Red, White and Blue (Book Two of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Five: The Wylies

Eynsham, Oxfordshire, 1881:

Danvers couldn't help thinking, as he walked down the damp, fir-lined path to Madam Myrrha's door, that the place looked like a witch's cottage, and that, if she should decide to push him into the oven, there would be nobody, out here, to hear his screams.

He told himself it was the height of bad manners to even think this, but his imagination went on working just the same. It had been given plenty of dark materials over the past few days, and seemed inclined to make something of them, no matter what he said.

Much to his surprise, however, the door was opened not by a toothless old crone – or even a hunch-backed servant – but by a well-dressed young woman in a black-and-white striped gown, who could easily have strolled out of the pages of the London fashion papers. She had dark hair, lively eyes and deep-stained red lips. She was also smoking – quite a scandalous thing for a woman to be seen doing – although she used a long cigarette-holder, which made the action seem a bit more dainty.

Danvers took off his hat and explained that he had come to consult Madam Myrrha on a matter of great importance. The woman blew out a thin, blue stream of smoke, and said, "A man?"

This was baffling, but Danvers didn't want to get off on the wrong foot, especially as he was standing quite emphatically outside the door, so he smiled and enquired whether Madam Myrrha was at home.

The woman regarded him for a few moments, and then said, as though he presented her with no alternative, "You'd better come in."

She led him through a dark hallway into a lovely, low-beamed room, which he presumed had once been the cottage kitchen. Danvers looked around uneasily for the oven, but with no success. There was no evidence that this room had ever been used for its intended, culinary purpose.

Instead, it looked like a lovely, disordered museum. There were shelves of squishy things in glass jars, oil-paintings of lamp-lit scenes with glossy black backgrounds, and statues of naked gods and goddesses. The house seemed just like a charming, low-beamed Oxford Faculty.

"I'm Fabienne," the woman added, but didn't volunteer any more information. Danvers was used to the kind of introductions which laid out very clearly a woman's marital status and her familial connection with the owner of the house before you could even shake her hand, but perhaps attitudes were more relaxed in the country. Or rather, less relaxed, because he sensed that there was no way Miss Fabienne was going to allow him to shake her hand. "I'll tell Myrrha you're here."

She turned around with a sweep of her skirts and disappeared up a flight of steps which presumably led to the above-stairs apartments. But Danvers wasn't at all annoyed at being left in the servant's quarters, not when they were so delightfully crammed with paintings and ornaments. He drifted over to the shelves of glass jars and peered in at their contents.

Danvers had seen squishy, colourless specimens in glass jars before – the Museum of Natural History was full of them. They didn't scare him. They usually bore no resemblance to what they had been in life, anyway, so it was possible for the truly optimistic imagination to maintain that they were nothing more than plants – perhaps orchids from Borneo, or rare lilies from the Amazon. In fact, it seemed to Danvers, as he approached one particular shelf, that the items in the jars looked like nothing so much as roots and bulbs, even if they did occasionally have hairs growing on them. Perhaps Madam Myrrha was an amateur botanist?

He reached the end of the jar-laden shelf with a sigh of relief, despite his optimism, and was confronted with a framed photograph mounted on the wall. It reminded him of the pictures his cricket-team were forced to pose for every year, except that the women seated in orderly rows in this photograph were not wearing sports clothes, and not smiling very much – not even in the strained, artificial way that people forced to hold a pose for three minutes tended to get on their faces.