The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (132 page)

Down and down she came, and at last onto the foyer floor, her pointed slippers making a menacing sound on the tiles: like a pair of snakes tiptoeing on their rib ends.

Ned Cropper shrank back a little as she swept past him towards the front door.

She’s leaving!
I thought.
She’s walking out!

I twisted round in my chair, fighting to remain seated, as Phyllis Wyvern, having reached the scaffolding, seized hold of the ladder, placed a delicately slippered foot on the first rung, and began to climb.

Up and up she went, her Elizabethan dress, even in the darkness, shooting off sparks of light like a comet ascending the heavens.

At the top, she stepped off onto the plank flooring and edged her way along to where Gil Crawford stood watching her approach, his mouth open.

Clinging to the scaffold’s railing with one hand, Phyllis Wyvern hauled off and, with the other, slapped Gil hard across the face.

The sharp crack of it echoed back and forth across the foyer, refusing to die.

Gil’s hand flew to his cheek, and even in the near darkness, I saw the flash from the whites of his terrified eyes.

She hitched up the hem of her dress and maneuvered back to the ladder, which she managed to climb down with surprising grace.

Looking neither to the right nor the left, Phyllis Wyvern processed—there’s no other word for it; she looked as if she were walking in state up the center aisle of Westminster Abbey—she processed across the foyer to the foot of the west staircase, which she climbed, skirt still hitched in one hand, to the landing, where she turned and struck a pose at the railing of her make-believe bedroom balcony.

After a heart-stopping pause, the second spotlight came on with an audible
clack
, catching her in its beam like some exotic moth.

She clasped her hands to her breast, took a shuddering breath, and spoke her first line:

“Ay me!”
she said.

“She speaks!”
said Romeo.

“O, speak again, bright angel!”
he went on, rather hesitantly,

“For thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head
,

As is a wingèd messenger of heaven

Unto the white-upturnèd wondering eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him …”

I couldn’t help thinking of Gil Crawford’s eyes.

“O Romeo, Romeo!”
she cooed.
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

And so on. The rest of the performance was just a lot of that moon-June-balloon stuff—a load of old mulch, really—and I found myself wishing they had chosen a more exciting scene from the play, one of those involving toxicology, for instance, which are the only really decent parts of
Romeo and Juliet
.

We had been made to listen to the play in its entirety on one of Father’s compulsory Thursday wireless nights, during which I had formed the opinion that while Shakespeare was good with words, he knew beans about poisons.

The difference between poisons and narcotics seems to have escaped him, and he was in an utter muddle when it came to those vegetable and mineral irritants that act upon the brain and spinal cord.

In spite of all the wordy hocus-pocus about gathering herbs by moonlight, Juliet’s symptoms indicated the use of nothing more mystifying than plain old hydrocyanic acid administered in drinking water.

For ever and ever, Amen.

By now, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan were taking their bows. Joining hands like Hansel and Gretel, they took a couple of steps towards the audience, then backed away, and then advanced again, like waves lapping at the sands.

Flushed with pleasure, or something, they were both perspiring freely, their makeup, at close range, suddenly ghastly in the overhead lights.

Phyllis Wyvern was so close to Ned that his mouth gaped open like a flounder on a fishmonger’s stall, so that Mary had to nudge him in the ribs.

I looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark figure vanishing into the shadows at the head of the stairs, just above Juliet’s makeshift balcony.

It was Dogger, and I realized with a start that he had been there all along.

• ELEVEN •

With the foyer lights switched back on, I had my first chance to have a glance round at the entire audience.

There in the back row, with a happy look on his face, sat Dieter. Beside him, chewing on a mint, was Dr. Darby, and behind him, Mrs. Mullet with her husband, Alf.

Each of them seemed caught up in a trance, blinking round in silly wonder, as if they were surprised to find themselves still in their same old bodies.

Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that’s the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.

I had seen a spell woven before my eyes, broken by a slap, then woven again as easily as a granny darns a sock. It was marvelous—a blooming wonder, actually—when you came to think about it.

The actors now had gone to remove their makeup, and the ciné crew vanished to the upper reaches of the house to do whatever they do after a performance. They had not stayed to mingle with the audience, but that, perhaps, was part of the spell.

A gust of cold rushed suddenly into the foyer. Someone had opened the front door for a breath of fresh air, given a gasp, cries had gone up, and now everyone, including me, was crowding for a look outside.

A sharp wind had arisen during the performance and piled a waist-deep snowdrift at the door.

It was easy enough to see that tractor or no tractor, sleigh or no sleigh, no one was going to get home to Bishop’s Lacey tonight.

Still, Dieter was brave enough to give it a try. Bundling up in his heavy coat and scaling the white mountain that had appeared so suddenly, he was soon lost in the darkness.

“Better ring up Tom McGully to bring his snowplow,” someone said.

“No use doing that,” came a voice from the far corner, “as I’m already here.”

A nervous laugh went up, as Tom came forward and peered out the door with the rest of us.

“It’s a mort o’ snow,” he said, somehow making it official. “A mighty mort o’ snow.”

The hands of several ladies flew to their throats. The men exchanged quick glances, their faces expressionless.

Ten minutes later, Dieter was back, caked with the stuff, shaking his head.

“Tractor doesn’t start,” he announced. “Battery’s dead.”

The vicar, as usual, had taken charge.

“Ring up Bert Archer at the garage,” he had told Cynthia. “Tell him to bring his wrecker. If you can’t get through to Bert, leave a message with Nettie Runciman at the exchange.”

Cynthia nodded grimly and plodded off towards the telephone.

“Mrs. Mullet … I saw her here somewhere … Mrs. Mullet, do you think it would be possible to lay on some tea, and perhaps some cocoa for the little ones?”

Mrs. Mullet made for the kitchen, happy to be one of the first enlisted. As she vanished into the passageway, Cynthia reappeared.

“The line is dead,” she announced in a monotone.

“Well, then,” the vicar said, “as it seems we’re here for the duration, we shall just have to make do, shan’t we?”

It was decided with surprisingly little fuss that preference would be given to those with children, who would be allowed, wherever room permitted, to bunk in among the ciné crew who had already been assigned digs on the first floor.

Somewhere during the process, Father had put in a brief appearance, and with a couple of pointed fingers and a few words to the vicar, had mobilized the operation as if it were a precision military exercise. He had then re-vanished into his study.

Those who could not be accommodated upstairs would bunk down in the foyer. Pillows and blankets that had not been used since Harriet was alive would be brought out of their storage presses and handed out to the makeshift refugees.

“It shall be just like old times,” the vicar told them, rubbing his hands together vigorously. “Not unlike the bomb shelters during the war. We shall make a great success of it; a grand adventure. After all, it isn’t as if we haven’t done it before.”

There was more than a trace of Winston Churchill in his voice.

The vicar organized a few games for the children: puss in the corner, blindman’s buff, hide-and-go-seek, with prizes donated by Dr. Darby—mints, of course—to the winners.

The grownups gossiped and laughed quietly on the sidelines.

After a while, the more boisterous activities dwindled to guessing games.

As the evening wore on, the false jollity subsided. Yawns appeared, stifled at first but eventually becoming open and damn the niceties.

Children began to doze off, and their parents soon followed. It wasn’t long before most of the displaced villagers of Bishop’s Lacey were in the grips of sleep.

Later, as I lay snuggled beneath my eiderdown, alone in the vast, barnlike coldness of the east wing, I could hear, for a while, the muted buzz of conversation, like the hum of a distant hive.

After a time, this, too, died down, and my ears detected only an occasional cough.

It had been a long, long day, but in spite of it, I couldn’t sleep. In my mind, I saw the bundled bodies scattered helter-skelter in the foyer: sleeping mounds beneath their blankets like so many tussocks in a country churchyard.

I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, but it was no use. Surely everyone was asleep by now, and nobody would be disturbed if I crept to the top of the stairs and took a peek. With the very real threat of Father losing his battle with the taxman, I was now consciously saving up images for a time when I was an old lady—a time when I would rummage through my recollections of Buckshaw as one might turn the pages of a dusty photograph album.

“Ah, yes,” I would quaver in my old woman’s voice, “I mind the time we were snowed in on Christmas Eve. The winter night that Bishop’s Lacey came to Buckshaw.”

I climbed out of bed and into my refrigerated clothing.

Down the corridor I crept, stopping now and then to listen.

Nothing.

I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down upon the makeshift shelter.

Perhaps because it was so close to Christmas, there was something oddly touching about those huddled forms, as if I were an aviator, or an angel, or God, even, looking down from above upon all of these helpless, sleeping humans.

From somewhere far away, in the west wing, came the sound of distant music, and of unreal recorded voices.

So profound was the silence in the house that I was even able to make out the words:

“I shall never forget Hawkhover Castle.”

Phyllis Wyvern was watching herself on film again.

The music swelled, and then died.

Downstairs, someone rolled over and began to snore. From where I stood, I could see Dieter, bundled against the railing on the landing. Smart enough to choose a higher sleeping place, I thought, where the air is slightly warmer, and the flooring not so cold as the tiles of the foyer.

In the hall below, Mrs. Mullet breathed heavily, her arm draped as casually over Alf as the babes in the wood.

Slowly, I descended the staircase, taking special care to tiptoe past the sleeping Dieter.

Over there, against the wall, was Cynthia Richardson, in sleep as relaxed as an archangel on a Christmas card; her face like Flora in the Botticelli painting. I wished I’d had a camera so that I could preserve that unexpected glimpse of her forever.

At her side the vicar slept, his brow deeply furrowed.

“Hannah, please! No!” he whispered, and for a moment, I thought that he had awakened.

Who was Hannah, I wondered, and why was she tormenting him in his sleep?

Upstairs, a door closed softly.

Phyllis Wyvern
, I thought.
She’s finished for the night with her viewing
.

A marvelous idea floated into my mind.

Why not see if she wanted to talk? Perhaps, like me, she was sleepless.

Or what if she was lonely? We could have a nice chat about grisly murders. Being so famous probably meant that all her friends were in it for the money—or the glory: for being able to say they were chummy with Phyllis Wyvern.

She’d have no one to talk to about the things that really counted.

Besides, it would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a world-famous movie star all to myself—even if only for a few minutes.

But wait! What if she was tired? What if she still hadn’t got over that fierce outburst when she’d slapped Gil Crawford’s face? Would she do the same to me? I could almost feel the sting of her hand on my cheek.

Still, if I told Feely I’d spent an hour or so idly chitchatting with Phyllis Wyvern, she’d be sick jealous!

That settled it.

From the bottom of the stairs, I set out on tiptoe across the foyer, picking a precarious and winding path between the sleeping bodies.

While I was still in the midst of the encampment and halfway to the west staircase, a water closet flushed.

I froze.

It was an unpleasant fact of life at Buckshaw that the rickety maze of pipes that passed for plumbing had seen far, far better days. They were, in fact, past their prime when Queen Victoria was on the throne, if one may be permitted to say such a thing.

A flush here or a water faucet activated there transmitted vast shudders and groans to the farthest corners of the house like some bizarre hydraulic signaling system from another age.

To put it plainly, no one at Buckshaw had any secrets—not, at least, in the plumbing department.

I stopped breathing until the shudder of pipes subsided in a far distant clatter. Ned, who was propped up against a wall with his feet splayed out like a cast-off doll, gave a groan, and Mary, whose head was on his knees, turned over in her sleep.

I counted to a hundred, just to be sure, and again began picking my way between the sleeping bodies.

Up the west staircase I went, one step at a time, counting them as I climbed: ten to the landing, another ten to the top corridor.