Speaking From Among The Bones (30 page)

If I were anyone other than Flavia de Luce, I would have marched up to Father’s room and demanded an explanation. After all, it was my life, too, wasn’t it?

But I could feel myself growing older by the minute.

Admit it, Flavia
, I thought.
You simply don’t have what it takes to beard the lion in his den
.

Which, for some odd reason, reminded me of Magistrate Ridley-Smith and his peculiar lionlike face.

“Dogger,” I asked, switching tracks like an emergency on the railway, “what would you say if I asked you about wasted thumb muscles, a drooping hand, and dragging feet?”

“I should say you’ve been at Bogmore Hall again,” Dogger answered, keeping a straight and proper face.

“And if I told you I hadn’t?”

“Then I should ask you for more details, miss.”

“And I should tell you that I had met someone who had all of those symptoms, as well as wide, round staring eyes, no eyebrows or eyelashes, a crumbled nose, a blotchy, brownish complexion, and the most awful frown.”

“And I should say, ‘Well done, Miss Flavia. A nicely observed description of
facies leonine
—the so-called “lion face.” ’ Would it be out of place for me to ask if this person had spent time in India?”

“Spot on, Dogger!” I crowed. “Spot … on! A classic case of lead poisoning, I believe.”

“No, miss,” Dogger said. “A classic case of Hansen’s disease.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“I daresay not,” said Dogger. “It is known more commonly as leprosy.”

Leprosy! That dread disease we had been warned against in Sunday school—that dread disease which Father Damien had contracted among the lepers of Molokai: the whitened, crusted, peeling skin, the blue ulcers, the rotted noses, the toes and fingers snapping off, and the face falling at the end into a sad and incurable wreckage. The lepers of Molokai to whom the pennies from our Sunday school collection boxes were regularly sent.

Leprosy! The secret fear of every girl and boy in the British Empire.

Surely Dogger must be wrong.

“I thought people died from that,” I said.

“They do. Sometimes. But in certain cases it becomes dormant—goes into a state of suspended animation—for years.”

“How many years?”

“Ten, twenty, forty, fifty. It varies. There is no hard-and-fast rule.”

“Is it contagious?” I asked, wanting suddenly and desperately to wash my hands.

“Not as much as you might think,” Dogger said. “Hardly at all, in fact. Most persons have a natural immunity to the organism which causes it
—mycobacterium leprae
.”

I had been aching for ages to ask Dogger about his vast storehouse of medical knowledge, an urge I had so far managed to keep in check. It was none of my business. Even the slightest inquiry into his shocked and troubled past would be an unforgivable invasion of trust.

“I have myself known of a case in which the bullae of the prodromal stage—”

His words stopped abruptly.

“Yes?” I prompted.

Dogger’s eyes seemed to have packed their bags and fled to some far-off place. A different century, perhaps, a different land, or a different planet. After a long time he said: “It is as if—”

It was as if I wasn’t there. Dogger’s voice was suddenly the rustle of leaves or the sighing of the wind in a vanished willow.

I held my breath.

“There is a pool,” he said slowly, his words strung out like beads on a long cord. “It is in the jungle … sometimes, the water is clear and may be drunk … other times, it is murky. An arm dipped into it disappears.”

Dogger reached out to touch something which I could not see, his hand trembling.

“Is it gone … or is it still there, invisible? One fishes in the depths, helpless, hoping to find—something—anything.”

“It’s all right, Dogger,” I said, as I always did, touching his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.”

“Oh, but it does—and it is, Miss Flavia,” he said, startling me with his intense presence. “And perhaps never more than now.”

“Yes,” I said automatically. “Perhaps never more than now.”

I wasn’t sure that I knew what we were talking about, but I knew that we had to keep on, no matter what.

Without really changing the subject, I continued as casually as if nothing had happened. “Without giving away any confidences,” I said, “I can tell you that the person I am speaking of is Magistrate Ridley-Smith.” Dogger, after all, had he been with me in the crypt, might have seen him with his own eyes.

“I have heard him mentioned, nothing more,” Dogger said.

“The other, the one I asked you about earlier, is his son Jocelyn.”

“Yes, I remember. Lead poisoning.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You deduced that I had been at Bogmore Hall.”

“I have heard the son spoken of,” Dogger said. “Servants talk. One hears things at the market.”

“But not the father?” I prompted.

“No. Not the father. Not, at least, a physical description.”

“Poor Jocelyn!” I said. “If your diagnosis is correct, his mother was lead-poisoned and his father a leper.”

Dogger nodded sadly. “Such things happen,” he said, “even though we try to pretend they do not.”

“Will they live?” I asked.

I had worked my way slowly up to the most important question of all.

“The son, perhaps,” Dogger replied. “The father, no.”

“Odd, isn’t it?” I said. “The leprosy, now that it has come to life again, will kill him.”

“Leprosy in itself is rarely fatal,” Dogger said. “Its victims are more likely to die from kidney or liver failure. And now if you’ll excuse me, miss—”

“Of course, Dogger,” I said. “I’m sorry for interrupting. I know you have things to do.”

It had been a near thing. Dogger had come within a hairsbreadth of sliding into one of his episodes. I knew that he wanted nothing more than to get to his room and fall quietly to pieces.

The worst was over, at least for now, and he needed to be given the gift of being alone.

“What’s up, Daff?” I said, barging into the library as if it were just another jolly day at Buckshaw. My sister was extraordinarily perceptive, even though she pretended she was not. If there had been a crushing call on the telephone, Daffy would by now have ferreted out all the details.

In that way, she was a lot like me.

“Nothing,” Daffy said, without looking up from her book-sorting. It seemed as if the warm feeling built up earlier by our sisterly cease-fire had leaked away like the sand in an hourglass.

“Who telephoned?” I asked. “I thought I heard it ring a while ago.”

A ringing telephone at Buckshaw was such a rarity that it could be commented upon without suspicion.

Daffy shrugged and opened
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
.

Whatever it was that had upset Father, he had not shared it.

Which, in a peculiar way was comforting. My sisters shared everything. Whatever Daffy knew, Feely knew. Whatever Feely knew, Daffy knew.

What Flavia knew was, by comparison, like the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Deep, dark, and nobody gave a rat’s anatomy.

Trying to cheer things up a bit, I said, “I’m looking for a good book to read. Can you recommend something suitable?”

“Yes,” Daffy said. “The Holy Bible.”

With that, she slammed shut
Wildfell Hall
and stalked out of the room.

So much for shared blood.

S
UPPER WAS A CHARADE
.

Father did not put in an appearance.

Feely and Daffy and I sat picking at our food, being horridly decent to one another, passing the salt and pepper and the cold peas with elaborate pleases and thank-yous.

It was dreadful.

None of us knew for certain what was happening either with Buckshaw or with Father, and we didn’t want to be the first to ask—didn’t want to be the one to throw the last pebble: the pebble which would smash, once and for all, our fragile house of glass.

As if words alone could cause its final fall.

“May I be excused?” Daffy asked.

“Of course,” Feely and I said too quickly, at the same time.

I wanted to cry.

I also wanted to go to my laboratory and prepare an enormous batch of nitrogen triiodide with which to blow up, in a spectacular mushroom cloud of purple vapor, the world and everyone in it.

People would think it was the Apocalypse.

The sea of glass like unto crystal … the star called Wormwood, the seven lamps of fire, the rainbow round about the throne, and the second angel pouring out his vial upon the sea where it became as the blood of a dead man.

I’d show them!

I’d give them something to think about.

The blood of a dead man.

It had all begun with blood, hadn’t it?

That’s what was dribbling through my mind as I climbed the stairs.

In the beginning there had been the blood of the flattened frog and the blood of my own family glowing with red iridescence under the microscope. There had been the stained-glass blood of John the Baptist and the blood that dripped from the brow of the wooden Saint Tancred. I had still not had the opportunity to tell the vicar the results of my analysis.

There had been the red stain on the floor of the organ chamber where Mr. Collicutt was murdered, but that, of course, was not blood. It was red-colored alcohol from the organ’s broken manometer.

Of Mr. Collicutt’s blood, there had been not a trace.

Of course!

Not a single drop.

Not in the chamber where he was killed, not in the tomb where his body ended up, and not, so far as I had seen, anywhere in between.

In the case of Mr. Collicutt, it was not so much a case of bloodstains as the lack of them.

The obvious conclusion was that he had not been stabbed or shot, and poisoning, somewhat to my regret, was out of the question.

In spite of what Wilfred Sowerby, the undertaker, had told Adam about internal explosions, it was obvious that those injuries were inflicted after death.

No blood.

QED.

You didn’t need to be a Professor Einstein to see that Mr. Collicutt had most likely died of suffocation. Actually, I should have spotted that as soon as I laid eyes on him.

The gas mask itself told much of the story.

And then, now that I thought about it, there had been that white ruffle at his chin. Like the Highwayman.

A handkerchief. Shoved under the mask.

But why?

The answer hit me like a dropped brick.

Ether! Diethyl ether!

Good old (C
₂
H
₅
)
₂
O.

The stuff had been discovered either in the eighth century by the Persian alchemist Abu Abdallah Jaber ben Hayyam ben Abdallah al-Kufi, sometimes called Geber, or in the thirteenth century by Raymond Lully, sometimes called Doctor Illuminatus, and could in a jiff be
concocted easily at home from sulfuric acid and heated cream of tartar. It could also be pinched from a hospital, or from a doctor’s surgery.

I could all too easily imagine Mr. Collicutt’s last moments: the saturated handkerchief clapped to the nose, cold at first, then a fierce burning followed by numbness. The hot sweet taste of it as he gasped for air, the warmth of it in his stomach, the fading of the senses, the swirling darkness, and then—what?

Well, death, of course, if the ether were applied for too long or in too great a quantity. Paralysis of the central nervous system and failure of the respiratory system could possibly result if great care were not taken. I had read the grisly details in Heinrich Braun’s classic text
Local Anaesthesia
, a well-thumbed copy of which Uncle Tar had kept on the shelf above his desk. His own experiments with procaine and stovaine (named for the Frenchman Ernest Fourneau, whose name, in French, means “stove”) were well documented in Uncle Tar’s microscopically inked notes in the margins.

But who, nowadays, in Bishop’s Lacey, would be able to obtain ether? Probably very few.

In fact, when you came to think of it, a medical doctor was likely the only person on earth who regularly carried the stuff with him everywhere in his bag.

I needed to speak to Dr. Darby.

Tomorrow was Easter Sunday. He would almost certainly—barring medical emergencies—be at church with the rest of Bishop’s Lacey, organizing, as he always did, the pace-egging and the egg hunt. I could catch him
at the lych-gate and ask casually if anything had recently gone missing from his bag.

But first I needed to sleep.

Dogger must have brought Esmeralda in from the greenhouse, because I found her roosting contentedly on the iron ring of a laboratory support stand and there was a fresh egg in my bed.

I would save it for the morning, I decided. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

Father would have us rousted out of our beds by five o’clock so we could have a light breakfast before the three-hour curfew.

As Roman Catholics, we were bound to fast from at least midnight before receiving the Holy Eucharist. Only those who were gravely ill and in danger of death were permitted their toast and marmalade in advance.

Father, however, disagreed.