• NINETEEN •
IT WAS NOT UNTIL I was halfway home that the indignation struck me.
“If only that were true,” indeed! It was obvious from his words that in spite of his calling, the vicar was a man of little faith.
I had taken him by the hand and led him out through the vestry, tiptoed with him through the churchyard, and delivered him safely to the vicarage door. I had lurked behind a large tombstone and watched as the grumbling crowd slowly broke up and drifted away.
Not one of them had even thought of looking round behind the church. Not one had thought to follow us on our sad procession to the imaginary deathbed. They had all been so touched by my pretended mission of mercy, that nobody—not even the most hardened of the newspapermen—had tried the church door.
And yet the vicar had no faith in me.
I hate to admit how much that stung.
The best thing for soothing a disappointed mind is oxygen. A couple of deep inhalations of the old “O” rejuvenates every cell in the body. I suppose I could have gone upstairs to my laboratory for a bit of the bottled stuff, but to me, that would have been cheating. There is nothing like oxygen in its natural form—oxygen which has been naturally produced in a forest or a greenhouse, where many plants, by the process of photosynthesis, are absorbing the poisonous carbon dioxide which we breathe out, and giving us oxygen in exchange.
I had once remarked to Feely that, because of the oxygen, breathing fresh air was like breathing God, but she had slapped my face and told me I was being blasphemous.
The greenhouse at Buckshaw, I had found, always cheered me up instantly, although how much of that was due to Dogger’s presence and how much to oxygen I couldn’t say. Probably half and half. This much was certain: A greenhouse is a placid place. You never hear about ax murders taking place in a greenhouse.
My theory is that it is because of the “O.”
I found Dogger among the flowerpots, lashing gardening tools into bundles with heavy twine.
“Dogger,” I said casually, stifling a yawn as I bent over to inspect a potted polyanthus, “what would you say if I asked you the cause of wasted thumb muscles and drooping hands?”
“I should say you’d been at Bogmore Hall, Miss Flavia.”
I suppose I should have been dumbfounded, but somehow I wasn’t.
“You’ve seen the photograph of Mrs. Ridley-Smith?”
“No,” Dogger replied, “but I have overheard the idle chatter of servants.”
“And?”
“Most unfortunate. By what I have been able to piece together, a classic case of lead poisoning. The flexor muscles and, to a lesser degree, the extensors are affected. But you will have spotted that already, won’t you, miss?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I needed you to verify it.”
There was a silence as each of us considered how to handle what was inevitably coming next.
“You’ve known about it all along.” I ventured not to make my words sound like an accusation.
“Yes,” he said, and there was a sadness in his words, “I’ve known about it all along.”
There was another silence and I realized suddenly that it was because both of us were avoiding any mention of Harriet.
“She used to visit him, didn’t she?” I asked. “Jocelyn, I mean.”
“Yes,” Dogger said, simply.
“And you went with her!”
“No, miss. You must remember, I wasn’t yet at Buckshaw in those days.”
Of course! How stupid of me. What was I thinking of? Dogger hadn’t come to Buckshaw until after the war. He must have heard about the Ridley-Smiths, as I did, from someone else.
“But he’s a prisoner! How could they keep him locked up like that?”
“Is he locked up—” Dogger began.
“Of course he is,” I said, perhaps too loudly. “Behind a set of double doors!”
“—or is he being protected?”
Now I found myself speaking too quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.
“No,” Dogger said. “People often don’t. One reads these stories in the daily press and jumps to conclusions. Facts are often in direct opposition to assumptions.”
“To the headlines,” I said, thinking for an instant of the vicar.
“Yes,” Dogger said. “As you know from your own studies, lead poisoning is not a pretty thing.”
It was true. I had read about what happened to women who had used it in hair dyes, or had slathered quack cosmetics containing carbonate of lead onto their faces: stuff with names like Cosmetique Infallible, and Ali Ahmed’s Treasures of the Desert.
I let my mind fly back to those fat books in Uncle Tar’s library in which I had first come across the details: Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, and Blyth’s Poisons: Their Effects and Detection, which, since I had discovered them, had become my Old and New Testaments and my Apocrypha.
I thought of the gruesome but fascinating horrors that lay within their pages: the wrist drop, or lead palsy; the paleness, the bloodlessness, the headaches, the foul taste in the mouth, the cramping legs, the difficulty in breathing, the vomiting, the diarrhea, the convulsions, the unconsciousness. I knew that if by some magic we had been able to peel back the lips of Ada Ridley-Smith in that old black-and-white photograph, we should have spotted at least a trace of the blue line where her gums met her teeth, the classic sign of plumbism, better known as lead poisoning.
No wonder the woman was depressed!
“Lead toy soldiers painted with lead paint,” Dogger said. “Intended to be looked at, not played with—not, at least, in such great numbers.”
“But Jocelyn—” I said.
“Unfortunately, the damage is already done.” Dogger shook his head. “He was born poisoned.”
It seemed too shocking a thought to be put into mere words.
“The brain of an unborn baby is a most susceptible target,” Dogger said. “Women suffering from lead poisoning, more often than not, lose the child.
“But not always,” he added. “Not always.”
“Tell me about the ‘not always,’ ” I said quietly.
“Children born of a lead-poisoned mother seldom survive more than two or three years. The odds are less than three in a hundred.”
“But what’s to be done?” I asked. “Surely we can’t allow him to be cooped up like that. It isn’t right.”
Dogger put aside the rakes and hoes. “Sometimes,” he said, “a jackstraw family life is the best that can be hoped for.”
He paused, and then went on as quietly as if he were dusting furniture. “It may not be ideal, but still, it might be the best possible under the circumstances. The slightest interference might bring the whole thing tumbling down entirely like a house of cards.”
Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. It was odd. Perhaps I was overtired. Father had more than once lectured us about overexertion, but perhaps he was right. I had had rather a hectic day.
“I have taken the liberty of preparing a nest for Esmeralda,” Dogger said, neatly changing the subject, “and laying on a supply of the approved feed.”
He pointed to a wooden box in the corner, where Esmeralda was nestling in a luxurious bed of straw. I hadn’t even noticed her.
“Dogger,” I said, “you’re a darling!”
I don’t know what came over me. It just slipped out. I was mortified. It was the sort of thing Feely’s friend Sheila Foster might have said.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “I didn’t mean—”
And then I fled, leaving Dogger placidly at work amidst his atmosphere of oxygen.