Read Online I Am Half-Sick Of Shadows by Alan Bradley - Free Book Online Page A

freeze.
    The world outside my bedroom windows was the sickly shade of an underdeveloped snapshot: a bruised black and white, under which lay an ever so slightly menacing tinge of purple, as if the sky were muttering “Just you wait!”
    A few taunting flakes were still sifting down slowly like little white warning notes from the gods, shaking their tiny frozen fists as they fell past the window.
    Half the film crew, it seemed, were at work clearing a maze of pathways between the vans and lorries.
    I dug quickly through a pile of gramophone records (Daffy told me I had pronounced it “grampaphone” when I was younger) and, picking out the one I was looking for, dusted it on my skirt.
    It was “Morning,” by Edvard Grieg, from his
Peer Gynt
suite: the same piece of music that Rupert Porson (deceased) had used at the parish hall last September to open his puppet performance of
Jack and the Beanstalk
.
    It wasn’t my favorite piece of morning music, but it was infinitely better than “Let’s All Sing Like the Birdies Sing.” Besides, the disk had that lovely picture of the dog, his head tilted quizzically as he listens to his master’s voice coming out of a horn, not realizing that his master is behind him painting his picture.
    I gave the gramophone a jolly good cranking and dropped the needle onto the surface of the spinning disk.
    “La-la-la- LAH , la-la la-la, LAH-la-la-la,” I sang along, even putting the little hitches in the right places, until the end of the main melody.
    Then, because it seemed to suit the bleakness of the day, I adjusted the control to reduce the speed, which made the music sound as if the entire orchestra had suddenly been overcome with nausea: as if someone had poisoned the players.
    Oh, how I adore music!
    I flopped limply round the room, sagging with the slowing music like a doll whose sawdust stuffing is pouring out, until the gramophone’s spring ran all the way down and I collapsed on the floor in a boneless heap.
    “I hope you haven’t been getting underfoot,” Feely said. “Remember what Father told us.”
    I let my tongue crawl slowly out of my mouth like an earthworm emerging after a rain, but it was a wasted effort. Feely didn’t take her eyes from the sheet of paper she was studying.
    “Is that your part?” I asked.
    “As a matter of fact, it is.”
    “Let’s have a dekko.”
    “No. It’s none of your business.”
    “Come on, Feely! I arranged it. If you get paid, I want half.”
    Daffy inserted a finger in
Bleak House
to mark her place.
    “ ‘In BG, OOF , a maid places a letter on the table,’ ” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
    “That’s all?” I asked.
    “That’s it.”
    “But what does it mean?”
    “It means that in the background, out of focus, a maid places a letter on the table. Just as it says.”
    Feely was pretending to be preoccupied, but I could tell by the rising color of her throat that she was listening. My sister Ophelia is like one of those exotic frogs whose skin changes color involuntarily as a warning. In the frog, it’s trying to make you think that it’s poisonous. It’s much the same in Feely.
    “
Caramba!
” I said. “You’ll be famous, Feely!”
    “Don’t say
‘Caramba,’
 ” she snapped. “You know Father doesn’t like it.”
    “He’ll be home this morning,” I reminded her. “With Aunt Felicity.”
    At that, a general glumness fell over the table and we finished our breakfasts in stony silence.
    The down train from London was due at Doddingsley at five past ten. If Clarence Mundy had been picking them up in his taxicab, Father and Aunt Felicity would be at Buckshaw within half an hour. But today, allowing for the snow and the practiced funereal pace at which the vicar usually drove, it seemed likely to be well past eleven before they arrived.
    It was, in fact, not until a quarter past one that the vicar’s Morris pulled up exhausted at the front door, piled like a refugee’s cart with various