Flavia de Luce 1 - The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie (16 page)

I was seized with a sudden idea: How many miles was it to Hinley? Could I reach there before dark? And even if I did, would I be allowed to see him?

My heart began to pound as if someone had slipped me a cup of foxglove tea.

Time to go. I had been here long enough. I glanced at the bedside clock—3:40, it now said. The chimneypiece clock ticked solemnly on, its hands at 3:37.

Father must have been too distraught to notice, I supposed, since generally, when it came to the time of day, he was a martinet. I remembered his way of giving orders to Dogger (although not to us) in military fashion:

“Take the gladioli along to the Vicar at thirteen hundred hours, Dogger,” he'd say. "He'll be expecting you. Be back by thirteen forty-five and we'll decide what to do with the duckweed.”

I stared at the two clocks, hoping that something would come to me. Father had told us once, in one of his rare expansive moods, that what made him fall in love with Harriet was her ability to cogitate. “Remarkable thing in a woman, really, when you come to think of it,” he had said.

And suddenly I saw. One of his clocks had been stopped—stopped for precisely three minutes. The clock on the chimneypiece.

I moved slowly towards it, as one would stalk a bird. Its dark funereal case gave it the look of a Victorian horse-drawn hearse: all knobs and glass and black shellac.

I saw my hand reaching out, small and white in the shadowed room; felt my fingers touch its cold face; felt my thumb pop open the silver catch. Now the brass pendulum was right at my fingertips, swinging to and fro, to and fro with its ghastly tock-tocking. I was almost afraid to touch the thing. I took a deep breath and grabbed the pulsing pendulum. Its inertia made it squirm heavily in my hand for a moment, like a goldfish suddenly seized; like the telltale heart before it fell still.

I felt round the back of the weighted brass. Something was fastened there; something taped behind it: a tiny packet. I pulled at it with my fingers, felt it come free and drop into my hand. Even as I withdrew my fingers from the clock's internal organs I guessed what I was about to see… and I was right. There in my palm lay a little glassine envelope inside which, clearly visible, was a Penny Black postage stamp. A Penny Black with a hole in its center, such as might have been produced by the bill of a dead jack snipe. What was there about it that had frightened Father so?

I fished the stamp out for a better look. In the first place, there was Queen Victoria with a hole in her head. Unpatriotic, perhaps, but hardly enough to shake a grown man to his roots. No, there must be more.

What was it that set this stamp apart from any other of its kind? After all, hadn't the things been printed by the tens of millions, and all of them alike? Or were they?

I thought of the time that Father—in the interests of broadening our outlook—had suddenly announced that Wednesday evenings would henceforth be given over to a series of compulsory lectures (delivered by him) on various aspects of British Government. “Series A,” as he called it, was to be, predictably enough, on the topic “The History of the Penny Post.”

Daffy, Feely, and I had all brought notebooks to the drawing room and pretended to take notes while passing scraps of paper back and forth with scribbled messages to one another such as “Stamp Out Lectures” and “Let's Lick Boredom!”

Postage stamps, Father had explained, were printed in sheets of two hundred and forty; twenty horizontal rows of twelve, which was easy enough for me to remember since 20 is the atomic number for Calcium and 12 the number for Magnesium—all I had to do was think of CaMg. Each stamp on the sheet carried a unique two-letter identifier beginning with “AA” on the upper left stamp and progressing alphabetically from left to right until “TL” was reached at the right end of the twentieth, or bottom, row.

This scheme, Father told us, had been implemented by the Post Office to prevent forgeries, although it was not perfectly clear how this was to work. There had been rampant paranoia, he said, that dens of forgers would be toiling away day and night, from Land's End to John o'Groats, producing copies to bilk Her Victorian Majesty out of a penny per time.

I looked closely at the stamp in my hand. At the bottom, below Queen Victoria's head, was written its value: ONE PENNY. To the left of these words was the letter B, to their right, the letter H.

It looked like this: B  ONE PENNY.  H

“BH.” The stamp had come from the second row on the printed sheet, eighth column to the right. Two-eight. Was that significant? Aside from the fact that 28 was the atomic number for Nickel, I could think of nothing.

And then I saw it! It wasn't a number at all: It was a word!

Bonepenny! Not just Bonepenny, but Bonepenny, H.! Horace Bonepenny!

Impaled on the jack snipe's bill (Yes! Father's schoolboy nickname had been “Jacko”!), the stamp had served as calling card and death threat. A threat that Father had taken in and understood at first glance.

The bird's bill had pierced the Queen's head, but left the name of its sender in clear view for anyone who had the eyes to see.

Horace Bonepenny. The late Horace Bonepenny.

I returned the stamp to its hiding place.

AT THE TOP OF THE HILL, a rotted wooden post—all that remained of an eighteenth-century gibbet—pointed two fingers in opposing directions. I could reach Hinley, I knew, by either taking the road to Doddingsley, or by following a somewhat longer, less traveled road that would take me through the village of St. Elfrieda's. The former would get me there more quickly; the latter, being more sparsely traveled, would offer less risk of being spotted in case someone reported me missing.

“Har-har-har!” I said, with vast irony. Who could care enough?

Still, I took the road to the right and pointed Gladys towards St. Elfrieda's. It was downhill all the way, and I made good speed. When I back pedaled, the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub on Gladys's rear wheel gave off a noise like a den of enraged, venom-dripping rattlesnakes. I pretended they were right there behind me, striking at my heels. It was glorious! I hadn't felt in such fine form since the day I first produced, by successive extraction and evaporation, a synthetic curare from the bog arum in the Vicar's lily pond.

I put my feet up on the handlebars and gave Gladys her head. As we shot down the dusty hill, I yodeled a song into the wind:

"'They call her the lass

With the delicate air!…’”

AT THE BOTTOM OF OAKSHOTT HILL I SUDDENLY thought of Father and sadness came creeping back. Did they honestly believe he had murdered Horace Bonepenny? And if so, how? If Father had murdered him beneath my bedroom window, the deed had been done in utter silence. I could hardly imagine Father killing someone without raising his voice.

But before I could speculate further, the road leveled out before twisting off to Cottesmore and to Doddingsley Magna. In the shade of an ancient oak was a bus stop bench, upon which sat a familiar figure: an ancient gnome in plus fours, looking like a George Bernard Shaw who had shrunk in the wash. He sat there so placidly, his feet dangling four inches above the ground, that he might have been born on the bench and lived there all his life.

It was Maximilian Brock, one of our Buckshaw neighbors, and I prayed he hadn't seen me. It was whispered in Bishop's Lacey that Max, retired from the world of music, was now earning a secret living by writing—under feminine pseudonyms (such as Lala Dupree)—scandalous stories for American magazines with titles like Confidential Confessions and Red Hot Romances.

Because of the way he pried into the affairs of everyone he met, then spun what he was told in confidence into news-seller's gold, Max was called, at least behind his back, “The Village Pump.” But as Feely's one time piano teacher, he was someone whom I could not politely ignore.

I pulled off into the shallow ditch, pretending I hadn't seen him as I fiddled with Gladys's chain. With any luck, he'd keep looking the other way and I could hide out behind the hedge until he was gone.

“Flavia! Haroo, mon vieux.”

Curses! I'd been spotted. To ignore a “haroo” from Maximilian—even one from a bus stop bench—was to ignore the eleventh commandment. I pretended I had just noticed him, and laid on a bogus grin as I wheeled Gladys towards him through the weeds.

Maximilian had lived for many years in the Channel Islands, where he had been pianist with the Alderney Symphony, a position—he said—which required a great deal of patience and a good supply of detective novels.

On Alderney, it was only necessary (or so he had told me once while chatting about crime, at St. Tancred's annual Flower Show), in order to bring down the full power of the law, to stand in the middle of the town square and cry “Haroo, haroo, mon prince. On me fait tort!“ This was called the ”hue and cry,“ and meant, in essence, ”Attention, my Prince, someone is torting me!” Or, in other words, committing a crime against me.

“And how are you, my little pelican?” Max asked, canting his head like a magpie awaiting a crumb of response even before it was offered.

“I'm all right,” I said warily, remembering that Daffy had once told me that Max was like one of those spiders that paralyzed you with a bite, and didn't quit until he had sucked the last drop of juice from your life—and from the life of your family.

“And your father, the good Colonel?”

“He's keeping busy, what with one thing and another,” I said. I felt my heart give a flip-flop in my breast.

“That Miss Ophelia, now,” he asked. “Is she still painting her face like Jezebel and admiring herself in the tea service?”

This was too close to home, even for me. It was none of his business, but I knew that Maximilian could fly into a towering rage at the drop of a hat. Feely sometimes referred to him behind his back as “Rumpelstiltskin,” and Daffy as “Alexander Pope—or lower.”

Still, I had found Maximilian, in spite of his repellent habits, and perhaps because of our similarity in stature, occasionally to be an interesting and informative conversationalist—just so long as you didn't mistake his diminutive size for weakness.

“She's very well, thank you,” I said. “Her complexion was quite lovely this morning.”

I did not add “maddeningly.”

“Max,” I asked, before he could wedge in another question, “do you think I could ever learn to play that little toccata by Paradisi?”

“No,” he said, without an instant's hesitation. “Your hands are not the hands of a great artist. They are the hands of a poisoner.”

I grinned. This was our little joke. And it was obvious that he had not yet learned of the murder at Buckshaw.

“And the other one?” he asked. “Daphne. the slow sister?”

“Slow” was a reference to Daffy's prowess, or lack of it, at the piano: an endless, painful quest to place unwilling fingers upon keys that seemed to shy away from her touch. Daffy's battle with the instrument was one of the hen pitted against the fox, a losing battle that always ended in tears. And yet, because Father insisted upon it, the war went on.

One day when I found her sobbing on the bench with her head on the closed piano lid, I had whispered, “Give it up, Daff,” and she had flown at me like a fighting cock.

I had even tried encouragement. Whenever I heard her at the Broadwood, I would drift into the drawing room, lean against the piano, and gaze off into the distance as if her playing had enchanted me. Usually she ignored me, but once when I said, “What a lovely piece that is! What's it called?” she had almost slammed the lid on my fingers.

“The scale of G major!” she had shrieked, and fled the room.

Buckshaw was not an easy place in which to live.

“She's well,” I said. “Reading Dickens like billy-ho. Can't get a word out of her.”

“Ah,” Maximilian said. “Dear old Dickens.”

He didn't seem to be able to think of anything further on that topic, and I dived into the momentary silence.

“Max,” I said. “You're a man of the world—”

At this he preened himself, and puffed up to whatever little height he could muster.

“Not just a man of the world—a boulevardier,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said, wondering what the word meant. “Have you ever visited Stavanger?” It would save me looking it up in the atlas.

“What? Stavanger in Norway?”

“SNAP!” I almost shouted aloud. Horace Bonepenny had been in Norway! I took a deep breath to recover myself, hoping it would be mistaken for impatience.

“Of course in Norway,” I said condescendingly. “Are there other Stavangers?”

For a moment I thought he was onto me. His eyes narrowed and I felt a chill as the thunderclouds of a Maximilian tantrum blew across the sun. But then he gave a tiny giggle, like springwater gurgling into a glass.

“Stavanger is the first stepping-stone on the Road to Hell. which is a railway station,” he said. "I traveled over it to Trondheim, and then on to Hell, which, believe it or not, is a very small village in Norway, from which tourists often dispatch picture postcards to their friends with the message, 'Wish you were here!' and where I performed Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor. Grieg, incidentally, was as much a Scot as a Norwegian. Grandfather from Aberdeen, left in disgust after Culloden—must have had second thoughts, though, when he realized he'd done no more than trade the firths for the fjords.

"Trondheim was a great success, I must say. critics kind, public polite. But those people, they never understand their own music, you know. Played Scarlatti as well, to bring a glimpse of Italian sunshine to those snowy northern climes. Still, at the intermission I happened to hear a commercial traveler from Dublin whispering to a friend, ‘It's all Grieg to me, Thor.’”

I smiled dutifully, although I had heard this ancient jest about forty-five times before.

“That was in the old days, of course, before the war. Stavanger! Yes, of course I've been there. But why do you ask?”

“How did you get there? By ship?”

Horace Bonepenny had been alive in Stavanger and now he was dead in England and I wanted to know where he had been in between.

“Of course by ship. You're not thinking of running away from home, are you, Flavia?”