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

My mind was a whirl. Heigh-ho ! I thought. What jolly sport is the world of Flavia de Luce .

Next thing I knew it was morning, and sunlight was pouring in through the windows.

THIRTEEN

I ROLLED OVER AND blinked. I had been sprawled across the bottom of the bed, my head twisted painfully against the footboard. At the top of the bed, Porcelain was tucked in with my blanket pulled over her shoulders, her head on my pillow, sleeping away for all she was worth like some Oriental princess.

For a moment I felt my resentment rising, but when I remembered the tale she had told me last night, I let the resentment melt into pity.

I glanced at the clock and saw, to my horror, that I had overslept. I was late for breakfast. Father insisted that dishes at the table arrive and be taken away with military precision.

Taking great care not to awaken Porcelain, I made a quick change of clothing, took a swipe at my hair with a brush, and crept down to breakfast.

Father, as usual, was immersed in the latest number of The London Philatelist , and seemed hardly to notice my arrival: a sure sign that another philatelic auction was about to take place. If our financial condition was as precarious as he claimed, he’d need to be sharp about current prices. As he ate, he made little notes on a napkin with the stub of a pencil, his mind in another world.

As I slipped into my chair, Feely fixed me with the cold and stony stare she had perfected by watching Queen Mary in the newsreels.

“You have a pimple on your face,” I said matter-of-factly as I poured milk on my Weetabix.

She pretended she didn’t hear me, but less than a minute later I was gratified to see her hand rise automatically to her cheek and begin its exploration. It was like watching a crab crawl slowly across the seabed in one of the full-colored short subjects at the cinema: The Living Ocean , or something like that.

“Careful, Feely!” I said. “It’s going to explode.”

Daffy looked up from her book—the copy of A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande I had found at the fête. She’d picked it up herself, the swine!

I made a note to steal it later.

“What does it mean where it says ‘a red herring without mustard’?” I asked, pointing.

Daffy loved the slightest opportunity to show off her superior knowledge.

I had already reviewed in my mind what I knew about mustard, which was precious little. I knew, for instance, that it contained, among other things, the acids oleic, erucic, behenic, and stearic. I knew that stearic acid was found in beef and mutton suet because I had once subjected one of Mrs. Mullet’s greasy Sunday roasts to chemical analysis, and I had looked up the fact that erucic acid gets its name from the Greek word meaning “to vomit.”

“Red herring, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was considered an inferior dish,” Daffy replied, with an especially withering look at me on the word “inferior.”

I glanced over at Father to see if he was looking, but he wasn’t.

“Nicholas Breton called it ‘a good gross dish for a coarse stomach,’ ” she went on, squirming and preening in her chair. “He also said that old ling—that’s another fish, in case you don’t know—is like ‘a blew coat without caugnisaunce,’ which means a servant who doesn’t wear his master’s badge of arms.”

“Daphne, please …” Father said, without looking up, and she subsided.

I knew that they were referring—over my head, they thought—to Dogger. Warfare at Buckshaw was like that: invisible and sometimes silent.

“Pass the toast, please,” Daffy said, as quietly and politely as if she were addressing a stranger in an A.B.C. tea shop: as if the last eleven years of my life hadn’t happened.

“They’re having a new badminton court at Fosters’,” Feely remarked suddenly to no one in particular. “Sheila’s going to use the old one to park her Daimler.”

Father grunted, but I could tell he was no longer listening.

“She’s such a saucy stick,” Feely went on. “She had Copley bring out little dishes of dessert onto the south lawn, but instead of ices she served snails— escargots ! We ate them raw, like oysters, as the cinema stars do. It was ever so amusing.”

“You’d better be careful,” I said. “The snail gatherers sometimes pick up leeches by mistake. If you swallow a leech, it will eat its way out of your stomach from the inside.”

Feely’s face drained slowly, like a washbasin.

“There was something in The Hinley Chronicle ,” I added helpfully, “three weeks ago, if I remember correctly, about a man from St. Elfrieda’s—not that far from here, really—who swallowed a leech and they had to—”

But Feely had scraped back her chair and fled.

“Are you provoking your sister again, Flavia,” Father asked, looking up from his journal, but leaving a forefinger on the page to mark his place.

“I was trying to discuss current events,” I said. “But she doesn’t seem much interested.”

“Ah,” Father said, and went back to reading about plate flaws in the 1840 tuppenny blue.

With Father present at the table, we were at least semi-civilized.

I made my escape with surprisingly little difficulty.

Mrs. Mullet was in the kitchen torturing the corpse of a chicken with a ball of butcher’s twine.

“No good roastin’ ’em ’less you truss properly,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Chadwick up at Norton Old Hall used to tell me, and she ought to know. She was the one that learned me—mind you that was back in the days of Lady Rex-Wells, long before you was born, dear. ‘Truss ’em up three-times-three,’ she used to say, ‘and you’ll never have to rake out your oven.’ What are you laughin’ at, miss?”

A nervous titter had escaped me as a sudden image—of being tied up in a similar way by my own flesh and blood—had flashed across my mind.

The very thought of it reminded me that I had not yet taken my revenge. Certainly, there had been my little leech joke, but that was a mere warm-up: no more than a prelude to vengeance. The fact was that I had simply been too busy.

As Mrs. M slid the doomed bird into the maw of the open Aga, I took the opportunity to pinch a pot of strawberry jam from the pantry.

“Three-times-three,” I said with an awful grimace and a horrid wink at Mrs. Mullet, as if I were giving the password of a secret society—one in which she and I were the only members. At the same time, I gave her a Winston Churchill “V for Victory” sign with my right hand, to divert attention from the jam jar in my left.

Safely back upstairs, I opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible. There was no need to disturb Porcelain. I would leave a note telling her that I’d be back later, and that was all. No need to say where I was going.

But no note was necessary: The bed was perfectly made and Porcelain was gone.

Confound her ! I thought. Hadn’t she understood that she was to keep to my room and out of sight? I thought I had made that perfectly clear, but perhaps I hadn’t.

Where was she now? Wandering the halls of Buckshaw—where she would surely be caught? Or had she returned to the caravan in the Palings?

I’d been intending to accompany her to the police station in Bishop’s Lacey so that she could make her presence known to Constable Linnet. By being on the spot, I’d be not only doing my duty, but putting myself in the perfect position to overhear anything that passed between Porcelain and the police. PC Linnet would, in turn, inform his superiors in Hinley, who would pass the word to Inspector Hewitt. And I’d be the recipient of his grateful thanks.

It could have been so simple. Damn the girl!

Back through the kitchen I trudged with a second-degree wink to Mrs. Mullet and a muttered “Three-times-three.”

Gladys was waiting by the garden wall and Dogger was in the greenhouse, intent upon his work.

But as I pedaled away, I was aware of his eyes upon my back.

Malden Fenwick lay to the east of Bishop’s Lacey, not far beyond Chipford.

Although I had never been there before, the place had a familiar look: and no wonder. “The Prettiest Village in England,” as it was sometimes called, had been photographed almost to distraction. Its Elizabethan and Georgian cottages, thatched and timbered, with their hollyhocks and diamond-paned windows, its duck pond and its tithe barn had appeared not just in hundreds of books and magazines, but as the setting for several popular films, such as Honey for Sale and Miss Jenks Goes to War .

“Trellis Terraces,” Daffy called it.

This was the place where Brookie Harewood’s mother lived and had her studio, although I hadn’t the faintest idea which of the cottages might be hers.

A green charabanc was parked in front of The Bull, its passengers spilling forth into the high street, cameras at the ready, fanning out in every direction with dangling arms, like a gaggle of gunfighters.

Several elderly villagers, caught out-of-doors in their gardens, began furtively fluffing up their hair or straightening their ties even as shutters began to click.

I parked Gladys against an ancient elm and walked round the coach.

“Good morning,” I said to a lady in a sun hat, as if I were helping to organize the tea. “Welcome to Malden Fenwick. And where are you from?”

“Oh, Mel,” she said, turning to a man behind her, “listen to her accent! Isn’t she adorable? We’re from Yonkers, New York, sweetheart. I’ll bet you don’t know where that is.”

As a matter of fact, I did: Yonkers was the home of Leo Baekeland, the Belgian chemist who had accidentally discovered polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride , better known as Bakelite, while working to produce a synthetic replacement for shellac which, until Baekeland came along, had been made from the secretions of the lac beetle.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I think I’ve heard of Yonkers.”

I attached myself to Mel, who was busily arming his camera as he strolled off towards a wash-painted cottage, dragging along behind him, with slack bones and downcast eyes, a sulking daughter who looked fed to the gills with transatlantic travel.

Shifting from foot to foot, I waited as he fired off a couple of shots of a white-haired woman in tweeds who was perched precariously on a ladder, deadheading a climbing rosebush.

As Mel wandered off in search of new memories, I lingered for a moment at the gate pretending to admire the garden and then, as if awakening from a partial trance, put on my best attempt at an American accent.

“Say,” I called out, pointing to the village green. “Isn’t this where whatsername lives? The painter lady?”

“Vanetta Harewood. Glebe Cottage,” the woman said cheerily, waving her secateurs. “Last one on the right.”

It was so easy I was almost ashamed of myself.

So that was her name: “Vanetta.” Vanetta Harewood. It certainly had the right ring to it for someone who painted the gentry with their hounds and horses.

Barging in on a freshly bereaved mother was not, perhaps, in the best of taste, but there were things I needed to know before the police knew them. I owed as much to Fenella Faa, and to a lesser degree, to my own family. Why, for instance, had I found Vanetta Harewood’s son in the drawing room at Buckshaw in the middle of the night, just before he was murdered?