“Sad? No, not sad. Those were the best days of our lives. We just didn’t realize it at the time.
“There was one particular officer that was always hanging round the club: tall bloke with a little blond mustache. I used to see him in the street, coming and going. Never had much to say, but he always seemed to be keeping an eye out for something. One day, just for a lark, Lunita invited him in and told his fortune. Wouldn’t take a penny for it because it happened to be a Sunday.
“Within a day or two she was working for MI-something. They wouldn’t tell her what, but it seemed that whatever she’d seen in his cards, she’d hit the nail on the head.
“Some boffin in Whitehall was trying to work out what Hitler’s next move was going to be, and he’d heard through the grapevine about the Gypsy who spread the cards in Moorgate.
“They invited Lunita straightaway to lunch at the Savoy. At first, it might have been no more than a game. Maybe they wanted word to get about that they were desperate enough to pin their hopes on a Gypsy.
“But again, the things she told them were so close to the top-secret truth that they couldn’t believe their ears. They’d never heard anything like it.
“At first, they thought she was a spy, and they had a scientist from Bletchley Park come up to London to interrogate her. He was hardly through the door before she told him he was lucky to be alive: that an illness had saved his life.
“And it was true. He’d just been attached to the Americans as a liaison officer when a sudden attack of appendicitis had kept him from taking part in a rehearsal for D-day—Exercise Tiger, it was called. The thing had been badly botched—hundreds killed. It was all hushed up, of course. Nobody knew about it at the time.
“Needless to say, the bloke was flabbergasted. She passed the test with flying colors, and within days—within hours—they had us set up in our own posh flat in Bloomsbury.”
“She must have remarkable powers,” I said.
Porcelain’s body went slack. “Had,” she said flatly. “She died a month later. A V1 rocket in the street outside the Air Ministry. Six years ago. In June.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. At last we had something in common, Porcelain and I, even if it was no more than a mother who had died too young and left us to grow up on our own.
How I longed to tell her about Harriet—but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain, and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.
I set about cleaning up the shattered glass from the test tube she had dropped.
“Here,” she said. “I should be doing that.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m used to it.”
It was one of those made-up excuses that I generally despise, but how could I tell her the truth: that I was unwilling to share with anyone the picking up of the pieces.
Was this a fleeting glimpse of being a woman? I wondered.
I hoped it was … and also that it was not.
We were sitting on my bed, Porcelain with her back against the head, and I cross-legged at the foot.
“I expect you’ll be wanting to visit your gram,” I said.
Porcelain shrugged, and I think I understood her.
“The police don’t know you’re here yet. I suppose we’d better tell them.”
“I suppose.”
“Let’s leave it till the morning,” I told her. “I’m too tired to think.”
And it was true: My eyelids felt as if they had been hung with lead sinkers. I was simply too exhausted to deal with the problems at hand. The greatest of these would be to keep secret Porcelain’s presence in the house. The last thing I needed was to look on helplessly as Father drove away the granddaughter of Fenella and Johnny Faa.
Fenella was in hospital in Hinley and, for all I knew, she might be dead by now. If I was to get to the bottom of the attack upon her at the Palings—and, I suspected, the murder of Brookie Harewood—I would have to attract as little attention as possible.
It was only a matter of time before Inspector Hewitt would be at the door, demanding details about how I had discovered Brookie’s body. I needed time to review which facts I would tell him and which I would not. Or did I?
My mind was a whirl. Heigh-ho! I thought. What jolly sport is the world of Flavia de Luce.
Next thing I knew it was morning, and sunlight was pouring in through the windows.
I ROLLED OVER AND blinked. I had been sprawled across the bottom of the bed, my head twisted painfully against the footboard. At the top of the bed, Porcelain was tucked in with my blanket pulled over her shoulders, her head on my pillow, sleeping away for all she was worth like some Oriental princess.
For a moment I felt my resentment rising, but when I remembered the tale she had told me last night, I let the resentment melt into pity.
I glanced at the clock and saw, to my horror, that I had overslept. I was late for breakfast. Father insisted that dishes at the table arrive and be taken away with military precision.
Taking great care not to awaken Porcelain, I made a quick change of clothing, took a swipe at my hair with a brush, and crept down to breakfast.
Father, as usual, was immersed in the latest number of The London Philatelist, and seemed hardly to notice my arrivaclass="underline" a sure sign that another philatelic auction was about to take place. If our financial condition was as precarious as he claimed, he’d need to be sharp about current prices. As he ate, he made little notes on a napkin with the stub of a pencil, his mind in another world.
As I slipped into my chair, Feely fixed me with the cold and stony stare she had perfected by watching Queen Mary in the newsreels.
“You have a pimple on your face,” I said matter-of-factly as I poured milk on my Weetabix.
She pretended she didn’t hear me, but less than a minute later I was gratified to see her hand rise automatically to her cheek and begin its exploration. It was like watching a crab crawl slowly across the seabed in one of the full-colored short subjects at the cinema: The Living Ocean, or something like that.
“Careful, Feely!” I said. “It’s going to explode.”
Daffy looked up from her book—the copy of A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande I had found at the fête. She’d picked it up herself, the swine!
I made a note to steal it later.
“What does it mean where it says ‘a red herring without mustard’?” I asked, pointing.
Daffy loved the slightest opportunity to show off her superior knowledge.
I had already reviewed in my mind what I knew about mustard, which was precious little. I knew, for instance, that it contained, among other things, the acids oleic, erucic, behenic, and stearic. I knew that stearic acid was found in beef and mutton suet because I had once subjected one of Mrs. Mullet’s greasy Sunday roasts to chemical analysis, and I had looked up the fact that erucic acid gets its name from the Greek word meaning “to vomit.”
“Red herring, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was considered an inferior dish,” Daffy replied, with an especially withering look at me on the word “inferior.”
I glanced over at Father to see if he was looking, but he wasn’t.
“Nicholas Breton called it ‘a good gross dish for a coarse stomach,’ ” she went on, squirming and preening in her chair. “He also said that old ling—that’s another fish, in case you don’t know—is like ‘a blew coat without caugnisaunce,’ which means a servant who doesn’t wear his master’s badge of arms.”
“Daphne, please …” Father said, without looking up, and she subsided.
I knew that they were referring—over my head, they thought—to Dogger. Warfare at Buckshaw was like that: invisible and sometimes silent.