The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (17 page)

Then there were the hypodermic needles: two sturdy and somewhat suspicious specimens from Uncle Tar’s truly comprehensive collection of laboratory glassware.

I removed from my pocket and unwrapped from my handkerchief the two vials of adenosine triphosphate which Dr. Darby had so generously contributed to my scheme, followed by the bottle of thiamine which Annabella Cruickshank had handed over in open defiance of her brother, Lancelot.

If Undine or Lena had noticed the peculiar bulges in my jumper they had said nothing.

Next, in preparation for the act itself, I reviewed the relevant pages from Uncle Tar’s notebooks: those concerning the reanimation of the dead.

The resurrection of Harriet de Luce.

I pulled up a tall stool and began reviewing the spidery, handwritten texts.

It was obvious to even the most casual reader that Uncle Tar had actually experimented upon rabbits. Page after page was filled with his hand-drawn charts and graphs showing times, dosages, and results of his attempted resurrections of twenty-four rabbits, who had been given the names Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on, all the way up to Omega.

All of them—save Epsilon, who Uncle Tar suspected might have had a dicky heart to begin with—had been successfully revived from a state of clinical death and had lived to be experimented upon another day.

My eyes were heavy, not helped by my uncle’s minuscule handwriting, as they plowed over the pages. Once or twice I nodded—recovered with a start—yawned several deep yawns and—

I awoke completely disoriented. The side of my face lay flat upon the laboratory bench in a puddle of drool.

I shook my head groggily and rotated it upon my neck, trying to ease the dull headache that invariably comes with sleeping during the day.

I unlocked the door and hurried to my bedroom to have a look at the clock.

It was 6:44!

I had slept away whatever little remained of the afternoon and now had just four minutes to get to Harriet’s boudoir and take up my post. I would have to sneak back later for my tools and supplies.

With the speed of a music-hall quick-change artist, I removed my rumpled clothing and threw on my best black jumper and a clean white blouse. Long black stockings and a pair of detestable black goody-two-shoes completed the getup.

Using my fingers as a comb, I gave my hair a lick and a promise and straightened my pigtails.

Too late for decent grooming, I rubbed the crusty sleep from my eyes, removed a smudge of dirt from my chin with a bit of spit, and made haste for the west wing.

“You’re two and a half minutes late,” Aunt Felicity said, glaring at her wristwatch.

“I was held up by the crowd outside,” I said, which had a morsel of truth in it. The straggling line of silent mourners still stretched along the upper hall, down the stairs, across the foyer, out the door, and, for all I knew, all the way into the village.

I had asked the woman at the head of the queue—a stranger, I hasten to say—to wait a bit longer before entering:
There was an urgent family matter that must be seen to before the public visitations resumed. She had stared unflinchingly at me with her offended duck eyes. To be honest, she gave me the fantods.

“Orp!” I had wanted to shout in the woman’s face. It was easier than saying “orpiment,” which was the layman’s term for As
₂
S
₃
, or “arsenic trisulfide.”

Before Aunt Felicity could reply, I changed the subject.

“I’m worried about Father,” I said. “What happened to him? I thought he wasn’t due to begin his vigil until now.”

“He couldn’t bear to stay away,” Aunt Felicity said. She nodded towards Harriet’s catafalque. “He came up the stairs with her and remained at her side until he crumpled. It’s a jolly good thing I was here to go for help.”

“Dogger?” I asked.

“Dogger,” she said. And that seemed to be that—until she added: “Whom else would I send for?”

“Well, Dr. Darby. I should have thought—”

“Pfah!” Aunt Felicity almost spat. “Dogger has better qualifications than half the medical men in the kingdom.”

“Dogger?”

“Oh, don’t look so shocked, girl. And close your mouth—it’s not at all becoming. I thought you might have worked it out long before this.”

“Well, I’ve always known he has buckets of medical knowledge, but it seemed—”

“ ‘Seemed’ isn’t worth tuppence. How many solicitors or publicans, jockeys or bishops, do you know who could set a broken femur or snick out a pair of infected tonsils?”

“None,” I admitted.

“Precisely,” Aunt Felicity said. “There it was all the time, wasn’t it? As plain as the nose on your face.”

She was taking such great delight in my ignorance that I thought for a moment she was going to crow.

But everything fell suddenly into place. How many times in the past had Dogger described to me the most exact clinical details of various medical conditions? I couldn’t even begin to count the occasions. Why is it, I wondered, that the facts closest to our noses are so often the most overlooked?

I felt an absolute chump. Although I prided myself on being able to put two and two together, for most of my life, I had been adding them up to get three. It was humiliating!

“He was with Father in the prisoner-of-war camp, wasn’t he? In Changi—in Singapore?”

This was a bit of family history I had wheedled out of Mrs. Mullet and her husband, Alf, in particles of gossip too small individually to draw attention to themselves.

“Dogger saved your father’s life on more than one occasion,” she said, her voice suddenly soft. “And for that, he paid the price.”

The light of the flickering candles threw such shifting shadows upon Aunt Felicity’s features that it seemed as if the hovering face of a stranger were telling the tale.

“Your father had been sentenced to death by the Japanese. His crime? Refusing to name those men under his command who had been involved in planning an escape. I’m not going to tell you what they did to him, Flavia: It would not be decent.”

She paused to let me realize what she had just said. “In
spite of the primitive conditions, and using not much more than the utensils from a mess kit, Dogger somehow managed to keep your father from bleeding to death.”

My throat was instantly hard and dry. I could not swallow.

“For his troubles, Dogger was sent to work on the Death Railway.”

The Death Railway! The brutal road that had been hacked by prisoners of war for more than two hundred miles through forbidding hills and jungles from Thailand to Burma. I had looked with horror at the ghastly images in the old news magazines: the skeletal laborers, the haunted faces, the crude graves by the wayside. A hundred thousand dead. There was more—much more—some of it too sickening to read.

“For Dogger,” Aunt Felicity went on, “that was only the beginning. He was sent to work on what came to be known as Hellfire Pass, a notorious section of the line upon which he and his fellow prisoners were forced to dig through sheer rock using little more than primitive tools and their own bare hands.”

“How awful,” I said, aware even as I spoke of how trivial my words must sound.

“Cholera broke out, as it often does under such appalling conditions. Dysentery followed by starvation, followed by—

“In spite of his own shocking physical condition, Dogger attempted to deal with the casualties.”

She broke off suddenly. “I think it best at this point, Flavia, to bring down a curtain upon the scene. There are things too terrible to be described by mere words.”

My brain understood what she was saying, even if I did not.

“Your father and Dogger did not meet again until the end of the War, when they were thrown together by chance at a hospital operated by the British Red Cross.

“They didn’t recognize each other until a chaplain introduced them. The padre said later of their reunion that even God cried—”

“Please, Aunt Felicity,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“You’re a wise child,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you any more.”

We stood there for a few more minutes saying nothing. Then, without a word, Aunt Felicity turned and left the room, leaving me alone with Harriet.

SEVENTEEN

I
LISTENED AT THE
door to the low hum of voices outside.

Taking a deep breath and turning the knob, I stepped solemnly into the hall.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Friends … neighbors—”

I was trying desperately to think how Father would phrase it. “I know that you’ve been waiting patiently for a very long time, and I can’t tell you how much the family appreciates it. But I’m afraid that we’re going to have to close the house for the rest of this evening. There are, as you can imagine, many details which must be seen to before my mother’s funeral, and I—”

An appeal to their imaginations seemed like an inspired touch, but still, there was a murmur of disappointment.

“It’s all right, ducks,” said the woman with the duck eyes, and I nearly burst into hysterical laughter at my private joke.

“We all know what you’ve been through”—she pronounced it “froo”—“We all know what you’ve been froo, so you don’t have to tell us twice when to clear out.”

“You’re very kind,” I said. “I’m glad you understand. We shall resume in the morning at a quarter past nine.”

By that time, Daffy would be ending her shift, and I, for better or for worse, would have finished most of what I had come to do.

If, as I hoped, history had been made in the night, tomorrow’s early mourners would arrive to find the tomb empty, so to speak.

It promised to be a most interesting day.

The woman with the duck eyes had actually begun to walk away, but now she turned and called back to me, almost desperately: “Miss Harriet babysat me and my sister once. Our mam was taken sudden with the appendix, and Miss Harriet, God bless her, made us brown sugar sangriches.”

I gave her a sad smile: sad because I hated her—no, not hated—
envied
her for this sudden stabbing memory of Harriet, who had never made brown sugar sandwiches—or any other kind, for that matter—for me, at least that I could remember.

My announcement was relayed from person to person back along the line; people began to turn reluctantly away, and in a few minutes, the hall was empty.

As the last few stragglers made their way down the west staircase, I slipped quietly through the baize door, which opened into the northwest corner of the house, and by a roundabout trek, made my way to the east wing. Again,
except for Lena and Undine, there was little danger of a personal encounter.

Within minutes I was on my way back from the laboratory, ticking off once more in my mind a list of the tools I had carefully laid out for myself: tin-snips, torch, gloves, screwdriver, and coal scuttle, to say nothing of the ATP and the thiamine, which, wrapped in handkerchiefs, were stuffed safely into my pocket to keep from breaking or rattling. In the coal scuttle was a brass alarm clock I had brought from my bedroom: a last-minute addition which might have doomed the entire operation had it been forgotten.

Back in Harriet’s boudoir, I leaned thankfully against the door and heaved a sigh of relief. I hadn’t been spotted.

The lock gave a satisfying
click
as I turned the key, which I then removed and dropped into my pocket.

This is it
, I thought, glancing at the clock.
Time to show them what you’re made of, Flavia
.

It was 7:22.

Time to remove the black pall with which Harriet’s coffin had been draped.

But before beginning my actual work, I replaced and relit each one of the now guttering candles at the head and foot of the catafalque.

I would be needing all the light and all the heat they could generate.

Dare Lucem
.

The coffin screws were the easy part. Since they were new and had not been moldering and rusting away in some
damp old churchyard, they would be almost ridiculously simple to remove. In such a short time that it surprised even me, I had them loosened.

Now came the moment of truth.

“Saint Tancred, help me,” I whispered. “Harriet, forgive me.”