Speaking From Among The Bones (3 page)

“Looks almost good enough to eat,” I remarked pleasantly.

Sticking a finger into
The Mysteries of Udolpho
to mark her place, Daffy shot me one of her paralyzing looks.

“Ungrateful little wretch,” she muttered.

“Daphne …” Father said.

“Well, she is,” Daffy went on. “Mrs. Mullet’s soup is nothing to joke about.”

Feely quickly clapped a napkin to her lips to stifle a smile, and I saw another of those silent messages wing its way between my sisters.

“Ophelia …” Father said. He had not missed it, either.

“Oh, it’s nothin’, Colonel de Luce,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Miss Flavia ’as to ’ave ’er little joke. Me an’ ’er ’as an understandin’. She means no ’arm.”

This was news to me, but I trotted out a warm smile.

“It’s all right, Mrs. M,” I told her. “They know not what they do.”

Very deliberately, Father closed the latest issue of
The London Philatelist
which he had been reading, picked it
up, and left the room. A few moments later, I heard his study door closing quietly.

“Now you’ve done it,” Feely said.

Father’s money problems had become more pressing with each passing month. There had been a time when his worries made him merely glum, but recently I had detected something which I feared was far, far worse: surrender.

Surrender in a man who had survived a prisoner-of-war camp was almost unthinkable, and I realized with a sudden twinge in my heart that the bone-dry little men of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue had done to Father what the Empire of Japan had failed to do. They had caused him to give up hope.

Our mother, Harriet, to whom Buckshaw had been left by her great-uncle Tarquin de Luce, had died in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas when I was a year old. Because she had left no will, His Majesty’s Vultures had descended upon Father at once, and had been busily pecking out his liver ever since.

It had been a long struggle. From time to time, it had looked as if circumstances might take a turn for the better, but recently, I had noticed that Father was tiring. On several occasions, he had warned us that he might have to give up Buckshaw, but somehow we had always muddled through. Now, it seemed as if he no longer cared.

How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me gooseflesh.

Uncle Tar’s first-rate chemistry lab upstairs in the unheated east wing was the only part of the house that
would pass inspection, but it had long been abandoned to the dust and the cold of neglect until I had discovered the forgotten room and commandeered it for my own.

Although Uncle Tar had been dead for more than twenty years, the laboratory which his indulgent father had built for him had been so far in advance of its time that it would even now, in 1951, be considered a marvel of science. From the gleaming brass of the Leitz binocular microscope to the rank upon rank of bottled chemicals, from the forest of flasks and flagons to the gas chromatograph which he had caused to be built, based upon the work of the enviably named Mikhail Semenovich Tswett, Uncle Tar’s laboratory was now mine: a world of glass and wonder.

It was rumored that, at the time of his death, Uncle Tar had been at work upon the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide. If those whispers were true, he was one of the pioneers of what we have recently come to call “The Bomb.”

From Uncle Tar’s library and his detailed notebooks, I had managed to turn myself into a cracking good chemist, although my interests were not so much given over to the splitting of atoms as to the concocting of poisons.

To me, a jolly good dose of potassium cyanide beats stupid old spinning electrons any day of the week.

The thought of my waiting laboratory was impossible to resist.

“Don’t bother getting up,” I said to Daffy and Feely, who stared at me as if I had sprouted a second head.

I walked from the room in utter silence.

V
IEWED THROUGH A MICROSCOPE
at low power, human blood looks at first like an aerial view of the College of Cardinals, dressed in their scarlet birettas and capes, milling about in Vatican Square, waiting for the Pope to appear on the balcony. Not that they have to, of course.

But as the magnification is increased, the color fades, until at last, when we are looking at the individual red corpuscles in close-up, we see that, in reality, each one has no more than a pale pink tint.

Blood’s red coloration comes from the iron contained in the hemoglobin. The iron bonds easily with oxygen, which it carries to the most far-flung nooks and crannies of our bodies. Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it’s based on copper rather than iron.

I suppose it was finding the dead frog that had given me the idea in the first place. The poor thing had probably been trying to make its way from the river that ran behind St. Tancred’s to the small marsh across the road, when it experienced a major misadventure with a motorcar.

Whatever the case, the thing had been squashed flat even before I stuffed it into my pocket and brought it home for scientific purposes.

In order to make the corpuscles more transparent under the microscope, I had mixed a sample of its blood with a one-in-four solution of acetic acid; then, as I adjusted the fine focus, I could see clearly that the frog’s corpuscles were flat disks—rather like pink pennies—while my own, which I had extracted with a quick jab of a safety pin, were twice the size, and concave, like dozens of red doughnuts.

The idea of comparing my
own
blood to that of my father and sisters had come later, and indirectly from Daffy.

“You’re no more a de Luce than the man in the moon,” she had snapped when she caught me snooping in her diary. “Your mother was a Transylvanian. You have bat’s blood in your veins.”

As she snatched the leather-bound book from my hand, she gave herself a rather bad paper cut with the edge of one of its pages.

“Now look what you’ve made me do!” she’d shrieked, holding out for my inspection her bleeding, quivering finger as it dripped spectacularly onto the drawing-room carpet. In order to increase the dramatic effect even further, she had milked a few extra drops from the wound.
And then, without another word, she’d dashed, half sobbing, from the room.

It had been a simple matter to sponge up a good bit of the gore with my handkerchief. Father was always going on about the importance of carrying a clean honking-rag, and there had been several occasions upon which I’d offered up silent praise for such excellent advice. This was another of them.

I had dashed at once to my laboratory, prepared a microscope slide from the blood sample, and made several quite good sketches of my observations, coloring them neatly with a boxed set of professional artist’s pencils that Aunt Millicent had given to Feely several Christmases ago.

Then, through an incredible stroke of good luck, Feely, who was uncommonly vain about her hands, ripped a hangnail at the breakfast table a few days later, and it was Flavia on the spot—which is rather a good witticism, when you come to think of it.

“Watch out! You’ve stained the table linen,” I said, whisking the napkin out of her fingers and handing her a wad of woolly lint from my pocket. “I’ll rinse this out in cold water before it sets.”

In my laboratory, I had added another set of colored sketches to my notebook.

The circular flattened disks of the red corpuscles
, I had written,
have a tendency to stick together. They display their characteristic red color only where they are seen to overlap. Otherwise, they are the pale yellow of the western sky after an evening rain
.

Obtaining a sample of Father’s blood had been more
tricky. It wasn’t until the following Monday, when he appeared at the breakfast table with a ragged little patch of toilet tissue stuck to his throat where he had cut himself shaving, that I saw a way.

It was the morning after Dogger had suffered one of his awful midnight episodes, crying out every few minutes in a shockingly hoarse voice, followed by long, horrid periods of whimpering which were even more unnerving than his screams.

Dogger was Father’s general factotum. His duties varied according to his capabilities. He was sometimes valet and sometimes gardener, depending upon how the winds were presently blowing in his brain. Dogger and Father had served together in the army, and together they had been imprisoned at Changi. It was something that they never spoke of, and what few details I knew of those ghastly years had been pried, bit by painful bit, from Mrs. Mullet and her husband, Alf.

In the morning, I realized that Father had not slept—that he had stayed at Dogger’s side until the terrors subsided. Father would never normally dream of allowing himself to be seen with lavatory paper clinging to his person, and the fact that he had done so said more about his distress than he could ever put into mere words.

It had been a simple matter to retrieve the stained scrap from the refuse container in his dressing room, but I must admit that in doing so, I’d never felt more guilty in my life.

Our red and white corpuscles, Father’s, Feely’s, Daffy’s, and mine
, I had written in my notes, although I hardly
wanted to believe it,
are identical in size, shape, density, and coloration
.

From a battered and interestingly stained book on microscopy in Uncle Tar’s library, I knew that the corpuscles of a bat’s blood were approximately 25 percent smaller in size than those of humans.

Even magnified a thousand times, my corpuscles were identical with those of my father and my sisters.

At least in appearance.

I had read, in one of the popular magazines which littered our drawing room, that human blood is identical in chemical composition to the seawater from which our remote ancestors are said to have crawled: that seawater, in fact, had sometimes been used for temporary transfusions in emergency medical situations in which the real thing was not available.

A French researcher and artillery officer, René Quinton, had once replaced a dog’s blood with diluted seawater and found that not only did the dog live—to a ripe old age, evidently—but that within a day or two of the experiment, the dog’s body had replaced the seawater with blood!

Both blood and seawater are composed primarily of sodium and chlorine, although not in the same proportions. Still, it was amusing to think that the stuff which flowed in our veins was little more than a solution of table salt, although, to be fair, both also contain dribs and drabs of calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron, and copper.

For a short time, this so-called fact had made me immensely excited, suggesting, as it did, the possibility of
any number of daring experiments, some of them involving humans.

But then Science had set in.

An extensive and carefully calibrated set of chemical tests using my own blood (I was faint for weeks) showed clearly the differences.

I had demonstrated quite conclusively that what flowed in the veins of the de Luces was not seawater, but a different blend of the elements of creation.

And as for Daffy’s accusation of my having a Transylvanian mother—well, that was simply ludicrous!

My sisters had attempted, on numerous occasions, to convince me that Harriet was not my mother: that I had been adopted, or left by the Little People as a changeling, or abandoned at birth by an unknown mother who couldn’t bear the thought of weeping every day at the sight of my ugly face.

Somehow, it would have been much more comforting to know that my sisters and I were not of the same tribe.

Bat’s blood, indeed! That witch Daffy!

However, all that now remained, in order to conclude my experiment in the correct scientific manner, was to add a few firsthand notes based upon my observations of the juices of an actual bat.

And I knew precisely where to find one.

I would get an early start in the morning.

I
T WAS ONE OF
those glorious days in March when the air was so fresh that you worshipped every whiff of it; that each breath of the intoxicating stuff created such new universes in your lungs and brain you were certain you were about to explode with sheer joy; one of those blustery days of scudding clouds and piddling showers and gum boots and wind-blown brollies that made you know you were truly alive.

Somewhere, off to the east in the woods, a bird was singing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we-to-witta-woo
.

It was the first day of spring, and Mother Nature seemed to know it.

Gladys squeaked with delight as we rattled through the rain. Even though she was considerably older than me, she loved a good run on a damp day as much as I did. She had been manufactured at the bicycle branch of the
British Small Arms factory in Birmingham before I was born, and had originally belonged to my mother, Harriet, who had named her
l’Hirondelle
, “the swallow.”

I had rechristened her Gladys because of her happy nature.

Gladys did not usually like to get her skirts wet, but on a day such as this, with her tires singing on the wet tarmac and the wind shoving at our backs, it was no time for prissiness.

Spreading my arms wide so that the flaps of my yellow mackintosh became sails, I let myself be swept along on a river of wind.

“Yaroo!” I shouted to a couple of dampish cows, who looked up at me vacantly as I sped past them in the rain.

In the misty green light of early morning, St. Tancred’s looked like a Georgian watercolor, its tower floating eerily above the bulging churchyard as if it were a hot-air balloon casting off its moorings and bound for heaven.

The only jarring note in the quiet scene was the scarlet van pulled up onto the cobbled walk which led to the front door. I recognized it at once as Mr. Haskins’s, the church sexton’s. Beside it, on the grass under the yews, was a gleaming black Hillman, its high polish telling me that it didn’t belong to anyone in Bishop’s Lacey.