The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (96 page)

“May I speak to Mrs. Harewood?” I ventured. “It’s about—”

“No!” she said loudly. “Go away!”

But before she could slam the door, a voice came from somewhere inside the house.

“Who is it, Ursula?”

“A girl selling something,” she called over her shoulder, and to me, “Go away. We don’t want any biscuits.”

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

“Mrs. Harewood,” I shouted. “It’s about Brookie!”

It was as if I had cast a spell and frozen time. For what seemed like forever, the woman at the door stood perfectly motionless, gaping at me as if she were a life-sized painted cutout from a picture book. She didn’t even breathe.

“Mrs. Harewood—please! It’s Flavia de Luce, from Bishop’s Lacey.”

“Show her in, Ursula,” the voice said.

As I brushed past her and into the narrow hallway, Ursula didn’t move a muscle.

“In here,” the voice said, and I moved towards it.

I suppose I was half expecting to find a decayed Miss Haversham, clinging to her moldy treasures in the curtained cave of her drawing room. What I found was altogether different.

Vanetta Harewood stood in a beam of sunlight at the bow window, and she turned to hold out her hands to me as I entered.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

She looked, I thought, to be about forty-five. But surely she must be much older than that. How on earth could such a beautiful creature be the mother of that middle-aged layabout, Brookie Harewood?

She wore a smart dark suit with an Oriental silk at her neck, and her fingers were afire with diamonds.

“I must apologize for Ursula,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “but she’s fiercely protective of me. Perhaps too fiercely.”

I nodded dumbly.

“In my profession, privacy is paramount, you see, and now, with all this …”

She made a wide sweep of her hands to take in the entire world.

“I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry about Brookie.”

She turned and took a cigarette from a silver box, lit it with a silver lighter that might have been a scale model of Aladdin’s lamp, and blew out a long jet of smoke which, oddly enough, was also silver in the sunlight.

“Brookie was a good boy,” she said, “but he did not grow up to be a good man. He had the fatal gift of making people believe him.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I nodded anyway.

“His life was not an easy one,” she said reflectively. “Not as easy as it might seem.”

And then, quite suddenly—“Now tell me, why have you come?”

Her question caught me by surprise. Why
had
I come?

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed, child. If you’re here to express your condolences, you have already done so, for which I thank you. You may leave, if you wish.”

“Brookie was at Buckshaw,” I blurted. “I found him in the drawing room in the middle of the night.”

I could have cut out my tongue! There was no need for his mother to know this—no need at all, and even less for me to tell her.

But part of me knew that it was safe enough. Vanetta Harewood was a professional woman. She would no more want the midnight ramblings of her son brought to light than … than I would.

“I am going to ask you a very great favor, Flavia. Tell the police if you must, but if you feel it isn’t essential …”

She had walked back to the window, where she stood staring out into the past. “You see, Brookie had his … demons, if you will. If there is no need to make them public, then—”

“I won’t tell anyone, Mrs. Harewood,” I said. “I promise.”

She turned back to me and came across the room slowly. “You’re a remarkably intelligent girl, Flavia,” she said. And then, after thinking for a couple of seconds, she added, “Come with me; there’s something I wish to show you.”

Down a step we went, and then up another, into the part of the house whose door I had first knocked upon. Low timbered ceilings made her stoop more than once as we went from room to room.

“Ursula’s studio,” she said, with a wave of a hand at a room that seemed full of twigs and branches.

“Basketry,” she explained. “Ursula is a devotee of traditional crafts. Her willow baskets have taken prizes both here and on the Continent.

“To tell you the truth,” she went on, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper, “the smell of her chemical preparations sometimes drives me out of the house, but then, it’s all she has, poor dear.”

Chemical preparations? My ears went up like those of an old warhorse at the sound of the bugle.

“Mostly sulfur,” she said. “Ursula uses the fumes to bleach the willow withies. They end up as white as polished bones, you know, but oh dear—the smell!”

I could foresee that I was going to have a late night poring over books in Uncle Tar’s chemical library. Already my mind was racing ahead to the chemical possibilities of salicin (C
₁₃
H
₁₈
O
₇
)—which was discovered in willow bark in 1831 by Leroux—and good old sulfur (S). I already knew from personal experience that certain willow catkins, kept in a sealed box for several weeks, give off the most dreadful odor of dead fish, a fact which I had filed away for future use.

“Through here,” Mrs. Harewood said, ducking to keep her head from banging on an exceptionally low beam. “Mind your head and watch your step.”

Her studio was a glorious place. Clear north light flooded in through the angled transom windows overhead, making it seem like a room suddenly stumbled upon in a forest glade.

A large wooden easel stood in the light, and on it was a half-finished portrait of Flossie, the sister of Feely’s friend Sheila Foster. Flossie was sitting in a large upholstered chair, one leg curled under her, petting an enormous white Persian cat that nestled in her lap. The cat, at least, looked almost human.

Actually, Flossie didn’t look that bad, either. She was not my favorite living person, but I didn’t hold that against her. The portrait captured perfectly, in a way that even a camera can’t, her air of highly polished dopiness.

“Well, what do you think?”

I looked around at the tubes of paints, the daubed rags, and the profusion of camel-hair brushes that jutted up all around me from tins, glasses, and bottles like reeds in a December marsh.

“It’s a very nice studio,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to show me?”

I pointed a finger at Flossie’s portrait.

“Good heavens, no!” she said.

I had not noticed it before but at the far end of the studio, away from the windows, were two shadowy corners in which perhaps a dozen unframed paintings were leaning with their faces against the wall, their paper-sealed backsides towards the room.

Vanetta (by now I was thinking of her as “Vanetta,” rather than “Mrs. Harewood”) bent over them, shifting each one as if she were riffling through the record cards in a giant index file.

“Ah! Here it is,” she said at last, pulling a large canvas from among the others.

Keeping its back towards me, she carried the painting to the easel. After shifting Flossie to a nearby wooden chair, she turned it round and lifted it into place.

She stepped back without a word, giving me an unobstructed view of the portrait.

My heart stopped.

It was Harriet.

FOURTEEN

Harriet. My mother.

She is sitting on the window box of the drawing room at Buckshaw. At her right hand, my sister Ophelia, aged about seven, plays with a cat’s cradle of red wool, its strands entangling her fingers like slender scarlet snakes. To Harriet’s left, my other sister, Daphne, although she is too young to read, uses a forefinger to mark her place in a large book:
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
.

Harriet gazes tenderly down, a slight smile on her lips, like a Madonna, at the white bundle which she holds supported in the crook of her left arm: a child—a baby dressed in a white, trailing garment of elaborate and frothy lace—could it be a baptismal gown?

I want to look at the mother but my eyes are drawn repeatedly back to the child.

It is, of course, me.

“Ten years ago,” Vanetta was saying, “I went to Buckshaw on a winter day.”

She was now standing behind me.

“How well I remember it. There had been a killing frost overnight. Everything was covered with ice. I rang up your mother and suggested that we leave it until another day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was going away, she said, and she wanted the portrait as a gift for your father. She meant to give it to him as a surprise when she returned.”

My head was spinning.

“Of course, she never did,” she added softly, “and frankly I’ve not since had the heart to hand it over to him, the poor man. He grieves so.”

Grieves? Although I had never thought about it in precisely this way, it was true. Father did grieve, but he did so in private, and mostly in silence.

“The painting, I suppose, belongs to him, since your mother paid me for it in advance. She was a very trusting person.”

Was she
? I wanted to say.
I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know her as well as you did
.

Suddenly, I needed to get out of this place—to be outdoors again where I could breathe my own breath.

“I think you’d better keep it, Mrs. Harewood—at least for now. I wouldn’t want to upset Father.”

Hold on
! I thought. My whole life was given over to upsetting Father—or at least to going against his wishes. Why now was I filled with a sudden desire to comfort him, and to have him hug me?

Not that I would, of course, because in real life we de Luces don’t do that sort of thing.

But still, some unknowable part of the universe had changed, as if one of the four great turtles that are said to support the world on their backs had suddenly shifted its weight from one foot to another.

“I have to go now,” I said, backing, for some reason, towards the door. “I’m sorry to hear about Brookie. I know he had lots of friends in Bishop’s Lacey.”

Actually, I knew no such thing! Why was I saying this? It was as if my mouth were possessed, and I had no way of stopping its flow of words.

All I really knew about Brookie Harewood was that he was a poacher and a layabout—and that I had surprised him in his midnight prowling. That and the fact that he had claimed to have seen the Gray Lady of Buckshaw.

“Goodbye, then,” I said. As I stepped into the hallway, Ursula turned rapidly away and scuttled out of sight with a wicker basket in her hand. But not so quickly that I missed the look of pure hatred that she shot me.

As I bicycled westward towards Bishop’s Lacey, I thought of what I had seen. I’d gone to Malden Fenwick in search of clues to the behavior of Brookie Harewood—surely it was he who had attacked Fenella Faa in the Palings, for who else could have been abroad at Buckshaw that night? But instead, I had come away with a new image of Harriet, my mother: an image that was not as happy as it might have been.

Why, for instance, did it gnaw at my heart so much to see Feely and Daffy, like two contented slugs, secure and basking in her glow, while I lay helpless, wrapped up like a little mummy in white cloth; of no more interest than a bundle from the butcher?

Had Harriet loved me? My sisters were forever claiming that she did not: that, in fact, she despised me; that she had fallen into a deep depression after I was born—a depression that had, perhaps, resulted in her death.

And yet, in the painting, which must have been made just before she set out on her final journey, there was not a trace of unhappiness. Harriet’s eyes had been upon
me
and the look on her face had shown, if anything, a trace of amusement.

Something about the portrait nagged at my mind: some half-forgotten thing that had tried to surface as I stood staring at the easel in Vanetta Harewood’s studio. But what was it?

Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of it.

Relax, Flavia
, I thought.
Calm down. Think about something else
.

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind, the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers, for instance, or oatmeal. Then, when the fugitive word was least expecting it, I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it, catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.