The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  "Flavia!"

  I poked at my cereal, giving it a stir with a corner of my toast. In spite of the burnt bits of crust to liven it up, the soggy muck in the bowl still tasted like cardboard.

  There was a jerk, a jump in my consciousness like a badly spliced cinema film. I had fallen asleep at the table.

  "What's wrong?" I heard Feely ask. "Are you all right?"

  "She is stuck in her 'enervating slumbers, from the hesternal dissipation or debauch,'" Daffy said.

  Daffy had recently been reading Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham, a few pages each night for her bedtime book, and until she finished it, we were likely to be lashed daily at breakfast with obscure phrases in a style of prose as stiff and inflexible as a parlor poker.

  Hesternal, I remembered, meant, “pertaining to yesterday.” I was nodding over the rest of the phrase when suddenly Feely leapt up from the table.

  "Good God!" she exclaimed, quickly wrapping her dressing gown round her like a winding-sheet. "Who on earth is that?"

  Someone stood silhouetted at the French doors, peering in at us through hands cupped against the glass.

  "It's that writer," I said. "The country house man. Pemberton."

  Feely gave a squeak and fled upstairs where I knew she would throw on her tight blue sweater set, dab powder on her morning blemishes, and float down the staircase pretending she was someone else: Olivia de Havilland, for instance. She always did that when there was a strange man on the property.

  Daffy glanced up disinterestedly, and then went on reading. As usual, it was up to me.

  I stepped out onto the terrace, pulling the door closed behind me.

  "Good morning, Flavia," Pemberton said with a grin. "Did you sleep well?"

  Did I sleep well? What kind of question was that? Here I was on the terrace, sleep in my eyes, my hair a den of nesting rats, and my nose running like a trout stream. Be sides, wasn't a question about the quality of one's sleep reserved for those who had spent a night under the same roof? I wasn't sure; I'd have to look it up in Beeton's Complete Etiquette for Ladies. Feely had given me a copy for my last birthday, but it was still propping up the short leg of my bed.

  "Not awfully," I said. "I've caught cold."

  "I'm sorry to hear that. I was hoping to be able to interview your father about Buckshaw. I don't like to be a pest, but my time here is limited. Since the war, the cost of accommodation away from home, even in the most humble hostelry, such as the Thirteen Drakes, is simply shocking. One doesn't like to plead poverty, but we poor scholars still dine mostly upon bread and cheese, you know."

  "Have you had breakfast, Mr. Pemberton?" I asked. "I'm sure Mrs. Mullet could manage something."

  "That's very kind of you, Flavia," he said, "but Landlord Stoker laid on a veritable feast of two bangers and an egg and I live in fear for my waistcoat buttons."

  I wasn't quite sure how to take this, and my cold was making me too grumpy to ask.

  "Perhaps I can answer your questions," I said. "Father has been detained—"

  Yes, that was it! You sly little fox, Flavia!

  "Father has been detained in town."

  "Oh, I don't think they're matters that would much interest you: a few knotty questions about drains and the Enclosure Acts—that sort of thing. I was hoping to put in an appendix about the architectural changes made by Antony and William de Luce in the nineteenth century. 'A House Divided' and all that."

  "I've heard of an appendix being taken out," I blurted, "but this is the first time I've heard of one being put in."

  Even with my nose running I could still thrust and parry with the best of them. A wet, explosive sneeze ruined the effect.

  "P'raps I could just step in and have a quick look round. Make a few notes. I shan't disturb anyone."

  I was trying to think of synonyms for “no” when I heard the growl of an engine, and Dogger, at the wheel of our old tractor, appeared between the trees at the end of the avenue, hauling a load of compost to the garden. Mr. Pemberton, who noticed at once that I was staring over his shoulder, turned to see what I was looking at. When he spotted Dogger coming our way, he gave a friendly wave.

  "That's old Dogger, isn't it? The faithful family retainer?"

  Dogger had braked, looking round to see who Pemberton might be waving at. When he saw no one, he raised his hat as if in greeting, then gave his head a scratch. He climbed down from the wheel and shambled across the lawn towards us.

  "I say, Flavia," Pemberton said, glancing at his wrist-watch, "I'd quite lost track of the time. I promised to meet my publisher at Nether Eaton to have a look over a shroud tomb, quite a rare one: both hands exposed and all that. Extraordinary railings. He's got a thing about tombs, has old Quarrington, so I'd better not stand him up. If I do, why, Pemberton's Tombs and Traceries might never be anything more than a twinkle in its author's eye.”

  He hitched up his artist's knapsack and strolled down the steps, pausing at the corner of the house to close his eyes and draw in a deep, bracing lungful of the morning air.

  "My regards to Colonel de Luce," he said, and then he was gone.

  Dogger shuffled up the steps as if he hadn't slept. “Visitors, Miss Flavia?” he asked, removing his hat and wiping his forehead on his sleeve.

  "A Mr. Pemberton," I said. "He's writing a book about country houses or tombs or something. He wanted to interview Father about Buckshaw."

  "I don't believe I've heard his name," Dogger said. "But then I'm not much of a reader. Still and all, Miss Flavia."

  I knew that he was going to give me a homily, complete with parables and bloodcurdling instances, about talking to strangers, but he didn't. Instead he settled for touching the brim of his hat with his forefinger, and we both of us stood there gazing out across the lawn like a couple of cows. Message sent; message received. Dear old Dogger. Such was his way of teaching.

  It had been Dogger, for instance, who had patiently taught me to pick locks when I had come upon him one day fiddling with the greenhouse door. He had lost the key during one of his “episodes,” and was busily at work with the bent tines of a retired kitchen fork he'd found in a flowerpot.

  His hands were shaking badly. Whenever Dogger was like that, you always had the feeling that if you stuck out a finger and touched him, you'd be instantly electrocuted. But in spite of that, I had offered to help, and a few minutes later he was showing me how the thing was done.

  "It's easy enough, Miss Flavia," he'd said after my third try. "Just keep in mind the three Ts: torque, tension, and tenacity. Imagine you live inside the lock. Listen to your fingertips.”

  "Where did you learn to do this?" I asked, marveling as the thing clicked open. It was laughably easy once you'd got the hang of it.

  "Long ago and far away," Dogger had said as he stepped into the greenhouse and made himself too busy for further questioning.

  ALTHOUGH SUNLIGHT WAS FLOODING in through the windows of my laboratory, I could not seem to think properly. My mind was swarming with the things Father had told me and what I had ferreted out on my own: the deaths of Mr. Twining and Horace Bonepenny.

  What was the meaning of the cap and gown I had found hidden in the tiles of Anson House? Whom did they belong to, and why had they been left there?

  Both Father's account, and that in the pages of The Hinley Chronicle, had stated that Mr. Twining was wearing his gown when he tumbled to his death. That both of them could be mistaken seemed most unlikely.

  Then, too, there were the thefts of His Majesty's Ulster Avenger and its twin, which had belonged to Dr. Kissing.

  Where was Dr. Kissing now? I wondered. Would Miss Mountjoy know? She seemed to know everything else. Could he possibly still be alive? Somehow it seemed doubtful. It had been thirty years since he thought he saw his precious stamp going up in smoke.

  But my mind was swirling, my brain addled, and I couldn't think clearly. My sinuses were plugged, my eyes were watering, and I felt a splitting headache coming on. I needed to clear my head.

/>   It was my own fault: I never should have let my feet get cold. Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying, “Keep warm feet and a cool head, and you'll ne'er find yourself sneezing in bed.” If one did come down with a cold, there was only one thing for it, so down to the kitchen I shuffled where I found Mrs. Mullet making pastry.

  "You're sniffling, dear," she said, without looking up from her rolling pin. "Let me fix you a nice mug of chicken broth." The woman could be maddeningly perceptive.

  At the words chicken broth, she dropped her voice to a near-whisper and shot a conspiratorial look over her shoulder.

  "Hot chicken broth," she said. "It's a secret Mrs. Jacobson told me at a Women's Institute tea. Been in her family since the Exodus. Mind you, I've said nothing."

  Mrs. Mullet's other favorite bit of village wisdom had to do with eucalyptus. She forced Dogger to grow it for her in the greenhouse, and assiduously concealed sprigs of the stuff here and there about Buckshaw as talismans against the cold or grippe.

  "Eucalyptus in the hall, no grippe or colds shall you befall,” she used to crow triumphantly. And it was true. Since she had been secreting the dark waxy green leaves in unsuspected places around the house, none of us had suffered so much as a sniffle.

  Until now. Something had obviously failed.

  "No, thank you, Mrs. Mullet," I said. "I've just brushed my teeth."

  It was a lie, but it was the best I could come up with at short notice. Besides having a whiff of martyrdom about it, my reply had the added advantage of bucking up my image in the personal cleanliness department. On my way out, I filched from the pantry a bottle of yellow granules labeled Partington's Essence of Chicken, and from a wall sconce in the hall I helped myself to a handful of eucalyptus leaves.

  Upstairs in the laboratory, I took down a bottle of sodium bicarbonate which Uncle Tar, in his spidery copperplate script, had marked sal aeratus, as well as, in his usual meticulous manner, Sod. Bicarb. to distinguish it from potassium bicarbonate, which also was sometimes called sal aeratus. Pot. Bicarb. was more at home in fire extinguishers than in the tummy.

  I knew the stuff as NaHCO3, which the cottagers called baking soda. Somewhere I remembered hearing that the same rustics believed in the power of a good old dosing of alkali salts to flush out even the fiercest case of the common cold.

  It made good chemical sense, I reasoned: If salts were a cure, and chicken broth were a cure, think of the magnificent restorative power of a glass of effervescent chicken broth! It boggled the mind. I'd patent the thing; it would be the world's first antidote against the common cold: De Luce's Deliquescence, Flavia's Foup Formula!

  I even managed a moderately happy hum as I measured eight ounces of drinking water into a beaker, and set it over the flame to heat. Meanwhile, in a stoppered flask I boiled the torn shreds of eucalyptus leaves and watched as straw-colored drops of oil began to form at the end of the distillation coil.

  When the water was at a rolling boil, I removed it from the heat and let it cool for several minutes, then dropped in two heaped teaspoons of Partington's Chicken Essence and a tablespoon of good old NaHCO3.

  I gave it a jolly good stir and let it foam like Vesuvius over the lip of the beaker. I pinched my nostrils shut and tossed back half of the concoction chug-a-lug.

  Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

  I unstoppered the flask and dumped the eucalyptus water, leaves and all, into the remains of the yellow soup. Then, peeling off my sweater and draping it over my head as a fume hood, I inhaled the camphoraceous steam of poultry eucalyptus, and somewhere up inside the sticky caverns of my head I thought I felt my sinuses throw their hands up into the air and surrender. I was feeling better already.

  There was a sharp knock on the door and I nearly jumped out of my skin. So seldom did anyone come into this part of the house that a tap at the door was as unexpected as one of those sudden heart-clutching organ chords in a horror film when a door swings open upon a gallery of corpses. I shot back the bolt and there stood Dogger, wringing his hat like the Irish washerwoman. I could see that he had been having one of his episodes.

  I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed—although I did not often make use of the fact—that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.

  "What's the password?" I asked, linking my fingers together and placing both hands atop my head.

  For about five and a half seconds Dogger looked blank, and then his tense jaw muscles relaxed slowly and he almost smiled. Like an automaton he meshed his fingers and copied my gesture.

  "It's on the tip of my tongue," he said haltingly. Then, "I remember now: It's 'arsenic'"

  "Careful you don't swallow it," I replied. "It's poison."

  With a remarkable display of sheer willpower, Dogger made himself smile. The ritual had been properly observed.

  "Enter, friend," I said, and swung the door wide.

  Dogger stepped inside and looked round in wonder, as if he had suddenly found himself transported to an alchemist's lab in ancient Sumer. It had been so long since he had been in this part of the house that he had forgotten the room.

  "So much glass," he said shakily.

  I pulled out Tar's old Windsor chair from the desk, steadying it until Dogger had folded himself between its wooden arms.

  "Have a sit. I'll fix you something."

  I filled a clean flask with water and set it atop a wire mesh. Dogger started at the little “pop” of the Bunsen burner as I applied the match.

  "Coming up," I said. "Ready in a jiff."

  The fortunate thing about lab glassware is that it boils water at the speed of light. I threw a spoonful of black leaves into a beaker. When it had gone a deep red I handed it to Dogger, who stared at it skeptically.

  "It's all right," I said. "It's Tetley's."

  He sipped at the tea gingerly, blowing on the surface of the drink to cool it. As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes—or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Feely, who had told Daffy, who had told me.

  "Thank you," Dogger said. "I feel quite myself now. But there's something I must tell you, Miss Flavia."

  I perched on the edge of the desk, trying to look chummy.

  "Fire away," I said.

  "Well," Dogger began, "you know that there are occasions when I have sometimes—that is, now and then, I have times when I—"

  "Of course I do, Dogger," I said. "Don't we all?"

  "I don't know. I don't remember. You see, the thing of it is that, when I was—" His eyes rolled like those of a cow in the killing-pen. "I think I might have done something to someone. And now they've gone and arrested the Colonel for it."

  "Are you referring to Horace Bonepenny?"

  There was a crash of glassware as Dogger dropped the beaker of tea on the floor. I scrambled for a cloth and for some stupid reason dabbed at his hands, which were quite dry.

  "What do you know about Horace Bonepenny?" he demanded, clamping my wrist in a steely grip. If it hadn't been Dogger I should have been terrified.

  "I know all about him," I said, gently prying his fingers loose. "I looked him up at the library. I talked to Miss Mountjoy, and Father told me the whole story Sunday evening."

  "You saw Colonel de Luce Sunday evening? In Hinley?"

  "Yes," I said. "I bicycled over. I told you he was well. Don't you remember?"

  "No," Dogger said, shaking his head. "Sometimes I don't remember."

  Could this be possible? Could Dogger have encountered Horace Bonepenny somewhere inside the house, or in the garden, then grappled with him and brought about his death? Had it been an accident? Or was there more to it than that?

  "Tell me what happened," I said. "Tell me as much as you can remember."

 
"I was sleeping," Dogger said. "I heard voices—loud voices. I got up and went along to the Colonel's study. There was someone standing in the hall."

  "That was me," I said. "I was in the hall."

  "That was you," Dogger said. "You were in the hall."

  "Yes. You told me to buzz off."

  "I did?" Dogger seemed shocked.

  "Yes, you told me to go back to bed."

  "A man came out of the study," Dogger said suddenly. "I ducked in beside the clock and he walked right past me. I could have reached out and touched him."

  It was clear he had jumped to a point in time after I had gone back to bed.

  "But you didn't—touch him, I mean."

  "Not then, no. I followed him into the garden. He didn't see me. I kept to the wall behind the greenhouse. He was standing in the cucumbers. eating something. agitated. talking to himself. foulest language. didn't seem to notice he was off the path. And then there were the fireworks."

  "Fireworks?" I asked.

  "You know, Catherine wheels, skyrockets, and all that. I thought there must be a fete in the village. It's June, you know. They often have a fete in June."

  There had been no fête; of that I was sure. I'd rather slog the entire length of the Amazon in perforated tennis shoes than miss a chance to pitch coconuts at the Aunt Sally and gorge myself on rock cakes and strawberries-and-cream. No, I was well up on the dates of the fêtes.

  "And then what happened?" I asked. We would sort out the details later.

  "I must have fallen asleep," Dogger said. "When I woke up I was lying in the grass. It was wet. I got up and went in to bed. I didn't feel well. I must have had one of my bad turns. I don't remember."

  "And you think that, during your bad turn, you might have killed Horace Bonepenny?"

  Dogger nodded glumly. He touched the back of his head.

  "Who else was there?” he asked.

  Who else was there? Where had I heard that before? Of course! Hadn't Inspector Hewitt used those very words about Father?

  "Bow your head, Dogger," I said.

  "I'm sorry, Miss Flavia. If I killed someone I didn't mean to."

  "Bend down your head."