The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Hot chicken broth," she said. "It's a secret Mrs. Jacobson told me at a Women's Institute tea. Been in her family since the Exodus. Mind you, I've said nothing."

Mrs. Mullet's other favorite bit of village wisdom had to do with eucalyptus. She forced Dogger to grow it for her in the greenhouse, and assiduously concealed sprigs of the stuff here and there about Buckshaw as talismans against the cold or grippe.

"Eucalyptus in the hall, no grippe or colds shall you befall,” she used to crow triumphantly. And it was true. Since she had been secreting the dark waxy green leaves in unsuspected places around the house, none of us had suffered so much as a sniffle.

Until now. Something had obviously failed.

"No, thank you, Mrs. Mullet," I said. "I've just brushed my teeth."

It was a lie, but it was the best I could come up with at short notice. Besides having a whiff of martyrdom about it, my reply had the added advantage of bucking up my image in the personal cleanliness department. On my way out, I filched from the pantry a bottle of yellow granules labeled Partington's Essence of Chicken, and from a wall sconce in the hall I helped myself to a handful of eucalyptus leaves.

Upstairs in the laboratory, I took down a bottle of sodium bicarbonate which Uncle Tar, in his spidery copperplate script, had marked sal aeratus, as well as, in his usual meticulous manner, Sod. Bicarb. to distinguish it from potassium bicarbonate, which also was sometimes called sal aeratus. Pot. Bicarb. was more at home in fire extinguishers than in the tummy.

I knew the stuff as NaHCO₃, which the cottagers called baking soda. Somewhere I remembered hearing that the same rustics believed in the power of a good old dosing of alkali salts to flush out even the fiercest case of the common cold.

It made good chemical sense, I reasoned: If salts were a cure, and chicken broth were a cure, think of the magnificent restorative power of a glass of effervescent chicken broth! It boggled the mind. I'd patent the thing; it would be the world's first antidote against the common cold: De Luce's Deliquescence, Flavia's Foup Formula!

I even managed a moderately happy hum as I measured eight ounces of drinking water into a beaker, and set it over the flame to heat. Meanwhile, in a stoppered flask I boiled the torn shreds of eucalyptus leaves and watched as straw-colored drops of oil began to form at the end of the distillation coil.

When the water was at a rolling boil, I removed it from the heat and let it cool for several minutes, then dropped in two heaped teaspoons of Partington's Chicken Essence and a tablespoon of good old NaHCO₃.

I gave it a jolly good stir and let it foam like Vesuvius over the lip of the beaker. I pinched my nostrils shut and tossed back half of the concoction chug-a-lug.

Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

I unstoppered the flask and dumped the eucalyptus water, leaves and all, into the remains of the yellow soup. Then, peeling off my sweater and draping it over my head as a fume hood, I inhaled the camphoraceous steam of poultry eucalyptus, and somewhere up inside the sticky caverns of my head I thought I felt my sinuses throw their hands up into the air and surrender. I was feeling better already.

There was a sharp knock on the door and I nearly jumped out of my skin. So seldom did anyone come into this part of the house that a tap at the door was as unexpected as one of those sudden heart-clutching organ chords in a horror film when a door swings open upon a gallery of corpses. I shot back the bolt and there stood Dogger, wringing his hat like the Irish washerwoman. I could see that he had been having one of his episodes.

I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed—although I did not often make use of the fact—that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.

"What's the password?" I asked, linking my fingers together and placing both hands atop my head.

For about five and a half seconds Dogger looked blank, and then his tense jaw muscles relaxed slowly and he almost smiled. Like an automaton he meshed his fingers and copied my gesture.

"It's on the tip of my tongue," he said haltingly. Then, "I remember now: It's 'arsenic'"

"Careful you don't swallow it," I replied. "It's poison."

With a remarkable display of sheer willpower, Dogger made himself smile. The ritual had been properly observed.

"Enter, friend," I said, and swung the door wide.

Dogger stepped inside and looked round in wonder, as if he had suddenly found himself transported to an alchemist's lab in ancient Sumer. It had been so long since he had been in this part of the house that he had forgotten the room.

"So much glass," he said shakily.

I pulled out Tar's old Windsor chair from the desk, steadying it until Dogger had folded himself between its wooden arms.

"Have a sit. I'll fix you something."