The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Read online

  "First-rate flipper work," I'll say loudly enough to be heard above the music. "Arf! Arf! Arf!"

  Ophelia has milky blue eyes: the sort of eyes I like to imagine blind Homer might have had. Although she has most of her repertoire off by heart, she occasionally shifts herself on the piano bench, folds a bit forward at the waist like an automaton, and has a good squint at the sheet music.

  Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.

  As I climbed over the last stile and Buckshaw came into view across the field, it almost took my breath away. It was from this angle and at this time of day that I loved it most. As I approached from the west, the mellow old stone glowed like saffron in the late afternoon sun, well settled into the landscape like a complacent mother hen squatting on her eggs, with the Union Jack stretching itself contentedly overhead.

  The house seemed unaware of my approach, as if I were an intruder creeping up on it.

  Even from a quarter of a mile away I could hear the notes of the Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi—the one from his Sonata in A Major—come tripping out to meet me.

  The Toccata was my favorite composition; to my mind it was the greatest musical accomplishment in the entire history of the world, but I knew that if Ophelia found that out, she would never play the piece again.

  Whenever I hear this music it makes me think of flying down the steep east side of Goodger Hill; running so fast that my legs can barely keep up with themselves as I swoop from side to side, mewing into the wind, like a rapturous seagull.

  When I was closer to the house, I stopped in the field and listened to the perfect flow of notes, not too presto—just the way I liked it. I thought of the time I heard Eileen Joyce play the Toccata on the BBC Home Service. Father had it switched on, not really listening, as he fiddled with his stamp collection. The notes had found their way through the corridors and galleries of Buckshaw, floated up the spiral staircase and into my bedroom. By the time I realized what was being played, raced down the stairs, and burst into Father's study, the music had ended.

  We had stood there looking at one another, Father and I, not knowing what to say, until at last, without a word, I had backed out of the room and gone slowly back upstairs.

  That's the only problem with the Toccata: It's too short.

  I came round the fence and onto the terrace. Father was sitting at his desk in the window of his study, intent on whatever it was he was working at.

  The Rosicrucians claim in their adverts that you can make a total stranger turn round in a crowded cinema by fixing your gaze intently on the back of his neck, and I stared at him for all I was worth.

  He glanced up, but he did not see me. His mind was somewhere else.

  I didn't move a muscle.

  And then, as if his head were made of lead, he looked down and went on with his work, and in the drawing room, Feely moved on to something by Schumann.

  WHENEVER SHE WAS THINKING ABOUT NED, Feely played Schumann. I suppose that's why they call it romantic music. Once when she was playing a Schumann sonata with an excessively dreamy look on her face, I had remarked loudly to Daffy that I simply adored bandstand music, and Feely flew into a passion—a passion that wasn't helped by my stalking out of the room and returning a few minutes later with a Bakelite ear-trumpet I had found in a closet, a tin cup, and a hand-lettered sign tied round my neck with a string: “Deafened in tragic piano accident. Please take pity.”

  Feely had probably forgotten that incident by now, but I hadn't. As I pretended to push past her to look out the window, I had a fleeting close-up of her face. Drat! Nothing for my notebook again.

  "You're probably in trouble," she said, slamming down the lid on the keyboard. "Where have you been all day?"

  "None of your horse-nails," I told her. "I'm not in your employ."

  "Everyone's been looking for you. Daffy and I told them you'd run away from home, but no such bloody luck by the look of it."

  "It's bloody poor form to say 'bloody,' Feely; you're not supposed to. And don't puff out your cheeks like that: It makes you look like a petulant pear. Where's Father?"

  As if I didn't know.

  "He hasn't stuck his nose out all day," Daffy said. "Do you suppose he's upset about what happened this morning?"

  "The corpse on the premises? No, I shouldn't say so—nothing to do with him, is it?"

  "That's what I thought," Feely said, and lifted the piano lid.

  With a toss of her hair, she was off into the first of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

  It was slow, but lovely nonetheless, although even on his best days Bach, to my way of thinking, couldn't hold a candle to Pietro Domenico Paradisi.

  And then I remembered Gladys! I had left her at the Thirteen Drakes, where she could be spotted by anyone. If the police hadn't been there already, they soon would be.

  I wondered if by now Mary or Ned had been made to tell them of my visit. But if they had, I reasoned, wouldn't Inspector Hewitt be at Buckshaw this very moment reading me the riot act?

  Five minutes later, for the third time that day, I was on my way to Bishop's Lacey—this time on foot.

  BY KEEPING TO THE HEDGEROWS and skulking behind trees whenever I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, I was able to make my way, by a devious route, to the far end of the High Street which, this late in the day, was deep in its usual empty sleep.

  A shortcut through Miss Bewdley's ornamental garden (water lilies, stone storks, goldfish, and a red lacquered footbridge) brought me to the brick wall that skirted the inn yard of the Thirteen Drakes, where I crouched and listened. Gladys, if no one had moved her, was directly on the other side.

  Except for the hum of a far-off tractor, there wasn't a sound. Just as I was about to venture a peek over the top of the wall I heard voices. Or, to be more precise, one voice, and it was Tully's. I could have heard it even if I'd stayed home at Buckshaw with earplugs.

  "Never laid eyes on the bloke in my life, Inspector. His first visit to Bishop's Lacey, I daresay. Would have remembered if he'd stopped here before: Sanders was my late wife's maiden name, God bless 'er, and I'd have marked it if someone by that name ever signed the register. You can put a fiver on that. No, he wasn't never out here in the yard; he come in the front door and went up to his room. If there's any clues, that's where you'll find 'em—there or in the saloon bar. He was in the saloon bar later for a bit. Drank a pint of half-and-half, chug-a-lug, no tip.”

  So the police knew! I could feel the excitement fizzing inside me like ginger beer, not because they had identified the victim, but because I had beaten them to it with one hand tied behind my back.

  I allowed a smug look to flit across my face.

  When the voices had faded, I used a bit of creeper for a screen and peeked over the top of the bricks. The inn yard was empty.

  I vaulted over the wall, grabbed Gladys, and wheeled her furtively out into the empty High Street. Darting down Cow Lane, I retraced my tracks from earlier in the day by circling back behind the library, between the Thirteen Drakes, and along the rutted towpath beside the river, into Shoe Street, past the churchyard, and into the fields.

  Bumpety-bump across the fields we went, Gladys and I. It was good to be in her company.

  "Oh the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

  And on her daughter

  They wash their feet in soda water.”

  It was a song Daffy had taught me, but only after exacting the promise that I would never sing it at Buckshaw. It seemed like a song for the great outdoors, and this was a perfect opportunity.

  Dogger met me at the door.

  "I need to talk to you, Miss Flavia," he said. I could see the tension in his eyes.

  "All right," I said. "Where?"

  "Greenhouse," he said, with a jerk of his thumb.

  I followed him round the east side of the house
and through the green door that was set into the wall of the kitchen garden. Once in the greenhouse, you might as well be in Africa; no one but Dogger ever set foot in the place.

  Inside, open ventilation panes in the roof caught the afternoon sun, reflecting it down to where we stood among the potting benches and the gutta-percha hoses.

  "What's up, Dogger?" I asked lightly, trying to make it sound a little bit—but not too much—like Bugs Bunny.

  "The police," he said. "I have to know how much you told them about."

  "I've been thinking the same thing," I said. "You first."

  "Well, that Inspector. Hewitt. He asked me some questions about this morning."

  "Me too," I said. "What did you tell him?"

  "I'm sorry, Miss Flavia. I had to tell him that you came and woke me when you found the body, and that I went to the garden with you."

  "He already knew that."

  Dogger's eyebrows flew up like a pair of seagulls.

  "He did?"

  "Of course he did. I told him."

  Dogger let out a long slow whistle.

  "Then you didn't tell him about. that row. in the study?"

  "Certainly not, Dogger! What do you take me for?"

  "You must never breathe a word of that, Miss Flavia. Never!"

  Now here was a pretty kettle of flounders. Dogger was asking me to conspire with him in withholding information from the police. Who was he protecting? Himself? Father? Or could it be me?

  These were questions I could not ask him outright. I thought I'd try a different tack.

  "Of course I'll keep quiet," I said. "But why?"

  Dogger picked up a trowel and began shoveling black soil into a pot. He did not look at me, but his jaw was set at an angle that signaled clearly that he had made up his mind about something.

  "There are things," he said at last, "which need to be known. And there are other things which need not to be known."

  "Such as?" I ventured.

  The lines of his face softened and he almost smiled.

  "Buzz off," he said.

  IN MY LABORATORY, I pulled the paper-wrapped packet from my pocket and carefully opened out the folds.

  I gave a groan of disappointment: My cycling and wall climbing had reduced the evidence to little more than particles of pastry.

  "Oh, crumbs," I said, not without a little pleasure in the aptness of my words. "Now what am I going to do?"

  I put the feather carefully into an envelope, and slipped it into a drawer among letters belonging to Tar de Luce that had been written and replied to when Harriet was my age. No one would ever think of looking there, and besides, as Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.

  Even in its mutilated form, the broken pastry reminded me that I had not eaten all day. Supper at Buckshaw was, by some archaic statute, always prepared earlier by Mrs. Mullet and warmed over for our consumption at nine o'clock.

  I was starved, hungry enough to eat a… well, to eat a slice of Mrs. Mullet's icky custard pie. Odd, wasn't it? She had asked me earlier, just after Father fainted, if I had enjoyed the pie… and I hadn't eaten any.

  When I had gone through the kitchen at four in the morning—just before I stumbled upon that body in the cucumber vines—the pie had still been on the windowsill where Mrs. Mullet had left it to cool. And there had been a piece missing.

  A piece missing indeed!

  Who could have taken it? I remembered wondering about that at the time. It hadn't been Father or Daffy or Feely; they would rather eat creamed worms on toast than Mrs. Mullet's cussed custard.

  Nor would Dogger have eaten it; he wasn't the sort of man who helped himself to dessert. And if Mrs. Mullet had given him the slice, she wouldn't have thought I ate it, would she?

  I walked downstairs and into the kitchen. The pie was gone.

  The window sash was still in its raised position, just as Mrs. Mullet had left it. Had she taken the remains of the pie home to her husband, Alf?

  I could telephone and ask her, I thought, but then I remembered Father's telephonic restrictions.

  Father was of a generation that despised “the instrument,” as he called it. Always ill at ease with the thing, he could be coaxed to talk into it only in the most dire circumstances.

  Ophelia once told me that even when news had come of Harriet's death, it had to be sent by telegram because Father refused to believe anything he hadn't seen in print. The telephone at Buckshaw was subscribed to for use only in the event of fire or medical emergency. Any other use of “the instrument” required Father's personal permission, a rule which had been drummed into us from the day we climbed out of our cribs.

  No, I would have to wait until tomorrow to ask Mrs. Mullet about the pie.

  I took a loaf of bread from the pantry and cut a thick slice. I buttered it, then slathered on a blanket of brown sugar. I folded the bread twice in half, each time pressing it down flat with the palm of my hand. I stuck it in the warming oven and left it there for as long as it took me to sing three verses of “If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake.”

  It was not a true Chelsea bun, but it would have to do.

  ten

  EVEN THOUGH WE DE LUCES HAD BEEN ROMAN Catholics since chariot races were all the rage, that did not keep us from attending St. Tancred's, Bishop's Lacey's only church and a fortress of the Church of England if ever there was one.

  There were several reasons for our patronage. The first was its handy location, and another the fact that Father and the Vicar had both (although at different times) been to school at Greyminster. Besides, Father had once pointed out to us, consecration was permanent, like a tattoo. St. Tancred's, he said, had been a Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation and, in his eyes, remained one.

  Consequently, every Sunday morning without exception we straggled across the fields like ducks, Father slashing intermittently at the vegetation with his Malacca walking stick, Feely, Daffy, and me in that order, and Dogger, in his Sunday best, bringing up the rear.

  No one at St. Tancred's paid us the slightest attention. Some years before, there had been a minor outbreak of grumbling from the Anglicans, but all had been settled without blood or bruises by a well-timed contribution to the Organ Restoration Fund.

  "Tell them we may not be praying with them,” Father told the Vicar, “but we are at least not actively praying against them.”

  Once, when Feely lost her head and bolted for the Communion rail, Father refused to speak to her until the following Sunday. Ever since that day, whenever she so much as shifted her feet in church, Father would mutter, “Steady on, old girl.” He did not need to catch her eye; his profile, which was that of the standard-bearer in some particularly ascetic Roman legion, was enough to keep us in our places. At least in public.

  Now, glancing over at Feely as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil's Hairball.

  The congregation at St. Tancred's had soon become accustomed to our ducking and bobbing, and we basked in Christian charity—except for the time that Daffy told the organist, Mr. Denning, that Harriet had instilled in all of us her firm belief that the story of the Flood in Genesis was derived from the racial memory of the cat family, with particular reference to the drowning of kittens.

  That had caused a bit of a stir, but Father had put things right by making a handsome donation to the Roof Repair Fund, a sum he deducted from Daffy's allowance.

  "Since I don't have an allowance anyway," Daffy said, "no one's the loser. It's a jolly good punishment, actually."

  I listened, unmoved, as the congregation joined in the General Confession:

  "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

  Dogger's words flashed into my mind:

  "There are things which need to
be known. And there are other things which need not to be known."

  I turned round and looked at him. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving. And so, I noticed, were Father's.

  Because it was Trinity Sunday we were treated to a rare old romp from Revelation all about the sardine stone, the rainbow round about the throne, the sea of glass like unto crystal, and the four beasts full of eyes before and uncomfortably behind.

  I had my own opinion about the true meaning of this obviously alchemical reference, but, since I was saving it for my Ph.D. thesis, I kept it to myself. And even though we de Luces were players on the opposing team, as it were, I couldn't help envying those Anglicans the glories of their Book of Common Prayer.

  The glass, too, was glorious. Above the altar, morning sunlight washed in through three windows whose stained glass had been poured in the Middle Ages by half-civilized semivagrant glassmakers who lived and caroused on the verge of Ovenhouse Wood, the thin remains of which still bordered Buckshaw to the west.

  On the left panel, Jonah sprang from the mouth of the great fish, looking back over his shoulder at the thing with a look of wide-eyed indignation. From the booklet that used to be given away in the church porch, I remembered that the creature's white scales had been achieved by firing the glass with tin, while Jonah's skin had been made brown with salts of ferric iron (which, interestingly enough—to me at least—is also the antidote for arsenical poisoning).

  The panel on the right portrayed Jesus emerging from his tomb, as Mary Magdalene, in a red dress (also iron, or perhaps grated particles of gold), holds out to him a purple garment (manganese dioxide) and a loaf of yellow bread (silver chloride).

  I knew that these salts had been mixed with sand and the ashes of a salt marsh reed called glasswort, fired in a furnace hot enough to have given even Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego second thoughts, and then cooled until the desired color was obtained.

  The central panel was dominated by our own Saint Tancred, whose body lay at this very moment somewhere beneath our feet in the crypt. In this view, he is standing at the open door of the church in which we sit (as it looked before the Victorians improved it), welcoming with outstretched arms a multitude of parishioners. Saint Tancred has a pleasant face: He's the sort of person you would like to invite over on a Sunday afternoon to browse through back issues of the Illustrated London News, or maybe even Country Life, and, since we share his faith, I like to imagine that while he snores away eternity down below, he has a particular soft spot for all of us at Buckshaw.