Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  “See?” Undine said triumphantly.

  In a remarkably few minutes, Daffy was back.

  “I’ve just remembered,” she said. “The Listeners were one of the tribes of underground fairies. Neither visible nor invisible—which means that they can be seen by some people but not by others—they exist on the threshold of vision, and have the habit of hiding underfoot where they have the least chance of being detected. Possessing small, weak, sunken eyes, but with large, powerful ears, they overhear everything, even the most secret conversations, which they use to their own dreadful advantage. They are said to endow humans with great artistic talents, but to exact a terrible price in return.”

  I knew at once that these were not Daffy’s own words: She was quoting from a book.

  I should have known! The flushing of the WC had been no more than a diversion, a decoy. Daffy had dashed, not to the lavatory, but to the library where she had consulted Professor Thorvald Fenn’s great work, An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Fairy Folk. I had intended to do so myself, but she had saved me the trouble.

  The fat green book was one I remembered well. I had pored over its pages in some detail after Daffy and Feely had almost convinced me that I was a changeling: a monstrous child swapped by the fairies for the real Flavia de Luce who was now, at that very moment, enslaved in some hidden cavern, a subterranean Cinderella being made to serve endless shamrock teas to the Little People.

  Very much like my real life, I sometimes thought—but only when I was having a bitter day.

  “Thanks, Daff,” I said. “That’s very helpful. I’ve been reading The Golden Bough, and it’s made me think about taking up mythology and folklore.”

  “Jolly good choice,” she said. “It will keep you away from those moonlighters.”

  Moonlighters? I thought. Had she let something slip?

  “Those imbeciles that annoy the sheep by dancing round old stones in the rain. It’s all the rage nowadays, even though it’s a load of horsewallop.”

  But if that were entirely true, why was Daffy warning me off it?

  It was no harmless specter that had killed Roger Sambridge, or, rather, Oliver Inchbald. Had the Auditories at Lillian Trench’s cottage had anything to do with his death? Had they been sent marching across the road to Thornfield Chase, to do their witch mistress’s bidding?

  There was no doubt that the late Oliver had been granted great artistic talents, as both author and wood-carver, and it was even more certain that he had paid a terrible price for these gifts. But who—or what—had actually killed him: man or spook?

  Or could it have been the alleged witch, Lillian Trench herself? She had been a close neighbor of the dead man, so who knew what dealings she had had with him? It is common knowledge that neighborly disputes can sometimes escalate into murder, and even a lightning glance at the front page of the Daily Mail is enough to demonstrate this fact. A simple disagreement over a wandering cat may easily end with corpses piled up like kindling wood.

  Which brought my thoughts back to the cat that had strolled so casually into the bedroom of the dead Mr. Sambridge, or, as I now knew him to be, Oliver Inchbald. It had made a second appearance at the cottage of his neighbor, Lillian Trench.

  Whose cat was it, then? As I had noted earlier, cats don’t generally waste their time howling at the homes of strangers.

  It probably made sense when you stopped to think about it, that Lillian Trench kept a cat. Witches are widely known to keep felines as their familiars. I’ve never heard of a witch who didn’t—except of course the Witch of Endor in the book of Samuel, but that’s because there are no cats in the Bible—and it wouldn’t have been mentioned even if she’d had one, just for the sake of consistency. I’d bet a fiver that she did.

  By now, Daffy had given up on her conversation and returned to Mr. Salinger. I couldn’t help noticing that her ears were going slightly pink.

  As interesting a phenomenon as it was, I realized I was going to get nowhere with my investigation by watching someone read. There were certain questions which even my sister could not answer.

  —

  I tapped on Dogger’s door with my knuckles, but there was no reply.

  “Dogger,” I called softly. “It’s Flavia. Is everything all right?”

  Was he all right, was what I meant, of course.

  Although he had not suffered one of his terrifying episodes for quite some time, there was always the worry that I was going to find him whimpering in a corner, his head cradled in his forearms, howling like a madman as his poor brain reenacted some unspeakable torture he had endured at the hands of his wartime captors. Father and Dogger had been held in the same Japanese prison, where each of them had lost parts of his being that could never be recovered.

  Although it went against my every instinct to do so, I opened the door and peeped round it. We had been taught since we were children that Dogger’s room at the top of the back stairs was his Holy of Holies; that when he was in his sanctum he was not on any account to be disturbed. Although I had broken the rule from time to time—mostly with good reason, such as when he was having an attack—I had generally left him alone.

  I needn’t have worried. The room was empty, and Dogger’s sparse bed was neatly made up with military precision.

  Perhaps he was in the kitchen, I thought, as I made my way downstairs.

  But he was not. Mrs. Mullet had gone for the day, and the room felt curiously empty. I vowed never to be late for dinner again as long as I lived.

  And suddenly it came to me. Of course! It made perfect sense. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  I retrieved my coat and mittens from the cupboard in the foyer, retraced my steps through the kitchen, and opened the back door.

  The world was a nighttime wonderland. A razor wind had stripped away most of the clouds and the trees, under a gibbous moon, were a glorious, ice-covered confection, transparent spangles glittering with a cold brightness. It was like a decorated stage set from the Russian ballet, awaiting the dancers—The Snow Queen, perhaps, in which human hearts are pierced and frozen by shards of ice from the trolls’ shattered mirror.

  In the moonlight, even the kitchen garden glowed, the red brick of the old walls illuminating the dead beds with the cold, faded glory of old silver.

  The ground crunched beneath my feet as I walked towards the coach house.

  I made the courtesy of knocking on the door.

  “Dogger?” I called out. “Are you here? It’s Flavia.”

  Almost as if he had been waiting inside, the door opened straightaway, and there stood Dogger.

  “Miss Flavia. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, thank you, Dogger. May I come in?”

  “Please do,” Dogger said, and I saw as he stepped back that his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows.

  In the middle of the room stood Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce Phantom II, which had stood neglected for years until quite recently when Dogger had somehow managed to get it started at a time when my life was in danger. It had been brought out again at Harriet’s funeral, but had since then stood alone in the coach house, thinking its own thoughts and dreaming its own dreams among the dusty beams and the long-abandoned wooden stalls.

  It was like a manger scene, I thought, lit by the light of a single hanging paraffin lantern, in order to conserve electricity.

  Dogger had placed a milking stool in front of the towering nickel-plated radiator, which he now resumed polishing with a surgeon’s touch.

  “You’re cleaning her up to go fetch Father, aren’t you?” I asked.

  I had known it all along.

  Dogger picked at a reluctant bit of road grit with his fingernail.

  “Bert Archer has offered to iron out some of her wrinkles,” he said. “He can’t resist an old Rolls—especially one that has suffered indignities.”

  He was referring, of course, to the damage the car had suffered in rescuing me from the Pit Shed behind the library, an incident which I p
referred to forget—except for the happiness of my father’s face on that occasion.

  “Bert tells me that if we run her over to his garage this evening, he’ll get to work straightaway.”

  “But the cost—” I said, thinking of the piles of papers and unpaid bills that littered Father’s desk like the crumbling towers of Angkor Wat. In spite of my having inherited Buckshaw, the affairs of the estate were still in shocking disarray after years of siege by those gray men, His Majesty’s Revenue Rats, as Father called them when he thought I wasn’t listening.

  “Bert has offered to carry out the necessary repairs gratis,” Dogger said.

  “He says it’s the least he can do,” he added somewhat mysteriously. “Would you care to assist?”

  Would I!

  “I think I should like that,” I said, stuffing my happiness down my throat. If I were to become the lady of the manor I’d better start playing the part.

  Dogger put on his jacket and held the door open for me. I stepped up into the front passenger’s seat.

  “I hope you’ll teach me to drive her one day, Dogger,” I said.

  “I hope I shall, too, miss,” he said.

  The Rolls started without a hitch. On almost the first turn she was trembling with silent life in the lamplight.

  “Tally ho,” Dogger remarked.

  “Tally ho,” I replied.

  Even at walking pace, the journey into the village was a relatively short one. There was no time to waste.

  “It turns out that the late Mr. Sambridge was actually Oliver Inchbald, the author,” I remarked.

  Dogger nodded. “Interesting, but hardly surprising,” he said.

  What did he know that I didn’t?

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Meaning that it is interesting but hardly surprising,” he said, and I knew I was going to get no more out of him. If there was one thing Dogger was not, it was a gossip.

  It was time to change the subject.

  “What’s a black thing that can be hung up as a wall decoration?” I asked. “Rather like a cross section of a brain—a silhouette—a fan with a distinct stem and various branches. It’s hard to describe.”

  “It sounds much like a gorgonian sea fan,” Dogger said. “And your description is a very good one. Rhipidigorgia, if I’m not mistaken. Polyps of the family Gorgonaceae, which are easily distinguished from their neighbors, you will recall, by their axes not being effervescent in muriatic acid. They are wrenched, sadly, from the sea-floor of the northwest Mediterranean and are lugged home to be pasted up until they return to dust on our parlor walls.”

  A shiver ran through me. Hadn’t Carla’s auntie Loo met her fate while diving in the Mediterranean? Could it have been she who had brought a sea fan home as a gift to Oliver Inchbald?

  They had, after all, been great pals. Or so I was led to believe.

  Was Oliver’s death somehow connected to hers—even though the two events were separated by several years? I needed to think this through, and to do so properly.

  “You seem to know a great deal about natural history,” I said, and Dogger smiled.

  “As a boy,” he said, “I was very keen—as we used to say. I suppose I had rather a crush on Mother Nature. I did a bit of botanizing.”

  “Botanizing?”

  “Plants and grasses and so forth. Thought it might come in handy someday.”

  “And did it?” I was only partly serious.

  “It did,” Dogger said, and left it at that.

  And in that moment, a sudden dark image welled up in my mind, of Dogger and Father flushed from hiding at the edge of a steaming field somewhere in southeast Asia, leaping from cover in a ditch to twist garrotes of steel-sharp grasses around the necks of their ambushed hunters.

  “And the sea fans?” I asked, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible.

  “A sideline,” Dogger said. “I gave my specimens eventually to the Museum of Natural History in Oxford.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So that they would be viewed by those who could enjoy them more than I did.”

  “Ah,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  By now we were pulling up outside Bert Archer’s garage. In spite of the cold, Bert came out to greet us. He guided the Rolls in through the open doors with a series of elaborate hand signals.

  “Magnificent piece of machinery,” he said as we came to a stop. “Had Lady Denniston’s Silver Ghost in last month for a noisy clock.”

  He grinned horribly, as if he had made a capital joke. “Now, then,” he said, rubbing his knuckles together in anticipation. “Let’s get the old girl up onto the hoist and find out what’s under her skirts.”

  Dogger frowned, but ever so slightly.

  “If you please, Mr. Archer,” I said. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

  Bert took it lightly, but I had the distinct feeling that he had learned his lesson.

  “Found another body, so I hear?” he said. It sounded almost as if he took personal pride in my accomplishments. “That Sambridge fellow, out at Thornfield Chase?”

  “That’s right,” I said quietly. I was trying to teach myself not to burble.

  “I shall miss his custom. Regular filler-upper he was.”

  How odd, I thought. Roger Sambridge’s old Austin had looked to me as if it had been parked since dinosaurs roamed the earth. I couldn’t resist.

  “Did he have a second car, then?” I asked.

  “Ha!” Bert said. “Didn’t need one, did he? Not with a neighbor like Lillian. Man who has a neighbor like Lillian, therefore shall he want for nothing, as the vicar likes to say.”

  I hadn’t seen a car at Lillian Trench’s cottage, but that didn’t mean she didn’t own one. Even witches have to get around when brooms would be too obvious.

  “Thank you, Mr. Archer,” Dogger said. “We shall leave you to your work.”

  And so, with the Rolls in dry dock, as it were, Dogger and I were left to walk home across the moonlit fields to Buckshaw.

  —

  Halfway across a field that has been known, since the Middle Ages, as Breakplough, we stopped for a breather, and to look back at our own footprints, which receded in the direction of the village, our trail growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

  “Rather like ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ isn’t it?” I said, ticking off the points on my mittened fingers (which isn’t as easy as it sounds). “Snow lying round about, deep and crisp and even? Check. Brightly shining moon? Affirmative. Cruel frost? Check. It’s just perfect, isn’t it, Dogger?”

  “Perfect,” Dogger said.

  “Except, perhaps, for a poor man gathering winter fu-oo-el.”

  At that very moment, a single headlight swept the field as a farm tractor came bumping out of a nearby lane, pulling a trailer full of firewood.

  We both laughed.

  No one would have believed it, and I knew that Dogger and I would keep this moment to ourselves. There is a kind of magic that cannot be shared. Even talking about it robs it of its power.

  Oliver Inchbald had known that, hadn’t he?

  We saunter the shore, holding hands,

  Sharing the silence of the sands…

  He had written that in one of his books, about walking by the sea with his son. I could still remember the illustration: no living persons in sight—simply two pairs of footprints, one large, one small, vanishing in the distance.

  How like they were to our own footprints in the snow, Dogger’s and mine. A different season, to be sure, and a different setting, but still much the same: an adult and a younger person walking side by side in a sort of wilderness with no more than their footprints to tell us where they’ve been.

  How could a man capable of writing those lines possibly be cruel enough to beat a child? Had Hilary Inchbald been telling the truth?

  And if he hadn’t, what else might he be lying about?

  Overhead, the stars twinkled vividly. They don’
t care about humans, the stars, except in picture books.

  “Have you ever wondered, Dogger,” I asked, “if wickedness is a chemical state?”

  “Indeed I have, Miss Flavia,” he said. “I have sometimes thought of little else.”

  We began walking again, silent for a while, save for the crunching of the brittle snow.

  Although I was aching to talk to Dogger about Father, I found myself unable to do so. Dogger was burdened with enough grief of his own without my adding to it.

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters, Dogger?” I asked. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before.

  “Yes, I do, Miss Flavia,” he said at last, after a very long pause. “Do you wish me to tell you about them?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he replied.

  Again we walked on in silence for a while: silent because there was far too much to say.

  “Dogger, do you think it’s right that some of us should live for ages while others are doomed to die?”

  Dogger laughed. He actually laughed!

  I had never heard him laugh before, and it was a strange and pleasant sound.

  “It makes no difference what I think,” he said. “We had an old saying in our regiment: ‘It matters not if we march with the Marchmorts or the Mortmarches; our final destination is the same.’ ”

  I nodded sadly, because I knew that this was true.

  “On account of the chemistry,” I said.

  “On account of the chemistry,” Dogger agreed.

  · SEVENTEEN ·

  I COULDN’T SLEEP. OUTSIDE my bedroom window, the winter stars were blazing even brighter—if that were possible—than they had while Dogger and I were walking home.

  Beyond the Visto, Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins, had risen well above the eastern horizon.

  Oliver Inchbald had written something about the stars, hadn’t he?

  What was it? Of course! It wasn’t from Hobbyhorse House, but its companion volume, Bedtime Ballads:

  Old Castor says to Pollux,

  “A little lad I see,

  A-strolling on the distant Earth.

  Could he be watching me?”

  Old Pollux says to Castor,