The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  "His greatest recognition came when the headmaster, Dr. Kissing, asked him to get up a conjuring show for Parents' Day, a happy scheme into which he threw himself wholeheartedly.

  "Because of my prowess with an illusion called 'The Resurrection of Tchang Fu,' Mr. Twining was keen to have me perform it as the grand finale of the show. The stunt required two operators, and for that reason he allowed me to choose any assistant I wanted; that was how I came to know Horace Bonepenny.

  "Horace had come to us from St. Cuthbert's after a fuss at that school about some missing money—just a couple of pounds, I believe it was, although at the time it seemed a fortune. I felt sorry for him, I admit. I felt he had been misused, particularly when he confided to me that his father was the cruelest of men and had done unspeakable things in the name of discipline. I hope this is not too coarse for your ears, Flavia.”

  "No, of course not," I said, pulling my chair closer. "Please go on."

  "Horace was an extraordinarily tall boy even then, with a shock of flaming red hair. His arms were so long in the school jacket that his wrists stuck out like bare twigs beyond the cuffs. 'Bony,' the boys called him, and they ragged him without mercy about his appearance.

  "To make matters worse, his fingers were impossibly long and thin and white, like the tentacles of an albino octopus, and he had that pale bleached skin one sometimes sees in redheads. It was whispered that his touch was poison. He played this up a bit, of course, snatching with pretended clumsiness at the jeering boys who danced round him, always just out of reach.

  "One evening after a game of hare and hounds he was resting at a stile, panting like a fox, when a small boy named Potts danced in on tiptoe and delivered him a stinging blow across the face. It was meant to be no more than a touch, like tagging the runner, but it soon turned into something else.

  "When they saw that the fearful monster, Bonepenny, was stunned, and his nose bleeding, the other boys began to pile on, and Bony was soon down, being pummeled, kicked, and savagely beaten. It was just then that I happened along.

  "'Hold up!' I shouted, as loudly as I could, and to my amazement, the scuffle stopped at once. The boys began extricating themselves, one by one, from the tangle of arms and legs. There must have been something in my voice that made them obey instantly. Perhaps the fact that they had seen me perform mystifying tricks lent me some invisible air of authority, I don't know, but I do know that when I ordered them to get themselves back to Greyminster, they faded like a pack of wolves into the dusk.

  "'Are you all right?' I asked Bony, helping him to his feet.

  "'Faintly tender, but only in one or two widely separated spots—like Carnforth's beef,' he said, and we both laughed. Carnforth was the notorious Hinley butcher whose family had been supplying Greyminster with its boot-leather Sunday roasts of beef since the Napoleonic Wars.

  "I could see that Bony was more badly beaten than he was willing to let on, but he put a brave face on it. I gave him my shoulder to lean upon, and helped him hobble back to Greyminster.

  "From that day on, Bony was my shadow. He adopted my enthusiasms, and in doing so seemed almost to become a different person. There were times, in fact, when I fancied he was becoming me; that here before me was the part of myself for which I had been searching in the midnight mirror.

  "What I do know is that we were never in better form than when we were together; what one of us couldn't do, the other could accomplish with ease. Bony seemed to have been born with a fully formed mathematical ability, and he was soon unveiling for me the mysteries of geometry and trigonometry. He made a game of it, and we spent many a happy hour calculating upon whose study the clock tower of Anson House would fall when we toppled it with a gigantic steam lever of our own invention. Another time, we worked out by triangulation an ingenious series of tunnels which, at a given signal, would collapse simultaneously, causing Greyminster and all its inhabitants to plunge into a Dantean abyss, where they would be attacked by the wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots with which we planned to stock the place.”

  Wasps, hornets, bees, and maggots? Could this be Father speaking? I suddenly found myself listening to him with new respect.

  "How this was to be achieved," he went on, "we never really thought through, but the upshot of it all was that while I was getting chummy with old Euclid and his books of propositions, Bony, with a bit of coaching, was turning out to be a natural conjurer.

  "It was the fingers, of course. Those long white appendages seemed to have a life of their own, and it wasn't long before Bony had mastered completely the arts of prestidigitation. Various objects appeared and vanished at his fingertips with such fluid grace that even I, who knew perfectly well how each illusion was done, could scarcely believe my eyes.

  "And as his conjuring skill grew, so did his sense of self-worth. With a bit of magic in hand, he became a new Bony, confident, smooth, and perhaps even brash. His voice changed too. Where yesterday he had sounded like a raucous schoolboy, he seemed now, suddenly—at least, when he was performing—to possess a voice box of polished mahogany: a hypnotic professional voice which never failed to convince its hearers.

  "'The Resurrection of Tchang Fu' worked like this: I decked myself out in an oversized silk kimono I had found at a church jumble sale, a beautiful bloodred thing covered with Chinese dragons and mystical markings. I plastered my face with yellow chalk and stretched a thin elastic round my head to pull my eyes up at the corners. A couple of sausage casings from Carnforth's, varnished and cut into long, curving fingernails, added a disgusting detail. All that was needed to complete my getup was a bit of burnt cork, a few wisps of frayed string for a beard, and a frightful theatrical wig.

  "I would call for a volunteer from the audience—a confederate, of course, who had been rehearsed beforehand. I would bring him onstage and explain, in a comic singsong Mandarin voice, that I was about to kill him, to send him off to the Land of the Happy Ancestors. This matter-of-fact announcement never failed to fetch a gasp from the audience, and before they could recover themselves, I would pull a pistol from the folds of my robe, point it at my confederate's heart, and pull the trigger.

  "A starter's pistol can make a frightful din when it's fired indoors, and the thing would go off with the most dreadful bang. My assistant would clasp his chest, squeezing in his hand a concealed paper twist of ketchup, which would ooze out horribly between his fingers. Then he would look down at the mess on his chest and gape in disbelief.

  "'Help me, Jacko!' he would shriek. 'The trick's gone wrong! I'm shot!' and fall dead flat on his back.

  "The audience would, by now, be sitting bolt upright in shock; several would be on their feet, and a few in tears. I would hold up a hand to quiet them.

  "'Sirence!' I would hiss, fixing them with an awful stare. 'Ancestahs lequire sirence.'

  "There might be a few titters of nervous laughter, but generally there was a shocked hush. I would fetch a rolled-up sheet from the shadows and drape it over my apparently dead assistant, leaving only his upturned face visible.

  "Now this sheet was quite a remarkable object; one which I had manufactured in great secrecy. It was divided lengthwise into thirds by a pair of slender wooden dowels sewn into two narrow pockets that ran the length of the sheet and were, of course, invisible when the thing was rolled up.

  "Squatting down and using my robe as cover, I would slip my assistant's shoes from his feet (this was easily done, since he had secretly loosened his laces just before I chose him from the audience) and stick them, toes up, on the end of the dowels.

  "The shoes, you see, had been specially prepared by having a hole drilled up through each heel into which a penny nail could be inserted and pushed through to pierce the end of the dowel. The result was most convincing: a gaping corpse lying dead on the floor, its head sticking out at one end of the draped sheet and its upturned shoes at the other.

  "If everything went according to plan, great red stains would by now have begun to seep through the sheet abov
e the 'corpse's' chest, and if not, I could always add a bit from a second twist of paper sewn into my sleeve.

  "Now came the important part. I would call for the lights to be lowered ('Honabuh ancestahs lequire comprete dahkness!') and in the gloom I would set off a couple of flashes of magnesium paper. This had the effect of blinding the audience for a moment: just enough time for my assistant to arch his back and, as I adjusted the sheet, get his feet firmly on the floor in a squatting position. His shoes, of course, protruding from the bottom of the sheet, made it seem as if he were still lying perfectly horizontal.

  "Now I would go into my Oriental mumbo jumbo, waving my hands about, summoning him back from the land of the dead. As I jabbered away in made-up incantations, my assistant would very slowly begin to raise himself from a squat until he was standing upright, supporting the projecting dowels on his shoulders, his shoes sticking out at the far end of the sheet.

  "What the audience saw, of course, was a sheet-draped body that rose straight up into the air and hung floating there five feet above the floor.

  "Then I would beg the happy ancestors to restore him to the Land of the Living Spirits. This would be done with many mystifying passes of my hands, after which I would set off a final flash of magnesium paper and my assistant would throw off the sheet as he leaped into the air and landed on his feet.

  "The sheet, with its nailed-on shoes and its sewn-in dowels, would be thrown aside in the darkness, and we would be left to take our bows amid a storm of thunderous applause. And because he wore black socks, no one ever seemed to notice that the 'dead man' had lost his shoes.

  "This was 'The Resurrection of Tchang Fu,' and that was the way I planned to stage it for Parents' Day. Bony and I would sneak off to the washhouse with our gear, where I would drill him in the niceties of the illusion.

  "But it soon became apparent that Bony was not the ideal confederate. In spite of his enthusiasm, he was simply too tall. His head and feet stuck out too far beyond my doctored sheet, and it was too late to fabricate a new one. And there was the inescapable fact that while Bony was a marvel with his hands, his body and limbs were still those of an awkward and ungainly schoolboy. His stork-like knees would tremble when he was supposed to be levitating, and at one rehearsal he fell flat on his behind, bringing the whole illusion—sheet, shoes, and all—down with a crash.

  "I couldn't think what to do. Bony would be devastated if I chose another assistant, and yet it was too much to hope that he would master his role in the few days remaining before the performance. I was on the verge of despair.

  "It was Bony who came up with the solution.

  "'Why not swap roles?' he suggested after one particularly embarrassing collapse of our props. 'Let me have a go. I'll put on the old sorcerer's robe and you shall be the floater.'

  "I have to admit it was brilliant. With his face a chalky yellow, and his long thin hands projecting from the sleeves of the red kimono (made even more ghastly by three inches of sausage-skin fingernails), Bony made as remarkable a figure as has ever stalked the stage.

  "And because he was a natural mimic, he had no trouble in picking up the cracked, piping voice of an ancient Mandarin. His Oriental double-talk was, if anything, better than my own, and those long twiggy fingers waving in the air like stick insects were a sight not soon to be for gotten.

  "The performance itself was brilliant. With the entire school and the visiting parents as onlookers, Bony put on a show that none of them will ever forget. He was, by turns, exotic and sinister. When he called me up from the audience as his assistant, even I shivered a little at this menacing figure who was beckoning from beyond the footlights.

  "And when he fired the pistol and shot me in the chest, there was pandemonium! I had taken the precaution of warming up and watering down my reservoir of ketchup blood, and the resulting stain was all too horridly real.

  "One of the parents—the father of Giddings Minor—had to be physically restrained by Mr. Twining, who had foreseen that some gullible onlooker might rush the stage.

  "'Steady on, dear sir,' Twining whispered in Mr. Giddings's ear, 'It's simply an illusion. These boys have done it many a time before.'

  "Mr. Giddings was escorted reluctantly back to his seat, his face still burning red. Yet in spite of it, he was man enough to come up after the show and give both our hands a good cranking.

  "After such a bath of gore at the death, my levitation at the resurrection was almost a letdown, if I may use the phrase, although it brought round after round of ringing applause from an audience of kind hearts who were relieved to see the hapless volunteer restored to life. At the end, we were made to come back for seven curtain calls, although I knew perfectly well that at least six of them were for my partner.

  "Bony soaked up the adulation like a parched sponge. An hour after the show he was still shaking hands and being patted on the back by a tidal wave of admiring mothers and fathers who seemed to want only to touch him, although when I threw my arm across his shoulders, he gave me rather an odd look: a look which suggested, for a fleeting instant, that he had never seen me before.

  "In the days that followed, I saw that a transformation had come over him. Bony had become the confident conjurer, and I was now no more than his simple assistant. He began speaking to me in a new way, and adopted a rather offhand manner, as if his earlier timidity had never existed.

  "I suppose I could say he dropped me—or that was how it seemed. I often saw him with an older boy, Bob Stanley, who was someone I had never much fancied. Stanley had one of those angular, square-jawed faces that photographs well but seems hard in real life. As he had done with me, Bony seemed to take on some of Stanley's traits, in much the same way a bit of blotting paper absorbs the handwriting from a letter. I know that it was at about this time that Bony began smoking and, I suspect, tippling a bit as well.

  "One day, I realized with a bit of a shock that I no longer liked him. Something had changed inside Bony or, perhaps, had crawled out. There were times when I caught him staring at me in the classroom when his eyes would seem to be at first the eyes of an aged Mandarin, and then, as they regarded me, would become cold and reptilian. I began to feel as if, in some unknowable way, something had been stolen from me.

  "But there was worse to come."

  Father fell silent and I waited for him to go on with his story, but instead he sat gazing out sightlessly into the falling rain. It seemed best to keep quiet and leave him to his thoughts, whatever those might be.

  But I knew that, as with Horace Bonepenny, something had changed between us.

  Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.

  I wished I could hug him, but I couldn't. For some time now I had been aware that there was something in the de Luce character which discouraged any outward show of affection towards one another; any spoken statement of love. It was something in our blood.

  And so we sat, Father and I, primly, like two old women at a parish tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life, but it would have to do.

  sixteen

  A FLASH OF LIGHTNING BLEACHED EVERY TRACE OF color from the room, and with it came a deafening crack of thunder. We both of us flinched.

  "The storm is directly overhead," Father said.

  Nodding to reassure him that we were in it together, I looked about at my surroundings. The brightly lighted little cubicle—its naked bulb overhead, its steel door, and its cot—the rain pouring down outside, was oddly like the control room of the submarine in We Dive at Dawn. I imagined the rolling thunder of the storm to be the sound of depth charges exploding immediately above our heads, and suddenly I was not quite so fearful for Father. We two, at least, were alli
es. I would pretend that as long as we kept still and I remained silent, nothing on earth could harm us.

  Father went on as if there had been no interruption.

  "We became rather strangers, Bony and I," he said. "Al though we continued as members of Mr. Twining's Magic Circle, each of us pursued his own particular interests. I developed a passion for the great stage tricks: sawing a lady in half, vanishing a cage of singing canaries, that sort of thing. Of course, most of these effects were beyond my schoolboy budget, but as time went on, it seemed enough simply to read about them and learn how each one was executed.

  "Bony, however, progressed to tricks which required an ever-greater degree of manual dexterity: simple effects which could be done under the spectator's nose with a minimal amount of gadgetry. He could make a nickel-plated alarm clock disappear from one hand and appear in the other before your very eyes. He never would show me how it was done.

  "It was about that time that Mr. Twining had the idea of organizing a Philatelic Society, another of his great enthusiasms. He felt that in learning to collect, catalogue, and mount postage stamps from round the world, we would learn a great deal about history, geography, and neatness, to say nothing of the fact that regular discussions would promote confidence among the more shy members of the club. And since he was himself a devoted collector, he saw no reason why every one of his boys should be any less enthusiastic.

  "His own collection was the eighth wonder of the world, or so it seemed to me. He specialized in British stamps, with particular attention to color variations in the printing inks. He had the uncanny ability of being able to deduce the day—sometimes the very hour—a given specimen was printed. By comparing the ever-changing microscopic cracks and variations produced by wear and stress upon the engraved printing plates, he was able to deduce an astonishing amount of detail.