"But — "
"Father has given instructions to Mr. Pringle, his solicitor, to draw up a Covenant of Reversion, which means, of course, that you will be returned to the Home for Unwed Mothers, who will have no option but to take you back."
"Because of the Covenant, you see," Daffy said. "It's in their Constitution. They can't say no. They can't refuse."
I clenched my fists as I felt the tears beginning to well up in my eyes. It was no good waiting upon reason.
I shoved Daffy roughly away from the door.
"Have you eaten those chocolates yet?" I demanded of Feely.
She was somewhat taken aback by the harshness in my voice.
"Well, no ...," she said.
"Better not," I spat. "They might be poisoned."
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I'd done the wrong thing.
Blast it! I'd given myself away. All that work in my laboratory wasted!
Flavia, I thought, sometimes you're no brighter than a lightning-struck lizard.
Angry with myself for being angry, I stalked out of the room on general principles, and nobody tried to stop me.
I took a deep breath, relaxed my shoulders, and opened the kitchen door.
"Flavia," Mrs. Mullet called, "be a dear and fetch me a glass of sherry from the pantry. I've gone all-over strange. Not too much, mind, or else I shall be tipsy."
She was stretched full length in a chair by the window, her heels on the tiles, fanning herself with a small frying pan.
I did as I was bidden, and she gulped down the drink in a flash.
"What is it, Mrs. M?" I asked. "What's happened?"
"The police, dearie. They gave me such a turn, comin' for that young woman like they did."
"What young woman? You mean Nialla?"
She nodded glumly, waggling her empty glass. I refilled it.
"Such a dear, she is. Never done nobody no harm. She rapped at the kitchen door to thank me, and Alf, of course, for puttin' her up the night. Said she was movin' on — didn't want us to think she was ungrateful, like. No more the words were out of her mouth than that there Inspector whatsis — "
"Hewitt," I said.
"Hewitt. That's 'im — that's the one ... 'E shows up in the doorway right behind 'er. Spotted 'er comin' across from the coach house, 'e did."
"And then?"
"'E asked if 'e might have a word outside. Next thing I knows, poor girl's off in the car with 'im. I 'ad to run round the front to get a good look. Proper fagged me out, so it did."
I refilled her glass.
"I shouldn't ought to, dearie," she said, "but my poor old heart's not up to such a muddlederumpus."
"You're looking better already, Mrs. M," I told her. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"I was just about to put them things in the oven," she said, pointing to an array of dough-filled pans on the table, and heaving herself to her feet. "Open the oven door for me — that's a good girl."
Much of my life was given over to holding the oven door of the Aga as Mrs. M fed heaps of baking into its open maw. Hell, in Milton's Paradise Lost, had nothing to compare with my drudgery.
"Clean out of pastries, we were," she said. "When it comes to dainties, that young man of Miss Ophelia's seems to have a bottomless stomach."
Miss Ophelia's young man? Had it come to that already? Had my rambles round the village caused me to miss some sensational scene of courtship?
"Dieter?" I asked.
"Even if 'e is a German," she said with a nod, "'e's ever so much more refined than that rooster as keeps leavin' 'is rubbishy gifts on the kitchen doorstep."
Poor Ned! I thought. Even Mrs. Mullet was against him.
"I just 'appened to overhear a bit of what 'e said while I was dustin' the hall — about 'Eathcliff, an' all that. I mind the time me and my friend, Mrs. Waller, took the bus over to Hinley to see 'im in the cinema. Wuthering Heights, it was called, and a good name for it, too! That there 'Eathcliff, why, 'e kept 'is wife 'id up in the attic as if she was an old dresser! No wonder she went barmy. I know I should 'ave! Now then, what you laughin' at, miss?"
"At the idea," I said, "of Dieter mucking across Jubilee Field through rain and lightning to carry off the Fair Ophelia."
"Well, 'e might do," she said, "but not without a right fuss from Sally Straw — and, some say, the old missus herself."
"The old missus? Grace Ingleby? Surely you don't mean Grace Ingleby?"
Mrs. Mullet had suddenly gone as red as a pot of boiling beets.
"I've said too much," she said, flustered. "It's the sherry, you see. Alf always says as 'ow sherry coshes the guard what's supposed to be keepin' watch on my tongue. Now then, not another word. Off you go, dearie. And mind you — I've said nothing."
Well! I thought. Well, well, well, well, well!
* TWENTY-THREE *
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one's attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.
With a good dollop of sulfuric acid already decanted into a freshly washed flask and warmed slightly, I gingerly added a glob of crystalline jelly, and watched in awe as it slowly dissolved, quivering and squirming in the acid bath like a translucent squidling.
I had extracted the stuff, with water and alcohol, from the roots of a Carolina jessamine plant (Gelsemium sempervirens) that, to my delight, I had discovered blooming blissfully away in the corner of the greenhouse, its flowers like little trumpets sculpted from fresh butter.
The plant was native to the Americas, Dogger had told me, but had been brought home to English greenhouses by travelers; this particular specimen by my mother, Harriet.
I had asked if I could have it for my laboratory, and Dogger had readily agreed.
The root contained a lovely alkaloid called gelsemine, which had lurked undetected inside the plant since the Creation, until it was teased out in 1870 by a man from Philadelphia with the charming name of Wormley, who administered the bitter poison to a rabbit, which turned a complete backwards somersault and perished in twenty minutes.
Gelsemine was a killer whose company I much enjoyed.
And now came the magic!
Into the liquid I introduced, on the tip of a knife, a small dose of K2Cr2O7, or potassium dichromate, whose red salts, illuminated by a fortuitous beam of sunlight from the casement window, turned it the livid cherry red hue of a carbon monoxide victim's blood.
But this was only the beginning! There was more to come.
Already the cherry brilliance was fading, and the solution was taking on the impressive violet color of an old bruise. I held my breath, and — yes! — here it was, the final phase of yellow-green.
Gelsemine was one of chemistry's chameleons, shifting color with delicious abandon, and all without a trace of its former hue.
People were like that, too.
Nialla, for instance.
On the one hand, she was captive to a traveling puppeteer; a young woman who, other than the baby she was now carrying, had no family to speak of; a young woman who allowed herself to be beaten by a semi-invalid lover; a young woman now left with no money and no visible means of support. And yet, in rather a complicated way that I did not entirely understand, she did not have my complete sympathy.