The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

NOT TO BE TOO DRAMATIC ABOUT IT, THAT NIGHT I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

When at last I awoke, the sun was at the window and I had a perfectly wretched cold. Even before I went down to breakfast I had used up all the handkerchiefs from my drawer and put paid to a perfectly good bath towel. Need less to say, I was not in a good humor.

"Don't come near me," Feely said as I groped my way to the far end of the table, snuffling like a grampus.

"Die, witch," I managed, making a cross of my fore fingers.

"Flavia!"

I poked at my cereal, giving it a stir with a corner of my toast. In spite of the burnt bits of crust to liven it up, the soggy muck in the bowl still tasted like cardboard.

There was a jerk, a jump in my consciousness like a badly spliced cinema film. I had fallen asleep at the table.

"What's wrong?" I heard Feely ask. "Are you all right?"

"She is stuck in her 'enervating slumbers, from the hesternal dissipation or debauch,'" Daffy said.

Daffy had recently been reading Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham, a few pages each night for her bedtime book, and until she finished it, we were likely to be lashed daily at breakfast with obscure phrases in a style of prose as stiff and inflexible as a parlor poker.

Hesternal, I remembered, meant, “pertaining to yesterday.” I was nodding over the rest of the phrase when suddenly Feely leapt up from the table.

"Good God!" she exclaimed, quickly wrapping her dressing gown round her like a winding-sheet. "Who on earth is that?"

Someone stood silhouetted at the French doors, peering in at us through hands cupped against the glass.

"It's that writer," I said. "The country house man. Pemberton."

Feely gave a squeak and fled upstairs where I knew she would throw on her tight blue sweater set, dab powder on her morning blemishes, and float down the staircase pretending she was someone else: Olivia de Havilland, for instance. She always did that when there was a strange man on the property.

Daffy glanced up disinterestedly, and then went on reading. As usual, it was up to me.

I stepped out onto the terrace, pulling the door closed behind me.

"Good morning, Flavia," Pemberton said with a grin. "Did you sleep well?"

Did I sleep well? What kind of question was that? Here I was on the terrace, sleep in my eyes, my hair a den of nesting rats, and my nose running like a trout stream. Be sides, wasn't a question about the quality of one's sleep reserved for those who had spent a night under the same roof? I wasn't sure; I'd have to look it up in Beeton's Complete Etiquette for Ladies. Feely had given me a copy for my last birthday, but it was still propping up the short leg of my bed.

"Not awfully," I said. "I've caught cold."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I was hoping to be able to interview your father about Buckshaw. I don't like to be a pest, but my time here is limited. Since the war, the cost of accommodation away from home, even in the most humble hostelry, such as the Thirteen Drakes, is simply shocking. One doesn't like to plead poverty, but we poor scholars still dine mostly upon bread and cheese, you know."

"Have you had breakfast, Mr. Pemberton?" I asked. "I'm sure Mrs. Mullet could manage something."

"That's very kind of you, Flavia," he said, "but Landlord Stoker laid on a veritable feast of two bangers and an egg and I live in fear for my waistcoat buttons."

I wasn't quite sure how to take this, and my cold was making me too grumpy to ask.

"Perhaps I can answer your questions," I said. "Father has been detained—"

Yes, that was it! You sly little fox, Flavia!

"Father has been detained in town."

"Oh, I don't think they're matters that would much interest you: a few knotty questions about drains and the Enclosure Acts—that sort of thing. I was hoping to put in an appendix about the architectural changes made by Antony and William de Luce in the nineteenth century. 'A House Divided' and all that."

"I've heard of an appendix being taken out," I blurted, "but this is the first time I've heard of one being put in."

Even with my nose running I could still thrust and parry with the best of them. A wet, explosive sneeze ruined the effect.

"P'raps I could just step in and have a quick look round. Make a few notes. I shan't disturb anyone."