I Am Half-Sick of Shadows Page 4

  She came across the room and, putting a finger under my chin, raised my eyes to hers. And then she hugged me.

  She actually hugged me, and I breathed in her jasmine—synthetic or not.

  “Let’s go down to the kitchen for tea. It will save Mrs. Mullet a trip upstairs.”

  I beamed at her. I almost took her hand.

  “It will also,” she added, “give us a chance to pick up the latest gossip. Kitchens are hotbeds of scandal, you know.”

  “Ohhhhh!” Mrs. Mullet said as we walked into the kitchen. Aside from that, and gaping a bit, she handled it quite well.

  “We decided to come down to the Command Center,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  I could see that she had won Mrs. Mullet over—just like that.

  “No, no, no,” she said breathlessly, “sit yourself down, miss. The water’s almost at the boil, and I’ve got a nice lardy cake comin’ out the oven.”

  “Lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern exclaimed, putting her hands in front of her eyes and peeking out through her fingers. “Good lord! I haven’t had lardy cake since I was in pigtails!”

  Mrs. Mullet beamed.

  “I makes ’em for Christmas, as did my mother before me, and ’er mother before ’er. Lardy cake runs in the family, so to speak.”

  And so it did, but I wasn’t going to let the cat out of the bag.

  “ ’Ere now,” she said, pulling the cake from the oven with a pair of pot holders and placing it on a wire rack. “Look at that. Almost good enough to eat!”

  It was an old joke, and although I’d heard it a hundred times before, I laughed dutifully. There was more truth in it than Phyllis Wyvern knew, but I wasn’t going to spoil her treat. Who knew? She might even find the stuff edible.

  If cooking were a game of darts, most of Mrs. Mullet’s concoctions would be barely on the board.

  Mrs. Mullet sliced the cake into twelve pieces.

  “Two for each soul in the ’ouse’old,” she proclaimed, with a glance at Dogger as he came into the kitchen. “That’s what they taught us up at Lady Rex-Wells’s place: ‘Two slices a soul, keeps you out of the ’ole.’ Meanin’ the grave, of course. The old lady said it meant everyone from ’erself right on down to the gardener’s boy. A reg’lar tartar she was, but she lived to be ninety-nine and a half, so there must be somethin’ in it.”

  “What do you think, Dogger?” Phyllis Wyvern asked Dogger, who was taking his tea unobtrusively, standing in the corner.

  “Good lard makes good bile. Good bile makes good digestion, which results in great longevity,” Dogger said rather tentatively, looking into his cup. “Or so I have heard.”

  “And all because of a double helping of lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern said, clapping her hands together in delight. “Well, here’s to the second hundred years.”

  She picked up her fork and lifted a morsel to her mouth, pausing halfway to give Mrs. Mullet a smile that must have cost someone a thousand guineas.

  She chewed reflectively.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she said, putting the fork down on her plate. “Oh, my goodness!”

  Even her magnificent acting ability couldn’t suppress the little gag reflex I saw at her throat.

  “I knew you’d like it,” Mrs. Mullet crowed.

  “But I must be brutal and rein myself in,” Phyllis Wyvern said, pushing the plate roughly away and getting to her feet. “I tend to make a swine of myself when there’s cake to be had, and with lardy cake, it’s no more than a day from lips to hips. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  Mrs. Mullet lifted the plate away and placed it a little too carefully behind the sink.

  I knew without a doubt that she would take the slice of cake home, wrap it in gift paper, and put it in her china cabinet between the china-dog salt and peppers marked “A Present From Blackpool” and the slender glass bird that bobbed up and down as it sipped water from a tube.

  When her friend Mrs. Waller came to visit, Mrs. Mullet would reverently unwrap the moldy relic. “You’ll never guess ’oo ate the missin’ bit of this,” she would say in a hushed voice. “Phyllis Wyvern! Look—you can still see ’er teeth marks. Just a peek, mind—quick, so’s it doesn’t go stale.”

  The doorbell rang and Dogger put down his tea.

  “That will be Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said, with a wry grin. “She’ll claim to have missed her connection from Paddington. She always does.”

  “I’ll fix ’er a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Mullet said. “The train always makes your stomach go all skew-gee—at least it does mine.

  “Gives me the dire-rear,” she whispered in my ear.

  In a moment, Dogger was back, followed by a round little woman with iron-rimmed spectacles, her hair tied back in a large tight ball like the tail of the horse, Ajax, that had once been owned by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Both of them, Florizel and Ajax, immortalized in oils, now hung side by side in the portrait gallery.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Wyvern,” the little woman said. “The taxicab took a wrong turning and I missed my connection at Paddington.”

  Phyllis Wyvern looked round triumphantly at each of us, but she said nothing.

  I felt rather sorry for the little creature, who, now that I thought about it, looked like a flustered cannonball.

  “I’m Bun Keats, by the way,” the woman said, giving a jerk of the head to each of us in the room. “Miss Wyvern’s personal assistant.”

  “Bun’s my dresser—but she has even greater aspirations,” Phyllis Wyvern said in a haughty, theatrical voice, and I could not tell if she was teasing.

  “Hurry along now, Bun,” she added. “Spit-spot! My wardrobe wants unpacking. And if my pink dress is wrinkled again, I’ll cheerfully strangle you.”

  She said this pleasantly enough but Bun Keats did not smile.

  “Are you related to the poet, Miss Keats?” I blurted, anxious to lighten the moment.

  Daffy had once read me “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I’d never forgotten the part about drinking hemlock.

  “Distantly,” she said, and then she was gone.

  “Poor Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “The more she tries—the more she tries.”

  “I’ll give her a hand,” Dogger said, moving towards the door.

  “No!”

  For an instant—but only for an instant—Phyllis Wyvern’s face was a Greek mask: her eyes wide and her mouth twisted. And then, almost at once, her features subsided into a carefree smile, as if the moment hadn’t happened.

  “No,” she repeated quietly. “Don’t do that. Bun must have her little lesson.”

  I tried to catch Dogger’s eye, but he had moved away and begun rearranging tins in the butler’s pantry.

  Mrs. Mullet turned busily to polishing the covers on the Aga cooker.

  As I trudged upstairs, the house seemed somehow colder than before. From the tall, uncurtained windows of my laboratory, I looked down upon the vans of Ilium Films, which were clustered, like elephants at a watering hole, round the red brick walls of the kitchen garden.

  The crew members were going about their work in a well-rehearsed ballet, lifting, shifting, unloading rope-handled shipping boxes: always a pair of hands in the right place at the right time. It was easy to see that they had done this many times before.

  I warmed my hands over the welcoming flame of a Bunsen burner, then brought a beaker of milk to a bubbling boil and stirred in a good dollop of Ovaltine. At this time of year, no refrigerator was required to keep milk chilled: I simply kept the bottle on a shelf, alphabetically, between the manganese and the morphine, the latter bottle neatly labeled in Uncle Tarquin’s spidery handwriting.

  Uncle Tar had been given the gate under mysterious circumstances just before taking a double first at Oxford. His father, by way of compensation, had built the remarkable chemistry laboratory at Buckshaw in which Uncle Tar had spent, by choice, the remainder of his days, conducting what was said to be top-secret research. Am
ong his papers I had discovered several letters that suggested he had been both friend and advisor to the young Winston Churchill.

  As I sipped at the Ovaltine, I shifted my gaze to the painting that hung above the mantelpiece: a beautiful young woman with two girls and a baby. The girls were my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. I was the baby. The woman, of course, was my mother, Harriet.

  Harriet had secretly commissioned the work as a gift for Father just before setting out on what was to become her final journey. The painting had lain for ten years, almost forgotten, in an artist’s studio in Malden Fenwick, until I had discovered it there and brought it home.

  I’d made happy plans to hang the portrait in the drawing room: to stage a surprise unveiling for Father and my sisters. But my scheme was thwarted. Father had caught me smuggling the bulky painting into the house, taken it away from me, and removed it to his study.

  Next morning I had found it hanging in my laboratory.

  Why? I wondered. Did Father find it too painful to look upon his blighted family?

  There was no doubt that he had loved—and still loved—Harriet, but it sometimes seemed that my sisters and I were no more to him than ever-present reminders of what he had lost. To Father we were, Daffy had once said, a three-headed Hydra, each one of our faces a misty mirror of his past.

  Daffy’s a romantic, but I knew what she meant: We were fleeting images of Harriet.

  Perhaps that was why Father spent his days and nights among his postage stamps: surrounded by thousands of companionable, comforting, unquestioning countenances, not one of which, like those of his daughters, mocked him from morning till night.

  I had thought about these things until my brains were turning blue, but I still didn’t know why my sisters hated me so much.

  Was Buckshaw some grim training academy into which I had been dumped by Fate to learn the laws of survival? Or was my life a game, whose rules I was supposed to guess?

  Was I required to deduce the secret ways in which they loved me?

  I could think of no other reason for my sisters’ cruelty.

  What had I ever done to them?

  Well, I had poisoned them, of course, but only in minor ways—and only in retaliation. I had never, or at least hardly ever, begun a row. I had always been the innocent—

  “No! Watch it! Watch it!”

  A scream went up outside the window—harsh at first, and agonized, then quickly cut off. I flew to the window and looked out to see what was happening.

  Workers were flocking round a figure that was pinned against the side of a lorry by an upended packing case.

  I knew by the red handkerchief at his neck that it was Patrick McNulty.

  Down the stairs I ran, through the empty kitchen and out onto the terrace, not even bothering to throw on a coat.

  Help was needed. No one among the ciné crew would know where to turn for assistance.

  “Keep back!” one of the drivers said, seizing me by the shoulders. “There’s been an accident.”

  I twisted away from him and pressed in for a closer look.

  McNulty was in a bad way. His face was the color of wet dough. His eyes, brimming with water, met mine, and his lips moved.

  “Help me,” I think he whispered.

  I put my first and fourth fingers into the corners of my mouth and blew a piercing whistle: a trick I had learned by watching Feely.

  “Dogger!” I shouted, followed by another whistle. I put my heart and soul into it, praying that Dogger was within earshot.

  Without taking his eyes from mine, McNulty let out a sickening gasp.

  Two of the men were heaving at the crate.

  “No!” I said, louder than I had intended. “Leave it.”

  I had heard on the wireless—or had I read it somewhere?—about an accident victim who had bled to death when a railway crane had been moved away too soon from his legs.

  To my surprise, the larger of the men nodded his head.

  “Hold on,” he said. “She’s right.”

  And then Dogger was there, pushing through the gathering crowd.

  The men fell back instinctively.

  There was an aura about Dogger that brooked no nonsense. It was not always in evidence—in fact, most of the time, it was not.

  But at this particular moment, I don’t think I had ever felt this power of his—whatever it was—so strongly.

  “Take my hand,” Dogger told McNulty, reaching between the lorry and the packing case, which was now teetering precariously.

  It seemed to me an odd—almost biblical—thing to do. Perhaps it was the calmness of his voice.

  McNulty’s bloodied fingers moved, and then entwined themselves with Dogger’s.

  “Not too hard,” Dogger told him. “You’ll crush my hand.”

  A sick, silly grin spread across McNulty’s face.

  Dogger unfastened the top half of McNulty’s heavy jacket, then worked his hand slowly into the sleeve. His long arm slid along McNulty’s arm, feeling its way, inch by inch along the space between the upended case and the lorry.

  “You told me you were master of many trades, Mr. McNulty,” Dogger said. “Which ones, in particular?”

  It seemed rather an odd question to ask, but McNulty’s eyes shifted slowly from mine to Dogger’s.

  “Carpentry,” he said through gritted teeth. It was easy to see that the man was in terrible pain. “Electrical … plumbing … drafting …”

  Cold sweat stood out in globules on his brow.

  “Yes?” Dogger asked, his arm steadily at work between the heavy box and the lorry. “Any more?”

  “Bit of tool making,” McNulty went on, then added, almost apologetically, “I have a metal lathe at home …”

  “Indeed!” Dogger said, looking surprised.

  “… to make model steam engines.”

  “Ah!” Dogger said. “Steam engines. Railway, agricultural, or stationary?”

  “Stationary,” McNulty said through gritted teeth. “I fit them up with … little brass whistles … and regulators.”

  Dogger removed the handkerchief from McNulty’s neck, twisting it quickly and tightly about the upper part of the trapped arm.

  “Now!” he said briskly, and a hundred willing hands, it seemed, were suddenly gripping the packing case.

  “Easy, now! Easy! Steady on!” the men told one another—not because the words were needed, but as if they were simply part of the ritual of shifting a heavy object.

  And then quite suddenly they had lifted the crate away with no more effort than if it had been a child’s building block.

  “Stretcher,” Dogger called, and one was brought forward instantly. They must carry these things with them wherever they go, I thought.

  “Bring him into the kitchen,” Dogger said, and in less time than it takes to tell, McNulty, wrapped in a heavy blanket, was raising himself on his good elbow from the kitchen floor, sipping at the cup of hot tea that was in Mrs. Mullet’s hand.

  “Chip-chip,” he said, giving me a wink.

  “And now, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “if you wouldn’t mind giving Dr. Darby a call …”

  “Um,” Dr. Darby said, fishing with two fingers for a crystal mint in the paper bag he always carried in his waistcoat pocket.

  “Let’s get you to the hospital where I can have a decent look at you. X-rays, and all that. I’ll take you myself, since I’m going that way anyway.”

  McNulty was now getting up painfully from a chair at the kitchen table, his arm and hand in a sling, bandaged from shoulder to knuckles.

  “I can manage,” he growled, as many hands reached out to help him.

  “Put your arm round my shoulder,” Dr. Darby told him. “The good people here will understand there’s nothing in it.”

  Crammed together in a corner of the kitchen, the men from the film studio laughed loudly at this, as if the doctor had made a capital joke.

  I watched as McNulty and Dr. Darby moved cautiously through to the foyer.


  “Now we’re for it,” one of the men grumbled when they had gone. “How’re we to get on without Pat?”

  “It’ll be Latshaw, then, won’t it?” said another.

  “I suppose.”

  “God help us, then,” said the first, and he actually spat on the kitchen floor.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed how cold I was. I gave a belated shiver, which didn’t escape the notice of Mrs. Mullet as she came bustling in from the pantry.

  “Upstairs with you, dear, and into an ’ot bath. The Colonel’ll be fair cobbled to come ’ome and find you been out gallivantin’ in the snow nearly naked, so to speak. ’E’ll ’ave Dogger’s and my ’eads on a meat platter. Now off you go.”

  • FOUR •

  AT THE BOTTOM OF the stairs, I was taken with a sudden but brilliant idea.

  Even in summer, taking a bath in the east wing was like a major military campaign. Dogger would have to lug buckets of water from either the kitchen or the west wing to fill the tin hipbath in my bedroom, which would afterwards have to be bailed out, and the bathwater disposed of by dumping it down a WC in the west wing or one of the sinks in my laboratory. Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.

  Besides, I had never really liked the idea of dirty bathwater being brought into my sanctum sanctorum. It seemed somehow blasphemous.

  The solution was simple enough: I would bathe in Harriet’s boudoir.

  Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  Harriet’s suite had an antique slipper bathtub, draped with a tall and gauzy white canopy. Like an elderly railway engine, the thing was equipped with any number of interesting taps, knobs, and valves with which one could adjust the velocity and the temperature of the water.

  It would make bathing almost fun.

  I smiled in anticipation as I walked along the corridor, happy in the thought that my chilled body would soon be immersed to the ears in hot suds.

  I stopped and listened at the door—just in case.

  Someone inside was singing!

  “O for the wings, for the wings of a dove!

  Far away, far away, would I rove!