The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

THE BEDROOMS AT BUCKSHAW WERE VAST, dim Zeppelin hangars, and mine, in the south—or Tar—wing, as we called it, was the largest of the lot. Its early-Victorian wallpaper (mustard yellow, with a spattering of things that looked like bloodred clots of string) made it seem even larger: a cold, boundless, drafty waste. Even in summer the trek across the room to the distant washstand near the window was an experience that might have daunted Scott of the Antarctic; just one of the reasons I skipped it and climbed straight up into my four-poster bed where, wrapped in a woolen blanket, I could sit cross-legged until the cows came home, pondering my life.

I thought, for instance, of the time I used a butter knife to scrape off samples of my jaundiced wall covering. I remembered Daffy's wide-eyed recounting of one of A. J. Cronin's books in which some poor sod sickened and died after sleeping in a room in which one of the wallpaper's prime coloring ingredients was arsenic. Filled with hope, I carried my scrapings up to the laboratory for analysis.

No stodgy old Marsh's test for me, thank you very much! I favored the method by which the arsenic was first converted to its trioxidic, then heated with sodium acetate to produce cacodyl oxide: not only one of the most poisonous substances ever known to exist on this planet Earth, but one with the added advantage of giving off a most unbelievably offensive odor: like the stink of rotten garlic, but a million times worse. Its discoverer, Bunsen (of burner fame), noted that just one whiff of the stuff would not only make your hands and feet tingle, but also your tongue would develop a vile black coating. Oh, Lord, how manifold are thy works!

You can imagine my disappointment when I saw that my sample contained no arsenic: It had been colored by a simple organic tincture, most likely one made from the common goat-willow (Salix caprea) or some other harmless and supremely boring vegetable dye.

Somehow that caused my thoughts to go flying back to Father.

What had frightened him so at the kitchen door? And was it really fear I had seen in his face?

Yes, there seemed little doubt of that. There was nothing else it could have been. I was already far too familiar with his anger, his impatience, his fatigue, his sudden bleak moods: all of them states which drifted now and then across his face like the shadows of the clouds that moved across our English hills.

He was not afraid of dead birds, that much I knew. I had seen him tuck into many a fat Christmas goose, brandishing his knife and fork like an Oriental assassin. Surely it couldn't be the presence of feathers? Or the bird's dead eye?

And it couldn't have been the stamp. Father loved stamps more dearly than he loved his offspring. The only thing he had ever loved more than his pretty bits of paper was Harriet. And she, as I have said, was dead.

Like that snipe.

Could that be the reason for his reaction?

"No! No! Get away!" The harsh voice came in at my open window, derailing and wrecking my train of thought.

I threw off the blanket, leaped from my bed, ran across the room, and looked down into the kitchen garden.

It was Dogger. He was flattened against the garden wall, his dark, weathered fingers splayed out across the faded red bricks.

"Don't come near me! Get away!"

Dogger was Father's man: his factotum. And he was alone in the garden.

It was whispered—by Mrs. Mullet, I might as well admit—that Dogger had survived two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, followed by thirteen more months of torture, starvation, malnutrition, and forced labor on the Death Railway between Thailand and Burma where, it was thought, he had been forced to eat rats.

"Go gently, dear," she told me. "His nerves are something shocking."

I looked down at him there in the cucumber patch, his thatch of prematurely white hair standing on end; his eyes upturned, seemingly sightless, to the sun.

"It's all right, Dogger!" I shouted. "I've got them covered from up here."

For a moment, I thought he hadn't heard me, but then his face turned slowly, like a sunflower, towards the sound of my voice. I held my breath. You never know what someone might do in such a state.

"Steady on, Dogger," I called out. "It's all right. They've gone."

Suddenly he went limp, like a man who has been holding a live electrical wire in which the current has just been switched off.

"Miss Flavia?" His voice quavered. "Is that you, Miss Flavia?"

"I'm coming down," I said. "I'll be there in a jiff."

Down the back stairs I ran, pell-mell, and into the kitchen. Mrs. Mullet had gone home, but her custard pie sat cooling at the open window.

No, I thought: What Dogger needed was something to drink. Father kept his Scotch locked tightly in a bookcase in his study, and I could not intrude.

Luckily, I found a pitcher of cool milk in the pantry. I poured out a tall glass of it, and dashed into the garden.

"Here, drink this," I said, holding it out to him.