A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

“Slag? Whatever do you want with slag?”

It would be a mistake to tell her that I was working on a new kind of ceramic flask, one that would stand up to the temperatures produced by a super-oxygenated Bunsen burner.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just mucking about.”

“Oddly enough, I believe you,” Feely said. “That’s what you pixy changelings do best, isn’t it? Muck about?”

My puzzlement must have been evident on my face.

“Changelings,” Daffy said in a weird voice. “The pixies come in the night and steal a healthy baby from its crib. They leave an ugly shriveled changeling like you in its place, and the mother desolate.”

“If you don’t believe it,” Feely said, “go stand in front of a looking glass.”

“I’m not a changeling,” I protested, my anger rising. “Harriet loved me more than she did either of you two morons!”

“Did she?” Feely sneered. “Then why did she used to leave you sleeping in front of an open window every night, hoping that the pixies would bring back the real Flavia?”

“She didn’t!” I shouted.

“I’m afraid she did. I was there. I saw. I remember.”

“No! It’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. I used to cling to her and cry, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Please make the pixies bring back my baby sister.’ ”

“Flavia? Daphne? Ophelia?”

It was Father!

His voice came at parade-square volume from the direction of the kitchen staircase, amplified by the stone walls and echoing from arch to arch.

All three of our heads snapped round just in time to see his boots, his trousers, his upper body, and finally his face come into sight as he descended the stairs.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, peering round at the three of us in the near-darkness. “What have you done to yourselves?”

With the backs of their hands and their forearms, Feely and Daffy were already trying to scrub the black markings from their faces.

“We were only playing Prawns and Trivets,” Daffy said before I could answer. She pointed accusingly at me. “She gives us jolly good what-for when it’s her turn to play the Begum, but when it’s ours she always …”

Well done, Daff, I thought. I couldn’t have concocted a better spur-of-the-moment excuse myself.

“I’m surprised at you, Ophelia,” Father said. “I shouldn’t have thought …”

And then he stopped, unable to find the required words. There were times when he seemed almost—what was it … afraid? … of my oldest sister.

Feely rubbed at her face, smearing her cork makeup horribly. I nearly laughed out loud, but then I realized what she was doing. In a bid for sympathy, she was spreading the stuff to create dark, theatrical circles under her eyes.

The vixen! Like an actress applying her makeup onstage, it was a bold and brazen performance, which I couldn’t help admiring.

Father looked on in thrall, like a man fascinated by a cobra.

“Are you all right, Flavia?” he said at last, not budging from his position on the third step from the bottom.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

I was going to add “Thank you for asking” but I stopped myself just in time. I didn’t want to overdo it.

Father looked slowly from one of us to another with his sad eyes, as if there were no words left in the world from which to choose.

“There will be a parley at seven o’clock,” he said at last. “In the drawing room.”

With a final glance at each of us, he turned and trudged slowly up the stairs.

“The thing of it is,” Father was saying, “you girls just don’t seem to understand …”

And he was right: We no more understood his world than he did ours.

His was a world of confetti: a brightly colored universe of royal profiles and scenic views on sticky bits of paper; a world of pyramids and battleships, of rickety suspension bridges in far-flung corners of the globe, of deep harbors, lonely watchtowers, and the heads of famous men. In short, Father was a stamp collector, or a “philatelist,” as he preferred to call himself, and to be called by others.

His every waking moment was spent in peering through a magnifying lens at paper scraps in an eternal search for flaws. The discovery of a single microscopic crack in a printing plate, which had resulted in an unwanted hair on Queen Victoria’s chin, could send him into raptures.

First would come the official photograph, and elation. He would bring out of storage, and set up on its tripod in his study, an ancient plate camera with a peculiar attachment called a macroscopic lens, which allowed him to take a close-up of the specimen. This, when developed, would produce an image large enough to fill an entire page of a book. Sometimes, as he fussed happily over these operations, we would catch snatches of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Gondoliers drifting like fugitives through the house.