Actually, I was just making conversation. I knew that bats didn’t come in through open doors. There were enough of the things hanging in the attics at Buckshaw for me to know that they generally got in through broken windows or were dragged in, injured, by cats. Since St. Tancred’s didn’t have a cat, the answer seemed obvious.
“Why are they opening his tomb?” I asked, changing the subject. Feely would know I was referring to the saint.
“Saint Tancred? Because it’s the quincentennial of his death.”
“The what?”
“Quincentennial. It means five hundred years.”
I let out a whistle. “Saint Tancred’s been dead five hundred years? That’s five times longer than old Hezekiah Whytefleet lived.”
Feely said nothing.
“That means he died in 1451,” I said, making a quick mental subtraction. “What do you suppose he’s going to look like when they dig him up?”
“Who knows?” Feely said. “Some saints remain forever uncorrupted. Their complexions are still as soft and peachy as a baby’s bottom, and they have a smell of flowers about them. ‘The odor of sanctity,’ it’s called.”
When she felt like it, my sister could be downright chatty.
“Supercolossal!” I said. “I hope I get a good squint at him when they drag him out of his box.”
“Forget about Saint Tancred,” Feely said. “You won’t be allowed anywhere near him.”
“It’s like eatin’ cooked ’eat,” Mrs. Mullet said. What she meant, of course, was “eating cooked heat.”
I stared doubtfully at the bowl of squash and parsnip soup as she put it on the table in front of me. Black peppercorns floated in the stuff like pellets of used birdshot.
“Looks almost good enough to eat,” I remarked pleasantly.
Sticking a finger into The Mysteries of Udolpho to mark her place, Daffy shot me one of her paralyzing looks.
“Ungrateful little wretch,” she muttered.
“Daphne …” Father said.
“Well, she is,” Daffy went on. “Mrs. Mullet’s soup is nothing to joke about.”
Feely quickly clapped a napkin to her lips to stifle a smile, and I saw another of those silent messages wing its way between my sisters.
“Ophelia …” Father said. He had not missed it, either.
“Oh, it’s nothin’, Colonel de Luce,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Miss Flavia ’as to ’ave ’er little joke. Me an’ ’er ’as an understandin’. She means no ’arm.”
This was news to me, but I trotted out a warm smile.
“It’s all right, Mrs. M,” I told her. “They know not what they do.”
Very deliberately, Father closed the latest issue of The London Philatelist which he had been reading, picked it up, and left the room. A few moments later, I heard his study door closing quietly.
“Now you’ve done it,” Feely said.
Father’s money problems had become more pressing with each passing month. There had been a time when his worries made him merely glum, but recently I had detected something which I feared was far, far worse: surrender.
Surrender in a man who had survived a prisoner-of-war camp was almost unthinkable, and I realized with a sudden twinge in my heart that the bone-dry little men of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue had done to Father what the Empire of Japan had failed to do. They had caused him to give up hope.
Our mother, Harriet, to whom Buckshaw had been left by her great-uncle Tarquin de Luce, had died in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas when I was a year old. Because she had left no will, His Majesty’s Vultures had descended upon Father at once, and had been busily pecking out his liver ever since.
It had been a long struggle. From time to time, it had looked as if circumstances might take a turn for the better, but recently, I had noticed that Father was tiring. On several occasions, he had warned us that he might have to give up Buckshaw, but somehow we had always muddled through. Now, it seemed as if he no longer cared.
How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me gooseflesh.
Uncle Tar’s first-rate chemistry lab upstairs in the unheated east wing was the only part of the house that would pass inspection, but it had long been abandoned to the dust and the cold of neglect until I had discovered the forgotten room and commandeered it for my own.
Although Uncle Tar had been dead for more than twenty years, the laboratory which his indulgent father had built for him had been so far in advance of its time that it would even now, in 1951, be considered a marvel of science. From the gleaming brass of the Leitz binocular microscope to the rank upon rank of bottled chemicals, from the forest of flasks and flagons to the gas chromatograph which he had caused to be built, based upon the work of the enviably named Mikhail Semenovich Tswett, Uncle Tar’s laboratory was now mine: a world of glass and wonder.
It was rumored that, at the time of his death, Uncle Tar had been at work upon the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide. If those whispers were true, he was one of the pioneers of what we have recently come to call “The Bomb.”
From Uncle Tar’s library and his detailed notebooks, I had managed to turn myself into a cracking good chemist, although my interests were not so much given over to the splitting of atoms as to the concocting of poisons.
To me, a jolly good dose of potassium cyanide beats stupid old spinning electrons any day of the week.
The thought of my waiting laboratory was impossible to resist.
“Don’t bother getting up,” I said to Daffy and Feely, who stared at me as if I had sprouted a second head.
I walked from the room in utter silence.