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

by Alan Bradley

What was going on in the woman’s mind? I wondered. Was she hiding something? Was she simply being dramatic? Had the pressure driven the poor creature to the edge of madness? Or was it me? I was beginning to learn that when you’re bereaved, as I have been, you live in a shattered looking-glass world. Nothing is as it seems. I needed to focus: to pull myself back together into that single, intense, burning intelligence I once had been. And I needed to do it quickly.

“Who would want to kill a man like that?” I asked. “It’s really quite extraordinary, isn’t it?” Daffy said. Daffy was always saying things like “It’s really quite extraordinary,” when I would have said, “Well, I’ll be bumfuddled!” It’s a matter of taste, I suppose.

But as I was saying, I had become aware that there was an “inner me” and an “outer me,” and at the moment I didn’t much care for the outer one. I was only truly myself when I was alone among the glass flasks and retorts in that dear chemical lab in the otherwise abandoned east wing of Buckshaw.

I needed first to let the hatred boil away, and hatred, I had already learned, can be a slow, slow thing. If love was sugar, hate was lead.

So much to think about. So much to sort and sift. Sometimes I wished I had two skulls and two brains, so that I could think two things at once. As far as I can see, this is the greatest shortcoming in our human design.

It’s called trust, and it’s often the hardest thing we are called upon to do in our lives.

There are moments you know you will remember until the sun and all the stars burn out, and this was one of them. Sometimes we don’t appreciate, or even realize at the time, our most cherished moments, so that when we do, we do so with regret.