Father’s answer was a very long time in coming, as if his words needed to be fetched back, one by one, from the past.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he said at last. “Why do you never add water to sulfuric acid?”
“Because of the exothermic reaction!” I cried. “The concentrated acid must always be added to the water, rather than the other way around. Otherwise it can play Old Hob with your surroundings!”
Just thinking about it made me boil over with excitement!
“Precisely,” Father said.
Of course I saw instantly what he was driving at. O, how wise a man my father was!
But then, in a flash, the present intruded. The meaning of his words sank in.
I was to leave Buckshaw.
I wanted to fling myself down on the floor and kick and scream, but of course I couldn’t.
It simply wasn’t fair.
“I have done my best for you, Flavia,” Father said. “In spite of the fierce opposition of others, I have tried so damnably hard to leave you alone, which seems to me the most precious gift one can bestow upon a child.”
Realization came flooding in.
How clever I had always thought myself, and yet, without my suspecting it, Father had all along been my co-conspirator.
“We shall miss you, of course,” he said, and then he had to stop, because by now, both of us were gulping like guppies.
Poor dear Father. And, come to think of it, poor dear Flavia.
How alike we were!
When you came right down to it.
It was the morning after the funeral, and Aunt Felicity and I were poling along in the sunshine on the ornamental lake in an ancient punt which Dogger had dug out and brought down from the attic of the coach house.
“Don’t push too vigorously,” Aunt Felicity cautioned, adjusting her ancient parasol. “Dogger warned me that it’s only the paint that’s holding this relic together.”
I grinned. Even if we broke through the bottom of the boat, we’d only find ourselves up to our knees in sun-warmed water.
“Life’s like that, too,” Aunt Felicity continued. “Too much push, and bang through the bottom one goes. Still, if one doesn’t paddle, one doesn’t get anywhere. Maddening, isn’t it?”
I could hardly believe it: Here I was floating along on an eighteenth-century lake with the Gamekeeper herself, and yet to a spy lurking behind a ruined statue on the Visto, we would look to be no more than a pleasant painting by one of those French impressionists: Monet, perhaps, or Degas.
Light twinkled on the lake and under the hanging willows.
We were like an image on a ciné screen.
After breakfast, I had taken Aunt Felicity to my laboratory and shown her the film I had developed.
She had watched it in silence, and when the last frame had run through the projector, seized the spool of film and thrust it into her pocket.
“Pheasant sandwiches.”
Her mouth formed the words, but not a sound came out.
“The phrase was chosen carefully for its combination of plosives and fricatives: consonants which could be formed in total silence. Innocuous to the casual observer, but a clear warning of danger to an initiate.”
“But who was Harriet warning?”
“Me,” Aunt Felicity said. “It was I who was shooting the film. I had a perfect view of your mother in the camera’s viewfinder and recognized her warning instantly.”
“Against who?” I was about to say, but caught myself just in time to correct it to “Against whom?”
“The late Lena,” Aunt Felicity answered. “She had come down to Buckshaw unexpectedly, as she was wont to do, and had waded across to the Folly without our noticing, perhaps hoping to catch us off guard. Your mother—and it is to her eternal credit that she did so—had already begun, even then, to suspect Lena’s leanings, if I may coin a rather tawdry phrase.”
It took me a moment, but I nodded to show that I understood.
But why hadn’t Harriet simply called out, “Hullo! Here’s Lena!” or some such thing? Why had she chosen to mouth a coded warning to Aunt Felicity alone?
I recalled Lena’s words: “We were quite chummy, your mother and I—at least when we ran into each other outside of a family setting.”
Outside of a family setting, she had said. Perhaps inside of one they were at loggerheads. It was a situation I had no difficulty in understanding.
Families were deep waters indeed, and I still had much to learn about what luces lurked beneath the surface of my own.
Now, floating lazily on the lake with Aunt Felicity, surrounded by the reality, those black-and-white images from another time—filmed at this very location—seemed as distant as a half-forgotten dream.
“Who was the man in the window?” I asked.
It was one of the strands of the puzzle I had been unable to unwind to my satisfaction.
“Tristram Tallis,” Aunt Felicity said.
“I thought as much. But why was he dressed in an American uniform?”
“A very perceptive observation,” Aunt Felicity said, “since he was in view for mere fractions of a second.”
“Well, actually it was Dogger who spotted that,” I admitted.
“You showed Dogger the film?” She pounced upon my words like a leopard upon its prey.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I didn’t know it was important—I mean, I didn’t know what it meant.”
I still didn’t, but I was hoping to find out.
“Was it wrong of me?”
Aunt Felicity did not answer my question. “It is essential,” she said, “to know at all times who knows what. Keep Kipling in mind.”
“Kipling was a goddamn Tory and a jingoist to boot,” I said, hoping to seem wise beyond my years.
“Pfah!” Aunt Felicity said, surprising me by spitting over the side of the boat. “You picked up that nonsense from Lena, or at least from Undine.”
I admitted I had.
“Kipling was no Tory, nor was he a jingoist. He was a spy in the service of Queen Victoria, and a damned good one at that. He as much as said so, but no one recognized it. They thought he was prattling on for children. Perfect camouflage that, you’ll have to admit.”
She sat up straight in the punt, and for a moment I had the uncanny feeling that I was in the presence of a queen.
She raised her voice an octave and in a royal accent began to recite:
“I keep six honest serving-men
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.