SEVEN
I MADE AN APOLOGETIC entrance to the drawing room. I needn’t have bothered. No one paid me the slightest bit of attention.
Father, as usual, was standing at the window, lost in his own thoughts. At the railway station, he had worn a suit of darkest blue with a black band on one arm, as if clinging desperately to the hope that even the slightest tinge of color might bring Harriet home alive. But now he had given up and was dressed in black. His white face hanging above his mourning attire was awful.
Feely and Daffy, too, wore black dresses I had never seen before. I shuddered at the thought of what ancient wardrobes must have been plundered to turn out something decent, something proper.
Why hadn’t Father dressed me in black? I wondered. Why had he let me be seen at Buckshaw Halt in a white summer dress which, come to think of it, must have stuck out like a firework in the night sky?
Like a fizzler at a funeral, I thought, but quickly forced it out of my mind.
The problem with bereavement, I had already decided, was learning when to put on and when to take off the various masks that one was required to wear: with anyone who wasn’t a de Luce, profound and inconsolable grief, complete with limp hands and downcast eyes; with family, a distant coolness which, to tell the truth, was not all that different from our everyday life. Only when one was alone in one’s own room could one pull faces at oneself in one’s looking glass, hauling the corners of one’s eyes down with first and fourth fingers spread, lolling one’s tongue out and crossing one’s eyes horribly just to assure oneself that one was still alive.
I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it describes precisely how I felt.
We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don’t have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away.
A pale smile came into my mind because that was what Lena had given me as she looked up from the newspaper through which she had been leafing at far too fast a clip to be actually reading.
She took a last suck on her cigarette and crushed it without mercy in the ashtray before lighting another with a long match from the hearth.
In the corner, Undine was idly tearing off strips of the wallpaper.
“Undine, dear,” her mother said. “Stop doing that and run upstairs for my cigarettes. You shall find them in one of our portmanteaus.”
Father seemed at last to realize that we were all present, but even at that, he did not turn away from the window as he began to speak in a dull voice: “The lying-in-state shall commence at 1400 hours,” he said. “I’ve drawn up a rota. We shall each of us take turns standing vigil in six-hour watches in order of age, which means that I shall begin and Flavia shall finish. Kneeling benches have been laid on and Mrs. Mullet has seen to the candles.”
I thought I heard him swallow.
“From now until the funeral tomorrow, your mother is not to be left alone—not even for a moment. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Yes, Father,” Daffy said.
And there fell one of those de Lucean silences during which you could hear the ancient stones of Buckshaw shedding their dust.
“Are there any questions?”
“No, Father,” we said in unison, and I was surprised to hear my own voice leading all the rest.
Feely and Daffy took his words as a signal of dismissal and left the room as quickly as respect allowed. Lena drifted idly off in their wake.
We stood there not moving, Father and I. I hardly dared breathe. What I should have done, of course—what my heart was demanding me to do—was to run at him and throw my arms around him.
But I did not, of course. I had at least the decency to spare him that embarrassment.
After a time, perhaps because of my silence, he thought I had gone.
When he turned away from the window, I saw that his eyes were brimming.
Naturally, I couldn’t let him know that I had seen his tears. Pretending I hadn’t noticed, I walked from the room with my fingertips pressed together, as if in procession.
I needed to be alone.
Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I felt as if I were one of those prisoners in Daffy’s French novels who finds herself shackled hand and foot at the bottom of an old well in a dungeon with the water rising.
The only thing for it was to go to my laboratory and do something constructive with strychnine. There had been that business of the poisoned beehive written up in the News of the World not all that long ago, and I had hoped to add to scientific knowledge—to say nothing of the art of criminal investigation—with a number of my own insights into the possibilities of poisoning at the breakfast table.
I climbed the stairs, fishing the key from my pocket as I went. When working with deadly potions I had found it best to keep the door tightly locked.
I twisted the doorknob and stepped inside.
Esmeralda, my Buff Orpington hen, lay stretched out stiffly on the floor in a beam of sunlight, her neck and both legs fully extended, one wing unfurled as if she had been reaching for help. Sweep marks in the dust showed all too clearly her recent frantic floundering.
“Esmeralda!”
I dashed to her side.
Her only visible eye was staring at me blankly.
“Esmeralda!”
The eye blinked.
Esmeralda got dreamily to her feet and gave herself a good shaking, like a fat feather duster.
I cradled her in my arms, buried my face in the softness of her breast, and burst into tears.
“You goose!” I said into her feathers. “You silly goose! You frightened me half to death.”
Esmeralda pecked at my mouth, as she sometimes did when I put millet seeds between my lips for her to discover.
“How did you manage to get in here?” I asked, even though I thought I already knew the answer.
Dogger must have brought her up to my laboratory, as he did when she was being a nuisance in the greenhouse. And now that Dogger came to mind, I remembered he once told me that some chickens were given to treating themselves to dust baths during which they behaved as if hypnotized. And the floor was certainly dusty.
The truth of the matter is, I wanted to throw myself down on the floorboards and have a jolly good wallow in the dirt myself. I was sick of this constant being on show that Harriet’s sudden reappearance had brought us: this going about in utter silence; this being dressed forever in our best; this perpetual watching of our words; this being always on our best behavior; these round-the-clock reminders of returning to dust.
It was probably time to think about giving the place a good housecleaning.
But not just yet. My sudden tendency to tears had shaken me.
“What am I going to do, Esmeralda?” I asked.
Esmeralda fixed me with her yellow eye: an eye as warm and mellow as the sun, and yet, at the same time, as old and cold as the mountains.
And in that instant, I knew.
Harriet.
Harriet was in the house and I needed to go to her.
She had something to tell me.