The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (124 page)

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!

In the wilderness build me a nest …”

I edged the door open and slipped inside.

“Is that you, Bun? Fetch me my robe, will you? It’s on the back of the door. Oh, and while you’re at it, a nice drinksie-winksie would be just what the doctor ordered.”

I stood perfectly still and waited.

“Bun?”

There was a faint, yet detectable note of fear in her voice.

“It’s me, Miss Wyvern … Flavia.”

“For God’s sake, girl, don’t lurk like that. Are you trying to frighten me to death? Come in here where I can see you.”

I showed myself around the half-open door.

Phyllis Wyvern was up to her shoulders in steaming water. Her hair was piled on top of her head like a haystack in the rain. I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t look at all like the woman I’d seen on the cinema screen. For one thing, she was wearing no makeup. For another, she had wrinkles.

I felt, to be perfectly honest, as if I’d just walked in on a witch in mid-transformation.

“Put the lid down,” she said, pointing to the toilet. “Have a seat and keep me company.”

I obeyed at once.

I hadn’t the heart—the guts, actually—to tell her that Harriet’s boudoir was off-limits. But then, of course, she had no way of knowing that. Dogger had explained the ground rules to Patrick McNulty before she’d arrived. McNulty was now on his way to the hospital in Hinley, and probably hadn’t had time to pass along the message.

Part of me watched the rest of me being in awe of the most famous movie star in the world … the galaxy … the universe!

“What are you staring at?” Phyllis Wyvern asked suddenly. “My puckers?”

For once, I couldn’t think of a diplomatic answer.

I nodded.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked, picking up a long cigarette holder from the edge of the tub. The smoke had been invisible in the steam.

I thought carefully before answering. Too low a number would indicate flattery; too high could result in disaster. The odds were against me. Unless I hit it dead-on, I couldn’t win.

“Thirty-seven,” I said.

She blew out a jet of smoke like a dragon.

“Bless you, Flavia de Luce,” she said. “You’re bang on! Thirty-seven-year-old stuffing in a fifty-nine-year-old sausage casing. But I’ve still got some spice in me.”

She laughed a throaty laugh, and I could see why the world was in love with her.

She plunged a pudding-sized bath sponge into the water, then squeezed it over her head. The water streamed down her face and dribbled off her chin.

“Look! I’m Niagara Falls!” she said, making a silly face.

I couldn’t help myself: I laughed aloud.

And then she stood up.

At that very instant, as if in a scene from one of those two-act comedies the St. Tancred’s Amateur Dramatic Society put on at the parish hall, a loud voice in the outer room said, “
What
in blue blazes do you think you’re doing?”

It was Feely.

She came storming—there’s no other way to express it—
storming
into the room.

“You know as well as I do, you, you filthy little swine, that no one is allowed—”

Naked, except for a few soap bubbles, Phyllis Wyvern stood staring at Feely through the swirling steam.

Time, for an instant, was frozen.

I was seized by the mad thought that I’d been suddenly thrust into Botticelli’s painting
The Birth of Venus
, but I quickly rejected it: Even though Feely’s expression
was
rather like the “I’ll-huff-and-I’ll-puff” look on the face of the wind god, Zephyrus, Phyllis Wyvern was no Venus—not by a long chalk.

Feely’s face was turning the color of water in which beets have been boiled.

“I … I …

“I beg your pardon,” she said, and I could have cheered! Even in the rush of that bizarre moment, I couldn’t help thinking that it was the first time in Feely’s life she had ever uttered those words.

Like a courtier withdrawing from the Royal Presence, she backed slowly out of the room.

“Hand me my towel,” commanded the bare-naked queen, and stepped out of the bath.

“Oh,
here
you are,” Bun Keats said behind me. “The door was open, so I—”

She caught sight of me and shut her mouth abruptly.

“Well, well, well,” said Phyllis Wyvern. “The delinquent Bun condescends at last to grace us with her presence.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.”

“ ‘I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.’ God help us.”

She mimicked her assistant’s voice in the same cruel and cutting way that Daffy had mimicked mine, but in this case, though, the imitation was brilliant. Professional.