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

“Free her, Garbax!”

“Yes, O Three-Eyed One.”

It sometimes amused my sisters to slip suddenly into the roles of bizarre alien creatures: creatures even more bizarre and alien than they were already in everyday life. Both of them knew it was a trick that for some reason I found particularly upsetting.

I had already learned that sisterhood, like Loch Ness, has things that lurk unseen beneath the surface, but I think it was only now that I realized that of all the invisible strings that tied the three of us together, the dark ones were the strongest.

“Stop it, Daffy. Stop it, Feely!” I shouted. “You’re frightening me.”

I gave my legs a couple of convincing froglike kicks, as if I were on the verge of a seizure.

The sack was suddenly whisked away, spinning me round so that I now lay facedown upon the stones.

A single candle, stuck to the top of a wooden cask, flickered fitfully, its pale light sending dark shapes dancing everywhere among the stone arches of the cellar.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw my sisters’ faces looming grotesquely in the shadows. They had drawn black circles round their eyes and their mouths with burnt cork, and I understood instantly the message that this was intended to convey: “Beware! You are in the hands of savages!”

Now I could see the cause of the distorted robot voice I had heard: Feely had been speaking into the mouth of an empty cocoa tin.

“ ‘French jet is nothing but glass,’ ” she spat, chucking the tin to the floor where it fell with a nerve-wracking clatter. “Your very words. What have you done with Mummy’s brooch?”

“It was an accident,” I whined untruthfully.

Feely’s frozen silence lent me a bit of confidence.

“I dropped it and stepped on it. If it were real jet it mightn’t have shattered.”

“Hand it over.”

“I can’t, Feely. There was nothing left but little chips. I melted them down for slag.”

Actually, I had hit the thing with a hammer and reduced it to black sand.

“Slag? Whatever do you want with slag?”

It would be a mistake to tell her that I was working on a new kind of ceramic flask, one that would stand up to the temperatures produced by a super-oxygenated Bunsen burner.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just mucking about.”

“Oddly enough, I believe you,” Feely said. “That’s what you pixy changelings do best, isn’t it? Muck about?”

My puzzlement must have been evident on my face.

“Changelings,” Daffy said in a weird voice. “The pixies come in the night and steal a healthy baby from its crib. They leave an ugly shriveled changeling like you in its place, and the mother desolate.”

“If you don’t believe it,” Feely said, “go stand in front of a looking glass.”

“I’m not a changeling,” I protested, my anger rising. “Harriet loved me more than she did either of you two morons!”

“Did she?” Feely sneered. “Then why did she used to leave you sleeping in front of an open window every night, hoping that the pixies would bring back the real Flavia?”

“She didn’t!” I shouted.

“I’m afraid she did. I was there. I saw. I remember.”

“No! It’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. I used to cling to her and cry, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Please make the pixies bring back my baby sister.’ ”

“Flavia? Daphne? Ophelia?”

It was Father!

His voice came at parade-square volume from the direction of the kitchen staircase, amplified by the stone walls and echoing from arch to arch.

All three of our heads snapped round just in time to see his boots, his trousers, his upper body, and finally his face come into sight as he descended the stairs.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, peering round at the three of us in the near-darkness. “What have you done to yourselves?”

With the backs of their hands and their forearms, Feely and Daffy were already trying to scrub the black markings from their faces.

“We were only playing Prawns and Trivets,” Daffy said before I could answer. She pointed accusingly at me. “She gives us jolly good what-for when it’s her turn to play the Begum, but when it’s ours she always …”

Well done, Daff , I thought. I couldn’t have concocted a better spur-of-the-moment excuse myself.

“I’m surprised at you, Ophelia,” Father said. “I shouldn’t have thought …”

And then he stopped, unable to find the required words. There were times when he seemed almost—what was it … afraid ? … of my oldest sister.

Feely rubbed at her face, smearing her cork makeup horribly. I nearly laughed out loud, but then I realized what she was doing. In a bid for sympathy, she was spreading the stuff to create dark, theatrical circles under her eyes.

The vixen! Like an actress applying her makeup onstage, it was a bold and brazen performance, which I couldn’t help admiring.

Father looked on in thrall, like a man fascinated by a cobra.

“Are you all right, Flavia?” he said at last, not budging from his position on the third step from the bottom.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

I was going to add “Thank you for asking” but I stopped myself just in time. I didn’t want to overdo it.

Father looked slowly from one of us to another with his sad eyes, as if there were no words left in the world from which to choose.

“There will be a parley at seven o’clock,” he said at last. “In the drawing room.”

With a final glance at each of us, he turned and trudged slowly up the stairs.

“The thing of it is,” Father was saying, “you girls just don’t seem to understand …”

And he was right: We no more understood his world than he did ours.

His was a world of confetti: a brightly colored universe of royal profiles and scenic views on sticky bits of paper; a world of pyramids and battleships, of rickety suspension bridges in far-flung corners of the globe, of deep harbors, lonely watchtowers, and the heads of famous men. In short, Father was a stamp collector, or a “philatelist,” as he preferred to call himself, and to be called by others.

His every waking moment was spent in peering through a magnifying lens at paper scraps in an eternal search for flaws. The discovery of a single microscopic crack in a printing plate, which had resulted in an unwanted hair on Queen Victoria’s chin, could send him into raptures.

First would come the official photograph, and elation. He would bring out of storage, and set up on its tripod in his study, an ancient plate camera with a peculiar attachment called a macroscopic lens, which allowed him to take a close-up of the specimen. This, when developed, would produce an image large enough to fill an entire page of a book. Sometimes, as he fussed happily over these operations, we would catch snatches of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Gondoliers drifting like fugitives through the house.

Then would come the written paper which he would submit to The London Philatelist or suchlike, and with it would come a certain crankiness. Every morning Father would bring to the breakfast table reams of writing paper which he would fill, page after laborious page, with his minuscule handwriting.

For weeks he would be unapproachable, and would remain so until such time as he had scribbled the last word—and more—on the topic of the queen’s superfluous whisker.

Once, when we were lying on the south lawn looking up into the blue vault of a perfect summer sky, I had suggested to Feely that Father’s quest for imperfections was not limited to stamps, but was sometimes expanded to include his daughters.

“Shut your filthy mouth!” she’d snapped.

“The thing of it is,” Father repeated, bringing me back to the present, “you girls don’t appear to understand the gravity of the situation.”