Sir Arthur Shipley, I recalled, was the world’s foremost authority on parasitic worms.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you go gather some death cap mushrooms? I desperately need a few for an experiment.”

  I didn’t, but it sounded genuine. Because I firmly believe that death caps do furnish a room, I like to keep a few of these bright red warty wonders scattered about in small vases as resting places for the eye. Undine would skip off merrily with thoughts of dark deeds stewing in her brain, and I would be left alone to get on with my investigation.

  “They’re the ones with the colorful caps. You’ll find them growing under the three oaks just beyond the Visto.

  “And after you’ve picked them,” I told her, “don’t put your fingers in your mouth. On second thought, take some gloves from the greenhouse, do you understand?”

  “Yowza,” she said, and she was gone. I heard the sound of her thundering feet fading away down the stairs. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what.

  I began to have second thoughts almost immediately. Who in their right mind would send a child to handle deadly poison? But then I thought: Why not? There comes a time in every girl’s life when she must be trusted; a time at which she must, even in a small way, be set free. It’s like riding a bicycle for the first time, and even more like later discovering you can let go of the handlebars. I had done so myself, hadn’t I? Even though it had cost me a black eye and a trip up to London and a visit to that despised dentist’s office in Farrington Street.

  Gladys had fortunately come to rest without a scratch, despite ending up in a nearby bramble bush, so that the only real damage had been to my mouth and Father’s pocketbook.

  I touched my face and felt a smile forming. Undine would come through with flying colors, and I would not be dragged into the dock on a charge of manslaughter.

  It’s called trust, and it’s often the hardest thing we are called upon to do in our lives.

  “Don’t lick your fingers!” I whispered.

  I went to one of the east windows and looked out almost fondly. Undine was already just a small figure with a wicker basket striding determinedly toward the distant trees.

  Her mention of Sir Arthur Shipley (how odd that she had remembered his name) reminded me that Sir Arthur had been not just vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, but also the author of several dozen publications on zoology. At least one of these, Pearls and Parasites, I remembered seeing in Uncle Tar’s library. Despite the promising title, I had not found time to read it. If only I could find it now…

  Uncle Tar’s books were shelved by size, and then by color and then alphabetically, which made a lot of sense to me. In my experience, the visual memory of a book is the one that first comes to mind, followed by the color, then by the title and/or the name of the author. Indexing is a juggling act: a gift possessed by very few. Or at least, so says my sister Daffy.

  A dark book, as I recall, bound in rough, soiled linen the color of rancid olive oil. And here it was: Pearls and Parasites.

  Sir Arthur got off to a good start on the very first page by quoting Sir Edward Arnold:

  Know you, perchance, how that poor formless wretch—

  The Oyster—gems his shallow moon-lit chalice?

  And then almost immediately, before you’ve had time to digest that tasty morsel, he quotes the poet Thomas Moore:

  Precious the tear as that rain from the sky

  Which turns into pearls as it falls in the sea.

  “Certain Eastern peoples,” he begins, “believe that pearls are due to raindrops falling into the oyster shells which conveniently gape to receive them.”

  He goes on for a while before getting to the poisons, but even by skimming, I could see that Sir Arthur knew what he was talking about.

  I was leafing through the book to see what the author had to say about poisoning by bivalve when I heard a distant scream. If it hadn’t been for my extremely acute hearing, and for the fact that it was calling my name—“Flavia! Flavia! Flavia!”—I might have missed it entirely.

  I rushed to the window and looked out across the Visto.

  A wall of black roiling smoke was blowing toward the house. As if out of nowhere, an east wind had sprung up, driving the flames from the burning grass. I lifted the heavy window in its frame just long enough to shout “I’m coming! I’m coming!” then slammed it shut again. A brick wall and thick window glass were a good fire retardant; an open window was not.

  I raced down the stairs, grabbing two brooms from the butler’s pantry on the way. Out the kitchen door I went, flying like Pieter Bruegel’s Mad Meg, leading her army of women on the way to pillage Hell. Across the Visto I went, through the acrid stench of the smoke, waving the brooms as if their faint breeze could drive back the flames.

  By the time I got to Undine, her eyes, too, were red and streaming. She was trying to wipe them with her elbows.

  “Take this,” I shouted, shoving one of the brooms into her hands. With the other, I began to beat at the flames, as if cleaning the filthiest carpet in the world. Undine joined in and we swatted away at the burning grass like a pair of blacksmiths on a German town clock.

  The flames were already halfway to the house and were getting ahead of us. If they reached the coach house, which still had old bales of hay stacked in the loft, we were lost. The bristles of both our brooms were black and burning, the wooden handles smoldering.

  “Keep going!” I shouted to Undine. “This is fun!”

  She shot me half a smile, not entirely convinced.

  Now we were working in silence as the facts struck home. It was like a scene in a horror film. Two girls with two brooms working against utter disaster. No time to think.

  Swat! Swat! Swat!

  It is a remarkable fact that the human mind, when threatened, can generate hilarity, perhaps as an antidote to danger.

  A little broom closet at the back of my mind had been flung open by the broom in my hands, and out sprang the words of Lewis Carroll. I shouted them to Undine:

  “If seven (swat!) maids with seven (swat!) mops

  “Swept it for half a year,

  “ ‘Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,

  “ ‘That they could get it clear?’ ”

  And Undine shouted back:

  “ ‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter (swat!),

  “And shed a bitter tear.”

  “ ‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’ ” I replied, coughing and almost in tears.

  Here were the oysters again! Oysters, oysters, everywhere. What could it all mean?

  It was at that moment that I saw Dogger come swarming onto the Visto, a stirrup pump in hand, with which he began spraying a red fire-retardant liquid onto the flames. He looked as if he knew precisely what he was doing: very businesslike, as if he had been putting out fires all his life.

  As Undine made a few last whacks at the grass and we laid down our brooms, Dogger made quick work of the remaining flames. Soon there was nothing left but the three of us amid the rising smoke.

  “Excellent work,” Dogger said. “Quick thinking and perfect execution. Take a bow.”

  And the two of us, Undine and I, grasped our waists and bent, sweeping off imaginary hats to an invisible audience, much as Carl Pendracka had done at the damaged lych-gate. The only difference was that our bows were not a joke; they were deadly serious, and we stood basking for as long as we could in imagined applause.

  “How did that get started?” I asked Undine. “Did you see anyone in the woods?”

  “I heard a motor, but I couldn’t see it. Poachers, possibly?”

  Dogger had now led us to the far side of the Visto: to the very verge of the woods. This was where the burnt grass began, forming a long wavy line. Despite the recent rain, the wind and the barren exposure of the Visto had dried the grass to tinder.

  But that wasn’t all.

  “Petrol,” Dogger said. “You can smell it. We knew that anyway, didn’t we? From the black smoke.”

  Actually, I hadn’t, but I nodded agreeably. Dogger was right: Grass smoke is essentially gray.

  “And,” Undine chimed in, “fires start from a central point, not a long line. They taught us that during the war.”

  “You were barely born during the war,” I said, but I said it nicely in honor of her recent firefighting service.

  “It is fair to say,” Dogger said, “that we learned a great deal during the late war, especially about incendiary devices.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” I asked before realizing with a start that I already knew the answer. And the question remained: How much did Dogger know of the big picture? Of the wheels within wheels?

  “The answer might well lie in the woods,” he said. “Shall we take a stroll?”

  Our shoes blackened with ashes, we walked slowly toward the standing trees. This part of the Buckshaw estate had once been part of a royal hunting preserve but was now all that remained of an even earlier ancient forest. The few shady trails among the trees had been reduced to little more than footpaths. In the litter of leaves behind a fallen oak was a double line of zigzag tracks and the single mark of a boot sole.

  “Rough diamond or oval shape, filled with pineapples,” Dogger said. “Most distinctive.”

  I was too afraid to speak. I knew I had seen the prints of these boots before.

  I even fancied I knew who was wearing them.

  “We’d better get back,” I said, looking round at the dark trunks of the trees and the blackened Visto beyond. A sudden wariness had arisen in my mind, and I began to tingle from being out in the open.

  Dogger glanced up at the sky. “It’s going to rain within the hour. The ground will be soaked. We shall keep an eye on the situation from the greenhouse.”

  It is surprising how much comfort can be created by sitting on a few potato sacks draped over an upturned pail. Above our heads, the rain streamed down the glass, bathing us in a weird and watery light.

  It was like being let down into the ocean’s deepest trench in Professor Piccard’s bathyscaphe: down and down and away from all the cares of the world, coddled by water. It was no wonder that seeds flourished here. I had never felt so safe and insulated.

  But how very odd, I thought, that I should feel the greatest security in a house made of glass, and with two other people. It was a puzzling development—and perhaps a troubling one. I pushed the thought aside.

  Undine poured the tea for us. I had never noticed until now how beautiful she was. For an instant, her late mother was before us—not as she was in life, but as she might have been.

  “Do you like my hair?” Undine asked, smoothing down her frizzled locks. Her face was streaked with soot, and although I suspect that mine was also, I didn’t care. Appearance is nothing among friends and a runny nose is like gold in the bank.

  “Isn’t this lovely?” Undine said, glancing round at our cozy bubble.

  Dogger and I both nodded and sipped at our tea.

  “Do you happen to have any Peek Freans lying about?” she asked, innocently raising her eyebrows. Which told me instantly that she had been snooping about in the greenhouse when neither of us was there. Dogger did, in fact, keep a spare tin of the biscuits on a shelf among the flowerpots. “In case Her Majesty drops by,” he had once told me.

  And there was once a time when I had believed him. There were many tales of the Queen’s late grandmother presenting herself unexpectedly at decayed estates, demanding to be fed and slashing away with her cane at any rogue ivy on the ancestral bricks. She had quietly breathed her last just a few months ago, and I wondered idly if there were any vines left on the gates of Saint Peter.

  I was smiling at the thought when Undine said abruptly: “Do you suppose it was Asterion?”

  I didn’t want this conversation: not now, and perhaps not ever. I couldn’t allow it to happen.

  “In Greek mythology,” Dogger said, “Asterion was the name of the Minotaur: the bull-headed man in the labyrinth in Knossos.”

  “Really?” Undine went goggle-eyed. Dogger’s description had obviously impressed her far more than mine had.

  “Some believe,” Dogger went on, “—and I am perhaps inclined to agree with them—that the myth of the labyrinth was some dim perception of the coiled physical structure of their own brains. Perhaps they had studied the brains of their enemies, beaten out in battle.”

  I held my breath. Was Dogger intentionally steering the topic away from our present danger, or was he genuinely still in the dark about Father? The conversation had become a tightrope and I walked it gently, swaying from side to side, from storybook to the prospect of sudden, unexpected, and violent death. It had happened to Major Greyleigh and it could happen to us.

  “Can you guess what he was fed, this Minotaur?” Dogger asked, looking directly at Undine.

  “Sausages!” she said.

  “No.” Dogger smiled. “Every nine years he was sent a meal of human flesh. Fourteen boys and girls. Or was it nine boys and girls every fourteen years?”

  God bless you, Dogger, I thought.

  Undine squirmed with delight. This was the sort of mucilaginous information which attracts girls at a certain age and boys forever.

  “Which part of the Minotaur was bull?” she asked.

  “Just the head,” Dogger replied. “The rest was human.”

  “Criminy!” she said. “Bull breath! It must have been awful for those boys and girls.”

  “Yes,” Dogger said. “I believe it was.”

  “Bull breath!” she said again. “We could distill it and sell it as cologne. Evening in Knossos. We’d be rolling in the dough.”

  I sensed the ghostly presence of Carl Pendracka.

  But as the conversation drifted away from cannibalism, I could see that she was becoming bored. She got up off her pail and drifted about the greenhouse, picking up various objects, putting them down again, and looking quickly around in search of something else.

  She had begun fidgeting with a Victorian vase, one that Dogger always kept filled with fresh flowers for my mother’s bedroom.

  “Look!” she said suddenly. “The rain has stopped.”

  We had been so wrapped up in bulls and labyrinths, we hadn’t noticed.

  “I can go for the mushrooms now,” she said. “They’ll be growing like weeds after the rain.”

  “You’ll get filthy,” I said. “That charred grass will make an awful mess.”

  Undine laughed a laugh of cut glass. “I’m already a mess,” she said, and it was true. I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic. Her dress and her jumper were streaked with soot, her face like a music hall zany. Mrs. Mullet would sigh and reach for the Sunlight.

  There seemed little danger of the arsonist still lurking in the woods. Dogger smiled, meaning “yes.”

  Undine skipped to the door, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder.

  “Ibu simply adored death caps,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her. “She called them her ‘pimpled persuaders’ and then she’d laugh.”

  My blood ran cold, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dogger’s did, too.

  “Happy hunting,” I managed to say. “Don’t forget your basket.”

  When she was gone, there was a long silence, but it was Dogger who spoke first. “She misses her mother,” he said at last.

  I could only nod. I missed my mother, too, but now was not the time to bring it up.

  I was still wrapped in the warm glow of companionship, which was immediately replaced with a sudden sinking.

  The time had come to tell the truth. The whole truth. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done so. Like a defense counsel at the Old Bailey with his long white fingers tucked into his lapels, I was accustomed to doling out as many or as few of the facts as the situation required.

  “Dogger,” I said, “I have a confession to make. I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

  “Oh?” Dogger said, surprised.

  Should I tell him and betray a confidence, or would we go forward into the future with an invisible wedge driven between us?

  I took the plunge. “Mrs. Mullet confided in me that Major Greyleigh had courted her in their younger days. But please—Alf mustn’t know. He’s insanely jealous.”

  Dogger stared out for a moment through the clouded window, then looked me in the eye.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was aware of that.”

  “Did she confide in you, too?”

  “Logic dictates that I mustn’t say,” Dogger said.

  So here it was: another odd banana peel to be stepped over. Another argument, pro and con, about secrets and virtuous friendships.

  “Life’s a bramble bush, isn’t it, Dogger.”

  “Yes, Miss Flavia, it certainly is.”

  “There’s something I’m dying to show you,” I said in a sudden flush of companionship. “I’ll run into the house and get it. Will you wait here?”

  Dogger nodded, and again I was reminded of the great silence he could summon upon himself. He radiated calm, as if he were carved in stone. At this very moment, he reminded me of one of the great stone kings at Luxor, except that Dogger was sitting on a pail.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, and Dogger may have smiled.

  Into the house I went, upstairs into my laboratory, where I snatched up Mrs. Mullet’s sketches and dashed downstairs again. I saw no one and heard no one: The house might as well have been abandoned.

  Dogger was sitting as I had left him. He apparently hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Have a look at these,” I said, thrusting the drawings into his hands.

  He leafed through them slowly, maddeningly, turning back again to a previous sketch. “Major Greyleigh,” he said. “I recognize him. Who drew these?”