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

Back through the kitchen I trudged with a second-degree wink to Mrs. Mullet and a muttered “Three-times-three.”

Gladys was waiting by the garden wall and Dogger was in the greenhouse, intent upon his work.

But as I pedaled away, I was aware of his eyes upon my back.

Malden Fenwick lay to the east of Bishop’s Lacey, not far beyond Chipford.

Although I had never been there before, the place had a familiar look: and no wonder. “The Prettiest Village in England,” as it was sometimes called, had been photographed almost to distraction. Its Elizabethan and Georgian cottages, thatched and timbered, with their hollyhocks and diamond-paned windows, its duck pond and its tithe barn had appeared not just in hundreds of books and magazines, but as the setting for several popular films, such as Honey for Sale and Miss Jenks Goes to War.

“Trellis Terraces,” Daffy called it.

This was the place where Brookie Harewood’s mother lived and had her studio, although I hadn’t the faintest idea which of the cottages might be hers.

A green charabanc was parked in front of The Bull, its passengers spilling forth into the high street, cameras at the ready, fanning out in every direction with dangling arms, like a gaggle of gunfighters.

Several elderly villagers, caught out-of-doors in their gardens, began furtively fluffing up their hair or straightening their ties even as shutters began to click.

I parked Gladys against an ancient elm and walked round the coach.

“Good morning,” I said to a lady in a sun hat, as if I were helping to organize the tea. “Welcome to Malden Fenwick. And where are you from?”

“Oh, Mel,” she said, turning to a man behind her, “listen to her accent! Isn’t she adorable? We’re from Yonkers, New York, sweetheart. I’ll bet you don’t know where that is.”

As a matter of fact, I did: Yonkers was the home of Leo Baekeland, the Belgian chemist who had accidentally discovered polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, better known as Bakelite, while working to produce a synthetic replacement for shellac which, until Baekeland came along, had been made from the secretions of the lac beetle.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I think I’ve heard of Yonkers.”

I attached myself to Mel, who was busily arming his camera as he strolled off towards a wash-painted cottage, dragging along behind him, with slack bones and downcast eyes, a sulking daughter who looked fed to the gills with transatlantic travel.

Shifting from foot to foot, I waited as he fired off a couple of shots of a white-haired woman in tweeds who was perched precariously on a ladder, deadheading a climbing rosebush.

As Mel wandered off in search of new memories, I lingered for a moment at the gate pretending to admire the garden and then, as if awakening from a partial trance, put on my best attempt at an American accent.

“Say,” I called out, pointing to the village green. “Isn’t this where whatsername lives? The painter lady?”

“Vanetta Harewood. Glebe Cottage,” the woman said cheerily, waving her secateurs. “Last one on the right.”

It was so easy I was almost ashamed of myself.

So that was her name: “Vanetta.” Vanetta Harewood. It certainly had the right ring to it for someone who painted the gentry with their hounds and horses.

Barging in on a freshly bereaved mother was not, perhaps, in the best of taste, but there were things I needed to know before the police knew them. I owed as much to Fenella Faa, and to a lesser degree, to my own family. Why, for instance, had I found Vanetta Harewood’s son in the drawing room at Buckshaw in the middle of the night, just before he was murdered?

I didn’t expect his mother knew the answer to that, but mightn’t she give me some scrap of information that would allow me to find it out for myself?

As the woman with the secateurs had said, Glebe Cottage was the last one on the right. It was twice the size of the others—as if two cottages had been shoved together end-to-end like dominos to form a larger one. Each half had its own front door, its own leaded window, and its own chimney; each half of the house was the mirror image of the other.

There was only one gate, though, and on it was a small brass plaque upon which was engraved: Vanetta Harewood—Portraitist.

My mind flew back to a spring evening upon which Daffy, during one of Father’s compulsory literary evenings, had read aloud to us excerpts from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and I remembered that Johnson had declared portrait painting to be an improper employment for a woman. “Public practice of any art, and staring in men’s faces, is very indelicate in a female,” he had said.

Well, I’d seen Dr. Johnson’s face in the book’s frontispiece, and I couldn’t imagine anyone, male or female, wanting to stare into it for any length of time—the man was an absolute toad!

Behind the gate, the garden of Glebe Cottage was a mass of electric blue; the tall delphiniums in their second blooming seemed to stand on tiptoe behind the salvia, trying desperately to be first to touch the sky.

Dogger had once told me that although delphiniums could be made to bloom again by cutting them down low after their first flowering, no honest gardener would dream of doing so, since it weakened the stock.

Whatever else she might be, Vanetta Harewood was not an honest gardener.

I touched my finger to the china doorbell button and gave it a jab. As I waited for someone to answer, I stepped back and stared up in an interested way at the sky, pursing my lips as if I were whistling carelessly. You never knew: Someone might be peeking out from behind the curtains and it was important to look harmless.

I waited—then pushed the button again. There was a scurrying inside the house, followed by a grating noise directly behind the door, as if someone were moving a barricade of furniture.

As the door opened, I almost gasped aloud. Standing in front of me was a muscular woman in riding breeches and a lavender blouse. Her short gray hair lay tightly against her head like an aluminum helmet.

She screwed a tortoiseshell monocle into her eye and peered at me.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Harewood?”

“No,” she said, and shut the door in my face.

Very well, then!

I remembered Father remarking once that if rudeness was not attributable to ignorance, it could be taken as a sure sign that one was speaking to a member of the aristocracy. I pushed the bell again. I would ask for directions.

But this time the door stayed closed, and the house behind it remained in silence.

But wait! The cottage had two front doors. I had simply chosen the wrong one.

I gave myself a knuckle on the head and walked to the other door. I raised the door knocker and gave it a gentle tap.

The door flew open instantly, and there stood Riding Breeches, glaring at me for all she was worth, though not through her monocle this time.

“May I speak to Mrs. Harewood?” I ventured. “It’s about—”

“No!” she said loudly. “Go away!”

But before she could slam the door, a voice came from somewhere inside the house.

“Who is it, Ursula?”

“A girl selling something,” she called over her shoulder, and to me, “Go away. We don’t want any biscuits.”

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

“Mrs. Harewood,” I shouted. “It’s about Brookie!”

It was as if I had cast a spell and frozen time. For what seemed like forever, the woman at the door stood perfectly motionless, gaping at me as if she were a life-sized painted cutout from a picture book. She didn’t even breathe.

“Mrs. Harewood—please! It’s Flavia de Luce, from Bishop’s Lacey.”

“Show her in, Ursula,” the voice said.

As I brushed past her and into the narrow hallway, Ursula didn’t move a muscle.

“In here,” the voice said, and I moved towards it.

I suppose I was half expecting to find a decayed Miss Haversham, clinging to her moldy treasures in the curtained cave of her drawing room. What I found was altogether different.

Vanetta Harewood stood in a beam of sunlight at the bow window, and she turned to hold out her hands to me as I entered.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

She looked, I thought, to be about forty-five. But surely she must be much older than that. How on earth could such a beautiful creature be the mother of that middle-aged layabout, Brookie Harewood?

She wore a smart dark suit with an Oriental silk at her neck, and her fingers were afire with diamonds.

“I must apologize for Ursula,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “but she’s fiercely protective of me. Perhaps too fiercely.”

I nodded dumbly.

“In my profession, privacy is paramount, you see, and now, with all this …”

She made a wide sweep of her hands to take in the entire world.

“I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry about Brookie.”

She turned and took a cigarette from a silver box, lit it with a silver lighter that might have been a scale model of Aladdin’s lamp, and blew out a long jet of smoke which, oddly enough, was also silver in the sunlight.

“Brookie was a good boy,” she said, “but he did not grow up to be a good man. He had the fatal gift of making people believe him.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I nodded anyway.

“His life was not an easy one,” she said reflectively. “Not as easy as it might seem.”

And then, quite suddenly—“Now tell me, why have you come?”

Her question caught me by surprise. Why had I come?

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed, child. If you’re here to express your condolences, you have already done so, for which I thank you. You may leave, if you wish.”

“Brookie was at Buckshaw,” I blurted. “I found him in the drawing room in the middle of the night.”

I could have cut out my tongue! There was no need for his mother to know this—no need at all, and even less for me to tell her.

But part of me knew that it was safe enough. Vanetta Harewood was a professional woman. She would no more want the midnight ramblings of her son brought to light than … than I would.

“I am going to ask you a very great favor, Flavia. Tell the police if you must, but if you feel it isn’t essential …”

She had walked back to the window, where she stood staring out into the past. “You see, Brookie had his … demons, if you will. If there is no need to make them public, then—”

“I won’t tell anyone, Mrs. Harewood,” I said. “I promise.”

She turned back to me and came across the room slowly. “You’re a remarkably intelligent girl, Flavia,” she said. And then, after thinking for a couple of seconds, she added, “Come with me; there’s something I wish to show you.”

Down a step we went, and then up another, into the part of the house whose door I had first knocked upon. Low timbered ceilings made her stoop more than once as we went from room to room.

“Ursula’s studio,” she said, with a wave of a hand at a room that seemed full of twigs and branches.

“Basketry,” she explained. “Ursula is a devotee of traditional crafts. Her willow baskets have taken prizes both here and on the Continent.

“To tell you the truth,” she went on, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper, “the smell of her chemical preparations sometimes drives me out of the house, but then, it’s all she has, poor dear.”

Chemical preparations? My ears went up like those of an old warhorse at the sound of the bugle.

“Mostly sulfur,” she said. “Ursula uses the fumes to bleach the willow withies. They end up as white as polished bones, you know, but oh dear—the smell!”

I could foresee that I was going to have a late night poring over books in Uncle Tar’s chemical library. Already my mind was racing ahead to the chemical possibilities of salicin (C13H18O7)—which was discovered in willow bark in 1831 by Leroux—and good old sulfur (S). I already knew from personal experience that certain willow catkins, kept in a sealed box for several weeks, give off the most dreadful odor of dead fish, a fact which I had filed away for future use.

“Through here,” Mrs. Harewood said, ducking to keep her head from banging on an exceptionally low beam. “Mind your head and watch your step.”

Her studio was a glorious place. Clear north light flooded in through the angled transom windows overhead, making it seem like a room suddenly stumbled upon in a forest glade.

A large wooden easel stood in the light, and on it was a half-finished portrait of Flossie, the sister of Feely’s friend Sheila Foster. Flossie was sitting in a large upholstered chair, one leg curled under her, petting an enormous white Persian cat that nestled in her lap. The cat, at least, looked almost human.

Actually, Flossie didn’t look that bad, either. She was not my favorite living person, but I didn’t hold that against her. The portrait captured perfectly, in a way that even a camera can’t, her air of highly polished dopiness.

“Well, what do you think?”

I looked around at the tubes of paints, the daubed rags, and the profusion of camel-hair brushes that jutted up all around me from tins, glasses, and bottles like reeds in a December marsh.

“It’s a very nice studio,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to show me?”

I pointed a finger at Flossie’s portrait.

“Good heavens, no!” she said.

I had not noticed it before but at the far end of the studio, away from the windows, were two shadowy corners in which perhaps a dozen unframed paintings were leaning with their faces against the wall, their paper-sealed backsides towards the room.

Vanetta (by now I was thinking of her as “Vanetta,” rather than “Mrs. Harewood”) bent over them, shifting each one as if she were riffling through the record cards in a giant index file.

“Ah! Here it is,” she said at last, pulling a large canvas from among the others.

Keeping its back towards me, she carried the painting to the easel. After shifting Flossie to a nearby wooden chair, she turned it round and lifted it into place.

She stepped back without a word, giving me an unobstructed view of the portrait.

My heart stopped.

It was Harriet.

FOURTEEN

HARRIET. MY MOTHER.

She is sitting on the window box of the drawing room at Buckshaw. At her right hand, my sister Ophelia, aged about seven, plays with a cat’s cradle of red wool, its strands entangling her fingers like slender scarlet snakes. To Harriet’s left, my other sister, Daphne, although she is too young to read, uses a forefinger to mark her place in a large book: Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Harriet gazes tenderly down, a slight smile on her lips, like a Madonna, at the white bundle which she holds supported in the crook of her left arm: a child—a baby dressed in a white, trailing garment of elaborate and frothy lace—could it be a baptismal gown?

I want to look at the mother but my eyes are drawn repeatedly back to the child.