Free Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley Page B

odd thing—
    As odd can be—
    That whatever Miss T eats
    Turns into Miss T.
    If Mr. de la Mare was correct, Carla must be in the habit of feasting on fireflies. Her red face fairly glowed with the heat of her body, and her forehead was glossy with a greasy dampness.
    “I
hate
you, Flavia de Luce!” she spat. “You’ve ruined everything. I hate you! I loathe you! I despise you!”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was involuntary.”
    Involuntary
was perhaps too grand a word—too pretentious for the occasion—but it slipped out of me before I could stop my mouth.
    It launched Carla into a cold, full-fledged fury.
    “You de Luces are so…so…blooming
superior,
” she said, her voice dripping with the venom of a sack of vipers.
    “Look, Carla,” I said, trying to calm her, “it’s a question of mechanics, not malice. When you put pressure on your metatarsals—”
    “Oh,
bugger
your metatarsals!” Carla snarled, and I sucked in my breath noisily and widened my eyes, as if I were scandalized.
    “Carla!”
    The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius.
    I also let my jaw fall open in astonishment—which was gilding the lily, perhaps, but if a dab of gold paint here and there—as in the Sistine Chapel, for instance—hadn’t ruined Michelangelo’s reputation, why should it ruin mine?
    The thought of gilding reminded me: Here was a golden opportunity.
    “I know how you feel, though,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’re two of a kind, you and I.”
    We were no such thing, but the second step was: Create a kinship with your subject.
    Carla looked up at me with something approaching hope. I came close to feeling sorry for her.
    “We are?” she asked, and I knew she was mine.
    “Of course we are!” I said with a laugh. “Everyone knows how dreadfully your family treats you.”
    It was a shot in the dark, but I knew at once that it had struck blood, bone, and gristle.
    “They do?” she said, something dawning on her face.
    According to my sister Daffy, Tolstoy had written something about happy families being all alike and unhappy ones each unhappy in its own way. “Like us,” she had added with a horrible grimace. Well, Tolstoy was wrong. It’s the other way round—at least in my limited experience.
    I knew nothing whatsoever about Carla, but it seemed a safe enough bet that she must have a family.
    “You’re quite right,” she said suddenly. “They
do
treat me dreadfully
.
They think I’m going to be a failure.”
    “Whatever makes them think such a thing?” I asked.
    “Because they’re such failures themselves. Mother is a failed sculptor and Father a failed advertising man. I wonder what I shall fail at when I’m old enough?”
    “How old are you? Right now, I mean. Today.”
    “Sixteen,” she mumbled, casting her eyes down as if being sixteen were an indictable criminal offense.
    “But let’s talk about happier things,” I said, putting the other hand on her other shoulder.
    She looked up at me doubtfully.
    “ ‘The Lass with the Delicate Air,’ ” I said. “You were actually singing about yourself, weren’t you?”
    I paused to let the oblique compliment sink in. Carla was not the brightest star in the firmament.
    “And you sing it so beautifully,” I said, shoring up the dam, just in case.
    “Do you really, really think so?” Her great wet eyes swam up towards me.
    It says somewhere—in the Book of Proverbs, I think—that lying lips are abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight.
    I considered my words carefully before I spoke them. “I don’t just
think
so—I
know
so,” I told her, giving her shoulder a tender squeeze.
    I would probably burn in the fires of Hell for an eternity of eternities for such a flaming fib, but I didn’t care. Paradise would just have to get along without me.
    “It always