It didn’t come easily to me to knock at the door of my own laboratory, but knock I did. No point in startling Porcelain and ending up with my throat slit from ear to ear.
But when I stepped inside, the laboratory was empty, and I felt my anger rising. Blast her! Hadn’t I told her to stay where she was until I returned?
But when I opened my bedroom door, there she was, sitting cross-legged on my bed like a malnourished Buddha, reading my notebook.
It was too much.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted, running across the room and snatching the book from her hand.
“Reading about myself,” she said.
I’ll admit it: I saw red.
No, that’s not quite true: I first saw white—a silent, brilliant white that erased everything—like the A-bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only after this deadly burst of flower petals had begun to cool and fade, passing first from yellow through orange, did it at last simmer down to red.
I had been angry before, but this was like something ripped from the pages of the Book of Revelation. Could it be some secret fault in the de Luce makeup that was manifesting itself in me for the first time?
Until now, my fury had always been like those jolly Caribbean carnivals we had seen in the cinema travelogues—a noisy explosion of color and heat that wilted steadily as the day went on. But now it had suddenly become an icy coldness: a frigid wasteland in which I stood unapproachable. And it was in that instant, I think, that I began to understand my father.
This much was clear: I needed to get away—to be alone—until the tidal wave had passed.
“Excuse me,” I said abruptly, surprising even myself, and walked out of the room.
I sat for a while on the stairs—neither up nor down.
It was true that Porcelain had violated my privacy, but my response had frightened me. In fact, I was still shaking a little.
I riffled idly through the pages of my notebook, not really focusing upon its written entries.
What had Porcelain been reading when I interrupted her? She had been reading about herself, or so she claimed.
I could hardly remember what I had written. I quickly found the spot.
PORCELAIN—Can’t possibly be her grandmother’s attacker since she was in London at the time. Or was she? I have only her word for it. But why did she feel compelled to wash out her clothing?
The answer to that remained a puzzle, but surely, if Porcelain had come back to do me in, she’d have done so by now.
As I closed the book, I remembered that at the time my last notes were made, I had not yet met the Pettibones. I had promised the Queen Bee that I would bring her some papers from Buckshaw relating to Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers.
The fact that I had fabricated these juicy documents on the spur of the moment was really of no importance: with a library like Buckshaw’s, there might very well be documents lurking that would satisfy the woman’s obvious greed.
If the library was unoccupied, I could begin my search at once.
I was feeling better already.
I listened with my ear glued to the door. If Daffy was inside reading, as she usually was, I could swallow a teaspoon of pride and ask her opinion, perhaps under cover of an insult, which almost always resulted in her taking the bait.
If that didn’t work, there was always the Solemn Truce. Under these rules, I would, immediately upon entering the room, drop to one knee on the carpet and declare “Pax vobiscum,” and if Daffy replied, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the ceasefire went into effect for a period of five minutes by the mantel clock, during which time neither of us was allowed to offer any incivility to the other.
If, on the other hand, she flung an inkwell, then the peace pipe was declined, and the whole thing was off.
But there was no sound from the other side of the panel. I opened the door and peeked round it.
The library was empty.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. For safety’s sake, I turned the key in the lock and, although it probably hadn’t been operated in the past hundred years, the bolt slid home in perfect silence.
Good old Dogger, I thought. He had a way of seeing that essentials were taken care of.
If anyone questioned me, I would claim that I was feeling somewhat peaked, and had hoped to have a nap without being disturbed.
I turned and had a good look round the library. It was simply ages since I’d been alone in this room.
The bookshelves towered towards the ceiling in strata, as if they had been formed geologically in stacks, by the upwards shifting of the earth.
Near the floor and closest to hand were the books that belonged to the present generation of de Luces. Above these, and just out of reach, were those that had been hoarded by the house’s Victorian inhabitants, above which, piled to the ceiling, was the rubbish left behind by the Georgians: hundreds and hundreds of leather-and calf-bound volumes with thin worm-eaten pages and type so small it made your eyes go buggy.
I’d had a squint once before at some of these relics, but had found them devoted mainly to the lives and sermons of a bunch of dry old sticks who had lived and died while Mozart was still crawling around in diapers.
If ever there was a graveyard of religious biography, this was it.
I’d work methodically, I thought, one wall at a time, top of the north wall first, then top of the east wall, and so forth.
Books about dissenting clergymen were not exactly kept at one’s fingertips at Buckshaw. Besides, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was searching for, but I knew that I would likely find it nearer the ceiling.
I dragged the rolling library ladder into position and began my climb: up, up, up—my footing more precarious with every step.
Libraries of this design, I thought, ought to be equipped with oxygen bottles above a certain height, in case of altitude sickness.
Which made me think of Harriet, and a sudden sadness came over me. Harriet had scaled these very same bookcases once upon a time. In fact, it was stumbling upon one of her chemistry texts in this very room that had changed my life.
“Get on with it, Flave,” said a strict-sounding voice inside me. “Harriet is dead, and you’ve got work to do.”
Up I went, my head still cocked at an uncomfortable angle from reading titles on book spines at the lower levels. Fortunately, at this higher altitude, the older volumes had sensible, no-nonsense horizontal titles stamped deeply into their spines in gold-leaf letters, making them three-dimensional, and relatively easy to read in the perpetual twilight near the ceiling: