Alan Bradley - I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Hullo!” she said, stopping in front of me. “I’ve seen this face before. You’re Flavia de Luce, if I’m not mistaken. I was hoping you’d be here.”

I stopped breathing and I didn’t care.

“Your photo was in the Daily Mirror , you know. That dreadful business about Stonepenny, or Bonepenny, or whatever he was called.”

“Bonepenny,” I said. “Horace Bonepenny.”

I had given my assistance to the police in that case when they were completely stymied.

“That’s it,” she said, sticking out a hand and seizing mine as if we were sisters. “Bonepenny. I keep up paid subscriptions to the Police Gazette and True Crime , and I never miss so much as a single issue of the News of the World . I simply adore reading about all the great murderers: the Brides in the Bath … the Islington Mumbler … Major Armstrong … Dr. Crippen … the stuff of great drama. Makes you think, doesn’t it? What, after all, would life be without puzzling death?”

Exactly! I thought.

“And now I think we should go inside and not keep poor Mr. Dogger standing out here in the cold.”

I glanced quickly at Dogger, but his face was as reflective as a millpond.

As she brushed past me, I couldn’t help thinking: I’m breathing the same air as Phyllis Wyvern!

My nostrils were suddenly filled with her scent: the odor of jasmine.

It had probably been concocted in some perfumery, I thought, from phenol and acetic acid. Phenol, or “benzanol,” I recalled, had been discovered in the mid-seventeenth century by a German chemist named Johann Rudolf Glauber, although it was not actually isolated until nearly two hundred years later by one of his countrymen, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who extracted it from coal tar and christened it “carbolic acid.” I had synthesized the extremely poisonous stuff myself by a process which involved the incomplete oxidation of benzene, and I remembered with pleasure that it was the most powerful embalming agent known to mankind: the stuff that is used whenever a body is required to last, and last, and last.

It was also to be found in certain of the Scotch whiskies.

Phyllis Wyvern had swept past me into the foyer and was now spinning round in a delighted circle.

“What a gloomy old place!” she said, clapping her hands together. “It’s perfect! Absolutely perfect!”

By now, the chauffeur had brought the luggage and was piling it inside the door.

“Just leave it there, Anthony,” she said. “Someone will see to it.”

“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he replied, making a great show of coming to attention. He almost clicked his heels.

There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what.

He stood there for a long moment, perfectly still, as if he were expecting a tip—or was he waiting to be asked in for a drink and a cigar?

“You may go,” she announced rather abruptly and the spell was broken. In an instant he was no more than a member of the chorus in The Chocolate Soldier .

“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he said, and as he turned away from her towards the door, I saw on his face a look of—what was it?—contempt?

• THREE •

“THIS ONE IS SUNNIER, miss,” Dogger was saying. “If you don’t mind, we shall put you in here until your assigned bedroom has been made ready.”

We had been looking at bedrooms, and had arrived at last at Feely’s.

Since we didn’t get much sun at this time of year, I guessed that Dogger could only be thinking of former days.

“It will do admirably,” Phyllis Wyvern said, drifting to the window. “View of a little lake—check … a romantic ruin—check … glimpses of the wardrobe van. What more could a leading lady ask?”

“May I unpack?” Dogger asked.

“No, thank you. Bun will take care of it. She’ll be along directly.”

“It’s no trouble, I assure you,” Dogger said.

“Most kind of you, Dogger, but no—I must insist. Bun is very possessive. She’d swear like blue lightning if she thought anyone else had laid hands on my belongings.”

“I understand,” Dogger said. “Will there be anything else? May I ask Mrs. Mullet to bring you a pot of tea?”

“Dogger, you are a treasure beyond rubies. I’d love nothing better. I’m going to slip into something more comfy and immerse myself in Val’s abominable script. It’s as much as your life is worth if one isn’t word perfect by the time the lights are set up.”

“Thank you, miss,” Dogger said, and was gone.

“Funny old stick,” she said. “He’s been with you forever, of course?”

“Father and Dogger were in the army together,” I said, bristling slightly.

“Ah, yes, companions-in-arms. Quite common nowadays, I understand. Tit for tat. You save my life now and I’ll save yours later. Perhaps you saw me in The Trench in the Drawing Room? Much the same plot.”

I shook my head.

At that instant the door flew open and Feely came rushing in.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing ?” she shouted. “I told you before what would happen if I caught you in my room again.”

She had not noticed Phyllis Wyvern standing at the window.

She made a grab for me.

“No!”

Feely spun round to see who had spoken. Her raised hand fell to her side, where it hung limply.

For a moment they stood there staring at each other, Feely as if she had been confronted by some ghastly specter, Phyllis Wyvern as she looked when she’d clung defiantly to the rain-lashed spire of the cathedral in the final moments of The Glass Heart .

Then Feely’s lower lip began to quiver, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears.

She turned and fled.

“So,” said Phyllis Wyvern after a long silence, “you have an older sister, too.”

“That was Feely,” I said. “She—”

“No need to explain. Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

“My sister’s the same,” she said. “Six years older?”

I nodded.

“Mine, too. I see we have a great deal more in common than a taste for horrific murder, Flavia de Luce.”

She came across the room and, putting a finger under my chin, raised my eyes to hers. And then she hugged me.

She actually hugged me, and I breathed in her jasmine—synthetic or not.

“Let’s go down to the kitchen for tea. It will save Mrs. Mullet a trip upstairs.”

I beamed at her. I almost took her hand.

“It will also,” she added, “give us a chance to pick up the latest gossip. Kitchens are hotbeds of scandal, you know.”

“Ohhhhh!” Mrs. Mullet said as we walked into the kitchen. Aside from that, and gaping a bit, she handled it quite well.

“We decided to come down to the Command Center,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

I could see that she had won Mrs. Mullet over—just like that.

“No, no, no,” she said breathlessly, “sit yourself down, miss. The water’s almost at the boil, and I’ve got a nice lardy cake comin’ out the oven.”

“Lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern exclaimed, putting her hands in front of her eyes and peeking out through her fingers. “Good lord! I haven’t had lardy cake since I was in pigtails!”

Mrs. Mullet beamed.

“I makes ’em for Christmas, as did my mother before me, and ’er mother before ’er. Lardy cake runs in the family, so to speak.”

And so it did, but I wasn’t going to let the cat out of the bag.

“ ’Ere now,” she said, pulling the cake from the oven with a pair of pot holders and placing it on a wire rack. “Look at that. Almost good enough to eat!”