by Alan Bradley
“Let the girl go, Felicity,” he said.
I had no idea how much the child had witnessed, and because Dogger had whisked her off so quickly into the vestry at the very outset of the excitement, there’d been no opportunity for me to find out.
We arrived home to a silent house. Father had given Mrs. Mullet the rest of the day off, and she’d required no persuasion.
“I’ve left meats enough in the ’fridgerator,” she whispered to Dogger. “Puddings and that in the pantry. Make sure they eat.”
Dogger had nodded delicately.
Adam and Tristram pulled up at the front door just seconds behind us with Undine, all three of them engaged in a serious discussion, apparently about dragonflies.
“There are far more species in Singapore than in England,” she was telling them, “well over a hundred—but of course I’m including the damselflies.”
Did she know yet about her mother? Surely she must—Aunt Felicity must have told her.
It was going to be difficult for the little girl, growing up without her precious Ibu. Who knows? In time, she might even come to appreciate a few pointers.
Our party broke up in the foyer, each of us going our separate way. Father was the first to leave, climbing slowly up the stairs. I wanted to follow him—to console him—but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know how.
Perhaps in time I shall learn the antidote for grief. But for now, I would just have to make do with silent pity.
Since I had no interest in damselflies, nor was I hungry, I went directly to my laboratory to feed Esmeralda, who appeared not to have missed me. She fell upon her feed as if I didn’t exist.
It seemed an eternity since I had last been alone with myself.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to read, I didn’t feel like listening to music, and chemistry was out of the question.
I took a wooden match from a box and idly lit the flame of the Bunsen burner. With my elbows on the bench, I stared into the changing flame—yellow, orange, purple, blue—as if, from a great distance, from the outer edge of the universe, I was an onlooker to the birth of galaxies.
There was only me, and nothing more. Nothing else existed.
Light and heat: That was what it was all about.
The secret of the stars.
But when you came right down to it, light was energy, and so was heat.
So energy, when you stopped to think about it, was the Grand Panjandrum: the be-all and the end-all, the root of all things.
The flame flickered, as if taunting me. I warmed my hands for a moment and then switched off the gas.
Poof! The end of Creation.
Extinguished by an almost-twelve-year-old girl in pigtails.
Just like that.
It was not much consolation, but it was all that I was likely to get.
I had not heard the door open, nor had I heard Dogger come into the room. I can only suppose he didn’t want to startle me.
“Oh! Dogger,” I said. “I was just sitting here thinking.”
“An uncommonly good pastime, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “I often do it myself.”
There was a time when I might have asked Dogger what it was that he thought about: if saving Father’s life and being forced to work in Hellfire Pass on the Death Railway ever crossed his mind.
It wasn’t that I didn’t dare, but rather that I didn’t want to inflict these shadows on his waking soul. Lord knows, he has enough of them already in his dreams.
Until now, I had never even stopped to consider what agonies might be visited upon him by even the sight of railway tracks.
It was a great mercy that, at the time of our family’s greatest distress, Dogger had suffered not so much as a single one of his night terrors. He had been a rock. In future, I would try to keep our conversations interesting and steer clear of railways.
“Dogger,” I asked, “how long does it take a person to bleed to death?”
Dogger cradled his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “On average, the human body contains about a gallon of blood. Slightly less in women than in men.”
I nodded. That seemed about right. “And how long does it take—a woman, say—to bleed to death?”
“Complete exsanguination,” Dogger said, “may take place in little more than a minute. It depends, of course, upon the size and health of the individual and upon which vessels were severed. Were you thinking of Miss Lena?”
I couldn’t hide it.
“Yes,” I told him.
“I can assure you that she died very quickly.”
“Would she have been in pain?”
“Initially, yes,” Dogger replied. “But that would have been followed quite quickly by unconsciousness and then death.”
“Thank you, Dogger,” I told him. “I needed to know.”
“I understand,” Dogger said. “I thought you might.”
“How’s Father getting on?” I asked. It had occurred to me suddenly that Father was due the same consideration that Dogger was.
“He’s bearing up,” Dogger replied.
“Is that all?”
“Yes. He has asked to see you at 1900 hours.”
“All of us?”
“No, Miss Flavia. Only you.”
A sense of dread seized me.
Father had waited until after the funeral to punish me for opening Harriet’s coffin. I had foolishly expected that having her long-lost will dropped into his hands would somehow make him happy, but he had given not the slightest sign that his troubles had been eased.
In fact, now that I thought about it, he had seemed even more troubled, more silent today than he had ever been before, and it frightened me.
How could we possibly go on? With Harriet dead and buried, Father no longer had the slightest shred of hope. He appeared to have given up.
“What are we going to do, Dogger?”
It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations.
“We shall wait upon tomorrow,” he said.
“But—what if tomorrow is worse than today?”
“Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.”
“And so forth?” I asked.
“And so forth,” Dogger said.
It was comforting to have an answer, even one I didn’t understand. I must have looked skeptical.
It was still early; 1900 was hours in the future. It might as well have been nineteen hundred years.
What was I going to do until I was summoned?
The answer came to me in a flash, as it so often does when you’re at your wit’s end.
Ordinarily, I might have sat waiting, biting my nails, counting the hours, and working myself up into a lather. But not today—no, not today.
This time I would seize control before control had a chance to seize me. I would not wait until 1900 hours. Why should I? I was sick and tired of being a pawn.
Besides, there was a lot to be said for getting it over with. Since half of punishment is in the waiting, I could, simply by showing up early, reduce my sentence by half. I was not looking forward to confessing my sins to Father, but it had to be done, like it or not. Best get it over with.
I marched down the stairs, and if what was in my heart was not a species of happiness, it was not far off.
I tapped lightly on the door of Father’s study. There was no answer.
I put my ear to the door panel, but the hollow roar of an empty room told me that he was not inside. It was unlikely that he had gone upstairs; after all, hadn’t Dogger just been talking to him?
A quick trip round the west wing showed that he was not in the drawing room, where Feely was at the piano, staring in silence at a piece of sheet music; nor was he in the library, where Daffy sat cross-legged on the floor leafing through a pulpit-sized Bible.
“Shut the door when you leave,” she said without looking up.
I had just passed Father�
��s study when I heard a sound that stopped me dead in my tracks.
It was a sound I had heard often enough on the weekly episodes of Philip Odell, the private detective on the wireless, and one that I recognized instantly: the sound of a revolver being cocked. It had come from the firearms museum.
My blood turned to ice.
Foolhardy as it may seem—I can hardly believe now that I did it—I threw open the door and stepped inside.
Father was standing in front of an open glass case, and in his hand lay as nasty-looking a weapon as you would ever care to see.
I had peeked at it often enough in its case to remember that the tag identified it as an 1898 Rast & Gasser service revolver, made in Vienna for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Although the thing held eight 8mm cartridges, you could easily tell by looking at it that one would be enough.
Malevolent is the word Daffy would have used to describe the gun.
My mind was seething. What could I possibly say?
“You wanted to see me?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think of.
Father looked up in surprise—almost guiltily, and yet, as if from a dream. “Oh, Flavia … yes … I … but not until later. Surely it can’t be 1900 hours already?”
“No, sir,” I said. “It isn’t. But I thought I’d come early so as not to keep you waiting.”
Father ignored my twisted logic. It clearly didn’t make any sense, but Father didn’t seem to notice. Slowly, as if it were made of cut glass, he returned the pistol to its case and ran an opened hand across his brow.
“Badgers,” he said. “I was thinking of frightening off a few of the little blighters. They’re making such a frightful shambles of the west lawn.”
My heart broke a little for my father. Even I could have come up with a better excuse than that. Whatever was he thinking? What must be going through his mind?
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” he began, referring to the fact that I had come early, but before he could say another word, I broke in.
“I want to tell you how sorry I am about the will. I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t intend to be disrespectful.”
No need to tell him about my failed scheme for Harriet’s resurrection. The less said about that, the better.
Yes, Father need never know.
“Sir Peregrine felt it his duty to inform me that your mother’s coffin had been tampered with.”
Blast the man! Had the Home Office no discretion? No heart?
“Yes, sir,” I said, steeling myself.
I waited for the blow to fall. Whatever punishment Father had planned, this would clearly be the end of Flavia de Luce.
Here it comes, I thought: They’re going to either cast me into Wormwood Scrubs or throw me into the Isle of Dogs Home for Delinquent Girls.
I watched as he raised a hand and pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger.
When his words came, they were words not of anger, but of infinite sadness.
“I am going to have to send you away,” he said.
THIRTY
SEND ME AWAY? IT was unthinkable!
I can’t even begin to describe what was ripping through my mind.
It was beyond shock.
I knew in that instant how a cow must feel when it steps into an abattoir and is poleaxed between the eyes by someone it thought was going to feed it.
Simply because I had tampered with my mother’s coffin?
I stared at Father in disbelief. This couldn’t possibly be happening. It was a dream—a nightmare.
“Mind you,” he added, “I should have been greatly surprised if you hadn’t.”
Surprised if I hadn’t?
What was the man saying?
What mad Alice in Wonderland world had I been plummeted into? Who was this stranger dressed in my father’s clothing, and why was he talking such nonsense?
Had I died, perhaps, without realizing it, and been propelled into a Hell in which I was to be punished for evermore by this incomprehensible scarecrow who had taken on my Father’s form?
Surprised if I hadn’t?
“It was so very like you, Flavia. I must tell you I was expecting you to do something of the sort.”
“Me, sir?” Eyes wide open—mouth hanging agape.
Father shook his head.
“I have told you several times how like your mother you are, and never more than now—at this very instant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry? Whatever for?”
That old sadness came welling up, and my eyes were suddenly full of tears.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s just it,” Father said gently. “One often doesn’t.”
“No,” I agreed.
As ludicrous as it sounds, Father and I had fallen into conversation. It was something I had experienced only a few times in my life, and it tended to leave me feeling as giddy as if I were walking a rope rigged between two trees in the orchard.
“I wanted to bring her back to life,” I said. “I wanted to give her to you as a gift—so that you wouldn’t be sad.”
In spite of not wanting to, I had blurted it out.
Father removed his spectacles and cleaned them elaborately on his handkerchief.
“There is no need for that,” he said at last, softly. “Your mother has been given back to me—in you.”
Now the two of us were near to blubbering, restrained only by the slender thread of fact that we were both de Luces. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I knew my place.
Love at Arm’s Length: That should have been our family’s motto, rather than the forced witticism of Dare Lucem.
“And now,” Father was saying, “we must go on.”
He spoke the words with such determination that they might have been coming from the mouth of Winston Churchill himself. I could imagine his bulldog voice issuing from the wireless speaker in the drawing room: “We must go on.”
My brain supplied the sounds of cheering hordes in Trafalgar Square. I could almost see the flags waving.
“I have neglected your education,” Father said. “You’ve dabbled in chemistry, of course, but chemistry is not enough.”
Dabbled? Were my ears deceiving me?
Chemistry not enough? Chemistry was everything!
Energy! The universe. And me: Flavia Sabina de Luce.
Chemistry was the only thing with any real existence. Everything else was just bubbles on the broth.
Father had quenched our fledgling conversation with cold water before it ever had a chance to properly take fire.
Dabbled, indeed!
But he was not finished.
“Perhaps because they were older, your sisters have had an unfair advantage. The time has now come to set you straight.”
Numbness was setting in. I could feel it in my face.
“I have discussed matters with your aunt Felicity and we are in complete agreement.”
“Yes, sir?”
I was the prisoner at the bar, gripping the rail with white knuckles, waiting for the judge to drape his head with the black handkerchief and pronounce a sentence of death upon me.
“And may God have mercy on your soul.”
“Your mother’s old school in Canada, Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, has agreed to enroll you in the autumn term.”
There was a sickening silence, and then my stomach did what it does when the uniformed lift attendant in the Army and Navy Store gives you a furtive grin and shoves the lever full over to “Down.”
“But Father—the expense!”
All right, I’ll admit it: I was floundering—inventing excuses.
“Because your mother has left Buckshaw to you, I believe I am correct in saying that the expense should no longer be at issue. There will be many details to be sorted out, of course, but once put properly in order—”
What?
“Your aunt Felicity and I will, of course, act as trustees until such time as—”
I stuck my forefingers into my ears. I didn’t want to hear it.
Father gently removed them and his hand was surprisingly warm. It was, I think, the first time he had ever voluntarily touched me, and I wanted to jam them back in so that he could pull them out again.
“Buckshaw?” I managed. “Mine? Do Feely and Daffy know?”
It was probably an uncharitable thought, but it was the first thing that came to mind and I had said it before I could stop myself.
“No,” Father said. “And I suggest that you not tell them—at least for the time being.”
“But why?”
In my heart of hearts, I was already swanking around my kingdom like Henry VIII.
“I banish thee, proud sister, and thee, oh bookish one,
To some far isle to rue e’ermore thy sauciness
T’ward sister piteous—”
Father’s answer was a very long time in coming, as if his words needed to be fetched back, one by one, from the past.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he said at last. “Why do you never add water to sulfuric acid?”
“Because of the exothermic reaction!” I cried. “The concentrated acid must always be added to the water, rather than the other way around. Otherwise it can play Old Hob with your surroundings!”
Just thinking about it made me boil over with excitement!
“Precisely,” Father said.
Of course I saw instantly what he was driving at. O, how wise a man my father was!
But then, in a flash, the present intruded. The meaning of his words sank in.
I was to leave Buckshaw.
I wanted to fling myself down on the floor and kick and scream, but of course I couldn’t.
It simply wasn’t fair.
“I have done my best for you, Flavia,” Father said. “In spite of the fierce opposition of others, I have tried so damnably hard to leave you alone, which seems to me the most precious gift one can bestow upon a child.”
Realization came flooding in.
How clever I had always thought myself, and yet, without my suspecting it, Father had all along been my co-conspirator.
