I walked slowly along the table, running a finger across the books, all of them arranged with their spines upwards: Ethel M. Dell, E. M. Delafield, Warwick Deeping …

I had noticed on another occasion that most of the great poisoners in history had names beginning with the letter C, and now here were all of these authors beginning with a D. Was I on to something? Some secret of the universe?

I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated: Dickens … Doyle … Dumas … Dostoyevsky—I had seen all of them, at one time or another, clutched in Daffy’s hands.

Daffy herself was planning to become a novelist when she was older. With a name like Daphne de Luce, she couldn’t fail if she tried!

“Daff!” I said. “You’ll never guess—”

“Quiet!” she snapped. “I’ve told you not to speak to me when I’m reading.”

My sister could be a most unpleasant porpoise when she felt like it.

It had not always been this way. When I was younger, for instance, and Father had recruited Daffy to hear my bedtime prayers, she had taught me to recite them in Pig Latin, and we had rolled among the down-filled pillows, laughing until we nearly split.

“Od-gay ess-blay Ather-fay, Eely-fay, and Issis-may Ullet-may. And Ogger-day, oo-tay!”

But over the years, something had changed between my sisters and me.

A little hurt, I reached for a volume that lay on top of the others: A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande. It was a book, I thought, that would appeal to Feely, since she was mad about mirrors. Perhaps I would purchase it myself, and store it away against the unlikely day when I might feel like giving her a gift, or a peace offering. Stranger things had happened.

Riffling through its pages, I saw at once that it was not a novel, but a play—full of characters’ names and what each of them said. Someone named Adam was talking to a clown: