A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel - Alan Bradley

The old woman made a clucking noise and the villagers gave way on both sides as the caravan jerked into motion and began to rumble slowly along the churchyard path. From my high vantage point I looked down into the many upturned faces, but Feely’s and Daffy’s were not among them.

Good, I thought. They were most likely in one of the stalls stuffing their stupid faces with scones and clotted cream.

TWO

WE LUMBERED THROUGH THE high street, the sound of the horse’s hooves echoing loudly on the cobbles.

“What’s his name?” I asked, pointing at the ancient animal.

“Gry.”

“Gray?”

“Gry. ‘Horse’ in the Romany tongue.”

I tucked that odd bit of knowledge away for future use, looking forward to the time when I would be able to trot it out in front of my know-it-all sister, Daffy. Of course she would pretend that she knew it all along.

It must have been the loud clatter of our passage that brought Miss Cool, the village postmistress, scurrying to the front of her confectionery shop. When she spotted me seated beside the Gypsy, her eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth. In spite of the heavy plate-glass windows of the shop and the street between us, I could almost hear her gasp. The sight of Colonel Haviland de Luce’s youngest daughter being carried off in a Gypsy caravan, no matter how gaily it was painted, must have been a terrible shock.

I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop, fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say “What jolly fun!” What I wanted to do, actually, was to leap to my feet, strike a pose, and burst into one of those “Yo-ho for the open road!” songs they always play in the cinema musicals, but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.

News of my abduction would soon be flying everywhere, like a bird loose in a cathedral. Villages were like that, and Bishop’s Lacey was no exception.

“We all lives in the same shoe,” Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying, “just like Old Mother ’Ubbard.”

A harsh cough brought me back to reality. The Gypsy woman was now bent over double, hugging her ribs. I took the reins from her hands.

“Did you take the medicine the doctor gave you?” I asked.

She shook her head from side to side, and her eyes were like two red coals. The sooner I could get this wagon to the Palings, and the woman tucked into her own bed, the better it would be.

Now we were passing the Thirteen Drakes and Cow Lane. A little farther east, the road turned south towards Doddingsley. We were still a long way from Buckshaw and the Palings.

Just beyond the last row of cottages, a narrow lane known to locals as the Gully angled off to the right, a sunken stony cutting that skirted the west slope of Goodger Hill and cut more or less directly cross country to the southeast corner of Buckshaw and the Palings. Almost without thinking, I hauled on the reins and turned Gry’s head towards the narrow lane.

After a relatively smooth first quarter mile, the caravan was now lurching alarmingly. As we went on, bumping over sharp stones, the track became more narrow and rutted. High banks pressed in on either side, so steeply mounded with tangled outcroppings of ancient tree roots that the caravan, no matter how much it teetered, could not possibly have overturned.

Just ahead, like the neck of a great green swan, the mossy branch of an ancient beech tree bent down in a huge arc across the road. There was scarcely enough space to pass beneath it.

“Robber’s Roost,” I volunteered. “It’s where the highwaymen used to hold up the mail coaches.”

There was no response from the Gypsy: She seemed uninterested. To me, Robber’s Roost was a fascinating bit of local lore.

In the eighteenth century, the Gully had been the only road between Doddingsley and Bishop’s Lacey. Choked with snow in the winter, flooded by icy runoffs in spring and fall, it had gained the reputation, which it still maintained after two hundred years, of being rather an unsavory, if not downright dangerous, place to hang about.

“Haunted by history,” Daffy had once told me as she was inking it onto a map she was drawing of “Buckshaw & Environs.”

With that sort of recommendation, the Gully should have been one of my favorite spots in all of Bishop’s Lacey, but it was not. Only once had I ventured nearly its whole length on Gladys, my trusty bicycle, before a peculiar and unsettling feeling at the nape of my neck had made me turn back. It had been a dark day of high, gusty winds, cold showers, and low scudding clouds, the kind of day …

The Gypsy snatched the reins from my hands, gave them a sharp tug. “Hatch!” she said gruffly, and pulled the horse up short.

High on the mossy branch a child was perched, its thumb jammed firmly into its mouth.

I could tell by its red hair it was one of the Bulls.

The Gypsy woman made the sign of the cross and muttered something that sounded like “Hilda Muir.”

“Ja!” she added, flicking the reins, “Ja!” and Gry jerked the caravan back into motion. As we moved slowly under the branch, the child let down its legs and began pounding with its heels on the caravan’s roof, creating a horrid hollow drumming noise behind us.

If I’d obeyed my instincts, I’d have climbed up and at the very least given the brat a jolly good tongue-lashing. But one look at the Gypsy taught me that there were times to say nothing.

Rough brambles snatched at the caravan as it jolted and lurched from side to side in the lane, but the Gypsy seemed not to notice.

She was hunched over the reins, her watery eyes fixed firmly on some far-off horizon, as if only her shell were in this century, the rest of her escaped to a place far away in some dim and misty land.

The track broadened a little and a moment later we were moving slowly past a decrepit picket fence. Behind the fence were a tumbledown house that seemed to be hammered together from cast-off doors and battered shutters, and a sandy garden littered with trash which included a derelict cooker, a deep old-fashioned pram with two of its wheels missing, a number of fossilized motorcars, and, strewn everywhere, hordes of empty tins. Clustered here and there around the property stood sagging outbuildings—little more than makeshift lean-tos thrown together with rotten, mossy boards and a handful of nails.

Over it all, arising from a number of smoking rubbish heaps, hung a pall of gray acrid smoke which made the place seem like some hellish inferno from the plates of a Victorian illustrated Bible. Sitting in a washtub in the middle of the muddy yard was a small child, which jerked its thumb from its mouth the instant it saw us and broke into a loud and prolonged wailing.

Everything seemed to be coated with rust. Even the child’s red hair added to the impression that we had strayed into a strange, decaying land where oxidation was king.

Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks. It was nibbling away at my own skin at this very moment and at the skin of the Gypsy seated beside me, although it was easy to see that she was much further gone than I was.

From my own early chemical experiments in the laboratory at Buckshaw, I had verified that in some cases, such as when iron is combusted in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, oxidation is a wolf that tears hungrily at its food: so hungrily, in fact, that the iron bursts into flames. What we call fire is really no more than our old friend oxidation working at fever pitch.

But when oxidation nibbles more slowly—more delicately, like a tortoise—at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations. I have sometimes thought that if we could stop oxidation we could stop time, and perhaps be able to—

My pleasant thoughts were interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek.

“Gypsy! Gypsy!”

A large, redheaded woman in a sweat-stained cotton housedress came windmilling out of the house and across the yard towards us. The sleeves of her cardigan were rolled up above her rawboned elbows as if for battle.

“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she shouted, her face as red as her hair. “Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”

Everyone in Bishop’s Lacey knew perfectly well that Tom Bull had cleared off ages ago and that he would not likely be back. The woman was bluffing.

“ ’Twas you as stole my baby, and don’t tell me you didn’t. I seen you hangin’ round here that day and I’ll stand up in any court o’ law and say so!”

The disappearance of the Bulls’ baby girl several years earlier had been a seven-day wonder, but the unsolved case had gradually crept to the back pages of the newspapers, then faded from memory.

I glanced at the Gypsy to see how she was bearing up under the ravings of her howling accuser. She sat motionless on the driving ledge, staring straight ahead, numb to the world. It was a response that seemed to spur the other woman to an even greater frenzy.

“Tom, get yourself out here … and bring the ax!” the woman screeched.

Until then, she had seemed hardly to notice me, but now my gaze had become suddenly entangled with hers, and the effect was dramatic.

“I know you!” she shouted. “You’re one of them de Luce girls from over at Buckshaw, ain’t you? I’d rec’nize them cold blue eyes anywhere.”

Cold blue eyes? Now, here was something worth thinking about. Although I had often been frozen in my tracks by Father’s icy stare, I had never for an instant thought of possessing such a deadly weapon myself.

I realized, of course, that we were in a dangerous situation, the sort of predicament that can turn nasty in a flash. It was obvious that the Gypsy woman was beyond counting upon. For all practical purposes I was on my own.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” I said, lifting my chin and narrowing my eyes to achieve the greatest effect. “My name is Margaret Vole, and this is my great-aunt Gilda Dickinson. Perhaps you’ve seen her in the cinema? The Scarlet Cottage? Queen of the Moon? But of course, how foolish of me: You wouldn’t recognize her in this Gypsy costume, would you? Or in her heavy makeup? I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name, Miss …”

“B-Bull,” the woman stammered, slightly taken aback. “Mrs. Bull.”

She stared at us in utter astonishment, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Lovely to meet you, Mrs. Bull,” I said. “I wonder if you might offer us assistance? We’re thoroughly lost, you see. We were to have joined the cine crew hours ago at Malden Fenwick. We’re both of us quite hopeless when it comes to directions, aren’t we, Aunt Gilda?”

There was no response from the Gypsy.

The redheaded woman had already begun to poke damp strands of hair back into position.

“Damn fools, whoever you are,” she said, pointing. “There’s no turning round hereabouts. Lane’s too narrow. Straight on to Doddingsley you’ll have to go, then back by way of Tench.”

“Thanks awfully,” I said in my best village-twit voice, taking the reins from the Gypsy and giving them a flick.

“Ya!” I cried, and Gry began to move at once.

We had gone about a quarter of a mile when suddenly the Gypsy spoke.

“You lie like one of us,” she said.

It was hardly the sort of remark I should have expected. She must have seen the puzzled look on my face.

“You lie when you are attacked for nothing … for the color of your eyes.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I do.” I had never really thought of it in this way.

“So,” she said, suddenly animated, as if the encounter with Mrs. Bull had warmed her blood, “you lie like us. You lie like a Gypsy.”

“Is that good?” I asked. “Or bad?”

Her answer was slow in coming.

“It means you will live a long life.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, as if a smile was about to escape, but she quickly suppressed it.

“In spite of the broken star on my Mount of Luna?” I couldn’t resist asking.

Her creaking laugh caught me by surprise.

“Mumbo jumbo. Fortune-teller’s rubbish. You weren’t taken in by it, were you?”

Her laughter set off another round of coughing, and I had to wait until she regained her breath.

“But … the woman on the mountain … the woman who wants to come home from the cold …”

“Look,” the Gypsy woman said wearily—as if she were unaccustomed to speaking—“your sisters put me up to it. They tipped me off about you and Harriet. Slipped me a couple of bob to scare the daylights out of you. No more to it than that.”

I felt my blood freeze. It was as though the faucet that feeds my brain had suddenly switched from hot to cold. I stared at her.

“Sorry if I hurt you,” she went on. “I never meant to …”

“It makes no difference,” I said with a mechanical shrug. But it did. My mind was reeling. “I’m sure I shall find a way of repaying them.”

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “Revenge is my specialty.”

Was she pulling my leg? Hadn’t the woman just admitted that she was a fraud? I looked deeply into her black eyes, searching for a sign.

“Don’t stare at me like that. It makes my blood itch. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? And I meant it.”

“Did you?” I asked rather haughtily.

“Spare us the pout. There’s enough lip in the world without you adding to it.”

She was right. In spite of my turning them down, the corners of my mouth flickered, then began to rise. I laughed and the Gypsy laughed with me.

“You put me in mind of that creature that was in the tent just before you. Regular thundercloud. Told her there was something buried in her past; told her it wanted digging out—wanted setting right. She went white as the garden gate.”

“Why, what did you see?” I asked.

“Money!” she said with a laughing snort. “Same as I always see. Couple of quid if I played my cards right.”

“And did you?”

“Pfah! A bloomin’ shilling she left me—not a penny more. Like I said, she went all goosey when I told her that. Scampered out of my pitch as if she’d sat on a thistle.”

We rode along in silence for a while, and I realized that we had almost reached the Palings.

To me, the Palings was like some lost and forgotten corner of Paradise. At the southeast angle of the Buckshaw estate, beneath a spreading tent of green and leafy branches, the river, as though twirling in its skirts, swept round to the west in a gentle bend, creating a quiet glade that was almost an island. Here, the east bank was somewhat higher than the west; the west bank more marshy than the east. If you knew precisely where to look among the trees, you could still spot the pretty arches of the little stone bridge, which dated from the time of the original Buckshaw, an Elizabethan manor house that had been put to the torch in the 1600s by irate villagers who made the wrong assumptions about our family’s religious allegiances.

I turned to the Gypsy, eager to share my love of the place, but she seemed to have fallen asleep. I watched her eyelids carefully to see if she was shamming, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker. Slumped against the frame of the caravan, she gave off the occasional wheeze, so that I knew she was still breathing.