TWENTY-ONE
MRS. MULLET JERKED AWAKE as I opened the kitchen door. I could tell by her eyes that she had been crying.
“Mrs. M. What are you doing here?”
Her head was still half raised from where it had been cradled in her arms on the kitchen table. She looked as if she didn’t know where she was.
“No, don’t get up,” I told her. “I’ll put the kettle on and make you a nice cup of tea.”
Less than five seconds in the room and I was already taking charge of a woman in distress. How very, very odd.
I patted her shoulder like mad, and surprisingly, she let me.
“You’ve been here all night, haven’t you?”
Mrs. M nodded and pressed her lips tightly together until they were white.
“It’s too much for you,” I told her. “You’ve been working too hard. Daffy told me Adam Sowerby arrived last night. I’ll knock him up and have him run you home.”
“ ’E’s gone already, love. Hours ago.”
Adam gone already? It didn’t make sense. Why, he’d only just arrived.
I dawdled over the sink, taking my time with the kettle, waiting for the water to run cold to allow Mrs. Mullet time to wipe her eyes and poke in the ends of her hair.
“You’ve been overdoing it, Mrs. M,” I said. “You must be exhausted. Why don’t you go up to my room and have a nap? No one will disturb you there.”
“Workin’ too ’ard?” Her voice was suddenly battleship steel. “That’s where you’re wrong, Miss Flavia. I ’aven’t been workin’ ’ard enough. That’s the trouble.”
I put the kettle on the stove and waited for her to subside, but she didn’t.
“There’s work to be done and it’s my place to do it.”
“But—”
“Don’t but me, miss. ’Tisn’t every day Miss ’Arriet comes ’ome, an’ ’tisn’t every day I gets to welcome ’er. No one shall take that away from me—
“Not even you, Miss Flavia.”
I went to her and put my arms around her from behind, resting my cheek on top of her head.
I didn’t say a word because I didn’t need to.
Outside, seen from the kitchen garden, one of the larger planets—Jupiter, I think—was well up above the pink ribbon of the eastern horizon.
It was the dark of the moon, and overhead, the stars sparkled in the inky blue-black vault of the heavens.
I was wiping the dew from Gladys’s cold seat when something rustled near the greenhouse.
“Dogger?” I called quietly.
There was no reply.
“Adam?
“All right,” I said. “I know you’re there. Come out before I call the police.”
Someone stepped out of the shadows.
It was Tristram Tallis.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was trying not to wake the household.”
“You didn’t frighten me,” I told him. “I thought you were a prowler. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
This was a bit of a stretch, even for me, and I think he knew it. Although Buckshaw did have a firearms museum—or “muniment room,” as Father called it—most of the weapons in its glass cases had likely not been fired since the Roundheads and the Cavaliers had squeezed their triggers in the days of “Jolly Ollie” Cromwell.
“Good job you didn’t,” Tallis said. “I should have been hurt if you’d potted me.”
Was the man twitting me?
I decided to let it pass and find out what he was up to.
“You’re up early.” I tried to put a pinch of accusation in my voice.
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come down and check on Typhon. Sorry, Blithe Spirit, I mean. Oil and so forth.”
It seemed an unlikely excuse for a moment until I remembered that I felt the same way about Gladys.
“Since it might be our last day together, I thought I’d get an early start.”
Our last day together? Was he referring to me? Or to Blithe Spirit?
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, seeing the look of puzzlement on my face. “I’m selling up. Cashing in my chips. As the old song says, I’m off to Tipperary in the morning. I’ve been offered a post shuffling papers in South America.”
“That’s not exactly Tipperary,” I said. I didn’t know where Tipperary was, actually, except that it sounded as if it might be somewhere in Ireland.
“No, not exactly.” He grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think I should wire them and tell them I’ve changed my mind?”
Now I knew he was teasing me.
“No,” I said. “You should go. But leave Blithe Spirit here at Buckshaw, so that when I’m old enough, I can learn to fly her.”
“I would if I could. But the old girl—See? You’ve got me calling her an old girl!—needs hangaring. Plus the gentle hand of a good mechanic.”
“Dogger could look after her,” I said.
Dogger, after all, could do anything.
He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid I’ve sold her,” he said.
I felt my heart sink within me.
Blithe Spirit sold? I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem right. She had, after all, been sold before.
“Look here,” Tristram Tallis said. “How would it be if I took you for a flip?”
At first I didn’t understand him—didn’t know what he was suggesting.
“A flip?”
“A flight.”
Could this be true? Could it actually be happening to me? I had once asked Father what Buckshaw looked like from the air. “Ask your aunt Felicity,” he’d said. “She’s flown.”
I never had, of course. Now the opportunity was staring me straight in the face.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Tallis, but I couldn’t possibly accept without permission.”
I knew already what Father’s reply would be, even if I was willing to intrude upon him, which I wasn’t.
What a disappointment, though: having to refuse my only chance to take to the air in Harriet’s Blithe Spirit.
My spirits were already sinking when a second figure stepped from the shadows.
It was Dogger.
He handed me a red woolly jumper I had mislaid a week ago in the greenhouse.
“Put this on, Miss Flavia,” he said, without so much as a smile. “The air can be remarkably cold in the mornings.”
Then I, with a silly grin splitting my face from side to side in the damp dawn, was sprinting across the Visto towards Blithe Spirit.