The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (102 page)

She clapped her hand across her mouth and her shoulders heaved.

I waited patiently for more, but if there were any further interesting details, Porcelain was keeping them to herself.

We stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time.

“Fenella was right,” she said at last. “There is a darkness here.”

I held out the key and she lifted it from my open palm with two fingers, as if it—or I—were contaminated.

Without a word, she unlocked the door and let herself out.

What was I supposed to feel? I wondered.

To be perfectly honest, I think I had been looking forward to having Porcelain dog my every step as I went about investigating the attack upon Fenella and the murder of Brookie Harewood. I had even thought of ways of giving her the slip, if necessary, as I traipsed about the village, digging up information. And perhaps I had too much anticipated sitting her down and patiently explaining the trail of clues, and the ways in which they pointed to the culprit—or culprits.

But now, by walking out, she had deprived me of all of that.

I was alone again.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen
.

No one to talk to but myself.

Except Dogger, of course.

Dogger was sitting in the last shaft of sunlight in the garden. He had brought an old wooden chair from the greenhouse and, perched upon the edge of its seat, was hammering nails into the tin stripping that sealed the wooden tea chest that lay before him in the grass.

I lowered myself into the wheelbarrow that was standing nearby.

“They’ve found another body,” I said. “At the Palings.”

Dogger nodded. “I believe that’s so, Miss Flavia.”

“It’s the Bull baby, isn’t it?”

Dogger nodded again and put down the hammer. “I should be surprised if it weren’t.”

“Did you hear about it from Mrs. Mullet?”

Although I knew it was not a done thing to inquire of one servant about another, there was no other way. I couldn’t just ring up Inspector Hewitt and pump him for the details.

“No,” he said, preparing to drive home another nail. “Miss Porcelain told me.”

“Porcelain?” I said, gesturing up towards the east wing—towards my bedroom window. “You knew about Porcelain? That she was staying here?”

“Yes,” Dogger said, and left it at that.

After a few seconds I relaxed, and there fell between us another one of those luxurious silences that is part of most conversations with Dogger: silences so long and profound and golden that it seems irreverent to break them.

Dogger rotated the tea chest and began to apply stripping to another edge.

“You have very fine hands,” I said at last. “They look as if they belong to a concert pianist.”

Dogger put down the hammer and examined both sides of each hand as if he had never seen them before.

“I can assure you that they are my own,” he said.

This time, there could be no doubt about it. Dogger
had
made a joke. But rather than laughing condescendingly, I did the right thing and nodded wisely, as if I knew it all along. I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.

“Dogger,” I said, “there’s something I need to know. It’s about nosebleeds.”

I had the impression that he looked at me sharply—even though he hadn’t.

“Are you having nosebleeds, Miss Flavia?”

“No,” I said. “No—not at all. It’s no one here at Buckshaw. Actually, it’s Miss Mountjoy, at Willow Villa.”

And I described to him what I had seen in that dank kitchen.

“Ah,” Dogger said, and then fell silent. After a time, he spoke again—slowly—as if his words were being retrieved, one by one, from some deep well.

“Recurrent nosebleeds—epitaxis—may have many causes.”

“Such as?” I urged.

“Genetic predisposition,” he said. “Hypertension—or high blood pressure … pregnancy … dengue—or breakbone—fever … nasopharyngeal cancer … adrenal tumor … scurvy … certain diseases of the elderly, such as hardening of the arteries. It may also be symptomatic of arsenic poisoning.”

Of course! I knew that! How could I have forgotten?

“However,” Dogger went on, “from what you’ve told me, it is none of these. Miss Mountjoy’s nosebleeds are most likely brought on by the excessive consumption of cod-liver oil.”

“Cod-liver oil?” I must have said it aloud.

“I expect she takes it for her arthritis,” Dogger said, and went back to his hammering.

“Gaaak!” I said, making a face. “I hate the smell of the stuff.”

But Dogger was not to be drawn out.

“Isn’t it odd,” I plowed on, “how nature puts the same pong in the liver of a fish as it does in a weed like the stinking goosefoot, and in the willow that grows by the water?”

“Stinking goosefoot?” Dogger said, looking up in puzzlement. And then: “Ah, yes, of course. The methylamines. I’d forgotten about the methylamines. And then …”

“Yes?” I said, too quickly and too eagerly.

There were times when Dogger’s memory, having been primed, worked beautifully for a short time, like the vicar’s battered old Oxford which ran well only in the rain.

I crossed my fingers and my ankles and waited, biting my tongue.

Dogger removed his hat and stared into it as if the memory were hidden in its lining. He frowned, wiped his brow on his forearm, and went on hesitantly. “I believe there were several cases reported in
The Lancet
in the last century in which a patient was recorded as exuding a fishy smell.”

“Perhaps he was a fisherman,” I suggested. Dogger shook his head.

“In neither case was the patient a fisherman, and neither had been known to be in contact with fish. Even after bathing, the piscine odor returned, often following a meal.”

“Of fish?”

Dogger ignored me. “There was, of course, the tale in the
Bhagavad Ghita
of the princess who exuded a fishy odor …”

“Yes?” I said, settling back as if to hear a fairy tale. Somewhere in the distance, a harvesting machine clattered away softly at its work, and the sun shone down. What a perfect day it was, I thought. “But wait!” I said. “What if his body were producing trimethylamine?”

This was such an exciting thought that I sprang out of the wheelbarrow.

“It would not be unheard of,” Dogger said, thoughtfully. “Shakespeare might have been thinking of just such a complaint:

“
‘What have we here
?
a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish: a very ancient and fish-like smell.’
”

A chill ran up my spine. Dogger had slipped into the loud and confident voice of an actor who has delivered these lines many and many a time before.

“
The Tempest,
” he said quietly. “Act two, scene two, if I’m not mistaken. Trinculo, you’ll recall, is speaking of Caliban.”

“Where do you dig up these things?” I asked in admiration.

“On the wireless,” Dogger said. “We listened to it some weeks ago.”

It was true. At Buckshaw, Thursday evenings were devoted to compulsory wireless listening, and we had recently been made to sit through an adaption of
The Tempest
without fidgeting.

Other than the marvelous sound effects of the storm, I didn’t remember much about the play, but obviously Dogger did.

“Is there a name for this fishy condition?” I asked.

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” he said. “It is exceedingly rare. I believe …”

“Go on,” I said, eagerly.

But when I looked up at Dogger, the light in his eyes had gone out. He sat staring at his hat, which he held clutched in his trembling hands as if he had never seen it before.

“I believe I’ll go to my room now,” he said, getting slowly to his feet.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I think I will, too. A nice nap before dinner will do both of us good.”

But I’m not sure that Dogger heard me. He was already shambling off towards the kitchen door.

When he was gone, I turned my attention to the wooden tea chest he had been nailing shut. In one corner was pasted a paper label, upon which was written in ink:

THIS SIDE UP - Contents - Silver Cutlery - de Luce - Buckshaw

Cutlery? Had Dogger packed the Mumpeters in this crate? Mother and Father Mumpeter? Little Grindlestick and her silver sisters?

Is that why he’d been polishing them?

Why on earth would he do such a thing? The Mumpeters were my childhood playthings, and the very thought of anyone—

But hadn’t Brookie Harewood been murdered with one of the pieces from this set? What if the police—?

I walked round to the far side of the crate: the side that Dogger had turned away from me as I approached.

As I read the words that were stenciled in awful black letters on the boards, something vile and sour rose up in my throat.

Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, London, W.C.
, it said.

Father was sending away the family silver to be auctioned.

NINETEEN

Dinner was a grim affair.

The worst of it was that Father had come to the table without
The London Philatelist
. Instead of reading, he insisted upon solicitously passing me the peas and asking, “Did you have a nice day today, Flavia?”

It almost broke my heart.

Although Father had spoken several times of his financial troubles, they had never seemed threatening: no more than a distant shadow, really, like war—or death. You knew it was there but you didn’t spend all day fretting about it.

But now, with the Mumpeters nailed up inside a crate, ready to be taken to the train for London and pawed over by strangers at the auction rooms, the reality of Father’s predicament had hit home with the force of a typhoon.

And Father—the dear man—was trying to shield us from the reality by making bright table chatter.

I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, but I dared not give in to them. It was fortunate that Daffy, who sat across from me, did not even once look up from her book.

To my left, at the far end of the table, Feely sat staring down into her lap, her face pale, her colorless lips pressed together into a tight, thin line. The dark circles under her eyes were like bruises, and her hair was lank and lifeless.

The only word to describe her was “blighted.”

My chemical wizardry had worked!

The proof of it was the fact that Feely was wearing her spectacles, which told me, without a doubt, that she had spent the day staring in horror at the spirit message that had materialized upon her looking glass.

In spite of her occasional cruelty—or perhaps because of it—Feely was a pious sort, whose time was devoted to making bargains with this saint or that about the clarity of her complexion, or the way in which a random beam of sunlight would strike her golden hair as she knelt at the altar for communion.

Where I generally believed in chemistry and the happy dance of the atom, Feely believed in the supernatural, and it was that belief I had taken advantage of.

But what had I done? I hadn’t counted on such utter devastation.

Part of my brain was telling me to leap up and run to her—to throw my arms around her neck and tell her that it was only French chalk—and not God—that had caused her misery. And then we would laugh together as we used to in the olden days.