A Red Herring Without Mustard

I hoped it was … and also that it was not.

We were sitting on my bed, Porcelain with her back against the head, and I cross-legged at the foot.

“I expect you’ll be wanting to visit your gram,” I said.

Porcelain shrugged, and I think I understood her.

“The police don’t know you’re here yet. I suppose we’d better tell them.”

“I suppose.”

“Let’s leave it till the morning,” I told her. “I’m too tired to think.”

And it was true: My eyelids felt as if they had been hung with lead sinkers. I was simply too exhausted to deal with the problems at hand. The greatest of these would be to keep secret Porcelain’s presence in the house. The last thing I needed was to look on helplessly as Father drove away the granddaughter of Fenella and Johnny Faa.

Fenella was in hospital in Hinley and, for all I knew, she might be dead by now. If I was to get to the bottom of the attack upon her at the Palings—and, I suspected, the murder of Brookie Harewood—I would have to attract as little attention as possible.

It was only a matter of time before Inspector Hewitt would be at the door, demanding details about how I had discovered Brookie’s body. I needed time to review which facts I would tell him and which I would not. Or did I?

My mind was a whirl. Heigh-ho! I thought. What jolly sport is the world of Flavia de Luce.

Next thing I knew it was morning, and sunlight was pouring in through the windows.

THIRTEEN

I ROLLED OVER AND blinked. I had been sprawled across the bottom of the bed, my head twisted painfully against the footboard. At the top of the bed, Porcelain was tucked in with my blanket pulled over her shoulders, her head on my pillow, sleeping away for all she was worth like some Oriental princess.

For a moment I felt my resentment rising, but when I remembered the tale she had told me last night, I let the resentment melt into pity.

I glanced at the clock and saw, to my horror, that I had overslept. I was late for breakfast. Father insisted that dishes at the table arrive and be taken away with military precision.

Taking great care not to awaken Porcelain, I made a quick change of clothing, took a swipe at my hair with a brush, and crept down to breakfast.

Father, as usual, was immersed in the latest number of The London Philatelist, and seemed hardly to notice my arrival: a sure sign that another philatelic auction was about to take place. If our financial condition was as precarious as he claimed, he’d need to be sharp about current prices. As he ate, he made little notes on a napkin with the stub of a pencil, his mind in another world.

As I slipped into my chair, Feely fixed me with the cold and stony stare she had perfected by watching Queen Mary in the newsreels.

“You have a pimple on your face,” I said matter-of-factly as I poured milk on my Weetabix.

She pretended she didn’t hear me, but less than a minute later I was gratified to see her hand rise automatically to her cheek and begin its exploration. It was like watching a crab crawl slowly across the seabed in one of the full-colored short subjects at the cinema: The Living Ocean, or something like that.

“Careful, Feely!” I said. “It’s going to explode.”

Daffy looked up from her book—the copy of A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande I had found at the fête. She’d picked it up herself, the swine!

I made a note to steal it later.

“What does it mean where it says ‘a red herring without mustard’?” I asked, pointing.

Daffy loved the slightest opportunity to show off her superior knowledge.

I had already reviewed in my mind what I knew about mustard, which was precious little. I knew, for instance, that it contained, among other things, the acids oleic, erucic, behenic, and stearic. I knew that stearic acid was found in beef and mutton suet because I had once subjected one of Mrs. Mullet’s greasy Sunday roasts to chemical analysis, and I had looked up the fact that erucic acid gets its name from the Greek word meaning “to vomit.”

“Red herring, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was considered an inferior dish,” Daffy replied, with an especially withering look at me on the word “inferior.”

I glanced over at Father to see if he was looking, but he wasn’t.

“Nicholas Breton called it ‘a good gross dish for a coarse stomach,’ ” she went on, squirming and preening in her chair. “He also said that old ling—that’s another fish, in case you don’t know—is like ‘a blew coat without caugnisaunce,’ which means a servant who doesn’t wear his master’s badge of arms.”

“Daphne, please …” Father said, without looking up, and she subsided.

I knew that they were referring—over my head, they thought—to Dogger. Warfare at Buckshaw was like that: invisible and sometimes silent.

“Pass the toast, please,” Daffy said, as quietly and politely as if she were addressing a stranger in an A.B.C. tea shop: as if the last eleven years of my life hadn’t happened.