I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (5 page)

“You told me you were master of many trades, Mr. McNulty,” Dogger said. “Which ones, in particular?”

It seemed rather an odd question to ask, but McNulty’s eyes shifted slowly from mine to Dogger’s.

“Carpentry,” he said through gritted teeth. It was easy to see that the man was in terrible pain. “Electrical … plumbing … drafting …”

Cold sweat stood out in globules on his brow.

“Yes?” Dogger asked, his arm steadily at work between the heavy box and the lorry. “Any more?”

“Bit of tool making,” McNulty went on, then added, almost apologetically, “I have a metal lathe at home …”

“Indeed!” Dogger said, looking surprised.

“… to make model steam engines.”

“Ah!” Dogger said. “Steam engines. Railway, agricultural, or stationary?”

“Stationary,” McNulty said through gritted teeth. “I fit them up with … little brass whistles … and regulators.”

Dogger removed the handkerchief from McNulty’s neck, twisting it quickly and tightly about the upper part of the trapped arm.

“Now!” he said briskly, and a hundred willing hands, it seemed, were suddenly gripping the packing case.

“Easy, now! Easy! Steady on!” the men told one another—not because the words were needed, but as if they were simply part of the ritual of shifting a heavy object.

And then quite suddenly they had lifted the crate away with no more effort than if it had been a child’s building block.

“Stretcher,” Dogger called, and one was brought forward instantly.
They must carry these things with them wherever they go
, I thought.

“Bring him into the kitchen,” Dogger said, and in less time than it takes to tell, McNulty, wrapped in a heavy blanket, was raising himself on his good elbow from the kitchen floor, sipping at the cup of hot tea that was in Mrs. Mullet’s hand.

“Chip-chip,” he said, giving me a wink.

“And now, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “if you wouldn’t mind giving Dr. Darby a call …”

“Um,” Dr. Darby said, fishing with two fingers for a crystal mint in the paper bag he always carried in his waistcoat pocket.

“Let’s get you to the hospital where I can have a decent look at you. X-rays, and all that. I’ll take you myself, since I’m going that way anyway.”

McNulty was now getting up painfully from a chair at the kitchen table, his arm and hand in a sling, bandaged from shoulder to knuckles.

“I can manage,” he growled, as many hands reached out to help him.

“Put your arm round my shoulder,” Dr. Darby told him. “The good people here will understand there’s nothing in it.”

Crammed together in a corner of the kitchen, the men from the film studio laughed loudly at this, as if the doctor had made a capital joke.

I watched as McNulty and Dr. Darby moved cautiously through to the foyer.

“Now we’re for it,” one of the men grumbled when they had gone. “How’re we to get on without Pat?”

“It’ll be Latshaw, then, won’t it?” said another.

“I suppose.”

“God help us, then,” said the first, and he actually spat on the kitchen floor.

Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed how cold I was. I gave a belated shiver, which didn’t escape the notice of Mrs. Mullet as she came bustling in from the pantry.

“Upstairs with you, dear, and into an ’ot bath. The Colonel’ll be fair cobbled to come ’ome and find you been out gallivantin’ in the snow nearly naked, so to speak. ’E’ll ’ave Dogger’s and my ’eads on a meat platter. Now off you go.”

FOUR

AT
THE
BOTTOM
OF the stairs, I was taken with a sudden but brilliant idea.

Even in summer, taking a bath in the east wing was like a major military campaign. Dogger would have to lug buckets of water from either the kitchen or the west wing to fill the tin hipbath in my bedroom, which would afterwards have to be bailed out, and the bathwater disposed of by dumping it down a WC in the west wing or one of the sinks in my laboratory. Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.

Besides, I had never really liked the idea of dirty bathwater being brought into my
sanctum sanctorum
. It seemed somehow blasphemous.

The solution was simple enough: I would bathe in Harriet’s boudoir.

Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

Harriet’s suite had an antique slipper bathtub, draped with a tall and gauzy white canopy. Like an elderly railway engine, the thing was equipped with any number of interesting taps, knobs, and valves with which one could adjust the velocity and the temperature of the water.

It would make bathing almost fun.

I smiled in anticipation as I walked along the corridor, happy in the thought that my chilled body would soon be immersed to the ears in hot suds.

I stopped and listened at the door—just in case.

Someone inside was singing!

“O for the wings, for the wings of a dove!

Far away, far away, would I rove!

In the wilderness build me a nest …”

I edged the door open and slipped inside.

“Is that you, Bun? Fetch me my robe, will you? It’s on the back of the door. Oh, and while you’re at it, a nice drinksie-winksie would be just what the doctor ordered.”

I stood perfectly still and waited.

“Bun?”

There was a faint, yet detectable note of fear in her voice.

“It’s me, Miss Wyvern … Flavia.”

“For God’s sake, girl, don’t lurk like that. Are you trying to frighten me to death? Come in here where I can see you.”

I showed myself around the half-open door.

Phyllis Wyvern was up to her shoulders in steaming water. Her hair was piled on top of her head like a haystack in the rain. I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t look at all like the woman I’d seen on the cinema screen. For one thing, she was wearing no makeup. For another, she had wrinkles.

I felt, to be perfectly honest, as if I’d just walked in on a witch in mid-transformation.

“Put the lid down,” she said, pointing to the toilet. “Have a seat and keep me company.”

I obeyed at once.

I hadn’t the heart—the guts, actually—to tell her that Harriet’s boudoir was off-limits. But then, of course, she had no way of knowing that. Dogger had explained the ground rules to Patrick McNulty before she’d arrived. McNulty was now on his way to the hospital in Hinley, and probably hadn’t had time to pass along the message.

Part of me watched the rest of me being in awe of the most famous movie star in the world … the galaxy … the universe!

“What are you staring at?” Phyllis Wyvern asked suddenly. “My puckers?”

For once, I couldn’t think of a diplomatic answer.

I nodded.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked, picking up a long cigarette holder from the edge of the tub. The smoke had been invisible in the steam.

I thought carefully before answering. Too low a number would indicate flattery; too high could result in disaster. The odds were against me. Unless I hit it dead-on, I couldn’t win.

“Thirty-seven,” I said.

She blew out a jet of smoke like a dragon.

“Bless you, Flavia de Luce,” she said. “You’re bang on! Thirty-seven-year-old stuffing in a fifty-nine-year-old sausage casing. But I’ve still got some spice in me.”

She laughed a throaty laugh, and I could see why the world was in love with her.

She plunged a pudding-sized bath sponge into the water, then squeezed it over her head. The water streamed down her face and dribbled off her chin.

“Look! I’m Niagara Falls!” she said, making a silly face.

I couldn’t help myself: I laughed aloud.

And then she stood up.

At that very instant, as if in a scene from one of those two-act comedies the St. Tancred’s Amateur Dramatic Society put on at the parish hall, a loud voice in the outer room said, “
What
in blue blazes do you think you’re doing?”

It was Feely.

She came storming—there’s no other way to express it—
storming
into the room.

“You know as well as I do, you, you filthy little swine, that no one is allowed—”

Naked, except for a few soap bubbles, Phyllis Wyvern stood staring at Feely through the swirling steam.

Time, for an instant, was frozen.

I was seized by the mad thought that I’d been suddenly thrust into Botticelli’s painting
The Birth of Venus
, but I quickly rejected it: Even though Feely’s expression
was
rather like the “I’ll-huff-and-I’ll-puff” look on the face of the wind god, Zephyrus, Phyllis Wyvern was no Venus—not by a long chalk.

Feely’s face was turning the color of water in which beets have been boiled.

“I … I …

“I beg your pardon,” she said, and I could have cheered! Even in the rush of that bizarre moment, I couldn’t help thinking that it was the first time in Feely’s life she had ever uttered those words.

Like a courtier withdrawing from the Royal Presence, she backed slowly out of the room.

“Hand me my towel,” commanded the bare-naked queen, and stepped out of the bath.

“Oh,
here
you are,” Bun Keats said behind me. “The door was open, so I—”

She caught sight of me and shut her mouth abruptly.

“Well, well, well,” said Phyllis Wyvern. “The delinquent Bun condescends at last to grace us with her presence.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.”

“ ‘I’m sorry, Miss Wyvern. I’ve been seeing to the unpacking.’ God help us.”

She mimicked her assistant’s voice in the same cruel and cutting way that Daffy had mimicked mine, but in this case, though, the imitation was brilliant. Professional.

I realized at once that a great actress can never be greater than when she’s starring in her own life.

Tears sprang to Bun Keats’s eyes, but she bent over and began picking up soggy towels.

“I don’t think these rooms are part of the agreement, Miss Wyvern,” she said. “I’d already laid out your bath in the north wing.”

“Mop up this mess,” Phyllis Wyvern said, ignoring her. “Use the towels. There’s nothing worse than a wet floor. Someone could slip and break their neck.”

I took the opportunity to make myself scarce.

Outside, the weather had worsened. I watched from the drawing room window as the snow, driven by a merciless north wind, blurred the outlines of the vans and lorries. By late afternoon, the wind had lessened a little and the stuff was now coming straight down in the gathering dark.

I turned from the window to Daffy, who was sunk deep into an armchair, her legs dangling over the arms. She was reading
Bleak House
again.

“I love books where it’s always raining,” she had once told me. “So much like real life.” I wasn’t sure if this was one of her clever insults, so I did not reply.

“It’s snowing like stink outside,” I said.

“It always snows outside. Never inside,” she said without looking up from her book. “And don’t say ‘stink.’ It’s common.”

“Do you think Father will make it home from London?”

Daffy shrugged. “If he does, he does. If he doesn’t, he can bunk over the night at Aunt Felicity’s. She doesn’t usually charge him more than a couple of quid for bed and breakfast.”

She reversed herself in the chair, making it clear that the conversation was at an end.

“I met Phyllis Wyvern this morning,” I said.

Daffy did not reply, but I saw that her eyes had stopped moving across the page. At least I had her attention.

“I talked to her while she was bathing,” I confided. I did not mention that this had taken place in Harriet’s boudoir. Whatever I was, I wasn’t a rat.

There was no response.

“Aren’t you interested, Daffy?”

“There’s time enough to meet these thespians later. They always put on a dog and pony show before the actual filming begins. A grace and favor thing. They call it ‘yakking up the yokels.’ Someone will take us round and show us all the ciné gear and tell us what a bloody marvel it is. Then they’ll introduce us to the actors, beginning with the boy who plays the hero as a child and falls through the ice, and ending with Phyllis Wyvern herself.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

Daffy preened a little.

“I try to keep myself well informed,” she said. “Besides, they shot a couple of exteriors at Foster’s last year, and Flossie dished the dirt.”

“I wouldn’t expect there was much dirt if they were only shooting exteriors,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” Daffy said darkly, and went on with her reading.

At four-thirty, the doorbell rang. I had been sitting on the stairs watching the electricians as they snaked miles of black cable from the foyer to far-flung corners of the house.

Father had ordered us to keep to our quarters and not to interfere with the work at hand, and I was doing my best to obey. Since the eastern staircase led up to my bedroom and laboratory, it could be considered, technically at least, as part of my quarters, and I certainly had no intention of interfering with the ciné crew.

Several rows of chairs had been set up in the foyer as if a meeting were planned, and I threaded my way through them to see who was at the door.

With all the noise and bustle of the workmen, Dogger mustn’t have heard the bell.

I opened the door and there, to my surprise, amid the whirling snow, stood the vicar, Denwyn Richardson.

“Ah, Flavia,” he said, brushing the flakes from his heavy black coat and stamping his galoshes like a cart horse’s feet, “how lovely to see you. May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, and as I stepped back from the door, a certain foreboding came over me. “It’s not bad news about Father, is it?”

Even as one of Father’s oldest and dearest friends, he seldom paid a visit to Buckshaw, and I knew that an unexpected vicar at the door could sometimes be an ominous sign. Perhaps there had been an accident in London. Perhaps the train had run off the tracks and overturned in a snowy field. If so, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be the first to hear it.

“Good lord, no!” the vicar said. “Your father’s gone up to London today, hasn’t he? Stamp meeting, or some such thing?”