Alan Bradley - A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

And I remember nothing more until we were grinding to a stop on the gravel sweep at Buckshaw’s front entrance. I had no recollection whatever of having been driven back through the Gully, along the high street, past St. Tancred’s, and so to Buckshaw. But here we were, so I must have been.

Dogger, surprisingly, was at the door—as if he had been waiting up all night. With his prematurely white hair illuminated from behind by the lights of the foyer, he seemed to me like a gaunt Saint Peter at the pearly gates, welcoming me home.

“I could have walked,” I said to the Inspector. “It was no more than a half mile.”

“Of course you could,” Inspector Hewitt said. “But this trip is at His Majesty’s expense.”

Was he teasing me? Twice in the recent past the Inspector had driven me home, and upon one of those occasions he had made it clear that when it came to petrol consumption the coffers of the King were not bottomless.

“Are you sure?” I asked, oddly fuddled.

“Straight out of his personal change purse.”

As if in a dream, I found myself plodding heavily up the steps to the front door. When I reached the top, Dogger fussed with the blanket round my shoulders.

“Off to bed with you, Miss Flavia. I’ll be along with a hot drink directly.”

As I trudged exhausted up the curving staircase, I could hear quiet words being exchanged between Dogger and the Inspector, but could not make out a single one of them.

Upstairs, in the east wing, I walked into my bedroom and without even removing His Majesty’s tartan blanket, fell facedown onto my bed.

I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table.

As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond, something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise, but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.

Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling, then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.

Of course by now the cocoa would be as cold as ditch water. For various complicated reasons reaching back into my family’s past, Buckshaw’s east wing was, as I have said, unheated, but I could hardly complain. I occupied this part of the house by choice, rather than by necessity. Dogger must have—

Dogger!

In an instant the whole of the previous day’s events came storming into my consciousness like a wayward crash of thunder, and like those fierce sharp bolts of lightning that are said to strike upwards from the earth to the sky, so did these thoughts arrive in curiously reversed order: first, Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby, the Gully, and then the blood—the blood!—my sisters, Daffy and Feely, the Gypsy and Gry, her horse, and finally the church fête—all of these tumbling in upon one another in tattered but nevertheless sharply etched detail.

Had I been hit by lightning? Was that why I felt so curiously electrified: like a comb rubbed with tissue paper?

No, that wasn’t it—but something in my mind was evading itself.

Oh, well , I thought, I’ll turn over and go back to sleep .

But I couldn’t manage it. The morning sun streaming in at the windows was painful to look at, and my eyes were as gritty as if someone had pitched a bucket of sand into them.

Perhaps a bath would buck me up. I smiled at the thought. Daffy would be dumbstruck if she knew of my bathing without being threatened. “Filthy Flavia,” she called me, at least when Father wasn’t around.

Daffy herself loved nothing better than to subside into a steaming tub with a book, where she would stay until the water had gone cold.

“It’s like reading in one’s own coffin,” she would say afterwards, “but without the stench.”

I did not share her enthusiasm.

A light tapping at the door interrupted these thoughts. I wrapped myself tightly in the tartan blanket and, like a penguin, waddled across the room.

It was Dogger, a fresh cup of steaming cocoa in his hand.

“Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said. He did not ask how I was feeling, but nonetheless, I was aware of his keen scrutiny.

“Good morning,” I replied. “Please put it on the table. Sorry about the one you brought last night. I was too tired to drink it.”

With a nod, Dogger swapped the cups.

“The Colonel wishes to see you in the drawing room,” he said. “Inspector Hewitt is with him.”

Blast and double blast! I hadn’t had time to think things through. How much was I going to tell the Inspector and how much was I going to keep to myself?

To say nothing of Father! What would he say when he heard that his youngest daughter had been out all night, wading around in the blood of a Gypsy he had once evicted from his estate?

Dogger must have sensed my uneasiness.

“I believe the Inspector is inquiring about your health, miss. I shall tell them you’ll be down directly.”

Bathed and rigged up in a ribboned dress, I came slowly down the stairs. Feely turned from a mirror in the foyer in which she had been examining her face.

“Now you’re for it,” she said.

“Fizz off,” I replied pleasantly.

“Half the Hinley Constabulary on your tail and still you have time to be saucy to your sister. I hope you won’t expect a visit from me when you’re in the clink.”

I swept past her with all the dignity I could muster, trying to gather my wits as I walked across the foyer. At the door of the drawing room, I paused to form a little prayer: “May the Lord bless me and keep me and make His face to shine upon me; may He fill me with great grace and lightning-quick thinking.”

I opened the door.

Inspector Hewitt came to his feet. He had been sitting in the overstuffed armchair in which Daffy was usually lounging sideways with a book. Father stood in front of the mantelpiece, the dark side of his face reflected in the mirror.

“Ah, Flavia,” he said. “The Inspector was just telling me that a woman’s life has been saved by your prompt action. Well done.”

Well done? … Well done?

Was this my father speaking? Or was one of the Old Gods merely using him as a ventriloquist’s dummy to deliver to me a personal commendation from Mount Olympus?

But no—Father was a most unlikely messenger. Not once in my eleven years could I recall him praising me, and now that he had done so, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to respond.

The Inspector extracted me from a sticky situation.

“Well done, indeed,” he said. “They tell me that in spite of the ferocity of the attack, she’s come out of it with no more than a fractured skull. At her age, of course …”

Father interrupted. “Dr. Darby rang up to express his commendations, Flavia, but Dogger told him you were sleeping. I took the message myself.”

Father on the telephone? I could hardly believe it! Father only allowed “the instrument,” as he called it, to be kept in the house with the express understanding that it be used only in the direst of emergencies: the Apocalypse, for instance.

But Dr. Darby was one of Father’s friends. In due course, I knew, the good doctor would be sternly lectured on his breach of household standing orders, but ultimately would live to tell the tale.

“Still,” Father said, his face clouding a little, “you’re going to have to explain what you were doing wandering round the Palings in the middle of the night.”

“That poor Gypsy woman,” I said, changing the subject. “Her tent burned down at the fête. She had nowhere to go.”

As I talked, I watched Father’s face for any sign of balking. Hadn’t he, after all, been the one who had driven Johnny Faa and his wife from the Buckshaw estate? Had he forgotten the incident? He was almost certainly not aware that his actions had caused the Gypsy’s husband to fall dead in the road, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“I thought of the vicar’s sermon, the one about Christian charity—”

“Yes, yes, Flavia,” Father said. “Most commendable.”

“I told her she could camp in the Palings, but only for one night. I knew that you’d—”

“Thank you, Flavia, that’s quite enough.”

“—approve.”

Poor Father: outflanked, outgunned, and outwitted. I almost felt sorry for him.

He crooked a forefinger and touched the angled joint to each side of his clipped mustache in turn: right and then left—a kind of suppressed, nervous preening that had probably been practiced by military officers since time immemorial. I’d be willing to bet that if Julius Caesar had a mustache he knuckled it in precisely the same way.

“Inspector Hewitt would like a word with you. Because it concerns confidential information about individuals with whom I am not acquainted, I shall leave you alone.”

With a nod to the Inspector, Father left the room. I heard the door of his study open, and then close, as he sought refuge among his postage stamps.

“Now then,” the Inspector said, flipping open his notebook and unscrewing the cap of his Biro. “From the beginning.”

“I couldn’t sleep, you see,” I began.

“Not that beginning,” Inspector Hewitt said without looking up. “Tell me about the church fête.”

“I’d gone into the Gypsy’s tent to have my fortune told.”

“And did you?”

“No,” I lied.

The last thing on earth I wanted to share with the Inspector was the woman on the mountain—the woman who wanted to come home from the cold. Nor did I care to tell him about the woman that I was in the process of becoming.

“I knocked her candle over, and before I knew it, I … I …”

Much to my surprise, my lower lip was trembling at the recollection.

“Yes, we’ve heard about that. The vicar was able to provide us with a very good account, as was Dr. Darby.”

I gulped, wondering if anyone had reported how I’d hidden behind a pitch as the Gypsy’s tent burned to ashes.

“Poor girl,” he said tenderly. “You’ve had quite a series of shocks, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“If I’d had any idea of what you’d already been through, I’d have taken you to the hospital directly.”

“It’s all right,” I said gamely. “I’ll be all right.”

“Will you?” the Inspector asked.

“No,” I said, struggling with tears.

And suddenly it all came pouring out: From the fête to the Palings, not forgetting the seething Mrs. Bull; from my frankly fabricated tale of awakening in the night to fret about the Gypsy woman’s welfare to my discovery of her lying in a pool of her own blood in the caravan, I left out not a single detail.

Except Brookie Harewood, of course.

I was saving him for myself.

It was a magnificent performance, if I do say so. As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie—or at least a glaring omission—than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.

During it all, Inspector Hewitt’s Biro fairly flew over the pages, getting every scrap of it down for the record. He must have studied one of the shorthand methods , I thought idly as he scribbled. Later, he would expand these notes into a longer, neater, more legible form.

Perhaps he would dictate them to his wife, Antigone. I had met her not long before at a puppet show in the parish hall. Would she remember me?