The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  He tried to get to his feet, but was unable to lift himself from the overturned pail.

  "Miss Flavia," he said, "there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not to be asked."

  So there it was again: so like a law, these words that fell from Dogger's lips as naturally, and with as much finality, as if Isaiah himself had spoken them.

  But those few words seemed utterly to have exhausted him, and with a loud sigh he covered his face with his hands. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to throw my arms round him and hug him, but I knew that he wasn't up to it. Instead, I settled for putting my hand on his shoulder, realizing even as I did so that the gesture was of greater comfort to me than it was to him.

  "I'll go and get Father," I said. "We'll help you to your room."

  Dogger turned his face slowly round towards me, a chalky white mask of tragedy. The words came out of him like stone grating upon stone.

  "They've taken him away, Miss Flavia. The police have taken him away."

  twelve

  FEELY AND DAFFY WERE SITTING ON A FLOWERED DIVAN in the drawing room, wrapped in one another's arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.

  "Where have you been, you little beast?" she hissed, springing up and coming at me like a wildcat, her eyes swollen and as red as cycle reflectors. "Everyone's been searching for you. We thought you'd drowned. Oh! How I prayed you had!"

  Welcome home, Flave, I thought.

  "Father's been arrested," Daffy said matter-of-factly. "They've taken him away."

  "Where?" I asked.

  "How should we know?" Ophelia spat contemptuously. "Wherever they take people who have been arrested, I expect. Where have you been?"

  "Bishop's Lacey or Hinley?"

  "What do you mean? Talk sense, you little fool."

  "Bishop's Lacey or Hinley," I repeated. "There's only a one-room police station at Bishop's Lacey, so I don't expect he's been taken there. The County Constabulary is at Hinley. So they've likely taken him to Hinley."

  "They'll charge him with murder," Ophelia said, "and then he'll be hanged!" She burst into tears again and turned away. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

  I CAME OUT OF THE DRAWING ROOM and into the hallway and saw Dogger halfway up the west staircase, plodding slowly, step by step, like a condemned man ascending the steps of the scaffold.

  Now was my chance!

  I waited until he was out of sight at the top of the stairs, then slipped into Father's study and quietly locked the door behind me. It was the first time in my life I had ever been alone in the room.

  One full wall was given over to Father's stamp albums, fat leather volumes whose colors indicated the reign of each monarch: black for Queen Victoria, red for Edward the Seventh, green for George the Fifth, and blue for our present monarch, George the Sixth. I remembered that a slim scarlet volume tucked between the green book and the blue contained only a few items—one each of the nine known variations of the four stamps issued bearing the head of Edward the Eighth before he decamped with that American woman.

  I knew that Father derived endless pleasure from the countless and minute variations in his bits of confetti, but I did not know the details. Only when he became excited enough over some new tidbit of trivia in the latest issue of The London Philatelist to rhapsodize aloud at breakfast would we learn a little more about his happy, insulated world. Apart from those rare occasions, we were all of us, my sisters and me, babes in the wood when it came to postage stamps, while Father puttered on, mounting bits of colored paper with more fearsome relish than some men mount the heads of stags and tigers.

  On the wall opposite the books stood a Jacobean sideboard whose top surface and drawers overflowed with what seemed to be no end of philatelic supplies: stamp hinges, perforation gauges, enameled trays for soaking, bottles of fluid for revealing watermarks, gum erasers, stock envelopes, page reinforcements, stamp tweezers, and a hooded ultraviolet lamp.

  At the end of the room, in front of the French doors that opened onto the terrace, was Father's desk: a partner's desk the size of a playing field, which might once have seen service in Scrooge and Marley's counting house. I knew at once that its drawers would be locked—and I was right.

  Where, I wondered, would Father hide a stamp in a room full of stamps? There wasn't a doubt in my mind that he had hidden it—as I would have done. Father and I shared a passion for privacy, and I realized he would never be so foolish as to put it in an obvious place.

  Rather than look on top of things, or inside things, I lay flat on the floor like a mechanic inspecting a motorcar's undercarriage, and slid round the room on my back examining the underside of things. I looked at the bottoms of the desk, the table, the wastepaper basket, and Father's Windsor chair. I looked under the Turkey carpet and behind the curtains. I looked at the back of the clock and turned over the prints on the wall.

  There were far too many books to search, so I tried to think of which of them would be least likely to be looked into. Of course! The Bible!

  But a quick riffle through King James produced no more than an old church leaflet and a mourning card for some dead de Luce from the time of the Great Exhibition.

  Then suddenly I remembered that Father had plucked the Penny Black from the bill of the dead snipe and put it in his waistcoat pocket. Perhaps he had left it there, meaning to dispose of it later.

  Yes, that was it! The stamp wasn't here at all. What an idiot I was to think it would be. The entire study, of course, would be at the very top of the list of too-obvious hiding places. A wave of certainty washed over me and I knew, with what Feely and Daffy incorrectly call “female intuition,” that the stamp was somewhere else.

  Trying not to make a sound, I turned the key and stepped out into the hall. The Weird Sisters were still going at it in the drawing room, their voices rising and falling between notes of anger and grief. I could have listened at the door, but I chose not to. I had more important things to do.

  I went, silent as a shadow, up the west staircase and into the south wing.

  As I expected, Father's room was in near-darkness as I stepped inside. I had often glanced up at his windows from the lawn and seen the heavy drapes pulled tightly shut.

  From inside, it possessed all the gloom of a museum after hours. The strong scent of Father's colognes and shaving lotions suggested open sarcophagi and canopic jars that had once been packed with ancient spices. The finely curved legs of a Queen Anne washstand seemed almost indecent beside the gloomy Gothic bed in the corner, as if some sour old chamberlain were looking on dyspeptically as his mistress unfurled silk stockings over her long, youthful legs.

  Even the room's two clocks suggested times long past. On the chimneypiece, an ormolu monstrosity, its brass pendulum, like the curved blade in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” tock-tocking away the time and flashing dully at the end of each swing in the subdued lighting of the room. On the bedside table, an exquisite little Georgian clock stood in silent disagreement: Her hands were at 3:15, his at 3:12.

  I walked down the long room to the far end, and stopped.

  Harriet's dressing room—which could be entered only through Father's bedroom—was forbidden territory. Father had brought us up to respect the shrine that he had made of it the day he learned of her death. He had done this by making us believe, even if we were not told so outright, that any violation of his rule would result in our being marched off in single file to the end of the garden, where we would be lined up against the brick wall and summarily shot.

  The door to Harriet's room was covered with green baize, rather like a billiard table stood on end. I gave it a push and it swung open with an uneasy silence.

  The room was awash in light. Through the tall windowpanes on three of its sides poured torrents of sunshine, diffused by endless swags of Italian lace, into a chamber that might have been a stage-setting for a play about the Duk
e and Duchess of Windsor. The dresser top was laid out with brushes and combs by Fabergé, as if Harriet had just stepped into the adjoining room for a bath. Lalique scent bottles were ringed with colorful bracelets of Bake lite and amber, while a charming little hotplate and a silver kettle stood ready to make her early morning tea. A single yellow rose was wilting in a vase of slender glass.

  On an oval tray stood a tiny crystal bottle containing no more than a drop or two of scent. I picked it up, removed the stopper, and waved it languidly under my nose.

  The scent was one of small blue flowers, of mountain meadows, and of ice.

  A peculiar feeling passed over me—or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain. I looked at the label and saw that it bore a single word: Miratrix.

  A silver cigarette case with the initials H. de L. lay beside a hand mirror whose back was embossed with the image of Flora, from Botticelli's painting Primavera. I had never noticed this before in prints from the original, but Flora looked hugely and happily pregnant. Could this mirror have been a gift from Father to Harriet while she was pregnant with one of us? And if so, which one: Feely? Daffy? Me? I thought it unlikely that it was me: A third girl would hardly have been a gift from the gods—at least so far as Father was concerned.

  No, it was probably Ophelia the Firstborn—she who seemed to have arrived on earth with a mirror in her hand… perhaps this very one.

  A basket chair at one of the windows made a perfect spot for reading and here, within arm's reach, was Harriet's own little library. She had brought the books back from her school days in Canada and summers with an aunt in Boston: Anne of Green Gables and Jane of Lantern Hill were next-door neighbors to Penrod and Merton of the Movies, while at the far end of the shelf leaned a dog-eared copy of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. I had not read any of them, but from what I knew of Harriet, they were probably all of them books about free spirits and renegades.

  Nearby, on a small round table, was a photo album. I lifted the cover and saw that its pages were of black pulpy paper, the captions handwritten below each black-and-white snapshot in chalky ink: Harriet (Age 2) at Morris House; Harriet (Age 15) at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy (1930—Toronto, Canada); Harriet with Blithe Spirit, her de Havilland Gypsy Moth (1938); Harriet in Tibet (1939).

  The photos showed Harriet growing from a fat cherub with a mop of golden hair, through a tall, skinny, laughing girl (with no perceptible breasts) dressed in hockey gear, to a film star with blond bangs, standing, like Amelia Earhart, with one hand resting negligently on the rim of Blithe Spirit's cockpit. There were no photographs of Father. Nor were there any of us.

  In every photograph, Harriet's features were those of a woman whose design has been arrived at by taking those of Feely, Daffy, and me and shaking them in a jar before reassembling them into this grinning, confident, yet endearingly shy adventuress.

  As I stared at her face, trying to see through the photographic paper to Harriet's soul, there was a light tapping at the door.

  A pause—and then another tapping. And the door began to open.

  It was Dogger. He stuck his head slowly into the room.

  "Colonel de Luce?" he said. "Are you here?"

  I froze, hardly daring even to breathe. Dogger didn't move a muscle, but gazed straight ahead in the expectant way of a well-trained servant who knows his place, relying on his ears to tell him if he was intruding.

  But what was he playing at? Hadn't he just told me that the police had taken Father away? Why on earth, then, would he expect to find him here in Harriet's dressing room? Was Dogger so addled as that? Or could it be that he was shadowing me?

  I parted my lips slightly and breathed in slowly through my mouth so that a wayward nose-whistle wouldn't give me away, at the same time offering up a silent prayer that I wouldn't sneeze.

  Dogger stood there for the longest time, like a tableau vivant. I had seen etchings in the library of those ancient entertainments in which the actors were plastered with whitewash and powder before arranging themselves in motionless poses, often of a titillating nature, each supposedly representing a scene from the lives of the gods.

  After a time, just as I was beginning to realize how a rabbit must feel when it “freezes,” Dogger slowly withdrew his head and the door closed without a sound.

  Had he seen me? And if he had, was he pretending he hadn't?

  I waited, listening, but there wasn't a sound from the room next door. I knew Dogger would not linger for long, and when I judged that time enough had passed, I opened the door and peeked out.

  Father's room was as I had left it, the two clocks ticking away, but now, because of my fright, they seemed louder than they had before. Realizing this was an opportunity that would never come again, I began my search using the same method as I had in Father's study, but because his bedroom was as spartan as the campaign tent of Leonidas must have been, it did not take very long.

  The only book in the room was a sale catalogue from Stanley Gibbons for a stamp auction to be held in three months' time. I turned it over and flipped eagerly through its pages, but nothing tumbled out.

  There were shockingly few clothes in Father's closet: a couple of old tweed jackets with leather patches at their elbows (their pockets empty), two wool sweaters, and some shirts. I dug inside his shoes and an ancient pair of regimental half-Wellingtons but found nothing.

  I realized with a twinge that Father's only other clothing was his Sunday suit, which he must still have been wearing when Inspector Hewitt took him away. (I would not allow myself to use the word arrested.)

  Perhaps he had hidden the pierced Penny Black somewhere else—in the glove box of Harriet's Rolls-Royce, for instance. For all I knew, he might already have destroyed it. Now that I stopped to think about it, that would have made most sense. The stamp itself was damaged, and therefore of no value. Something about it, though, had upset Father, and it seemed logical that as soon as he had gone to his room on Friday, he would have put a match to it at once.

  That, of course, would have left its traces: paper ash in the ashtray and a burnt-out match in the wastepaper basket. It was easy enough to check since both of these were right there in front of me—and both were empty.

  Perhaps he had flushed away the evidence.

  Now I knew that I was clutching at straws.

  Give it up, I thought; leave it to the police. Go back to your cozy lab and get on with your life's work.

  I thought—but only for a moment, and with a little thrill—what lethal drops could be distilled from the entries at the Spring Flower Show; what a jolly poison could be extracted from the jonquil and what deadly liquors from the daffodil. Even the common churchyard yew, so loved by poets and by courting couples, contained within its seeds and leaves enough taxine to put paid to half the population of England.

  But these pleasures would have to wait. My duty was to Father, and it had fallen upon my shoulders to help him, particularly now that he couldn't help himself. I knew that I should go to him, wherever he was, and lay my sword at his feet in the way that a medieval squire vows service to his knight. Even if I couldn't help him, I could still sit beside him, and I realized with a sudden piercing pang that I missed him dreadfully.

  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.”