Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

worms—to peel away in great sheets which hung in forlorn flaps, while the paper from the ceilings hung down in great loose swags whose contents were probably best not thought about.
    Sometimes, especially in winter, I liked to pretend that I lived beneath an iceberg in an Arctic sea; that the coldness was no more than a dream, and that when I awoke, there would be a roaring fire in the rusty fireplace and hot steam rising from the tin hip-bath that stood in the corner behind the door.
    There never was, of course, but I couldn’t really complain. I slept here by choice, not by necessity. Here in the east wing—the so-called “Tar” wing—of Buckshaw, I could work away to my heart’s content until all hours in my chemical laboratory. Since they faced south and east, my windows could be ablaze with light and no one outside would see them—no one, that is, except perhaps the foxes and badgers that inhabited the island and the ruined folly in the middle of the ornamental lake, or perhaps the occasional poacher whose footprints and discarded shell casings I sometimes found in my rambles through the Palings.
    The Palings! I had almost forgotten.
    My abduction at the kitchen door by Feely and Daffy, my subsequent imprisonment in the cellars, my shaming at the hands of Father, and finally my fatigue: All of those had conspired to make me put the Gypsy clean out of my mind.
    I leapt from my bed, somewhat surprised to find myself still fully clothed. I must have been tired!
    Shoes in hand, I crept down the great curving staircase to the foyer, where I stopped to listen in the middle of that vast expanse of black-and-white tiling. To an observer in one of the galleries above, I must have looked like a pawn in some grand and Gothic game of chess.
    A pawn? Pfah, Flavia! Admit it: surely something more than a pawn!
    The house was in utter silence. Father and Feely, I knew, would be dreaming their respective dreams: Father of perforated bits of paper and Feely of living in a castle built entirely of mirrors in which she could see herself reflected again and again from every possible aspect.
    Upstairs, at the far end of the west wing, Daffy would still be awake, though, goggling by candlelight, as she loved to do, at the Gustave Doré engravings in Gargantua and Pantagruel. I had found the fat calf-bound volume hidden under her mattress while rifling her room in search of a packet of chewing gum that an American serviceman had given to Feely, who had come across him sitting on a stile one morning as she was walking into the village to post a letter. His name was Carl, and he was from St. Louis, in America. He told her she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Feely, of course, had come home preening and hidden the gum, as she always does with such tributes, in her lingerie drawer, from which Daffy had pinched it. And I in my turn from her.
    For weeks afterwards it was “Carl-this” and “Carl-that” with Feely prattling endlessly on about the muddy Mississippi, its length, its twists and bends, and how to spell it properly without making a fool of oneself. We were given the distinct impression that she had personally conceived and executed the formation of that great river, with God standing helplessly on the sidelines, little more than a plumber’s assistant.
    I smiled at the thought.
    It was at that precise instant that I heard it: a metallic click.
    For a couple of heartbeats, I stood perfectly still, trying to decide from which direction it had come.
    The drawing room, I thought, and immediately began tiptoeing in that direction. In my bare feet, I was able to move in perfect silence, keeping an ear out for the slightest sound. Although there are times when I have cursed the painfully acute sense of hearing I’ve inherited from Harriet, this was not one of them.
    As I moved at a snail’s pace along the corridor, a crack of light suddenly appeared beneath the drawing-room door. Who could be in there