The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"But time went on, as time does, and I found myself being swept up into the life of the school. I was good at history but quite hopeless when it came to the books of Euclid, which put me somewhere in the middle ranks: neither so proficient nor so stupid as to draw attention to myself.

"Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.

"It was in the fourth form, I think, that I finally began to take an interest in the things around me and, like all boys of that age, I had an insatiable taste for mystification, so that when Mr. Twining, my housemaster, proposed the founding of a conjuring circle, I found myself suddenly ablaze with new enthusiasm.

"Mr. Twining was more kindly than adept; not a very polished performer, I must admit, but he carried off his tricks with such ebullience, such good-hearted enthusiasm, that it would have been churlish of us to withhold our noisy schoolboy applause.

"He taught us, in the evenings, to turn wine into water using no more than a handkerchief and a bit of colored blotting paper; how to make a marked shilling vanish from a covered drinking glass before being extracted from Simpkins's ear. We learned the importance of 'patter,' the conjurer's line of talk, as it were; and he drilled us in spectacular shuffles which left the ace of hearts always at the bottom of the pack.

"It goes without saying that Mr. Twining was popular; loved might be a better word, although few of us at the time had seen enough of that emotion to recognize it for what it was.

"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.