I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (2 page)

“Fire,” I had said in a dazed and vaguely monotonous voice. “The house is in flames … the walls and the floor. I’m afraid I must ring off now. I’m sorry, but the firemen are hacking at the window.”

The bill collector had not called back.

“My meetings with the Estate Duties Office,” Father was saying, “have come to nothing. It is all up with us now.”

“But Aunt Felicity!” Daffy protested. “Surely Aunt Felicity—”

“Your aunt Felicity has neither the means nor the inclination to alleviate the situation. I’m afraid she’s—”

“Coming down for Christmas,” Daffy interrupted. “You could ask her while she’s here!”

“No,” Father said sadly, shaking his head. “All means have failed. The dance is over. I have been forced at last to give up Buckshaw—”

I let out a gasp.

Feely leaned forward, her brow furrowed. She was chewing at one of her fingernails: unheard of in someone as vain as she.

Daffy looked on through half-shut eyes, inscrutable as ever.

“—to a film studio,” Father went on. “They will arrive in the week before Christmas, and will remain in full possession until their work is complete.”

“But what about us?” Daffy asked. “What’s to become of us?”

“We shall be allowed to remain on the premises,” Father replied, “provided we keep to our quarters and don’t interfere in any way with the company’s work at hand. I’m sorry, but those were the best terms I could manage. In return, we shall receive, in the end, sufficient remuneration to keep our noses above water—at least until next Lady Day.”

I should have suspected something of the kind. It was only a couple of months since we had received a visitation from a pair of young men in scarves and flannels who had spent two days photographing Buckshaw from every conceivable angle, inside and out. Neville and Charlie, they were called, and Father had been exceedingly vague about their intentions. Supposing it to be just another photo visit from
Country Life
, I had put it out of my mind.

Now Father had been drawn again to the window, where he stood gazing out upon his troubled estate.

Feely got to her feet and strolled casually to the looking glass. She leaned in, peering closely at her own reflection.

I knew already what was on her mind.

“Any idea what it’s about?” she asked in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. “The film, I mean.”

“Another one of those blasted country house things, I believe,” Father replied, without turning round. “I didn’t bother to ask.”

“Any big names?”

“None that I recognize,” Father said. “The agent rattled on and on about someone named Wyvern, but it meant nothing to me.”

“
Phyllis
Wyvern?” Daffy was all agog. “Not
Phyllis
Wyvern?”

“Yes, that’s it,” Father said, brightening, but only a little. “Phyllis. The name rang a bell. Same name as the chairwoman of the Hampshire Philatelic Society.

“Except that
her
name is Phyllis
Bramble
,” he added, “not Wyvern.”

“But Phyllis Wyvern is the biggest film star in the world,” Feely said, openmouthed. “In the
galaxy
!”

“In the universe,” Daffy added solemnly. “
The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter
—she played Minah Kilgore, remember?
Anna of the Steppes … Love and Blood … Dressed for Dying … The Secret Summer
. She was supposed to have played Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
, but she choked on a peach pit the night before her screen test and couldn’t speak a word.”

Daffy kept up to date on all the latest cinema gossip by speed-reading magazines at the village newsagent’s shop.

“She’s coming here to Buckshaw?” Feely asked. “Phyllis Wyvern?”

Father had given the ghost of a shrug and returned to staring glumly out the window.

I hurried down the east staircase. The dining room was in darkness. As I walked into the kitchen, Daffy and Feely looked up sourly from their porridge troughs.

“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Mrs. Mullet. “We was just talkin’ about sendin’ up a search party to see if you was still alive. ’Urry along now. Them fillum people will be ’ere before you can say ‘Jack Robertson.’ ”

I bolted my breakfast (clumpy porridge and burnt toast with lemon curd) and was about to make my escape when the kitchen door opened and in came Dogger on a rush of cold, fresh air.

“Good morning, Dogger,” I said. “Are we picking out a tree today?”

For as long as I could remember, it had been a tradition for my sisters and me, in the week before Christmas, to accompany Dogger into the wood on Buckshaw’s eastern outskirts, where we would gravely consider this tree and that, awarding each one points for height, shape, fullness, and general all-round character before finally selecting a champion.

Next morning, as if by magic, the chosen tree would appear in the drawing room, set up securely in a coal scuttle and ready for our attentions. All of us—except Father—would spend the day in a blizzard of antique tinsel, silver and gold garlands, colored glass balls, and little angels tooting pasteboard trumpets, hovering as long as we could over our small tasks until late in the darkening afternoon when, reluctantly, the thing was done.

Because it was the single day of the year upon which my sisters were a little less beastly to me than usual, I looked forward to it with barely suppressed excitement. For a single day—or for a few hours at least—we would be carefully civil to one another, teasing and joking and sometimes even laughing together, as if we were one of those poor but cheerful families from Dickens.

I was already smiling in anticipation.

“I’m afraid not, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “The Colonel has given orders for the house to be left as is. Those are the wishes of the film people.”

“Oh, bother the film people!” I said, perhaps too loudly. “They can’t keep us from having Christmas.”

But I saw at once by the sad look on Dogger’s face that they could.

“I shall put up a little tree in the greenhouse,” he said. “It will keep longer in the cool air.”

“But it won’t be the same!” I protested.

“No, it won’t,” Dogger agreed, “but we shall have done our best.”

Before I could think of a reply, Father came into the kitchen, scowling at us as if he were a bank manager and we a group of renegade depositors who had somehow managed to breach the barriers before opening time.

We all of us sat with eyes downcast as he opened his
London Philatelist
and turned his attention to spreading his charred toast with pallid white margarine.

“Nice fresh snow overnight,” Mrs. Mullet remarked cheerily, but I could see by her worried glance towards the window that her heart was not in it. If the wind kept blowing as it was, she would have to wade home through the drifts when her day’s work was done.

Of course, if the weather were too severe, Father would have Dogger ring up for Clarence Mundy’s taxicab—but with a stiff winter crosswind, it was always touch and go whether Clarence could plow through the deep piles that invariably drifted in between the gaps in the hedgerows. As all of us knew, there were times when Buckshaw was accessible only on foot.

When Harriet was alive, there had been a sleigh with bells and blankets—in fact, the sleigh itself still stood in a shadowy corner of the coach house, behind Harriet’s Rolls-Royce Phantom II, each of them a monument to its departed owner. The horses, alas, were long gone: sold at auction in the wake of Harriet’s death.

Something rumbled in the distance.

“Listen!” I said. “What was that?”

“Wind,” Daffy replied. “Do you want that last piece of toast, or shall I have it?”

I grabbed the slice and gobbled it down dry as I dashed for the foyer.

TWO

A
BLAST
OF
COLD
air blew a flurry of freezing flakes into my face as I tugged open the heavy front door. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering, and squinted out at the winter world.

In the first bleak light of day, the landscape was a black-and-white photograph, the vast expanses of the snowy lawn broken only by the ink-black silhouettes of the stark, leafless chestnut trees that lined the avenue. Here and there on the lawns, white-capped bushes bent towards the earth, cringing under their heavy loads.

Because of the blowing snow, it was impossible to see as far as the Mulford Gates, but something out there was moving.

I wiped the condensation from my eyes and looked again.

Yes! A small spot of pale color—and then another—had appeared upon the landscape! In the lead was an immense pantechnicon, its scarlet color growing ever more vivid as it came growling towards me through the falling snow. Lumbering along in its wake like a procession of clockwork elephants was a string of lesser vans … two … three … four … five … no, six of them!

As the pantechnicon made its slow, stiff-jointed final turn into the forecourt, I could clearly make out the name on the side:
Ilium Films
, it said, in bold cream and yellow letters, painted as if in three dimensions. The lesser lorries were similarly marked, but still impressive as they pulled up in a herd around their leader.

The door of the pantechnicon swung open and a massive sandy-haired man climbed down. He was dressed in a bib overall, with a flat cap on his head and a red handkerchief wrapped round his neck.

As he crunched towards me through the snow, I was suddenly aware of Dogger at my side.

“S’truth,” the man said, wincing at the wind.

With a disbelieving shake of his head, he approached Dogger, sticking out a raw, meaty hand.

“McNulty,” he said. “Ilium Films. Transport Department. Jack-of-all-trades and master of ’em all.”

Dogger shook the huge hand but said nothing.

“Need to get this circus round back the house and out of the north wind. Fred’s generator cuts up something fierce when it gets too cold. Needs coddling, Fred’s generator does.

“What’s
your
name, little girl?” he asked suddenly, turning to me and crouching down. “Margaret Rose, I’ll bet. Yes, that’s it … Margaret Rose. You’re a Margaret Rose if I ever saw one.”

I had half a mind to march upstairs to my laboratory, fetch down a jar of cyanide, seize this boob’s nose, tilt his head back, pour the stuff down his throat, and hang the consequences.

Fortunately, good breeding kept me from doing so.

Margaret Rose, indeed!

“Yes, that’s right, Mr. McNulty,” I said, forcing a smile of amazement. “Margaret Rose
is
my name. However did you guess?”

“It’s the sixth sense I’m gifted with,” he said, with what looked like a practiced shrug. “Me Irish blood,” he added, putting on a bit of the old brogue, and giving me a saucy tip of his cloth cap as he stood up.

“Now, then,” he said, turning to Dogger, “their lordships and ladyships will be along at noon in their motorcars. They’ll be hungry as hounds after the drive down from London, so look sharp and see that you’ve got buckets of caviar laid on.”

Dogger’s face was a total blank.

“Here, I’m only joking, mate!” McNulty said, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to dig Dogger in the ribs.

“Joking, see? We travel with our own canteen.”

He gave a jerk of his thumb to indicate one of the vans that sat patiently waiting in the forecourt.

“Joking,” Dogger said. “I understand. If you’ll be so good as to remove your boots and follow me …”

As Dogger closed the door behind him, McNulty stopped and gaped at his surroundings. He seemed particularly in awe of the two grand staircases that led up to the first floor.

“S’truth!” he said. “Do people actually live like this?”

“So I am given to believe,” Dogger said. “This way, please.”

I tagged along as Dogger gave McNulty a whirlwind tour: dining room, firearms museum, Rose Room, Blue Room, morning room …

“The drawing room and the Colonel’s study are off limits,” Dogger said, “as has been previously agreed upon. I have affixed a small white circle to each of those doors as a reminder, so that there will be no breach of—their privacy.”

He had almost said “our privacy.” I was sure of it.

“I’ll pass the word,” McNulty said. “Should be no sweat. Our lot’s pretty clannish, as well.”

We made our way through to the east wing and into the portrait gallery. I was half expecting to find it as it had been in my dream: an icy, flooded wasteland. But the room remained as it had been since time immemorial: a long dim train shed of glowering ancestors who, with just a few exceptions (Countess Daisy, for instance, who was said to have greeted visitors to Buckshaw by turning handsprings on the roof in a Chinese silk smock) seemed to have subsided, one and all, into a collective and perpetual sulk that did not exactly gladden one’s heart.

“Use of the portrait gallery has been negotiated—” Dogger was saying.

“But none of yer ’obnail boots on the floor, mind!” a voice cut in. It was Mrs. Mullet.

Hands on hips, she gave McNulty her proprietary glare, then in a softer voice said:

“Beggin’ your pardon, Dogger, but the Colonel’s off now to London for ’is stamp meet. ’E wishes to see you about the tinned beef, an’ that, before ’e goes.”

“Tinned beef” was a code word meaning that Father needed to borrow money for train and taxi fare. I had discovered this by listening at the door of Father’s study. It was a fact I wished I didn’t know.

“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.”