The Grave's a Fine and Private Place (Flavia de Luce, #9)

by Alan Bradley

Oh, for the good old days, I thought, when Death was an everyday equal and not to be padlocked away like some dim-witted relative whom nobody wanted to see or spend time with.

“Da says that life is full of death, and that it’s better to make friends with it than fight it.”

‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.’ ”

She was being ironic, I was quite sure of it. Daffy had once explained to me that irony consisted of words from another world: that they did not seem to mean what you thought they meant, which was a contradiction in itself. “They’re words from the other side of the looking-glass,” Daffy told me, “and ought always to be answered as such.”

It is always pleasant to reflect, also, that the same cyanogen is found in the kernels of peaches and cherries, and that the glucoside amygdalin, which is contained in the essential oil of bitter almonds, as well as in the kernels of plums and apricots, is converted into hydrogen cyanide in the presence of certain enzymes and a bit of moisture, and is often used to provide the characteristic taste and odor in the manufacture of certain sweets.

How pleasant it is, as you sit in an ancient church, to ponder poisons, surrounded as you are by the towering toxicity of the stained-glass windows.

Such happy thoughts are proof that I have become an adult. I am now ruled by not only what I see, what I hear, what I taste, and what I smell, but also, and perhaps most important, by what I think.

“The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.