The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (8 page)

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?

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?