threaded the film into the machine and switched it on. The picture was smaller but brighter than it had been in my bedroom fireplace, and, oddly enough, I was able to pick out more detail.
Here is Harriet, scrambling once more from the cockpit of Blithe Spirit with yours truly still invisible but present nevertheless beneath her flying togs. Feely and Daffy wave and shield their eyes.
Was it from the sun, as I had supposed?
Or had Harriet, in real life, been too radiant to look at?
Whatever the case, by developing this forgotten film, I had, with the magic of chemistry, restored my mother to life.
Deep inside me, something awoke, rolled over—and then went back to sleep.
Now Father strolls towards the camera, unaware that he is trapped in another world: the world of the past.
Daffy and Feely dabble at the edge of the ornamental lake, unaware that they are being filmed. The camera turns away, moving towards the blanket upon which Father and Harriet are picnicking.
But wait!
What was that shadow on the grass? I hadn’t spotted it before.
I stopped the projector and threw it into reverse.
Yes! I was right—there was a dark blot on the grass: the shadow of the camera operator, whoever that may have been.
I let the film run on a bit: As Father turns away to remove something from the hamper, Harriet turns to the camera and mouths those words again.
Along with her, I speak them aloud, attempting to match my lips with hers, getting the feel of her words in my own mouth:
“Pheasant sandwiches,” she says on the flickering image.
“Pheasant sandwiches,” I say.
Again I back up the film for another glimpse of that fleeting shadow on the grass. To whom had Harriet mouthed those mysterious words?
I watched it all again wondering if there was a way to freeze the picture.
“Pheasant—” Harriet said, and there was the most awful clatter and grinding.
The projector had jammed!
On the wall, the image had frozen mid-word. Before my very eyes, Harriet’s face began to turn brown—to darken—to shrivel—to bubble—
The film had caught fire! A little column of dark, acrid smoke arose from somewhere inside the projector.
If the film was cellulose nitrate, as I knew some films to be, I was in trouble.
Even if it didn’t explode—as was quite likely—the burning stuff could still fill the room almost instantly with a noxious mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and various unpleasant forms of the nitrogen oxides, to say nothing of cyanide.
This little darkroom would, in an instant, become a perfect chamber of death. Buckshaw itself might then, in minutes, be reduced to ashes.
I tore a laboratory apron from its hook on the wall and flung it over the machine.
Cellulose nitrate doesn’t require outside oxygen to burn: It contains its own.
Nothing—not even fire extinguishers or water—can extinguish a cellulose nitrate blaze.
Usually, when it comes to chemicals, I have my wits about me, but I must confess that in this case, I panicked.
I dashed out of the darkroom, slammed the door behind me, and threw my back against it to keep it shut. A cloud of smoke escaped with me.
I was standing like that—like a creature that had just dragged itself up out of the pit—when a voice from the smoke asked “Close call?”
It was Dogger.
All I could do was nod.
“I beg your pardon for intruding,” he said, fanning his hands at the air and opening a window, “but Colonel de Luce wishes the family to congregate in the drawing room in a quarter of an hour.”
“Thank you, Dogger. I shall be along directly.”
Dogger didn’t move. His nostrils dilated as he very slightly raised his chin.
“Acetate?” he asked, not even bothering to
take a full-fledged sniff.
“I believe it is,” I said. “If it had been cellulose nitrate we’d be in rather a sticky spot.”
“Indeed,” Dogger agreed. “May I be of assistance?”
I paused for only a fraction of a second before blurting out, “Can ciné film be patched?”
“It can indeed,” Dogger replied. “It is referred to in the trade, I believe, as ‘splicing.’ A few drops of acetone should do the trick.”
I reviewed the reaction in my mind.
“Of course!” I said. “A chemical bonding of the celluloid.”
“Just so,” Dogger said.
“I should have thought of that,” I admitted. “Wherever did you learn it?”
A cloud drifted across Dogger’s face, and for a few unsettling moments, I felt as if I were suddenly in the presence of an entirely different person.
A complete stranger.
“I—don’t know,” he said at last, slowly. “These fragments appear suddenly sometimes at the tips of my fingers—or on my tongue—as if—”
“Yes?”
“As if—”
I held my breath.
“Almost as if they were memories.”
And with those words the stranger had vanished. Dogger was suddenly back.
“May I be of assistance?” he asked again, as if nothing had happened.
Now here was a pretty pickle! Much as I wanted Dogger’s help, some dark and ancient part of me clung stubbornly to keeping the spool of film a secret.
It was all so beastly complicated! On the one hand, part of me wanted to be patted on the head and told “Good girl, Flavia!” while at the same time, another part wanted to hoard this new and unexpected glimpse of Harriet: to keep the film strictly to myself, like a dog with a fresh-flung soup bone.
But then, I thought, Dogger had never actually met Harriet in person: He had not come to Buckshaw until after the War. In an odd way, Harriet was no more to him than a shadow left behind by the deceased wife of his employer—in much the same way, I realized with an unpleasant pang, as she was to me.
Except, of course, that she was also my mother.
What it came down to, then, was this: How much did I trust Dogger?
