The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

What intrigued me more than anything was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation—all of it!—was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was real stability.” 

Flavia was instantly drawn to chemistry because it makes sense to her. The elegant way in which her experiments come to logical conclusions comforts her. In this passage, Flavia finds comfort in knowing that there is stability in the world. This is because her own life feels so unstable, with her father failing to provide the dependable security she craves and the constant reminders of the mother she cannot remember. Because there are no bonds between herself and her family, Flavia examines how life is held together by invisible chemical bonds.

“I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Flavia is an atypical 11-year-old girl, especially for her time. She has a well-developed, sardonic sense of humor and a passion for poisons. It is not surprising that Flavia is curious rather than terrified after encountering a dying man in her garden. When the man expires right in front of her eyes, she finds the whole situation very exciting. Flavia does not have much to consume her time other than her chemistry experiments, so she is bored with life. A murder mystery in her own front yard sparks great interest in Flavia, in a way not expected of a child her age.

“I knew instantly, too, that Father had just told a lie, and suddenly, without warning, somewhere inside me, a little thread broke. It felt as if I had just aged a little and something old had snapped.” 

Flavia has always viewed her father as irreproachably proper and impeccably honest. When Inspector Hewitt asks Laurence if he will look at the corpse to see if he can identify the man, he refuses, saying that he is “not good with death.” This astonishes Flavia, who knows that as a former military man, her father is well acquainted with death and has never indicated any squeamishness about it. Flavia experiences a small loss of innocence hearing her father tell an outright lie.

“When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poisons, and come to ‘Cyanide,’ I am going to put under ‘Uses’ the phrase ‘Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one “Dearie.”’” 

Flavia despises being condescended to. She hates the saccharine way that people, particularly elderly women, speak to her, using terms like “dearie.” Flavia spends an inordinate amount of time contemplating ways to poison people, which is how Flavia deals with her emotions. As a proper English young lady, she cannot express her true feelings, so she internalizes her annoyance, anger, and sadness with mental exercises.

“I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.” 

Flavia thinks about how her life might be different if she was born a boy, as she imagines her father would have liked. Gender roles are highly ingrained, so Flavia imagines that if she was a boy, her father would have taken her fishing and hunting. They might be closer; her father might love her more. Flavia also wonders if, had she been a boy, she might have been kinder to Miss Mountjoy. Finally, Flavia yells “Hell, no!” and rides Gladys faster, deciding that she is who she is, that she was never going to be some Boy Scout, and that she loves herself as she is.

“As I approached from the west, the mellow old stone glowed like saffron in the late afternoon sun, well settled into the landscape like a complacent mother hen squatting on her eggs, with the Union Jack stretching itself contentedly overhead.” 

Buckshaw is almost a character itself, full of history and interesting details. Though the ancient manor has seen better days and is crumbling from neglect, Flavia loves her home and feels safe there. In this passage, Flavia feels Buckshaw welcoming her, ready to envelope her like a mother hen surrounding her precious eggs. The Union Jack flying above the house symbolizes the family’s long history as British aristocracy. This beautiful description is a good example of the imagery used throughout the story by the author.

“If he had been attacked where I found him, the killer had used a silent method: silent and slow since, when I found him, the man had been still, although barely, alive.” 

Flavia demonstrates her analytical mental processes throughout the story. Here, she ponders how the murder took place directly below her window without her hearing the struggle. Flavia’s first thoughts turn to poison, since that it her own area of expertise, and she believes that Mrs. Mullet’s pie must have been poisoned. This passage shows how Flavia methodically works through her investigations, though she is somewhat influenced by her personal bias toward poisoning. In the end, Flavia is correct: Bonepenny was poisoned, though not in the way she first suspected.

“Only when he became excited enough over some new tidbit of trivia in the latest issue of The London Philatelist to rhapsodize aloud at breakfast would we learn a little more about his happy, insulated world.” 

Flavia and her sisters are highly neglected by their father. He has sheltered himself from his grief over his wife’s death by complete immersion into stamp collecting. Flavia and her sisters know nothing about the subject, so they are shut out of his world. Flavia suffers greatly from this lack of engagement with her father, who shows only a stern, remote face. It saddens Flavia that her father only shows emotion over the minutiae of stamps, not the lives of his children.

“The photos showed Harriet growing from a fat cherub with a mop of golden hair, through a tall, skinny, laughing girl (with no perceptible breasts) dressed in hockey gear, to a film star with blond bangs, standing, like Amelia Earhart, with one hand resting negligently on the rim of Blithe Spirit’s cockpit. There were no photographs of Father. Nor were there any of us.”

Flavia has grown up hearing secondhand stories about her mother and has to imagine much on her own using little clues like her mother’s handwriting in books. Seeing this photo album of Harriet’s pictures impacts Flavia deeply, as it shows her mother’s progression through life. It is notable to Flavia that there are only pictures of Harriet, not of her father or herself and her sisters. This album must have been put together by her father, as part of the shrine-like room that he has kept of Harriet’s possessions. That this room is kept intact, as if Harriet never left, shows Flavia that her father never came to terms with the loss of his wife and that she remains his focal point.

“When I thought about it for a moment—actually thought about it—I saw how foolish I had been. Why had I not realized this before? Cold-blooded murder was just one of the many things Father was incapable of.” 

When Flavia goes to see her father at the police station, she is caught up in the excitement of her investigations. She is thrilled to have outdone the police by finding clues before them, and she is willing to sacrifice herself by confessing to the murder to save her father. Flavia is very intelligent, but she is still a child with little experience of the real world. When Laurence tells her that he did not kill Bonepenny, Flavia realizes how in her pursuit to solve the case, she has behaved as if the situation were a novel or movie, not real life. In real life, Flavia knows that her father could not have murdered anyone. She concedes that her father is incapable of many things, with the implication that showing emotion is one of those things.

“It goes without saying that Mr. Twining was popular; loved might be a better word, although few of us at the time had seen enough of that emotion to recognize it for what it was.” 

When Flavia’s father opens up about his school days, it feels like a life-changing experience for Flavia. She has never heard so much about her father’s personal history, and it makes him appear more human and understandable. This gives her insight into her father’s transition into the stoic, dispassionate person she has known. As a child himself, he was sensitive and emotional, but that was forced out of him by the boarding school lifestyle. The boys there could not recognize that what they felt for Mr. Twining was love, since this expression of feeling was unfamiliar to them.

“And so we sat, Father and I, primly, like two old women at a parish tea. It was not a perfect way to live one’s life, but it would have to do.” 

Flavia feels overwhelmed with emotion after her father shares his story. She thinks of it as the first true conversation that she has ever had with her father, though he is the one doing all the talking. She feels like he is treating her like a real person for the first time, rather than as an afterthought. She longs for this moment to never end, and she wishes she could hug her father, show him the kind of affection she has been starved of, but she knows instinctively that her family is incapable of such demonstrations. She is still thankful for the attention her father showed her in this rare moment.

“It was said that the King himself had once offered to buy the stamp, an offer that was politely but firmly declined. When that failed, the King begged, through his private secretary, special permission to view ‘this marmalade phenomenon’ as he called it: a request which was speedily granted and which ended with a secret after-dark visit to Greyminster by his late Royal Highness.” 

Flavia had found and dismissed the two orange Penny Black stamps. Through her father’s story, she learns how significant the stamps, both historically and in her father’s life. Her father ponders whether the king, during his clandestine visit to Greyminster to view the TL stamp, had brought the AA stamp along so that the two might be briefly reunited. He thinks of this as a monumental event. Flavia does not know how to tell him that the stamps are presently reunited, in her pocket, and she realizes this situation is over her head.

“‘Try to be a good girl, Flavia,’ he said. Try to be a good girl? Was that all he could think of? It was evident that our submarine had surfaced, its occupants hauled up from the vasty deeps and all the magic left below.” 

Flavia is devastated that the feeling of closeness and camaraderie she felt is lost as her father says goodbye. He reverts back to his usual paternal platitudes, and Flavia feels a sense of loss. Moments before, she had felt like they were safely under the sea in a submarine, just the two of them. She felt like they were allies in addition to being father and daughter. She tries to hug her father before she goes, but his body is rigid. All the magic Flavia felt is lost.

“Yesterday I had been all too ready to throw my arms around him and hug him to jelly, but now I understood that yesterday’s cozy prison scene had not been a dialogue, but a troubled monologue.” 

Upon later reflection, Flavia realizes that her father was not even talking to her during his lengthy recollections. He was confessing to Harriet, relieving himself of the guilt and shame he felt for so many years. Flavia was merely there, a prop in her father’s confession. Flavia likens it to how Bonepenny confessed to her about Mr. Twining’s murder by breathing his last word, vale, in her presence. Her father had merely talked at Flavia, not to her, and nothing truly changed between them.

“As he drank, I remembered that there’s a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty’s Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes—or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Feely, who had told Daffy, who had told me.” 

Several passages remind the reader that this story takes place in postwar England. There are references or allusions to British character and the stoic attitude with which the British faced the hardships of World War II. When Flavia needs to help calm Dogger down after one of his episodes, she brews him tea, which is a national way of dealing with any problem.

“Like a steel ball bearing dropping into a cut-glass vase, something in my mind went click, and I knew as surely as I knew my own name how Horace Bonepenny had been murdered.”

Flavia has felt stumped about who killed Bonepenny, so she turns on the wireless radio to help clear her mind. A line from Mikado helps solidify the clues Flavia has collected, demonstrating the associative mental process that Flavia employs.

“Realization swept over me like a wave: Bonepenny’s dying mind had wanted only to confess to Mr. Twining’s murder, and fate had granted him only one word with which to do so.” 

Flavia sees the word vale inscribed on Mr. Twining’s gravestone and realizes that Horace Bonepenny used his dying breath to gasp the word that embodies his confession for Mr. Twining’s murder. It had not made sense to Flavia why a dying man would say “farewell” to a complete stranger, in the same way she had not understood why Mr. Twining would shout “farewell,” the exclamation of a suicide, if he was murdered. As the twin mysteries are clarified in her mind, Flavia sees the many ways they are intertwined.

“As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.” 

Pemberton, who is actually Bob Stanley, finds Flavia at Mr. Twining’s grave. He does not realize exactly how much Flavia knows about his role in the deaths of Mr. Twining and Horace Bonepenny, so he maintains his friendly demeanor toward her. He continues pretending he is researching a book and extends the fabrication further. Flavia nervously tries to conceal how much she knows and spars verbally with him, but she does not yet appreciate how genuinely dangerous Pemberton is.

“Being kidnapped is never the way you imagine it will be. In the first place, I had not bitten and scratched my abductor. Nor had I screamed: I had gone quietly along like a lamb to the September slaughter.” 

Flavia often thinks of life in terms of books and films, as she is very young and has not experienced much of real life. She thinks that Ophelia and Daphne would criticize her for not acting like fictional heroines who would fight off their abductors. Flavia knows now that in real life, being kidnapped is a terrifying experience, and following a kidnapper’s instructions is an automatic response. Flavia is truly a brave girl, but she learns that bravery is not always as it appears in fiction.

“There had been several times in the past, at work in my chemical laboratory or lying in bed at night, when I unexpectedly caught myself thinking, ‘You are all alone with Flavia de Luce,’ which sometimes was a frightening thought and sometimes not.” 

Flavia has spent much of her life alone, as she is neglected by her family and has no friends her own age. She is all too aware of her solitary existence. With her chemistry experiments and her books, Flavia often is at peace with being alone, as there is no one to bother her, but here Flavia realizes that she is truly alone in a desperate and dangerous situation, and she feels genuine fear. It is the scariest moment she can remember in her entire life.

“Having just come through a war in which tons of trinitrotoluene were dumped on our heads in the dark, we were a nation of survivors, and I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, could see it even in myself.” 

Flavia, alone, bound, gagged, and blinded by Pemberton’s jacket, is strikingly resilient. Instead of helplessly crying in the dark, she fights to free herself. Flavia is proud of her perseverance and imagines herself as part of the British fortitude in the face of adversity. She recalls how Napoleon once called England “a nation of shopkeepers,” and she defiantly demonstrates the spirit of her nation.

“If she was, I couldn’t hear her; perhaps I was farther removed from Harriet than Feely and Daffy. Perhaps she had loved me less.” 

Flavia despairs as Pemberton threatens her life; she wonders if she will actually die in the pit. Rather than appealing to the heavens, she wonders if her mother will be her guardian angel. Flavia does not hear her dead mother’s voice or sense her intervention, and she sadly wonders if this is because she is the youngest child, farthest removed, with no memories of Harriet at all. That Ophelia remembers “Mummy,” and even Daphne claims to have snapshot memories of her, has caused Flavia lifelong heartbreak.