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.
“Don’t you ever get tired of that book?” I asked.
“Certainly not!” she snapped. “It’s so like my own dismal life that I can’t tell the difference between reading and not reading.”
“Then why bother?” I asked.
“Bug off,” she said. “Go haunt someone else.”
I decided to try a different approach.
“You’ve got black bags under your eyes,” I said. “Were you reading late last night, or does your conscience keep you awake over the despicable way you treat your little sister?”
“Despicable” was a word I’d been dying to use in a sentence ever since I’d heard Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, fling it at Miss Cool, the village postmistress, in reference to the Royal Mail.
“Sucks to you,” Daf
fy said. “Who could sleep with all that caterwauling going on?”
“I didn’t hear any caterwauling.”
“That’s because your so-called super-sensitive hearing has blown a fuse. You’re probably beginning to display the hereditary de Luce deafness. It skips from youngest daughter to youngest daughter and generally sets in before the age of twelve.”
“Piffle!” I said. “There was no caterwauling. It was all in your head.”
Daffy’s left earlobe began twitching as it does when she’s upset. I could see that I had hit a nerve.
“It’s not in my head!” she shouted, throwing down her book and jumping to her feet. “It’s that damned Wyvern woman. She runs old films all night—over and over until you could scream. If I have to listen to that voice of hers saying ‘I shall never forget Hawkhover Castle’ one more time as that cheesy music swells up, I’m going to vomit swamp water.”
“I thought you liked her—those magazines …”
Curses! I’d almost given myself away. I wasn’t supposed to know about what was in Daffy’s bottom drawer.
But I needn’t have worried. She was too agitated to spot my slipup.
“I like her on paper, but not in person. She stares at me as if I’m some kind of freak.”
“Perhaps you are,” I offered helpfully.
“Get stuffed,” she said. “Since you’re such great pals with Lady Phyllis, you can tell her next time you see her to keep the noise down. Tell her Buckshaw’s not some slimy cinema in Slough, or wherever it is she comes from.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, turning on my heel and walking out of the room. For some odd reason I was beginning to feel sorry for Phyllis Wyvern.
In the foyer, Dogger was atop a tall orchard ladder, hanging a branch of holly from one of the archways.
“Mind the ilicin,” I called up to him. “Don’t lick your fingers.”
It was a joke, of course. There was once thought to be enough of the glycoside in a couple of handfuls of the red berries to be fatal, but handling the leaves was actually as safe as houses.
Dogger raised an elbow and looked down at me through the crook of his arm.
“Thank you, Miss Flavia,” he said. “I shall be most careful.”
Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning. That’s what I was doing when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
A gust of snow blew into my face as I opened the door. I wiped my eyes, and only partly in disbelief, for there in the forecourt stood the Cottesmore bus, tendrils of steam rising ominously from its radiator cap. Its driver, Ernie, stood before me, digging at his dentures with a brass toothpick.
“Step down! Step down! Mind your feet!” he called back over his shoulder to the column of people who were climbing down from the bus’s open door.
“Your actors,” he said, “have arrived.”
They came trooping past him and into the foyer like tourists flocking into the National Gallery at opening time—there must have been about thirty in all: coats, scarves, galoshes, hand luggage, and gaily wrapped parcels. They were going to be here, I remembered, for Christmas.
One last straggler was having difficulty with the steps. Ernie made a move to help her, but she brushed away his offered arm.
“I can manage,” she said brusquely.
That voice!
“Nialla!” I shouted. And indeed it was.
Nialla Gilfoyle had been the assistant to Rupert Porson, the traveling puppeteer who had come to a rather grisly end in St. Tancred’s parish hall. I hadn’t seen her since the summer, when she had gone off from Bishop’s Lacey in something of a huff.
But all of that seemed to have been forgotten. Here she was on the front steps of Buckshaw in a green coat and a joyful hat trimmed with red berries.
“Come on, then, give me a hug,” she said, opening her arms wide.
“You smell like Christmas,” I said, noticing for the first time the large protuberance that stood between us.
“Eight months!” she said, taking a step back and throwing open her winter coat. “Have a gander.”
“A gander at Mother Goose?” I asked, and she laughed appreciatively. Nialla had played the part of Mother Goose in the late Rupert’s puppet show, and I hoped my little joke would not stir up unhappy memories.
“Mother Goose no more,” she said. “Just plain old Nialla Gilfoyle (Miss). Jobbing actress, comedy, tragedy, pantomime. Apply Withers Agency, London. Telegraph WITHAG.”
“But the puppet show—”
“Sold up,” she said, “lock, stock, and barrel to a lovely chap from Bournemouth. Fetched me enough to rent a flat, where Junior here can have a roof over his or her head as the case may be, come January, when he or she finally decides to make his or her grand entrance.”
“And you’re starring in this?” I asked, waving my hand to take in the theatrical hubbub in the foyer.
“Hardly starring. I’ve undertaken the less-than-demanding role of Anthea Flighting, pregnant daughter—in a nice way, of course—of Boaz Hazlewood—that’s Desmond Duncan.”
“I thought he was a bachelor. Doesn’t he court Phyllis Wyvern?”
“He is, and he does—but he has a past.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see.” Although I didn’t.
“Let me look at you,” she said, grasping my shoulders and retracting her head. “You’ve grown … and you’ve got a little color in your cheeks.”
“It’s the cold,” I said.
“Speaking of which,” she said with a laugh, “let’s go inside before the acorn on my belly button freezes and falls off.”
“Miss Nialla,” Dogger said as I closed the door behind us. “It’s a pleasure to have you back at Buckshaw.”
“Thank you, Dogger,” she said, taking his hand. “I’ve never forgotten your kindness.”
“The little one will be along soon,” he said. “In January?”
“Spot on, Dogger. You’ve got a good eye. January twenty-fifth, according to my panel doctor. He said it wouldn’t hurt me to sign on for this lark as long as I gave up the ciggies, got plenty of sleep, ate well, and kept my feet up whenever I’m not actually in front of the camera.”
She gave me a wink.
“Very good advice,” Dogger said. “Very good advice, indeed. I hope you were comfortable on the bus?”
“Well, it is a bit of a jolter, but it was the only transportation Ilium Films could lay on to get us from the station in Doddingsley. Thank God the thing’s such a hulking old bulldog. It managed to hang on to the roads in spite of the snow.”
By now, Marion Trodd had shepherded the others away to the upper levels, leaving the foyer empty except for the three of us.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Dogger said, and Nialla gave me a happy twiddle of the fingers like Laurel and Hardy as he led her away.
They had barely disappeared up the staircase when the doorbell rang again.
Suffering cyanide! Was I to spend the rest of my life as a doorkeeper?
Another gust of frozen flakes and cold air.
“Dieter!”
“Hello, Flavia. I have brought some chairs from the vicar.”
Dieter Schrantz, tall, blond, and handsome, as they say on the wireless, stood on the doorstep, smiling at me with his perfect teeth. Dieter’s sudden appearance was a bit disconcerting: It was somewhat like having the god Thor deliver the furniture in person.
As a devotee of English literature, especially the Brontë sisters, Dieter had elected to stay in England after his release as a prisoner of war, hoping someday to teach Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to English students. He also had hopes, I think, of marrying my sister Feely.
Behind him, in the forecourt, the Cottesmore bus had now been replaced by a gray Ferguson tractor which stood putt-putting quietly in the snow, behind it a flat trailer piled high with folding chairs which were covered almost entirely with a
tarpaulin.
“I’ll hold the door for you,” I offered. “Are you coming to the play tonight?”
“Of course!” Dieter grinned. “Your William Shakespeare is almost as great a writer as Emily Brontë.”
“Get away with you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
It was a phrase Mrs. Mullet used. I never thought I’d find myself borrowing it.
Load after load, five or six at a time, Dieter lugged the chairs into the house until at last they were set up in rows in the foyer, all of them facing the improvised stage.
“Come into the kitchen and have some of Mrs. Mullet’s famous cocoa,” I said. “She floats little islands of whipped cream in it, with rosemary sprigs slit for trees.”
“Thank you, but no. I’d better get back. Gordon doesn’t like it if I—”
“I’ll tell Feely you’re here.”
A broad grin spread across Dieter’s face.
“Very well, then,” he said. “But just one whipped-cream island—and no more.”
“Feely!” I hollered towards the drawing room. “Dieter’s here!”
No point wasting precious shoe leather. Besides, Feely had legs of her own.
• NINE •
“WELL, WELL, WELL,” MRS. Mullet said. “And ’ow’s everythin’ at Culver’ouse Farm?”
“Very quiet,” Dieter told her. “It is perhaps the time of year.”
“Yes,” she said, although each of us knew there was more to it than that. It would be a grim old Christmas at the Inglebys’ after the events of last summer.
“And Mrs. Ingleby?”
“As well as can be expected, I believe,” Dieter said.
“I promised Dieter a cup of cocoa,” I said. “I hope it won’t be too much trouble?”
“Cocoa’s my speci-al-ity,” Mrs. Mullett said, “as you very well knows. Cocoa is never too much trouble in any ’ouse’old what’s run as it ought to be.”
“Better make three cups,” I said. “Feely will be here in … six … five … four … three …”