But it was no good—I couldn’t speak.
“Fenella told me all about it. You and your family have hated us for years. Your father drove Fenella and Johnny Faa off your estate and that’s why Johnny died. You took her back to their old camping place so that you could finish the job, and you very nearly did, didn’t you?”
“That’s insane,” I managed. “Why would I want to—”
“You were the only one that knew she was camped there.”
“Look, Porcelain,” I said. “I know you’re upset. I understand that. But if I wanted to kill Fenella, why would I bother going for Dr. Darby? Wouldn’t I simply let her die?”
“I—I don’t know. You’re confusing me now. Maybe you wanted an excuse—just in case you hadn’t killed her.”
“If I’d wanted to kill her, I’d have killed her,” I said, exasperated. “I’d have kept at it until I was finished. I wouldn’t have botched it. Do you understand?”
Her eyes widened, but I could see that I had made my point.
“And as for being the only one around that night, what about Brookie Harewood? He was roaming around at Buckshaw—I even caught him in our drawing room. Do you think I killed him, too? Do you think someone who weighs less than five stone murdered Brookie—who probably weighs thirteen—and hung him up like a bit of washing from Poseidon’s trident?”
“Well …”
“Oh, come off it, Porcelain! I don’t think Fenella saw her attacker. If she had, she wouldn’t have blamed it on me. She’s badly injured and she’s confused. She’s letting her mind fill in the blanks.”
She stood there in the lane staring at me as if I were the cobra in a snake charmer’s basket, and had suddenly begun to speak.
“Come on,” I said, getting Gladys ready to go. “Hop on. We’ll go back to Buckshaw and find some grub.”
“No,” she said. “I’m going back to the caravan.”
“It isn’t safe,” I said. Perhaps by presenting the nasty facts without varnish I could change her mind. “Whoever bashed in Fenella’s skull and stuck a lobster pick up Brookie’s nostril is still wandering about. Come on.”
“No,” she said. “I told you, I’m going back to the caravan.”
“Why? Are you afraid of me?”
Her answer came a little too quickly for my liking.
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“All right, then,” I said softly. “Be a fool. See if I care.”
I put a foot on a pedal and prepared to push off.
“Flavia—”
I turned and looked at her over my shoulder.
“I told Inspector Hewitt what Fenella said.”
Wonderful, I thought. Just bloody wonderful.
Someone once said that music has charms to soothe a savage breast—or was it “beast”? Daffy would know for sure, but since I wasn’t speaking to her, I could hardly ask.
But for me, music wasn’t half as relaxing as revenge. To my way of thinking, the settling of scores has a calming effect upon the mind that beats music by a Welsh mile. The encounter with Porcelain had left me breathing noisily through my nose like a boar at bay and I needed time to simmer down.
Stepping through the door into my laboratory was like gaining sanctuary in a quiet church: The rows of bottled chemicals were my stained-glass windows, the chemical bench my altar. Chemistry has more gods than Mount Olympus, and here in my solitude I could pray in peace to the greatest of them: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (who, when he found a young assistant in a linen draper’s shop surreptitiously reading a chemistry text which she kept hidden under the counter, promptly dumped his fiancée and married the girl); William Perkin (who had found a way of making purple dye for the robes of emperors without using the spit of mollusks); and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who probably discovered oxygen, and—more thrilling even than that—hydrogen cyanide, my personal pick as the last word in poisons.
I began by washing my hands. I always did this in a ceremonial way, but today they needed to be dry.
I had brought with me to the laboratory an object that was normally strapped to Gladys’s seat. Gladys had come fully equipped from the factory with a tire repair kit, and it was this tin box with the name of Messrs. Dunlop on the lid that I now deposited on my workbench.
But first I closed my eyes and focused on the object of my attentions: my beloved sister, Ophelia Gertrude de Luce, whose mission in life is to revive the Spanish Inquisition with me as the sole victim. With Daffy’s connivance, her recent torture of me in the cellars had been the last straw. And now the dreadful clock of revenge was about to strike!
Feely’s great weakness was the mirror: When it came to vanity, my sister made Becky Sharp look like one of the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary—an order with which she was forever comparing me (unfavorably, I might add).
She was capable of examining herself for hours in the looking glass, tossing her hair, baring her teeth, toying with her pimples, and pulling down the outer corners of her upper eyelids to encourage them to droop aristocratically like Father’s.
Even in church and already primped to the nines, Feely would consult a little mirror that she kept hidden inside Hymns Ancient and Modern so that she could keep an eye on her complexion while pretending to refresh her memory with the words to Hymn 573: All Things Bright and Beautiful.
She was also a religious snob. To Feely, the morning church service was a drama, and she its pious star. She was always off like a shot to be the first at the communion rail, so that in returning to our pew, she would be seen with her humble eyes downcast, her long white fingers cupped at her waist, by the maximum number of churchgoers.
These were the facts that had sifted through my mind as I planned my next move, and now the time had come.
With the little white Bible Mrs. Mullet had given me on my confirmation day in one hand and the tire kit in the other, I headed for Feely’s bedroom.
This was not as difficult as it might seem. By following a maze of dusty, darkened hallways, and keeping to the upper floor, I was able to make my way from Buckshaw’s east wing towards the west, passing on my way a number of abandoned bedrooms that had not been used since Queen Victoria had declined to visit in the latter years of her reign. She had remarked to her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, that she “could not possibly find enough breath in such a wee dwelling.”
Now, behind their paneled doors, these rooms were like furniture morgues, inhabited only by sheet-covered bedsteads, dressers, and chairs which, because of the dryness of their bones, had been known sometimes to give off alarming cracking noises in the night.
All was quiet now, though, as I passed the last of these abandoned chambers, and arrived at the door that opened into the west wing. I put my ear to the green baize cloth, but all was silent on the other side. I opened the door a crack and peered through it into the hallway.