by Alan Bradley
Could I swear him to secrecy?
A minute later we were in the darkroom. Dogger had switched on the exhaust fan (which I hadn’t known existed) and was examining the sticky residue in the guts of the projector. The smoke and the fumes had dissipated and with them, the fear of an explosion.
“No great harm done, I think,” he told me. “Not more than a few frames burnt. Do you have scissors?”
“No,” I said. I had recently ruined a perfectly good pair of scissors by using them to cut a piece of zinc in a failed experiment intended to retrieve fingerprints from a downspout by an acid etching process of my own invention.
“Anything else sharp?” Dogger asked.
Somewhat shamefaced, I pulled from a drawer Father’s prized Thiers-Issard hollow-ground straight razor: one I had borrowed in the past, which had come in so handy that I was thinking of asking for one of my own next Christmas.
“Ah,” Dogger said. “So that’s where it got to.”
“I took care to keep it in its case,” I pointed out. “Accidents, and so forth.”
“Very wise,” Dogger said. He did not mention returning the thing to Father, as many people would have done. That’s another of the things I love about Dogger: He’s not a snitch.
“To begin with, we cut out the damaged section,” Dogger explained, “then scrape the emulsion off the film at the two fresh ends.”
“You sound as if you’ve done this before,” I remarked casually, keeping a close eye on him.
“I have, Miss Flavia. Showing ciné films of an instructional nature to hordes of uninterested men was once a not insubstantial part of my responsibility.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
Dogger’s memory was always a puzzle. There were times when he could see his own past only, as Saint Paul puts it, “through a glass darkly,” and yet at other times as if through a highly polished window.
I have often thought how maddening it must be for him: like trying to view the moon with a telescope through tattered clouds on a windy night.
“Meaning,” Dogger said, “that we shall have this film repaired hubble-de-shuff. Ah! Here we are—most satisfactory.”
He held out a length of the repaired film for my inspection, flexing it and giving the new join a good hard snap. It seemed as good as new.
“You’re a wizard, Dogger!” I told him, and he did not contradict me.
“Shall we give it a try?” he asked.
“Why not?” I said. My fears had vanished with the smoke.
Having scraped the melted muck out of the projector—I suggested using Father’s razor again, but Dogger wouldn’t hear of it—we reloaded the film, switched off the lights, and watched closely as the flickering black-and-white images brought Harriet back to life.
Here she was again, hauling herself once more from the cockpit of Blithe Spirit, Father strolling self-consciously towards the camera.
“Hullo!” I said suddenly. “Who’s that?”
“Your father,” he said. “It’s just that he’s younger.”
“No—behind him. In the window.”
“I didn’t see anyone,” Dogger said. “Let’s back things up.”
He reversed the projector. He seemed more familiar with the controls than I had been.
“Just there—look,” I insisted. “In the window.”
It happened so quickly. No wonder he had missed it.
As Father approached the camera, there was a mere shifting of the light in an upstairs window—and then it was gone.
“A man—in shirtsleeves. Tie and braces. Papers in his hand.”
“You’ve a sharper eye than I have, Miss Flavia,” he said. “It was too quick for me. We shall have another look.”
With infinitely patient fingers he reversed the film again. “Yes,” he said. “I see him now. Quite distinct: shirtsleeves, tie, braces, papers in his hand—hair parted in the middle.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Let’s take another squint.”
Dogger smiled and ran the scene again.
Was I seeing what I was seeing? Or was my imagination playing up on me?
But it wasn’t the man in the film that interested me so much as his location.
“How odd,” I said with a private shiver. “Whoever he is, he’s in this very room.”
And it was true. Mr. Tie-and-Braces—it was quite easy to make him out clearly once you’d got used to it—had been shuffling papers at the window of my chemical laboratory: a room which had been abandoned and locked up in 1928 after Uncle Tarquin had been found by his housekeeper, stone cold at his desk, gazing sightlessly through his microscope.
Judging by the ages of Feely and Daffy, and by the fact that I had not yet made my appearance in the world, the film had been made in about 1939: not long before I was born, and about a year before Harriet’s disappearance.
More than ten years after Uncle Tar’s death.
No one should have been in that room.
So who was the man at the window?
Had Father known he was there? Had Harriet? Surely they must have done.
“What do you make of it, Dogger?”
One of the things I love about myself is my ability to remain open to suggestion.
“American, I should say. Military, by the shirt. An NCO. Probably a corporal. Tall—six foot three, or perhaps four.”
I must have gaped in awe.
“Elementary, as Sherlock Holmes might have said,” Dogger explained. “Only an American NCO would have the blade of his tie tucked into his shirt in such a way—between the second and third button—and his height can be judged easily against the top of that sash rail, which I judge to be six feet above the floor.”
He pointed at the very window which had appeared in the film.
“The question remains,” he went on, “as to what an American clerk was doing at Buckshaw in 1939.”
“My thoughts precisely,” I said.
“We’d best be getting along,” Dogger said suddenly. “They shall be awaiting us.”
I’d completely forgotten about Father and Harriet.
SEVEN
I MADE AN APOLOGETIC entrance to the drawing room. I needn’t have bothered. No one paid me the slightest bit of attention.
Father, as usual, was standing at the window, lost in his own thoughts. At the railway station, he had worn a suit of darkest blue with a black band on one arm, as if clinging desperately to the hope that even the slightest tinge of color might bring Harriet home alive. But now he had given up and was dressed in black. His white face hanging above his mourning attire was awful.
Feely and Daffy, too, wore black dresses I had never seen before. I shuddered at the thought of what ancient wardrobes must have been plundered to turn out something decent, something proper.
Why hadn’t Father dressed me in black? I wondered. Why had he let me be seen at Buckshaw Halt in a white summer dress which, come to think of it, must have stuck out like a firework in the night sky?
Like a fizzler at a funeral, I thought, but quickly forced it out of my mind.
The problem with bereavement, I had already decided, was learning when to put on and when to take off the various masks that one was required to wear: with anyone who wasn’t a de Luce, profound and inconsolable grief, complete with limp hands and downcast eyes; with family, a distant coolness which, to tell the truth, was not all that different from our everyday life. Only when one was alone in one’s own room could one pull faces at oneself in one’s looking glass, hauling the corners of one’s eyes down with first and fourth fingers spread, lolling one’s tongue out and crossing one’s eyes horribly just to assure oneself that one was still alive.
I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it describes precisely how I felt.
We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don’t have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away
.
A pale smile came into my mind because that was what Lena had given me as she looked up from the newspaper through which she had been leafing at far too fast a clip to be actually reading.
She took a last suck on her cigarette and crushed it without mercy in the ashtray before lighting another with a long match from the hearth.
In the corner, Undine was idly tearing off strips of the wallpaper.
“Undine, dear,” her mother said. “Stop doing that and run upstairs for my cigarettes. You shall find them in one of our portmanteaus.”
Father seemed at last to realize that we were all present, but even at that, he did not turn away from the window as he began to speak in a dull voice: “The lying-in-state shall commence at 1400 hours,” he said. “I’ve drawn up a rota. We shall each of us take turns standing vigil in six-hour watches in order of age, which means that I shall begin and Flavia shall finish. Kneeling benches have been laid on and Mrs. Mullet has seen to the candles.”
I thought I heard him swallow.
“From now until the funeral tomorrow, your mother is not to be left alone—not even for a moment. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Yes, Father,” Daffy said.
And there fell one of those de Lucean silences during which you could hear the ancient stones of Buckshaw shedding their dust.
“Are there any questions?”
“No, Father,” we said in unison, and I was surprised to hear my own voice leading all the rest.
Feely and Daffy took his words as a signal of dismissal and left the room as quickly as respect allowed. Lena drifted idly off in their wake.
We stood there not moving, Father and I. I hardly dared breathe. What I should have done, of course—what my heart was demanding me to do—was to run at him and throw my arms around him.
But I did not, of course. I had at least the decency to spare him that embarrassment.
After a time, perhaps because of my silence, he thought I had gone.
When he turned away from the window, I saw that his eyes were brimming.
Naturally, I couldn’t let him know that I had seen his tears. Pretending I hadn’t noticed, I walked from the room with my fingertips pressed together, as if in procession.
I needed to be alone.
Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I felt as if I were one of those prisoners in Daffy’s French novels who finds herself shackled hand and foot at the bottom of an old well in a dungeon with the water rising.
The only thing for it was to go to my laboratory and do something constructive with strychnine. There had been that business of the poisoned beehive written up in the News of the World not all that long ago, and I had hoped to add to scientific knowledge—to say nothing of the art of criminal investigation—with a number of my own insights into the possibilities of poisoning at the breakfast table.
I climbed the stairs, fishing the key from my pocket as I went. When working with deadly potions I had found it best to keep the door tightly locked.
I twisted the doorknob and stepped inside.
Esmeralda, my Buff Orpington hen, lay stretched out stiffly on the floor in a beam of sunlight, her neck and both legs fully extended, one wing unfurled as if she had been reaching for help. Sweep marks in the dust showed all too clearly her recent frantic floundering.
“Esmeralda!”
I dashed to her side.
Her only visible eye was staring at me blankly.
“Esmeralda!”
The eye blinked.
Esmeralda got dreamily to her feet and gave herself a good shaking, like a fat feather duster.
I cradled her in my arms, buried my face in the softness of her breast, and burst into tears.
“You goose!” I said into her feathers. “You silly goose! You frightened me half to death.”
Esmeralda pecked at my mouth, as she sometimes did when I put millet seeds between my lips for her to discover.
“How did you manage to get in here?” I asked, even though I thought I already knew the answer.
Dogger must have brought her up to my laboratory, as he did when she was being a nuisance in the greenhouse. And now that Dogger came to mind, I remembered he once told me that some chickens were given to treating themselves to dust baths during which they behaved as if hypnotized. And the floor was certainly dusty.
The truth of the matter is, I wanted to throw myself down on the floorboards and have a jolly good wallow in the dirt myself. I was sick of this constant being on show that Harriet’s sudden reappearance had brought us: this going about in utter silence; this being dressed forever in our best; this perpetual watching of our words; this being always on our best behavior; these round-the-clock reminders of returning to dust.
It was probably time to think about giving the place a good housecleaning.
But not just yet. My sudden tendency to tears had shaken me.
“What am I going to do, Esmeralda?” I asked.
Esmeralda fixed me with her yellow eye: an eye as warm and mellow as the sun, and yet, at the same time, as old and cold as the mountains.
And in that instant, I knew.
Harriet.
Harriet was in the house and I needed to go to her.
She had something to tell me.
EIGHT
I SLIPPED SILENTLY OUT of my laboratory, locked the door, and made my way towards the seldom-used north hall which paralleled the front of the house. Even though Dogger had installed Lena and Undine in one or another of these cavernous crypts, there was little chance of running into them if I kept my wits about me.
Father had told us that he would be first to stand watch. And yet he was, as far as I knew, still in the drawing room, entranced by his grief. There would be little enough time, but perhaps if I hurried …
At the south end of the west wing, I put my ear to the door of Harriet’s boudoir. I could hear nothing but the breathing of the house.
I tried the door and found it unlocked.
I stepped inside.
The room was hung in black velvet. The stuff was everywhere: on the walls, across the windows; even Harriet’s bed and dresser were swathed in the dismal material.
In the center of the room, on draped trestles—a catafalque, Father had called it—was Harriet’s coffin. The Union Jack had been replaced with a black pall bearing the de Luce coat of arms: per bend sinister sable and argent, two lucies haurient counterchanged. The crest, the moon in her detriment, and the motto “Dare Lucem.”
“The moon in her detriment” was a moon eclipsed, and the “lucies,” of course, were silver and black luces, or pikes, a double pun on the name de Luce. “Haurient” meant simply that the pikes were standing on their fishy tails.
And the motto, another pun on our family name: Dare Lucem—to give light.
Precisely what I was attempting to do.
At the head and foot of the catafalque, tall candles flickered with a weird glow in iron sconces, making the darkness dance with scarcely visible demons.
An almost perceptible mist hung round the candle flames, and in the awful silence I detected a faint odor upon the air.
I couldn’t hold back a shudder.
Harriet was here—inside this box!
Harriet, the mother I had never known, the mother I had never seen.
I took three steps forward, reached out, and touched the gleaming wood.
How oddly and unexpectedly cold it was! How surprisingly damp.
Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
In order to preserve it for the long trip home, Harriet’s body would most likely have been packed in the solid form of carbon dioxide, or “card ice” as it is called. The stuff had first been described by the French scientist Charles Thilorier in 1834 after he had discovered it almost by accident. By mixing crystallized CO2 with ether, he had been able to achieve the remarkably cold temperature of minus 100 degrees on the centigrade scale.
So inside this wooden shell there would have to
be a sealed metal container—zinc, perhaps.
No wonder the bearers at the railway station had moved so slowly under their burden. A metal casing filled with card ice, plus the oaken coffin, plus Harriet would strain the shoulders of even the strongest men.
I sniffed at the oak.
Yes, no doubt about it. Carbon dioxide. Its faint, pungent, pleasantly acid smell gave it away.
How difficult would it be, I wondered, to—
Suddenly I heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. Father’s boots! I was sure of it!
I whipped round behind the catafalque and ducked out of sight, hardly daring to breathe.
The door opened and Father came into the room and the door closed again.
There was a long moment of silence.
And then there came the most heartbreaking sound I have ever heard as great shuddering sobs began slowly to break off from my father like floes from an iceberg.
I jammed my forefingers into my ears and screwed them down. There are certain sounds which are meant never to be heard by children—even though I am no longer really a child—and the chiefest of these is the sound of a parent crying.
It was agony.
I crouched there behind the catafalque, above my head my frozen mother, a few feet away my convulsively crying father.
There was nothing to do but wait.
After a very long time, the muffled sounds seemed to have lessened, and I removed my fingers from my ears. Father was still weeping, but very quietly now.
He sucked in a convulsive, broken breath.
“Harriet,” he said at last in a hoarse whisper. “Harriet, my heart, forgive me. It was I.”
“It was I”?
Whatever could he mean by that? Father was obviously out of his mind with grief.
But before I could think about it, I heard him turn and leave the room.
It would soon be two o’clock, and the villagers would begin arriving at Buckshaw to pay their respects to Harriet’s remains. Father would not want to be seen with moist eyes and had obviously gone next door to his own room to regain his composure. I knew that when the mourners arrived, they would find him showing only the stony face of that cold-fish colonel in whose shell he lived.
