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.