“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.