TWENTY-SIX
AUNT FELICITY AND I spoke not another word as we entered the house from the kitchen garden. To an observer, it might have appeared as if we were a couple of casual acquaintances returning from an afternoon stroll on the lawns of Buckshaw.
Things were beginning to make sense; pieces were falling into place. Aunt Felicity, I knew, had rather a peculiar and unlikely circle of acquaintances. As far as I could deduce, she seemed to have been some kind of Queen Bee at the BBC during the War but had always refused to discuss it.
Had the MI department—the one with a number so high that not even the Prime Minister was aware of its existence—been quartered at Broadcasting House? It was a distinct possibility.
By “the Prime Minister,” she had obviously meant the present Prime Minister. Winston Churchill, the former PM, as everybody knew, still had certain secrets which he kept even from God.
And Tristram Tallis had seemed not at all surprised at our sudden departure in Blithe Spirit. He must have had some prior understanding with my aunt, since, when we landed, he had done no more than inquire pleasantly if “the old girl,” as he put it, had behaved herself.
As Aunt Felicity went silently to her room, I walked slowly through the narrow passage to the front of the house.
The foyer was empty. The last mourners had gone, and the place was now steeped in utter silence. It was the dramatic pause in the moment before the curtain goes up on a different and as yet unknown world.
The scent of flowers hung heavily in the air. What was the word Daffy had once used to describe it? Cloying. Yes, that was it: cloying.
It felt as if your sinuses, your nostrils, and your adenoids, all at the same time, were about to vomit.
Perhaps I was coming down with a cold.
In spite of the fine weather, my laboratory, too, seemed unusually cold. Had I caught a chill during one of my flights in Blithe Spirit? I shrugged into an old brown bathrobe I kept hanging on the back of the door for just such emergencies and bundled myself as tightly as if I were setting out for the Pole.
I must have looked like a medieval monk or an alchemist fussing over his flasks as I prepared my experiment.
From the bottom drawer of Uncle Tar’s desk, I brought out the oilskin wallet which had contained Harriet’s will, placed it on one of the benches, and lit a Bunsen burner.
I have to admit that I wasn’t yet quite sure what I hoped to discover, but most objects, analyzed both visually and chemically, will eventually give up whatever secrets they hold, however incidental they may at first have seemed.
I began with the outside surface. The wallet was made from a kind of yellowish oilcloth: cotton or linen, perhaps, which had been varnished with several coats of linseed oil and pipe clay.
Aside from a few mottled stains—which I would leave for later analysis—the packet presented no remarkable features. I brought it to my nose and sniffed gently: a brackish odor of oily fungus, as if the wallet had been brought not long ago from the underworld, which I suppose, in a way, it had.
I pried it gently open and looked inside, turned it upside down and tapped it. A few particles of debris fell out onto the bench.
Lint? Dust? Soil? It was difficult to know. I brushed them carefully onto a piece of filter paper for later examination under the microscope.
Next was the taste test. I stuck out my tongue and, touching its tip to the packet, inhaled gently, waiting for the warmth of my body to release whatever essential oils might remain after all these years to be sensed by my taste buds and my olfactory system.
Linseed oil, definitely—as I had supposed.
For an advanced analysis of the material, I would snip off a sample and subject it to steam distillation, which would reveal any of the less obvious ingredients that might have been used in the wallet’s manufacture, or to which it had later been exposed.
Body fluids, such as sweat, were a distinct possibility, and I couldn’t say I was much looking forward to their discovery. On the other hand, the packet had been preserved for ten years by freezing and might well be a treasury of hidden chemical clues.
But first I would carry out the simplest and least destructive test: a gentle warming over the flame of the Bunsen burner while watching intently for any physical change. The volatile oils heated and combusted at varying degrees of temperature depending upon their chemical structure, and the first changes, however slight, were often visual.
By starving it slightly for air, I adjusted the burner for its coolest flame and began by holding the oilskin packet several inches off to one side. It wouldn’t do to have the oily wallet catching fire.
Keeping it in constant motion and waving gently back and forth, I gradually brought the wallet closer to the flame.
After a minute or so, there had been no perceptible change.
I increased the flow of air and watched as the flame changed instantly from orange to blue.
Again I began waving the wallet: to and fro … to and fro.
Still nothing.
I was about to give it up when something caught my eye. It was as if parts of the oilcloth were darkening ever so slightly.
I held my breath. Was it—could it be—?
Yes!
A pattern was becoming visible on the oilcloth: at first no more than a mottled appearance—tiny rivers of black similar to thin, dark veins on marble.
But even as I watched, they began to blur. The heat was causing these stains—whatever they might be—to spread and absorb into the fabric of the oilcloth.
There wasn’t a moment to waste! I needed to outline this twisting shape before it could blur beyond all recognition.
I shut off the burner, pulled a pencil from a drawer, and sketched quickly on the warm surface, trying to trace each part of the pattern before it could disappear.
Some far corner of my brain recognized the shape even before I became consciously aware of it.
Look, Flavia! Look! Think!
It was handwriting.
Letters. A word.
Invisible writing! A black word brought to light by heat—brought to light by the flame of the burner in the same way that the invisible images on the ciné film had been made visible by the chemicals of the developer.
A word resurrected. A word presumably written by Harriet, trapped in a glacial crevasse, knowing that she would never escape alive.
Why would she leave a message in invisible ink? Why wouldn’t she have written it on the paper, and in pencil, as she had done with her will?
The answer seemed obvious: She wanted the will to be legible to anyone who found it—found her—but the two words scribbled on the oilskin wallet to remain invisible to everyone but a person who was looking for them.
But how on earth could a woman trapped in a glacier contrive to leave a message in invisible ink? It could easily be done in a country manor house with access to even a few common household chemicals. But in the Himalayan ice?
Any acid could be used to produce invisible writing. It was only necessary to take care that its strength was not so great as to burn the paper.
But invisible inks? They were everywhere: lemon juice, vinegar, milk—even spit could be used in a pinch.
Spit? Saliva?
Of course!
Like all great simple solutions, the answer had been there all along.
Urine! How clever of her.
One’s urine was a rich stew of chemical constituents: urea, sulfates of potash and of soda, phosphate and muriate of soda, ammonia, lactic acid, and uric acid, to name just a few. A better invisible ink could hardly be concocted if it had been prepared by an apothecary and bottled in the back room at Boots!
Besides that, the stuff was readily available and free.
In ordinary circumstances, I would have begun my analysis by examining the wallet under ultraviolet light, but the bulb in my UV lab lamp had recently snuffed it, and I hadn’t had an opportunity to manage a replacement. Bathed in ultraviolet light, the urine would have fluoresced at once, saving me the trouble of using the Bunsen burner.
I stared at the squiggly lines, straining to make sense of their twistings and turnings. It is a fact that any unfamiliar pattern takes a certain amount of time for the brain to recognize. One moment it is garbled nonsense, and the next—
And then I saw it.
“LENS PALACE” it said.
Lens palace? Whatever could that mean?
If I remembered correctly, there was a place in France called Lens. Our neighbor Maximilian Brock, the retired concert pianist, told me he had once been pelted there with lumps of coal by miners in the audience when he absentmindedly began his performance with a patriotic piece by Percy Grainger rather than the Debussy which had been listed on the program.
Was there a palace in Lens? I hadn’t the foggiest notion. If Max was at the funeral, I could ask him.