“Off to bed with you, Miss Flavia. I’ll be along with a hot drink directly.”
As I trudged exhausted up the curving staircase, I could hear quiet words being exchanged between Dogger and the Inspector, but could not make out a single one of them.
Upstairs, in the east wing, I walked into my bedroom and without even removing His Majesty’s tartan blanket, fell facedown onto my bed.
I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table.
As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond, something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise, but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.
Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling, then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.
Of course by now the cocoa would be as cold as ditch water. For various complicated reasons reaching back into my family’s past, Buckshaw’s east wing was, as I have said, unheated, but I could hardly complain. I occupied this part of the house by choice, rather than by necessity. Dogger must have—
Dogger!
In an instant the whole of the previous day’s events came storming into my consciousness like a wayward crash of thunder, and like those fierce sharp bolts of lightning that are said to strike upwards from the earth to the sky, so did these thoughts arrive in curiously reversed order: first, Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby, the Gully, and then the blood—the blood!—my sisters, Daffy and Feely, the Gypsy and Gry, her horse, and finally the church fete —all of these tumbling in upon one another in tattered but nevertheless sharply etched detail.
Had I been hit by lightning? Was that why I felt so curiously electrified: like a comb rubbed with tissue paper?
No, that wasn’t it—but something in my mind was evading itself.
But I couldn’t manage it. The morning sun streaming in at the windows was painful to look at, and my eyes were as gritty as if someone had pitched a bucket of sand into them.
Perhaps a bath would buck me up. I smiled at the thought. Daffy would be dumbstruck if she knew of my bathing without being threatened. “Filthy Flavia,” she called me, at least when Father wasn’t around.
Daffy herself loved nothing better than to subside into a steaming tub with a book, where she would stay until the water had gone cold.
“It’s like reading in one’s own coffin,” she would say afterwards, “but without the stench.”
I did not share her enthusiasm.
A light tapping at the door interrupted these thoughts. I wrapped myself tightly in the tartan blanket and, like a penguin, waddled across the room.
It was Dogger, a fresh cup of steaming cocoa in his hand.
“Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said. He did not ask how I was feeling, but nonetheless, I was aware of his keen scrutiny.
“Good morning,” I replied. “Please put it on the table. Sorry about the one you brought last night. I was too tired to drink it.”
With a nod, Dogger swapped the cups.
“The Colonel wishes to see you in the drawing room,” he said. “Inspector Hewitt is with him.”
Blast and double blast! I hadn’t had time to think things through. How much was I going to tell the Inspector and how much was I going to keep to myself?
To say nothing of Father! What would he say when he heard that his youngest daughter had been out all night, wading around in the blood of a Gypsy he had once evicted from his estate?
Dogger must have sensed my uneasiness.
“I believe the Inspector is inquiring about your health, miss. I shall tell them you’ll be down directly.”
Bathed and rigged up in a ribboned dress, I came slowly down the stairs. Feely turned from a mirror in the foyer in which she had been examining her face.
“Now you’re for it,” she said.
“Fizz off,” I replied pleasantly.
“Half the Hinley Constabulary on your tail and still you have time to be saucy to your sister. I hope you won’t expect a visit from me when you’re in the clink.”
I swept past her with all the dignity I could muster, trying to gather my wits as I walked across the foyer. At the door of the drawing room, I paused to form a little prayer: “May the Lord bless me and keep me and make His face to shine upon me; may He fill me with great grace and lightning-quick thinking.”
I opened the door.
Inspector Hewitt came to his feet. He had been sitting in the overstuffed armchair in which Daffy was usually lounging sideways with a book. Father stood in front of the mantelpiece, the dark side of his face reflected in the mirror.
“Ah, Flavia,” he said. “The Inspector was just telling me that a woman’s life has been saved by your prompt action. Well done.”
