Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (9 page)

“But Oliver Inchbald was already dead by then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. For some years. As a matter of fact, it was Auntie Loo who was called upon to identify his body.”

“Really?” I couldn't hide my interest. “How do you know that?”

“Because she told me so. ‘
It was I who was called upon to identify the body.'
Those were her very words. I remember them quite distinctly.”

My mind was running away with itself.

“Why would she be called upon to identify his body? Why not his family?”

“Well, Auntie Loo said it was because his wife had become deranged, and his son point-blank refused.”

“Good lord,” I said. “I wonder why? Was there something unusual about the way he died?”

“I suppose you could say so. He was pecked to death by seagulls while he was bird-nesting. On the island of Steep Holm. It's in the Bristol Channel.”

“Nesting season?” I asked.

You didn't need to be a radio panelist on
Puzzle Corner
or
What Do You Know?
to deduce that fascinating fact.

“I think so,” Carla said. “Auntie Loo said there wasn't much left of him but a few ribbons, his wallet, and his pipe.”

“Crispian Crumpet—Crispian Inchbald, I mean—must have been devastated. What a way to lose your father!”

“I suppose,” Carla said. “Although by then he was no longer a boy. He was at Oxford, I think, and was already doing something in cinema films, lighting or sound or something. I don't remember. He was very artistic—like his father.”

“Was?” I asked. “Isn't he still alive? Crispian, I mean?”

“As far as I know. Auntie Loo used to send him a Christmas card every year, but he never wrote her back. ‘
He's a bit of a rum 'un,'
she used to say.”

Crispian Crumpet? A rum 'un? I could hardly believe it. Whatever could have become of the famous little boy who baptized his bicycle—the little boy who was digging a hole to China (or Bengal)—the dear little boy who wanted to build his father a house of mud, for just the two of them?

I realized with a pang that I had often wished to do just that myself.

I had a brief vision of kidnapping Father from the hospital in Hinley and whisking him off to some distant island in the tropics—just the two of us—where I would build him a hut of mud and grass: a new Buckshaw, free of all the cares and worries that had brought him so low. There would be an annex, of course, for his stamp collection, and another for my chemistry lab.

And there we would live upon turtle's eggs and coconut milk, tuning in on a short-wave wireless set to the BBC whenever we felt like a bit of Bach or Philip Odell.

It would be heaven on earth, and we would hang in our hammocks, Father and I, as we talked quietly to each other and watched the setting sun.

“He got himself into some kind of trouble with the law,” Carla said. “Auntie Loo wasn't sure what it was, but it had something to do with the racetrack.”

“A betting man, was he?” I asked.

Carla shrugged.

Undine chose that very moment to interrupt. She came charging out of the parish hall like a deranged bowling ball, arms flailing and veering alarmingly from side to side.

“Flavia! Gravia! Quavia, Slavia!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, as if the whole world had just gone deaf. She climbed up onto a teetering tombstone, where she stood wigwagging her arms for balance. “I'm the king of the castle, and you're the dirty rascal!” she bellowed.

“Pipe down!” I said. “There's a concert going on inside.”

“It's finished,” Undine said. “The gingerbread was better than the music. I'm already hungry again. Let's go home.”

“I must apologize for my cousin, Undine,” I said. “She can be quite uncouth.”

“Not at all,” Carla said. “I admire her frankness.”

“See?” Undine crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

“I've enjoyed our little talk,” Carla said. “Perhaps we can continue it another time.”

“I'd like that,” I told her. “Oh, by the way: I couldn't help wondering if you still have all your Oliver Inchbald books? I'd like to borrow them one of these days,” I added, “…just for old times' sake, and because of their association with the author. I promise I'd look after them.”

“Of course I have,” Carla replied, with just a trace of a glare. “I wouldn't part with them for all the tea in China.”

“Oolong!” Undine shouted. As I seized her by the arm and dragged her away, she made a remarkably coarse sound with her mouth.

Outside, the temperature had plummeted and, as we made our way across the hardening fields in the growing darkness, a light snow began to fall. Here and there, distant electric lights came on in other people's homes, mere pinpricks in the gloom.
Mirages of happiness,
I thought.
If you walk towards them, they will never grow any closer. Eventually they will vanish into thin air, like the Lady of the Lake.

“What are you thinking about?” Undine demanded. “You make me nervous when you don't say anything.”

“Grub,” I said. “I was thinking about grub.”

“Ha!” she shouted. “Sausages with jam! Pickled shortbread! Cold candied tongue with snail sauce!”

And so on, until we reached Buckshaw at teatime and in darkness.

Having handed Undine over to Mrs. Mullet, and begging a fierce headache (“You poor dear. You'd best go up for a nap. Bundle up warm, mind.”), I made my way up the shadowed staircase, which seemed longer and steeper than usual.

A
LONE AT LAST IN
my chemical laboratory, I put my back against the door and pushed, as if hordes of barbarians with battle-axes were battering at the other side.

There had been so little time to think. I mean to
really
think.

I needed to settle my mind: to restore it to some kind of normality.

Everything was out of kilter, and it wasn't just me.

The prospect of a missed Christmas hung like a pall over Buckshaw. Memories of Christmases past danced just beyond the fringes of consciousness, taunting me with half-remembered sounds and smells: of carols, cranberries, and Christmas crackers; the fresh rustle of wrapping paper and the feel of fat, fresh snowflakes tickling our faces as we trudged through the drifts to church on Christmas Eve.

I took down a glass bell jar from a shelf and placed it on a bench.

In spite of the imagined barbarians at the barricaded door, I unlocked it, opened it, and made my way down the stairs for a raid upon the kitchen.

One of the joys of an old house, such as Buckshaw, is its constancy. The squeaking stairs have squeaked for centuries, and the quiet ones have remained silent. Particular treads that gave out a groan under my feet had similarly misbehaved under the boots, shoes, and slippers of my ancestors. There were no surprises. We de Luces had known since time immemorial how to raid a kitchen in silence. We could do it in our sleep.

I waited until Mrs. Mullet was busy with the cooker, then slipped in and did what I had to do.

Within two minutes I was back in my laboratory, and the pantry was missing three stems of rosemary. I couldn't resist holding them to my nose and inhaling their intoxicating scent.

I tied the sprigs together with a bit of thread and set them aside.

Now, from a bottom cupboard, I brought out a round iron plate which had once been the base of a flask stand. I lit a Bunsen burner and held the heavy disk to the flame—using oven mitts, of course. Mrs. Mullet wouldn't miss them.

Within a minute or so, the room was filled with the smell of hot iron: a sharp, acrid aroma, which is what I always imagine railway tracks must smell like in the extremes of an Australian summer.

As a precaution, I opened a window sash. It wouldn't do to have someone think the house was on fire.

When the disc was nearly red-hot, I placed it on a sheet of Pyrex, sprinkled on it a layer of powdered gum bezoin, placed my bundled sprigs of rosemary on the metal, covered them with the bell jar, and sat down to watch.

The gum bezoin melted at once, causing the little world inside the glass to fill with a dense fog. As the fumes arose, the bundle of herbs took on a coat of silky white crystals: benzoic acid.

The branches of rosemary were now completely covered with artificial hoarfrost: my own private Christmas tree growing somewhere in a secret, snowy wood.

Lacking gifts and decorations, it was not, of course, as comforting as the real thing, but it would have to do.

I put my head down on my arms and fell asleep at the workbench.

Hours later—I don't know the time—I was awakened by a loud clatter. My first thought, of course, was that it was Father Christmas who, in that famous American poem, makes just such a sound on the lawn.

Without even thinking—and only half awake—I dashed to the window. The snow had continued to fall, and the Visto outside was now covered with a flawless white blanket.

As I stood blinking, something hard struck the glass directly in front of my face: the same sound as before.

I opened the window and peered down into the white darkness.

“Who is it?” I called in a hoarse whisper.

“It's Carl, Flavia. Carl Pendracka. Remember me?”

Of course I remembered him!

Even though, in the long run, he was not likely to become my brother-in-law, I've always had a soft spot for Carl Pendracka, another of my sister Feely's former suitors. Carl was, after all, the one who had described to me how while swimming in St. Louis, Missouri, he had dived under an abandoned pier and found himself floating face-to-face with a bloated corpse. How could I forget him?

“Funny thing was, I
knew
the son of a gun,” Carl had told me. “His name was Bobby Ryback, and we had gone to the same school. He was a year ahead of me, in the eighth grade. I knew it was him because, in spite of being blue and swollen, he still looked a lot like Bobby Ryback.”

It's in the sharing of such fascinating tidbits of information that real friendships are formed.

Meanwhile, Carl must have grown tired of waiting for a response. A moment later, he came swarming hand over hand up the dead vines on the side of the house.

“Nya, what's up, Doc?” he said, wrinkling his nose and making carrot-chewing noises as he swung his legs over the sill and into the room.

Carl was an American, and he actually talked like that. I answered with the expected grin.

His wet army greatcoat and oversized boots gave him the look of a woolly cartoon caterpillar.

“How's that sister of yours…whatsername?”

“Ophelia,” I said. “Feely. As you know perfectly well. She's engaged, thank you—as you also know perfectly well.”

“So I heard,” Carl said. “I also heard she and her German pilot have gone
kaput
.”

Combined with the village gossip mill of Bishop's Lacey, the jungle telegraph of the air base at Leathcote was faster and much more accurate than even the most high-grade military intelligence—at least, according to Mrs. Mullet's husband, Alf.

“I wouldn't know,” I said. “I've been away.”

“Roger, wilco,” Carl said. “Over and out. Canada. Land of the loon and the knotty pine.”

For a supposed descendant of King Arthur, Carl could be remarkably dopey.

“What are you doing hanging round at this unholy hour? I might have called the police.”

“Hoping to catch a glimpse of the dearly beloved,” Carl said, and my heart almost broke for his honesty. “I saw your light—knew you were home—knew you'd let me in. Do you think she'd see me?”

“It's the middle of the night, Carl,” I said. “You can't stay here. Besides, the dearly beloved is in her bed snoring away like twenty hogs. Her face is slathered with Turtle Oil, her lips are coated with Eau de Suez Vaccine Cream, and her hair is in a bag. She's hardly the Chelsea Flower Show.”

“I don't care,” Carl said. “If there's half a chance, it's now, while she and Hans—”

“Dieter,” I interrupted. “Dieter Schrantz. He's almost criminally handsome, you know.” I couldn't resist twitting him.

“I know.” Carl sighed. “A Norse god.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I'll make you a deal. You find out everything you can about a man called Sambridge and I'll arrange a tryst.”

“A what?”

“A tryst. You know, like the ones in Georgette Heyer. A secret meeting of lovers.”

I knew at once I'd chosen the right words.

A sudden fire came into Carl's eyes. He seized my right hand and gave it a couple of powerful pumps.

“Done!” he said. “And done again! Now who's this Stanfield you need to know about?”

“Sambridge,” I corrected him. “He lives at Thornfield Chase, near East Finching. He's a wood-carver.”

“Don't need to know that,” Carl said. “I'll ask my friend Mordecai. Mordecai's in Intelligence. Say you want to find out what the King had for breakfast this morning? Ask Mordecai. Want to know how much the chancellor of the exchequer owes his banker? Ask Mordecai. Who's the smart money on for the Derby or the Grand National?”

“Ask Mordecai.” I grinned. “And while you're at it, you can also ask him who won the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake last summer.”

“The horse or the lucky ticket holders?”

“Both,” I told him. “If you think he can.”

Carl made a rude raspberry noise with his mouth. “Leave it with me,” he said. “I'll see what I can do.”

He put a forefinger to his lips in a sign of secrecy, then, adjusting an imaginary gun belt on his hips, he drawled, “Well, I reckon I'll climb on my old cayuse and mosey off into the whatchamacallit.”

A moment later, the dead vines outside the window were creaking with his departure.

When I was sure that Carl was gone, I lowered and locked the sash. Taking up a pencil and a scrap of paper, I scribbled a note:

Dear Dogger,

Gone up to London to see a friend. Don't worry.

And I signed it:

Yours faithfully, Flavia S. de Luce.

I crept through the silent house and pinned the note to the outside of Dogger's bedroom door.

He wouldn't read it, of course, until I was gone, by which time it would be too late to stop me.

Downstairs, in the library, I consulted the
ABC Railway Guide
. The first train of the day was scheduled to leave Doddingsley at 7:03. If I broke all speed records, I could just make it, and be back in time for an evening visit to the hospital.

I hadn't, of course, counted upon the snow. Fortunately, it was dry, fluffy stuff, which Gladys's front wheel cut, for the first few miles, like a saber through soft butter. The advantage of traveling so early in the day was that I had the roads to myself.

I inhaled the cold air in great gulps, willing the miles to pass, praying that we would not come to grief in a clatter of metal and ice at the end of some long incline.

Although sunrise would not be for another hour, I couldn't help wondering what I would look like to some hypothetical observer. Hypothetical farmers and their hypothetical wives were notoriously early risers, and I pictured them glancing out their hypothetical kitchen windows at the silhouette of a phantom girl in a black winter coat on a black bicycle moving steadily across a white winter landscape. An oil painting by somebody dark, like Whistler.

Flavia Cycling,
it could be called—or
The Ride of the Snow Queen
.

Would they wonder who I was and where I was going? Would they care?

Halfway to Doddingsley, we came abruptly upon the tire tracks of an early morning farm tractor, and settled into them. Riding its ribbed footprints, we juddered and bumped our way towards the railway station.

From the top of the last hill, I could see the engine standing panting in the station, clouds of steam obscuring the forward carriages. The stationmaster was already making his way towards the closed crossing gates.

The engine gave out a sharp whistle. It was leaving!

Even as I watched in horror the train began to move.

“No! Wait! Stop!” I shouted, but it was too late for words.

I jerked Gladys's handlebars sharply to one side and steered her into a steep, narrow gully that ran at a right angle down to the tracks.

With a bang and a series of stomach-churning slithers, we tobogganed in a shower of snow and slush, slipping and sliding, veering from side to side, down the cutting, across the ditch at the bottom, and directly onto the tracks, where we came to an abrupt halt at the end of the platform. The train, like a panting dragon, was picking up speed. It was coming directly at us.

I couldn't help closing my eyes and waiting for the End.

It's remarkable how time slows when you're about to die, and even more remarkable the things that come to mind at such moments of peril.

It was only last summer, here at Doddingsley station, that I had witnessed the death of a stranger beneath the wheels of a train. And it was here, too, although years ago, that the Richardsons' young daughter had met her tragic end. And now, it seemed, so would I. Cynthia would soon have another death to mourn.

There came a cold, shrill sound of steel against steel and a deafening hiss of steam. My face was suddenly hot and wet.

I dared not move a muscle.

And then the sound of voices: human voices raised in what sounded like anger. A couple of naughty words found their way into my innocent ears.

I was still alive!

I opened my eyes.

I was standing in a cloud of swirling steam, so close to the front of the locomotive that I could have reached out and touched it. But I did not.

Instinct seized me.

I picked up Gladys and marched past the driver and the fireman, both of whom had climbed down from their cab and were kicking up snow as they marched towards me with clenched fists and red, furious faces.

I dragged Gladys onto the platform, leaned her against the brick wall of the station, gave her a reassuring pat on the seat and strolled—looking straight ahead—across to the train. The guard and the stationmaster stood speechless, shoulder to shoulder, mouths open as I sailed past them in the stately way I imagined Aunt Millicent might have done.

“Carry on,” I said, as I stepped into the closest carriage and took a seat.