The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

kept sputtering out: hardly a selection to float you off to dreamland…

WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, an oyster-colored dawn was peeping in at the windows. The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at 3:44. On Summer Time, daylight came early, and in less than a quarter of an hour, the sun should be up.

I stretched, yawned, and climbed out of bed. The gramophone had run down, frozen in mid-Polonaise, its needle lying dead in the grooves. For a fleeting moment I thought of winding it up again to give the household a Polish reveille. And then I remembered what had happened just a few hours before.

I went to the window and looked down into the garden. There was the potting shed, its glass panes clouded with the dew, and over there, an angular darkness that was Dogger's overturned wheelbarrow, forgotten in the events of yesterday.

Determined to put it right, to make up to him somehow, for something of which I was not even certain, I dressed and went quietly down the back stairs and into the kitchen.

As I passed the window, I noticed that a slice had been cut from Mrs. Mullet's custard pie. How odd, I thought; it was certainly none of the de Luces who had taken it. If there was one thing upon which we all agreed—one thing that united us as a family—it was our collective loathing of Mrs. Mullet's custard pies. Whenever she strayed from our favorite rhubarb or gooseberry to the dreaded custard, we generally begged off, feigning group illness, and sent her packing off home with the pie, and solicitous instructions to serve it up, with our compliments, to her good husband, Alf.

As I stepped outside, I saw that the silver light of dawn had transformed the garden into a magic glade, its shadows darkened by the thin band of day beyond the walls. Sparkling dew lay upon everything, and I should not have been at all surprised if a unicorn had stepped from behind a rosebush and tried to put its head in my lap.

I was walking towards the wheelbarrow when I tripped suddenly and fell forward onto my hands and knees.

'Bugger!' I said, already looking round to make sure that no one had heard me. I was now plastered with wet black loam.

'Bugger,' I said again, a little less loudly.

Twisting round to see what had tripped me up, I spotted it at once: something white protruding from the cucumbers. For a teetering moment there was a part of me that fought desperately to believe it was a little rake, a cunning little cultivator with white curled tines.

But reason returned, and my mind admitted that it was a hand. A hand attached to an arm: an arm that snaked off into the cucumber patch.

And there, at the end of it, tinted an awful dewy cucumber green by the dark foliage, was a face. A face that looked for all the world like the Green Man of forest legend.

Driven by a will stronger than my own, I found myself dropping further to my hands and knees beside this apparition, partly in reverence and partly for a closer look.

When I was almost nose to nose with the thing its eyes began to open.

I was too shocked to move a muscle.

The body in the cucumbers sucked in a shuddering breath… and then, bubbling at the nose, exhaled it in a single word, slowly and a little sadly, directly into my face.

'Vale,” it said.

My nostrils pinched reflexively as I got a whiff of a peculiar odor—an odor whose name was, for an instant, on the very tip of my tongue.

The eyes, as blue as the birds in the Willow pattern, looked up into mine as if staring out from some dim and smoky past, as if there were some recognition in their depths.

And then they died.

I wish I could say my heart was stricken, but it wasn't. I wish I could say my instinct was to run away, but that would not be true. Instead, I watched in awe, savoring every detail: the fluttering fingers, the almost imperceptible bronze metallic cloudiness that appeared on the skin, as if, before my very eyes, it were being breathed upon by death.

And then the utter stillness.

I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

three

I RACED UP THE WEST STAIRCASE. MY FIRST THOUGHT was to waken Father, but something—some great invisible magnet—stopped me in my tracks. Daffy and Feely were useless in emergencies; it would be no good calling them. As quickly and as quietly as possible, I ran to the back of the house, to the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs, and tapped lightly on the door.

'Dogger!' I whispered. 'It's me, Flavia.'

There wasn't a sound within, and I repeated my rapping.

After about two and a half eternities, I heard Dogger's slippers shuffling across the floor. The lock gave a heavy click as the bolt shot back and his door opened a couple of wary inches. I could see that his face was haggard in the dawn, as if he hadn't slept.

'There's a dead body in the garden,' I said. 'I think you'd better come.'

As I shifted from foot to foot and bit my fingernails, Dogger gave me a look that can only be described as reproachful, then vanished into the darkness of his room to dress. Five minutes later we were standing together on the garden path.

It was obvious that Dogger was no stranger to dead bodies. As if he'd been doing it all his life, he knelt and felt with his first two fingers for a pulse at the back angle of the jawbone. By his deadpan, distant look I could tell that there wasn't one.