Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (32 page)

It was too much.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted, running across the room and snatching the book from her hand.

“Reading about myself,” she said.

I’ll admit it: I saw red.

No, that’s not quite true: I first saw white—a silent, brilliant white that erased everything—like the A-bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only after this deadly burst of flower petals had begun to cool and fade, passing first from yellow through orange, did it at last simmer down to red.

I had been angry before, but this was like something ripped from the pages of the Book of Revelation. Could it be some secret fault in the de Luce makeup that was manifesting itself in me for the first time?

Until now, my fury had always been like those jolly Caribbean carnivals we had seen in the cinema travelogues—a noisy explosion of color and heat that wilted steadily as the day went on. But now it had suddenly become an icy coldness: a frigid wasteland in which I stood unapproachable. And it was in that instant, I think, that I began to understand my father.

This much was clear: I needed to get away—to be alone—until the tidal wave had passed.

“Excuse me,” I said abruptly, surprising even myself, and walked out of the room.

I sat for a while on the stairs—neither up nor down.

It was true that Porcelain had violated my privacy, but my response had frightened me. In fact, I was still shaking a little.

I riffled idly through the pages of my notebook, not really focusing upon its written entries.

What had Porcelain been reading when I interrupted her? She had been reading about herself, or so she claimed.

I could hardly remember what I had written. I quickly found the spot.

PORCELAIN—Can’t possibly be her grandmother’s attacker since she was in London at the time. Or was she? I have only her word for it. But why did she feel compelled to wash out her clothing?

The answer to that remained a puzzle, but surely, if Porcelain had come back to do me in, she’d have done so by now.

As I closed the book, I remembered that at the time my last notes were made, I had not yet met the Pettibones. I had promised the Queen Bee that I would bring her some papers from Buckshaw relating to Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers.

The fact that I had fabricated these juicy documents on the spur of the moment was really of no importance: with a library like Buckshaw’s, there might very well be documents lurking that would satisfy the woman’s obvious greed.

If the library was unoccupied, I could begin my search at once.

I was feeling better already.

I listened with my ear glued to the door. If Daffy was inside reading, as she usually was, I could swallow a teaspoon of pride and ask her opinion, perhaps under cover of an insult, which almost always resulted in her taking the bait.

If that didn’t work, there was always the Solemn Truce. Under these rules, I would, immediately upon entering the room, drop to one knee on the carpet and declare “Pax vobiscum,” and if Daffy replied, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the ceasefire went into effect for a period of five minutes by the mantel clock, during which time neither of us was allowed to offer any incivility to the other.

If, on the other hand, she flung an inkwell, then the peace pipe was declined, and the whole thing was off.

But there was no sound from the other side of the panel. I opened the door and peeked round it.

The library was empty.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. For safety’s sake, I turned the key in the lock and, although it probably hadn’t been operated in the past hundred years, the bolt slid home in perfect silence.

Good old Dogger, I thought. He had a way of seeing that essentials were taken care of.

If anyone questioned me, I would claim that I was feeling somewhat peaked, and had hoped to have a nap without being disturbed.

I turned and had a good look round the library. It was simply ages since I’d been alone in this room.

The bookshelves towered towards the ceiling in strata, as if they had been formed geologically in stacks, by the upwards shifting of the earth.

Near the floor and closest to hand were the books that belonged to the present generation of de Luces. Above these, and just out of reach, were those that had been hoarded by the house’s Victorian inhabitants, above which, piled to the ceiling, was the rubbish left behind by the Georgians: hundreds and hundreds of leather- and calf-bound volumes with thin worm-eaten pages and type so small it made your eyes go buggy.

I’d had a squint once before at some of these relics, but had found them devoted mainly to the lives and sermons of a bunch of dry old sticks who had lived and died while Mozart was still crawling around in diapers.

If ever there was a graveyard of religious biography, this was it.

I’d work methodically, I thought, one wall at a time, top of the north wall first, then top of the east wall, and so forth.

Books about dissenting clergymen were not exactly kept at one’s fingertips at Buckshaw. Besides, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was searching for, but I knew that I would likely find it nearer the ceiling.

I dragged the rolling library ladder into position and began my climb: up, up, up—my footing more precarious with every step.

Libraries of this design, I thought, ought to be equipped with oxygen bottles above a certain height, in case of altitude sickness.

Which made me think of Harriet, and a sudden sadness came over me. Harriet had scaled these very same bookcases once upon a time. In fact, it was stumbling upon one of her chemistry texts in this very room that had changed my life.

“Get on with it, Flave,” said a strict-sounding voice inside me. “Harriet is dead, and you’ve got work to do.”

Up I went, my head still cocked at an uncomfortable angle from reading titles on book spines at the lower levels. Fortunately, at this higher altitude, the older volumes had sensible, no-nonsense horizontal titles stamped deeply into their spines in gold-leaf letters, making them three-dimensional, and relatively easy to read in the perpetual twilight near the ceiling:

The Life of Simeon Hoxey; Notes on the Septuagint; Prayer and Penance; Pew’s Thoughts Upon Godliness; Astronomical Principles of Religion Natural and Reveal’d; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Polycarp of Smyrna; and so forth.

Just above these was Hydraulicks and Hydrostaticks, a relic, no doubt, of Lucius “Leaking” de Luce. I pulled the book from the shelf and opened it. Sure enough, there was Lucius’s bookplate: the de Luce family crest, with his name written beneath it in a surprisingly childish hand. Had he owned the book when he was a boy?

The title page was almost completely covered with dense, inky calculations: sums, angles, algebraic equations, all of them more hurried than neat, crabbed, cramped, and rushing across the page. The entire book was somewhat rippled, as if it had once been wet.

A folded paper had been inserted between the pages which, when I opened it out flat, proved to be a hand-drawn map—but a map unlike any I had ever seen before.

Scattered upon the page were circles of various sizes, each joined to the others by lines, some of which radiated directly to their targets, while others followed more rectangular and roundabout paths. Some of the lines were thick; some thin. Some were single; others double; and a few were shaded in various schemes of cross-hatching.

At first I thought it was a railway map, so dense were the tracks—perhaps an ambitious expansion scheme for the nearby Buckshaw Halt, where trains had once stopped to put down guests and unload goods for the great house.

Only when I recognized the shape at the bottom of the map as the ornamental lake, and the unmistakeable outline of Buckshaw itself, did I realize that the document was, in fact, not a map at all, but a diagram: Lucius “Leaking” de Luce’s plan for his subterranean hydraulic operations.

Interesting, I thought, but only vaguely. I shoved the paper into my pocket for future reference and resumed my search for books that might contain some mention of the Hobblers.

Sermons for Sailors; God’s Plan for the Indies; Remains of Alexander Knox, Esq.

And suddenly there it was: English Dissenters.

I must say—it was an eye-opener!

I suppose I had been expecting a dry-as-dust account of hellfire parsons and dozing parishioners. But what I had stumbled upon was a treasure trove of jealousy, backbiting, vanity, abductions, harrowing midnight escapes, hangings, mutilations, betrayal, and sorcery.

Wherever there had been savage bloodshed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English history, there was sure to have been a Dissenter at the heart of it. I made a note to take some of these volumes up to my bedroom for a bit of horrific bedtime reading. They would certainly be more lively than Wind in the Willows, which had been languishing on my night-table since Aunt Felicity had sent it to me for Christmas, pretending to believe it was a history of corporal punishment.

With English Dissenters in hand, I climbed down the ladder, dropped into the upholstered wing-back chair that Daffy usually occupied, and began flipping through its pages in search of the Hobblers.

Because there was no index, I was forced to go slowly, watching for the word “Hobblers,” trying not to become too distracted by the violence of the religious text.

Only towards the end of the book did I find what I was looking for. But then, suddenly, there it was, at the bottom of a page, in a footnote marked by a squashed-spider asterisk, set in quaint old-fashioned type.

“The mischief of Infant-baptism,” it said, “is an innovation on the primitive practice of the church: one of the corruptions of the second or third century. It is, moreover, often made the occasion of sin, or is turned into a farce as, for example, in that custom of the sect known as the Hobblers, whose dipping of a child held by the heel into running water, must be understood as no more than a bizarre, not to say barbaric, survival of the Greek myth of Achilles.”

It took several moments for the words to sink in.

Mrs. Mullet had been right!

UP THE EAST STAIRCASE I flew, English Dissenters clutched in my hand.

I couldn’t contain myself.

“Listen to this,” I said, bursting into my bedroom. Porcelain was sitting exactly as I had left her, staring at me as if I were a madwoman.

I read aloud to her the footnote on infant baptism, the words fairly tumbling from my mouth.

“So what?” she said, unimpressed.

“Mrs. Bull,” I blurted out. “She lied! Her baby drowned! It had nothing to do with Fenella!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Porcelain said.

Of course she didn’t! I hadn’t told her about the encounter with the enraged Mrs. Bull in the Gully. I could still hear those frightening, hateful words in my mind:

“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she had screamed at Fenella. “ ’Twas you as stole my baby. Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”

Thinking to spare Porcelain’s feelings, I skated quickly over the story of the Bull baby’s disappearance, and of the furious outburst its mother had directed at Fenella in the Gully.

Mrs. Mullet’s friend had told her the Hobblers dipped their babies by the heel, like Achilles in the River Styx. She didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s what she meant.

“So you see,” I finished triumphantly, “Fenella had nothing to do with it.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Porcelain scoffed. “She’s a harmless old woman, not a kidnapper. Don’t tell me you believe those old wives’ tales about Gypsies stealing babies?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said, but I was not being truthful. In my heart of hearts I had, until that very minute, believed what every child in England had been made to believe.

Porcelain was becoming huffy again, and I didn’t want to risk another outburst, either from her, or worse, from me.

“She’s that redhead, then?” she said suddenly, bringing the topic back to Mrs. Bull. “The one that lives in the lane?”

“That’s her!” I said. “How did you know?”

“I saw someone like that … hanging about,” Porcelain said evasively.

“Where?” I demanded.

“About,” she said, locking eyes with me, just daring me to stare her down.

The truth hit me like a slap in the face.

“Your dream!” I said. “It was her! In your dream you saw her standing over you in the caravan, didn’t you?”

It made perfect sense. If Fenella really could see into the past and the future, and her daughter, Lunita, could impress the Air Ministry with her powers, there was no reason Porcelain couldn’t summon up such an unpleasant woman in her sleep.

“It was like no dream I’ve ever had before,” Porcelain said. “Oh, but God … I wish I’d never had it!”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t seem like a dream. I’d fallen asleep on Fenella’s bed—didn’t even bother taking off my clothes. It must have been a noise that roused me—somewhere close—inside the caravan.”

“You dreamed you’d fallen asleep?”

Porcelain nodded. “That was what was so horrible about it. I didn’t move a muscle. Just kept taking deep quiet breaths, as if I was asleep, which I was, of course. Oh, damn! It’s so hard to explain.”

“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean. You were in my bed, dreaming you were in Fenella’s bed.”

She gave me a look of gratitude. “There wasn’t a sound. I listened for a long time, until I thought they were gone, and then I opened my eyes—no more than a sliver, and …”

“And?”

“There was a face! A big face—right there—just inches away! Almost touching mine!”

“Good lord!”

“So close I couldn’t really focus,” Porcelain went on. “I managed to make a little moan, as if I was dreaming—let my mouth fall open a bit …”

I have to admit I was filled with admiration. I hoped that, even in a dream, I should have the presence of mind to do the same thing myself.

“The lamp was burning low,” she went on. “It shone through the hair. I could only see the hair.”

“Which was red,” I said.

“Which was red. Long and curly. Wild, it was. And then I opened my eyes—”