A Red Herring Without Mustard

He let out another sigh: this one frighteningly like a death rattle. “I did not go to London to buy stamps, Flavia. I went there to sell them.”

Even Feely gasped.

“Our days at Buckshaw may be drawing to a close,” Father said. “As you are well aware, the house itself belonged to your mother, and when she died without leaving a will …”

He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness that reminded me of a stricken butterfly.

He had deflated so suddenly in front of us that I could scarcely believe it.

“I had hoped to take her brooch to someone whom I know …”

For quite a few moments his words did not register.

I knew that in recent years the cost of maintaining Buckshaw had become positively ruinous, to say nothing of the taxes and the looming death duty. For years Father had managed to keep “the snarling taxmen,” as he called them, at bay, but now the wolves must be howling once again on the doorstep.

There had been hints from time to time of our predicament, but the threat had always seemed unreal: no more than a distant cloud on a summer horizon.

I remembered that for a time, Father had pinned his hopes on Aunt Felicity, his sister who lived in Hampstead. Daffy had suggested that many of his so-called “philatelic jaunts” were, in fact, calls upon Aunt Felicity to touch her for a loan—or to beg her to fork over whatever remained of the family jewels.

In the end, his sister must have turned him down. Just recently, and with our own ears, we had heard her tell him he must think about selling his philatelic collection. “Those ridiculous postage stamps,” she had called them, to be precise.

“Something will turn up,” Daffy remarked brightly. “It always does.”

“Only in Dickens, Daphne,” Father said. “Only in Dickens.”

Daffy had been reading David Copperfield for the umpteenth time. “Boning up on pawnshops,” she had answered when I asked her why.

Only now did it occur to me that Father had intended to take Harriet’s brooch—the one I had destroyed—to a pawnbroker.

“May I be excused?” I asked. “I’m suddenly not feeling well.”

It was true. I must have fallen asleep the instant my head touched the pillow.

Now, hours later, I was suddenly awake. The hands of my alarm clock, which I had carefully dabbed with my own formulation of phosphorescent paint, told me that it was several minutes past two in the morning.

I lay in bed watching the dark shadows of the trees as they twitched restlessly on the ceiling. Ever since a territorial dispute between two of my distant ancestors had ended in a bitter stalemate—and a black line painted in the middle of the foyer—this wing of the house had remained unheated. Time and the weather had taken their toll, causing the wallpaper of nearly every room—mine was mustard yellow with scarlet worms—to peel away in great sheets which hung in forlorn flaps, while the paper from the ceilings hung down in great loose swags whose contents were probably best not thought about.

Sometimes, especially in winter, I liked to pretend that I lived beneath an iceberg in an Arctic sea; that the coldness was no more than a dream, and that when I awoke, there would be a roaring fire in the rusty fireplace and hot steam rising from the tin hip-bath that stood in the corner behind the door.

There never was, of course, but I couldn’t really complain. I slept here by choice, not by necessity. Here in the east wing—the so-called “Tar” wing—of Buckshaw, I could work away to my heart’s content until all hours in my chemical laboratory. Since they faced south and east, my windows could be ablaze with light and no one outside would see them—no one, that is, except perhaps the foxes and badgers that inhabited the island and the ruined folly in the middle of the ornamental lake, or perhaps the occasional poacher whose footprints and discarded shell casings I sometimes found in my rambles through the Palings.

The Palings! I had almost forgotten.

My abduction at the kitchen door by Feely and Daffy, my subsequent imprisonment in the cellars, my shaming at the hands of Father, and finally my fatigue: All of those had conspired to make me put the Gypsy clean out of my mind.

I leapt from my bed, somewhat surprised to find myself still fully clothed. I must have been tired!

Shoes in hand, I crept down the great curving staircase to the foyer, where I stopped to listen in the middle of that vast expanse of black-and-white tiling. To an observer in one of the galleries above, I must have looked like a pawn in some grand and Gothic game of chess.

A pawn? Pfah, Flavia! Admit it: surely something more than a pawn!

The house was in utter silence. Father and Feely, I knew, would be dreaming their respective dreams: Father of perforated bits of paper and Feely of living in a castle built entirely of mirrors in which she could see herself reflected again and again from every possible aspect.