TWENTY-TWO
“DOGGER,” I ASKED, “WHAT possible reason could Adam Sowerby and Lena de Luce have for driving to Rook’s End before sunrise?”
“I’m sure I can’t say, Miss Flavia.”
“Can’t say—or won’t say?”
My conversations with Dogger were often like that: a gentle game between two chess masters.
“Can’t say. I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
Dogger gave the ghost of a smile, and I knew that he was enjoying this as much as I was.
“I know that each left in his or her own vehicle at approximately twelve minutes past five this morning.”
“Anything else?”
“And that the elder Miss de Luce—your aunt Felicity—accompanied them.”
“What?!”
It was unheard of that Aunt Felicity, who loved nothing better than to barricade herself in her bedroom armed with no more than toaster, tea, and the latest thriller, should go gallivanting round the countryside in the dark of the moon.
Simply unheard of.
“Where were they going?”
“At a guess, Rook’s End,” Dogger said. “An assumption confirmed perhaps, at least in part, by your own aerial reconnaissance.”
His placid, utterly impassive face told me there was more.
“And?” I demanded. “What else?”
“Colonel de Luce accompanied them.”
My whole world tilted, as if I was still in the air, making a steep turn in Blithe Spirit.
If it was unheard of for Aunt Felicity to venture out beyond the bounds of Buckshaw, the fact that Father would—
No! I simply refused to believe it.
“Are you sure?” I asked. Perhaps Dogger was having a gentle joke, although it seemed unlikely.
“Quite sure,” he said.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“He did not. And I did not inquire.”
Was there a message in Dogger’s words? Was he warning me to mind my own business?
Dogger’s loyalty, I sometimes had to remind myself, was first of all to Father, and I must never, for any reason, impose upon that devotion.
“Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Not at all, Miss Flavia,” he said, with that look on his face. “I am always pleased to be of service.”
Alone in my laboratory, I tried desperately to keep my mind occupied in the hours remaining before the funeral by resuming an experiment I had been considering when news had come of Harriet’s discovery in the Himalayas.
It is a fact of nature that, given sufficient quantities, poison can be obtained from even the most harmless organic substances. Tapioca and rhubarb, for instance, contain exquisite death if the wrong parts of the plant are used in their preparation, and even our dear old friend water, H2O, is capable of poisoning if too much of the stuff is drunk in too short a span of time.
I made a couple of notes but my heart just wasn’t in it. I threw down my pencil.
Although I loathed the very idea, it was likely time to begin dressing for the day. Mrs. Mullet had fetched out and cleaned one of the mothballed school uniforms that Harriet, when she was my age, had been made to wear at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Toronto, Canada: a black-belted horror worn with long black stockings and a white blouse that made me look like one of those grotesque but amusing creatures from Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s cartoons. Like Father and Dogger, Mr. Searle had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, and his work was much admired by some of us at Buckshaw.
I scrubbed my face and teeth, cleaned the remnants of my nails, sighed deeply, and turned to the task I most truly despised: the braiding of my hair into pigtails.
I had tried everything I could think of to make it an adventure. I had pretended that I was a pirate, lashed to the mainmast in a howling hurricane, splicing the only rope that could secure the last remaining sail.
Right over left … and up … and under. Left over right …
“Ha, ha, me hearties. Simple as sin. Break out the grog!”
But it was no use. Transforming a haystack of mousy brown hair into a length of romantic rigging was too much to hope for.
The worst thing about dressing one’s own hair was the fact that it needed to be done backwards. It was like playing a game of “In a Glass Darkly” in Girl Guides, in which one must try to write one’s full name with pencil on a scrap of paper while looking in a mirror:
—a game during which I always wished I had been born plain old AVA OXO, or at least someone with a more symmetrical name.
The losers and the clumsy players were always hooted heartily, and it was at those times I most often found my thoughts turning to the subject of poisons.
I secured the ends of the pigtails with a couple of blue ribbons tied into neat bows. Yellow was too cheerful for the occasion, red too gaudy, and orange out of the question.
I stared at myself in the looking glass. Who was this girl with her mother’s face? It was as if I were wearing a Harriet mask for Carnival and had not noticed it until now.
And, to tell the truth, it frightened me.