A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

the caravan’s locker. As the flame touched the twigs, it sizzled and went out. Another did the same.

As I am not noted for my patience, I let slip a mild curse.

If I were at home in my chemical laboratory, I thought, I would be doing as any civilized person does and using a Bunsen burner to boil water for tea: not messing about on my knees in a clearing with a bundle of stupid green twigs.

It was true that, before my rather abrupt departure from the Girl Guides, I had learned to start campfires, but I’d vowed that never again would I be caught dead trying to make a fire-bow from a stick and a shoestring, or rubbing two dry sticks together like a demented squirrel.

As noted, I had all the ingredients of a roaring fire—all, that is, except one.

Wherever there are paraffin lamps, I thought, paraffin can not be far away. I let down the hinged side panel of the caravan and there, to my delight, was a gallon of the stuff. I unscrewed the cap of the tin, splashed a bit of it onto the waiting firewood, and before you could say “Baden-Powell,” the teakettle was at a merry boil.

I was proud of myself. I really was.

“Flavia, the resourceful,” I was thinking. “Flavia, the all-round good girl.”

That sort of thing.

Up the steep steps of the caravan I climbed, tea in hand, balancing on my toes like a tightrope walker.

I handed the cup to the Gypsy and watched as she sipped at the steaming liquid.

“You were quick about it,” she said.

I shrugged humbly. No need to tell her about the paraffin.

“You found dry sticks in the locker?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I …”

Her eyes grew wide with horror, and she held out the cup at arm’s length.

“Not the bushes! You didn’t cut the elder bushes?”

“Why, yes,” I said modestly. “It was no trouble at all, I—”

The cup flew from her hands with a clatter, and scalding tea went flying in all directions. She leapt from the bunk with startling speed and shrank herself back into the corner.

“Hilda Muir!” she cried, in an eerie and desolate wail that rose and fell like an air-raid siren. “Hilda Muir!” She was pointing to the door. I turned to look, but no one was there.

“Get away from me! Get out! Get out!” Her hand trembled like a dead leaf.

I stood there, dumbfounded. What had I done?

“Oh, God! Hilda Muir! We are all dead!” she groaned. “Now we are all dead!”

THREE

SEEN FROM THE REAR, at the edge of the ornamental lake, Buckshaw presented an aspect seldom seen by anyone other than family. Although the tall brick wall of the kitchen garden hid some parts of the house, there were two upper rooms, one at the end of each wing, that seemed to rise up above the landscape like twin towers in a fairy tale.

At the southwest corner was Harriet’s boudoir, an airless preserve that was kept precisely as it had been on that terrible day ten years ago when news of her tragic death had reached Buckshaw. In spite of the Italian lace that hung at its windows, the room inside was a curiously sanitized preserve as if, like the British Museum, it had a team of silent gray-clad scrubbers who came in the night to sweep away all signs of passing time, such as cobwebs or dust.

Although I thought it unlikely, my sisters believed that it was Father who was the keeper of Harriet’s shrine. Once, hiding on the stairs, I had overheard Feely telling Daffy, “He cleans in the night to atone for his sins.”

“Bloodstains and the like,” Daffy had whispered dramatically.

Far too agog for sleep, I had lain in bed for hours, open-eyed and wondering what she meant.

Now, at the southeast corner of the house, the upstairs windows of my chemical laboratory reflected the slow passage of the clouds as they drifted across the dark glass like fat sheep in a blue meadow, giving no hint to the outside world of the pleasure palace that lay within.

I looked up at the panes happily, hugging myself, visualizing the array of gleaming glassware that awaited my pleasure. The indulgent father of my great-uncle Tarquin de Luce had built the laboratory for his son during the reign of Queen Victoria. Uncle Tar had been sent down from Oxford amidst some sort of scandal that had never been quite fully explained—at least in my presence—and it was here at Buckshaw that he had begun his glorious, if cloistered, chemical career.

After Uncle Tar’s death, the laboratory was left to keep its secrets to itself: locked and forgotten by people who were more concerned with taxes and drainage than with cunningly shaped vessels of glass.

Until I came along, that is, and claimed it for my own.

I wrinkled my nose in pleasure at the memory.

As I approached the kitchen door, I felt proud of myself to have thought of using the least conspicuous entrance. With Daffy and Feely forever scheming and plotting against me, one could never be too careful. But the excitement of the fete and the moving of the Gypsy’s caravan to the Palings had caused me to miss lunch. Right now, even a slice of Mrs. Mullet’s stomach-churning cabbage cake would probably be bearable if taken with a glass