Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Just suppose she wanted to see you but her father wouldn't allow it. Suppose one of her younger sisters could help."

Already his ruddy crop was subsiding. I thought he was going to cry.

"Do you mean it, Flavia?"

"Honest Injun," I said.

Ned stuck out his calloused fingers and gave my hand a surprisingly gentle shake. It was like shaking hands with a pineapple.

"Fingers of Friendship," he said, whatever that meant.

Fingers of Friendship? Had I just been given the secret handshake of some rustic brotherhood that met in moonlit churchyards and hidden copses? Was I now inducted, and would I be expected to take part in unspeakably bloody midnight rituals in the hedgerows? It seemed like an interesting possibility.

Ned was grinning at me like the skull on a Jolly Roger. I took the upper hand.

"Listen," I told him. "Lesson Number One: Don't leave dead birds on the loved one's doorstep. It's something that only a courting cat would do."

Ned looked blank.

"I've left flowers once or twice, hopin' she'd notice," he said. This was news to me; Ophelia must have whisked the bouquets off to her boudoir for mooning purposes before anyone else in the household spotted them.

"But dead birds? Never. You know me, Flavia. I wouldn't do a thing like that."

When I stopped to think about it for a moment, I knew that he was right; I did and he wouldn't. My next question, though, turned out to be sheer luck.

"Does Mary Stoker know you're sweet on Ophelia?" It was a phrase I had picked up at the cinema from some American film— Meet Me in St. Louis or Little Women —and this was the first opportunity I'd ever had to make use of it. Like Daphne, I remembered words, but without an account book to jot them down.

"What's Mary have to do with it? She's Tully's daughter, and there's an end of it."

"Come off it, Ned," I said. "I saw that kiss this morning as I was. passing by."

"She needed a little comfort. 'Twas no more than that."

"Because of whoever it was that crept up behind her?"

Ned leapt to his feet. “Damn you!” he said. “She don't want that getting out.”

"As she was changing the sheets?"

"You're a devil, Flavia de Luce!" Ned roared. "Get away from me! Go home!"

"Tell her, Ned," said a quiet voice, and I turned to see Mary at the door.

She stood with one hand flat on the doorpost, the other clutching her blouse at the neck like Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Close up, I could see that she had raw red hands and a decided squint.

"Tell her," she repeated. "It can't make any difference to you now, can it?"

I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.

"Go on, tell her!" Mary shouted.

Ned swallowed hard and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

"You're Flavia de Luce, aren't you?" she said. "One of that lot from up at Buckshaw." She flung it at me like a pie in the face.

I nodded dumbly, as if I were some inbred ingrate from the squire's estate who needed coddling. Better to play along, I thought.

"Come with me," Mary said, beckoning. "Be quick about it—and keep quiet."

I followed her into a dark stone larder, and then into an enclosed wooden staircase that spiraled precipitously up to the floor above. At the top, we stepped out into what must once have been a linen press: a tall square cupboard now filled with shelves of cleaning chemicals, soaps, and waxes. In the corner, mops and brooms leaned in disarray amid an overwhelming smell of carbolic disinfectant.

"Shhh!" she said, giving my arm a vicious squeeze. Heavy footsteps were approaching, coming up the same staircase we had just ascended. We pressed back into a corner, taking care not to knock over the mops.

"That'll be the bloody day, sir, when a Cotswold horse takes the bloody purse! If I was you I'd take a flutter on Seastar, and be damned to any tips you get from some bloody skite in London what don't know his ark from his halo!"

It was Tully, exchanging confidential turf tips with someone at a volume loud enough to be heard at Epsom Downs. Another voice muttered something that ended in “Haw-haw!” as the sound of their footsteps faded away in the warren of paneled passages.

"No, this way," Mary hissed, tugging at my arm. We slipped round the corner and into a narrow corridor. She pulled a set of keys from her pocket and quietly unlocked the last door on the left. We stepped inside.

We were in a room which had not likely changed since Queen Elizabeth visited Bishop's Lacey in 1592 on one of her summer progresses. My first impressions were of a timbered ceiling, plastered panels, a tiny window with leaded panes standing ajar for air, and broad floorboards that rose and fell like the ocean swell.

Against one wall was a chipped wooden table with an ABC Railway Guide (October 1946) shoved under one leg to keep it from teetering. On the tabletop were an unmatched Staffordshire pitcher and ewer in pink and cream, a comb, a brush, and a small black leather case. In a corner near the open window stood a single piece of luggage: a cheap-looking steamer trunk of vulcanized fiber, plastered over with colored stickers. Beside it was a straight chair with a missing spindle. Across the room stood a wooden wardrobe of jumble-sale quality. And the bed.

"This is it," Mary said. As she locked us in, I turned to look at her closely for the first time. In the gray dishwater light from the sooty windowpanes, she looked older, harder, and more brittle than the raw-handed girl I had just seen in the bright sunlight of the inn yard.

"I expect you've never been in a room this small, have you?" she said scornfully. "You lot at Buckshaw fancy the odd visit to Bedlam, don't you? See the loonies—see how we live in our cages. Throw us a biscuit."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

Mary turned her face towards me so that I was receiving the full intensity of her glare. “That sister of yours—that Ophelia—sent you with a message for Ned, and don't tell me she didn't. She fancies I'm some kind of slattern, and I'm not.”

And in that instant I decided that I liked Mary, even if she didn't like me. Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

"Listen," I said, "there's no message. What I said to Ned was strictly for cover. You have to help me, Mary. I know you will. There's been a murder at Buckshaw."

There! I'd said it!

". and nobody knows it yet but you and me—except the murderer, of course."

She looked at me for no more than three seconds and then she asked, “Who is it that's dead, then?”

"I don't know. That's why I'm here. But it makes sense to me that if someone turns up dead in the cucumbers, and even the police don't know who he is, the most likely place he'd be staying in the neighborhood— if he was staying in the neighborhood—is right here at the Thirteen Drakes. Can you bring me the register?”

"Don't need to bring it to you," Mary said. "There's only one guest right now, and that's Mr. Sanders."

The more I talked to Mary the more I liked her.

"And this here's his room," she added helpfully.

"Where is he from?" I asked.

Her face clouded. “I don't know, rightly.”

"Has he ever stopped here before?"