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

No good begging for help here , I thought. Mrs. Bull had made no bones about her hatred of the Gypsy.

Seizing a handful of Gry’s thick mane, I tugged at it gently. As if he had been trained from birth to this primitive means of control, the old horse slowed to a shamble. At the change of pace, one of his hooves struck a rock in the rutted road.

“Shhh!” I whispered into his ear. “Tiptoe!”

I knew that we had to keep moving. The Gypsy woman needed help desperately, and the Bulls’ was not the place to seek it.

A door banged as someone came out into the yard—on the far side of the house, by the sound of it.

Gry stopped instantly and refused to move. I wanted to whisper into his ear to keep going, that he was a good horse—a remarkable horse—yet I hardly dared breathe. But Gry stood as motionless in the lane as if he were a purebred pointer. Could it be that a Gypsy’s horse knew more about stealth than I did? Had years of traveling the unfriendly roads taught him more low cunning than even I possessed?

I made a note to think more about this when we were no longer in peril.

By the sound of it, the person in the yard was now rummaging through a lot of old pots, muttering to themselves whenever they stopped the clatter. The light from the house, I knew, would cast me into deeper darkness. Better, though, to make myself smaller and less visible than a rider on horseback.

I waited until the next round of banging began, and slipped silently to the ground. Using Gry as a shield, I kept well behind him so that my white face would not be spotted in the darkness.

When you’re in a predicament time slows to a crawl. I could not begin to guess how long we stood rooted to the spot in the lane; it was probably no more than a few minutes. But almost immediately I found myself shifting my weight uneasily from foot to foot and shivering in the gloom while Gry, the old dear, had apparently fallen asleep. He didn’t move a muscle.

And then the racket stopped abruptly.

Had the person in the garden sensed our presence? Were they lying in wait—ready to spring—on the far side of the house?

More time leaked past. I couldn’t move. My heart was pounding crazily in my chest. It seemed impossible that whoever was in the Bulls’ garden could fail to hear it.

They must be keeping still … listening, as I was.

Suddenly there came to my nostrils the sharp reek of a safety match; the unmistakeably acrid odor of phosphorus reacting with potassium chlorate. This was quickly followed by the smell of a burning cigarette.

I smiled. Mrs. Bull was taking a break from her brats.

But not for long. A door banged and a dark shape fluttered across behind one of the closed curtains.

Before I could talk myself out of it I began moving along the lane—slowly at first, and then more quickly. Gry walked quietly behind me. When we reached the trees at the far edge of the property, I scrambled up onto his back and urged him on.

“Dr. Darby’s surgery,” I said. “And make it snappy!”

As if he understood.

The surgery was situated in the high street, just round the corner from Cow Lane. I lifted the knocker—a brass serpent on a staff—and pounded at the door. Almost instantly, or so it seemed, an upstairs window flew open with a sharp wooden groan and Dr. Darby’s head appeared, his gray, wispy hair tousled from sleeping.

“The bell,” he said grumpily. “Please use the bell.”

I gave the button a token jab with my thumb, and somewhere in the depths of the house a muted buzzing went off.

“It’s the Gypsy woman,” I called up to him. “The one from the fête. I think someone’s tried to kill her.”

The window slammed shut.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute before the front door opened and Dr. Darby stepped outside, shrugging himself into his jacket. “My car’s in the back,” he said. “Come along.”

“But what about Gry?” I asked, pointing at the old horse, which stood quietly in the street.

“Bring him round to the stable,” he said. “Aesculapius will be glad of his company.”

Aesculapius was the ancient horse that had pulled Dr. Darby’s buggy until about ten years ago, when the doctor had finally caved in to pressure from patients and purchased a tired old bull-nosed Morris—an open two-seater that Daffy referred to as “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”

I hugged Gry’s neck as he sidled into the stall with an almost audible sigh.

“Quickly,” Dr. Darby said, tossing his bag into the back of the car.

A few moments later we were veering off the high street and into the Gully.

“The Palings, you said?”

I nodded, hanging on for dear life. Once, I fancied I caught Dr. Darby stealing a glance at my bloody hands in the dim light of the instrument panel, but whatever he might have been thinking, he kept it to himself.

We rocketed along the narrow lane, the Morris’s headlamps illuminating the green tunnel of the trees and hedgerows with bounces of brightness. We sped past the Bulls’ place so quickly that I almost missed it, although my mind did manage to register the fact that the house was now in total darkness.

As we shot across the little stone bridge and into the grove, the Morris nearly became airborne, then bounced heavily on its springs as Dr. Darby brought it to a skidding halt just inches from the Gypsy’s caravan. Even in the dark his knowledge of Bishop’s Lacey’s lanes and byways was remarkable, I thought.

“Stay here,” he barked. “If I need you, I’ll call.” He threw open the driver’s door, walked briskly round the caravan, and was gone.

Alone in the darkness, I gave an involuntary shiver.

To be perfectly honest, my stomach was a bit queasy. I don’t mind death, but injury makes me nervous. It would all depend upon what Dr. Darby found inside the caravan.

I shifted restlessly in the Morris, trying to sift through these rather unexpected feelings. Was the Gypsy woman dead? The thought that she might be was appalling.

Although Death and I were not exactly old friends, we did have a nodding acquaintance. Twice before in my life I had encountered corpses, and each one had given me—

“Flavia!” The doctor was at the caravan’s door. “Fetch a screwdriver. It’s in the tool kit in the boot.”

A screwdriver ? What kind of—

It was perhaps just as well that my speculations were interrupted.

“Quickly. Bring it here.”

At any other time I might have balked at his insolence in ordering me about like a lackey, but I bit my tongue. In fact, I even forgave him a little.

As Dr. Darby began loosening the screws of the door hinges, I couldn’t help thinking what remarkably strong hands he had for an older man. If he hadn’t used them to save lives, he might have made a wizard carpenter.

“Unscrew the last few,” he said. “I’ll take the weight of the door. That’s it … good girl.”

Even without knowing what we were doing, I was his willing slave.

As we worked, I caught glimpses of the Gypsy beyond, in the caravan’s interior. Dr. Darby had lifted her from the floor to her bed where she lay motionless, her head wrapped in surgical gauze. I could not tell if she was dead or alive and it seemed awkward to ask.

At last the door came free of the frame, and for an instant, Dr. Darby held it in front of him like a shield. The image of a crusader crossed my mind.

“Easy now—put it down here.”

He maneuvered the heavy panel carefully onto the caravan’s floor, where it fit with not an inch to spare between the stove and the upholstered seats. Then, plucking two pillows from the bed, he placed them lengthwise on the door, before wrapping the Gypsy in a sheet and ever so gently lifting her from the bunk onto the makeshift stretcher.