I stretched out on my bed, facedown, unable to keep awake, unable to sleep, and guilt was the culprit.
How could I have sat so calmly in the kitchen watching a carefree shadow-show when all the while my mother was lying dead upstairs?
Dead and lost: frozen in a glacier for a decade until some moronic mountaineer, posing for a snapshot, had stepped backwards into a crevasse, where a rescue party eventually found his—and her—icy remains.
How did I feel? Guilty as sin!
Why wasn’t I blubbering and shrieking and ripping out my hair? Why wasn’t I prowling the battlements of Buckshaw, howling into the wind?
Even Cousin Lena had been able to weep at the station. Why then had I stood there on the platform like a piece of rotted timber, more attentive to the death of a stranger than to that of my own mother?
Why had I needed to be reprimanded by a voice from the swamps of my mind?
How could my grief have failed me so miserably?
Perhaps Feely and Daffy had been right all along: Perhaps I really was a changeling. Perhaps Harriet really had plucked me from an orphanage—which would mean, of course, that I had no more real physical connection with her than does a monkey with the moon.
Never in my life had I wanted more desperately to be a de Luce, yet never had I felt less as if I actually were one. My family and I seemed to stand at opposite ends of the universe. I was as much a mystery to them as they were to me, and yet, in spite of it, we needed one another.
I rolled over, faceup, and stared at the ceiling. The great loose bags of water-damaged paper that hung like moldy barrage balloons above my head made me feel as if I were under attack from the very house itself.
I covered my head with a pillow. But it was no use.
In just a few hours, the people of the village would begin arriving at Buckshaw for Harriet’s lying-in-state. Dogger would usher them in small groups up the west staircase to her boudoir, where they would stand gazing at their own reflections in the awful polish of that hideous coffin, whose contents were too horrible to be imagined.
I leapt from my bed and, picking up the ciné projector, carried it into my laboratory darkroom.
Again I threaded the film into the machine and switched it on. The picture was smaller but brighter than it had been in my bedroom fireplace, and, oddly enough, I was able to pick out more detail.
Here is Harriet, scrambling once more from the cockpit of Blithe Spirit with yours truly still invisible but present nevertheless beneath her flying togs. Feely and Daffy wave and shield their eyes.
Was it from the sun, as I had supposed?
Or had Harriet, in real life, been too radiant to look at?
Whatever the case, by developing this forgotten film, I had, with the magic of chemistry, restored my mother to life.
Deep inside me, something awoke, rolled over—and then went back to sleep.
Now Father strolls towards the camera, unaware that he is trapped in another world: the world of the past.
Daffy and Feely dabble at the edge of the ornamental lake, unaware that they are being filmed. The camera turns away, moving towards the blanket upon which Father and Harriet are picnicking.
But wait!
What was that shadow on the grass? I hadn’t spotted it before.
I stopped the projector and threw it into reverse.
Yes! I was right—there was a dark blot on the grass: the shadow of the camera operator, whoever that may have been.
I let the film run on a bit: As Father turns away to remove something from the hamper, Harriet turns to the camera and mouths those words again.
Along with her, I speak them aloud, attempting to match my lips with hers, getting the feel of her words in my own mouth: “Pheasant sandwiches,” she says on the flickering image.
“Pheasant sandwiches,” I say.
Again I back up the film for another glimpse of that fleeting shadow on the grass. To whom had Harriet mouthed those mysterious words?
I watched it all again wondering if there was a way to freeze the picture.
“Pheasant—” Harriet said, and there was the most awful clatter and grinding.
The projector had jammed!
On the wall, the image had frozen mid-word. Before my very eyes, Harriet’s face began to turn brown—to darken—to shrivel—to bubble— The film had caught fire! A little column of dark, acrid smoke arose from somewhere inside the projector.
If the film was cellulose nitrate, as I knew some films to be, I was in trouble.
Even if it didn’t explode—as was quite likely—the burning stuff could still fill the room almost instantly with a noxious mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and various unpleasant forms of the nitrogen oxides, to say nothing of cyanide.
This little darkroom would, in an instant, become a perfect chamber of death. Buckshaw itself might then, in minutes, be reduced to ashes.
I tore a laboratory apron from its hook on the wall and flung it over the machine.
Cellulose nitrate doesn’t require outside oxygen to burn: It contains its own.
Nothing—not even fire extinguishers or water—can extinguish a cellulose nitrate blaze.
Usually, when it comes to chemicals, I have my wits about me, but I must confess that in this case, I panicked.
I dashed out of the darkroom, slammed the door behind me, and threw my back against it to keep it shut. A cloud of smoke escaped with me.
I was standing like that—like a creature that had just dragged itself up out of the pit—when a voice from the smoke asked “Close call?”
It was Dogger.
All I could do was nod.
“I beg your pardon for intruding,” he said, fanning his hands at the air and opening a window, “but Colonel de Luce wishes the family to congregate in the drawing room in a quarter of an hour.”
“Thank you, Dogger. I shall be along directly.”
Dogger didn’t move. His nostrils dilated as he very slightly raised his chin.
“Acetate?” he asked, not even bothering to take a full-fledged sniff.
“I believe it is,” I said. “If it had been cellulose nitrate we’d be in rather a sticky spot.”
“Indeed,” Dogger agreed. “May I be of assistance?”
I paused for only a fraction of a second before blurting out, “Can ciné film be patched?”
“It can indeed,” Dogger replied. “It is referred to in the trade, I believe, as ‘splicing.’ A few drops of acetone should do the trick.”
I reviewed the reaction in my mind.
“Of course!” I said. “A chemical bonding of the celluloid.”
“Just so,” Dogger said.
“I should have thought of that,” I admitted. “Wherever did you learn it?”
A cloud drifted across Dogger’s face, and for a few unsettling moments, I felt as if I were suddenly in the presence of an entirely different person.
A complete stranger.
“I—don’t know,” he said at last, slowly. “These fragments appear suddenly sometimes at the tips of my fingers—or on my tongue—as if—”
“Yes?”
“As if—”
I held my breath.
“Almost as if they were memories.”
And with those words the stranger had vanished. Dogger was suddenly back.
“May I be of assistance?” he asked again, as if nothing had happened.
Now here was a pretty pickle! Much as I wanted Dogger’s help, some dark and ancient part of me clung stubbornly to keeping the spool of film a secret.
It was all so beastly complicated! On the one hand, part of me wanted to be patted on the head and told “Good girl, Flavia!” while at the same time, another part wanted to hoard this new and unexpected glimpse of Harriet: to keep the film strictly to myself, like a dog with a fresh-flung soup bone.