FOURTEEN
HARRIET. MY MOTHER.
She is sitting on the window box of the drawing room at Buckshaw. At her right hand, my sister Ophelia, aged about seven, plays with a cat’s cradle of red wool, its strands entangling her fingers like slender scarlet snakes. To Harriet’s left, my other sister, Daphne, although she is too young to read, uses a forefinger to mark her place in a large book: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Harriet gazes tenderly down, a slight smile on her lips, like a Madonna, at the white bundle which she holds supported in the crook of her left arm: a child—a baby dressed in a white, trailing garment of elaborate and frothy lace—could it be a baptismal gown?
I want to look at the mother but my eyes are drawn repeatedly back to the child.
It is, of course, me.
“Ten years ago,” Vanetta was saying, “I went to Buckshaw on a winter day.”
She was now standing behind me.
“How well I remember it. There had been a killing frost overnight. Everything was covered with ice. I rang up your mother and suggested that we leave it until another day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was going away, she said, and she wanted the portrait as a gift for your father. She meant to give it to him as a surprise when she returned.”
My head was spinning.
“Of course, she never did,” she added softly, “and frankly I’ve not since had the heart to hand it over to him, the poor man. He grieves so.”
Grieves? Although I had never thought about it in precisely this way, it was true. Father did grieve, but he did so in private, and mostly in silence.
“The painting, I suppose, belongs to him, since your mother paid me for it in advance. She was a very trusting person.”
Was she? I wanted to say. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know her as well as you did.
Suddenly, I needed to get out of this place—to be outdoors again where I could breathe my own breath.
“I think you’d better keep it, Mrs. Harewood—at least for now. I wouldn’t want to upset Father.”
Hold on! I thought. My whole life was given over to upsetting Father—or at least to going against his wishes. Why now was I filled with a sudden desire to comfort him, and to have him hug me?
Not that I would, of course, because in real life we de Luces don’t do that sort of thing.
But still, some unknowable part of the universe had changed, as if one of the four great turtles that are said to support the world on their backs had suddenly shifted its weight from one foot to another.
“I have to go now,” I said, backing, for some reason, towards the door. “I’m sorry to hear about Brookie. I know he had lots of friends in Bishop’s Lacey.”
Actually, I knew no such thing! Why was I saying this? It was as if my mouth were possessed, and I had no way of stopping its flow of words.
All I really knew about Brookie Harewood was that he was a poacher and a layabout—and that I had surprised him in his midnight prowling. That and the fact that he had claimed to have seen the Gray Lady of Buckshaw.
“Good-bye, then,” I said. As I stepped into the hallway, Ursula turned rapidly away and scuttled out of sight with a wicker basket in her hand. But not so quickly that I missed the look of pure hatred that she shot me.
As I bicycled westward towards Bishop’s Lacey, I thought of what I had seen. I’d gone to Malden Fenwick in search of clues to the behavior of Brookie Harewood—surely it was he who had attacked Fenella Faa in the Palings, for who else could have been abroad at Buckshaw that night? But instead, I had come away with a new image of Harriet, my mother: an image that was not as happy as it might have been.
Why, for instance, did it gnaw at my heart so much to see Feely and Daffy, like two contented slugs, secure and basking in her glow, while I lay helpless, wrapped up like a little mummy in white cloth; of no more interest than a bundle from the butcher?
Had Harriet loved me? My sisters were forever claiming that she did not: that, in fact, she despised me; that she had fallen into a deep depression after I was born—a depression that had, perhaps, resulted in her death.
And yet, in the painting, which must have been made just before she set out on her final journey, there was not a trace of unhappiness. Harriet’s eyes had been upon me and the look on her face had shown, if anything, a trace of amusement.
Something about the portrait nagged at my mind: some half-forgotten thing that had tried to surface as I stood staring at the easel in Vanetta Harewood’s studio. But what was it?
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of it.
Relax, Flavia, I thought. Calm down. Think about something else.
I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind, the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers, for instance, or oatmeal. Then, when the fugitive word was least expecting it, I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it, catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
“Thought-stalking,” I called the technique, and I was proud of myself for having invented it.
I let my mind drift away towards tigers, and the first one that came to mind was the tiger in William Blake’s poem: the one that burned away with fearful symmetry in the forests of the night.
Once, when I was younger, Daffy had driven me into hysterics by wrapping herself in the tiger-skin rug from Buckshaw’s firearm museum and creeping into my bedroom in the middle of the night, while reciting the poem in a deep and fearsome snarl: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright …”
She had never forgiven me for throwing my alarm clock. She still had the scar on her chin.
And now I thought of oatmeal: in the winter, great steaming ladles of the stuff, gray, like lava dished from a volcano on the moon. Mrs. Mullet, under orders from Father—
Mrs. Mullet! Of course!
It was something she’d told me when I’d asked about Brookie Harewood. “His mother’s that woman as paints over in Malden Fenwick.
“P’raps she’ll even paint you in your turn,” Mrs. M had added. “In your turn.”
Which meant that Mrs. M knew about the portrait of Harriet! She must have been in on the secret sittings.
“Tiger!” I shouted. “Tye-ger!”
My words echoed back from the hedgerows on either side of the narrow lane. Something ahead of me bolted for cover.
An animal, perhaps? A deer? No, not an animal—a human.
It was Porcelain. I was sure of it. She was still wearing Fenella’s black crepe dress.
I brought Gladys to a skidding stop.
“Porcelain?” I called. “Is that you?”
There was no answer.
“Porcelain? It’s me, Flavia.”
What a foolish thing to say. Porcelain had hidden in the hedgerow because it was me. But why?
Although I couldn’t see her, she was probably close enough to touch. I could feel her eyes upon me.
“Porcelain? What is it? What’s the matter?”
The eerie silence lengthened. It was like one of those parlor séances when you’re waiting for the dial on the Ouija board to move.
“All right,” I said at last, “take your time. I’m sitting down and I’m not moving until you come out.”
There was another long wait, and then the bushes rustled and Porcelain stepped out into the lane. The look on her face suggested that she was on her way to the guillotine.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
As I took a step towards her, she moved away, keeping a safe distance between us.
“The police took me to see Fenella,” she said shakily. “In the hospital.”
Oh, no! I thought. She’s died of her injuries. Let it not be true.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking another step. Porcelain fell back, raising her hands as if to fend me off.
“Sorry?” she said in a strange voice. “What for? No!—Stay where you are!”
“Sorry for whatever’s happened to Fenella. I did everything I could to help her.”
“For God’s sake, Flavia,” Porcelain screamed, “stop it! You bloody well tried to kill her, and you know you did. And now you want to kill me!”
Her words hit me like a body blow, knocking the wind completely out of me. I couldn’t breathe; my head was spinning, my mind was spinning, and there was a sound in my head like a swarm of locusts.
“I—”