“Flavia—”
I turned and looked at her over my shoulder.
“I told Inspector Hewitt what Fenella said.”
Someone once said that music has charms to soothe a savage breast—or was it “beast”? Daffy would know for sure, but since I wasn’t speaking to her, I could hardly ask.
But for me, music wasn’t half as relaxing as revenge. To my way of thinking, the settling of scores has a calming effect upon the mind that beats music by a Welsh mile. The encounter with Porcelain had left me breathing noisily through my nose like a boar at bay and I needed time to simmer down.
Stepping through the door into my laboratory was like gaining sanctuary in a quiet church: The rows of bottled chemicals were my stained-glass windows, the chemical bench my altar. Chemistry has more gods than Mount Olympus, and here in my solitude I could pray in peace to the greatest of them: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (who, when he found a young assistant in a linen draper’s shop surreptitiously reading a chemistry text which she kept hidden under the counter, promptly dumped his fiancee and married the girl); William Perkin (who had found a way of making purple dye for the robes of emperors without using the spit of mollusks); and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who probably discovered oxygen, and—more thrilling even than that—hydrogen cyanide, my personal pick as the last word in poisons.
I began by washing my hands. I always did this in a ceremonial way, but today they needed to be dry.
I had brought with me to the laboratory an object that was normally strapped to Gladys’s seat. Gladys had come fully equipped from the factory with a tire repair kit, and it was this tin box with the name of Messrs. Dunlop on the lid that I now deposited on my workbench.
But first I closed my eyes and focused on the object of my attentions: my beloved sister, Ophelia Gertrude de Luce, whose mission in life is to revive the Spanish Inquisition with me as the sole victim. With Daffy’s connivance, her recent torture of me in the cellars had been the last straw. And now the dreadful clock of revenge was about to strike!
Feely’s great weakness was the mirror: When it came to vanity, my sister made Becky Sharp look like one of the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary—an order with which she was forever comparing me (unfavorably, I might add).
She was capable of examining herself for hours in the looking glass, tossing her hair, baring her teeth, toying with her pimples, and pulling down the outer corners of her upper eyelids to encourage them to droop aristocratically like Father’s.
Even in church and already primped to the nines, Feely would consult a little mirror that she kept hidden inside
She was also a religious snob. To Feely, the morning church service was a drama, and she its pious star. She was always off like a shot to be the first at the communion rail, so that in returning to our pew, she would be seen with her humble eyes downcast, her long white fingers cupped at her waist, by the maximum number of churchgoers.
These were the facts that had sifted through my mind as I planned my next move, and now the time had come.
With the little white Bible Mrs. Mullet had given me on my confirmation day in one hand and the tire kit in the other, I headed for Feely’s bedroom.
This was not as difficult as it might seem. By following a maze of dusty, darkened hallways, and keeping to the upper floor, I was able to make my way from Buckshaw’s east wing towards the west, passing on my way a number of abandoned bedrooms that had not been used since Queen Victoria had declined to visit in the latter years of her reign. She had remarked to her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, that she “could not possibly find enough breath in such a wee dwelling.”
Now, behind their paneled doors, these rooms were like furniture morgues, inhabited only by sheet-covered bedsteads, dressers, and chairs which, because of the dryness of their bones, had been known sometimes to give off alarming cracking noises in the night.
All was quiet now, though, as I passed the last of these abandoned chambers, and arrived at the door that opened into the west wing. I put my ear to the green baize cloth, but all was silent on the other side. I opened the door a crack and peered through it into the hallway.
Again nothing. The place was like a tomb.
I smiled as the strains of Bach’s
I stepped into her bedroom and closed the door.
It was a room not totally unknown to me, since I often came here to filch chocolates and to have a good old rifle through her drawers. In design, it was much like my own: a great old barn of a place with high ceilings and tall windows; a place that seemed better suited to the parking of an aeroplane than the parking of one’s carcass for a good night’s sleep.
The greatest difference between this room and my own was that Feely’s did not have damp paper hanging in bags from the walls and ceiling: bags that during heavy rainstorms would fill up with cold, dripping water that turned my mattress into a soggy swamp. On those occasions, I would be forced to abandon my bed and spend the night, wrapped in my dressing gown, in a mousy-smelling wing chair that stood in the one dry corner of the room.
Feely’s bedroom, by contrast, was like something out of the cinema. The walls were covered with a delicate floral pattern (moss roses, I think) and the tall windows were bracketed with yards of lace.
A four-poster with embroidered curtains was dwarfed by the room, and stood almost unnoticed in a corner.
To the left of the windows, in pride of place, was a particularly fine Queen Anne dresser, whose curved legs
