Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of many short stories, children's stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. His first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Dilys Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award, and was nominated for the Anthony Award. His other Flavia de Luce novels are The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Speaking from Among the Bones, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, and The Grave's a Fine and Private Place, as well as the ebook short story "The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse."

-One- The winter rain slashes at my face like icy razor blades, but I don't care. I dig my chin deep into the collar of my mackintosh, put my head down, and push on against the buffeting of the furious wind. I am cycling madly towards the village of Bishop's Lacey, fleeing hordes of Hell's hobgoblins. The past twenty-four hours have been a nightmare. All I can think about is getting away from Buckshaw. Gladys's wheels groan horribly beneath us. The biting cold has penetrated her steel bones and seized the tendons of her brake cables. She judders wickedly on the slick tarmac, threatening to skid off the road entirely and pitch me into the icy ditch. I want to scream into the wind, but I don't. One of us, at least, must keep her wits about her. I try to put my thoughts in order. In spite of having been banished to Canada and then re-banished back home from Miss Bodycote's Female Academy-in what may or may not have been double disgrace-I have to admit that I had been looking forward to being reunited with my family: Father; my two elder sisters, Feely and Daffy; our cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet; and most of all, Dogger, Father's general factotum and all-round right-hand man. As every traveler does on an Atlantic crossing, I had daydreamed about my return to England. Father, Feely, and Daffy would be at the docks to greet me, of course, and perhaps even Aunt Felicity would put in an appearance. Welcome Home Flavia banners would be waved, a few discreet balloons, and all that sort of thing. Discreet of course, because, like myself, none of us de Luces wear our hearts on our sleeves. But when the ship berthed finally at Southampton, there had been only Dogger standing motionless in the rain beneath a dark umbrella. With the strangeness that comes of separation, I had offered him my hand, rather than giving him the crushing bear hug that was in my heart. I regretted this at once, but it was too late: The moment had passed and the opportunity was wasted. "I'm afraid I must be the bearer of rather bad news, Miss Flavia," Dogger had said. "Colonel de Luce has been taken ill. He is in hospital with pneumonia." "Father? In hospital? In Hinley?" "I'm afraid so." "We must go to him at once," I said. "What time will we be there?" We still had a long journey ahead of us, Dogger explained. The five-twenty boat train from Southampton would take us up to London and to Waterloo Station, where, just after seven in the evening, we would have to change to a taxicab for a dash across the city to another train at another station. We would not reach Doddingsley until late in the evening, and would not arrive at Bishop's Lacey, Hinley, and the hospital until even later. By then, visiting hours would be long over. "Surely Dr. Darby-" I said. But Dogger gave his head a sad shake, and it was not until that moment that I realized how grave Father's situation must be. Dogger was not the kind of person who would tell you that everything would be all right when he knew perfectly well that it would not. His silence said everything. Although there had been so much to say, we had spoken little in the train. Each of us had stared out blank-faced through the rain-streaked glass at a rushing landscape that seemed in the gathering twilight to be the color of old bruises. From time to time I glanced at Dogger, but found that I could no longer decipher his face. Dogger had suffered horribly with Father in a Japanese prison camp during the war, and still, from time to time, experienced flashbacks of such terrifying intensity that they left him little more than a weak, whimpering child. Once, I had asked him how he and Father had survived. "One tries to keep a stiff upper lip, mentally," he had said. I had worried about Dogger almost constantly during my absence, but in writing-although missing