Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  I thought of Father, and of how he used to walk across the fields with us to church, saying little but listening patiently as we prattled on about our lives: me about Chemistry, Feely about Music, and Daffy about Books. How strong he seemed—and how immortal.

  Now, here he was, laid low by bacterial pneumonia, and probably because of me.

  Already weakened by years of captivity in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he had been shipped home at last, only to face the worry and decay of a crumbling estate and the incessant demands of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue, who had, apparently, never heard of gratitude. The retrieval of my mother, Harriet’s, body from a Tibetan glacier had crushed him, and then to find that she had bequeathed Buckshaw to me must have been like a foot in the face, although he never said so, of course.

  Outside the carriage window, an enameled sign advertising chocolate glided by in the growing darkness. Bournville, it said, Home of Chocolate.

  What a cruel, grim joke it is, I thought, that the day should come when even chocolate should have a home while my beloved father does not.

  I’m afraid I let slip an audible cackle.

  The gentleman across from me put down his paper, removed his spectacles, and spoke: “Laughter makes for a good appetite, Miss Flavia—or so it is said. I expect Mrs. Mullet shall have the roast beef blackened to perfection.”

  “Dogger!”

  I let out a whoop and clasped his hands. That Dogger should say such a thing about Mrs. Mullet’s cooking was, in itself, incredible. Although her burned beef was legendary, it was one of those things that were not to be spoken of aloud, like YHWH, the four-letter name of God.

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was the kind of stupid question which I ordinarily hate: the kind of question one sees in the cinema or hears on the wireless. I’m sure Dogger was thinking the same thing but he smiled, nevertheless.

  “The same as you are, Miss Flavia. Going home.”

  Whether it was the time, the place, the darkness, the snow, or the general situation regarding Father, I do not know, but I burst into tears.

  Dogger unfurled a spotless white handkerchief from somewhere about his person and handed it over.

  “The Christmas season is always a difficult one,” he remarked. “Even at the best of times.”

  And with that, he turned to the window, leaving me enough privacy to mop up my face. We rode along in what I believe is called “companionable silence,” Dogger lost in his own thoughts and I in mine.

  Many miles slipped by before I felt I had control of my voice.

  “You’ve been with me all day, haven’t you? You followed me up to town.”

  “There were certain interests of Colonel de Luce which required attention…,” he said, his voice trailing off, and I knew that he meant “Yes.”

  “Then you probably know all about Mr. Sambridge, and the fact that I found him dead.”

  “Indeed,” Dogger said. “As does all of Bishop’s Lacey and environs. I heard it from Mrs. Mullet, who had it direct from the lips of her friend Mrs. Waller, who heard it from Maximilian Brock, who heard it from the vicar’s wife.”

  He couldn’t resist a gentle smile.

  “Murder,” he said, “can be a particularly nasty business—or so I am given to understand.”

  “Max will already be scribbling something suitable for Hair-Raising Tales,” I said.

  This was an American magazine which Daffy insisted was subscribed to by rabbit breeders but which, in reality, published articles that they claimed—with no sense of irony—were based upon “real-life murders.”

  Maximilian, who was both dwarf and retired concert pianist, was rumored to be one of the hired pens who published his lurid tales under various transparent pseudonyms, such as Jayne Nightwork and Sally Tell.

  “I write for the little people,” he had once told me, holding a forefinger to his lips, warning me to keep quiet about it. “The little people, who have no voice.”

  “How’s Father?” I asked, abruptly switching tracks. “Has there been any improvement? Do you think Matron will allow us—”

  “I hope so,” Dogger interrupted. “I certainly hope so.”

  —

  Clarence Mundy’s taxicab awaited us at Doddingsley station. Dogger had made arrangements with Clarence to meet the train and, although I wondered vaguely, I did not ask how he knew at what time we would arrive.

  Gladys was waiting patiently where I had left her, as I knew she would be, although she was now wearing, on her seat, a dunce’s cap of snow, as if to welcome me home with a practical joke.

  I brushed her off and, giving her a good shake, handed her to Clarence, who lashed her to the luggage rack on the roof with a strong cord.

  “Place of honor,” he said. “Best seat in the house. Sixpence extra.”

  He was teasing, of course, but I loved him for it all the same.

  As we pulled away from the railway station, I remembered that Clarence had been a pilot during the war, and as I watched him now, hunched over the glowing instrument panel in the darkness, I imagined that Dogger and I were with him in the cockpit of his giant Sunderland flying boat, thundering through the night. Five thousand feet below us was the English Channel—visibility zero—nothing to be seen through the blurred windscreen but the wild, driving snow.

  It was good to be in Clarence’s capable hands, and I tightened my coat around my neck.

  “Nasty bit of work up at Thornfield Chase,” Clarence said, jolting me out of my trance. “Heard by the jungle telegraph you were the one found the body. Must have been a bit of a shock.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was ghastly. I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Dogger gave me a nearly invisible smile in the near darkness.

  I was fibbing, of course. How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: It was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying.

  How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?

  —

  Mrs. Mullet must have been watching for our headlights. No sooner had we come to a stop than she was out the door, not even bothering with a coat.

  “Go back inside, Mrs. M,” I told her, our roles reversed for the first time in recorded history. “You’ll catch your death.”

  “You lot!” she said, planting her hands on her hips, and shifting her searchlight glare from me to Dogger and back again. “It’s you lot’ll be the death of me. Parsnips at six, I told you. Stone cold they are now. Might as well toss ’em out. Moses ’imself couldn’t keep parsnips ’ot past their time. Might as well give ’em to the cat, if we ’ad one.”

  Her frustration, I knew, was not particularly with us, but with the fact that Father was in hospital and beyond her sphere of influence; beyond her need to advise and counsel. Pretended anger was Mrs. Mullet’s way of weeping.

  “It’s good to be home,” I told her, giving her a quick hug—but not so great a one as to draw attention to itself. “I need your advice desperately on an important matter. But first, the parsnips. We must have parsnips! Cold parsnips are my delight. Lead me to them.”

  Playing the clown is not an easy task. Clowns, I have come to believe, are placed upon the earth solely to fill the needs of others, while running perilously close to “Empty” themselves.

  We shepherded one another into the house and order was restored.

  —

  A gloom hung over the dinner table, caused by the news that Father’s condition had not improved. Feely had a spot the size of a farthing on her left cheek and she didn’t seem to care. Her left hand lay limp and listless in her lap as she picked at her food with the other. Daffy was intently reading something by Pearl S. Buck, which was a bad sign.

  “You’ll never guess who I happened to run into,” I said, trying to draw Feely out of her stupor. “Carl Pendracka.”

&nbs
p; “How utterly awe-inspiring,” she said.

  “He’d like to see you sometime, now that, well…you know.”

  “I do not need Flavia de Luce to organize my social life,” Feely said. “I am not in need of an appointments secretary, and if ever I should be, at some point in the far, far distant future, I shall be sure to give you a pass.”

  “Turnip!” I said.

  “Gong farmer,” she shot back.

  I have to hand it to my sister. As I have remarked elsewhere, Feely can be remarkably coarse when she’s cornered, and I have to admit I admire her for it. She has a limitless supply of insults from the Middle Ages, to which she is constantly adding by reading up on the lives of the great composers. Musicians, I have discovered, can be a surprisingly scatological (another of her words) crew. Later, I looked up gong farmer (or gongfermour) in the OED and found that it meant a person who went from house to house collecting the night soil. In other words, a cleaner-out of privies.

  I copied it into my notebook for future reference.

  “That Inspector Whatshisname called round today to see you,” Daffy said unexpectedly, looking up from her book. “He seemed peevish to find you not at home. I told him you were on the lam.”

  “Inspector Hewitt?”

  “He’s charging you with aggravated meddling,” she said. “Honestly, Flavia. Why can’t you take up tatting, or pokerwork, or paper dolls, or something civilized? Something with less blood?”

  Less blood? My heart gave a clunk.

  I could have kissed her! But not quite.

  Less blood. That was just the point, wasn’t it?

  In Mr. Sambridge’s case, other than the clotted crust under his fingernails and the moist stains on the rope, there had been no blood at all. Any wound serious enough to kill would almost certainly result in blood, and yet there hadn’t been a drop—as far as I could see—on either the body of the deceased or on his clothing. There was always the possibility, I suppose, that it had been extracted by some apprentice witch trying to pass her Blood & Body Fluids test, but somehow I doubted that.

  Besides, Mr. Sambridge’s darkened face was evidence enough that blood was present in his body: It was just that gravity had dragged it to the lowest point.

  From my own studies, I knew that bloodless murder was most frequently caused by poisoning, but I knew also that poisoners do not usually follow through by hanging their victims by the heels.

  On the contrary. Victims of cyanide, say, gasp their last in their own beds, or on a handy sofa, with their astonished family standing by, wringing their hands (all except one, of course) and crying out, “What is it, Cressida? What’s the matter?”

  But in Mr. Sambridge’s case, there had been no blood, no bed, and no sofa.

  Just a village wood-carver, trussed upside down in a doorway like an inverted version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

  It was altogether a pretty little puzzle.

  How I would love to be a spider on the wall, looking over Inspector Hewitt’s shoulder. What had he made of the evidence at Thornfield Chase, and who, if any, were his suspects? I knew that my name would be somewhere on his list: It only stood to reason. I had been observed leaving the house in which a dead body had been found, and the fact that the finder was me would hardly keep me out of the sights of the hawk-eyed and hawk-witted—well, you know what I mean—Inspector Hewitt.

  It was too late to ring him up, which I wouldn’t do, even if it weren’t. The last thing on earth I’d ever do would be to disturb the dear man and his dear wife, Antigone, in their rose-covered cottage, where they would be warming themselves in front of a cozy winter fire this very minute, he with his briar pipe clutched in his mouth, she with her knitting needles clacking…

  Knitting needles!

  Oh, Flavia…Flavia! Where is your intelligence?

  I had suspected as early as last April, when I had seen her at my mother’s funeral, that Antigone Hewitt might be pregnant. I had witnessed with my own eyes that radiant glow (in spite of the solemn occasion) and that secret squeeze of her husband’s arm. But since then, I hadn’t given it another thought. Swept off my feet and out to sea by the undertow of my own life, I had forgotten completely about the possibly interesting condition of the inspector’s wife.

  Why, even now, she and the inspector might well be sharing the heat of their comfy fire with a little stranger in a little bassinet, rocking it tenderly, cooing and calling to it and to each other like a pair of turtledoves.

  It was enough to turn your stomach.

  Hang the hour! I would call Antigone at once and kill two birds with one stone.

  · TEN ·

  FOR AS LONG AS I could remember, and probably long before that, the telephone at Buckshaw had been off limits. Father had a horror of the thing, caused by certain experiences in his past of which he never spoke, and because “the instrument,” as he called it, had brought him news of Harriet’s disappearance and, later, the discovery of her dead body. Consequently, the telephone was to be used in only the most dire emergencies: a rule that had been—with only a few exceptions on my part—strictly observed.

  The instrument was contained in a small cubicle tucked away beneath the stairs in the foyer. Once inside, you could lower your voice and whisper away unobserved with no danger of being overheard (unless, of course, you applied your ear to the tread of the seventh step from the bottom, a phenomenon which no one knew about but me).

  Against all expectations, Inspector Hewitt’s number was listed in the directory. How thoughtful of him. How many other investigators of his rank would share his private number with the riffraff? Perhaps he found that it encouraged the phoning-in of anonymous tips.

  At any rate, his address was listed simply as Maybank, Hinley.

  So that was the name of the rose-covered cottage! “Maybank!” I said it aloud and let the word escape from my mouth like a perfumed puff of jasmine scent as I dialed the number. “Maybank.”

  It was picked up at once.

  “Antigone Hewitt speaking,” came that soft, familiar voice, and I was nearly struck speechless.

  “Uh, Mrs. Hewitt…Antigone…” (Dare I use her baptismal name?) “…this is Flavia de Luce. I understand Inspector Hewitt called in to see me today, but I wasn’t home. I had to go up to London unexpectedly, you see, and…”

  “Oh, yes, Flavia. Welcome home, by the way. How nice to hear your voice again.”

  I wanted to thank her but my mouth had gone suddenly and unaccountably dry.

  “My husband did mention that he planned to see you, but he’s unfortunately not here at the moment. Shall I take a message?”

  “N…no,” I managed. “I’ll call him tomorrow—during working hours.”

  “I shall tell him,” she assured me, and then she added, “Flavia, is everything all right?”

  At least she had the good grace not to ask if anything was wrong.

  “Yes,” I said. And then I said, “No.”

  “Is there anything that I can do?”

  “No, thank you. It’s just that Father’s in the hospital, and everything’s a little muddled right now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Flavia.”

  Her words should have comforted me, but they did not. Sympathy was not what I wanted. There are times when sympathy is not enough.

  “How are you?” I asked, quickly turning the tables.

  “Very well, thank you.”

  This was going to be more difficult than I thought. I needed to be devious.

  “Have you made any interesting shopping trips lately?”

  Brilliant! Just girl talk.

  “Am I pregnant, do you mean? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am. We’re expecting a blessed event; the patter of little feet; the clang of the diaper pail—however you want to put it—next month. Hello? Flavia? Are you there?”

  “Son of a sea cook!” I said. It just slipped out.

  Not that there was anything wrong with the words. They had been spoken by the act
or Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace, a gripping film about a family of poisoners who, in order to relieve homeless men of their suffering, spiked their elderberry wine with arsenic, strychnine, and just a pinch of cyanide.

  Antigone laughed. “Indeed!” she said.

  How I wanted to add, “We must go out for a glass of elderberry wine,” but I restrained myself. She knew the film and I knew the film, and her single word, “Indeed,” had cemented the bond. Nothing more needed to be said.

  Sometimes less is more.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “You must be very excited.”

  “Yes, we are. But you knew all along, didn’t you?”

  “Well…,” I said. “Yes.”

  “I should have been terribly disappointed if you hadn’t noticed.”

  Was she twitting me?

  “So should I,” I said, and after a second or two we both laughed.

  Except for her saying that she would tell her husband I had called, that was pretty well the end of my conversation with Antigone Hewitt.

  I had not really learned anything, except for the imminent arrival of a young Master—or Mistress—Hewitt, and I wasn’t yet sure how I felt about the so-called blessed event.

  I wasn’t like Aunt Millicent, who believed that babies ought to be shellacked and framed at birth to keep them out of mischief, or like Daffy, who hated them because of the noise and fumes:

  “Like smelly little motorcars,” she would say, sticking her little fingers in her ears and pinching her nose shut between her thumbs whenever she spotted one.

  To me, a baby was a temporary nuisance: a mere metamorphosis on its way from egg to adult. Scientists once believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that we all of us repeat the history of our species, passing in form from simple water-dwelling creatures to air-breathing mammals, and growing, in nine months, through all the various phases of human development from single-celled organism through primitive invertebrate, fish, reptile, and so forth, and ending up being your auntie Mabel, or some other mammalian horror.