A Red Herring Without Mustard

“I have,” I told her, “but not in this particular passage.”

Before she could question me, I reached out, took hold of the corner of the sheet, and yanked it away.

A cloud of dust went billowing up, blinding us both—making us choke as if we had been caught in a sudden sandstorm.

“Oooh!” Porcelain wailed.

“It’s only dust,” I said, even though I was stifling.

And then the candle guttered—and went out.

I gave a silent curse and felt in my pocket.

“Hold this,” I said, finding her hands in the darkness and wrapping her fingers round the candlestick. “I’ll have it going in a jiff.”

I dug deeper into my pocket. Drat!

“Bad luck,” I said. “I think I left the matches in the pantry.”

I felt the candlestick being shoved back into my hands. After a brief moment, there was a scraping sound, and a match flared up brightly.

“Good job I thought to pick them up, then,” Porcelain said, applying the match to the candle. As the flame grew taller and more steady, I could see the object over which the sheet had been draped.

“Look!” I said. “It’s a sedan chair.”

The thing looked like an early closed-in motorcar whose wheels had been stolen. The wood paneling was painted light green with hand-drawn flowers clustered in the corners. The gold medallion on the door was the de Luce crest.

Inside the chair, fleur-de-lis wallpaper had peeled away and hung down in tongues upon the green velvet padding of the seat.

There was an odd musty smell about the chair, and it wasn’t just mice.

To think that some of my own ancestors had sat in this very box and been borne by other humans through the streets of some eighteenth-century city!

I wanted nothing more than to climb inside and become part of my family’s history. Just to sit, and nothing more.

“This is owned by a woman,” Porcelain said in a slow, strange voice that sounded, more than anything, like an incantation. “Silk dress … powdered wig … white face, and a black spot—like a star—on her cheek. She wants—”

“Stop it!” I shouted, spinning round to face her. “I don’t want to play your stupid games.”

Porcelain stood perfectly still, staring, black eyes shining madly out of her white face. She was entirely covered with dust, Harriet’s flame-colored dress now faded to an ashen orange in the light of the flickering candle.

“Look at you,” she said in a voice that sounded to me accusing. “Just look at you!”

I couldn’t help thinking that I was in the presence of my mother’s ghost.

At that moment, a metallic clang came from the passageway ahead, and both of us jumped.

It sounded like iron on iron: chains being dragged through the bars of a cage.

“Come on,” Porcelain said, “let’s get out of here.”

“No, wait,” I said. “I want to find out what’s down here.”

She snatched the candlestick from my hand and began to move quickly back towards the stairs.

“Either come back with me, or stay here alone in the dark.”

I had no choice but to follow.

TWENTY-NINE

THE FLAME COLOR BEGAN to brighten as soon as I shoved the material into the beaker.

“See?” I said. “It’s working.”

“What is that stuff?” Porcelain asked.

“Dry-cleaning fluid,” I said, giving Harriet’s dress a poke with a glass rod, and stirring gently. “Carbon tetrachloride, actually.”

I couldn’t say its name without recalling, with pleasure, that the stuff had first been synthesized in 1839 by a Frenchman named Henri-Victor Regnault, a one-time upholsterer who had produced carbon tetrachloride through the reaction between chlorine and chloroform. One of the early uses of his invention had been to fumigate barrels of food in which various unpleasant insects had taken up residence; more recently, it had been used to charge fire extinguishers.

“Father uses it to scrutinize watermarks on postage stamps,” I said.

I did not mention that I had recently liberated the bottle from one of his storage cupboards for an experiment involving houseflies.

“Look at the dress. See how clean it is already? A few more minutes and it will be as good as new.”

Porcelain, who had wrapped herself in one of my old dressing gowns, looked on in awe.

I had changed into a cleanish dress and left the dusty one soaking in one of the laboratory’s sinks. Later, I would hang it from one of the gas chandeliers to dry.

“You de Luces are a strange lot,” Porcelain said.

“Ha! Less than an hour ago you thought that at least two of us were ladylike young women.”

“That was before you showed me the cellars.”

I noted that our little tour of the Chamber of Horrors had changed her mind.

“Speaking of cellars,” I told her, “I’m not easily frightened, but I didn’t much care for that stuff about the lady who owned the sedan chair.”

“It wasn’t stuff. I was telling you what I saw.”

“Saw? You’re asking me to believe that you saw a woman in a powdered wig and a silk dress?”