Mrs. Mullet on the telephone? Our telephone was kept in a small cubicle under the stairs, and Father had always strictly forbidden its use except in the direst emergency. Even after his death there was still no chitchat at Buckshaw, and I could never recall Mrs. Mullet using “the instrument,” as Father called it, in my lifetime.

  “You couldn’t have,” I said. “She never goes near the thing.”

  “Not here,” Undine said in an exasperated voice, blowing through her nose like a startled horse. “It was at her house. On her telephone. She was talking to her friend Mrs. Waller.”

  That explained it—at least in part. When it came to trumpeting things aloud, Mrs. Waller wasn’t far behind the BBC Home Service.

  I shook my head.

  “Tell me exactly what happened. I need to know the context. Do you know what context means?”

  “No.”

  “It means I need more details. Describe the scene. What were you doing at Mrs. Mullet’s? What was she doing? And so forth.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Undine said. “It’s a secret.”

  I almost bit through my lip to keep from swearing.

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” she said. “Because you and I are chums now. But keep it under your hat. We were planning a birthday surprise for you.”

  “Para-Dimethylaminobenzaldehyde!” I expostulated.

  It was my favorite chemical cuss word. It was not only melodic, but like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. The substance was used in drug tests, such as the one for opium, and in detecting the indole alkaloids, such as physostigmine, the active poison in the seeds of the Calabar bean. It had been used notably by the famous Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich to detect the difference between typhoid and diarrhea.

  Edward G. Robinson had played the role of Ehrlich in the film Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, which Father refused to allow me to see. I begged and I pleaded—I even cajoled—but Father refused to give in. “It is unsuitable for a girl of your age and upbringing,” he had said. I had even tried jollying the vicar into booking the film for his Friday Night Famous Film series for the boys and girls of the parish. But Father had somehow got wind of my plan and put the kibosh on it.

  “But Dr. Ehrlich is a famous chemist,” I had pleaded.

  “I know who Dr. Ehrlich is,” Father had said, “and Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize, he’s not to be trotted out for public view in a decent parish church.”

  “Para-Dimethylaminobenzaldehyde!” I said it again for emphasis, and Undine grinned from ear to ear.

  “Gesundheit!” she said, and I was instantly in a better mood.

  “Now then,” I told her, rubbing my hands together, “without giving away any more secrets, tell me about Mrs. Mullet’s cozy phone chat with her friend Mrs. Waller.”

  “Well, I went up to her front door and rang the bell—”

  “Skip the bell, kid,” I lisped in my best Humphrey Bogart voice. “Get down to the dirt.”

  It’s sometimes best to inject a bit of humor when you’re manipulating people. It’s not much different from masking the taste of cod liver oil with a sickly sweet fruit, such as cherries or oranges or lemons.

  “The dirt?” Undine said. “You mean Asterion, don’t you?”

  I patted her on the head. “You got it, kid. Now spit it out.”

  By now Undine was fairly glowing. She was at my mercy as effectively as if I had hypnotized her.

  “Well, Mrs. Mullet and Mrs. Waller were at Lady Rex-Wells’s together, years and years ago. They were already on the phone when I came in. They were gabbing about Elsie, one of the maids at Lady Rex-Wells’s who used to go hysterical and roll herself up in a rug.”

  “I think I’ve heard about Elsie,” I said.

  “Mrs. Waller’s so loud! I could hear her even when Mrs. Mullet had the phone pressed tight against her ear.”

  She mimicked an annoying tinny-sounding voice I took to be Mrs. Waller’s: “Well, Elsie’s had an operation. She hasn’t been herself since. She can’t work anymore. Cookers give her the fantods.”

  I grinned. Undine had all the makings of a crackerjack mimic. Encouraged, she went on, bubbling away like a roadside spring.

  “Mrs. Waller’s daughter Madge supports her,” she continued. “Madge is a wizard typist, you know. She types at a hundred and twenty words a minute and takes Pitman shorthand at two hundred. She was offered a job at Leathcote. Confidential secretary to Mister Big Britches. Confidential! She doesn’t even know his real name. He goes by the name of Colonel Crane, but some of the other bigwigs call him Asterion. Not to his face, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. But my mind was partly distracted. Did Mrs. Waller and her daughter Madge realize the consequences of bandying gossip about with Mrs. Mullet on a country telephone line? Probably not. Father had been quite right to think “the instrument” deadly.

  “Of course,” I said again to regain control of the conversation.

  I have found that when listening, agreeing now and then builds the bonds of trust with the speaker, and often results in a whole fresh flow of scuttlebutt.

  “You overheard all this?” I asked. “Jolly good show!”

  “I pretended to be asleep at the kitchen table.” Undine grinned. “I even drooled a little.”

  How could you hate a girl like that?

  “Mrs. Waller said Madge told her some of the things she reads and writes would curl your hair, toes, and fingernails.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say. But Mrs. Mullet said ‘I know’ as if she actually did know.”

  “Remind me to buy you a pair of brass knuckles, Sluggo,” I said. “You’re a marvel.”

  “May I go now?” Undine asked. “I’ve got some scores to settle.”

  I waved her away. Well, no, I didn’t actually wave her away, I blew her a kiss before I could stop myself. And then I was appalled at what I had done.

  Is this what happens when you’re becoming a woman? I wondered. Do you suddenly start blowing kisses to your antagonist as if you were onstage in the West End at the curtain call of Peter Pan?

  “I’m your crocodile,” Undine had told me in the churchyard. “Tick-tock. Tick-tock.”

  But instead, she had saved my bacon several times in just two days. Was it possible that your nemesis could also be your savior?

  Undine seemed to be developing the ability of disgorging the most unexpected information at the most unexpected times.

  “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Dogger had once advised me when I scoffed at the idea of communion wafers and sacramental wine being the literal body and blood of Christ.

  And he was right. Sometimes it pays to listen to one’s soul.

  Why was I blocking the name Asterion? Why was my mind resisting even thinking about it?

  The very sound of the word rang deeply, and always had, somewhere inside my brain: like the bells of a distant country church.

  Asterion. Asterion. Where had I heard that name before?

  I racked my brain, but nothing special came to mind. Whatever the memory, it was deeply buried.

  Rather than Asterion, my mind threw up the name Marcel Proust.

  Marcel Proust? I thought. You must be joking.

  Marcel Proust, that boring old scribbler lounging in his bed full of crumbs?

  Daffy had insisted upon reading aloud to me from Remembrance of Things Past: the part where Proust nibbles on a madeleine and releases a mind-numbing torrent of memories that will gush on unplugged for seven soggy volumes. Madeleines, she explained, were little shell-shaped cakes named for Mary Magdalene and a French word meaning “little girl.”

  “Which is far more than you need to know at present,” she had added.

  The only part of this sludge that interested me was that smells have a high speed and high priority railway to the brain: particularly those parts of it involved with memories and emotions.

  And believe me, I had a surplus of those! I needed only to set them free.

  I had rifled through a shelf of Mrs. Mullet’s cookbooks, a few still bearing the stamp of Lady Rex-Wells’s domestic library.

  I had almost worn my fingers to the bone on these grease-spotted pages before I finally came across the recipe for madeleines. The secret ingredients were flour, sugar, baking soda, and either lemon juice or vanilla.

  Eureka! Here comes chemistry to the rescue.

  I knew from my own analysis of one of Mrs. Mullet’s lemon pies that the essential oil in lemons is one of the most common terpenes, limonene. Lemons also contain eight of the chemical elements: sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, iron, and zinc.

  The lemon’s shape is no accident: It is Mother Nature’s hand grenade.

  I remembered from my laboratory work that the very smell of lemons raised from the back of my brain scenes of polished furniture and floors, and of those uck-making pies.

  I had not yet investigated vanilla. Alone in the kitchen, and with the pantry at hand, there was no time like the present.

  A few steps and I had in my hand a jar of sugar with vanilla pods embedded in the granules. I unscrewed the lid and held the jar to my nose.

  I breathed in the scent, scooping the air toward my nostrils.

  My legs quaked and trembled, baby-like. I had to sit down on a stool.

  In in an instant, I was transported from the pantry to the Visto.

  It was a warm summer’s day, and I was bundled, too warmly dressed, into a hooded wicker pram. The sky overhead was a limitless blue.

  A large red face blotted out the sun.

  This was my very earliest memory.

  “No tantrums from you,” the red face said. It bore an uncanny resemblance to Aunt Felicity. A large spoon was being forced into my mouth, and on it was a disgusting white mess.

  I tried to pull away. My head recoiled and hit a hard wooden backstop. I began to cry.

  I would later learn that this horror, looking like a load of maggots, was Nesselrode pudding, speckled with pieces of pulverized chestnut like the dead flies on the white paper in a butcher-shop window.

  And then Father’s face appeared.

  The wicker creaked alarmingly as the two of them bent over me, their faces like twin moons blooming, hiding the sky.

  I looked from one of them to the other.

  “She’s dead,” one of them said in a bare whisper. “You are now Asterion. The Nide has spoken.”

  I spat the unholy mess out of my mouth and onto my yellow wool jumper.

  The memory ended there abruptly, like a needle knocked from a gramophone record by a clumsy dancer.

  And yet the scene had remained seared into my soul: so private and so obscene that I had never told anyone—not even myself.

  Who was the “she” they whispered about?

  They could only have been referring to the death of my mother, Harriet.

  But which of them had then become Asterion? Was it Father or Aunt Felicity?

  And more to the point, with Father dead, who was now Asterion? Who was leading the powerful Nide?

  Shaken, and with my head spinning, I pressed the vanilla pods deeper into their nest of sugar. The jar of memories, I thought, ought to be labeled with a skull and crossbones.

  I needed some fresh air.

  · Five ·

  Gladys was overjoyed to see me. I could tell by the little squeak of delight she gave as I seized her handlebars. She frets when I’m too long at breakfast, eager to hit the open road.

  The fresh air of the outdoors cleared my mind marvelously. I knew precisely what my next step ought to be. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  It wasn’t more than a few minutes’ ride to the home of our neighbor Maximilian Brock. Max was a retired concert pianist of what he called “diminished verticality.” He had once confided in me that he was the president of the Royal Society of Dwarfs, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Max was, above all, mischievous.

  I found him fiddling at the front door with a fistful of wires.

  “Haroo, haroo, mon prince,” he called out as I approached. “On me fait tort!”

  This was Max’s traditional greeting: the famous hue and cry, as raised by injured parties on the island of Alderney.

  “I’m rerigging my doorbell,” he explained as I drew nearer. “I’ve had Bach and I’ve had Mozart, but now, by Jove, it’s time for something scintillating by Scriabin. One of the preludes, perhaps?”

  He touched the ends of two wires together and from somewhere in the depths came the sound of a cascading piano passage. I recognized it at once as a piece that Feely had worked up. Max had tutored her in the keyboard arts until Feely called it off. “He’s far too personal,” she said. “Too forte in the fingering department, if you know what I mean.”

  I had appreciated Feely sharing this information, as it was a sign that I was growing up. Max had never been a pest with me, and now I needed information, which he had by the bushel basket.

  Among his other accomplishments, he—or so it was said—had written lurid tales of love and betrayal for certain American confession magazines: “Lust in the Timberland,” “I Was a Child Taxidermist,” and so forth.

  “It pays the bills,” he had once told the vicar’s wife, “and can be done in bed, unlike playing the piano.” It was also the vicar’s wife to whom he had confessed compiling a series of scrapbooks on judicial hangings.

  “Justice must not only be done, and seen to be done,” he had told her, “but documented in great detail as a deterrent to our young ones.”

  “And with that he laughed,” she told me. “A most peculiar giggling laugh. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

  “I need a favor, Max,” I said. “I believe you once mentioned your collection of hanging scrapbooks.”

  “No, I didn’t, dear girl. Not to you, at least.”

  “Can I have a squint anyway?” I asked. “I’m awfully keen on the scaffold, the gallows, and the drop—whatever you want to call them.”

  Better to be up-front about things.

  “Delighted!” he said. “Come in and lock away the weary world.”

  I followed him into the depths.

  “Investigating the death of Major Greyleigh, are you?” he asked over his shoulder as we navigated a zigzagging series of alternating dark and white passages before stepping at last through an oak-paneled door and into a surprisingly sun-drenched library.

  “Yes, but keep it under your hat, Max,” I said.

  “Wild horses,” he said, drawing an imaginary zipper across his mouth. “Flaming toothpicks under fingernails, cannibal snails in ear canals, that sort of thing. Safe with me.

  “Now then,” he said, turning and pointing to a wall of scrapbooks. “What do you think of that?”

  There must have been scores of the things—possibly even hundreds: scrapbooks bound in linen and in oilcloth, scrapbooks bound in cardboard and in leather, each a different color, a panorama of Harlequin costumes with their lozenge-shaped labels, scrapbooks bound in silk and sailcloth, in canvas and in crepe, in taffeta and tinsel—scrapbooks bound in, for all I knew, human skin, and all lovingly homemade.

  I wanted to think something appropriately solemn and noble at this moment; something I could remember in my later years: “a National Gallery of the Gallows,” perhaps.

  But I was overwhelmed and disgraced myself.

  I hissed through my teeth. “Hangings, Max?” I asked. “All this?”

  I gaped around the room and let out a second hiss.

  Scraping bashfully at the carpet with a small pointed shoe, Max stuck out his chin, almost defensively, then pulled it in again. “It’s just a hobby,” he said. “A mere hobby. Trifle heaped upon trifle, and so forth.”

  “It’s magnificent!” I said. “I’d kill to have a library like this.”

  “Some have,” Max said, almost under his breath.

  What did he mean by that? Surely Max hadn’t—

  “Were you acquainted with Major Greyleigh?” I asked.

  It slipped out before I could stop it.

  Surely a man of Max’s tastes would have made the acquaintance of the only public hangman for miles around.

  “No, I’m afraid I was not. Never had the pleasure.”

  “But you both attend—attended—St. Tancred’s!”

  “And so do you,” Max said. “Odd, isn’t it?” he went on, picking delicately at an invisibly flawed fingernail. “But one doesn’t just go galloping up to strangers demanding all the dirty details, does one? At least not at the beginning.”

  “You first need to be introduced. Is that it?”

  “Something like, yes. Rather like those two Englishmen in the play…but go ahead. Help yourself.”

  He made a sweeping gesture with his hand toward the rows of books.

  “Dig in. I bestow upon you the freedom of the parish, as it were.”

  But where to begin? It was like being told to grab a handful of ocean.

  “The volumes are arranged chronologically and alphabetically,” Max said. “It takes a bit of getting used to. But once you’ve got the hang of it…”

  He giggled. “You must forgive my enthusiasm,” he said.

  “Enthusiasm begs no forgiveness,” I told him, quoting something Father had once said when criticized about his stamp collection.

  Max beamed and turned away for a moment. I was astonished to realize he was close to tears.

  He used the moment to fetch down a large apple-green volume. “Here’s Hanley,” he said. “As good a place as any to start.”

  He placed the scrapbook on a table and opened it gently. “Fragile,” he said. “Old newspaper reminds us vividly how close we are to dust.”

  I was going to enjoy this. I could tell.

  Max pointed to a grainy black-and-white photograph—a newspaper clipping—of a man in a high-winged collar standing alone in the dock. Facing him, a judge in a white horsehair wig was raising a frozen finger.