She chewed reflectively.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said, putting the fork down on her plate. “Oh, my goodness!”

Even her magnificent acting ability couldn’t suppress the little gag reflex I saw at her throat.

“I knew you’d like it,” Mrs. Mullet crowed.

“But I must be brutal and rein myself in,” Phyllis Wyvern said, pushing the plate roughly away and getting to her feet. “I tend to make a swine of myself when there’s cake to be had, and with lardy cake, it’s no more than a day from lips to hips. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Mrs. Mullet lifted the plate away and placed it a little too carefully behind the sink.

I knew without a doubt that she would take the slice of cake home, wrap it in gift paper, and put it in her china cabinet between the china-dog salt and peppers marked “A Present From Blackpool” and the slender glass bird that bobbed up and down as it sipped water from a tube.

When her friend Mrs. Waller came to visit, Mrs. Mullet would reverently unwrap the moldy relic. “You’ll never guess ’oo ate the missin’ bit of this,” she would say in a hushed voice. “Phyllis Wyvern! Look—you can still see ’er teeth marks. Just a peek, mind—quick, so’s it doesn’t go stale.”

The doorbell rang and Dogger put down his tea.

“That will be Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said, with a wry grin. “She’ll claim to have missed her connection from Paddington. She always does.”

“I’ll fix ’er a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Mullet said. “The train always makes your stomach go all skew-gee—at least it does mine.

“Gives me the dire-rear,” she whispered in my ear.

In a moment, Dogger was back, followed by a round little woman with iron-rimmed spectacles, her hair tied back in a large tight ball like the tail of the horse, Ajax, that had once been owned by one of my ancestors, Florizel de Luce. Both of them, Florizel and Ajax, immortalized in oils, now hung side by side in the portrait gallery.