Directly below the laboratory, in the Long Gallery, there is a portrait in oils of Uncle Tar. In it, he is looking up from his microscope, his lips pressed together and his brow furrowed, as if someone with an easel, a palette, and a box of paints had rudely barged in just as he was about to discover deLucium.
"Fizz off!" his expression clearly says. "Fizz off and leave me alone!"
And so they had fizzed off — and so, eventually, had Uncle Tar.
The laboratory, and all that was in it, was now mine, and had been for a number of years. No one ever came here — which was just as well.
As I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key, something white fluttered to the floor. It was the handkerchief I had lent Nialla in the churchyard — and it was still vaguely damp to the touch.
An image rose up in my mind of Nialla as she had been when first I saw her, lying facedown upon a weathered tombstone, hair spread out like a sea of red, her hot tears sizzling in the dust.
Everything dropped into place like the tumblers in a lock. Of course!
Vengeance would have to wait.
With a pair of cuticle scissors I had pinched from Feely's vanity table, I snipped four damp disks from the linen handkerchief, taking care to avoid the green grass stains I had inflicted upon it, and cutting out only those parts diagonally opposite the stains — the spots into which Nialla had wept.
These I stuffed — with tweezers — into a test tube, which I then injected with a three-percent solution of sulfosalicylic acid to precipitate the protein. This was the so-called Ehrlich test.
As I worked, I thought with pleasure of how profoundly the great Alexander Fleming had changed the world when he accidentally sneezed into a petri dish. This was the sort of science that was dear to my heart. Who, after all, can honestly say that they have never sneezed on a culture? It could happen to anyone. It has happened to me.
After the sneeze, the magnificently observant Fleming noticed that the bacteria in the dish were shrinking back, as if in fear, from the flecks of his spattered mucus. It wasn't long before he had isolated a particular protein in his snot that repelled bacteria in much the same way that the presence of a dog foaming at the mouth keeps off burglars. He called it lysozyme, and it was this substance for which I was now testing.
Fortunately, even in high summer, the ancestral halls of Buckshaw were as cold and dank as the proverbial tomb. Room temperature in the east wing, where my laboratory was located — in spite of the heating that had been spitefully installed by warring brothers in only the west wing of the once politically divided house — was never more than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, which, as luck would have it, was precisely the temperature at which lysozyme precipitates when sulfosalicylic acid is added.
I watched, entranced, as a veil of crystals began to form, their white flakes drifting gently down in the little winter inside the test tube.
Next, I lit a Bunsen burner, and carefully warmed a beaker of water to seventy degrees. It did not take long. When the thermometer indicated that it was ready, I dipped the bottom of the test tube into the warm bath and swirled it gently.
As the newly formed precipitate dissolved, I let out a gasp of delight.
"Flavia." Father's faint voice came drifting up to the laboratory. Having traversed the front hall, floated up the curving stair, penetrated the east wing, and wended its way down the long corridor to its southernmost point, it now seeped through my closed door, its force spent, as wispy as if it had come drifting to England all the way from Ultima Thule.
"Supper," I thought I heard him call.
"It's damnably irritating," Father said.
We were seated round the long refectory table, Father at the far end, Daffy and Feely one on each side, and me at the very bottom, at Cape Horn.
"It's damnably irritating," he said again, "for one to sit here and listen to one's daughter admit that she absconded with one's eau de cologne for a bloody chemical experiment."
No matter if I denied these things or admitted my guilt, Father found it equally irritating. I simply couldn't win. I had learned that it was best to remain silent.
"Damn it, Flavia, I just bought the bloody stuff. Can't very well go up to London in this heat smelling like a shoulder of pork that's gone off, can I?"
Father was most eloquent when he was angry. I had nicked the bottle of Roger & Gallet to fill an atomizer with which I needed to spray the house after an experiment involving hydrogen sulfide had gone spectacularly wrong.
I shook my head.
"I'm sorry," I said, assuming a hangdog look and dabbing at my eye with a napkin. "I'd buy you a new bottle — but I have no money."
As if I were a tin duck in a shooting gallery, Feely glared down the long table at me in silent contempt. Daffy's nose was stuck firmly in Virginia Woolf.
"But I could make you some," I said brightly. "It's really not much more than ethanol, citrus oils, and garden herbs. I'll ask Dogger to pick me some rosemary and lavender, and I'll get some oranges and lemons and limes from Mrs. Mullet — "
"You'll do no such thing, Miss Flavia," said Mrs. Mullet, bustling — literally — into the room as she knocked open the door with one of her ample hips and dumped a large tray onto the table.
"Oh, no!" I heard Daffy whisper to Feely. "It's 'the Whiffler' again."
"The Whiffler," as we called it, was a dessert of Mrs. Mullet's own devising, which, so far as we could make out, consisted of a sort of clotted green jelly in sausage casings, topped with double Devon cream, and garnished with sprigs of mint and other assorted vegetable refuse. It sat there, quivering obscenely now and then, like some great beastly garden slug. I couldn't help shivering.
"Yummy," Father said. "How very yummy."
He meant it ironically, but Mrs. Mullet's antennae were not attuned to sarcasm.
"I knew you'd like it," she said. "It was no more than this morning I was sayin' to my Alf, 'It's been a while since the Colonel and those girls 'ave 'ad one of my lovely jells. They always remarks over my jells" (this was no more than the truth), "and I loves makin' 'em for the dears.'"
She made it sound as if her employers had antlers.
Feely made a noise like a distressed passenger at the rail of the Queen Mary on a November crossing of the North Atlantic.
"Eat it up, dear," said Mrs. Mullet, unfazed. "It's good for you." And with that she was gone.
Father fixed me with that gaze of his. Although he had brought the latest issue of The London Philatelist to the table, as he always did, he had not so much as opened it. Father was a keen, not to say rabid, collector of postage stamps, his life wholly given over to gazing through a magnifying lens at a seemingly endless supply of little colored heads and scenic views. But he was not looking at stamps now — he was looking at me. The omens did not bode well.
"Where were you all afternoon?" he asked.
"At church," I answered promptly and primly and, I hoped, a little devoutly. I was a master at this kind of deflected chitchat.
"Church?" he asked. He seemed rather surprised. "Why?"
"I was helping a woman," I said. "Her van broke down."
"Ah," he said, allowing himself a half-millimeter smile. "And there you were on the spot to offer your skills as a motor mechanic."
Daffy grinned at her book, and I knew that she was listening with pleasure to my humiliation. To give her credit, Feely remained totally absorbed in polishing her fingernails on her white silk blouse.