Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley

books as you could by snooping through their diaries—a practice of which I am exceedingly fond and, I must confess, especially adept.
    Mr. Sambridge did not have many books—perhaps a dozen in all. Several of these, such as the King James Bible and Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy,
were well thumbed, but the remaining volumes seemed unread: as fresh and crisp as if they had just arrived from Foyles in the morning post.
    And, oddly, there were several copies of the same books, each in mint condition in a fresh dust wrapper.
    I recognized them at once by their brightly illustrated covers:
Rainy Day Rhymes, Hobbyhorse House, The History of Crispian Crumpet,
and
Pirates in the Garden
: those immortal childhood classics by Oliver Inchbald.
    Who, in England, or for that matter, anywhere else in the Empire or beyond, hadn’t had these books read aloud to them even before they could manage bread and milk? I myself still had distinct memories of:
Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink!
    Jumping in the rain
    What a jolly mess, I think
    Here I go again!
    Or worse:
Captain Congleton’s kangaroo
    Is coming tonight for the Irish stew.
    I still have several disjointed recollections of the unfortunate Miss Gurdy reciting this nonsense mechanically and without expression as she forced a spoon of gruel upon me in a high chair.
    To someone like myself who had already been exposed to
real
poetry, these childish rhymes were an enormous letdown. I thought in particular of one rainy afternoon when I was very young that Daffy, in a far corner of one of the attics, had rehearsed “Westron Wind”:
“Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow
    The smalle rayne downe can rayne.
    Cryst yf my love were in my armes
    And I yn my bed a-gayne.”
    Outside, the small rain had raced down the leaded windowpanes, adding blurred but vivid images to her words.
    Reminded of another song, Daffy went on:
“Marti’mas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
    And shake the green leaves from the tree?
    O gentle death, when wilt thou come?
    For of life I am wearie.”
    The words had touched something so deep inside me that I shivered at their sound. Although I did not know it at the time, the feeling was one of loneliness: a feeling I would later come to know—and later yet, to treasure.
    Captain Congleton’s kangaroo, my aunt Fanny!
    Using my handkerchief to avoid leaving fingerprints, I picked up one of the copies of
Rainy Day Rhymes
and opened it to a random page:
Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink!
    Jumping in the rain
    What a jolly mess, I think
    Here I go again!
    There was no getting away from this stuff, even at the scene of a murder.
    But then I thought,
Hold on!
    Could it be that there was a message here for me? Had the book fallen open at that particular page for a reason? Was it like those cases I had heard about where people would seek solutions to their problems by sticking a finger at random into the Bible?
    Prognostication, Daffy called it, and said it was a load of old horse hockey.
    What a jolly mess, I think. Here I go again.
    Were the words not meant to point up my present predicament? They could hardly have been better chosen. And besides, it was raining outside:
Splash! Sploik! Splonk! Splink! Jumping in the rain.
    Gladys would certainly appreciate this weird reflection of our actual lives. The sounds perfectly described her progress along a puddle-filled lane.
    “Stick to the facts,”
Uncle Tarquin said inside my head.
    I leafed slowly through the pages: Here was Crispian Crumpet building sand castles by the sea, and here he was feeding a pony an apple over a wicket gate. Here he was gluing feathers to his forearms for a poem called
The Child Icarus,
and here, roasting a chestnut on a stick over an open bonfire.
    I wondered if Oliver Inchbald’s real-life son, upon whom the books were based, had actually done these things, or whether they were make-believe, the result of the author’s overheated imagination?
    I had never noticed it before, but in spite of his