• TWENTY-SEVEN •
NEVER—NOT IN MY DOPIEST dreams—would I have believed I’d be so happy to see the woman.
I brushed roughly past Benson and Magistrate Ridley-Smith and took shelter behind Miss Tanty, peering round from behind her ample skirts.
“What’s going on here, Quentin?” she repeated, looking accusingly from one of my attackers to the other, and then at me, her thick spectacles focusing that frightful gaze like twin burning-glasses.
“A misunderstanding,” the magistrate said, with an apologetic and counterfeit chuckle. “Nothing more.”
“Misunderstanding,” Benson echoed, as if entering his own plea.
“I see …” Miss Tanty said, wavering on the brink of what to do. She seemed to be of two minds, or perhaps even more.
For a long time she stared at them in silence, and they at her.
“Come along, girl,” she said suddenly and, whirling round, seized my arm.
I winced. I hadn’t realized how much Benson had hurt me.
Without another word, she led me to the center aisle, and down it we marched together, like some nightmare bride and groom, toward the door.
Outside, the fog had lessened, although the air remained cool. The churchyard was empty. It was still too early for the ladies of the Altar Guild. No one was in sight.
Out the door and down the walk we went toward the road, Miss Tanty pulling me along like a toy dog on a string.
I must have hung back.
“Come along, girl,” Miss Tanty repeated. “You’ve had a bad shock. I can see it in your eyes. We need to get you warm. Get something hot and sweet into you.”
I couldn’t have agreed with her more. My knees were already beginning to tremble as we turned east toward Cater Street and Miss Tanty’s house.
I was suddenly exhausted, as if someone had opened a spigot in my ankle and let my energy pour out onto the ground.
The idea of a cup of tea and a fistful of cookies was both oddly comforting and oddly familiar. Like a fairy tale once heard and long forgotten.
We were walking quickly now as we turned into Cater Street.
“I forgot Gladys!” I exclaimed, stopping suddenly. “My bicycle. I left her in the churchyard.”
“I’ll fetch her while you have your tea,” Miss Tanty said. “I shall ring someone up and have them drive you home.”
I had a sudden, ridiculous vision of the someone—Miss Gawl, perhaps—herding me along the narrow road to Buckshaw with a shepherd’s crook—or a bishop’s crosier—as if I were a wayward lamb.
“It’s very kind of you,” I said.
“Not at all,” Miss Tanty replied, with the most awful and comforting grin.
We reached her house so suddenly that we might have been transported there by magic carpet.
Is this what shock does? I wondered. Warps time?
Was it possible to be in shock and yet, at the same moment, observe oneself being in shock?
Miss Tanty fished in her pocket for a key and unlocked the door, which was odd, I thought, since nobody in Bishop’s Lacey locks their doors.
As we stepped inside and she shot the bolt behind us, the parrot called out from the conservatory, “Hello, Quentin. All hands on deck!” and it whistled four notes which I recognized as the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
“Dah-dah-dah-DUM!”
Hello, Quentin? I thought. That’s what the bird had said when I was here before. It was also the name Miss Tanty had called Benson. No, wait—Benson’s name was Martin.
She must have been addressing the magistrate?
“Sit down,” Miss Tanty commanded. We had now magically arrived in her kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
I looked round at my surroundings and they were blue. It’s odd but true. That’s chiefly what I remember about it: Miss Tanty’s kitchen was blue. I hadn’t noticed it before.
On the table was a milk pitcher full of decomposing lilies, a small breadboard and half a loaf of Hovis bread, an electric toaster, a pewter candlestick with a partially melted candle, and a box of matches.
It was obvious that Miss Tanty’s meals were lonely ones.
Then there was, in a jiff, a cup of tea steaming in front of me, and I was feeling peculiarly grateful.
“Drink it,” Miss Tanty said. “Take these. Eat them.”
She shoved a saucer of shortbreads under my nose, then turned away and began fussing with something in a cupboard.
“Those men,” she was saying, too casually—too conversationally. “Those men in the church. What were they doing to you?”
“They thought I had found something,” I said. “They wanted me to hand it over.”
“And did you?”
“No,” I said.
The great goggles swung round and fixed me in their gaze.
“No, you didn’t find something? Or no, you didn’t hand it over?”
I looked into her eyes, mesmerized, and no words came.
“Well?”
Too late, the truth came crashing down.
“I have to go home now,” I said. “I’m not feeling well.”
Miss Tanty’s hands appeared suddenly from behind her back. In one was clutched a glass bottle and in the other, a handkerchief.
She sloshed liquid onto the linen and clapped it to my nose.
Aha! I thought—(C2H5)2O.
Diethyl ether again.
I’d recognize its sweet, gullet-tickling odor anywhere.
The chemist Henry Watts had once described it as having an exhilarating odor and the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called it pleasant, but it was obvious that neither Professor Watts nor the Encyclopaedia Britannica had ever had the stuff clapped over their noses in a blue-painted kitchen by a hulking and surprisingly powerful madwoman with bottle-bottom spectacles.
It burned.
It seared my nostrils—tore at my brain.
I struggled to get to my feet—but it was no use.
Miss Tanty had crooked an arm around my neck and, from behind, was pulling me down and backward into the chair. Her other hand was holding the handkerchief firmly over my nose.
“Teach you!” she was saying. “Teach you!”
I flailed my arms and kicked out, but it was no use.
Less than ten seconds had passed and my brain was spinning like a whirlpool into a sweet, sickening oblivion. All I had to do was give in to it.
To let myself go.
“No!”
Who had shouted that?
Was it me?
Or was it Harriet?
I had heard the voice distinctly.
“No!”
Now she had let go of my neck and was digging with her hand in one of my pockets—then the other.
I lashed out, fingers spread, and knocked Miss Tanty’s glasses from her face.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I turned my head to one side and sucked my lungs full of fresh air—one quick deep breath and then another—and another.
Without her powerful lenses, Miss Tanty looked round the kitchen, her mad eyes huge and weary, weak, watery, and unfocused.
Fighting my way out of the chair, I dodged to the left but she blocked me with her hips like a rugby player.
I dodged to the right, but she was there also.
Even though I could have been no more than a blur to her, the woman managed to throw herself in front of my every move.
There was no way out. No back door.
Now she had her arm around my neck again, tighter than before.