What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust (Flavia de Luce, #11)

by Alan Bradley

Slowly, silently, and with perfect control, I was drawing in a measured breath when—pfft—close to my head—as if a fairy had dropped a little posey… But then the stink struck me like a sudden sledgehammer. This was no fairy. This was no delicate daisy. It was Undine! That rotten, putrid villain, Undine. She had let off a silent broadside: one that was going to kill all the cattle within a radius of a mile and cause the greenwoods beyond first to sicken and then to die.

In those pale blue irises were births, deaths, and loves; successes and failures; tragedies and comedies; and, yes, hates. I had never seen anything like it, and in a way, I hoped I never would again. It was a kind of nakedness I could not yet understand. The nakedness of age.

I feel that I have been diminished, and yet at the same time magnified. I’m beginning to understand why people’s brains can sometimes become addled like eggnog, without their even noticing the change. One day you’re Flavia de Luce and the next you’re not, and presumably you will have to wait through patient eons, like an evolving caveman, to discover who it is you’re in the process of becoming. I know I’m not the girl I once was, but I’m not yet sure who I really am. Nor, when it comes right down to it, am I now even sure who I used to be. I’m like a tightrope walker teetering on the edge of some vast, but still invisible, abyss.

To my mind, a sign is—well, a sign of laziness. If it isn’t important enough to have a human enforcer, it isn’t important enough to obey. A few dabs of paint don’t cut any ice with me.

Our relationship had become one of icy respect rather than genuine love. I could see that clearly now: a gift of the moment.

Time stolen from children can never be repaid. That is the true bitterness.

Characters in fiction must remain believable. It is not so in real life.”

My mind had become a gigantic concrete mixer, churning endlessly away at tons of gray, sloppy speculation that only time could harden into fact.

If you wish to be noted for truthfulness, you must always tell the truth—but not all of it.