Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (37 page)

He did? This was something new.

“And no sooner had he done so, than along came Flavia. I had more confessions walking in the door than Our Lady of Lourdes on a Saturday night.”

“I was just trying to protect him,” I said. “At that point, I thought he might have done it.”

"And whom was he trying to protect?” Inspector Hewitt asked, watching me carefully.

The answer, of course, was Dogger. That was what Father meant when he said “I feared as much” after I told him that Dogger, too, had overheard the scene in his study with Horace Bonepenny.

Father thought Dogger had killed the man; that much was clear. But why? Would Dogger have done it out of loyalty—or during one of his peculiar turns?

No—best to leave Dogger out of this. It was the least I could do.

“Probably me,” I lied. “Father thought I had killed Bonepenny. After all, wasn't I the one who was found, so to speak, at the scene of the crime? He was trying to protect me.”

“Do you really believe that?” the Inspector asked.

“It would be lovely to think so,” I said.

“I'm sure he was,” the Inspector said. "I'm quite sure he was. Now then, back to the stamp. I haven't forgotten about it, you know.”

“Well, as I was saying, I'd like to do something for Father; something that will make him happy, even for a few hours. I'd like to give him the Ulster Avenger, even if it's only for a day or two. Let me do that, and I'll tell you everything I know. I promise.”

The Inspector strolled over to the bookcase, fetched down a bound volume of the Proceedings of the Chemical Society for 1907, and blew a cloud of dust from the top of the spine. He leafed idly through its pages, as if looking for what to say next.

“You know,” he said, "there is nothing my wife, Antigone, detests more than shopping. She told me once that she'd rather have a tooth filled than spend half an hour shopping for a leg of mutton. But shop she must, like it or not. It's her fate, she says. To dull the experience, she sometimes buys a little yellow booklet called You and Your Stars.

“I have to admit that up until now I've scoffed at some of the things she's read out to me at breakfast, but this morning my horoscope said, and I quote, 'Your patience will be tried to the utmost.' Do you suppose I could have been misjudging these things, Flavia?”

“Please!” I said, giving the word a gimlet twist.

“Twenty-four hours,” he said, “and not a minute more.”

And suddenly it all came gushing out, and I found myself babbling on about the dead jack snipe, Mrs. Mullet's really quite innocent (although inedible) custard pie, my rifling of Bonepenny's room at the inn, my finding of the stamps, my visits to Miss Mountjoy and Dr. Kissing, my encounters with Pemberton at the Folly and in the churchyard, and my captivity in the Pit Shed.

The only part I left out was the bit about my poisoning Feely's lipstick with an extract of poison ivy. Why confuse the Inspector with unnecessary details?

As I spoke, he made an occasional scribble in a little black notebook, whose pages, I noticed, were filled with arrows and cryptic signs that might have been inspired by an alchemical formulary of the Middle Ages.

“Am I in that?” I asked, pointing.

“You are,” he said.

“May I have a look? Just a peek?”

Inspector Hewitt flipped the notebook shut. “No,” he said. “It's a confidential police document.”

“Do you actually spell out my name, or am I represented by one of those symbols?”

“You have your very own symbol,” he said, shoving the book into his pocket. “Well, it's time I was getting along.”

He stuck out a hand and gave me a firm handshake. “Good-bye, Flavia,” he said. “It's been… something of an experience.”

He went to the door and opened it.

“Inspector.”

He stopped and turned.

“What is it? My symbol, I mean.”

"It's a P,” he said. “Capital P.”

"A P?” I asked, surprised. “What does P stand for?”

“Ah,” he said, “that's best left to the imagination.”

DAFFY WAS IN THE DRAWING ROOM, sprawled full-length on the carpet, reading The Prisoner of Zenda.

“Are you aware that you move your lips when you read?” I asked.

She ignored me. I decided to risk my life.

“Speaking of lips,” I said, “where's Feely?”

“At the doctor's,” she said. “She had some kind of allergic outbreak. Something she came in contact with.”

Aha! My experiment had succeeded brilliantly! No one would ever know. As soon as I had a moment to myself, I'd record it in my notebook:

I let out a quiet snort. Daffy must have heard it, for she rolled over and crossed her legs.

“Don't think for a moment you've got away with it,” she said quietly.

“Huh?” I said. Innocent puzzlement was my specialty.

“What witch's brew did you put in her lipstick?”

“I haven't the faintest what you're talking about,” I said.

“Have a peek at yourself in the looking-glass,” Daffy said. “Watch you don't break it.”

I turned and went slowly to the chimneypiece where a cloudy leftover from the Regency period hung sullenly reflecting the room.

I bent closer, peering at my image. At first I saw nothing other than my usual brilliant self, my violet eyes, my pale complexion: but as I stared, I began to notice more details in the ravaged mercury reflection.

There was a splotch on my neck. An angry red splotch! Where Feely had kissed me!

I let out a shriek of anguish.

“Feely said that before she'd been in the pit five seconds she'd paid you back in full.”

Even before Daffy rolled over and went back to her stupid sword story, I had come up with a plan.

ONCE, WHEN I WAS ABOUT NINE, I had kept a diary about what it was like to be a de Luce, or at least what it was like to be this particular de Luce. I thought a great deal about how I felt and finally came to the conclusion that being Flavia de Luce was like being a sublimate: like the black crystal residue that is left on the cold glass of a test tube by the violet fumes of iodine. At the time, I thought it the perfect description, and nothing has happened over the past two years to change my mind.

As I have said, there is something lacking in the de Luces: some chemical bond, or lack of it, that ties their tongues whenever they are threatened by affection. It is as unlikely that one de Luce would ever tell another that she loved her as it is that one peak in the Himalayas would bend over and whisper sweet nothings to an adjacent crag.

This point was proven when Feely stole my diary, pried open the brass lock with a can opener from the kitchen, and read aloud from it while standing at the top of the great staircase dressed in clothing she had stolen from a neighbor's scarecrow.

These thoughts were in my mind as I approached the door of Father's study. I paused, unsure of myself. Did I really want to do this?

I knocked uncertainly on the door. There was a long silence before Father's voice said, “Come.”

I twisted the knob and stepped into the room. At a table by the window, Father looked up for a moment from his magnifying lens, and then went on with his examination of a magenta stamp.

“May I speak?” I asked, aware, even as I said it, that it was an odd thing to be saying, and yet it seemed precisely the right choice of words.

Father put down the glass, removed his spectacles, and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of blue writing paper into which I had folded the Ulster Avenger. I stepped forward like a supplicant, put the paper on his desk, and stepped back again.

Father opened it.

“Good Lord!” he said. “It's AA.”

He put his spectacles back on and picked up his jeweler's loupe to peer at the stamp.

Now, I thought, comes my reward. I found myself focused on his lips, waiting for them to move.

“Where did you get this?” he said at last, in that soft voice of his that fixes its hearer like a butterfly on a pin.

“I found it,” I said.

Father's gaze was military—unrelenting.

“Bonepenny must have dropped it,” I said. “It's for you.”

Father studied my face the way an astronomer studies a supernova.

“This is very decent of you, Flavia,” he said at last, with some great effort.

And he handed me the Ulster Avenger.

“You must return it at once to its rightful owner.”

“King George?”

Father nodded, somewhat sadly, I thought. “I don't know how you came to have this in your possession and I don't want to know. You've come this far on your own and now you must see it through.”

“Inspector Hewitt wants me to hand it over to him.” Father shook his head. “Most kind of him,” he said, “but also most official. No, Flavia, old AA here has been through many hands in its day, a few of them high and many low. You must see to it that your hands are the most worthy of them all.”

“But how does one go about writing to the King?”

“I'm sure you'll find a way,” Father said. “Please close the door on your way out.”

AS IF TO COVER UP THE PAST, Dogger was shoveling muck from a wheelbarrow into the cucumber bed.

“Miss Flavia,” he said, removing his hat and wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve.

“How should one address a letter to the King?” I asked.

Dogger leaned his shovel carefully against the greenhouse.

“Theoretically, or in actual practice?”

“In actual practice.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I think I should look it up somewhere.”

“Hold on,” I said. "Mrs. Mullet's Inquire Within Upon Everything. She keeps it in the pantry.”

“She's shopping in the village,” Dogger said. “If we're quick about it, we may well escape with our lives.”

A minute later we were huddled in the pantry.

“Here it is,” I said excitedly, as the book fell open in my hands. “But wait—this was published sixty years ago. Would it still be correct?”

“Sure to be,” Dogger said. “Things don't change as quickly in royal circles as they do in yours and mine, nor should they.”

The drawing room was empty. Daffy and Feely were off somewhere, most likely planning their next attack.

I found a decent sheet of writing paper in a drawer, and then, dipping the pen in the inkwell, I copied out the salutation from Mrs. Mullet's greasy book, trying to make my handwriting as neat as possible:

“Apprehended,” Dogger said, reading over my shoulder.

I changed it.

“What else?”

“Nothing,” Dogger said. “Just sign it. Kings prefer brevity.”

Being careful not to blot the page, I copied the closing from the book:

“Perfect!” Dogger said.

I folded the letter neatly, making an extra-sharp crease with my thumb. I slipped it into one of Father's best envelopes and wrote the address:

“Shall I mark it Personal?”

“Good idea,” Dogger said.

A WEEK LATER, I was cooling my bare feet in the waters of the artificial lake, revising my notes on coniine, the chief alkaloid in poison hemlock, when Dogger appeared suddenly, waving something in his hand.

“Miss Flavia!” he called, and then he waded across to the island, boots and all.

His trouser legs were soaking wet, and although he stood there dripping like Poseidon, his grin was as bright as the summer afternoon.

He handed me an envelope that was as soft and white as goose down.

“Shall I open it?” I asked.

“I believe it's addressed to you.”

Dogger winced as I tore open the flap and pulled out the single sheet of creamy paper which lay folded inside:

And it was signed simply “George.”

Whenever I pick up a new book, I always turn to the acknowledgments first because they provide me with a sort of aerial photograph of the work: a large-scale map that shows something of the wider environment in which the book was written, where it has been, and how it came to be.

No work-in-progress was ever more kindly nurtured than The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and it gives me tremendous pleasure to express my gratitude to the Crime Writers' Association and the panel of judges who chose the book for the Debut Dagger Award: Philip Gooden, chair of the CWA; Margaret Murphy; Emma Hargrave; Bill Massey; Sara Menguc; Keshini Naidoo; and Sarah Turner.

Additional and special thanks are due to Margaret Murphy, who not only chaired the Debut Dagger Awards Committee, but also stole time from her own hectic schedule on awards day to personally welcome a wandering alien to London.

To Meg Gardiner, Chris High, and Ann Cleeves for making me feel as if I'd known them all my life.

To Louise Penny, a Dagger winner herself, whose warm generosity and encouragement is exemplified in the beacon her website has become for aspiring writers. Louise truly knows how to “give back” for the things she has received. Besides that, her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels are simply terrific!

To my agent, Denise Bukowski, for flying the Atlantic to be there and, in spite of my jet lag, for getting me to the church on time.

Again, to Bill Massey, of Orion Books, who had faith enough to buy the novel—and the series—on the strength of that first handful of pages, and for treating me to a memorable lunch at the onetime Bucket of Blood, in Covent Garden, the very spot where the poet and critic John Dryden was set upon by ruffians in a passageway. No one has ever been blessed with a better editor than Bill. He is truly a kindred spirit!

To Kate Miciak and Molly Boyle, of Bantam Dell in New York, and Kristin Cochrane of Doubleday Canada, for their early faith and encouragement.

Special thanks to Janet Cooke, vice president, director of sales, the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, whose enthusiasm has contributed so much to the world of Flavia de Luce.

To Robyn Karney and Connie Munro, copy editors at Orion Books and at Bantam Dell, respectively, for their excellent and perceptive suggestions. And to Emma Wallace and Genevieve Pegg, also at Orion Books, for their enthusiastic and friendly welcome.

To the helpful and friendly staff of the British Postal Museum and Archive, at Freeling House, Phoenix Place, London, for so cheerfully answering my questions and allowing me access to materials in their care relating to the history of the Penny Black.