Alan Bradley - I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

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.

• POSTLUDE •

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.