FOURTEEN
I STOOD IN THE High Street realizing that I was utterly alone. The villagers were, for the most part, at Buckshaw mourning Harriet, leaving Bishop’s Lacey a ghost town.
I placed the bottle in Gladys’s wicker basket, shoved off, and pedaled to the east. Dr. Darby’s surgery was just beyond Cow Lane.
His battered bull-nosed Morris was nowhere in sight.
I raised the door knocker—a serpent coiled round a staff—but couldn’t bring myself to let it fall. Dr. Darby’s wife was an invalid who was said never to leave her first-floor bedroom.
I was standing there with the brass serpent in my hand when a voice came drifting down from an open upper window.
“Who is it? Is that you, Flavia?”
“Yes,” I called up. “Yes, it’s me, Mrs. Darby. How did you know I was here?”
“The doctor’s rigged up a mirror for me. Pulleys and so forth. All very clever. He’s handy like that.”
I looked up and spotted the glint of a glass surface wigwagging from side to side before coming to rest.
“Is Dr. Darby at home?”
“No, I’m afraid not, dear. Have you cut yourself again?”
She was referring to an incident involving broken glass which I had yet to live down in certain quarters.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Darby. I just wanted to ask the doctor a question.”
“Anything I can help you with, dear? I’m always happy to lend an ear if it’s something in the nature of a personal problem.”
How ridiculous this is, I thought. I had no personal problems—at least not any that I wanted to bellow back and forth to a woman in an upper room in the High Street who was keeping an eye on me with a mechanical mirror.
“No, nothing like that, thank you. I’ll see him another time.”
“He’s at the hospital in Hinley,” she informed me. “Very sad outcome there, I’m afraid. He rang up not half an hour ago saying he’d be late for lunch but he’d be here nonetheless.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Darby. You’ve been extremely helpful. I hope you’re feeling better soon. I’ll bring you some flowers when I come back. The lilacs are in bloom at Buckshaw.”
“Dear girl,” she called down. “Dear girl!”
As I rode off, I realized that Mrs. Darby hadn’t mentioned Harriet. Not a word. How very odd. Perhaps she didn’t know. Ought I have told her?
The High Street was still empty as I pedaled along, head down, totally absorbed in my own thoughts.
There seemed to be so many questions—so few answers.
I hadn’t forgotten the man under the train’s wheels—how could I? But I simply hadn’t had time to think about him. My brain was a whirlpool, rotating like all fury around the still center that was Harriet.
I was almost at St. Tancred’s when I was deafened by a sudden loud noise: an earsplitting mechanical cawing of a klaxon horn and a hideous scream of brakes.
I looked up just in time to see an oncoming Morris leave the road, scrape past a hair’s breadth from my elbow, go skidding across the verge, and come to an ominous-sounding stop against the churchyard wall.
Steam arose from its radiator.
I was fixed to the spot: frozen and trembling at the same time.
Dr. Darby, looking more than ever like John Bull, sprang out of the car with remarkable agility for a man his age and size, and came sprinting to my side.
“Damn it all!” he said. “Are you all right?”
I looked round rather stupidly, as if to find the answer in the church tower or the treetops, then nodded slowly.
He fished in the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a crystal mint, which he popped into his mouth.
He did not shout at me. He did not even raise his voice.
“Um. Near thing, that,” he observed, offering me a lint-covered mint, which I took with shaking fingers. I could scarcely find my mouth.
When I’m finished growing up, I thought, I want to be like him.
“Come sit with me on the lych-gate,” he said. “We both of us need a bit of a breather.”
A moment later, I was dangling my legs as if I hadn’t a care in the world, and so, after a minute or two, was Dr. Darby.
“How are you getting on?” he asked.
I blinked several times. The sun was dazzling my eyes.
“I’m all right,” I said at last. “Thank you,” I added.
“What are you up to these days? Any interesting experiments?”
I could have hugged him. He was not going to try to pry open my heart.
It was an opportunity sent by the gods. I couldn’t resist.
“I was hoping to do some work with adenosine triphosphate,” I blurted, “but I don’t know how to get my hands on the stuff.”
There was a silence.
“Good lord,” Dr. Darby said at last. “ATP?”
I nodded.
“You’re not planning to inject it into some poor, unsuspecting creature, I hope?”
It was the kind of philosophical question which might have baffled Plato—and even Daffy.
Was Harriet poor? Was she unsuspecting?
Not in the sense that Dr. Darby meant those words, I was sure.
Was she a creature?
Well, that would depend upon which definition one chose to use. I had looked up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary not long ago while trying to work out if it would be sinful to destroy a fly in the name of Science.
“All things bright and beautiful,” we sang in church, “All creatures great and small.
“All things wise and wonderful
“The Lord God made them all.”
The O.E.D. wasn’t much help. On the one hand, it said that “creature” meant anything created, animate or inanimate, while another definition stated that it referred to a living creature or animate being, as opposed to “man.”
The moral choice was left up to the individual.
“No,” I said.
“Not that it’s my place to check you up.” Dr. Darby smiled.
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, surrounded by the moundy graves in the churchyard, kicking at the wall with our four heels.
“It is good to sit on a wall with a young woman on a sunny summer day,” the doctor said. He could see by my grin that I couldn’t agree more. He was flattering me but I didn’t mind.
“It makes up in part for the less happy occasions.”
I let the silence lengthen until he said: “We lost a girl today … about your age. At the hospital. Her name was Marguerite and she didn’t deserve to die.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“There are times when all we doctors with all our fabled skills are simply not enough. Death defeats us.”
“You must be sad,” I said.
“I am. Damned sad. She suffered from what we call an idiopathic neuropathy. Do you know what that means?”
“It means you don’t know the cause,” I said.
“We’re working on it,” Dr. Darby said, nodding wearily, “but it’s early days yet. Early, that is, for the rest of us—but too late, I fear, for Marguerite.”
“Was she beautiful?” I asked. It seemed desperately important to know.
Dr. Darby nodded.
I pictured the dying Marguerite with her golden hair spread out across a pillow, her face pale and damp, her black-circled eyes shut, her mind already in another world. I pictured her grieving parents.
“And there was nothing you could do?”
“We had been going to administer ATP as a last-ditch attempt, but—how very odd, you see, that you should have mentioned it.”
“ATP? Adenosine triphosphate?”
“It’s in my bag.” He pointed towards the still-steaming Morris. “An old school chum managed to wangle a couple of trial doses. Not much need for it now, I’m afraid.”
Was Dr. Darby telling me what I thought he was telling me? I scarcely dared breathe.
“If you wish to have it, it’s yours,” he said, sliding down from the wall and walking towards his car. “I’ll have to get Bert Archer to tow old Bessie into dry dock.”
“I’m sorry about your car,” I said. “I should have watched where I—”
Dr. Darby held up a hand, its palm towards me. “The poet Cowper,” he said, “who knew whereof he spoke, once wrote, ‘God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’ We mere mortals must never question what we sometimes take to be the blind workings of Fate.”
He lifted his black doctor’s bag out of the Morris, reached into its square mouth, and extracted two stoppered glass vials. “That’s why I have faith in you, Flavia,” he said, and handed them over without another word.
I suppose I should have been filled with feelings of warm gratitude, but I was not. Rather, I was overcome, sitting on that sunny wall, with something like a chill.
How laughably easy it had been, when you stopped to think about it, to extract the thiamine and the ATP from Annabella Cruickshank and Dr. Darby. It was almost as if their actions were being guided by some greater power.
Could it be that the spirit of my deceased mother, wherever it might be, was reaching through the veils from another world to assure her own resurrection?
Were we all of us no more than puppets in Harriet’s dead hands?