The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (128 page)

“It’s a pity, isn’t it,” a voice said almost at my shoulder, “when people don’t get along?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I spun round and there was Marion Trodd, with a quizzical—or was it a rueful—half-smile on her face. In spite of her smart tailored suit, her dark horn-rimmed glasses gave her the look of a tribal princess who had rubbed ashes round her empty black eyes in preparation for a jungle sacrifice.

She’d been there all along. And to think that I hadn’t heard or seen her!

The two of us stood motionless, staring at each other in the dim corridor, not knowing quite what to say.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve just remembered something.”

It was true. What I’d remembered was this: While I was not in the least afraid of the dead, there were those among the living who gave me the creeping hooly-goolies, and Marion Trodd was one of them.

I turned and walked quickly away, before something horrid could rise up out of the carpet and suck me down into the weave.

• SEVEN •

Father was sitting at the kitchen table listening to Aunt Felicity. This, more than anything, brought home to me how much—and how rapidly—our little world had been shrunk.

I slipped silently, or so I thought, into the pantry and helped myself to a piece of Christmas cake.

“This has gone on long enough, Haviland. It’s been ten years now, and I’ve looked on in silence as your situation declined, hoping that you’d one day come to your senses …”

This was laughably untrue. Aunt Felicity never missed an opportunity to dig in a critical oar.

“… but all in vain. It’s unhealthy for the children to go on living under such barbaric conditions.”

Children? Did she think of us as children?

“The time has come, Haviland,” she went on, “to stop this incessant moping about and find yourself a wife—and preferably a rich one. It is positively indecent for a tribe of girls to be raised by a man. They become savages. It’s a well-known fact that they don’t develop properly.”

“Lissy …”

“Flavia, you may step out,” Aunt Felicity called, and I shuffled into the kitchen, a little shamefaced at having been caught snooping.

“See what I mean?” she said, darkly, pointing at me with a finger whose nail was the red of exhausted blood.

“I was getting Dogger a piece of Christmas cake,” I said, hoping to make her feel dreadful. “He’s been working so hard … and he often doesn’t take enough to eat.”

I took one of Dogger’s black jackets from behind the door and threw it over my shoulders.

“And now if you’ll excuse me …” I said, and went out the kitchen door.

The cold air nipped at my cheeks and knees and knuckles as I trotted through the falling flakes. The narrow path that someone had shoveled was already beginning to fill in.

Dogger, in overalls, was in the greenhouse, trimming sprigs of holly and mistletoe.

“Brrrrr!” I said. “It’s cold.”

Since he wasn’t in the habit of responding to chitchat, he said nothing.

The Christmas tree Dogger had promised was nowhere in sight, but I fought down my disappointment. He probably hadn’t had time.

“I’ve brought you some cake,” I said, breaking off half and handing it to him.

“Thank you, Miss Flavia. The kettle is just coming to the boil. Will you join me for tea?”

Sure enough: On a potting bench at the back of the greenhouse, a battered tin kettle on a hot plate was shooting out excited jets of steam from lid and spout.

“Let’s rouse Gladys,” I said, and as Dogger filled two refreshingly grubby teacups, I lifted my trusty bicycle from the corner where she had been stowed, and carefully unwound the protective sacking in which, after a thorough oiling, Dogger had wrapped her for the winter.

“You’re looking quite
fit
,” I told her, making a little joke. Gladys was a BSA Keep-Fit that had once belonged to Harriet.

“
Quite
fit,” Dogger said. “In spite of her hibernation.”

I propped up Gladys on her kickstand beside us and gave her bell a couple of jangles. It was good to hear her cheery voice in winter.

We sat in companionable silence for a while, and then I said, “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she—for her age?”

“Gladys?… Or Miss Wyvern?”

“Well, both, but I meant Miss Wyvern,” I said, happy that Dogger had made the leap with me. “Do you think Father will marry her?”

Dogger took a sip of tea, put down his cup, and picked up a sprig of mistletoe. He held it up by the stem as if weighing it, then put it down again.

“Not if he doesn’t want to.”

“I thought we weren’t having decorations,” I said. “The director didn’t want the trouble of removing them when they begin filming.”

“Miss Wyvern has decided otherwise. She’s asked me to provide a suitably sized Christmas tree in the foyer for her performance on Saturday night.”

I felt my eyes widening.

“To remind her of the trees she had in childhood. She said that her parents always put up a tree.”

“And she asked you for holly? And mistletoe?”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir.” Dogger smiled.

I hugged myself, and not just from the cold. Even the smallest of jokes on Dogger’s lips warmed my heart—perhaps made me too bold.

“Did
your
parents?” I asked. “Used to put up a tree, I mean? The holly and the ivy and the mistletoe, and all that?”

Dogger did not answer straight away. The faintest of shadows seemed to drift across his face.

“In that part of India in which I was a child,” he said at last, “mistletoe and holly were not easily to be had. I believe I remember decorating a mango tree for Christmas.”

“A mango tree! India! I didn’t know you lived in India!”

Dogger was silent for a long time.

“But that was long ago,” he said at last, as if returning from a dream. “As you know, Miss Flavia, my memory is not what it once was.”

“Never mind, Dogger,” I said, patting his hand. “Neither is mine. Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.”

“I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.”

“Butter and all?” I asked.

“Butter and all.”

“But not the dish.”

“But not the dish,” said Dogger.

Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?

Remembering Father’s orders to keep out from underfoot, I spent what remained of the day in my laboratory making last-minute adjustments to the consistency of my powerful birdlime. The addition of just the right amount of oil of petroleum would keep it from freezing.

Christmas Eve was now just forty-eight hours away, and I needed to be ready for it. There would be no margin for error. I would have just one chance to capture Father Christmas—if, in fact, he existed.

Why was I so mistrustful of my sisters’ tales of myth and folklore? Was it because experience had taught me that both of them were liars? Or was it because I really wanted—perhaps even
needed
—to believe?

Well, Father Christmas or no, I would soon be writing up the Great Experiment in my notebook: Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

One way or another, it was bound to be a classic.

Scribbled in the margin of one of Uncle Tar’s notebooks, I had found a quotation from Sir Francis Bacon: “We must not then add wings, but rather lead and ballast to the understanding, to prevent its jumping or flying.”

Precisely what I had in mind for Saint Nicholas! A dose of the old tanglefoot! Later, in bed, my head filled with visions of reindeer stuck fast to the chimney pots like giant bluebottles to flypaper, I realized I was grinning madly in the dark. Sleep came at last, to what might have been the sounds of a distant gramophone.

• EIGHT •

I paused at the top of the stairs.

“It’s not right,” a voice was grumbling. “They’ve no right to lumber us with all this.”

“Better keep it down, Latshaw,” said another voice. “You know what Lampman told us.”

“Yes, I know what His Eminence said. Same as he did on the last shoot, and the shoot before that. I’ve heard that beef speech of his enough times I can recite it in my sleep. ‘If you’ve got a beef, tell it to me,’ and so on and so forth. Might as well tell it to the man in the moon for all the good it does.”

“McNulty used to—”

“McNulty be damned! I’m in charge now, and what I say goes. And all I’m saying is this: They’ve got no right to lumber us with all this extra, just so that Her Royal Highness can give the local bumpkins something to gape at.”

I backed slowly away from the staircase, then re-approached it more noisily.

“Shhh! Someone’s coming.”

“Good morning!” I said brightly, rubbing my eyes and going into my best village idiot impersonation. If there’d been time, I’d have blacked out one of my front teeth with pulverized carbon.

“Good morning, miss,” said the one, and I knew by his voice that the other was Latshaw.

“Snowy old morning, eh what?”

I knew this was laying it on with a trowel, but with some people it doesn’t matter. I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.

“Oh, how pretty,” I exclaimed as I reached the bottom of the stairs, clasping my hands together like a spinster who has just been given an engagement ring by a red-faced squire on bended knee.

The south side of the foyer had been transformed overnight into an Italian courtyard in evening. Stone walls painted onto canvas had been set up in front of the wood paneling, and the landing on the south staircase had become a balcony in Verona.

A few artificial trees spotted here and there in pots skillfully disguised as little benches added greatly to the effect. The whole thing was so well done I could almost feel the warmth of the Italian sun.

It was here, I knew, that in just a few hours, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan would be re-creating the scene from
Romeo and Juliet:
a production that had once kept the West End of London awake until the small hours with curtain call after curtain call.

I had read about it in the musty film and theater magazines that were piled everywhere in Buckshaw’s library, or at least
had
been until they were cleared away for purposes of filming.

“Best scamper, miss. The paint’s still wet. You don’t want to go getting it all over yourself, do you?”

“Not if it’s lead-based,” I shot back as I wandered casually away, recalling with a little shiver of pleasure the case of the American artist Whistler, who, while painting his famous
The White Girl
, because of the high content of lead white in the pigment in his prime color had contracted what artists called “painter’s colic.”

Would lead poisoning by any other name taste as sweet? I knew that rats had been known to gnaw through lead pipes because they had acquired a taste for the sweetness of the stuff. In fact, I had begun compiling notes for a pamphlet to be called
Peculiarities of Plumbism
, and had turned to thinking pleasantly on that topic when the telephone rang.

I went for it at once before it could ring a second time. If Father heard it, we were in for a day of wrath.

“Blast!” I said, as I picked the thing up.

“Hello … Flavia? Have I caught you at an inopportune time?”

“Oh, hello, Vicar,” I said. “Sorry—I just banged my knee on the door frame.”

From Flavia’s Book of Golden Rules: When caught swearing, go for sympathy.

“Poor girl,” he said. “I hope it’s all right.”

“It will be fine, Vicar, when the agony abates.”

“Well, I’m just ringing up to let you know that everything at this end is going splendidly. Tickets nearly sold out and it’s barely sunrise. Cynthia and her telephonic warriors outdid themselves last night.”

“Thank you, Vicar,” I said. “I’ll let Father know.”

“Oh, and Flavia, tell him that Dieter Schrantz, at Culverhouse Farm, has suggested, if your father’s willing, of course, that we use the old sleigh from your coach house to shuttle our theatergoers from the parish hall to Buckshaw. He says he’ll rig up a hitch that will allow him to tow it along behind the tractor. The ride itself should be worth the price of admission, don’t you think?”

Father had agreed, with surprisingly little grumbling, but then, where the vicar was concerned, he nearly always did. There was a friendship between them of a deep and abiding power which I didn’t really understand. Although they had both attended Greyminster, they had not been at the school in the same years, so that wouldn’t explain it. The vicar had no more than a polite interest in postage stamps and Father had no more than a passing interest in heaven, so the bond between them remained a puzzle.

To be perfectly frank, I was a little envious of their easy chumminess, and I sometimes caught myself wishing that I were as great friends with my father as the vicar was.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. Once, while using one of his philatelic magazines to fan the flame of a sluggish Bunsen burner, the pages had riffled open and the words “nascent oxygen” had caught my eye. The stuff, it seemed, had been produced by adding formaldehyde to potassium permanganate, and had been used by the Post Office to fumigate mailbags in the Mediterranean in the days when cholera was a constant threat.

Now here was a fact about stamp collecting that was actually interesting! A bridge—however precarious it might seem—between my father’s world and mine.

“If you ever need any of your stamps disinfected,” I had burst out, “I’d be happy to do them for you. I could whip up some nascent oxygen in a jiff. It would be no trouble at all.”

Like a time traveler who had just awakened to find himself in a strange household in an unexpected century, Father had looked up at me from his albums.

“Thank you, Flavia,” he had said after an unnerving pause. “I shall keep it in mind.”

Daffy, as always, was draped over a chair in the library, with
Bleak House
open on her knees.