A Red Herring Without Mustard

Whether it was from the sudden shock or the clammy coldness of the cellars I could not be certain, but I had begun to shiver. Would they take this as a sign of weakness? It is said that in certain small animals it is instinctive when in danger to play dead, and I realized that I was one of them.

I took shallow breaths and tried not to move a muscle.

“Free her, Garbax!”

“Yes, O Three-Eyed One.”

It sometimes amused my sisters to slip suddenly into the roles of bizarre alien creatures: creatures even more bizarre and alien than they were already in everyday life. Both of them knew it was a trick that for some reason I found particularly upsetting.

I had already learned that sisterhood, like Loch Ness, has things that lurk unseen beneath the surface, but I think it was only now that I realized that of all the invisible strings that tied the three of us together, the dark ones were the strongest.

“Stop it, Daffy. Stop it, Feely!” I shouted. “You’re frightening me.”

I gave my legs a couple of convincing froglike kicks, as if I were on the verge of a seizure.

The sack was suddenly whisked away, spinning me round so that I now lay facedown upon the stones.

A single candle, stuck to the top of a wooden cask, flickered fitfully, its pale light sending dark shapes dancing everywhere among the stone arches of the cellar.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw my sisters’ faces looming grotesquely in the shadows. They had drawn black circles round their eyes and their mouths with burnt cork, and I understood instantly the message that this was intended to convey: “Beware! You are in the hands of savages!”

Now I could see the cause of the distorted robot voice I had heard: Feely had been speaking into the mouth of an empty cocoa tin.

“ ‘French jet is nothing but glass,’ ” she spat, chucking the tin to the floor where it fell with a nerve-wracking clatter. “Your very words. What have you done with Mummy’s brooch?”

“It was an accident,” I whined untruthfully.

Feely’s frozen silence lent me a bit of confidence.

“I dropped it and stepped on it. If it were real jet it mightn’t have shattered.”

“Hand it over.”

“I can’t, Feely. There was nothing left but little chips. I melted them down for slag.”

Actually, I had hit the thing with a hammer and reduced it to black sand.

“Slag? Whatever do you want with slag?”

It would be a mistake to tell her that I was working on a new kind of ceramic flask, one that would stand up to the temperatures produced by a super-oxygenated Bunsen burner.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just mucking about.”

“Oddly enough, I believe you,” Feely said. “That’s what you pixy changelings do best, isn’t it? Muck about?”

My puzzlement must have been evident on my face.

“Changelings,” Daffy said in a weird voice. “The pixies come in the night and steal a healthy baby from its crib. They leave an ugly shriveled changeling like you in its place, and the mother desolate.”

“If you don’t believe it,” Feely said, “go stand in front of a looking glass.”

“I’m not a changeling,” I protested, my anger rising. “Harriet loved me more than she did either of you two morons!”

“Did she?” Feely sneered. “Then why did she used to leave you sleeping in front of an open window every night, hoping that the pixies would bring back the real Flavia?”

“She didn’t!” I shouted.

“I’m afraid she did. I was there. I saw. I remember.”

“No! It’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. I used to cling to her and cry, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Please make the pixies bring back my baby sister.’ ”

“Flavia? Daphne? Ophelia?”

It was Father!

His voice came at parade-square volume from the direction of the kitchen staircase, amplified by the stone walls and echoing from arch to arch.

All three of our heads snapped round just in time to see his boots, his trousers, his upper body, and finally his face come into sight as he descended the stairs.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, peering round at the three of us in the near-darkness. “What have you done to yourselves?”

With the backs of their hands and their forearms, Feely and Daffy were already trying to scrub the black markings from their faces.

“We were only playing Prawns and Trivets,” Daffy said before I could answer. She pointed accusingly at me. “She gives us jolly good what-for when it’s her turn to play the Begum, but when it’s ours she always …”

Well done, Daff, I thought. I couldn’t have concocted a better spur-of-the-moment excuse myself.

“I’m surprised at you, Ophelia,” Father said. “I shouldn’t have thought …”

And then he stopped, unable to find the required words. There were times when he seemed almost—what was it … afraid? … of my oldest sister.

Feely rubbed at her face, smearing her cork makeup horribly. I nearly laughed out loud, but then I realized what she was doing. In a bid for sympathy, she was spreading the stuff to create dark, theatrical circles under her eyes.

The vixen! Like an actress applying her makeup onstage, it was a bold and brazen performance, which I couldn’t help admiring.