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

rest in his present post of gardener, and Father had donated our Hillman estate wagon to St. Tancred’s as a raffle prize.
    Poor Dogger! That’s what I thought, even though Daphne told me I should never say that about anyone: “It’s not only condescending, it fails to take into account the future,” she said.
    Still, who could forget the sight of Dogger in the garden? A great simple hulk of a helpless man just standing there, hair and tools in disarray, wheelbarrow overturned, and a look on his face as if … as if …
    A rustle of sound caught my ear. I turned my head and listened.
    Nothing.
    It is a simple fact of Nature that I happen to possess acute hearing: the kind of hearing, Father once told me, that allows its owner to hear spiderwebs clanging like horseshoes against the walls. Harriet had possessed it too, and sometimes I like to imagine I am, in a way, a rather odd remnant of her: a pair of disembodied ears drifting round the haunted halls of Buckshaw, hearing things that are sometimes better left unheard.
    But, listen! There it was again! A voice reflected; hard and hollow, like a whisper in an empty biscuit tin.
    I slipped out of bed and went on tiptoes to the window. Taking care not to jiggle the curtains, I peeked out into the kitchen garden just as the moon obligingly came out from behind a cloud to illuminate the scene, much as it would in a first-rate production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream .
    But there was nothing more to see than its silvery light dancing among the cucumbers and the roses.
    And then I heard a voice: an angry voice, like the buzzing of a bee in late summer trying to fly through a closed windowpane.
    I threw on one of Harriet’s Japanese silk housecoats (one of the two I had rescued from the Great Purge), shoved my feet into the beaded Indian moccasins that served as slippers, and crept to the head of the stairs. The voice was coming from somewhere inside the house.
    Buckshaw possessed two Grand Staircases, each one winding down in a sinuous mirror image of the other, from the first floor, coming to earth just short of the black painted line that divided the checker-tiled foyer. My staircase, from the “Tar,” or east wing, terminated in that great echoing painted hall beyond which, over against the west wing, was the firearm museum, and behind it, Father’s study. It was from this direction that the voice was emanating. I crept towards it.
    I put an ear to the door.
    “Besides, Jacko,” a caddish voice was saying on the other side of the paneled wood, “how could you live in the light of discovery? How could you ever go on?”
    For a queasy instant I thought George Sanders had come to Buckshaw, and was lecturing Father behind closed doors.
    “Get out,” Father said, his voice not angry, but in that level, controlled tone that told me he was furious. In my mind I could see his furrowed brow, his clenched fists, and his jaw muscles taut as bowstrings.
    “Oh, come off it, old boy,” said the oily voice. “We’re in this together—always have been, always will be. You know it as well as I.”
    “Twining was right,” Father said. “You’re a loathsome, despicable excuse for a human being.”
    “Twining? Old Cuppa? Cuppa’s been dead these thirty years, Jacko—like Jacob Marley. But, like said Marley, his ghost lingers on. As perhaps you’ve noticed.”
    “And we killed him,” Father said, in a flat, dead voice.
    Had I heard what I’d heard? How could he—
    By taking my ear from the door and bending to peer through the keyhole I missed Father’s next words. He was standing beside his desk, facing the door. The stranger’s back was to me. He was excessively tall, six foot four, I guessed. With his red hair and rusty gray suit, he reminded me of the Sandhill Crane that stood stuffed in a dim corner of the firearm museum.
    I reapplied my ear to the paneled door.
    “… no statute of limitations on shame,” the voice was saying. “What’s a couple of thousand to