The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 Read Free Page A

A.M. Subject’s appearance normal but grumpy.
(Isn’t she always?) Onset may vary from 12 to 72 hours.
    I could wait.
    Mrs. Mullet, who was short and gray and round as a millstone and who, I’m quite sure, thought of herself as a character in a poem by A. A. Milne, was in the kitchen formulating one of her pus-like custard pies. As usual, she was struggling with the large Aga cooker that dominated the small, cramped kitchen.
    “Oh, Miss Flavia! Here, help me with the oven, dear.”
    But before I could think of a suitable response, Father was behind me.
    “Flavia, a word.” His voice was as heavy as the lead weights on a deep-sea diver’s boots.
    I glanced at Mrs. Mullet to see how she was taking it. She always fled at the slightest whiff of unpleasantness, and once when Father raised his voice, she had rolled herself up in a carpet and refused to come out until her husband was sent for.
    She eased the oven door shut as if it were made of Waterford crystal.
    “I must be off,” she said. “Lunch is in the warming oven.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Mullet,” Father said. “We’ll manage.” We were always managing.
    She opened the kitchen door—and let out a sudden shriek like a cornered badger. “Oh, good Lord! Beggin’ your pardon, Colonel de Luce, but, oh, good Lord!”
    Father and I had to push a bit to see round her.
    It was a bird, a jack snipe—and it was dead. It lay on its back on the doorstep, its stiff wings extended like a little pterodactyl, its eyes rather unpleasantly filmed over, the long black needle of its bill pointing straight up into the air. Something impaled upon it shifted in the morning breeze—a tiny scrap of paper.
    No, not a scrap of paper, a postage stamp.
    Father bent down for a closer look, then gave a little gasp. And suddenly he was clutching at his throat, his hands shaking like aspen leaves in autumn, his face the color of sodden ashes.

two
    My spine, as they say, turned to ice. For a moment I thought he was having a heart attack, as sedentary fathers often do. One minute they are crowing at you to chew every mouthful twenty-nine times and the next you are reading about them in The Daily Telegraph :
Calderwood, Jabez, of The Parsonage, Frinton. Suddenly at his residence on Saturday, the 14th inst. In his fifty-second year. Eldest son of et cetera … et cetera … et cetera … survived by daughters, Anna, Diana, and Trianna …
    Calderwood, Jabez, and his ilk had the habit of popping off to heaven like jacks-in-the-box, leaving behind, to fend for themselves, an assortment of dismal-sounding daughters.
    Hadn’t I already lost one parent? Surely Father wouldn’t pull such a rotten trick.
    Or would he?
    No. He was now sucking air noisily up through his nose like a cart horse as he reached out towards the thing on the doorstep. His fingers, like long, unsteady white tweezers, deskewered the stamp delicately from the dead bird’s bill, and then shoved the punctured scrap hastily into one of his waistcoat pockets. He pointed a trembling forefinger at the little carcass.
    “Dispose of that thing, Mrs. Mullet,” he said in a strangled voice that sounded like someone else’s: the voice of a stranger.
    “Oh my, Colonel de Luce,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Oh my, Colonel, I don’t … I think … I mean to say …”
    But he was already gone, to his study, stumping off, huffing and puffing like a freight engine.
    As Mrs. M went, hand over mouth, for the dustpan, I escaped to my bedroom.
    The bedrooms at Buckshaw were vast, dim Zeppelin hangars, and mine, in the south—or Tar—wing, as we called it, was the largest of the lot. Its early-Victorian wallpaper (mustard yellow, with a spattering of things that looked like bloodred clots of string) made it seem even larger: a cold, boundless, drafty waste. Even in summer the trek across the room to the distant washstand near the window was an experience that might have daunted Scott of the Antarctic; just one of the reasons I skipped it and