Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (35 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve been down here hundreds of times.”

Which was a lie: Prior to my inquisition, I had been in the cellars just once, with Dogger, when I was five, hunting for a pair of eighteenth-century alabaster urns that had been put away at the beginning of the war to protect them from possible air raids.

Candle held high, I set off along one of the black passageways. Porcelain could either follow, or stay where she was in the dark shadows between the widely spaced electric bulbs.

Needless to say, she followed.

I had already formed the theory that the footprints had been made by Brookie Harewood—the late Brookie Harewood—but there was no point in mentioning this to Porcelain, who would probably get the wind up at the very idea of following in a dead man’s footsteps.

But what on earth could Brookie have been doing in the Buckshaw cellars?

“Poachers know all the shortcuts,” Father had once said, and again, he was probably right.

As we passed under a low brick archway, I let my mind fly back to the night I had caught Brookie in his midnight prowl of the drawing room. It was hard to believe that had been only five days ago.

I still had a perfect mental image of our strange interview, which had ended with Brookie warning me against housebreakers who might have their eyes on Father’s silver. “Lot of that going on nowadays, since the war,” he had said.

And then I had opened one of the French doors and made it quite clear that I wanted him to leave.

No—wait!—I had first unlocked the door!

The door had been locked when I entered the drawing room. And there was no earthly reason to believe that Brookie had locked it behind him if he had broken into the house from the terrace. He’d have wanted it ready for a quick escape, had he been in danger of being caught.

It was reasonable, therefore, to assume that Brookie had gained entry to the house by some other route: through the cellars, for instance.

And the footprints now before us, disappearing into the darkness—quite clear impressions of a fisherman’s gum boots, now that I stopped to think about it—suggested that my assumption was correct.

“Come on,” I said, sensing that Porcelain was hanging back. “Stay close behind me.”

I thought I heard a little whimper, but I may have been wrong.

We had passed the end of the string of electric lights, and were now in an arched passageway lined on both sides with piles of decaying furniture. Here the footprints—more than one set of them, but all made by the same pair of boots—revealed that they had ventured more than once into, and out of, Buckshaw. The most recent prints were razor sharp, while the older impressions were softened slightly by the incessant sifting of dust.

“What’s that?” Porcelain cried, seizing my shoulder with a painful grip.

Ahead of us, a shrouded object half blocked the passage.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I thought you’d been down here hundreds of times,” she whispered.

“I have,” I told her, “but not in this particular passage.”

Before she could question me, I reached out, took hold of the corner of the sheet, and yanked it away.

A cloud of dust went billowing up, blinding us both—making us choke as if we had been caught in a sudden sandstorm.

“Oooh!” Porcelain wailed.

“It’s only dust,” I said, even though I was stifling.

And then the candle guttered—and went out.

I gave a silent curse and felt in my pocket.

“Hold this,” I said, finding her hands in the darkness and wrapping her fingers round the candlestick. “I’ll have it going in a jiff.”

I dug deeper into my pocket. Drat!

“Bad luck,” I said. “I think I left the matches in the pantry.”

I felt the candlestick being shoved back into my hands. After a brief moment, there was a scraping sound, and a match flared up brightly.

“Good job I thought to pick them up, then,” Porcelain said, applying the match to the candle. As the flame grew taller and more steady, I could see the object over which the sheet had been draped.

“Look!” I said. “It’s a sedan chair.”

The thing looked like an early closed-in motorcar whose wheels had been stolen. The wood paneling was painted light green with hand-drawn flowers clustered in the corners. The gold medallion on the door was the de Luce crest.

Inside the chair, fleur-de-lis wallpaper had peeled away and hung down in tongues upon the green velvet padding of the seat.

There was an odd musty smell about the chair, and it wasn’t just mice.

To think that some of my own ancestors had sat in this very box and been borne by other humans through the streets of some eighteenth-century city!

I wanted nothing more than to climb inside and become part of my family’s history. Just to sit, and nothing more.

“This is owned by a woman,” Porcelain said in a slow, strange voice that sounded, more than anything, like an incantation. “Silk dress … powdered wig … white face, and a black spot—like a star—on her cheek. She wants—”

“Stop it!” I shouted, spinning round to face her. “I don’t want to play your stupid games.”

Porcelain stood perfectly still, staring, black eyes shining madly out of her white face. She was entirely covered with dust, Harriet’s flame-colored dress now faded to an ashen orange in the light of the flickering candle.

“Look at you,” she said in a voice that sounded to me accusing. “Just look at you!”

I couldn’t help thinking that I was in the presence of my mother’s ghost.

At that moment, a metallic clang came from the passageway ahead, and both of us jumped.

It sounded like iron on iron: chains being dragged through the bars of a cage.

“Come on,” Porcelain said, “let’s get out of here.”

“No, wait,” I said. “I want to find out what’s down here.”

She snatched the candlestick from my hand and began to move quickly back towards the stairs.

“Either come back with me, or stay here alone in the dark.”

I had no choice but to follow.

THE FLAME COLOR BEGAN to brighten as soon as I shoved the material into the beaker.

“See?” I said. “It’s working.”

“What is that stuff?” Porcelain asked.

“Dry-cleaning fluid,” I said, giving Harriet’s dress a poke with a glass rod, and stirring gently. “Carbon tetrachloride, actually.”

I couldn’t say its name without recalling, with pleasure, that the stuff had first been synthesized in 1839 by a Frenchman named Henri-Victor Regnault, a one-time upholsterer who had produced carbon tetrachloride through the reaction between chlorine and chloroform. One of the early uses of his invention had been to fumigate barrels of food in which various unpleasant insects had taken up residence; more recently, it had been used to charge fire extinguishers.

“Father uses it to scrutinize watermarks on postage stamps,” I said.

I did not mention that I had recently liberated the bottle from one of his storage cupboards for an experiment involving houseflies.

“Look at the dress. See how clean it is already? A few more minutes and it will be as good as new.”

Porcelain, who had wrapped herself in one of my old dressing gowns, looked on in awe.

I had changed into a cleanish dress and left the dusty one soaking in one of the laboratory’s sinks. Later, I would hang it from one of the gas chandeliers to dry.

“You de Luces are a strange lot,” Porcelain said.

“Ha! Less than an hour ago you thought that at least two of us were ladylike young women.”

“That was before you showed me the cellars.”

I noted that our little tour of the Chamber of Horrors had changed her mind.

“Speaking of cellars,” I told her, “I’m not easily frightened, but I didn’t much care for that stuff about the lady who owned the sedan chair.”

“It wasn’t stuff. I was telling you what I saw.”

“Saw? You’re asking me to believe that you saw a woman in a powdered wig and a silk dress?”

For someone with a scientific mind, like me, this was hard to swallow. I had still not decided what to make of Brookie Harewood’s Gray Lady of Buckshaw, or Fenella’s cold woman who wanted to come home from the mountain. To say nothing of the pixies. Did everyone take me for a gullible fool, or were there really other worlds just beyond our range of vision?

“In a way, yes,” Porcelain said. “I saw her with my mind.”

This I could understand—at least a little. I could see things with my own mind: the way, for instance, that trimethylamine could be produced by allowing Bacillus prodigiosus to grow on a sample of Mrs. Mullet’s mashed potatoes in the heat of a summer afternoon. The resulting blood-red specks—which were known in the Middle Ages as “Wunderblut,” or “strange blood,” and which for a whole week in 1819 had appeared on various foods at Padua—would release not only the smell of ammonia, but also the unmistakeable odor of trimethylamine.

When you come right down to it, I suppose, there is no great difference between ghosts and the invisible worlds of chemistry.

I was glad I had remembered dear old trimethylamine: my chemical friend with the fishy smell. I had discussed it with Dogger several days ago and formed certain opinions which I had been prevented from acting upon.

It was time now to pick up the threads and follow them, wherever they might lead.

“I’m tired,” I told Porcelain, yawning vastly.

Five minutes later we were tucked up in bed, one of us drifting rapidly towards oblivion.

I waited until she was asleep, then slipped quietly out of bed.

It was just past midnight when I eased shut my bedroom door and crept silently down the curving staircase.

I remembered that Dogger kept a high-powered torch in the butler’s pantry for what he called “midnight emergencies,” and it took only a moment to find it.

No frail candle this time, I thought: I had at my fingertips sufficient power to light up the Palace Pier at Brighton. I hoped it would be enough.

The cellars seemed colder than I had remembered. I should have worn a sweater, but it was too late now.

I was quickly at the point where the electric bulbs ended: beyond them, a cavernous blackness that led—who knew where?

I switched on the torch and pointed it along the passageway. Far ahead, I could see the outline of the sedan chair. I no longer relished the thought of climbing into the thing and recalling days gone by; in fact, I would be relieved to get past it.

“There is no lady,” I said aloud, and to my relief, there wasn’t.

Ahead, the passage took a slight shift to the right. Since I had essentially set off to the right from the bottom of the kitchen stairs, I was heading east—now a little southeast, towards the Visto and the Poseidon fountain.

The gum-boot footprints were easy to follow now, no longer overprinted with Porcelain’s and mine. There were several sets, I noted, three coming and two going. If, as I suspected, they were Brookie’s, he had made his first trip to steal one of the firedogs, his second to return it and make off with the second. On his last visit he had left by way of the French doors.

A sudden cold draft swept past me. Good job I’d brought the torch—the candle would certainly have blown out.

With the draft came a dark and a dank odor: an odor I could not at once identify, but one which suggested the reservoirs of neglected water closets: green corrosion with more than a whiff of zinc.

Well, I thought, I’m not afraid of zinc, and green corrosion is something that has always interested me.

I pushed on.

When I had been down here earlier with Porcelain, I had heard a definite metallic clank, but now the passage—which had begun to narrow—was as silent as the tomb.

In front of me was an archway with an open door, beyond which, or so it seemed, was a room.

I took two careful steps down into the chamber and found myself surrounded on all sides with metal pipes: zinc pipes, lead pipes, iron pipes, bronze pipes, copper pipes; pipes running up, down, and across, all interconnected with right elbows and great metal bolts with here and there a huge valve like the steering wheel of a motorcar.

I was at the very heart of Lucius de Luce’s subterranean waterworks!

And then I heard it—a metallic clanking that echoed round and round the chamber.

I’ll admit it—I froze.

Another clank.

“Hello,” I called, my voice shaking. “Is anyone there?”

From somewhere came another sound: an animal sound for certain, though whether it was human, I could not tell.

What if a fox had made its way into the tunnel? Or a badger?

If that was the case, it would likely run away from a human with a torch—but what if it didn’t?

“Hello?” I called again. “Is anyone there?”

Again a muffled sound, weaker. Was it farther away, or was I imagining things? One thing was certain: It could only be coming from somewhere behind a giant pipe that rose up out of the stonework, leveled off, bent ninety degrees, and headed off towards the far side of the chamber.

I scrambled up onto the thing, straddled it for a moment—then dropped down on the other side.

The passageway into which the pipe led was lower, narrower, and damp. Moisture beaded on the walls, and the floor, between bricks, was wet earth.

Just ahead, the tunnel was blocked by an iron gate: an iron gate that was chained shut and locked on the other side with a large, old-fashioned padlock.

I gave the thing a rattle, but it was absolutely solid. Without a key, there wasn’t a hope of getting past.

“Damn!” I said. “Damn and double damn!”

“Flavia?” someone croaked.

I must admit that I came very close to disgracing myself.

I shone the beam through the bars and picked out a shape huddled on the ground.

For as long as I live I shall never forget his white face staring up at me, blinded by the torch’s beam. He had managed, somehow, to lose his spectacles, and his pale eyes, blind and blinking, were those of a baby mole pulled from its hole and dragged out suddenly into the daylight.

“Colin?” I said. “Colin Prout?”

“Turn it off!” he pleaded in a ragged voice, twisting away from the light.