by Alan Bradley
“We shall miss you, of course,” he said, and then he had to stop, because by now, both of us were gulping like guppies.
Poor dear Father. And, come to think of it, poor dear Flavia.
How alike we were!
When you came right down to it.
It was the morning after the funeral, and Aunt Felicity and I were poling along in the sunshine on the ornamental lake in an ancient punt which Dogger had dug out and brought down from the attic of the coach house.
“Don’t push too vigorously,” Aunt Felicity cautioned, adjusting her ancient parasol. “Dogger warned me that it’s only the paint that’s holding this relic together.”
I grinned. Even if we broke through the bottom of the boat, we’d only find ourselves up to our knees in sun-warmed water.
“Life’s like that, too,” Aunt Felicity continued. “Too much push, and bang through the bottom one goes. Still, if one doesn’t paddle, one doesn’t get anywhere. Maddening, isn’t it?”
I could hardly believe it: Here I was floating along on an eighteenth-century lake with the Gamekeeper herself, and yet to a spy lurking behind a ruined statue on the Visto, we would look to be no more than a pleasant painting by one of those French impressionists: Monet, perhaps, or Degas.
Light twinkled on the lake and under the hanging willows.
We were like an image on a ciné screen.
After breakfast, I had taken Aunt Felicity to my laboratory and shown her the film I had developed.
She had watched it in silence, and when the last frame had run through the projector, seized the spool of film and thrust it into her pocket.
“Pheasant sandwiches.”
Her mouth formed the words, but not a sound came out.
“The phrase was chosen carefully for its combination of plosives and fricatives: consonants which could be formed in total silence. Innocuous to the casual observer, but a clear warning of danger to an initiate.”
“But who was Harriet warning?”
“Me,” Aunt Felicity said. “It was I who was shooting the film. I had a perfect view of your mother in the camera’s viewfinder and recognized her warning instantly.”
“Against who?” I was about to say, but caught myself just in time to correct it to “Against whom?”
“The late Lena,” Aunt Felicity answered. “She had come down to Buckshaw unexpectedly, as she was wont to do, and had waded across to the Folly without our noticing, perhaps hoping to catch us off guard. Your mother—and it is to her eternal credit that she did so—had already begun, even then, to suspect Lena’s leanings, if I may coin a rather tawdry phrase.”
It took me a moment, but I nodded to show that I understood.
But why hadn’t Harriet simply called out, “Hullo! Here’s Lena!” or some such thing? Why had she chosen to mouth a coded warning to Aunt Felicity alone?
I recalled Lena’s words: “We were quite chummy, your mother and I—at least when we ran into each other outside of a family setting.”
Outside of a family setting, she had said. Perhaps inside of one they were at loggerheads. It was a situation I had no difficulty in understanding.
Families were deep waters indeed, and I still had much to learn about what luces lurked beneath the surface of my own.
Now, floating lazily on the lake with Aunt Felicity, surrounded by the reality, those black-and-white images from another time—filmed at this very location—seemed as distant as a half-forgotten dream.
“Who was the man in the window?” I asked.
It was one of the strands of the puzzle I had been unable to unwind to my satisfaction.
“Tristram Tallis,” Aunt Felicity said.
“I thought as much. But why was he dressed in an American uniform?”
“A very perceptive observation,” Aunt Felicity said, “since he was in view for mere fractions of a second.”
“Well, actually it was Dogger who spotted that,” I admitted.
“You showed Dogger the film?” She pounced upon my words like a leopard upon its prey.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I didn’t know it was important—I mean, I didn’t know what it meant.”
I still didn’t, but I was hoping to find out.
“Was it wrong of me?”
Aunt Felicity did not answer my question. “It is essential,” she said, “to know at all times who knows what. Keep Kipling in mind.”
“Kipling was a goddamn Tory and a jingoist to boot,” I said, hoping to seem wise beyond my years.
“Pfah!” Aunt Felicity said, surprising me by spitting over the side of the boat. “You picked up that nonsense from Lena, or at least from Undine.”
I admitted I had.
“Kipling was no Tory, nor was he a jingoist. He was a spy in the service of Queen Victoria, and a damned good one at that. He as much as said so, but no one recognized it. They thought he was prattling on for children. Perfect camouflage that, you’ll have to admit.”
She sat up straight in the punt, and for a moment I had the uncanny feeling that I was in the presence of a queen.
She raised her voice an octave and in a royal accent began to recite:
“I keep six honest serving-men
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
“As a member of the Nide, you will need to keep those words always in the forefront of your mind.”
“Was Lena a member of the Nide?” I asked.
“Lena was the enemy!” Aunt Felicity hissed. “One of the dark de Luces. The Black Ones, we called them in my youth. We were told horror stories about them, and even made up a few of our own.”
“She killed my mother, didn’t she?”
It was the question whose answer I dreaded, but I needed to know.
“I have every reason to believe she did,” Aunt Felicity said, “but we shall never be sure of it. When she died, the truth died with her. There was only one other person on that final trek in Tibet, and he unfortunately—”
“Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven,” I rattled off, my words tumbling over one another in the mad race to get out. “The man under the train!”
Aunt Felicity’s eyes narrowed as if she were squinting at me through tobacco smoke, and I was reminded for an instant of Dr. Kissing.
“Sowerby has been indiscreet,” she said. “I shall have to call him to account.”
“Please don’t be hard on Adam,” I said. “He’s more or less my partner—ever since that business with the Heart of Lucifer.”
“I am aware of that,” Aunt Felicity said, “but he must be corrected notwithstanding. The Nide must not be jeopardized by loose lips. Lives may be lost—and one of them may be yours. Do you understand, Flavia?”
“Yes, Aunt Felicity. Adam had been following Tardiman for five days, and not for the first time, either.”
I let my usual silence fall, hoping to open Aunt Felicity’s floodgates, but it did not work. She was even foxier than I was.
“Was Tardiman one of the Nide?” I asked. “One of us?”
How proud I was to be able to say that!
“There are certain questions you must learn not to put to me,” Aunt Felicity said. “Not, at least, so far as they concern the living.”
“But Tardiman is dead,” I protested.
“So he is,” she said reflectively, and then after a time she added, “He may have been a double agent.”
“He came to Bishop’s Lacey to warn us of grave danger and that the Nide was under attack. Lena probably guessed that he would be here. She saw it as perhaps her last opportunity to silence him. Once he was dead, no one would know the truth about Harriet but Lena herself.”
“Very likely,” Aunt Felicity said.
“But why only now?” I asked. “Why did it take her ten years to find him?”
“Because he has been living all the while under an assu
med name.”
“Tardiman!” I said. “Tardiman was not his real name. Who was he, Aunt Felicity?”
“I have told you, Flavia, that there are certain questions you must not put to me insofar as they concern the living. I must tell you also that certain questions must not be asked about the dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that I might never know the name of the man I had watched die under the train at Buckshaw Halt. Nor might I ever know why Tristram Tallis had stayed at Buckshaw in an American serviceman’s uniform. Perhaps it had something to do with the Japanese naval codes and the fact that America had, at that time, not yet entered the War.
What had become of the traitor that Harriet had been sent to bring to justice? Had she found him before she was betrayed?
Had she perhaps killed him?
Had Harriet been an assassin?
My blood thrilled. These were deep waters indeed!
I made a mental note to pay a visit to the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library at the earliest opportunity. The newspaper archives for 1939 might well be worth rooting through. I could always tell Miss Pickery, the librarian, that Daffy was encouraging me to take up knitting and had referred me to a photo of a not-too-difficult jumper that had appeared in one of the back issues, the name and date of which she had unfortunately forgotten.
In manufacturing a lie, it is important to get the amount of detail just so: Too much or too little is a dead giveaway.
Then, too, there was Mrs. Mullet. Hadn’t she asked Tristram if she should now be addressing him as “Squadron Leader”? Did the U.S. Air Force have Squadron Leaders? I’d never heard one mentioned. Perhaps she had slipped up.
And then I had this thought: What if Mrs. Mullet was a member of the Nide!
Surely there was no one in the entire universe more privy to loose talk in a village so near to the military airfield at Leathcote.
I almost dropped the pole in my excitement.
Could Mrs. M be a spook? It would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?
And her husband, Alf, who was admittedly such a great authority on all things military.
It was, of course, one of those questions which Aunt Felicity had said must never be asked about the living, and perhaps not even about the dead.
Harriet, for instance.
There were so many things I would have to find out for myself.
“May I ask you one question?” I said to Aunt Felicity.
“You may,” she said. “But you mustn’t think I am obliged to answer.”
“What about Father?”
“Well, what about him?”
“Is he a member of the Nide?”
Terence Tardiman had obviously thought he was, since it was Father he had told me to warn at the station—yet in the ciné film, Harriet had mouthed the words “pheasant sandwiches” to Aunt Felicity alone. But hadn’t Father accompanied the others in their early-morning trip to consult with Dr. Kissing?
And Dr. Kissing himself—what role did he play in all this?
I think I realized then, simply by the look Aunt Felicity gave me, how deep these waters were: how deep, how murky, and how unfathomable. I’d simply have to learn to answer my own questions. That, perhaps, was the intended lesson.
“I believe we may be in for a rain shower,” Aunt Felicity said, holding her hand out beyond the edge of her parasol.
Without my noticing, the sky had clouded over in the west.
“This school,” I said. Surely I would be allowed to ask a question about myself! Father had already told me he’d discussed it with Aunt Felicity.
“Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.”
“I should hate it. I’m not going.”
“I wish you would reconsider,” Aunt Felicity said. “For two reasons: the first being that you will change your mind when you have been there for a while, and the second being that you have no choice.”
I stuck out my lower lip. I wasn’t going to argue with the woman.
“One thing you don’t know about your mother is this, Flavia. She, like you, protested being sent out to Canada. But, like you also, she had no choice. She always said later that it was the making of her.”
“I don’t care!”
All right, I’ll admit it: “I don’t care” is the last bit of baggage to be tossed overboard in a losing argument, but it was all I had left. Aunt Felicity would surely take pity on a poor girl who was hardly twelve.
“Don’t be petulant,” she said. “It is a tradition in the de Luce family to hand down certain privileges—as well as obligations—to the youngest daughter, as was sometimes done in ancient Greece and Italy. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed how much your sisters resent you.”
This was plain talk from a plain-talking old woman. Had she been aware of my torment all along?
“They know about the Nide?” I gasped.
“They don’t know, but they have always suspected that in some unknown way, they are being excluded from some mystery which you are not—and believe me, they will feel so even more keenly when they hear that Buckshaw has been left to you as part of your inheritance.”
“Has Father still not told them?” I asked. “I should have thought he—”
“They’ll find it out soon enough when the solicitors read out your mother’s will.
“You might not want to be around,” she added, and I thought I spotted a twinkle in her eye.
Did she see that I was wavering? I shall never know. Aunt Felicity is such a deuced clever old trout.
“Besides,” she said, “I am told that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy boasts a first-rate chemistry laboratory. Rumor has it that they are about to install an electron microscope. The Academy is exceptionally well endowed.”
I could feel myself shifting, like a fish caught in the current.
“All the latest innovations,” Aunt Felicity went on. “Spectrophotometers and so forth—”
Spectrophotometers! Ever since reading about the hydrogen spectrophotometer in Chemical Abstracts & Transactions, I had been itching to get my hands on one of those beauties. Armed with the knowledge that each chemical has its own unique fingerprint, one was able to crack open the secrets of the universe, all the way from cyanide to the stars.
And although I was fighting to keep it down, the corner of my mouth was beginning to rise of its own accord.
“And the chemistry mistress,” Aunt Felicity said, far too casually, “a certain Mrs. Bannerman, was acquitted several years ago of poisoning her wayward husband. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”
Of course I’d heard of Mildred Bannerman. And who hadn’t? Her trial had been covered in delicious detail by the News of the World. Mildred had done away with her husband by applying the poison to the blade of the knife he was using to carve the Christmas turkey. An old trick, to be sure: known to the ancient Persians but presumably not to a modern-day jury in Canada.
I could scarcely wait to meet her.
EPILOGUE
AND SO I AM to leave Buckshaw.
What a pity it is that Inspector Hewitt will no longer have me here to set him straight. I can only hope that Bishop’s Lacey experiences no more murders, and that if it does, they are less baffling to him than those of the past year.
It is true, of course, that I was not entirely successful in identifying Lena de Luce as the killer of Terence Tardiman. But hadn’t Inspector Hewitt, perhaps through sheer luck or trick of Fate, by his own methods, managed to run her down in the nick of time even without my assistance? It crossed my mind that I should send him a card of congratulations, until I thought better of it. He might take it as an insult.
Feely and Daffy will have no one to torture, although Feely will soon enough be gone, and Daffy left to subside into Bleak House forever and ever, amen, or at least until her reading is interrupted by the Apocalypse.
Today I made one final attempt to beg off being sent to Miss Bodycote for “finishing,” as Father put it.
“But what about you?�
� I had pleaded. “You’ll have only Daffy when Feely is gone.”
“I shall have Daphne,” he said. “And I shall also have Undine. I’ve already taken the necessary steps to have her stay with us at Buckshaw. After all, damn it, it’s the only decent thing to do.”
He was right, of course. And because Daffy would soon come to dote on the little girl—I was sure of it; they were birds of a feather—she would be coddled with books and buns. I could already imagine the pair of them hurling polysyllabic words at each other ad nauseam, or whatever that phrase is.
While I, as I have already remarked, am to be banished to the colonies.
My trunks are packed and Dogger is at the door.
But before I go, I must make note of the fact that all of this has been brought about by my aunt Felicity: the Gamekeeper.
She has already taught me this: Never underestimate either an old woman—or old blood.
Beloved Amadeus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IT IS THE SECRET desire of every mystery novelist to be invited to speak at Oxford, the very cradle of the English golden-age detective novel, and I am no exception. Time spent among those dreaming spires in the pleasant company of such modern day practitioners as Simon Brett, Kate Charles, Ann Cleeves, Natasha Cooper, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kate Ellis, Chris Ewan, Barry Forshaw, P. D. James, Gillian Linscott, Peter Lovesey, Val McDermid, Michelle Spring, Marcia Talley, Andrew Taylor, and L. C. Tyler is, in retrospect, like living a tale from the Arabian Nights.
To dine with idols is a privilege granted to few, and I thank them for their friendship.
Special gratitude is due to Eileen Roberts and the faculty and staff of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, not just for making me feel at home, but for making me be at home.
David Appleton, of Appleton Studios, for his invaluable expert assistance in blazoning the de Luce coat of arms. The trails and footpaths of heraldry are littered with traps and pitfalls for the unwary, and it was comforting to have David along to illuminate so happily some of the darker corners.
Roger K. Bunting, Professor Emeritus, Inorganic Chemistry, Illinois State University. His book The Chemistry of Photography, which he so kindly put at my disposal, is what every good textbook should be: both fascinating and accessible.
