NINE
FATHER HAD DECREED THAT we, the immediate family, would take turns standing watch over Harriet. He himself would take the first shift of six hours, he had decided, from two until eight o’clock. Feely, as next oldest, would serve from eight till two in the morning, followed by Daffy until eight A.M., at which time I was to take over until two in the afternoon. Aunt Felicity had at first been written off on grounds of age.
“Nonsense, Haviland!” she had told him. “I’m as capable as you are. More, when you come right down to it. You must not deny me my vigil.”
And so the rota had been rearranged. We each would be assigned a watch of 4.8 hours, which came out neatly, as Daffy pointed out, at 4 hours and 48 minutes per person.
Aunt Felicity would stand watch from 2:00 this afternoon until 6:48 in the evening; Father from 6:48 until 11:36; Feely from 11:36 until 4:24; Daffy from 4:24 until 9:12 in the morning; and me from then until 2:00 tomorrow afternoon, the time of the funeral.
It was a typical de Luce solution: logical beyond question, and yet, at the same time, mad as a March hare.
There was just one problem: In order to carry out the work I intended to do, my watch needed to be in the latest hours of the night and the earliest hours of the morning.
In short, I needed to switch shifts with Feely.
Feely, however, was busy soaking up sympathy from the Misses Puddock and I didn’t want to deprive her of that. I’d tackle her later about swapping shifts.
Meanwhile, I needed to prepare for what might well prove to be the greatest chemical experiment of my life. There wasn’t an instant to lose.
Upstairs in my laboratory I riffled through my notebook. I knew I had written down the details somewhere.
Ah, yes—here it was: Hilda Silfverling, a Fantasy, by Lydia Maria Child. Daffy had once entertained us with it at the breakfast table: the tale of a poor, unfortunate woman in Sweden who was about to have her head chopped off after being falsely accused of infanticide.
I had never forgotten the learned chemist of Stockholm in the story, “whose thoughts were all gas, and his hours marked only by combinations and explosions.”
To be perfectly honest, it was the only part of the tale that had really interested me. This scientist, whose name was never given so that I could look him up in Scientific Lives, had discovered a process of artificial cold by which he could suspend animation in living creatures. Even more importantly, he had discovered a way to restore the subject, Hilda Silfverling in this case, to life whenever he wished.
“Is that really possible?” I had asked.
“It’s fiction,” Daffy had said.
“I know. But couldn’t it be based on truth?”
“All writers would have you believe that their stories are based on truth, but the word ‘fiction’ is formed from a word meaning ‘to contrive.’ You, in particular, ought to relate to that.”
I bit my tongue, hoping she would continue, and she did.
“Take Jack London, for instance,” she said. My sister loved to show off.
“What about him?”
“Well, he wrote what amounted to essentially the same story. ‘A Thousand Deaths,’ it was called. About a man whose occupation was allowing himself to be killed in as many different ways as you can imagine, then brought back to life by his father, who was something of a mad scientist.”
“Like Dr. Frankenstein!” I said excitedly.
“Exactly. Except that this fool let himself be poisoned, electrocuted, drowned, strangled, and suffocated. Among other things,” she added.
Now this was my kind of reading!
“Where can I find a copy?”
“Oh, in the library, somewhere,” Daffy had sniffed, waving me away with an impatient hand.
It had taken quite a while, but in the end, I had found it almost by accident in a rather grubby penny book.
And what a disappointment! Rather than giving any specific details about his many deaths and resurrections, the author allowed his character to ramble on vaguely about magnetic fields, polarized light, nonluminous fields, electrolysis, molecular attraction, and a hypothetical force called apergy, which was claimed to be the opposite of gravity.
What a load of bloody codswallop!
I could have come up with a better theory of resurrection from the dead with both hands tied behind my back at the bottom of a pond in a potato sack.
In fact, I did, even though I couldn’t take full credit for it myself.
I had been passing the time of day with Dogger in the greenhouse, trying to think of ways to ask him about his imprisonment with Father in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but without actually seeming to.
“Dogger,” I had asked with a burst of sudden inspiration, “do you know anything about jiujitsu?”
He pulled a root-bound plant from its pot and prodded it tenderly with his trowel. The root ball looked like a Martian’s brain.
“Perhaps,” he said at last, “a little.”
I tried to breathe through my ears so as not to break his fragile train of thought.
“Long ago, before I—”
“Yes?”
“As a student—” Dogger said, picking at the roots with his fingers as if he were unraveling the strands of the Gordian knot, “as a student, I had occasion to study for a time the Kano system of jiujitsu. It was popular in my day.”
“Yes?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I was much interested in the art of kuatsu, that branch of the subject which deals with the lethal blows, but much more important, the healing and restoration of life to those who may have suffered them.”
My eyes must have widened. “Restoration of life?”
“Just so,” Dogger said.
“You’re pulling my leg!”
“Not at all,” Dogger said, giving the plant a gentle shake to dislodge the old soil. “Professor Kano’s methods were used for a time, I believe, in certain special instances by the Royal Life Saving Society, in cases of drowning.”
“They restored drowning victims to life? Dead people?”
“I believe so,” Dogger said. “Of course I never actually witnessed it myself, but I was nevertheless taught the sharp blow which was needed to restore life to the dead.”
“Show me!” I said.
Dogger stood up and turned round. “Stick your finger into my spine.”
I gave him a halfhearted prod.
“Higher,” he said. “A little higher yet. Yes, that’s it. The second lumbar vertebrum. A sharp blow there with the second knuckle will do the trick.”
“Shall I try it?” I asked eagerly. “Get ready!”
“No,” Dogger said, turning round to face me. “In the first place, I’m not dead, and in the second, the fatal blows are never actually delivered except in cases of dire emergency. In practice, it is sufficient to announce them.”
“Biff!” I said, delivering a powerful punch with a projecting knuckle, but pulling it at the last possible instant. “Consider it delivered!”
“Thank you,” Dogger said. “Very good of you, I’m sure.”
“Phew!” I said. “Imagine that: the resurrection of the dead by a poke in the back. There’s no mention of that in the Bible, but perhaps Jesus wasn’t aware of it.”
“Perhaps.” Dogger smiled.
“It seems crazy, doesn’t it? Completely crazy, when you come right down to it, I mean.”
“Perhaps,” Dogger said again, “and perhaps not. It is quite widely known that in the primitive societies, and perhaps no less in our own, the healers are quite often neurotics or psychotics.”
“Meaning?”
“That they suffer from certain nervous disorders—that they may even be deranged.”
“Do you believe that?”
The greenhouse was so still that I fancied I could hear the plants growing.
“Sometimes I must, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said at last. “I have no other choice.”
Those, then, had been the two instances that had set my mind on restoring Harriet to life. Although the very thought of such a thing might be repellent to some, I found it nevertheless exciting. Exhilarating, even!
In the first place, I had no fear of corpses: none whatsoever. The past year had brought me face-to-face with a half dozen of the deceased, and I must admit that I had found them all, each in his or her own way, far more interesting than their living counterparts.
Then, too, there was Father. How deliriously happy he would be to have his beloved restored to him! In all the years I could remember, I had never seen Father smile—I mean really smile and show his teeth.
With Harriet home and alive and happy among us on the drawing room hearth, Father would be a different person. He would laugh, make jokes, hug us, ruffle our hair, play games with us, and, yes, perhaps even kiss us.
It would be like living in an earthly paradise: a modern-day land of Cockaigne, such as is seen in those paintings by Pieter Brueghel that Feely is so fond of; a land of milk and honey in which there was no rationing, no bitterly cold rooms, and no decay.
Buckshaw would be new again, and we all of us would live together happily ever after until the cows came home.
All I needed now was to work out a few of the chemical details.