he did, since Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the
I knew that there would never be a better time to dig for information: Mrs. M was away from her usual post in the kitchen and Dogger seemed to be at a peak of alertness. I took a deep breath and plunged directly in: “I found Brookie Harewood in the drawing room last night,” I said. “Actually, it was past two in the morning.”
Dogger finished polishing a grapefruit knife, then put it down and aligned it perfectly with its mates on a strip of green baize.
“What was he doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just standing by the fireplace. No, wait! He was crouched down, touching one of the firedogs.”
These fire irons had belonged to Harriet, and although they had different faces, each was that of a wily fox. Harriet had used them as the main characters in the bedtime stories she’d invented for Daffy and Feely: a fact of which they never tired of reminding me.
To be perfectly truthful, I bitterly resented the fact that my mother had spun so many tales of the make-believe world for my sisters but not for me. She had died before I was old enough to receive my due.
“Which of the two irons was he touching?” Dogger asked, already halfway to his feet.
“The Sally Fox,” I said. “The one on the right.”
Sally Fox and Shoppo were the names Harriet had given to the cunning pair, who had gone jauntily adventuring through an imaginary world—a world that had been lost with Harriet’s death. From time to time, Feely and Daffy, trying to resuscitate the warm and happy feeling of bygone days, had made up their own tales about the two crafty foxes, but in recent years they had, for some reason, stopped trying. Perhaps they had grown too old for fairy tales.
I followed as Dogger walked from the kitchen through to the foyer and made for the drawing room in the west wing.
He paused for a moment, listening at the door, then seemed to vanish through its panels like a wisp of smoke, as so many of the older servants are able to do.
He went straight to the Sally Fox, regarding her as solemnly as if he were a priest come to administer the last rites. When he had finished, he moved a few feet to his left and repeated the same performance with Shoppo.
“Most odd,” he said.
“Odd?”
“
“Missing?”
“It was not here yesterday. I did not inform the Colonel because I knew he would worry. At first I thought I might have misplaced it myself during one of my—my …”
“Reveries,” I suggested.
Dogger nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
Dogger suffered occasional terrors during which his very being was snatched away for a while by unseen forces and hurled into some horrid abyss. At such times his soul seemed to be replaying old atrocities, as he was once more thrown into the company of his dear old comrades-in-arms, their restless spirits dragged back from death by his love for them.
“A month ago it was Shoppo: here one day, gone the next. And then he reappeared. I thought I must be imagining things.”
“Are you sure, Dogger?”
“Yes, Miss Flavia—quite sure.”
I thought for a moment of telling him I had taken the firedogs, but I couldn’t bring myself to mouth the lie. There was something in Dogger that demanded truth.
“Perhaps Daffy borrowed them for one of her drawing sessions.”
Daffy’s occasional pencil sketches usually began well enough but then, quite often, took a spectacularly wrong turn. The Virgin Mary would suddenly sprout buck teeth, for instance, or an impromptu cartoon of Father seated at the dinner table would turn into a man with no eyes. Whenever this happened, Daffy would set the drawing aside and go back to her reading. For weeks afterwards we would keep finding, stuffed into the crevices of the chesterfield and under the cushions of the drawing-room chairs, the pages she had ripped from her sketchbook.
“Perhaps,” Dogger said. “Perhaps not.”
I think it was at that moment, without realizing it, that I began to see the solution to the puzzle of the fire irons.
“Is Mrs. Mullet here today?”
I knew perfectly well that she was but I hadn’t seen her in the kitchen.
“She’s outside having a word with Simpkins, the milk-float man. Something about a wood chip in the butter.”
I’d have to wait until Dogger put away the cutlery before I tackled Mrs. M.
I wanted to be alone with her.
“Them tradesmen don’t give a flick,” Mrs. Mullet said disgustedly, her arms white to the elbows with flour. “Really, they don’t. One day it’s a fly in the clotted cream, and the next it’s a—well, you really don’t want to know, dear. But one thing’s as clear as dishwater. If you lets ’em get away with it, there’s never any tellin’ what they’ll bring round next time. Keep quiet about a toothpick in today’s butter and next thing you know you’ll be findin’ a doorknob in the cottage cheese. I don’t like it, dear, but it’s the
