The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

'Those boys! They killed him as surely as if they had taken a dagger into their own hands and stuck him in the heart.'

'Who were they, these boys. these monsters, I mean? Do you remember their names?'

'Why do you want to know? What right have you coming here to stir up these ghosts?'

'I'm interested in history,' I said.

She passed a hand across her eyes as if commanding herself to come out of a trance, and spoke in the slow voice of a woman drugged.

'It's so long ago,' she said. 'So very long ago. I really don't care to remember. Uncle Grenville mentioned their names, before he was—'

'Murdered?' I suggested.

'Yes, that's right, before he was murdered. Strange, isn't it? For all these years one of their names has stuck most in my mind because it reminded me of a monkey. a monkey on a chain, you know, with an organ grinder and a little round red hat and a tin cup.'

She gave a tight, nervous little laugh.

'Jacko,' I said.

Miss Mountjoy sat down heavily as if she'd been pole-axed. She stared at me with goggle eyes as if I'd just materialized from another dimension.

'Who are you, little girl?' she whispered. 'Why have you come here? What's your name?'

'Flavia,' I said as I paused for a moment at the door. 'Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce.' The 'Sabina' was real enough; 'Dolores' I invented on the spot.

UNTIL I RESCUED HER from rusty oblivion, my trusty old three-speed BSA Keep Fit had languished for years in a toolshed among broken flowerpots and wooden wheelbarrows. Like so many other things at Buckshaw, she had once belonged to Harriet, who had named her l'Hirondelle: 'the swallow.' I had rechristened her Gladys.

Gladys's tires had been flat, her gears bone dry and crying out for oil, but with her own onboard tire pump and black leather tool bag behind her seat, she was entirely self-sufficient. With Dogger's help, I soon had her in tiptop running order. In the tool kit, I had found a booklet called Cycling for Women of All Ages, by Prunella Stack, the leader of the Women's League of Health and Beauty. On its cover was written with black ink, in beautiful, flowing script: Harriet de Luce, Buckshaw.

There were times when Harriet was not gone; she was everywhere.

As I raced home, past the leaning moss-covered headstones in the heaped-up churchyard of St. Tancred's, through the narrow leafy lanes, across the chalky High Road, and into the open country, I let Gladys have her head, swooping down the slopes past the rushing hedges, imagining all the while I was the pilot of one of the Spitfires which, just five years ago, had skimmed these very hedgerows like swallows as they came in to land at Leathcote.

I had learned from the booklet that if I bicycled with a poker back like Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz at the cinema, chose varied terrain, and breathed deeply, I would glow with health like the Eddystone Light, and never suffer from pimples: a useful bit of information which I wasted no time in passing along to Ophelia.

Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men's League of Health and Handsomeness?

I pretended I was the boy Father must always have wanted: a son he could take to Scotland for salmon fishing and grouse shooting on the moors; a son he could send out to Canada to take up ice hockey. Not that Father did any of these things, but if he'd had a son, I liked to think he might have done.

My middle name should have been Laurence, like his, and when we were alone together he'd have called me Larry. How keenly disappointed he must have been when all of us had come out girls.

Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding?

'Hell, no!' I shouted into the wind, and I chanted as we flew along:

Oomba-chukka! Oomba-chukka

Oomba-chukka-Boom!

But I felt no more like one of Lord Baden-Powell's blasted Boy Scouts than I did Prince Knick-Knack of Ali Kazaam.

I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

'All hail Flavia! Flavia forever!' I shouted, as Gladys and I sped through the Mulford Gates, at top speed, into the avenue of chestnuts that lined the drive at Buckshaw.

These magnificent gates, with their griffins rampant and filigreed black wrought iron, had once graced the neighboring estate of Batchley, the ancestral home of “The Dirty Mulfords.” The gates were acquired for Buckshaw in the 1760s by one Brandwyn de Luce, who—after one of the Mulfords absconded with his wife—dismantled them and took them home.

The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates (“The finest this side Paradise,” Brandwyn had written in his diary) seemed to have settled the matter, since the Mulfords and the de Luces remained best of friends and neighbors until the last Mulford, Tobias, sold off the estate at the time of the American Civil War and went abroad to assist his Confederate cousins.

'A WORD, FLAVIA,” Inspector Hewitt said, stepping out of the front door.

Had he been waiting for me?

'Of course,' I said graciously.