Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard (34 page)

I held my tongue. In ordinary circumstances, I should have lashed out against such an impertinent remark, but today I had a new weapon.

“Quite right, Mrs. M,” I heard myself saying, as I trotted instantly and obediently to the door.

Here I paused, turned dramatically, and then in my best innocent-as-a-lamb voice, said, “Oh, by the way, Mrs. Mullet, Vanetta Harewood showed me her portrait of Harriet.”

The clatter of dishes stopped, and for a few moments there was a stony silence in the kitchen.

“I knew this day would come,” Mrs. Mullet said suddenly in an odd voice; the voice of a stranger. “I’ve been ’alf expectin’ it.”

She collapsed suddenly into a chair at the table, buried her face in her apron, and dissolved into a miserable sobbing.

I stood by helplessly, not quite knowing what to do.

At last, I pulled out the chair opposite, sat down at the table, and watched her weep.

I had a special fascination with tears. Chemical analyses of my own and those of others had taught me that tears were a rich and a wonderful broth, whose chief ingredients were water, potassium, proteins, manganese, various yeasty enzymes, fats, oils, and waxes, with a good dollop of sodium chloride thrown in, perhaps for taste. In sufficient quantities, they made for a powerful cleanser.

Not so very different, I thought, from Mrs. Mullet’s chicken soup, which she flung at even the slightest sniffle.

By now, Mrs. M had begun to subside, and she said, without removing the apron from her face: “A gift, it was. She wanted it for the Colonel.”

I reached out across the table and placed my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t say a word.

Slowly, the apron came down, revealing her anguished face. She took a shuddering breath.

“She wanted to surprise ’im with it. Oh, the trouble she went to! She was ever so ’appy. Bundlin’ up you lot of angels and motorin’ over to Malden Fenwick for your sittin’s—’avin’ that ’Arewood woman come ’ere to Buckshaw whenever the Colonel was away. Bitter cold, it was. Bitter.”

She mopped at her eyes and I suddenly felt ill.

Why had I ever mentioned the painting? Had I done it for no reason other than to shock Mrs. Mullet? To see her response? I hoped not.

“ ’Ow I’ve wanted to tell the Colonel about it,” Mrs. Mullet went on quietly, “but I couldn’t. It’s not my place. To think of it lyin’ there in ’er studio all these years, an’ ’im not knowin’ it—it breaks my ’eart. It surely does—it breaks my ’eart.”

“It breaks mine, too, Mrs. M,” I said, and it was the truth.

As she pulled herself to her feet, her face still wet and red, something stirred in my memory.

Red.

Red hair … Timofey Bull … his mouth stuffed with sweets and the silver lobster pick in his hand.

“Danny’s pocket,” he’d said, when I asked him where he got it. “Danny’s pocket.”

And I had misheard him.

Daddy’s pocket!

Red and silver. This was what my dreams and my good sense had been trying to tell me!

I felt suddenly as if a snail were slowly crawling up my spine.

Could it be that Tom Bull was still in Bishop’s Lacey? Could he still be living secretly amid the smoke that blanketed his house in the Gully?

If so, it might well be he who’d been outside smoking as I crept with Gry past his house in the dark. Perhaps it was he who had watched from the wood as Inspector Hewitt and his men removed Brookie’s body from the Poseidon fountain—he who had removed the pick from Brookie’s nose when Porcelain and I—

Good lord!

And Timofey had found the lobster pick in his father’s pocket, which could only mean—

At that very instant, the gong in the foyer was rung, announcing supper.

“Better get along, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, poking at her hair with a forefinger and giving her face a last swipe with her apron. “You know what your father’s like about promptness. We mustn’t keep ’im waitin’.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mullet,” I said.

THE HOUSEHOLD HAD BEEN summoned, and we all of us stood waiting in the foyer.

I understood at once that Father had decided to make an occasion of Porcelain’s presence in the house, perhaps, I thought, because he felt remorse for the way in which he had treated her grandparents. He still did not know, of course, about the tragic death of Johnny Faa.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs, a little apart from the others, taking in, as if for the first time, the sad splendor of the de Luce ancestral home.

There had been a time when Buckshaw rang with laughter, or so I’d been told, but quite frankly, I could not even imagine it. The house seemed to hold itself in stiff disapproval, reflecting only the sound of whispers—setting dim but rigid limits on the lives of all of us who lived within its walls. Other than Father’s gorgon sister, Aunt Felicity, who made annual expeditions in order to berate him, there had been no guests at Buckshaw for as long as I could remember.

Daffy and Feely stood with annoyingly perfect posture on either side of Father, both of them scrubbed to disgusting perfection, like the well-bred but rather dim daughters of the local squire in a drawing-room drama. Just wait till they saw Porcelain!

To one side, Dogger hovered, nearly invisible against the dark paneling, save for his white face and his white hair—like a disembodied head afloat in the gloom.

Glancing at his military wristwatch, Father made a slight involuntary frown, but covered it nicely by pulling out his handkerchief and giving his nose an unconvincing blow.

He was nervous!

We stood there in silence, each of us staring off in a different direction.

Precisely fifteen minutes after the gong had sounded, a door closed somewhere above, and we focused our attention upon the top of the staircase.

As Porcelain appeared, we gasped collectively, and Mrs. Mullet, who had just come from the kitchen, gave out a cry like a small nocturnal animal. I thought for a moment she was going to bolt.

Porcelain had not chosen from Daffy’s or Feely’s wardrobe. She was dressed in one of my mother’s most memorable outfits: the knee-length, flame-colored dress of orange silk chiffon that Harriet had worn to the Royal Aero Society Ball the year before her final journey. A photograph had been taken by the Times that evening as Harriet arrived at the Savoy—a photograph that created a stir that to this day has never been quite forgotten.

But it wasn’t just the dress: Porcelain had pulled her hair back in the same way that Harriet had done when she was riding to the hounds. She must have copied the style from the black-and-white photo on Harriet’s desk.

Because I had rifled my mother’s jewel box myself from time to time, I recognized at once the antique amber necklace that lay against Porcelain’s surprisingly well-developed bosom, and the stones that glittered on her fingers.

Harriet’s—all of them Harriet’s!

Porcelain paused on the top step and looked down at us with what I took at the time to be shyness, but later decided might well have been contempt.

I must say that Father behaved magnificently, although at first, I was sure he was going to faint. As Porcelain began her long, slow descent, his jaw muscles began tightening and loosening reflexively. As with most military men, it was the only permissible show of emotion, and as such, it was at once both nerve-wracking and deeply endearing.

Down and down she came towards us, floating on the air like some immortal sprite—a pixy, perhaps, I thought wildly. Perhaps Queen Mab herself!

As she neared the bottom, Porcelain broke into the most heartbreaking smile that I have ever seen on a human face: a smile that encompassed us all and yet, at the same time, managed to single out each one of us for particular dazzlement.

No queen—not even Cleopatra herself—had ever made such an entrance, and I found myself gaping in open-mouthed admiration at the sheer audacity of it.

As she swept lightly past me at the bottom of the stairs, she leaned in close upon my neck, her lips almost brushing my ear.

“How do I look?” she whispered.

All she needed was a rose in her teeth, but I hardly dared say so.

Father took a single step forward and offered her his arm.

“Shall we go in to dinner?” he asked.

“Macaroons!” Porcelain said. “How I love them!”

Mrs. Mullet beamed. “I shall give you the recipe, dear,” she said. “It’s the tinned milk as gives ’em the extra fillet.”

I nearly gagged, but a few deft passes of my table napkin provided a neat distraction.

Daffy and Feely, to give them credit, had—apart from their initial goggling—seemed not to have turned a hair at Porcelain’s borrowed costume, although they couldn’t take their eyes off her.

At the table, they asked interesting questions—mostly about her life in London during the war. In general, and against all odds, my sisters were charming beyond belief.

And Father … dear Father. Although Porcelain’s sudden appearance in Harriet’s wardrobe must have shocked him deeply, he managed somehow to keep a miraculously tight grip on himself. In fact, for a few hours, it was as if Harriet had been returned to him from the dead.

He smiled, he listened attentively, and at one point he even told rather an amusing story about an old lady’s first encounter with a beekeeper.

It was as if, for a few hours, Porcelain had cast a spell upon us all.

There was only one awkward moment, and it came towards the end of the evening.

Feely had just finished playing a lovely piano arrangement of Antonin Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs, Opus 55: Songs My Great-Grandfather Taught Me, one of her great favorites.

“Well,” she asked, getting up from the piano and turning to Porcelain, “what do you think? I’ve always wanted to hear the opinion of a real Gypsy.”

You could have cut the silence with a knife.

“Ophelia …” Father said.

I held my breath, afraid that Porcelain would be offended, but I needn’t have worried.

“Quite beautiful in places,” she said, giving Feely that dazzling smile. “Of course I’m no more than half-Gypsy, so I only enjoyed every other section.”

“I thought she was going to leap over the piano stool and scratch my eyes out!”

We were back upstairs in my bedroom after what had been, for both of us, something of an ordeal.

“Feely wouldn’t do that,” I said. “At least, not with Father in the room.”

There had been no mention of Brookie Harewood, and apart from a polite enquiry by Father (“I hope your grandmother is getting on well?”), nothing whatever said about Fenella.

It was just as well, as I didn’t fancy having to answer inconvenient, and perhaps even embarrassing, questions about my recent activities.

“They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,” Porcelain remarked.

“Ha!” I said. “Shows what little you know! I hate them!”

“Hate them? I should have thought you’d love them.”

“Of course I love them,” I said, throwing myself full length onto the bed. “That’s why I’m so good at hating them.”

“I think you’re having me on. What have they ever done to you?”

“They torture me,” I said. “But please don’t ask me for details.”

When I knew that I had gained her undivided attention, I rolled over onto my stomach so that I couldn’t see her.

Talking to someone dressed in my mother’s clothing was eerie enough, without recounting to her the tortures my sisters had inflicted upon me.

“Torture you?” she said. “In what way? Tell me about it.”

For a long while there was only the sound of my brass alarm clock ticking on the bedside table, chopping the long minutes into manageable segments.

Then, in a rush, it all came spilling out. I found myself telling her about my ordeal in the cellars: how they had lugged me down the stairs, dumped me on the stone floor, and frightened me with horrid voices; how they had told me I was a changeling, left behind by the pixies when the real Flavia de Luce was abducted.

Until I heard myself telling it to Porcelain, I had no idea how badly shaken the ordeal had left me.

“Do you believe me?” I asked, desperate, somehow, for a “yes.”

“I’d like to,” she said, “but it’s hard to imagine such ladylike young women operating their own private dungeon.”

Ladylike young women? I’m afraid I almost uttered a word that would have shocked a sailor.

“Come on,” I said, leaping to my feet and tugging at her arm. “I’ll show you what ladylike young women get up to when no one is looking.”

“Cor!” Porcelain said. “It’s a bloody crypt!”

In spite of an occasional electric bulb strung here and there on frayed wiring, the cellars were a sea of darkness. I had brought from the pantry the pewter candlestick that was kept for those not infrequent occasions when the current failed at Buckshaw, and I held it above my head, moving the flickering light from side to side.

“See? There’s the sack they threw over my head.

“And look,” I said, holding the candle down close to the flagstones. “Here are their footprints in the dust.”

“Seems like rather a lot of them for a couple of ladylike young women,” Porcelain said skeptically. “Rather large, too,” she added.

She was right. I could see that at once.

Distinct footprints led off into the darkness, too big to be Daffy’s or mine or Feely’s, which mingled near the bottom of the stairs. Nor were they Father’s: He had not come all the way down the steps, and even if he had, his leather-soled shoes left distinct impressions with which I was quite familiar.

Dogger’s footprints, too, were unmistakeable: long and narrow, and placed one in front of the other with the precision of a red Indian.

No, these were not Father’s footprints, nor were they Dogger’s. If my suspicions were correct, they had been made by someone wearing rubber boots.

“Let’s see where they go,” I said.

Porcelain’s presence bucked up my bravery no end, and I was ready to follow the prints to wherever they might take us.

“Do you think that’s wise?” she asked, the whites of her eyes flashing in the light of the candle. “No one knows we’re down here. If we fell into a pit or something, we might die before anyone found us.”

“There are no pits down here,” I said. “Just a lot of old cellars.”