And then there were the poisonous gases: phosphine, arsine (a single bubble of which has been known to prove fatal), nitrogen peroxide, hydrogen sulfide … the lists went on and on. When I found that precise instructions were given for formulating these compounds, I was in seventh heaven.
Once I had taught myself to make sense of the chemical equations such as K4FeC6N6 + 2K = 6KCN + Fe (which describes what happens when the yellow prussiate of potash is heated with potassium to produce potassium cyanide), the universe was laid open before me: It was like having stumbled upon a recipe book that had once belonged to the witch in the wood.
What intrigued me more than anything was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation—all of it!—was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was real stability.
I didn’t make the obvious connection at first, between the book and the abandoned laboratory I had discovered as a child. But when I did, my life came to life—if that makes any sense.
Here in Uncle Tar’s lab, row on row, were the chemistry books he had so lovingly assembled, and I soon discovered that with a little effort most of them were not too far beyond my understanding.
Simple experiments came next, and I tried to remember to follow instructions to the letter. Not to say that there weren’t a few stinks and explosions, but the less said about those the better.
As time went on, my notebooks grew fatter. My work was becoming ever more sophisticated as the mysteries of Organic Chemistry revealed themselves to me, and I rejoiced in my newfound knowledge of what could be extracted so easily from nature.
My particular passion was poison.
I SLASHED AWAY at the foliage with a bamboo walking stick pinched from an elephant-foot umbrella stand in the front hall. Back here in the kitchen garden, the high redbrick walls had not yet let in the warming sun; everything was still sodden from the rain that had fallen in the night.
Making my way through the debris of last year’s uncut grass, I poked along the bottom of the wall until I found what I was looking for: a patch of bright leaves whose scarlet gloss made their three-leaved clusters easy to spot among the other vines. Pulling on a pair of cotton gardening gloves that had been tucked into my belt, and launching into a loudly whistled rendition of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” I went to work.
Later, in the safety of my sanctum sanctorum, my Holy of Holies—I had come across that delightful phrase in a biography of Thomas Jefferson and adopted it as my own—I stuffed the colorful leaves into a glass retort, taking care not to remove my gloves until their shiny foliage was safely tamped down. Now came the part I loved.
Stoppering the retort, I connected it on one side to a flask in which water was already boiling, and on the other to a coiled glass condensing tube whose open end hung suspended over an empty beaker. With the water bubbling furiously, I watched as the steam found its way through the tubing and escaped into the flask among the leaves. Already they were beginning to curl and soften as the hot vapor opened the tiny pockets between their cells, releasing the oils that were the essence of the living plant.
This was the way the ancient alchemists had practiced their art: fire and steam, steam and fire. Distillation.
How I loved this work.
Distillation. I said it aloud. “Dis-till-ation!”
I looked on in awe as the steam cooled and condensed in the coil, and wrung my hands in ecstasy as the first limpid drop of liquid hung suspended, then dropped with an audible plop! into the waiting receptacle.
When the water had boiled away and the operation was complete, I turned off the flame and cupped my chin in my palms to watch with fascination as the fluid in the beaker settled out into two distinct layers: the clear distilled water on the bottom, a liquid of a light yellow hue floating on top. This was the essential oil of the leaves. It was called urushiol and had been used, among other things, in the manufacture of lacquer.
Digging into the pocket of my sweater, I pulled out a shiny gold tube. I removed its cap, and couldn’t help smiling as a red tip was revealed. Ophelia’s lipstick, purloined from the drawer of her dressing table, along with the pearls and the Mint Imperials. And Feely—Miss Snotrag—hadn’t even noticed it was gone.
Remembering the mints, I popped one into my mouth, crushing the sweet noisily between my molars.
The core of lipstick came out easily enough, and I relit the spirit lamp. Only a gentle heat was required to reduce the waxy stuff to a sticky mass. If Feely only knew that lipstick was made of fish scales, I thought, she might be a little less eager to slather the stuff all over her mouth. I must remember to tell her. I grinned. Later.
With a pipette I drew off a few millimeters of the distilled oil that floated in the beaker and then, drop by drop, dripped it gently into the ooze of the melted lipstick, giving the mixture a vigorous stir with a wooden tongue depressor.
Too thin, I thought. I fetched down a jar and added a dollop of beeswax to restore it to its former consistency.
Time for the gloves again—and for the iron bullet mold I had pinched from Buckshaw’s really quite decent firearm museum.
Odd, isn’t it, that a charge of lipstick is precisely the size of a .45 caliber slug. A useful bit of information, really. I’d have to remember to think of its wider ramifications tonight when I was tucked safely into my bed. Right now, I was far too busy.
Teased from its mold and cooled under running water, the reformulated red core fitted neatly back inside its golden dispenser.
I screwed it up and down several times to make sure that it was working. Then I replaced the cap. Feely was a late sleeper and would still be dawdling over breakfast.
“WHERE’S MY LIPSTICK, you little swine? What have you done with it?”
“It’s in your drawer,” I said. “I noticed it when I purloined your pearls.”
In my short life, bracketed by two sisters, I had of necessity become master of the forked tongue.
“It’s not in my drawer. I’ve just looked, and it isn’t there.”
“Did you put on your specs?” I asked with a smirk.
Although Father had had all of us fitted with spectacles, Feely refused to wear hers and mine contained little more than window glass. I wore them only in the laboratory to protect my eyes, or to solicit sympathy.
Feely slammed down the heels of her hands on the table and stormed from the room.
I went back to plumbing the depths of my second bowl of Weetabix.
Later, I wrote in my notebook:
Friday, 2nd of June 1950, 9:42 A.M. Subject’s appearance normal but grumpy.
(Isn’t she always?) Onset may vary from 12 to 72 hours.
I could wait.
MRS. MULLET, WHO WAS short and gray and round as a millstone and who, I’m quite sure, thought of herself as a character in a poem by A. A. Milne, was in the kitchen formulating one of her pus-like custard pies. As usual, she was struggling with the large Aga cooker that dominated the small, cramped kitchen.
“Oh, Miss Flavia! Here, help me with the oven, dear.”
But before I could think of a suitable response, Father was behind me.
“Flavia, a word.” His voice was as heavy as the lead weights on a deep-sea diver’s boots.
I glanced at Mrs. Mullet to see how she was taking it. She always fled at the slightest whiff of unpleasantness, and once when Father raised his voice, she had rolled herself up in a carpet and refused to come out until her husband was sent for.
She eased the oven door shut as if it were made of Waterford crystal.
“I must be off,” she said. “Lunch is in the warming oven.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Mullet,” Father said. “We’ll manage.” We were always managing.
She opened the kitchen door—and let out a sudden shriek like a cornered badger. “Oh, good Lord! Beggin’ your pardon, Colonel de Luce, but, oh, good Lord!”
Father and I had to push a bit to see round her.
It was a bird, a jack snipe—and it was dead. It lay on its back on the doorstep, its stiff wings extended like a little pterodactyl, its eyes rather unpleasantly filmed over, the long black needle of its bill pointing straight up into the air. Something impaled upon it shifted in the morning breeze—a tiny scrap of paper.
No, not a scrap of paper, a postage stamp.
Father bent down for a closer look, then gave a little gasp. And suddenly he was clutching at his throat, his hands shaking like aspen leaves in autumn, his face the color of sodden ashes.
two
MY SPINE, AS THEY SAY, TURNED TO ICE. FOR A MOment I thought he was having a heart attack, as sedentary fathers often do. One minute they are crowing at you to chew every mouthful twenty-nine times and the next you are reading about them in The Daily Telegraph:
Calderwood, Jabez, of The Parsonage, Frinton. Suddenly at his residence on Saturday, the 14th inst. In his fifty-second year. Eldest son of et cetera … et cetera … et cetera … survived by daughters, Anna, Diana, and Trianna …
CALDERWOOD, JABEZ, AND HIS ILK had the habit of popping off to heaven like jacks-in-the-box, leaving behind, to fend for themselves, an assortment of dismal-sounding daughters.
Hadn’t I already lost one parent? Surely Father wouldn’t pull such a rotten trick.
Or would he?
No. He was now sucking air noisily up through his nose like a cart horse as he reached out towards the thing on the doorstep. His fingers, like long, unsteady white tweezers, deskewered the stamp delicately from the dead bird’s bill, and then shoved the punctured scrap hastily into one of his waistcoat pockets. He pointed a trembling forefinger at the little carcass.
“Dispose of that thing, Mrs. Mullet,” he said in a strangled voice that sounded like someone else’s: the voice of a stranger.
“Oh my, Colonel de Luce,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Oh my, Colonel, I don’t … I think … I mean to say …”
But he was already gone, to his study, stumping off, huffing and puffing like a freight engine.
As Mrs. M went, hand over mouth, for the dustpan, I escaped to my bedroom.
THE BEDROOMS AT BUCKSHAW WERE VAST, dim Zeppelin hangars, and mine, in the south—or Tar—wing, as we called it, was the largest of the lot. Its early-Victorian wallpaper (mustard yellow, with a spattering of things that looked like bloodred clots of string) made it seem even larger: a cold, boundless, drafty waste. Even in summer the trek across the room to the distant washstand near the window was an experience that might have daunted Scott of the Antarctic; just one of the reasons I skipped it and climbed straight up into my four-poster bed where, wrapped in a woolen blanket, I could sit cross-legged until the cows came home, pondering my life.
I thought, for instance, of the time I used a butter knife to scrape off samples of my jaundiced wall covering. I remembered Daffy’s wide-eyed recounting of one of A. J. Cronin’s books in which some poor sod sickened and died after sleeping in a room in which one of the wallpaper’s prime coloring ingredients was arsenic. Filled with hope, I carried my scrapings up to the laboratory for analysis.
No stodgy old Marsh’s test for me, thank you very much! I favored the method by which the arsenic was first converted to its trioxidic, then heated with sodium acetate to produce cacodyl oxide: not only one of the most poisonous substances ever known to exist on this planet Earth, but one with the added advantage of giving off a most unbelievably offensive odor: like the stink of rotten garlic, but a million times worse. Its discoverer, Bunsen (of burner fame), noted that just one whiff of the stuff would not only make your hands and feet tingle, but also your tongue would develop a vile black coating. Oh, Lord, how manifold are thy works!
You can imagine my disappointment when I saw that my sample contained no arsenic: It had been colored by a simple organic tincture, most likely one made from the common goat-willow (Salix caprea) or some other harmless and supremely boring vegetable dye.
Somehow that caused my thoughts to go flying back to Father.
What had frightened him so at the kitchen door? And was it really fear I had seen in his face?
Yes, there seemed little doubt of that. There was nothing else it could have been. I was already far too familiar with his anger, his impatience, his fatigue, his sudden bleak moods: all of them states which drifted now and then across his face like the shadows of the clouds that moved across our English hills.
He was not afraid of dead birds, that much I knew. I had seen him tuck into many a fat Christmas goose, brandishing his knife and fork like an Oriental assassin. Surely it couldn’t be the presence of feathers? Or the bird’s dead eye?
And it couldn’t have been the stamp. Father loved stamps more dearly than he loved his offspring. The only thing he had ever loved more than his pretty bits of paper was Harriet. And she, as I have said, was dead.
Like that snipe.
Could that be the reason for his reaction?
“No! No! Get away!” The harsh voice came in at my open window, derailing and wrecking my train of thought.
I threw off the blanket, leaped from my bed, ran across the room, and looked down into the kitchen garden.
It was Dogger. He was flattened against the garden wall, his dark, weathered fingers splayed out across the faded red bricks.
“Don’t come near me! Get away!”
Dogger was Father’s man: his factotum. And he was alone in the garden.
It was whispered—by Mrs. Mullet, I might as well admit—that Dogger had survived two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, followed by thirteen more months of torture, starvation, malnutrition, and forced labor on the Death Railway between Thailand and Burma where, it was thought, he had been forced to eat rats.
“Go gently, dear,” she told me. “His nerves are something shocking.”
I looked down at him there in the cucumber patch, his thatch of prematurely white hair standing on end; his eyes upturned, seemingly sightless, to the sun.
“It’s all right, Dogger!” I shouted. “I’ve got them covered from up here.”
For a moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then his face turned slowly, like a sunflower, towards the sound of my voice. I held my breath. You never know what someone might do in such a state.
“Steady on, Dogger,” I called out. “It’s all right. They’ve gone.”
Suddenly he went limp, like a man who has been holding a live electrical wire in which the current has just been switched off.
“Miss Flavia?” His voice quavered. “Is that you, Miss Flavia?”
“I’m coming down,” I said. “I’ll be there in a jiff.”
Down the back stairs I ran, pell-mell, and into the kitchen. Mrs. Mullet had gone home, but her custard pie sat cooling at the open window.
No, I thought: What Dogger needed was something to drink. Father kept his Scotch locked tightly in a bookcase in his study, and I could not intrude.
Luckily, I found a pitcher of cool milk in the pantry. I poured out a tall glass of it, and dashed into the garden.
“Here, drink this,” I said, holding it out to him.
Dogger took the drink in both hands, stared at it for a long moment as if he didn’t know what to do with it, and then raised it unsteadily to his mouth. He drank deeply until the milk was gone. He handed me the empty glass.
For a moment, he looked vaguely beatific, like an angel by Raphael, but that impression quickly passed.
“You have a white mustache,” I told him. I bent down to the cucumbers and, tearing off a large, dark green leaf from the vine, used it to wipe his upper lip.
The light was coming back into his empty eyes.
“Milk and cucumbers …” he said. “Cucumbers and milk …”
“Poison!” I shouted, jumping up and down and flapping my arms like a chicken, to show him that everything was under control. “Deadly poison!” And we both laughed a little.
He blinked.
“My!??
? he said, looking round the garden as if he were a princess coming awake from the deepest dream, “isn’t it turning out to be a lovely day!”
FATHER DID NOT APPEAR AT LUNCH. To reassure myself, I put an ear to his study door and listened for a few minutes to the flipping of philatelic pages and an occasional clearing of the paternal throat. Nerves, I decided.
At the table, Daphne sat with her nose in Walpole (Horace), her cucumber sandwich beside her, soggy and forgotten on a plate. Ophelia, sighing endlessly, crossing, uncrossing, and recrossing her legs, stared blankly off into space, and I could only assume she was trifling in her mind with Ned Cropper, the jack-of-all-trades at the Thirteen Drakes. She was too absorbed in her haughty reverie to notice when I leaned in for a closer look at her lips as she reached absently for a cube of cane sugar, popped it into her mouth, and began sucking.
“Ah,” I remarked, to no one in particular, “the pimples will be blooming in the morning.”
She made a lunge for me, but my legs were faster than her flippers.
Back upstairs in my laboratory, I wrote:
Friday, 2nd of June 1950, 1:07 p.m. No visible reaction as yet. “Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.”
—(Disraeli)
TEN O’CLOCK HAD COME and gone, and still I couldn’t sleep. Mostly, when the light’s out I’m a lump of lead, but tonight was different. I lay on my back, hands clasped behind my head, reviewing the day.
First there had been Father. Well, no, that’s not quite true. First there had been the dead bird on the doorstep—and then there had been Father. What I thought I had seen on his face was fear, but still there was some little corner of my brain that didn’t seem to believe it.
To me—to all of us—Father was fearless. He had seen things during the War: horrid things that must never be put into words. He had somehow survived the years of Harriet’s vanishing and presumed death. And through it all he had been stalwart, staunch, dogged, and unshakeable. Unbelievably British. Unbearably stiff upper lip. But now …