Read Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard for Free Online

its secrets to itself: locked and forgotten by people who were more concerned with taxes and drainage than with cunningly shaped vessels of glass.
    Until I came along, that is, and claimed it for my own.
    I wrinkled my nose in pleasure at the memory.
    As I approached the kitchen door, I felt proud of myself to have thought of using the least conspicuous entrance. With Daffy and Feely forever scheming and plotting against me, one could never be too careful. But the excitement of the fête and the moving of the Gypsy’s caravan to the Palings had caused me to miss lunch. Right now, even a slice of Mrs. Mullet’s stomach-churning cabbage cake would probably be bearable if taken with a glass of ice-cold milk to freeze the taste buds. By this late in the afternoon Mrs. M would have gone home for the day, and I would have the kitchen to myself.
    I opened the door and stepped inside.
    “Got you!” said a grating voice at my ear, and everything went dark as a sack was pulled over my head.
    I struggled, but it did no good. My hands and arms were useless, as the mouth of the sack was tied tightly about my thighs.
    Before I could scream, my assailants—of whom I was quite sure there were two, judging by the number of hands that were grabbing at my limbs—turned me head over heels. Now I was upside down, standing on my head, with someone grasping my ankles.
    I was suffocating, fighting for breath, my lungs filled with the sharp earthy smell of the potatoes that had recently occupied the sack. I could feel the blood rushing to my head.
    Damn! I should have thought sooner of kicking them. Too late now.
    “Make all the noise you want,” hissed a second voice. “There’s no one here to save you.”
    With a sinking feeling I realized that this was true. Father had gone up to London to a philatelic auction, and Dogger had gone with him to shop for secateurs and boot polish.
    The idea of burglars inside Buckshaw was unthinkable.
    That left Daffy and Feely.
    In an odd way I wished it had been burglars.
    I recalled that in the entire house there was only one doorknob that squeaked: the door to the cellar stairs.
    It squeaked now.
    A moment later, like a shot deer, I was being hoisted up onto the shoulders of my captors and roughly borne, headfirst, down into the cellars.
    At the bottom of the stairs they dumped me heavily onto the flagstones, banging my elbow, and I heard my own voice shrieking with pain as it came echoing back from the vaulted ceilings—followed by the sound of my own ragged breathing.
    Someone’s shoes shifted in the grit not far from where I lay sprawled.
    “Pray silence!” croaked a hollow voice, which sounded artificial, like that of a tin robot.
    I let out another shriek, and I’m afraid I might even have whimpered a little.
    “Pray silence!”
    Whether it was from the sudden shock or the clammy coldness of the cellars I could not be certain, but I had begun to shiver. Would they take this as a sign of weakness? It is said that in certain small animals it is instinctive when in danger to play dead, and I realized that I was one of them.
    I took shallow breaths and tried not to move a muscle.
    “Free her, Garbax!”
    “Yes, O Three-Eyed One.”
    It sometimes amused my sisters to slip suddenly into the roles of bizarre alien creatures: creatures even more bizarre and alien than they were already in everyday life. Both of them knew it was a trick that for some reason I found particularly upsetting.
    I had already learned that sisterhood, like Loch Ness, has things that lurk unseen beneath the surface, but I think it was only now that I realized that of all the invisible strings that tied the three of us together, the dark ones were the strongest.
    “Stop it, Daffy. Stop it, Feely!” I shouted. “You’re frightening me.”
    I gave my legs a couple of convincing froglike kicks, as if I were on the verge of a seizure.
    The sack was suddenly whisked away, spinning me round so that I now lay facedown upon the