A Red Herring Without Mustard

Using a pipette, I measured half an ounce of a clear liquid from the first of these into a calibrated test tube. From the second bottle I measured three ounces of another fluid into a small flask. I watched in fascination as I combined the two clear fluids with several ounces of distilled water, and before my eyes a reddish color appeared.

Presto chango! Aqua regia … royal water!

The ancient alchemists gave it that name because it is capable of dissolving gold, which they considered to be the king of metals.

I have to admit that manufacturing the stuff myself never fails to excite me.

Actually, aqua regia is more orange than red: the precise color of pomegranates, if I remember correctly. Yes, pomegranates—that was it.

I had once seen these exotic fruits in a shop window in the high street. Mr. Hughes, the greengrocer, had imported the things on a trial basis, but they had remained in his shop window until they blackened and caved in upon themselves like rotted puffballs.

“Bishop’s Lacey’s been’t ready for pomegranates yet,” he had told Mrs. Mullet. “We don’t deserves ’em.”

I had always marveled at the way in which three clear liquids—nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, and water—when combined could produce, as if by magic, color—and not just any color, but the color of a flaming sunset.

The swirling shades of orange in the glass seemed to illustrate perfectly the thoughts that were swarming round and round, mixing in my mind.

It was all so confoundedly complicated: the attack upon Fenella, the gruesome death of Brookie Harewood, the sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance of Porcelain, Harriet’s firedogs turning up in not one but three different locations, the strange antiques shop of the abominable Pettibones, Miss Mountjoy and the Hobblers, Vanetta Harewood’s long-lost portrait of Harriet, and underneath it all, like the rumble of a stuck organ pipe, the constant low drone of Father’s looming bankruptcy.

It was enough to make an archangel spit.

In its container, the aqua regia was growing darker by the minute, as if it, too, were waiting impatiently for answers.

And suddenly I saw the way.

Lighting a Bunsen burner, I set it beneath the flask. I would warm the acid gently before proceeding with the next step.

From a cupboard I took down a small wooden box upon the end of which Uncle Tar had penciled the word “platinum”; and slid open the lid. Inside were perhaps a dozen flat squares of the silvery-gray mineral, none larger than an adult’s fingernail. I selected a piece that weighed perhaps a quarter of an ounce.

When the aqua regia had reached the proper temperature, I picked up the bit of platinum with a pair of tweezers and held it above the mouth of the flask. Aside from the hiss of the gas, the laboratory was so quiet that I actually heard the tiny plop as I let the platinum drop into the fluid.

For a moment, nothing happened.

But now the liquid in the flask was a darkening red.

And then the platinum began to writhe.

This was the part I liked best!

As if in agony, the bit of metal crept towards the glass wall of the flask, trying to escape the acids that were consuming it.

And suddenly poof! The platinum was gone.

I could almost hear the aqua regia licking its lips. “More, please!”

It wasn’t that the platinum had not put up a noble fight, because it had. The important thing, I reminded myself, was this: Platinum cannot be dissolved by any one acid!

No, platinum could not be dissolved by nitric acid alone, and it merely laughed a jolly “ha-ha!” at hydrochloric acid. Only when the two combined could platinum be broken down.

There was a lesson here—two lessons, in fact.

The first was this: I was the platinum. It was going to take more than a single opponent to overcome Flavia Sabina de Luce.

What was left in the flask was bichloride of platinum, which in itself would be useful to test—in some future experiment, perhaps—for the presence of either nicotine or potassium. More to the point, though, was the fact that although the platinum chip had vanished, something new had been formed: something with a whole new set of capabilities.

And then quite suddenly, I caught a glimpse of my face reflected in the glassware, watching wide-eyed as the somewhat cloudy liquid in the flask, shifting uneasily, took on, perhaps, a tinge of sickly yellow, as if in the drifting mists of a Gypsy’s crystal ball.

I knew then what I had to do.

“Aha! Flavia!” the vicar said. “We missed you at church on Sunday.”

“Sorry, Vicar,” I told him, “I’m afraid I rather overdid myself on Saturday, what with the fête and so forth.”

Since good works do not generally require trumpeting, I did not feel it necessary to mention the assistance I had offered to Fenella. And as it turned out, I was right to hold my tongue, because the vicar quickly brought up the subject himself.