He was bundled up in some kind of heavy fur coat—buffalo or yak, I thought. On his head was a wide-brimmed floppy hat of the sort worn by artists on the Continent.
“Ted!” he said, patting one of the electricians on the back. “How’s the missus? Still collecting matchbooks? I’ve got one she might like to have—straight from the Savoy.
“Only two matches missing,” he added with a broad pantomime wink.
I had seen Desmond Duncan in a film whose name I have forgotten: the one about the little girl who hires a failed barrister to force her estranged parents to reconcile. I had also seen pictures of him in some of the fan magazines Daffy kept hidden at the bottom of her undies drawer.
He had a sharp, beaked nose, and a projecting chin, which gave him the profile of a thunderbolt: a profile that was probably instantly recognizable from Greenland to New Guinea.
A sudden gasp from above and behind me caused me to crane my neck and look up. I should have known! Daffy and Feely were peering through the balusters. They must be flat on their bellies on the floor.
Feely made shooing motions with her hands, indicating that I wasn’t to give away their presence by staring at them.
I bounded up the stairs and lay down on the floor between them. Daffy tried to pinch me, but I rolled away.
“Do that again and I’ll scream your name and your brassiere size,” I hissed, and she shot me a villainous look. Daffy had only recently begun to develop and was still shy about trumpeting the details.
“Look at them!” Feely whispered. “Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan—actually together here—at Buckshaw!”
I peered down through the railings just in time to see them touch fingertips—like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except that their respective clothing gave them the appearance, from above, of something more like a large bison coming face-to-face with a small pinwheel whirligig.
Desmond Duncan was now removing the bulky coat, which was taken instantly away by a little man who had been trailing him.
“Val!” he said loudly, looking round to take in the whole of the foyer. “You’ve done it again!”
By way of reply, Val Lampman smiled a tight smile and glanced almost too casually at his watch.
“Right, then,” he said. “All present and accounted for. Jeannette and Clifford, as you were. You may stand down. We’ll be taking the principals this evening, after all. First read-through tomorrow morning at seven-thirty, costumes at nine-fifteen. Miss Trodd will hand out the sheets in two hours’ time.”
“Now’s your chance,” Daffy whispered, nudging Feely. “Go ask him!”
In the foyer, the actors and crew were beginning to drift away, leaving Val Lampman alone at the bottom of the stairs jotting something in a notebook.
“No! I’ve changed my mind,” Feely said.
“Silly camel!” Daffy told her. “Do you want me to ask him? I will, you know.
“She’s going to be one of the extras,” Daffy whispered. “She’s got her heart set on it.”
“No!” Feely said. “Shush!”
“Oh, Mr. Lampman,” Daffy said, in quite a loud voice, “my sister—”
Val Lampman looked up into the shadows.
Feely punched Daffy on the upper arm. “Stop it!” she hissed.
I got up from the floor, gave my face a rub with the palm of my hand, adjusted my clothing, and walked down the stairs in a way that would have made Father proud.
“Mr. Lampman?” I said at the landing. “I’m Flavia de Luce, of the Buckshaw de Luces. My sister Ophelia is seventeen. She was hoping you’d be able to give her a small walk-on part.” I pointed. “That’s her up there peeking through the banister.”
Val Lampman shaded his eyes and looked up into the dim woodwork.
“Please show yourself, Miss de Luce,” he said.
Upstairs, Feely got to her knees, then to her feet, dusted herself off, and peered foolishly down over the railings.
There was an awkward silence. Val Lampman lifted his fedora and scratched his thin flaxen hair.
“You’ll do,” he said at last. “See Miss Trodd in the morning.”
The telephone rang in its cubicle beneath the stairs, and, although I couldn’t see him, I heard Dogger’s measured footsteps coming through from the kitchen to answer it. After a muffled conversation, he came out into view and spotted me on the stairs.
“That was the vicar,” he said. “Miss Felicity rang him to say that Colonel de Luce will be staying the night in London.”
It must be snowing like stink! I thought, rather uncharitably.
“Odd that Aunt Felicity didn’t telephone here,” I said.
“She’s been trying for more than an hour, but the line was engaged. She rang up the vicar instead. As it happens, he’s driving over to Doddingsley in the morning to pick up some extra holly for the church decorations. He’s kindly offered to meet Colonel de Luce and Miss Felicity at the railway station there and bring them to Buckshaw.”
“The holly and the ivy,” I caroled loudly, not caring that I was a little off-key.
“When they are both full grown,
Of all the poisons that are in the wood,
The holly wears the crown.”
Probably, I thought, because it contained theobromine, the bitter alkaloid that is also to be found in coffee, tea, and cocoa, and was first synthesized by the immortal German chemist Hermann Emil Fischer from human waste. The theobromine in the berries and leaves of the holly was just one of the cyanogenic glycosides, which, when chewed, release hydrogen cyanide. In what quantities, I had yet to determine, but just the thought of such a delicious experiment made the hairs on my forearms stand up in pleasure!
“You’re thinking of the ilicin,” Dogger said.
“Yes, I’m thinking of the ilicin. It’s an alkaloid in the holly leaves, and it causes diarrhea.”
“So I believe I have read somewhere,” Dogger said.
I could use the same batch of holly I’d dragged home to make the birdlime!
“You’d better watch out …” I sang, as I skipped upstairs with more than just the capture of Father Christmas in mind.
Wet, heavy flakes were falling straight down towards the earth, no two alike as they plummeted past the lighted window of my laboratory—yet all of them members of the same family.
In the case of snowflakes, the family’s name is H2O, known to the uninitiated as water.
Like all matter, water can exist in three states: At normal temperatures it’s a liquid. Heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes a gas; cooled below 32 degrees, it crystallizes and becomes ice.
Of the three, ice was my favorite state: Water, when frozen, was classified as a mineral—a mineral whose crystalline form, in an iceberg, for instance, was capable of mimicking a diamond as big as the Queen Elizabeth.
But add a bit of heat and poof!—you’re a liquid again, able to run easily, with only the assistance of gravity, into the most secret of places. Just thinking of some of the subterranean spots in which water has been makes my stomach tickle!
Then, raise the temperature enough, and Ali-kazam! you’re a gas—and suddenly you can fly.
If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is!
Hyponitric acid, for instance, is absolutely fascinating: At –4 degrees Fahrenheit, it takes the form of colorless prismatic crystals; warm it up to just 7 degrees and it becomes a clear liquid. At 30 degrees the liquid turns yellow and then orange, until at 82 degrees, it boils and becomes a brownish-red vapor: all within a range of no more than 86 degrees!
Stupendous, when you stop to think about it.
But getting back to my old friend water, the thing of it is this: No matter how hot or how cold, no matter its state, its form, its qualities, or its color, each molecule of water still consists of no more than a single oxygen atom bonded to two sister atoms of hydrogen. It takes all three of them to make a blinding blizzard—or a thunderstorm, for that matter … or a puffy white cloud in a summer sky.