The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (11 page)

Then, too, there was Father. How deliriously happy he would be to have his beloved restored to him! In all the years I could remember, I had never seen Father smile—I mean
really
smile and show his teeth.

With Harriet home and alive and happy among us on the drawing room hearth, Father would be a different person. He would laugh, make jokes, hug us, ruffle our hair, play games with us, and, yes, perhaps even kiss us.

It would be like living in an earthly paradise: a modern-day land of Cockaigne, such as is seen in those paintings by Pieter Brueghel that Feely is so fond of; a land of milk and honey in which there was no rationing, no bitterly cold rooms, and no decay.

Buckshaw would be new again, and we all of us would live together happily ever after until the cows came home.

All I needed now was to work out a few of the chemical details.

TEN

W
HEN
I
TURNED THE
key in the lock of my laboratory and stepped inside, I found Esmeralda perching contentedly on a nearby test-tube rack and Undine boiling an egg over a Bunsen burner.

“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “How dare you! How did you get in?”

The place was becoming as peopled as Paddington Station.

“I came across the roofs,” she said cheerily, “and down that little staircase.” She pointed.

“Bugger!” I’m afraid I said, making a mental note to install a deadbolt.

“I needed to talk to you,” she said, before I could say something worse.

“Talk to me? Why ever would you want to do that?”

“Ibu said I was never to go to bed angry with anyone.”

“Well, what difference does that make? Besides, it isn’t bedtime yet.”

“No,” Undine agreed, “it isn’t. But Ibu sent me for my nap, and a nap counts as bed, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” I said grudgingly. “But what has that to do with me?”

“I’m cheesed off with you.” She pouted, planting her fists on her hips. “I have a bone to pick with you and I can’t possibly nap until we’ve had a jolly good chin-wag about it.”

“Chin-wag?”

“A powwow. A council of war.”

“And
what
,” I asked, making my voice drip with sarcasm, “have I done to deserve your displeasure?”

“You treat me like a child.”

“Well, you
are
a child.”

“Of course I am, but that’s hardly reason enough to treat me like one, do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do,” I admitted.

How Daffy is going to love talking to this curious, nitpicking little creature!
I thought.

“What, in particular, have I done?” I was almost afraid to ask.

“You underestimate me,” she said.

I nearly chucked my kippers. “Underestimate you?”

“Yes, you set me at naught.”

“I beg your pardon?” I laughed. “Do you even know what that means?”

“Set me at naught. It means you disbelieved me. You disbelieved me about the saltwater crocodile and you disbelieved
me again when I told you that Ibu and I were at the railway station this morning.”

“I did not!”

“Come off it, Flavia—admit it.”

“Well,” I said, “perhaps just a little …”

“See?” Undine crowed. “I told you so! I knew it!”

A sudden clever thought popped into my mind. Daffy had more than once accused me of possessing a certain low cunning, and she was right.

“When did you arrive at the station? Before or after the train?”

“Before—but only just. Ibu said, ‘Here it comes now’ as she was parking at the end of the platform.”

“Which end?” I asked, almost too casually.

“The far end. I don’t know my directions very well, but the end farthest from Buckshaw.”

“The south end,” I said. “The direction from which the train arrived.”

Undine nodded. “Near the luggage trolley.”

Now I knew she was telling the truth. Although there had been no luggage trolleys on the platform at Buckshaw Halt for years, someone had managed to rustle one up from somewhere for the occasion of Harriet’s sad return. Part of my mind had noticed it being piled high with the luggage of those strangers, whoever they may be, who had brought her body home.

“Let’s play a game,” I suggested brightly.

“Oh,” Undine said. “Yes, let’s. I adore games.”

“Do you know how to play Kim’s Game?”

“Of
course
,” she scoffed. “Ibu used to read to me from
Kim
at bedtime in Sembawang. She said it was a good fairy
tale, even if Kipling
was
a goddamn Tory, and a jingoist to boot. He visited Sembawang, you know.”

“Jingoist?” She had caught me by surprise. It was likely that even Daffy didn’t know the meaning of the word.

“Yes, you know: like in the song.”

And she began to sing in a curiously sweet and innocent voice:

“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do
,

“We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too!

“Old England and Saint George!”
she shrieked suddenly.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve!

“That’s the way the song ends,” she explained. “It’s all I can remember.”

I’ll admit it: I was out of my depth. I needed to get this conversation back under control.

“Kim’s Game,” I reminded her.

“Kim’s Game!” she cried, clapping her hands together with delight. “Twelve assorted objects are placed on a tray and covered with a silk scarf. We’ll have Dogger do it! Then he whisks away the scarf and we have sixty seconds to study the items. The scarf is replaced and we each write down the names of as many as we can. Whoever remembers the most wins. That will be me.”

There was no need for her to explain it to me. We had been made to play the wretched game to distraction on rainy evenings in Girl Guides—that is, until the night I had managed to smuggle a toad and a quite decent-sized adder under the silk.

As I have said before, elsewhere, that organization is not
noted for its sense of humor, and I had found myself on that occasion being made to sit in the corner once again wearing Miss Delaney’s handmade but highly irregular “Crown of Thorns,” which may have been amusing to some but not to me.

“Exactly,” I said to Undine. “But just to keep things interesting, let’s play the game a different way this time.”

Undine clapped her hands happily again.

“Let’s pretend that the railway platform is the tray and that all the people on it are the objects we have to remember.”

“That’s not fair!” Undine protested. “I don’t know any of the people—except you and your family … and Mr. Churchill, of course. Ibu pointed you out.”

“You had quite a good view of us, then?”

My Daimler mind was firing on all twelve cylinders.

“Top hole!” she said. “Like a box at the pantomime.”

Something twisted inside me. It didn’t seem right that the arrival of my mother’s body at Buckshaw had been viewed by anyone, let alone this little twerp, as some kind of cheap music-hall entertainment.

“All right, then,” I said, holding myself in check. “I’ll begin. There was Aunt Felicity. She counts for one.”

“And the men in uniforms who lifted your mother from the train. That’s six—I’m winning!”

This was insane, I thought, but the game needed to go on.

“Father, Feely, Daffy, and me,” I said. “And Dogger, of course. Six all.”

“Not fair! I already counted the lot of you. Eleven to me!”

“Mrs. Mullet,” I said, “and her husband, Alf.”

“The vicar!” Undine shouted. “I knew him by his collar! Twelve ho!”

I counted on my fingers: “The woman with Aunt Felicity … the officer who saluted Father …

“The engine driver on the footplate,” I added with sudden inspiration, “the conductor, and the two guards on the van. That’s nine, plus Sheila and Flossie Foster and Clarence Mundy, the taxicab driver.”

Although I thought I had spotted Sheila and Flossie at the edge of the platform, I had picked Clarence’s name out of thin air. Undine would never know the difference.

“Tied at twelve,” I told her. “I’m finished. Last chance.”

Undine gnawed at her knuckles, her brow furrowed. “That man in the long coat!” she said, her face lighting up.

My heart stopped.

“What man in the long coat?” I managed, my voice trembling a little. “You’re making him up.”

“The one who was talking to Ibu!” she shouted. “I win!”

Her face was a little, round glowing orb, red with excited accomplishment.

I even smiled a little myself.

I watched as Undine’s happy smile slowly froze—and then solidified. She was staring over my shoulder—like the stranger at the station—as if she had spotted a specter.

The hair at the back of my neck was already bristling with strange electricity as I turned slowly round.

Lena was standing in the doorway and I swear her eyes were glowing like red coals in the darkness of the hall. How long she had been there, and how much she had overheard, I couldn’t begin to guess.

“Go to your room, Undine,” she said in a voice that was like a cold wind blowing through frozen grass.

Without a word, Undine brushed past me and vanished.

“You mustn’t encourage her,” Lena said when the little girl was gone. She spoke in that same odd voice, as if she were a ventriloquist’s dummy being operated by a cobra. “She’s far too excitable. Living too much in one’s imagination may be detrimental to one’s health.”

She smiled at me and lit a cigarette. When it was drawing to her satisfaction, she blew a trumpet of smoke from a protruding lower lip towards the ceiling.

“Do you understand?”

“Detrimental to one’s health,” I repeated.

“Exxxs-zactly!” Lena said, and let out another cannonade of smoke.

I made a swift calculation of the risk involved and then blurted out: “Who was he? The man in the long coat, I mean?”

Lena touched her cigarette to her lips in a picturesque fashion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The man on the railway platform. The one Undine saw you talking to.”

Lena walked over to one of the laboratory’s casement windows, placed her palms on the sill, and stood looking down upon the Visto for what seemed like an eternity.

Was she remembering happier days? Those days when Harriet took off and landed in
Blithe Spirit
on that grassy expanse?

“How well did you know my mother?” I asked. She had not even answered my first question and here I was already
pelting her with another. I was almost, but not quite, aghast at my own boldness.

“Not as well as I should have liked,” she said. “We de Luces, as you know, are a peculiar lot.”

I smiled at her as if I knew what she was talking about.

“ ‘Cousin Excelsior,’ we used to call her in Cornwall. Harriet flew further, farther, and faster than any human being has a right to do. I suppose in some quarters that was resented.”

“In yours?”

I couldn’t believe my mouth!

“No, not in mine.” Lena turned away from the window. “I cared for her a great deal.”

Cared for her a great deal?
Those were the precise words Undine had used to express her mother’s feelings towards Harriet.

“In fact,” Lena went on, “we were quite chummy, your mother and I—at least when we ran into each other outside of a family setting.”

I sat there in utter stillness hoping the vacuum created by my silence would attract more words about my mother. I had learned by close observation of Inspector Hewitt’s questioning techniques that silence is a question mark that cannot be ignored.

“I’m going to confide in you,” Lena said at last.

Hallelujah! My trap had worked!

“But you must promise me that what I say goes no further than this room.”

“I promise,” I said, meaning it at the time.

“Undine is a most unusual child,” she said.

I nodded sagely.

“Hers has not been an easy life. She lost her father in tragic circumstances when she was no more than a baby—much like yourself.”

For a moment I took this to be an insult, but then I saw what she meant—that both Undine and I had lost a parent while still in the cradle.