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Chapter One 

THE GREATEST MINDS IN THE WORLD are often cranky when they first awaken in the morning, and mine is no exception. If I am to ascend above the masses, I require solitude the way a balloon needs helium.

Which is why, barely a quarter of an hour after a hasty and solitary breakfast at Buckshaw, I am now hunched under a black umbrella in the one place I can be certain of being left alone and in peace: the churchyard of St. Tancred’s.

In my experience, nothing is more deeply refreshing than to huddle under a bumbershoot in the raw fog and the rain of a country churchyard. Bare inches above your head, the downpour drums a military tattoo on the taut black silk as your nose greedily drinks in the invigorating pong of tombstones, wet grass, and old moss: a smell which opens doors in your mind you didn’t even know you had.

Churchyard moss is soft to sit on — but wet. Mrs. Mullet says I’ll get rheumatism and have to have my bones replaced.

It may sound cold and clammy, but there is a special warmth in knowing that you are utterly alone – except for the dead.

With the dead, there are no sudden rages; no fits of hissing savagery; no flung plates or cutlery; no petulant sulks or towering rages. Just beneath your feet the deceased are being devoured by fat black beetles, in a vast, grand banquet, while merry mushrooms digest the welcome leftovers of coffin-wood. It is a world of harmony and dark contentment; a world of quiet grace and beauty. It is a happy dance of death.

I thought about the year I had sent up from a remote corner of this same churchyard, on All Souls Night, an armful of skyrockets, each labelled by hand with the name of one of the nearby but almost forgotten dead:

BLAM!

That was Nettie Savage (1792-1810).

KABOOSH!

Samuel Pole (1715-1722)

BLASSH! Arden Glassfield (1892-1914).

BOOM! POOM! POOM! A triple salvo for Anne Starling, Spinster of this Parish (1744-1775).

Unfortunately, one of Anne’s fuses had come down in the gutters of the church, setting alight a stupid cluster of accumulated moss and setting the House of God on fire. The Bishop’s Lacey Fire Brigade had to be called to extinguish the small, but fierce blaze. Father had expressed his displeasure by requiring me to make a monthly donation to the Fireman’s Fund which, since it was ultimately his money, was no hardship at all. The tough thing was that I had to deliver each donation in person which, at first, was excruciating, but in the end, I got to know a lot of firemen and to learn the chemistry of quenching blazes.

Oh, those days of glory. And Oh, to have them back again.

These days, my only friends are fungi.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I pretend that I myself am a fungus, creeping silently and unobserved along some slimy moonlit surface, feeding greedily on unsuspecting bits of bark, smacking my fungus lips as only a fungus can smack them.

Smack! A nice bit if pine-needle. Smack! A taste of bitter willow.  Smack! an unexpected splinter of coffin-lid, with a faint bouquet of formaldehyde. Encouraged, I move on, hoping for something much more meaty.

And so on and so forth…until I fall into a grey and groggy sleep.

Which brings us back to St. Tancred’s churchyard in the rain.

I needed time alone.

‘Flavia!’

Coloured curses! It was Undine, my pestilent little cousin: the Bane of Buckshaw. How had she found me?

I squatted even more deeply, scrunching my body slowly, as much as I was able, as if doing so would make me smaller, or maybe even invisible. Perhaps the pest would mistake my wet umbrella for part of a black marble tomb.

‘Flavia!’

I held my breath and gritted my teeth.

‘What is it, O precious one?’ I finally managed, wiping a raindrop from my eyelid.

She looked at me as if I had just climbed down from the sky on a golden rope.

‘You’re nuts,’ she said. ‘Do you know that? You’re nuts.’

I bit my tongue.

‘I want us both to take an oath, right here and now, on the sacred tomb of St. Tancred, so to speak, to be more kind and more gentle with one another. We’re both orphans, remember, and orphans ought to stick together. Do you know what I mean?’

“Yowzah!” she said enthusiastically.

“Don’t say “yowzah,” I said. “It makes you sound like a ventriloquist’s dummy. You’ve been spending too much time with Carl Pendracka.”

Carl was one of my sister Ophelia’s former suitors: an American serviceman from Cinncinati, Ohio. Although Carl’s ardour had been dampened somewhat by Feely’s marrying one of his rivals, he nevertheless had taken to hanging round Buckshaw again, perhaps, as my other sister, Daffy, suggested: “in search of smaller game”.

“Carl is a swell guy,” Undine said. “He’s teaching me to fart Hail to the Chief.”

“Undine! Don’t be coarse.”

“I wanted him to teach me Rule Britannia but Carl said that’s a concert piece, and too risky for a beginner. So, I come here to practise, sometimes. In case of an accident.”

“You’re disgusting,” I said, trying not to smile. I didn’t want to encourage her.

“I’m not disgusting. I’m enterprising. Do you know that a Frenchman named Joseph Pujol earned a respectable living breaking wind onstage in front of enormous audiences? And not just musical numbers —he could also do animal impressions!”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You’re a prude.”

“I’m not a prude. I’m a decent human being.”

Undine squinted one eye and sized me up as if I were for sale in an oriental market.

“You’re a Buckshaw de Luce. You’re all the same. Hoity-toity. Nothing but starch and sauce. Lah-de-dah. Sniff my hem. Ibu used to poke fun at you., you know.”

She peered at me through an imaginary pair of pince-nez and sang in a haughty and disapproving voice:

“Hush, hush, whisper who dares

Christopher Wren is designing our stairs.”

Ibu was her late mother, Lena, who had come to so horrid an end that I didn’t dare reply.

“Hardly original,” was the best I could manage.

“She heard it at a thing in Oxford,” Undine said. “But she said it fit all you Buckshaw de Luces to a ‘T’.”

“She was probably right,” I said, trying to be a better person, even if only for a few moments, but the effort was like grasping jelly and I felt oddly soiled.

Was that the best I could do to mend a fractured family? What would Father have thought of me?

Father’s death had hit me hard. It seemed so senseless. At first, I had tried to insulate myself and to pretend he was still alive and merely, as usual, unavailable. But as the days and the weeks and then the months crept awkwardly on, I found myself more and more often awakening in the night, weeping. There was a hidden shame in finding a tear-soaked pillow that I could not — or would not explain — even to myself.

I would be the first to admit that I’m not what you would call a conventional girl, but something strangely disturbing was creeping —almost secretly —into my life.

            It was as if a glass wall was being formed slowly: almost, but not quite, transparent, between me and the real world, setting me apart. I needed to take action before it was too late: before I was trapped and couldn’t get myself back to the other side.

Nourishment was what I required. Or was it love?

But I needed to begin with practicalities. Spades and chisels first — then cathedrals.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘Dogger asked me to come and fetch you home,’ she said. ‘At once.’

‘Any particular reason?’ I asked.

‘I only know what I can hear through doors,’ Undine said. ‘But it seems to be about Mrs. Mullet. I think she’s killed someone.’