A Red Herring Without Mustard

As the door opened, I almost gasped aloud. Standing in front of me was a muscular woman in riding breeches and a lavender blouse. Her short gray hair lay tightly against her head like an aluminum helmet.

She screwed a tortoiseshell monocle into her eye and peered at me.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Harewood?”

“No,” she said, and shut the door in my face.

Very well, then!

I remembered Father remarking once that if rudeness was not attributable to ignorance, it could be taken as a sure sign that one was speaking to a member of the aristocracy. I pushed the bell again. I would ask for directions.

But this time the door stayed closed, and the house behind it remained in silence.

But wait! The cottage had two front doors. I had simply chosen the wrong one.

I gave myself a knuckle on the head and walked to the other door. I raised the door knocker and gave it a gentle tap.

The door flew open instantly, and there stood Riding Breeches, glaring at me for all she was worth, though not through her monocle this time.

“May I speak to Mrs. Harewood?” I ventured. “It’s about—”

“No!” she said loudly. “Go away!”

But before she could slam the door, a voice came from somewhere inside the house.

“Who is it, Ursula?”

“A girl selling something,” she called over her shoulder, and to me, “Go away. We don’t want any biscuits.”

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

“Mrs. Harewood,” I shouted. “It’s about Brookie!”

It was as if I had cast a spell and frozen time. For what seemed like forever, the woman at the door stood perfectly motionless, gaping at me as if she were a life-sized painted cutout from a picture book. She didn’t even breathe.

“Mrs. Harewood—please! It’s Flavia de Luce, from Bishop’s Lacey.”

“Show her in, Ursula,” the voice said.

As I brushed past her and into the narrow hallway, Ursula didn’t move a muscle.

“In here,” the voice said, and I moved towards it.

I suppose I was half expecting to find a decayed Miss Haversham, clinging to her moldy treasures in the curtained cave of her drawing room. What I found was altogether different.

Vanetta Harewood stood in a beam of sunlight at the bow window, and she turned to hold out her hands to me as I entered.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

She looked, I thought, to be about forty-five. But surely she must be much older than that. How on earth could such a beautiful creature be the mother of that middle-aged layabout, Brookie Harewood?

She wore a smart dark suit with an Oriental silk at her neck, and her fingers were afire with diamonds.

“I must apologize for Ursula,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “but she’s fiercely protective of me. Perhaps too fiercely.”

I nodded dumbly.

“In my profession, privacy is paramount, you see, and now, with all this …”

She made a wide sweep of her hands to take in the entire world.

“I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry about Brookie.”

She turned and took a cigarette from a silver box, lit it with a silver lighter that might have been a scale model of Aladdin’s lamp, and blew out a long jet of smoke which, oddly enough, was also silver in the sunlight.

“Brookie was a good boy,” she said, “but he did not grow up to be a good man. He had the fatal gift of making people believe him.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I nodded anyway.

“His life was not an easy one,” she said reflectively. “Not as easy as it might seem.”

And then, quite suddenly—“Now tell me, why have you come?”

Her question caught me by surprise. Why had I come?

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed, child. If you’re here to express your condolences, you have already done so, for which I thank you. You may leave, if you wish.”

“Brookie was at Buckshaw,” I blurted. “I found him in the drawing room in the middle of the night.”

I could have cut out my tongue! There was no need for his mother to know this—no need at all, and even less for me to tell her.

But part of me knew that it was safe enough. Vanetta Harewood was a professional woman. She would no more want the midnight ramblings of her son brought to light than … than I would.

“I am going to ask you a very great favor, Flavia. Tell the police if you must, but if you feel it isn’t essential …”

She had walked back to the window, where she stood staring out into the past. “You see, Brookie had his … demons, if you will. If there is no need to make them public, then—”

“I won’t tell anyone, Mrs. Harewood,” I said. “I promise.”

She turned back to me and came across the room slowly. “You’re a remarkably intelligent girl, Flavia,” she said. And then, after thinking for a couple of seconds, she added, “Come with me; there’s something I wish to show you.”

Down a step we went, and then up another, into the part of the house whose door I had first knocked upon. Low timbered ceilings made her stoop more than once as we went from room to room.

“Ursula’s studio,” she said, with a wave of a hand at a room that seemed full of twigs and branches.

“Basketry,” she explained. “Ursula is a devotee of traditional crafts. Her willow baskets have taken prizes both here and on the Continent.