“Yes, it is. I used to cling to her and cry, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Please make the pixies bring back my baby sister.’ ”
“Flavia? Daphne? Ophelia?”
It was Father!
His voice came at parade-square volume from the direction of the kitchen staircase, amplified by the stone walls and echoing from arch to arch.
All three of our heads snapped round just in time to see his boots, his trousers, his upper body, and finally his face come into sight as he descended the stairs.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, peering round at the three of us in the near-darkness. “What have you done to yourselves?”
With the backs of their hands and their forearms, Feely and Daffy were already trying to scrub the black markings from their faces.
“We were only playing Prawns and Trivets,” Daffy said before I could answer. She pointed accusingly at me. “She gives us jolly good what-for when it’s her turn to play the Begum, but when it’s ours she always …”
Well done, Daff, I thought. I couldn’t have concocted a better spur-of-the-moment excuse myself.
“I’m surprised at you, Ophelia,” Father said. “I shouldn’t have thought …”
And then he stopped, unable to find the required words. There were times when he seemed almost—what was it … afraid? … of my oldest sister.
Feely rubbed at her face, smearing her cork makeup horribly. I nearly laughed out loud, but then I realized what she was doing. In a bid for sympathy, she was spreading the stuff to create dark, theatrical circles under her eyes.
The vixen! Like an actress applying her makeup onstage, it was a bold and brazen performance, which I couldn’t help admiring.
Father looked on in thrall, like a man fascinated by a cobra.
“Are you all right, Flavia?” he said at last, not budging from his position on the third step from the bottom.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
I was going to add “Thank you for asking” but I stopped myself just in time. I didn’t want to overdo it.
Father looked slowly from one of us to another with his sad eyes, as if there were no words left in the world from which to choose.
“There will be a parley at seven o’clock,” he said at last. “In the drawing room.”
With a final glance at each of us, he turned and trudged slowly up the stairs.
“The thing of it is,” Father was saying, “you girls just don’t seem to understand …”
And he was right: We no more understood his world than he did ours.
His was a world of confetti: a brightly colored universe of royal profiles and scenic views on sticky bits of paper; a world of pyramids and battleships, of rickety suspension bridges in far-flung corners of the globe, of deep harbors, lonely watchtowers, and the heads of famous men. In short, Father was a stamp collector, or a “philatelist,” as he preferred to call himself, and to be called by others.
His every waking moment was spent in peering through a magnifying lens at paper scraps in an eternal search for flaws. The discovery of a single microscopic crack in a printing plate, which had resulted in an unwanted hair on Queen Victoria’s chin, could send him into raptures.
First would come the official photograph, and elation. He would bring out of storage, and set up on its tripod in his study, an ancient plate camera with a peculiar attachment called a macroscopic lens, which allowed him to take a close-up of the specimen. This, when developed, would produce an image large enough to fill an entire page of a book. Sometimes, as he fussed happily over these operations, we would catch snatches of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Gondoliers drifting like fugitives through the house.
Then would come the written paper which he would submit to The London Philatelist or suchlike, and with it would come a certain crankiness. Every morning Father would bring to the breakfast table reams of writing paper which he would fill, page after laborious page, with his minuscule handwriting.
For weeks he would be unapproachable, and would remain so until such time as he had scribbled the last word—and more—on the topic of the queen’s superfluous whisker.
Once, when we were lying on the south lawn looking up into the blue vault of a perfect summer sky, I had suggested to Feely that Father’s quest for imperfections was not limited to stamps, but was sometimes expanded to include his daughters.
“Shut your filthy mouth!” she’d snapped.
“The thing of it is,” Father repeated, bringing me back to the present, “you girls don’t appear to understand the gravity of the situation.”
Mainly he meant me.
Feely had ratted, of course, and the story of how I had vaporized one of Harriet’s dreadful Victorian brooches had come tumbling out of her mouth as happily as the waters of a babbling brook.
“You had no right to remove it from your mother’s dressing room,” Father said, and for a moment his cold blue stare was shifted to my sister.
“I’m sorry,” Feely said. “I was going to wear it to church on Sunday to impress Dieter. It was quite wrong of me. I should have asked permission.”
It was quite wrong of me? Had I heard what I thought I’d heard, or were my ears playing hob with me? It was more likely that the sun and the moon should suddenly dance a jolly jig in the heavens than that one of my sisters should apologize. It was simply unheard of.
The Dieter Feely had mentioned was Dieter Schrantz, of Culverhouse Farm, a former German prisoner of war who had chosen to remain behind in England after the armistice. Feely had him in her sights.
“Yes,” Father said. “You should have.”
As he turned his attention to me, I could not help noticing that the folds of skin at the outer corners of his hooded eyes—those folds that I so often thought of as making him look so aristocratic—were hanging more heavily than usual, giving him a look of deeper sadness than I had ever seen.
“Flavia,” he said in a flat and weary voice that wounded me more than a pointed weapon.
“Yes, sir?”
“What is to be done with you?”
“I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to break the brooch. I dropped it and stepped on it by accident, and it just crumbled. Gosh, it must have been very old to be so brittle!”
He gave an almost imperceptible wince, followed instantly by one of those looks that meant I had touched upon a topic that was not open for discussion. With a long sigh he shifted his gaze to the window. Something in my words had sent his mind fleeing to safety beyond the hills.
“Did you have an enjoyable trip up to London?” I ventured. “To the philatelic exhibition, I mean?”
The word “philatelic” drew him back quickly.
“I hope you found some decent stamps for your collection.”
He let out another sigh: this one frighteningly like a death rattle. “I did not go to London to buy stamps, Flavia. I went there to sell them.”
Even Feely gasped.
“Our days at Buckshaw may be drawing to a close,” Father said. “As you are well aware, the house itself belonged to your mother, and when she died without leaving a will …”
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness that reminded me of a stricken butterfly.
He had deflated so suddenly in front of us that I could scarcely believe it.
“I had hoped to take her brooch to someone whom I know …”
For quite a few moments his words did not register.
I knew that in recent years the cost of maintaining Buckshaw had become positively ruinous, to say nothing of the taxes and the looming death duty. For years Father had managed to keep “the snarling taxmen,” as he called them, at bay, but now the wolves must be howling once again on the doorstep.
There had been hints from time to time of our predicament, but the threat had always seemed unreal: no more than a distant cloud on a summer horizon.
I remembered that for a time, Father had pinned his hopes on Aunt Felicity, his sister who lived in Hampstead. Daffy had suggested that many of his so-called “philatelic jaunts” were, in fact, calls upon Aunt Felicity to touch her for a loan—or to beg her to fork over whatever remained of the family jewels.
In the end, his sister must have turned him down. Just recently, and with our own ears, we had heard her tell him he must think about selling his philatelic collection. “Those ridiculous postage stamps,” she had called them, to be precise.
“Something will turn up,” Daffy remarked brightly. “It always does.”
“Only in Dickens, Daphne,” Father said. “Only in Dickens.”
Daffy had been reading David Copperfield for the umpteenth time. “Boning up on pawnshops,” she had answered when I asked her why.
Only now did it occur to me that Father had intended to take Harriet’s brooch—the one I had destroyed—to a pawnbroker.
“May I be excused?” I asked. “I’m suddenly not feeling well.”