Speaking From Among the Bones

He let this sink in.

  “You mean—?” I asked.

  “That’s right, miss,” he said. “ ’Ad a room built special. Kept it locked up tight as the Treasury, she did. Nobody allowed in but ’erself. Old Beatty only knew about it ’cause ’e was called in one time to carry ’er out when she’d fainted. That didn’t stop ’im ’avin’ a good look round, though.”

  I edged forward on my chair, begging with my eyes for more.

  “The whole battlefield at Plassey, she ’ad, laid out like a model. Exact scale replica of the real thing. ’Uge, it was. Rocks, ’ills, pipe-cleaner trees. The Bhagirathi River was a mirror, tinted blue. Wonderful clever with their ’ands, the Indians. Filled the whole room, wall to wall to wall to wall. Marvelous to see, Old Beatty said.”

  “And Mrs. Ridley-Smith—?”

  “Locked ’erself away in there from mornin’ to night, movin’ the figures around, fightin’ the Battle of Plassey over and over and over again.”

  “But her husband,” I said. “The magistrate, the chancellor—did he think she was—”

  “Right in the ’ead? Nobody knows. ’E never mentions ’er name.”

  A chill went through me. I would not think why until later.

  “ ‘Depressed,’ they calls it nowadays. Back then it was more likely ‘the vapors’ or some suchlike.”

  “What about her family? Were they like that, too?”

  “Solid as rocks, the lot of ’em. Soldiers, lawyers, nabobs in the East India Company back to the year dot. They left ’er pretty well alone with ’er toys, at least accordin’ to old Beatty.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mullet,” I said, scraping back my chair and giving his hand a shake. “I’d better be getting along. I don’t want anyone to be worrying about me.”

  The truth was, I needed to talk to Dogger immediately.

  It was a matter of life and death.

  As I pedaled past St. Tancred’s, my eye was caught by a crowd milling outside the front door of the church.

  I skidded to a stop.

  The vicar was standing in the porch, his hands raised.

  “Gentlemen … gentlemen,” he was saying.

  I parked Gladys against the wall and crept slowly forward through the crowd, trying not to be noticed. Most of the people were from Bishop’s Lacey, but a few of them were not.

  One of the strangers was a tall, thin man in a gray trench coat and red bow tie with a notebook in his hand. At his side was another, shorter man, similarly dressed, holding a press camera up to his eyes.

  “But they’re saying it’s a miracle, Vicar. Surely you can spare us a few words?”

  The vicar tried without success to smooth down his disarranged hair, which was blowing in the wind. As he did so, a flashbulb went off.

  “What did you think when you saw the blood?” another man called out. “We were told someone threw away their crutches. Is it true?”

  A murmur went through the crowd.

  “Gentlemen, please. All in good time.”

  “What about the corpse in the crypt, Vicar?”

  I could already see the sensational headlines in tomorrow’s Hinley Chronicle and The Morning Post-Horn and so, I knew, could the vicar.

  THE CORPSE IN THE CRYPT! SAINT WEEPS BLOOD!

  With that kind of publicity, the bishop would soon have him paddling to a new post somewhere up the Amazon. The press was ruthless, but then so was the Church.

  “Gentlemen, please … we must remember that today is Good Friday. Nothing must be allowed to profane—”

  “Let me through,” I shouted. “It’s an emergency. Please let me through.”

  I pushed my way into the crowd and stepped up beside the vicar. Taking his elbow in my hand, I said in a stage whisper just loud enough to be overheard by the newspaper reporters, “I’m afraid she’s taken a turn for the worse, Vicar. The doctor says she may not last. They need you to come at once.”

  I hopped from foot to foot, squinting horribly, trying to force a tear to my eye.

  The vicar looked at me as if he had just awakened suddenly on another planet.

  “Please,” I whimpered, then added in a loud and rising wail, “before it’s TOO LATE!”

  I pulled at his arm, swung him round, dragged him into the porch, slammed the heavy door shut, and shot the iron bolt.

  “Phew!” I said. “What a siege. Just like in Ivanhoe. We can sneak out through the vestry.”

  The vicar looked at me for a moment with empty eyes. He was even more shaken than I had thought. This whole business was taking its toll, to say nothing of his troubles with Cynthia.

  I walked him to one of the back pews and sat down beside him.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” I told him. “I’ve almost got it figured out.”

  His face, shaded with mauve from the colored windows above, turned reluctantly toward me.

  “Oh, Flavia,” he said. “If only that were true.”

  • NINETEEN •

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL I was halfway home that the indignation struck me.

  “If only that were true,” indeed! It was obvious from his words that in spite of his calling, the vicar was a man of little faith.

  I had taken him by the hand and led him out through the vestry, tiptoed with him through the churchyard, and delivered him safely to the vicarage door. I had lurked behind a large tombstone and watched as the grumbling crowd slowly broke up and drifted away.

  Not one of them had even thought of looking round behind the church. Not one had thought to follow us on our sad procession to the imaginary deathbed. They had all been so touched by my pretended mission of mercy, that nobody—not even the most hardened of the newspapermen—had tried the church door.

  And yet the vicar had no faith in me.

  I hate to admit how much that stung.

  The best thing for soothing a disappointed mind is oxygen. A couple of deep inhalations of the old “O” rejuvenates every cell in the body. I suppose I could have gone upstairs to my laboratory for a bit of the bottled stuff, but to me, that would have been cheating. There is nothing like oxygen in its natural form—oxygen which has been naturally produced in a forest or a greenhouse, where many plants, by the process of photosynthesis, are absorbing the poisonous carbon dioxide which we breathe out, and giving us oxygen in exchange.

  I had once remarked to Feely that, because of the oxygen, breathing fresh air was like breathing God, but she had slapped my face and told me I was being blasphemous.

  The greenhouse at Buckshaw, I had found, always cheered me up instantly, although how much of that was due to Dogger’s presence and how much to oxygen I couldn’t say. Probably half and half. This much was certain: A greenhouse is a placid place. You never hear about ax murders taking place in a greenhouse.

  My theory is that it is because of the “O.”

  I found Dogger among the flowerpots, lashing gardening tools into bundles with heavy twine.

  “Dogger,” I said casually, stifling a yawn as I bent over to inspect a potted polyanthus, “what would you say if I asked you the cause of wasted thumb muscles and drooping hands?”

  “I should say you’d been at Bogmore Hall, Miss Flavia.”

  I suppose I should have been dumbfounded, but somehow I wasn’t.

  “You’ve seen the photograph of Mrs. Ridley-Smith?”

  “No,” Dogger replied, “but I have overheard the idle chatter of servants.”

  “And?”

  “Most unfortunate. By what I have been able to piece together, a classic case of lead poisoning. The flexor muscles and, to a lesser degree, the extensors are affected. But you will have spotted that already, won’t you, miss?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I needed you to verify it.”

  There was a silence as each of us considered how to handle what was inevitably coming next.

  “You’ve known about it all along.” I ventured not to make my words sound like an accusation.

  “Yes,” he said, and there was a sadne
ss in his words, “I’ve known about it all along.”

  There was another silence and I realized suddenly that it was because both of us were avoiding any mention of Harriet.

  “She used to visit him, didn’t she?” I asked. “Jocelyn, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Dogger said, simply.

  “And you went with her!”

  “No, miss. You must remember, I wasn’t yet at Buckshaw in those days.”

  Of course! How stupid of me. What was I thinking of? Dogger hadn’t come to Buckshaw until after the war. He must have heard about the Ridley-Smiths, as I did, from someone else.

  “But he’s a prisoner! How could they keep him locked up like that?”

  “Is he locked up—” Dogger began.

  “Of course he is,” I said, perhaps too loudly. “Behind a set of double doors!”

  “—or is he being protected?”

  Now I found myself speaking too quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

  “No,” Dogger said. “People often don’t. One reads these stories in the daily press and jumps to conclusions. Facts are often in direct opposition to assumptions.”

  “To the headlines,” I said, thinking for an instant of the vicar.

  “Yes,” Dogger said. “As you know from your own studies, lead poisoning is not a pretty thing.”

  It was true. I had read about what happened to women who had used it in hair dyes, or had slathered quack cosmetics containing carbonate of lead onto their faces: stuff with names like Cosmetique Infallible, and Ali Ahmed’s Treasures of the Desert.

  I let my mind fly back to those fat books in Uncle Tar’s library in which I had first come across the details: Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, and Blyth’s Poisons: Their Effects and Detection, which, since I had discovered them, had become my Old and New Testaments and my Apocrypha.

  I thought of the gruesome but fascinating horrors that lay within their pages: the wrist drop, or lead palsy; the paleness, the bloodlessness, the headaches, the foul taste in the mouth, the cramping legs, the difficulty in breathing, the vomiting, the diarrhea, the convulsions, the unconsciousness. I knew that if by some magic we had been able to peel back the lips of Ada Ridley-Smith in that old black-and-white photograph, we should have spotted at least a trace of the blue line where her gums met her teeth, the classic sign of plumbism, better known as lead poisoning.

  No wonder the woman was depressed!

  “Lead toy soldiers painted with lead paint,” Dogger said. “Intended to be looked at, not played with—not, at least, in such great numbers.”

  “But Jocelyn—” I said.

  “Unfortunately, the damage is already done.” Dogger shook his head. “He was born poisoned.”

  It seemed too shocking a thought to be put into mere words.

  “The brain of an unborn baby is a most susceptible target,” Dogger said. “Women suffering from lead poisoning, more often than not, lose the child.

  “But not always,” he added. “Not always.”

  “Tell me about the ‘not always,’ ” I said quietly.

  “Children born of a lead-poisoned mother seldom survive more than two or three years. The odds are less than three in a hundred.”

  “But what’s to be done?” I asked. “Surely we can’t allow him to be cooped up like that. It isn’t right.”

  Dogger put aside the rakes and hoes. “Sometimes,” he said, “a jackstraw family life is the best that can be hoped for.”

  He paused, and then went on as quietly as if he were dusting furniture. “It may not be ideal, but still, it might be the best possible under the circumstances. The slightest interference might bring the whole thing tumbling down entirely like a house of cards.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. It was odd. Perhaps I was overtired. Father had more than once lectured us about overexertion, but perhaps he was right. I had had rather a hectic day.

  “I have taken the liberty of preparing a nest for Esmeralda,” Dogger said, neatly changing the subject, “and laying on a supply of the approved feed.”

  He pointed to a wooden box in the corner, where Esmeralda was nestling in a luxurious bed of straw. I hadn’t even noticed her.

  “Dogger,” I said, “you’re a darling!”

  I don’t know what came over me. It just slipped out. I was mortified. It was the sort of thing Feely’s friend Sheila Foster might have said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “I didn’t mean—”

  And then I fled, leaving Dogger placidly at work amidst his atmosphere of oxygen.

  What was happening to my world? Everything was topsyturvy. Buckshaw was to be sold. Father had told me I was Harriet and so more or less had Jocelyn Ridley-Smith. Daffy had hugged me. The vicar had doubted me. I had learned that I was likely a collateral descendant of a saint. I had already begun to love the hated Cynthia. I had allowed myself to burst into tears in front of Mrs. Mullet. And now I had spoken down to Dogger as if I were a cinema star and he a mere hireling. The universe was changing in ways that I did not necessarily approve of.

  If only we could go back to the good old days of a week ago when, as unpleasant as they might have seemed, we were revolving securely in our dusty old orbits.

  Feely, it seemed, was, as Sherlock Holmes once called Dr. Watson, “the one fixed point in a changing world.” Throughout the events of the past few days, Feely had somehow managed to remain her same unpleasant self.

  Could it be that goodness waxes and wanes like the moon, and that only evil is constant?

  If I could find the answer to that question, perhaps everything else would come clear.

  It was, in a way, the same problem that was now facing Inspector Hewitt and me, and to a lesser degree, I suppose, Adam Sowerby and Miss Tanty.

  Could it be that some person with an otherwise spotless record had suddenly become unhinged and committed murder? Or had Mr. Collicutt met his end at the hands of someone who had killed before?

  A professional, say?

  His death did not seem to fit what one thinks of as a village murder: the jealousy, the angry words, the blow, the strangulation, the poisoning, the booby-trapped bed warmer.

  Instead, he had been brutally murdered within the closed casing of a historical pipe organ, his body hauled out of doors and through the churchyard, dropped down into an open grave, dragged through a tunnel, and tossed at last into a hidden chamber atop the tomb of a long-dead saint.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Or did it?

  The truth, I suspected, was in a bit of cloth.

  The white ruffle I had seen protruding from the gas mask at Mr. Collicutt’s throat.

  I flung myself down on my bed to rest my eyes.

  When I opened them again, it had grown dark outside.

  I came slowly down the east staircase rubbing my eyes after a restless night. My dreams had been of Buckshaw—dark dreams in which holes were appearing everywhere, as if some monstrous mole were blindly digging away at the house and its grounds, relentless and unstoppable.

  I had awakened to find it well past nine in the morning. I would need to find Father and apologize, not just for missing yesterday’s supper, to say nothing of lunch, but also for this morning’s breakfast.

  Father, as I have said, was a stickler for attendance. Excuses not allowed.

  I dawdled along the corridor, dragging out the inevitable confrontation as long as I possibly could.

  I stopped outside the drawing-room door and listened. If Father were not here, he would be in his study, and I certainly didn’t want to disturb him there.

  In a way, I would be off the hook.

  I put my ear to the door and listened to the low murmer of voices. Although I could not hear what was being said, I knew by the way the paneling vibrated that one of the speakers was Feely.

  I knelt down and applied my eye to the keyhole, but it was no good: The key was in the lock a
nd my view was blocked.

  I listened at the door again—pressing my ear tightly against the wooden panel—but it was no use. Even my supersensitive hearing was not enough.

  The solution came—as brilliant solutions often do—in a flash.

  On tiptoe, I loped back to the foyer and upstairs to my laboratory, chuckling as I went.

  From a cupboard under one of the sinks I extracted a screwdriver, a length of rubber hose, and two funnels, used ordinarily for filling bottles but now destined for a much more exciting role.

  Back along the upstairs corridor I went, along the unused north wing and through the baize door that led to family quarters. Directly across from Harriet’s boudoir, which Father kept untouched as yet another shrine to her memory, was Feely’s room. Besides Harriet’s it was the largest bedroom at Buckshaw, and the most luxurious.

  I tapped at the door with a fingernail, to check that the coast was clear.

  If Feely were inside—if it happened to be someone else’s voice I had heard in the drawing room—she would instantly answer the slightest sound with a loud and surly “What?”

  Feely was the most territorial of all we de Luces, and as fearsomely protective of her domain as God is of Heaven.

  I tapped again.

  Nothing.

  I tried the door and, miracle of miracles, it swung open. Feely must have gone downstairs in an almighty rush to overlook such a basic point of privacy.

  I closed the door quietly behind me and tiptoed across the room. I was now directly above the drawing room, and didn’t want the sound of my footsteps to give me away. Not that they would, of course. Buckshaw was as solid as any ancient cathedral—high ceilings, thick floors—but still, one didn’t want to trip on the carpet and give away the game.

  One of the marvels of Buckshaw, at least in its Victorian days, had been the conversion of its chimneys from their original smokestack design to a patent draft-regulating scheme. Through the ingenious knocking together of flues on the ground and second floors, by means of a crude valve—actually, no more than a cast-iron plate—the inhabitants could be protected against the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal fires in the grate, should one of the chimneys become blocked by a jackdaw’s nest.