I watched as the nylons shriveled, writhing and blackening in the flames, transformed by heat into their constituent chemicals (adipoyl chloride, I knew, and hexamethylenediamine). I felt a little shiver of pleasure as the stockings gave up the ghost in one last, delicious flickering flame. Their dying breath, a wisp of the deadly poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide, floated up the chimney and then it was gone. In just a few seconds, Carl’s gift was no more than a sticky black glob bubbling on the Yule logs.
“I … I don’t understand,” Carl said.
He stood looking from Father to Feely to Daffy to me.
“You Limeys are crackers,” he said. “Just plain dizzo.”
“Dizzo,” Carl repeated to me in the foyer, shaking his head in disbelief. Feely had fled, shaken by sobs, to her bedroom and Father, in a thundercloud of outraged dignity, had taken refuge in his study.
“Have a chair,” I said and, as the doorbell rang again, I introduced Carl quickly to the Misses Puddock.
“Carl’s from St. Louis, in America,” I told them, and by the time I reached the door, they were already chatting away like lifelong cronies.
On the doorstep, as if for inspection, was Ned Cropper, gift in hand and brilliantine in hair. A few steps behind him stood Mary Stoker.
Aside from her ruddy complexion and a bit of a squint, Mary might have been a Madonna in the National Gallery as she stood on the doorstep, radiant in the snow.
No room at the inn, I thought uncharitably.
“Ned! Mary!” I crowed, a little too cheerfully.
Ned was the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, Bishop’s Lacey’s sole hostelry, and Mary was the landlord’s daughter. I knew without being told that Ned had brought the gift for Feely: another box of those flyblown prewar Milady chocolates from the window of Miss Cool’s confectionery, its contents lightly frosted with a mold which could, of course, if you had a strong enough stomach, be scraped away before scoffing them.
Ned’s love tributes were generally left on the kitchen doorstep in the dark of the moon to be brought in dangling distastefully between finger and thumb by Mrs. Mullet.
“Them tomcats been round again,” she would mutter.
“I like your hair,” I said to Mary. “Did you get it cut?”
“Cut it myself, special for Christmas,” she whispered. “Do you like it, really?”
“Nobody’s going to give Phyllis Wyvern a second look with you in the room,” I said, giving her arm a squeeze.
“Oh, you!” she laughed, and slapped my hand a little harder than she knew.
“Find a seat,” I told them. “You’re early, so you can take your pick.”
I knew that Ned would choose front row center, and I was right. He’d want to be as close to Phyllis Wyvern as was humanly possible.
A roaring motor in the forecourt announced that Dieter had arrived with the first load of audience. I threw open the door just as the Fergie jerked to a stop, its lamps making cornucopias of foggy yellow light in the falling snow. Behind the tractor, brimming over with passengers—a couple of village men perched precariously on the runners—was Harriet’s sleigh.
A shadow passed in front of my heart.
How sad it was to think that somewhere, Harriet should have died in snow like this. How could such tragedy occur amid such beauty?
That was the way with ghosts, though: They appeared at the strangest of times in the most peculiar places.
I hadn’t long to call my mother’s face to mind; people were already piling out of the sleigh and coming towards the door, laughing and talking excitedly.
“Flavia! Haroo, mon vieux! Joyeux Noël!”
That was Maximilian Brock, the pint-sized concert pianist (retired) who had traded his keyboard and bench for a whole new career as the village gossip mill. It was whispered (but not by me) that he wrote up and sold as fiction to the romance magazines the thinly disguised tales of door-latch scandal he had gleaned in Bishop’s Lacey.
“Lust-sheets,” Daffy called them.
“Have you seen Phyllis Wyvern yet?” Max demanded. “How does she look in life? Are her wrinkles as parched gullies, or was that sheer meanness on the part of Tittle-Tattle?”
“Hello, Max,” I said. “Yes, I’ve seen her, and she’s never been more lovely.”
“And those sisters of yours; still growing?”
“You can ask them yourself,” I said, somewhat impatiently. Once Max got started, you might as well put down roots.
But before he could frame another question, Max was nudged aside by the substantial tummy of Bunny Spirling, of Nautilus Old Hall, looking so much like Mr. Pickwick that it gave me the momentary creeps.
His thumbs hooked tightly in his waistcoat pockets, Bunny patted his stomach and raised his pink nostrils into the air as if he were on the scent of food.
“Flavia,” he said, not putting too much effort into it before scurrying away on curiously dainty feet.
After the sleigh had emptied, Dieter made a tight circle with the tractor and sleigh in the snowy forecourt, and with the wave of a mitt, jounced off to the village for another load.
With Dogger out of commission, I was kept busy welcoming newcomers and chatting up old acquaintances. It was evident that no one else in my family was going to put in an appearance. They had obviously decided that the evening’s performance was the business of the filmmakers, and that there was no need for them to lift a finger. I was on my own.
Not long before starting time, the vicar arrived, huffing and puffing in the foyer, and stamping his feet.
“It’s coming down as if all the angels and archangels are plucking chickens,” he said.
Cynthia hung back, scowling at his blasphemy.
“Constable Linnet tells me that all roads in and out of Bishop’s Lacey are hopelessly blocked,” he went on, “and are likely to remain so until the Hinley road men clear their own turf. It’s the price we pay for being outlanders, so to speak, but nevertheless, it’s dashed inconvenient.”
Marion Trodd came squeezing herself through the hubbub.
“Miss Wyvern is ready, Vicar,” she said. “If you’d be so kind—”
“Of course, my dear. Tell her I shall preface her performance with a few remarks of my own re Roofing Fund, et cetera, and then it’s all hers—oh, and Mr. Duncan’s, of course. Dear me, we mustn’t forget Mr. Duncan.”
As the vicar made his way to the front, Father, Feely, and Daffy, led by Aunt Felicity, filed slowly into the foyer and took their seats in the front row. Since Ned was occupying the chair that should have been mine, I stayed in the back.
I twiddled my fingers at Nialla and she twiddled back, tapping her tummy and rolling her eyes comically.
“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I’ve managed to leave out—”
There was a polite titter to reward the vicar for his sparkling wit.
“We’ve all of us braved the roaring elements tonight to illustrate the wise old saw that Charity begins at home. If we now find ourselves warm and cozy in the ancestral home of the family de Luce, it is entirely due to the kind graces of Colonel Haviland de Luce” (“Hear! Hear!”) “that we are able to come together in such inclement weather to prop up the roof of St. Tancred’s, as it were.
“Without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Miss Phyllis Wyvern and Mr. Desmond Duncan. Miss Wyvern, it is unnecessary to tell you, is a star of stage and screen, who has thrilled all of our hearts in such productions as Whitehall Nellie, The Secret Summer, Love and Blood, The Glass Heart …”
He paused to pull a scrap of paper from his pocket, clean his spectacles with it, and then read what was written on it.
“The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter, The Trench in the Drawing Room, The Queen of Love … ahem … Sadie Thompson” (a couple of nervous titters and a distinctly wolfish whistle), “and last, but not least, The Rector’s Wife.”