“Never mind, Dogger,” I said, patting his hand. “Neither is mine. Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.”
“I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.”
“Butter and all?” I asked.
“Butter and all.”
“But not the dish.”
“But not the dish,” said Dogger.
Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?
Remembering Father’s orders to keep out from underfoot, I spent what remained of the day in my laboratory making last-minute adjustments to the consistency of my powerful birdlime. The addition of just the right amount of oil of petroleum would keep it from freezing.
Christmas Eve was now just forty-eight hours away, and I needed to be ready for it. There would be no margin for error. I would have just one chance to capture Father Christmas—if, in fact, he existed.
Why was I so mistrustful of my sisters’ tales of myth and folklore? Was it because experience had taught me that both of them were liars? Or was it because I really wanted—perhaps even needed—to believe?
Well, Father Christmas or no, I would soon be writing up the Great Experiment in my notebook: Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.
One way or another, it was bound to be a classic.
Scribbled in the margin of one of Uncle Tar’s notebooks, I had found a quotation from Sir Francis Bacon: “We must not then add wings, but rather lead and ballast to the understanding, to prevent its jumping or flying.”
Precisely what I had in mind for Saint Nicholas! A dose of the old tanglefoot! Later, in bed, my head filled with visions of reindeer stuck fast to the chimney pots like giant bluebottles to flypaper, I realized I was grinning madly in the dark. Sleep came at last, to what might have been the sounds of a distant gramophone.
• EIGHT •
I PAUSED AT THE top of the stairs.
“It’s not right,” a voice was grumbling. “They’ve no right to lumber us with all this.”
“Better keep it down, Latshaw,” said another voice. “You know what Lampman told us.”
“Yes, I know what His Eminence said. Same as he did on the last shoot, and the shoot before that. I’ve heard that beef speech of his enough times I can recite it in my sleep. ‘If you’ve got a beef, tell it to me,’ and so on and so forth. Might as well tell it to the man in the moon for all the good it does.”
“McNulty used to—”
“McNulty be damned! I’m in charge now, and what I say goes. And all I’m saying is this: They’ve got no right to lumber us with all this extra, just so that Her Royal Highness can give the local bumpkins something to gape at.”
I backed slowly away from the staircase, then re-approached it more noisily.
“Shhh! Someone’s coming.”
“Good morning!” I said brightly, rubbing my eyes and going into my best village idiot impersonation. If there’d been time, I’d have blacked out one of my front teeth with pulverized carbon.
“Good morning, miss,” said the one, and I knew by his voice that the other was Latshaw.
“Snowy old morning, eh what?”
I knew this was laying it on with a trowel, but with some people it doesn’t matter. I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.
“Oh, how pretty,” I exclaimed as I reached the bottom of the stairs, clasping my hands together like a spinster who has just been given an engagement ring by a red-faced squire on bended knee.
The south side of the foyer had been transformed overnight into an Italian courtyard in evening. Stone walls painted onto canvas had been set up in front of the wood paneling, and the landing on the south staircase had become a balcony in Verona.
A few artificial trees spotted here and there in pots skillfully disguised as little benches added greatly to the effect. The whole thing was so well done I could almost feel the warmth of the Italian sun.
It was here, I knew, that in just a few hours, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan would be re-creating the scene from Romeo and Juliet: a production that had once kept the West End of London awake until the small hours with curtain call after curtain call.
I had read about it in the musty film and theater magazines that were piled everywhere in Buckshaw’s library, or at least had been until they were cleared away for purposes of filming.
“Best scamper, miss. The paint’s still wet. You don’t want to go getting it all over yourself, do you?”
“Not if it’s lead-based,” I shot back as I wandered casually away, recalling with a little shiver of pleasure the case of the American artist Whistler, who, while painting his famous The White Girl, because of the high content of lead white in the pigment in his prime color had contracted what artists called “painter’s colic.”
Would lead poisoning by any other name taste as sweet? I knew that rats had been known to gnaw through lead pipes because they had acquired a taste for the sweetness of the stuff. In fact, I had begun compiling notes for a pamphlet to be called Peculiarities of Plumbism, and had turned to thinking pleasantly on that topic when the telephone rang.
I went for it at once before it could ring a second time. If Father heard it, we were in for a day of wrath.
“Blast!” I said, as I picked the thing up.
“Hello … Flavia? Have I caught you at an inopportune time?”
“Oh, hello, Vicar,” I said. “Sorry—I just banged my knee on the door frame.”
From Flavia’s Book of Golden Rules: When caught swearing, go for sympathy.
“Poor girl,” he said. “I hope it’s all right.”
“It will be fine, Vicar, when the agony abates.”
“Well, I’m just ringing up to let you know that everything at this end is going splendidly. Tickets nearly sold out and it’s barely sunrise. Cynthia and her telephonic warriors outdid themselves last night.”
“Thank you, Vicar,” I said. “I’ll let Father know.”
“Oh, and Flavia, tell him that Dieter Schrantz, at Culverhouse Farm, has suggested, if your father’s willing, of course, that we use the old sleigh from your coach house to shuttle our theatergoers from the parish hall to Buckshaw. He says he’ll rig up a hitch that will allow him to tow it along behind the tractor. The ride itself should be worth the price of admission, don’t you think?”
Father had agreed, with surprisingly little grumbling, but then, where the vicar was concerned, he nearly always did. There was a friendship between them of a deep and abiding power which I didn’t really understand. Although they had both attended Greyminster, they had not been at the school in the same years, so that wouldn’t explain it. The vicar had no more than a polite interest in postage stamps and Father had no more than a passing interest in heaven, so the bond between them remained a puzzle.
To be perfectly frank, I was a little envious of their easy chumminess, and I sometimes caught myself wishing that I were as great friends with my father as the vicar was.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. Once, while using one of his philatelic magazines to fan the flame of a sluggish Bunsen burner, the pages had riffled open and the words “nascent oxygen” had caught my eye. The stuff, it seemed, had been produced by adding formaldehyde to potassium permanganate, and had been used by the Post Office to fumigate mailbags in the Mediterranean in the days when cholera was a constant threat.
Now here was a fact about stamp collecting that was actually interesting! A bridge—however precarious it might seem—between my father’s world and mine.
“If you ever need any of your stamps disinfected,” I had burst out, “I’d be happy to do them for you. I could whip up some nascent oxygen in a jiff. It would be no trouble at all.”