I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (9 page)

“Not if he doesn’t want to.”

“I thought we weren’t having decorations,” I said. “The director didn’t want the trouble of removing them when they begin filming.”

“Miss Wyvern has decided otherwise. She’s asked me to provide a suitably sized Christmas tree in the foyer for her performance on Saturday night.”

I felt my eyes widening.

“To remind her of the trees she had in childhood. She said that her parents always put up a tree.”

“And she asked you for holly? And mistletoe?”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir.” Dogger smiled.

I hugged myself, and not just from the cold. Even the smallest of jokes on Dogger’s lips warmed my heart—perhaps made me too bold.

“Did
your
parents?” I asked. “Used to put up a tree, I mean? The holly and the ivy and the mistletoe, and all that?”

Dogger did not answer straight away. The faintest of shadows seemed to drift across his face.

“In that part of India in which I was a child,” he said at last, “mistletoe and holly were not easily to be had. I believe I remember decorating a mango tree for Christmas.”

“A mango tree! India! I didn’t know you lived in India!”

Dogger was silent for a long time.

“But that was long ago,” he said at last, as if returning from a dream. “As you know, Miss Flavia, my memory is not what it once was.”

“Never mind, Dogger,” I said, patting his hand. “Neither is mine. Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.”

“I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.”

“Butter and all?” I asked.

“Butter and all.”

“But not the dish.”

“But not the dish,” said Dogger.

Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?

Remembering Father’s orders to keep out from underfoot, I spent what remained of the day in my laboratory making last-minute adjustments to the consistency of my powerful birdlime. The addition of just the right amount of oil of petroleum would keep it from freezing.

Christmas Eve was now just forty-eight hours away, and I needed to be ready for it. There would be no margin for error. I would have just one chance to capture Father Christmas—if, in fact, he existed.

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,” Daffy 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.