The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"One reads in novels," he said, "of the reprieve that comes when the trap's already sprung; of the horse whose heart stops an inch past the finish line." He chuckled dryly, and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. "'Too late! Too late! the maiden cried'—and all that. 'Curfew shall not ring tonight!'

"How Fate loves a jest," he went on in a half whisper. "Who said that? Cyrano de Bergerac, was it not?"

For just a fraction of a second, I thought how much Daffy would enjoy talking to this old gentleman. But only for a fraction of a second. And then I shrugged.

With a slightly amused smile, Dr. Kissing removed his cigarette from his mouth, and touched its lighted tip to the corner of the Ulster Avenger.

I felt as if a ball of fire had been thrown into my face; as if my chest had been bound with barbed wire. I blinked, and then, frozen with horror, watched as the stamp began to smolder, then burst into a tiny flame which licked slowly, inexorably, across Queen Victoria's youthful face.

As the flame reached his fingertips, Dr. Kissing opened his hand and let the dark ashes float to the floor. From beneath the hem of his dressing gown, a polished black shoe ventured out and stepped daintily on the remains then, with a few quick twists, ground them beneath the toe.

In three thunderous heartbeats, the Ulster Avenger was no more than a black smudge on the linoleum of Rook's End.

"The stamp in your pocket has just doubled in value," said Dr. Kissing. "Guard it well, Flavia. It is now the only one of its kind in the world."

22

WHENEVER I'M OUT-OF-DOORS AND FIND MYSELF wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky. For the first little while, I'm usually entertained by my “floaters,” those wormy little strings of protein that swim to and fro across one's field of vision like dark little galaxies. When I'm not in a hurry, I stand on my head to stir them up, and then lie back to watch the show, as if it were an animated cinema film.

Today, though, I'd had too much on my mind to bother, so when I had bicycled no more than a mile from Rook's End, I threw myself down on the grassy bank and stared up into the summer sky.

I could not get out of my mind something that Father had told me, namely that the two of them, he and Horace Bonepenny, had killed Mr. Twining; that they were personally responsible for his death.

Had this been no more than one of Father's fantastic ideas I should have written it off at once, but there was more to it than that. Miss Mountjoy, too, believed they had killed her uncle, and had told me so.

It was easy enough to see that Father felt a real sense of guilt. After all, he had been part of the push to view Dr. Kissing's stamp collection, and his one time friendship with Bonepenny, even though it had cooled, made him an accomplice in a roundabout sort of way. But still…

No, there had to be more to it than that, but what it might be, I could not think.

I lay on the grass, staring up at the blue vault of Heaven as earnestly as those old pillar-squatting fakirs in India used to stare directly into the sun before we civilized them, but I could think of nothing properly. Directly above me, the sun was a great white zero, blazing down upon my empty head.

I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

Still nothing.

But wait! Yes! That was it! Father had done nothing. Nothing! He had known—or at least suspected—from the instant it happened that Bonepenny had pinched the Head's prize stamp… and yet he had told no one.

It was a sin of omission: one of those offenses from the ecclesiastical catalogue of crime Feely was always going on about that seemed to apply to everyone but her.

But Father's guilt was a moral thing and, as such, hardly my cup of tea.

Still, there was no denying it: Father had kept silent, and by his silence had perhaps made it seem necessary for the saintly old Mr. Twining to shoulder the blame and pay for the breach of honor with his life.

Surely there must have been some talk at the time. The natives in this part of England have never been known for their reticence; far from it. In the last century, the Hinley pond-poet Herbert Miles had referred to us as “that gaggle o' geese who gossip gaily 'pon the gladdening green,” and there was a certain amount of truth in his words. People love to talk—especially when the talking involves answering the questions of others—because it makes them feel wanted. In spite of the gravy-stained copy of Inquire Within Upon Everything which Mrs. Mullet kept on a shelf in the pantry, I had long ago discovered that the best way to obtain answers about anything was to walk up to the closest person and ask. Inquire without.