Speaking From Among The Bones (2 page)

I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not more than a month ago when Father read aloud the Second Lesson from the back of the great carved wooden eagle which served as the lectern at St. Tancred’s.

On that winter morning I had gazed up, transfixed, just as I was gazing now, at the stained-glass window in which this fascinating scene was depicted.

Later, during his sermon, the vicar had explained that in Old Testament times, our blood was thought to contain our lives.

Of course!

Blood!

Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

“Feely,” I said, tugging at her sleeve, “I have to go home.”

My sister ignored me. She peered closely at the music book as, in the dusky shadows of the fading light, her fingers flew like white birds over the keys of the organ.

Mendelssohn’s
Wie gross ist des Allmächt’gen Güte
.

“ ‘How great are the works of the Almighty,’ ” she told me it meant.

Easter was now less than a week away and Feely was trying to whip the piece into shape for her official debut
as organist of St. Tancred’s. The flighty Mr. Collicutt, who had held the post only since last summer, had vanished suddenly from our village without explanation and Feely had been asked to step into his shoes.

St. Tancred’s went through organists like a python goes through white mice. Years ago, there had been Mr. Taggart, then Mr. Denning. It was now Mr. Collicutt’s kick at the cat.

“Feely,” I said. “It’s important. There’s something I have to do.”

Feely jabbed one of the ivory coupling buttons with her thumb and the organ gave out a roar. I loved this part of the piece: the point where it leaps in an instant from sounding like a quiet sea at sunset to the snarl of a jungle animal.

When it comes to organ music, loud is good—at least to my way of thinking.

I tucked my knees up under my chin and huddled back into the corner of the choir stall. It was obvious that Feely was going to slog her way through to the end come hell or high water, and I would simply have to wait it out.

I looked at my surroundings but there wasn’t much to see. In the feeble glow of the single bulb above the music rack, Feely and I might as well have been castaways on a tiny raft of light in a sea of darkness.

By twisting my neck and tilting my head back like a hanged man, I could just make out the head of Saint Tancred, which was carved in English oak at the end of a hammer beam in the roof of the nave. In the weird evening light, he had the look of a man with his nose pressed
flat against a window, peering in from the cold to a cozy room with a cheery fire burning on the hearth.

I gave him a respectful bob of my head, even though I knew he couldn’t see me since his bones were moldering away in the crypt below. But better safe than sorry.

Above my head, on the far side of the chancel, John the Baptist and his murderers had now faded out almost completely. Twilight came quickly in these cloudy days of March and, viewed from inside the church, the windows of St. Tancred’s could change from a rich tapestry of glorious colors to a muddy blackness in less time than it would take you to rattle off one of the longer psalms.

To tell the truth, I’d have rather been at home in my chemical laboratory than sitting here in the near-darkness of a drafty old church, but Father had insisted.

Even though Feely was six years older than me, Father refused to let her go alone to the church for her almost nightly rehearsals and choir practices.

“A lot of strangers likely to be about these days,” he said, referring to the team of archaeologists who would soon be arriving in Bishop’s Lacey to dig up the bones of our patron saint.

How I was to defend Feely against the attacks of these savage scholars, Father had not bothered to mention, but I knew there was more to it than that.

In the recent past there had been a number of murders in Bishop’s Lacey: fascinating murders in which I had rendered my assistance to Inspector Hewitt of the Hinley Constabulary.

In my mind, I ticked off the victims on my fingers:
Horace Bonepenny, Rupert Porson, Brookie Harewood, Phyllis Wyvern.…

One more corpse and I’d have a full hand.

Each of them had come to a sticky end in our village, and I knew that Father was uneasy.

“It isn’t right, Ophelia,” he said, “for a girl who’s—for a girl your age to be rattling about alone in an old church at night.”

“There’s nobody there but the dead.” Feely had laughed, perhaps a little too gaily. “And they don’t bother me. Not nearly so much as the living.”

Behind Father’s back, my other sister, Daffy, had licked her wrist and wetted down her hair on both sides of an imaginary part in the middle of her head, like a cat washing its face. She was poking fun at Ned Cropper, the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, who had the most awful crush on Feely and sometimes followed her about like a bad smell.

Feely had scratched her ear to indicate she had understood Daffy’s miming. It was one of those silent signals that fly among sisters like semaphore messages from ship to ship, indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t know the code. Even if Father
had
seen the gesture, he would not have understood its meaning. Father’s codebook was in a far different language from ours.

“Still,” Father had said, “if you’re coming or going after dark, you are to take Flavia with you. It won’t hurt her to learn a few hymns.”

Learn a few hymns indeed! Just a couple of months ago when I was confined to bed during the Christmas holidays,
Mrs. Mullet, in giggling whispers and hushed pledges of secrecy, had taught me a couple of new ones. I never tired of bellowing:

Either that or:

—until Feely flung a copy of
Hymns Ancient and Modern
at my head. One thing I have learned about organists is that they have absolutely no sense of humor.

“Feely,” I said, “I’m freezing.”

I shivered and buttoned up my cardigan. It was bitterly cold in the church at night. The choir had left an hour ago, and without their warm bodies round me, shoulder to shoulder like singing sardines, it seemed even colder still.

But Feely was submerged in Mendelssohn. I might as well have been talking to the moon.

Suddenly the organ gave out a fluttering gasp, as if it had choked on something, and the music gargled to a stop.

“Oh, fiddle,” Feely said. It was as close to swearing as
she ever came—at least in church. My sister was a pious fraud.

She stood up on the pedals and waddled her way off the organ bench, making a harsh mooing of bass notes.

“Now what?” she said, rolling up her eyes as if an answer were expected from Above. “This stupid thing has been misbehaving for weeks. It must be the damp weather.”

“I think it died,” I told her. “You probably broke it.”

“Hand me the torch,” she said after a long moment.

“We’ll have a look.”

We?

Whenever Feely was frightened out of her wits,
“I”
became
“we”
as quick as a flash. Since the organ at St. Tancred’s was listed by the Royal College of Organists as a historic instrument, any damage to the dear old thing would probably be considered an act of national vandalism.

I knew that Feely was already dreading having to break the bad news to the vicar.

“Lead on, O Guilty One,” I said. “How do we get at the guts?”

“This way,” Feely answered, quickly sliding open a concealed panel in the carved woodwork beside the organ console. I hadn’t even time to see how the trick was done.

Switching on the torch, she ducked through the narrow opening and vanished into the darkness. I took a deep breath and followed.

We were in a musty Aladdin’s cave, hemmed in on all sides by stalagmites. In the sweep of the torch’s beam, organ pipes towered above us: pipes of wood, pipes of
metal, pipes of all sizes. Some were as small as pencils, some like drain spouts, and others as large as telephone posts. Not so much a cave, I decided, as a forest of giant flutes.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing to a row of tall, conical pipes which reminded me of pygmy blowguns.

“The Gemshorn stop,” Feely said. “They’re supposed to sound like an ancient flute made from a ram’s horn.”

“And these?”

“The Rohrflöte.”

“Because it roars?”

Feely rolled her eyes. “
Rohrflöte
means ‘chimney flute’ in German. The pipes are shaped like chimneys.”

And sure enough, they were. They wouldn’t have been out of place among the chimney pots of Buckshaw.

Something hissed suddenly and gurgled in the shadows and I threw my arm round Feely’s waist.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“The wind chest,” she said, aiming the torch at the far corner.

Sure enough, in the shadows, a huge leather trunklike thing was slowly exhaling with various bronchial wheezings and hissings.

“Super!” I said. “It’s like a giant’s accordion.”

“Stop saying ‘super,’ ” Feely said. “You know Father doesn’t like it.”

I ignored her and, threading my way among some of the smaller pipes, hauled myself up onto the top of the wind chest, which gave out a remarkably realistic rude noise and sank a little more.

I sneezed—once—twice—three times—in the cloud of dust I had stirred up.

“Flavia! Come down at once! You’re going to rip that old leather!”

I got to my feet and stood up to my full height of four foot ten and a quarter inches. I’m quite tall for my age, which is almost twelve.

“Yaroo!” I shouted, waggling my arms to keep my balance. “I’m the King of the Castle!”

“Flavia! Come down this instant or I’m telling Father!”

“Look, Feely,” I said. “There’s an old tombstone up here.”

“I know. It’s to add weight to the wind chest. Now get down here. And be careful.”

I brushed away the dust with my hands.
“Hezekiah Whytefleet,”
I read aloud. “1679 to 1778. Phew! Ninety-nine. I wonder who he was?”

“I’m switching off the torch now. You’ll be alone in the dark.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m coming. No need to get owly.”

As I shifted my weight from foot to foot, the wind chest rocked and subsided a little more, so that I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a swamped ship.

Something fluttered just to the right of Feely’s face and she froze.

“Probably just a bat,” I said.

Feely gave a shriek, dropped the torch, and vanished.

Bats were high on the list of things that turned my sister’s brains to suet pudding.

A further fluttering, as if the thing were confirming its presence.

Picking my way gingerly down from my perch, I retrieved the torch and dragged it along the rank of pipes like a stick on a picket fence.

A furious leathery flapping echoed in the chamber.

“It’s all right, Feely,” I called out. “It
is
a bat, and it’s stuck in a pipe.”

I popped out through the hatch into the chancel. Feely was standing there in an angled beam of moonlight, as white as an alabaster statue, her arms wrapped round herself.

“Maybe we can smoke it out,” I said. “Got a cigarette?”

I was being facetious, of course. Feely was death on smoking.

“Maybe we can coax it out,” I suggested helpfully. “What do bats eat?”

“Insects,” Feely said blankly, as if she were struggling awake from a paralyzing dream. “So that’s no use. What are we going to do?”

“Which pipe is it in?” I asked. “Did you happen to notice?”

“The sixteen-foot diapason,” she said shakily. “The D.”

“I have an idea!” I said. “Why don’t you play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor? Full throttle. That ought to fix the little sod.”

“You’re disgusting,” Feely said. “I’ll tell Mr. Haskins about the bat tomorrow.”

Mr. Haskins was the sexton at St. Tancred’s, who was expected to deal with everything from grave-digging to brass-polishing.

“How do you suppose it got into the church? The bat, I mean.”

We were walking home between the hedgerows. Scrappy clouds scudded across the moon and a raw crosswind blew and tugged at our coats.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to talk about bats,” Feely said.

Actually, I was just making conversation. I knew that bats didn’t come in through open doors. There were enough of the things hanging in the attics at Buckshaw for me to know that they generally got in through broken windows or were dragged in, injured, by cats. Since St. Tancred’s didn’t have a cat, the answer seemed obvious.

“Why are they opening his tomb?” I asked, changing the subject. Feely would know I was referring to the saint.

“Saint Tancred? Because it’s the quincentennial of his death.”

“The what?”

“Quincentennial. It means five hundred years.”

I let out a whistle. “Saint Tancred’s been dead five hundred years? That’s five times longer than old Hezekiah Whytefleet lived.”

Feely said nothing.

“That means he died in 1451,” I said, making a quick mental subtraction. “What do you suppose he’s going to look like when they dig him up?”

“Who knows?” Feely said. “Some saints remain forever uncorrupted. Their complexions are still as soft and peachy as a baby’s bottom, and they have a smell of flowers about them. ‘The odor of sanctity,’ it’s called.”

When she felt like it, my sister could be downright chatty.

“Supercolossal!” I said. “I hope I get a good squint at him when they drag him out of his box.”

“Forget about Saint Tancred,” Feely said. “You won’t be allowed anywhere near him.”

“It’s like eatin’ cooked ’eat,” Mrs. Mullet said. What she meant, of course, was “eating cooked heat.”

I stared doubtfully at the bowl of squash and parsnip soup as she put it on the table in front of me. Black peppercorns floated in the stuff like pellets of used birdshot.