The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

by Alan Bradley

hardly a selection to float you off to dreamland …

Weird section break...

The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at 3:44. On Summer Time, daylight came early, and in less than a quarter of an hour, the sun should be up. I

I think 4 a.m. is a little early for sunrise, but I could be wrong

For a fleeting moment I thought of winding it up again to give the household a Polish reveille. And then I remembered what had happened just a few hours before.

So it didn't wake anyone up in the middle of the night but it would now?

the almost imperceptible bronze metallic cloudiness that appeared on the skin, as if, before my very eyes, it were being breathed upon by death.

No idea what that's meant to look like

had stepped over the line.

These section breaks are killing me

It sounded to me like a classic case of cyanide poisoning,

Considering there are zero symptoms given besides "suffering" and "screaming" (and I don't think pain is a major symptom of cyanide, so much as things like dizziness and vomiting) I guess it's a good thing you're the best chemist who ever chemistried so you can figure it out.

Here, sometimes, I would reenact, step by step, the discoveries of the great chemists.

You're lucky you're not dead given some of that old school chemistry...

How could I tell them that, just a few hours ago, the stranger from Norway had breathed his last breath into my face?

Why *can't* you tell them? Because you're an obnoxious, pretentious little shit?

which had begun to go the color of pink plasticine.

So... Pink.

Leaning heavily on Dogger’s arm—Dogger had been summoned—Father

Well thanks for informing me

BISHOP LACEY’S

I thought it was Bishop's Lacey

Daphne had described to me the effects of tetanus: One scratch from an old auto wheel and I’d be foaming at the mouth, barking like a dog, and falling to the ground in convulsions at the sight of water.

... That's...rabies...tetanus is lockjaw and spasms... Like, maybe this is meant to be deliberately wrong because child, but on the flip side obnoxiously precocious child, so it definitely doesn't read that way.

I gave him a Winston Churchill V with my fingers. It was the least I could do.

Well that was a pointless detour

She gasped. Her face went red, then gray, as if it had caught fire before my eyes and collapsed in an avalanche of ashes. She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, knotted it, and jammed it into her mouth, and for a few moments, she sat there, rocking in her chair, gripping the lace between her teeth like an eighteenth-century seaman having his leg amputated below the knee. At last, she looked up at me with brimming eyes and said in a shaky voice, “Mr. Twining was my mother’s brother.”

That seems a little overwrought for three decades after the fact...

“My uncle had been housemaster of Anson House forever—or so it seemed.

Thanks for clarifying that he's not actually immortal

I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face … “Vale.” The thrill of it all!

... Is she meant to be a tiny psychopath? Because that's what I'm getting.

Had I, through some freak accident of chemistry, produced a miracle facial cream?

If she's using lipstick as facial cream she's got other complexion issues

Like Daphne, I remembered words, but without an account book to jot them down.

Well ain't you special

“I’d have scratched his eyes out and sucked the holes,” I said. Her eyes widened in horror. “John Marston,” I told her.

Man, someone's playing Red Dead Redemption with terrible karma...

Ergo (that means “therefore”)

Fuck off

Yes! That made sense! What better way to get a dead bird past an inquisitive H. M. Customs inspector?

Well obviously! This makes perfect sense and there are no flaws in the logic

Paris was red, white, and blue, and so was Stavanger.

What, girl genius here doesn't realize red, white and blue are the colors of like ten different European flags?

As I extracted the blade, I thought how lucky it was that women—other than the occasional person like Miss Pickery at the library—don’t need to shave.

God you're an unpleasant little git

I flew on tiptoe in the other direction, through the twisting, turning labyrinth of corridors:

Is this place an inn or the Winchester house?

Why not something of practical value, like the Thirteen Carbon Atoms, for instance? Something that could be used as a memory aid? There were thirteen carbon atoms in tridecyl, whose hydride was marsh gas. What a jolly useful name for a pub!

I am very unclear as to how that works as a memory aid. Are marsh gas and pubs intrinsically linked? I also think "tridecyl" is missing...the rest of the name but whatever.

The Thirteen Drakes, indeed. Leave it to a man to name a place for a bird!

My first thought was dragons, but whatever.

tridecyl

Maybe this specific compound is different but just saying "tridecyl" feels really awkward, because it's not a full name. That's like saying you were thinking about ethyl instead of ethyl alcohol, you're missing part of the word.

Because she plays so beautifully, I have always felt it my bounden duty to be particularly rotten to her.

Why am I supposed to like her?

Ophelia has no sense of humor.

Or you're not funny

The house seemed unaware of my approach, as

I mean... It's a house. It'd be weird if it pulled a Baba Yaga and turned to look at you

WHENEVER SHE WAS THINKING ABOUT NED, Feely played Schumann.

How could you possibly know that given your adversarial relationship with her? Are you a mind reader?

It was slow, but lovely nonetheless, although even on his best days Bach, to my way of thinking, couldn’t hold a candle to Pietro Domenico Paradisi.

God I want to throw things at you

had been poured in the Middle Ages by half-civilized semivagrant glassmakers who lived and caroused on the verge of Ovenhouse Wood,

God you're such a bougie ass

Feely had a particular aversion to having her shoes vomited on, a useful quirk of which I took advantage from time to time.

I mean... Don't most people?

Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one.

Is there? Also, holy shit, something she doesn't have memorized?

But before I could scramble to my feet it came pouring down in buckets,

Sure that's how weather works

“You’re saturated.” “Not so much saturated as drenched,” I corrected him. When it came to chemistry, I was a stickler.

Nobody says that

“I haven’t used the library in the village since I was a child.”

You're still a child

whereas Daffy and Feely had pinups of Charles Dickens and Mario Lanza respectively.

What fucking century is this supposed to be?

“The front door’s locked,” I said. “I couldn’t get in.”

"So I decided to break into your property because I'm a tiny psychopath with no regard for other people."

the kind of orange you see when the scarlet cap of a Death’s Head mushroom has just begun to go off.

Do you mean Death Cap, because those are demonstrably not even slightly scarlet. Or do you mean fly agaric, which is not actually particularly deadly, although it will make you feel rotten and hallucinate? Or Russula emetica, which is very red/orange but also not deadly so much as, well, an emetic? Lacterius deliciosus is also quite orange, but also quite edible. (I can be a know-it-all prat, too.)

Horace Bonepenny

That's quite a name

Flave,

Flava Flave?

In every photograph, Harriet’s features were those of a woman whose design has been arrived at by taking those of Feely, Daffy, and me and shaking them in a jar before reassembling them into this grinning, confident, yet endearingly shy adventuress.

Almost like that's how genetics work. I'm glad her features don't change between pictures, that would be kind of weird. And since I don't know anything about what you three look like, this means nothing

For all I knew, he might already have destroyed it. Now that I stopped to think about it,

Well I'm glad we took this pointless detour then

My heart began to pound as if someone had slipped me a cup of foxglove tea.

So it slowed down?

twenty horizontal rows of twelve, which was easy enough for me to remember since 20 is the atomic number for Calcium and 12 the number for Magnesium—all I had to do was think of CaMg.

That works for literally any two numbers, you are bad at mnemonics

and the next they were as hollow as a horse trader’s.

Are horse traders known for hollow cheeks?

‘Faintly tender, but only in one or two widely separated spots—like Carnforth’s beef,’ he said, and we both laughed. Carnforth was the notorious Hinley butcher whose family had been supplying Greyminster with its boot-leather Sunday roasts of beef since the Napoleonic Wars.

Nothing like a third hand joke that requires explaining...

I decked myself out in an oversized silk kimono I had found at a church jumble sale, a beautiful bloodred thing covered with Chinese dragons and mystical markings. I plastered my face with yellow chalk and stretched a thin elastic round my head to pull my eyes up at the corners.

Oh Christ