TWENTY-EIGHT
THE HOUSEHOLD HAD BEEN summoned, and we all of us stood waiting in the foyer.
I understood at once that Father had decided to make an occasion of Porcelain’s presence in the house, perhaps, I thought, because he felt remorse for the way in which he had treated her grandparents. He still did not know, of course, about the tragic death of Johnny Faa.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs, a little apart from the others, taking in, as if for the first time, the sad splendor of the de Luce ancestral home.
There had been a time when Buckshaw rang with laughter, or so I’d been told, but quite frankly, I could not even imagine it. The house seemed to hold itself in stiff disapproval, reflecting only the sound of whispers—setting dim but rigid limits on the lives of all of us who lived within its walls. Other than Father’s gorgon sister, Aunt Felicity, who made annual expeditions in order to berate him, there had been no guests at Buckshaw for as long as I could remember.
Daffy and Feely stood with annoyingly perfect posture on either side of Father, both of them scrubbed to disgusting perfection, like the well-bred but rather dim daughters of the local squire in a drawing-room drama. Just wait till they saw Porcelain!
To one side, Dogger hovered, nearly invisible against the dark paneling, save for his white face and his white hair—like a disembodied head afloat in the gloom.
Glancing at his military wristwatch, Father made a slight involuntary frown, but covered it nicely by pulling out his handkerchief and giving his nose an unconvincing blow.
He was nervous!
We stood there in silence, each of us staring off in a different direction.
Precisely fifteen minutes after the gong had sounded, a door closed somewhere above, and we focused our attention upon the top of the staircase.
As Porcelain appeared, we gasped collectively, and Mrs. Mullet, who had just come from the kitchen, gave out a cry like a small nocturnal animal. I thought for a moment she was going to bolt.
Porcelain had not chosen from Daffy’s or Feely’s wardrobe. She was dressed in one of my mother’s most memorable outfits: the knee-length, flame-colored dress of orange silk chiffon that Harriet had worn to the Royal Aero Society Ball the year before her final journey. A photograph had been taken by the Times that evening as Harriet arrived at the Savoy—a photograph that created a stir that to this day has never been quite forgotten.
But it wasn’t just the dress: Porcelain had pulled her hair back in the same way that Harriet had done when she was riding to the hounds. She must have copied the style from the black-and-white photo on Harriet’s desk.
Because I had rifled my mother’s jewel box myself from time to time, I recognized at once the antique amber necklace that lay against Porcelain’s surprisingly well-developed bosom, and the stones that glittered on her fingers.
Harriet’s—all of them Harriet’s!
Porcelain paused on the top step and looked down at us with what I took at the time to be shyness, but later decided might well have been contempt.
I must say that Father behaved magnificently, although at first, I was sure he was going to faint. As Porcelain began her long, slow descent, his jaw muscles began tightening and loosening reflexively. As with most military men, it was the only permissible show of emotion, and as such, it was at once both nerve-wracking and deeply endearing.
Down and down she came towards us, floating on the air like some immortal sprite—a pixy, perhaps, I thought wildly. Perhaps Queen Mab herself!
As she neared the bottom, Porcelain broke into the most heartbreaking smile that I have ever seen on a human face: a smile that encompassed us all and yet, at the same time, managed to single out each one of us for particular dazzlement.
No queen—not even Cleopatra herself—had ever made such an entrance, and I found myself gaping in open-mouthed admiration at the sheer audacity of it.
As she swept lightly past me at the bottom of the stairs, she leaned in close upon my neck, her lips almost brushing my ear.
“How do I look?” she whispered.
All she needed was a rose in her teeth, but I hardly dared say so.
Father took a single step forward and offered her his arm.
“Shall we go in to dinner?” he asked.
“Macaroons!” Porcelain said. “How I love them!”
Mrs. Mullet beamed. “I shall give you the recipe, dear,” she said. “It’s the tinned milk as gives ’em the extra fillet.”
I nearly gagged, but a few deft passes of my table napkin provided a neat distraction.
Daffy and Feely, to give them credit, had—apart from their initial goggling—seemed not to have turned a hair at Porcelain’s borrowed costume, although they couldn’t take their eyes off her.
At the table, they asked interesting questions—mostly about her life in London during the war. In general, and against all odds, my sisters were charming beyond belief.
And Father … dear Father. Although Porcelain’s sudden appearance in Harriet’s wardrobe must have shocked him deeply, he managed somehow to keep a miraculously tight grip on himself. In fact, for a few hours, it was as if Harriet had been returned to him from the dead.
He smiled, he listened attentively, and at one point he even told rather an amusing story about an old lady’s first encounter with a beekeeper.
It was as if, for a few hours, Porcelain had cast a spell upon us all.
There was only one awkward moment, and it came towards the end of the evening.
Feely had just finished playing a lovely piano arrangement of Antonin Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs, Opus 55: Songs My Great-Grandfather Taught Me, one of her great favorites.
“Well,” she asked, getting up from the piano and turning to Porcelain, “what do you think? I’ve always wanted to hear the opinion of a real Gypsy.”
You could have cut the silence with a knife.
“Ophelia …” Father said.
I held my breath, afraid that Porcelain would be offended, but I needn’t have worried.
“Quite beautiful in places,” she said, giving Feely that dazzling smile. “Of course I’m no more than half-Gypsy, so I only enjoyed every other section.”
“I thought she was going to leap over the piano stool and scratch my eyes out!”
We were back upstairs in my bedroom after what had been, for both of us, something of an ordeal.
“Feely wouldn’t do that,” I said. “At least, not with Father in the room.”
There had been no mention of Brookie Harewood, and apart from a polite enquiry by Father (“I hope your grandmother is getting on well?”), nothing whatever said about Fenella.
It was just as well, as I didn’t fancy having to answer inconvenient, and perhaps even embarrassing, questions about my recent activities.
“They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,” Porcelain remarked.
“Ha!” I said. “Shows what little you know! I hate them!”
“Hate them? I should have thought you’d love them.”
“Of course I love them,” I said, throwing myself full length onto the bed. “That’s why I’m so good at hating them.”
“I think you’re having me on. What have they ever done to you?”
“They torture me,” I said. “But please don’t ask me for details.”
When I knew that I had gained her undivided attention, I rolled over onto my stomach so that I couldn’t see her.
Talking to someone dressed in my mother’s clothing was eerie enough, without recounting to her the tortures my sisters had inflicted upon me.
“Torture you?” she said. “In what way? Tell me about it.”
For a long while there was only the sound of my brass alarm clock ticking on the bedside table, chopping the long minutes into manageable segments.
Then, in a rush, it all came spilling out. I found myself telling her about my ordeal in the cellars: how they had lugged me down the stairs, dumped me on the stone floor, and frightened me with horrid voices; how they had told me I was a changeling, left behind by the pixies when the real Flavia de Luce was abducted.
Until I heard myself telling it to Porcelain, I had no idea how badly shaken the ordeal had left me.
“Do you believe me?” I asked, desperate, somehow, for a “yes.”
“I’d like to,” she said, “but it’s hard to imagine such ladylike young women operating their own private dungeon.”
Ladylike young women? I’m afraid I almost uttered a word that would have shocked a sailor.
“Come on,” I said, leaping to my feet and tugging at her arm. “I’ll show you what ladylike young women get up to when no one is looking.”