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

Just above these was Hydraulicks and Hydrostaticks, a relic, no doubt, of Lucius “Leaking” de Luce. I pulled the book from the shelf and opened it. Sure enough, there was Lucius’s bookplate: the de Luce family crest, with his name written beneath it in a surprisingly childish hand. Had he owned the book when he was a boy?

The title page was almost completely covered with dense, inky calculations: sums, angles, algebraic equations, all of them more hurried than neat, crabbed, cramped, and rushing across the page. The entire book was somewhat rippled, as if it had once been wet.

A folded paper had been inserted between the pages which, when I opened it out flat, proved to be a hand-drawn map—but a map unlike any I had ever seen before.

Scattered upon the page were circles of various sizes, each joined to the others by lines, some of which radiated directly to their targets, while others followed more rectangular and roundabout paths. Some of the lines were thick; some thin. Some were single; others double; and a few were shaded in various schemes of cross-hatching.

At first I thought it was a railway map, so dense were the tracks—perhaps an ambitious expansion scheme for the nearby Buckshaw Halt, where trains had once stopped to put down guests and unload goods for the great house.

Only when I recognized the shape at the bottom of the map as the ornamental lake, and the unmistakeable outline of Buckshaw itself, did I realize that the document was, in fact, not a map at all, but a diagram: Lucius “Leaking” de Luce’s plan for his subterranean hydraulic operations.

Interesting, I thought, but only vaguely. I shoved the paper into my pocket for future reference and resumed my search for books that might contain some mention of the Hobblers.

Sermons for Sailors; God’s Plan for the Indies; Remains of Alexander Knox, Esq.

And suddenly there it was: English Dissenters.

I must say—it was an eye-opener!

I suppose I had been expecting a dry-as-dust account of hellfire parsons and dozing parishioners. But what I had stumbled upon was a treasure trove of jealousy, backbiting, vanity, abductions, harrowing midnight escapes, hangings, mutilations, betrayal, and sorcery.

Wherever there had been savage bloodshed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English history, there was sure to have been a Dissenter at the heart of it. I made a note to take some of these volumes up to my bedroom for a bit of horrific bedtime reading. They would certainly be more lively than Wind in the Willows, which had been languishing on my night-table since Aunt Felicity had sent it to me for Christmas, pretending to believe it was a history of corporal punishment.

With English Dissenters in hand, I climbed down the ladder, dropped into the upholstered wing-back chair that Daffy usually occupied, and began flipping through its pages in search of the Hobblers.

Because there was no index, I was forced to go slowly, watching for the word “Hobblers,” trying not to become too distracted by the violence of the religious text.

Only towards the end of the book did I find what I was looking for. But then, suddenly, there it was, at the bottom of a page, in a footnote marked by a squashed-spider asterisk, set in quaint old-fashioned type.

“The mischief of Infant-baptism,” it said, “is an innovation on the primitive practice of the church: one of the corruptions of the second or third century. It is, moreover, often made the occasion of sin, or is turned into a farce as, for example, in that custom of the sect known as the Hobblers, whose dipping of a child held by the heel into running water, must be understood as no more than a bizarre, not to say barbaric, survival of the Greek myth of Achilles.”

It took several moments for the words to sink in.

Mrs. Mullet had been right!

TWENTY-SEVEN

UP THE EAST STAIRCASE I flew, English Dissenters clutched in my hand.

I couldn’t contain myself.

“Listen to this,” I said, bursting into my bedroom. Porcelain was sitting exactly as I had left her, staring at me as if I were a madwoman.

I read aloud to her the footnote on infant baptism, the words fairly tumbling from my mouth.

“So what?” she said, unimpressed.

“Mrs. Bull,” I blurted out. “She lied! Her baby drowned! It had nothing to do with Fenella!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Porcelain said.

Of course she didn’t! I hadn’t told her about the encounter with the enraged Mrs. Bull in the Gully. I could still hear those frightening, hateful words in my mind:

“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she had screamed at Fenella. “ ’Twas you as stole my baby. Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”

Thinking to spare Porcelain’s feelings, I skated quickly over the story of the Bull baby’s disappearance, and of the furious outburst its mother had directed at Fenella in the Gully.

Mrs. Mullet’s friend had told her the Hobblers dipped their babies by the heel, like Achilles in the River Styx. She didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s what she meant.

“So you see,” I finished triumphantly, “Fenella had nothing to do with it.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Porcelain scoffed. “She’s a harmless old woman, not a kidnapper. Don’t tell me you believe those old wives’ tales about Gypsies stealing babies?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said, but I was not being truthful. In my heart of hearts I had, until that very minute, believed what every child in England had been made to believe.

Porcelain was becoming huffy again, and I didn’t want to risk another outburst, either from her, or worse, from me.

“She’s that redhead, then?” she said suddenly, bringing the topic back to Mrs. Bull. “The one that lives in the lane?”

“That’s her!” I said. “How did you know?”

“I saw someone like that … hanging about,” Porcelain said evasively.

“Where?” I demanded.

“About,” she said, locking eyes with me, just daring me to stare her down.

The truth hit me like a slap in the face.

“Your dream!” I said. “It was her! In your dream you saw her standing over you in the caravan, didn’t you?”

It made perfect sense. If Fenella really could see into the past and the future, and her daughter, Lunita, could impress the Air Ministry with her powers, there was no reason Porcelain couldn’t summon up such an unpleasant woman in her sleep.

“It was like no dream I’ve ever had before,” Porcelain said. “Oh, but God … I wish I’d never had it!”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t seem like a dream. I’d fallen asleep on Fenella’s bed—didn’t even bother taking off my clothes. It must have been a noise that roused me—somewhere close—inside the caravan.”

“You dreamed you’d fallen asleep?”

Porcelain nodded. “That was what was so horrible about it. I didn’t move a muscle. Just kept taking deep quiet breaths, as if I was asleep, which I was, of course. Oh, damn! It’s so hard to explain.”

“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean. You were in my bed, dreaming you were in Fenella’s bed.”

She gave me a look of gratitude. “There wasn’t a sound. I listened for a long time, until I thought they were gone, and then I opened my eyes—no more than a sliver, and …”

“And?”

“There was a face! A big face—right there—just inches away! Almost touching mine!”

“Good lord!”

“So close I couldn’t really focus,” Porcelain went on. “I managed to make a little moan, as if I was dreaming—let my mouth fall open a bit …”

I have to admit I was filled with admiration. I hoped that, even in a dream, I should have the presence of mind to do the same thing myself.

“The lamp was burning low,” she went on. “It shone through the hair. I could only see the hair.”

“Which was red,” I said.

“Which was red. Long and curly. Wild, it was. And then I opened my eyes—”

“Yes, yes! Go on!”

“And it should have been your face I was looking at, shouldn’t it? But it wasn’t! It was that face of the man with the red hair. That’s why I flew at you and nearly choked you to death!”

“Hold on!” I said. “The man with the red hair?”

“He was beastly … all covered with soot. He looked like someone who slept in a haystack.”

I shook my head. In a weird way it made sense, I suppose, that in a dream, Porcelain should transform Mrs. Bull, whom she had perhaps glimpsed in the Gully, into a redheaded wild man. Daffy had not long before been reading a book by Professor Jung, and had announced to us suddenly that dreams were symbols that lurked in the subconscious mind.

Ordinarily, I should have written off the contents of a dream as rubbish, but my recent life seemed so flooded with inexplicable instances to the contrary.

In the first place, there had been Fenella’s vision—in her crystal ball—of Harriet wanting me to help her come home from the cold, and even though Fenella had claimed that Feely and Daffy put her up to it, the whole thing had left me shaken; wondering, in fact, if her confession was not itself a lie.

Then, too, there had been Brookie’s tale about the restless Gray Lady of Buckshaw. I still hadn’t decided if he’d been having me on about the so-called legend, but there’d been simply no time to look into it on my own.

I must admit, though, that these nibblings of the supernatural at the base of my brain were more than a little unnerving.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Oh, I don’t know, everything’s so confusing. Part of me didn’t trust you enough. And I knew that you no more trusted me.”

“I wasn’t sure about your clothes,” I told her. “I wondered why you had to wash them in the river.”

“Yes, you put that in your notebook, didn’t you? You thought I might have been soaked with Fenella’s blood.”

“Well, I …”

“Come on, Flavia, admit it. You thought I’d bashed in Fenella’s skull … to … to … inherit the caravan, or something.”

“Well, it was a possibility,” I said with a grin, hoping it would be infectious.

“The fact of the matter is,” she said, giving her hair a toss, then winding and unwinding a long strand of it round a forefinger, “that women away from home sometimes feel the urge to rinse out a few things.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If you’d taken the trouble to ask me, I’d have told you.”

Even if it wasn’t meant as such, I took this as an invitation to ask blunt questions.

“All right,” I said. “Then let me ask you this: When the man in the caravan was leaning over you in your dream, did you notice anything besides his hair?”

I thought I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to put words in her mouth.

Porcelain knitted her brows and pursed her lips. “I don’t think so—I … wait! There was something else. It was so ghastly I must have forgotten it when you woke me so suddenly.”

I leaned forward eagerly.

“Yes?” I said. Already my pulse was beginning to race.

“Fish!” she said. “There was the most awful reek of dead fish. Ugh!”

I could have hugged her. I could have put my arm around her waist and—if it hadn’t been for that curious stiffness in the de Luce blood that keeps me on an invisible tether—danced her round the room.

“Fish,” I said. “Just as I thought.”

Already, my mind was a flask at the boil, the largest bubbles being: Brookie Harewood and his reeking creel, Ursula Vipond and her decaying willow withies, and Miss Mountjoy with her lifetime supply of cod-liver oil.

The problem was this: Not a single one of them had red hair.

So far, the only redheads in my investigation were the Bulls: Mrs. Bull and the two little Bulls. The little ones were out of the question—they were far too young to have attacked Fenella or murdered Brookie.

Which left the obnoxious Mrs. B who, in spite of her other failings, did not, to the best of my knowledge, smell of fish. If she did, Mrs. Mullet couldn’t have resisted mentioning it.

Fish or no fish, though, Mrs. Bull had an obvious grievance against Fenella, whom she believed to have kidnapped her baby.

But whoever left the fishy smell hanging about the caravan was not necessarily the same person who fractured Fenella’s skull with the crystal ball.

And whoever had done that had not necessarily murdered Brookie.

“I’m glad I don’t think as hard as you do,” Porcelain said. “Your eyes go all far away and you look like someone else—someone older. It’s quite frightening, actually.”

“Yes,” I said, even though this was news to me.

“I’ve tried to,” she said, “but it just doesn’t seem to work. I can’t think who would want to harm Fenella. And that man—the one we found hanging from the fountain—whoever would want to kill him?”

That was the question. Porcelain had put her finger on it.

The whole thing came down to what Inspector Hewitt would call “motive.” Brookie was an embarrassment to his mother and had stolen from Miss Mountjoy. As far as I knew, he had no connection with the Pettibones, other than the fact that he provided them with stolen goods. It would be odd indeed if those two old curios had murdered him. Without her husband’s help, Mrs. Pettibone could never have manhandled Brookie’s body into the position in which Porcelain and I had found it. Even with her husband’s help—old Pettibone was so frail—they’d have needed a motorized crane.

Or the assistance of their friend Edward Sampson, who owned acres of rusting machinery in East Finching.

“I can think of only one person,” I said.

“And who might that be?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

“So much for trust,” she said in a flat voice.

“So much for trust.”

It hurt me to cut her off in that way, but I had my reasons, one of which was that she might be forced to spill the beans to Inspector Hewitt. I couldn’t have anyone interfering when I was so close to a solution.

Another was that Brookie’s killer and Fenella’s attacker were still at large, and I couldn’t possibly put Porcelain at risk.

She was safe enough here at Buckshaw, but how long could I keep her presence a secret?

That’s what I was thinking about when there came a light tap on the door.

“Yes?” I called out.

A moment later, Father walked into the room.

“Flavia—” he began, then stopped in his tracks.

Porcelain leapt from the bed and backed towards the corner of the room.

Father stared at her for a moment, and then at me, then back at Porcelain again. “Excuse me,” he said, “I didn’t realize—”

“Father,” I said, “I should like to introduce Porcelain Lee.”