I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows (27 page)

Father shuffled his feet and looked cautiously out from beneath his eyebrows.

“I’ve told Miss Gilfoyle she is welcome to stay as long as she likes, but …”

“… but she must be getting along,” Nialla finished brightly, smiling down at the child in her arms and brushing an imaginary something off its chin.

“He looks a little like Rex Harrison,” I said. “Especially his forehead.”

Nialla blushed prettily, glancing at the vicar, as if for support.

“I hope he has his father’s brains,” she said, “and not mine.”

There was one of those long, uncomfortable silences during which you pray in earnest that no one will make a rude noise.

“Ah, Colonel de Luce, here you are,” said the world-famous voice, and Desmond Duncan made his entrance with as polished and attention-getting a stride as had ever been stridden in front of a ciné camera or a West End audience. “Dogger told me I should find you here. I’ve been awaiting the opportunity to convey to you some remarkably good news.”

In his hand was the copy of
Romeo and Juliet
he had pocketed in the library.

“ ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news,’ or so, at least, said the apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah, but presumably speaking of his own feet, in his letter to the Romans,” the vicar remarked to no one in particular.

Everyone glanced at once at Desmond Duncan’s Bond Street shoes, but when they realized their mistake, they all stared intently instead at the ceiling.

“This quite unassuming little volume, which has turned up in your library, is, if I am not mistaken, a Shakespeare First Quarto. That it is of great value is beyond question, and I should be guilty of a cruel trespass if I pretended it was not.”

He scanned the cover, removed his glasses, glanced at Father, restored the glasses, and opened the book to the title page.

“John Danter,” he said, in a slow, reverent whisper, holding the book out for inspection.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Father said.

Desmond Duncan drew in a deep breath.

“Unless I miss my bet, Colonel de Luce, you are the possessor of a First Quarto of
Romeo and Juliet
. Printed in 1597 by John Danter. Pity about the modern inscription, though. You could, perhaps, have it professionally removed.”

“How much?” Aunt Felicity demanded abruptly. “Must be worth a pretty penny.”

“How much?” Desmond Duncan smiled. “A king’s ransom, possibly. I can tell you that, without question, if brought to auction today … a million, perhaps.

“It’s what is known as a ‘Foul Quarto,’ ” he went on, his excitement barely under control. “The text is quite different in places from the one we are accustomed to seeing performed. It was believed to have been created from Shakespeare’s players having to recall their parts from memory. Hence its inaccuracy.”

As if in a trance, Daffy was creeping slowly forward, her hand extended towards the book.

“Are you saying,” she asked, “that Shakespeare himself might have held this very volume in his hands?”

“It’s certainly possible,” Desmond Duncan said. “It needs to be assessed by an expert. Look here: There are inky chicken scratches all the way through—very old, by the look of them. Someone has certainly marked it up.”

Daffy’s fingers, now no more than an inch from the book, pulled back suddenly as if she had been burned.

“I can’t!” she said. “I simply can’t!”

Father, who had been standing motionless, now reached mechanically for the book, his face as stiff as a chapel poker.

But Desmond Duncan was not finished.

“Having been party to the discovery, or at least the identification of such a great treasure, I should like to think of myself as having something of an edge when and if you decide to …”

The room fell silent as Father took the book from the actor’s hands and slowly turned its pages. He riffled through the Quarto, as most people do with a book, from back to front. He had now arrived at the title page, which lay open in his hand.

“As I say, this modern defacement could be removed easily by an expert,” Desmond Duncan went on. “I believe the British Library employs specialists in restoration who could erase these unfortunate blots without a trace. I’m quite sure that, when all’s said and done, you’ll be happy with the outcome.”

Although Father’s face did not betray it, he was staring at the monogram—his own initials and Harriet’s intertwined.

Slowly, his forefinger moved across the surface of the paper, coming to rest at last on the red and black inked initials, carefully tracing them out afresh: Harriet’s, and then his own, in the form of a cross.

As if by wireless, I was able to read the thoughts that were flying through his mind. He was remembering the day—the very moment—that these initials had been inscribed, the red ink by Harriet, the black by himself.

Had they been written, perhaps, as the two of them were seated at a sunny casement window in summer? Or after taking breathless shelter in the greenhouse, while a sudden sun shower ran in unnoticed rivers down the outside of the glass, casting weak, watery shadows onto their young and wonder-filled faces?

Twenty years flashed like cloud shadows across Father’s face, invisible to everyone but me.

And now he was thinking about Buckshaw. The Shakespeare Quarto, at auction, would bring in enough to pay off his debts and, with a bit of prudent investing, keep us in modest but comfortable circumstances for as long as was needed, with—God willing—even a few odd pounds left over to treat himself to the occasional block of Plate 1B Penny Blacks.

I could read it in his face.

He closed the book and looked round at us all, one by one … Daffy … Feely … the vicar … Dogger, who had just come into the room … Aunt Felicity … Nialla … and me, as if he might find written on our faces instructions on how to proceed.

And then, quite quietly, he said to none of us:

“How oft when men are at the point of death

Have they been merry! which their keepers call

A lightning before death. O, how may I

Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!

Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath
,

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

Daffy gasped audibly. Feely was as pale as death, her lips parted, her eyes on Father’s face. I recognized the words at once as those Romeo had spoken at the tomb of Juliet.

“Thou art not conquered,”
Father went on, his voice becoming ever more hushed, the Quarto clutched tightly in his hands.

“Beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks
,

And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.”

He was speaking to Harriet!

His words, now barely audible, were scarcely more than a whisper.

“Shall I believe

That unsubstantial Death is amorous
,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?”

As if she were in the room …

“For fear of that I still will stay with thee

And never from this palace of dim night

Depart again.”

And then he turned, and walked slowly out of the room, as if from a graveside.

My father is not a hugger, but I wanted to hug him. I wanted to run after him and throw my arms around him and hug him until the jam ran out.

But of course, I didn’t. We de Luces do not gush.

And yet, perhaps, when they come to write the final history of this island race, there will be a chapter on all those glorious scenes that were played out only in British minds, rather than in the flesh, and if they do, Father and I will be there, if not hand in hand, then marching, at least, in the same parade.

EVERYONE
HAD
QUIETLY
FOLLOWED
Father from the drawing room. They had melted away as casually as the extras in a film after the big dance number, leaving me alone at last to stretch luxuriously on the sofa, close my eyes for a while, and plan for the future, which, for now, seemed likely to be given over to a course of steaming mustard plasters, buckets of cod-liver oil, and forced feedings of Mrs. Mullet’s revolting invalid pudding.

The very thought of the stuff made my uvula cower behind my tonsils. The uvula is that little fleshy stalactite that dangles at the back of your throat, whose name, Dogger told me, comes from the Latin word for “grape.”

How did he know these things? I wondered. Although there had been numerous occasions when Dogger’s knowledge of the human body had come in handy, I had thought of it until just recently as being due to his age. Surely someone who has lived as long in the world as Dogger has, someone who has endured a prisoner-of-war camp, couldn’t help but to have acquired a certain amount of practical information.

And yet there was more to it than that. I knew it instinctively and realized with a sudden shiver that part of me had known it all along.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I had asked as we’d stood together over Phyllis Wyvern’s body.

“Yes,” Dogger had replied.

My mind was teeming. There were so very many things that needed thinking about.

Aunt Felicity, for instance. Her account of her wartime service, however scanty, had reminded me of Uncle Tar’s correspondence with Winston Churchill, much of which still lay unexamined in a desk drawer in my laboratory. All of it was too early, of course, to have a direct bearing upon the matter. Uncle Tar had been dead for more than twenty years, but I had not forgotten that Aunt Felicity and Harriet had spent happy summers with him here at Buckshaw.

It was definitely worth another look.

And then there was Father Christmas. Had he, in spite of the mob, managed to make his way secretly into the house? Had he brought me the glass retorts and test tubes I had asked for—all the lovely flasks and funnels, the beakers and pipettes, packed in straw and nestled in together, crystal cheek almost touching crystal cheek? Were they already upstairs in my laboratory, gleaming in the winter light, awaiting only the touch of my hand to bring them to bubbling life?

Or was the old saint, after all, really no more than the cruel myth Daffy and Feely had made him out to be?

I surely hoped not.

Then suddenly there sprang to my mind a particular proof that starts with the letter
P
, and it wasn’t potassium.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of laughter in the next room, and a moment later, Feely and Daffy came in, their arms full of gaily wrapped gifts.

“Father said it was all right,” Daffy told me. “You were out cold for Christmas and we’re both of us dying to see what Aunt Felicity gave you.”

She let fall onto my legs a package wrapped in what looked suspiciously like Easter paper.

“Go ahead—open it.”

My curiously weakened fingers picked at the ribbon, tearing the paper at the corner of the package.

“Give it here,” Feely said. “You’re so clumsy.”

I had already felt through the paper that the package contained something soft, and had written it off. Everyone knows that truly great gifts are always hard to the touch, and I could tell, even without opening it, that Aunt Felicity’s was a dud.

I handed it over without a word.

“Oh, look!” Feely said, with fake enthusiasm, tossing aside the paper. “A bed jacket!”

She held the silk monstrosity up to her chest as if she were modeling it. Cross-stitched all over in a padded diamond pattern, the thing looked like a cast-off life jacket from a Chinese junk.

“The jade will go nicely with your complexion,” Daffy said. “Do you want to try it on?”

I turned my face towards the back of the sofa.

“This next one is from Father,” Feely said. “Shall I open it?”

I reached out and took the small packet from her hands. The label read:

To: Flavia

From: Father

Merry Christmas
.

There was a picture of a little robin redbreast in the snow.

The paper came away easily enough. Inside was a small book.

“What is it?” Daffy demanded.

“
Aniline Dyes in the Printing of the British Postage Stamp: A Chemical History
,” I read aloud.

Dear old Father. I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry.

I held the book out for Daffy to see, forcing myself to remember how excited I had been when I’d first read that the great Friedrich August Kekulé, one of the fathers of organic chemistry, had originally envisioned the tetravalent carbon atom while coming home from Clapham on top of a horse-drawn omnibus. The voice of the conductor calling out “Clapham Road!” had interrupted his train of thought, and he had forgotten his revelation until four years later.

Kekulé had been associated with printing inks, hadn’t he? Hadn’t his friend Hugo Müller been employed by De La Rue, the printers of British postage stamps?

I put the book aside. I would deal with my jumble of feelings later—when I was alone.

“This is from me,” Feely said. “Open it next. Careful you don’t break it.”

I peeled the paper carefully from the flat, square package, knowing as soon as I touched it that it was a phonograph record.

As indeed it was: Toccata, by Pietro Domenico Paradis, from his Sonata in A, played by the superb Eileen Joyce.

To me, it was the greatest piece of music composed since Adam and Eve were camped out in Eden, a melody that bubbled and danced and skittered about like the happy atoms of sodium or magnesium when they are dropped into a beaker of hydrochloric acid.