A Red Herring Without Mustard

Hold on! I thought. My whole life was given over to upsetting Father—or at least to going against his wishes. Why now was I filled with a sudden desire to comfort him, and to have him hug me?

Not that I would, of course, because in real life we de Luces don’t do that sort of thing.

But still, some unknowable part of the universe had changed, as if one of the four great turtles that are said to support the world on their backs had suddenly shifted its weight from one foot to another.

“I have to go now,” I said, backing, for some reason, towards the door. “I’m sorry to hear about Brookie. I know he had lots of friends in Bishop’s Lacey.”

Actually, I knew no such thing! Why was I saying this? It was as if my mouth were possessed, and I had no way of stopping its flow of words.

All I really knew about Brookie Harewood was that he was a poacher and a layabout—and that I had surprised him in his midnight prowling. That and the fact that he had claimed to have seen the Gray Lady of Buckshaw.

“Good-bye, then,” I said. As I stepped into the hallway, Ursula turned rapidly away and scuttled out of sight with a wicker basket in her hand. But not so quickly that I missed the look of pure hatred that she shot me.

As I bicycled westward towards Bishop’s Lacey, I thought of what I had seen. I’d gone to Malden Fenwick in search of clues to the behavior of Brookie Harewood—surely it was he who had attacked Fenella Faa in the Palings, for who else could have been abroad at Buckshaw that night? But instead, I had come away with a new image of Harriet, my mother: an image that was not as happy as it might have been.

Why, for instance, did it gnaw at my heart so much to see Feely and Daffy, like two contented slugs, secure and basking in her glow, while I lay helpless, wrapped up like a little mummy in white cloth; of no more interest than a bundle from the butcher?

Had Harriet loved me? My sisters were forever claiming that she did not: that, in fact, she despised me; that she had fallen into a deep depression after I was born—a depression that had, perhaps, resulted in her death.

And yet, in the painting, which must have been made just before she set out on her final journey, there was not a trace of unhappiness. Harriet’s eyes had been upon me and the look on her face had shown, if anything, a trace of amusement.

Something about the portrait nagged at my mind: some half-forgotten thing that had tried to surface as I stood staring at the easel in Vanetta Harewood’s studio. But what was it?

Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of it.

Relax, Flavia, I thought. Calm down. Think about something else.

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind, the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers, for instance, or oatmeal. Then, when the fugitive word was least expecting it, I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it, catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.

“Thought-stalking,” I called the technique, and I was proud of myself for having invented it.

I let my mind drift away towards tigers, and the first one that came to mind was the tiger in William Blake’s poem: the one that burned away with fearful symmetry in the forests of the night.

Once, when I was younger, Daffy had driven me into hysterics by wrapping herself in the tiger-skin rug from Buckshaw’s firearm museum and creeping into my bedroom in the middle of the night, while reciting the poem in a deep and fearsome snarl: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright …”

She had never forgiven me for throwing my alarm clock. She still had the scar on her chin.

And now I thought of oatmeal: in the winter, great steaming ladles of the stuff, gray, like lava dished from a volcano on the moon. Mrs. Mullet, under orders from Father—

Mrs. Mullet! Of course!

It was something she’d told me when I’d asked about Brookie Harewood. “His mother’s that woman as paints over in Malden Fenwick.

“P’raps she’ll even paint you in your turn,” Mrs. M had added. “In your turn.”

Which meant that Mrs. M knew about the portrait of Harriet! She must have been in on the secret sittings.

“Tiger!” I shouted. “Tye-ger!”

My words echoed back from the hedgerows on either side of the narrow lane. Something ahead of me bolted for cover.

An animal, perhaps? A deer? No, not an animal—a human.

It was Porcelain. I was sure of it. She was still wearing Fenella’s black crepe dress.

I brought Gladys to a skidding stop.

“Porcelain?” I called. “Is that you?”

There was no answer.

“Porcelain? It’s me, Flavia.”

What a foolish thing to say. Porcelain had hidden in the hedgerow because it was me. But why?

Although I couldn’t see her, she was probably close enough to touch. I could feel her eyes upon me.

“Porcelain? What is it? What’s the matter?”