Father Christmas, they had told me, again and again, was for children.
“He’s no more than a cruel hoax perpetrated by parents who wish to shower gifts upon their icky offspring without having to actually touch them,” Daffy had insisted last year. “He’s a myth. Take my word for it. I am, after all, older than you, and I know about these things.”
Did I believe her? I wasn’t sure. When I was able to get away on my own and think about it without tears springing to my eyes, I had applied my rather considerable deductive skills to the problem, and come to the conclusion that my sisters were lying. Someone, after all, had brought the glassware, hadn’t they?
There were only five possible human candidates. My father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, was penniless, and was therefore out of the question, as was my mother, Harriet, who had died in a mountaineering accident when I was no more than a baby.
Dogger, who was Father’s general roustabout and jack-of-all-trades, simply hadn’t the resources of mind, body, or finances to lug round lavish gifts secretly by night in a drafty and decaying country house. Dogger had been a prisoner of war in the Far East, where he had suffered so awfully that his brain had remained connected to those horrors by an invisible elastic cord—a cord that was sometimes still given a jerk by cruel Fate, usually at the most inopportune moments.
“ ’E ’ad to eat rats!” Mrs. Mullet had told me, wide-eyed in the kitchen. “Rats, fancy! They ’ad to fry ’em!”
With everyone in the household disqualified for one reason or another as the Bringer of Gifts, that left only Father Christmas.
He would be coming again in less than a week and, in order to settle the question for once and for all, I had long ago laid plans to trap him.
Scientifically.
Birdlime, as any practical chemist will tell you, can be easily manufactured by boiling the middle bark of holly for eight or nine hours, burying it under a stone for a fortnight, and then, when it is disinterred, washing and pulverizing it in running river water and leaving it to ferment. The stuff had been used for centuries by bird-sellers, who had smeared it on branches to trap the songbirds they sold in the city streets.
The great Sir Francis Galton had described a method of manufacturing the stuff in his book The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, a signed copy of which I had found among a heavily underlined set of his works in Uncle Tar’s library. I had followed Sir Francis’s instructions to the letter, lugging home in midsummer armloads of holly from the great oaks that grew in Gibbet Wood, and boiling the broken branches over a laboratory Bunsen burner in a stew pot borrowed—without her knowledge—from Mrs. Mullet. During the final stages, I had added a few chemical twists of my own to make the pulverized resin a hundred times more sticky than the original recipe. Now, after six months of preparation, my concoction was powerful enough to stop a Gabon gorilla in its tracks, and Father Christmas—if he existed—wouldn’t stand a chance. Unless the jolly old gentleman just happened to be traveling with a handy bottle of sulfuric ether, (C2H5)2O, to dissolve the birdlime, he was going to stay stuck to our chimney pot forever—or until I decided to set him free.
It was a brilliant plan. I wondered why no one had thought of it before.
Peering out through the curtains, I saw that it had snowed in the night. Driven by the north wind, white flakes were still swirling madly in the light of the downstairs kitchen window.
Who could be up at such an hour? It was too early for Mrs. Mullet to have walked from Bishop’s Lacey.
And then I remembered!
Today was the day the intruders were arriving from London. How could I ever have forgotten such a thing?
It had been more than a month ago—on November 11, in fact, that gray and subdued autumn day upon which everyone in Bishop’s Lacey had mourned in silence all those whom they had lost in the wars—that Father had summoned us to the drawing room to break the grim news.
“I’m afraid I have to tell you that the inevitable has happened,” he said at last, turning away from the window, out of which he had been staring morosely for a quarter of an hour.
“I needn’t remind you of our precarious financial prospects …”
He said this forgetting the fact that he reminded us daily—sometimes twice in an hour—of our dwindling reserves. Buckshaw had belonged to Harriet, and when she had died without leaving a will (Who, after all, could even imagine that someone so brimming over with life could meet her end on a mountain in far-off Tibet?) the troubles had begun. For ten years now, Father had been going through the courtly steps of the “Dance of Death,” as he called it, with the gray men from His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue.
Yet in spite of the mounting pile of bills on the foyer table, and in spite of the increasing telephonic demands from coarse-voiced callers from London, Father had somehow managed to muddle through.
Once, because of his phobia about “the instrument,” as he called the telephone, I had answered one of these brash calls myself, bringing it to rather an amusing end by pretending to speak no English.
When the telephone had jangled again a minute later, I picked up the receiver at once, then jiggled my finger rapidly up and down on the cradle.
“Hello?” I had shouted. “Hello? Hello? I’m sorry—Can’t hear you. Frightful connection. Call back some other day.”
On the third ring, I had taken the receiver off the hook and spat into the mouthpiece, which began at once to give off an alarming crackling noise.
“Fire,” I had said in a dazed and vaguely monotonous voice. “The house is in flames … the walls and the floor. I’m afraid I must ring off now. I’m sorry, but the firemen are hacking at the window.”
The bill collector had not called back.
“My meetings with the Estate Duties Office,” Father was saying, “have come to nothing. It is all up with us now.”
“But Aunt Felicity!” Daffy protested. “Surely Aunt Felicity—”
“Your aunt Felicity has neither the means nor the inclination to alleviate the situation. I’m afraid she’s—”
“Coming down for Christmas,” Daffy interrupted. “You could ask her while she’s here!”
“No,” Father said sadly, shaking his head. “All means have failed. The dance is over. I have been forced at last to give up Buckshaw—”
I let out a gasp.
Feely leaned forward, her brow furrowed. She was chewing at one of her fingernails: unheard of in someone as vain as she.
Daffy looked on through half-shut eyes, inscrutable as ever.
“—to a film studio,” Father went on. “They will arrive in the week before Christmas, and will remain in full possession until their work is complete.”
“But what about us?” Daffy asked. “What’s to become of us?”
“We shall be allowed to remain on the premises,” Father replied, “provided we keep to our quarters and don’t interfere in any way with the company’s work at hand. I’m sorry, but those were the best terms I could manage. In return, we shall receive, in the end, sufficient remuneration to keep our noses above water—at least until next Lady Day.”
I should have suspected something of the kind. It was only a couple of months since we had received a visitation from a pair of young men in scarves and flannels who had spent two days photographing Buckshaw from every conceivable angle, inside and out. Neville and Charlie, they were called, and Father had been exceedingly vague about their intentions. Supposing it to be just another photo visit from Country Life, I had put it out of my mind.
Now Father had been drawn again to the window, where he stood gazing out upon his troubled estate.
Feely got to her feet and strolled casually to the looking glass. She leaned in, peering closely at her own reflection.
I knew already what was on her mind.
“Any idea what it’s about?” she asked in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. “The film, I mean.”
“Another one of those blasted country house things, I believe,” Father replied, without turning round. “I didn’t bother to ask.”
“Any big names?”
“None that I recognize,” Father said. “The agent rattled on and on about someone named Wyvern, but it meant nothing to me.”
“Phyllis Wyvern?” Daffy was all agog. “Not Phyllis Wyvern?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Father said, brightening, but only a little. “Phyllis. The name rang a bell. Same name as the chairwoman of the Hampshire Philatelic Society.
“Except that her name is Phyllis Bramble,” he added, “not Wyvern.”
“But Phyllis Wyvern is the biggest film star in the world,” Feely said, openmouthed. “In the galaxy!”
“In the universe,” Daffy added solemnly. “The Crossing Keeper’s Daughter—she played Minah Kilgore, remember? Anna of the Steppes … Love and Blood … Dressed for Dying … The Secret Summer. She was supposed to have played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but she choked on a peach pit the night before her screen test and couldn’t speak a word.”
Daffy kept up to date on all the latest cinema gossip by speed-reading magazines at the village newsagent’s shop.
“She’s coming here to Buckshaw?” Feely asked. “Phyllis Wyvern?”
Father had given the ghost of a shrug and returned to staring glumly out the window.
I hurried down the east staircase. The dining room was in darkness. As I walked into the kitchen, Daffy and Feely looked up sourly from their porridge troughs.
“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Mrs. Mullet. “We was just talkin’ about sendin’ up a search party to see if you was still alive. ’Urry along now. Them fillum people will be ’ere before you can say ‘Jack Robertson.’ ”
I bolted my breakfast (clumpy porridge and burnt toast with lemon curd) and was about to make my escape when the kitchen door opened and in came Dogger on a rush of cold, fresh air.
“Good morning, Dogger,” I said. “Are we picking out a tree today?”
For as long as I could remember, it had been a tradition for my sisters and me, in the week before Christmas, to accompany Dogger into the wood on Buckshaw’s eastern outskirts, where we would gravely consider this tree and that, awarding each one points for height, shape, fullness, and general all-round character before finally selecting a champion.
Next morning, as if by magic, the chosen tree would appear in the drawing room, set up securely in a coal scuttle and ready for our attentions. All of us—except Father—would spend the day in a blizzard of antique tinsel, silver and gold garlands, colored glass balls, and little angels tooting pasteboard trumpets, hovering as long as we could over our small tasks until late in the darkening afternoon when, reluctantly, the thing was done.
Because it was the single day of the year upon which my sisters were a little less beastly to me than usual, I looked forward to it with barely suppressed excitement. For a single day—or for a few hours at least—we would be carefully civil to one another, teasing and joking and sometimes even laughing together, as if we were one of those poor but cheerful families from Dickens.
I was already smiling in anticipation.
“I’m afraid not, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “The Colonel has given orders for the house to be left as is. Those are the wishes of the film people.”
“Oh, bother the film people!” I said, perhaps too loudly. “They can’t keep us from having Christmas.”
But I saw at once by the sad look on Dogger’s face that they could.
“I shall put up a little tree in the greenhouse,” he said. “It will keep longer in the cool air.”
“But it won’t be the same!” I protested.
“No, it won’t,” Dogger agreed, “but we shall have done our best.”
Before I could think of a reply, Father came into the kitchen, scowling at us as if he were a bank manager and we a group of renegade depositors who had somehow managed to breach the barriers before opening time.
We all of us sat with eyes downcast as he opened his London Philatelist and turned his attention to spreading his charred toast with pallid white margarine.
“Nice fresh snow overnight,” Mrs. Mullet remarked cheerily, but I could see by her worried glance towards the window that her heart was not in it. If the wind kept blowing as it was, she would have to wade home through the drifts when her day’s work was done.
Of course, if the weather were too severe, Father would have Dogger ring up for Clarence Mundy’s taxicab—but with a stiff winter crosswind, it was always touch and go whether Clarence could plow through the deep piles that invariably drifted in between the gaps in the hedgerows. As all of us knew, there were times when Buckshaw was accessible only on foot.
When Harriet was alive, there had been a sleigh with bells and blankets—in fact, the sleigh itself still stood in a shadowy corner of the coach house, behind Harriet’s Rolls-Royce Phantom II, each of them a monument to its departed owner. The horses, alas, were long gone: sold at auction in the wake of Harriet’s death.
Something rumbled in the distance.
“Listen!” I said. “What was that?”
“Wind,” Daffy replied. “Do you want that last piece of toast, or shall I have it?”
I grabbed the slice and gobbled it down dry as I dashed for the foyer.