by Alan Bradley
Who Miss Wilberforce was, or from what horrid malady she was suffering, I hadn’t the faintest idea. It was intended to extract Feely from the predicament she was in, and to brook no argument.
But it didn’t work.
Feely gave me one of her ten-ton looks.
“What do you mean by barging in here!” she shouted, her face already going the color of brick.
As if to defend her, one of the men put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her toward him.
“Well?” he demanded, in a parade-square voice.
I marched over to Feely, seized the man’s hand between my thumb and forefinger as if it were a stinking fish, and lifted it from my sister’s shoulders.
I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
It was a showdown of sorts:
“What’s going on here?” a voice demanded: a voice that I would know anywhere. Anywhere! Even on the darkest desert night.
I dropped the offending hand and spun round.
Dieter, Feely’s forsaken fiancé, was standing in the doorway, his face frozen at the scene before him.
“Dieter!” I shouted and flew into his arms. I wanted to squeeze him until nothing was left but a husk.
The room fell suddenly silent.
The three men with kerchiefs all let their hands fall to their sides, as if to be within handy reach of their holsters. They stared at Dieter, as if afraid to be the first to unlock eyes.
Dieter stared back at them.
And then, on the other side of the room, a whine began: low at first, like a distant air-raid siren, then rising in pitch and volume from a whisper to a buzzing scream.
It was, all in all, an amazing vocal performance.
“Dieterrrrrrrr!”
Feely’s shriek flew past my ears like an enraged hornet or a ricochet from a .45 caliber slug. Feely herself followed, knocking me out of the way with a wicked forearm.
In a lightning flash, she was in his arms and he in hers.
All, apparently, was forgiven.
Much as I wanted to gab with Dieter, I decided to leave the lovebirds alone. As far as I knew, they hadn’t seen each other for a while, which meant that they would want to be alone to swap spit until they were caught up, or until they died of saturation.
In chemistry, the term “saturation” refers to the state of a compound at which all the units of affinity of the contained elements become engaged, and it is dependent upon both heat and pressure.
In this case, I could not have come up with a better definition if I tried. It was downright disgusting. I didn’t want to watch.
I strolled casually out the door, whistling Thomas Morley’s musical setting of Shakespeare’s song “It Was a Lover and His Lass” from As You Like It, but I don’t think either of them heard me.
Outside, the world seemed suddenly quiet in the warmth of a perfect English day. There was no one in the street, nor did there seem to be any further activity across the road in the churchyard.
I made my way round, under the quaint hanging signboard—THE OAK & PHEASANT, ARVEN PALMER PROPRIETOR—to the sunken garden at the back of the inn, to the enclosed area I had seen from my bedroom window.
“Go away!” said a voice.
I turned to find Daffy curled up with a notebook and a pencil, in a small bower behind the garden gate. I had walked straight past without seeing her.
“Go away,” she repeated.
“Go away yourself,” I said. “I am not your slave or your bondmaid, you know.”
I stuck out my tongue at her to prove my point.
“Idiot,” she retorted, and returned to her reading.
“Dieter’s back,” I said.
“I know that,” she said. “He came round here to see me first. I told him where Feely was.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “I’ve missed him.”
Daffy said nothing: a perfect indication that she had missed him, too.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“None of your beeswax,” Daffy said.
She had picked up some rather colorful American expressions from Carl Pendracka, one of Feely’s—now supposedly unsuccessful—suitors.
“Oh, here you are, luv!” exclaimed Mrs. Palmer as she came bustling through the gate with a tray, upon which was a tall glass of milk and an artfully arranged stack of cucumber sandwiches.
I had already begun a grin, and had raised my hands to receive this most welcome feast, when the landlord’s wife walked straight past me and put the tray down on Daffy’s bower bench.
“I thought you were still in your room, and took it up there by mistake,” she said, shaking her head in baffled amusement.
“Thank you, Mrs. Palmer. This is most kind of you,” Daffy said in her smarmiest, stickiest voice.
I could have whacked her on the head with a warming pan.
“Would you like one, too, dearie?” Mrs. P asked, turning to me with dramatically raised eyebrows.
The lesson had not been learned.
“No, thank you,” I managed to mumble, shaking my head.
“Headache warning still in effect, then?” she asked. Whatever she meant by that.
I nodded.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, and she was gone.
“You oughtn’t to do that, you know,” Daffy grumbled.
“Do what?” I replied, out of habit.
“Whenever anyone calls you ‘dearie’ you change instantly into a monster. It’s like Hocus Pocus! or Alakazam! And—poof! You become The Ineffable Flavia.”
“I don’t know what ‘ineffable’ means,” I said, although I had my suspicions.
“It means you’re a beast. A chump; a bufflehead; a clam; a foozle; a proper dickey-dido.”
I knew that, with Daffy, it was best to let her exhaust her storehouse of exotic insults. She would eventually, like an overwound alarm clock, run down and stop her clatter.
While I waited, I examined my fingernails—which I was now rather proud of. I had finally been able to break my habit of gnawing the old keratin to the gristle, and had grown, quite to my surprise and admiration, as slick a set of claws as had ever graced a maiden’s hand.
“You’ve made a friend,” I said when Daffy’s jaw had tired.
“Huh?” she said, taken by surprise.
“Mrs. Palmer. She’s your lapdog. Unlike me.”
Daffy scoffed: a prolonged and horrible damp process involving her sinuses.
“She’s a published poet,” she threw at me. “Her work has appeared in the New Statesman and in Blackwood’s. She’s spent weekends with the Sitwells, for heaven’s sake! What do you say to that?”
“I hope she enjoyed the blue cows,” I said.
Sir George Sitwell had caused his cows to be painted in the blue and white willow pattern so as to look better in the green landscape. Or so the vicar’s wife had once told me.
“A grand triumph of aesthetics over brains,” Cynthia had remarked. “So remarkably rare nowadays.”
“Besides,” Daffy said, lowering her voice to an excited whisper and scanning the horizon for eavesdroppers, “she’s the author of The Mussel Bed.”
“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” I said.
“You’re so ignorant!” Daffy spat. “The Mussel Bed was a literary sensation. It was short-listed for every book prize going but they could never discover who the author was.”
She closed her eyes and recited:
“On Monday morn
The maid came up
And found him there in bed,
His jaw ajar,
His face affright,
All pale,
All cold,
All dead.”
Daffy shivered.
“ ‘Brilliant but chilling,’ The Times called it. ‘Folk naïf, but all the more effective because of it.’ James Agate wrote: ‘Raw, bleeding, essential,’ and George Bernard Shaw suggested, mischievously, that he had taken upon himself the skin of a country barmaid and written the thing.�
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“And Mrs. Palmer wrote it?” I asked.
“She confided in me,” Daffy said. “She made me swear never to tell, and I won’t.”
“You’ve just told me,” I pointed out.
“Pfaugh!” Daffy said. “You’re nobody. And if you ever tell, I shall pour poison in your ear while you’re asleep.”
I knew that Daffy was desperate. She was cribbing from Shakespeare: the scene in which Hamlet’s wicked uncle, Claudius, pours hebenon into the ear of the sleeping king.
Hebenon, in my opinion, was simply a mangled form of henbane, misremembered by one of Shakespeare’s acting pals when it came time to write down the plays. Either that, or the error was caused by a daydreaming typesetter.
My point being that the old poison-in-the-ear-of-a-sleeper was nothing new to me.
Daffy’s threat was as empty as her hope chest.
“Ho-hum,” I said.
But it was at that very moment that I realized something: Two pairs of ears were better than one and twice as likely to gather useful gossip.
Did that mean using my sister as a listening device?
Well, yes, frankly, it did.
We were in a strange place where we knew almost nobody. We would not likely be staying here any longer than required by the law. Time, therefore, was of the essence. I needed to collect as many ears as I could—as American soldiers were said to have done from the British during the American War of Independence.
I drew my forefinger across my mouth in the signal of the zipped lip, crossing my heart and holding my fingers up in the Girl Guide sign of honor (Ha-ha!), and said:
“I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, do most solemnly swear that I shall never reveal, upon pain of poison in the ear, those secrets which my dearly beloved sister Daphne de Luce is about to impart unto me.”
I realized, even as I said it, that the “unto” was a bit rich, but I wanted Daffy to take me seriously.
“But why would she entrust her secret to you?” I asked. I needed to keep a bit of skepticism in the conversation, otherwise Daffy would suspect I was acting—which I was, but not in the way she thought.
“Because there are times,” Daffy answered, choosing her words carefully, “when a woman needs to confide in another woman—and only in another woman. Doctors won’t do, nor will an entire army of Freud’s followers.”
“True,” I agreed, hoping to sound wise beyond my years.
“What would you know about it?” Daffy scoffed.
I shrugged, which was as good an answer as any. It got Daffy off my back and gave her a perfect opening to go on spilling her guts.
And it worked.
“The poor woman is petrified,” Daffy told me. “It seems that her book cut a little too close to the bone. Some of the poems were far too close for comfort.”
“To real life?” I asked. This could prove interesting. Especially in a town whose vicar had gone to the scaffold for vile crimes against women!
“Of course to real life!” Daffy said.
“Which poems were they—in particular?” I asked.
“She didn’t tell me. I’ll look them up when we get home to Buckshaw.”
“You have a copy of The Mussel Bed?” I asked. Sometimes my sister amazed me.
“Of course,” she said, “as does every discriminating woman in England. The Times Literary Supplement called it ‘indispensable’ and they weren’t far off the mark.”
It was at that moment that I vowed to get my hands as quickly as possible on this literary gem. Daffy’s copy might be back at Buckshaw, but surely there was one within earshot of where we were sitting. In its author’s bedroom, for instance.
She wouldn’t have left a copy in the little library of the saloon bar of the Oak and Pheasant. No, that would have been too risky. But it was reasonable to assume that it wasn’t far away.
“So no one knows that she wrote this book?” I asked. “Not even her husband?”
“No,” Daffy said, glancing over her shoulder. “Especially not her husband.”
“Then what’s she got to worry about?” I asked.
Daffy bit her bottom lip as if she were making a critical decision, then beckoned me with a crooked finger.
I went to her side and put my ear close to her mouth.
“She’s begun to receive blackmailing letters,” she said.
“Somebody knows?”
I couldn’t help myself.
“Shhh!” Daffy whispered. “Apparently so. Now promise you won’t breathe a word.”
I pantomimed the old sewing-the-lips-shut-with-an-invisible-needle-and-very-long-thread routine, which seemed to satisfy her.
“Now run along,” she said, opening her notebook.
“What are you writing?” I asked. “Notes on the case?”
“No. It’s a sonnet. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Of course I’d be interested, Daff,” I said. “I’m your sister, aren’t I?”
She gave me a speculative look.
“Some say you are, yes.”
“Come on, Daff. Let’s hear it. I’ll bet it’s a killer. A masterpiece, I mean.”
Vanity overcame her. She turned to a middle page.
I might not have thought of looking there.
“Well,” she said, clearing her throat, “it might not be very good, but here it is—”
Why do so many poets apologize before reading their work aloud? I wondered. How many readings had we attended at St. Tancred’s parish hall where the poet felt obliged to kill his own young before they ever drew breath?
“Get on with it!” you always wanted to shout—but you never did. Poets—other than the dreaded Millbank Morrison, of course, who had a hide as thick as a rhinoceros’s in chain mail—were notoriously sensitive about their creations, whereas scientists never were.
Did Joseph Priestley apologize for discovering oxygen? Or Henry Cavendish for hydrogen?
Of course not! They fairly crowed about it.
“Pray go on,” I said. “I’m listening.”
Daffy cleared her throat again and began to read:
“What pale-flesh’d slugs or graveyard grubs do mar
Thy fair and once beguiling former face?”
“Stop!” I said, holding up a hand.
How dare she? How dare she trespass upon my personal territory? I was the expert on the business of the dead. I was the Doctor of Decay. How dare she?
“I’m sorry, Daff,” I said. “You’ll have to stop there. It’s too real. You’ve made me queasy.”
Daffy looked up, flushed with pride, then closed her book.
“Actually, that’s all there is so far. I’ve only just begun, but I shall read you the rest of it when I’m finished.”
“Don’t wear out your pencil,” I said as I walked out through the garden gate.
·TEN·
“AH, MISS DE LUCE,” said a voice before I’d taken half a dozen paces. “A word with you, if you don’t mind.”
It was Constable Otter, notebook and indelible pencil poised at the ready.
How long had he been lurking outside the garden gate? How much had he overheard?
I tried to sneak a look at the page to see if it was blank, but as I stepped forward, he stepped automatically back. What a canny customer he was!
“Yes, Constable?” I said. “How may I help you?”
“By not meddling,” he replied, “in things you know nothing about.”
Was this a threat? Was I being warned off by a village bobby?
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I believe you do,” Constable Otter said, shutting his notebook with an elaborate single-handed flourish and, with all the art of a well-drilled sailor loading a cannon, tamping it down into his jacket pocket.
“Yes, I believe you do,” he went on.
I put on Innocent Face Number 5: the full-on expression that combines injured innocence with just the slightest hint of aggression, co
nveyed by the rolling-out of precisely four millimeters of lower lip. I had practiced it many times in a mirror.
The next move was his—and he took it.
“I’ve rung up Inspector Hewitt at Hinley,” he said. “I am led to believe you’re rather notorious in that neck of the woods.”
In that neck of the woods? Was this country bumpkin suggesting that my small successes in the solving of crimes were limited to Hinley and environs? Had Inspector Hewitt neglected to tell him that I had been thanked—in person!—by our own dear (and now, alas, late) King George VI?
What was the inspector thinking of? Had he forgotten already that I had sent him—and his wife, Antigone, whom I adored—a wicker hamper of apples and oranges upon the birth of their daughter, and first child, in January?
Antigone, of course, had sent back a card thanking me for my thoughtfulness, but since then, I had heard nothing.
It was, I must admit, quite soon after Father’s death, and the Hewitts, perhaps, had wanted to respect my family’s privacy.
There had been a discreet card of sympathy, edged in black, but that was all, which came as a keen disappointment when I had been expecting to be asked to stand as the baby’s godmother: to stand with the child at the font as she was christened Flavia Antigone Hewitt.
And now this!
“Notorious in that neck of the woods,” the constable had said.
“Yes, Constable Otter,” I replied. “I have been known to solve a crime or two.”
The hairs on the back of my neck were fairly bristling.
“Perhaps you have, miss, but what makes you think that a crime has been committed here? What makes you think that the young man’s death was anything more than misadventure?”
Sharp as a tinker’s tack, this constable! He was giving nothing away.
Since I already knew that Orlando Whitbread was a young man, Otter wasn’t being indiscreet. But, obviously, he wasn’t yet aware I knew the dead man’s name.
“I didn’t say it was a crime,” I shot back.
Two can play at this game, you saucy Peeler! I thought. Didn’t he realize he was taking on a master?
“I merely observed that I have been known to solve a crime or two. Elsewhere. In the past.”
That ought to put him in his place. I had given away nothing.