Speaking From Among The Bones (28 page)

“I thought you’d like to watch,” he said. “May I give you a lift?”

“Ra-ther!”

W
E WERE BUCKETING ALONG
the road to Bishop’s Lacey in Adam’s open Rolls-Royce, Nancy, the wind whistling round our ears.

“They decided to do it straightaway before anyone’s the wiser. The vicar tipped me off,” Adam said, shouting above the noise of the car’s cutaway body. “I knew you’d never forgive me if I didn’t let you in on it.”

“But why?” I asked, perhaps for the third time. “You didn’t have to.”

“Let’s just say I’m a kindly old gaffer.”

“No,” I told him firmly. “I want the truth.”

“Well,” Adam said, “I’ve always believed that when the bones of the great are exhumed, it should always be done in the presence of the youngest person practicable—the one who is going to live the longest; the one who will carry down the years the memory of coming face-to-face, as it were, with history.”

“And I’m the youngest person practicable? Is that the only reason?”

“Yes,” Adam said.

Blast the man!

“Then, too,” he went on, “I thought you might like to be first in the queue to have a squint at the Heart of Lucifer.”

Now I was grinning like a fool.

The Heart of Lucifer!

I was struck with a sudden and remarkable idea.

“If what you say is true,” I told Adam, “and it turns out that Saint Tancred
was
a de Luce, doesn’t that mean that the Heart of Lucifer would belong rightfully to Father?”

“The Church might think otherwise,” he said, after thinking about it.

“Oh, bother the Church. If they’re stupid enough to dump a priceless diamond in the grave, they can’t have wanted it very badly. It’s probably under one of those peculiar laws like flotsam and jetsam. I’ll ask Daffy. She’ll know.”

Daffy had read aloud to us one of Victor Hugo’s novels in which the laws of flotsam and jetsam were explained to the point that you became seasick.

“One way or another, it’s bound to be interesting,” Adam said, “although if I were you, I shouldn’t get my hopes up much.”

He must have seen at once the dampening effect his words had on me.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

I kept quiet.

“Thinking that perhaps we should make a swap. Scandal for scandal. Tit for tat.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” I said, not willing to give up my advantage a second too soon.

“You tell me what you found in Collicutt’s bedroom, and I’ll tell you the results of his autopsy.”

He grinned at me, daring me to say no.

“Done!” I said. “It was money—and quite a lot of it. Six hundred pounds, hidden under his bed in a Players cigarette tin.”

“Phew!” Adam whistled, and then he laughed. “And the police missed it?”

“Evidently,” I said, and he laughed even more.

“Now, then,” I told him, “it’s your turn. The autopsy. How did you find out about it? Did you pump Dr. Darby?”

“Dear me, no! The good Dr. Darby is much more discreet than that. I merely had a word with my cousin Wilfred.”

I must have looked blank.

“Wilfred Sowerby, of Sowerby & Sons, your local undertakers.
Furnishers of Funerals and Furniture
. Bit of a tongue twister, that.”

Of course! I had forgotten about their connection.

“The ones who chose Death while your side of the family chose Life,” I said. “Yes, I remember now.”

How like the de Luces
, I wanted to say, but it was not a thought I wanted to share.

“Yes,” Adam said. “The
Dismal
Sowerbys.”

“And?”

“And what?”

He was playing the fool again.

“Ah, yes. The autopsy,” he said when I did not rise to his stupid bait. “Cousin Wilfred was most enlightening. Rupture of the internal organs. Everything from the esophagus to points south of the equator. Wilfred said he’d never seen a blowout anything like it. Quite spectacular, he said.”

“Caused by?”

I could hardly contain myself, but I kept still.

“They haven’t a clue. At least, not so far.”

I needed to change the subject. Quickly.

“Huh,” I said, as if I weren’t interested. “Fancy that.”

We went along without speaking for a minute or so, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts, and then I said, “Hold on—how can they be going ahead with opening Saint Tancred’s tomb? I thought the bishop had forbidden it.”

“The bishop, it seems, has had a change of heart. As has Chancellor Ridley-Smith.”

“What?”

“It’s true,” Adam said. “Although bishops are not generally known for their flexibility, this one, it seems, has gone into reverse on the matter. He has withdrawn the withdrawn faculty.”

“But why? Why would he do such a thing?”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Adam said with a cinema-star grin.

Why were people always quoting this tired old line to me? The last time I’d heard it was from Dr. Darby, and before that, my sister Daffy.

Why do people always quote Hamlet when they want to seem clever?

Altogether too much Shakespeare, methinks!

“Meaning?” I’m afraid I snapped, without really intending to.

“Perhaps he was made to do so,” Adam said.

“Ha!” I told him. “Nobody orders a bishop about.”

I was no expert in theology, but even
I
knew that.

“Do they not?” Adam asked, a little smugly, I thought.

“You know something you’re not telling me,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said, looking more like the Cheshire cat with every passing second.

What a maddening man he was!

“You know who’s bossing the bishop and you won’t tell me?” I asked him.

“
Can’t
tell you,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

We were now approaching the marshy land which surrounded the church. Adam applied the brakes and stopped for a mallard that was waddling across the road.

I jumped out and slammed the door.

With eyes fixed straight ahead, I marched off toward the church, leaving Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., to stew in his own clever juices.

“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said as I picked my way over the rubble into the crypt. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“It’s awfully good of you to let me know,” I said, craning my neck to see over his shoulder. George Battle and his workers had drilled eyebolts into the bottom stone of
the chamber—the slab upon which Mr. Collicutt’s corpse had been lying.

“It’s actually the lid of the sarcophagus,” the vicar explained in a hushed voice, as if he were a BBC commentator covering some particularly solemn ceremony on the Home Service.

A compact winch had been set up to lift the stone, and the ropes were already straining under its weight.

“You’re just in the nick of time. Dear me, to think that in just a few moments we shall be looking into the face of—of course, given your proclivities, I knew you wouldn’t want to miss a moment of what promises to be—”

“Heave!” said George Battle.

With a hollow groan, the stone rose half an inch.

“It is said that when certain Royal tombs were opened, the workers found the occupant unchanged by time, clothed in armor, crowned with gold, their faces as fresh as if they had just fallen asleep. And then suddenly, within a minute or so of being exposed to the air, they crumbled away to dust. The Royal personages, that is—not the workers.”

“Heave!”

The stone came up another grating inch.

“You may be interested to hear, George,” the vicar said, “that the stonemason who opened the tombs of the regicides Cromwell and Ireton was paid seventeen shillings for his trouble.”

George Battle said nothing, but hauled grimly again on his rope.

“Heave!”

Now a dark crack was showing round the edges of the slab.

“Good heavens,” the vicar said. “I’m as excited as a schoolboy. Here, let me give a hand.”

“Watch your fingers, Vicar!” George Battle shouted. “You’ll lose ’em if this bugger drops.”

The vicar sprang back.

The stone was now free of its channel, swinging slowly and heavily from side to side, like a two-ton marble pendulum.

I felt the draft at once and smelled the tomb’s cold stink.

“Swing now, Norman. Grab that bar, Tommy. Easy! Easy!”

The stone swung out of its setting, revealing a black and gaping pit. I leaned forward but could see only a few of the bricks that lined its side. The vicar put his hand on my shoulder and smiled at me. Was he imagining that I was his daughter, Hannah, returned from the grave to be at his side for this wonderful but terrifying moment?

He squeezed, and I put my hand on his. We neither of us spoke a word.

“And down … down … down—that’s it … down … down.”

With an unnerving grinding noise, the stone settled onto the floor.

“Well done,” Norman said, to nobody in particular.

“Let’s have that torch,” Tommy said, and George Battle handed it over.

Tommy scrambled up onto the ledge, straddling the pit, and shone the beam down into the abyss.

“Blimey,” he murmured.

The vicar was next. He stepped slowly forward, leaned in, and, dodging Tommy’s legs, stared for a long moment downward.

Without a word, he crooked his forefinger and beckoned me to come.

Although only a couple of days had passed, it seemed as if I had been looking forward to this moment forever. Now that the moment had arrived, I found myself wavering.

What was I about to see? A fresh-faced Saint Tancred? A diamond as big as a turkey’s egg—the Heart of Lucifer?

I eased my face slowly over the edge of the pit and looked down.

At the bottom, in the torch’s beam, perhaps ten feet deep in the earth, covered with dust and reeking slightly, was a heap of moldy fabric and old green bones.

They lay in a lead sarcophagus whose lid had been ripped off and stood on end in a corner.

A shriveled stick of carved black wood, shaped vaguely like a shepherd’s crook, had been tossed carelessly atop the pile, like a withered and badly weathered tree branch thrown onto the remains of a dead fire.

Saint Tancred’s crosier, carved from the Glastonbury Thorn, fashioned, it was said, from the Holy Grail itself.

At its thicker end, a gaping oval hole with twisted metal clasps showed clearly where something had been wrenched away. The Heart of Lucifer was gone.

Someone had been here before us.

“M
Y WORD,” THE VICAR
said. “Someone has been here before us.”

The two of us were shoulder to shoulder at the very edge of the pit, staring down into the shaft as if we were looking down a well. A cold, acrid draft blew up into our faces from a ragged opening halfway down the side. At the bottom of the pit, pitiful tatters of Saint Tancred’s robe shivered in the moving air.

“They’ve knocked a hole in the wall,” I said.

“A cave-in,” George Battle said, edging me aside and taking my place. “You get cave-ins in old churches.”

Suddenly and quietly, Adam was behind us. He was wearing a soft peaked cap, rubber boots, and a sort of explorer’s vest covered in pockets bursting with scientific supplies. A bulky camera bag completed his kit.

“If I may,” he said quite abruptly to the vicar, “I need to make my descent before anything else is disturbed.”

“By all means. Albert, if you wouldn’t mind fetching Mr. Sowerby a ladder …”

He was speaking to Mr. Haskins, who had come into the crypt behind Adam.

“Ladder?” Mr. Haskins asked, as if he didn’t know the meaning of the word, or as if he didn’t want to be bothered.

“There’s a ladder on the back of Mr. Battle’s lorry,” I said helpfully. “Several of them, actually.”

“Norman,” Mr. Battle said, with a glance at his helpers. Norman, tall in the crypt, ducked his head and stepped out through the archway.

Nobody said anything for the longest time, each of us shifting from foot to foot, looking everywhere but at one another.

I wondered why.

I glanced casually round at the remaining workers. Tommy from Malden Fenwick took advantage of the lull to light a cigarette. The other man, whose name I did not know, shook his head as Tommy held out the pack and offered him a smoke.

There was no idle chatter. Just a couple of workmen waiting restlessly to get on with the job.

Then Norman was back with the ladder, clattering through the crypt, breaking the spell of silence. With much banging and a few muttered instructions, the ladder’s end was maneuvered down into the saint’s grave.

Adam sprang up onto the ledge and placed a foot on one of the upper rungs.

“Wish me luck,” he said, and taking the torch from Tommy, he began his descent.

“Adam—” the vicar said.

Adam stopped, already almost out of sight. He seemed surprised.

“Let us pray,” the vicar said, in a remarkably strong voice, and we all of us bowed our heads.

“Lord, Thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and the world without end. Thou turnest man back to the dust, and Thou sayest, ‘Return, ye children of men.’ For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Amen.”

“Amen,” we echoed.

Adam’s face looked up at us quizzically, strangely pale in the light of the torch.

“Just in case,” the vicar said.

“Thank you,” Adam said quietly, and was gone.

I recognized the vicar’s words as being from the Order of the Burial of the Dead. Psalm 90. But why had he chosen them? Was he thinking of Saint Tancred? Of Adam? Of his lost Hannah?—or of himself?

The ladder trembled as Adam descended. I peered over the edge to watch as he pulled an elaborate flash unit from the bag. The shaft and even the chamber where we stood were soon illuminated by a series of white lightning flashes from the pit.

There wasn’t much to see from directly above. I was content to linger and listen. At first there was silence and an occasional muffled exclamation. And then Adam began to whistle.