“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!”
It was an old joke, and although I’d heard it a hundred times before, I laughed dutifully. There was more truth in it than Phyllis Wyvern knew, but I wasn’t going to spoil her treat. Who knew? She might even find the stuff edible.
If cooking were a game of darts, most of Mrs. Mullet’s concoctions would be barely on the board.
Mrs. Mullet sliced the cake into twelve pieces.
“Two for each soul in the ’ouse’old,” she proclaimed, with a glance at Dogger as he came into the kitchen. “That’s what they taught us up at Lady Rex-Wells’s place: ‘Two slices a soul, keeps you out of the ’ole.’ Meanin’ the grave, of course. The old lady said it meant everyone from ’erself right on down to the gardener’s boy. A reg’lar tartar she was, but she lived to be ninety-nine and a half, so there must be somethin’ in it.”
“What do you think, Dogger?” Phyllis Wyvern asked Dogger, who was taking his tea unobtrusively, standing in the corner.
“Good lard makes good bile. Good bile makes good digestion, which results in great longevity,” Dogger said rather tentatively, looking into his cup. “Or so I have heard.”
“And all because of a double helping of lardy cake!” Phyllis Wyvern said, clapping her hands together in delight. “Well, here’s to the second hundred years.”
She picked up her fork and lifted a morsel to her mouth, pausing halfway to give Mrs. Mullet a smile that must have cost someone a thousand guineas.
She chewed reflectively.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said, putting the fork down on her plate. “Oh, my goodness!”
Even her magnificent acting ability couldn’t suppress the little gag reflex I saw at her throat.
“I knew you’d like it,” Mrs. Mullet crowed.
“But I must be brutal and rein myself in,” Phyllis Wyvern said, pushing the plate roughly away and getting to her feet. “I tend to make a swine of myself when there’s cake to be had, and with lardy cake, it’s no more than a day from lips to hips. I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Mrs. Mullet lifted the plate away and placed it a little too carefully behind the sink.
I knew without a doubt that she would take the slice of cake home, wrap it in gift paper, and put it in her china cabinet between the china-dog salt and peppers marked “A Present From Blackpool” and the slender glass bird that bobbed up and down as it sipped water from a tube.
When her friend Mrs. Waller came to visit, Mrs. Mullet would reverently unwrap the moldy relic. “You’ll never guess ’oo ate the missin’ bit of this,” she would say in a hushed voice. “Phyllis Wyvern! Look—you can still see ’er teeth marks. Just a peek, mind—quick, so’s it doesn’t go stale.”
The doorbell rang and Dogger put down his tea.
“That will be Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said, with a wry grin. “She’ll claim to have missed her connection from Paddington. She always does.”
“I’ll fix ’er a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Mullet said. “The train always makes your stomach go all skew-gee—at least it does mine.
“Gives me the dire-rear,” she whispered in my ear.
In a moment, Dogger was back, followed by a round little woman with iron-rimmed spectacles, her hair tied back in a large tight ball like the tail of the horse, Ajax, that had once been owned by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Both of them, Florizel and Ajax, immortalized in oils, now hung side by side in the portrait gallery.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Wyvern,” the little woman said. “The taxicab took a wrong turning and I missed my connection at Paddington.”
Phyllis Wyvern looked round triumphantly at each of us, but she said nothing.
I felt rather sorry for the little creature, who, now that I thought about it, looked like a flustered cannonball.
“I’m Bun Keats, by the way,” the woman said, giving a jerk of the head to each of us in the room. “Miss Wyvern’s personal assistant.”
“Bun’s my dresser—but she has even greater aspirations,” Phyllis Wyvern said in a haughty, theatrical voice, and I could not tell if she was teasing.
“Hurry along now, Bun,” she added. “Spit-spot! My wardrobe wants unpacking. And if my pink dress is wrinkled again, I’ll cheerfully strangle you.”
She said this pleasantly enough but Bun Keats did not smile.
“Are you related to the poet, Miss Keats?” I blurted, anxious to lighten the moment.
Daffy had once read me “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I’d never forgotten the part about drinking hemlock.
“Distantly,” she said, and then she was gone.
“Poor Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “The more she tries—the more she tries.”
“I’ll give her a hand,” Dogger said, moving towards the door.
“No!”
For an instant—but only for an instant—Phyllis Wyvern’s face was a Greek mask: her eyes wide and her mouth twisted. And then, almost at once, her features subsided into a carefree smile, as if the moment hadn’t happened.
“No,” she repeated quietly. “Don’t do that. Bun must have her little lesson.”
I tried to catch Dogger’s eye, but he had moved away and begun rearranging tins in the butler’s pantry.
Mrs. Mullet turned busily to polishing the covers on the Aga cooker.
As I trudged upstairs, the house seemed somehow colder than before. From the tall, uncurtained windows of my laboratory, I looked down upon the vans of Ilium Films, which were clustered, like elephants at a watering hole, round the red brick walls of the kitchen garden.
The crew members were going about their work in a well-rehearsed ballet, lifting, shifting, unloading rope-handled shipping boxes: always a pair of hands in the right place at the right time. It was easy to see that they had done this many times before.
I warmed my hands over the welcoming flame of a Bunsen burner, then brought a beaker of milk to a bubbling boil and stirred in a good dollop of Ovaltine. At this time of year, no refrigerator was required to keep milk chilled: I simply kept the bottle on a shelf, alphabetically, between the manganese and the morphine, the latter bottle neatly labeled in Uncle Tarquin’s spidery handwriting.
Uncle Tar had been given the gate under mysterious circumstances just before taking a double first at Oxford. His father, by way of compensation, had built the remarkable chemistry laboratory at Buckshaw in which Uncle Tar had spent, by choice, the remainder of his days, conducting what was said to be top-secret research. Among his papers I had discovered several letters that suggested he had been both friend and advisor to the young Winston Churchill.
As I sipped at the Ovaltine, I shifted my gaze to the painting that hung above the mantelpiece: a beautiful young woman with two girls and a baby. The girls were my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. I was the baby. The woman, of course, was my mother, Harriet.
Harriet had secretly commissioned the work as a gift for Father just before setting out on what was to become her final journey. The painting had lain for ten years, almost forgotten, in an artist’s studio in Malden Fenwick, until I had discovered it there and brought it home.