The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (122 page)

As he crunched towards me through the snow, I was suddenly aware of Dogger at my side.

“S’truth,” the man said, wincing at the wind.

With a disbelieving shake of his head, he approached Dogger, sticking out a raw, meaty hand.

“McNulty,” he said. “Ilium Films. Transport Department. Jack-of-all-trades and master of ’em all.”

Dogger shook the huge hand but said nothing.

“Need to get this circus round back the house and out of the north wind. Fred’s generator cuts up something fierce when it gets too cold. Needs coddling, Fred’s generator does.

“What’s
your
name, little girl?” he asked suddenly, turning to me and crouching down. “Margaret Rose, I’ll bet. Yes, that’s it … Margaret Rose. You’re a Margaret Rose if I ever saw one.”

I had half a mind to march upstairs to my laboratory, fetch down a jar of cyanide, seize this boob’s nose, tilt his head back, pour the stuff down his throat, and hang the consequences.

Fortunately, good breeding kept me from doing so.

Margaret Rose, indeed!

“Yes, that’s right, Mr. McNulty,” I said, forcing a smile of amazement. “Margaret Rose
is
my name. However did you guess?”

“It’s the sixth sense I’m gifted with,” he said, with what looked like a practiced shrug. “Me Irish blood,” he added, putting on a bit of the old brogue, and giving me a saucy tip of his cloth cap as he stood up.

“Now, then,” he said, turning to Dogger, “their lordships and ladyships will be along at noon in their motorcars. They’ll be hungry as hounds after the drive down from London, so look sharp and see that you’ve got buckets of caviar laid on.”

Dogger’s face was a total blank.

“Here, I’m only joking, mate!” McNulty said, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to dig Dogger in the ribs.

“Joking, see? We travel with our own canteen.”

He gave a jerk of his thumb to indicate one of the vans that sat patiently waiting in the forecourt.

“Joking,” Dogger said. “I understand. If you’ll be so good as to remove your boots and follow me …”

As Dogger closed the door behind him, McNulty stopped and gaped at his surroundings. He seemed particularly in awe of the two grand staircases that led up to the first floor.

“S’truth!” he said. “Do people actually live like this?”

“So I am given to believe,” Dogger said. “This way, please.”

I tagged along as Dogger gave McNulty a whirlwind tour: dining room, firearms museum, Rose Room, Blue Room, morning room …

“The drawing room and the Colonel’s study are off limits,” Dogger said, “as has been previously agreed upon. I have affixed a small white circle to each of those doors as a reminder, so that there will be no breach of—their privacy.”

He had almost said “our privacy.” I was sure of it.

“I’ll pass the word,” McNulty said. “Should be no sweat. Our lot’s pretty clannish, as well.”

We made our way through to the east wing and into the portrait gallery. I was half expecting to find it as it had been in my dream: an icy, flooded wasteland. But the room remained as it had been since time immemorial: a long dim train shed of glowering ancestors who, with just a few exceptions (Countess Daisy, for instance, who was said to have greeted visitors to Buckshaw by turning handsprings on the roof in a Chinese silk smock) seemed to have subsided, one and all, into a collective and perpetual sulk that did not exactly gladden one’s heart.

“Use of the portrait gallery has been negotiated—” Dogger was saying.

“But none of yer ’obnail boots on the floor, mind!” a voice cut in. It was Mrs. Mullet.

Hands on hips, she gave McNulty her proprietary glare, then in a softer voice said:

“Beggin’ your pardon, Dogger, but the Colonel’s off now to London for ’is stamp meet. ’E wishes to see you about the tinned beef, an’ that, before ’e goes.”

“Tinned beef” was a code word meaning that Father needed to borrow money for train and taxi fare. I had discovered this by listening at the door of Father’s study. It was a fact I wished I didn’t know.

“Of course,” Dogger said. “Excuse me for a moment.”

And he vanished in the way he does.

“You’ll have to lay down some tarpaulings on that floor,” Mrs. Mullet told McNulty. “ ‘Par-key,’ they calls it: cherry wood, mahogany, walnut, birch—six different kinds of oak is in it. Can’t ’ave workmen tramplin’ all over the likes of that, can I?”

“Believe you me, Mrs.…”

“Mullet,” said Mrs. Mullet. “With an ‘M.’ ”

“Mrs. Mullet. My name’s McNulty—also with an ‘M,’ by the way. Patrick McNulty. I can assure you that our crew at Ilium Films are hired for their fussy natures. In fact, I can confide in you—knowing it will go no further—that we’ve just come from shooting a scene inside a certain royal residence without one word of complaint from You-Know-Who.”

Mrs. M’s eyes widened.

“You mean—”

“Exactly,” McNulty said, putting a forefinger to his lips. “You’re a very shrewd woman, Mrs. Mullet. I can see that.”

She gave a flimsy smile, like the Mona Lisa, and I knew that her loyalty was bought. Whatever else he was, Patrick McNulty was as slick as nose oil.

Now Dogger was back, his face bland and capable, giving away nothing. I followed as he led the way upstairs and into the west wing.

“The room at the south end of the corridor is Miss Harriet’s boudoir. It is strictly private, and is not to be entered upon any account.”

He said this as if Harriet had just stepped out for a couple of hours to pay a social call in the county, or to ride with the Halstead-Thicket Hounds. He did not tell McNulty that my mother had been dead for ten years, and that her rooms had been preserved by Father as a shrine where no one, or so he thought, could hear him weeping.

“Understood,” McNulty said. “Over and out. I’ll pass it along.”

“The two bedrooms on the left belong to Miss Ophelia and Miss Daphne, who will share a room for the duration. Choose the one you wish to use as a setting and they’ll settle for the other.”

“Sporting of them,” McNulty said. “Val Lampman will be seeing to that. He’s our director.”

“All other bedrooms, sitting rooms, and dressing rooms, including those along the north front, may be assigned as you see fit,” Dogger went on, not batting an eye at the mention of England’s most celebrated cinema director.

Even
I
knew who Val Lampman was.

“I’d best be getting back to my crew,” McNulty said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “We’ll organize the lorries, then see to the unloading.”

“As you wish,” Dogger told him, and it seemed to me there was a touch of sadness in his voice.

We descended the stairs, McNulty openly running his fingers over the carved banister ends, craning his neck to gawk at the carved paneling.

“S’truth,” he muttered under his breath.

“You’ll never guess who’s directing this film!” I said, bursting into the drawing room.

“Val Lampman,” Daffy said in a bored voice, without looking up from her book. “Phyllis Wyvern doesn’t work with anyone else nowadays. Not since—”

“Since what?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

“No, I’m not. What about Boccaccio?” Daffy had recently been reading aloud to us at tea, selected tales from Boccaccio’s
Decameron
.

“That’s fiction,” she said. “Val Lampman is real life.”

“Says who?” I countered.

“Says
Cinema World
. It was all over the front page.”

“What was?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Flavia,” Daffy said, throwing down her book, “you grow more like a parrot every day:
‘Since what? Says who? What was?’
”

She mimicked my voice cruelly.

“We ought to teach you to say ‘Who’s a pretty bird, then?’ or ‘Polly wants a biscuit.’ We’ve already ordered you a cage: lovely gold bars, a perch, and a water dish to splash about in—not that you’ll ever use it.”

“Sucks to you!”

“I deflect it back unto you,” Daffy said, holding out an invisible shield at arm’s length.

“And back to you again,” I said, duplicating her gesture.

“Ha! Yours is a brass shield. Brass doesn’t bounce sucks. You know that as well as I do.”

“Does!”

“Doesn’t!”

It was at this point that Feely intervened in what had been, until then, a perfectly civilized discussion.

“Speaking of parrots,” she said, “Harriet had a lovely parrot before you were born—a beautiful bird, an African Grey, called Sinbad. I remember him perfectly well. He could conjugate the Latin verb
‘amare’
and sing parts of ‘The Lorelei.’ ”

“You’re making this up,” I told her.

“Remember Sinbad, Daffy?” Feely said, laughing.

“
‘The boy stood on the burning deck,’
” Daffy said. “Poor old Sinby used to scramble up onto his perch as he squawked the words. Hilarious.”

“Then where is he now?” I demanded. “He should be still alive. Parrots can live more than a hundred years.”

“He flew away,” Daffy said, with a little hitch in her voice. “Harriet had spread a blanket on the terrace, taken you out for some fresh air. Somehow you managed to work loose the catch on the door of the cage, and Sinbad flew away. Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t!”

Feely was looking at me with eyes which were no longer those of a sister.

“Oh, but you did. She often said afterwards that she wished it had been you who had flown away, and Sinbad who had stayed.”

I could feel the pressure rising in my chest, as if I were a steam boiler.

I said a forbidden word and walked stiffly from the room, vowing revenge.

There were times when a touch of the old strychnine was just the ticket.

I would go upstairs straight away to my chemical kitchen and prepare a delicacy that would have my hateful sisters begging for mercy. Yes, that was it! I would spice their egg salad sandwiches with a couple of grains of
nux vomica
. It would keep them out of decent company for a week.

I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang.

“Dash it all!” I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.

I trudged down from the landing and flung open the door angrily.

There, looking down his nose at me, stood a chauffeur in livery: light chocolate coat with corded trim, flared breeches tucked into tall tan leather boots, a peaked cap, and a pair of limp brown leather gloves held a little too casually in his perfectly manicured hands.

I didn’t like his attitude, and, come to think of it, he probably didn’t like mine.

“De Luce?” he asked.

I stood motionless, waiting for decency.

“Miss de Luce?”

“Yes,” I said grudgingly, peering round his body as if there might be others like him hiding in the bushes.

The pantechnicon and vans had gone from the forecourt. A maze of snowy tracks told me that they had been moved round to the back of the house. In their place, idling silently in little gusts of snow, was a black Daimler limousine, polished, like a funeral coach, to an unearthly shine.

“Come in and close the door,” I said. “Father’s not awfully keen on snowdrifts in the foyer.”

“Miss Wyvern has arrived,” he announced, drawing himself to attention.

“But—” I managed, “they weren’t supposed to be here until noon …”

Phyllis Wyvern! My mind was spinning. With Father away, surely I couldn’t be expected to …

I’d seen her on the silver screen, of course, not just at the Gaumont, but also at the little backstreet cinema in Hinley. And once, also, when the vicar had hired Mr. Mitchell, who operated Bishop’s Lacey’s photo studio, to run
The Rector’s Wife
in St. Tancred’s parish hall, hoping, I suppose, that the story would arouse a feeling of sympathy in our parish bosoms for his rat-faced—and rat-hearted—wife, Cynthia.

Of course, it had no such effect. Despite the fact that the film was so old and scratched and full of splices that it sometimes made the picture leap about on the screen like a jumping jack, Phyllis Wyvern had been magnificent in the role of the brave and noble Mrs. Willington. At the end, when the lights came up, even the projectionist was in tears, although he’d seen the thing a hundred times before.

Nobody gave Cynthia Richardson a second look, though, and I had seen her afterwards, in the darkness, slinking home alone through the graveyard.

But how does one talk, face-to-face, with a goddess? What does one say?

“I’ll ring for Dogger,” I said.

“I’ll see to it, Miss Flavia,” said Dogger, already at my elbow.

I don’t know how he does it, but Dogger always appears at precisely the right instant, like one of those figures that pops out of the door on a Swiss clock.

And suddenly he was walking towards the Daimler, the chauffeur slipping and sliding in front of him, trying to be the first to take hold of the car’s door handle.

Dogger won.

“Miss Wyvern,” he said, his voice coming clearly to my ears on the cold air. “On behalf of Colonel de Luce, may I welcome you to Buckshaw? It’s a pleasure to have you with us. The Colonel has asked me to express his regrets that he is not here to greet you.”

Phyllis Wyvern took Dogger’s extended hand and stepped out of the car.

“Watch your step, miss. The footing is treacherous this morning.”

I could see her every breath distinctly on the cold air as she took Dogger’s arm and floated towards the front door. Floated! There was no other word for it. In spite of the slick walkway, Phyllis Wyvern floated towards me as if she were a ghost.

“We weren’t expecting you until noon,” Dogger was saying. “I regret that the walkways have not yet been fully shoveled and ashes put down.”

“Think nothing of it, Mr.—”

“Dogger,” Dogger said.

“Mr. Dogger, I’m just a girl from Golders Green. I’ve managed in snow before and, I expect I shall manage again.

“Oops!” She giggled, pretending to slip and smiling up at him as she clung to his arm.

I couldn’t believe how tiny she was, her head barely level with his chest.

She wore a tight-fitting black suit with a white blouse with a black and yellow Liberty scarf, and, despite the grayness of the day, her complexion was like cream in a summer kitchen.